Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - Special Episode: Bret Stephens on Cancel Culture

Episode Date: January 2, 2023

One of our regular guests – Bret Stephens, Pulitzer Prize winning columnist for The New York Times – returns for a conversation on cancel culture, anti-semitism and a new issue of a journal he edits, called Sapir. Bret joined 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 Israel, he was based in Brussels for The Wall Street Journal. In this episode we speak extensively about Sapir: https://sapirjournal.org/

for years, the Hasidic community in Williamsburg and other areas of New York has been under attack and very few people outside of those communities were aware of them. We just weren't reporting it. From time to time on this podcast, we drop special episodes, topics that are meaty enough to warrant their own conversation, but not long enough to be a dedicated episode. It's what one of my favorite podcasters, Bill Simmons, calls free appetizers, free apps. It comes before the meal. It's not the entire meal, but it's on the house. So this one's on the house. Look out for a regular full-length episode, The Meal,

to drop Tuesday. But until then, for this special episode, this free app, we have one of our regular guests, Brett Stevens, the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The New York Times, returning for a conversation about cancel culture, anti-Semitism, and a new issue of a journal he edits called Sapir. More on Sapir later. As listeners to this podcast know, Brett 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 Israel, he was based in Brussels, also for the Wall Street Journal. Brett was raised in Mexico City. He earned his BA at the University of Chicago and his master's at the London School of Economics. This is Call Me Back. And I'm pleased to welcome back to the podcast for a special episode uh brett stevens of the new york times of the superior

journal and as we recently discussed banned officially banned by vladimir putin and the russian government a very high distinction brett good to see you good to be here okay so i want to talk i am um i inhale superior superior journal which is a new journal that you started and the Maimonides Fund backs. And it's this incredible collaboration between you and Maimonides. I'm a huge fan. I have the various issues here and you can read it online, sapirjournal.org. There was the summer 2021 issue on power. There was the winter 2021 issue on power. There was the winter 2022 issue on aspiration.

There was the spring 2022 issue on Zionism. I can go on and on. I actually have highlighted notes from some of these essays that I liked or wanted to use or reference, you basically collect a pretty interesting group of writers. But I want to talk about the newest issue, which just came out, called Jews and Cancel Culture. So I guess, first, tell us what Sapir is, and then I want to talk about why you decided to do a whole issue on Jews and Cancel Culture.

Well, Sapir is a new Jewish quarterly whose subtitle is Ideas for a Thriving Jewish Future. So what we see ourselves as doing is providing Jews, particularly Jewish Americans, with not just arguments, but really prescriptive ideas for how to make different aspects of Jewish life more successful, to increase a sense of community and commitment and purpose and excellence to Jewish life. And I also am of the view that the best way to do that is to bring in writers of different perspectives, whether they're different religious perspectives or different political perspectives, so that we're really speaking to the broad Jewish family

and not just the left-wing sort of dissent-reading side of it, but a broad spectrum of people. So that's Sapir, and every issue, we do it, we publish it on a quarterly basis. Every issue is devoted to a single theme, whether it's social justice or continuity or Zionism or education, or now cancellation, and we attack that theme from a whole variety of perspectives. So the new issue on cancellation, what was the inspiration for this issue? Why did you think you needed to write it? And you wrote an essay for it called Jews and Cancel Culture, which can you talk a little bit about that too? Well, I think the whole subject of cancellation engages a set of deeply Jewish questions ethically and theologically. David Wolpe, the rabbi, has a wonderful essay

tackling some of the theological issues. But it also engages, I think, a lot of Jews and people who are in professional life on a personal basis, because cancel culture has come knocking on our doors in our organizations, in our universities, in our media establishments, and so on and so we thought that this was uh a a fruitful topic about which people have um strong views and important views and uh and we we decided to cover it and what you talk a bit a little bit about you know we we we tend to um we don't we're not very clear i guess is my interpretation on drawing a distinction between what it means to be canceled and what it means to live with consequences for bad behavior, but not totally canceled. So you talk a little bit about the distinction and why it's important. Yeah, I mean, look, Harvey Weinstein wasn't canceled. Harvey Weinstein was behaving in a criminal fashion, and he was not just fired, but he paid deep legal consequences. Another example I mentioned is Roseanne Barr, who addressed, tweeted about Valerie Jarrett, the former President Obama's former aide, in a manner that was sort of

nakedly racist. And Disney fired her. Well, Disney has legitimate reputational interests and not having one of its premier talents speaking that way. And that's normal established behavior. That's not cancel culture. Cancel culture is a new, different set of attitudes about what is a firing offense. And the goal is not simply to discipline an unruly person. The goal is to establish a set of norms within organizations that are punitive and that advance ideological agendas. That's cancellation. So I spell out in my essay that cancellation is an action. It's a method. it is a mentality,

it's a culture, and finally it involves also capitulation on the part of managers who ought to know better and ought to know that there ought to be something between capital punishment and no consequences whatsoever when it comes to infractions that are effectively about political views or norms rather than professional conduct. And you point out that it often is, that are constantly changing that are impossible to keep up with. Right, exactly. And that's one of the things that's terrifying about cancel culture, which is what was acceptable five years ago. Or five weeks ago. Or five weeks ago, acceptable today.

