Noam: Hey everyone, welcome to Wondering Jews with Mijal and Noam.
Mijal: I’m Mijal.
Noam: And I’m Noam. And this podcast is our way of trying to unpack those really big questions being asked by Jewish people, by non-Jewish people about the Jewish story, about the Jewish people, about the Jewish state often, about Judaism. We absolutely don’t have it all figured out, but we try to learn together to wonder together.
As we say every week, we really enjoy hearing from you. So please send us questions, suggestions, feedback. Email us at wonderingjews@unpackeded.media. That’s wonderingjews@unpacked.media.
Noam: So listen, today’s conversation is with our close friend with Haviv Rettir Gur, and our conversation today is going to be about antisemitism. Now, here’s what I want to say about antisemitism to start. For one, I want to say that there is a major, major, major problem and challenge with antisemitism in the United States of America. I just recently read a statistic from AJC, from the American Jewish Community Committee which says that roughly three-quarters, 77% of American Jews said they feel less safe as a Jewish person in the United States because of the October 7th attacks, with nine in 10 saying that antisemitism in the US has increased since that fateful day. That is 90% of people feeling that way.
And I gotta say about all of this, I didn’t want to speak about antisemitism, and I’ll tell you why. For lots of reasons, let me list them.
Number one, I fear it’s being internalized into Jewish identity too much. The antisemitism is becoming part of Jewish identity. And so speaking about antisemitism bothers me.
Number two, I fear non-Jewish people are relating to Judaism in terms of simply reducing it to antisemitism as opposed to appreciating Judaism, meaning…when non-Jewish people think about Judaism, they’re thinking about, we need to reduce antisemitism. And that’s how they’re thinking about Jewish identity, and that bothers me as well. There’s so much that Judaism has to offer.
Number three, I don’t like associating my identity with feeling scared or being a victim. I don’t like that. I don’t want to think that way. And when I think of the world of Zionism, in many ways it was a retreat or a reaction against that to say, we’re not going to be a victim. So I don’t like that we talk about it so much.
Number four, I’m annoyed that people bicker about what constitutes antisemitism and that has almost replaced the conversation about antisemitism and how it’s been experienced itself, meaning the conversation about what is antisemitism has replaced the conversation of antisemitism itself, of the experience of antisemitism. And I want to say one story as it relates to that, then I’m going to get into conversation with Mjal and Haviv.
Raizie, my wife and I were in Chicago recently. We had a remarkable event. Unpacking Israeli History live show with Michael Oren. Lots of people there, hundreds of hundreds upon hundreds of people in the theater. We were walking around the city of Chicago and Eyal, my son, was wearing a kippah publicly. And my wife and I were looking at each other. He was publicly in the city of Chicago, just strolling the streets wearing his kippah. And we asked ourselves, should we tell him to stop wearing the kippah publicly? Should he be nervous about wearing the kippah?
He wasn’t nervous. He was so unaware, so not self-conscious about wearing a kippah that I kind of loved that about him, this naivete. And we were debating as parents, what is our job? Should we tell him that there is antisemitism and therefore he should put it away or should we allow him to wear that kippah publicly? These are the things I’m thinking about as it relates to antisemitism. This is what I’m thinking about.
But Mjal had said to me, we’re going to be doing things a little bit differently. She said, we’re not here to vent or to give marching orders. We’re here to understand because so many people feel destabilized right now. And while we can’t make that go away, we believe there are deeper ways of thinking that might help anchor us. So the goal here in this conversation with Mijal, with Haviv is to explore, not to resolve.
So this is what we’re gonna be doing. I’m gonna be the host, Mijal, Haviv. You’re my dinner guest right now, and I wanna ask the two of you to think with me about this. Is that cool? Okay, Haviv, cool with you?
Mijal: Awesome.
Haviv: No, I object. No, sorry.
Noam: You object. Classic you, always objecting to everything I say.
Haviv: Jews, Jews, right?
Noam: Jews, Israelis, could go either way. Mijal, let me start with you here.
Mijal: Israelis.
Noam: You were insistent we speak about this first of all with Haviv. Why?
Mijal: Yeah, and I had to some convincing Noam like you just said. Yeah, I mean, I think that in nearly every single conversation that I have, wherever I’m traveling, everybody just wants to talk about antisemitism because there is a very visceral fear, like you expressed, that we are all feeling. And even as we have this intense desire to kind of understand what’s going on, I find that a lot of the discourse that happens publicly, especially on social media, is a sort of like, like outrage, a lot of anger that exists. But it’s almost like it fits the fear and it’s not constructive. So I wanted to have a conversation. And the reason that I wanted to have it with Haviv is, I don’t know, Haviv, if you remember this, shortly after October 7th, you were in New York and we went out for coffee or lunch or something in Midtown or Times Square.
And I, my brain can go very dark. Like I have thought about like passports for me, my kids, what we need to have. Literally looked up like gold bars. Like, like my brain goes dark, like in terms of Jewish history. And I remember sitting there with you and being like,Haviv, the world has fallen apart. Like, you know, what’s happening here now. And like, I was catastrophizing very quickly.
, But you were like, wait a second, let’s think about this. And you started sharing with me different aspects of Jewish history. And you weren’t doing it in a way to be like Pollyannaish and tell me there’s nothing to worry about. But you were actually asking me like, let’s think a little bit more thoroughly about this and let’s situate things in a historical context. So I wanted us to have a conversation with you, Haviv, in which we talk to each other. And part of what I always value from you is how you bring in frameworks that give a certain historical grounding and that help us situate ourselves better in our current moment. So that’s, that’s why I was so insistent that we have this conversation.
Noam: I appreciate that. Haviv, do you feel good about that representation and providing these frameworks?
Haviv: I remember going out to lunch. I remember we talked about a whole bunch of things affecting the modern politics in this moment in October 7 and American Jews. But we are the strongest Jews who have ever lived, certainly up to this moment. And I think one of the scary things about antisemitism for American Jews specifically, this is unique to American Jews. And that’s a wonderful thing because they have never really experienced the real thing. And the real thing in some pieces and places, not throughout, it isn’t saturated America, but has come back, has come forward.
And Americans just don’t know why. They don’t know what it is. And why would someone be an antisemite? That’s such a silly, stupid thing to be. How could so many people fall for it? What the hell is this Tucker Carlson suddenly coming to this woke right that’s antisemitic? How could irrational, obsessive hatred and blaming victims for antisemitism itself and what you just described, the conversation on antisemitism has become a conversation about whether something should be called the weaponizing of antisemitism by those dastardly Jews. How could that just take over everywhere suddenly? We know how and we know why and there’s tremendous research and we know where antisemitism comes from. But for American Jews, it’s a new experience. So there’s a shock. That’s a wonderful thing to say about America. But yeah.
