Ideas - Adam Gopnik: Confronting Anti-Semitism in the 21st Century

Episode Date: February 18, 2025

The current wave of anti-elitism, and anti-urbanism we’re seeing from authoritarian leaders and their followers may seem to have erupted out of nowhere. But New Yorker writer, Adam Gopnik argues what we see now stems from historic anti-Semitism. He delivered the second annual Irving Abella Lecture. 

1942, Europe. Soldiers find a boy surviving alone in the woods. They make him a member of Hitler's army. But what no one would know for decades, he was Jewish. Could a story so unbelievable be true? I'm Dan Goldberg. I'm from CBC's Personally, Toy Soldier. Available now wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. The subject I have taken today is not one that easily delights us, but I will try to end if I can, at least on some note of light, if not delight. This is the New Yorker writer and author Adam Gopnik speaking at Massey College in Toronto

in September 2024. I love to be back here at Massey College. It's where I set out in one of the greatest honours and journeys of my life to give the Massey lectures in 2011, which took me from one end of Canada, from Newfoundland to British Columbia. It was a transforming experience. We had the whole family with us. And of course, it began here. Adam was at Massey College to deliver the second annual Irving Abela lecture. His talk was entitled On Confronting Hate. Let me just add a technical note.

Those of you who have had the misfortune to hear me speak in the past will know that I've made rather a fetish out of not speaking from a prepared text, but always from notes without the interposition of paper between me and the audience. But tonight, I've decided to read freely from a finished text. I've done that in part because of the extreme complexity and sensitivity of the topic I've taken, and in part because I have reached an age where I either have to have my glasses on or my glasses off. Tonight I will have

my glasses on. The complexity and sensitivity Adam mentions stem from the subject he's chosen, anti-semitism, its historic roots on both the political right and left and its expressions today in the context of Israel and Gaza. There's also an unexpected facet to his argument that the current wave of anti-elitism and anti-urbanism we're seeing from authoritarian leaders and their followers today has its roots in anti-Semitism. One other note, Adam grew up in Montreal and was later based in Paris.

And he starts his talk with a phenomenon that he calls the French power of saying no. The French power of saying no, and certainly all of us expatriates who have lived there sometimes get tormented and worn down by the number of no's we get in a typical French day. And whenever I was bewildered or puzzled or overwhelmed

by those experiences, I would go up to the north of Paris and visit my late friend, the great French Jewish philosopher Andre Glucksmann. Glucksmann, who was known to everyone, including his wife as Gluck, no one ever called him André, would always listen patiently and then almost invariably he would begin his explanation, his explication of whatever was puzzling me with a simple remark which became one of my favorite French idioms. He would say, nous sommes des adultes et pour compter je suis perdu.

Meaning simply that asserting one wrong doesn't wipe away some other, that one can hardly criticize the wrongs and even crimes of one side without denying the crimes of another, and that it is possible to unequivocally condemn some action without immediately excusing some other. Gluckx, whose parents had met in Jerusalem in the 1930s and so he could very quickly condemn some action without immediately excusing some other. Gluck's, whose parents had met in Jerusalem in the 1930s, when each recognized the other because they were both carrying Stefan Zweig's magazine in their pockets,

returned to Europe and then had been deported to the camps and then eventually made new lives, however warily, in France. Gluck's, very much in the French way, began as a Gaullist, became a Maoist, and ended as a humanist. Canadians, I think, are good at counting to two. We count one, and we see the nobility of our history in building a multicultural democracy that spans a continent. When I did the Massey lecture, starting here, as I said a decade ago, which is still the greatest honor of my working life, I was overwhelmed as we traveled en famille from St. John's to Vancouver

by the intellectual continuity of our country. For all its diversity, the audience has had similar scruples, raised similar questions, shared a similar national tone. But we also recognize within that noble achievement, the brutality and cruelty of the crushing of the first nations that was inextricably linked. Note, I do not say necessarily linked to build it. We recognize both truths and we comptez juste deux.

We always counted two. And then, us Jewish Canadian folks counted two, and three, and four, and all the way up. Since our hyper-conscious, multiple consciousness, our love of placing commentary upon commentary, mid-rush upon Talmud upon Torah demands it. And Jewish Canadians who are also Francophone, Quebec raised Jewish Canadians. Well, we wear many faces.

