Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - Bret Stephens teaches college grads to argue!

Episode Date: June 5, 2023

Bret Stephens, Pulitzer Prize winning columnist for The New York Times, returns for a conversation immediately following his address at the University of Chicago’s Class Day, where there was an organized — and ultimately unsuccessful — effort against his speech. We discuss his address, the effort against him and lessons learned. Bret also recently returned from a mission to rescue 111 Ethiopian Jews, part of a multi-decade effort to bring thousands of Ethiopian Jews to Israel to become Israeli citizens, the history of which he unpacks at the end of our conversation. Bret came to The New York 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. And prior to working in Israel, he was based in Brussels for The Wall Street Journal. Today, Bret is also the editor-in-chief of Sapir Journal. Bret was raised in Mexico City, earned his BA at the University of Chicago and his Masters at the London School of Economics. Items discussed in this episode: Sapir Journal — https://sapirjournal.org/ “The Herd of Independent Minds: Has the Avant-Garde Its Own Mass Culture” — https://www.commentary.org/articles/harold-rosenberg-2/the-herd-of-independent-mindshas-the-avant-garde-its-own-mass-culture/ Bret Stephens — “Go Forth and Argue” — https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/02/opinion/free-speech-campus.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare Bret Stephens — “Israel’s Unfinished Exodus Story” — https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/26/opinion/ethiopian-jews-israel.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare “Sideways” — https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0375063/ “The Lives of Others” — https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0405094/

It's moderate Democrats who find themselves in the very institutions where these things have taken grip. A lot of my conservative friends are working at hedge funds or their own businesses, and they kind of look at it as like some form of insanity that's taking place outside of their business, outside of their community. They're somewhat insulated from it, but it's moderate Democrats who grew up with the usual set of liberal assumptions in publishing, academia, the media, all of those institutions, which have usually attracted a kind of a left of center employee base that have really headed up to their necks because they say, hey, I'm a liberal. I've never voted for a Republican.

I believe in marriage equality. I believe in rights. And now all of a sudden I'm unemployable on account of my race, or I can't speak my mind because there isn't really a free speech culture or any form of dissent from a prevailing orthodoxy is likely to cost me, if not my job, at least a promotion. And there's where the rebellion, I think, is really brewing. Welcome to Call Me Back. Before we get into the introduction of our guest today, Brett Stevens, I just have one housekeeping note. Our conversation with Tyler Cowen in our last episode

sparked quite a response. Some people loved what he had to say. Some people hated what he had to say. Some people, although very few, were in the middle, but it was basically divided between techno-optimists and techno-pessimists. And so for our next episode, we are going to have Dr. Christine Rosen on, who's a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a columnist for Commentary Magazine and is a regular on the critically acclaimed Commentary Magazine podcast. And I would say she follows more, although not entirely, but more in the techno-p Commentary Magazine podcast. And I would say she falls more, although not entirely, but more in the techno pessimist camp. I don't want to speak for her. But in that commentary podcast episode that was released the day our Tyler Cowen episode was released, she did have some very strong views in response to Tyler's take on the future of AI. So we are going to have Christine on to talk about her take on the implications of this AI revolution. So plenty of questions for Christine Rosen on AI, especially

in response to Tyler Cowen's take. If you have questions yourself, please send them in. Just record a voice memo and send them to dan at unlocked.fm. That's dan at unlocked.fm. Just record a voice memo with your question. Tell us your name. Keep it under 30 seconds and send it in, and we'll try to get to as many of them as possible. We also, interestingly, at the end of the conversation with Tyler Cowen, got into a discussion, quasi-debateate about who is the greatest of all time, LeBron James or Michael Jordan.

My 15-year-old son came storming in to tell me that I had it completely wrong, and he had a strong view on where at least he came down on that side of the debate. And the good news for me as a parent, not only as a podcaster, is to know that my son is actually listening to these podcasts. Now, I don't know if he fast forwarded to the debate about Jordan versus LeBron and skipped over all the economics and AI and geopolitics. But I am hopeful that if we have these items at the end, the young people are listening to. Okay. And now onto today's guest, who is, quote, a veteran columnist for the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, and has spent the better part of the last three decades acting as a professional mouthpiece for such forces as U.S. imperialism, Israeli apartheid,

climate denialism, and racist policing. Still more troubling, he has used his journalistic platform to lend these and other reactionary causes a veneer of intellectual and political respectability, dressing up the grossest lies, crimes, and prejudices of the U.S. political establishment in the polished rhetoric of New York Times-style journalism. Close quote. Mind you, those are quotes on either end of that because that is not my description of Brett Stevens, but the description in a letter that circulated in advance of a speech he gave at the University of Chicago class day at their graduation a few days ago. And there was a student organized protest of his speech and this letter circulated. And we're going to talk to Brett both about his speech and the reaction to his speech, which is a good lens through which to think about this moment we are living in today. I will, in fairness to Brett,

not rely on their bio of Brett and just say that he is a Pulitzer Prize winning columnist for the Times. He 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 the editor-in-chief of the Jerusalem Post, and prior to working in Israel, he was based in Brussels for the Wall Street Journal. He's also the editor-in-chief of the quarterly called Sapir, the Sapir Journal. He was raised in Mexico City. He earned his BA at the University of Chicago and his master's at the London School of Economics. Here's Brett Stevens. This is Call Me Back. And I'm pleased to welcome back to this

