Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - Is Israel Losing America's Jews? With Yossi Klein Halevi and Rabbi David Ingber

Episode Date: April 5, 2024

Over the past several weeks, especially the Biden administration’s statements Thursday, Israel has been subjected to a fresh round of harsh criticisms. We’ll be turning to the elevating U.S.-Israel tensions in our Monday episode with Nadav Eyal. But today we have a conversation about the criticisms we have been hearing in intra-Jewish community debates here in the U.S. and other Diaspora communities. While there is a growing number of American Jewish leaders calling on Israel to change course and pursue a permanent ceasefire -- or at least wage a more “humane” war -- these voices are still a small minority (albeit a very loud minority). These voices get outsized attention, but they should not be ignored. They are people that many of us know. Some have large platforms. Many non-Jews hear them on those platforms and cite these Jewish figures as sources. What does all this tell us about trends in American Jewish life long before October 7? What is the impact now on Israel? These are some of the questions we try to unpack with: -Yossi Klein Halevi, who is a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. Yossi has written a number of books, including his latest, "Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor," which was a New York Times bestseller. He has written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Times of Israel. He is co-host of "For Heaven's Sake" podcast. -Rabbi David A. Ingber is the new Senior Director for Jewish Life and Senior Director of the Bronfman Center at 92NY. He serves as the founding rabbi of Romemu, the largest Renewal synagogue in the United States. Items discussed in this episode: -Rabbi David Ingber's Shabbat sermon on Israel (03/22/24): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=px5i9mIxd5E&t=3942s -Rabbi Angela Buchdahl's letter to her congregants on her position on the war in response to the "Times of Israel" article: https://centralsynagogue.cmail20.com/t/j-e-sulquk-dhkutlbli-r/ -Yossi Klein Halevi's books: https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B001IXOA04

I see Israel as a laboratory, first of all, in terms of democracy, democracy under extremity. What happens when you apply relentless security pressures on a democracy? What are the fault lines? Where does it start to crack? Where does it defend itself? In other words, Israeli democracy is valuable not because we're a paragon of democracy, but because we're not. We can't be a paragon of democracy, but we are a paragon

for the struggle for democratic values. It's 10 p.m. on Thursday, April 4th here in New York City. It's 5 a.m. on Friday, April 5th in Israel as Israelis get ready to start their day. Over the past several weeks, especially Thursday when the Biden administration issued some pretty harsh statements, Israel has been subjected to a fresh round of red hot criticisms. We'll be turning to the elevating U.S.-Israel tensions in our next episode, which will come out Monday, with Nadav Ayel. But today we want to have a conversation about the overall criticisms we've been hearing, not just from the U.S. administration. These criticisms that we hear all the time can be boiled down to, in its response to the war launched by Hamas on October 7th, Israel has gone,

and I quote here, too far. Its response is, quote, disproportionate. Some say it's a form of, quote, collective punishment against innocent Palestinian civilians. Others have even accused Israel of deliberately slowing the delivery of humanitarian assistance, or even worse, that Israel has been targeting humanitarian aid workers, like those with World Central Kitchen who were tragically killed earlier this week. These themes, they are criticisms and conversations that many of you have reached out to me about, as you have been watching them play out externally on television or on social media. But there is also an internal conversation, an intra-Jewish community conversation here in the United States and in other diaspora communities around the world. It's reflective of a sharpening divide in the Jewish community.

I remain skeptical that the divide is evenly split or even remotely close to split. My sense, based on anecdotal evidence but also from survey data, is that the overwhelming majority of American Jews continue to strongly support Israel in its response to the Hamas war. In fact, according to a recent Pew survey, 89% of American Jews believe Israel has valid reasons for fighting Hamas. And that while there is a growing number of American Jewish leaders calling on Israel to change course and pursue a permanent ceasefire, those voices are still a small minority. But they should not be ignored. They are people that many of us know. Some of them have large platforms. Many non-Jews hear them

on those platforms and cite these Jewish figures in their criticisms of Israel. I've been thinking a lot about this since I read a recent letter signed by hundreds of American rabbis and cantors and Jewish lay leaders organized by TRUA, an organization whose mission is to, quote, amplify the voices of rabbis and cantors on the pressing human rights concerns of our time. TRUA has been calling for an immediate ceasefire. Their most recent letter celebrated, and I quote here, the Biden-Schumer approach of working toward an off-ramp that leads to long-term peace and security. Close quote. TRUA does not believe that a necessary step for the peace and security of Israelis and Palestinians is the decisive defeat of Hamas and its military

infrastructure in Gaza in this war. The Truer letter followed a previous group letter that they had sent to Senator Schumer, and I quote here, with his historic speech, Senator Schumer has modeled what it looks like to truly support Israel. Now, interestingly, a couple weeks ago, I saw an article in the Times of Israel which reported on Rabbi Angela Buchdahl, who's the senior rabbi of New York's Reformed Congregation Central Synagogue. Angela Buchdahl is one of the most high-profile rabbis in the country, and the article reported, or it turns out actually kind of misreported, Rabbi Buchdahl's comments at a conference in which she was asked to explain why there is some fracturing within the U.S. Jewish community over the issue of Israel. Now, Rabbi Buchdahl was describing what she's seeing and hearing increasingly from some critics within the

Jewish community as she thinks through her views on these issues. Now, she herself has not signed on to any of these ceasefire letters. In fact, to make sure the record was corrected from that original article, Angela Buchdahl wrote a letter to her congregants that's worth a read in its entirety. I'll post it in the show notes, but I just want to quote one part of it here. She writes, Israel has an absolute moral imperative to protect its citizens and to rescue its hostages. Like many, Rabbi Buchdahl writes, I am pained by this war's devastating and tragic consequences for Gazans, and we must never lose sight of that nor Hamas's responsibility for their suffering. But I believe Israel is 168 days into this war because Hamas still holds 135 hostages in Gaza

and has not retreated from their promise to continue attacking Israel. Now, here's a liberal or center-left rabbi saying something that should be easy, I think at least, for any Jewish leader to say. But some won't. Why not? And what does it say about trends in American Jewish life that have been in the works long before October 7th? These are some of the questions we try to unpack and we wound up debating, sometimes quite intensely, with two of my favorite teachers. Yossi Klein-Halevi is a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. He's written a number of books, including his latest,

Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor, which was a New York Times bestseller. Yossi has written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Times of Israel, and he's the co-host of a terrific podcast, although I don't always agree with it, but I highly recommend it. It's called For Heaven's Sake. Rabbi David Ingber is the new senior director for Jewish life and senior director of the Bronfman Center at the 92nd Street Y. He serves as the founding rabbi of Ramamu, which is the largest renewal synagogue in the United States. While David leads a renewal congregation, he was trained and educated in the Orthodox Jewish world. Yossi Klein-Halevi and Rabbi David Ingber on, Is Israel Losing America's Jews? This is Call Me Back.