And by the way, if it is unacceptable, is the consequence going to be firing? Are there any warnings? Are there any steps along the way to disciplinary action and are the penalties going to apply retroactively to behavior that happened when it was much more ordinary behavior? So that's a profound distinction which is that cancel culture reaches into the past to discover behavior that might have been okay then or at least not a firing offense then and turning into a firing offense now and it's making it's making organizational life professional life scary and it is and another key distinction it is mostly most of it involves

people the the accusers and the system that enforces you know that that that sentences one to cancellation is basically operating in bad faith they're not actually trying to constructively engage the the person charged it is right there's no effort at achieving reconciliation offering forgiveness uh if you say, if you apologize in an organization that has adopted a cancel culture mentality, that apology isn't seen as a bid for forgiveness or an effort at a conversation. It's an admission of guilt for which the sentence is always reputational ruin.

And anyone who is working in most organizations, large organizations in the United States today, I think is afraid. There's just a pervasive fear in almost any line of work with which I'm familiar. So now let's talk about rising anti-Semitism, which you've written about in your column. Most recently, you wrote a column about Kanye West, and you cite some pretty staggering data. It's out there.

For 2020, the FBI reports that Jews who constitute about 2.4% of the total adult population in the United States were on the receiving end of 54.9% of all religiously motivated hate crimes. On many nights in New York City, Hasidic or Orthodox Jews are being shoved, harangued, and beaten. You talk a lot about this. The chief of the New York City Police Commissioner was recently in a meeting with some friends of mine who, she said, it's like unbelievable. You have these gangs of young people roaming the streets of Brooklyn who go out, they go out on a Saturday night looking to go beat an Orthodox and a Hasidic Jew. That's like they're out and about. Like that's their recreational activity.

It's something they have not seen anything like this, I mean, in decades, right, since the early 90s. And even what they're seeing now is actually different than what they were seeing post-Crown Heights. But you say what we're going through now is one of the most underreported stories in the country. And you say, which itself is a telling indicator in an era that is otherwise hyper attuned to prejudice and hate, I guess, hyper attuned to the need to cancel. And yet you're saying here, no one's paying attention. And then Kyrie happens, Kyrie Irving, and then Kanye West happens.

Do you think things are changing? Do you think people are paying attention I hope so and I think that the media started paying attention because uh Kanye West is seen as a right-wing figure uh um although his strand of uh anti-semitism seems to be inspired by kind of lewis farrakhan uh or uh the black hebrew movement nation of islam yeah an anti-semitic uh movement and so i think that has prompted some some belated attention by the media. But I've been just shocked by so much of the coverage. Just to give you one example, after that hostage-taking situation near Dallas in January, the FBI said, I think idiotically, I just think the agent in charge didn't know what he was talking about, said, well, we don't think this was an anti-Semitic attack, or words to that effect. the same media, and then the media parroted that line from the FBI for about a week. Compare that to the way the mainstream media provided wall-to-wall coverage on anti-Asian attacks in the wake of that horrific set of massage parlor shootings in the vicinity of Atlanta a year earlier. So when there are hate crimes against Jews, particularly if the hate crimes are not coming from people in MAGA hats,

they tend to be dramatically, noticeably underreported or excused as a function of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or as a misguided retribution for Jewish behavior in mixed neighborhoods, like aggressive landlords or Jewish landlords or new Jewish neighbors who want to buy their neighbors' homes. So this itself is part of the problem. It's not anti-Semitism, but it's sort of anti-Semitic adjacent because it applies one set of standard to anti-Jewish hate crimes, and another set of standards to hate crimes against other groups. You also cite other examples, like what's happened at the University of Berkeley Law School, UC Berkeley Law School, or the new museum in LA. Oh, well, that was extraordinary.