podcast my longtime friend, columnist for the New York Times, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, and editor of one of my favorite periodicals, Sapir, Ideas for a Thriving Jewish Future, which we've talked with Brett about in the past. We'll talk to him a little bit towards the end of this conversation, and we'll post the most recent couple of issues in our show notes. Brett, thanks for being here. Good to be back on, Dan. So, Brett, I would not use these words to describe you, but a letter was circulating among students at the University of Chicago in the last couple of weeks calling you a bigoted ideologue, an apologist for Israeli apartheid, and anyways, many other ad hominem attacks against you, signed by a whole range of student groups at the University of Chicago, the Environmental Justice Task Force, Students for Disability Justice, Students for Justice in Palestine, Chicago Against Displacement, Chicago Democratic Socialists of America. I can go on and on and on and on. And why they were circulating this letter is because you, these last few days, I guess a couple days ago, were the speaker at the University of Chicago's Class Day speech around their graduation.

And I was in touch with you. Actually, we were in touch just as your son was getting ready to graduate high school at his graduation ceremony about a week or so before this. And you were telling me that you had the speech coming up and there may be a little bit of blowback. And I just sort of thought to myself, my gosh, here you are on the one hand giving the speech where there could be blowback at the same time that you're sending your son off into the world, or at least into the post-secondary education world. And it made me think, what must have been going through your head in terms of sending our kids out into this world, whether it's the colleges or the professional world, and what kind of environments they're walking into.

What was going on here at Chicago? So I was honored by the invitation to be the Class Day speaker. It was the principal invited speaker at the University of Chicago. It's my alma mater, and the tradition at Chicago is that a faculty member always gives the graduation speech. But for the last several years, I've been inviting an outsider to be the guest speaker, and that was me this year. And not entirely surprisingly, the coalition of campus groups that you just listed wrote a lengthy letter of denunciation, which I read carefully. It was signed by alumni, some students, and even some faculty members, accused me of being an imperialist. It felt to me like something out of some 1960s agitprop manifesto. On the other hand,

I want to underscore, I completely respect their right to do it. They didn't call for my cancellation, which was important. They protested me, but they didn't call for my cancellation, which was important. They protested me, but they didn't call for my cancellation. And they announced that they were going to have some kind of action at the speech itself. And that, in fact, wound up being a great favor to me because I was struggling to come up with the appropriate speech. Commencement speeches are really difficult to do well. They're either a string of cliches. Well, because the basic task as a writer is to alight on a timeless cliche that is familiar to everyone and freshen it so it seems new and important and the message needs to be timely and timeless and universal. It's in fact a hard, as writing projects go, if you think of it not just as a moment of inspiration for students,

but as a task of sitting down and really thinking about shaping the prose, it's a real challenge to say something that hasn't been said in one form or another hundreds of times before. And with this protest, I realized this was a real opportunity to do a couple of things that I really wanted to underscore. First of all, to congratulate the protesters on exercising responsibly their right of free speech, their right of protest, which I accept, so long as they weren't heckling me or demanding my cancellation. The second thing is to talk about the other set of Chicago principles, which is to create an environment of intellectual challenge where you are meeting and hearing from and talking to

people with whom you profoundly disagree in the service of knowing your own mind better. And the final thing, maybe the most important, is that my very good friend Robert Zimmer, the former president of the university, passed away just about 10 or 12 days ago. And he was, I think, far and away America's greatest university president and the leading champion of free expression in American academia. So it was an opportunity to give him the honor I think he deserved. And just particularly on Zimmer, he really was a trailblazer in that he was one of the few leaders in academia to establish that University of Chicago and other universities need to be a safe space, dare I say, for thought and even thought that one may disagree with. So it actually fit perfectly. It was an opportunity to honor him and to really point to this part of his legacy.

You know, Bob was a mathematician, a very distinguished mathematician. His specialty was in things that I don't even begin to understand. But Chicago had a long tradition of upholding the principles of free expression, going back to the 1930s when they defended the rights, 1930s and 40s, that defended the principles of free expression. Going back to the 1930s, when they defended the rights, 1930s and 40s, that defended the rights of communists to speak on campus. The candidate for the Communist Party, USA, famously spoke on the campus in the 1930s over a huge protest from some of the trustees. And Chicago has said, we give people a platform. We believe that free expression is central to an education. But that's become the minority position in American academic life.

