Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - The End of a Jewish Golden Age — with John Podhoretz

Episode Date: January 20, 2024

Will we look back at the past few decades in America as the Jewish ‘golden age’? And is this ‘golden age’ now over? Did October 7th mark the end? Or should the signs have been obvious years ago? John Podhoretz recently wrote a long essay for Commentary Magazine describing how we got here. He writes: “Several seemingly unconnected arguments and controversies in the United States that had been carefully cultivated over the past couple of decades sprang into full flower on October 8 and thereafter. The weapons were ideas that had flowed for a quarter century from university graduate programs to activist groups to K–12 education and then began to reach millions through online mailing lists, listservs, and social-media entertainment services.” I wanted to have a conversation with John about how we got here, whether we are truly alone, and are they – actually – coming after us? John Podhoretz is a return guest to this podcast. He is a writer and public intellectual. He is editor-in-chief of Commentary Magazine and host of Commentary’s critically acclaimed daily podcast, he’s a columnist for the New York Post, and author of several books (including one of my favorites, “Hell of a Ride”, about his time in the first Bush Administration). Here is the essay we discuss in the episode: “There’s Coming After Us” — https://www.commentary.org/articles/john-podhoretz/antisemites-coming-after-jews/

In each of these cases, the community came together, did what it could to fight things, didn't take it lying down. It's not like we weren't on it. What we didn't know was that it was a web. And I don't mean this like, I don't want to sound like a conspiratorial lunatic. The minute that October 7th happened, groups that had been training in some sense for 20 years for a moment at which they could go at Israel's existence and go at the Jews in America who, according to them, are no different from Israel and the Israelis. They swung into action simultaneously and on

all fronts. And that is what knocked us all sideways. That's the new thing. It's not just that people are getting injured and killed more. That's terrible. It's that Jews were killed in the most horrible ways. 240 people were taken hostage. And the response in the United States on the part of radical leftists was to say, the Jews deserved it. It is 6.30 p.m. on Friday, January 19th in New York City. Shabbat Shalom. It is 1.30 a.m. on Saturday, January 20th in Israel. Will we look back at the past 80 to 100 years in America as the Jewish Golden Age? And if so, is the Jewish Golden Age now over? Are they, as my guest today argues, coming after us? John Podhortz recently wrote a long essay for Commentary Magazine that does a very good, if not outright scary job of describing how we got here, how we got to this end of the Jewish golden age. He writes, and I quote,

several seemingly unconnected arguments and controversies in the United States that had He writes, and I quote, for a quarter century from university graduate programs to activist groups to K-12 education, and then began to reach millions through online mailing lists and social media entertainment services. Close quote. I was struck by this essay. I wanted to have a conversation with John about how we got here. Are we truly alone? Is this in fact the end of the Jewish golden age? And are they actually coming after us? John Putthorst is a return guest to this podcast. He's a writer, public intellectual, and cultural critic. He is editor-in-chief of Commentary Magazine and host of Commentary's critically acclaimed daily podcast. John's also a columnist for the New York Post and author of several books, including Hell of a Ride, about his time as a

speechwriter in the George H.W. Bush administration. John Podhoretz, On the End of the Jewish Golden golden age. This is Call Me Back. And I am pleased to welcome back to this podcast my longtime friend and fellow partner, kibitzer, I don't know what to call you, John. John Podhortz, editor-in-chief of Commentary Magazine and a columnist for the New York Post. John, good to see you. Good to see you too. I remember you before you were you. That's how long I've known you. And then you became you, and then you became a best-selling author, and then you became a TV pundit, and now you have your second book out.

You're just, you're all over the place, and I'm just me. It's okay. I'm fine out here in the rain. Just don't worry about me you're well actually you you are not just you here's this for a transition uh you're not just you and not only as as uh as jonah goldberg points out you are the host of a very influential albeit niche podcast the niche play the commentary podcast which i'm a daily consumer of. But you are also the author of a new essay in the new issue of Commentary Magazine, which you can find online.