And I am pleased to welcome back to this podcast, my longtime friend, Yossi Klein-Halevi, who's been on this podcast many times and longtime friend, I think longtime listener, first time guest on the podcast, Rabbi David Ingber. Thank you both for being here in person. Yeah. Great to be with both of you. Yossi, I was just thinking as we were talking before we started recording that the last

time you and I were together was in New York in this studio. We recorded an episode about mine and Saul's new book before the book had come out. It was six or seven weeks before the book came out, which means it was two or three weeks before October 7th. Which means it was about 20 years ago. You were trying to reconcile the ideas of our book with 2023, or up to that point, what was 2023 in Israel, which was a highly divisive, polarized Israel, obviously before a war. You said 20 years ago. That's exactly how it feels. As I said in the introduction, I've been watching what's going on in the American Jewish community,

the diaspora Jewish community more broadly, but we'll focus on the American Jewish community. And there are very loud voices that are very critical of Israel, very critical of Israel's government, very critical of decisions Israel is making, very critical of the way Israel is conducting itself in this war. And I tend to be dismissive of not all, but many of the criticisms, but I don't want to do that today. I want to have a conversation trying to understand, taking at face value, in good faith, the issues that are raised by Jewish critics of Israel. And then we can get into more broadly what we think is actually going on in the Jewish world. But I just want to start by looking at these issues in Israel. And before we do that, David, I want to start just a high-level

question, which is, you gave the sermon at Ramamu a little over a week ago, and you opened the sermon by saying, I love Israel. Why did you say that? Why did you have to say that? I think the reason I started that way was because I think people would expect after that, that I would say, but I love Israel, but, and I wanted to say, I love Israel and out of my love for Israel and more than loving Israel, like it's some list of various things that I love about Israel. It's, you know, it's people or this and this and that. In much the same way that really loving the person means you also know what hurts them and where they're in pain. And you don't love externalities, but you love being in their presence and you make every effort to understand where they're coming from,

what their worldview is and what they're experiencing, I wanted to articulate from within, as I had experienced it, what it might feel like to be someone who's sending their kids to fight a war. What it might feel like for the cab driver whom I quoted who had just returned from surviving being in Gaza for three months, but now knows that he's going back in, you know, at some point in the next couple of months. And what's it like to live your life knowing that you might have to go back again and might not make it out. And you have two little girls as Ori did. So I kind of wanted to say, I love Israel. And because I love Israel, I want to speak about Israel as if I'm trying to articulate for you what it's like to be there now. and also what it might then feel like for an Israeli to hear

from, you know, many liberals, especially liberals here in the United States, some of the things that we've heard them say in the last couple of months. So, Yossi, I want to pivot off of that. And then there's, I love Israel. And then there are these specific issues. You can love Israel and still say, but, you know, I love Israel in all the ways David just articulated. But, and I want to throw a few of these questions, start with you. But why does Israel have to conduct the war the way it's conducting it? In other words, we understood that Israel was hit. We understood that Israel had to respond. These are not my views. I'm just trying to express what we hear out there from many people in our own community. But six months in, if you believe the Hamas-run Gazan Healthcare Ministry data, which I'm skeptical of, we're actually about to drop an episode just in the data, but let's just say, you know,

somewhere over 30,000 casualties without getting into what's the composition, you know, terrorists versus civilians, but there's been suffering. There's been human catastrophe in Gaza. And to what end? Where does this go? Isn't fighting for 30 days, fighting for 60 days? This is what I hear from certain voices, but at some point, it's enough. The point is made, and you're running the risk of, as they say, creating more terrorists than you're defeating. I want to respond, David, to what you were saying. And you were really speaking very much in an Israeli voice. Because in Israel, people would say, I love Israel. And then they would go on to say all of the issues, all of the problems that they have with the government, with policies. But they wouldn't say it as a but, they would say it as an and. I love Israel, and I believe that desperately we have to change this

government because I love Israel. There isn't a but for critics in Israel. So it was so moving for me to hear you speak as an Israeli. And I spent the last year demonstrating against this terrible government. And as soon as the war is over, God willing, I'll be back on the streets because I love Israel, because I believe that Israel deserves a better government. We deserve a better face. So that's from an Israeli perspective. The word but doesn't come into the conversation about love. And in terms of the American Jewish conversation and critics of Israel, I feel a strong need to draw a distinction between those who say, I love Israel but, and truly do love Israel, even if they're speaking in the language of but, and those who criticize Israel and really don't love it,

and those who have essentially declared war or joined those who have declared war against Israel. And we're in a new reality now, which is that Jewish anti-Zionism, which we all assumed the Holocaust had put an end to in the most literal way possible by destroying the center of Jewish anti-Zionism, which was the socialist Bund, and the transformation of Reform Judaism and the shift of most of the Haredi, the ultra-Orthodox world, from anti-Zionism to non-Zionism. These were really post-Holocaust developments that effectively ended anti-Zionism as a credible force. Just for our listeners who may not be as familiar with the Jewish history, what you're saying is the ultra-Orthodox were not supportive before 1948 of a modern state of Israel

that, shall we say, would come ahead of its time, a Jewish sovereignty that would come ahead of its time. And it's not to say that majorities of the Haredi community are aware. The rest of Israel is on that issue, but they're not hostile to the idea. Most Haredim today have made their peace with a reasonably secular Jewish state. But the resurrection of Jewish anti-Zionism in American Jewry, and it's not happening anywhere else in the diaspora, which is a whole conversation in itself. Why is it happening here? But it is happening here, and it's growing. That creates a new line. And for me, when I look at who's inside the tent and who's outside the tent, my measure is now the Washington demonstration of a couple months ago. If you felt the need to be with your fellow Jews

in a public space after October 7th, you're in the tent. Even if you use that language of, I love Israel, but even if you're a critic of this war, even if you call for a ceasefire, I don't like it, I disagree with it, but that's a disagreement within the tent. And part of a commitment to Jewish peoplehood is to stay engaged with people who you think are wrong. I don't think that Jewish Voice for Peace or If Not Now are wrong because that assumes a shared language. And these are Jewish Voices for Peace and If Not Now are organizations that are created by, populated, led by Jews that are anti-Zionist. Yes, this is the far left anti-Zionist. I'm tempted to say fringe. I hope they're a fringe, but they're a growing fringe of the Jewish community.

I don't have enough of a shared language or purpose to have the basis of a disagreement, to have a conversation with them. But I do have a conversation and a disagreement with J Street, with Truah. J Street is a Washington lobbying organization that lobbies against the policies of Israel, lobbies against Israel, supports members of Congress who are very critical of Israel. And what was the other one?

Truah is a rabbinic organization. Yeah, it's like a rabbi for human rights. Yeah, but both J Street and Trua were in Washington at the rally, and both of those organizations resisted pressure to call for a ceasefire. They now are calling for a ceasefire, but I was frankly amazed that they resisted pressure for so long. And so I have to treat them seriously. They're partners. From my point of view, they're sometimes problematic partners, but that's different than saying these are people who have betrayed the Jewish people. And we have to be very careful with that language.

Yeah, I fully agree. I think, I mean, maybe we'll get back to some of the actual what they're saying and try to understand what they're saying on its own terms in terms of their critiques, I do think that there's a rich tradition of debate. And, you know, we have what's called machlokah leshem shemayim, like disagreeing for the sake of heaven, which of course, you know, for heaven's sake is the name of the podcast that you're on so frequently at Hartman Institute. Like for heaven's sake means that as long as you're aligned with in the same universe of discourse, as you said, and so we're on the same, we have a shared language and we can disagree and that's robust and that's what democracy and pluralism are all about. I think there are some problematics about the kinds of things that they criticize

and the ways that they criticize, which we can get to. Oh, that's part of why we need to disagree. That's part of the argument. I want to actually divide between the substantive element and the kind of public relations considerations that, like, the Jews in the diaspora don't have an army. Jews in the diaspora, and we talked about how America is unique, you said, in terms of what's happening on the left, and it's not happening in other elements of the diaspora. The American Jewish community, like many other ethnic minorities,

depends to a great extent on its positioning vis-a-vis power for its own protection, its own interests, and that's kind of as it should be. But I often feel like the liberal Jewish community, especially in the aftermath of October 7th, liberal Jewish groups have not fully really done the inner work of understanding how they and we unwittingly and with the best of intentions were willing to countenance our de-centering of Jewish concerns, our own issues, and allowed, in some way, the language of oppressor and oppressed and victim and victimizer into the discourse that then led to this kind of combustible reality on October 8th and 9th. And I wonder to myself consistently about critics of Israel, especially Jews, in what ways are their words,

even if they're best intentioned, weaponized in the diaspora and around the world by others who seek, right, a Chuck Schumer to say as the chief Jew of America, I want to let you all know that Israel has to comport with Jewish values. And you sit there thinking to yourself, A, I don't think that the Israeli army is not comporting with Jewish values. B, even if you thought that as a Jew after October 7th, would you say that in quite that way? Like, wouldn't that be part of your deliberation before you went public with a condemnation or a broadside against the Jewish state? That's one of the things that I keep thinking about. of criticism. There's Jonathan Glaser, who set a whole new standard of Holocaust manipulation, Holocaust abuse, self-flagellation, and abuse of a platform that he was given, and to accuse the Jews of manipulating the Holocaust at the moment when much of the world is accusing us of being Nazis. It doesn't get much worse than that. And so I listened to Chuck Schumer, and I disagree with him. But again, it's a disagreement.

