Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - Bonus Episode: Diary from Columbia’s ‘Liberated Zone’ - with Michael Powell

Episode Date: April 30, 2024

Michael Powell has been covering New York City life and politics for decades, as a long-time reporter for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and now the Atlantic. He recently was on Columbia’s campus to try to better understand the encampment movement that has taken over the campus. He joins us to report what he saw and learned. Article discussed in this episode: The Unreality of Columbia’s ‘Liberated Zone’ — https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/04/columbia-university-protests-palestine/678159/

Michael Powell has been covering New York City life and politics for a long time. As a reporter for the New York Times, the Washington Post in New York, and now the Atlantic, he has actually been reporting about this city for decades. Against that backdrop, he was recently on Columbia University's campus to try to better understand this movement that we are watching play out, this unraveling that has taken over the Columbia campus. He joins us to report on what he saw and what he learned. And I'm pleased to welcome to this podcast for the first time Michael Powell,

who is staff writer for The Atlantic, previously a longtime reporter and columnist for The New York Times and The Washington Post. And throughout all of those stops on his journalistic journey, his career, he's mostly been focused on New York City. And obviously, what we are experiencing now is not only a New York City experience, but there is something very New York centric about all of it. Michael, thanks for being here. Thank you. It's a pleasure, Dan. Michael, I want to begin, we're going to talk about the piece you wrote for The Atlantic, the most recent piece. But before we do, I just want to set up how we got here. I think for most listeners of this podcast, in and around April 17th is when they started focusing on Columbia University. Because it was on April 17th that the president

of the university, Safiq, she testified before Congress. So her actual testimony and those of her colleagues attracted a lot of attention. But also at that time, there was also one of these encampments already in motion that ultimately that day got broken down and removed by the NYPD. But can you just describe that stage? So take us back a little over a week ago. Sure. I mean, so the president of Columbia goes to Congress and it would appear she was most intent on not having a replay of what befell her brethren at University of Pennsylvania and Harvard. She did not want to appear the fool, and she did not want to appear that she was being overly lenient towards the pro-Palestinian protesters, those opposing the war in Gaza. And so she took a fairly tough line, I mean,

by the nature of these things before Congress. But really the punctuation came when shortly thereafter, the NYPD, the police department in New York, moved on the first iteration of this encampment on the Columbia campus and arrested protesters, took down all the tents. And so, as I say, it was sort of a one-two punch and it happened more or less, not quite simultaneously, but close. And it's understood that she took the action against the encampment most likely because she knew she was under enormous scrutiny with the congressional hearing. I think that's a fair inference. I mean, it is an inference, but it is, I think, a fair inference.

Yes, I mean, certainly she knew she had the eyes of Congress on her and that she did not want to have the fate that, you know, fell upon her colleagues at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania fall on her, which was they lost their jobs. Right. Okay. So she has something like a hundred people removed, arrested, and lots of people who want to see this kind of behavior and this kind of quote-unquote activism clamped down upon are cheering because there's actually action being taken and the encampment appears to have been shut down. And then what happened? Then there's a growing uproar. To some extent, I think was predictable. I mean, there were a number of people who were not sympathetic to those, the protesters and the encampment, who said, you know, you do this and you're going to get a whirlwind

of opposition. And in fact, that's what happened. I mean, you had a bunch of, there was a lot of attention paid to those protesters because they were all suspended by Columbia, which meant that they had to leave the dorms. So there were stories of, you know, homeless students and they're bereft, they're going to face loss of their credits for the spring semester, all this sort of thing. And you also had then an upsurge in activism on the campus. I mean, more protesters coming out and faculty also starting, not all faculty, but, you, but faculty that were sympathetic to the protesters really starting to grouse and talk. And then in fairly short order, you had a second encampment, frankly, probably a bit larger than the first encampment.

Again, this is sort of the grounds of Columbia. I mean, Columbia is an urban campus and it has these very kind of manicured lawns. And one of these sections of lawns was almost immediately filled by a second encampment called a liberated zone. So the second encampment begins and seems now like a much larger number of students participate and the professors come out and basically endorse it, right? They threaten now because they saw what happened a few days earlier where the NYPD had come on campus to remove the encampment. And now the professors are coming out saying, we stand with the students and we're calling on the authorities not to break up this encampment. The professors really kind of came to the fore when it became clear that the administration was probably going

to move on these students too. Well, they kind of came to the fore for two reasons. One is they knew they were likely to remove the tents again, and they were speaking up for these hundred or so students who had been suspended. And you went up there when? I went up there Sunday afternoon, around two in the afternoon. And, you know, there had already been, frankly, some videos of students getting in the face, that is pro-Palestinian students getting in the face of Jewish students. There was another protest, and this is kind of important. There's on the Broadway side, so the main, main entrance to the campus really is at 116th and Broadway. On the Broadway side, there was a fairly, certainly a very vocal, cacophonous group of protesters outside who were not Columbia students and who said really probably the most outrageous stuff. I mean, sort of openly saying, you know, we are Hamas and this sort of thing.

