Plain English with Derek Thompson - How Israel Is Transforming American Politics

Episode Date: July 7, 2026

Peter Beinart joins Derek to unpack a major shift inside the Democratic Party. As Democratic Socialist-backed candidates notch a string of surprising primary victories, one issue has emerged as a defining political litmus test: Israel and the war in Gaza. But it's difficult to hold two ideas at once … that the war in Gaza is a moral catastrophe, and that antisemitism is rising in some of the spaces where that catastrophe is being debated. Derek and Peter discuss why the conflict has become so central to Democratic primaries, how debates over anti-Zionism and antisemitism are reshaping public life, and what it all means for the future of the Democratic coalition. Subscribe to our YouTube channel here:https://www.youtube.com/@PlainEnglishwithDerekThompson If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [e-mail]. Host: Derek ThompsonGuest: Peter BeinartProducer: Devon BaroldiAdditional Production Support: Ben Glicksman Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, everybody. Happy summer. This is just a reminder that, like most summers, this show is going to move to one episode a week for much of July, a little bit of August. So do not go anywhere. This feed will be just as active or maybe even more active, I bet, than many podcasts this time of year. We'll have new episodes every Tuesday with the occasional Friday summer episode. We will see you and listen with you quite a bit over the next few weeks. Thank you. something is happening in the Democratic Party. And before we look at what it means, I want to understand what it is. Over the past few weeks, candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America, the DSA, have won a series of primary elections that taken together represent something much more significant than a fluke. In late June, three candidates endorsed by New York City Democratic Socialist Mayor Zora and Mamdani, won congressional primaries in deep blue house districts. Claire Valdez, a DSA-aligned State Assembly member, won an open seat in the 7th District.

Brad Lander, the Progressive City Controller, defeated incumbent Dan Goldman in the 10th. And in the biggest upset, Dari Elisa Avila Chevalier, a 32-year-old community organizer who supports abolishing prisons, police, and deportations, unseeded a four-term congressman who was also the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. One week later, 29-year-old Melot Kiros, another deed. DSA-back candidate, won a primary against a 30-year congressional veteran. Those are just the House races. The DSA also prevailed in the Washington, D.C., mayoral primary, along with the Democratic Socialist advancing to the runoff in Los Angeles.

What is driving this? As I see it, there's a few big forces at work. The first is deep anti-establishment energy. Every one of these candidates ran against the Democratic leadership as much as they ran against their individual opponents. The second major factor, as I see it, is economic frustration and a leftward pull on economic issues. Positive views of capitalism or markets among Democrats have plunged in the last few years, and half of the party now says they view socialism favorably. Poll suggests that when voters say they like, quote, socialism, what they mean is not so much Stalinism and more universal health care and an antagonistic relationship to corporations.

But the third force, and the one that might be the most revealing, the most combustible, and in some cases the most difficult to talk about, is Israel and Gaza. In race after race, a candidate's position on Israel's military campaign in Gaza has become a major litmus test. In the Lander-Goldman race, both candidates are Jewish, but Lander blasted Goldman for voting against legislation to block military aid to Israel and for 10,000. making money from pro-Israel lobby groups. Goldman refused to call Israel's campaign a genocide.

Lander did. And Goldman lost. Chevalier attacked her opponent for refusing to say there were genocide as well. And in Colorado, Kiros made opposition to the war a centerpiece of her campaign. One new pro-Palestinian super PAC, American Priorities, has backed eight winning primary candidates the cycle, all of whom have condemned the war in Gaza. The question of Israel and Gaza is not staying put inside the primary process.

It is unfortunately spilling over into American life. In New York, swastikas have been spray painted on synagogues, Jewish community centers, and homes. When the Heim sisters, three Jewish musicians, sat courtside with Taylor Swift at game four of the NBA finals, they faced a surge of anti-Semitic hate online. In San Francisco last week, California state senator Scott Weiner, who is gay and Jewish and currently running to replace Nancy Pelosi in Congress was surrounded and verbally attacked at the city's trans march for his views on Israel,

despite the fact that he has called the events in Gaza a genocide. Now, it would be absurd to suggest that any opposition to the Israeli government's military campaign in Gaza is the equivalent of anti-Semitism. I am definitely not saying that. Like the majority of Democratic voters, I am outraged by the scale of civilian death and suffering in Gaza, but it would also be oblivious to ignore the fact

that opposition to Israel's government is rising alongside anti-Semitism on the right and on the left. Now, I've just put a lot in the table here. Number one, the rise of the DSA and the progressive left in some key elections. Number two, the centrality of Gaza to those elections. And number three, a coincident rise in anti-Semitism.

To guide us through all this, I've asked Peter Beinart back onto the show. Peter is the author of several books, including being Jewish after the destruction of Gaza. He's also the author of the Beinert Notebook on Substack and a professor at the City University of New York. He's someone who has long argued that the American Jewish establishment's unwillingness to criticize Israel has been a moral failure. Today we talk about how the Jewish. genocide question has become a defining litmus test in democratic primaries, what the left owes

to the distinction between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, and whether the Democratic Party can hold two truths at once. Number one, that the war in Gaza has become a moral catastrophe, and number two, that something ugly is growing in some of the spaces where this catastrophe is being discussed. I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. This episode is brought to you by SAP. Waiting. It's one thing mid-sized businesses cannot afford to do.

When your biggest ideas are ready to launch, you need technology that's ready to. SAP Grow comes preconfigured to your industry standards. With AI embedded at its core, you can hit the ground running. Bring it with SAP Grow, AI Cloud, ERP for any size business. Peter Beynard, welcome back to the show. Thanks. My first question for you is pretty straightforward, but also quite weighty.

