Making Sense with Sam Harris - #173 — Anti-Semitism and Its Discontents

Episode Date: October 28, 2019

Sam Harris speaks with Bari Weiss about her book “How to Fight anti-Semitism.” They discuss the three different strands of anti-Semitism (rightwing, leftwing, and Islamic), the Tree of Life shooting in Pittsburgh, the difference between anti-Semitism and other forms of racism, “Great Replacement Theory,” the populist response to globalization, the history of anti-Semitism in the U.S., criticisms of Israel, the fate of Jews in Western Europe, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Well, very brief housekeeping here. Just reminding you all once again that if you're supporting the podcast, please subscribe to the subscriber-only feed. You do this by, with your mobile device, going to my website, going to the subscriber content page, and grabbing the RSS with one click on the icon of the podcasting app that you're using. If you're not using a supported app, then you can manually copy the RSS information, and that will ensure that you get all the content that I produce going forward. Okay, well, I'm recording this on October 27th, probably releasing this on the 28th.

But this is the one-year anniversary of the Tree of Life shooting in Pittsburgh, where 11 people were murdered. I believe six were injured. And this was the worst attack on the Jewish community in American history, I believe. And the timing of this episode is fortuitous because I am speaking with Barry Weiss about her new book, How to Fight Antisemitism. And Barry is a staff writer and editor for the Opinion section at the New York Times. She was also an op-ed and book review editor at the Wall Street Journal before that.

She has worked at Tablet, the online magazine of Jewish politics and culture. And she is a native of Pittsburgh, and in fact was a bat mitzvah at the Tree of Life synagogue, and knew people who were killed, as you'll hear. So this is a timely conversation, and Barry and I cover a fair amount of ground here. We talk about the different strands of anti-Semitism, right-wing, left-wing, and Islamic. We talk about the difference between anti-Semitism and other forms of racism, which was a point that only became clear to me in reading Barry's book. We talk about the so-called Great Replacement Theory among white supremacists, the populist response to globalization, the history of anti-Semitism in the U.S.,

its theological roots, criticisms of Israel, the fate of the Jews in Western Europe, and other topics. I'll have a few more things to say about all this in my afterward, but now without further delay, I bring you Barry Weiss. I am here with Barry Weiss. Barry, thanks for joining me on the podcast. Thanks for having me, Sam. So you have written a book that's not going to be controversial at all. This has to be fun for you. I know this is already out and launched and reviewed and you're well into your book tour or maybe somewhere near

the end of it, or maybe the book tour is going to subsume the rest of your life. It feels like that at the moment. Yeah. The book is How to Fight Antisemitism. And it is a great and bracing read. It's a short book. This is one of these books that you really can start and finish with confidence, which is nice. We want to talk about this in great depth, the topic of antisemitism. But before we do, I just want to get some context for you and your work as a journalist and as an opinion person, how would you describe your politics and your career thus far as a journalist? Well, if you Google me, you'll get one answer, which is that I'm apparently extremely controversial.

My answer is that I'm fairly boring. I am very socially liberal. I'm sort of hawkish on foreign policy. I consider myself left of center. But I think, like many people who are similarly positioned, we're a bit politically homeless at the moment. So we sort of don't fit into either of the increasingly extreme tribes and therefore are sort of seized upon and pilloried by both of them. Just for some background, I spent six or seven years at the Wall Street Journal in two stints, first as an op-ed editor on the editorial page and then as a book review editor, both of which were under the umbrella of the editorial page, which is of course, famously, I would say, free market conservative place.

And I was always the most left wing person in that milieu. Then I moved after Trump became the candidate and I didn't want to be a part of an editorial page that was in some way apologizing for or kind of quietly supporting him or covering for him. I left along with many people, including Brett Stevens, who's now my colleague at the New York Times. And I went from being sort of the most left-wing person at the journal's editorial page to one of the most, I guess, right-wing people at the New York Times. So that sort of, I think, concisely sums it up a little bit. Yeah. So needless to say, you are often maligned as a Nazi or Nazi adjacent. And I know the feeling. And perhaps we'll get into that. But let's talk about the genesis of the book, because I believe you began writing this book after the synagogue atrocity in Pittsburgh, which landed all too close to home. Perhaps summarize what happened there for those who have forgotten. Right. There have been so many since then. On the morning of October 27th,

2018, a white supremacist walked into Tree of Life Synagogue in Squirrel Hill, which is the neighborhood of Pittsburgh where I was raised. Tree of Life was the synagogue where I became a bat mitzvah. And he walked in, he shouted that all Jews must die. And then he murdered 11 people there on a Shabbat Saturday morning. I was in Arizona at the time. I got a text from my youngest sister on our family chat. And she simply said, there's a shooter at Tree of Life. I immediately thought of my dad who often goes to synagogue at one of the different services that meets there on Saturday morning. There are three communities that meet in that building. And I immediately typed back, is dad? I didn't even finish the question. Thank God he wasn't there. He was still at home with my mom, but my mom wrote back, we're going to know a lot of people there. My dad knew six or seven of the people that were killed.