They were outside. Then there's the students on the inside. There is, in fairness to the students, a real difference in tone between the two. But neither is it. It's a pretty porous membrane. The students throughout the time I was there on Sunday. So I got there around two o'clock in the afternoon, students would come down and there's a gate. So it's closed. You can't, those outside cannot chants. And it was clear they kind of knew each other. Those outside would hand them food, would hand, again, through the gate, drink and this kind of stuff.

So there is a symbiotic relationship between those two. It's not as simple as saying, oh, if you will, the non-student lunatics are on the outside, and then it's just much calmer and gentler inside. There was a difference, but it's, again, the membrane is porous. Yeah, and one could argue there's coordination, maybe, maybe not, but at a minimum, there was camaraderie and even perhaps familiarity between the inside and the outside. Oh, absolutely. Without a, I mean, I saw it. The students would take turns on the loudspeaker, that is, shouting through the gate to the protesters and leading them in chants. So yes, I mean, there was absolutely some coordination.

Okay. So why don't you describe then what happened next in terms of how this whole encampment sort of grew and developed and became like this little community, little city. Right. And it happened very quickly in some very, very nice tents. Though it's funny, the first encampment was a series of green tents. I mean, it almost looked like a military. I mean, they all were identical tents. And it did kind of raise the question, which I've not seen answered, of where the money came for those tents. If you search, as I did, I'm sure I'm not the only one online, for those tents. These are not cheap tents.

They're not just like some piece of, you know, covering with a few sticks. These are, I mean, you have to buy them from like REI or something. I mean, they're like, they were real tents. They're probably at least a couple hundred dollars each. And they all seem to be the same tent. Oh, yeah. a lot of them were north face tents yeah they're a lot they're actually quite a bit more than a couple hundred dollars i mean those are they're nice tents i'd very happily have one of those when i'm out camping

and i agree with you i mean i've seen other student encampments i mean she's going to really date myself going all the way back to the anti-apartheid stuff. And those were much more kind of ramshackle affairs. I mean, these were very nice tents. On the other hand, it's an Ivy League school. Maybe there's more money. I mean, whatever. There were a lot of food. There were some skin oils. I mean, Palestinian speakers, very closely to the Palestinian struggle. They would bring in professors. There were dance troupes doing interpretive dances. These were students. And there were these, I described it as Intifada meets Woodstock. But I mean, there was this sense of like a, you know, there were Hindus for Intifada, there were lesbians against genocide. I mean, not every tent, but it appeared that the tents were largely broken down by, in some rough way, by identity. So, there might be Pakistanis here, there might be Vietnamese students there, white students. I mean, there were Jewish students. They would do a, the day before I got

there, apparently there had been a little Shabbat service that they had done or dinner of some sort. And this was important to them because they wanted to show, well, you know, we have Jewish support for this. Yes. And if you wanted to enter, even when I got there, security, as we will discuss, got tougher almost with each hour. But I got there, say, by 3.30, I got to the encampment. And you could not enter without talking to students who were manning a security thing. And they would, certainly as a reporter, I had to wait for a press person to come over. Then I had to stand there and be read the kind of community guidelines, which included, well, a bunch of things, but most notably for me that I couldn't talk to anyone without

essentially the press person there, a tender there, that I couldn't talk to anyone whose views differed from those within the encampment, which was kind of most striking. So if somebody was lucky enough to have infiltrated and then had started to speak in any way other than praising the movement, that would have violated the community guidelines. Well, they also had a media team, right? You talked about this. They had like a quote-unquote professional team to deal with the press. Yeah, well, I don't know if it was a professional. I don't know about professional. I mean designated, a designated team. Designated, absolutely. Meaning they were very aware that they were under scrutiny from press

and they wanted like a message-focused engagement team to deal with the press. 100%. And it was really, in my case, there was one woman, a social work grad student, herself a Palestinian. Well-spoken. We had a long talk, and then I wanted to talk to, I mean, the whole point was I wanted to talk to other protesters. And I got a tour of the site, but then I had to leave. So in other words, I couldn't stay there and interview people. Meaning they made you leave. They made me leave, yes. I mean, not, you know, it was polite enough.

But yes, they wanted, they were very message driven. And when I stood outside and tried to interview people as they came or left, most of the students, credit to, they were on message. They just said, you know, look, you got to talk to the press person. I'm not going to talk to you. I then walked further. I mean, reporter tricks 101, right? I mean, just kind of walk further from the encampment and sort of walk along. And there were some people I got to talk to me, but everybody was pretty wary. They wanted one consistent, careful message. Okay. I'm going to want to go back to how this whole thing started.