How would you describe the role that Gaza has played in the Democratic primary elections in the last few weeks? I think Gaza's played a quite significant role. It was one of the striking things about the candidates who have won, the candidates kind of running. from the left, many of them associated with the DSA in New York, in Philadelphia, in Colorado. These are all House races. But I also think in the Michigan Senate race is that the candidates who are running on the left have a very, very deep concern about Gaza. It's something they talk about a lot. It's something they care about a lot. And I think it's part of what is defining them in voters' minds as people who are authentic

and people who have courage and people who kind of have a moral vision that's appealing to progressive Democrats. And why, going a little bit deeper, do you think Gaza has come to play such a significant role in the self-identity of this generation of the new left? So I think the first thing that one should start with

is just how utterly horrific what Israel and America have done in Gaza has been. I think there's a tendency sometimes to kind of skip that over. I mean, what Israel has done in Gaza may be the great, you know, has been now described as the genocide by the world's leading human rights organizations, by Israel's leading human rights organizations, by the United Nations. In the 1990s, the United States considered very seriously intervending militarily. We did intervene militarily to prevent, try to fight against.

the genocide in Yugoslavia. We're sending weapons to the Ukrainians to respond to something that Russia is doing that probably doesn't even meet that threshold of genocide. Here we have spent $20 billion to arm a genocide. So this is something that I think before one gets into the larger kind of questions of why Israel has a particular status, simply the fact that the United States has spent $20 billion to basically fund something that is widely understood. The International Association of Genocide Scholars has called it a genocide. is something that I think on its face is astonishing and deeply horrifying and should be, right? And so I think we kind of need to start there, especially because social media has meant that this particular genocide,

much more than, let's say, Bosnia or Rwanda or Cambodia, let alone, you know, the Nazi Holocaust, is much more available to people. We see it, right? So I think that's part of it. the second thing I would I would say is that I think Gaza has become kind of a manifestation of the way progressive sea of two things progressive C. First is that we are entering a world of we have entering a world of extraordinary brutality and profound racism of a kind of really crude sort on the right. And in the kind of Democratic Party establishment, what you see is an unwillingness to actually really. resist that. It was a Democratic president who enabled this genocide to take place. And I think the fact that the Biden administration, for all its protestations about international law,

basically armed this genocide, is representative of a larger sense that the Democratic Party and its leaders are not actually willing to fight seriously hard enough against the kind of racism and brutality of this moment. Peter, do you see a connection between the issue of Gaza and the other issues that populate the identity of the new left. It's one thing to say, as I think you have said, that there's a moral shock looking at the death counts coming out of Gaza and the images coming out of Gaza. It's another thing for that event in Israel

to act as in many cases a kind of litmus test as it has in many of the Democratic primaries. And so I wonder, where does that, you see and how you see the war in Gaza sort of clicking into the rest of the progressive left's identity. It's their case against corporate power, their case, which in many cases I take as one about power and powerlessness. So maybe just talk a little bit about the role that you think it plays within that sort of that portfolio of issues that the left talks about. Partly, I think what progressives have noticed is that politicians who to support, who support,

support Israel unconditionally and take money from APAC, even if they are kind of conventionally described as liberals, tend to not be people who actually really fight hard against the kind of American's political and economic system. You know, one of the things you notice in a lot of these campaigns is that when APA or other pro-Israel organizations go in against a progressive candidate, other corporate interests, whether it's crypto or others, basically go in as well. Because, people who there tends to be an overlap between one's view about Israel and how radical one's critique of the American kind of economic system is. And so I think that's one of the things that people have noticed that basically this serves to some degree as a kind of proxy for how much you're kind of going to be a kind of go along get along Democrat or whether you're going to be someone more like, you know, AOC and Zeran Mamdani who basically has a very serious structural critique of the way in which business is done in Washington. and the way in which American capitalism works. So I think that's part of the reason that the issue matters so much.

But it also intersects. And I think the analogy here that's interesting to think about would be the role of the anti-apartheid movement in the 1980s in American politics, where for a period of time it was a significant force, but it didn't meet the same kind of resistance that this movement for Palestinian freedom did. And that debate in some ways about South Africa in the 80s was during the Reagan era, you know, 20 years after the voting

and Civil Rights Act, a kind of proxy for debates about race in America in the 1980s. And I think coming in the wake of the George Floyd 1619 moment, this debate about Israel and its settler colonial project, and that's a controversial word to use kind of in American politics, but it's not really a controversial word to use among academics who study Israel Palestine. The question of how you think about that settler colonial project and what it says about how you think about America's settler colonial project, I think is also a very important. a kind of connection that people make. One of the things that Darya Leiva, Avila, Chevalier, who just won the Congressional C,

the Democratic nomination in a district in northern Manhattan mentioned was that she went and spent two months in the West Bank. And she reflected on the way in which she saw parallels between the use and abuse of state power and the way it was racialized there and what she had seen in New York. Yeah, to pull back the curtain a little bit of my own thought process about doing episodes on Gaza and Israel. I find it, I think that the audience

of this podcast to me seems to be, I don't know if moderate is the right word, but somewhat down the middle on this issue. I'll interview Israelis who are critical of Hamas

and I'll be accused of apologizing for the Israeli genocide. I will interview people who are critical of Israel's military effort and am accused of apologizing for the folks in Hamas.

And so I want to make sure that I represent a range of opinions in my questions to you. And I think there is a debate right now about what words to use, and there's also a debate about what policies to pass. And those two discussions are related but distinct, and I want your thoughts on both the words

that we should use and the policies that those words should lead us toward. So let's start with this word genocide. I want you to imagine that you're talking to a liberal Jew who holds the following opinions. October 7th was a vile crime, and the beginning of a new kind of war between Israel and Hamas.

