Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - Anti-Semitism’s Enablers with Bret Stephens of The New York Times

Episode Date: January 21, 2022

Anti-semitism was tragically back in the news in recent days with the hostage-taking at the Beth Israel synagogue in Colleyville, Texas. But was this event covered the way it should have been? Barely. And this tells us a lot about anti-Semitism during these times. Is this period different? Have we entered a ‘new normal’ for anti-Semitism? Is it just the extremes or are there now more enablers? Bret Stephens, Pulitzer Prize winning columnist for The New York Times, joins us. Bret came to The Times after a long career with The Wall Street Journal, where he was most recently deputy editorial page editor and, for 11 years, a foreign affairs columnist. Before that, he was editor in chief of The Jerusalem Post. Bret has reported from around the world and interviewed scores of world leaders. He is also the author of "America in Retreat: The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder.” Bret was raised in Mexico City, earned his BA at the University of Chicago and his Masters at the London School of Economics.

Jew hatred begins as a religious hatred which transmogrifies or mutates into a racial hatred which transmogrifies and mutates into anti-Zionism as a hatred. And if Israel were to ever cease to exist, some new form of Jew hatred would surely take its place. We just don't know what it will be. In the past year, nearly 25% of American Jews were the target of anti-Semitism. Think about it. That's one in four Jews. This, according to a recent study, a very large survey conducted by the American Jewish Committee, and anti-Semitic incidents in the U.S. more than doubled during the Gaza War last May. And the expressions of anti-Semitism are not only increasing in number, but are also becoming more violent. This topic was back in the news in recent days with the hostage taking at the beth israel synagogue in collieville texas but was it actually in the news was this event covered the way it

should have been barely and this tells us a lot about anti-semitism during these times is this period different have we entered a new normal for antisemitism? Is it just the extremes, or are there now more enablers? To help us put all of this in perspective, we're joined by Brett Stevens, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the New York Times. Brett came to the Times after a long career with the Wall Street Journal, where he was most recently deputy editorial page editor and, for 11 years, a foreign affairs columnist. Before that, Brett was editor-in-chief of the Jerusalem Post, where he was based in Israel. Brett has reported from around the world and interviewed scores of world leaders. He was raised in Mexico City,

earned his BA at the University of Chicago, and his master's at the London School of Economics. Brett is also the editor-in-chief of Sapir, a journal exploring the future of the American Jewish community. I highly recommend it. Brett has written a lot about this new wave of anti-Semitism. This is Call Me Back. And I'm pleased to welcome my friend Brett Stevens from the New York Times to the podcast. Thanks for joining the Convo, Brett. Nice to see you, Dan. Happy New Year. I was hoping we'd be off to a less insane year than last year, but here we are.

No less insane it feels. I want to start with events of recent days with the hostage-taking at the Beth Israel Synagogue in Collierville, Texas. Malik Faisal Akram took a number of hostages in the synagogue during Shabbat morning services on behalf of a fellow jihadi who's serving an 86-year sentence at a Texas prison for assaulting U.S. officers with an M4 rifle. And, you know, during during Siddiqui's trial, she told the judge that she did not want anyone with quote, a Zionist or Israeli background on the jury, and suggested they be subject to genetic testing, because jurors left the courtroom at the end of the trial, or as jurors left the courtroom at the end of the trial, of Siddiqui's trial, she said, this is a verdict coming from Israel, not America. That's where the anger belongs. So

it was on behalf of this person that the hostage-taking took place last Shabbat. And Brett, you had a number of reactions to this incident, one of which, and I want to get into what this tells us about the state of anti-Semitism in America today more broadly, but before we do, you had an immediate visceral reaction to how this event was covered in the press generally. What was your reaction? Well, if you look at the press outside of the traditional Jewish press, the forward or Israeli newspapers. The striking fact, Dan, is that the word or term anti-Semitism is almost comprehensively omitted from the overwhelming majority of the news coverage. And I was just reflecting on how a little more or a little less than a year ago, we had this terrible shooting in Atlanta, where it wasn't, in fact, entirely clear, at least not initially, whether the shooter went on a murderous rampage because of anti-Asian bigotries or because of