Mijal: I got to tell you, Haviv, and this reflects, you know, Noam, to what you said at the beginning about Eyal and the kippah. I grew up in South America until I was 12 years old. And I have pretty strong memories of my time there. And I remember it was very obvious. I’m one of seven children. I have four brothers. I grew up in an observant home. Every man wears a kippah. My brothers and my dad, they had a uniform. Like they were at home and they had their cap ready whenever we would leave the house. So there was something there that was like very obvious for us. know, my, my kindergarten was, I remember that we had to, there were attacks with swastikas and we had to evacuate it. My family lived in Argentina throughout the AMIA bombing. I remember growing up in like, you know, when I lived in Montevideo, at moments in which people in cars would like scream at us ugly things when walking to shul. And what I remember the most is that we weren’t shocked by it. It was almost like the price of doing business. It’s like, this is what it means to be a Jew. And we were, thank God, mostly safe. We had heavy security. And, but it was, was, it was not surprising. And there’s something to me. It’s interesting what you’re saying. Like I think that the American Jewish experience has been so fabulously exceptional that a lot of what we are sensing right now, it’s just absolute surprise about things that Jews around the world have been pretty used to.
Noam:So Are you saying that the American Jewish experience is unique right now is because the American Jewish experience has been lulled into a sense of complacency, arrogance, exceptionalism. What’s the right word? what like when you describe your experience Mijal, it’s not I just described my son’s experience and frankly my experience growing up also in the United States of America. I didn’t throw away my kippah when I was going outside. did not, I know I’m wearing a hat right now. That’s because I’m wearing an Unpacked hat. But like I did not do that. I mean when I travel I wear backwards hat because that’s how I travel, But that’s not the way I thought about things. is, what is it? Has the American Jewish world been lulled into something?
Mijal: I don’t know. I don’t want to use the word like arrogance. Like, I’m going to go somewhere else biblically for a second, but when you look at the scroll of Eicha, which talks about the destruction of the temple
Noam: Lamentations.
Mijal: Lamentations. Thank you. But some of the most tragic moments is when you describe somebody who was wealthy, who was secure, who was happy, who had children, who had everything. And then suddenly that gets taken away. And there’s something there that is almost like descriptively, it feels more painful that if you had nothing and you continue to suffer. So I think that I don’t, I am not gonna say that there was an absolute illusion. I do think that America in many ways has been exceptional and has broken the patterns of Jewish history or what we expected from Jewish history. So now there is this element and Haviv you can agree or disagree with that, but now there is this element of, of, I think it’s a lot of confusion and shock.
And I’ll say one more thing here that I’ve been thinking about. I was speaking with a friend of mine, former colleague, Dr. Ilana Steinhein, and she shared with me some really interesting philosophical papers that speak about how much individuals cannot stand uncertainty, right? To the extent that there has been suggestions that human beings are more likely to assume the worst, and to almost like insist that they know things are the worst they can be to catastrophize over uncertainty. Because being in this place of not knowing just feels so destabilizing.
So I think there’s like this right now, right now, I think the American Jewish experience is characterized by a tremendous amount of uncertainty and of trying to figure out where are we right now? Is this again, the binaries that are being used, which I don’t love is, is this the end of a golden era? Is it the beginning of one? Are we still in one? This and that.
Noam: Haviv, do you agree with Mijal’s take on that? Do you think that the American community has been lulled into something or from an Israeli’s perspective, how do you see it?
Haviv: No, I don’t think it’s been lulled at all. I think it was absolutely correct. America has been totally safe. And Jews have walked around looking however weird way they wanted to look in absolutely almost any community in America and lived their lives and had their, you know, and there was always some kind of low level. Some people antisemitic in some ways, sometimes imported from abroad. But it was so marginal and all of society was so deeply rejecting of it, that, you know, to be an antisemite was to be anti-American. It was to be a weirdo. It was to be a social outcast. Americans never had a need. There was never this kind of destabilization in society, felt throughout society that was causing great ruptures and great rebellions. And those are the times, those are the places that restore what a professor of mine, Manuela Consoni at Hebrew University who I’m going to get this wrong. I apologize, Manuela, was in her classes 15 years ago, so I don’t know if she’ll remember me, but she runs the Vidal Sassoon Center for the Study of Antisemitism, I think, at Hebrew University. That’s, think, what it’s called.
She talks about a mythological machine where you have symbols about Jews. They’re greedy, they’re powerful. And this mythological code, this ideological code is brought out when you need an explanation for major disruption. So, societies that have very good social mobility, societies that are economically stable, they just don’t produce antisemites.America never ever ever needed antisemitism.
And by the way, when did it have antisemitism? 20s and 30s when it was anti-immigrant sentiment. And it was also about Chinese immigration. It was also about Japanese immigration. It was also about Catholic immigration, Irish, Italian, Polish, et cetera.
So what’s happening now is this mythological machine now talking again, finding, in a secular way, in a political way, Jews are blamed for capitalism or globalization or migration or COVID. There was a lot of anti-Jewish stuff going on around COVID. It’s a sign of something deep happening to America for the first time. And if you understand that, look, a vote for Trump, it took the New York Times quite a few years after Trump’s even win to seriously begin to explore why someone would vote Trump. And that’s a strange thing, right? Because generally, think that the coastal elites, but also the tens of millions of Democrats in America had a lot of trouble understanding why someone would vote Trump. And they missed this enormous destabilization and rupture that is happening in America that is driving many changes.
One of them, one of these rebellions is this brand new antisemitism that’s back. So, Americans are absolutely right to have no idea what this is about, to not be able to predict it because they had never experienced it. They weren’t missing it, they weren’t naive. And they’re right now to think that there’s now something there that’s new in the American experience.
Noam: Let me step in from a listener perspective. So my friends who are from the former Soviet Union or from other parts of North Africa and the Middle East, they laugh.
They laugh at us. They’re like, what’s wrong with you? Do you really think that there’s some carve out of Jewish history that is different in the United States of America? There is an ontological reality, folks, that what you just said, Haviv, that Manuela taught you that there are reasons why these sorts of things happen throughout Jewish history.
And I’m reminded of, I think it was Rabbi Yehuda Amital, the former head of the Yeshiva of Har Etzion in the Gush, in the West Bank, who lamented the fact that every single time Zionist people got upset about antisemitism in the world and that there was antisemitism that drove their Zionism. He’s like, you silly? Do you really think that there’s not going to be antisemitism? You thought Zionism would kibosh antisemitism? There will always be antisemitism. That’s not why you need Zionism. Zionism is a value in and of itself not related to antisemitism. That can’t be what drives your Zionism.
