Ben Shapiro & Yair Rosenberg: A Discussion Around Antisemitism moderated by Rabbi Efrem Goldberg

foreign [Music] [Applause] good evening everyone thank you for your patience and thank you so much for being here an enormous thank you to yair and to Ben for being with us tonight for this incredibly important and timely conversation before we begin I do want to mention that weighing very heavily on our hearts our community was shaken shalom and in fact we considered canceling or postponing this event the moscow's family understanding really the urgency of this conversation encouraged us to continue but even as we do when we sit here tonight they're very very much on our hearts we take a moment to offer our prayer that God give them strength and comfort during this incredibly difficult time for them and by extension for all of our community and our BRS family I want to take a moment to thank our generous sponsors for tonight without whom this evening wouldn't be possible doctors Mark and Eva horn and family in memory of Eva's mother Dr Judith ruza Survivor was devoted to preserving the memory of the showa thank you so much for your generosity also an enormous thank you an evening like this doesn't come together on its own it was the work of many people a big thank you to Jeffrey Talia to yaakov Benjamin Yankee and thank you to the white stocks for their help for tonight we are incredibly proud that BRS continues to provide content like this last week with the Tikvah fund Rabbi Dr mayor salivichuk the week before of Moshe Weinberger BRS is incredibly proud to offer such diverse content programming informative thought-provoking inspirational but we need your help to continue to do it so if you're not a member of BRS we ask you to contribute evenings like tonight we make available without charge but we ask your help and support brsonline.org Global be part of our Global Community continue to enjoy our content and continue to enable us to provide it widely tonight I don't have time I don't think we have time or need to spend the time tracing the roots of anti-Semitism in history or even in religion and theology we all know that anti-Semitism is the world's oldest hatred and it began at the very beginning of the Jewish people we've been hated since we've existed in fact Rashi the great biblical commentator comments in partials the Great Sage of Sona liyakov there's different gear says different exact languages but essentially it's axiomatic or it's built in the almighty created a world in which the Jewish people we who are designated as a nation of priests we were meant to be an example to the world will you bear a responsibility to live a certain elevated lifestyle we are hated and we are hated we will be hated and somehow this is built into the fabric is difficult as that is to accept tonight our conversation will center around anti-Semitism but I hope I really hope in a more subtle way that tonight will actually accomplish another goal as well and that is the ability to sit together and discuss something that we largely agree about partly disagree about But ultimately realize that if we come from different angles or perspectives if we have different opinions we all care equally and our hearts are in the right in the same place and whether this topic of anti-semitism or true about Ben and yair or about us and people we know it's important to remember that we have so much more in common that we have which divide us and these two incredibly thoughtful prominent individuals who the world would like to position as opposed on so many issues and they have important disagreements between them have so much more in common proud and passionate and practicing Jews than they have that divide them and so while this was framed originally as a debate and immediately the jokes began like who's taking the side supporting anti-Semitism someone actually asked me if we're bringing a Neo-Nazi to represent the pro anti-Semitism position but the reality is that it's important to understand that we can debate and dialogue without dividing and destroying that we could come out richer and better and more thoughtful and recognizing that may be different but still with the more we have in common and so there are too many in Israel right now and around the world who are trying to kill us we don't need to kill each other we should feel United by the things that we have in common and hopefully tonight will be an example of how to disagree agreeably and how to recognize how much more we have in common than that which divides us in addition to being too highly respected and nationally recognized personalities are two panelists tonight have an intimate knowledge of the subject matter just a few years ago the ADL the Anti-Defamation League's task force on journalism and harassment identified our two panelists as number one and two most targeted Jewish journalists receiving online anti-semitic abuse yeah you're commented in the New York Times my parents didn't raise me to be number two fortunately there's always 20 20. they are here because they know about and they speak about and they write about this issue they care deeply about this issue and they've been the targets of this issue Ben Shapiro the founding editor-in-chief and editor Ramirez the daily wire host of the Ben Shapiro show one of the most popular podcasts in the nation author of numerous non-fiction books several New York Times bestsellers I will add a generous leader in our Boca Raton Community someone has become a good friend Ben thank you so much for being here tonight thank you for so much for participating in this conversation Rosenberg I'm looking forward to becoming a good friend as a staff writer at the Atlantic and writes it's deepstal newsletter prior to joining the Atlantic year was a senior writer tablet magazine is written for the Washington Post New York Times Wall Street Journal the guardian his work has received recognition from the religious news Association in the Harvard Center for Jewish studies thank you so much for being here tonight I don't need to and I don't want to take the time to lay out the statistics of the proliferation the growth of anti-Semitism both online and the brutal violence and attacks that are taking place offline we all know about it we read about it and we live it but I want to begin with the following question to you both can you each give a snapshot of how you see anti-Semitism in America today is it indeed worse than ever or does it just feel that way but maybe we should start with even something broader a little step back from that which is the very definition of what's anti-semitic what is anti-Semitism there's a tendency today we all suffer from it and we all see others who do it who label anything and everything anti-Semitism the newspaper or the cable network that doesn't cover Israel accurately the celebrity or the politician who said something that sounds bad even if they didn't intend it that way the crossword puzzle that looks like a swastika by Design or by accident or even the driver who cuts us off in traffic and curses at us and didn't even realize we were Jewish but we call them an anti-semite if everything's anti-Semitism then nothing is anti-Semitism and if nothing is anti-Semitism then we are in grave Danger so I've always felt if we label everything anti-Semitism we lose our credibility and we don't know where or how to fight or stop it so what is anti-Semitism how do we Define it and what is the state of anti-Semitism in America today then for a changer sitting on the left but B comes first your crown number two is the first loser in terms of being targeted by anti-Semitism but I I wish I had your security class and not mine uh the uh when it comes to uh you know the definition of anti-semitism I'm sure this is a place where we're largely going to agree uh anti-Semitism is essentially a conspiracy theory unlike other forms of racial hatred it is not rooted particularly in a or necessarily in a belief in the inferiority of a particular race although there is a type of anti-Semitism ethnic anti-Semitism that is that is directed in that direction it really is a conspiracy theory about power and how the world works and I think you can sort of break it down in today's world into four semi theories you have right-wing anti-Semitism which is rooted in the idea that an independent Jewish Community to any polity is a threat to the polity this idea here is that sort of the Egyptian idea alaparo that there's this group of people and they are apart from us and they are not keeping our laws and they are a threat to us because of that and they're breaking down uh the nation state that is sort of right-wing anti-Semitism you have left-wing anti-Semitism which ties into ideas about structures of power the idea being that Jews are disproportionately powerful because they are people unto themselves and they have these connections with one another that allow them to succeed in an in capitalist Enterprise in a way that that others would not uh you have religious anti-Semitism which used to be more characteristic in in Christian Europe and now is more characteristic in in Islamic Middle Eastern countries the idea being that that Judaism is itself a corrupt religion in the adherence thereof are corrupt and evil and then you have ethnic anti-Semitism which really is a late stage developing anti-Semitism usually for for most of human history the way that you got out of anti-Semitism is that you assimilated or converted and really in the last couple of hundred years obviously that changed to you can't assimilate or convert your way out if you have a grandparent who is who's Jewish you're a Jew and therefore you're lesser on an ethnic level at ethnic anti-Semitism can Infuse either right wing or left-wing anti-Semitism you see it actually appear in aspects of both religious anti-Semitism same sort of thing you sometimes see Rick Wiles for example who's an anti-semite on the Christian side and and he seems like he's more right-wing politically and then you will see radical islamists who somehow are getting garnering sympathy from the Jeremy corbyns of the world so you see an allied with sort of left-wing politics that's sort of the these various strains of anti-Semitism exist the the thing that links them all is this idea that Jews are behind all of the levers of the world right we're we're all the best capitalists if you're a communist we're all the best Communists if you're a capitalist well one of the most powerful people in the world and and Israel is in an evil nation state if you are a person who opposes the nation of Israel if you are a person who is a a nationalist then Jews are part of the international socialist cabal right Jews are sort of lurking behind every corner and that's what makes it incredibly difficult to fight it's because it takes all these various forms it means it's much more difficult to sort of spot and identify and what this also means that in terms of it's not just diagnosing anti-Semitism that's the problem it's fighting anti-Semitism that's the problem because to a certain extent it it can at the edges there are certain cases where it's clear and anti-Semitism right yay just speaking through storm and autism is clear anti-Semitism there are cases that are sort of edge cases where it's it's sort of the the old legal saw you know when you see it but that doesn't answer the question of exactly how you're going to fight it and so the rubric that I've sort of started to think through in terms of how to fight it is just a way of thinking it through is that you have hardcore anti-semites or as a percentage of the population fairly well these are people who actually believe strongly in the actual theories of anti-Semitism that might be anywhere from five to ten percent of a given population in the West and then you have adherence to political philosophies that sometimes make common cause with the anti-semites and then you have individuals who are making comments and when you have individuals who are making comments you have to determine whether that individual is a member of the five percent anti-semites whether that person is ignorant the stupid person who's saying a thing it needs to be corrected or whether that person is acting as an unwitting or winning conduit between the five percent and the 45 to put anti-jewish policies over the Finish Line because what you do see is political movements very often will wink and Nod at the five percent in order to get a majority in in any society so in 2015 2016 this is actually what I felt president Trump was doing with the alt-right I think that he was winking and nodding at the alt-right through large parts of 2015 2016 before he kind of forcibly threw them out of the administration and I think that you see the Democratic party with regard to Rashida Talib and Ohana Omar this is a this is a solid core and we can't get rid of them because they're too useful politically and so you know the we have to determine whether an individual is a link between the five percent the 45 whether they're remember the five percent or whether they're just adults in determining how to fight them and do you think things are indeed as bad that as we perceive them to be or I mean it's hard to say that that I will say they're they're the worst that they've been in my lifetime but my lifetime is a blessed lifetime I mean across the broad span of Jewish history the answer is not even remotely close to the worst that we've seen it's probably close to the best that we've ever seen in terms of global anti-Semitism but in terms of obviously you know day-to-day life and the number of Jews who are being attacked in Williamsburg for wearing a tribal on the street uh or the number of terrorist attacks are taking place in Israel it's it's worse than it's been for a long time your definition anti-Semitism and the state of it today let me pick up with the state of it first uh because I agree with Ben but I'd make I'd say it's stronger and I think it's important to say that at the outset of a debate like this well first I want to thank all of you for being here actually because uh I don't know a thousand people saying I'm gonna spend my night uh listening to people talk about anti-Semitism I don't know it doesn't sound like my idea of a good time I'm being paid to be here I know about the rest of you um Valentine's Day among the Jews you know and then all of the exactly well the Jewish Jewish Jewish Super Bowl um and so and then you have uh and then you have all the people I know who are tuning in and watching online I believe they've already posted to YouTube under the title Ben Shapiro fillets leftist mainstream journalists like fish get filter fish um so I appreciate all you taking care um and I appreciate the show putting all this together and I know that there are other things happening right now in this community um and I hope that we keep those in our hearts um so the state of anti-Semitism today I always say to students when I go and speak on college campuses or elsewhere that if you had to pick if I had to pick any time and place in human history uh to live as a Jew in a non-jewish country I would pick the 21st century in the United States of America and I think most people in this room would as well um and I think that's really really important to remember because we're going to spend a lot of tonight talking about disturbing things a lot of things that have gone wrong for the Jewish people and it's important to remember that actually we live in an incredibly privileged place in a an exceptional Place American exceptionalism is what we've experienced and I think that's really important and that being said if my time machine had really fine-tuned uh controls I'd probably say maybe 10 years old 10 years ago 10 2013 right and that's sort of what's going to be coming up which is saying it's clear that certain things have happened within the parameters of the normal fluctuations of American anti-Semitism which has gotten worse and better it's not that it's never been here right it's always been here um and it gets worse and better at different times and it feels like it's getting worse I don't think people have that in their heads um and there are all sorts of directions that it comes from and we'll we'll get into those um as for defining anti-Semitism uh people have debated this for centuries there are current debates going on about this and of course we're going to solve it in approximately three minutes because we have other questions to get to um in the true Jewish tradition one does this on one foot so I'm going to try it's uh I agree largely with what Ben laid out about conspiracy theories we'll get into that I'm sure more later but I want to try something a little different which is I think of anti-Semitism as treating Jews or groups of Jews differently whether that's intellectually politically or interpersonally then equivalent groups of non-goods um and that might sound like it doesn't apply to all the sorts of things that you think about but I think if you think about a little more you'll find that applies to a lot of things and I'll give an example that might be on a lot of people's minds that Ben has talked about and written about um the biggest podcaster in the world Joe Rogan um recently had a sort of one offline on his podcast where he was talking about uh Jews and money and he said how come you can't say you know Jews are into money right saying Jews are not into money it's like saying Italians aren't into pizza so setting aside the fact that nobody Mass murdered Italians for their alleged obsession with pepperoni um put that aside what is going on when when uh Joe Rogan says that I don't think he woke up in the morning and said I'm going to say something that's dangerously stereotypical about Jews that has really led to bad things happening to Jews uh over the centuries I think he actually was just reflecting in a received cultural stereotype and way of thinking about Jews that he wouldn't apply to other people because it's a stereotype but what do I mean by that well probably many people in this room don't realize but if you look at the statistics of wealth in the United States and some other countries Western countries um a group that's very similar to Jews are South Asians are particularly Hindus so Hindu Americans have a tremendous share of wealth in the United States have been very successful here which is a wonderful thing um I don't think you've ever heard people conspiracy theorizing right about how you know Hindus control the economy or about how South Asians are super into money and that's really good I'm really glad let's not start that um right that's wonderful that's how normally it works for some reason though right and it would never even occur to someone like Joe Rogan to say that right but for some reason it occurs to many people not just Joe Rogan that it's a perfectly normal way to speak about Jews even though you wouldn't speak about equivalent nodges in the same way so this is what I mean that if you start looking at a lot of these things right you can go to Israel you can go to almost any issue and you will find that this is what's going on I'd add one more caveat which is uh there's a big difference between how non-jews right talk about Jews and Jews talk about non-jews is the difference between how a community a minority Community talks about itself and how people outside talk about that Community that's why there's a difference between a black person using the n-word and a non-black person using the n-word and we all intuitively I hope understand this and similarly when a Jewish person might say or a rabbi might get up and say Jewish people are supposed to hold themselves to the highest possible moral and ethical standard we hold ourselves to a higher standard than