But before I do that, what motivated you to go to this scene? Like, why did you go? I wanted to see what was happening. I had this sense, I don't want to throw my reporting colleagues at other places under the bus, but I just didn't feel like I had a clear sense of what was going on. And so I wanted to get up there and see what I could get on the ground. You know, it was clear the New York Times had done a piece interviewing a couple of the protesters, but it was clear that they were hand-selected by the spokespeople. It just didn't feel like I had a real sense of it. The other thing I wanted to do was talk to, and I did, to Jewish students up there. How was that part clear? Because had I wanted to, I could have said, look, you know, find me someone to interview,

right? And someone in all likelihood would have been brought to me had I wanted to do that. I did not want to do that. I'm not looking to put a finger on the scale, but I wanted to wander inside this encampment, which is on Columbia grounds, and just have polite conversations with students of my choosing. And that wasn't going to happen. The other thing, as I say, I also want to talk to Jewish students, Jewish students who are not protesters. And it took a while to get into the campus because it was like a fortress. But once I got in, I mean, there were quite a few Jewish students, not counter protesting, but kind of standing and watching that. And I had a number of conversations with them and their tales were disturbing. They were disturbing tales.

I mean, they were encountering bad stuff. You know, they had friends who were telling them, you're a Zionist, we can't be friends anymore. One of the things that came up a couple times is the students would say like, well, you know, I don't even know if I'm a Zionist. They would say like, I'm just, you know, basically, you know, I'm Jewish. I'm proud to be Jewish. I have been to Israel. I haven't been to Israel. I have family in Israel. I don't. But like they didn't, in other words, these were not passionate activists. Some of them were, but some of them really were just, they were like normal 18, 19 year old

American Jewish kids, right? I mean, they kind of had some loose sense of identity, obviously as Jewish, but also, you know, I mean, they weren't hostile to Israel. But they don't think Israel's existence is a political statement. I find that with a lot of Jewish Americans. Exactly. Yes. They think certainly the statements and policies of certain Israeli politicians are political statements or political ideas or expressions of political ideas, as are the statements and actions of leaders of any country, elected leaders. But they don't think of Israel, just the existence of it, as a political statement. I think that's what you're getting at, is they're like, am I supposed

to have a position on Israel's existence? Your colleague Jeffrey Goldberg, literally as we're talking real time, I'm reminded of something he and I were once giving, we were on a panel together a number of years ago at some conference about Israel, and he made the point, which has always stuck with me, and this conversation is reminding me of it, where he says Israel's the only country where people will have discussions, are you a Zionist, are you not? Which is like, do you believe in the right for this country to exist or not? Like, you don't have those discussions about other countries, and his point was, he says Zionism, it's like parenthood, right? So you can have parents, people, a married couple that are thinking of having a kid could have abstract discussions

all the time about, should we have a child? Should we not have a child? What are the pros and cons of having a child? And it's all very theoretical. And then one day they have a child and they don't have a discussion whether or not they're like pro or anti-parenthood or pro or anti-having a child. It's like, we have a child. It exists. Like, we're now in the business of parenting. And I think for many Jews, Israel is, it exists. It's a country.

It's no longer an abstract debate about should it or shouldn't exist. Again, we can debate policies as we do about any country, but Israel seems to be the only country where the whole discussion about it has to be whether or not you believe it should exist. Yes. No, and that's kind of what I was hearing from, because as I say, the ones who were saying, well, I don't even know if I'm a Zionist, it wasn't that they were saying, like, I don't think it should exist.

It was just like, I don't think of it that way. It's just, it's Israel. Right. And suddenly it was this charged, it was like they were outing themselves as racist. I mean, you know, that was the nature of what was being thrown at them. Oh, you're a Zionist. And yeah, there was a lot of kind of fear and anxiety from the kids I was talking to. And as I say, these were not, you

know, they weren't sitting there, nothing wrong with that, but they weren't sitting there waving the Israeli flag. They were just, you know, these were kids kind of sitting on the steps in the middle of campus. And by this point, were they aware how supportive most of these professors were of the protest or how hostile most of these professors seem to be towards Israel? Were the students also aware of that and worried about it? Yes, some of them were. And in fact, one of the students who was an East Asian studies major, her professor was there. She said her professor was kind of following her around. She was doing a documentary kind of film on it for a nonfiction class at Columbia.

I mean, it wasn't like she came in with a camera. Yes. So I think that it was starting to dawn on them that there were a number of professors who were extremely supportive of the protesters. I will say, because I know some, I went to the Columbia Journalism School. I know some of the professors there. There's also a lot of professors who are not ready to throw their bodies, you know, in front of the police to stop the dismantling of these encampments and this sort of thing. But I mean, it's a liberal left academic environment. And these days, that means very often,

strongly anti-Zionist. Yeah. And the problem is you take that group that you just described, you know, the ones that have the more strident position among the professors, and then the group of professors who just want to lay low, that don't want to take sides. And I spoke at a couple universities two weeks ago. I spoke at University of Michigan and at Duke University, and I was struck by the number of professors. When I would talk to them, they just sort of said,

look, I'm not supporting the opposition to the Jewish students in Israel or the criticism. I'm not supporting that, but I just don't want to get involved. So I'm just kind of staying, you know, they just want to keep their heads down because they know it's too controversial. So when you take the crowd that wants to keep their heads down and you combine them with the more strident group, that's a lot of professors, which leaves, like it makes, I think, these Jewish students feel especially lonely, because there aren't a lot of professors willing to stick their necks out for them.