Israel has killed an egregious number of civilians and children in its counterattacks, but this is a war. And the United States killed an egregious number of Japanese civilians in its firebombing of Tokyo. And the Allies killed an unreasonable number of civilians in its firebombing of Dresden. And I cannot, in being this person,

this person cannot think of it quite as a genocide, like the Holocaust or even Ukraine war, because there was a clear act of aggression on the part of the state of Gaza. And so what we're describing here is happening in the context of a war, which distinguishes it from something like the Holocaust where the Jews did not themselves elect a state

that attacked Berlin. To someone who has those sort of, I guess you would call them liberal Zionist opinions. Why is this a genocide and why is it important that we use that word? So I'd say a couple things. The first is that genocide usually take place in the case of war. And oftentimes they take place against one side in that war. So in Rwanda, for instance, right? The genocide against Tutsis in Rwanda was taking place at the very time that the Tutsi-led Rwanda and patriotic front was leading a rebellion against the government, and in fact, ultimately won

and is the government now. So there's nothing about, in fact, in fact, in the former Yugoslavia, there was a genocide against Bosniaks at the very time that the Bosniaks were waging a war of independence against the Serb-led Yugoslav Federation. So this is not, that would not be unusual. On the question of genocide, I would simply say to that person, and again, these are the conversations I have constantly, because these are many of the people around with whom I live, I would say, if someone told you that there was, that there was something going on in Paraguay, and Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the United Nations, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, and the Human Rights Organization in Paraguay had all said it was a genocide,

would you think, and the government of Paraguay vehement and its supporters around the world vehemently said it was not, who would you be likely to believe? Under any other circumstances, I think, with this weight of scholarly and human rights consensus, I think people would accept that it was a genocide. On the question of the analogy between Japan or Germany on the critical thing to remember is that Gaza is not a state. It is not the equivalent of the United States being attacked by Mexico. Gaza is the territory of under Israeli occupation. Israel occupied Gaza starting in 1967.

Although it removed its settlers and soldiers in 2005, it never ended the occupation. It controlled Gaza by air, land, and sea. It controlled the population registry. It's like saying you remove the prison guards from a prison, but you have people around the perimeter determining everything who and what can go in and out. And Gaza is also a territory composed overwhelmingly of refugees, the families of refugees expelled from Israel in 1948. So to me, the much better analogy would be, imagine it's the 19th century in the United States. You have Native Americans pushed off their land into smaller and smaller enclaves that are basically essentially like concentration camps, not death camps, but concentration camps. And they break out and they commit a terrible massacre.

And this did happen throughout the 19th century United States, right? And then you respond to that by essentially doubling down with even more catastrophic force and taking even more of the land and forcing them into an even smaller area, which is, what Israel's done, because Israel's now basically taken 60% of Gaza and basically not allowing virtually any Palestinians to live there. And an area was already overwhelmingly crowded because of its refugee population. I think that puts the question, even before we get to the question of proportionality and whether under international law you have the right to destroy apartment buildings because you think there's some host fighters there, even before you get to any of that, I think it suggests that the entire moral and legal prison that we should look at this is very

different than the one we would apply if you were attacked by a sovereign state. And what is the policy that you think this moral argument leads to? What should the United States do? What laws should its Congress pass? Well, in some ways, the goodness is the U.S. doesn't actually have to pass many new laws. We have a law called the Leahy Law, which has been in place for quite a long time, but never applied to Israel, which says that we are not allowed to sell weapons to units of foreign militaries that have committed grave human rights abuses. We just didn't, to implement the Leahy law as it relates to Israel. And I think it would make it virtually impossible for us to either give military aid or to sell weapons to Israel. I also think that we should

follow on our stated commitment, or at least the Biden administration's stated commitment, to the belief in international law. We supported the International Criminal Court when it tried, when it prosecuted Vladimir Putin over Ukraine. We support the prosecutions that it is, that it is brought in the case of Israel and also a Fomass leaders. And we shouldn't give Israel international impunity under international law. I think those would be the policies that I would promote. We're talking about a moral case to motivate certain policy changes. And it's interesting because the war in Gaza and the war in Iran, as I see it, are fracturing

both parties ahead of the midterms. On top of everything that we've said about the Democratic Party, you have the Republican Party where isolationists like J.D. Vance are trying to negotiate an exit from the war. There are hawks who are fiercely critical of Trump's memorandum. Prices are rising. The president's approval rating has hit a record low. The war in Gaza clearly is being directed by Netanyahu, but the individual most responsible for persuading Trump to enter the war against Iran is also, without question, objectively, Benjamin Netanyahu.

And so I think that alongside a moral argument that Israel, has crossed a line in Gaza, there also seems to me to be an emerging practical argument against tethering our foreign policy to Israel's interests. And I wonder if you've thought about that because most of this conversation, and indeed the conversation that we've had so far,

has been contained to the moral sphere, but there also is this practical, almost amoral case for distancing ourselves from Israel at the moment. Do you see that as well playing a role either within the, well, specifically, I should say, within the Democratic Party? Yeah, I mean, I think this is part of the reason that the politics of Israel are changing so dramatically, because the argument that the critics of Israel are making is not only a moral argument.

It's also an argument that in some ways is very appealing to people who voted for Donald Trump, right? It also has elements of an America first argument. I mean, if you listen to Abdul El-Sayyad, who's running for the Democratic nominee, in Michigan. What he says again and again and again is, why are we sending our money there to kill kids when we should be investing in kids in Michigan, right? That's a message that Tucker Carlson would be, you know, would be shaking his head and agreeing with. And it's a view that has actually really widespread support. I mean, and so in a way, I think the reason this issue has bipartisan appeal, even though the worldviews of progressives and conservatives may be quite

different is precisely because actually there's not a lot of support on the right for foreign aid of any sort, right? And so it's pretty easy to say, and people on the right also see what's being done to people in Gaza. And so it's pretty easy to make the case to them. This is not a good use of U.S. money, that you should either give the money back to Americans to put in their tax in their pockets, or you should invest it on roads and health care and housing and all that. We've talked about where we can see this, the beginning of a shift against Israel. It exists at the level of voters. It exists at the level of politicians. But I've seen you point out that the Democratic Party has this historical tendency sometimes of electing doves who surround themselves with hawks.