And, you know, there's something here, Senator, that you need to think through. And I pretty much agree with your critique. But I don't feel the same vehemence that Jonathan Glazer, you know, I never tweet because I don't know how to do it. I don't know how to condense. So I was so beside myself, I tweeted. This is where, you know, we're really, who else he takes to Twitter? My son Gabriel sends me an SMS saying, mazab, what was that? He said, nobody will understand what you were talking about. So he says, delete. I said, no, no, I'm not going to delete. I'll delete and write it again. So I wrote it again. And he wrote me back

saying, it still makes no sense. I did it three times. But it was an expression of this feeling of I had to scream. And Chuck Schumer didn't make me feel like I wanted to scream. He made me feel like let's sit down and really argue this out. Right. You know, I think that for him to put into a series of obstacles to peace, to put, you know, without an asterisk next to it saying like Islamic jihadists like Hamas are of an entirely different order than let's say the democratic elected government of Israel. Put them on the same plane. The same on the same plane

like I'm not a fan of BBs. I actually also protested you know over the summer when I was in Israel but I'll tell you the truth here in America when the protests began in America about the judicial reform like you know a year ago I was very hesitant to go and publicly protest Bibi. And the reason for that was I had to think to myself, I know why I'm protesting, but I don't know why you think I'm protesting. And I don't want you to think that protesting Bibi and his two ridiculous ministers, it will become part of the same set of signifiers, like use the worm extremist and they're extremist, you hear that bandied about. And when Chuck Schumer talks about Bibi and his extremist government in the same language, in the same list of five impediments as Hamas, I think something is completely askew

and dangerously askew because here he is publicly giving fuel to the people who say, well, we have two extremist governments now that are fighting out this war. There's Hamas in Gaza, and then there's Bibi and his extremists, and then they'll quote some, they'll cherry pick quotes. And I think that the public relations nightmare is, besides being a public relations nightmare, is actually part of the mimetic war that we in the diaspora have to take into account. You and I both were talking before the podcast, there is a front here in America. There is a front line. And the front line is not with tanks and with guns, but it's a war of memes. And the more fuel we give to people thinking that Israel acts as an extremist government or is acting in ways that are

analogous to an Islamic jihadist regime, I think that's extremely dangerous for us on so many levels. I think that we need to develop two simultaneous languages on Israel. The first language is unequivocal pushback against those who would turn Israel into the world's criminal nation. Then there's an internal Jewish language. And there we need to ask the question, how has it come to it that a khanist is in charge of the Israeli police? A disciple of Rabbi Meir Kahane, a radical, racist, far-right rabbi who I was once a disciple of when I was a teenager. Which you wrote an excellent book about, which I will post in the show notes. Thank you. Not that you're looking for book sales of that book. And so precisely because I know that world from the inside, I know how dangerous it is. And I

still, even in the middle of this war, I find myself saying almost out loud, they're in charge of the Israeli police. And that in its way is an existential threat to Israel. And I find the need to be fighting multiple wars at the same time, and also for our moral credibility. And in the end, it's the same war. What worries me about where we're going as a people is that we have a rising movement in Israel of anti-democratic Israelis and a rising movement among American Jews who oppose Israel as a Jewish state. And so this notion of the entwinement of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, and those are two non-negotiable identities. Israeli resilience is based on maintaining the creative tension

between Israel as a Jewish state, Israel as a democratic state. And here we have two growing movements in either center of Jewish life that are trying to pull these two apart, that are trying to negate either the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state, the legitimacy of Israel as a democratic state. And during war, when you have a communist in the government, that weakens our moral credibility. It weakens our ability to explain ourselves, never mind to our enemies. I don't owe any moral accountability to our enemies, but I do owe moral accountability to our friends. I owe moral accountability to Biden and Schumer. I may not agree with them, but when they pose hard moral questions to me, I am obliged to take those questions seriously. This kind of

government, these people in government, that's not incidental to this war. But Yossi, criticism of Israel today that David is speaking to and that you observe as well, among certain critics from the left, in the media, and also from some in the Jewish world. Smoltrich and Ben-Gvir are crutches for them. But when you listen to the substantive criticisms, they are criticizing the policies of the war cabinet. They are criticizing the policies of Netanyahu and Benny Gantz and Yoav Galant. It's like, you know, look over there, look over there,

look at Ben-Gvir, look at Ben-Gvir. And you say, what's the substantive criticism? We want to ceasefire. Well, Yoav Galant and Benny Gantz don't want to ceasefire and they're not extremists. 90% of us do not want to ceasefire. And so what I try to explain when I speak to American audiences is this is not Netanyahu's war. This is my war. This is the war of the people of Israel. At the same time, I am in a life and death struggle, an existential struggle with the forces of anti-democracy who would destroy Israel from within. And I'm speaking two languages at the same time. And I know you're right that the enemies of Israel are using Ben-Gurion,

Smotrich, et cetera, as a way to delegitimize us. But they're there. They exist. And I have to deal with that as an Israeli. But historically, it's ahistoric to imagine that it was Ben-Gurion and Smotrich and their presence in the government that are giving cover to... They have nothing to do with this war. They're not in a war cabinet. They're not decision makers. And it didn't stop, you know, the left in 2015. It didn't stop them. You name it. There's always been a double standard applied to Israel.

And those who apply it in some way make it impossible. Almost, I question whether or not it's possible for anyone to publicly criticize Israel. And I know that it's problematic, but I question whether or not any Jewish leader who has a platform can successfully criticize Israel in the public specter now without it having a deleterious effect or dangerous possible effect on actual living Israelis in the state of Israel, either by dint of becoming a dilution of the strength of the

lobby for Israel here. I think to myself, if I say something about Israel now, will this eventually lead to literally to a tsunami of public opinion that will then mean less support for Israel, Iron Dome and so on? And I think about my sister who lives in Tel Aviv. I think about my nephew. I think about you. I think about all of the Jews in Israel who are dependent on American support. Now, you might say, and others, not you, but I'm saying they might say, well, if Israel continues to act in this way, in and of itself invalidates, it gives it less moral credibility. And I would argue that it's a red herring. They throw out