the general Society or other countries and such and things like that right that is legitimate discourse if a non-jew does that it's anti-Semitism and again I think that actually makes perfect logical sense I just wanted to spell it out because sometimes say oh people juice talk this way so it's okay it's not right and it's important to be able to tell the difference and be able to recognize that groups should talk about themselves in different ways than Outsiders can and that this definition is good it shouldn't be misused can I follow up on that last point because isn't there a fundamental difference between a group holding themselves to a standard but asking others not to feel as entitled to hold them to that standard and a word which is either objectionably objectionally objectionable or it's permissible meaning the comparison you made between the n-word or the fact that we say we hold ourselves to a higher standard I mean think of it this way think about jokes about a particular Community there are certain jokes that we would not tell about other communities maybe when you were growing up they might have and now we recognize we shouldn't do that right but that Community can tell those jokes it's a self-deprecation it's very different than other deprecations right and when you use when a word is a slur when directed towards someone else whereas it can be a term of affection in German or just a lyric in a song it's a totally different context right now there are educational settings and others what youth mentioned distinctions right and we could have a totally different debate on all those but that's not that's not this debate right but I do think it is much very much in the same category so so far there's a lot of overlap but I think the next question maybe we'll hear some disagreement maybe not and that is which concerns you more anti-Semitism coming from the left or from the right broadly we could talk about individuals and I have a follow-up question about that but broadly speaking in terms of Trends are you more concerned from the left or from the right can I please um so I'm really happy that Rabbi Goldberg asked this question we this was originally even on the flyer for the the program and I knew that this was something that we talk about and I wanted us to talk about it and in these terms so I could say I reject the premise of the question um and I want to tell you why because I think every single one of you walked into this room has probably already heard is it the left or is it the right who's worse right man maybe you've had this fight over your Shabbos table or with somebody online and I wanted to think about it for one second and just think has anyone ever won this argument and has anyone ever walked into this argument and changed their minds and if so and if not if that hasn't actually happened is it a useful question or is it a distraction and I'm going to submit to you that this is actually the wrong way to look at it it doesn't read of course there isn't left-wing anti-semites there's a right one we're gonna hear examples we'll help with plenty more I've written about them for 10 years um what I don't do is say that this is the framework in which we should understand anti-Semitism and this is actually something Ben already alluded to and I'll get to it but let me tell you a few reasons why um Left Right is not the dichotomy you want so one it's an unwittable argument two it's a blame shifting argument it's basically a way for people to say that anti-Semitism is the Perpetual problem of other people you talk to left-wing people they will always talk about right-wing anti-Semitism they're very comfortable about that you talk to right-wing folks they'll always talk about left wing anti sentence I know I've done it I've been in these rooms um it's so much easier to impute people we already dislike and disagree with for something like this than to look inside and have those hard conversations I want to encourage those hard conversations I want to encourage the the changes uh change is not going to happen from without um and that brings us to the Strategic argument which is that if you could say somehow theoretically solve who is more anti-semitic the left or the right say we somehow came up with you know we chat GPT gets a little bit more advanced and figures out that anti-Semitism is a 53.7 percent a left-wing phenomenon and you know 46.7 a right-wing phenomenon what have we actually learned what is actually useful about that not very much for a couple reasons one is that anti-Semitism in Ohio looks a lot different than anti-Semitism in New York anti-Semitism in France looks a lot different than anti-Semitism in the United Kingdom and we have polls and statistics that back this up we've actually they've actually done really good surveys of Jews in Europe for example in different countries the European Union did this multiple times they were smart they said we're going to ask the Jews where are you experiencing anti-Semitism from because if you opponents say that non-jews are you anti-semitic some of them will actually tell you which is pretty remarkable but some of them will lie so they're not the great the best polls they're useful but not the best better to ask you is what they're experiencing and what you find is that if you look at say um I remember Poland for example almost everyone says I've experienced anti-Semitism from the right that's where it's all coming from but then you go uh to somewhere like Italy and there's much more coming from the left right and then you go to somewhere like Britain more from the left you go to France they say it's for Muslims right and this is my experience as a reporter on anti-Semitism right it's different in each place so these generalizations that we use as pundits right which are really fun one for political debates and takes on Twitter are largely useless in real life that's Point number two three what if we could really solve it what if we figured it out it still wouldn't help because that doesn't tell us how to change it um Ben Shapiro is never going to walk into a meeting of a Democratic Socialist of America and convince them that they should worry about the fact that some of their activism against Israel and Israeli policies sometimes bleeds into anti-Semitism right they're going to laugh him out of the room and they might even become defensive about something that if someone in their own Community raised they might have taken seriously and similarly Alexandria ocasio-cortez will never ever successfully walk in to you know a trump rally and say you should be worried that Donald Trump had dinner with Kanye West and Nick Fuentes right they're not going to take it from her because this is how people are we listen to people we respect whose voices carry credibility in our community um and so it doesn't really matter who happens to have more and who happens to have less it matters where do you have credibility to change it and encouraging people to have those hard conversations inside their communities so that right Wingers are fighting right-wing anti-Semitism left when fingers left-wing Muslims Muslim anti-Semitism and Christians Christian anti-Semitism things like that and so I think that that would be how my model then the question is okay I've just destroyed your left right Paradigm but it's really easy to tear things down what would you put up in its place and there I would turn to what Ben was talking about with understanding anti-Semitism is something much deeper than these ideological Expressions because I think we all know as Rabbi Goldberg said at the beginning that anti-Semitism predates capitalism communism Republicans Democrats Christianity Islam so it can't be caused by any of those things those are just manifestations where does it come from if it comes from before that it comes from much more fundamental human impulses and I would submit that that comes from I'll start with a three-part thing that ends at The Conspiracy Theory um I would say the greatest text in Tanakh on anti-Semitism is the Book of Esther um in regardless Esther which we'll read on Purim in less than a month um Haman the villain turns to the king and is trying to convince him to knock off all of the Jews in his kingdom and he does this by saying um [Music] and Below uh um right so there is this people spread and Scattered throughout the land um whose laws are different whose beliefs are different than the other peoples and they do not obey the king's laws it is not in the king's best interest to tolerate them right so what is going on here this is the siren song of every anti-semite for centuries everyone is just really riffing off of what Haman already said it was perfectly distilled already thousands you know thousands of years ago um this is somebody saying there's this small community that's different than the majority um and they're they they believe differently they act differently and we should not allow that people are very bad human communities are very bad at tolerating minority difference um we've seen that with many other minorities not just with Jews the thing with Jews is that we've been around a really long time so we've been hit by this human home pulse over and over and over again um and so that's that's like fundamentally this inability to tolerate Jews who are always different until the modern state of Israel and specific periods of Jewish history right almost all of us history is Jews being this minority community that behaves differently than the society that they're in in some way and that is very hard for groups to tolerate I thought there was a very interesting poll that yougov did very recently where they tried to pull Republicans and Democrats in their opinions of different religious groups and for some reason they decided to pull Judaism and Orthodox Judaism separately which is really interesting and he gets you interesting results because you discover that Republicans and Democrats both have different opinions on they like one more than the other but it reverses so they don't understand opinion on Judaism they split um and Republicans who um like Orthodox Judaism more than like Judaism and Democrats like Judaism more than they like Orthodox Judaism what is going on well people like people who are more like themselves and Republicans are more religious right and more and the whole Coalition is more religious and more conservative and they perceive Orthodox Jews as one of them as like them people who work me right that is comfortable for them right whereas the Democratic Coalition right is more liberal right in some cases more secular and they're going to be much more likely to like the majority be much more comfortable with the majority of American Jews who are from Liberal Jewish denominations right conservative reform Reconstructionist um who don't dress as distinctively right and look more like them and sound more like them um and this is again a very natural human impulse and so what you have here is that Republicans like Jews are more like them and Democrats like Jews who are more like them um and so the inability of tolerate minority difference lies at the heart of anti-Semitism this quickly becomes um an Impulse to scapegoat the minority for anything that goes wrong because if something goes wrong in the society you have two options one is to look within yourself and find out why did this go wrong economically politically whatever um or much more easy you can just blame Outsiders so sometimes that takes the form of blaming foreigners or foreign people from foreign countries but it's even easier if you've received foreigners within your country and the Jews had perpetually been the foreigners in the country so they get scapegoated which naturally leads to conspiracy theories which justify scapegoating Jews for all of society's problems so I would submit that looking at this as a conspiratorial mindset as an inability to tolerate minority difference is is a more useful way to spot warning signs of someone who might have symptoms of anti-Semitism and a more useful way to combat it than getting bogged down in partisan fights that nobody wins and I want to say one more thing you may have noticed you were lured here under false pretenses you were told this was a debate and discussion about anti-Semitism it's really an effort to break the land speed record for most words spoken per minute and at the end they're going to add them up and they will declare the victory purely based on which of us has talked more uh I was about to say that the people here have never been to an event live on double speed live so this is this is why it's it's being put on YouTube so you can watch it afterwards on half speed and figure out what it is we were saying exactly first podcast that will ever have to be listened to on have to Ben before I printed to you I just wanna I just want to share because it's one of my favorite insights and I find myself sharing it almost every year it's an inside of a salivation only because you invoked Purim where is says you know what the miracle of Purim is the miracle of Purim is not that we were saved the miracle of perm is that it was an anti-semite who got up and said what he was going to do and declared his intent and we believed him the miracle we didn't excuse them we didn't explain them we didn't justify him we didn't ignore him the miracle of the story of Purim is that he got up and spoke that way and we believed him so Ben do you agree with your ear that that was a terrible question um so first of all you know one of the nice things about this is there will be a new conspiracy theory about how Jews talk fast after after all of this my entire career I actually really appreciate this is this is like you're finally operating my speed finally someone's catching up this is great so um so I agree in the international context that it is far too narrow a question because International politics doesn't map onto American politics and I also agree that when it comes to you know right left dichotomies in terms of anti-Semitism they don't manifest in quite the same ways I'm I will reject the idea there are no meaningful distinctions that ought to be dealt with in the public sphere however and by the way I also agree that it's incumbent on people on the right to child people on the right when they do the wrong thing and it's incumbent on people on the left they tried people on the left wing they do the wrong thing and I hope that we all do that you know regardless of which side of the al-time which is very often a difficult business I'm sure we'll talk about uh the the the distinction that I would make in terms of modern American politics and the reason why it doesn't I'll start the reason why it matters because you kind of suggested it didn't I think the reason why it matters is because very often when Jews are deciding how to vote one of the things that they are trying to figure out is which party for example or which ideology is going to victimize people like me which ideology is closer to policies that are going to harm people like me which is is not a shock I mean that's virtual however how everybody individually votes and that's also how pretty much every group votes in the United States and I will also suggest that the poll that you cited which suggests that Democrats are much warmer toward Judaism as a whole and Republicans are much more toward or Orthodox Judaism for example but I wouldn't say to be clear I think that Judaism in that Poe is functioning as a code for what is the typical Jew I encounter which is just a Jew from a more liberal denomination rather than identifying that is true by the way I totally agree with you and that's the reason why what I'm going to say is that broad space that broad spectrum of anti-Semitism is going to be more common on the left because one of the things about anti-Semitism is that it should be defining people as the the other who actually are the other I mean what I mean by that is that if what you're saying is I like Jews because Jews don't wear funny hats and Jews dress exactly like me and Jews act like secular left-wing people who went to the same University that I do and occasionally eat a bagel well then that's that really has very little to do with with pro-jewish or anti-jewish that has to do with these are people who think the way I do and they just happen to be labeling themselves Jewish right this gets into itself the identity is Judaism but no but I would say that exactly but I would say then Republicans look and I have been in these rooms and I've reported you know from the public National Convention and in Republic spaces you know these places well and I think that they look and they see someone like me um wearing a yamaka distinctive Jewish dress making decisions that put myself out there in a world that is more secular and doesn't always look kindly on that and they say oh you're one of us right my mother would always say that I'm making yeah it's a more pro-jewish position than it is to say I'm pro-jeish because it's just people who are like them because they do the same thing but and they perceive themselves as secular society but the point that I'm making is that if you are talking about who's more visibly Jewish if you're talking about the people who are more under threat as Jews in America right now typically speaking you're talking about the guy wearing a black hat in Williamsburg typically you're talking about the people who are more openly identifying as Jewish not the person whose name is is Greenstein who just happens like matzo ball soup and takes a break for for brunch on Yom Kippur and so like the this this notion that if if if we can distinguish between Judaism and Orthodox Judaism as that poll did and one group is warmer toward Orthodox Judaism and another is is warmer toward secular leftism that they think is Judaism that that has very little to do with them being pro-jewish that has them it has to do much you're telling me that in your view a Texas oilman who worships Jesus and goes to church regularly but feels solidarity with a guy who wears weird hair around his ears and wears a strange hat on his head and prays three times a day one of them wrapping weird leather things around his arm that there's no difference in terms of anti-Semitism in these two groups I would say there's a vast difference in anti-Semitism in terms of these two groups if I'm going to talk about phylosematism to me the alcohol semitism has to speak to acceptance of Judaism as Judaism is I don't think that all Judaism is created the same I don't think that all Jewish practices created the same and so when I so this goes to the original question which was when we talk about right left distinctions in terms of anti-Semitism what I will say is that right-wing anti-Semitism is kind of stupid people anti-Semitism what I mean by that is what you very often see is people saying you know the Jews are corrupt the Jews are the Jews you know they they hate Jesus the Jews kill Jesus the Jews are corrupting our society and so when it comes to God forbid a shooting in a synagogue that's usually going to come from only a couple of groups that typically is not going to come from a left-wing secularist typically that's going to come from a white supremacist it might come from a radical Muslim it might come from Black Hebrew Israelite I believe that that named pretty much every major synagogue or or you know Jewish shooting in the United States for the last 10 to 15 years um when it comes to Broad left when it comes to Broad politics that victimizes Jews quad Jews meaning anti-religious policies that victimize Jewish Day schools or that Target synagogues or policy that targets Israel for destruction or put Israel in an intensely vulnerable vulnerable position which I think for Jews as a people