So I think the examples that you use from the last 50 to 60 years of American history were Jimmy Carter runs as a dove and he makes his, I think it was national security advisor, is the big New Brzynski? Was it NSA? Yeah. And then you have Barack Obama, 2008 in the primaries, in many cases, you can say that one of the things that most distinguish him from Hillary Clinton was his position against the Iraq war that she had voted for. He becomes president, who becomes his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton. And one could argue that the foreign policy class around Barack Obama was more hawkish than the rhetoric that he used during the primaries.

And so it raises this important question of, okay, well, let's say that you have the voters and the politicians, the Democratic Party, maybe also the Republican Party. beginning to move against Israel, shift against Israel in the ways that you've described. But if the foreign policy class does not shift, then policies might not shift. And so I wonder what you see in terms of the foreign policy class's evolution on Israel. Is there an evolution or are they sort of hanging on a little bit more to sort of an antebellum, anti-October 7th frame of mind than the rest of the country? No, there is some shift in the foreign policy class.

So, for instance, Jake Sullivan, right, who was Biden's national security advisor, who basically was a critical person as Biden gave Israel essentially unconditional military support during Israel's assault on Gaza, has now said that he thinks military aid should be conditioned. I mean, one might say, well, you know, it's a little late. But it's striking that he has now moved towards that view. I think if a Democrat gets elected, there will be a really fascinating struggle over whether the kinds of people who were in the Clinton, Obama, and Biden administration, who generally came of age in an environment in which unconditional U.S. support for Israel was kind of uncontested, whether those people return to these key jobs or whether you have people who are more kind of outsiders who instead get them. One of the things that's been inching Chris Van Pollen himself, who could be very likely, I think, a candidate to be Secretary of State, who's been one of the most critical senators on Israel, actually wrote in a column in the New York Times basically said that people who were intimately involved in Gaza policy should not actually get jobs in the next administration. The last time we kind of had this kind of thing play out, I think was after Vietnam, where you had a series of Democratic foreign policy, you know, luminary. like McGeorge Bundy and Walt Rostow and Robert McNair, who kind of became outcasts in the party.

And I think that's possible. It could happen again. This episode is brought to you by Lincoln. Too many summer plans end in maybe next year. The Lincoln Summer Sales event is on now, making this the time to go. Watch the sunrise through the available panoramic vista roof in the Lincoln Navigator,

picnic from the available Lincoln Splitgate, Then go somewhere new guided by the available 48-inch panoramic display guide. Visit your Lincoln retailer today or learn more at Lincoln.com. I'm going to turn the page to the second chapter of this conversation, which is about the coinciding rise of not just anti-Israel politics, but what I think I would objectively call anti-Semitism. I have traditionally associated anti-Semitism with the right. most Jews I have known.

Most Jews, I think, by census and poll fact, are liberal Democrats. But the rise of anti-Israel sentiment has coincided with, and I want to be clear, has coincided with, not been caused by necessarily, but coincided with a surge of anti-Semitism. And I wonder if you think there is a part of the new left, the new young left. that has an incipient strain of anti-Semitism within it? So I would start by saying that I think this traditional Jewish intuition, that anti-Semitism is more a feature of the right, remains the case. And the reason it was true then and it's true now is that bigotries often travel together, right?

So what you see in the kind of MAGA movement, right, is basically a vision of saying America was a lot better when we had clear hierarchies based on race, you know, sexual orientation, gender, et cetera. And that perspective is much more conducive to anti-Semitism than a more equality-based perspective. And I think that there was a, and what you see particularly clearly not with people like Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes

and to some degree Tucker Parleson is basically that they're taking a lot of the same kinds of tropes that they used about Muslims, about, you know, everyone used to talk about what was in the Quran. Now, if you look at Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes, they're talking about things they've discovered in the Talmud, right? If you look at one of the things that Tucker Carlson and these guys had been focusing on in the past was this idea that Somalis and Haitians were leaching off the American welfare system. If you notice now, they're increasingly saying that about Orthodox Jews. So I think that because bigotries tend to travel together, the Pittsburgh shooter in 2008, at Tree of Life, didn't start out focusing on Jews. He started focused, he got radicalized

by Fox News about this migrant caravan from Central America and then decided that the Jews were behind it because there was a group called Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society that was associated with a local synagogue that basically helped refugees. So that, I think, is the largest anti-Semitism problem we have. I think what you see on the left is a bit different. First of all, some of that does, some of that stuff does bleed into the left, right? Because people are not in purely ideological camps. And the second thing you find is some tendency to blame Jews for what Israel does, right? And I think this is something, this is an area in which a certain kind of anti-Semitism is rising.

People basically take out their anger against Israel at Jews, which is just as wrong as it was during COVID to take out your anger against Chinese Americans because you were angry at the government of Beijing because of their role in COVID, right? The particular challenge I think we face in fighting against that kind of anti-Semitism, which blames Jews or Judaism or Jewishness for the actions of the state of Israel, is that you need to disaggregate these two things, right? You have to say, Jews in America are not responsible for what Israel does. Israel is a state.

Jews are a group of people who can have whatever set of opinions. about Israel they want. But the American Jewish establishment itself actually rejects that disaggregation. If you listen to people like Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, what they say again and again essentially is that to be Jewish is to be a Zionist. Inherent in being Jewish is supporting the state of Israel. And that you have synagogues all over America that have big signs outside saying, we stand with Israel, right? Imagine if the Chinese churches all have big signs saying, we stand with the People's Republic of China. to me is a big problem we have in fighting against that version of anti-Semitism.

