David L. Bernstein
Ollie Anisfeld Interviews David Bernstein About his New Book, ‘Woke Antisemitism: How a Progressive Ideology Harms Jews’.
Ollie Anisfeld and David Bernstein - ‘Woke Antisemitism: How a Progressive Ideology Harms Jews’
- Hello everyone. I’m Ollie Anisfeld, friend of Lockdown University, and also run J-TV, an online Jewish channel, which you can find primarily on YouTube. The origins of this interview were that I was introduced to David Bernstein, who is our guest today, by one of my second cousins about six months ago, and I interviewed him on J-TV, and he was, without question, one of my favourite guests that I’ve interviewed in the seven years that I’ve been doing this. Just found him to be incredibly insightful and offering some really interesting commentary on an issue that’s so incredibly relevant today, so wanted to share his ideas with you. He’s recently come out with a book called “Woke Anti-Semitism: How a Progressive Ideology Harms Jews,” and we’re going to talk about that today. A bit of background on David. He’s the founder of the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values, which supports viewpoint diversity, counters radical ideologies within and beyond the Jewish community, and opposes novel forms of anti-Semitism, in this case, emerging from radical social justice ideology. David considers himself a progressive, and on the centre left of American politics, at least last time I checked. He served as President and CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, and as Executive Director of The David Project, which educates and trains college and high school students in pro-Israel advocacy. He’s also held senior roles with the American Jewish Committee. And let’s just jump right into this, this topic in your book. The first question is, let’s just clarify, for those who aren’t familiar with the term “woke.” First of all, if you’re not familiar with the term, I’d like to know what it’s been like living in a cave for the last four years, but if you’re not familiar with it, and for the avoidance of any doubt, could you first clarify and define what is this term and what does it come to mean and represent?
Yeah, it’s certainly been very provocatively discussed recently. There are people who think that the term is, in itself, prejudicial and pejorative and shouldn’t be used. If someone wants to come up with a better word that doesn’t trigger everyone, I’m all for it, but every time we come up with one, people find a way of getting triggered anyway, so you might as well stick with what we have right now. What is woke ideology? I believe it has two key tenets. One is that the belief, the perspective, that bias and oppression are not just a matter of one’s personal attitudes, but they’re embedded, ingrained in the very structured systems of society. They’re like in the air that we breathe. And the second core tenant is only those with lived experience of oppression have the standing to define that oppression for everybody else, so if you are white, you have really no business having a unique view on racism. If you’re a man, you really have no business having a unique view of misogyny, and so forth. Now, interestingly, I feel like both of those things can be true, they’re just not always true. So it can be true that bias and oppression is embedded in the very structures and systems of society. I mean, 1950’s Jim Crow America was a pervasively racist place, and I think it wasn’t just a matter of personal attitudes, it was structural in nature, and that doesn’t mean there’s no structural racism today, it just means it’s not always the case, and asserting it doesn’t make it so. And this idea of lived experience giving you the qualifications to define racism for society, I mean, I do think that people who experience oppression or bias or whatever do sometimes have a unique perspective. So a Jew who’s experienced anti-Semitism has something to say about it, but you know, I’m Jewish, I’ve experienced anti-Semitism, but there are other Jews who have experienced it differently or might have a different perspective, so my perspective can’t be the one and only perspective you listen to. And the other thing is, there’s other forms of data. There are other data points besides lived experience. So if the Pew Survey comes out with a another poll that, as they did in 2019, that shows that American Jews are the most admired religious community in the United States, that’s also a data point that I have to factor in when I think about anti-Semitism in America. So I think that these things have insights like from radical social justice ideology, woke ideology, there are insights to be found there, but they take what can be like a heuristic and turn it into some grand axiom that purports to explain all of reality, and I think that’s the problem with woke ideology and any ideology.
Right, right. And when did this woke viewpoint ideology perspective, what are its origins? How did it start? Who were the voices? What were the ideas? And also, how would you sort of characterise the progressive left, especially in America before that happened, and then what was the transition?
Yeah, so if you go back to, let’s say the late 1960’s, there was this new branch of sort of neo-Marxist ideology that was gaining ground and this idea of the long march through institutions, which was that we were going to, they were going to sort of start teaching activist ideology at the universities and slowly but surely move through, you know, the institutions, universities, and the like, and I have to say, it’s been extraordinarily effective, because yes, for a long time, the long march for institutions might have been confined in academia, but eventually, it escaped, and eventually it escaped to other institutions, and it became, you know, very highly influential. I don’t think that it was that popular up until, let’s say, you know, you start to really feel the weather changing in 2013, 2014, with the onset of the Black Lives Matter movement especially. And then some social media, like Tumblr for example, also ended up amplifying these messages. So you had this sort of confluence of, you know, the Black Lives Matter movement. You had new forms of social media. I think that it started to really break through at that point. Now, the American left, prior to that, I think, you know, while there are all, this has been around in various forms, political correctness before it, it wasn’t dominant and it wasn’t that, and the American left did not tend to be very descriptive in nature, ideological nature, so it was, growing up as a liberal in America, it was, you know, there were haves and have-nots, for sure, but no one had a theory as to why there were have-nots. We just thought, “Okay, some people have more than others, let’s help them.” We were agnostic about the reasons for it.
But this ideology as Marxism or post-colonial ideology believes that there are haves and have nots, and the haves cause the conditions of the have-nots. And that, and I always, by the way, I used to see that among my British and European friends, you know, growing up in college, that they tended to be more ideological than the American Jews that I knew really well, that they had a post-colonial perspective, which tended to, you know, hold, you know, this have, have not perspective, and so it was really only in the last 10 or so years that that’s become a dominant force in America, but it seems that as soon as it did, it became, like everything in America, it became, it became almost monopolistic, and so I think even though, I think, you know, Europe was ahead of us in that way or behind us, now, I think the United States is at a much higher level, and Canada.