is significantly more threatening that I think is more centralized on the left in the United States again that differs by country you might not see that in a place like Poland or France let me let me follow up we have a lot of questions we want to get to in this next one maybe if you could both answer it somewhere briefly because I want to get to the others but I think it's an important not not to suggest you weren't brief the rabbi telling you it's the rabbi telling others to be brief well the secret is that you get twice as many words for the same amount of time that you've devoted to this true you're getting a bar game listen I have all night so I'm happy to continue this conversation and I think others would love to hear it but we throw around and I think words are so important and that's what we're missing is is nuance and subtlety and sophistication in a lot of the conversations around anti-Semitism and that's really what what precipitated tonight is there are Jewish organizations dedicated to this fight who are largely unsuccessful we're seeing this enormous proliferation despite the investment of millions of dollars and we wanted to take this outside those organizations and bring some thought leaders to try to change the conversation a little bit so around Shabba Stables as was alluded to or on WhatsApp groups people will talk about the anti-semites in Washington and depending which side they may be talking about different people and the question is are there really anti-semites in Washington so whether it's Trump or Marjorie Taylor green AOC Elon Omar Richard are these people actual anti-semites and do words matter it's important what we label people what we call people first of all if we say it enough they'll become those people because they might as well we've already labeled them that are these people with really bad ideas and policies they've said and tweeted really bad and dangerous things when is someone labeled an anti-semite and when do we oppose some of the things they say and believe but we're doing a disservice we call them an anti-semite Trump hosted those notorious anti-semites for lunch is he an anti-semite Elon Omar has talked about the Benjamins does that make her an anti-semite they both might be wrong about things but do we have to be careful who we call an anti-semi penal start with you so I think the answer to that is yes and I think that we should try to distinguish between people who hold full-scale anti-semitic philosophies and people who say anti-semitic things in the same way that you have an uncle who told a racist joke does that make him a racist for his entire life or does it mean that he said a racist thing and he should be chatted for for saying the racist thing the difference between the person who says the racist thing and the person who is the racist is that when chided the person who says the racist thing might stop saying the racist thing as opposed to doubling down and then re-dumbling down and saying well no this is part of a broad framework of philosophy that I have so to take you know one of the examples that you gave so I think Marjorie Taylor green says an enormous number of stupid things including some anti-semitic things right I mean she the Jewish space laser thing which as I said is right-wing stupid people anti-Semitism because no one actually believes except for a dumb person the Jews control a space laser because if if we did we'd have a lot of people that we would hit with the Jewish space laser as it turns out Marjorie Taylor green when she spoke for example at in America First conference with Fuentes was hit from the right and then she denounced being at the at the conference right and then she went to the Holocaust Museum and botched that because that's what Marjorie Taylor green does and that is is I think a difference in kind from ilhan Omar who not only takes the position that that Hamas is not really a body worthy of full-scale condemnation but also has been tried to by Democratic leaders in the Jewish community in Minnesota I mean there are full-scale articles about this in the Minneapolis Star Tribune they met with her they said we would like for you to walk some of this back we would like to know what the hell you were thinking and came away extremely disappointed that she was not willing to walk any of that sort of stuff back now again this is not suggesting that there aren't anti-semites on the right side of the aisle there clearly are but to suggest for example that ilhan Omar Rashida Talib for example who literally meets with Terror supporters in her office right who put it posted on a map in her office that said Palestine with an arrow toward the entire state of Israel right that Rashida Talib is in the same boat as Donald Trump is absurd I mean Donald Trump does stupid things because this is who Donald Trump is Donald Trump does things that he believes benefit him in the moment because that's who Donald Trump is Donald Trump also happens to be the most pro-israel president in the history of the United States by by policy to pretend that those two things are completely comparable is I think incredibly silly you can say clearly that Donald Trump committed an act of anti-Semitism and having Kanye West and Nick Fuentes to his dinner table I will say there was an act of anti-Semitism and also an act of incredible stupidity and I I try to as a general rule this is you know as a general rule I don't always succeed I try to attribute to everything I can to stupidity before I attribute it to malice which is why I'm distinguishing between making a racist joke and being a racist or saying an anti-semitic thing and being an anti-semite I you know I I don't think that ilhan Omar wassued to leave have at any point along the line earned the benefit of the doubt I think that that President Trump has earned a lot of benefit of the doubt which does not excuse him for having done what he did with Nick Fuentes or or Kanye even though afterward he did come out and say I don't know these people and I don't know them from Adam right which is something that Rashida tulip has never said about Terror supporters she's had so that distinction would also dictate that we respond to them differently meaning the person who made the racist joke could be taught inspired reformed but the racist is the person that we publicly oppose and if you apply that here let me actually and the truth is that I think that even the people who say racist things or a person who says an anti-semitic thing you have to determine what's the best way to convince them to dissociate from from that particular Viewpoint Sometimes the best way to do it is to approach them behind the scenes and have text messages with them and have done with many people because if you do it publicly then they actually react badly and they move into the wrong Camp sometimes the answer is you do smack them publicly in an attempt to kind of swap them down and make clear to them there are public ramifications for this thing so you better move off that line when you have somebody who continues to repeat and repeat and repeat the thing over and over and over I'm not sure how many times the person can repeat the thing before you start believing them right being unrepentant is the difference yeah you agree or the actual first of all now I'm nervous at every question I asked you I don't know if there's a bad question but are there actual anti-semites actual anti-semites in Washington do we have to be careful do you subscribe to Ben's distinction between the uncle with the racist joke and the racist so there's a bunch of different things that have been folded into one answer here that I would disentangle but first I want to acknowledge the Trap before I dive into the Trap which is I just told you that we shouldn't be doing this in partisan terms because it's an unwillable argument that convinces no one and makes for really good entertainment and then actually nobody actually changes their mind and nothing changes and perhaps if the whole point don't respond to that partisan way I don't know but this was a partisan remark and I think that I will show you that I can play this game too and then we will all agree to disagree and it will be kind of silly but I'm going to show that I can but first I want to acknowledge that that's what we've just done and I also want to say that if you're looking at politicians in general and you're saying I don't think they're speaking well on Jews or in general you're saying I think there's a problem with our politicians then what you're really seeing because politicians are Downstream from voters in a democracy they are elected is you're perceiving problems in the polity among the people right and our politicians we get the politicians we deserve we get the politicians who represent different ideologies and conspiracy theories that are percolating in our society um and if we are focusing on these individuals and making them into these giant blob things right then we're actually missing again what is really going on because you're not gonna you could fix every racist politician I don't know with a whack-a-mole right and it wouldn't solve the actual fundamental thing they put in there the first place you should get new ones I agree with that right and so I really find this sort of level of the discourse right as much as I find that people will click on it online right and I know because I write um it is backwards and I want to like focus on that I think what is the we'll get to those things what are the bottoms so essentially yes that was another bad question but but no but I'm going to answer because I think it's fair I also think what I'm saying just saying you should focus on certain personalities like perhaps the person who became the president of the United States which I think is a category difference from Marjorie Taylor green and a category difference from ilhan Omar there's just no there's a huge difference between members of the House of Representatives who hold very little power comparably and the president of the United States who doesn't just set the tone for the United States of America but for the entire world and when the president of the United States goes and has dinner at his personal residence with the person who has been skewing every anti-semitic idea Under the Sun and a white supremacist uh you know who what he brought along for fun right and then like doesn't actually apologize for it right didn't actually apologize Elon Omar deleted some of her tweets and apologies you might not think we're about she was in Sierra or that she doubled down which is what you were saying I'm not going to here to debate that I'm just saying he didn't even have an instance in your apology I miss insincere apologies our country doesn't even have those anymore um and so Donald Trump and here I'm going to tell you some things that you probably might not have heard in your you know because they were done in small podcasts and media stuff but you can Google me the people watching at home open a new tab I won't be offended um Donald Trump has said these things and they are not taken out of context he has said Israel owned Congress he has said and he said this to a conservative interviewer and he said and I'll explain why he said these things I don't think it's quite as simple as he's an anti-semite we'll talk about that he has also said Israel used to completely control Congress and doesn't anymore um and he thinks that's and then he also said when he was running in 2016 and Ben knows this very well he went to the Republican Jewish Coalition back when he wasn't the nominee and he was competing with many other Republican candidates and he did not get a lot of Applause because he was saying some weird you know sort of Jewish stereotypes and other stuff about them being good negotiators and people were uncomfortable and there's a lot of nervous laughter in the room and he's like they weren't applauding him like 10 or something and he said it's okay I get it yeah you don't want my you don't it's like you know that I don't want your money and that's why you're not clapping because you want to control your own politician it's on video he said it right all of these things he said it's on video it's on audio um what is going on with Trump because he's not saying those things right first of all they aren't taken out of context be clear it wasn't the context wasn't get a load of this crazy anti-semitic thing that my friend Kanye told me the other day over dinner right no this is actually something that he believes um Donald Trump believes a lot of anti-Semitic stereotypes very consistent not just weird stupid things it's a whole architecture it's an ideology that he consistently expressed but he thinks that they're praiseworthy traits what does that mean Donald Trump thinks that Jews scheme together they work together to put their own interests ahead of other peoples they work for Israel ahead of the nation they work for their own interests they they try to hoard the money they try to be in control of things and Donald Trump looks at that and unlike the traditional anti-summit because he's not one right he says that sounds cool I like that those people should be on my team right because Donald Trump also believes that what you should do is put yourself first right that's absolutely his entire brand right he thinks you should put your self-interest ahead of any other interest and I would argue including the national interest because he believes that you're a sucker if you don't that's how he talks about things um and so he looks at the anti-semites vision of the Jew and says I like it right and he's like he's like the onion article which is like area anti-semite pretty happy with how the Jews have been you know setting up the fall TV lineup right and it's like you know and he says you know it's not so great that they crash the economy but have you got a load of the TV shows on HBO right and so there are this is a form of final semitism that accepts all the anti-semitic stereotypes but takes them positively and you see it actually in a lot of places in the world you see it in the Far East I've written about this there's a hotel in Taiwan called the tamut hotel and the rooms are like names of rich people um and the idea is you can come here and you can learn the secrets of the Jews right about how to be successful in business because again they accept some of these things that are really anti-semitic stereotypes but they take them as praiseworthy and they want to learn from them right that's obviously better than the alternative but when it's the most and so when Donald Trump does this it's much better than that that he's saying the Jews are schemers and they're out to get us right and they're bad right but there's two reasons why this is very perilous one is that the most powerful person in the world repeating anti-semitic stereotypes on gigantic stages with the biggest megaphone in the world is most likely to activate and encourage people who genuinely believe those things and want to hurt Jews because they see the most powerful person reflecting their beliefs and they don't make these distinctions right and that's how he ends up having dinner with Kanye West and Nick Fuentes because they're like this guy talks like us he thinks like us right now you can say that he doesn't think quite the same way but that is not what is coming the message it empowers these people right and that's pretty obvious like when you see the most powerful person in the world say something that you agree with that makes you feel good um that's one two it's a coin let's think of an anti-Semitism negative anti-Semitism at the top and this form of sort of phylosemitism on the bottom it's a coin that can be flipped if people accept anti-semitic stereotypes it's very easy to get them to turn on Jews because they believe that Jews are scheming and look out for themselves and all that and they might take it as as cool up until they have a reason to go against Jews and there is an example of this that actually happened there is a um someone I think perhaps Ben is familiar with there's a finance here um named Paul Stinger very successful businessman um and he had a stake in Samsung which is one of the biggest businesses in South Korea and they wanted to do some sort of uh you know sort of restructuring within Samsung the people the South Korean family that owns Samsung wanted to restructure the company and he was a part-time investor and he said I think this is bad for the company and here's all the reasons why and did they debate him on the grounds of his argument no they started seeding in the press and elsewhere arguments that the scheming Jew is coming from outside the country um in order to sort of tell us what to do and to control all our money and make all these decisions um and it worked and it worked as a campaign because South Korea has a lot of these phylic stereotypes the people don't hate Jews but they believe Jews are good at money you can buy extracts of translations of a talmud which will tell you how to be good at business and all of these sorts of things by the way my wife is a Tamil Professor if you read the gamara trying to find out how to be really good at business you will just end up really confused right Ben does this thing where my wife the doctor so I had to do my wife I have already that part of the debate I've already won um now so that's why I think so I just fell into the Trap and I did this and we could spend the whole night on it but I do want to say that I really strongly disagree on that I think it's really important to think about this right and think about what it means to have a president of the United States who talks in this way and what the implications could be even if that's not his intentions well let me yeah go ahead Ben sorry this will be a very quick response you can respond to my response yeah otherwise we can go forever yeah exactly the so I'll stipulate to pretty much everything that you just said and I will also stipulate that the reason that the question mattered in the first place and it wasn't a bad question by Rabbi Goldberg and I'm not just sucking up because because we're friends and he's the rabbi here but but but is because politics is inherently comparative what I mean by that is I can stipulate to all things you just said I can acknowledge all of the flaws of President Trump all the instrumentic things that he said all the stereotypes that he's promoted all of those things and still recognize he's the most pro-israel president in the history of the United States and but and here's why this matters begs to differ well Harry okay if you're too if you're calm is the guy who who voted for the establishment of the state of Israel he's in pretty high company in terms of pro-israel presidents I don't want to exaggerate even beyond that but yes okay we debate separate but I I I'll make the Israel policy we can stipulate okay because it's not the subject of debate right okay stipulate to that if I have a choice between a president who didn't say all of these things but fomented policies that really put at risk the state of Israel and also fomented a bunch of policies that forwarded the cause of what I would term to be left-wing anti-Semitism in the United States like Barack Obama in a significantly more subtle way I will take the guy who has that flip-flop philosophy anti-Semitism problem because politics is also partially unfortunately a game of the moment and and what is the best choice in this moment okay if the choice is always this versus the ideal was President Trump the ideal president for the Jews I mean first of all I hesitate to use that phrase because that will immediately be taken out of context and used in a variety of ways but if the question is was he the best president