So I’m wondering how the two of you think about that point. Like you said Americans haven’t been lulled into it, but if the rest of world history, when you look at Addis Ababa and you look at Kiev and you look at all other places throughout the world, yeah, come on. Have you two not experienced friends who have said to you Americans have been so naive?
Haviv: Yeah, I I’m Israeli. I mean, everyone I know thinks Americans are naive. But I think they’re wrong. I don’t think Americans are naive. I think Americans are facing something genuinely new in their experience. And the Jews for whom this isn’t new don’t understand that everything American Jews have experienced in a century…goes against what’s happening now.
So it’s too easy to dismiss American Jewish surprise as naivete. It’s not naivete. But nevertheless, it is surprise and this thing is here and this thing is, by the way, imported, ironically, both through certain immigrant groups from the global south, we’ll call it, the Muslim world, where a version of European antisemitism actually survived, and we have polls of Muslim countries that you don’t want to know about because it’ll make you very sad and frustrated, where these ideas very much survived throughout the 20th century and have come in.
And we have it also coming in, in a slightly different form through all kinds of ideological elites that have brought in a lot of the ideas of various offshoots of Marxism about essentially about how all things are power structures and all things are class structures and there are, you know, enemies always everywhere in these structures and all history can be explained in this simple way and they’re always enemies. Now you don’t have to think that the Jews are the enemy, you can think that the rapacious billionaire capitalist is the enemy. But some of them will land on the Jews.
Are these ideological codes and this ideological reasons. I think it’s worth, before just saying, before talking about what Americans are surprised, it’s worth talking about the history of it. One of the things that I think really shocks American Jews is the why. What the hell is antisemitism? How can normal people, normative people really fall for this stuff? Where does it come from?
Noam: So I want you guys to define. So I want you to define what, okay.
Haviv: Why is it powerful?
Mijal: But before we define it, I respond to something about the name? I want to maybe just add to…
Noam: Yeah, please, please. At my dinner table, everyone’s allowed to interrupt no matter what. That’s how my dinner table works, so go for it.
Mijal: I love your dinner table now. Well, you’ve never actually invited me to the real dinner table. So don’t know how real this is, but I’m going to. Yeah. Yeah. It’s like, all, it’s all like, you know.
Haviv: Me neither, the way, Mijal, we’re both outcasts here.
Noam: My God. This is the second time you two have come at me. All right, it’s all a farce. I’ma tease, I’ma tease. That’s what I am. Okay, go on.
Haviv: We’re just, keep hinting. don’t know how much we have to hint.
Mijal: It’s terrible. Terrible. Yeah. Yeah. I want to say two things. I do think that we can talk about the last few years, maybe the last decade, and say that there have been many moments in which we American Jews have been almost like naive in the sense that we have been slow to catch on. Right. But, but I believe this is new. Like, I don’t believe that we can say, for the last, the historians often talk about like the 1960s as the year in which American Jews negotiated what Eric Goldstein would call like a white identity and have higher social capital.
Noam: Who’s Eric Goldstein?
Mijal: Eric Goldstein is a historian, I believe based at Emory. He wrote the most authoritative book on Jews, race and whiteness. Him and many other historians would often say that, you know, Haviv described how in the twenties and thirties there was rising antisemitism and anti-nativism across America. And then it’s almost like in the 1960s, and I’m being a little bit loose here, that American Jews social capital begins to go up. That’s when we have rising intermarriage, not because Jews suddenly wanted to marry non-Jews, but because non-Jews suddenly were open to marrying Jews. So there’s a shift there.
So going back to your question, Noam, two things. Number one, I agree with Haviv that we can’t look backward and say, you know, American Jews have always been naive. But I do think that the reason people are thinking about it now is in the last 10 years or so, again, we can quibble over the exact years, but too many Jews have waited too long, have trusted too much, have given too many chances, have been too naive when they have seen too many signs from the right and the left about antisemitism. So I would agree with that critique of recent naivete that I think is part of this process of disillusionment.
The second thing I want to say is that I think Deborah Lipstadt has a metaphor in her book about antisemitism that I think is really instructive here. And let me take a step back. Historians are divided in the way they think about antisemitism. I would broadly classify them as those who believe antisemitism is a hatred like all other hatreds. So we can talk about racism, about antisemitism, about sexism. And those who say, there’s something unique about the way antisemitism functions, that we have to look at it in a very particular way.
So Deborah Lipstadt, when she talks about antisemitism, one of the metaphors that she gives is that it’s like, I hope I’m pronouncing this right, but it’s like the virus of herpes. Am I saying this right?
Noam: Nailed it. You nailed the herpes reference. Yes.
Mijal: Nailed it. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So from what I understand, what she means by this is that the virus is present in the biological organism. It’s present in the body, right? But it’s only when it’s under great stress, like Haviv was mentioning, society is suffering, that it will have an outbreak. So that to me, I found that an important metaphor because it helps explain kind of like the way you were saying, Noam, like the presence that it has had, how resilient it’s been across time and space. But it also helps explain the fact that when there isn’t stress upon the organism, almost like quiets and goes away. So I think there’s something there that I find really helpful to think with about both the eternal presence, but not always the eternal manifestation.
Noam: I just came up with a great new slogan to stop antisemitism. Want herpes? No, me neither. So stop antisemitism.
Haviv: I think you nailed it. think that was it. We’re done here.
Noam: Haviv, I think that’s it, right? We’re gonna end it just like, you don’t want herpes, you don’t want antisemitism. That’s a great outcome of this conversation. I think that’s it. Okay, but beyond the conversation about herpes and antisemitism.
Mijal: You should have that as a t-shirt in your airport, you know.
Haviv: So that’s it, we’re done, right? We’re all set.
Noam: I want you to talk to me like a 10-year-old. I find when we talk about what antisemitism is, this is part of the problem.What constitutes antisemitism? I just go to the conferences and this big scholar gets up and they say, I’m gonna define for you what antisemitism is.
And people start like taking notes. And they’re like, here’s what antisemitism is. I now know what it is. And I look at that and I’m like, wait, wait, that’s the problem. That’s part of the, we have to like struggle with coming up with a definition. Mijal just gave us the two different schools of thought within the historical world, within the historian’s worlds. What is antisemitism? Could you just give me a way to just conceptualize it and help me understand it? Go for it.