Yeah, I would agree, I would agree. And before we now talk about woke anti-Semitism and your book, you touched on this, but it’s important to ask, is there any valuable insights that the woke view is giving us? You said it is raising certain moral, ethical issues, but you just think it takes it too far and it’s too generalised?
Yes, I think that is absolutely the truth. It is too, takes it too far, too generalised, but it, and you know, it’s an all-encompassing ideology. It pretends to be able to explain the entire world. So sometimes, you can take something, a unique insect, like the original understanding of intersectionality that being Black and a woman puts you at greater jeopardy than just being Black or just being a woman, and that our law didn’t account for that, and that our understanding of what people were going through didn’t account for this sort of intersectional reality. I mean, that’s an interesting insight. I think it’s probably true in certain circumstances. It just doesn’t explain all of reality, all of the world. So you take a heuristic and you turn it into a grand axiom, and I think that’s what we’ve witnessed happening. Again, the idea of critical theory, that bias is embedded in systems and not just a matter of personal attitudes, I think we use that mode of thinking a lot, like that’s a lens that I bring, and the way I think about anti-Semitism, as well, it’s just that it can’t be the final word on it. You know, Jonathan Hyde, the great social psychologist, likes to say that critical race theory is cuckoo, and by that he doesn’t mean crazy, but cuckoo like the cuckoo bird who kicks all the other birds’ eggs out of a nest, goes and takes over a nest, and kicks out all the other bird’s eggs, and I think that’s what we’ve seen, this critical theory not only has a theory, which is fine, where there’s a lot of theories, but tries to say, “We’re the only game in town.” That’s where it’s a problem.
Yeah, yeah. Very typical approach of my generation, the narcissism. Unbelievable. But tell us about woke anti-Semitism. This is what your book’s all about. What is it? How does it all manifest?
Yeah, so I’m arguing that this ideology, this oppression versus oppressed binary ideology, fuels anti-Semitism that always has existed on the left, it already exists on the left, but gives it very fertile ground to further expand and spread. So if you believe that there are oppressors and oppressed, by virtue of your identity, either you’re privileged or you’re oppressed, and that, in general, groups that are successful in nature, or above the mean, in let’s say educational achievement or in economic achievement, have gotten their success because they’re part of the oppressive dominant class, then what do you think is going to happen to Jews in that framework? Jews, on average, are successful, so they’re going to be viewed as the dominant class. They’re going to be viewed as complicit in white supremacy. They’re going to be viewed as white-adjacent in some circumstances. And the same for Israel, by the way. If your only way of understanding the moral good is based on who has power, then Israel compared to the Palestinians is going to look like the most powerful actor or Hamas or whoever. Even if Hamas is doing everything it can to create a war-like situation and to bombard Israeli population with missiles, Israel being the stronger party, will always look like it’s at fault. That’s what this ideology conditions you to think, and I think that’s really what we’re seeing is that you have an ideology that is conditioning our population, conditioning our youth, to think of the world in this very simplistic, binary ideology of who has power and who doesn’t, who the oppressors are, and who the oppressed are, who the victims are, who the victimizers are, and when you have that, Jews, because we’ve been relatively successful in the west, because Israel’s been a relatively successful country, are always going to be on the wrong side of the moral equation. I think that’s the main reason. There are other ways that it functions, you know, it can also sort of try to take the spotlight off of anti-Semitism altogether. There was a psychiatrist at Stanford University, at this clinic in Stanford, who was part of a diversity, equity, and inclusion discussion at Stanford.
His name is Ron Albucher, and during those discussions, he raised the anti-Semitism as an issue, because when there was this town hall meeting that was Zoom bombed with all this, with swastikas and the “N” word, the DEI people wanted to just talk about it as an act of racism, and he wanted to mention that there were swastikas and that’s usually associated with anti-Semitism, and he was told basically that he was taking the spotlight off of racism, that he was de-centering anti-Blackness. And so, you hear a lot of this nowadays, and I could give you several other examples of this, where any mention of anti-Semitism in the diversity conversation is viewed as an act of privilege by a privileged group like Jews who are not considered at-risk and are therefore taking the spotlight off of racism and anti-racism. And so I think that’s another way that this weakens us, and I could talk about other ways, as well. I mean, defining Jews as white, for example. You know, Jews are, in many ways, can be ethnically distinct and maybe just don’t want to be part of this idea of whiteness. They don’t have, that’s just not how they define themselves. Yet we’re being told that we are either white or white-passing, and that we must accept our complicity in white supremacy in order to be an ally. And again, that’s erasive of the Jewish experience and how we see ourselves very often.
Yeah, I often say that it’s so ironic, isn’t it, that for 2000 years, the Jewish people have been trying to tell the world to care about the oppressed and the underdog, and now finally, when they seem to start to start doing that, the Jews are no longer seen as in any way oppressed or vulnerable or an underdog. And the other irony is that, it’s not an irony, it’s just a flaw in their thinking is that even if a group like the Jewish people might be doing disproportionately well according to some measures in Western society, they also seem to be doing pretty well according to some measures in Germany in the early 20th centuries, so it’s far too simplistic to be divide, I feel, to be dividing groups in such narrow ways and determining vulnerability in such narrow ways. But how do you?
