Eps 21. When the Left Was Pro-Israel

Did you know that the forgotten founder of Zionism went on to play a leading role in Agudas Yisrael? Or that Rabbi Chaskel Abramsky was responsible for the continued presence of the Muslim Waqf on Har HaBayit? It turns out that the margins of history tell the real story. Behind the Times dives into the big concepts and overlooked moments that carry vast meaning all through the lens of Torah and rabbinic thought. Join me, Gedalia Guttentag, as I go behind the times to explore the forgotten history, remarkable personalities, and transformative moments that shape current events and explain how we got here. Behind the Times with Gedalia Guttentag. I was once on a train from London to Manchester with my family. It was one of those gray, drizzly English days, and I remember that we stopped at some station, and a white-bearded man came and sat next to us at the table. So, just allow me to describe him, because he was what I'd call the embodiment of the left-wing professor type. He was wearing tweed jacket. He was wearing sandals despite the fact that it was gray and raining outside, and he came and he looked around, and there was one seat left on the little table area where I was sitting with my family, and he puts himself, says, you know, smiles, and puts down this kind of Iranian yogurt drink. And he takes off his backpack, and he says, "Hello." Sits down. And he was an older man, and as I said, the stereotypical uh left-wing professor. And indeed, he turned out to be a professor, because he, from the conversation, he turned out to have been a physics professor, physics lecturer. But then something interesting happened. He took out of his bag a law textbook and prepared to start studying. And at point I knew there's a story. So I asked him. I said to him, "How if you're physics lecturer, why are you studying law?" He said, "Well, I'll tell you, I need to defend myself in court." The conversation was growing curiouser and curiouser at this point. "Need to defend yourself in court?" I said, "What did you do?" This was a man who was so obviously proud to tell it. He said, "Well, I was um stopped in a rubber dinghy in a one of Britain's ports, actually outside the naval base, and I was stopped there because I was holding a hammer and I was on the way to smash the sonar panels on the side of the Britain's nuclear one of the nuclear submarines because I worked out that it wouldn't put out to sea if a sufficient number of them were smashed." So you get the picture. This was a classic left-wing ban the bomb type, and I'd really met one of them in the flesh. And he asked me where I was from. And this was getting on for sort of 16, 17 years ago. And so when I said I'm from Israel, he, you know, he said he came up with one comment, and I knew I could almost see this about to happen. He said, "I used to like Israel." He said, "The Israel of the kibbutzim." And that was more or less, you know, the conversation basically fizzled a bit afterwards. But that line remained with me with all the details. Because it was absolutely an eye-opening window, I think, into left-wing thought and one of the most serious stories of our time. The rise and massive fall of the left when it comes to Israel. Or in other words, how the left turned on Israel. Because look where we are today. October the 7th, the bloodiest day for Jews since the Holocaust, didn't bring an instinct to mourn with Jews. That's what we all thought was going to happen. That's now the world can finally see what we're confronting. Instead, it released an incredible, I would say, bloodlust. It was almost as if the shark had smelled the Jewish blood in the water. At universities, Ivy League universities like Columbia, there was these eruption of even greater hostility towards Jews and Israel. On the very day, right? Remember those t-shirts of all the paragliders? On the rallies taking place on the day, the next day, the fighting had far from ended in the Gaza border kibbutzim. And already Israel was in a far worse place than it had been. Totally counter-intuitively to us, we could not understand it at the time. But it was a fact. And it's no longer just obviously a campus story. We've seen October the 7th has led to a massive leftward shift in American politics. The left, you have the rise of the DSA, Democratic Socialists, furiously anti-Israel. People like Zohran Mamdani, now just wrote 25 years after September the 11th, you have a Muslim mayor like Zohran Mamdani who is with all his baggage anti-Israel, in many ways anti-America. A man in in the electoral success in Michigan of of a Democratic far-left, very far anti-Israel candidate for Senate the Senate, Abdul El-Sayed. So, these ideas, that's what happened on October the 7th. And we forces us to ask, how did Israel of the kibbutzim, the Israel of pioneers, of old socialist imagination, as that professor say, become the bogeyman, the epitome of evil for the modern left and the central symbol of apartheid and genocide more than any others. Because obviously anti-Semitism figures in here. But this is why I think it's important to focus on a bit on the history over here. Because we in the firm world, broader Jewish world, have lost the ability, I think, to look at the the left as a serious entity. It is so ludicrous. It is so insane in our eyes that the way that they've turned on Israel so ferociously, so viciously that we can't engage with the story of the left and we can't take it seriously in that way. And I think that does nothing. That inability is a problem for us. Because the tendency to dismiss the left as, "Oh, they're a bunch of anti-Semites." That failure to think