Even if a lot of universities claim to believe in free speech in theory, they don't really believe in it in practice. And Bob stood up for it in both theory and practice. He essentially initiated a report that created something called the Chicago Principles about the role of the university as a neutral platform for a wide variety of views. I think at this point, it's 100 other institutions. But more importantly, Bob created or showed that if you were a leader who enunci to begin to stand up to some of the bullying, the outrage mobs, essentially the cancellation platoons, and restore the university to its proper place in American intellectual life. So you're being more generous, I think, to university should be training students to, and I'm quoting here from your remarks, to respond to ideas we reject with more and better speech, not heckling or censorship. That's what you wrote. And I just see this, like when we're hiring, when I'm hiring people or trying to give people professional advice coming out of school. One problem or one challenge that we identify these days is that more and more students coming out of more and more elite institutions aren't comfortable with listening, analyzing, and then disagreeing or even battling, intellectually battling ideas that they disagree with,

that their knee-jerk reaction is to shut it down, to shut down the dialogue. So when I read that letter, I was reminded of this wonderful put-down that the Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli is said to have applied to a particularly bad student of his. He said, you're not even wrong. And I always think that's the ultimate put down. I mean- You're not even wrong? Well, what does that mean? So if you ask a little child, what's two plus two? And the child says five, he's wrong, right? But at least he understands that it's a mathematical question. If the child says banana, they're not even wrong. They that it's a mathematical question. If the child says

banana, they're not even wrong. They're not even in the category. They're not understanding what the category is. And as I was reading the letter signed about me, it was such a caricature of my views, done in such bad faith with such moralistic fervor, cherry picked, or blatantly misapplied quotations. And so I thought, well, it's not even wrong. It's really sophomoric. I mean, I'm perfectly happy to accept the real critique of my writing. And people can do that in a sort of smart way. This wasn't that. On the other hand, I got to tell you, Dan, two things. Number one, as I said earlier, they did not call for me to be canceled. And when they had a protest at the very beginning of my talk, they unfurled banners. They weren't disruptive. And I knew as I was sitting on the stage, I could pretty much guess who the protesters were going to

be. And I was completely right because they were all wearing surgical masks and hats and most of the dark, dark sunglasses. And they had to sit there for about an hour of the overall ceremony before it was my turn to speak. And I thought, you know, they're sitting here in the hot sun, and they're screwing up their courage to do this. There are, there were probably at least 1000 people there, and they were maybe 10 or courage to do this. There were probably at least a thousand people there, and there were maybe 10 or 15 who did this. And I thought, you know, that takes some guts. So even if nothing else, if nothing else, kudos to them for actively protesting someone whose views they may misunderstand, but they dislike. They took a stand. They were respectful. It wasn't like the Stanford. Stanford Law School, yeah, which was a catastrophe.

And a disgrace. Yeah. And I gave my speech, and it was really well received by the overwhelming majority of people. So I think it was actually a model for what free speech can be at its best, even with people who are going to walk out on you. Okay. So now let me refer to another line from your speech that struck me. You said, in my generation, I'm quoting here, I'm quoting you, in my generation, the hardest people to say no to were the people who had professional power over us. In your generation, speaking to the students before you, in your generation, I think, it's the people who are in your own ideological tribe. Now, I was struck by

that line. So you're basically saying when you were coming of age professionally, when I was coming of age professionally, the people who had this power over us were our bosses, our supervisors, people more senior to us in professional environments. And we could be bullied by them. We could be intimidated by them. We had to be overly responsive to them. But there weren't these intellectual cliques, if you will, or ideological cliques. And so this ideological clique or ideological tribe culture is a newer thing. But I think you're right on the one hand. On the other hand, what is most disheartening and sort of, in some cases, unnerving of what we're living, watching today is the merging of those two, that there are a lot of institutions in media,

in academia, in medicine, in, I mean, we can go through in lots of big swaths, large swaths of corporate America, where, where the, the, the business supervisors are part of the ideological tribe. And that to me is like a very dangerous, um, cocktail. I think that's really well observed. Um, and now that you mentioned it, I kind of wish I had expanded on that in the speech itself. It's absolutely true that if you are a faculty member at a university and you're being asked to sign this or that statement for, and you don't have tenure, the pressure to sign, conform, agree, to commit what's known as preference falsification, which is to suggest that you think things that you really don't.

The expectation that you should put your pronouns at the bottom of your preferred pronouns at the bottom of your emails, it happens in ways that are large and small, is real. And I think you and I have both seen that it can have damaging consequences, and in a handful of cases, really harm people's careers. I think it's a little different in, or there's a little bit of relief, only in this sense, which is that the number of people who have migrated away from those ideological hothouses, those zones of enforced ideological conformity, are waning. I think we reached peak wokeness a couple of years ago.

I don't exactly know when the peak moment arrived, but you sense that a lot of people who are in positions of corporate power and used to sort of thoughtlessly enforce the kind of the regime of groupthink and a certain kind of mentality have themselves gotten sick of it because they realize it's in bad faith, it's bottomless, and ultimately it's coming for them. So I think there's been a change in the culture, at least in my little pocket of it, but maybe I'm being overly optimistic. I also think a weakening economy contributes to it. There are a lot of resources that are invested in the enforcement mechanisms in various parts of the business world,

the nonprofit world, the academic world. And I think in a time in which resources are tighter, there's just fewer resources. But also just take someone like Andy Sullivan. He essentially got fired by New York Magazine. And he's laughing all the way to the bank. I mean, what he's able to do through his sub stack and his podcasts, I'm sure he's making loads more money than New York in its wildest dreams could ever afford to pay him. You can