I just want to touch upon one thing that you said there before you go on. My colleague Pamela Paresky talks, Dr. Pamela Paresky talks about Jews and whiteness, and when whiteness was considered a moral good, Jews were not generally considered white. When whiteness is now considered an unmitigated moral evil, Jews are considered white. So, you know.
Yeah.
It’s not surprising that we.
I’m sure that’s just a coincidence though.
Exactly, just a coincidence.
But my question was going to be sort of as a follow up to what I was saying, so how do you respond to the woke view that Jews are privileged? What do you say to that?
So I’m not sure I have to say anything to that other than I just reject the framing, because I’m not primarily trying to talk to them. I’m trying to talk to people who already, I mean, you know, maybe down the line of target audiences, there’s sort of a soft, woke person who thinks that this has gone a little too far, but my primary target audience are people who already agree with us, and there’s a lot of them. There are the people who just aren’t comfortable with the nature of the current discourse, who are political moderates or liberals, who want to go back to.
But I’m saying David, let’s say I was, you know, from that woke perspective, how would you try and dismantle my argument?
Well, first of all, I would say, I think that this whole doctrine of privilege is way too simplistic, that linking one’s identity to privilege gets us nowhere. It’s profoundly alienating and very often wrong, so the idea that just because you perceive me as white, that I have privilege, I don’t think is always the correct, it can be correct in certain circumstances, or being Black is a source of oppression can be true, but very often it isn’t. Or a woman as an oppressed, I think it just flattens the conversation altogether and doesn’t allow us to have nuanced conversation about power and how it actually works and victimisation and how it actually works. So I think on that basic level, it’s just wrong, and so I don’t want to have, what I don’t want to do is have a conversation that gets us into the oppression Olympics where I’m saying, “Oh, no, no, no, we Jews are actually quite oppressed. We experienced the Holocaust” or whatever. I mean, not that I wouldn’t do that at all, but I just think that I would rather just, at this point, challenge the entire framework, because once you’re thinking in those terms, you’re just going to inexorably view Jews in a certain way. Like if you view the world that simplistically, that rigidly, you have that hierarchy of privilege, then you’ve all seen these like pyramids where they map out whose identity is oppressed or whose is privilege based on, you know, just these immutable characteristics. You know, I just don’t think that that’s a sophisticated way to see the world. So if I’m now participating in that discussion and trying to just move us higher up on the, you know, on the oppression ladder, I think that that’s just going to, it’s not going to work. A, because of the properties of the ideology, which says that if you’re successful, you can’t be oppressed, and B, I think we should just be rejecting this ideology altogether. It’s too simplistic.
Well, that’s interesting. Yeah, sure.
The other part about this, and I would say to them, it’s profoundly alienating. So you know, when you tell somebody from an old manufacturing town who’s white, which has experienced an opioid epidemic, who hasn’t worked, and not only hasn’t the person worked, but the father hasn’t had, his father didn’t even have a manufacturing job, that they’re experiencing white male privilege, you know, they’re likely to give you the middle finger and they’re going to think you’re the white supremacist. You’re the elitist white supremacist, not them, and I think that creates an identitary in politics on the right that’s also not healthy, and I don’t think we should be doing anything to contribute, to adding fuel to that fire either.
Right, right. So that’s interesting. So you believe that woke anti-Semitism, it can’t be dealt with on their ideological terms. You have to dismantle the whole ideology.
Yeah, so, you know, I think what. I think, that’s my view on anti-Semitism even more generally, that anti-Semitism tends to be embedded in larger conspiracy theories, and that sometimes we make this mistake of just thinking of anti-Semitism apart from the conspiracy theories that are empowering it, but from where I sit, we’re seeing anti-Semitism grow because we’re seeing dogma and conspiracy theories in society at a very, at a time of sort of epistemic chaos and fake news and the like, people are looking for simplistic explanations for all of reality, and that gives rise to things like QAnon or whatever, or the great replacement theory in the United States, which holds that, you know, immigrants are replacing ordinary Americans and their work and the like, and guess who’s behind the scenes doing all that? That’s Jews. So I don’t think you can actually effectively combat anti-Semitism without at least knowing the ideological roots of the anti-Semitism and naming them clearly, and then also challenging the fundamental properties of the conspiracy theory itself, the ideologies that are giving a rise to the anti-Semitism. See, what’s happening now is American Jews, when we talk about anti-Semitism on the right, we have no problem talking about the great replacement theory and how that’s animating anti-Semitism on the right, right? When we talk about anti-Semitism coming from the Muslim world, it’s not taboo to say that Islamist ideology is giving rise to this idea of the infidel and that Jews are the infidel, and that that understanding in the Muslim brotherhood and Islamist ideology is giving rise to anti-Semitism in the Muslim world. So yet, when we talk about anti-Semitism on the left, we tend to talk about it as if it’s like a set of symptoms with no causes, and I think that’s the problem. People are afraid to actually talk about woke ideology and how that’s animating anti-Semitism on the left. And so, to me, that’s part of the project that I’m engaged in is to try to raise awareness of how this ideology is giving rise to anti-Semitism on the left.
Very interesting. And with the whole question of, you know, when people say Jews are privileged, and I just say, yeah, I just would direct reject that whole kind of conversation. What do you say to people who say, to the contrary, we should actually be owning our success and we should say, “Look, there’s a combination of our culture and hard work,” and or, you know, and then there’s other people who say, “No, no, our focus should be, don’t talk about us like that. We are all so very vulnerable.” Like, do you fit into either camp or do you just say?