It's posted online. It just posted a couple days ago. I actually cited from it in my last conversation with Haviv Rettiguer before it was posted, sort of violating the rules of- You're whetting the appetites of the American consumer. Thank you. Fair enough. And you're the author of an essay that we'll post in the show notes called They're Coming

After Us. And when you first sent me the draft of it, John, it's a cliche to say this, but it really did shake me to the core. What the piece does is it lays out why Israelis are so incredibly unsettled during this moment in a way that they have not been unsettled during other periods of feeling very unsettled, that this moment for Israelis is extremely different, and why those of us who care about Israel are extremely unsettled, if not shocked, in a way we've never been before, out of concern for friends and family in Israel and for Israelis generally. But that's not what I want to focus on today with you. I want to focus on the other

part of the essay. I talked a little bit about that first track with Haviv the other day, but the other part of the essay which I didn't talk about with Haviv the other day, but the other part of the essay which I didn't talk about with Haviv, which I wanted to talk about with you, is the part you focus on about what's happening here, what's happening in the United States, what's happening also in places like the UK and Canada and really throughout the West, in terms of this, I don't even know what to call it, but let's just call it this wave of anti-Semitism that is on a scale that we have never seen before, certainly in your and my lifetimes and in modern history. And on the one hand, we haven't seen something like this before. On the other hand,

when I read this piece, why it was so hard to read is because I felt like the signs were there. The signs were there before October 7th about what was happening in this country and in the diaspora for Jews, and we're idiots, because we should have known, we should have seen it. And I know that you and I and others like us, we're seeing signs that we were screaming from the hilltops about, but I just feel like maybe we should have done more. I guess that's why it was so hard to read. So I just want to set up the conversation by laying out for our listeners, who will obviously dutifully, as soon as they finish listening to this episode, go download the commentary, become a subscriber, and read the essay. But in the interest of time, before they get to that, I just want to lay out the kind of structure of the piece, or this part of the piece, and start,

and I'm going to quote here, where you write, consider this astounding fact. After the lynching of the Atlanta businessman Leo Frank in 1915 at the hands of a mob that believed he had raped a worker in his factory, it would be another 52 years until a Jew in America was publicly murdered for being a Jew. That happened in 1977 in St. Louis when a neo-Nazi shot a few men at random outside a synagogue. It would then be another 41 years before the massacre at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018. In the intervening four decades, you could count on one hand the number of anti-Semitic killings in the United States. The fact that there were any such killings is awful, of course, but the point stands.

American Jews of my age and younger simply did not feel themselves to be at any specific physical risk for being Jewish, close quote. So that's the point. American Jews of my age, meaning yours, John, and mine, and younger, and I think about a lot of Jews younger, people I work with, I think about my children, they simply didn't feel themselves to be at any specific risk for being Jewish. So let's start with that. Can you just describe generally kind of from 1915 to 2018, that sense of security we had in this, in the diaspora, in the West, in thriving democracies, the sense of security we had about being Jewish? Yeah, I mean, I'm not willing to sort of, you know, extrapolate this necessarily outside the United States to other countries. But in the

United States, once you were here, and of course there are issues of immigration restriction after 1924 that may have contributed to the number of people who were murdered in the Holocaust and all of that. But once you were here as a Jew jew you faced standard issue ethnic discrimination not wildly dissimilar from the discrimination against other ethnic groups meaning you know italians were thought of in this way jews were thought of in another way jews couldn't get jobs in white shoe law firms they couldn't get jobs in wall street stock broker. They couldn't get jobs in Wall Street stock brokerages. They couldn't get tenured positions in the professoriate. But if you were here in the United States for the first time, certainly and particularly if you had come from Russia or the Pale of Settlement where

pogroms were an active and ongoing thing from the 1880s, you know, through whenever, you lived your life. You were a Jew and you lived your life. And it wasn't like you had this, there was going to be a mob that marched and smashed your window because you had a Jewish owned business. You went to school, You got a job. You went into the military. You lived a fully American life, except in the upper echelons of the, I don't know what you would call it, sort of the white shoe upper echelons in America where there were barriers and gates put up. And so the risk to any Jewish person in America from 1915 onward was really not all that different from the risk to most people. I know kids grew up in small towns if they were Jewish and someone said, oh, you have horns or called them names or

whatever. My father, Norman Putth hortz famously wrote an essay called my negro problem in ours where he gets beat up on the streets as a six-year-old by another kid but these weren't anti-semitic crimes and in the classic sense the things that jews had been subjected to for two millennia so we have le Leo Frank in 1915. We have the shooting at the St. Louis synagogue in 1977. We have the murder of the disc jockey Allen Berg in Denver in 1984. There was a horrible killing during the Crown Heights pogrom riots in 1991 in Brooklyn. And that's pretty much it until 2018 when Robert Bowers came down from wherever, from whatever hellhole he was in and shot up the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh.

Okay, before we get to the Tree of Life in 2018, I just want to stay for a moment on this. You would hear these stories. I hear these stories. Jews couldn't get – there are certain law firms that Jews couldn't get jobs in. There were like Jewish law firms and then there were law firms that won like these quote-unquote WASP law firms that people knew, Jews knew. Don't bother applying. You can get a job there. Only a certain number of Jews allowed, either by formal mandate or informal, only a certain number of Jews could be admitted to certain Ivy League schools. There was the whole thing about country clubs, right?