think of lots of other people like that who just left that ecosystem because it's still a free country. And if you're a popular voice with some courage, you can create new institutions of your own. And I think a lot of institutional America got wise to that, that they were driving away the most interesting voices in their own stables. So you're kind of cautiously optimistic about this craziness that we've been living with the last few years, that it could be not gone, not even on the sharp decline, but sort of the beginning of the end. You know, a couple of years ago, I wrote a column called Why Wokeness Will Fail. And I think one piece of evidence that I'm right is that now you're not supposed to use the term woke. So just in terms of the linguistic

battle, people understand that the word woke is a really bad signifier. It puts them on the defensive. It's an argument that that corner of the ideological world, whatever you want to call it, progressive, critical theory type world, really lost the culture with its humorlessness and its nastiness. And so the very fact that they insist now that you shouldn't use the word woke is a sign that something really turned. And my argument basically was that social movements, which run against the grain of the American idea, which is an idea that moves us towards greater freedom, not away from it, are always going to fail. So wokeness failed in just the same way that the militant movements of the 60s and 70s failed, in just the same way that the various nationalist movements like black nationalism

from the 1920s failed, because that's not what America is about. The social movements that succeed, succeed by playing up the American ideal. Martin Luther King Jr. succeeded because he spoke about the Declaration of Independence. The marriage equality movement succeeded for exactly the same reason, because it was about a sense that what America is for includes the pursuit of happiness, life, liberty, equality, and a free society. And just to put a sort of sharper political point on what you're saying, it's a political loser. I mean, it's a political loser for Democrats. I mean, other than very hardline progressives, most moderate Democrats I know are as turned off by this as you and I are.

I mean, they don't- Well, I think in fact, even more so. Yeah. And I'll tell you why, because it's moderate Democrats who find themselves in the very institutions where these things have taken grip. A lot of my conservative friends are working at hedge funds or their own businesses, and they kind of look at it as like some form of insanity that's taking place outside of their business, outside of their community, more or less outside of their world. Yale or whatever, and they think, oh, what's going to happen to my kid? But they're somewhat insulated from it. But it's moderate Democrats who grew up with the usual set of liberal assumptions in publishing, academia, the media, all of those institutions, which have usually attracted a kind of a left of center employee base that have really had it up to their necks because they say, hey, I'm a liberal. I've never voted for a Republican. I believe in marriage equality. I believe in rights. And now all of a

sudden I'm unemployable on account of my race, or I can't speak my mind because there isn't really a free speech culture or any form of dissent from a prevailing orthodoxy is likely to cost me, if not my job, at least a promotion. And there's where the rebellion I think is really brewing. Just before we move off your speech, your Chicago speech, you talk about the herd of independent minds. And I want to ask you a question about that. But before I do, can you explain it? It's quoting, it's a quote, The Herd of Independent Minds, which you use then to characterize a whole bunch of movements where people think they're thinking independently, but wind up collectively at the wrong conclusion or

the wrong policy, even though they all think they're thinking independently and are like a check on the conventional wisdom. So since I'm sure our mutual friend, John Podhoretz, will listen to this podcast, I have to underscore that the term the herd of independent minds came from an essay in Commentary Magazine in 1948 by the great art critic Harold Rosenberg. I will make sure that John sends us the link. So we put it in the show notes. It's very important to do so because you can't have citations in graduation speeches. But I want that shout out to really a great American institution and a magazine. The herd of independent minds are people who, for example, think they arrive at their own

conclusions about politics by just reading the news and getting the facts. And yet somehow, the conclusions they're getting to are exactly the same kinds of conclusions that millions of other people are doing. So they're telling themselves that they're free thinkers, but they're really taking their marching orders from Rachel Maddow or someone like that. I always think of The Herd of Independent Minds. I couldn't mention this in the speech because the reference was too dated. But do you remember the movie Sideways? Of course.

So you remember that scene where the Paul Giamatti character says, you know, if anyone orders Merlot, I'm out of here. Right. And after that, the sale of Merlot, the sales of Merlot, like really declined for a period of time because all of these sort of bien pensant people, it's a kind of a, you know, it's a highbrow movie that went to see sideways. So they were like, well, I'm not ordering Merlot. Yeah. So you can think of all kinds of examples in which people who think of themselves

as independent people, independently minded people, really aren't. And I was trying to say that's also true of institutions in American life. Outside of, I don't know, the Franciscan religious order, every company that you've ever known of is saying, well, we want our employees to think outside the box and we want robust debate so that we get the best ideas from all kinds of people. But in my experience, most of these institutions, like most people, actually really discourage independent thought. And my message to these students and their families was to try to break the mold in the way that the University of Chicago really breaks the mold.

You know, Princeton University talks about applying the Chicago principles, but it doesn't really, not when it's punishing professors for speech and pretending that it's something else. It's really Chicago that has stood alone in the academic world. And I want these kids to create institutions that at least in that sense, resemble the University of Chicago. By the way, the sideways, I love the sideways reference. You just prompted me. I'm going to see it again. That film came out in 2004, I think. So it's been 20 years.