I tend to say, look, Jews can be the idea of self-empowerment, which is I think very healthy for societies, and the idea that we can be vulnerable, I think we should be able to have complex, nuanced conversations about that and what it means, so we can own our success and at the same time say, you know, we’re still vulnerable. And that’s what this ideology tries to crowd out, like you can’t be both of those things, and it tries to crowd out the entire empowerment idea, right? That self-empowerment idea that that ethnic groups have agency, that even if they’re facing discrimination and headwinds and the like, doesn’t mean that they can’t be successful and empower themselves. And, you know, there are a lot of Black Americans who resent this ideology a great deal, and who worry that it’s teaching their kids that the system is rigged against them. Even if they worry that the system might be partially rigged against them, they don’t want their kids to be taught that, because it’s very disempowering, and I think that we can both embrace an empowerment paradigm and yet have thoughtful conversations about where prejudice exists, where discrimination exists, and the like.
Sounds far too nuanced for my generation. I dunno, but.
No, you guys, you’ll get there.
I’m being far too deprecating and generalising about my generation.
Yes, lot of smart young people.
Yeah. So how do perceptions, you touched on this a little bit, but how do these kind of perceptions, woke perceptions, play into the Israel narrative and how they see Israel and anti-Zionism, which often falls into the anti-Semitism thing?
Yeah, so obviously, if you view the only reason for disparity as oppression, and then Israel being this successful miracle in the Middle East is going to clearly be viewed as, you know, an oppressive power just by virtue of its own success, so I think that you’ve seen this in very obvious ways. The most obvious was in May, 2021 when there was a round of conflict between Israel and Hamas and Gaza. I think it was something like, I don’t know, the sixth round of conflict since 2008 that involved either missiles or tunnels or what have you. And prior to that, there was this very common trajectory, Israel, at least in the mainstream American press, like in the “New York Times” and “The Washington Post,” was given the benefit of the doubt in the early days. And it said, “Yes, Israel’s has to defend itself against missiles being fired at ” or wherever else it was happening, and then, three or four days into it, when the casualties started to mount on the Hamas, Palestinian, Gaza side, they would start to turn on Israel and talk about disproportionate force, and then Israel would have to, you know, negotiate a ceasefire. This time, however, from the get go, Israel was facing a disadvantage, a tremendous disadvantage, in public perceptions, and you could really feel how the ideology changed people’s perspectives and like the mainstream media and the like.
Israel was given no benefit of the doubt at no point, and so you could really see that, and you’re starting to see this in the numbers, by the way, like, so, you know, the Gallup poll has been doing tracking American public opinion for many, many years. For the first time in 20 something years, for the first time, Democrats are more sympathetic with Palestinians than they are with Israelis. That’s the first time, just this last time around. So it’s really seeped into the way people are thinking about it. We, my organisation, the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values did a poll, you could actually find it on JILV.org/poll if you want, and it really looked at like who believes that Israel is a country fundamentally that has a right to defend itself, and who believes that it’s like a settler colonial state, and that settler colonial state narrative is catching on, even among like larger swaths of the mainstream left. That would’ve been unthinkable just, you know, a few years ago, but it is catching on because we prepared the ground for this by embracing this ideology that views the world in such a way.
And how do you see the pervasiveness of this woke ideology affecting Jewish identity, especially for young Jews who may be susceptible to these ideas or not well equipped to deal with them?
Yeah, so let me first say that I think you can be woke and be very proudly Jewish, and there are many young people who are woke and proudly Jewish, and they look to Judaism as sort of a, as another vector of their larger ideology. So they latched onto social justice, and they say so, and they think social justice or “Tikkum olam” only means doing sort of, you know, anti-racist ideology or gender theory or whatever. So there, so I don’t think it means that you’re not going to be Jewishly-associated, but I do think it has a very, first of all, it’s alienating to a lot of Jews who aren’t woke. So if you go to a synagogue and all of a sudden, you know, all the Rabbis and the Cantor and everybody else is hyper woke, people who don’t share that political position are going to feel very alienated, and I think you’re seeing a lot of that, particularly in like reformed Judaism and the like, reconstructionist Judaism, I know people who have been reconstructionists, it always had a left-wing feel, but now it’s becoming so explicit that they’re feeling more and more alienated. I think this idea that Jews are complicit in white supremacy and that we’re a group that has long-benefited from privilege, you know, and to the degree that that’s being taught in Jewish educational environments, and it is. In a lot of Jewish educational environments, they are teaching this. I don’t think that that’s a great source of Jewish identity. I mean if you’re, you know, Jews went from seeing themselves as being morally upright and defending human rights and civil rights alike to now we have to take responsibility in white complicity and so forth. I don’t think that’s a great avenue toward Jewish identity. So I don’t think this is going to produce like a lot of healthy, proud Jews in the long run. I think it’s going to have the opposite effect.
Wow, wow. And I would, first of all, I just want to say to the audience, we’re going to take some questions soon, so if you want to pose a question and type a question out in the Q and A, please do, and I’ll have a look at that and pose that to David. I want to talk a bit about the emergence of sort of right-wing anti-Semitism that we’ve seen recently, but before we do that, what what are your tips or views on how anyone listening can fight back against this specific form of woke anti-Semitism that you detail in your book?