that the Jewish people could possibly have conceived the answer of course is no because that president has never existed and probably will never exist if the question is am I supposed to or are the Jews supposed to spend in extraordinary amounts of time condemning president Trump's anti-semitic comments compared with the full-scale movement that is taking place inside the Democratic party to move against the state of Israel and this is a serious problem inside the Democratic party right now and again we do live in a partisan system and so this is why I again go back to the the nature of the question whether it's good or not these are choices that we make as voters I mean there's two roles that we're being asked to fill in this conversation one is sound off on anti-Semitism and say that it's bad fine stipulated I'm happy to say that what they what I think is anti-Semitic is anti-Semitic then the question becomes what policies do you back which politicians do you back when faced with a choice that you don't like either of the choices and again I thought these things through in a variety of ways over over time and you evolve on these things over time and the fact is I did not vote for either candidate in 2016 in part because of President Trump's association with the alt-right in 2015-2016 and then he turned out to be an extraordinarily pro-israel president who pursued many of the policies that I liked and without changing my opinion of his character which I think is again deeply flawed in a wide variety of ways I voted for him in 2020. and so the this this kind of make a decision about this person in a vacuum as opposed to you now have a decision the decision is between the policies of this guy and the policies of this guy and this guy comes along with a lot of baggage and this person comes along with a different type of baggage which do you choose I I think that that is almost that is almost a useless conversation I think this is I want to go in response but not to dispute this like let's go through the same thing where we stipulate right so let's stipulate that President Trump was the best president for the history of the state of Israel and in the Jewish people and so forth um if you genuinely believe this there is still a really big problem um and I think that's really important let's typically he loves the Jews of Israel very very much and does everything for them and not possibly because they're Evangelical Christians in his base who actually are far more influential and he does basically what they would like him to do and they love Israel in a very particular way with a very particular vision and he has said in other contexts that he moved the embassy to Jerusalem because of his Evangelical supporters he has also said and this is where we get David Friedman would probably disagree but David Freeman would disagree but Donald Trump so like at a certain point which of them is telling the truth the guy who did it or the people who are staying afterwards it's not for me but that's not God who manipulated him to do it right but that sounds very problematic to me um I like I like the result but I would say I would say that there and this this is something that Elon ass and Levy who is now the chief spokesman for the Israeli president uh once wrote which is that it is impossible for somebody to hate only half of the world's Jews um and what I mean by this is that a lot of anti-semites in history and today um don't actually say that they hate all Jews they usually divide Jews in some way in pieces often in half and they say this group of Jews are the good Jews and this group of Jew are the bad Jews and I am super fans of these particular Jews right so I can't be an anti-sama even though I say all these sorts of weird and vicious things about the other Jews or I enable bad things to happen to them and an example of this would be Ken Livingston formerly known as red Ken the Socialist mayor of London who got kicked out of the British labor party after way too long um who he kept saying anti-semitic things so you may be familiar story some of you may not be uh be thankful that you didn't this is a guy who was a prominent fixture of left-wing politics in Britain and he was saying things like Hitler was a Zionist and that didn't get it kicked out eventually he was saying things like um it's not anti-semitic if you only hate the Jews of Israel right that half of the world's Jews right and we all know that that's the sort that clusters on the left the sort of people either explicitly or implicit he just said it out loud you're not supposed to do that right but sort of saying that it's I hate all those Jews there as an undifferentiated massive cancerous tumor that should be excised right but I'm okay because I like all of the Jews in America and the diaspora that's cool Jesus diaspora that's cool right and Donald Trump has done all these things for Israel and if we stipulate let's stipulate they're all I could dispute but let's not let's do it that they're all completely unreservedly pro Israel so then here's the thing right he has gotten very mad and he started to say it out loud uh at Jews who aren't sufficiently American Jews and others who are not sufficiently grateful to him and don't seem to vote for him um and he has almost he literally went on his Network true social and he basically threatened Jews American Jews and he said right I don't understand why they're so ungrateful to me right if they keep being ungrateful they should watch out right this is something that he said which is very again it's impossible to hit one half of the world's Jews and then if you once you've given yourself permission to despise one group of Jews and to talk in that way about a group of Jews writers we like some Jews you will inevitably find reasons why it's okay to do that to other Jews it always spreads from left to right from right to left doesn't matter and so I look at Donald Trump the way he talks and Ken Livingston the way he talks that's the architecture of anti-Semitism that's how it works and so no it really troubles me and I don't have to sit here and say that it was bad that you know he you know moved the embassy to Jerusalem or whatever right that's not required you could say he's doing great things for the Jews uh in Israel and be concerned about what he's doing for the Jews in America the way he's starting to talk about a lot of Jews in America right because they're not his you know subjects he doesn't get to say you're ungrateful and I'm going to punish you which is not just how he talks about Jesus let's be clear he talks about other things when you'd have a natural disaster in different parts of the country right so he would start saying well did the state vote for me right and you start like chatting the governors and this is all public record and some people like again it's all about him and putting himself in church first again he's very open about what he does right but you should understand that you're not his friend right and that's not how he works he said he doesn't have friends right and he said you know when Netanyahu did the thing that any Israeli Prime Minister would do which which was acknowledged that Joe Biden won the 2020 election he went to an Israeli reporter he said fbb right it's a family-friendly program but he didn't say it that way um and it's on audio again it's recorded so I'm not making this up um and he said that and this is these are people that they work together they did all these things right and then as soon as he doesn't acknowledge what I would say quite frankly is a straight up lie and netanyahua is a smart guy and he knew it was a lie and he also knew it was not in Israel's best interest to entertain this lie um because Joe Biden is President um and so then he just throws them overboard right and it's not that he can't go back the other way but it enables a way of talking about Jews that's entirely transactional and architecture that talks about Jews as conditions once you talk that way right so the comparative point is saying is it really is once you're enabling a president of the United States who actually enables this architecture of talking about Jews one way it will spread to the others and then you will discover that actually perhaps you didn't have like even if I stipulated all your arguments about the Democrats which I would disagree with right then you just have two terrible options right and now I just like you know that's absolutely awesome they were in pretty good shape yeah this was was the short answer so I want to let's go to that long questions no I want to move on because I want to talk about the media and their role but I think actually this last segment really demonstrated how complicated it is to identify a name anti-Semitism and anti-semites which is an enormous part of our problem today Kanye is clearly an anti-semite we would have had a very short program if we were talking about is the an anti-semite that is anti-Semitic things we would all agree and we close up shop but I think what we just demonstrated is just how enormously complex this is and also how sort of predisposed or biased people are based on other analyzes they're doing of an individual will they give the benefit of the doubt do they make the distinction about the racist joke versus the racist and it's it's oriented around much bigger and broader issues than just the narrow particular person and I wonder is it important that we're struggling to be able to build consensus around definition of anti-semitism and anti-semite or maybe it's unimportant and it's a distraction because it really doesn't it doesn't matter that we name or label someone what matters is that we confront the behavior well this is this is actually the the question I think because our definitions were pretty close to identical I mean I think our definitions of anti-Semitism are very very very similar uh the the real question is what what is the thing that we are seeking at the end of the conversation and so this raises the question this is really a normal question I don't know your answer to it we're kind of talking about it backstage a little bit earlier just a hypothetical so we have a popular let's say there's a population the population 10 holds very deep and abiding anti-semitic beliefs and 40 of the population is is wildly anti-israel but but 30 of that 30 to 40 they're not deeply anti-smetic they just don't like Israel for whatever reason and then you have a population that's 20 20 anti-semitic and 20 percent really despises Israel you're not giving a third option okay this is the kobayashimuru this is these are your two options in terms of a situation which situation do you prefer and again I I agree with you I think virtually all of politics is bad options I think that there are very very few excellent options in politics uh you know the Donald Trump said terrible things on a routine basis because that's what Donald Trump did and Barack Obama went to Jeffrey Goldberg and said really terrible things about Barack Obama on background on a fairly routine basis uh at the Atlantic so you know and again this this exists that's not ripping your publication you couldn't mind I mean we we'll get into that I'm sure you know the the and you know edit the Atlantic anyways you're not the blame um but the the to back to the hypothetical I mean the question is what are you attempting to achieve so for me the question in politics because that's what we do for a living is not trying to get the guy down the street to change his mind per se about the Jews the question for me typically speaking is which politics do I favor the politics that is more pro-religious freedom on behalf of Jews because this is the ask one of the aspects of Judaism that I find most crucial which politics favors the continued flourishing and existence of the state of Israel which is very important to me as a Jew you know these are the questions that I'm really most concerned with and with that goal in mind that means that that actually does change the means that you take in different situations and so that I guess the question is for you back to that sort of hypothetical you've got a 2020 versus a 10 40 split which one is which one is more troubling to you I'll put it that way you don't prefer either one which one is more troubling ten percent deeply antimatter views 40 anti-israel 20 and 20 I think policy differences over Israel we could get to that right our rational disputes for the most part there are some people who have 100 views about countries not just Israel and they can't be right reasoned out of it but anti-Semitism isn't inherently irrational as we said conspiracy theory a way of seeing the world I would much rather have to deal with people that I would have to argue with right than people who I basically can't and they're already failures and this comes back to sort of how do we respond to anti-Semitism which is very often when we're talking about this we're talking about oh Kanye said this uh Kyrie said that um Donald Trump said this and when those things happen right when a shooting happens in the synagogue we're reacting it's already too late right the horse has already left the barn um something's already gone wrong deeply wrong in society that led to the dominoes that led to this happening um and what we should be doing in our society I think you have a question about this I'm sure about what we should be doing it should be working actively from the bottom up and so like that's me right but that's the only way you can even think about stopping the conspiracy theory stuff is to head it off at the pass once people get past a certain point it's really hard to reel them back I don't know if you ever talk to someone who is in thrall to a particular conspiracy theory it is extremely extremely difficult so you want whereas somebody who has a particular you do this all the time has a particular political opinion you can engage with them politically and you can engage with them rationally and you can have a debate and people can actually change their minds and in fact significant numbers of Voters do switch who they vote for over time and that's part of the reason why I don't always buy the whole sort of Hard Sell it's this side or that side because I don't see parties as all one thing I think everyone here knows certain Democrats that they like in Congress and they think have good views for the Jews including in Florida their particular congressmen the head of the American Jewish committee is Ted Deutsch right who represented this area for quite some time and now it's Jared Moskowitz there are many different kinds of people in all of these parties just like if I were to pretend that the entire Republican party is Marjorie Taylor green you know that I was being dishonest for political purposes right this is a sort of game that pundits play where they point to the worst examples of each of the groups and then they say that's the entirety of the group and I just don't see it I see his parties as Battlegrounds you want the Jewish interest to be valued in both parties as soon as you give up on one party you've already lost because that means half the country you've given up on and you will always lose you've drawn the circle so small that half the time no one's going to care about anything you say so it doesn't really change the math right you really have to care about both parties we live in a two-party system it's unfortunate I don't disagree that we have to care about but Partners I do think that you have to do a relative risk assessment in terms of how you are voting for either party which is why people versus president versus Senators right but I think the daily wire position would be always somehow vote Republican and that would not be my that's not true I've had I've had people I've had people in the Republican Party primary when Steve King came out and was supportive of white supremacy that literally supported his his primary opponent yes but that was a republican it was a republican against the Republican I'm saying would you have supported a Democrat against Steve King in that particular District it depends on the Democrat ically I mean shout out the race in 2016 I literally did and you're seeing a mentality difference here because you're sitting here I'm sort of a journalist and I get to have the privilege of being sort of apart from this and Ben is part in the trenches and he's fighting this and of course he sees a differently right and I want to acknowledge I just want to say I'm neither I'm neither just the rabbi and supposedly the moderator I I just suppose it's exactly right I I just want to draw a conclusion from this this last conversation which I think is the important questions again right which I think is really important and I and I do think that I know that not only both you agree but I also know you agree that this is critically important for us to work on which is to reintroduce Nuance to the conversation because unfortunately in the last few years what we saw were people who wholesale either entirely embraced and lauded and loved Trump and he could do no wrong or people who couldn't acknowledge any positive he did he could do nothing right and really the Jewish perspective on all these politicians and on this issue at large is let's acknowledge positive and embrace it and promote it let's also be willing to identify and see problems and and there was an enormous phenomenon that happened to our own detriment where there was a glorification of somebody and a an idea really worshiping somebody to a point of not being able to see their flaws in a way that was detrimental to ourselves and so if there's any lesson learned from it and really I think demonstrated by the nuance and the conversation that you were just having is how careful we need to be in that in both directions overly critical and overly glorifying and worshiping and being able to see that Nuance which is really really important I can say as a reporter who has talked to many many politicians that report on them many of whom I consider to be admirable people within the context they operate do not place your faith in politicians right do not look to them as your moral leaders right you are their moral leaders you are the pressure that you put on them this is actually something Barack Obama would say a lot he went to Israel and said this he said he said people need to put pressure on their politicians to do things you can't expect the politicians to solve the problems that the people don't want the problem solved and he ascended into the clouds you know and so the thing with these and they I would recommend people watch that speech I think it holds it pretty well um so let's move over to the media let's talk about the media a little bit you're both members of the media in different ways you both participate in it I want to share with you a report that was released just yesterday quote there have been dozens of anti-Semitic incidents tied to Kanye West in the U.S since his Onslaught against Jews late last year including assaults hate speech targeted harassment and vandalism so just yesterday this report said that when someone says bad things it's not like dismiss it or ignore it or they didn't really mean it it we can connect the dots and there is a direct line between prominent people saying really bad things and Jews getting attacked assaulted targeted harassed vandalism so I want to I want to know and and here we'll start with you can you draw a direct line between the New York Times writing negative stories about hasidim in schools and visibly Orthodox Jews being physically attacked in the streets of New York did the media also bear that responsibility can correct that direct line or connect those dots when a group of people are portrayed one way particularly while