Ben-Gvir and Smotrich. But look at America and the way that America fought in Mosul. Look at any of the ways in which governments are trying to fight an impossible war in an urban setting. You know, your average Jew in America just listens to their leader who says, it's legitimate now for you to say something in public, right? I don't like the way Israel is conducting the war. Like, how many of those people that say this actually have any substantive understanding of the way that Israel conducts the war? I mean, it took David Brooks in his article recently to really show us how weak is our understanding of what it takes to conduct a quote-unquote war in an urban setting in that way. And so I'm afraid for the fraying of, as you said,

for the fraying of support for Israel. I'm afraid of two things. I'm afraid for the fraying of support, and especially support for this war, which I completely support and have devoted myself these last months to being as public a supporter as I can and to working in American public opinion. That's one commitment. The other commitment is to try to keep the Jewish people together as much as possible and to create the space where the diversity of opinion, of legitimate diversity, can be played out as painful as it is even during a war. And if we don't make space for the critics who will say, I love Israel, but are affirming that they love Israel, and are not with the Jewish anti-Zionists, then I think we are impairing our vitality as a people. Okay. Two things. First of all, to David's earlier point,

my last conversation with Haviv Redegur, I pulled up some columns from Israel's critics, friendly critics, Jewish critics over the years and quoted them. So, for instance, if you had listened to Thomas Friedman's critique of Israel's conduct in its operation in Lebanon, was it Graves of Wrath in 96? If you would listen to Thomas Friedman's critique, which I quoted from, you could have taken out Shimon Peres, who he was criticizing, and put in Benjamin Netanyahu. You could have taken out Hezbollah, put in Hamas. It was literally, like I said, it's like rinse and repeat. This was 1996. The whole Western world was rooting for Shimon Peres. He had just taken over as prime minister after Rabin's assassination. The idea of had to conduct this operation in Southern Lebanon. And yet he was

being excoriated. The best was Friedman even alluded to the possibility that the reason Peres was doing this was for electoral reasons, that it was about politics. He was conducting a war for politics, and it was... Which Paris might have been doing, by the way. You can say that about anything. Okay, but the question is then, how do you treat Friedman? Do you treat him as... All right, I don't want to debate about... No, no. I mean, not him in particular, okay? What he represents. Yeah.

As someone who's wrong, but is still part of a Jewish conversation, or someone who's beyond the pale? Well, why not apply that across the board? For example, after the sermon I gave last Friday night that Dan alluded to earlier, I received many emails from many different constituencies within our community. So many of the people that supported what I was saying, you know, thank you for saying that, thank you for speaking up for Israel, and thank you for defending Israel, and so on. And then I received no shortage of emails from people who were critical. And in one particular email that someone said, make sure, Rabbi, that you don't turn your sterling pulpit, your rabbinate, into a bully pulpit. To which I responded that if my rabbinate is so sterling that I can't stand up and have the freedom to say something that defends the Jewish people in Israel, then it's not a ramrod that I want.

And then I said further, I don't remember getting an email from you when I was critical of Donald Trump in our community. No one wrote to me and said, don't mix politics in your pulpit. They were thrilled that I was using my pulpit as a platform to be critical of something that they were agreed with. So I agree with you. Like these rabbis and other liberals who signed the letter to support Chuck Schumer and President Biden, they're not outside the pale.

But I think just as many of them, and I know them personally, have been critical of Israeli leaders who said things that they didn't like, you know, I think that we should be critical of them and their critique. Like we can be critical of the critics. Oh, absolutely.

And I am. I share the criticism of both of you. I deeply disagree. I think that they're wrong. I think they're doing harm to Israel. So Yossi, let's take some of these issues. Let's take their complaints. They are now calling for a ceasefire. Now, many of them. Your response to the calls for a ceasefire is what? If Israel does not destroy Hamas's ability to govern, if Sinoir emerges from his tunnel with the V sign, then Israel will not only have lost, October 7th will not only stand, but I believe we will be at the beginning of a downward trajectory that will place Israel in existential

threat. Not immediately, but the message that will go out to our enemies on our borders and our enemies, you know, Iran's historic strategic victory is to place its proxies all along our borders. Iran is not thousands of kilometers away. The message to our enemies and the message to those in the Arab world who have been seeking an alliance with us because they trusted our strength. This is what we didn't understand all those years, is that peace would come with the Arab world, not because of Israeli weakness and concessions, but if Israel were strong. And so the disastrous message of an Israeli defeat in the war against our weakest enemy, Hamas is our weakest enemy, will have existential implications. Meaning every enemy of Israel will look and say, wait a minute, if Hamas could do what they did on October 7th and Sinwar can emerge from the rubble.

And our friends will start to pull back. And worst of all, the message for the people of Israel will be we don't have it in us anymore to survive long term in the Middle East. And I'm afraid of an emigration of young people. I'm not going to raise my kids in a country that can't defend itself. And this is what happened to us on October 7th was the collapse of the Jewish state. It was a one-day collapse, but we experienced a kind of a pre-enactment of the destruction of Israel. And this is a war to re-establish the credibility of Israeli military deterrence without which the lone non-Arab, non-Muslim state in the Middle East will not

survive. So I'm very hawkish on this war. I believe it has to be fought. And maybe I should have said this at the beginning. I'm trying to draw a distinction between what I believe we have to do and how do we navigate this semi-dysfunctional Jewish people and keep us all somehow around the same table in conversation. I totally understand where you're coming from, but I want to, the critics of Israel are raising issues. Let's talk about these issues. So you say Israel will be a fraction of itself if it does not have a decisive victory over an entity that tried to wage genocide against it. And actually committed a microcosmic genocidal act. Okay. Is there a point where you could say, as some of the critics say, we were with you for the first 30 days, we're with you for the first 60 days, whatever it may be, but we're reaching

a point now, again, this is not my view, I'm just telegraphing, projecting their views, but we're reaching a point where we are imposing so much human suffering on bystanders, quote unquote bystanders, I'm not sure they're all bystanders, but be that as it may, in pursuit of this war against Hamas. And it's not who we are. It's not who we are. And yes, we will suffer perhaps by allowing a remnant of Hamas to survive. But the spirit of Jewish values in the spirit of Jewish values in the spirit of Jewish morality. And also the fact that many more terrorists

will be born. That's also the argument, like the suffering will lead, of course, inevitably to the cycle never ending. That I find to be the weakest of all the arguments. Because if you think of Berlin 1945, the takeaway of young Germans was, whoa, this didn't work out so good, as we used to say in

Brooklyn. And Nazism, for all practical purposes, disappeared. Now, it will work differently in Hamas, in Gaza, for all kinds of reasons. I would just say, David, the other point is, Israel withdrew from Gaza, 2004, 2005. That too created a lot of terrorists. So the idea that like... Right. I think that October 7th created more terrorists than October 8th. When radical Islamism senses victory, it becomes charismatic. And I think that there are lots of Palestinians, this is just intuition, lots of people in the Arab world who look at the devastation in Gaza and say, was this worth it? Why is it every time we attack Israel and we think we're winning, it ends up in some form of disaster against the Palestinians? That's a pattern. I mean, really a pattern going back over a century. on something unknowable, right? It's kind of saying like, listen, what do you have to do in the moment? Think about what will happen from it,

which of course is not causally, you know, certain at all. And what is certain though to many Israelis is that if they leave Hamas there, right, whatever that means, that another October 7th, they've promised to have more and more October 7th. So your average Israeli is thinking whatever costs, right? And creating, I hate to use it, but creating more terrorists who don't have

a state from which to wage war is preferable than creating more terrorists who do have, I mean, it's the argument the government has used, the Israeli government, it's non-public debates with the Biden administration that ISIS as an idea still exists, right? It still exists. But ISIS without a caliphate in parts of Iraq and Syria can't wage war. This is a war about destroying the capacity, the governing capacity of Hamas. You're not going to destroy Hamas as a movement or an idea. The other question that you raised, Dan, about what is the moral red line? Is there a moral red line?