Yeah, so I think that the way you do it is you first have to be willing to speak about wokeness and what it’s doing. You have to be able to acknowledge the problem, and getting others to acknowledge the problem, so the first act is a act of personal courage, because a lot of people are afraid of doing that. It’ll make them look like they’re on the wrong side of the culture wars, abut that doesn’t mean that, you know, that if we don’t speak about it, to our friends and our synagogues and the like, then I think we’re complicit, if you will, in perpetuating it. So that’s the first thing is to show a little courage yourself and to build coalitions of people around this. There’s safety in numbers when it comes to this. You know, you can get around people’s fears by creating critical mass. So for example, a couple year, a year ago or so, there was a letter written by Rabbis that warned of the onset of this ideology and how it was stifling discourse, and it was also giving rise to anti-Semitism. And before their letter ever saw the light of day, they made sure that they had 15 original signatory of prominent Rabbinical voices, so that anybody else who signed on was in good company. So I think that that’s one thing we can do. The other thing is we have to start to build a new coalition. You know, I think Jews have always seen their primary coalition partners on the progressive left, and we’ve spent a lot of time building this relationship. I’ve done that work for a long time in my own professional life, so I know the feeling of having a lot of, some costs in progressive relations, but I think that this is going to require us to build new coalition partners. And thankfully if you, once you start to look, you realise that other ethnic communities like, you know, Chinese and Hindus and others are also concerned about this, as well, and it’s just finding those new ascending voices and building bridges to them. I think that’s something that we can do collectively that will move the ball forward.
Yeah, absolutely. Let’s just, or to encourage everyone listening, if you submit a question, to submit a, if you comment to please actually, to phrase it as a question. It just helps us to pose them to David. Let’s talk a bit about the, I think somewhat surprising rise of more classical anti-Semitism also emerging in American culture, which I didn’t really anticipate. You know, now, as an example, there was Kanye West, he had several outbursts. He’s a, you know, previously declared Trump supporter. It’s pretty clear to me in this case that most people just thought he was just, you know, mentally unwell and just, and that sort of seems to be the case, but the thing that concerned some people was the lack of, or the silence rather, by some of people he might have cozied up to on the conservative right in America, with regard to him, because it wasn’t so expedient to make a song and dance about what he was saying. And my view was, look, even if he is saying this from a place of just he’s having some kind of manic episode or whatever, ultimately he is, he was consistent with what he was saying, and he has a huge platform, and therefore it’s very influential, and if it isn’t called out by people who have allied with him, then that that’s a problem. And it, there’s a certain irony, isn’t there, to like, that’s they call like the horseshoe of politics, where the far left and far right are meeting where they’re both portraying Jews as this powerful elite, just from slightly different angles, but they get to the same conclusion. You know, a few other incidents. Recently, on “Saturday Night Live,” I think Dave Chappelle said some jokes, which I actually thought were trying to make serious points about Jewish power. A few other incidents. It’s more just the lack of condemnation that I’ve seen some of the time or their moral equivocation from their colleagues on the right. What are your thoughts on that?
Yeah, look, in general, I believe in the backyard principle, that we should be primarily fighting anti-Semitism in our own ideological backyard. I mean, we have polling data, I already cited a poll that my organisation did, but you can look at, which shows that both left-wing and right-wing Americans believe that there’s an uptick in anti-Semitism, and they both point fingers at the other camp. So if you’re a right-winger, you’re pointing to the left, and if you’re left-winger, you’re pointing to the right. And I think the Jewish community should try to encourage an ethic of starting in your own camp, that like, we don’t, otherwise it becomes a political football. It’s always the other person’s fault and it becomes just tied up into the larger, you know, political campaign and culture wars or whatever, and that’s not taking anti-Semitism seriously, and it’s not effective when right-wing people are just complaining about lefties and lefties are complaining about righties, so I think that’s number one, and that’s what we should demand of our political leaders and our civic leaders and the like is that they should start with their own camp. It’s ironic, though, that even though there’s a general understanding of that in the Jewish community, when I talk about how woke ideology is giving rise to anti-Semitism on the left, I’m still sort of pillaried by in some circles for it, because they’re really not actually dealing with anti-Semitism in their own camp. They want to sort of conveniently ignore that whole thesis of it.
You know, Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, the ADL, the primary organisation that fights anti-Semitism in the United States, or one of them, likes to say that anti-Semitism on the right is like a hurricane and anti-Semitism on the left is like climate change. So on the right, it’s sort of violent, it’s immediate, it’s an immediate, present danger, and on the left, it’s sort of corrosive in taking its toll over time. I think that’s a perfectly apt analogy, but going back to what I said before, what he doesn’t do and what I want people to do, is to talk about the ideological CO2 emissions that are producing the climate change on the left, ‘cause there’s, no one’s shy about talking about them on the right, what is producing the hurricane? You can, it’s easy to talk about. So I do think anti-Semitism on the right, just like anti-Semitism the left, is increasing, I think as sort of society loses its moorings in this time, and we, institutions have lost a lot of their credibility in the eyes of people, that people are looking for simplistic explanations of the world. So that goes for both the right and the left, and so it doesn’t surprise me that there are hate crimes and they’re coming from different quarters. You know, we’ve seen a lot of violence against Orthodox Jews in New York committed mostly by Black Americans. But, and you know, there again, you have to be careful not to overgeneralize, because it’s happening, like three boroughs in New York City. There are a lot of other places where Blacks and Jews live in close proximity where there’s no violence, so this seems to be sort of a New York phenomena, but it is, nevertheless, highly concerning and something that has not been fought effectively. And you have almost like a Black supremacist variant of anti-Semitism, which sort of combines traditional tropes of, you know, of anti-Semitism, the classical tropes of Jewish power and the like with a little bit of distinct Black theological overlay, like this idea that the Jews stole the covenant from Blacks, and that’s an idea that you see in Black Hebrew circles.
But again, these things don’t stay isolated. So Kyrie Irving, who was a, you know, an NBA player in the United States, also at the same time as Kanye West made his anti-Semitic foray, Kanye, you know, endorsed this video that was produced by the Black Hebrews that was just completely anti-Semitic, and again, so there are ideological underpinnings of each form of anti-Semitism that we have to familiarise ourselves with so we can fight them. And that’s happening on the right, it’s happening in the Black community, it’s happening in the Muslim world, and it’s certainly happening on the left as well.