about it, the left story the rise and fall of the left's relationship with Israel leaves us without the language to have dialogue with a vast and critical part of the modern world. The political and intellectual system that's now dominates universities, political parties, and public language, and a huge part of the American electorate and around the world comes from the left. If we want to have a hope of pushing back against it, we have to understand where it comes from. And I think we're better off ask ourselves the question how did the left get here? So just to see, I think, to highlight just how far the left and Israel have traveled I think it's helpful to recall one very important fact that obviously the left wants to bury. And that is is not so so that we think about ourselves, which is that in the beginning it was the left that supported Israel. It was the Labour Party in England, it was the Democrats, it was crucially the Soviet Union support that made Israel possible. So I don't intend to go into all that history now in particular. I just want to focus one on one figure. We know that Stalin 1947 1948 his motives were to kick Britain out of the Middle East and he definitely thought that in use the state that the state of Israel was going to be not communist but inclined towards the communist. It was definitely dominated by socialists. And so what's remarkable now is the country that's Israel is so often presented as colonial output of the West was born with the immensely enthusiastic backing of the communist world. Now one of the men it's just interesting to look at focus on one of the men who made that who spoke up for that was a man about as far left as you could get. He was a man called Itzik Feffer. Itzik Feffer was a Soviet Yiddish poet. He's a communist loyalist and a slavishly pro-Stalin. And he just to give you an idea it today unless you have you know you a student of of far left Jewish American Jewish history you wouldn't necessarily have heard of Itzik Feffer but in the time he was well-known as a Yiddish poet and he became also well-known in America because he travels in the 1940s during the war from the Soviet Union. He travels on behalf of the Soviet Union to America to basically drum up support within the American Jewish community for the Soviet Union. And that was part of an effort that was backed by Stalin which said that created something called the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee which was an organization that for a few years and essentially became the for want of a better word, the Jewish replaced the rabbinic Jewish leadership with a secular Soviet Jewish leadership. And this Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was led by a man called Solomon Mikhoels who was a famous Shakespearean actor of great renown in Moscow. And together Mikhoels and Fefer traveled to America. And their job was not only to get money from the wealthy Jews for the Soviet Union, but also to crucially open the Jewish door to the White House. And as ever that was that was actually it was as true then as it's true now that there is a certain level of an influence you foreign country can get by turning towards the Jews and that's always the story that you see. And what happens is it just give me a give you an idea. This it's Fefer was a deeply compromised man, let's just say this, because he was a man who was in the pay and worked for I don't know if he was in the pay but he worked for the KGB. And when Stalin starts cracking down on the Jews, he is the one who informs on his friend Solomon Mikhoels basically in order to save his own skin. But that's in a minute that it doesn't. But what in the meantime what happens is in mid-1947 there is abrupt shift in which at a speech in the United Nations, the Soviet diplomat there Andrei Gromyko basically says it indicates what's an enormous astounding shift in Soviet foreign policy. Instead of criticizing Zionism, instead of being dogmatically opposed to Zionism and refusing to talk about the Jews as a separate entity, the Soviet Union shifts to being pro-Zionist effectively. And it's the communist Russia who paves the way for a Jewish state. They provided the numbers, they provided the crucial diplomatic support. And without getting into the full story now, it's important to know that this is something if you look on you can look it up and you're going to see anguished responses in today that are still published today to explain amongst Jewish Marxists and and general far left websites, you can actually find it and they'll just say what a disgrace it was. It was a wrong move that it it and we acknowledge that it was the left that created Israel. And it was as Itzik Fefer, you can see he was if you look he had a dual with the Forward, right? The Forward which still is the you know, the left-leaning left-wing really Jewish newspaper that still exists in online form digital form still a powerful force in American Jewish media. Their editors got into a big fight with Itzik Fefer and vice versa because he was saying he was a defender of Stalin and his job was to say why the Forward had it all wrong. Really Stalin had been for it all along and there is Itzik Fefer acting as the apologist for Stalin about the Jewish state because it was the Soviet Union that effectively backed the creation of Israel. And just as a footnote, it's a a tragic end and this is such a tragic figure this Itzik Fefer because he was this typical Jew who was speaking up, who was defending, who was lavishly praising the regime that was about to kill him and eventually he was shot himself a few years later when he outlived his usefulness. This is important