they're vulnerable and then we see a spike of attacks on them in a public way is there a correlation between Kyrie Irving and the attacks Trump and the an attacks can we connect these dots in the way that this report does yeah so you've seen me talk a lot about Donald Trump and you know the way he talks about Jews and how that influenced people but you also did not see me say and therefore Charlottesville happened because I don't believe that right if you look at the history of the United States every few years we have a mass shooting against Jewish people or some form of mass violence and it's been going on for a very long time my colleague at the Atlantic Isabel fatal wrote a piece on this after Pittsburgh it's often forgotten because people do not connect it with the conspiracy they don't realize it's all one thing right they think of them as isolated incidents that people quickly forget or they try to pin them on particular partisans and blame them on who happens to be the President right but none of those things are actually true um so I think we need to be very careful about the um you know basically attributing direct calls on anything in the case of the New York Times and critical reporting on how Hasidic schools operate um well you need a time machine to blame that because my colleague Armand Rosen and tap has been writing about this for years right long before the New York Times was writing these stories you know Hasidic Jews and visibly religious Jews were being attacked in the streets of Brooklyn you should absolutely look up Armin rosen's articles on this subject one of the pieces was called everybody knows right because we're sort of this Open Secret that people were not talking about and we can also get to that in terms of the media and what gets covered and what doesn't and how it gets covered um but I don't I think it's really wrong to blame the New York Times for later on covering a story that maybe some people uncomfortable may have some flaws here and there right but like for example the uh there was a particular Yeshiva that had to give back millions and millions of dollars because it was determined that they had been cheating the system right at the New York Times wrote a story about it right well you know it's not their fault for reporting what actually happened you know the Yeshiva played you know agreed to play the money uh because they did it um and you know what we shouldn't commit Hashem if we don't want to see it in the paper that is my general approach if people ask me how to get good coverage it's like don't do the bad stuff that would end up in you know things that embarrass me it doesn't mean that journalists do not get things wrong and we can talk about that too um and so I think that that's important but I do think we should be very very careful about the attributing direct causal stuff there's an Infamous example the New York Times is still involved in this lawsuit I think where uh when it was recent was finally dismissed but it was only because they were deemed to be incompetent not malicious um where they like said that a particular uh mass shooting was attributed to the fact that there was like some graphic on a Sarah Palin website with some targets right uh which one of which happened to me in this area turned out was just a mentally ill guy didn't have a particular political ideology it was a horrific tragedy but they attributed immediately and jumped to this and we all do this and partisans do this all the time I think if you search my writing I'm pretty proud that I've never done this to the left to the right unless I can draw a direct line let me give you an example I'm not going to cop out you absolutely can find these things this is not a specific instance of violence but there was a mass rally outside of Madison Square Garden I believe right or wherever the Nets were playing at the time um after Kyrie Irving had his anti-Semitism controversy and got suspended from his team and so forth um he uh did a bunch of Black Hebrew Israelites rallied and said hey Caillou is right well I think we can pretty easily draw a straight line right and it's important to say like but when people are naming it it's not even as simple as that and we should be a little careful on that too right I'll give you an example um there was this thing that you might have seen on social media where these people who hung up a banner in Los Angeles um on a freeway that said Kanye was right and then go to this anti-semitic website and people are like look proof Kanye West has activated anti-semites who weren't there who weren't there before so they're white supremacist but Kanye West was saying things that white supremacists agree with anti-zionism.org is a white supremities website we can get to why that is right but these things are connected Kanye West was saying things about how zionists control America he was saying these things on shows but all these people who put this Banner there so people like Kanye West activated these people and it's a very seductive and it almost makes sense except I happen to report on this stuff and know that they've been hanging anti-semitic banners in that exact same spot on the freeway for years and it's been covered by the media just the local Jewish media and nobody cared and then once they attached a celebrity to it well suddenly they got attention and suddenly people are paying attention and this is what I'm talking about how I think celebrity stuff and antisense is a double-edged sword because most stuff gets ignored most bottom-up stuff gets ignored unless you can attach a celebrity to it that's fine but if you make it about the celebrity the celebrity becomes a shortcut and a scapegoat to avoid talking about the broader societal problem and not the actual issue that might be true about the banner but I will say that more disturbing to me when Kanye would tweet something is that within half an hour there were 80 000 people who liked it so he doesn't concern me probably for his mental illness and other reasons as much as the fact that there's such an enormous amount of people who might be ignorant and Thoughtless and Mindless and not even understand the issues but we're willing to like such a blatantly and overtly anti-semitic comment which is which I think reflects of the deeper Sorry by the way which is that you didn't create those people they already had it and he's exposing it in a certain sense in a very strange way he did us a favor because he made it hard for the broader media and for the broader conversation for a moment and then of course it moves on to ignore it right and this if you talk to people who are like sympathetic and we're trying to make change during black lives matter that's what they said people will finally pay attention to the issues that we in the black community are facing right because we know that the attention will move on and they try to take these moments and make something of them and I think as Jews we should do that too right and when these things happen we should try to educate and certainly I as a journalist when that happens I write that piece for the Atlantic and I know a lot more people will read it than if I wrote it on a random Tuesday but but it's always late right if you're doing it if you're reacting you're already losing and I think we have to think more of it as a community you're wondering why are we spending millions of dollars and yet things stay the same will get worse it's because almost everything we do is reactionary right and what would proactive attempts to counter anti-Semitism look like I keep saying this eventually we'll ask we're going to get there we have to finish that Shabbos we have to finish in time for Shabbos but we're going to get there we're going to get to Ben so do you think that we can connect the dots is there a direct correlation between things I I actually agree a lot with what yair just said and I also have held the standard right I don't blame Bernie Sanders for Congressional baseball shooting I don't blame Barack Obama for Adele's police shooting I don't blame Donald Trump for a shooting at a Charleston church right this this notion that I I because I'm in the business of media there's this kind of soft incitement standard that's very often used in partisan fashion which is you said something and a lot of people follow you and therefore and somebody took that and then went nuts on that basis I don't I don't like that sort of thing because that can literally be applied to almost anyone who has a massive following of any sort because there will be nuts in their audience uh now what you do get blamed for is raising the temperature when you say something bad right when you raise something bad the way that I tend to kind of turn this into a metaphor is that if Society is sort of constantly simmering at a certain temperature on the stove if you turn up the flame then there will be more overflow in in the liquid that's on the stove and so you get sort of an indirect level of credit or blame for things that happen in society obviously that's why we're in politics we're trying to change the temperature on the stove some of us trying to cool it down or up depending on the circumstance um but drawing a direct line between ex-celebrity said this and then somebody was not who's not told to do this by the celebrity went and did this that I think is is is wrong the one area where I will say I don't think it's wrong is I do think that the media coverage I do think that you can almost statistically draw a direct line between media coverage and Terror attacks in Israel so I think that the the media coverage of Israel draws drives political actors who literally incentivize murder to look at whether they believe they can make a move and whether now is an opportune time to to incentivize terrorism or whether it's not a a good time to incentivize terrorism I think people take Advantage now again maybe that's maybe that also falls under the category of turning off the temperature versus turning down the temperature as opposed to sort of direct core direct uh direct Predator direct blame um but maybe I'll put it back in that category maybe I'll say that the media belongs in that category as well and it's particularly true with Middle Eastern coverage how do you think the media do all together on anti-Semitism and the Legacy I think you called them the Legacy Media how do you think they're doing what score would you give them on their coverage of anti-Semitism and are they contributing negatively or positively Ben to hell don't well how's this going to sound not self-interested um I think that they are a bowl of steaming hot dog I mean I think that I think that the media in extraordinary fashion ignore particular stories about anti-Semitism and upplay particular stories about anti-Semitism for partisan purposes I think this holds true across a broad range of narratives so it's not exclusive to anti-Semitism if you decide in the media what is a local crime story versus what is a national issue uh that directly correlates with particular narratives that the media particularly favor if there is a if the in in the race context if there is a black on white crime that will not be a national news story if there's a white on black crime that will almost certainly be a national news story I think when it comes to anti-Semitism the big hole in coverage for virtually all New York media for decades was that he disproportionate share of the people who were beating up Jews in the streets of Williamsburg were black and that was something the media really would not cover for a long time to the point where Bill de Blasio is like wait there's anti-Semitism in New York I mean he literally said this he was like there's anti-Semitism in New York City I can't believe there's anti-Semitism in New York City that's crazy it's like well yeah there is and people have been yelling about it for a long time but this didn't follow the it's white supremacism spurred on by Donald Trump narrative for the past several years and so you've decided to ignore that I think when it comes to the coverage of Israel is particularly egregious the last two weeks of media coverage from The New York Times have been some of the worst media coverage I've ever seen in in any realm uh the headlines that you see car strikes too at Jerusalem bus stop right or Israelis kill mine in Janine Palestinian Terror they won't say terrorists they'll say Palestinian kills seven and these two are equivalent while Israel is doing a raid against terrorism engineering and a Palestinian is murdering seven people coming out of Shoal in Jerusalem and these sorts of headlines are egregious and drawing moral equivalents between people defending themselves against terrorism and people who are literally shooting innocent people coming out of synagogue is disgusting and so that I think media do a horrible job yeah you're rather than the Atlantic what would you say how would the media do yeah so obviously I will also give a self-interest and answer because I work for what you might call the Legacy Media but I went into journalism precisely because I thought the things that I cared about a lot were not being covered well so that would include religion um Judaism but also other religious uh communities I just felt that they didn't get it I didn't feel that uh anti-Semitism was covered well I didn't think that Israel was covered particularly well and when you're a Jew in that situation you have two options right one of them is fetch which in the internet version is to leave a comment on a website or write a letter to the editor which no one will read and you will really change nothing the other is to put your money where your mouth is and try to show what it would look like if you did it yourself um and so I tried to write about these subjects and say here's what I think is being missed and it turns out in journalism you can explain things that other people can't explain as well right and if you can help people make sense of things that puzzle them like why are so many people anti-semitic when it seems like they couldn't agree on anything else but they could agree on hitting Jews if you can talk it to them and explain anti-Semitism as a conspiracy theory right that opens their eyes like oh right go subscribe to your newsletter right and they'll ask you to write for them again um and that's how I eventually just ended up doing this as a job I never intended it to be my job right but I kept being asked by Legacy mediality so those people who have read read my stuff on anti-Semitism and learn from it should know that that's not because I could force The Washington Post to publish me or Force the Atlantic to publish me it's because people wanted that in their Pages they were aware that they weren't so good at this and that they could do a better job do you remember generally do you remember the exception or are you becoming the rule right and I think that since I have entered journalism in general the Legacy has gotten a lot better at covering things like anti-Semitism which is a very big difference from saying that it's good at it yet right but it's saying it's made a lot of progress I think people don't remember right that there you used to be people who talked about anti-scientists as a conspiracy theory they didn't connect the dots and say Here's The History of anti-jewish Violence none of that stuff actually got published it took them years to even notice that there was a lot of anti-Semitism spiking in different parts of Europe despite the fact that every you know year you'd have another horrific terrorist attack um and I started writing about those and a few other people did and now this is something that is part of the discourse does it mean that I think first of all I work for the Atlantic I think selfishly we do it the best right you should all subscribe um and you can see and you can test for yourself right because I'm not the only person who does this right actually it's an extremely important part of what they do they hired me because they valued this that's an investment in this kind of coverage um so that's one thing that I would say I would agree with Ben that there are big blind spots in the media and in the public discourse not just in the media about anti-Semitism and it has to do with the narratives that we we tell about anti-Semitism and there are two earned areas two primary narratives into which most anti-Semitism Falls that gets talked about right and one is the one he alluded to which is sort of this right-coded anti-Semitism which is that it comes from White supremacists and neo-nazis right and the media knows how to tell that story by the way when I started they didn't know how to tell that story I had to write a piece about why white supremacists go after Jews well I'm talking about Improvement you have to understand it started from people didn't realize that white supremacists and neo-nazis really had a whole world view that was organized around Jews being behind all the world's problems right A lot of people didn't know that and now they do and now we take it for granted and say the media is not good at it but actually they figured it out right and they continue to sort of make these things but you know it takes time for new younger people to come up and so on so that's right coded the right code of narrative the media knows how to tell there's also the left coded narrative which the daily one knows how to tell but also the legacy of here knows how to tell which is this is criticism of Israel but did it straight into did it turn into anti-Semitism right and the Legacy Media covers those controversies I guarantee you look in the New York Times you may not like how they cover it right you might think this is they're still kids this is still basically they're covering it but you feel that it's sort of it's tilted towards the side that says it's not but they always cover it they know how to tell that story they understand that narrative right and then there are some people who will write about those things in both directions right and that's why I have a job because I can write about left wing antiseptical right we have that semitism as I see fit um and I don't feel the need to stack the deck I just call it as I see it um but you have the left narrative and you have the right narrative and in general both the Legacy Media and the non-legacy media know how to tell those stories um you know they don't know how to tell the story about and you probably have never heard about is that the Attorneys General in New York and in New Jersey have successfully sued actual townships for passing very specific discriminatory laws to keep Orthodox Jews from moving into those communities putting up any roof starting a shul building various different family housing right basically these these places that were near other Jewish communities where Orthodox Jews lived realized oh they're they're starting to fill up over there they're going to start moving into our towns and we don't want them to change the character of the town and so so we're going to pass very bespoke laws that are really designed to prevent like large family housing or allow you to build the synagogue write or put up in a roof and it was obviously designed right with a disparate impact as they would say in legal terms right to keep these Jews out and by the way Democratic Attorneys General in both of these states successfully sued right and crushed these things right and got those laws taken down and got allowed the people to move in you heard nothing about it why because the media it doesn't fit into the left narrative or the right narrative it's just a totally different thing so it's not there right the people being beaten up on the streets of Brooklyn I would say that there is an element that people are