There's two pieces of that answer that I want to respond to, and I appreciate it. The first response is about the left anti-Semitism, and the second is on the modern Jewish identity. One more cut at anti-Semitism on the left. Here just a range of facts. Asan Piker has said that the government of Israel is a thousand times worse than Hamas. Hamas, which is clearly an anti-liberal, anti-democratic organization that has in its charter a kind of genocidal intent in terms of its aims of wiping out the state of Israel, which is not to say that Hamas itself is guilty of currently conducting a genocide, but that it certainly has expressed murderous intent. Darya Lisa Avila Chevalier participated in a pro-Palestinian march on October 8th.

the day after the egregious Hamas attacks. I think a lot of the messaging in the days and weeks after October 7th about globalizing the Intifada was not necessarily anti-Semitic, but I do think that the idea of globalizing an intifada certainly walks up to the precipice of calling for violence against Jewish populations around the world. And then finally, I don't want to put too much weight

on the cross tabs of any one poll. There's a thousand polls out there, and maybe you've got one or some listeners got one that can invalidate what I'm about to say. But there was a Harvard study for a Harvard Center for American Studies Harris Poll in December 2023 that found that two-thirds of voters between the ages of 18 and 24 agreed with the statement that, quote, Jews as a class are oppressors and should be treated as oppressors, and more than half 51 percent, again between 18 and 24, said Israel should be ended and given to Hamas

and the Palestinians. Cross tabs can be janky. It's just one poll. But I consider both of those statements to be pretty, pretty heinous. Putting all of that together and adding to it, you know, any number of anecdotes about the treatment of the Heim sisters or Schwastika's burning in New York, does it not make you a little bit afraid that maybe this moral effort to change the way that Americans, see the ethics of the Israeli government is carrying alongside of it a genuinely hateful category of people who might be as anti-Semitic as parts of the far right. Does it, are you a, is any part of you afraid that what you see is a largely moral movement has this sort of attending sidecar attached to it that's going to become more of a problem in the next few years. So I think that there's a lot in what you said. I would say on the question of people who say that Jews are an oppressor class, which is essentially another version of conflating,

let's say, Israel and Jews, right? If you look, I think the best work we have on the relationship between ideology and anti-Semitism is by a tough political scientist named Aeton Her. He's also worked with a person at Harvard named Laura Rodin. What they thought, and they've done a number of these studies, is there's much, much more of a conflation between Israel and Jews on the right than there is on the left, that people who on the right who are anti-Israel are much, much more likely to say, for instance, that Jewish shores should be boycotted than people on the left. The people on the left actually are better at making these distinctions. And I just think it's worth just noting that in the anti-Palestinian solidarity

movement, Jews often are very well represented. I mean, in many of the people, you know, in many of the encampments on college campuses, Jews were a higher percentage of the student activists in those campuses on those encampments than they were of the student bodies as a whole. Many of the students who were expelled or suspended or beaten up by the police were Jewish themselves, right, which I think suggests that there is some capacity to make that conflation. I think more on the left than on the right. I think the examples you give need to be looked at individually, and I think it's important to say that people can have views that I think are morally wrong, that I fundamentally disagree

with not necessarily being anti-Semitic. So let's take Piper's claim that Hamas is a thousand times worse. By the way, it's just as worth noting, again, and I have lots and lots of criticisms of Hamas. Hamas, you know, bombed a bus that had a, where a friend of mine was on the bus and killed him. Hamas is an organization ideologically I fundamentally disagree with. But if we're going to mention that Hamas had an anti-Semitic charter in 1987, its first charter, it undoubtedly was anti-Semitic.

It is also important to mention that it issued a new charter in. 2017, which is not anti-Semitic. Again, Hamas is still Islamist. It's still attacks and target civilians, which I think are war crimes, absolutely. But its 2017 Charter makes a clear distinction between Jews and Zionism. On the question of Hamas being a thousand times worse, it's certainly not language. I would use, I think, again, I think I would like to see the leaders of Hamas be tried before the international criminal court. But I think that the point that Piker is getting at is that Israel has a thousand times more power than Hamas, right? The number of children that Israel has killed in Gaza, Israel's killed, you know, tens of thousands

of children in Gaza, right? Hamas killed 1,200 people, including children on October 7. So, again, I did a whole conversation with House and Biker pushed him a lot on some of his views because I disagree with him. But I don't see that view. That statement is anti-Semitic. The march on October 8th, I would certainly never have gone to that march on October 8th. And I think there were speakers at the march who supported violence against civilians. I oppose violence against civilians, period. I think it's a war crime to target violence against civilians for whatever purpose, right? But even supporting violence against civilians, again, let's say you're a supporter of Ukraine and you think Ukraine has the right to kill Russian civilians.

I think that's an immoral view. I don't think it makes you an anti-Russian bigot. I just think you don't respect the rules of war, right? So, again, I think it's important to distinguish the fact that we can think traditions are immoral without necessarily think they were bigoted. What Avila Chevalier has said about her decision to go to that march was that she had witnessed that Israel's 2014 assault on Gaza, and she feared rightly that what Israel was going to do in response to October 7th was going to be even worse.

and she wanted to protest against that. Again, I would not have gone to a March on October 8th, but I certainly would have supported a ceasefire. And so, again, I think it's important to distinguish the fact that there are elements, there are things that we can disagree with strategically and disagree with things morally, and that doesn't necessarily make them anti-Semitic. There are things that are clearly anti-Semitic as well,

but I don't see those two things in and of themselves as anti-Semitic. In the second issue, which is sort of shifting Jewish identities, There's a column in the New York Times today by Nicholas Lemon that really, for me, as a 40-year-old reformed Jew, with currently a sometimes tenuous relationship with the faith itself, that really captured, I think, where I am. Here's two quotes from this essay. Quote, politically, most American Jews were liberal Democrats, and still are.