Haviv: Sure, on one leg as the Talmud says. So even what Mijal quoted from Deborah Lipstadt has this suggestion that there’s something essentialist, that it’s built into Western society or Eastern, Islam or Christianity, or that it will never not go away, it’s part of the curse of the Jews in exile, it’s, you know…The Jews talk about it this way and I think they should be allowed to talk about it that way because it certainly feels that way.
But we actually know what antisemitism is and we know a tremendous amount about it and there’s something different between antisemitism and other hatreds. And it sometimes operates the same, but it sometimes has these unique features that are unique to antisemitism. It begins in a very particular place and a particular time. And all antisemitism since then is part of this same lineage.
And that beginning really is basically religious and it is Christianity. There was some anti-Jewishness in the Roman Empire. There was some Yuck Jews among the Egyptians in the ancient world, but it really begins as a system of thought in Christianity. And the reason is, in early, early Christianity, it’s very obvious. The Messiah came, the Son of God, to fulfill the Jews’ own narrative of redemption, their own story of redemption. And guess what? The Jews did not accept it.
And that’s a huge gaping hole at the heart of early Christianity that Christians were constantly worried about and thinking about. And when you read, for example, St. Augustine, who is famously this brilliant, fascinating philosopher from Carthage, what is today basically Tunisia, who writes all about love and all about universal love and then suddenly he gets to the Jews and he says we must oppress them for all time as a sign to my people, to Christians. They rejected Christ and they’re going into exile and they have to suffer in that exile until the coming of Christ or their own acceptance of Christ.
You don’t get more fundamental, foundational infrastructure kind of Christianity than St. Augustine. And these ideas remain and they constantly come back. And you see it in the Crusades when Crusaders are headed to the Holy Land. Everybody knows about the kingdoms in the Holy Land. Everybody knows about the Christian-Muslim wars and Saladin and all of that. But on the way to the Holy Land, the Crusaders again and again and again massacre the Jews they find there.
And the very first crusade, the People’s Crusade, which is actually crusade number zero because they only officially count crusades from the following year when the first crusade went out, but there were tens of thousands of, I think it was 1096, right after the call by the Pope, I think, but look it up, I don’t remember exactly, but–
Noam: 1096, 1096.
Haviv: Yes. But that first crusade was basically a bunch of peasants and they make it, I think, 20 miles into Muslim territory where a Seljuk cavalry army just destroys them, wipes them out.
They’re not a very successful crusade. They’re a bunch of peasants. But on their way down the Rhine to the Holy Land, they massacre probably a third of all the Jews on the cities of the Rhine. And as they’re massacring them, they say out loud, and we have diaries and we have memoirs from this, and they say out loud, you rejected Christ and I have to kill you. So this is an antisemitism that is deeply embedded in Christianity.
In the Quran, you have a not dissimilar process. Early Muhammad has this relationship with Jews where he’s essentially trying to get them to join him and institutes all kinds of customs and rituals that are very well known, they’re part of Islam today, that are modeled off of, now, they officially inside Islam, these are of course part of the revelation of God and what you’re supposed to do, and the Jewish version is a fake version that the Jews, that Islam is not favorable to Jews. It thinks Jews basically got a revelation but then lied about it.
By the way, all monotheistic religions have to think all the other ones are basically lies, otherwise they’re wrong, But early Muhammad tries to bring the Jews on board. Later Muhammad, at least based on the hadiths that we have and the stories about him that come after him, is viciously anti-Jewish. Viciously wants to murder the Jews and destroy the Jews and the end times come when the Jews are killed. Or in the end times the Jews will be killed by the great faithful. And so you have in the Quran these texts that are very kind of pro, you know, a Jewish minority, pro-people, you can’t convert by force in Islam, the Quran, but also murder all the Jews and at the end of days the Jews will all be killed by all the believers.
And both of these things exist. Now, it’s the same fundamental process of we took these fundamental ideas from the Jews, monotheism, let’s say, and the Jews didn’t convert. So their existence is a standing rebuke, early Muslims felt, to the truth of our revelation.
Long story short, in the 19th, 20th centuries, this religious antisemitism with deep religious roots basically becomes ideological and racial. In other words, Karl Marx secularizes, but this foundational concept, I’m sorry this has gone on so long, I’ll finish up.
But it starts by people who say the Jews should take our religion instead of their own and if they don’t then they are critiquing and undermining our religion because their religion flows from the Jewish religion and that’s the heart of it. That’s the beginning of it. And these ideas secularize in the 19th century. And so Marx hates Jews because he has this class sense that all history is class war. All history is about capital and control of capital. And there is a group, what Thomas Sowell called mediator minorities, that is essentially all capital. I mean, the Jews were a minority that by law, by the laws of the ghetto, by the laws that would be overturned in emancipation, can only live in certain places, can only work in certain professions.
And so they become money changers and they become people who move things around stuff that Christians don’t want to be or can’t be easily. And they become, have relationships with each other in different places in Europe across national boundaries. And so they’re interlopers everywhere and they don’t live and are part of the local place everywhere. Jews live for centuries and centuries in the Russian empire and the Russian empire never saw them as Russians. Ditto Poland, ditto Germany, ditto right everywhere, France.
And, and so you have this, this racialization, everything secularizes, but the basic idea of the Jews, when universalist progressivism comes in, whether it’s communist or sort of modern western progressivism, the Jews are not universalist. The Jews are anti-homogenization. The Jews want to stay Jews, and that’s a critique of universalism. And so that’s friction. And the nationalists rise up in the 19th century and in the early 20th century with the fall of the great empires, the multi-ethnic empires, the Russian empire, the, you know, Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, these new nationalisms come up.
Well, the Jews are not any of the specific nation. They’re, yeah, they might have been there longer than that nation is identified as a nation, but nevertheless, they are outsiders, strangers in this land. And so the Jews are always something else. They fall between the cracks of the universalist nationalist argument in the 19th and 20th centuries. And then we get to today.
And over the course of the 20th century, you have all these totalitarian regimes. Ruth Weiss, Professor Ruth Weiss talks about this a lot. For example, the Jews are this minority that you can deflect problems onto, and they’re too weak to fight back. So why the hell not? There’s no cost to it. So you have Arab dictators in the 1950s, right? They’re newly decolonized, and the Arab states could have massively developed, just like in East Asia. Many states decolonized and massively developed. But they needed deflection from their own failures and their own weaknesses.
And there were these Jews. And so they just developed, they organized Arab politics around the destruction of Israel, around the talking about that. When the Egyptian state radio talked about the destruction of Israel in the 50s, they talked about Jews. They did not talk about Zionists or, you know, the state itself or everybody having citizenship everywhere, universalism.