discomforted when the victimizers are also victims right in the sense of black people committing anti-semitic acts I would also add sometimes anti-asian hate crimes which is a difficult subject that has been written about by others um but it's much bigger problem is that they just can't see it because it's not the left narrative it's not the right narrative it's just people who look like me or even more visibly Jewish getting beaten up in the street right without a white supremacist purpose and without an Israel purpose right and so they're like what is going on they don't see it there's a show called Westworld on HBO which you may or may not have seen and it involves humanoid robots and how do you tell the difference between you know a human and a humanoid robot well the humanoid robots in some cases are programmed not to see certain things that they're not supposed to see so it doesn't alter their programming and so if you hold up something that they're not supposed to notice like in their environment they'll just be looking directly at the object and you ask them so what is this and they're like it doesn't look like anything to me that is how what happens when you are so enthralled to particular narratives of how anti-Semitism works right that you can't see these other things now if you listen to my definition of anti-semitism and bends and you're focused on that instead of the partisan ones once again you wouldn't miss all of these things you would understand people treating Jews differently than equivalent non-jews all this stuff would start to fall into place if that was the narrative right and I spend my time at the Atlantic trying to make that how we look at it that's the framework because as long as it's the partisan framework you're going to miss a lot so we can use this first of all we could use those Attorneys General here in Boca we're having our own issues right now but so there's a lot of quotes for concern but a lot of reason for optimism because things are improving I want to get to responses to anti-Semitism which I think really is a focal point of Senate's conversation so again either briefly or on Two and a Half speed if we could talk about Israel you alluded to it so it's a perfect segue where do anti-israel or anti-zionist sentiment where does it overlap with anti-Semitism what's legitimate criticism of Israel and what form of criticism of Israel is just a modern manifestation of really the classic anti-Semitism Ben what are the ground rules for 30 seconds 30 seconds yeah okay I mean the state department definition here is is pretty good actually um and uh that state department definition crosses streams with what yair was saying about anti-Semitism generally which is treating Israel unlike you would treat any other state is a pretty good example of anti-semitisms the idea that Israel has no right to self-defense would be one the idea that Israel should be labeled an apartheid state when it is in no way in apartheid state the idea that Israel has no right to exist as an independent Jewish polity which is something that has never been applied to the Myriad Muslim polities or many Christian polities that exist in Europe uh the there are a bunch of these sort of arguments that are out there about Israel that just don't exist with regard to any other state and have gained enormous amounts of credence in politics and and you know obviously those are sort of examples of that disagreements about the judicial system in Israel are not aspects of anti of anti-zionism amounting to anti-Semitism but as rabbit Jonathan sack says when people say that they think that Israel should not exist what they're really saying is that the apology of seven and a half million Jews should not exist and when they say that what they really mean is that they would prefer that those Jews not be because that is the only way that that ends I mean the only way that ends is with the Jews being pushed into the seed people are not leaving voluntarily from that particular area so you know the the there's a great irony in the fact that all the same people who claim that Israel went away anti-Semitism would end are the same people who declared that if the Jews would just get out of Europe anti-Semitism would end it's legitimately the same kinds of people who are saying both of those things uh so yeah that that really is the crossover but in terms of arguing Israeli policy I mean we can do that all day long and should do that all day long obviously so that the presence of which we should measure whether it should disturb us or come up on the anti-Semitism meter is are they denying Israel the right that they wouldn't deny anyone else or are they defending over terrorist acts against civilians for example right in the name of in the name of Human Rights are they are they promoting maps that wipe Israel off the map are they are they suggesting that that Hamas is a legitimate political body and like Hamas is a terrorist group everybody knows Hamas is a terrorist group it literally says in their Charter they wish for Israel not to exist I mean these are things where if you're supporting groups that say that they wish Israel not to exist this is a pretty good example of being anti-semitic and Jews around the world Hamas also right not only against them they don't restricted they're nice that way do you agree with that distinction or that definition so I generally just like my definition if you are treating the Jewish State differently than equivalent non-jewish States um then you're having you're running into that double standard problem um I would say that this doesn't to be clear this shouldn't insulate Israel from criticism the issue often is actually that we just don't hold non-jewish states to account for things that they do wrong and then people we're going to make an example out of a Jews you can't make an example out of the Jews you have to do the same rule evenly apply there is definitely room for a more muscular critical of Israel policy it just would require you to be more muscular and critical of a lot of other countries and it turns out a lot of people aren't willing to do that they almost always want to start with the Jews right and that becomes very difficult and problematic um but there is really to me like I have met people who are very principled critics of Israel who are principled across the board and they have extremely harsh criticism of Israel um and I might not agree with it but I can see that they're consistent um but that's really the way I would test it right first of the way I would test it is saying don't start with Israel start with classical anti-semitic understandings right when you know what an anti-semitic conspiracy really looks like the Jews are behind all of the world's Wars they're behind they control the economy they control the media they control the government if they replace that with Israelis or zionists right you're not an idiot right we shouldn't be idiots and we should know what's going on and that's an easy way to train people to like sort of scan for something very easy and try to be able to tell what are we dealing with here um if the person is consistent right and the Press think they're a principled anti-nationalists and such people exist and they think nation states are the root of a tremendous number of problems it's where our world wars came from um and they don't want any nation states to exist and they do say this there are radicals who talk about this in all different contexts they'll talk about it in America and they'll talk about it about Israel right or say you're a Jewish anti-nationalist and maybe then that means you're going to talk about Israel a lot more why because anti-nationals is so important to you and you think it's a source of evil it hurts you more that there's a Jewish State out there doing it then if there's a Chinese State out there doing it right because it's personal to you um so I think it's important to understand that there are forms of pretty pretty vicious uh you know Christians of Israel that we would not consider anti-semitic even if it made us upset or uncomfortable and we shouldn't equate upset and discomfort with anti-Semitism um I think it's something Ben talks about in other contexts right um and so that's one thing and then the other thing I would say is that it's actually people think these questions are hard and some of them are but a lot of them are a lot easier if you just say does this person talk about other countries in the same way and I'll give you a very straightforward example um people referring to Israel as a Nazi State this is a fun thing to do if you want to mess up your Google ads search for like zionazi right and Israel is a Nazi State and look at the images right you remember the Kanye West post today swastika intertrime at the Star of David this is the sort of symbology that is used um and here's the thing you could technically come up with an intellectually honest uh way to do this right which you're saying if you commit certain types of crimes uh that I don't like right certain violations of human rights that's what I deem to be Nazi but if Israel is a Nazi state by that definition then that obviously Assad in Syria writers Mass murdered his own people is a Nazi and that's a Nazi regime obviously King Jong-Un Nazi regime China which has crushed on Comcast designs on Taiwan and has Muslims in concentration camps where they sterilize them right is a Nazi State and here's the thing have you ever heard someone who calls Israel a Nazi State call anybody else other than the people who are the descendants of those killed by the Nazis a Nazi state right so what you're actually seeing there is people taking the Holocaust and weaponizing it because it's taking up people's worst trauma and using it to re-victimize them again because it makes the anti-semite feel good right but that doesn't mean you couldn't be intellectually consistent and just go around calling everybody Nazis nobody actually does this even on Twitter which really tells you it's a real talent right because you would think someone would do it but they don't there's actually one historical example of someone who did this under pressure it wasn't a debate setting um some decades ago there was a debate of I would say more August personalities than us a famous British historian named Arnold Towing we went to McGill University in Canada and he gave a speech where he said that the Israel committed acts like the Nazis in the founding of the state of Israel and this you can imagine did caused a small bit of controversy at the time and the then-israeli ambassador to Canada challenged toynbee who was the the most preeminent one of the most predominant intellectual historians of the day right to a public debate uh which happened at the McGill Hill house I think um and and he and Jack of her the first to do this jacob you haven't heard of him because he unfortunately tragically died young but he ran the office uh the political office of multiple Israeli Prime Ministers he also was asked to be the chief Rabbi of Britain and he turned it down very exceptional person you should look up the things he wrote um and Jacob debates joined me we have the recording you can listen to this and he says I have here your history books and you go through a lot of atrocities that a lot of other people including the British committed um during their Wars and during their revolutions and things like that and is there any categorical difference between that and the atrocities which you accuse this of which by the way Herzog which I think through his credit acknowledge because Israel did commit atrocities in 1948 so did the Palestinians and the Arabs right in Wars atrocities are committed you can look at the history um and he acknowledged that we you know that the Israelis committed atrocities and that their opposition committed atrocities and that all these others did and he's like why are we the Nazis and singled out to be the Nazis and nobody else and so then uh twin B said you know you're right all of those I would call those Nazi students he hadn't until that point until he was pushed into it but to be fair he was consistent he said those would all be Nazi acts and so and we that's when he lost the debate because then everyone realized sort of you've used this this this really profound attack but you actually apply to everybody um and so hold people to the standard whatever the standard is and I think that means you could call in theory you even could call me Israel a Nazi state if you actually did it consistently and you could do a lot of other things but people have to really be held to that um and you will find people and this is a great way to find out whether or not they're really on the level the last thing I'd say is that my colleague my friend Monty Friedman who is a very prominent Israeli journalist or some of you may have read um so he says the way you distinguish uh between criticism um that is what good faith criticism for bad faith bigotry is is the criticism intended to make Israel better or to make it disappear right and that is a really important distinction um and it's going to be really important I think in the days ahead because there's some really really difficult things happening in Israel right now that if you may have noticed if you follow the news right hundreds of thousands of Israelis in the streets protesting things that they perceive to be the end of their democracy these are going to be hard questions and people are going to Echo things that Israeli protesters say and you're going to have to decide is that person out to get Israel or are they really just trying to keep Israel the best it can be um and I think we need to think about those in a deep way right and not just assume that every that any harsh criticism of Israel is meant out of spider malice because we're hearing a lot of that in the streets of Israel today and I think for a good reason so I think really you overlap and mostly agree and that question of Israel and anti-Semitism which is important and somewhat refreshing um although we'll disagree on the remaking of the Israeli Judicial System I'm sure I'm sure and we're definitely not going there responses to anti-semitism it'd be very interesting but we'll have to have you both back for that responses to anti-Semitism and this is really I think a main focus of tonight and of where we go from here and sort of a call to action for the enormous crowd we have here in person and I haven't seen but I assume we're watching and we'll continue to watch online what is our call to action what are some marching orders what are the standards and how should we be behaving we're living in a time a generation which is almost addicted to outrage outrage is sort of the reaction that's in Vogue at the time and it's our Instinct we see someone said something we see something tweeted something and we react with outrage and we compete who could be more outraged more offended and then we call to cancel them but is that strategic is that thoughtful and most importantly is it effective is that instinct is that leap to try to cancel everyone is it warranted is it useful does it get wasted is in fact damaging should we be educating embracing not necessarily canceling and is there a place in between accepting and being different on the one side we're seeking to cancel and boycott those who say objectionable things can we criticize and call out and confront and ask for clarification and demand Contrition and educate and turn people who made a mistake or said something bad or even had the wrong beliefs and turned them into being people on our side spokespeople of of we believe you know one example of this a friend of our community Myers Leonard who was playing for the Miami Heat at the time if you actually look relative to most egregious things that have been going on it's absurd what happened to him there's no history there's no pattern there's no background of anti-Semitism there's zero evidence other he was playing a video game and he said a stupid word which he immediately apologized and took responsibility and hasn't stopped apologizing for a year and a half and and he's become a good friend of of our community and there was the case that if we jumped on the bandwagon of criticizing and canceling him and calling to boycott him and the NBA suspended him and find him things they haven't done I will say to players who've retweeted lyrics and done things much worse that's probably to do with many things about him different than those players which I'm not going to say but there was an example when you Embrace someone he's now a proud and vocal friend and spokesperson of the Jewish people so it's that instinct to react with outrage is it warranted is it appropriate is it strategic is it useful are we better off trying to embrace and educate and the third option certain people maybe we're better off ignoring you two have platforms then you have millions of followers and millions of listeners daily when you speak about something go write about something and you're you also 100 000 followers there are many people who now are taking notice of something otherwise they may not have so are we actually contributing to the the person who said the egregious Thing by shining that Spotlight when maybe we're better off ignoring them and figuring out a much more effective way to react I know I threw a lot in there but I think that this is a really focal core part of tonight it's sort of a marching order how should we be reacting what could we do that's much more effective instead of Simply following what emotionally feels good in the moment or might be our instinct or might be in Vogue which is this addiction to outrage yeah so I don't think I'm telling anyone a secret when I say that we live in a very angry and unforgiving culture um that it sort of defines us it's fueled in large part by social media where giant cavalcades that people can descend on anyone from any particular offense which may not be proportional right to the response um and I don't think that that is particularly healthy for society I don't think it solves problems because I don't think it's really directed I don't think it's strategic and I don't think it's right um I think we should treat people the same way we'd want to be treated which is not to be reduced to our worst moment on the Internet to our worst tweet and have that pasted as our first Google search result forever and said this is who you are and always will be right there's nothing Jewish about that that is not what Yom Kippur it's going to be about um and yet that it very much feels often how our you know public culture works and Jews it's so seductive we see that and we're like we can use it for ourselves right but it never really works right first of all we don't have the numbers to actually do it right even if we wanted to um but it's not who we are and we're not very good at it um and what actually really helps in most situations and what we need to understand because I think it's hard when you're sitting in Boca Raton Florida right or in my case in New York um or in Los Angeles right you're you're among so many Jews you don't realize that Jews are only two percent of the American population um which means that most people I encounter and most people in this country have never met a Jewish person or maybe had passed an interaction with somebody um all they know is what they see on TV and what they read on the internet and receive stereotypes and you can see how this would go horrifically wrong and by the way Muslims also two percent of the population my Muslim friends deal with a lot of the same problems um and like this is really so what that means is that a lot of people they're not out to get us but they really don't know us right and it's really really