Dan Snow's History Hit - How to Fight anti-Semitism

Episode Date: March 16, 2020

In this episode, Dan meets New York Times journalist and writer Bari Weiss, who grew up near and attended the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsberg, Pensylvania. In 2018 this synagogue was the site of the deadliest attack on the Jewish community in American history. Dan and Bari delve into the long history of anti-Semitism, from 2nd century BCE to our modern era.

Hello everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. On this episode we are talking to Barry Weiss. She is a journalist, a writer at the New York Times, and she grew up very near and went to the Tree of Life Synagogue in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In 2018 the synagogue tragically was the target of a mass shooting in which 11 people were killed and around seven injured. It was the deadliest attack on the Jewish community in the United States in living memory. This inspired her to write the book How to Fight Antisemitism. There's a strong historical component. So she was in London recently and it was great. We met up and had a talk all about it. This interview,

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everyone here is Barry Weiss. Enjoy. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thanks for having me. What I find very interesting about your discussion of anti-Semitism is you trace it way back to before the Christian era even began. So people had it in for Jews since, well, before, you know, we traditionally would expect. Yes. I mean, the anti-Semitic template that people think of, of course, is the Jesus story. What happens in that story? The Jews use their proximity to power to get then the most powerful force in the world, the Roman Empire, to do their bidding and kill the Son of God. And so much flows from that story, right? There is the image of the Jew as the kind of wily puppet master getting powers in the

world to do its bidding. And we see echoes of that when we hear about the bankers and the globalists controlling banks and capital and borders and governments. But in fact, and I was really shocked to learn about this too, the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory goes, you know, at least there's some people say to, you know, 700 BCE, but certainly 300. And what happens in 300? At that time, the 300 CE, at that time, the Jewish community and Alexandria, Egypt, was then the biggest Jewish community in the world, which is quite astonishing when you think about today the fact that there are less than 20 people in all of Egypt. At one time, it was the heart of Jewish civilization.

And you have the story of the exodus from Egypt, right, the story of one God liberating a group of slaves, taking them to freedom in the Promised Land. That story, in a way, was an assault on everything that was then sacred to normative Egyptian culture, the worship of idols, the idea that all human beings deserved freedom, right? These were things that were a total anathema to the norm at the time. And so you have this priest by the name of Manateo devising the first anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. And what does he say? He says the Jews weren't freed by God. The Jews were, in fact, a group of lepers who were making war against normal Egyptians. And they were kicked out, actually. They weren't freed by God. Each aspect of the story is revised in his

telling. And it's just amazing to me that it went back even further than I had even understood. And the book that I would recommend to your listeners, your viewers, that informed my thinking about how to understand anti-Semitism is a book called Anti-Judaism by a scholar at the University of Chicago named David Nirenberg. And what he says is both comprehensive and also very chilling. What he says is that it's a mistake to think about hatred or demonization of, let's call it Judaism, really, because it's not just Jews, it's Jewish ideas, as some kind of basement or closet in the history of Western civilization. He says it's one of the tools with which that civilization was constructed. And that, to me, was both terrifying to read, but also helped me understand how it is that this

thing could be so malleable and so resilient that you see it back then and you see it in force today just under a different guise. So why is that? Western civilization has had no problem in demonizing groups, committing genocide, atrocities against peoples all over the world. What is it that is this enduring, like why is it so central, does he argue and you argue, to the birth and development of Western civilization? I mean, I was talking to Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sachs about this yesterday, and he traces it deeply to Christianity and the idea of these are the children of the light, the children of the darkness. I mean, it's confusing, which is one of the reasons that I wrote this book. But to me, Nirenberg really goes a long way to explaining this

when he says, you know, it's not just a bigotry. It's a way for people to sort of define themselves as against this other thing. And what that other thing is, is not actually Jews, right? It's what Jews come to stand in for whatever a given civilization defines as its most sort of detestable or loathsome qualities, right?