Even today you hear about certain country clubs. There are no Jews. So that was a lot of what we were talking about right when we were when that was almost exclusively what the american jewish leadership was concerned with was acts jewish access to all corners of american society they were not concerned with people going around kill assaulting stealing, robbing, raping Jews for being Jews. That was not the concern of the American Jewish community and for a good reason because it wasn't a problem. That was not the problem. The problem was institutional access. The reason that the tree of life synagogue represents a hinge moment here is that and remember came after the charlottesville march riot will not replace right where people

were chanting jews will not replace us after the 2015 explosion of anti-semitic content on social media somewhat connected to the rise of Donald Trump, where people like me, to a very little extent, Ben Shapiro, getting hundreds of thousands of, you know, go into an oven, people like you belong in an oven, you know, I'm going to shoot your children, various people in media starting to get messages and things like that, of a sort that no one had ever seen before and then the violence started so after tree of life two different synagogues right one chabad in poe california one in texas uh there was shooting at poe there was somebody who invaded the synagogue in texas a jewish a kosher supermarket

in patterson new jersey was shot up guy, a home in Muncie, New York, which is sort of like the capital of the ultra-Orthodox Jews in New York State, was invaded by a guy with a machete. And then things started to change. And then visible Jews, by which I mean a Jew with a yarmulke, a Jew with payas, you know, earlobs, forelocks, a Jew with tzitzis, the ritual fringes that hang outside your pants, black hats, suits like that. We're getting assaulted. For our listeners who are not as familiar, these are all, to those who aren't Jewish, when you see the people wearing what John is describing, it's a tell that not only are they Jewish, it's a very visible tell that they are Orthodox Jews or ultra-Orthodox Jews. And so what John is saying is if one was out kind of Jew hunting, these were obvious, very publicly identifying, tragically targeted. And there were dozens of assaults on such people, particularly in Brooklyn, which were called knockout attacks, where someone's walking down the street, someone runs up behind him and punches him in the head and knocks him down.

And we know this because people took video of it. These attacks are on social media. Right. So we started to see these videos all over social media all over youtube because you'd see these like either people would film it on their phones or you'd see like the cctv yeah you'd see security camera footage it just started these images started appearing all over and so this anyway all of this was new and And Dan, I think you were involved, our friend Mitch Silber was involved. Immediately, the Jewish community started gathering to raise money to harden Jewish sites, to protect Jewish institutions, synagogues in particular, but others helping defray the cost of security guards, maybe redoing the lobby to make it harder for people to have access that kind of thing so there was an immediate response people did respond

and i would say that you know what changed after october 7th if i can just okay before before we get to october 7th i want to say it's to point out, and you touch on this in your piece, even at this moment, because when I read your piece, I was trying to go back and think, like, in my mind, what was I doing around then, 2018, 2019, 2020? And public polling at the time still pointed to a country, the United States, that was extremely pro-Israel, extremely, you know, philo-Semitic, you know, very supportive of Jews. So there were these two realities. One reality was more and more violence against Jews was becoming normal, like just a normal fact of life. You'd open the New York Post, you'd see another story about a Jew who was being assaulted. At the same time, there was no sense in public polling or in any kind of survey research that American attitudes towards Jews had changed.

Right. If you were not a visible Jew of the sort that I described, you sort of didn't feel like you were at any physical risk like that. And you probably weren't like, I didn't walk around New York City, worried that someone was going to come up and punch me in the side of the head, because I don't wear a kippah, you know, I don't wear a long black coat, I don't wear a big black hat. Nobody would know. And so even somebody like me, of course my job at commentary magazine is to watch very closely the behavior of anti-semites and the condition of anti-semitism all over the place and i didn't feel at risk now okay here's the important thing because i'm talking about 2018 this is physical risk for being a Jew, right? Okay. If you go back 20 years or 15 years back from 2018, and I can chart this in the pages of my magazine and on our blog and that sort of thing, you are seeing disparate elements

in a rise of elite opinion and some populist opinion that is either implicitly or pretty explicitly anti-semitic and there are various categories of this that the jewish community did respond to but did not connect the dots to say there is a kind of network or net being cast to kind of like create a quilt of anti-semitism okay can you can you talk about those dots so let's talk about them one a lot of it is on campus right so first you have the rise of the theory of intersectionality first promulgated uh in the late 80s by kimberly crenshaw a law professor according to which white people are colonial oppressors and that the oppressor is all the same and so the oppressor is not just america or this or that it's a kind of network against people of color and jews are part of that