What our persecutors would say is that we wear many masks. I'll come to that. And we want it darker always, as our great Bard said. Not because we love the dark, but because when you pile on multiple consciousness, the simple light of certitude recedes, and a certain healthy darkness, the darkness of the human condition as it is, will obscure some of the sometimes too easy light for good or ill. So I am going to try and stand here tonight and count to two, and to three, and perhaps

beyond on some of the most vexed and painful questions that confront all of us, Jew and non-Jew today. And I will try to make it darker, and then perhaps in the end offer what the Canadian side of me always wants, and that is a slant of light. Let me begin here. It is usually normal to declare one's credentials,

one's bona fides, and here I am going to declare my absence of credentials, my mala fides, as I suppose I have to say. I am here to talk about, yes, about hate, but very specifically about anti-Semitism as it exists in the world today and as it has persisted in the world for so many millennia. And I should add that I am not really a very observant Jew, nor a particularly fervent Zionist. Indeed, I can well imagine that given the circumstances, I would have been anti-Zionist, or at least

indifferent to the argument, if I had been around in Theodor Herzl's time and known what Herzl knew. Nevertheless, my children insist that I am as pure a type of the vanishing kind of the Jewish intellectual, culturally and by temper and by temperament, as one can be. Certainly more Yiddish words seem to creep

into my vocabulary, direct from my grandfather's spirit, in middle age than they ever have before. My wonderful son was married with his whole family in attendance, and I found myself saying, when I heard that we were going to go outside Manhattan for this wedding, I found myself saying to my beautiful Winnipeg Icelandic Canadian wife, we've really got to schlep all that way with the whole mishpoka? She looked at me, startled, but not really surprised. So I am not a very good Jew, but I am also not a fool.

I have spent much of my life reading history and writing about it, criticizing historians, and learning from them, even occasionally, as with my study of Lincoln and Darwin as literary stylists, writing a little new history of my own. I will even boast, and forgive me if I do, that I suspect I am one of the few who have recently read both translations of the Jewish and Islamic scriptures, intact and on successive weeks, and written about them, and lived to tell the tale. I've also read the entire Book of Mormon, if you want to know.

And it takes no paranoia, merely a knowledge of that history, to recognize anti-Semitism and irrational hatred of Jews when it rises. One sees and witnesses again the monomaniacal insistence on Jewish evil at the expense of common sense or any other kind of broader understanding, and we see it all around us today. Let me say at once that you will not hear from me any mechanical defense of the far-right government of Israel as it exists today. Two years ago, my friend and one of my intellectual heroes, Simon Schama, author of First Class

History of the Jewish People, Simon and I, in conversation at the Swedish Book Fair in Gotenberger, spoke out so strongly against the Netanyahu government that the Israeli ambassador to Sweden walked out in protest. So my bona fide is on that account, at least, to clear. But I would urge you all to see the, listen to the follow-up lecture that Simon gave this summer in Aspen, Colorado. You can find it easily on YouTube.

He made the point emphatically from our shared liberal, indeed left point of view, that Israel is not a colonial nor settler state, that it is a country of refugees continuously occupied by Jews for many millennia, that there was even a majority of Jews living in Jerusalem at the beginning of the 20th century, and that it still seems that only Jews of all the world's people have to plead for their right to their existence. More than half the population of Israel after all is not of European origin including my own family there and never had a metropolitan home to return to not at all like the French in Algeria

or the British in India or the Dutch in Indonesia. Jews my own Sephardic North African family, on my mother's side included, had nowhere to go after the war. Illegal immigrant ships were being sunk, and Palestine was sealed off from us before and during the war. Immigration was banned in most places. And so no Jew, however secularized, however universalist in outlook, however humanist in purpose,

can be indifferent to the story, painfully recited in the brilliant reportage of Lee Yaron, the Haaretz journalist, whose new book, 10-7, is truly a necessary read. No one can read of that day and of the elderly caught in a bus and murdered one by one by Hamas terrorists exalted in their deaths indifferently. It brings to our minds only the imagery and memory of the Einsatzgruppen and their indiscriminate work of killing Jews on the Eastern Front in the 1940s. And also to the Jewish determination not ever to accept our murder, unevenged or unpunished.

Jews having been murdered en masse, made up their minds to never be murdered en masse again. And yet this decision seems somehow to shock, not just the would-be murderers, but too many of their so-called friends. Jews alone of all the world's people are told to blame themselves for the murder of their helpless parents and children.

But I counted two, and I recognized that I had been born of a different heritage in a different place. My sympathies would be not different, I hope, but differently inflected. Had my family hailed from Jaffa or Hebron, where indeed they do hail from, doubtless why my conscience might be ticking away universally, my affections would still

be running necessarily towards the other party in the conflict. And it is one of the great and impossible virtues of Lee Yaron's book, which again I recommend to all of you, that she never fails to recognize the despair and the humanity of the other side and asks rightly what suffering they have known that could cause such suffering. Yet recognizing that we inevitably make our theory of justice and our emotions of empathy out of different parts of our mind,

still, still, the obsessive attention to Jewish evil, the relentless accusations of genocide, his purpose is in part at least to deface and demean the memory of the Shoah and remove his special claims to the experience of persecution, as I say they resonate in my heart. Nor need I point out that the religious government of Iran, the patrons of Hamas, are engaged right now in the brutal hanging of dissidents who spoke up in favor of the right of women to appear unveiled in public and with less evident protest. But I defer to Simon Schama and Simon C. Bigmontafiore and others far more polemically expert