history because it's the idea that the left has as it were trying to overcome its original sin because it is desperately trying to blot out the fact that it was in many ways the icons of the left who pushed towards the creation of Israel. Even once the Soviet Union had turned on Israel which happened within a few years. Outside Stalin's empire, the old democratic left was even more openly and warmly attached to Israel. It was obviously because of sympathy for a newly created country, and it was obviously connected to the Holocaust. But, there was more to it than that. The Israel, the old Israel, as the professor on the train said to me, the Israel of the kibbutzim was one that the old left identified with. It said it's saw it as part of its moral universe. They could see the pioneers draining the swamps, collective farms, and the kibbutzim, obviously. And there was the workers cooperatives that the Histadrut and the trade unions. And this kind of like socialist democracy built by people who were workers. This was something the old left absolutely loved. And the kibbutz was a great symbol of that. And this professor was only one part of a massive movement that used to exist of young, idealistic, left-leaning, or even not so left-leaning young people would go out for decades. They went out to work to Israel to work on a kibbutz. It was full of non-Jews. And we know there's a couple of names. For example, one of the big names in the in was actually Jewish, but that's not the besides the point. Bernie Sanders, who went to work in a place called Kibbutz Sha'ar HaAmakim in 1963. And then a couple of decades later, Boris Johnson. He worked in the fields of Kibbutz Kfar Hanassi, where he undoubtedly made a clown of himself, but he enjoyed himself thoroughly. And it goes this kind of spread, right? Goes to show the range of who was in there. Everyone's doing this back in the day. It was part It was on the international gap year route, as it were. I suppose before things became a gap year became formalized. That was just one sign of a deep relationship that was especially especially pronounced on the left politically because the Labour Friends of Israel, which was the Labour Party's affiliate and pro-Israel lobby group in effect was founded in 1957, right? At the time of the Six-Day War, even as late as the Six-Day War, what it was very last still very widespread support for Israel inside Britain's Labour Party at least in the parliament, the parliamentary Labour Party as opposed to the local, and inside the trade unions movement. It's a very interesting thing that Britain's Trades Union Congress, which was obviously a left-wing Labour Party affiliated organization, helped Israel's Histadrut, which is the behemoth that ran the trade union behemoth that basically ran the state back in the day. It helped the Histadrut train African trade unionists at a place called the Afro-Asian Institute in Tel Aviv, and this was happening in the '60s. So, until fairly recent memory, the left was firmly pro-Israel. And I'm just drawing on the work of Dave Rich, who's who's a Jewish researcher on anti- anti-Semitism researcher, basically writer and analyst of anti-Semitism. In his book, The Left Jewish Problem, Jeremy Corbyn, Israel and Anti-Semitism, he's got a great history of the long and bitter breakup between Israel and the left. And he comes he quotes The Tribune, the paper of the Labour left, in 1955 saying the following thing, "The cause of Israel is the cause of democratic socialism." So, there you have it. It was a mind melt at that stage, which makes the subsequent fallout and breakup and the viciousness of the turn against Israel so striking. So, just as just to understand, to the old left, Israel made sense. It was small, it was threatened, it was socialist-minded, and it'd been shaped by the catastrophe of as it were European fascism, meaning it was a vic- creation of the Holocaust, as it were. And his enemies were reactionary monarchies, Arab mon- monarchies, and military regimes. And in the British case, an imperial establishment still trying to cling to the remnants of empire in the Middle East. And so, my professor on the train was brought up was trained and was raised in that political universe. When he said he loved Israel and the kibbutzim, he was remembering an Israel that the left had once been able to recognize. Now, what changes, obviously, Israel did change, but the real story is the left changed. Because what happened is, the old left, and this is these are terms that are used, the old left, the the left of the labor, trade unionists, democratic socialists, even communists, they gave way to the new left, right? Capital N, capital L eft. The old left understood the world through Karl Marx's ideas, class war, workers and trade unions and cooperatives and socialists against the big capitalists. And that's why it supported Israel, cuz Israel was kibbutzim and and Histadrut. The new left in the '50s and the '60s began moving on from those ideas of class war. And the reason, one of the reasons that they moved on, was very simply that the workers of the world were actually getting too comfortable and prosperous in the 1950s and '60s to unite. The workers of the world actually did not want what the communists and the socialists had to sell. So, the democratic socialists with the new left basically basically came along and they said, "We're not going to focus anymore on class war, because actually the working class are part of the problem, right? This is how This gives you an idea of how the the left turned on the working class, how the Labor Party, the Democrats became parties of the professional and managerial