I find the argument of too many civilian casualties to be too amorphous. One deadas casualties appears to be something like 1.5 to 1. Now, I hate to use this language because one begins to sound like an accountant of misery, but 1.5 civilians to one combatant is normative in aetrical war. If anything, it's low. So that's one side. And when you say that you're comparing to other counterinsurgency, urban warfare situations that countries like this one, like the United States have had. Okay. But here's where what I was speaking about earlier is the need to learn two languages on Israel, an external and an internal come in. The external language is the need to learn two languages on Israel, an external and an internal come in. The external language that I need to use with the UN Secretary General who

says he's never seen any devastation like this is, well, what about Darfur? Excuse me, Mr. Secretary General. And on and on, the internal Jewish language, is that the category in which I really want the Jewish state to be measured by? That's a serious question. The internal question as well, to those who accuse us of you're deliberately causing civilian casualties, we know that the IDF doesn't do that. And the reason I could say that I know the IDF does not deliberately target civilians is because we're the IDF. It's us. We all served in the IDF. It's our kids and it's our friends coming back or our kids' friends coming back from the front. We know what's going on there. We don't know everything,

but we certainly know what the IDF does and the IDF doesn't do. Sometimes is the IDF reckless? Sometimes. Armies can be reckless. Does the IDF deliberately target civilians? We know. I am prepared to go in a court of law and testify the IDF does not target innocent civilians. So that's what I need to say. That's my external language. My internal language is, okay, we don't target civilians. Have we done everything possible to minimize

the deaths of innocents? And I don't know the answer to that. Another question, we are not responsible for hunger in Gaza, but we're not guilty. But shouldn't we be taking responsibility? Shouldn't we have initiated a food airlift rather than leave that to the Biden administration? And so I do have questions, and those are necessary questions. And those are the questions that fall for me within the parameter of how should a Jewish state fight the most brutal war in its history and one of the most necessary wars? I mean, I think I have a question about whether or not the binary of external-internal actually works in an age of global communication. And, you know, I think that there is the illusion that we can have an internal conversation

as necessary as it is. I mean, it's scary to imagine moral evolution without this kind of check and balance on our power. We are, as a Jewish people, learning what it is to live with power over the last 76 years in ways that we, for 2,000 some odd years, you know, never had to deal with. And you know that better than anyone as a philosopher, a moral philosopher. This is a relatively young country that has, for its own existential need, become extremely powerful. And if we ever, we had any doubt about the need for Israel to be a powerful place, October 7th dispelled with that completely. Like we actually, as Micha and others and you said, it was a knock on the door from Jewish history knocking on the door and saying to us, this is what life was like in the pre-state world. And I think I'm still shocked in America because I think that what October 7th should have shown us, which it kind of didn't in a way, is that we are desperately in need as the diasporic Jewish community of Israel to defend us in the diaspora. But instead, it's actually led to this reintroduction

of there's a Judaism and then there's Zionism, and those two things can be separate and we'll be fine here in America and everything will be great for us. Because again, it's great here in America for the Jews, which I think October 7th should have shown us on some level, or actually October 8th should have shown us that the winds are changing and we should not ever be completely complacent about any place that we are. And so I think that this internal-external conversation, I worry about having internal self-reflection and kind of the necessary moral inventory that we have to take

in order to maintain our moral purity is weaponized over and over again. And that's my deepest reservation around these public questionings. You know, when a rabbi in LA or somewhere else gives a big sermon and it gets picked up by the New York Times or by some, you know, global, you know, media outlet. And in that sermon, they start to ask all kinds of internal questions, like you said, that then become right, very much part of an external conversation, and then become used and retweeted. You know, again, take a person like Peter Beinart, whom I know personally, and I would never say that he's an observant Jew who's committed to

Judaism and committed to the Jewish people. Oh, I wouldn't say he's committed to the Jewish people at all. For me, he is completely outside the tent, and he's not part of my story anymore. Because he has aligned himself with those who want to destroy our ability to defend ourselves. Beinart wrote before October 7th that Hamas wants peace. He's never repudiated that. And after October 7th, when we saw what from the river to the sea would actually look like, and Beinart didn't ask himself a question for a moment, maybe I was wrong to oppose Jewish sovereignty. Maybe the only thing that's standing between the lives of 7 million Jews and October 7th is the fact that we have a Jewish state,

that we have a Jewish army. So Beinart is my enemy, and I don't care if he goes to synagogue five times a day. Wow, Yossi. It's so interesting. I'm so fascinated by that, because I would say that Peter Beinart is in the category of people who have an idea that is divorced from the reality of, like, it's so utopian and so naive about what actually is happening on the ground, in my opinion.

And so even though I think that is, like, ultimately, do I think that, God forbid, Peter wants to see October 7th? God forbid. You know, he's not an enemy per se, but I think that his naivete would, in my personal opinion, lead to something horrific. David, there are moments after which naivete becomes willful. Right. After October 7th, there is no naivete anymore. Well, I want to argue in a much less extreme way that there are many people at this moment who are critical, publicly critical of Israel. Let's say in the camp of, let's say, one statism or this kind of naivete. But he is. He is.

Right. But I say there are people who are even further to the center than Peter, like in the left, but not extreme left in Peter's way, who equally are naive about how their criticism, their public criticism of Israel lands. And I would put a Chuck Schumer in that category. His public excoriation, like even though he had the preamble where he said, oh, you know, I'm a lover of the state of Israel, I'm a shomer, that means I'm a guardian. He had this whole thing, which was a cover for him to then say something. It would be interesting to psychoanalyze, to understand the psychology of Jews

that were relieved by this. Almost like there was like, oh, now we can say out loud in the external conversation what we've been saying internally, which is it's Bibi and his war and all these things. I'm thinking to myself, no, that's not what Jews in Israel are saying. They're not Jews in Israel. Ninety percent of them are not going around going, oh, we're wondering if we're conducting this war with Jewish values and we're wondering if Bibi is on a par with Hamas. So their public protestation, which again, as you said,

we want to have this robust pluralism, and I agree with you totally. I put it not as dangerously naive as Peter, but I still put it in the camp of in the post-October 7th world, have you not learned anything, liberal Jews? Great. That's great.

And I sign on to every word that you just said. But the consequences of being wrong on that kind of criticism versus the kind of criticism that says a Jewish state is illegitimate and I will align with those forces who are opposing Israel's existence. So those people are people that I have an argument with. I don't have an argument with Beinart. I have no shared Jewish language or purpose. We are not part of the same story. We're not part of the same Jewish story. Okay. Now, David, in your sermon, you took on this issue of genocide, this word that has been so diluted and just thrown around. And you said a version of what Yossi just said. It's interesting. In that sermon, you said, do you know Israelis? You yourself said, I know Israelis. I know these kids who are serving in there. One thing I try to explain to non-Jewish podcasters and whatnot who are involved with Israel who've interviewed me,

I said, they said, well, are Israelis moved by these images of the suffering in Gaza? What do they think of the... First of all, there's not an Israeli I don't think that doesn't have a sense for what's going on in Gaza. Like they don't need to watch Christiane Amanpour to know what's going on in Gaza. Because when you have a people's army and you have 360,000 people called up for reserves out of a population of 9.2, 9.3. I mean, that's, I don't know what country in the world you could point to where you have that much of the population represented in a real war. Only Ukraine at this point. Right. And so that means that every Israeli knows someone. If they're not fighting themselves, they know a son, a daughter, a nephew, a friend, a student, a parent, everyone knows someone. It's the war of the people of Israel. It's not Netanyahu's war.

Right, absolutely. And so they know what's going on. Like, they don't need to be lectured. They don't need to be informed. They know what's going on. They don't even need to take it seriously to some extent. I think it's the work in the diaspora. In Israel, they hear that and they think it's a collective psychosis.