I completely agree. I mean, for instance, I talked with some people I'm friendly with, the journalism school, and, you know, I know they're kind of horrified that professors would be as they are now at these encampments, acting as kind of the front end security on who gets in and who doesn't and weeding out reporters. And they're appalled by that. But none of them talked to me on the record. I mean, none of them are willing to make these points with their names attached to it. Yes, precisely. Yes.

They would tell me this privately, but not state that publicly. Okay, last question before we go back in time is, in terms of the more extreme statements that were being made, either inside or, as you said, by some of the folks outside the campus, what were some of the more extreme things you were hearing? Because I hear from a lot of people who say, well, not all the rhetoric is extreme. I hear people who are sort of pushing back on the narrative that this thing is spiraled out of control. They say, look, some of the rhetoric, if someone is critical of Israeli government policy, what Israel is doing in Gaza, not all the rhetoric is extreme, which is true. You know, sure. But the problem is whoever is there with a more constructive approach, and there may be some people who are there that have a constructive approach, they are being subsumed or eclipsed, it seems to me, by much more extreme language that sort of is becoming definitional. That's my sense, but you were there. Look, it's complicated, right? I mean, the spokeswoman that I spoke to,

this Palestinian-American woman, she was nuanced and careful in her talking. I mean, she's taken on the role of being a spokeswoman. I don't think she was being disingenuous. I think that that, to some extent, reflects her real views. There were some other students I talked to as they would exit that had, I mean, they were, certainly I would say they were anti-Zionists, right? I mean, that's how they identified themselves, but they weren't making extreme statements. On the other hand, well, two things. I mean, one, outside. Outside, the rhetoric got pretty wild. I mean, you know, there was a, we are Hamas, I am Hamas. You would hear that mentioned in my article at the end of the night as I left. So this was past midnight. There were a couple of cars driving around that

I'd seen earlier with men inside screaming, Yehuda, Yehuda, Jew, Jew in Arabic. I don't know if I'm allowed to say it, but F-U. You can say it. It's fine. Very loudly. Okay. Fuck you. Very loudly. And coming on a near empty street on the Upper West Side, which is a, you know, side being the place that I grew up is one of the more Jewish neighborhoods in a quite Jewish city of New York. It was chilling. So that kind of stuff was going on outside. Inside, it was a little more careful, though it was interesting. I got into a talk with a former adjunct professor at John Jay College who was giving these teachings. He had given several of these in the encampment, was staying in the encampment. He had been pushed out of John Jay because of some tweets that were, you know, calling, among other things, Jews Babylon swine, and, you know, saying Zionism is a

genocidal ideology in talking with him. Now, this is somebody who's giving the teachings. So, you know, he said, I'm not in favor of violence. But, you know, really, when you think about October 7th, it's like a Warsaw Ghetto uprising. I mean, it was just like, really? Okay. You're not in favor, you know, and he described like the kind of peace andhetto uprising. I mean, it was just like, really? Okay. You're not in favor. You know, he described like the kind of peace and love. But I mean, it was very much of a peace with this. And this is somebody who was doing these teachings inside there. And it's not hard on Twitter to find videos of others who have come in and given talks.

And they're long and kind of revolutionary rhetoric, and, you know, you need to shed your kind of bourgeois affectations and be ready to take on Colombia, take on the city in defense of, well, not just defense of the Palestinian people, but also, you know, in service of ending Israel. You know, I heard a lot about calling on globalizing the Intifada, which I'm actually, we're recording this podcast, I'm in Israel right now, I'm in Tel Aviv, and I was speaking with an Israeli journalist earlier today, talking about this term globalizing the Intifada, which when you actually think about it, Intifada was armed resistance to Israeli military occupational rule

in Gaza and the West Bank a little less than 40 years ago. Okay, so that was the Intifada here, but when you say globalizing the Intifada, that means taking that armed resistance and globalizing it. The problem is there are no military installations or bases elsewhere in the world, certainly not at Columbia University. So when you're talking about globalizing the Intifada, it clearly means, in their minds, Jews. In other words, we had armed resistance against the IDF in the Jabali refugee camp in Gaza, and now we're going to have armed resistance or armed action against Jews in the United States at Columbia University. So I think when you were speaking to these Jewish students, that's why I was so chilling. A. B. Then you hear, there's this