elites, who have no idea and are actively hostile often to the workers that they still kind of claim to represent, but actually no one believes that they do anymore. So, what happens is the old left was focused on class, the new left was focused on empire versus colonialized, white power non-white people, established west and the nations who are obviously trying to upend that order. And that shift was driven by failure of communism, by the end of European empires, by civil rights in America. But, obviously to the new left, growing bubbling beneath the surface in the '50s and emerging more in the '60s, okay? The Israel begins to look different. It's no longer a socialist refuge for a persecuted people. Maybe it's European settler state in Arab land. So, now the trigger, the final trigger for that shift happened in two stages, and we're going to get to them. The first key year in this story is 1956. Now, what happened in 1956? So, if you ask Jews, Israelis, they'll point to one thing. There's one thing on the map for 1956, which is the Suez Crisis, which is when Britain, France, and Israel invaded Egypt to seize the Suez Canal and seize it back or whatever it was after Nasser had nationalized it. But, actually if you ask Hungarian Jews or Jews in Borough Park, I suppose, 1956 and and especially the and also large parts of the historical memory identify 1956 with another event. It wasn't just the Suez War, the Suez Crisis. It was the Hungarian Uprising because there was an uprising there of basically democratic so- socialists in Hungary who did not want to be ruled by Khrushchev's or post-Stalinist iron fist. And this was obviously in the year Stalin dies in 1953, and the is the feelings, I suppose, among the in the Eastern Bloc is that you can try and test the waters now that maybe with Stalin's gone, we want change. And there was an uprising. And the crackdown that the Soviet Khrushchev, the Soviet leader, orders is a seminal watershed event. Because what happens is that the socialists in the West, unless they are really the hardcore of Stalinists, of communists, this general left and socialist have a big wake-up moment. And they start saying things are going wrong. And the incredible thing that happens is that these two things happen together. And as I said, Dave Rich says, the British New Left was born in November 1956 when the Hungarian and Suez crises occurred in the same week. And it's really important to understand like this what's happening over there. Because these weren't seen as two unrelated foreign crises on the front page, you know, competing for the space on the front page. It was the two things were happening together with an earthquake on the political map in which Moscow and communism suddenly dethroned. And the idea that Britain is, you know, is a bit more progressive, uh democratic, that is shaken. Okay? And this let's see how this plays out. There's a guy called, you know, looked around for some voices for this. It was actually an interesting guy called Peter Fryer. Okay? Peter Fryer was a young journalist on the British Communist Party newspaper, The Daily Worker. And he was sent to Budapest in October 1956. And what he expected to find that the story that the Communist Party is saying that these are fascists, you know, they say the whole the whole thing they normally come out with. These are fascists trying to overthrow the people's will, etc. But obviously he finds it's not the case. It's just normal Hungarians. In fact, people who look a bit like him and sound like him are being crushed by Soviet troops. And he sends his report back to London, but his newspaper what doesn't print it because his newspaper is communist and he's bucking the party line. And he said later, he wrote a book called Hungarian Tragedy. After resigning, he wrote a book saying the Daily Worker sent me to Hungary, then suppressed what I wrote. He said the decision is a hard one, but I'm not going to be gagged. And he was one of the many that that is you know, his his writing and it was kind of part of the process for many people like him whose eyes were opened finally. You know, whose delusions basically the left the western left delusions about the Soviet Union's you know, utopia was suddenly was suddenly broken which is you know, obviously better better late than never. But that was one thing. At the same time the what was happening in Egypt was that obviously that France and Britain and Israel invade. And the timing what look what happens. Hungary's uprising begins on October 23rd. Israel invades Sinai and that was the opening to the Sinai campaign October the 29th within a week. British and French troops land at Port Said in Egypt on October 31st. And on November the 4th, right? Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest to reconquer it, to retake it. And for what what happens is for the mind of the mind of the left, these two things are happening. That you have it's it shows that Moscow I mean, this wasn't news to anyone who was straight thinking, but anyone who was part of the delusional left wing idea of the OF MOSCOW SAYS, "OH, I DIDN'T KNOW Moscow's really an evil empire is a colonial empire. And Britain was obviously not much better because it was going the wrong way. Britain was meant to be dismantling the British Empire and was in fact dismantling the British Empire. But here was the revenge and the reassertion of empire. And so what happened is that created the new left. The new left said, "We're not having anything to do with Moscow anymore with this communist, but we're also not having anything to do with western democracies because it's so perfidious." So basically it created