That's why under Soviet communism the Jews are the arch capitalists. It's why under Nazism we're the race contaminators. It's why today under the far right, you know, the white supremacist far right, we're accused of being sort of the greatest trick the devil has ever played, because we appear to be white. At least those of us in the West, the majority of us are of Eastern European Ashkenazi descent. But in fact, we're loyal to immigrants, we're loyal to Muslims, we're loyal to black and brown people. We believe in protecting the refugee, we fight for immigration. And therefore, we are in a way undoing, and this is their view, not mine, true white America, at least in my country, that's what they say. They

say it in different ways in other parts of the West. And then on the far left, right, we're kind of the opposite. We're accused of being handmaidens of white supremacy because of the success we've attained. We're accused of being defenders of racist colonialism, which is the Soviet lie that they tell about Israel. So both of those things are in force at once today. So which is it? Are we the isolationists or are we the internationalists? Are we the handmaidens of white supremacy or are we the betrayers of the white race? They're both in force at once. So it really, it's, I know that the term that was popularized here during the last election,

rather than anti-Semitism, was anti-Jewish racism. And I understand why. Because racism, everyone agrees, is a terrible thing. And so anti-Jewish racism, okay, we're all against that. Whereas anti-Semitism can sound kind of abstract or bloodless. The problem with framing it as racism is that it doesn't quite capture what anti-Semitism is. Because it can function the same way, meaning it can function as a prejudice against a person, right? But the racist sees themselves as punching down against a person that they

perceive to be subhuman because of the amount of melanin in their skin. The anti-Semite sees themselves as punching up, right? Because they're punching up against this group that sort of punches way above its own weight. When you're speaking about that it made me think is it something to do with the kind of fascinating demographics and geography of post-Roman medieval and early modern Europe where the only other group in European society there were of course small numbers of people all over the world but in terms of a big group that identified different sort of ethnicity or religion would have been Jews. If you were in Poland or Russia or Germany, it was Christians and then Jews. There was no large community of Africans or Asians there. Right. But then you're still like, this people was ghettoized. They had no political power.

They weren't allowed to own land. They weren't allowed to participate in many of the professions. And yet, for example, you know, I think of, you know, we're in the time of coronavirus. And so I've been thinking back to previous pandemics, right? And I was thinking about one of the worst ones, you know, the Black Death, the plague. Now, that disease came to this continent via rats that snuck on board from ships that were traveling here from Crimea. But the group that was blamed were the Jews. They were accused of poisoning the drinking wells.

And they were surviving oftentimes at a higher rate than their neighbors. That's because they were ghettoized and it's because of various Jewish religious practices like washing hands before you eat bread or the ritual bath before Shabbat, before the Sabbath. But rather than looking to that group and saying, aha, what are they doing that we can mimic? The response was to massacre 60 Jewish communities across Europe over the space of a year. And I think about one particularly chilling example. And of course, all of these histories have been lost in the shadow of the Holocaust because that was just so monumentally horrific that we've forgotten that like hundreds of thousands of Jews were massacred in pogroms years before. Anyway, in this specific

instance, the entire community of Basel, Switzerland was, the entire Jewish community was herded into a giant wooden barn that had been erected just for this purpose and burned alive. And the only people that survived were a few children that had been forcibly converted out. Yeah, I mean, yes, perhaps that's the reason, but it's just striking to me that the group with no power was accused always of having superhuman power. Another historical example I'll point out. So when I was growing up in high school, I was always paying attention, my family was paying close attention to the anti-Semitism that was just, is so prevalent and powerful throughout the Middle East, right? I was in high school during the Second Intifada, and I was paying unbelievably close attention to what was going on there. And to look at all of that, you know, ahistorically, you would think, oh, the Jews have never had it

worse. But in fact, the Jewish experience under Christendom was monumentally worse than it was under Islamic rule. It was bad under both. But as Bernard Lewis writes, the late great Bernard Lewis writes in his seminal work, if people haven't read it, they should, Semites and Anti-Semites. He's a scholar of Islam. He writes about the way that anti-Semitism gets imported into the Arab world. And it gets imported, the first blood libel in the Arab world, in the Muslim world, is in 1840 in Damascus. And the reason for that is that Christian Europeans who had been flooding that part of the world as, you know,