network now this was a revolutionary idea because if you had told my grandfather, who was a milkman in Brooklyn, that he was the same color as John D. Rockefeller, he would have thought you were insane. He was a poor immigrant Jew, and he was not white. I mean, whiteness wasn't a thing as a sort of conceptual framework like this at that moment. But he had no commonality with John D. Rockefeller, who was like in a different species practically from him. But according to the theory of intersectionality, whites are oppressors, Jews are white, Jews are therefore oppressors. And this was a new, and remember, Jews make up 2% of the population of the United States. This is a very startling intellectual development, that you could treat this tiny minority, arguably the most oppressed people in the history of the planet. Certainly the only people that have experienced

either a genocide, attempts at genocide, a persecution in the form of mass violence, every single century. Every single century, for 20 centuries, right? I mean, so the idea that Jews are part of the oppressor regime was new and was attacked and people said it was terrible and all of that, and yet it still gained purchase on the campuses. From there, we get to the movement on campuses, which really start on campuses, to BDS. So boycott, divest, and sanction Israel for its failure to create a Palestinian state or to be at war with Palestinians, however you want to slice it. But it's boycott, just to explain what it was. Right.

It's boycotting Israeli companies. It's an effort to make, to get universities to divest from any institution in Israel, whether it is businesses, whether it's working with other universities, doing research with other universities, working or investing or doing research at medical facilities in Israel. This then spread out to the creative arts, no work with creative facilities in Israel. This then spread out to the creative arts, no work with creative artists in Israel, even if those creative artists in Israel were as critical of Israeli government policy as those activists advocating for it on these U.S. college campuses. And sanction Israel in international organizations and deny Israel rights to, you know,

international banking rights and things like that. So that's bds and student activists with the leadership of some radical professors really pushed this very hard in the late decade of the late first decade of the 21st century and there was a combined very serious response from the jewish community from hillel uh from which is uh you know sort of the nationwide network of jewish institutions on campus to help people practice their religions on campus so we had bds we had intersectionality and then we had i't know, the rise of the Jewish lobby attack. In 2006, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt of Harvard University publish a book called The Israel Lobby. And it argues that American foreign policy is controlled by this tiny cabal of people

using as their means the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, AIPAC, the lobby for Israel in the United States to control, distort, and manage American foreign policy for the benefit of Israel. And again, this idea was very fervently opposed by the organized Jewish community, by the heads of the American Jewish Committee, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, and all of that. And then something interesting happened, which is that another organization was incepted out of nowhere to defend implicitly attacks on Israel with a Jewish coloration, and that was J Street, which was created in 2007 and it in turn gave barack obama an anti the first really anti-israel president since i mean i guess you could say george hw bush

was not friendly to israel but barack obama the first ideologically anti-israel president from my generation was born the year i was born, 1961, raised sort of in this college campus atmosphere where support for Israel was viewed as a distortion of Middle Eastern American policy. I would say, John, the distinction, and I haven't really thought about this until you just mentioned it, I would say the difference between George H.W. Bush's anti-Israel policies and Barack Obama's was George H.W. Bush's was more of a, at best, just like a real politic kind of balancing of interests on the one hand, or maybe, maybe, if you want to go there at worst, the sort of the country club version of hostility to Israel

that we talked about earlier. Obama's was different. This was like an ideological worldview that really fit with this notion of Israel as this colonial outpost. Right. And that's the other, the important part is that then there were assertions that the Palestinians were the true indigenous peoples of the land of Israel, which is preposterous because, of course, if you really want to talk about indigeneity, there is a historical record of Jews living in the land of Israel that now dates back archaeologically to 1100 BC, making us so indigenous.

I mean, that is three millennia of indigeneity and jews have lived by the way in the area of the land of israel pretty much for about a century after the jewish expulsion by the romans in 135 ce they started like bits and pieces of Jews started coming back and living in Judea and Samaria and other places and have been there consistently since the third century without let up. So there was this idea that because everybody always wants to parallel everything to American experience, just as Native Americans are the indigenous peoples of this land and we white oppressors forced them out or took over their land, so the Jews from elsewhere came into Israel and stole land from the Palestinians. That's very important. We can argue against that. Against that, you've had many brilliant analyses of the central problem with this argument. Habib brings it up with you all the time, which is, of course, that half the population of Israel does not come from Europe.