I knew two. I was supposed to fly to Israel of all places the following day to do a reporting trip on a very famous archeological dig in Jerusalem called the City of David. I put off the trip. I went home for the week. And I just sort of immersed myself in what happens to a community and a community you know so well in the aftermath of something like this and wrote several columns. I was on Bill Maher that Friday night. And I actually was under contract to write a different book, one that I'm still on the hook for, sort of about our culture wars, but found myself just drawn back again and again to this topic and just sort of seeing it everywhere I looked. And so I sort of went hat in hand to my publisher and asked if I could do this quickly first, and if we could get it out before the Jewish

high holidays, which somehow we managed to do. Well, you do a few very useful things in the book, and one of which is to differentiate the three poles of anti-Semitism, the right wing, the left wing, and the Islamic. I think we'll find as we speak about these things that the latter two interact in ways that are so cynical and sinister on the Islamic side, and so phantasmagorically stupid and masochistic on the left-wing side that, I mean, honestly, it's very hard to understand how that alliance is even possible. But when we talk about this, I think the left-wing and the Islamist problem will become sort of braided. You also make a point, which I hadn't really seen made before, which is that one of the reasons why the Jews are so

often attacked from the left and the right and elsewhere is that on the right, they are considered non-white or insufficiently white and yet able to pass for white in this kind of sinister way. And on the left, if anything, they are extra white. I mean, they somehow have extra privilege and the least points in the intersectionality Olympics. Perhaps we should start with the right wing side because that's sort of the cleanest to talk about. And this obviously is most relevant to what happened in Pittsburgh. Did I describe the way you differentiate these things accurately? Yeah, I had written a column. There was a survey or a study that came out that was very shocking last year about the

prevalence of anti-Semitism in Europe from, I believe CNN did it. And I wrote a column laying out this, what I described at the time as sort of a three-headed dragon. I use that same structure in the book, but frankly, if I'm honest, I had hoped to avoid the chapter on Islam for all of the reasons that I think we'll get into, but are probably already obvious to anyone who listens to your show and sees the way that your ideas get talked about, that it's a very scary topic to write about. And I had honestly hoped to avoid it and then realize that it would be the most intellectually dishonest thing to write a book about antisemitism and not talk about it. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, let's start with the cleanest case, which is the extreme right.

And you make a point in the book that I really had never considered, and it explains a lot, which is that anti-Semitism really is not just another flavor of racism on the right. You know, I won't put the words in your mouth, but how is the white supremacist hatred of Jews different from their hatred of other groups? So there's an anti-racist activist called Eric Ward who runs the Western States Center. And his essay, which is called Skin in the Game, I really recommend it to people, was illuminating to me and helped inform my thinking on this. So what he says is that when I heard, and maybe you're similar, when I saw the marchers in Charlottesville shouting, Jews will not replace us, I heard that originally in a very straightforward way. I heard it as the Jew is not going to take my place in the corner office.

A Jew is not going to take my status in society, something along those lines. But I realized in reading Eric Ward's work and others that that's not what they were saying at all. What they were suggesting is that Jews in a way, and this is Eric Ward's language, they're in a way the greatest trick the devil has ever played. And the reason for that is because at least in America, this is not true in Israel where the majority of Jews are of Mizrahi descent. So they're of North African and Middle Eastern descent. In America, the majority of Jews are of Eastern European or Ashkenazi descent, 15% of American

Jews are Jews of color by the most liberal estimate. So we appear to be white and we can pass as white. And so we trick real white people into thinking that we're like them. But in fact, we're loyal to black people and brown people and immigrants and Muslims. And if you go and you read, you could see them as deranged or you could see it as a kind of conspiracy theory when you read the social media postings of the killer in Pittsburgh, right? The reason that he chose Tree of Life as the synagogue is that the previous weekend, the previous Shabbat, Tree of Life had participated in what was called National Refugee Shabbat, in which dozens of synagogues around the country came together to say, Shabbat, Tree of Life had participated in what was called National Refugee Shabbat,

in which dozens of synagogues around the country came together to say, we are safe spaces. I hate that language, but we are places that are open to the stranger. And the reason that we are is that one of the core Jewish values is the idea that we should never oppress a stranger because we know what it was to be strangers in the land of Egypt. And that whole initiative was put together by a very, very admirable, righteous organization called HIAS, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, founded in the 1880s to help settle Jews fleeing Eastern European pogroms and now helps Jewish refugees, but all kinds of refugees and immigrants around the world. And he said in his social media postings, and there's lots of expletives, but something along the lines of, screw your optics, I'm going in, these people are bringing in, they're selling the country by helping bringing in the quote, dirty Muslims.

by helping bringing in the, quote, dirty Muslims. So that is the logic behind it. So Jews are kind of the linchpin, in a way, of white supremacist thinking because we're the kind of shadow force being the handmaidens of the people that white supremacists see as sullying white Christian America, if that makes sense.