for colonialist reasons, as bureaucrats, bringing religion, whatever, bring their ideas with them. And in a way, I think that's sort of comforting because it goes to show that there's sort of like nothing fundamental in a religion or a culture that leads people to bigotry. It's ideas. It's not identity. And so when people today fear immigrants coming in, let's say, to cities like this one or like Paris, it's true that we should be aware that they too are bringing ideas with them, maybe retrograde ideas about gay people or women or Jews. But the truth is that there's nothing fundamental in their religion or culture

that prevents them from assimilating to liberal democratic ideas. You call the book How to Fight Antisemitism. How do you fight antisemitism? And is history important here? Oh my God, history is everything. I know. Yes, but I think, you know, someone the other day was like, you're a historical Jew. You really focus on history. And I sort of was like, thanks. But then I thought for a moment and I'm like, I don't really think there's any other kind of Jew to be. The Jewish experience is inside of history. One of the reasons that I'm also able to still be optimistic is that people have been predicting our death prematurely for thousands of years. We're called the ever-dying people, right?

We're the ever-dying people. We refuse to die. Mark Twain talks about what is the secret to Jewish immortality. Walker Percy, the great, you know, Southern American Catholic writer, has this amazing quote that I think about all the time where he says, where are the Hittites? Why does no one find it amazing that you walk around a city like this one and there's no Moabites, there's no Amalekites, there's no Hittites, and yet there are Israelites. It's just today we call them Jews. A few Philistines around.

Yeah, exactly. But today that to me gives me tremendous optimism despite the dark moment it feels like we're living through. It's still true despite the fact that basically an American pogrom happened in my own city, in the synagogue where I became a bat mitzvah and tree of life, despite the fact that there's been, you know, that there's been hugely rising anti-Semitism in my country and, you know, rising throughout Western Europe, it's still the case that I live

a life that would have been unimaginable to my ancestors, let alone to my grandmother. And so I really try and approach things with that view of the world. And if you lack history, your hair would be on fire, given what's going on in the world. But if you know history, you feel pretty optimistic that it's a little troubling that we're sort of returning to the mean of Jewish history, but things ultimately are still the best they've ever been. Okay, now to your question about how we fight it. The thing that I want to emphasize more than anything else is that the reason to fight anti-Semitism is not just because we want to protect Jews, although we do. We want to protect all minorities.

The reason we want to protect anti-Semitism, I'll say to non-Jews, is because you want to protect all minorities. The reason we want to protect anti-Semitism, I'll say to non-Jews, is because you want to protect yourself. Now, what do I mean by that? I mean that if you look historically, it's clear that societies that cannot protect their Jews are societies that are on the road to death, if not actively dying already. That's just true. And the reason for that is that societies that cannot protect their Jews are societies that cannot protect difference. They can't protect liberal ideas. I mean that not in a partisan way, but liberal broadly defined. And this was brought home to me really powerfully when I saw that new Tom Stoppard play the other night. And it opens at the height of what was then the height of Jewish civilization, Vienna in 1899, this unbelievably assimilated, successful Jewish

community. It opens on a family where they're, you know, they say, we're sort of Jewish, but we're baptized. They're putting up a Christmas tree. But then history comes for them too. And what do we know about Vienna? Well, Vienna itself was destroyed. So the appeal that I make to non-Jewish audiences is you should fight against anti-Semitism because societies where it thrives are societies where facts and truth have been replaced with conspiracy theories and lies. And you should fight it because, yes, because you care about your neighbors, but also even if you don't care about us, fight it because you care about your own family and your own community and your own society. So the number one way to fight it is to resist the spread of illiberalism. And we do that by doing it,

by standing up for liberal ideas. And the thing is, is that's often, as we've seen in the case of the Republican Party in my country, Really, really hard to do. You have much more actually political courage in this country. And I just look at the last election. I look at an MP like an Ian Austin, who was willing to say, I was in the Labor Party my entire life, but I'm leaving it because I don't want to be part of a project that, let's just say generously, puts up and tolerates in an institutional level anti-Semitism. I could go farther if the libel laws were different in this country than they are. And the fact that you had all kinds of people leaving the party that they had sort of given