So I'm actually going to watch it again. But with regard to The Herd of Independent Minds, you're encouraging these students to, you're like imploring them to, quote, pay the price. So if I can say something critical of the kids who protested me, and I really don't because I really kind of give them kudos for the guts, but their manifesto against me was pure herd of independent minds. I mean, it was like a collage of cliches. And 260 odd people signed, people who signed petitions are part of the herd of independent minds, right? I mean, if you're putting your name to this petition that is thousands of words long with all kinds of allegations that aren't fact-checked, you're just sort of putting your faith that

some ideologue has got it all right, you're participating in that. And that was what I mainly found depressing about the protest. What I found inspiring was just how small the protest was, given the size of the Chicago community that came to hear me speak. But you tell them to pay the price. You tell these students to pay the price. And I guess my question is, has the price increased? Meaning when you and I were sort of coming of age in our studies or in the professional, in our respective professional worlds, the

price may have been modest, but there was no notion of cancellation. There was consequence if you spoke out and you took too much of a risk and got it wrong. There may be consequence. I remember specifically as I'm thinking about this specific moments in my career where I got it wrong and there was consequence, but not the sense of like, you know, capital punishment. Well, that's what cancellation is. It's more than just a consequence. It's reputational annihilation. Yeah. I think that if you were like a young Republican in college, and I want to underscore that I was not, your dating life might be hampered.

And I would almost say deservedly so. But if you were young, anything in college, your dating life should be hampered. That was the kind of consequence. I mean, one change is obviously technological, which is that if you said something untoward as a young person in college, even if it was genuinely stupid and sometimes bigoted, it was heard by very few people. And you had an opportunity to, at best, apologize to those people and say, you know, I said something really bad. I'm so sorry. I've reflected on it now if you say that and it's Captured on a video and then it's put on Twitter It's going to be heard by potentially

Hundreds of thousands if not billions of people and it's going to be sticky There's gonna be no way of getting rid of it In the way that you know you and I were in college in the early 1990s Yeah, it just kind of went away. People didn't remember. It wasn't recorded. Now everything is sticky. So I think the fact that technology has changed is a major difference. The other aspect, I think, is that these colleges certainly have huge administrative departments that didn't exist at the university when I was there. I mean, I keep reading about the number of administrators on elite college campuses, including places like Stanford, whose job is really to serve as enforcers of social norms on campuses.

And so there's consequence and there's a whole army of people who are looking to catch you up because that's their job, really. I mean, what else are these people doing? They're not teaching classes. They're not. That's what they exist to do. And then the third thing is that I think, look, there's a natural snitch culture in the world. And the combination of administrators who are receptive to complaints and technologies that can capture what you've said brings out all of the snitch instincts in lots and lots of young people. And that's a really toxic combination of-

Yeah. I mean, we're talking about movies from 20 years ago. There's The Lives of i don't know if you ever saw that oh it's one of the great films of of all time and and that captures how how just everyone can be vulnerable to playing that snitch role uh even if they would never see themselves as a as a snitch they can easily get sucked into it or i mean i would make if i were a call if i were a college president and I had a university-wide read, that would be, and a university-wide movie, I would make it The Lives of Others because it really brings home what we are doing on a voluntary basis. I mean, that was at least, East Germany at least was a police state. There was a whole armament of enforcement and ideology. We're doing this to ourselves because we, at some level, want to. It tells you how easily free people want to shackle themselves

in essentially a kind of a soft authoritarianism. For our listeners, we'll put the movie in the show notes. It is one of my favorite movies. It came out in 2006 about life in Stasi, basically run East Germany. Very different from Sideways. Released two years apart, but two different worlds. Sonoma versus Stasi. Right.

Okay. I want to switch gears and talk to you about a piece that you penned for The Times just before your piece about Chicago, which was not your typical column size. It was a really big in-depth piece for the Sunday paper called Israel's Unfinished Exodus Story, in which you really not only chronicled the history of this one part of the Israeli exodus story that actually gets far less attention than it should, which is the exodus from Ethiopia of Ethiopian Jews to Israel, but you not only chronicled the history of it, you were in a sense a participant or an observer in this story, because you actually flew with a plane of Ethiopian Jews who had made this exodus. So we'll put the piece in the show notes. Before we get into your actual trip, can you just give us a little bit of history of the Ethiopian story as

it relates to Israel? Well, I'm guessing everyone who listens to Dan Sienor's podcast knows that there are about 170,000 Israelis who are either Ethiopian born or of Ethiopian descent. Beta Israel is, by varying accounts, one of the oldest diasporic Jewish communities. By legend, it started with the union of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba and their child, King Menelik, the first of Abyssinia or Ethiopia. Other people, other historians think that maybe a thousand years ago, a breakaway group of Ethiopian Christians just decided they'd prefer to be Jewish rather than Christian. But it's a very

ancient community that in the early, in the late 1970s in particular, under the communist Mengistu regime, suffered gravely and had an opportunity to escape via Sudan. And thousands of Ethiopian Jews went from their homes and villages in a northern Ethiopian province called Gondar and headed to what's now South Sudan. Yeah, I think it's South Sudan. And through secret arrangements, the Mossad flew them out in something called Operation Moses. And Operation Moses was 1984, 1985? Yeah, 83 to 85, but that's approximately it. And that brought the first group of Ethiopian Jews out, but Israel was not able to get all of them out.