difficult and some people will say that the answer to that is education right and I'm big on education my parents are both Jewish Educators I in some sense am an educator myself that's what I see myself as doing when I write about the issues like anti-Semitism for a very wide largely non-jewish audience I am educating but there's education is what you do when you don't have access to experience right when there aren't enough Jews there aren't Jews around that people can actually meet and so you write instead but it is so much more powerful when people have an interaction with a Jewish person and when they are able to ask all their questions in a human context and I'm not just making this up there's a lot of social science research backing this up it's called the contact hypothesis which is this idea that if you meet members of a minority Community say that you didn't otherwise know and you might have had negative ideas about that's that reduces negative sentiments right the trouble with us for Jews is that there's so few of us it's very hard to beat us right and then forget about America go to Europe right um and like basically they engage in a very long-term product you know a very Civic project to get rid of all the Jews so there isn't anybody left to meet most of the time right which is how you get all and so the thing is what do you do about that there are actually creative efforts that have been done to start trying to address this you might sometimes see weird articles about meet a Jew exhibits in Germany or other places where they literally put a Jew in a box and you can come and visit and talk to the person you might think this is so weird right but it's actually very smart and they've done their homework and they recognize that this is more powerful than even the best article that I could write right that would go viral on Facebook right people read my articles it goes in one ear out the other very often right that's just how it works right but having a human interaction that can change you um here in the United States there's there's a program called student to student that has been run for many many years by the jcrc in St Louis and what they do is they take Jewish students of different backgrounds and they train them to be ambassadors to non-jewish schools in St Louis and they send them into those schools and they do show and tell them they talk about what it is for them to be Jewish and then they just answer everybody's questions and one that strengthens their Jewish identity and two this allows these children right who are not Jewish who otherwise would never meet a Jew or not be able to ask these questions to ask them um and they do they follow up and they find out that their people come with much more positive understandings and sentiments and interest in Jews right one Catholic School came back to the program and said you know it worked really well but now I have three kids and they want to know how they become Jewish right and so we you know we might accidentally end up proselytizing even though it's not our usual Mo um but imagine you've scaled that sort of thing up right I think that would be very valuable and these are all examples of what I've been referring to of as proactive efforts to fight anti-Semitism from the Grassroots rather than trying to do it from the top down after things have happened right because after things have happened it's already too late and if you do it from the top where you're saying okay now we will punish you for this thing you did but what you actually do and I've called this this is a catch-22 of anti-Semitism is you've played into the anti-semitic conspiracy theory because you're Kanye West and you say the Jews control the media and the entertainment industry and then they say well the meteorites about to match the articles about you and the entertainment Street kicks you out it's like see I was right right as it was really happening is that people are reacting in a good way which shows by the way a good thing about our culture right and that our culture deserves credit for right that they made the right decision and non-jews looked at this and said this is wrong and we're not going to accept it right but you can't really win in that situation because the Jews are the response to anti-Semitism is used to justify the anti-Semitism the only way you can get around it is if you stop the anti-Semitism before it happens if you expose people to real Jews right then when they are met with anti-semitic demonizations and caricatures right they don't fall for them because they said you know you can't tell me that you know the Jews are really greedy and good with money and control all the finances because I know yoel and he is terrible at math right and like it's just a totally different conversation when it's real people um let me ask you that is there Carl Larry first of all I love the message is that we need to be more proud more passionate more practicing Jews and the more people are exposed to that we can defeat this is something that each of you can do it's not about us and these people with the big platforms and things we're not nearly as influential as you think we are right each of you in your everyday interactions and the things that you say to your co-workers and the things that you post on your Facebook walls you are showing people what real Jews are I have a Muslim friend who like had this experience from just being you know about on social media and having some level of celebrity is that she would post about her cat and certain other things that she liked and people like oh Muslims they like cats right they like video games or whatever it's like they realize that it they're just not nearly as different and not the sort of like demonizations or stereotypes that float around in The Ether so is there a corollary and is there a challenge that we have with the rates of assimilation an affiliation intermarriage we see this enormous Spike 73 10 of non-orthodox are intermering so if Jews aren't proud to be Jewish practicing Jewish marrying Jewish and and passionate about being Jewish then they're not going to be able to be good spokespixel and advocates for being Jewish so do you see some corollary between this enormous assimilation into marriage and the disappearing of the American Jew and that space or void being filled with negative views of Jews well you could also look at intermarriage rates and Jonathan Sachs has written about this and you could see it as a success story because you could be saying that look this is finally a gentile Society that's willing to accept and literally marry Jews this was not a thing before again we're talking about an exceptional times wrote about that as a successor he said that there were because he once said three visions of a Jewish future and he said each of them had very different Visions right and the religious community had won right but the assimilating Jewish Community had a different one and both of them have had success right and you should look this up by that definition Hitler had the greatest success no no because he killed people they the living Jews who then become part of the secular society there have been always been Jews who wanted to do that and the reason in part that Israel got founded was Theodore foreign had this really embarrassing moment when after he wrote his Manifesto on Zionism the chief Rabbi Vana came to visit him and he walked in on the herzl family decorating their Christmas tree Theodore herzl really wanted to assimilate into non-jewish society he tried so hard and they said absolutely not right and so he went and he ran and helped build Israel right because he said they're never going to accept us and that was one of Jonathan's acts as success but you see that right now right intermarriage of 73 it goes across purposes with anti-Semitism because anti-semitis don't marry Jews um but what I would say is that if you're worried about assimilation rates right once again assimilation is a symptom it is not the siba right it is not the cause um what's going on is that people are not feeling educated or proud of their jewishness right and they're not feeling like they've had a place in the Jewish Community then maybe that's something that we need to work on right because people feel pushed out or they don't feel a connection right then that's something that we are doing and I think sometimes people try to put the blame as always on like people who like all their they had only negative experiences of Judaism or like you know unfortunately I've met plenty of people that's true I'm very fortunate I'm the son of two Jewish Educators I went to an amazing Jewish Day School in a Jewish high school and all of these things and I got very lucky lots of people don't get those opportunities um and so one of the really wonderful things about a program like student to student is in the process of training someone to explain their Judaism to others you explain their Judaism to them right this is by the way one of the secrets of the Mormons right the Mormons send all of their young people as many as they can on missions abroad to proselytize and people think that's to make more moments that it is but also if you spend an entire year just talking and thinking about your religion you're much more likely to keep it you're much more likely to Value it and to understand it and to know it and to apply it um and what do we do that is like that right and I think we could think more in terms of how you strengthen that in a pluralistic society where there's so many competing attentions and that's a great message to the audience of things that every one of us could be doing aside from online Ben you think outrage is useful is outrage ever warranted Joe Rogan after what Joe Rogan said about you know Italians and pizza and Jews and money is in anti-semite should we react with outrage do we call for canceling him should we stop listening to him so I mean first I I try to take these things on sort of a pragmatic level because you are in fact dealing with people in each one of these situations and so you do have to determine where the carrot is effective where the stick is effective and one of the best approaches actually a behind the scenes approach as opposed to for example blasting somebody publicly my personal viewpoint on on carrots and sticks is that when it's pretty clear that people are unrepentant then the stick is the available tool right at that point there are no carrots that can be offered and there's no actual sort of behind the scenes work that can be done when people keep saying the same thing over and over and over that's one thing when you have a situation like with what Joe said and I consider myself one of Joe's friends I texted with Joe and I said can you clarify this like what exactly did you mean by this and then I talked about on my show what he said he meant by that you know and um you know the according to Joe what he meant was sort of the old Richard Pryor line right black people love fried chicken and so does everybody else with that kind of thing Joe was the first person to say that he also happens to Love Money considering sending a 200 million dollar deal with Spotify so you know the I'm not gonna make excuses for Joe he can defend himself you know as always I have friends and I disagree with my friends and sometimes I think my friends do immoral and bad things and I'm not afraid to say that I think that what he said there was wrong uh with that said is the best approach to come out and say people should stop listening to Joe Rogan first of all not going to work second of all likely to push Joe in the opposite direction because when people have failed cancellation attempts then they tend to operate Contra that they they tend to say okay well these people who are going after me are the people who really deserve to be hit in the first place uh and so very often you know I'm taking it from sort of the media side so I first of all agree with everything yayer said uh in at least before he started talking about assimilation uh and uh and the uh and the the you know General kind of Concepts which is that we should be the the best the best thing we can do to fight anti-Semitism is to be a good Jew meaning a good person be a mensch in your everyday life that is in fact the best thing that you can do and that also means by the way that we should be perceptive of how people view the Jews around us also I mean the idea that cholesterol right that really does apply when it comes to public life if you see that there's a Jew who's behaving badly in front of you you do have a moral obligation as a Jew to step up and either stop that or to provide a counter example of that if you see somebody be rude to restaurant you should make a point to go up to the waiter to whom that person was rude and to give that person a big tip or be nice to that person and make clear that you know because people form stereotypes unfortunately with their lizard brain it's like they see one person everybody who looks like this is now that person uh and that's that's a really ugly thing all right so obviously everything that you're saying I agree with on that score when it comes to sort of public life that's the the diceiest conversation because it's it's a hard math you people can't see what you're doing behind the scenes by the very nature of you doing it behind the scenes right if you're approaching somebody who's saying something bad behind the scenes and you're having strenuous conversations with these people nobody can see you doing that and sometimes it's important for you to take the public hit the rightfully deserved I think in some cases public hit for not speaking out strongly enough while at the same time recognizing the best way to convince this person to stop doing that thing is by talking to them behind the scenes as opposed to publicly right these are actually a little bit more complex because people tend to think of people in public life as though they don't have friendships or they don't have personal relationships with the people that they're dealing with the people yair is dealing with on a regular basis are very famous the people that I'm dealing with on a regular basis are very famous and what that means is that people expect of maybe in yeah or two I would assume you know loud commentary on every available issue well sometimes that's effective and sometimes that's useful I would say a lot of the time the most effective thing I try to you know Grant this premise even to some the people I disagree with really a lot politically is go behind the scenes and say what did you mean by that is what you meant by that the way that this came off and very often they'll back off or they'll apologize or they'll say that they did something wrong or they're misinterpreted and I think that that's that's usually a better outcome than trying to cuddle people cuddling people is a very unsuccessful tactic and you're seeing this over and over and over and it's creating wide backlash the way that we've seen it in the general public culture is the is the backlash to cancel culture people have misinterpreted what what cancellation originally was supposed to achieve with cancel culture more generally well what what they've basically said we won an Overton window we all want an Overton window there's areas of acceptable discourse in areas of discourse we think meaning you should be part of the polite conversation if you're a Nazi we don't generally believe these should be part of the play conversation because you really don't have anything to offer and we'd already understand exactly what you think the the problem is that because everybody has now been called to Nazi people start to actually say well maybe the Nazis have something valuable to say after all that guy's a Nazi and that guy's a Nazi and they're all Nazis and so what you end up with is a general reservation about saying anything bad even about about calling anyone out even when they do a bad thing because oh my gosh there were consequences for Kanye that's cancel culture that's not cancel culture that's that's him saying something really egregious in him taking the natural consequence of that and but that is the danger of over utilizing the power of the stick is that eventually you hit people enough and they become your to it it just doesn't have the same impact especially because very often hitting them with sticking succeed in the first place cancellation tends to be a pretty temporary thing in American Life uh you know I I think that if yay came out tomorrow and started walking a lot of that stuff back he would probably be welcome back with open arms by the way if he started walking the stuff back I think that there should be grace for people who say even the world's most terrible things but I'll point out that Rihanna performed a Yay song at the Super Bowl and nobody seemed to care right yeah yay's music is still playing on the air right the full scale cancellation of va didn't apply to any of the things that people liked from from Kanye right it only applied to him as a person right now but all of his product is still out there in the public sphere so there's a very complex standard when it comes to who actually gets canceled and who doesn't and whose work gets canceled and who doesn't and it's pretty self-serving a lot of the time so we got to play the long game we've got to build relationships and work behind the scenes and most importantly you're both agreeing and I I couldn't agree more is we've got to be proud passionate and practicing Jews and maybe a little less focused with outrage of online and reaction and more proactive practicing who we are in such a way that we we demonstrate it that an anti-semit wouldn't want to rise but I want to move one more I actually can I make one more point on this sure you mentioned at the very outset that there are some 501 c3s and their job is just to call people out and I I would having worked at a 501c3 and seeing how 501c3's work particularly in political space one of the problems with the 501c3 charitable organizations that work on these sorts of issues is that they are in the they are in the business of creating their own Market meaning that one of the ways that you raise money is by signaling outrage and so you find the person who may be a little bit more obscure and if you just ignored me would have gone away and you signal you you single that person out for the outrage and then you go to your donors and you say isn't this outrageous this person said this we can only eradicate this with your help send in your 20 check today and that actually ends up you know continuing that process of in your mint because the stick is used so often on even the most minor offenses that people just say well I'm not going to pay any attention to somebody who comes at me with a stick no matter what I've said right which is why the conversation needs to be updated be more contemporary because the world's changing media social media and and people coming out can I ask question about that because I agree and I think it's very important as someone who you know wears the yamaka in public and does the things that I do I think very often this is the first time people will be exposed to this someone like me and they will draw sometimes unwanted inferences right and I should be particularly careful in how I speak and how I express myself um and we joked about how this video could be posted on YouTube and you could joke and this is obviously not how you've conducted yourself in this conversation but it could have been you know Ben Shapiro fillets you know mainstream journalists and things like that that's because there is a mode that you engage in that does that and do you worry that when you do that right that one people draw certain inferences about