It's like the fact that South Africa of all nations, right, the hypocrisy, it's so absurd that it doesn't even arise to the level of, it's like, what are they going to say? Like, yes, that you don't know what apartheid is, is just... What's the show, Eretz... It's a wonderful country. Right, it's Eretz Nader, which is their Israel Saturday Night Live. That's why their content during the war has been so spot on because they did this amazing sketch

of a BBC interviewer interviewing students at Columbia University from Queers for Palestine. And from an Israeli perspective, they're like, is this really happening? It's like you can only make this up. But they also, at the same time, do devastating sketches

about Netanyahu and the government. And it's happening simultaneously, of course. Right. So you made this point in your sermon. You're like, so can you talk a little bit about that? When you said, what are you people thinking using the word genocide? You know, I think Rabbi Jonathan Sachs of blessed memory wrote about this in a book called Future Tense, where he said that, you know, the three great movements of historical anti-Semitism were pre-Christian anti-Semitism and pre-Christian anti-Semitism and then Christian religious anti-Semitism, and then to some extent racial or scientific, quote-unquote,

pseudoscientific anti-Semitism in the 19th century. And then, of course, it's apotheosis with Hitler. And then he said that, you know, as we've said before, and others have said, that the virus of anti-Semitism, it mutates and it's brilliant. And what Rabbi Sachs pointed out was that as soon as the post-Holocaust world realized what had happened in the Holocaust, and that was the great moral atrocity that could be committed, then the entire mutation of anti-Semitism was, and its brilliance, was to then use the Holocaust as social justice. Like, the worst thing you could ever commit was a genocide, and then somehow anybody could commit a genocide. And then Jews, too, of course, could commit a genocide. And then somehow anybody could commit a genocide. And then Jews,

too, of course, could commit a genocide. And then so in a way, the Holocaust education became a great way of proliferating the notion that anyone could commit a genocide, including, right, Jews. And then power, Jews have power, and they're using it. And then that language begins to be used by the social justice movements, the greatest public relations machine ever over the last couple of decades, which was to intersectionally connect, you know, someone who's a Jewish communist with the Palestinian liberation movement or some African-American kid from Detroit. Somehow Black Lives Matter becomes intersectionally connected with the Palestinian. And then they begin to adopt the language of genocide. And it's just, it's almost, it's absurdity was one of the reasons why it kind of went under the radar, because we Jews were like, we who know what Israel is about, anybody who's ever visited Israel and has walked the streets of Tel Aviv or been to the queer bars in Tel Aviv, knows Israeli kids,

Jewish kids who don't have a bone in their body to kill an innocent Palestinian, God forbid, like how this entire movement came to dominate the mimetic, right, front lines. And so what I was saying in the sermon was anyone who's ever met, you know, my nephew or my cousins or your kids or your cousins knows how absurd the accusation of genocide is or ethnic cleansing or targeted killings, right? Again, any army in the world, right, can have its crimes and can have tribunals that are brought to assess it. And that certainly is something that takes place in Israel. But the gross misuse or the intentional usage of this and appropriation of this term is just such an affront. And you brought it with Jonathan Glaser. Watching Jonathan Glaser stand in front of the world and use Nazism and his Holocaust film,

his Holocaust film to say that Israelis in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv aren't aware of what's happening in Gaza, aren't aware of what's happening in the West Bank, right? The people on the border that were attacked by Hamas were peaceniks who were ever attuned to the suffering of Palestinians and wanted very much to see a different relationship with Palestinians. And yet, October 7th, completely radically, you know, changed everything. There's something, if I just want to get back to what you were talking about, Holocaust inversion. Yeah. Because this is a moment that requires a deep rethinking of Holocaust education. In some ways, this is the collapse of that part of Holocaust education that tried to universalize the Holocaust for the best of intentions,

to keep the memory alive, make it relevant. And the end result of universalizing the Holocaust is that we, we are now the Nazis. And when you remove the Holocaust from the specific context of what anti-Semitism is, anti-Semitism is not racism. It works differently. Anti-Semitism is seeing the Jew. It's the symbolization of the Jew to represent whatever a given society defines as its worst qualities. And so the great irony is that in the post-Holocaust era, the worst offense is Holocaust. And so that is what we now are symbolizing,

and that's the continuity of anti-Semitism. By the way, Dara Horn and Ruth Weiss have been— Ruth Weiss was early on this, that she thought we were making a big mistake with Holocaust education in the West. And she wrote extensively about this when the Holocaust Museum was being built in Washington, that the idea of every city in America today has a Holocaust memorial, has a Holocaust exhibit, has a – I'm traveling in the next few days to South America. Someone said, oh, do you want to go to the local Holocaust Museum? Like, they hear a Jew's coming.

Take them to – Take them to the Holocaust. Take them to the Holocaust Museum. That's what I want to do. Right. And so – It's what I want to do. Right. And so... It's like part of my vacation. Yeah.

And so... But it's become this... And you're right. It's like, we thought we will educate everyone about what we went through and about anti-Semitism. And they heard in it, it's a proxy for... For racism. Right. Or for hatred more broadly.

Yes. Or for right and wrong, and then they say and then, and then it soon became right and might. We left out the most important piece of the story, which is turning the Jew into the symbol of whatever a society regards as most loathsome. Right.

And so that piece is not actually front and center. It's not centered. And then ironically what happens, of course, is that the proliferation of Holocaust education can actually work against us, which is the great, horrible irony is that here we are trying to think that we're telling the world about the worst possible atrocity that could ever have occurred. And it becomes used against us, you know, in that way. I want to just also add that there is another impulse in the universalizing of the Holocaust, which is for your average liberal Jew is against essentializing human nature.

Like your average liberal Jew believes and must believe on some level that we are born, right? Tabula rasa, we were born with an empty slate and that it must be nurture. You know, hatred is something not inborn. It's something that's taught, right? A culture teaches it. Your average liberal in that camp wants to believe that, of course, there's nothing essential about anti-Semitism. It's like any other hatred. We can teach people to know Jews and get to know them and know their narrative. And the whole worldview of liberalism

is fundamentally that every human being can be nurtured and acculturated, right, in a particular way. And so if we make it only about the Jews, we're essentializing ourselves to our detriment, right? Jews will have an essential quality, and people must hate us. There's some essential quality. We can't ever hope that people won't hate us, right? So there is that impulse, but of course,

you know, I think liberalism collapses on itself because we don't fully understand antisemitism like other hatreds. It eludes our grasp. It's mysterious. It isn't exactly like racism. It isn't exactly like other forms of hatred. And that mystery is something that we can't really get our heads around. And so there is a bit of an impasse. I want to just admit it at this moment. I want to say for myself personally, I know this is a very public forum to say this, but I have and I am struggling with forms of liberal Judaism,

not because I'm not a liberal in my makeup and not because I don't believe in the goals of liberalism, but I do believe that that fructive tension, that tension that you were speaking of about democracy and liberalism and Judaism and liberalism, there is a place where it doesn't harmonize on some level. Maybe Yossi can speak to this, but I just feel as though I think that liberals are uncomfortable with the possibility that they can't get their heads around what a Jew is in the world and how the world sees the Jew. I'm not comfortable with that. I want to believe that every person I meet is so profoundly unconscious in almost everywhere we go that even the person looking at you whom you trust implicitly might have these latent,

unconscious seeds of anti-Semitism. And I don't want to believe that. And I don't want to believe that in the world. After October 7th and after what I've seen here in the West, I don't know. I just don't know. Israel is also a perplexing story. And the essence of Israel is contradiction. The language we use for bringing Jews back from a hundred diasporas is the engathering of the Jewish people. We've also engathered all of our contradictions. And you can say that Israel is a theocracy. You could also say Israel is a runaway secular state, depending where you're literally physically. Are you standing in Jerusalem? Are you standing in Tel Aviv? Israel is a democracy and Israel is also dealing with the kinds of security threats

that make it impossible for it to be fully democratic. And it's a very messy story. But my understanding spiritually of why Israel is so important is precisely because we are in a gathering of the world's contradictions. And Israel is the place, it's a laboratory for working out the identities that humanity is trying to work out. What are the borders between security and democracy? What are the borders between religion and democracy? What are the borders between religion and state? What is an ethnic democracy? What is a liberal democracy? These are the urgent questions that Israel deals with. And you have to have a lot of patience for the Israeli story. It's not an easy story. A democracy that's an occupier, well, why isn't

an occupier? How did it get to be an occupier? What would be the consequences for Israel if it stopped being an occupier? These are really important questions. And what tends to happen abroad is that Israel's dilemmas become flattened. And I see Israel as a laboratory, first of all, in terms of democracy, democracy under extremity. What happens when you apply relentless security pressures on a democracy? What are the fault lines? Where does it start to crack? Where does it defend itself?