Well, unfortunately, there's very often a kernel of truth embedded in these conspiracy theories. And the kernel of truth here is that, of course, Jews have historically had a very positive attitude towards civil rights and been very supportive of civil rights in the U.S. civil rights and been very supportive of civil rights in the U.S. And through hard experience learned the consequences of being the victims of jingoistic immigration restrictions. The most probably shocking case is what happened in 1939 with the SS St. Louis. This was a ship that was carrying over 900 Jews who were seeking to escape the Holocaust, and it was denied entry in the U.S. It was also denied entry in Cuba and Canada, and wound

up having to return to Europe, where many of these Jews ended up in Auschwitz. Experiences like that that would explain, you know, apart from just basic human decency around the general problem of refugees, it would explain a positive orientation toward immigration that if you're a white supremacist, you would revile. So we could sort of run to the same thing here on the right with the association between Jews and socialism and communism. There have been very prominent Jews who were supportive of those political movements. and isolationism and conspiracy thinking that's been fed for more than a century with notions born of fake literature like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and it culminates now in what you refer to as the Great Replacement Theory, which perhaps you want to summarize. The right is organized around a kind of an anti-globalist inward turn into nationalism

and jingoism and isolationism, and Jews are on the wrong side of that divide. Right. And that's a problem, like that setup, you know, leaving out the internet and all kinds of other new phenomenon. But that is familiar to us, which is one of the reasons that I think right-wing antisemitism is easier to grasp because we only need to look at, you know, our grandparents' generation in Europe and what they experienced to understand it.

It's like, I think it's in our bones in a way. And I would also just, speaking of the St. Louis, I don't usually recommend anything on Twitter, but there's this really beautiful, moving Twitter account called St. Louis Manifest that actually just tweets out the bios of everyone that was on that ship that I follow that's just really moving. And there's photographs and people want to know more about it. Wow. So remind me, what is the Great Replacement Theory? The Great Replacement Theory is, there's a great essay that Thomas Chatterton Williams wrote about it, but it's really this basic idea summarized by Steve King, which is,

you can't replace our civilization, as he put it, with someone else's babies. our civilization, as he put it, with someone else's babies. This to me is a deeply anti-American idea because the ideal of this country is the idea that our civilization is open to anyone who wants to adhere to the ideas of it. It has nothing to do with bloodline. It has everything to do with fealty to a certain set of beliefs. And this whole notion of sort of like blood and soil nationalism that you increasingly see on the right and that is at the heart of great replacement theory, which is that civilization or culture is somehow something that is passed down in the blood and not something that's passed down through culture and ideas and beliefs is just, to me, deeply anti-American. And anyway, that's the idea of it. Yeah, well, and it's mirrored on the left with this notion that

identity, racial identity in particular, is morally and politically paramount. Anything you would say against, let's say, Islam on the left will be immediately conflated with an attack on people for the color of their skin or the origin of their birth, whereas it's always, certainly in the context of a conversation like this, a criticism of ideas and their consequences, right? If I'm going to criticize neo-Nazis, I'm not criticizing white people, I'm criticizing terrible ideas. And when I'm criticizing Islamism or jihadism, I'm not criticizing Arabs or any other ethnicity, I'm criticizing the consequences of ideas. And the fact that people can't track this continues to be bewildering.

Yeah. Well, part of it is that they can track it and they're deciding not to. Yeah. And the other problem, right, is that we have a president who does exactly the opposite. not based on their ideas often, but based on immutable characteristics like their race or their gender or, you know, their religion. Obviously, that's mutable, but, you know, that's part of the problem is that the second he touches something, it becomes toxic. Let's take a moment to just remind people a little bit more about the history of anti-Semitism in the U.S. because it reaches further back than I think most people realize. So let's just briefly talk about the 1930s and

what you do in the book. Well, so, you know, it's amazing to me that most people my age have never heard of the name Charles Coughlin, but that's a name that if you're at all involved in the Jewish community, that is very, very familiar. He was the radio host, sort of the Rush Limbaugh of his day, I guess, different, but very, very popular in the same way, much more popular. I think something like 30 million Americans listen to him every week. He was a priest who's based in Michigan. He got so many letters that the town he was from actually had to build a new post office to keep up with the amount of mail he received. He was just hugely, hugely popular. And this was something who told 30 million Americans that the Jews deserved Kristallnacht. He talked about the Jews as modern Shylocks who