It comes from the Middle East and North Africa. And aren't white oppressors coming to take over? You know, they're not white, first of all. One of the interesting things about this white argument is that it comes out of controlled ignorance, because all you have to do is go to Israel for three hours and walk around Tel Aviv. And it is as if skin color is your determinant of whether or not someone is white or not, that is not a white country. Jews from Iran, Iraq, Morocco, Yemen. country i mean jews from from from iran iraq morocco yemen ethiopia and all intermarried so that you know it's a it's the ultimate melting pot in terms of skin color anyway i digress there so the indigeneity which says that jews are interlopers and invaders on somebody else's land

and then of course the idea that israel is an apartheid state an idea by the way that does not deal with palestinians per se but israeli arabs the idea being that both israeli arabs israeli arab citizens and and the palestinians who lived under israeli occupation that they were all one people and that they were israel had you know two forms of justice and social standing one was for jews and one was for arabs and it was an apartheid state jimmy carter of all people published a book about how israel was an apartheid state but that argument which we don't need to rehearse the objections to was then deepened and you hear it now every day by the idea that israel is a genocidal state

that its purpose isn't to manage or humiliate or control or treat arabs as second-class citizens but to eliminate them from the planet earth an argument that is as ludicrous as any argument can be on its face, since the population of Gaza grows and the population of Israeli Arabs grows, this is some genocide. Like, we're the worst genociders ever, because the people under our genocidal regimes here are growing in number, not shrinking in number. The population of Palestinian Arabs grows five times since Israel's takeover of the territories. The population of Israeli Arab citizens grows exponentially,

and Israeli Arabs, Israeli Arab Muslims, wind up on the supreme court in the kinesit as king makers in the formation of israeli governments in journalism in in the medicine in medicine in the creative arts some some apartheid state yeah and then of course finally we get this the mass adoption really in the last three months but you know really in the past three years on college campuses and places like that of the slogan from the river to the sea palestine shall be free which is a call for israel's destruction because of course the river is the jordan river which is the easternmost border of the west bank to the mediterranean which is the western most border of Israel,

and including Gaza, which is on the Mediterranean. So if Palestine is from the river to the sea, Israel no longer exists. So you take all of these things together, and they're all bubbling around in a brew. And then you get some violence, and then you get some violence and then you get this and then you get that and all of these things are being fought again by the jewish community pretty effectively in isolation each in isolation from the other what do you mean by each and i think this is a very important point you fight bds by organizing by helping people make shoot down faculty senate resolutions and calls on, and you have board members, you have people going to CalPERS, the largest pension fund in America, and saying, don't listen to these people. This is not fair. So you have that fight against BDS. Then you have the fight against the apartheid state idea or the genocidal state idea.

You have fighting against politicians from Rand Paul to the squad. But your point is left hand wasn't talking to the right hand. People are, different groups are working on different tracks. Some of these things were kind of amazing. I don't really get into this in the piece but because yasser arafat started the idea that jews were not indigenous to israel in his in a conversation at camp david when he was rejecting the deal to make a palestinian state and this idea was in 2000 in 2000 it's our thought ehud barack and bill clinton negotiating a last-ditch effort by president clinton to try to get a peace agreement before he left office and just yeah and our thought says and you know i don't even know why i'm talking to people about

jerusalem there's no jewish history in jerusalem this is all made up it's all invented no one had ever even thought to make such an argument. It's transparently preposterous on its face. The Bible historians know that there were Jews in Israel at the time of the birth of Christ. Famously in Rome, there's the Arch of Titus, which depicts the victory over the Jews in Jerusalem. people that we know, our dear friend Roger Hertog, others, immediately swung into action and activated a new and more activist form of archaeology in Israel to establish the Jewish presence in Israel over, you know, in ancient times that has borne unbelievably spectacular fruit. Like I said, like we now have incontrovertible evidence that there

were Jews who were themselves self-consciously Jewish with coinage and things like that dating back three millennia. So in each of these cases, the community came together, did what it could to fight things, argued, didn't take it lying down, all of that. And my magazine chronicled all of this and we're very alarmed by anti-Semitism. And I had a column for four years in the monthly pages of commentary called Anti-Semitism Watch. It's not like we weren't on it. What we didn't know and what we learned was that it was a web and i don't mean this like i don't want to sound like a conspiratorial lunatic the minute that october 7th happened groups that had been training in some sense for 20 years for a moment at which they could go at israel's existence

and go at the jews in America who, according to them, are no different from Israel and the Israelis. They swung into action simultaneously and on all fronts. And that is what knocked us all sideways. That's the new thing. It's not just that people are getting injured and killed more. That's terrible. That's the worst thing.