And that's valuable. In other words, Israeli democracy is valuable not because we're a paragon of democracy, but because we're a paragon of democracy, but because we're not. We can't be a paragon of democracy, but we are a paragon for the struggle for democratic values. And that's a really important distinction. And so people on the left, on the far left, and people on the far right look at this messy construct of Israeli democracy struggling under these impossible circumstances. And what they say on the far right in Israel is, who needs democracy? We're defending ourselves against an existential threat. A Supreme Court just gets in the way. These are all democratic niceties that don't allow me to defend myself adequately. And on the far left, they say the

opposite. They say a Supreme Court is just a fig leaf. You're not a real democracy. You're an occupier. You're an aggressor. But the reality is that we are living under conditions that no country has ever had to deal with. From the day of our birth, no country has ever faced the kinds of relentless security assaults and pressures that Israel has faced. And so, that also contributes to the inability to understand Israel and to make very simplistic judgments. And again, I put our far right and our far left in that same category. We are focused on very much a post-October 7th world. And we started this conversation about the Jewish criticism, the Jewish debate, you know, the intra-Jewish debate over here in the U.S. towards Israel post-October 7th or about Israel

post-October 7th. But you, David, have, you and I have talked about that the seeds were planted long before October 7th. And we didn't know when things would get this bad, but it's not surprising to you, I don't think, that they're this bad. So can you talk about what's been happening in the Jewish world pre-October 7th that you were seeing that this October 7th crazy set of events and circumstances, oddly, in a very sort of self-contradictory way, became the trigger for a lot of, like, this question I'm asking. Is Israel losing the Jews? Or at least is Israel losing some Jews? Yeah. Because I really want to be careful about that. It's something the three of us talked about when we weren't recording.

There's something else going on that gets less attention, which is that you look at the polling data, overwhelming majority of American Jews support Israel and support Israel in this war, A. B, Jews post-October 7th, many of which are turning out to be communally engaged in ways that we could have never seen or wouldn't have seen really for two or three decades. It's quite extraordinary. And you're seeing this on college campuses. Yes, you're seeing the pogroms on college campuses, but you're also seeing Jewish students who the Chabad's and the Hillel's and other Jewish organizations could never have reached, and suddenly they're turning out where that goes, how sustainable it is. We'll see.

But I don't want to suggest that it's all doom and gloom. That said, there is this symphony of voices that seem to be breaking with Israel within the Jewish world. Some of them are in the rabbinic leadership, as we saw from that letter. What's been happening before October 7th that could have created this environment? I think it's a kind of public secret that in the liberal Jewish world, the infusion of language and frames taken from social justice has become almost its own framing around liberalism and its intersection with Judaism. I think that if you were to go in the last 20 years, and if you were to go to a rabbinical school or you go to a synagogue,

the number of people who come in who believe in God and publicly can declare, I don't believe in God, has kind of, over the last 50 to 100 years, that's no longer heresy. But if you were to walk into a liberal synagogue and say something about DEI or to say something about, let's say, issues that confront the community in terms of identity politics, right, it's clear in liberals, the shift in liberal seminaries, rabbinic seminaries, and in liberal communities has been pretty radical. must bleed into the occupier-occupied-victim-victimizer framing around Israel. And so it's not shocking that on October 7th, right, of course, before Israel responded, right, it was pretty universal there was a condemnation. But you could see fissures because you could see people beginning to say,

well, how does Hamas come to be a Hamas? Obama said it. He said it within a week or two. Right. So this context. The story is complicated. The story is complicated. And so that language, of course, is. Speaking truths of both sides.

Right. Both side-ism and so on. So you see that in Jewish communities that are, let's say, to the left of center across the board, right? Like, you know, I can tell you personally that my own synagogue in New York City, and I grew up as an Orthodox kid, and I went to Israel for my bar mitzvah, and I grew up as a Zionist, and I spent years in Israel. But when I began my synagogue, I didn't kind of put Zionism at front and center in the synagogue. But around 2020, you know, I had an awakening in a conversation I had with African-American leaders around the Women's March. There was a big controversy around something that had been said by one of the women who was a leader in the Women's March that was going to be taking place in D.C. around that year. And I was in a private closed-door meeting.

Which she had- Tweeted. Yeah, trafficked in with anti-Semitic- And anti-Semitic leaders, and she was proud of it, and she was refusing to retract. And so at a closed-door meeting in New York City with a group of rabbis, liberal rabbis, each of them the heads of major synagogues in the New York metropolitan area, I sat in a room with African-American leaders and with this particular person from the Women's March. And I was, for some reason, no one asked

her, but I stepped forward and said, you know, I think that on behalf of my father and others who, you know, who survived the Holocaust and so on, you should retract your statement in support or glorifying this rabid anti-Semite, Louis Farrakhan. And she refused to. And then this was the most telling moment. One of the rabbis that was in the gathering publicly stood up and pointed at me and said, I'm ashamed of you, David Ingber, for putting our ally on the hot seat this way.

This is our ally. And it was clear. It was as clear as day that that was itself, right? In 2019, it happened. It was 2019, 2020, January 2020. That already had been in the works for a decade. So a decade or more of that kind of thinking about allyship and alliances and language, and it's a soup. It's not just one issue. Like intersectionality in these areas is also true. So allies across the board of those who are ethnically marginalized communities. And so Jews began to identify with the margins and feel guilty in any way, shape, or form being themselves part of the margins. After all, we have access to power. And as Barry Weiss pointed out in her book about how to fight anti-Semitism, Jews were not white enough for the right and too white for the left. And so this kind of conversation about Jews being white

and Jews being oppressors and Jews being powerful, that was already rampant before October 7th. So the minute, right, October 8th, 9th, and 10th happens, and these other groups begin to talk about how Israel is the occupier, the colonizer, this language is not foreign language to many of these other conversations, right? And I'm not equating great leaders in the Jewish community for being guilty of that, all of them, but it's of a piece. And so I feel personally at this moment, if I would have had enough foresight 15 years ago to begin to talk about what might be the constituent pieces to having an October 8th, 9th, and 10th happen, where we could be so morally confused. I want to think that way now, too. What are the things I have to say now as a Jewish leader that might in 10 to 15 years from

now be helpful in shifting where things are going now in an unhealthy way? So I think there's a deeper question here about the Jewish relationship to power. And like you, David, I grew up in a survivor family. And being powerful brings responsibility. And the first measure of responsibility of power is that you no longer see yourself as a victim. If you have power, you're not entitled to see yourself as a victim. You've made a decision. And in our case, again, I think this was one of the most important decisions in Jewish history. But what that means is that many Jews, certainly not in Israel, more in American Jewry, are uncomfortable with the transition to power. And in a way, October 7th,

and this will sound much worse than I mean it to sound, October 7th was a kind of relief for some Jews. And again, forgive me for that language because it wasn't that, but I mean it to sound. October 7th was a kind of relief for some Jews. And again, forgive me for that language because it wasn't that. But I mean in the sense of we're the good guys again. We're the victims. And then comes October 8th. And suddenly Israel is switching the narrative. But wait a minute, we're victims. Can we hang in this victimhood for a little bit?