than I am on these questions. What I want to raise here tonight that I hope may be fresh or new to you in part is the particular way in which a certain template of anti-Semitism spills over as a larger false model, as a larger misconstrual of modernity. For one of the key points in Irving Abela's great book on the great shame of Canadian immigration policy in the 1930s when Jewish refugees were kept out, is that they were banned, yes, for anti-Semitic reasons, but

that the form this anti-Semitism took was not simply a fear of the other. No, it involved a very specific mistrust of education, of the urban and the city-bound, not of the danger alone that helpless people posed, but that the danger of an alien educated elite might pose to Canadian values. Again and again, the notion that the Jews were coming to the cities was a particularity that made Jewish immigration impossible. Now let me stop to make a few distinctions. The tragedy of our time, the particular tragedy of our time, is that anti-semitism rises equally from left and right. But then it always had. Hitler had hardly finished his hideous work when

Stalin hatched the so-called doctor's plot, the anti-semitic conspiracy theory in the early 1950s, whose worst work was ended only by his death. Left anti-Semitic conspiracy theory in the early 1950s whose worst work was ended only by his death. Left anti-Semitism and right anti-Semitism, can we distinguish them? I'd say yes we can and that on the whole right anti-Semitism, right-wing anti-Semitism, since the beginning tends towards historical conspiracy. It looks back while left-wing anti-Semitism tends to be contemporary. It looks around, or claims to. Right-wing anti-Semitism is rooted in the idea of the past plotting of the Jews. It is rooted, tragic as this is to say, in the New Testament tales in which the Jews are ever increasingly excluded

from the city because of something they have done that cannot be forgiven. And it's worth noting, however painful, the way that the Gospels, the New Testament itself, increases in anti-Semitism as its authors seek more and more to placate the Roman authorities. If we follow the struggles of anti-Semitism from Paul's generally philosemitic epistles to John's openly anti-Semitic gospel, you can track the evolution of that first kind of hatred against the plotting of the Jews to kill God.

They may still be doing whatever it is they're doing the right-winger holds, but their past crimes alone are enough to condemn them. The wandering Jew is the symbol of this ugly creed. And God knows, or let's hope doesn't, the right-wing antisemitism remains intact. It not accidentally at all always takes the form therefore of historical negationism. Obsessively rewriting history is its particular task, as with Tucker Carlson, Donald Trump's favorite broadcaster,

and his little friend, the audacious popular historian. The obsession with Holocaust denial is, as I say, continuous with the original antisemitism that descends to us, I'm sad to say, from Christianity. They did it to themselves. Now, left-wing antisemitism, on the other hand, takes the form of a certain kind of wide-away contemporary pseudo-awareness. It takes as its icon not the wandering Jew,

but the too-much-at-home Jew, the too-easily-at-home Jew, as in the doctor's plot. Left antisemitism tends to be modern in outlook. Today it centers around Israel and clusters around the need for an anti-colonialist discourse in a post-colonial world. In France the anti-Semitism of someone like Monsieur Mélenchon takes the name of anti-Zionism but not in the sense of criticizing this or that government action but in the sense of placing as particularly Zionist all the features of the classic European hatred of the Jews. Conspiracy, the world of finance, the outsiders, and so on.

Yet both left and right have, I think, something in common. Most racism is of a kind that assigns a subhuman role to its victims. We saw this very clearly with the Trump and Vance insistence that those hardworking immigrant Haitians in Ohio were subhuman animals who ate what no one else would. A bit of racism so crazy that it ended with a search for a photograph of a barbecue in what were clearly chickens being grilled by Americans were transformed in the crazed imagination into cats being grilled by Haitians. But antisemitism is perhaps unique among the world's persistent ills in ascribing not sub

but superhuman powers to the objects of its hatreds. Antisemitism assigns a kind of superhuman role to its victims. They are too smart. They are too city bound. They are too quick to mount up in the professions. Now, for the purposes of this lecture, I said that I have read the Quran, and I have read the Torah, and I have even read the Book of Mormon.

And for the purposes of this lecture, I read, I am a reader, for the first time the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. And what is striking, what is striking about that odious fabrication is that though it pretends to be a medieval record, its particularly 20th century context is apparent. For it is responding not to the older myth of Jews as incorrigible outsiders, but to the newer myth of Jews as insidious insiders. It faked dates to the 15th century, this counsel as the advice of the grand rabbi. I quote, become Christians, but keep the law of Moses in your hearts. Make your sons merchants that they

may rob from the Christians. Make your sons and daughters doctors and apothecaries. Make your sons canons and clerics that they may destroy the churches. And tellingly, make your sons advocates and lawyers that you may put Christians under their yoke. This is a, perhaps the, wellspring of modern anti-Semitism.