It's like that Jews were killed in the most horrible ways 240 people were taken hostage and the response in the united states on the part of radical leftists was to say we deserved it they deserved it the hang gliders who came in to kill people at the the jews deserved it and you know black lives matter chicago made a meme online a logo black lives matter right this is not an arab group it's not of this black lives matter made a worshipful celebratory logo of a hang glider and who were the hang gliders on oct 7th? They were coming into the Nova Music Festival to massacre hundreds of people, beheading them, raping them, setting them on fire, all of that. in 2020 to defend justice for African Americans is now on the side celebrating an invasion that involved the massacring of civilians. And that was a professor at Cornell named Rickford gets up, you know, African American side, gets up and says he is exhilarated this was an exhilar the most exhilarating moment of his life

on college campuses everywhere then for three months as we know kids are getting harassed uh kid at harvard is harassed by the chairman of the harvard law review who circles him menaces him john i just i just want to read because i want because the details are important i want to quote from your piece. You write here, Columbia professor Joseph Massad celebrated as, quote, awesome the Palestinian resistance's takeover of several Israeli settler colonies near the Gaza boundary. This was within days, he said this publicly of October 7th. Yale professor Zerini Grual asserted that, quote, Israel is a murderous, genocidal settler state and Palestinians have every right to resist through armed struggle, close quote. Again, within days of October 7th.

And you write, when a journalist pointed out that she was talking about the deaths of innocent civilians, Grewal was dismissive and said, settlers are not civilians. This is not hard. And then you go on, George Washington professor, Lara Sheehy, deemed the massacre a justified response to Israel's genocidal intent. Columbia Yale and George Washington each declined to condemn their faculty members' remarks. Yeah. Close quote. And then we have public universities. Like there's a professor at UC Davis, you know, 40,000 kids in the most vaunted state public education system

in the country, professor named Gemma DeCristo, who basically said, we have access to these Zionist journalists. We can go, you know, we know where they live. We can basically go and kill them. As far as we know, though she is not teaching at the moment and her bio has mysteriously been removed from the UC Davis website in her American Studies department. She has not been disciplined. She has not been fired she has not been fired she is likely still on the payroll on the public dime so there's that and of course harvard we have the die-ins we have the invasion of

libraries where kids are trying to study for finals the law school where people but october 9th october 9th less than 48 hours after the attack, 31 student organizations at Harvard, including a chapter of Amnesty International, you point out, as well as the Harvard Islamic Society and Harvard Jews for Liberation, that's... issued a joint statement saying,

and I quote here, we, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence. The apartheid regime is the only one to blame. That's October 9th. They issue that statement, and what's Harvard University's official response? So a month later, of course, the Congress calls the president of Harvard, Claudine Gay, the president of Penn, McGill, and the president of MIT, Sally Kornbluth.

It calls them in front of Congress to talk about what of Jews was harassing to Jewish students on their campus and creating an atmosphere of intimidation that made it very difficult for them to do what it was that they were there to do. Of course, Claudine Gay said it all depends on the context. She acknowledged that Israel was a state, but would not say that it was a Jewish state. And all hell then broke loose in different arenas. But let's move off the campuses, because that's where things start getting scary for everybody. I mean, you're very unnerved about what's going on in college campuses, particularly if you have a kid on college campuses like I do. But you start having demonstrations in the streets. You start having protests outside Jewish-owned businesses like Michael Solomonoff's Goldie restaurant in

Philadelphia. You have people shutting down freeways and bridges and tunnels. I mean, just to give you a comic version of this and then you know this like my son had his bar mitzvah on october 28th it took everybody two hours to get to the site of the bar mitzvah remember because they called the party the party was in brooklyn at a kosher restaurant and it took everybody two hours to get there because the Brooklyn Bridge was shut down that night by anti-Israel protesters. And even three days ago, the bridges and tunnels in New York were shut down by these protesters. Now, it doesn't take very many of them. In schools, teachers are attacked for having posted something that was viewed as favorable to Israel, this school in Queens, for example, where a teacher was actually forced back into her classroom and had to lock her door and hide from students who wanted to go beat her up. Jewish-owned businesses all over the country have been facing this kind of action and then of course you have some of these

city councils in radical cities like in oakland and other places where they pass pro-hamas pro-palestinian resolutions right quickly the conversation went from there should be a ceasefire which sounded more peaceful once this once it was clear that even Hamas didn't seem to want to cease fire for very long, out and out anti-Israel stuff. And if we want to rehearse the idea that you can be anti-Israel without being anti-Semitic, that argument has now lost all of its purchase because Jews are attacked for being Jews in America who have nothing to do with Israel per se, except the explicit presumption that if you are a Jew, you are an Israeli, or you're a stand-in for an Israeli. Right, so Starbucks.

