Making Sense with Sam Harris - #348 — The Politics of Antisemitism

Episode Date: January 5, 2024

Sam Harris speaks with Rabbi David Wolpe about the global response to the atrocities of October 7th, 2023. They discuss the difference between Israeli and diaspora Jews, the history and logic of antisemitism, the role of conspiracy theories, Great Replacement Theory, reasons for Jewish success, right-wing antisemitism, left-wing antisemitism, the response of Harvard to October 7th, the college presidents’ testimony before Congress, the future of DEI and civil discourse, the BDS movement, antisemitism vs anti-Zionism, Jewish acceptance at Ivy League universities, the antisemitism endemic to Islam, foreign funding of US universities, 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.

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Today I'm speaking with Rabbi David Wolpe. David is a visiting scholar at Harvard Divinity School. He is a rabbinic fellow at the Anti-Defamation League, a senior advisor to the Maimonides Fund, and the emeritus rabbi at Sinai Temple in Los Angeles. And because he's at Harvard, he's had a front seat view of the recent controversy around anti-Semitism and free speech. I spoke to him before the president of Harvard, Claudine Gay, resigned in the aftermath of that terrible testimony before Congress. Elizabeth McGill, the president of Penn, resigned first, and Claudine Gay resigned last week,

though she's still a professor at Harvard. She resigned for reasons that were unrelated to her testimony, however. It seemed that she had an impressive pattern of academic misconduct, namely plagiarism. Many people on the left are alleging that racism is the reason she was forced out. That is clearly not the case. I'm sure she was personally subjected to a lot of racist abuse in the aftermath of her testimony before Congress. I don't doubt that, and I'm sure that was awful. But as for her being forced to resign from the presidency of Harvard, that was not a racist mobbing of her. The painful irony is that it was concern about racism and sexism, perhaps, that explains why she occupied the position of the presidency of Harvard in the first place.

perhaps, that explains why she occupied the position of the presidency of Harvard in the first place. As many people have pointed out, it is very difficult to imagine a white man with her academic record getting anywhere near the presidency of Harvard. Nor would a white man, having been found out for academic misconduct, have been defended so fulsomely by the institution, even in the wake of resigning. Honestly, the whole episode, the more you look at it, is diagnostic for what is wrong with the current DEI regime in our institutions. And of course, DEI was largely responsible for the explosion of anti-Semitism we saw on our college campuses, including Harvard, where over 30 student organizations on October 8th, before Israel had dropped a single bomb in Gaza, came out in support of Hamas, claiming that Israel was, quote, solely responsible for the atrocities of October 7th.

This derangement of ethical and political thinking was the result of the DEI ideology, this oppressor and oppressed narrative that has captured everything on the left. Anyway, Rabbi Wolpe and I get into that. We talk about the global response to the atrocities of October 7th. We discuss the difference between Israeli and diaspora Jews, the history and logic of anti-Semitism, the role of conspiracy theories, so-called great replacement theory, reasons for Jewish success, right-wing anti-Semitism,

left-wing anti-Semitism, the response of Harvard University to October 7th, the college president's testimony before Congress, the future of DEI and civil discourse, the BDS movement, anti-Semitism versus anti-Zionism, declining Jewish attendance at Ivy League universities, the anti-Semitism that is endemic to Islam, foreign funding of U.S. universities, and other topics. And now I bring you Rabbi David Wolpe. I am here with Rabbi David Wolpe. David, thanks for joining me. Thank you. So you were once named the most influential rabbi in America by Newsweek. And I noticed that this happened after we had our public debate. So apparently none of my atheist rhetorical skills were able to diminish your

stature. You only rose in stature after I put into challenge your entire worldview. So much for that. I used to say, for about six years in the history of the Jewish people, there was a Most Influential Rabbi Award. And it happened to be when I was like, after I was doing all these debates, had it been any other time in Jewish history, I never would have been able to put that on my resume. But for that brief time, there were a couple of people who got together and decided to, uh, to give this award. So yeah, I was, I was very lucky, but actually people still say to me, you know, I saw your debate with Sam Harris. Nobody says to me, and you won. So. Well, for at least one of them, I had hitch on my team too, which was also an advantage. Yes. And that was, that was fun. Those are. Those were fun debates. I've had many encounters that are not fun, and it's not fun on stage, and it's not fun in the green room,

but it's always been fun hanging with you. Thank you. I feel the same. But we've got other topics to touch here, and maybe we'll find something to disagree about, Maybe we'll find something to disagree about, but I don't think there'll be much. You've since been teaching at Harvard. And how's that going? It's uneventful? So, yeah, right. I remember I saw you, actually, before I went.