Anyway, I’ll just finish. This stuff has now made it into aggressive universalist higher, sort of elite academia in the United States. And a lot of these basic models are there. The idea that Israel oppresses Palestinians, for example, through military rule in the West Bank is an entirely legitimate conversation and there’s a real problem and it is kosher and not ever in any way antisemitic to come to Jews and say, hey, let’s talk about Israel and the problems and the injustices. The idea, which is always attached to it in elite academic discourse, that the entirety of the Middle East would magically fix itself if only the Jews stop being evil, is classic antisemitism. The early Christian idea is that the Jews, by rejecting Christ, stand in the way of the redemption of the world.
And Marx looks at Jews and says, these are the globalist, you know, capitalists who stand in the way of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the universalism that will result after it and therefore stand in the way of the redemption of the world. Hitler looked at the Jews and said, these are the conspiracies, whether from right or left, that stand in the way of the redemption of the world.
And now there’s this conversation about Zionism, where when you go to the Columbia campus and you see a t-shirt that says, everything is Palestine, police violence in St. Louis is Palestine, climate injustice or whatever, inequality in income, all is Palestine, ultimately all things are intersectional with all other things, so focus on Palestine, what they mean is Zionism and what they mean by Zionism, and they might not even know they mean it because they don’t know any of this history, is Jews. The Jews once again stand in the way of the history of the world.
So the idea, and this is foundational, and you heard it in the State Department for 50 years, the Arabs cannot develop and the Arabs cannot move forward and the Arabs cannot become competent states because there’s this irritant of Palestine just stuck in Arab discourse and Arab psych- Bullshit. The irritant is the idea that the Jews stand in the way of the redemption of the world. So antisemitism is this one thing.
Incidentally, if you have a Jewish neighbor who is terrible and you dislike him and from disliking him you say because I don’t know why he stole your cow imagining a Talmudic thing I don’t know if anyone has a cow today in America’s suburbs but you say all those Jews are greedy that’s not antisemitism that’s just this banal prejudice that you could have against any neighbor against the Irish against the Italians against your black neighbor that is not the unique thing of antisemitism if you come to the conclusion that the Jews somehow keeps you down and stands in the way of the redemption of the world, Mazel Tov, now you’re an antisemite.
Noam: That was a sweeping history, a sweeping history of antisemitism. Mijal, I wanna know, do you wanna add anything to that? yeah?
Mijal: Maybe I’ll just add two things. Well, first of all, for your question, Noam, I do think I want to acknowledge that it’s a very complicated question for parents about how to speak about this to our kids. I’ve had to figure out how to speak with my 8-year-old about this and how much to share with him.
I’ve gone in different directions. Sometimes I’ve spoken about envy, when you have a small group that does certain things, because that makes a lot of sense to him. And sometimes I’ve made it sound illogical. And yeah, I’m just naming that in my mind.
Maybe the other thing I would add, it’s interesting, Haviv, so you just made a distinction between what you’re calling just like good old prejudice against the other and the unique aspect of antisemitism that is conspiratorial in which Jews stand in the way of redemption. I would add here just an additional layer to what you said, and it aligns in some ways and not others. I think that we can also divide antisemitism between those who hate Jews qua Jews, you know what I mean? Like it’s like, you’re Jewish, doesn’t really matter what you say or do, and those who hate like Judaism. Which means, I’m just naming this because partially it explains the phenomenon of anti-Zionist Jews, in my opinion, which means for some people, Jews can be redeemed if they go against Judaism. So for those folks in Columbia, Haviv, with those t-shirts, I’m assuming if you join them and you say Israel is evil, then they would kind of say, okay, now you’ve been redeemed. You’ve converted. And for others, it doesn’t matter. It’s just like a Jew is a Jew is a Jew, doesn’t matter what you say. Some have compared this to like the Purim model, the Hanukkah model.
Noam: What are those models?
Mijal: Yeah. Purim model, you can say, Haman didn’t care what any Jew thought or said. There was no escape. It’s kind of like the racial model in which the Nazis did not care what you said, what you thought. If you have Jewish ancestry, you will be liable for that.
The Hanukkah model argues here a lot of Christian antisemitism has been this way, is a model in which, you know, if Jews became Hellenized, right, they were able to escape persecution. It was about giving, about forcing Jews to give up what I would argue is Judaism. Again, that can be debatable by historians. For many Jews across history with Christianity, with some exceptions, like, you know, in Spain with the Pudesa de Sangre laws, like laws around racial purity, blood purity. But most often, if Jews converted to Christianity, they got to get out of jail free card. So they were able to escape antisemitism by rejecting Judaism.
So to me, that’s also a really important distinction that helps us understand the pressures we’re facing. And I would argue that part of what’s complicated about this moment in America is that we are seeing a resurgence of both simultaneously. And that’s partially what is confusing about this moment, which is why Noam, we’re bickering. And last thing I’ll say is the bickering gives me a little bit of hope. Like as long as we are bickering this intensely, things have not gotten so bad. You know, if we can sit around and write papers and like argue, it means that as Haviv said, we’re still the strongest Jews in history and that we can still think about taking this on.
Noam: So I want to jump off of that point. Here’s what I heard so far. I heard your descriptions of antisemitism and I thought it’s really interesting that here’s who you described in the conversation of antisemitism. You described the extreme right, the Tucker Carlsons of the world. You described the universalists and the extreme left and the, you know, what’s taking over aspects of academia. You’ve spoken about the Muslim antisemitism that has been totally ingrained from the very beginning. You spoke about Christian antisemitism. You spoke about Marxist type of antisemitism, national antisemitism, all different types of antisemitism, meaning every single, every single, there’s nothing political here. You’re talking about the antisemitism that exists universally, pervasively.
You also said something interesting, Haviv. You said like, it’s okay, by the way, to be upset about the policies that Israeli government and the Israeli army has with Palestinians in the West Bank. That’s not being antisemitic. Here’s how you framed everything so far. I want you now to help me as the guy who just gave you some awesome appetizers and now is bringing out the main dish. I want to know, is there precedent in Jewish history that could allow us to think that, you know what, there is a good way to respond to all of this? Like, what do you think about that? Is there a precedent in Jewish history, and are you confident we could take this moment on?