- Yeah, absolutely. Okay, I’m going to start taking some questions, so please do submit a question if you have one.
Q&A and Comments:
Q - David Murfeld has asked, “You mentioned right and left accusing the other of being anti-Semitic. Are they comparable? Isn’t left-wing anti-Semitism more mainstream, while on the right, it seems to be more confined to the fringe, such as Marjorie Taylor Greene?” and I used to feel that way, but I feel like the climate is shifting.
A - Yeah, I hate to say it, but I don’t, I wish that were the case, but it’s, I don’t think it is. Look, if you look at any opinion piece or news piece about Jews in the right-wing media, I would urge you to take a look at the comments, that, in the comments section you will see dozens of anti-Semitic, virulantly anti-Semitic comments, made by all kinds of people. So when I wrote my book “Woke Anti-Semitism,” I posted about it in various like anti-critical race theory Facebook pages and the like and every single time I did it, every single time, at least one person, and very often more than one person said, “You Jews should stop whining about wokeness, because you created in the first place,” and that’s a right-wing anti-Semitic trope, not a left wing anti-Semitic trope. So I think that we have a much bigger problem, it’s much more pervasive, it finds fertile ground in places like QAnon, and there are millions of people who are buying into QAnon, it’s not like just Marjorie Taylor Green. So we have a very vibrant right-wing, conspiracy-oriented right-wing in America that’s gaining ground, and I think that there’s a reason to be concerned there as well. I think it’s also corrosive, just as anti-Semitism on the left is corrosive.
Q - Elaine asked, “What do you think keeps some Jews, possibly most Orthodox Jews, loyal to Trump, despite his overt gross anti-Semitic remarks? I mean, did you think he was a concern from a Jewish perspective and how do you explain that?”
A - Well look, I don’t personally believe that Trump has animus against Jews. I think he’s perfectly capable in the moment of saying something that is meant to sort of, that’s meant to get his own crowd riled up, and that can be using anti-Semitic stereotypes if it works. I think he probably has a few of those stereotypes running through his mind, and he sometimes cites them, and there’s plenty of examples of that. I think the bigger problem is that he contributed to sort of the ideological disarray, you know, flooding the airwaves with, as Steve Bannon talked about, creates the kind of conditions in society that people are looking for, you know, conspiracy theories and cheap, simplistic explanations. So I think that’s the main damage that comes from Trumpism.
Q - Right. We’ve got a question from Louise Sweet. She said, “Can’t Israel be seen as requiring self-defense while at the same time incorporating currently policies that are opposed by many Israelis that threaten the independence of the judiciary? Please comment on your polls and whether they address current perceptions of the ongoing protests against government policies in Israel.”
A - So we have not polled that at all, and that’s really outside of our area. I think the answer is yes, of course. Israel can both be a country that requires, that’s required to defend itself, and it may not always act perfectly, and you know, we all are constantly wrestling with those two, with that tension, I think.
Q - And Diane Marcus asked, “How do you feel about Israel being the catalyst for how the younger Jews embrace and perpetuate their Judaism?”
A - Well, I do think that that it is a catalyst, you know, sending hundreds of thousands of Jews to Birthright and other programmes has been good for Jewish identity. It’s created a bit of a backlash, as well, but that’s okay. I’d rather have more Jews care, and also some go the other direction, than just not engage at all. I do think Israel presents a view and a vision of being Jewish that can be quite compelling, that, you know, that you don’t always pick up in the American Jewish ether, and so I’m all for the emphasis on Israel, because I don’t think Jews are just a religion. I think what happened in the United States and much of Europe is, in order to be part of the pluralistic and dominant class sometimes, we were forced into this sort of religious mould, you know, the idea of Protestant, Catholic, and Jew, and so I think that that distorted Jewish identity as a religious identity, and many Jews didn’t really have a vocabulary for their peoplehood or their ethnicity and the like. I think when you go to Israel, and you send young people to Israel, they learn a dimension of their own identity that they might not have had before, that it shows them that they’re part of a people and not just a religion on the American scene or the British scene, as the case may be.
Q - Carol asks, “How do we deal with the anti-Semitic Democrat Congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib?”
A - Yeah, look, you know, they’re an outgrowth of this ideology, which thankfully has not yet dominated Democratic party politics. In other words, Democratic voters tend to be more moderate than radicals. So you, there’s only a few members of Congress that really fit the mould, and a lot of times, those far left-wingers like Tlaib or Omar end up losing in the primaries because the moderate Democrats are still relatively moderate. Now that could, that doesn’t always have to be the case, but I think we’re, the Democratic party is not on the immediate verge of “Corbinization,” as you might have seen, in the UK, which was taken over by Jeremy Corbin and that wing of the Labour Party. I don’t think that that’s happening right yet. I think that there’s some drift, but I don’t think it’s happening right yet. What I, look, what I would do is not spend, I mean, look, you have to condemn them when they make anti-Semitic remarks, but they’re just two members of Congress. I think we’ve got to spend more time building our new coalition partners and coming out with positive messages about what we believe, articulating a really robust narrative about what it means to be part of free societies like America or Great Britain. You know, what does it mean to be part of free societies and why do we value our freedom and how do we build constituencies that stand up for liberal, democratic principles? Those are the, that’s the work, and I think sometimes, we get too caught up in sort of focusing on our adversary obsession, I’ll call it. I don’t think it always, you’re just obsessed with the people that are after you, rather than trying to build something that can stand against them. And I think that we end up doing too much of the former, and not enough of the latter.