And I told you that I was going. And my aim was to do research and to write and to teach this coming semester. But then October 7th hit and everything changed. I mean, for the world, for Israel, certainly for Harvard and completely for me. Yes, that's obviously what I want to get into. So for me, as someone who has considered himself a somewhat distant student of Jewish history and anti-S obviously, I knew that it still existed, and it's existed in various contexts that we'll talk about. But, you know, I felt fairly blindsided by not October 7th itself, but the response to it that we saw most gallingly in our nation's finest most gallingly in our nation's finest educational institutions, or what purport to be.

What changed for you after October 7th? I think you're probably a much closer or have been a much closer observer of anti-Semitism than I've been, being a rabbi. How surprised were you in the aftermath of October 7th? I think that you and I grew up actually in a strange interregnum in antisemitism because post the Holocaust, I mean, my father, who was a conservative rabbi most of his life in Philadelphia, for him, antisemitism was real and a going concern. And I remember when I was ordained and afterwards, I thought, okay, anti-Semitism was the concern then, but now not so much. And the truth is, for the last, I don't know, I would say starting maybe 20 years ago and back to, I don't know, the 60s or the 70s, it was really a minimal concern compared to the way that Jews had been obsessed and preoccupied with it for all of Jewish history. So I, like you, was, I had certainly more experience with it day to day.

A large part of my congregation in Los Angeles was from Iran, and they had obviously fled anti-Semitism. But I was surprised at the explosive nature of anti-Semitism all over America and the world, certainly on college campuses, but not only on college campuses. Yeah, it a little bit shocked me and dispirited me because, as we can talk about, you know, it's not only coming from one political direction, even though on campus, it's almost entirely from one direction. in a minute. I definitely want to talk about the college campus problem in particular. But I just want to get some more of your experience here over the years. How much time have you spent in Israel? How close is your connection there? I've spent a lot of time in Israel. I'm usually there at least a couple times a year, and I lived there as a student, and I have constant touch with friends and colleagues in Israel. And how do you view the relationship between Israeli Jews and diaspora Jews, Jews elsewhere

in the world, in particular in America? I can imagine that post-October 7th, the experience for American Jews and really all Jews outside of Israel is one of a sudden sense of implication in what's happening there that has never, I mean, it's always been, it's possible to have felt that long before this moment, but this really was a September 11th moment for all the world's Jews in a way. And again, it was not, you know, the atrocities aside, it really was in how they were responded to that suddenly everything seemed upside down and in need of a hard reset. So how do you think about the relationship between Jews inside of Israel and everywhere else? One of the interesting things that happened as a result of October 7th is it resolved a long, in some ways, a long debate in Jewish inner circles, which is how, I mean, Israeli

Jews, for understandable reasons, sort of felt disconnected from the diaspora. They felt as a, look, we live in Israel. We're the ones who are living on the, we live in Israel. We're the ones who are living on the front lines of Jewish history. We're the ones who are building a state. You guys in Los Angeles or in, you know, or in Wichita or Miami or Chicago or Paris or London, you're living nice lives and you're Jewish. And maybe every now and then you face something, but the truth is you're not in this boat together the way we are. And October 7th changed that. And it changed it for both directions. That is, as you said, diaspora Jews finally said,

oh my God, all of us have to take a position on this. We're all part of this. We're all in this circle, whether we want to be or not. And Jews in Israel all of a sudden realized, actually, the Jews of the diaspora are part of our enterprise, even though we don't normally think of them that way. And it really matters what they say. And look what's happening on campuses because they're Jews and they're supporting us or speaking about us. So in a strange way, you know, Abba Eban once said, Jews like their clouds without silver linings. But there are sometimes some silver linings here.

And one of them is that I think it created a certain solidarity of Jews around the world because nobody could be indifferent or almost no one could be indifferent to this dilemma. And how do you think about anti-Semitism historically? I mean, it's just this ever-protean and perfectly durable hatred. It's been interesting to watch, again, in the aftermath of October 7th, people grapple with the concept and try to understand it. I think we can trace the history loosely from Christian theology 2,000 years ago. And there are a few salient landmarks in the last two millennia. salient landmarks in the last two millennia. I mean, one in particular is the racialized form it took in the 19th century. I think the term anti-Semitic first appears in the 1850s.