kind of a deep-seated misogyny and other issues. But you'll remember that the coverage was overwhelming at the time of the anti-Asian possible angle to the attack. And what struck me is that in this case, where the anti-Semitism is literally on record because the event was live-streamed, the services were being live-streamed when the hostage hostage taking took place, where you have multiple witnesses attesting to the anti-Semitic rants the attacker engaged and launched into. You have this incredible, and I thought very telling, very striking reticence to use the term anti-Semitism. And I just think that that is a small but very significant silence that needs to be rectified, needs to be addressed. The Jewish Chronicle, a British newspaper, is just reporting now, I think exclusively,

I'm quoting here, the British terrorist who took four people hostage inside a Texas synagogue ranted about the, quote, effing Jews in the final phone call he made to his family during the siege, a recording obtained exclusively by the Jewish Chronicle reveals. In a chilling conversation with his brother in the UK, from inside the congregation Beth Israel in Colville, Malik Faizal Akram said, I'm opening the doors for every youngster in England to enter America and F with them. F-U-C-K with them, meaning the Jews. So this is just more data making your point that this was an attack on Jews. Right. And the initial statement coming out from the FBI special agent in charge was just this mind-blowing statement of moral idiocy in which he said it was not specifically connected to the

Jewish community and that the Bureau was trying to determine motive. Now, when you're trying to determine motive, when the now dead assailant has given you every reason to understand the motive, does not speak well of the investigatory powers of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. So that's one aspect that I found worrisome. but what I found really worrisome was the quickness with which major news organizations decided, at least at the very beginning, to parrot that line, although it was obviously preposterous. And again, the striking reticence to call this for what it is. So that, I think, is, to me, the most, I mean, beyond, I think, our great relief, our universal relief that the hostages were saved, that the rabbi was quick-minded and courageous. That, to me, is the most important story coming from this event. And there was a lot on social media and in news interviews of analysts and commentators making the point that they hope that the coverage of this event does not lead to an

increase in Islamophobia. You never see this in any—again, the basis for comparison is uh attacks on other uh uh on other minorities um and that and that that's that's unimaginable you're immediately taking your gaze off the people who uh and the minority that has just been uh victimized uh by a hate crime and i think that's just bizarre. And compare this, and you've written about this in your columns over the last couple years, compare this to the reaction in the press when there's an anti-semitic act conducted by white supremacists, far-right extremists, it seems that the

the reaction the media is entirely different. Sure. I mean, if the assailant here—I refuse to use his name, just as a matter of principle. Okay. If the assailant here had put on a MAGA hat, then we would have had a very rich discussion about the nature of his anti-Semitism and about the rise of anti-Semitism in the United States, that rise being seen as purely something that is happening on the Trumpian or far-Trumpian right. But because you had a different kind of assailant making different sorts of claims, ranting in a different way, there's near total silence, and Jews should notice this silence. And this has also been the case when there's been this increased, dramatic increase in terror attacks—

or sorry, dramatic increase in anti-Semitic violence in places like New York City and New Jersey over the last couple years. Well, this is a whole different theme, and our mutual friend Barry Weiss wrote extensively about this in her own substack. But for years, there was almost universal silence on the subject of just who the perpetrators were in, or not were, but tended to be, were too often in a tidal wave of anti-Semitic attacks happening in New York streets, the fact that you can't have these conversations, the fact that you can't even talk about what's going on in major New York communities except by way of elision and euphemism is really, it's just extraordinarily troubling. So there's, just to put some data on this, so Jews are consistently the most targeted religious community in the U.S. It's not even close. According to the FBI's hate crime data, crimes against Jews have accounted for over 50% of all religion-based hate crimes for years, despite Jews only being 2% of the U.S. population. Now, again, you've written a lot about this, and here we are talking about these two kinds of,