have grown fat and wealthy. I mean, these are some of the most sort of old, vile, anti-Semitic tropes, and you could hear them on the radio in America in the 1930s. Henry Ford, people think of Henry Ford as the automaker, which of course he was, but Hitler shouted him out in Mein Kampf. He was awarded this thing called the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, which was the highest honor the Nazis gave. And I think there was a short film made about this next thing I'll tell you, which I really recommend to people at six or seven minutes. And you can watch, you know, in 1939, 20,000 people showed up at Madison Square Garden to raise their arms to Heil Hitler and stood beneath signs saying, you know, smash Jewish

communism and stop the Jewish domination of Christian Americans. So that all happened here. And yet still, and this is the thing that I find fascinating, I was still very much, and I don't know about you, Sam, raised on the idea that America was uniquely inoculated from the virus of antisemitism that was just much more natural. Or so I was taught in places like France and Germany and England. Yeah, yeah. It actually wasn't until I read the book, The Abandonment of the Jews by David Wyman, which I think came out in the mid 80s, that I understood just how touch and go the history is

here. I mean, you literally had congressmen giving anti-Semitic speeches on the floor of Congress, had congressmen giving anti-Semitic speeches on the floor of Congress while the Holocaust was raging and we understood the shape of it. I mean, it's just, it's mind-boggling that the history was what it was. And, you know, you could add Charles Lindbergh to the list of prominent figures who got singled out for Nazi accolades. And Charles Coughlin was a Catholic priest. So he links up with a larger trend of Catholic fascism or fondness for fascism and explicit anti-Semitism. And all of this, of course, is cashed out in Christian theology, both Catholic and Protestant theology. I mean, the Protestants are hardly better. I mean, once Martin Luther got an audience, he started raging against the Jews, really an explicitly eliminationist vein. And you cite some of this

in your book that the New Testament has several verses that seem to justify anti-Semitism outright. Yeah, I mean, the most famous of which is, you know, I think it's in the book of Matthew, his blood be on us and on our children, you know, which was used to justify, you know, untold amounts of violence. It's such a historically bloody line that even Mel Gibson, who right now is making a movie called The Rothschilds, and I'm not kidding, even he in Passion of the Christ, which was Aramaic, didn't translate the verse into English because that's how controversial it's been. But of course, there was Vatican II, and I don't want to undo the amount of progress that's happened, because of course it has. ideologically mandated anti-Semitism resulted, and yet Jesus and the Twelve Apostles and the

Virgin Mary were all Jews. How there could have been such a durable basis for Jew hatred is a little hard to square, except for the fact that it really was a kind of internecine schism in the religion. You have Jews who were, in order to maintain their Judaism, had to explicitly reject the Messiah status of Jesus. And that's, you know, that is the founding sin that really is unforgivable if you're a dogmatic Christian. Yeah. The other thing that just thinks, just going back a bit to American history pieces, after Pittsburgh, you know, there was a lot of talk about how there had never been an attack on a synagogue. Actually, there had never been that many people killed in a synagogue. That was true. And it was by far the most violent attack against Jews in American history,

also true. But there had been, and this is one of the things I was shocked to find out, a lot of attacks on synagogues, a lot. And I sort of go through them in the book. And the ones that stick out to me the most were these sort of spate of attacks, specifically targeting civil rights, supporting rabbis in the South, in Mississippi and in Atlanta specifically. And one of the occasions they actually went and I believe bombed the house of the rabbi. And that was news to me. I had not grown up learning about that at all. Yeah. Yeah. There's an ambient level of anti-Semitic hate crime in the U.S. and there has always been. And I've always been somebody who, as a Jew, have minimized its significance.

I mean, it's always felt to me that anti-Semitism is not a major problem in the U.S. And even as shocking as, you know, the murder of dozens of people in any given year is, you know, the murder of dozens of people in any given year is, we're not talking about, you know, 9-11 scale terroristic atrocities against Jews in general. Obviously, it could get a lot worse. But the thing to point out is that all of the people who complain about hate crimes against other groups, you know, in particular Muslims in the U.S., have been complaining about a level of hate which has always been less than the level of hate crime against Jews. I mean, any given year, if you look at FBI statistics and you look for hate crimes against mosques and Muslims, it's always less than the number of hate crimes against Jews and synagogues. These are

mostly property crimes in most cases. And again, I don't mean to minimize it for the people who suffer directly, but in a country of 330 million people, the numbers are not that high. But it's generally ignored. We have to make apples-to-apples comparisons here. If you're going to derange our politics over how awful it's been getting for Muslims in the United States, it would be only decent to notice that the numbers of the same sorts of insults and crimes against Jews has for every year since 9-11 been 5x worse. And it's just routinely ignored. If you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org.

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