And then we have the contributions of Russia with the protocols of the elders of Zion, forgery. And in America, we have Henry Ford and the synergy between his mania and the Third Reich. And obviously, all of this takes the most painful and consequential form with the Nazis and the Holocaust. But in the aftermath of that, we have, at least to my eye, three strands of anti-Semitism that we almost have to talk about separately. One is the great reservoir of Muslim anti-Semitism, which was given... It has its theological roots, obviously, but it was given a fair amount of top spin and inspiration from the Nazis.

And then we have, in an American context especially, but I guess it's true throughout the West at the moment, we have both anti-Semitism on the far left and on the far right, and they're different. It's a deeply inconvenient fact for Jews that if you go far enough in either direction on the political landscape, you meet stark anti-Semitism and for opposite reasons. So there really is no winning. I mean, to speak about it loosely, you know, on the far left, Jews are considered to have an extra helping of white privilege.

And on the far right, Jews are considered not to be white and therefore are condemned and hated as non-white, you-white interlopers in the otherwise pure society. I mean, that's a very quick loss of how I've been seeing things, but give me your picture of anti-Semitism. I will end up in the same place, although I'll take a couple different stops in the destination to get there. First of all, I think it's important to remember that one driver of anti-Semitism, and as you said, it is a protean hatred. I mean, people hate Jews for being capitalists, for being communists, for being stateless, for being in a state, for wandering, for being in

a place, for being powerless, for being powerful. There's nothing for which you cannot hate Jews on the left, on the right, as you said. But as you said, first of all, the fact that Jews were other was really significant all through history because they were the minority in other people's lands ever since they were kicked out of their own. And, you know, as I said once or twice in debates, actually, you know, if you think that human beings are basically good, you should visit a playground. And when you go to a playground, a new kid comes on the playground, they don't say, oh, look, a new child. Let us share our toys. No, there's something about otherness that makes us uncomfortable.

makes us uncomfortable. That was then given really, as you said, theologic rocket fuel because of Jews and Jesus. Because Jesus was Jewish, the Jews did not accept him as the Messiah. And now just think about this psychologically. If God walks on earth and you don't, and he's standing right next to you, and after all, he's part of the Jewish community. And you don't see him as God. You're either foolish or wicked. There are no other choices because it can't be that God's not impressive or that God's not God. And so what is really a family quarrel, which is what it was with Jesus, because everybody was Jewish, a family quarrel, which are sometimes the most toxic, got enshrined in sacred books. And that, here I will make a concession to your side of the debate,

that's not a good thing because that doesn't change. And so the roots of Christian antisemitism, Hyman McAbee, the English scholar, had a theory about this that's very interesting. He said, Judaism is one of the few hatreds where you're both subhuman and superhuman, because to kill a god, you have to be a devil. You can't just be a bad person. And so from the beginning, hatred of Jews was supercharged. And then, by the way, and many people are not aware of this, Muhammad made the same assumption that early Christianity did,

which was Jews would convert to Islam. And when they refused to convert, you get in the Quran as well, not with the same degree of toxicity as the New Testament, but it's still, there are some pretty awful verses in the Quran about Jews.

And I just want to say, before we get too complacent, that Jews are probably lucky that no Canaanites are still around because, you know, the Bible has its moments too, but Jews are still around. And the Amalekites. And the Amalekites especially, yeah, if you want to go to the darkest. But Jews are still around. And so in land after land after land, they were a minority with the Christians, a minority with the Muslims, and the other.

And the reason that America has always been different, I think, is that there were Frenchmen and Jews, there were Germans and Jews, there were Russians and Jews, but there aren't Americans and Jews. There are so many different groups that Jews were not the identified other. But on the fringes, they're still seen for different reasons as the other. And as you said, today we get those three strands. You get the far right, you get the far left, and the Islamists, and all three have different reasons but form weird alliances in their hostility, which is to end up in a place that you did not end up in, which is where you get those strange signs like queers for Hamas, which is totally inexplicable unless you understand that they're united by antipathy.