one image, I don't know if you saw this one, where there were some Jewish students speaking, and this woman held up a sign saying, Qasem, with an arrow pointing at it, Qasem is the armed wing of Hamas, and she's saying, Qasem, your next target is right here, meaning you did October 7th, and now this. And I don't know if this one was inside or outside the campus, it was of a bunch of students chanting, burn Tel Aviv to the ground. It's the idea that there are students at American colleges calling to burn this city down. It's very disorienting. Yeah, I think that was on the outside, if it makes it feel a little bit better, because the wilder stuff would happen there. There were certainly chants. I mean, I saw the Kassam thing. I mean, it's also an interesting rhetorical game that's played. Until October 7th, I think it's fair to say that if you heard river to the sea, you assume that that was, you know, do away with Israel. Whether it's exterminationist or not, I mean, certainly it was do away with Israel, do away with a Jewish state.

And if you have any doubt, one of the leaders of Hamas, Khaled Mashal, was giving an interview in Turkey a few weeks ago, and he was asked, you know, the Americans are talking about a two-state solution. So you're saying one-state solution, meaning you and the Americans are talking about two different things. He says, I absolutely mean a one-state solution, meaning one state free of Jews. And he said, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. And he says, and then he added from Rosh HaNikra, which is all the way in the north of Israel, to Eilat, all the way in the south. So it literally means a land without Jews, drive the Jews, you know, assuming October 7th were successful and October 7th covered the entire country.

That's what most Jews, certainly what most Israeli Jews hear when they hear that. So it's not a phrase that requires or is open to a lot of nuance. No, it's not a friendly phrase. This is not. I mean, there were there are some, as you know, Jewish intellectuals, historian Tony Jutt and some others who would sometimes talk of a one state solution. And they had this notion that you could have this kind of binational state. historian Tony Jutt and some others who would sometimes talk of a one-state solution, and they had this notion that you could have this kind of binational state, and this ain't that. And yet there's this interesting verbal sleight of hand where now we're told, no, no, no, no, you can't think of that as an extermination. That's just, you know, this is an expression of

kind of Palestinian yearning for freedom, and who knows what would come out of that. The same argument is made, I think, within Tafada now, right? That no, no, no, no, no, there's all these kind of peaceful iterations of it, or at least not explicitly violent, blowing oneself, interpretations. And I think it leads to, you know, I think what those are frankly designed to do is to, if you're a reporter, if you're somebody from the, well, no, no, no, this isn't violence. We're talking about intifada, you know, kind of like jihad, right? You know, sort of this, it's a state of mind. And I think it's a bit insidious because certainly for some of those Jewish students I talked to, I mean, frankly, for myself, I was pretty clear what those chants mean. I mean, they're not talking about some, you know, an intellectual vision of a binational state in which, you know, each has a piece of parliamentary block and this sort of thing. Okay, so now I want to go back, because you've been following this arc pretty closely since October 7th, and you wrote a separate piece about the fine line between criticizing quote-unquote settler colonialism and supporting terrorism, which you wrote after October 7th. So you've been tracking this. I guess my next set of questions have to deal with how we got to this moment, because

immediately after October 7th, there were signs that we could get to this, but obviously we weren't there. So what, based on your reporting, happened immediately after October 7th that this now we realize was a logical next step or iteration of what we were seeing immediately after October 7th? That's a great question. I think that one of those came, if you were in New York, almost immediately, which was when Democratic Socialists of America endorsed a chapter in New York, endorsed a rally. What was it? I guess on the Sunday following October 7th. So maybe it was October 9th. It was October 8th. This was a party that a lot of prominent New York politicians, both Jewish, black, and others were sort of, they would be kind of Democrats, and then they would declare themselves members, you know, democratic socialists. And they were pro-Israel. That is, I mean, Labor Israel.

I mean, they cast down with the, you know, liberal left party there, but they were very much pro-Israel. And that really disappeared. I mean, this was a rally against, you know, what they saw as the coming genocide of the Israeli response to, you know, mind you, there'd been really no Israeli response at that point yet. There were simply 1,200 dead Israelis, men, women, babies, kids. And it was quite striking. And one of the interesting things was, because I then ended up writing on this for Atlantic Magazine, is it led to a real breach within DSA. Because you had a number of left-wing, left-liberal Jewish intellectuals who broke with DSA over that. There were some who, you know, wrote letters of resignation and this sort of thing.