what is called the new left. Now, Israel was not in the immediate firing line, but you can see how it got there because Israel is suddenly tagged as part of the colonials. They go together with Britain and France. So, whereas the old left saw Israel as the kibbutz and as the, you know, the David against the Goliath, the new left began to see something else. They saw a state tied to Western power, and it was on the wrong side of the anti-colonial struggle. Fast forward a few years, a decade, to the next inflection point. And this is a major one. This is the Six-Day War. Because when Israel destroyed the Arab armies in six days, obviously Jews it create unleashed uncredible feelings. Jews around the world celebrated. In fact, much of the world celebrated with them. And obviously it was a high point for Israel. That's the point at which the left really breaks with Israel. Because this whole First of all, this whole story of David versus Goliath, being David the underdog, suddenly Israel is triple in size. Suddenly it is ruling over vast populations of Arabs, right? And suddenly Israel goes from being vulnerable to being, obviously, the central military power in the area. Now, there's one guy, actually, who's switch between 1948 Israel's independence and 1967 Israel as victor is very dramatic. He's a man called I.F. Stone. Again, very famous name on the left. He was one of the great journalists in the American left. Very, very, very iconoclast, very independent-minded, and very skeptical, right? I.F. Stone is Isidor Feinstein Stone. I mean, I don't think you can get better and more Jewish than that guy from Philadelphia. And what the important thing about him is that he was responsible. So, again, he's very far left, but he's responsible from 1946, etc., for some very, very pro-Jewish and pro-independence. I'm pro-Zionist journalism. What he did was he's he actually was a, you know, shoe leather reporter. He went out there and accompanied Jews trying to escape across Europe and escape through and break the British blockades. And he wrote a book after traveling there and called Underground to Palestine. And he actually said, I mean, this is not a guy who believes in Jewish except you know, he's a man who's assimilationist and he said really it would have been better for Jews to come to America and for different reasons. But he said, "I understand why the survivors want a Jewish country." He he wrote, "They've been kicked around as Jews and now they want to live as Jews." Okay? So he said that this was a man who's clearly on the side of Israel, the creation of Israel and that narrative in 1948. 1967, he's within weeks he publishes a famous essay in the New York Review of Books called Holy War. And he said, "I'm someone closely bound emotionally with the birth of Israel." And he obviously acknowledged what Jews had feared in the run-up to the war. But he said, "Stripped of propaganda and sentiment, the Palestine problem is simply the struggle of two different peoples for the same strip of land." Right? And that the Jews it was just come back to land for the Arabs it's an invasion. And he said a powerful line, "In a tragic struggle, the victors become the guilty and must make amends to the defeated." So now you can agree or disagree with him. But this is very central here because you see how the same figure, a man who's willing to he's he follows his own truth. He's a man of the left but he's fair-minded and he has flipped on Israel in 1967. And that was emblematic of what was happening across the new left because Israel had gone from being David to Goliath and instead of being kind of left-wing aligned it's clearly Western aligned ruling over Palestinian population, etc. The Six-Day War obviously didn't create every later argument by Israel, but I think it's really important to understand what it did to American Jews and its effect today. Okay? Because you can look at two different groups. Two different communities of Jews. The Jews of the Soviet Union, the victory of woke them up. It triggered the Bal T'shuva movement in Russia. A generation raised just crushed basically by communism, suddenly they felt a pride in being Jewish. And that awakened that sense of Jewish identity, which as I say unleashed the the Bal T'shuva movement, which is incredible powerful force. It sparked this Soviet Jewish revival. People were learning Hebrew and they were demanding became refuseniks and living openly as Jews and that's that's that story, but that was 1967. But 1967 triggered amongst left-leaning American Jews first a crisis that they were not on the side of progress anymore. And then greater and greater identification with the pro-Palestinian cause. And that is part of the road that ends with what we see today. An incredible thing, with a terrible thing, how American Jews right very high percentages in New York still voting for Zohran Mamdani because their place is so the the Democrats and the progressive cause is so central to their worldview that Israel has to go under the bus. They see that not as a betrayal of Jewish history, they see that as a kind of that's the what they talk about the Tikkun Olam, that's the moral universe. So, how did this shift happen? How did this way of seeing Israel become so dominant on the left? So, the lesson from here I think is something that is perhaps a takeaway from this episode, which is education, the power of education, ideas. Because what we call what is called the long march through the institutions. This was actually a left-wing strategy. It says it's going to be in educational institutions and cultural institutions that the battle, the wider battle for the culture is