It is right-wing anti-Semitism in as much as it sees Jews as outsiders, but left in as much as it sees them everywhere now. Hitler's anti-Semitism, and let us go there, let us go there, is of exactly this kind. Mein Kampf is another book that I had to read and review once in the New Yorker with my miserable graduate school German. If you read Mein Kampf what will be striking to you is not in its original impulse the

idea is not that the Jews are horrific outsiders who are trying to break their way into Germany, no it's that they're insiders who already have and they control the cultural institutions. The Jews, in Hitler's fevered imagination, controlled the drawing academy in Vienna, from which Hitler was, in defiance of his expectations, excluded. Arrogance, devious skill, and argument, above all,

their skill at getting places. This is the rude emotion of Hitler's hatred of the Jews. And interestingly, Hitler pairs the Jews with the French in Mein Kampf as people who are particularly good at lubricating their way into institutions where they don't belong. Blacks and the indigenous nations are, in the racist imagination of hatred,

near relations of the animals. Jews, on the other hand, are especially close relatives of the angels, fallen angels, Lucifer. And yet, they keep possession of superhuman gifts, of deception and masquerade. It is exactly the distinction, again, to repeat myself, of modern European antisemitism to have turned the rationale of hatred not to Jews as outsiders, but Jews, again, as insidious insiders taking advantage of a meritocratic system.

Now, this leads, I think, to a modern distortion, insidious for being mostly unconscious. And that is the argument very often made innocently, without any conscious imputation or intention of anti-Semitism, that the central crisis of our time is one between arrogant and unfeeling elites, defined simply as people who read and argue about their reading, and the common folk who understandably are outraged and enraged by the indifference of the elite and turned to demagogues and authoritarians in revenge for their dispossession.

They may misunderstand their experience, yes, but they recognize their oppression. And so we're told often, and often by well-meaning people, that those really at fault in the rise of Trump or the by now indisputably catastrophic accession of Brexit in the UK, or of the National Front, re-dubbed the National Rally in France, that the real people at fault are the Parisians, or the New Yorkers, or the Londoners, or yes, the Torontonians, who look past the alienation of the abandoned in the bubble of their own comfort. The language of that accusation rises relentlessly and we read it every day. Now I am certain as I said that some of this is well intended and some of it is even innocent.

One sees variance of it in such impeccable friends of liberalism as David Brooks and Michael Sandel and from more dubiously inclined but still entirely decent people like Ross Daltat and one hears it of course relentlessly from JD Vance of a more dubious and indecent kind. Yet this is not only something that races directly from Drummond to Goebbels, it is the most pernicious form because it speaks to the real and I believe underlying causes, I've tried to explain, of the modern hatred of Jews, and that is a larger hatred of modern cosmopolitanism. You're listening to Adam Gopnik, delivering the second annual Irving Abella Lecture on

Ideas. Ideas is a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio One in Canada, across North America, on SiriusXM, on US public radio, in Australia, on ABC Radio National, on World Radio Paris, and around the world at cbc.ca.ideas. Find us on the CBC News app and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayed. Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is

Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you got to know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighborhood or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts. The New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik delivered a talk in the fall of 2024 at Massey College in Toronto. It was called On Confronting Hate, specifically Hatred of Jews, antisemitism.

And in it, he makes an unexpected connection between the history of antisemitism and contemporary anti-elitism. That unexpected connection between the two has origins in what you might have expected, the rise of Nazi Germany. If we ask why the Nazis wanted to persecute the Jews so badly, we can go to the author Gertz Alley, I hope I'm not mispronouncing his name, in his fascinating work on how widespread anti-Semitism was throughout Europe in the 20s and 30s. And he distinguishes, as I have done, classic medieval-style anti-Semitism, in which Jews

were simply aliens, from a modern strain in which they had become unacceptably betters. But in particular, as I say, he credits the new anti-Semitism to the rise of meritocracy. A new sort of competition had arisen in which the Jews had seized a first mover advantage. In the 19th century, the Jewish peoples arrived before anyone else at an understanding that in the new world of modernity competitive advancement in plain English doing well on exams would provide an alternative to advancement through bloodlines. Now why Jews have done so well in societies that depend

on some form of test taking is a very complicated and interesting historical question though it may be as simple as that the tradition of Talmudic study form of test taking is a very complicated and interesting historical question, though it may be as simple as that the tradition of Talmudic study, post-temple rabbinical tradition could easily be accepted as students of Charles Darwin say for the purpose. An accepted trait is when a form used for one purpose becomes more valuable for some other as feathers evolved as insulation in flightless reptiles then became valuable for flight as those reptiles became birds. The tradition of reading and studying

became our Jewish feathers. And the new world where it mattered became our form of flight. The forms of reading and studying began not as in the Enlightenment tradition, to be sure, a skeptical and open-ended investigation of empirical reality, but in its first instance as an enforced study of set text. Let me add that my rabbinical friends dispute this, and I shall let them, but certainly

the traditions and the habits put us in our modern flight. And paradoxically, it was only when the national groups of Europe entered this competition themselves and began to catch up that then their hatred of the Jews took on a new ferocity. Ali writes, quote, as the gap in education closed, the degree of friction between Jews and majority populations increased. Envy is born of social proximity, not of the distance between two cleanly separated groups. The 1894 Dreyfus case, the original falling domino of all that was to come, and let's remember the source of Herzl Zionism, a truth that is still debated. The Dreyfus case fits the pattern perfectly.