Haviv: Every single part of this moment has happened before. All of it, except for one part. In 1144 in a town called Norwich, Norwich in Britain. A young boy was found dead and nobody quite knew, authorities didn’t know who had killed him. And a priest, a Catholic priest who was born a Jew and converted to Christianity named Theobald of Cambridge came forward and said, I was born a Jew. I want to tell you that the Jews conspire every year to kill a Christian boy for their ceremonies, and William died through this. The Jews draw lots in France every year to do it. And the local authorities didn’t believe him because everybody knew the Jews. They were sitting around, everybody could see them. That sounds a little crazy, but the story spread and it spread like wildfire. And over the next few centuries, Jews would be massacred more or less routinely because of this blood libel that the Jews conspire each year to kill Christian children and it changed a little bit to put their blood in matzot to you know, was many children and sometimes one children but the idea was born with a Jew and it was born with a specific kind of Jew desperate to escape what people don’t understand about the ideology of Zionism of antisemitism and I want to get to Zionism as a response the ideology of antisemitism is that it is powerful and it is psychologically intense and living under it is exhausting
And so you have now, a turn of this antisemitic idea to Zionism. This happened in the Muslim world very early on. The Jews and Zionism are the source of all failure in the Muslim world and in the Arab world especially. And this isn’t all Muslims. This isn’t maybe even most Muslims, but we have data on this. I mean, when you ask about global conspiracies run by the Jews and you poll that question in Algeria, you will get more than 90% agreeing that there’s global conspiracies by Jews to keep the Arab down and to control the world. And that’s true throughout so many parts of the Muslim world, even the parts of the Muslim world that have no Jews in them. And so this idea that the Jews stand in the way of our redemption and the Jews who experience it can’t live under it. Herzl was so bothered by this intensive rising antisemitism in Vienna, the election of a mayor on an antisemitic platform, get rid of the Jews of Vienna was his platform in 1896, I think.
Noam: Karl Luger? Karl Luger, right?
Haviv: Yeah, Karl Luger, yep. Herzl early on said, look, guys, there’s a solution to antisemitism. What if we all just convert? He literally said, what if all the Jews walk into the public square of Vienna and on mass convert to Catholicism? And he went to Zionism when he realized even that won’t work. The Inquisition in Spain was not against Jews. It was against converts to Catholicism who we can’t really trust because we all know that Jews are secretly, right? The Inquisition was about checking conversos and seeing if they’re actually really truly Christian or secretly still Jewish in their homes.
And so there is no thing the Jews can do, the Zionists argue, to escape it. therefore the only escape from being this cartoon character in the morality play running around in the antisemites head is to go away and be our own thing in our own place. That essentially is the Zionist argument.
Now all other Jews in the Eastern Hemisphere are dead, right? The Hebrew speaking Zionists of Israel the last living Jews in the Eastern Hemisphere the only place in the world where Jews did not either leave en masse or die en masse is the English speaking world and so when I say things like the Jews of America were right, they were right that they were safe and nobody knows why there’s no Zionist theory that explains why America didn’t turn on its Jews or Canada didn’t turn on his Jews when everyone else on earth remembered to turn on their Jews, only the English speakers forgot. So there’s an extraordinary and strange history in America, in the English speaking world generally, and there’s the Zionists, and those are the only two Jews who survived the 20th century.
And so, you know, looking forward, I think that when the discourse about Zionism now, and the fact that this is all back, our societies are being destabilized, all of them are being destabilized by social media algorithms, by, by cable news 40 years ago, I mean, that was driving in the United States and in Britain and everywhere else, polarization. By an economic world nobody understands anymore because everything has become digital value doesn’t make any sense. What does Google produce that it’s worth hundreds of billions? You know what mean? Like this whole world has seemed to gotten out of the hands of people.
Noam: Is this the hopeful part? Is that the hopeful part what you just said?
Haviv: No way. I mean, what’s driving the antisemitic spread now of these old, old ideas that really Americans never were interested in? And the answer is that you have engagement algorithms on social media that favor extreme content. The more extreme, the better. You have anonymity on social media that makes socially unacceptable things perfectly easily, you know, decentralized and distributed. You have virality that decontextualizes a critique of Israel into just a critique of child murdering.
How many people say Israel child murders? People who didn’t give a flying about Yemen, the Yemeni war starving 85,000 children to death six years ago, they talk constantly on the internet and repeat as a refrain about the child murdering Israelis. So you have, yeah.
Mijal: Haviv, can I ask something though? One of your first statements in our conversation was to say, we are still the strongest Jews in history and we are going to take this on or we can take this on. And I have my own feelings around this, many of them inspired by religious perspectives. But I’m curious for you, when you say we are the strongest Jews in history and we can take this on. What informs you saying this? Are you drawing from historical precedents in which Jews have taken this on? What are the theories or sense of knowledge that draw you?
Haviv: So there are two parts.
The first step is to say, this is real. And your anxiety and your fear is not stupid and not shallow and not just Jewish reaction to, classically Jewish reaction because you haven’t gotten with the program. And if you were a young person, you’d understand. The first thing is to say, what is now happening, the virality of this antisemitism, because it’s ideological code and not an argument, it’s not producing any text. All it’s producing is memes and the memes are flooding our lives everywhere. And if you’re a young person right now on TikTok, you’re constantly facing the taunts, the quips, the pictures, you know, all this viral stuff and it’s about Jews and it’s about Zionism and it always, always tilts into Jews. The anger is at part of the anger is at Jewish strengths. In other words, the part, the place where anti-Zionism and antisemitism intersect is in the idea that Jews don’t get to claim victimhood, even if they’re hated, right? There’s this idea that progressives advanced that, what do you do if you’re a progressive who thinks about the Black Lives Matter movement and you discover that it isn’t just white people or Asian people or Latino people who sometimes are racist, also black people can sometimes be racist.
And they developed an ideological answer. And the ideological answer is that racism is prejudice plus power. In other words, you’re not a racist if you don’t have the power to execute. Racism becomes something real and dangerous and ideological only if it’s embedded in the power structure. And so if you want to take away the power of antisemitism, the Jewish claim to victimhood as these ideas advance now in the elites, you just say the Jews are powerful. Now, how do we know they’re powerful? Zionism, how do we know they’re powerful? Right? So, antisemitism always claims massive Jewish power, but there’s a difference, and here’s the difference. Now there’s massive Jewish power. Now, if they come for us, they want to say… The problem with antisemitism isn’t that it’s going to hurt Jews. The problem with antisemitism is that it is both a signal and a driver of massive decline and collapse in your society.
Mijal: So that’s number one to admit that this is happening.
Haviv: What academia has allowed to fester and everywhere where you find these ideas, you also find a total monoculture. All the professors all agree with each other because this is a moral religion rather than an academic setting with discussions. For example, you have anti-Zionist Jews like Professor Sholem Magid, who was just hired by Harvard Divinity School to be an anti-Zionist Jewish scholar at Harvard Divinity School.