Most were ardently Zionist, and they considered that to be a liberal stance. To them, it meant supporting a fragile social Democrat, nation established as a home for refugees, which had rested its independence from the British Empire and immediately had to defend itself against the hostile armies of the surrounding countries. But with jarring suddenness, it now seems no longer possible to be at once, comfortably Jewish, and also Zionist, and also liberal, and also fully accepted outside the Jewish world. End quote. I think that nails my identity to a T, except for the fact that I rarely use the word

Zionists to describe my political opinions. Otherwise, that's more or less how I felt. And, you know, I've sort of watched my own feelings about the relationship between my Jewishness and Israel change since the war in Gaza started. I remember, I think it was this Passover where, you know, we were reading all of those passages about the Jews being slaves in Egypt. And those passages in, for Passover are, are about power, about Jews having a relationship. And, you know, we were relationship with power in which we were slaves and therefore the powerless. And there's a lot in in in in a run pesah about Jews emerging from powerlessness and and and about confronting a world of aggressors. And of course I think that Jewish powerlessness is is a theme of Jewish

history. It was just so uncomfortable to read those passages while recognizing what's happening in Gaza where the imbalance. of power, despite my absolute uncomplicated hatred of everything that Hamas stands for, the extraordinary imbalance of power that exists in Gaza lives uncomfortably alongside the readings of my absolute, no-question, favorite holiday to celebrate all year. And it raises this question of generations. I don't know how old Nicholas Lemon is. I assume he's a couple decades, maybe he's in the 60s or something. I'm 40 years old. but the quotes that I was reading you from the Harvard

Harris study of teenagers in 20-somethings, they are 15 to almost 20 years younger than I am. I wonder to what extent you see the evolving, the shifting Jewish identity. How much of it do you think is generational where the young Jews that you know feel one way and the Jews who are, I don't know, your neighbors in the upper side feel a different way?

And how much of it is what sort of sociologists would call, like, a period effect, where even the, you know, 40, 50, 60-year-old Jews that you know living in Manhattan think differently about the relationship between their faith and Israel than they did three years ago, because within the generation, their attitudes are changing. So long-winded question, but, like, how much of what we're seeing in terms of the Jewish identity is about differences between generations versus ways that people within one generation are feeling that they have to work up a new definition a relationship between their Jewishness and their relationship to Israel?

What I would say is I think there was always a deep moral contradiction between the liberalism that most American Jews wanted in the United States and their support of Israel because what most American Jews want in the United States is equality under the law,

is a state that treats everybody equally regardless of whether you're Christian or Jewish or black or white, et cetera. Israel is based on a very, on a completely different principle. Israel is based on the idea of Jewish, and this is a word that will land harshly on some people of the air, but it's the word that Bitslein, Israel's own human rights organization. It's based on Jewish supremacy. It's based on the state has, but Jews have legal privileges that Palestinians don't have. That's true most egregiously in the West Bank. But it's true inside Israel proper, too. If you look at the way the state actually functions, it has special obligations to Jews that it doesn't have even to the minority of Palestinians who have citizenship. And it would only have. Who it would only have. been created through an act of Palestinian mass expulsion because the Jewish state had to have a large Jewish majority. And it could only get a large Jewish majority by expelling large numbers of Palestinians. And so what's striking in Nicholas Christa, in Nick Lemon's kind of description of that liberalism is the word Palestinian doesn't appear, right? And it's only when Palestinians don't really appear that you can pretend that these two principles are consistent. What I think has happened is that Palestinians, because of social media and large numbers, and have gotten what Edward Said called permission to narrate

to talk about their own experience of Israel and Zionism. And it is made for younger American Jews more, it has made them more aware of the contradiction between the political principles they were raised to believe in the United States and the ones that exist in Israel. What the American Jewish establishment is historically done is a kind of translation effort, where they take Israel's political system

and try to translate it into American political terms, right? even though, again, I think in some ways, the principles that we want here and the principles that they operate, they are contradictory. But Benjamin Netanyahu and Ittimore Ben-Givir and the destruction of Gaza have made that translation project very, very difficult. So on the generational question, we've known for, since long before, we've known for, I would say, 15 years or so that there's quite a large generational divide among American Jews, but also among Americans of the whole. I think what's happened is that younger Americans have moved even, and new generations, younger Americans have moved even more dramatically in that direction as they've gotten older and as younger people have come up. But what we've seen among Democrats is that older Democrats have also moved, essentially are kind of following younger Democrats in their evolution

of views on Israel. And younger Republicans are also now moving against Israel. So the one quadrant, that remains strongly supportive of Israel is basically Republicans over the age of 50. Yeah, it's interesting because listening to you, I think in the days and months after October 7th, I was very frustrated by arguments on the left where I thought a lot of critics were, a lot of critics of Israel,

were presenting a falsely idealized image of Hamas. and as the years have gone by while I haven't changed my mind on that I do think that a lot of Jews falsely idealize Israel and have defended the idea of a liberal state of Israel

I'm talking here about the government the state of Israel that doesn't exist because what exists I think just has to be objectively described as a far right enterprise in consistent violation of international law. And I think that's a, I think it's a, I think it's a painful change of identity and change of opinion. And so I think, I think you're right that, um, you have some Jews, maybe under 50 that are moving toward the opinion of, of younger Jews. But it, it's,

what makes it all the more difficult, I think. And I don't even know if there's a question at the end of this confession is just that I see the group sometimes that I'm moving toward also, contain within it ideas about Israel or Jews that I also consider to be abhorrent. Not to say anti-Semitic. Sometimes, yes, anti-Semitic, but often just abhorrent.