Yeah. I mean, that's where it all becomes an SNL sketch, which is probably written by a disproportionate number of Jews. Let's start with the far right component of this, because I think the far left component will take us to college campuses where we should focus. But how do you understand the anti-Semitism of the right? And I guess the American context is the right one to think about. And some of this has been in the news in pieces of late, really having nothing to do with October 7th. So you have people like Tucker Carlson and Vivek Ramaswamy, you know, flirting with, beyond flirting, actually just fully endorsing so-called great replacement theory. You know, many people were bewildered to hear those good Americans in Charlottesville with their tiki torches chanting,

Jews will not replace us, and didn't know what that was about. But there's this idea that Yeah. the dispossessed people of the world flood the country through open borders as though that were a reliable way of producing democratic victories in elections. We're noticing now that there's a fair number of Arabs now who are not inclined to vote democratic in the aftermath of October 7th. How do you think about the far right problem? So for one of the, I almost want to say interesting, if it weren't so tragic, it would be interesting. Things about antisemitism, unlike other hatreds again, is it's almost always a conspiracy theory, which is a feature. I mean, look, you and Michael Shermer and others have explored the conspiratorial mind. All I can say about it is, for whatever reason, almost always you will find among anti-Semites

that Jews are somehow conspiring to do something terrible in the world. And whatever it is they fear, it is the Jew that has created that which they fear. the Jew that has created that which they fear. And so if you're right-wing white American who fears being replaced by minorities, obviously it's engineered by the Jews because things can't happen without an explanation. And there's always the Jewish possibility and Jews being such a small population, I mean, 2% of America, like 0.02% of the world, their prominence allows conspiracy theories to have life on social media and in people's minds, because as an example, like they would point to Paul Wolfowitz and say, ah, you see, you know, the war in Iraq is a Jewish conspiracy, regardless of the fact that the president and the vice president and the secretary of state and so on, none of them were Jewish. person who is tied to this international conspiracy. And that's what's happening right now with the quote unquote great replacement theory. It's engineered by the Jews, which is a bizarre but very persistent feature of anti-Semitism. You mentioned the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. That was a Russian forgery about Jewish bankers who control the world. And weirdly, I am told, I don't know this firsthand, you can find that book in hotel rooms in Jordan, like, you know, the way Gideon Bible was given.

And so there is this, it links all people who want to believe that everything bad in their life is due to someone else planning it, that it would be bad. And it's almost always the Jew. I mean, just think of the caricatures of the Jew, like as a predator holding the globe and spinning it to their will. Yeah. I remember this is now jumping to the Muslim context for a minute, but I remember our friend Ayaan Hirsi Ali telling me that when she was in Somalia and by her account had never met a person who had ever met a person who had met a Jew, still they knew they hated the Jews because of all their evil work in the world.

Exactly. No, you don't need our presence to hate us, actually. It's astonishing. Just to take the flip side of this, how do you explain Jewish prominence in either high status cultural contexts or powerful positions in governments? I mean, obviously, the point you just made still stands that even if we're overrepresented in really any of these contexts, we're still never the majority in those contexts, right? Because you're talking in America, if 2% of the population, if we're 20% in any field, well, then that's a tenfold, quote, overrepresentation. But we're still not the majority of anybody doing the work anywhere outside of a synagogue, I would imagine.

Yeah. Let me tell you a funny story about that that will actually illustrate, I think, both how we got there and what's happening to that. So I got COVID a couple of years ago, maybe a little bit less. And I was supposed to do a doctor's daughter's wedding. And I called him and I said, listen, I just want you to know this is in Los Angeles. I have COVID. He said, I'm getting you to Cedars tomorrow morning and you're going to get monoclonal antibodies.

So next morning I'm at Cedars because he wanted me to do his kid's wedding, which I did in the end. And the nurse is giving me monoclonal antibodies. She goes, how did you get here so quickly? I, you know, usually it takes a couple of days. And I said, well, honestly, if you're going to get monoclonal antibodies, it is good to be clergy to the Jews. And she said, that's true, but in a decade, you're going to want to be clergy to the Indians. And I thought that's part of the point is, yes, this is a certain moment in history where the skills that Jews have happen to be very suited to the kind of skills that are needed to succeed in the modern world.