But it was very interesting because it broke out. I mean, I'm sitting here with white hair, and I would have been one of the kids among those who broke. I mean, it was generationally a sharp divide. Basically, it was people who had come out of the new left over the years, had solid left liberal Democrats, and they broke with DSA. And there was a splintering. But DSA is very solidly, as an entity, very much speaks to the impulse we're talking about now. I mean,

that you're seeing on the campuses, I mean, that kind of a third worldism, I mean, that's very much the ethos of TSA today. So, that was my first inkling that, you know, there were not more than an inkling, but my first sense that there was really, there were these splits happening. And as the old line, you know, heaved off, I mean, you really were left with a worldview that was really formed in the last 20 years. I mean, in large part, no doubt in academia, some of it owed to kind of the identity politics to the sense of, you've heard all this, right? Israelis as Jews, as whites, you know, Israelis as settler, they were white, therefore Jews were settler colonialists. I mean, it fit this worldview in a way that I confess, and look, I used to cover this stuff for the New York Times for three years. I don't think I fully realized or saw it come to flower as it did until I saw it after October 7th.

Okay. So the rhetoric that we've really heard since October 7th, it's interesting you mentioned the October 8th rally because Brett Stevens from The New York Times, he covered it. He went to the DSA rally, and then he was at my apartment later that day because we were recording a podcast on about October 7th. And he had just come from that rally, and he says, you know, I went to this protest, but I remember him saying to me, I was going to write something about it, but it just didn't seem like there was much going on. It seemed so inconsequential.

At that moment, it seemed like the world was kind of with Israel. So the world was with of with Israel. So the world was with Israel, and then there's these mischief makers that were trying to get something going, but it didn't seem like there was much to it. There was much there there, and then all of a sudden, within a matter of days, you had a lot of the craziness begin. So who are the leaders, and who are the followers here? It's not always clear. It's clearly a youth-driven movement, which is not to say is the same as college student-driven. There's sort of this, if you will, cadre of people that are in their late 20s through their 30s for whom this is a movement. I think that there's some

large number who are Arab or Muslim. And I mean, there's certainly white, a lot of whites involved. And even to the extent that whites are very involved, though, there has been this kind of an almost ideological commitment in the last 15, 20 years or so to, you know, allyship, to proving that you can be, particularly if you're a white lefty, you know, you can be a good ally. You can follow. You can, you know, this is not simply a white-driven movement, even if, you know, look, this is something that's being imposed upon people of color. That god awful phrase tells you nothing. 75% of the world's population.

Including many Jews. Including many Jews, yes. I mean, what, more than a half of Israel is Mizrahi, right? Mizrahi, Sephardic, and then you add in Ethiopian Jews. So, you know, the way this movement categorizes white Jews, Ashkenazi white Jews are actually not the majority in Israel. Yes. A good friend of mine is the baseball commissioner in Israel. And at one point early, right after October 7th, when this line was starting to get out, he published a picture of, I guess, one of their, it was a group of soldiers in Israel who were all baseball players.

And I mean, they look like, frankly, a photo of American baseball players. And they were very mixed group if you looked at, you know, kind of skin color and where they were from. Anyway, put that to the side. But I do think that this makes it easier for, you know, kind of opposition to grow. And look, I mean, I don't know, you know, you have the squad that's kind of influential. I mean, in fact, what was it, Ilhan Omar's daughter was one of those at Columbia who was suspended. But I don't think it's, I think it would be simplistic to say that they are driving that. I think it's out of that part of the left. And this has been reinforced very heavily in academia. I mean, that's certainly what I spent, you know, a lot of the last three years at the

New York Times looking at was the sense in which you were not, in the old days, it would call third worldism, right? That there's this sense of struggle and that you're supposed to go along with that struggle. And it's also kind of romantic. Anyway, I don't know that I'm fully answering because I don't know quite. I haven't figured out the leadership structure,

but it feels to me like the coming together of a lot of different pieces of a movement. So you mentioned what you were covering at the Times, I guess, because I remember that a lot of different pieces of a movement. So you mentioned what you were covering at the Times, I guess, because I remember that a lot of that work that you had done. These are world-class universities. These are the most elite academic institutions, not only in the United States, but in the world. They have these students literally storming the campus over, again, we can debate differences of opinion on policies, but the core energy behind this movement is based on just completely factually incorrect

ideas and theories. Settler colonialism, you know, Israel is just a colonial presence. The Jews need to, quote unquote, go back to Europe. You know, the Jews don't have a history in what is today the modern state of Israel, like, that goes back thousands of years. This is not to say I want to get into that debate now, it's more to say, does anybody sit back that you're dealing with and say, these are the world's best academic institutions in the world, and we have a whole bunch of students and many professors who are teaching not just gibberish, but total nonsense, like fabricated nonsense. Even the Vietnam War, the protests over the Vietnam War, some of them may have been strident, some of them

may, but there was at least a shared understanding that America was in this war, or they could disagree that it made, whether or not it made sense for America to be in this war, whether or not America should be in Southeast Asia, whether or not American, you know, young men should be being sent, drafted and sent over there. We could debate the policy, debate Kissinger, Cambodia. But there was a shared understanding, though, of some of the basic facts, I think. And this just seems like there's a whole generation of students and professors, and maybe more than one generation, who aren't even operating on planet Earth about basic history. A lot of the history of Israel, my sense is, these days, and it's actually something I meant