Q - Yeah. Ari Castle asks, “David, it is evident to me that North American liberal Jews and the younger generation are no longer, for the most part, supporters of Israel. Why do you think this is? I think the big number of Jews in America are on the extreme left and typically are not supporters of Jews and Israel. Why is this? Why do young Jews in such big numbers support the extreme left when they are not supporters of Jews in Israel? Regarding Trump, I think he has been the biggest supporter President of Israel and Jews, unequal to previous presidents. What do you think?”
A - So as far as young Jews are concerned, I don’t think the polling data quite bears that out. I think what you’re seeing is a higher percentage, somewhere around maybe 15% of young Jews, who have become hostile, right? Now that doesn’t, but I think there’s also more and more pro-Israel activism, as well. Like there’s, more young people have gone to Israel than their parents for the first time ever, so you have a lot of young Jews who are deeply connected to Israel, as well. You know, I spoke to like 350 young people at a Birthright conference, and these were not just normal Birthright, you know, participants, these were people who were deep into like the business aspects of Birthright, and you know, that’s something that, I was a pro-Israel activist in the late 1980s, and that’s something we didn’t have back then. I mean, there’s just much more infrastructure, communal infrastructure, devoted to the young people and their relationship to Israel than ever before, so I think some of that’s paid off. I mean, so I don’t think that there’s a single narrative that can just describe the connection between young people and Israel. There’s an awful lot of connectivity, and there’s also growing hostility, as well, in certain quarters. So both of those things can be true at the same time. As for Trump, look, I think I talked about it before, you know, more than one thing can be true, right? And I think this is what our, you know, what’s the old phrase that, you know, the, I’m butchering it, but the telltale sign of a first rate mind is to be able to hold two opposing ideas in your head at the same time and not go crazy, and I think it can be true that Trump did some things for Israel that were incredibly important, the Abraham Accords, moving the embassy to Jerusalem, and the like, all very, very important. We have a, people should be thankful for that. And yet, at the same time, he created a more hostile environment in the United States that I think also gives rise to anti-Semitism. And so I don’t think you can say either with by itself. I think we have to hold both of those ideas in our head at the same time.
Q - Yeah. Paul Crossley asks, “How much do you think the present ultra-right government in Israel is causing problems for liberal Jews in this woke discussion?”
A - Yeah, I’m not sure it’s really become the, a big factor yet. I think what it’s done is it’s made a lot of liberal Jews worry about their relationship to Israel. They’re worried that Israel’s going to be less democratic than it once was, and it might be contributing to distancing of liberal Jews. I think that’s the more immediate threat. I don’t know that the protests in Israel have become sort of negative for Israel yet in terms of public perceptions, and whether that’s really caught on on the left so much. I don’t think we have data to support that yet, but we may find out more of that over time, as more and more polls and surveys are done.
Q - Right. James Levy asks, “Did the woke culture start with the Black Lives Matter movement?”
A - No, it started with the growth of post-modern ideology in American universities in the late 1960’s, and worked its way into more mainstream discourse. You know, going back to the late 1980s, and I write about this in my book, you know, there was already sort of second wave feminism, which I think borrowed from the same, what’s called epistemology, the same basic understanding of how the world works, you know? And so, you know, if I was, when I would, you know, when I, if arguing with a, let’s say a feminist writer, I would be told I have no right to have a voice in that conversation, 'cause I’m a man. So that’s the same basic epistemology that you’re seeing in wokeness. It’s been around, it’s been an ether, it just was a minority force, it didn’t claim its, you know, share of the population. Now, it not only I think claims more people, but it’s also, it’s got credibility and it creates what you call spirals of silence. You know, be a minority voice that’s loud and consistent can make it look like, that they’re much more domineering than they actually are, and it sort of cows people into silence. So we’re seeing record amounts of self-censoring in American society, as well, and there’s a lot of polling data on that. So I think it did not start with Black Lives Matter, but Black Lives Matter really did change the more mainstream left narrative. So I was, at that time, working for the, in let’s say 2013, 2014, I was working at the David Project.
I was Executive Director, which was a pro-Israel education and advocacy training programme for college and high school students, and I can tell you, when the Black Lives Matter protests hit in Ferguson, Missouri, it was, the effects of it on campus cannot be overstated. You really felt that the narrative went from being, “Everybody has their right to their own story. Every group has the right to their own narrative, and we should respect everybody’s narrative,” simplistic, but something we could live with, to “There are oppressed and there are oppressors, and either you’re part of the oppressor, or you’re part of the oppressed class.” And I think that that binary ideology took hold with the spread of the Black Lives Matter movement around 2013, 2014, and it’s, and that’s now become the dominant ideology. It went from a soft, post-modernism, everybody’s story is equal, to a hard post-modernism that there are oppressed and oppressors, and I think that’s what we’ve seen. So it’s been around a while, but it’s taken on new forms and new power in the last, you know, decade.
Q - A question that’s just come to mind for me is do you think that woke culture has peaked, or is it going to, do you think it will peak soon? Because, you know, there is, it seems to be a bit of a growing backlash.
A - Yeah, so there’s a lot of talk about peak woke, right? I think the two things are happening at the same time, and I know I do this a lot, I say “Yeah, it’s not so simple.” So I’m going to continue down that, two things are happening at the same time. One is that more and more people are speaking out against the ideology, and it’s becoming easier to do so than it was a year ago. and certainly two years ago. So it’s not good politics, and there are a number of heavy hitters, intellectual heavy hitters, that have come out and spoken out against it, so I think in the society.