But there are a lot of other groups that haven't actually had the opportunity, that now have the opportunity, that are going to, you know, flood the market, essentially. And that's going to change. But the reason, my explanation, at least, for why have been so successful, is their culture trained them to it. It was a portable culture. It was a literate culture. It was a culture brain work matter much more than physical labor. And it's almost as if we were primed by our tradition to do well. Okay. So back to the right and the alt-right and the far right. One thing that's so confusing about our current information landscape, and you just look at what's happening in the media and on social media, you have various characters seeming

to play well with each other. I mean, they signal boost each other. They are clearly on friendly terms. I'm thinking of people like Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson and Vivek Ramaswamy and Jared Kushner. And I mean, these are all people who are either in Trumpistan or Trumpistan adjacent. They're, I think, united in their hatred of so-called elites, all the while being among the elites. These are people that are standing outside our various institutions and condemning them as irretrievably corrupt. And everyone I just mentioned, with the exception of Jared Kushner, I would be reasonably sure, is someone who has either said, great replacement theory is absolutely real and it's just you overlook it at your peril or there's been some flirtation with it.

Again, none of this is the far right, you know, white nationalist quasi neo-Nazi fringe, but it's also not hostile to that either, right? So all of these people focus 100% of their energy in decrying what we're about to decry, the moral confusion of the far left, and they spend exactly none of it worrying about the various monsters at their backs on the right. My view is that we can keep both of these problems in view at the same time. My view is that we can keep both of these problems in view at the same time. What's your sense of the right of center problem in American political life? And I mean, you take it at any strata of society you want, but I mean, I just, there seems to be a populist moment on the right that is heavily infected by, if not frank antisemitism, a disinclination to see the antisemitism further to the right. a sort of delight with flirting with that anti-Semitism without pronouncing it yourself, giving openings to it and seeing it sort of rise up, which is kind of amusing and fun.

And it's not only in America, of course, you know, I was recently in Hungary, the same game is going on there as here and in other countries as well, where the populace and the energy of populism, and let us be honest, the votes of populism and the engine of fundraising and other things and all of that is in some ways intersecting with antisemitism and public figures understand that they don't have to be antisemites to get the, I mean, like frank antisemites, open antisemites to get the boost from the populist approval because a wink and a nod is sufficient. You only have to say, you know, because a wink and a nod is sufficient. You only have to say, you know, look, I really think that, you know, I'm not, that intellectual sophisticates are betraying us. And people know that you're saying Jews. People know that cosmopolitans means Jews, or that the intellectual elite means Jews.

And so you can get tremendous support and encouragement from this. There's a nice Hebrew word, chizuk, which means kind of strengthening from it without needing to say anything explicitly anti-Semitic. So I think Elon Musk has done this numerous times. And I don't believe for a moment that he doesn't know what he's doing when he says things that encourage anti-Semites to say, go Elon. And he's not alone. sides. Well, if you're marching with Nazis, you're probably not a fine person. But if you say that, and then you say, but I'm condemning Nazis, you have played that double game of encouraging people that want to understand you're on their side without saying explicitly, I'm on your side. And this game has been played on the right to the Jews' detriment now a lot. And it's, as you said, it's being done by people who have tremendous cultural influence and sway.

Let me bend over backwards to defend two people who I'm really not in the habit of defending now. So with Trump, I mean, the fine people on both sides moment, there's no question that there was a clip from a press conference there that was edited to make it seem like he was just without caveat endorsing the white supremacists as fine people. Which, yeah, which he wasn't. No, I totally agree with you. He was not doing that. So there's that, but I take your point that he's sloppy enough that you think that in the end there must be some method to his madness where he's unwilling to, in a very straightforward way, disavow's white nationalists or there's the Proud Boys or it's QAnon. I mean, whenever he's posed a, you know, really an ultimatum, like, tell us exactly what you think about X. He will say something mealy-mouthed of the sort that is invariably, you know, a testament to his own narcissism.

I mean, the formulation is usually something like, well, they really seem to like me, so they can't be all bad. Or it's like, he just turns it back to himself. Right. If you say to me, is Trump an anti-Semite? I think, no, I don't actually think that that's what's going on. And I don't, I have no, look,

also I can't look into people's hearts. I don't know what he thinks or what Elon Musk thinks in their heart, but I don't see them as being explicitly haters. That's not the issue. The issue is exactly what you said, which is if I can just wink and get people to buoy me up, then, you know, that's... I just don't see, perhaps I'm naive, but I just can't imagine. I mean, in Trump's case, I really don't have a

theory of mind. It all just breaks down. It's like, you know, you're getting sucked into a black hole and the normal physics changes. But with Elon, it just seems to me that there's no possible advantage for him to be confusing his fans about what he thinks with respect to Jew hatred. You know. I don't know if you've seen him going after George Soros. I don't know enough about George Soros to know exactly what he's focused on there, but I'm imagining that George Soros funds lots of left-wing groups and causes. And for that reason, many people right of center view him as fairly culpable for having delivered us the monstrosity of diversity, equity, and inclusion such as it now exists. And we'll be talking about that.