But before you get to that, can you just describe what those Ethiopian Jews had to go through to make this? name that she was given the moment she landed in Israel. But she, with her family, fled their remote village in northern Ethiopia, walked five and a half weeks in the darkness because they were hiding from the Mengistu regime. They would sleep in force in the day, ended up reaching a refugee camp in Sudan, where disease and hunger was taking as many as 20, 25 Ethiopian Jews a day. And at the time, the Begin government, Menachem Begin's government in Israel, through Ariel Sherrod reached a secret deal with the Sudanese government, which was, of course, part of the Arab League and part of the boycott of Israel, but essentially bribed the Sudanese government, which was, of course, part of the Arab League and part of the boycott of Israel, but essentially bribed the Sudanese government with, I think, the good offices of Vice President George H.W. Bush at the time to allow secret flights.

And Bush, this is one, I mean, Bush had a complicated, George H.W. Bush had a complicated relationship with Israeli governments, but this is one particular issue that he took a real interest in and worked on both in that period when he was vice president and also when he was president for the next big- Yeah. I mean, whatever else you think about his diplomacy after the first Gulf War, he was magnificent in helping this Aliyah because after Operation Moses ended in 1990-91, as the Mengistu regime was collapsing, the Israeli government managed to reestablish relations with Mengistu. Basically, Mengistu thought, well, if I can find a way to put myself in the good graces of the American government, I might be able to stave off or

keep my regime afloat. And in this odd twist, I think the anti-Semitic prejudice was, well, if you get in the good graces of the Israelis, they might be able to help you with the Americans. Right. So they opened a channel. Of course, Mengistu, what Mengistu really wanted was a bride. And largely, the American Jewish community came up with essentially $35 million in exchange for which they got a 36-hour window at the Addis Ababa airport to bring north of 14,000 Jews out in a 36-hour operation. I met one of the men, Micha Feldman, who was instrumental in making that happen. He was Israel's charge d'affaires at the embassy, Israeli embassy, Addis Ababa, who really saved the lives of these 14,000 refugees who were waiting outside the embassy grounds. He fed them, he schooled them, he kept them safe and warm until it was time to put them on planes. In one case, there was a 747 jumbo jet that managed to squeeze

on 1,086 people. And on the flight, a baby was born. So it became 1,087. There's going to be a pedant who'll say, no, two babies were born because that's what the guinness book of world record says but i have it on good authority from mika tholdman it was just one baby and this was wait sorry this was operation moses or operation solomon this is now we're talking about solomon in 1991 but as it happened there was still a remaining community because at least a century ago if not not more, Christian missionaries, European Christian missionaries, forcibly converted some portion of the Beta Israel community to Christianity.

But they began to come back to their Jewish roots. And about 20 years ago, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the chief Sephardic rabbi. And he was a major player in the kind of organization, part of the organization of Sephardic politics in Israel. Oh, he was a major force in Israeli life. He was the person who 30 years earlier had ruled that Beta Israel was in fact a Jewish community, despite obvious differences in practice simply because, I mean, for instance, for Ethiopian Jews, Hanukkah wasn't a thing because they dated their connection to Judaism. It came before the Maccabees. So he ruled twice on their behalf. And there was a second group, commonly referred to as the Falashmora, although that term is considered derogatory, who were then brought in yet again. Now in a much more regularized way because the Ethiopian government is not hostile to Israel.

What I was coming, what I was flying, the people I was flying with were a slightly different category. They were no longer being admitted to Israel as Falashmora, as Jews. They were being admitted as first relations to Ethiopian Jews who were already in the country. So brothers, sons, and parents. One of the most moving things, Dan, was that I met a family. I met a man, his wife and his five children. And this man's mother had been living in Israel for 26 years. And he, because he had to raise his family, he was unable to go to Israel. He saw his mother at the airport for the first time in 26 years. How you're not moved to

tears by that experience, I don't know how. It was just an extraordinarily emotional moment. And did you, wow. And you write in the piece also about the challenges for Ethiopians who've made their lives in Israel and made Aliyah today? And that's also part of the kind of unfinished work. Well, it's probably the most difficult Aliyah for at least two principal reasons, maybe three. The first is the Ethiopian Jewish community was living principally through tenant farming and other fairly basic work when they were brought out. So they were brought out from a kind of a medieval existence to a very modern existence virtually overnight. And that adjustment was especially difficult for the first,

the older generation of the Bet Ha'Yisrael community. Their kids do much, much better. They adapt very, very quickly. And anyone who's been to Israel sees that the younger generation is thriving, at least compared to their parents. Second issue, obviously, is they are black. They are a rarity. They are exotic at best.

There is unmistakable racism. By the way, it's the same racism that I think Mizrahi Jews had to deal with from the Ashkenazi community or the Yemenites back in the 1950s. ask those same questions about Russians who are coming into the country today, that they don't really meet the standards of the law of return. And it's in my view, a sort of ugly way of looking what is really a fantastic opportunity for Israel to enhance and expand the range and reach and variety of the Jewish community. All of them have to go through an Orthodox conversion anyway. So if you think that a converted Jew is just as good of a Jew as any other Jew, there shouldn't be a problem. But they do meet with discrimination, and they do meet with socioeconomic and various other sorts of obstacles. And many of them, so all that is true, and obviously it's a transition, but many of them have also achieved extraordinary success. I mean, I know this one individual named Eli Rada, who's a VP at OurCrowd, which is a very successful venture fund, crowd-based venture fund out of Jerusalem.