So Starbucks stores are boycotted or vandalized because Howard Schultz is Jewish. No one has any idea what Howard Schultz thinks of Israel. My friend Heather Reisman in Canada is the CEO of Indigo Books. Her bookstores on the anniversary of Kristallnacht are vandalized because she's Jewish. I mean, we see this over and over and over. So take this all together. So there have been some student protests here and there. So there was a protest in 1994 against a Jewish-owned business in Harlem called Freddy's Fashion Mart

that was led by Al Sharpton in which somebody then, a crazy person, set a fire and seven people died. Sharpton, by the way, still walking around as a pundit after his encouragement of this horrible event is one of the great Shondas of our time. So businesses, there's been, you know, there was an attack three years ago on a Jewish business. There was an attack in 2019 on a jewish business you know uh there also synagogues and jewish institutions have been vandalized somebody shot out shot up or tried to shoot up a synagogue in albany in december

point is all of this is happening at once that's what's new it's like you can't catch your breath and every jewish person i know liberal radical not so liberal very right everybody is in a state of blitzed shock and i tell the story in this piece of running into a rabbi of my acquaintance on the upper West Side at a vigil on the Upper West Side, female rabbi, institutional, very well known, with whom I have agreed on nothing in the 20 years that I've known her, though she's a lovely person. And we are entering through the barricades, essentially, which the New York City cops have set up to make it impossible for anybody to start a counter-riot. And I said, how are you doing? And she, like, ashen, looked at me and she said,

I can't believe this is happening. I never thought I would feel this way. That's the new thing. And so, Dan, you can say that you feel like shaken to your core because we could have fought this earlier. I'm saying we did fight it earlier. We fought it in the way that seemed to be the way you fight it, which is, okay, there's a problem here. You take care of this problem. There's a problem here.

Have some security issues at synagogues. Mitch Silber, former head of counterterrorism of the NYPD, go to him. He'll help you harden your sight. It's depressing that you have to do that because it's a house of worship. Nonetheless, better safe than sorry. Money was raised to do that, all of that. But the idea that our enemies were this, we're going to be this ruthless and remorseless and activated and do it in this way where there's a, this that happens at 10 AM and then something else happens in another city at 2 AM at 2 PM.

And then there's a bridge shut down. Then the Bay bridge is shut down at 6 PM and it's all on the same day. And you're like, where, where, where's our safe harbor? This is all about denying us any feeling of safety in the United States. And that's new. When I try to lay out a version of this, although not as eloquently and laced with so much powerful history, to friends who are skeptical of my concern or whether or not my concern is warranted.

I get one of two versions. Oh, they're crazy people. These people are crazy who are – they don't know anything. So it's either they're a bunch of idiot kids. It's the modern version of the kids who wear the Che Guevara t-shirts if they only knew what Che Guevara did to all these liberties and basic rights and human rights that these people wearing the t-shirts said they believed in. If they only knew how atrocious a person he was, they wouldn't be wearing the t-shirt. But they don't know any better, so they're wearing the t-shirt. And that's the modern version of that.

A, you get that. Or B, you, John, were on my podcast about a year and a half ago or two years ago, long before October 7th. We were talking about the crime, the rise in crime and the breakdown in order in American cities, especially New York City. And you talked about the phenomenon of the crimes of insanity, that what we're experiencing now, which didn't exist in New York in the 1970s and 80s, were crimes of insanity. Someone just pushing someone into the subway tracks at a subway station in New York, not out of economic desperation, but out of insanity. Someone just pushing someone into the subway tracks at a subway station in New York, not out of economic desperation, but out of insanity. We have a mental health crisis that is in part fueling this,

and the mental health crisis married to disorder and lax policing is a toxic combination. I get a version of that. People say, these people are crazy. They don't know what they're doing. They're just parroting this nonsense and they're turning into violent acts. What is your response to both of those? I think a lot of people are crazy. I think a lot of people who have been activated are crazy. And it doesn't matter because the activation is what matters, not the reason that

they're doing it. And in fact, what horrifies me and frightens me is how organized this is what the thing about crimes of insanity are that they are by definition unexpected their impulse you know they're driven by impulse a gathering organized on social media through texting texting to shut down major arteries and cities that's not an impulse that is come wreak havoc with us at 7 p.m because we are trying to inconvenience the largest number of people in the largest number of ways now we can look at that and say this is really stupid all this is going to do is like create support support for the cause you're fighting against. It's going to create support for Israel because you people have made it impossible for people to get home in less than three hours and they're going to hate you.