And it makes sense that it happened in France, the first European nation to ensure careers open to talent. Captain Dreyfus's great sin was not being a Dreyfus, it was being a captain. Hitler was enraged at the Jews in Vienna, not because Jews were practicing the arts instead of agriculture, but because they wouldn't let him into art school. Goebbels similarly was a failed philosophical novelist, not a rabble rouser. The circles of populist authoritarians

then, as very much now, tend to be filled with embittered B-minus competitors. And so we come to the last, and still the most morally instructive thing about studying the history of anti-Semitism now. We can see how tightly the elimination of the Jews was bound not to a hatred of Jews alone, but to a broader hatred of cosmopolitanism. Although huge numbers of the Jews who perished in the mass killings were poor religious Jews

from Eastern Europe, peasants and peddlers and small merchants, the main enemy as the leaders of doing the killing understood, had always been and always remained the educated Jews of Western Europe. In Auschwitz, when an SS doctor wondered aloud why all these poor Jews of the East had to be killed, Dr. Mengele himself explained to him, and I quote, that it was precisely from this reservoir of people that the Jews drew new power and refleshed their blood. Without the poor but supposedly harmless Eastern Jews, the civilized West European Jews

would not be capable of survival. Therefore, it is necessary to destroy all Jews to destroy the educated ones. The masses of poor religious Jews in Poland were almost accidental to the effort. The real target was the elite, who brought with them the Baxilis of cosmopolitanism. We can see then surprisingly the real and easily overlooked significance of that classic

of Holocaust literature, the diary of Anne Frank. And I was delighted to discover only recently in a piece I wrote for the New Yorker that Judith Jones, an old colleague of mine as an editor, famous for Julia Child, was the first person to put Anne Frank in print in English. For its real force, the real force of Anne Frank's diary, is not just that a Jewish family would have to go into hiding or that anti-Semitism was pervasive in Europe, but that the Nazis, perfectly capable of feasting on the helpless Jews of the East, were determined to use the full weight of the modern state to exterminate the Jews who they saw as their real enemies, the educated, elitist Jews of the West.

Similarly, in Tom Stoppard's great recent play, Leopoldstadt, the study of a thoroughly assimilated Jewish family, which begins in Vienna's golden period before the Great War with a star of David sitting atop the family Christmas tree. The final shattering scene, which I hope some of you have seen, is set in the 1950s when a man representing Staufford himself, whose immediate family escaped just in time, comes home and asks happily about all the relatives he had known as a boy. He lists one name after another and they all are dead. Auschwitz, Auschwitz, Auschwitz is the ringing explanation.

All his flawed and idiosyncratic relatives, aesthetic and elitist relatives, turn out to have been murdered by the Mengele's of the world. The audience, unique in my experience of the theatre, is silent at the end, almost unable to applaud the actors. But the invocation is exact.

It was the destruction of such happy and harmless Viennese cosmopolitan families that Hitler most desired. He was willing to destroy all of European civilization in order to achieve that end, and he did. And so we sense, I think, the same template today in the persistent myths of popular economic dispossession with the rise of the neo-fascist right. When people insist that the real cause of our crisis is the neglect of the vogue by an unfeeling elite, they are in the first instant denying the empirical reality, which shows us no connection at all between a state of de-industrialization or a broader planetary dispossession.

All the evidence of observation and empirical data shows that to be untrue. As in any moment of civic crisis, what we see are broad coalitions combining the very wealthy, the wealthier, the upper middle classes, the middle classes, and working classes in one coalition and the same kinds and groups on the other side. I am sure that those who insist on the myth of elite evil are not conscious of its anti-Semitic roots, but the result is the same. Those fighting against authoritarianism are made responsible for its rise while those fanning its flames are portrayed as pitiful victims without any agency or understanding of the ideologies they

support. Common sense, as I say, shows us that this makes no sense. The people who stormed the Capitol in 2021 knew perfectly well what they were doing and on whose behalf they were doing it. They were not struggling to return factories to Akron. They were struggling to install a dictator who they rightly imagined shared their terrors and hated their ideological enemies. The same right-wing populist anti-authoritarian movements

have risen parallel in countries with kinds of providential states that I wish the United States had Whatever else has happened within them and clearly the fact of immigration is in itself a powerful propellant The Swedes and the French are well protected by their own social networks from the depredations of neoliberalism To blame the people who are trying to stop the ascent of fascism for the rise of fascism is to insist all over again that it is the fault of the social democrats for being insufficiently sympathetic to the indigenous anti-Semitism of the German people as happened in the 1930s. Jews really shouldn't have forced themselves into such visible places.

There is no more insidious form of transmuted anti-Semitism than blaming the opponents of authoritarianism for the rise of authoritarianism. Pointing the finger of blame, not at the Nazis, but at their social democratic opponents for somehow creating the circumstance that allowed the Nazis to flourish, this is a familiar trope.