these two sources of anti-Semitic attacks. And just for our listeners who aren't as tuned in to the distinctions, can you just describe what these two sources of anti-Semitism are, the ones that we've seen, the kinds of attacks we've seen in New York over the last several years, and then the stuff coming from the extreme right? Well, I mean, what we've seen on New York streets overwhelmingly in the last few years have been attacks perpetrated almost exclusively by minorities against religious Jews, Jews who are either part members of the Hasidic community or otherwise wearing identifiable Jewish garb. We also saw during the Gaza war last May, these attacks coming from what appeared to be

pro-Palestinian or Middle Eastern, usually Middle Eastern men in Times Square, in the Diamond District. We saw something similar happen in Los Angeles. And then there's a second kind of source of this, which obviously we saw in places like Poway, California, where there was a murderous attack on a synagogue. And even more so in the fall of 2018 by a white supremacist anti-immigration fanatic in Pittsburgh at the Tree of Life Synagogue. So you have these two streams. And I think both of us, Dan, you and I, try to be alert to the fact that these dangers are coming in two directions. I think the problem with a lot of the American conversation about antisemitism today is that one side likes to pretend that it's only coming from the other and vice versa. You reviewed in the New York Times Deborah Lipstadt's latest book called Anti-Semitism Here and Now. You have a long memory, yes. Yes, I did. Which is a very good book. Deborah Lipstadt, who right now is a nominee by the Biden administration to be the coordinator on

monitoring and responding from the U.S. government's perspective to anti-Semitism here and abroad. You wrote in the book review, and I want to quote from it, you wrote, as recently as the turn of this century, it was just about plausible to hope that anti-Semitism might soon go the way of fear of witches, not extinct, but too manifestly absurd for all but the dumbest of bigots to avow. In the United States, there was hardly an institution where Jews weren't welcomed and fully, if not overrepresented. In Europe, taboos against anti-Semitism continued to hold firm two generations after the end of World War II. In the Middle East, it seemed possible that

the peace process would lead to at least a softening of hatred toward the Jewish state. So you kind of painted this picture in reviewing her book that there was a sense that the new normal was, you know, anti-Semitism in the rearview mirror. And I was just listening to this podcast between Russ Roberts and Tyler Cowen where they talked a lot about recency bias. And they were – and Russ Roberts, who runs Shalem College and now lives in – who has his own excellent podcast, Econ Talk, who's now based in Jerusalem, said, you know, he's had this sort of optimistic recency bias that because anti-Semitism hasn't reared its head in a long time in America that we have nothing to worry about And it's only in recent years that he may he's found that a he's grateful There's an Israel I make he's always grateful. There's an Israel but especially now Because maybe his recency bias is wrong Maybe we sort of like what you're talking about in this review of Lipstadt's book, that we just have gotten comfortable with anti-Semitism being on the decline,

and we almost don't know a world in which it isn't. Right. And just to be clear to the people listening to this podcast, that was the setup of the review to then explain that we have moved substantially backward in the intervening 20 or so years since the turn of the century. You know, antisemitism is a shape-shifting virus. It's, you know, I think thanks to COVID, we've all become sort of amateur virologists

who have a kind of a concept of the way in which viruses mutate in order to survive in their hosts over a long period of time. And so anti-Semitism in that sense is very much like a mutating virus in which every successive virus doesn't wholly resemble the one that came before because it has managed to adapt itself to a new host, new sets of circumstances. And that's been the story of anti-Semitism throughout history. We just didn't really understand it quite as well as we should have. Jew hatred begins as a religious hatred, which transmogrifies or mutates into a racial hatred, which transmogrifies and mutates into anti-Zionism as a hatred. And if Israel were to ever cease to exist, some new form of Jew hatred organized as a political movement would surely take its place. We don't know what it will be, but I can assure you that

if, God forbid, Israel were to ever go away, anti-Zionism would find some kind of successor adapted to the fashions and prejudices of its time. But what has happened, I think, in the last 20 or so years is that a new set of cultural assumptions have taken grip in the West, particularly in the United States, which make it uniquely inviting, if you will, for the anti-Semitic virus to proliferate, to flourish, to multiply. And just to name a few of those factors, one of them is that we have now replaced ethnic identities with racial identities. You know, it used to be the case that there were Jews, there were the Irish, there were the Mexicans, there were the Chinese, Poles, and so on. Many, many ethnic identities, each of which had had experiences of discrimination vis-a-vis