So insofar as that's true, if he is a major funder of district attorneys who won't jail anyone, even if they're ransacking a CVS near you, provided the color of their skin is the appropriate shade, well, then it's easy for people to just say, okay, this is an awful degradation of our society being funded by this billionaire. Let's criticize him for that. And it's perhaps unfair to say that is, given that this guy is famously maligned by real anti-Semites, that now you're party to the anti-Semitism that is- I agree with you. That is casting a shadow over the whole thing. I agree with you.

I mean, he's retweeted one or two things and said one or two things that have been more explicit, but I think the same, it's actually not so much a point about Donald Trump or Elon Musk. It's actually not so much a point about Donald Trump or Elon Musk. It is a point about the fact that the anti-Semitism on the right looks for any opening that suggests that there is encouragement of the ideology. it in, I think, lots of places, even if the putative encourager is not themselves, you know, anti-Semitic or trying to goose anti-Semitism, but you can call the rhetoric sloppy. You can call it, you know, conscious winking. I don't know, but it's clearly there and you see it in the responses that people get on social media. And I see it in my own feed where people will write, you know, as Elon Musk said about you people, as Donald Trump said

about you people. So, and I, I look, I try very hard to stay apolitical. I am not telling people they should vote for this person or that person. I obviously have my preferences, as I know you certainly have yours. But I really, I never, I try to be like consistently vigilant against anti-Semitic provocations. And they clearly exist among the characters we've mentioned, whether by design or inadvertence. Yeah, well, it's often in what isn't said, right? I mean, so it's the fact that, you know, in Trump's case, when asked about the Proud Boys, he just, all he can say is, you know, stand back and stand by, right? Like, which is just not the, it's not what you would say

if you recognize the problem of right-wing militia lunatics in our society agitating for their own power, right? I mean, you would completely disavow them, and you would leave nothing left to the imagination. And so it is with Elon. One of the things, though, that I have actually seen is that people on the right don't, I mean, people who are clearly not anti-Semites on the right don't take anti-Semitism on the right that seriously. And people on the left who are not anti-Semites by and large have not, maybe now is changing, taken anti-Semitism on the left that seriously.

Right, right. Yeah, it's the single focus to the other side of the aisle, which I think is so corrupting of one's ethical compass. Yeah. Okay. Well, let's go leftward. Right. And get a picture of what's happening there. I mean, the difference for me has always been, if you go far enough right, you meet just frank Nazis, right? Right. You literally meet people with swastikas on their foreheads. If you go far enough left, you have met, you know, up until the recent weeks, you have met people who were not at all violently disposed toward Jews. They're just confused people whose social justice

hysteria has caused them to view everything in terms of a very American framework of oppressor and oppressed dynamics that just really break down along the lines of the African-American experience. Everything gets mapped to that. It's what people like Ibram X. Kendi and Ta-Nehisi Coates have done to our civil rights thinking, where you can't just not be racist, you have to be anti-racist. And white guilt is a kind of original sin which can never be expiated. And everything, including objective standards in education, is a matter of power and oppression and privilege. And you force everything through that filter. And what falls out at the other end, if you're a Jew, is, again, the view that you're not only not among the oppressed,

you're among the most privileged, and you're a, you know, worse still, you're this model minority against whom African Americans and other minorities are always subject to invidious comparisons based on the success, you know, the success of the Jews in all walks of life. comparisons based on the success of the Jews in all walks of life. And so it's just, there's this animus toward Jews, but it never seemed to be the kind of thing that would give us our next Kristallnacht until October 8th, right? Where then we feel, okay, now this is now supercharged in its alliance with people who are actually celebrating, explicitly celebrating the murder of Jews. Right. Exactly. So I used to say, and not me alone, it's hardly original with me that the anti-Semitism...

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