So I will make a belligerent, let us say Jewish, counter case. Anytime we hear talk of elitism as the true impulsor of popular fascism, or hear again anyone blaming the staunchest enemies of authoritarianism as the authors of authoritarianism, anytime we hear anyone blaming the educated and the enlightened for the acts of the benighted and brutal,

we are in the presence of this enduring template which begins with the hatred of the Jews. A turn of thought that has its roots and its branches in the ugliest of all modern tropes. To make those who fight against fascism responsible for it is to engage in the core anti-Semitic tenor of the 20th century. To my mind, the educated and the erudite should be relentlessly unapologetic about the absolute good of education and erudition, while working just as relentlessly to make sure that education remains open to as many as possible, as inexpensive, as is humanly achievable, and is as widespread in ways that it has never been before. Let me make a final simpler point. Our problem is not, I think, the elite nor the dispossession of the

planetary underclass. We should always avoid what I have called elsewhere the causal catastrophe. The problem of persecution and cruelty in its most extravagant forms is simply the age-old problem of evil, which rises unexpectedly just when it seems defeated, shows its hideous face among every class and time and people and nation, among city folk and rural folk, among Israelis

and Palestinians alike. The illusion is imagining that it can be placated, that it can be solved. It can't. Is evil too big a word? Too profound a conception? Shouldn't we be focused instead on finding causes and treating problems? Of course we should. Yet, in another way, evil is not a profound conception. It is a trivial one. As a philosopher once said, truth is trivial. We all navigate the world through uncontroversially true propositions all the time.

It's only the outlier cases that make it problematic. What is so odd is that we are shocked by the presence of evil in our world, find it hard to imagine. We call it unimaginable when in fact we do little except imagine it. In fablesimaginable when in fact we do little except imagine it. In fables and fiction, in every Disney cartoon or Batman movie, we have no trouble recognizing the villain. They are embittered, shrewd, crazy in some ways and wise in others.

Their lives are governed by envy and resentment, usually of a group who slighted them. They'll never laugh at me again, is the villain's constant cry. They nonetheless have considerable charm and the ability always to attract a cult following and fanatically loyal hangers-on. They are comic, very often in affect, and we laugh at their vanity, but they are destructive and desperate in the end.

This is Ursula, Hades, Scar, and that's to go no farther than the Disney canon. Extended to Shakespeare, to Richard III, and to Edmund and King Lear. Smart people, all almost lovable in the self-recognition of their own deviousness, but not people we ever want to see in power, for in power their imaginations become unimaginably deadly. Evil need not be caused. And it is, I think, a liberal illusion to believe that it must be.

It simply exists. It kills helpless people because it can. My friend Andre Gluckman, whom I mentioned at the beginning of this talk, used that idea of counting to two to assist on another point as simple as it is to my mind sublime. And that is that while we can never know what good is and that we have so many competing ideas of the good that it is futile to pursue them necessarily, we all know what evil, what mal in

his vocabulary is. We know it when we see it and we can fight to combat it without imagining that we must have solutions to the larger problems. We may have no magical formula for solving the intractable problems of the world, much less the Middle East, but we know that the murder of innocence is always wrong on all sides and should be stopped for the mercy and sanity of us all. Today, Andre's son, Raphael Glucksmann, is the most potent social democratic leader in France. And his courage in standing up equally against both the extreme right and the extreme left, against both Hamas and the far-right government of Israel, is an effort

to apply his father's very Jewish wisdom to the modern world. It shouldn't work, but miraculously it has. Raphael's movement has been worked well enough to have kept both far left and far right from power in France, at least for the moment, which is all we have. We don't know how to build a society that is successfully immunized against irrational hatreds, even here in Canada where we try. But we know irrational hatred when we see it, and we can combat it while knowing full well that it is only vanquished for some short age of time. The whole point of our social existence is to broaden our circles of compassion. This is horrifically difficult, with the built-in trap too rarely recognized that as we do,

as we broaden our circles of compassion from our immediately family to our clan, to our city, or to our nation, we necessarily risk becoming enclosed in that same enlarging circle. This is exactly the trap of the 19th century liberal nationalism upon which Canada is constructed and which Herzl dreamed of for the Jews. My friend John Ralston Saul wrote so unforgettably about the compact between Baldwin and Lafontaine, Upper and Lower Canada. We enlarge our circles to build a country and fail to see the indigenous people who lie outside it. Nations are in this way dangerous.

Nomads and tribes tend to fight each other for goods, but not to exterminate each other out of principle. So the fight first to enlarge our circle of compassion and then again not to become entrapped in that enlargement is exactly the fight of patriotism against nationalism. Reading Lee Yaron's book, we are reminded that every person is a world, that ancient piece of Jewish wisdom in an agonizingly literal sense. For each one of the victims whose horrific deaths she narrates belong to a world, inhabited a kibbutz, a family, a place, a history, as all of those on the opposite side do as well.