And he tells a story like the story you're telling, and that's how he came over as a kid. I mean his story is mind-blowing, and there he is working at a venture fund in Israel. This is not to suggest that his is directly representative of everyone who's gone through this experience, but some are making it, some are facing challenges. It's gone through this experience. But some are making it, some are facing challenges. It's a story of transition. It's also a magnificent rebuke to the view of Israel as this colonialist settler enterprise. I mean, there I was on the plane coming in from Ethiopia with these families who have been dreaming of Jerusalem for at least a thousand years and landing in what they see and have seen for generations as their promised land.

And Israel, for all of its flaws, is a refuge and a beacon for them. And it's a reminder of what the Israeli enterprise, of what the state of Israel is at its very best. And that was a moment when Israel was truly at its very best. Every Ethiopian who comes will have years in an absorption center. Those are expensive. Everyone will get $100,000, I think it's $100,000 towards a mortgage. It's a challenging Aliyah for Israel, but they're doing it. And now you have a community soon approaching 200,000 people. It's a great tribute to the diversity of the Jewish community. Before we move off this, I'm just curious, the backstory. I never asked you this.

How did this come about? How did you decide, hey, I'm just curious, the backstory. I never asked you this. Like, how did this come about? Like, what was the, how did you decide, hey, I'm going to get on a plane and fly? A mutual friend of ours, a woman who I first met when I hired her as an intern, Daniela Greenbaum. Oh, sure. I know Daniela, yeah. Called me up and said, hey, are you interested in this? I said, am I interested in this? I'm going to move heaven and earth to make it happen. And the, I mean, the trip was under the auspices of the Jewish agency. And there are a variety of other people there who were

on the trip. Mark Wilf, better known as the owner of the Minnesota Vikings was the, I think was the leader of the trip, people from a variety of backgrounds. So I got to make some friends along the way, but far and away, the most extraordinary people who I had the chance to meet were the Ethiopians now working at the Jewish agency, who themselves had made the journey during operations Moses or Solomon, because their stories are just extraordinary, heartbreaking, and just something that the New York Times readership deserved to be aware of. That's a good way to put it. And speaking of readers who are deserving of good content, before we wrap, I want to pull up the most recent issue of Sapir, the spring 2023 issue, volume nine, Israel at 75. I'm told by one of my listeners and friends that I'm not allowed to use the word devour anymore when I talk about reading something because he doesn't believe that I actually devour everything I say I devour. But this is one I actually did devour.

This is how you maintain your physique, Dan. You do nothing but eat paper. That's right. I eat paper, and the only thing that will make that process obsolete, potentially, is chat GBT. Okay, so this is an issue dedicated to Israel at 75. You have a pretty diverse group. Like in the first section,

the achievement of Israel, I was struck by two writers who I like a lot, but I never associate in the same section other than their last names, which is Anshul Pfeffer, who writes for Haaretz, and Rabbi Yeshua Pfeffer, who's at Tikvah Israel, who's a major player in the Hasidic and the Haredi community in Israel. Yeah, and I'm pretty sure they're unrelated. Yes, exactly. And so it's a pretty ideological diverse group here. Stav Shafir writes, I mean, you know, from the hard left, I mean, you have, like I said, it's a pretty eclectic group. What are we trying to accomplish with this? So, look, the 75th anniversary of the founding of the state is an obvious occasion to take stock. From the moment I started Sapir, one of my core principles is I wanted to speak to a broader group of readers than just those who are in my sort of right of center corner.

So I've always made a point of looking for authors who are well to the left of me. I've looked for authors who are much more religious and observant than I am. I felt it's important that every side of Israeli life be included, not just ideologically. I think one of the most beautiful pieces in this issue is by a man named Nazir Magali, an Israeli Arab journalist. It's called Israel is a Hope for its Arab Citizens 2. As you mentioned, Stav Shafir, a politician, most definitely on the left. Very good piece by someone named Wendy Singer. I don't know if you've heard of her. I am familiar. I'm a fan. And I thought her piece was excellent.

It was excellent. Climate Tech Revolution. Because I wanted to, as best as we could i wanted to capture many faces of israeli life including taking into account the extraordinary historic uh protests uh taking place so let me ask you a question these protests this is spring of 23 the protests began in january of 23 just thinking about the production timeline of you putting this thing together, were you at any moment like thinking,

Oh my gosh, like how, how am I going to put something out celebrating Israel at 75 when it looked at that point, I'm sure while you were editing these pieces, like Israel was on the brink of something potentially really bad. I was sure Israel would find of something potentially really bad? I was sure Israel would find a way through.