won. Zarema Bardani didn't emerge from nowhere. Take his case for example. He was a student in college. He founded his college as chapter of SJP, which is students for justice in Palestine, which is an organization that in various chapters justified October the 7th immediately afterwards. That's where these ideas are formed, not in the parliament or in the city hall, in student groups and this kind of ridiculous stuff that looks to the ridiculous and and you know, pathetic really to the outside observer, is those struggles on campus are really really an important thing. After October the 7th, that showed what education had produced. That long, what they call the long march through the institutions from the '60s onwards, the idea that you can re-educate that you you're going to change a society by what's taught in universities. And the universities were able to create self-reinforcing patches of ever greater anti- Israel, but more widely anti-American, anti-Western, for want of a better word, fundamentalism, agitation really. Those hotspots, radical hotbeds, were responsible for educating a couple of few generations now of politicians, of cultural figures, of elites, of leaders. And that's how society was changed. And that's after October the 7th. We always knew that the campuses were turning more and more radical. I mean, this has been going on for decades. But after October the 7th, the outpouring of vicious anti-Semitism that came shocked us, I would say, but let's say didn't surprise us. And while Jews were still in the utter as in the in the in the Gaza border area, there was the battle between Hamas and the IDF was still ongoing. And people didn't even know whether they whether their loved ones had had survived or or where they were, the hostages. The national chapter of the head, in other words, of the Students for Justice in Palestine, called the attack a historic win for the Palestinian resistance. And that moral perversion, I think it's important to understand. Where does that come from? When you decide as the new left did that Israel is the colonizer and Palestine is of the colonized, then anything that happens is just the rage of the victim against his oppressor. And then every atrocity committed on on an Israeli, on a Jew, is simply an act of a freedom fighter. Because Jews have been classified as the lesser humans. They are fascists and Nazi-like oppressors. That's a very, very poisonous way of seeing the world that came into existence through the new left. It divides humanity into a permanent oppressors, permanent oppressed, and it came up with a whole load of strange language about intersectionality, about people who are gradations of who are more or less in oppressed, which is an incredible thing. That the moral abomination was born in which the victims of the Nazis, the minority that is at most risk traditionally and still today, which is the Jews, are part of the oppressor class. That moral inversion creates the possibility to turn on the Jews. And that's been taught for decades, getting worse and worse in universities and activist circles, etc., etc. We all know that's the long march. I think it's actually a testament to the very Jewish idea of education that the Mara talks about that one of the great Malachi Yehuda, one of the great kings of the Jewish people, revived the study of Torah by he said in main good deed he meant to teach him if there's no little baby goats, kid goats, there's going to be no big goats. And so, in other words, we need to start young, and he started educating young generation to return to the base of madrash. We know that's a very Jewish idea. Actually, the left's focus on education has been something that we can see that we recognize for the power of what it is. And that, I think, is something that is we have to understand because once you understand the architecture, the shift from old left to new left from vehemently supporting Israel, from enthusiastically supporting Israel to vehemently opposing it was a shift that happened within a couple of generations and that's what I encountered. The professor on the train lived it loved the Israel of the kibbutzim, but his political world had moved on because the old left saw Jewish workers building a socialist refuge, the new left saw a colonial power. And the students of that new left have now taken over. Their long march through the institutions is almost complete. And I think look, we all see the anti-Semitism and this is just beyond a sham. This is so clearly a a metaphysically impossible strange phenomenon, the enormous wave of anti-Semitism davka when Jews were being murdered which is incredible hard to fathom. But we have to understand as well that we operate in a world of cause and effect and we have to operate and try and do what we can. But we can't. We cannot do this. This is really a battle for Western civilization itself. The Jews as has often been said are the canary in the coal mine. And just to go with that analogy, if the Jews are the canary in the coal mine, it's the coal miner, okay, not the canary that needs to do something about the poisonous fumes. And the only way to do something about those noxious vapors in Western society, if it's an exist and if it still wants to do something about it, the only way is to reverse that lesson of the left turn on Israel. The extreme ideas that start in the classroom need to be countered in the classroom. >> Thank you for listening to Behind the Times. We appreciate you joining us as we explore the stories and people who shaped Jewish history. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, leave a review, and share with friends. Until next time.