a mainstream WASP majority. Now, American differences have become binary. There is white America, and there is people of color America. And Jews have now been shunted, the majority of Jews, those Jews who do not describe themselves as Jews of color, now find themselves as white people. So we've been stripped of a certain kind of religious and ethnic particularity, and we are now associated with a racial identity, which in the lifetime of our own parents was an identity that was used to try to kill us. So that's one aspect of it. We now have a hyper-racialized form of politics, despite the fact that Jews have never done well when politics are racial. The second thing is that our old concept of success in the United States has been

turned into something called privilege. I think this is an immensely important thing. It used to be, you know, Dan, you've done well in your career, with your life. I used to, I might say, 15 years ago, I might have said, well, Dan's had a very successful career, right? Now I might say, well, Dan's very privileged, you see. And because Dan is privileged, it's not because he achieved anything by his own merit. He achieved things for circumstances and the good luck of the draw in terms of when he was born, where he was born, the race into which he was born, the socioeconomic class into which you were born. And so all of these things that you thought you would achieve by hard work and talent are now things that you don't deserve to have. And that, I think, is a fundamental shift. One of the reasons why anti-Semitism continued to flourish in Europe when it didn't flourish in the United States is that

in Europe, success, especially the success of ethnic or religious minorities, tended to beget envy, and envy ultimately became murderous. In the United States, success begat admiration. Successful minorities in the United States were traditionally admired. It's how they escaped persecution, how they escaped stereotyping and discrimination by succeeding according to the rules of the American game. And that happened with many ethnic minorities in the United States, not the least of whom were Jews who had tremendous economic, social, academic, and ultimately political success. So now you have this transformation from this movement away from understanding achievement as a function of, or success as a function of personal achievement, and now we understand it as a function of this so-called privilege. The third aspect is that independent thought is now being treated as a form of heresy. You know, Thorsten Veblen, who was a great economist from over a century ago,

once wrote this wonderful essay on what he called the intellectual preeminence of European Jews. This is from, I think, 1919 or so, when he just took note of something that would become all the more obvious over the rest of the century, how distinguished Jewish intellectuals were in their respective fields in his time. And he had a series of theories about this, but what he was taking note of is certain aspects of Jewish culture which foster a sense of doubt, skepticism, irreverence, activism, dissent, thinking differently from the majority. And in America, up until recently, the concept of Think Different, I mean, it was the logo of Apple computers for many years. The concept of think different was venerated, was a central part of American culture. You wanted the person who thought different, including when it comes to adverbs. Now, that's being treated as heresy. And the list of topics that people are just not allowed to speak about is becoming longer and longer. I mean, even just to name the list of topics, is sex, you know, or, you know, is gender a function of biology, for example, these become like vexing things. The very fact that I just raised that is probably going to cause you problems. No, no, not with our audience, not with the Call Me Back audience.

I mean, I could go on a long list. Is climate change such a bad thing? The very fact that I phrased that question that way, although it is a question, not a rhetorical question, is the sort of thing that now gets you in trouble professionally and personally throughout American life. So American life has changed to no longer be a hospitable environment for contrarian or independent thinkers. And the final point, final point, is that conspiracy theories have become mainstream in the United States. Okay, so I think you addressed that in the same book review you did on Lipstadt, because you wrote here her analysis that the resurgence of anti-Semitism—you said that you wrote,

the resurgence of anti-Semitism owes as much to its political enablers who aren't openly bigoted as it does to its ideological practitioners who are. So you basically are arguing, yes, there are these extreme elements, they were marginalized, they were extreme, and now there's a whole number of stakeholders and constituencies that are enabling these extremists, and these people may not be motivated by bigotry, but they are enabling the bigots, and that's a new phenomenon. Well, I don't know if it's a new phenomenon, but it's an important phenomenon. It might be new in that it was only in the last few years that I really started thinking about it in a serious way. But look, that comes on both sides of the political divide. called replacement theory, which I find hilariously is now being put forward by Michael Anton,

