The New Yorker Radio Hour - A Rise in Antisemitism, at Home and Abroad

Episode Date: November 17, 2023

Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt is a noted historian of antisemitism, and serves the State Department as Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism. Violence and threats against Jews have been surging for years.  “We’ve been seeing [antisemitism] coming from all ends of the political spectrum, and in between,” Lipstadt tells David Remnick. “We see it coming from Christians, we see it coming from Muslims, we see it coming from atheists.  We see it coming from Jews.”  In the aftermath of Israel’s military strikes on Gaza, particularly on college campuses, she is very concerned about widespread sentiments that deny Israel a right to exist. While she doesn’t believe students or faculty should be penalized for expressing solidarity with Palestinians or Israelis, she believes that the language used by some influential people “has served as a green light to the haters,” she says. “It sort of takes the lid off.” And ethnic prejudice, she notes, rarely limits itself. “Once you start dealing in the stereotypes of that one group, you’re going to start dealing with the stereotypes in another group.” New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Anti-Semitism is known as the longest hatred, a prejudice that has persisted more than 2,000 years. Some might have believed that anti-Semitism might have reached its horrific peak in the 40s, the years of the Holocaust, and that through sheer revulsion, it would have faded. This is hardly the case. Well before October 7th, anti-Semitism had been on the rise, in the United States and Europe and well beyond. Since the explosion of violence in the Middle East,

the Hamas massacre of 1,200 Jews in southern Israel, and the horrific bombing and invasion of Gaza that followed, the rise in anti-Semitic statements and incidents has accelerated, alarming officials throughout the world. The director of the FBI, Christopher Ray, recently told a congressional committee that, quote, this is a threat that is reaching in some way

sort of historic levels. Ray was so alarmed that he warned of potential attacks from foreign terrorist organizations as well as domestic extremists. We've been seeing it coming from both all ends of the political spectrum

and in between. I've asked Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt to help think this through. Lipstadt is a historian and she holds a position in the State Department as the special envoy to monitor and combat anti-Semitism. We see it coming from Christians, we see it coming from Muslims, we see it coming from atheists, we see it coming from Jews. A member of a minority group that faces prejudice often has

members who engage in that very prejudice. If you saw the film Denial, that was Rachel Weiss, as Deborah Lipstadt, dramatizing her famous courtroom duel against a British Holocaust denier. Lipstadt's most recent book is called anti-Semitism here and now. At the center of this discussion today is the debate over whether anti-Zionism is part and parcel of anti-Semitism. Why isn't it possible to be critical of Zionism?

As by the way, many Jews were before the founding of the state of Israel. Hannah Arendt was not a Zionist. This debate was fast and furious as you know, and the New York Times was against the founding of the state of Israel. Adamantly so, adamantly so. Adamantly so. A real debate among Jews and among institutions that were either populated by or owned by Jews. This was a big debate.

They were anti-Zionist. Why today do I hear in lots of quarters that to be anti-Zionist is ipso facto. anti-Semitic? I think it was one thing to debate the viability of Jews having a state, creating a state, when it was theoretical. But today we're talking about a state with what, I don't know, seven, eight, nine million people in it. We're talking about a state that is an existing entity.

And to say at this point, A, I don't believe that the state should, exist, raises a very practical question, what to do with all the Jews are there. And B, often it now morphs into, well, Jews don't have a right to a national identity. And while that may have been something debatable in the 1920s, the 1930s, even up till the 1940s. After the Holocaust, that sort of, that debate became more and more moot. A, because there was a recognition that if they had had a state, things might have been different.

And B, I think there was also recognition. Many people who argue that a theocracy, a state built on a religious identity, is an anachronism. But then you turn around and you look at how many countries in the world. are built on religious identities. So I think that, A, it's the fact that when it was theoretical, when it was first evolving, that was one thing to oppose it. But once it's a living, breathing entity, once it is populated by millions of people,

to argue that it should just disappear is kind of mind-boggling. Well, what would you say to a young person who says, look, I'm anti-Zionist. I think that a state that privileges Jewish identity is a mistake and that I would rather see a one-state solution, a democratic state where all identities have equal rights, whether it be in what we now call Israel as well as West Bank and Gaza, or any other state around the world? world. Why is that necessarily anti-Semitic? That's the debate that you hear. We'll get to incidents of anti-Semitism and other matters in a second, but let's just focus on that for the moment. I think first of all, you're singling out one state when you say, I don't believe this one state and only this state. And you say, I don't believe this should be a state that privileges people of a certain religious identity. When there are, I don't know how many, certainly Muslim majority,

states which privilege Muslims. And I don't see anything wrong with that, you know. So it just seems strange to me. I don't say ipso facto they're anti-Semites, but I say it just is strange that this is the one state, the one national identity that they find illegitment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour with more to come. I was reporting in Israel. It was amazing to me the focus, the amount of focus a lot of Israelis were having on what was happening on American campuses in particular, particularly disturbed about incidents at Columbia,

Penn, Cornell, Yale, and elsewhere. How important and how not important is this? What does it represent and what does it not represent? How much of this is sometimes people saying stupid things and a few people getting the megaphone of the press. Or is it more widespread than that? What's your level of concern?

My level of concern is very great. There's something going on on the campus. Some people would say it's post-colonialism. Some people would say it's post-modernism. You know, I'm not willing, I don't know what the, or if there is one source, but there's a certain group think. And if you do not adhere to certain views, you're written out of the canon, so to speak,

you're written out of the community. But Deborah, let's put some pressure on that for a second. We've seen in all the debate and all the things said in the halls of Congress, one member of Congress has been censured. We just saw it, Columbia, a couple of student groups on the left, banned from holding any further demonstrations. We've seen a reporter from the New York Times who signed a petition and she was forced out. Again, I am not discounting anti-Semitism one bit in volume, depth, or hatefulness.