to pursue more rigorously, just so this is sort of a shard of a theory, but is driven by a combination of theories of settler colonialism, of, you know, oppression and atrocity, right? So that the history of Israel, and I know this happens in some of the elite universities, including Columbia, is driven by the sense that, well, you know, the Nakba, right? You know, the pushing out of the Arabs as Israel was being formed in 1948. A revisionist take on the war of 1967, the Yom Kippur War, I mean, and so on and so forth. And a Jewish friend of mine who, I guess it was right after October 7th, said, well, you know, look at every war that Israel's fought with Gaza. You know, the Gazans have just gotten essentially slaughtered. I mean, there was this, it's a very,

to my point of view, a very simplistic view, and it's kind of atrocity driven. It's like, Israel, the West, you know, and Israel is in this sense a stand-in for the West, keeps committing these atrocities. And I don't know to what extent, I mean, certainly look, this is simplistic, right? I am sure there are historians who do a more measured job of this, but it certainly feels like there is a vision of Israel as misshapen, you know, just driven to oppress the other, the people of color. How would you compare this moment to the protests against the Vietnam War? I mean, I had a couple of observations, but you're deeper into the history of that protest movement.

There were the occasional chant, pro-Viet Cong or whatever. But that was even into 1969, 1970, by the time we got Weatherman and all this sort of thing. That was the exception. I mean, that was not the mainstream kind of liberal opposition to the war. This feels different. And that isn't to defend everything God knows that Israel does or Bibi Netanyahu and all of that kind of stuff. But it feels so simple in the telling. And maybe my view of Vietnam is, you know, the Vietnam protests is too gauzy. But I mean, my sense is that there was, you know, a fairly rigorous attempt to kind

of figure out what was going on there. And, you know, look, there was some, I guess I'm thinking out loud. I mean, there was certainly some romanticizing of the North Vietnamese and what would happen when and if they took control of the whole country. I mean, but this just feels, I am struck by, I mean, when you hear chants, you know, defending the Houthi, you know, bombing ships and shooting missiles. I mean, the Houthi, really? Like people who are still practicing slavery and stoning people and killing, you know, you got Hamas throwing, you know, still throwing gays off of rooftops, and you've got these incredibly brave Iranian women who are fighting this misogynistic and repressive regime, and yet we're going to now cheer the Iranians firing a couple thousand missiles and drones at Israel, I am somewhat at a loss to kind of figure out how does that register as romantic for a presumably well-educated or on his way to

well-educated or her educated Columbia student, or frankly, a good SUNY student. I'm not sure there. I'm also struck, and this is not entirely true because, you know, State University of New York today or the city of New York had some students who were setting up, you know, tent encampment on a campus there. But I am struck that by and large, this is not happening on state university campuses. So it is hard to kind of avoid the sense that there's a class dynamic here, you know, kind of a class, you know, elite education. And I'm not sure what that's about. But a lot of these elite institutions also have a lot of international students. Yes. So Tablet Magazine did a big piece on quantifying the average, something like one in four students at elite American institutions.

Educational institutions today are foreign students. So what role they play, and I'm not generalizing here, but I think this whole part was not a factor during the Vietnam War. It's not like you had people from, you know, North Vietnam who were students at elite institutions in the United States during the Vietnam War protests. And yet, by the way, I'm not saying the foreign students are the only ones that are fueling a lot of this, but you did have that situation with the president of MIT, who made the threat that the protests and the disruptions of student life and of teaching have to stop or she was going to expel students. And then she made the threat and the protest continued and she didn't expel them. And she was asked, well, why didn't you expel them?

And she says, well, I realized most of these students who were organizing and participating in the protests were on student visas. And if we expel them, then they lose their visas and have to leave the country. So it's sort of like, oh, OK. So that's an element of the problem that probably didn't exist during the Vietnam War. Yes. Yes, I think that's certainly true. Look, in the Vietnam War also, the draft sharpened, focused the mind, right, I mean, of a lot of, you know, young men in particular. These kids had skin in the game. Yes.

They were protesting a policy that would directly affect their lives. That's the other thing that blows me away about this, is if you look at the students that may not be from the Middle East who are on these campuses, who are in the middle of these protests, they're not going to get drafted. No one's asking them to go fight this war. Like, how are they so obsessed with this? Well, no, as I said, I do think there's a romance to it. I think the sense that like somehow, I don't know, there's a romance. And then, I mean, I'm always reluctant to level, you know, kind of racism,