the notorious author of the Flight of... What is it? Flight 93. The Flight 93 Manifesto. The Flight 93 Manifesto. I looked up Michael Anton. This is a person who is the descendant of Lebanese and Italian migrants. Now, good for Lebanese and Italian migrants, but Henry Adams would find it hilarious that someone who came from Mediterranean stock,

like Anton does, would now be going on about the dangers of being replaced by immigrants from a slightly different geographical background. This idea of replacement theory is something that is being essentially laundered by— Can you just explain replacement theory very quickly, just so our listeners— Replacement theory is that rich Jews are urging the politicians who are in their pockets to have open borders so that they can replace white workers with cheap Hispanic laborers, in a nutshell. I mean, there's more to it than that, but that's the gist of it, that the way in which the liberal super elites are operating is the idea that by destroying national borders, they can achieve better returns on labor costs by just X-ing out that union worker who's been trying to

live a middle-class life on a union blue-collar job. This is a crazy, mistaken, false theory, okay? Not least the notion that it is being done, any of it is being done by design, or the notion that free trade doesn't, in fact, have huge benefits for American consumers, and therefore, American laborers, because consumers are also workers who benefit from cheaper products from more diverse sources and so forth and so on. Anyway, that's a long story. But replacement theory, when the neo-Nazis at Charlottesville marched saying, Jews will not replace us, they weren't worried that Jews would suddenly have a huge demographic growth spurt, right,

and suddenly become the majority in this country. The view was that Jews in the high places of American finance and industry would replace them with cheaper labor. Well, that idea is now being put forward in mainstream vehicles like Tucker Carlson's show, which is the number one show on Fox News. So this is one aspect of what I'm talking about, which is this is not overtly anti-Semitic. This is an idea that you could understand without reference to Jews, but it is, if you will, a half-sibling of an anti-Semitic idea that's now been put into the proverbial American bloodstream in terms of our acceptable public discourse. And it's happening on the left too. When you treat Israel as a state that is committing genocide towards the Palestinians. Again, a demonstrable naked untruth and a blood libel to boot.

You are, you know, on the one hand, you can say, well, I'm just talking about a foreign state that just happens to be a Jewish state. But the reality is that you are once again laundering ancient anti-Semitic blood libels through the more acceptable medium of anti-Zionist ideology and bringing it to the center of American debate. So on that last point, a big part of the manifestation of anti-Semitic rhetoric has been about Israel and Israel's right to exist. I was just struck by this letter that went out yesterday by our mutual

friend Rabbi David Ingber from the Ramamou Congregation in New York in response to events in Colleyville actually. But he was writing about anti-Semitism and the state of anti-Semitism and he state of anti-Semitism, and he talked about its connection to anti-Zionism and whether or not you could be

anti-Zionist and not be anti-Semitic. And he says here, he wrote, and I'm quoting, one can indeed reject Zionism in theory and historically find oneself in good company, but we are well beyond that point now, he writes. In far too many circles, calling out Zionist synagogues or Zionists more generally has become a slippery slope to Jew hatred. There are fewer and fewer anti-Zionists in the abstract whose critiques of the system remain just that, without leading to the dehumanization and demonization attack of the people who hold those beliefs. Well, right, and I think that's extremely well expressed and particularly important, more important coming from him than from me, because I'm a known quantity, and I've always been sort of traveled on the center right of American politics.

He's in a different place. And so it's important that he speak out as eloquently and clearly as he has and as he is in the lines you just quoted. Look, you know, it's perfectly possible to draw a Venn diagram and find that the circle that is marked as anti-Semitism and the circle that's marked as anti-Zionism don't perfectly overlap. As I said, this is a mutating virus. So just as the Omicron version looks very different from the Delta version, anti-Zionism will look in a variety of ways different from traditional anti-Semitism. What you will find, however, is that those circles do largely overlap. And you should look more, you should be more concerned about the overlap than the fact that around the edges, you will find

unusual people who fit in one circle, but not quite the other. Yes, there are anti-Semites who are pro-Zionists. There's no question that that exists Yes, there are anti-Semites who are pro-Zionists. There's no question that that exists. And there are anti-Zionists who are not anti-Semitic. Many of them are, or some of them are in fact Jewish, and they have arcane but principled objections to the idea of a Jewish state. That should not blind us to the broad reality that these things are almost perfectly twinned. And, you know, this is a point that I think is often missed. What is anti-Semitism? Anti-Semitism is a conspiracy theory about Jews.