But that's not what this is about. This is about making life for Jews in America uncomfortable, difficult, and unpleasant. And if there have to be ancillary damage done to everybody else, nobody cares. It doesn't matter. And part of the understanding here has to be that the goals seem crazy, right? The elimination of Israel, that seems crazy. The idea that you can sort of drive Americans into supporting Palestinian liberation from the river to the sea may seem crazy, but a lot of things happen over a long period of time. And if you follow my logic that all of this started organically a couple of decades ago, this is the fruition of something. And it's not chaotic. It creates chaos, but its purpose is very organized. And that is, we are not going to rest until you cave to us. And what is it about college campuses that makes them such fertile ground for this? Because the authorities do cave to them, have caved to them for decades. Claudine Gay didn't know that she was supposed to say, oh, gee, I'm sorry, you know, calling for Israel's elimination. that's hostile and creates a hostile

environment for Jewish students on campus she didn't know because she's been accepting of ideas like that her entire career maybe she's not herself articulated it but implicitly this is what people that she knows and helped her get to the top of the greasy pole in academia kind of think. Israel's bad. Israel's oppressing the Palestinians. The Palestinians are like African Americans. Intersectionality theory says Jews are oppressors the way whites are oppressors. So, you know, in context, you got to look at the context because in some contexts, that idea is perfectly defensible to her.

It isn't defensible. It's not morally defensible. It's disgusting. And she's, you know, her what happened there was an outrage. But it was very instructive because the head of the most important one of the five most important institutions in the United States was unable to condemn anti-Semitism in front of the U.S. Congress? Or condemn genocide, support for genocide. I mean, you got to look at that and say something very big is happening here, because it was safer for her to talk like that than it was for her to say, well, of course, I condemn anti-Semitism and lawless warrants.

And in fact, I'm going to go to Israel tomorrow on a flight and I'm going to tour Kvar Aza, which is like, I'm going to go tour one of the kibbutzim that was destroyed or had so many people killed in solidarity with the people of Israel, which is what you might have expected her to say 20 years ago, or Lawrence Summers, when he was president of Harvard 20 years ago, might have said. And of course, she couldn't even condemn the calls for genocide. John, I have a lot of friends, as I know you do, who have been very involved with organizations, liberal organizations, center-left organizations, or even just mainstream American secular organizations. A lot of friends of mine in Silicon Valley, in the tech community, friends of mine in the LA, in New York, in the creative arts, a lot of people in kind of established corporate business

worlds who have given gobs of philanthropic dollars to all sorts of organizations they thought they were totally aligned with on other issues, which they probably were aligned with on other issues that had nothing to do with, or Israel, political issues, civil rights issues, women's issues, whatever it may be. And the number of them that have said to me since October 7th, wow, like all these organizations I've been involved with, that happily were taking my funding and encouraged my leadership and were honoring me at these galas don't have my back. They're silent, if not outright critical in this moment.

And I feel alone. Yeah. What is your message to those people now? I guess that would be my question. Well, what is your message to them now? Forbearing, being magnanimous and gracious as I am at all times in all ways, I would say I honor your feeling of being alone. I honor the impulses that led to your philanthropic deeds in the past. And I'm deeply sorry that you felt abandoned see why maybe you should look in a different direction and help your own people in the right way.

That's so I'm not saying I told you so and saying, you know, again, here's the difference between you're saying we didn't do enough. It's like if you've been reading my magazine for the last 15 years, you would have known perfectly well who your enemies were and that these people were going to turn on you. If you had been reading Tablet, you would know that Black Lives Matter, for some reason, curdle almost instantly into anti-Semitism and organized anti-Semitism. We can talk about why. That's a conversation for another time. But if you had been paying attention and cared about the right things, and what I mean by the right things is, you know what, Judaism, America, that's all solved. So I can turn to secondary and tertiary issues that are of more importance to me. Well, okay, so you know what, you were wrong. You were wrong to do that the key role of jewish people in

positions of influence in my view in the west and in the world is first and foremost to protect and defend our people everything else is secondary including climate change because we may not exist in a hundred years if this kind of eliminationist ideology goes on and there is a country a thousand miles from israel that is developing nuclear weaponry that has as its stated goal the destruction of israel which could mean the murder of a million people in a nuclear strike and that's what's important and so those people they feel alone because they are alone. And the secret is they were alone it. It's extremely important. Thank you, not only for being with us, but for really stitching together a lot in this piece, which was extremely helpful to have all in one place. Well, thank you so much. And as you know, I, like many people,

have gotten an immense amount of satisfaction, pleasure, and information from listening to Call Me Back since October 7th. It's vital and essential. For somebody who is, I believe, I can describe myself modestly as being extraordinarily well-informed about these issues that you discuss, I find something revelatory or completely original that provokes new thoughts in me every time I listen. And I think everybody else who is listening to my voice at this moment is having the same experience. Thank you, John. And today's conversation is no exception to that. So onward, we continue. That's our show for today. To keep up with John Podhortz's work,

you can go to commentary.org or on X at commentary. You can also follow John personally on X. That's at J Podhortz. Trust me, you will want to follow him on X. And we will post the essay we discussed today in the show notes. Call Me Back is produced by Ilan Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan C.