anti-Semitism at the, you know, too easily. But you're inevitably, you kind of wonder with that. I mean, you just like, so why is it? I mean, Israel has lots of problems. I could, as I say, have a best friend who lives there. We could note out, you talk often brilliantly about this week after week. It's hard to think that there's not, like, why Israel? And that isn't to defend everything they've done in the war, God knows, or anything. It's the most scrutinized war I can think of since the Vietnam War. I can't think of another military conflict that has attracted this level of obsessiveness and scrutiny and driven so much ferocious and sometimes off the rails debate than this war. And you're right. It's like not Assad in Syria, over 600,000 Syrians dead and 15 to 20 million refugees. I mean, you mentioned the Houthis in Yemen. I mean, we can just go

country by country. It's not these other countries. Sudan, right, yeah. Sudan, right. It's not even the American wars, the modern American wars, like Iraq and Afghanistan. There's something about this. And in my darker moments, and I try not to be dark, but in my darker moments, I think there are flare-ups throughout history, waves of anti-Semitism about if you actually go back, like sort of every 80 to 100 years.

I mean, just to really personalize this. So I'm in Israel right now. I'm with my sons and my wife. We went yesterday to Kibbutz near Oz in southern Israel, which was one of the Kibbutzim that was hit, you know, one of the hardest hit Kibbutzim. Population of 400 people, 77 taken hostage, 40 killed on October 7th. So basically one in four of the residents of the

members of this kibbutz were taken hostage or killed. And you know, you just saw the barbarism up close by going, I don't want to get into the details, but my son who's 16 said to me last night, he said, we, last summer we visited Auschwitz because my mother's a Holocaust survivor. Her father was killed at Auschwitz and we went to her hometown in Slovakia and we traveled around Eastern Europe. And he said going to that kibbutz yesterday was harder for him than going to visit Auschwitz, which I was shocked that he had said that. And when I asked him why, he said some version of, I tend to think of the Holocaust that happened, something that happened so long ago. Like, it's almost like another humanity, another version of humanity, one that is so far removed from his life that he can just, in a sense, say that doesn't exist anymore. And that there's a new,

you know, the humanity he's lived with is enlightened and modernized and compassionate. And then he sees kibbutz Nero's and he says, wait a minute, this was not in the 1940s. This was seven months ago. And that's what was so jarring for him. And how do I explain that to a kid? Other than to say, like, I really, I was sort of at a loss. Other than to say what I feel, which is, as I said, in my darker moments, it just feels like a newer version of the same old. And there's a reason why it's called the oldest hatred. And it just keeps recurring. And the target now is the Jewish state. No, it's the Jewish state we have a problem with and those who support the Jewish state. Oh, well, those who support the Jewish state all happen to be Jews living in this very assimilated, enlightened, quote unquote,

progressive diaspora. But now it's very hard to explain other than exactly what you're saying, or at least not that you're saying, but that you're zeroing in on. I mean, look, I'm of a certain age. So on the Upper West Side that I grew up on, I was privileged, really, to have a number of friends whose parents were Holocaust survivors. We would get invited to Passover dinners and this sort of thing, and you would hear these stories. And it's a very distant memory. Like my sons know of it through my wife and I,

and because they know these friends of mine. But I think that as it grows more and more distant, I mean, I've been struck even in conversations with younger Jewish friends, say in their 30s, you know, that there's a, I mean, here I am the goy. And I feel like I, you know, like for me, it feels very like, no, no, I mean, I can put a face on it. You know, I can, it's Max, it's this, I mean, there's just these parents that I grew up with and that's a distant memory for others. And I think at a time like this, that's unfortunate. I mean, it isn't to say you want, you know, you don't want to have your entire world driven by a horror, but it doesn't hurt to remember that within lifetimes, I mean, this is what was done.

Yeah. On the one hand, it's an important reminder. On the other hand, like we have these fantasies that as Jews, given that the hatred has existed for so long, that we have these periods of bliss, of golden age of Jewish life in America. I mean, as a parent, I say, I hope that exists for my children. And then I suddenly see, my kids are going to be applying to college in a couple years and I'm thinking oh my gosh where on earth are they going to go because I want my kids at these places being taught by I mean I have a friend here who told me last night an Israeli friend whose son I won't say the person's name for obvious reasons an Israeli friend whose son, I won't say the person's name for obvious reasons, an Israeli friend whose son is admitted to Columbia for the fall, and he served in the last few years in the Israeli Air Force. This poor guy, he's going to show up. I mean, I don't even know if he's still going to go.

I mean, could you imagine? You see what these professors are saying? These professors are going to know about your background. And so it's really, like I said, you're just thinking about your kids and what world are they? It's just, it's very unsettling. Anyways, Michael, we will leave it there. Thank you for taking the time. Thank you for your writing and reporting and I hope to have you back on.

Terrific. I really enjoyed talking with you, Dan. That's our show for today. To keep up with Michael Powell, you can find him on X, at Powell Atlantic. You can also find his work at the Atlantic website. We'll post his most recent piece in the show notes. Call Me Back is produced and edited by Ilan Benatar. Our media manager is Rebecca Strom. Additional editing by Martin

Huergo. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.