Q - Who are those, by the way, that come to mind for you? People like Barry?
A - Oh, Jonathan Hyde and Barry Weiss and Steven Pinker, And you know, there’s a lot of great intellectual heft behind it, you know, for sure, and that’s changed. And then on the, you know, there are Black leaders, voices like Glenn Lowry and John McCord and Coleman Hughes and others who have been very important voices that I think restoring some semblance of rationality to the discussion. So yeah, I do think that there’s been a thaw. I find it much easier, for example, to get speaking invitations to mainstream Jewish audiences now than I did even six months ago. That might be because of what I’ve done, as well, the book coming out and the like, but it’s also because the ideological environment is starting to thaw and it’s starting to dawn on some people that we really do have a problem here, and I’m not just, you know, I’m just not making all this up. So that’s the first thing, but the other thing that’s happening is even as the larger ideological environment starts to thaw, people in institutions that are deeply bought in are doubling down, so I think they even sense that the winds of change are coming and they’re doing everything they can desperately to institutionalise as much of this as they possibly can.
So in schools, it’s spreading rapidly, you know, and you have ethnic studies coming out of California, which in it’s liberated form, regards both, liberated ethnic studies form, regards both America and Israel as settler colonial states. That’s spreading in school systems around the United States. So even as the ideological environment thaws, we’re fighting a multi-front war against the spread of this ideology in institutions that show no signs of letting up, and I think that’s going to be the challenge is that we can, you know, we can win in the larger form, but in institutions themselves that have really deeply bought into the ideology, it’s very hard to get them to change direction.
Yeah, absolutely. I did, the first question I asked you was about how you would define the woke culture. Mark Tennenbaum feels, is a little bit concerned, he hasn’t quite got full clarity on the term, so just would you mind just if you could just summarise one more time what it is that we’ve been discussing. I think you did discuss it at the start, but just to reiterate.
Right, right. It is an ideology that claims to be, let’s say a successor to liberalism. What is liberalism? Liberalism is the free exchange of ideas. It’s the idea that we come to the truth through debate and disagreement and the scientific method and the like. Wokeness is an ideology that is focused very much on power and that knowledge grows out of power, so that the powerful people, the dominant class, define what is true, what is knowledge, for the rest of society in a way that benefits them. That’s the sort of academic and theoretical underpinnings. Woke ideology is a very, maybe a more specific or critical social justice ideology is maybe a more specific idea that oppression and bias exists in the very foundations and systems of these societies. So you’re not racist just because you have bad, bigoted opinions of minorities, but rather because you are part of a society that has those bigoted opinions and you’re just complicit in it by not even challenging it. So in Ibram X. Kendi’s words, “You are either a racist or an anti-racist.” And anti-racist is somebody who sees that oppression is everywhere and fights that oppression, and then this other idea that the people with lived experience, the people who are being oppressed, are the people who have the right to define it. So that means that if you have a different opinion about what oppression is or what racism is, if you believe that the American police force is not as racist as some people are making it out, you’re speaking out of privilege, you’re speaking in a way that’s racist, and I think that that becomes the sort of foundation of cancel culture. It’s not just a perception that there’s racism everywhere, in every nook and cranny of our societies, but rather that only we get to define that, and you have to believe that yourselves.
Q - Yeah, yeah. And I assume there’ll be a recording of this, so for those who want a more detailed explanation and want to review what we discussed at the start of this interview, you can go have a look there. We’re nearly at the end of the hour. I know you’ve got a train to catch. The last question I would ask that ties into a few more of the questions that have been posed that I haven’t got to yet is the question of just the general paradigm for fighting this and fighting anti-Semitism, and this woke anti-Semitism, but other forms as well. My strong view is that as well as like fighting the anti-Semitism, we shouldn’t just be thinking about fighting, because that can put people on the defensive. We need to be thinking about creating pro-Semitism as a strategy to dealing with it, because part of the problem is that Jews are just a mystery, we’re a mystery to the world, and that feeds into conspiracy theories, and if we can educate about who we are and what our story is, and you know, demystify that, that can help. So just wanted your reflections on that and what you think the overall strategy should be for tackling all this?
A - Yeah, I mean, I think there can be more than one. Again, I think that pro-Semitism is a perfectly good strategy. I think though, and maybe the word “fight” is not the right one, but I think challenging the ideological paradigm is really important, because if these ideologies run rampant, so will the anti-Semitism that comes out of them, so I think we’ve got to fight with all of our intellectual strength, and which I think is more important. People don’t realise sometimes that, you know, fighting in the world of ideas can be, can actually make a huge difference in society. That’s how this stuff spread in the first place. We didn’t fight the radicals, and now they’ve become the dominant force. So I think we’re going to have to fight in the world of ideas and I think building new coalitions of people who agree with us will strengthen our voice. People who fight for democratic, liberal values, I think that’s really important, like that we’re, ultimately Jews do well in liberal, Democratic societies that respects everybody’s rights, so I think we have to work toward grading that. And I think both far way right ideological movements and far left ideological movements both work against sort of a liberal, Democratic society, so I think we have to fight for that.
Well, David, it’s always so, so enlightening talking to you. I’m so grateful for your time, as everyone is. I hope everyone felt similarly. I’m sure they did. So just thank you so much for your time and for all the work you do.
Thanks Ollie.
And encourage everyone to get the book, it’s called “Woke Anti-Semitism.” You can find it on Amazon, and yeah, get it and you can really educate yourselves in far more detail about the matters that we’ve been talking through today. So thanks a lot, David. Thank you everyone.
Be well. Take care.