their life to, that really didn't happen that much under Trump in the States. And so what I would say is we need to be courageous and we need to sort of like look beyond our immediate circumstances of career and ambition and success and say there are things that are more important than that. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive but to conquer whether you're preparing

for assassin's creed shadows or fascinated by history and great stories listen to echoes of history a ubisoft podcast brought to you by history hits there are new episodes every week that's inspiring um tell me more about the reason you wrote this book. You mentioned there briefly the Tree of Life Synagogue. I mean, what spurred you to take on this project? Yeah, I mean, I'm from a family that I'm the oldest of four daughters. I come from a politically mixed marriage. My dad is a Trump-curious conservative. My mom is a liberal. She withheld sex to make sure that he wouldn't vote for Trump. He wrote in Steph Curry, who's like the point guard of the Golden State Warriors. Hopefully the same thing will happen this time around and he'll be prevented from going

for Trump. I mean, if he was curious four years ago, what's happened in the last four years that's now made him go, hey, this is... Well, let's just hope it's Biden and not Bernie and we'll see if that's possible. Let's hope your mom doesn't have to use the ultimate sanction. I mean, whatever she has to do. We admired her for doing it last time around. She's a patriot.

She is, definitely. It was his Liz Estrada moment. So, you know, the kind of family I grew up in, we were always talking about politics. We were always talking about ideas. We were curious about the world. And the fact that my parents, you know, canceled out each other's votes made the conversation all the more interesting. So I don't want to give people the impression that I wasn't aware of anti-Semitism before the morning of October 27, 2018. That's

the morning that a white supremacist walked into Tree of Life, the synagogue where I became a bat mitzvah, you know, just down the road from the house where Mr. Rogers lived. It was literally Mr. Rogers' neighborhood. He said, all Jews need to die. And then he tried to kill as many Jews as he could. He killed 11 of my neighbors. My dad knew five or six of them. It's a very small community. We all sort of, it's kind of like a 21st century shtetl in the best way. So I talk about in the book how, in a way, I think I was living on a holiday from history before that. Now, what do I mean by that?

I don't mean, like I said, you know, I watched anti-Semitism rise in Western Europe. I watched, you know, what was going on throughout the Muslim world, especially after 9-11. But I was of the view that somehow America was uniquely inoculated from the virus of anti-Semitism. And I was raised on this beautiful mythology, some of which I still believe in, but I would be lying to you if I didn't say that I'd been revisiting it. And that mythology goes like this. America has been the greatest diaspora in Jewish history. I still believe that.

And the reason for that is that America's founders, you know, for all of their unbelievable flaws, saw themselves as new Israelites enacting a modern exodus, fleeing themselves as religious refugees in a way to a promising land. Benjamin Franklin wanted the image on America's great seal to be Moses crossing the Red Sea. Abraham Lincoln called Americans the almost chosen people because he believed in the other chosen people. In 1790, George Washington writes to the Jewish community in Rhode Island, the first Jewish community in America, and he says, you know, it's now no more that mere toleration will be spoken of. The Jews will possess, you know, immunities of citizenship.

We're not going to be second-class citizens in the new America. like my grandfather, who, you know, supported his single mother by selling newspapers, barely got a high school degree, and rose, you know, he lived literally the American dream, rose to be a truck driver for a dry goods business to own the business himself. And we would argue a lot about history, and he would say, no, Barry, yeah, Jerusalem's great, but I'm living in Jerusalem. This is Jerusalem for the Jewish people. And that was true, especially in the post-war years, you know, where Jews in America rose to achieve incredible success, where the Jewish return to political sovereignty in the land

of Israel happened. It felt like, you know, the Francis Fukuyama thing. It felt like the end of history for us. And all of a sudden that morning, it's like, no, we're returning to Jewish history. And then six months later to the day after the Pittsburgh attack, you have a white supremacist, same ideology, walking into a synagogue in Poway, California, saying all Jews must die. Then we have a scene straight out of the 1800s in Poland where a man wielding a machete the size of a baseball bat walks into a rabbi's home in Muncie, an hour's drive from Times Square. They're lighting the menorah.