Right. Give us another minute of sympathy, world sympathy on our own. And the Israeli public from left to center to right said, we cannot allow the disastrous perception of victimhood to stand. And so the Gaza war, among other strategic goals, is about reasserting the necessity of the Jewish transition from 1945 to today. Now, we're caught in this pathological loop where many Jews are understandably still in the condition of October 7th. And this includes many Israelis, by the way, who talk about we're back in Jewish history. I don't believe that. We're not back in Jewish history because October 7th was followed by October 8th, as it had to be, as we made the decision to do. But that means that for us to be saying to the world, look what they did to us. How can you not support us? And the world turns

around and says, well, look what you're doing in Gaza. We cannot win that kind of competition for victimhood, nor should we win because we don't want to win that competition. The Israeli ethos is, and we always say this, we'd rather be hated than to be pitied. Well, you know, be careful what you wish for, because that's what we want. You know, Golda Meir's great line, I'd rather take a bad news cycle than a good obit. But we got both. We got both, but it's also, I mean, just to name the contradictions that you articulated earlier, like, it's also the case that when you say the word existential, like, after 9-11,

America didn't say we're in an existential moment vis-a-vis, you know, ISIS, vis-a-vis, you know. ISIS wasn't sitting in Jersey City. And we weren't worried. And so when people, Jews who say that October 7th reminded us of the precariousness of our power, and let's say we're American support to collapse, if we didn't have those two aircraft carriers, right, that were sent, right, if we don't have Iron Dome, like it's kind of funny to hear both the power of Israel that we no longer are the victim,

and yet to use terminology that speaks to the existential tenuousness that most Israelis feel, even as we have an army. So we need to make a distinction between victimhood and vulnerability. The Jewish people post-October 7th is vulnerable again. We all woke up in America and Israel realizing we're much less safe than we thought we were. But that doesn't mean we're victims. We still have power. The tremendous achievement of the post-Holocaust generation, which we've inherited, of hard power in Israel

and soft power in American Jewry is still there. So once we own not just the legitimacy of power, but also the responsibility of power, then we can begin to free ourselves from this loop of we're either victims or victimizers. We're not victimizers. We're a country that's defending itself from extreme vulnerability, but we're also not victims because of October 8th. And so that kind of dichotomy is something that I think we just need to free ourselves from. You know, just in closing, I'll say, when you say, well, Yossi,

when you say that Jews in the diaspora want to kind of own this victim moment, another group, as you alluded to, that does want to believe that Israel is a nation of victims are like Mohammed bin Salman in Riyadh or the Emiratis or the Bahrainis. Like they have been normalizing with Israel because they were making a bet on Israeli strength, not on Israeli weakness. They weren't saying, oh, those poor Israelis with their tin cup, you know, we're going to come bail them out. They're like, no. If we want to survive in the region. They're going to bail us out.

Exactly. If we want to survive in this region, we need Israel's startup nation. We need their Silicon Valley. We need their military capabilities. We need their cyber capabilities. We're picking back on. They're not doing it out of goodness of their hearts. They're doing it because it's their survival strategy. Literally, I had an official from the Saudi government say to me a few weeks ago, MBS has these, what they call the 2030 goals,

the 2030, you know, where Saudi modernized the 2030. I said, is Saudi normalization dead post October 7th? He goes, dead. He says, MBS is fixated on these 2030 goals. And he says he can't achieve them without normalizing with Israel. In other words, he needs Israel to advance Saudi Arabia. That's a game changer for Israel and for the Jews, that these countries that were historically enemies are not just making peace, but saying, I need Israel. And so it's very nice for Jews in the diaspora to say, no, own the victim thing a little longer, where the Jews living in Israel are like, no, we need to be strong or we won't survive. And there's also another element here, which is, do we always have to be 100% right to be right?

Right. There are things about this war that really are open to question. But to my mind, the legitimacy of this war, the legitimacy of a goal of this war, of bringing Hamas down, is essential to uphold. And so, okay, let's create a space where we can have conversation. But if I could just say one last thing here, which this conversation has really helped me understand,

and that is as the son of a survivor. Really, I think we're all, all three of us are. Oh, you as well. My mother is a survivor. Okay, so my takeaway, what I learned from my father, that the Jewish people needs to learn from the Shoah, were two things. Power and Jewish unity. Now, this is a really complicated moment because our power is undermining our unity.

The necessary wielding of our power is weakening our ability to be one people. war and still make some space that will allow the liberal part of the Jewish people that still feels connected to Israel to remain engaged with Jewish power, to remain supportive of the war. I want to respond to that and say, first of all, I love that power and unity here are in tension with each other. I also want to just, as my last remark here for this, and this is a very Jewish conversation. Yeah, everybody wants the last word. I want Yossi and then the rabbi. Last of the last. First of all, it's an honor to sit with the both of you. And really amazing.

I just want to say that for me as someone who is sitting in soft power, I want to analogize the soft power of Jewish leadership here in America with the hard power that's happening in Israel. And say that what's complicated about soft power conversations is that it actually strikes to the core of democratic values that we hold. In other words, if I'm critical of the way that people are using their soft power, it seems as if I'm being critical of publicly critical of Israel. I'm not saying because I actually am trying to diminish the power of Jewish conversation and the importance of political conversation. I'm actually trying to say that just like an Israeli who disagrees with the government will still enlist in hard power and go to Gaza. It's a great insight. So should Jewish leaders who have the exercise of soft power, even if they disagree with the government of Israel, right, and are thinking to themselves, wait a second, I have a moral responsibility to speak out and to join. If I look at that, again, back to the statement of, you know, the greatest soft power peddler, which is Chuck Schumer, like there was no substantive, clear critique. All he did

was actually ramp up Jewish disunity by focusing on Bibi, who is not the problem, and equating Bibi with Hamas. And so I want to call on all... Not the only problem. Not the only problem. At this moment, he'll be a problem leader at some point. And I want to call on all Jewish leaders and others who are listening to this podcast. We have a tremendous responsibility to be enlisted, right,

as part of the Jewish people at this moment in soft power and being able to say the things that will ultimately redound back to those who are living in the state of Israel on the front lines, but be there Jew or Druze or, you know, whomever, that they feel that we are also keeping them safe. That is our number one responsibility. That's what I would say. I think we'll end it there. I mean, that's a miracle in and of itself that there's not a follow-up. Three Jews trying to get in the last word. I'm holding myself back. I know you are. I know you are.

All right. To be continued at a Shabbat table near you. Yeah. It's a pleasure to be with both of you. I view both of you as teachers of mine in different ways, and I hope those listening will understand why. And I do hope that conversations like this are happening or could be happening in the Jewish community in Israel, but especially where our focus here is on the diaspora. Yossi, David, thank you both. And Shabbat Shalom. Shabbat Shalom. Thank you. Thanks for having us. That's our show for today. We'll post information on how to keep up with Yossi and Rabbi Ingber's work in the show notes. Call Me Back is produced and edited by Ilan Benatar. Our media manager is

Rebecca Strom. Additional editing by Martin Huérgo. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.