Let us recall that the one text that passes complete from Jewish scripture to Islamic scripture, and I was shocked to discover it in the course of that reading a few years ago, is exactly the aphorism that whoever kills a soul, it is as if he has slain mankind entirely and whoever saves one's soul, it is as if he had saved mankind entirely. I wish I could end there with that bit of light. But as this audience or some in it will know, that in both the Talmud and the Quran, the text is in places corrupted by the assertion of an exception that this is true only for the Jews or only for the faithful. The Islamic scripture adds in what is an effective parentheses that yes, killing a soul can be

justified by corruption. No matter how wise our beliefs, no matter how perfect our beliefs, we struggle to apply them universally, to count past two to three and four, and if we could, pass that to the billions of individuals who live on this planet. The persistence of anti-Semitism is an expression of that difficulty. Expanding those circles of compassion is the hardest work human beings do. And when humanists, like Irving Abella, succeed in doing it, it is as well the best work humans can ever do. Thank you so much.

Adam Gopnik delivering the second annual Irving Abela lecture at Massey College in September 2024. Irving Abela was an historian at York University whose perhaps best-known book was None is Too Many Canada and the Jews of Europe. His wife, former Supreme Court Justice Rosie Abella, led the question and answer part of the evening. I'm going to lead the Q&A. I'm ready to start.

I have 70 questions. Can I start with 70? Please. That was extraordinary. Circles of Compassion will be the new mantra of those of us who don't want to completely give up faith, but it was remarkable. So there must be questions in the audience. I don't want to take it, but does anybody want to start?

Please. Tell me, first question is always the hardest, and this is very hard material, I know, and it's why I read it. I'll start. Please. I'm shocked. I'll start. Please. I'm shocked. I'm surprised. I've learned to come out of my shell.

Yes. You've been very good. You talked about Leopoldstadt, which is a really interesting metaphor about a moment in time when, as Stoppard describes it, you have Jewish people in Vienna, so assimilated that many of them have converted to Christianity.

Others haven't converted, but they have. The Star of David on the Christmas tree. On the Christmas tree. So the question is, because notwithstanding their assimilation, their sense that they were fully part of Viennese society They were Jewish in the eyes of Hitler

So not just Hitler but in the eyes of Europe, but yes going so the question is Here we are a hundred years later almost from when that story started and We seem to be back to where we were. You wrote a wonderful review called The Enablers of what happened in 1932 and how people just tolerated the intolerable until it became what it became. Are we there again? That's a big question.

Let me try and break it down into its parts as I understand them. On the question of Jewish assimilation particularly, that's the perpetual conundrum. That's what pushed Herzl to, if not invent, then to evangelize, to use a funny word in the context for Zionism. It was exactly his perception at the time of the Dreyfus trial that there was no plausible assimilation Possible for the European Jews that they it was not a question of having a dream of building a nation of their own It was a necessity of building a nation of their own for the simple cause of self-preservation I do not take that dark of view and that's what I said in the talk, that I think I would have argued with Herzl

had I been around at the time. But that sense of it is, I think, part of the historical shaping, part of the historical carpentry that creates our sensitivities today. That's an inexpungible fact of human history, that Stoppard's family thought they were assimilated, and they were assimilated, and they were horribly, tragically mistaken. And that's something that none of us can dismiss or forget

in living our own lives, even in a place where we feel and rightly feel as fully in place and embedded or happy as Canada or the United States. That's one thing. Now, the other thing, the question about the enablers in 1932 and so on is a different question because that speaks not so much to the particular condition of the Jews, it speaks to the particular condition of democracy. And there I think we are in a very great form.

I wrote that piece, as you will remember, without ever once mentioning the name of any contemporary politician, and I left the Trump word totally out of it, but everybody did their own work in filling in the blanks. And I certainly think, and that's what I was trying to say tonight, above all else, I know as always I say too many things as my kids say, Dad, I got the XYZs, but where were the ABCs?

But I do think that the point I was trying to make tonight is exactly that. When we try to extend our, we should always extend our understanding and sympathies to everybody who shares our community, no matter how profoundly we disagree with them. But when we try to retell that same story of the indifferent elite and the oppressed common folk, we are consciously or unconsciously repeating exactly the template of anti-Semitism

that in plain English ended in the Holocaust. And I think we should avoid it at all costs and condemn it when we hear it. Are we tolerating too much hate? Yes, of course we're tolerating too much hate. We've licensed in Canada, I think much less, but more than I had ever thought I would see in Canada. I grew up with the conservatism of Robert Stanfield and Joe Clark. I think that we are tolerating too much hate in the sense that we are all instrumental

in our condemnation of it. And that's true on all sides. We hear what we know to be unacceptable language coming, and I will say it bluntly, whether it's coming from a Trump rally or a Gaza encampment. And we are sympathetic enough with one side or another to look past it, to shut our eyes, to see past it. And if not to justify, never to justify it, to struggle to understand it and excuse it as rhetorical overcharge, which is what all of Trump's enablers do as well. That, I think, is a hugely dangerous thing to do. Adam offered one additional thought on the potential contradiction of tolerating the