Really? Yes. And I, in fact, I wrote it. This is not, is that documented somewhere so we can? Yes, I can prove it to you. Let me prove it to you right, right this second. Page 86, you're looking at it here. Yeah, I got it right here. Look at the second to last paragraph

but will israel really tear itself to pieces lose its freedom turn into something unrecognizable to its friends maybe but i doubt it yeah israelis have gone through similar periods of crisis okay so tell me why you i won't read i'm so so why were you, this is your Israel's a world power essay. Yeah. And what I said at the end of the essay was when nations find themselves staring into the abyss, they tend to recoil. That was just my basic thesis. Look, I had, as an editor, I had two challenges. One was Netanyahu would yank the reform, the legislation,

the protesters would go away. And this would seem like we had published essay after essay about a crisis that would soon be forgotten and would be irrelevant to the Israeli story. So that was one possibility that I thought about. And the other one was, you know, maybe Israel is just going to go over the ledge here. So you have to make a judgment as an editor when you're dealing with contemporary issues. There was a third risk, which was to write essays that were so out of time, right, that they just didn't seem fresh. I mean, I want to create it. This is a quarterly journal. And I ideally would like people to be able to pick this journal off the shelf in five years and still read these essays and still say, ha, you know, that feels so relevant and interesting. But in journalism, you have to be speaking to a moment, and this was

clearly a big moment that I couldn't ignore. I would also add, well, I too, while Israel was going through this, thought they would work through it. I wasn't as confident as you were to put pen to paper on it. But I also just felt that those who were so doom and gloom were not paying attention to the fact that Israel has been at the brink from debates over accepting German reparations in the 1950s, right up to the assassination of a prime minister in the 1990s, to Gaza disengagement. I wouldn't go down the list. There's been moments where Israel felt like it was coming apart and it doesn't. And this felt, you know, not better, not worse, but comparable in various, in varying degrees to those periods. Oh, I mean, there's, and it's not over and we don't know. But I thought it was worth,

you know, it's also worth thinking that even countries that appear from the headlines to be racked with dissent and protest, daily life goes on. People get up, they go to work, they think of the next big thing, they try to make money, politicians adapt, and that's exactly what happened here. In life, it's rarely the worst case and rarely the best. And just before we let you go, in this piece, Israel is a world power. I want you to spend a minute on that, because I felt like your subliminal message was to the diaspora, to the American international Jewish community, non-Israel-based Jewish community, basically saying, hey, everyone, Israel's no longer a charity case. And I know you all were raised thinking that a

form of your organized Jewish life was to think of Israel as a charity case, and you should participate in that charity project, which many Jews around the world did and was very important. But Israel's not a charity case anymore. And you've got to kind of change the way you think about Israel, about Israel's role in the world, and about your relation to Israel. Yeah, that was exactly it. I mean, one of the things I call for in the essay is that I think the next 10-, 10 year security agreement that, uh, memorandum of understanding that it, you know, it was last negotiated between, uh, president Obama and, uh,

and prime minister Netanyahu. Now it looks like it'll be negotiated between, uh, prime minister Netanyahu and president Biden. Uh'll be some arrangement. I think that should end. I mean, it made sense when a few billion dollars of American aid was a huge factor in Israel's overall GDP. But people forget Israel's GDP is now close, or in fact, may have exceeded half a trillion dollars. The several odd billion dollars that the United States gives Israel is good for Israel. It's actually really good for Lockheed Martin and Boeing and other American defense contractors. That's really where the money is going. But it harms Israel in the sense that it creates a kind of clientelistic relationship between what

ought to be two sovereign countries. I mean, people think of Israel as geographically small, but its population is now roughly that of Sweden. It's a mid-tier country demographically. It's increasingly a major country economically. It's a superpower technologically. It's not a baby anymore, and it's time for a new relationship between these

two countries. The only thing I would say, and this warrants a longer conversation, is the economic aid history of USAID to Israel has kind of been gradually wiped out. It is purely military assistance, and many in the U.S. national security apparatus argue that the memorandum, the MOU, the 10-year arrangement is as beneficial to the U.S. The question is, who's the true beneficiary? Because the U.S. deepening ties, at a time when the U.S. is pulling back from the Middle East through multiple administrations of both parties, it's kind of the direction of U.S. foreign policy, having these deep ties, military ties, with Israel expressed in this way, is a U.S. interest?

We have deep ties with Australia through AUKUS, the U.K., profound ties, New Zealand, the Five Eyes, Canada. No reason Israel shouldn't be in that category. We can have profound ties with countries. And by the way, it removes a demagogic point that is often made against Israel that we have a right to lecture the Israelis that much more when it comes to the Palestinians, because after all, they're the beneficiaries of our largesse. I think the relationship with, you know, it's like a child's relationship with a parent, it's healthier when the child is financially independent. It just is. Doesn't mean there can't be love, affection, and all the rest of it. It's just

better off when dad isn't slipping you a check once a month. Right. All right. Israel at 75 is the most recent issue of Sapir's journal. There's another issue coming out. We won't tease what it is, but when is it coming out? Later this summer. Later this summer.

All right. We will look forward to that. And we encourage our listeners to subscribe to Sapir, to visit the Sapir website, which we will include again in the show notes. And Brett, thanks for your powerful message to those students at University of Chicago, and your equally powerful piece on the Ethiopian exodus to Israel, Ethiopian Jewish exodus, and look forward to having you back on for your insight and illumination and candor and references to movies that came out in the early 2000s that are going to go now on my watch list.

Dan, thanks. It's always a pleasure. That's our show for today. To keep up with Brett Stevens, you can track him down at The New York Times. You can also track him down at sapirjournal.org. You can follow Sapir Journal online. You can also follow them on Twitter at Sapir Journal. Call Me Back is produced by Alain Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.