If we're going to be absolutely specific about it, it's not just prejudice against Jews. It's a political program against Jews based on a conspiracy theory. That's how the original anti-Semites saw themselves. It was called the League of Anti-Semites. Why was it a league? It was a political party, right? And the anti-Semites' fundamental contention was that Jews were swindlers and imposters. They were swindlers in the sense that what Jews did was swindle good Germans, good Frenchmen, good Englishmen out of their patrimony, out of their property, out of what was rightfully theirs, whatever that entailed. And they were imposters in the sense

that they claimed to be Germans, Frenchmen, Englishmen, but they were actually Semites, right? That's why this nonsense word Semite comes into the picture of Jew hatred. They were from somewhere else. They were from the Semitic lands, from the Middle East. What is anti-Zionism? Well, if you think about it, anti-Zionism is, A, it's a political program. B, it's a political program based in a conspiracy theory. It's a conspiracy theory that holds that Jews are swindlers and imposters. They are swindlers because they're trying to swindle the Arab people or the Palestinian people out of their patrimony, out of their land. And they're imposters because they're people who claim to be Middle Eastern, right? Claim to be the native inhabitants, in fact,

of a space in the Middle East, but are actually people who came from Europe. So the only difference there is the question of where the Jews come from. The anti-Semite says he comes from the Middle East, the anti-Zionist says he comes from Europe. Otherwise, the conspiracy theories are identical. So this whole notion—I take your point that there are some people who, at an abstract level, as David Ingber says, have problems with the notion of modern Jewish statehood. But those who have that problem have to wrestle with the practical reality that eight-plus

million Jews, the highest concentration of Jews in the world, live in this place. So to say that you are anti-against Zionism is to say you are against the existence of the Jewish state. You then have to explain what happens to those, to the largest concentration of Jews in the world. It's like a friend of mine said to me, like, being, saying you're wrestling with issues of Zionism is like wrestling with the concept of parenthood. Parents may debate whether or not they want to, how they feel about parenthood until they

have kids. And then they have kids and they don't say, hmm, are you pro-parenthood or against parenthood parents may debate whether or not they want to how they feel about parenthood until they have kids and then they have kids and they don't say hmm are you pro parenthood or against parenthood it's like guess what we're parents so like this is a silly discussion because a child hangs in the balance well i mean with three teenage children i can say i'm against parenthood it's just a little late right no, A, I love my children. B, the analogy is a very good one. C, let's imagine, let's just accept for the sake of argument that anti-Zionism is wholly different from anti-Semitism and that no one who calls himself an anti-Zionist can be fairly described as an anti-Semite unless they admit to it.

Let's just say this for the sake of argument. Well, then you are nonetheless advocating the destruction of an internationally recognized nation state, which is something that is advocated against no other nation state, broadly advocated against no other nation state that I know of. No one calls for the destruction of, I don't know, Ghana or Bangladesh or Turkmenistan or the Netherlands or Canada. Well, maybe the Quebecois. You know more about Canada. But by and large, nobody calls for the destruction of these states. Or China or Syria. Anti-Zionism calls for the destruction of a state with no serious thought to the reality that the political destruction of that state would lead to a humanitarian catastrophe on a scale unseen

since the Second World War. So even if you were to say that anti-Zionism has not a thing to do with anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism on its own merits is a foul and evil ideology. Okay, Brett, we will leave it there. We are going to have you back on in part two of our conversation next week. But until then, thanks for joining the conversation. Thanks for having me. That's our show for today. To keep up with Brett's regular column, you can follow him at The New York Times and also the journal he edits, sapirjournal.org. That's S-A-P-I-R journal.org.

We'll also put that in the show notes. Call Me Back is produced by Ilan Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.