intolerable in his response to another audience question. I am always torn between the claims of civility and civil conversation, which are very real and essential to a democracy, and the equal claims of the right kind of intolerance, the kind of intolerance that won't accept intolerance in Karl Popper's famous formulation, that we must not fall prey to the paradox of tolerance in as much as we come to tolerate the intolerable and then wake up to find that they have

eliminated tolerance from the society altogether. That's an, to my mind, and I, that's an insoluble knot. It's one of those things, what I was trying to say towards the end. There are many problems in life that have no solution, and that is one of them. They have no solution. They simply have a, you know, temperamental accommodations and adjustments we make to them along the line. What I do know for certain is, is that we risk as much by tolerating the intolerable as we do by asserting the power of civility. Both are essential. There's no recipe that tells you when one is right and when one is not. It's the part of our political, our common life that is only susceptible

to the tests of conscience and temperament. One of the questions came from Nathalie Derosier, the former principal of Massey College. I was quite intrigued by your idea of linking modern anti-Semitism to the distrust for cosmopolitism, you know. And there are different ways in which people criticize cosmopolitism. One of it is to say that it doesn't really exist. There's no such thing as somebody who's a true cosmopolitan.

And you talk a little bit about that at the end where you say, we expand our conscious, our circles, but really we always forget somebody. We never go far enough. So the criticism was that we imagine someone was a good cosmopolite, but they don't exist and we aspire to be, but we don't know how to criticize when we fail. So I wonder whether that's... Yes, of course. Well, perhaps I can answer that very pertinent question in a very Canadian way. That is to say that I just published not so very long ago a long essay in the New Yorker about Charles Taylor

a great Canadian philosopher, colleague of my parents at McGill and one of the presiding figures of my own coming of age and I'm probably the greatest philosopher Quebec has ever produced and Quebec can certainly claim him as a bilingual and Bicultural thinker and of course it was the key, the core of Taylor's thought that cosmopolitanism was not enough, that we could not exist without some idea of a coherent community. And Taylor always said, you know,

the question cosmopolitans, liberals in that sense, always ask is who am I? And that the real human question is where am I? Where do I stand in relation to a nameable community of people, of citizens who are like me or unlike me? And in Taylor's hands, that kind of communitarianism is in its most, not only most benevolent, but most elegant and humane form,

I think, that has ever been formulated. And I solve the problem of how you adjust, reconcile cosmopolitanism to communitarianism in that essay. So if everyone would subscribe to the New Yorker, I'm joking, I am joking. What I tried to say is of course that both things are true. You know, you focus on contes jusqu'à deux, jusqu'à deux. There's certainly any

Intelligent cosmopolitan not only knows Abstractly the values of Communitarianism we live the values of communitarianism when I go home to Quebec and I think of myself as going home to Quebec I go for the things for the that I participated which range from my beloved Montreal Canadians to Charlotte Char and Westmount to a hundred other small communal practices and engagements which enliven my life in which I can't replace in that great Alexandrian city of New York but I left for the great Alexandrian city of New York some 40 years ago I don't that I think again is one of those conundrums

that doesn't demand a solution, it demands a kind of elegant balancing and a double awareness. That's why again, saying we have to count to two means not only do we have to count good and evil from both sides, it means we have to accept that there are many conundrums in the complicated business of being human

that have no monolithic solution. But at the same time, none of us are prophets. We don't know what awaits us, and we can easily write a more benevolent scenario than not. France is the country in Europe that I know best. France is a country I know intimately. And it is certainly true that there's been a remarkable and terrifying renaissance of anti-Semitism in France. Chiefly, of the left-wing kind, one of the most hideous ironies of my grown-up existence

is that was the moment when Serge Klarsfeld, the great Nazi hunter who I had known during the trial of Pepin in Bordeaux in the 1990s, Serge Klarsfeld came out and said that he would vote for the national rally, as it's called now, the extreme right-wing party in France before he would vote for the left-wing party where he had been associated all his life because he thought that the left-wing had become far more anti-Semitic than the national front. That was truly a moment of unimaginable shock for me and for countless other people. But at the same time, as I say, the leaders of the movement to be equally against left

and right, to count one and say no and count two and say no, was Raphael Glucksmann, the son of Andre, who is French and Jewish and a philosopher and a statesman. So I would certainly don't think it's a landscape devoid of hope, of legitimate and real hope. You were listening to former CBC Massey lecturer and author Adam Gobnick. He delivered the second annual Irving Abella lecture at Massey College in Toronto. His talk was entitled On Confronting Hate. Special thanks to Jessica D. Humphries and Rosie Abella. The web producer of ideas is Lisa Ayuso.

Our technical producer is Danielle Duval. Our senior producer is Nikola Lukcic. The executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly. And I'm Nala Ayed.