Not at all. But I just wonder, I'm asking you, what is the sayable thing and what's not sayable? How do you go about policing this or not? And should you? I think it, well, I think it's very difficult. I don't think that the campus should be a place where you can only, if you say I'm for the Palestinians or I'm for, you know, a ceasefire or something like that, there's nothing. There's saying that whether you agree with it or disagree with it is not something that is an offense. I think when you have a Cornell, you had this student making an explicit threat.

In Stanford, you had an instructor who made this Jewish student. stand in a corner. In Cornell, you had a professor who talked about the days after the Hamas attack on the Jews throughout that southern peace of Israel, talking about how exhilarated he was. And I watched the tape of him saying that. Then you have to ask, something is wrong here. When you have professors, and they were free to say it, obviously, who can't bring themselves to condemn what happened. But are you suggesting there's something wrong systemically or there's something wrong with those particular professors?

I think that's something wrong with those particular professors, but I think if you get enough examples of this, then you have to wonder, I'm not ready to write off the whole university system and say it's all sick and it's rotten to the core. I think on each of these campus, the vast majority of the students pass by this conversation, pass by these demonstrations and try to get on with their lives. lives and their studies. I'm going to say something which, of course, you know well. And the different

with Israeli policy is not anti-Semitism. Anybody who says it is or says that makes that claim, you know, they're attacking me because I differed. That's ludicrous. As you know also from having been in Israel many times and reported from there, the national sport in Israel is criticism of the government. It's not football. This is, as I said earlier, questioning. the very legitimacy of the state. This is attributing to the state, whether it's Nazi-like qualities, whether it's even using anti-Semitic tropes to attack the state. There's a qualitative difference in what we're seeing.

Deborah, we've been talking about anti-Semitism, mainly on the left, on campuses and so on. Let's talk about it on the right. Oh, it's very much there. Well, so Mr. Orban in Hungary, is an example of a European leader who thrives on a certain degree of anti-Semitism and attacks on George Soros. We've seen this all over Europe on the far right in Poland, in France. We also had a president named Donald Trump, who constantly points to the fact that he has a Jewish son-in-law, but at the same time seems to have created, in my view, a safe space for anti-Semitism.

Would you agree with that? I think what we can say is that in the past five, six, seven years in the United States, and not only in the United States, certain rhetoric used by politicians in this country and in other countries has served as a green light to the haters. It's sort of like it takes the lid off. You know, someone said, well, you know, I don't believe when people, say, oh, you can't say that word, or you can't use that word. I would rather that they use the word so I knew where they stood. And I say, look, I know people don't all love minorities,

don't all love people of a certain, I don't know, religious affiliation, people of a certain sexual orientation or whatever identity. But I would rather live in a society where they know they can't say those things. And what we've seen in recent years, throughout the political spectrum is a freedom to say certain things, a freedom to express certain attitudes, a freedom to rationalize. The marchers at Charlottesville chanting Jews will not replace us were not nice people, were not good people. They stood before the synagogue.

It was a Saturday morning with their arms, so much so that the rabbi looked out the window and said we're canceling services and the Jews who were in the synagogue snuck out the back door to the parking lot in groups of twos and three so that they wouldn't all be leaving together with the safer Torah, with the Torah scroll. It's the only instance I know of American history, any place in America where Jews felt it necessary. to escape from a synagogue by the back door.

Have you seen a corresponding rise in Islamophobia at the same time as you're seeing a spike in anti-Semitism? I think there certainly is increased hostility towards Muslims, Muslim women wearing a hijab on the street. But I haven't seen the same thing at all on the campus, the same sort of demonstrations. one of the foci of my work at the State Department has been the argument, and I still believe it wholeheartedly, that you cannot fight hate in silos.

You know the saying it may begin with the Jews, but it never ends with the Jews. Many of the people who are watching this rise in the anti-Semitism love it and will be very happy to see a corresponding rise against Muslims, against Sikhs, against people of color. You know, the people who are happiest when minority groups are fighting with one another, are the people on a certain end of the political spectrum, the right, who love it

because they're sort of doing their work for them. Finally, I'd ask you this. You're a supporter of free speech. You have worries about certain things that people say, to be certain. But how do you combat anti-examination? Semitism. There's got to be a societal intolerance for anti-Semitism and for that matter for any form of hatred. Right now we are seeing the tsunami of anti-Semitism and it must be condemned. It's got to be

condemned, David, not just because it's a threat to Jews, which that it is. And if it were just that, it would be worth fighting. It would be valid for a government for society to say this is really disturbing. But it's also a threat to democratic values. It begins with people believing, oh, the Jews control this, the Jews control, the banks, the government, the electoral system, the media, et cetera. And that person has given up on the democratic system. And of course, once you start dealing in the stereotypes of about one group, you're going to start dealing with the stereotypes in another group. So it's a threat. to society and something that must be confronted.

Deborah Lipstadt, thank you so much. Thank you. This has been a difficult but important conversation. Deborah Lipstadt's books include anti-Semitism here and now, and she serves in the State Department a special envoy to monitor and combat anti-Semitism. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune. arts with additional music by Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Bolton, Adam Howard, Kalalia,

David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, and Louis Mitchell, with guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance from Mike Cutchman, Michael May, David Gable, and Alejandro Deckett. We had additional help this week from Jared Paul. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.