Mijal: Are we going there?
Haviv: Let’s go there. Harvard Divinity School is a monoculture. You can only think one way and then be at Harvard Divinity School.
Noam: Is he an anti-Zionist or non-Zionist?
Mijal: I’ve worked with Shaul for many years when I was at Hartman. I don’t believe he would describe himself as an anti-Zionist. in his latest book, The Necessity of Exile, he’s against the way that Zionism has been, what he argues, co-opted into Judaism. ⁓ But he distinguishes between Zionism and pro-Israelism.
But I wouldn’t call him a Zionist. And I would say that there’s a lot of anti-Zionists that use his research and his work for their aims.
Noam: Do you see that differently?
Haviv: What Harvard Divinity School wants from him, okay, is to have a scholarly Jew with serious scholarship who comes down anti-Zionist. That’s what they want from him. That is his role. And that’s a signal of a monoculture because Rabbi Wolpe left and kind of had to leave. And so the exchange of a Wolpe for a Magid is basically the story of how you police this kind of ideological monoculture in the American elites.
Mijal: And he’s a serious scholar, we should say that.
Haviv: The point is this stuff is exactly what it’s always been. But there’s a difference, which is that Jews can shrug it off. Jews can look at it and say, screw you. And Jews can actually stand up and say, there are no more bad endings. So if you guys want to decline in this way, if you guys want to go insane in this way, feel free to, we no longer have to worry about it. When Vienna organized itself around antisemitism in the 1890s, Vienna began a slow decline into Nazism. But if that happens today, the Jews no longer have to be terrified because they have somewhere to go.
Noam: So your answer is that Zionism is a great antidote to antisemitism. Walter Russell Meade, also a great historian writer, makes the argument that the number one problem in antisemitism is it leads to the decline in the corrosion of your own society. And that’s why it’s an incredibly dangerous thing for society.
But Mijal, I want you to just share with me just a last thought, you just wrote a really compelling piece in the Free Press. And I want to know if there’s anything in that article that relates to our conversation that you want to share or help us just wrap this conversation up with.
Mijal: Yeah, I wrote about the work of a scholar called Simon Rawidowicz, who one of the essays that he wrote have kind of like been obsessed with for like the last decade, was a philosopher, historian. He grew up in Poland and Germany and then got to go to England in 1930s. And from there, like watching the Holocaust, watching his in-laws being murdered.
And he wrote this magnificent essay that was probably a lecture beforehand in which he speaks about the freedom to be different. You know, it’s awesome. Read the whole thing. We’ll put the link to my own article in the show notes. But maybe just for this conversation, I’ll tease out a couple of things.
For him, the explanation for antisemitism is really hatred or fear or intolerance of difference. That whenever there is a people or a group that is different, they’re going to be kind of like hated by others. He also writes about the illusion that many Jews have had that you can escape antisemitism by putting away your difference. The other thing that he writes, which I find very powerful, is he’s almost like demanding a certain Jewish, he doesn’t say the word Jewish pride, but basically saying own your difference. Don’t be afraid of it, even if they’re murdering you. It’s worthwhile. It’s what makes you you. It’s fabulous.
And you know, in addition to what you’re saying, Haviv, you just spoke about I think what you articulated is Jewish power as a response to antisemitism, or at least, you know, holding on to Jewish power and not needing to be liked as long as we can have power to protect ourselves. Rawidowicz adds to this a sense of Jewish mission, of actually knowing who we are and knowing that we stand for something that the world really, really needs, which to me is almost like the religious response to antisemitism.
Going back now to your question about like, what am I telling my 8 year old?
A lot of the response that I have seen in many places is that we have to confront this on the one hand through power and policy. And on the other hand, through doubling down and telling our children that what they have is magnificent and is precious and has survived thousands and thousands of years across the globe. And it gives us an amazing, amazing life and not to let kind of like the rise in antisemitism take away from that, that amazing legacy that we have. So that’s something that I’m holding on to right now.
I will say just one more thing. The question that I think is up in the air for many people and Haviv, it’s something that neither you nor I kind of like touched on. But a big question that exists like in the social media policy world, like in the fighting against antisemitism world is, is there any strategy that can change hearts and minds? Right? Because when we speak about power, we’re speaking about like policy, safety, resources, security, right? A way to kind of like fight back. We speak about religious responses, we’re talking about identity and pride.
A big, big question that is debated right now is between those, let’s say like Robert Kraft, who invested millions and millions of dollars on different ads. But let’s not focus on the ads, just like the logic underneath it, which says, if we just told our story better, if we just had the right programming, we can change hearts and minds.
And between those who say, we’re not changing hearts and minds, you know, the virus is spreading and the only thing we can do is strengthen ourselves and strengthen our way to protect ourselves from that virus.
Haviv: Can I just, I wanna just say one last thing on Shalom Maggid because I think this is the clarifying point, which is about elite antisemitism and how these ideas of the Jews standing in the way of redemption get into these spaces that theoretically shouldn’t be susceptible to them.
I will allow him to respond of course and share his response if I’m mistaken on social media or whatever. My understanding of his argument, he calls it counter-Zionism I think, not anti-Zionism. Basically, he argues that Israel should have been created because it was a necessary response, because there was this massive persecution and all the Jews were dying, right?
Now, to me, that’s it, we’re done. The debate about Zionism is over. He’s a Zionist. He just said it. But then he says, but Zionist ideology or Zionist ideas evolved into a very repressive and illiberal and unequal Israel. Now, why isn’t that just a liberal Zionist who says we need Zionism, but Israel has problems that we have to fix, including serious problems we disagree with in Israeli society?
And the answer, of course, that, how shall I put this? I really apologize for being flippant, but it is. He’s a liberal Zionist, but he can’t say he’s a liberal Zionist because in his social circles, that’s not okay. And so he then has this massive Jewish concept of, know, exile and exilism and diasporicism and how Judaism was really born in a deep sense in exile and all this stuff. And it’s all fascinating. It’s all interesting. It’s all kind of cool to learn.
But this is someone who gets the point. Like when I come in and I say, you can’t be an anti-Zionist, all the other Jews are dead. And he knows that. Then yet he still needs to find a way. There’s counter-Zionism versus anti-Zionism, right? He still needs to find a way to fit in. That’s the story of the entirety of the Jewish elites of Europe right up until the Holocaust. American Jews are actually peasants. The great grandchildren of peasants who fled because all the Jewish elites stayed in Europe through all the collapse into antisemitism. So elites have a much harder time seeing this because they are much more invested in social capital that elitism gives. And so they’re kind of stuck there.