You know, I mean, Hollywood was a town, an industry that was invented by Jewish entrepreneurs back, you know, 100 or 90 years ago, and a new museum dedicated to exploring that history had an exhibit on diversity in Hollywood without once mentioning Jewish diversity. When this, of course, was pointed out, the museum scurried to find a permanent exhibit to people like Jack Warner, Louis Mayer, and so on. But the fact that it required public outrage to get there was extraordinarily telling. At Berkeley, a number of student organizations decided that they would not host any Zionist speaker and would

make this a litmus test and the university, which wouldn't have stood for this for one second if it came to another discriminated against group, is sort of twisting itself into knots over the free speech issues at play. My suggestion to Berkeley, for what it's worth, is they should absolutely accept the free speech principle that these organizations don't need to host Zionist speakers. reject Zionism and Israel and that apartheid state so that law schools and judges offering

clerkships can just see that posted in a public place so that these militant anti-Zionists, what amounts to essentially a no-Jewish Zionist policy, that they can be seen and heard in a way that goes beyond simply the question of a speaking engagement at Berkeley. So last week I was at an event for the Jewish Federation in New York City to do this annual gala, their big Wall Street event where they have leaders from finance and investment management sectors investment banking uh and a couple of them get honored each year it's a big it's one of the biggest fundraisers for the new york city jewish federation new york city jewish organized jewish community and the keynote speaker was van jones who you who you know worked in the obama administration who's a commentator on cnn who's done a lot of work on criminal justice reform,

a leader in the black community. And he got up there and gave a speech, and he opened. It was sort of chilling. He says, I'm here with an apology. That's what he said. I'm here with an apology. And the apology he was making, according to him,

you can find his speech. It's public. He says, it's on behalf of my community for not speaking out after Kanye, he focused on Kanye, and on behalf of the media, which I'm a part of, he says, for not actually taking these issues seriously and not reporting on them as we should have. And he says, that's about to change. Now, it was an impressive, his remarks, at least at the beginning, they were impressive. And it was admirable that he said these things. But I thought to myself, that's great. I like Van. It's great that he's saying these things. But he's saying it to a big Jewish audience in New York City.

Who's making this point to the media, decision makers in the media, mainstream media? Who's making this point to leaders in the black community? Like, is there a real effort? I know we're all talking about it and hand-wringing about it, but, you know, this is a discussion that has to happen inside certain industries and inside certain communities, not just within our own. Well, inside the media, I guess I yeah so you're there you're in the belly of the beast it's it's a point that i make uh repeatedly and i think uh i wrote a long sunday review uh piece of the times on after pretty much exactly exactly well actually so i did it about the cartoon uh and then i did it after the collieville oh right hostage hostage situation um but um uh the media i think to some extent

this is a hypothetical uh so i i don't uh i'm i may be wrong but i think to some extent, a lot of Jewish media, people who are Jews who are leaders in their respective media organizations that think, well, we can't have a Jewish problem here in terms of our coverage because, you know, we're Jewish. And so we are immune from any charge of anti-Semitism. And no one is charging them with anti-Semitism. The question is, are we giving this the kind of attention that it needs, or are we in fact downplaying it because we somehow think it's less important than hate crimes being perpetrated against other groups? I don't know whether that's true or not, but I suspect there's at least some aspect there that's accurate. And as a result, you know, for years, the Hasidic community in Williamsburg and other areas of New York has been under attack. And very few people outside of those communities

were aware of them. We just weren't reporting it. Or when the LA Times had this, I think it was, no, excuse me, it was another news organization, had a story about Jewish diners at a sushi restaurant in West Hollywood being assaulted. Yeah, during the Gaza War.

During the May 21 Gaza War. Right. And the suggestion was, well, anger about the war just spilled over onto the streets. Yeah, it was a KABC report. It was a local affiliate report. And the line was, I'm quoting quoting mid-east tensions lead to la fight yes which which is it was the mid-east tensions did not lead to the fight and the fight was not a fight it was an assault uh and yet that's how it was reported and you have to ask yourself well

right so jewish diners are eating sushi in la they get get attacked in like a mob attack, which is really like a blatantly anti-Semitic attack, and the press covers it as Mideast tensions lead to LA fight. I mean, it's unthinkable in other contexts. upset about human rights situation in Ethiopia attacks black people in the United States. I mean, you know, it's absurd and of course it would be unthinkable too, but it's commonplace when it comes to discussing the Middle East vis-a-vis the safety of American Jews. So this is an issue, and as I said, I've repeatedly tried to call attention to the problematic way in which too much of the media reports it.

All right, Brett, we'll leave it there. I highly recommend the Superior Journal, Ideas for a Thriving Jewish Future, which again, we'll post on the show notes. And as each issue comes out, there's always something you'll want to sink your teeth in. So maybe we'll, readers will, so Brett, maybe we'll have you come back on again in the future to hit a future issue, because uh that it's like a discussion driver and i have more and more people pointing out essays to me i'm like you don't have to point out superior to me i'm on it so anyways with that thanks for coming on and don't go to russia i had no plans thank you very much jen that's our show for today be sure to look out tomorrow for a full episode. And also be sure to follow Sapir at sapirjournal.org. S-A-P-I-R-G-O-U-R-N-A-L. That's sapirjournal.org. Call Me Back is produced by Ilan Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.