And so for a certain progressive Jew in the middle, it's like you're leaving one camp that you believed was diluted and you're moving toward another camp that you think is

populated in some cases by viewpoints that are just abhorrent. And so it's a little bit of an ideological diaspora to move from one home to another and not feel comfortable in either. Not sure there's a question there, but I think it just speaks to the weirdness of this moment to be a liberal Jew

without a clear home. Yeah, I mean, I guess, I think there's a lot there. I would say, the first thing I would say is that I think the idea that there was a liberal Israel and now we have a far-right Israel, in some ways, it's too easy, right? I mean, between 1948 and 1966, when the labor, socialist, non-religious government

was basically in complete control, Israel held its Palestinian citizens under military law, right? Palestinians literally citizens of Israel, those who had not been expelled, needed permission to go to leave their villages overnight. And I think we have a, I understand why people focus on Hamas, but it's just worth remembering

that virtually everything that people say about Hamas now, they said about the PLO in the 1970s and 1980s, because in fact, the vast majority of armed resistance against Israel in the 1960s, 70s, and it was not done by Islamists. It was done by leftist and leftist and nationalist factions, right? And one of the reasons that Israel supported Hamas in the late 1980s as it was coming out of the Muslim Brotherhood is because Israel couldn't imagine anything worse than the PLO. And when you talk to Palestinians, what I think Palestinian stress is the continuity of Palestinian resistance to Zionism. even though there are these internal Palestinian divisions about Islamism, leftism, and nationalism. And the last one I would make, and this may be taking us in a different direction, I think part of the crisis that American Jews are going through is based on the fact that Israel has been put at the center of our identity, right? So then once your relationship to Israel shifts, and it's no longer seems like a stable and positive thing, the question was, well, what's left?

And to me, this is part of the tragedy of American Jewish life, is that I just don't think that I don't think that a relationship with a foreign country that was created in 1948 is actually the right way to think about why, right way to answer the question, why be Jewish in an assimilation of society where you don't have to be. I think that the thing that has endured as a relation, as the reason historically most Jews have been Jewish is because they have found in Jewish religious texts answers to life, a structure. for living and answers to the questions that face them. And I think the American Jewish community has underinvested in giving American Jews the literacy

they would need to engage with those texts and the ability to actually see those texts as ones that could be meaningful to them. Well, I mean, one reaction that I have is, right, Israel is the home to half the Jewish population of the world. And the Israeli government is the, at least from a Jewish standpoint, democratically elected, representation of that Jewish identity. And so I do think there is something difficult about being Jewish and feeling such a moral chasm between my sense of liberal ethics and the government that represents more than half of,

just more than half of the Jewish population. It almost demands that an American liberal Jew develop a relationship with their faith that requires a divorce from a majority of the Jewish population. the planet's Jews, which essentially is like a kind of, you know, post-Luther's schism, right? It's like it almost, it almost demands an identity apart. And I, we're now reaching sort of the far out of most extremes of the cosmos of my thinking about Judaism. And so I don't know how much further I can go. But like, that's just where it becomes, it becomes most thorny and difficult for me. Yeah. Yeah. I mean,

I guess I would distinguish between a relationship between the Jews who live in Israel and the state. I do believe that not all Jews at all times. And I should be clear. And I do. It's just so painful to see their government, which is not a, like a Stalinist tyranny imposed on them. But a government elected by them, yes, disproportionately by the crazy far-right settlers. But it's nonetheless painful to watch this representation of it. the faith. Yes, I agree. I mean, again, I think that we should, in my view, I think Jews,

in American Jews should care very deeply about the safety and welfare of Jews in Israel. And Jews around the world. I mean, it says famously, you know, in the Talmud, you know, call Israel, Arabim, Zabh, all Jews are responsible for one another. There is a, there is a metaphor of family that runs through Jewish texts and Jewish identity, that we are a kind of quasi-imagined family. And I believe that. But I think the pain you're talking about is that, is that, is that, The answer to the modern Jewish condition that American Jews have generally gravitated towards here, and other diaspora Jews too, Australia, Canada, is basically secular governments based on the principle of equality under the law. And the answer that Zionism and Israel has given is, I think, much more like the answer that whites of Africans gave and Protestants in Northern Ireland gave,

which is that our safety is bound up with a system, or whites under Jim Crow, our safety is bound up with a system of legal supremacy. And so I think that what's painful, and I agree, I find it very painful too, is to believe that, is to morally, deeply oppose that answer to what keeps Jews safe, while still trying to maintain a sense of affinity and connection and care for people who you believe have embraced a political system that I believe is a system of apartheid. Yeah, and there's a way in which my feelings about Israel are an adjunctive my feelings about the United States today, days after July 4th, which is to say, I'm a proud patriot who's embarrassed by the government. In Israel, I am just unbelievably impressed by the achievements of and identity of and in any cases courage of the people while at the same time just feeling such shame about the behavior of the government. I want to end with a bit of a coda because we started with a relationship that Gaza is playing in the self-conception of the new left, and especially the DSA, Democratic Socialists of America, affiliated left.

And I want to return to that subject. Because there's really been, especially it must be said, in deep blue areas, an earthquake in terms of DSA's success in the last few weeks. And I wonder, return to that subject, to what you would credit the rise of DSA and DSA-affiliated progressives in the party beyond the issue of Gaza that we spent the last 51 minutes discussing. So I think, first of all, it's the sense that capitalism is not. not working for, especially for younger people, right? That the whole economic system, which is supposed to allow people, if they, you know, if they work hard, you know, what a bill Clinton said, work hard and play by the rules, right? I think a lot of people feel like they work hard and play by the rules. And basically, for their generation, it's really, really hard to basically actually buy, to,

to become a believer in the system, because the system isn't working for you very well, right? And people connect that to the mass increase in the economic disparity between very rich and everybody else. I also think it's the corruption of America's political system has made people alienated. The fact that our government had had so many catastrophic failures, whether it's wars, the financial crisis, refusal to respond to climate change. I think these have all been radicalizing things for folks. And then you add on top of that Donald Trump and the fact that, you know, it was like for the, even if you could forgive the Democrats and everything else, you would say what the Democratic Party is, you would say, what the Democratic Party is, said is, the one thing we're going to do, and this is especially Biden, the one thing we're going to do is keep this fascist lunatic out of power. And they fail in that, right? And so I think

all of that has led, I'm not sure I can ever remember a time in my adult lifetime where so many grassroots Democrats hated the Democratic Party establishment as much. That's especially strong on the left, but not only even among lefty Democrats. And I think that's part of what creates the conditions for these populist insurgments that we're seeing in various places. I wonder how you think about putting the DSA's success in what one might call, quote, unquote, the proper context. Because there's an argument that goes directly against the way that I even framed this issue for you a question ago. So I'm not even blaming your answer for this, right, that says, look, the DSA's success is dramatically overrated. It's disproportionately concentrated to deep blue areas in New York and maybe Chicago, Seattle, in which Republicans have absolutely no chance.