My reading of Jewish anti-Zionist intellectuals in America today and the young activists who follow them is exactly that, is that old story of, you and I hope America never goes so antisemitic that they’ll be proven mistaken because that’s what happened to Europe.
But here’s the point about Zionism. The hatred of Jews used to be functionally because they were weak. They were really useful. Ruth Wissue talks about this. You could turn on them and there’d be no cost. They couldn’t do anything to you in response. The hatred of Jews today, especially the hatred of Zionism, is no longer serves that function because, for example, in the Arab world, hatred of Israel and hatred of Zionism, the Jews suddenly hit back hard. In other words, it began as this excuse for our problems and mistakes, and we dump it all on the Jews, and we say that as soon as we destroy the Jews, everything will be fixed in the Middle East. But encountering the Jewish army in the desert and losing to it in the great tank battles of the 50s and 60s, instead of covering over our internal weaknesses, rendered them in much greater relief. The Jews’ power actually ruined the usefulness of the antisemitism.
So now we’re locked into this antisemitic thing, but also can’t look away from it. And so there’s a rage now and an overwhelming sense of the need to actually show that we’re not as weak as we are by actually destroying the Jews that kept the Arab political world locked into this anti-Israelism, deeply destructive anti-Israelism for generations and progressives now in a completely different way, but a way that rhymes a little bit.
They want a universalism that the Jews betray. And so as long as Jews remain coherent, as long as they remain unified, as long as they remain a kind of other that doesn’t plug into the universalist and power matrices and all these ideologies that the progressive left has, they will continue to defy. And the social ostracism that they’re trying to deploy, especially against young Jews on college campuses, won’t work for all of them. And so there will always be this thing that they can’t.
And so the, the Jews are powerful today. American Jews are the largest, most organized, most wealthy, most influential diaspora community there’s ever been. And they live in an America that still profoundly and almost entirely welcomes them, and not just welcomes them, feels their part and parcel of America’s own self. And so the antisemitism in the Arab world, that version of it, encountered Jews who do not get rolled over anymore, don’t get massacred on the way to the Holy Land. They will fight and they will fight hard and they will fight better than you.
And your very weaknesses that drive your antisemitism are why the Jews will ‘. And the antisemitism of that elite kind that existed in Europe and has been imported by some American elites is encountering also, I think, Jewish communities that are waking up in a massive way. You have double digit percentages, different polls showed in different ways of Jewish college students going back to Jewish institutions on campus that they were never gonna go to, 30% of American Jews, something like that, say they became October 8 Jews, they became Jews who came back to a sense of Jewish community and looking for Jewish institutions and communities. So antisemitism has gone all wrong. Zionism hacked history and antisemitism now makes Jews stronger instead of weaker. And that’s, think, the fundamental thing to know about this moment.
Noam: Mijal, you’re someone who’s worked closely with Professor Shaul Magid. I don’t know him personally. I want to know a very quick take from you on this.
Mijal: Yeah, I’ll just say it’s awkward because I think I don’t like talking about people who are not kind of like here to respond. And Shaul, I worked with him for nearly a decade. He was very generous with me, mentor in many ways. And he’s somebody whose scholarship I have learned a lot from and he’s a very generous person. I’ve never had like he loves being a Jew and Judaism and has a certain sense of that Israel that
Noam: Love of Israel, love of the Jewish people.
Mijal: A lot of people in the anti-Zionist camp don’t have. I don’t, know, Haviv, don’t think, I think that his work in Meir Kahane shows that he’s not a liberal Zionist. He believes that Zionism is almost like poisoned from like its inception. It would always end in Meir Kahane. It’s almost like he rejects the possibility of the, you know, I think you’re saying that he’s saying that, but doesn’t actually mean it. But I do believe he’s a true believer in that way. Even as I am, and I’m saying all this not to defend disappointment. I actually think that what Harvard did, I’m annoyed at Harvard here and angry at Harvard, is awful. A campus that has been very legitimately and plausibly shown to have allowed for antisemitism to fester and anti-Zionism to fester, to make such a prominent hire of somebody that Zionist students are not going to him to speak with.
And part of what just drives me nuts is that if you look at any other kind of like a minority group, whether religious or ethnic, a university would never have done that. So I just want to name that, and I think it’s a terrible thing what Harvard did. I think it’s perverse. I think it’s awful. I think it shows they don’t care. And it’s also a message.
Haviv: It’s a message to the Jews that they don’t get to be victims. What I’m hearing but also my own feeling so maybe I hope I’m not projecting, Mijal, to you, what you’re saying but it’s a message to Jews that they don’t get to be victims because in the in the power architecture of the progressive worldview they don’t get to be victims they’re white or whatever other word they use to describe people who don’t get to
Mijal: It’s either that ideologically, Haviv, or it’s like a practical political message of saying, we have money from Qatar. You know what I mean? We are going to almost like place our bet on like a different power source. And we are going to take this, like we’re going to strengthen our prestige and power by joining like an anti-Trump coalition, right? And fighting the president. And this is part of that. Like we don’t care about this. We are going in this one direction. It’s doubling down.
Noam: So there you have it. This is my conversation, my dinner table conversation with Haviv and Mijal. We have such chill dinner tables. It’s so awesome. It’s so awesome, but we have great food. We always have great food. We have great appetizers, great main course, and we’ll do dessert another time, folks. Dessert will be a different sort of conversation, but for now, we’re gonna leave this conversation where it is.
Such an intense, very real, very real authentic conversation that we just had about the history, the philosophy, the future of antisemitism, some major things that we just spoke about. So freaking awesome having this conversation. It was a heavy one, but my lord was it important. So thank you, Haviv, and I just want to say, Wondering Jews is a production of Unpacked, part of OpenDor Media. Today’s episode was hosted by me, Noam Weissman, and…
Mijal: and Mijal Bitton.
Noam: Yeah, the two of us. Our producers are Michael Weber and Rivky Stern.
Mijal: And we’d really love just to hear what this conversation sparked for you. I’m assuming all of our listeners or many of them or most of them you have thought about antisemitism and write to us. Tell us what you liked about this, what you disagreed with and what future question you want us to consider. You can find us on social at WonderingJews. You can email us at WonderingJews@unpacked.media. Also just want to give another shout out to Haviv and to Haviv’s podcast, Ask Haviv Anything. So subscribe, like follow both our podcasts, offer reviews and be in touch.
Noam: Yeah, we love that. So thanks so much. See you next week.
Haviv: Thank you.