He's there with his followers. And the man, again, tries to kill as many Jews as he can. Then you have an attack on a kosher supermarket in Jersey City. I mean, the beat is sort of going on. And what is that beat? That is the beat of Jewish history's return. But it's, you know, probably I sound naive to you, you know, the idea that I thought that we were somehow possibly inoculated from this conspiracy theory, this ever morphing disease.

But I thought that our immune system, so to speak, was just so strong. And now I'm revisiting that. So that's sort of where we are. There's an amazing moment, isn't there? The Hare with Amber Eyes, a story of the Jewish Central European family that everyone was reading a few years ago, which talks exactly like history. People think they don't need history,

but sometimes history just comes and taps them on the shoulder and that reminds me so powerfully of that. What is it like to be called to write a book and like drop everything else and into the struggle? Because that's an amazing thing to do. You wouldn't have written this book had it not been for that tragedy in your community, would you?

No, I think that I certainly at some, you know, my alternative career path was rabbi, honestly. So rabbi or lawyer. So I'm very interested in Jewish ideas and Jewish history. At some point, I thought to myself, I'll write a Jewish book. But you know, like many Jews, I was like, I don't want my first book to be Jewish.

I don't want to be pinned down. I don't want book to be Jewish. I don't want to be pinned down. I don't want to be ghettoized. I don't want to be boxed in. But then after that happened, I had sold a book, a book that I'm still on the hook to write, sort of about the crisis of liberalism. But then once this happened, I just found myself writing lots of columns about it and just unable to look away from it. And I, there was just unable to look away from it. And there was just nothing else that I could write. And so I went to my publisher sort of hat in hand and was like,

please, you don't even need to give me any money. Just let me do this book really fast and let me write it quickly so it can come out before the Jewish high holidays, which somehow I managed to do. It really just sort of came out of me. I mean, I worked hard on it, but it was just, I feel so passionately about this subject. And it feels just so unbelievably urgent in a way that, you know, writing about Andrew Yang or, you know, other topics are fun and wonderful, but they don't feel urgent to me in the same way as this did. I guess I just want to ask one thing before I let you go.

Why anti-Semitism now? Why this violence now? Is this a horrific Facebook, Twitter story? Is this a 2008 economic downturn? What is it? When things go badly in history, people want to look for an explanation. people want to look for an explanation. And the kind of politics that we're seeing on the far right and the far left as the center sort of collapses is a politics that puts the target on the back of enemies of the people. This takes different forms. It's always sort of an abstract thing. But it's populist politics don't tend to end well for the Jews because we're often the group that's pointed to. We are living through a perfect storm. We're living through a perfect storm of social media, which you pointed out, the economic inequality caused by lots of things, including globalization, which has been so wonderful in certain ways, but also left a lot of people as sort of the losers of this economic system.

We're living through an age in which politicians themselves, most prominently the president of the United States, himself pushes conspiracy theories. We're living through an age in which there's sort of a retreat from the idea of, you know, internationalism and the idea that when we come together we can do something great of a retreat from the idea of, you know, internationalism and the idea that when we come together, we can do something great and a retreat into isolationism. That leads often to xenophobia, fear of the outsider. So it's sort of a perfect storm. And the question is, can we see ourselves through this pass? Or is this just the beginning of a new darkening age? You're the real historian. You would know better than me. Well, I'd certainly meet some real historians and it's been a great

privilege to meet one in you. So thank you very much indeed. You have written How to Fight Antisemitism, but you also, like you're all over other media as well. How can people stay in touch with your brilliant articles? They can find me on Twitter or in the pages online or in print of The New York Times. Thank you very much. Thank you. I feel we have the history on our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished and liquidated.

One child, one teacher, one book, and one pen can change the world. He tells us what is possible, not just in the pages of history books, but in our own lives as well. I have faith in you. I hope you enjoyed the podcast, everyone. Just a massive favour to ask if you could go to iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts, give it a rating, five stars, obviously, and then leave a glowing review.

That'd be great. My mum is getting overwhelmed by the amount of different email accounts she's set up to leave good reviews for me. So you're going to have to do some of the heavy lifting. Thank you. you