of winning. And if you look at the parts of America that are purple, that are up for grabs, where Democrats actually do have to win in order to get back power in Congress and the Senate, we'll look at Pennsylvania where Josh Shapiro is running, you know, I think someone who said, like Assad numbers against his kid's opponent there. And so I wonder how you think about, like, putting the DSA success, quote, unquote, in the proper context and looking at, keeping everything that you just had on the table about how it represents national trends, right? National frustration with capitalism, national frustration with a democratic establishment,

a national frustration or motivation to overturn a kind of establishment order. And then on the other hand, you look at the places where the most important elections are being held, and like Roy Cooper and Josh Shapiro are not running as like secret socialists. It's not remotely a part of their platform. How do you think about those two things living alongside each other? I think it's worth distinguishing the DSA, from a kind of larger category of kind of left populists, right?

So I think you're right. It's not likely that we're going to see DSA candidates who, you know, winning in outside of bright blue districts. But we do have the cases of Graham Platner in Maine and Abdul El-Sayad in Michigan and even James Tala RICO in Texas, who, I mean, it's quite, you know, Texas, Paloico is not a moderate. I mean, really is running, as a pretty progressive guy, right, in Texas. And Syed is running, and Flatner running pretty far left campaign.

So the claim of not just DSA, but a broader category of people, I would say, is that, you know, these are people coming out of the Bernie kind of movement, basically, that if you have a hard, that an economic populist message can allow candidates to win without them having to kind of compromise on, cultural issues where, you know, Republicans have had success, like immigration or, you know, trans stuff. And I think we don't know the answer to that. It may be that it turns out that they're wrong and that Platner loses, El-Saiad loses, and Cooper and Shapiro wins, which strengthens I think the argument that says, actually, no, you have to be more in the center. But in a way, I think the fact that Donald Trump won, right, even though he violated so many of the normal

rules of politics and that he beat very somewhat conventional Democratic candidates in Hillary Clinton or Kamala Harris, who were only really different in their identity, but his politics, I think, has given some oxygen to this idea. Now, but I don't know, we will see. We'll see. I think 2026 will be a really interesting test case of whether this theory proves to be correct. What does economic populism mean to you? Well, I think what I see these candidates talking about, first of all, is simply their unwillingness to take money from corporations. And I think in a way that becomes a kind of stand-in for a lot of other things. It's kind of like, I'm not going to be beholden to these folks.

Then on policies you see, I mean, I think these people support Medicare for all. For instance, right, that's one position. They obviously support higher taxation. And rhetorically, they're more willing to talk in just kind of oppositional terms than I think someone like Josh Shapiro, Roy Cooper. I don't know which formula will be better politically. And I think that if my guess would be that the most successful Democrat in 2028 would probably not fall neatly into either of those camps, in a way, you know, one of the things

that Obama was able to do was, on the one hand, he was someone who was to the left of where the Bill Clinton, kind of Clinton, you know, was. But he created a particular narrative that actually also had some crossover appeal. And so what I think is most likely is that someone in 20208 will come up with a version of this, which is not clearly in either of those camps. But I can't claim to know which one I think will be more politically effective. It may well be that it's the Josh Shapiro and Roy Cooper position. It's one of the dangers for people, people, all political commentators, but me in particular, is to be willing to distinguish from the policies that I might support morally and the ones that are most likely. to get you elected.

Yeah, this is, we're out of time, and, you know, I, I want to go so much deeper under this issue, because I'm so interested in, in the appeal of populism right now, which I think is without question. I think that left populist groups, maybe more than a lot of establishment Democrats or central left Democrats, have a very clear message on power. And like many populists, they found a good. way to associate what ills America with a very particular group, in many cases, billionaires, even Tala Rico, who I consider, you know, more moderate maybe than Platner, still love to say

it's not left versus right. It's top versus bottom or up versus down, right? Which is a way of reorienting the way that we think about politics, not about disagreements among classes, but disagreements between class, which then gets us right back to this issue of assigning the problems of America with the oligarchs, with corporate Democrats or corporate money. I think there's ways in which the clear popularity of this message is worth interrogating a bit in terms of like where it cashes out in terms of policy. Because it's one thing to say, I think the Trump corporate tax plan was wrong. It's like, well, I think the Trump corporate tax plan was wrong too, and I'd be fine getting rid of that. It's another thing to say, how do we solve America's housing crisis in certain cities?

And it's not clear to me there that saying billionaires are bad leads you directly to a really good solution. to increasing, say, housing supply in a certain district. So I don't want to go too far in this soapbox. It's probably another episode, but I'm interested in where the rhetoric hits the road in terms of policy.

I mean, I think it's a super interesting question. And it's also, I think one of the interesting questions is how important is it for Democrats to have clear policies that actually, you know, Bernie, Elizabeth Sanders was, Elizabeth Warren, with a real policy won. Bernie Sanders is not a policy wonk in the same way, right?

But maybe one lesson that Democrats will learn from Donald Trump is actually that being wonky in that way, although it might be actually valuable in terms of the policy conversation, isn't actually the best political strategy. I don't know. It does seem that Glamtotner is not doing well among working class voters in Maine. So I would say that's one indicator, we have early indicator that perhaps this strategy that isn't working as well as the left populace would hope. Well, Peter, I really appreciate both Dakota on the progressive left, but also the conversation about Judaism and Gaza. This is an issue that's really vexed me, and I've been holding and holding and holding off to have this conversation, but I got a lot out of this. So I appreciate it. Peter Beiner, thank you very much. Thank you very much. I appreciate it.