Orthodox Jews right they might not be one do they flag Rush Limbaugh did it would be different right and that too right it may not be something that you feel like is that the person berating the waiter sometimes especially if you're the speaker on the podium and there's some confused college kid right and then three um would you say when you say people hit with the control over and over again they react the wrong way right do you think that this really works right and so like because I see two bends so to speak right and this band is different than that Ben and I'm curious how that works for you first of all I'd ask actually how many of the adventure Pro destroys Clips you've watched because the title doesn't match the video of course the value is always hyperbolic compared to the video content of course and if you actually watch me do debates with college students what you'll see is that I never call college students names of course I never mock them college students ask me questions and I answer the questions and sometimes they don't have a good answer for the question and that's just the nature of a q a in a college context yes if you watch any of the debates that I've done they are typically done in the exact same mode that we're doing it now I mean I've done debates they're very much like this or chankweiger that are exactly like this yeah this actually is how I fairly often conduct myself when I'm doing and as I said I've seen both videos that's what I'm saying well sometimes I find them hard to Recon slow I mean I'd have to have you pull the specific video that you find particularly offensive because there are certain things that I feel very passionately about and on which I'm willing to speak very passionately and frankly I don't think anti-judaically meaning I think that the the misimpression that mild-mannered equals good Judaism is not correct I think there are certain things that people ought to speak out very passionately about now I'm on the air live an hour and a half a day do I say things that I regret and that I would take back sure I mean I'm I think the only journalist that I've ever met who has an entire list of mistakes that I've said right like literally have a mistakes page on my website that is frequently updated yeah with that said I think that one of the examples that I try to set also is that Jews do not have to be mild manner to engage in the in the public debate they don't have to be shy to engage in the public debate and they can throw a couple of bombs once in a while when it is well deserved and I think that that is actually something that is good for people to know about Jews because again people are very happy to take it from every other group in America they should be able to take it from an Orthodoxy once in a while as well so let me see what's a little more complex on the outrage question and the definition of anti-semitism is what some have called I think venue taught me the label secondary anti-Semitism so Kyrie Irving promoting a movie that includes anti-semitic tropes or a prominent female media personality who defends Kanye or says he's not anti-semite when he is you can say Candace's name it's fine Candace Owens and the like so so many people and I'm not about to pile on but many people would see seek to understand why wouldn't we fire or call for the cancellation of Candace Owens why wouldn't we cancel or should we call for the cancellation of the the people who perpetrate secondary anti-Semitism where they didn't say a Trope directly or they didn't engage in anti-semitic practice but they they gave cover for or they defended or they identified with someone who is an anti-semite what standard do we hold them to and should we be canceling or firing them I mean I said publicly what Candace said was immoral ethically wrong I think that the Candace did not say what Kanye said if she had said what Kanye said then obviously we would have had to fire her now I'll make all this with the caveat that I am not the person who hires in Fires at the daily wire we have a an ownership team and I'm not the person who makes the sole decision when it comes to who gets hired and who gets fired over a daily wire with that said I don't think what Canada said was actually fireable and I think that that what Candace said well again I say it was wrong and unethical and we had it out and you know I had that I made those statements very publicly about a person that that is paid by my company um I think that to fire her would have been a massive error in judgment for several reasons among them that what Jager said earlier is true that if the entire contention of people like Yay is that Jews control the media and then the first reaction is one of the most prominent Orthodox used on planet Earth firing perhaps the most prominent black conservative woman on Earth for for defending a person who should considered a personal friend and still considers a personal friend as far as I'm aware uh then that would have been a massive strategic error as opposed to approaching Candace privately and talking to Candace privately and yes calling her out publicly as an employee of of the company for which I work which by the way you don't see from other companies I don't see very often you know editors coming out and saying the person who works for my company said this and this is wrong and they shouldn't have said that they don't do that and so you know for all the for all of the the people who who have you know suggested that the proper solution there was that Candace should have lost her job my first question would be what is the specific thing that she said that was that was fireable and two have you thought about the secondary consequences of firing people for engaging in speech that you don't like but also doesn't fall quite outside the Overton window and that has some broad scale ramifications for the nature of free speech and and the arguing about where the Overton window should be placed in the country right so some meaning because someone had a bad take on something doesn't necessarily mean they're an anti-semite or that we should be I mean I know I know Candace is not an anti-semites that gives me a little bit more leeway to work I mean if she if she had come out and said exactly the same things that Kanye had said then there would have been no leeway at all the common theme of all this conversations is how complex this is how nuanced it is and how strategic we need to be in looking forward thinking of the consequences of the different ways that we are the different ways we're reacting I take that in a different direction um that I hope will be helpful which is that um we talk about condemning like secondary condemnations of prejudice um and it's a good question right like to what level of diffusion do you expect other people to condemn anti-Semitism that they're in some proximity too um and I think that we have to be careful right we have to be careful about that but I think also we should recognize um that we should hold other people to the same standard we would want to be held ourselves um and I think very often sometimes in the public discourse um when it comes to anti-Semitism for example Louis Farrakhan says something horrific or anti-semitic or a follower of Ruth Farrakhan does something or says something horrible and anti-semitic including violence and then you see this move to say where all the black leaders condemning Louis Farrakhan right you know where they are like having nothing to do with Louis Farrakhan for you know their entire lives right most of these people want nothing to do with this guy they consider him a nut right they could serve as conspiracy theories you know that Louis Farrakhan if you've looked up he's a sport of Donald Trump you might know that almost you know that the majority overall majority of the black community opposed Donald Trump there's just tremendous differences right in so many different levels um so would you say to go to every black person you read and say why haven't you you because is like going to me and saying I am responsible for everything that Ben Shapiro says right in his videos or him responsible for everything I say right it is a way that sort of we sort of make these show because where we like want people into a group and then they're all collecting accountable happens to Muslims too right my Muslim friends it's like like totally cool like happy nice people and they're like why would you condemn this terrorism like I was never for terrorism right right that's not how I understand my religion I don't do that right and it's like why are they being asked right and so often this happens to you know us we should make sure that we're not doing it to others again I'm not sure the analogy to me works perfectly because I think and I actually had this conversation when then Senator Obama was running for office and he spoke here in Boca and I had the chance to speak with him I told him why I wasn't going to be voting for him and neither did I think many of my congregants and he said why that got his attention and I said because you sat in the pews of Reverend Wright when he said horrific things about the Jews and you know what his answer to me was I belong but you don't know that I barely ever attended church I didn't hear those things I didn't know he said those things and as you said before when you rise to the president that's a different level of different position he played a whole speech and he disavowed right he was never allowed to meet with him to the point this is a good story Reverend white got very upset that Obama would meet with him and he told the press the the Jews won't let me see him right and then when they said wait a second that sounds bad he came back and said I meant the zionists right look it up it's in Politico right and so this is valuable because that illustrates something that we have been talking about that sort of switch and Obama said like that's it but yeah how long did it take he was testifying to it so you can take it from him right he was very upset about this so how long did it take me to give during the campaign he did it he did it when Reverend writes things the Press Corps that he had no choice some conspiracy theory maybe think it was even set up to give him the excuse to distance himself but he waited he waited he waited and I know that because I had a direct conversation with him and he didn't say I disavow and they're horrific and they're terrible and I left the church and I said to him at the time I said they're prominent members of my synagogue again if I got up in said those outrageous things they would leave and they wouldn't leave quietly and when a person stays and keeps a membership it says something too so I'm only disagreeing with your analogy and your comparison because I would be held to that standard if there was a prominent Jewish that horrifically racist things I would give a sermon and I would disappoint myself you're saying a member of a particular congregation that's like saying I was a member of you know Lewis I'm saying as a Jewish leader every single I'm studying as a Jewish leader Community is not responsible for what say you say something on this stage that offends a lot of people right so the people the Jews in New York are not accountable for that right they're not members of your shoe they have nothing to do with it says something he's like now they're all like the global the global uh sure right and so Louis Farrakhan says something every black person in America no no not every black person you said black leader black leader is a prominent juice at a overtly racist thing I don't expect every Jew to have to be defensive but they would ask rabbis did you give a sermon did you write an article did you post a tweet did you disc it now did you criticize so I don't think the metaphor is expecting a difference between okay no I think it's fair to say making a difference between say moral leadership which is a specific category right and the average person and also just leaders who are not that right if you're like a business leader that's different right there's so many other categories and I think if we're honest a lot of people get put to the Inquisition over this question that shouldn't be right that's a fair point it's a fair point I think something so important about tonight as we wind down is as we said at the very beginning how much more you agree on that you disagree on how much more you have in common that you then then you have differences and how much work we have ahead of us to be able to not respond in generalities and not respond or shoot from the hip but to be sophisticated and nuanced and strategic in our thinking of this topic which unfortunately is not going away in which we have an incredible amount of work to do so I want to ask a last question in closing and I want to ask yeah what do you wish Ben did more of in order to combat anti-Semitism Ben what do you wish you saw more from yair to be able to have an impact on this issue of anti-semitism whichever which of us is being forced to answer this question at first that's right it's like in that debate when they ask them to say something nice about the other yeah but it's a much better version of the question it's not necessarily it's it's a constructive criticism of some sort and also I think we've gone to some of the criticisms of each other's approach I think if you pay attention you see that Ben thinks that I'm a little bit too mild mattered I'm a little too nice right and uh I think that I'm a little more cautious right and I think that sometimes that when you have a public platform you want to be very careful with your words because you know they do have impact not as much impact as sometimes people attribute but they do matter um and because we've seen that as Jews we've been on the other end of it and I want to be careful when I do it to others and that's not just when I talk about Jewish issues I talk about any issue and I think it's okay for people to say that like that Jewish person teaches people with sensitivity air is always on the side of forgiveness here is on the side of being careful with his words and not necessarily always throwing the grenade into the room that doesn't mean I don't throw grenades if you guys look at the stuff that I've written I've written plenty of grenades but when I throw an elbow I save them up because the more elbows you throw the fewer that actually land right as Ben said The more controls you do the more people become a newer to them and it's important to me that when I decide to put my foot down people listen and I tend to find that that's true because they know that if I'm doing it it really really really how do you hope to see more from Ben right so I I want Ben should be exactly like me to drop all of my opinions right but what I would like to see from Ben two things one is that I think like recognizing like he said following through on this idea that sometimes in the passion in the heat of what you're arguing um you throw many more grenades right that actually make them less and less effective and then they become fireworks instead of actually having the impact you want um and be more careful about that but two I think you heard here that Ben has a very sophisticated deep I would say systemic and structural and historical understanding of anti-Semitism it is not one-off it is not lib right and whether you agree with it or disagree that you can see that he's thought tremendously and deeply about it and how it's embedded in our history and our society and I would say that this is not significant anti-Semitism but more I would like to see that applied to how you talk about other communities in the United States and racism and things like that because I think when I learn about anti-Semitism it teaches me about other forms of prejudice and other forms of prejudice they teach me about anti-Semitism and I feel that it's sometimes tempting to sort of hoarding these off and make them into different conversations but while every Prejudice has unique features we talked about the good spiritual nature of anti-Semitism there's also things they share and I think we should hold ourselves if we can at best to our best principles at all times and with a Dave Chappelle story that try to illustrate this one another vastly more successful media personality than myself so Dave Chappelle incredibly talented um black comedian famously was on the set of a million dollar show that he was filming with a bunch of sketches and he was acting out the stereotype of sort of a uh you know stereotypical black man A caricature um and that was the comedy right he was making a joke that you can do from inside the community like we talked about but you wouldn't do from outside and then he looked in the audience and he saw a white person laughing and he thought that the person was laughing in a very uncomfortable and weird way like he wasn't laughing with the joke he was laughing at this sort of racist caricature because that's what he thought he agreed with it and he got very very uncomfortable and he walked off the set and he gave up this show and the amount of money that he was going to make from this debt um fast forward for very recently and Dave Chappelle was on Saturday Night Live after the Kyrie Irving comments right and after the Kanye West comments it's a very fraughtant moment and he gets up there and starts cracking anti-semitic conspiracy theory jokes and by the way they're very funny right he's like you know uh you know three Italians get together it's a mafia uh you know to uh to whatever you know these group people get together and it's a mob right and four Jews get together and you're not allowed to talk about it right and he's just sort of winking at the audience and saying these jokes about anti-semitic conspiracy theories and a lot of Jews got uncomfortable when they saw that and the fact is this is the kind of humor that Dave Chappelle does right so why are we getting upset and the reason we were upset is because it was in a moment where lots of people were expressing conspiracy theories about Jews and when people were laughing in that audience he didn't know if it was because they thought it was funny that he was mocking it or if they agreed with it and they were glad he was saying it out loud right in other words we were having a similar reaction that he was having to his own audience but he chose to make those jokes about Jews that he wouldn't have made about his own Community it's always that's always the Temptation is to speak a little bit differently to and this is very natural I do it sometimes too right we sort of privilege our own Community a little bit more we hold our principles out a little bit more for ourselves but we really really need to try to hold them universally which goes back to what we said about anti-Semitism which is that it shouldn't be a partisan conversation it should be about principles it shouldn't be about sources it should be about sentiments are you okay with those jokes are you okay with Chappelle making them I wrote a whole piece about it which is in the Atlantic which you absolutely should read um and then I could recapitulate the whole thing no but I I wrote about I tried to explain the discomfort the Jews had with without saying that he necessarily should or shouldn't make them right because I am uncomfortable with the conversation that says comedians can't make these kind of jokes but I wanted people to understand why Jews but it's in your standard he's not an Insider only insiders can make their jokes that is exactly part of the reason and plus the context right comedy is about you're making me recapitulate the article people need to subscribe to the Atlantic to read it I'm just saying you know that doesn't come with this fair enough fair enough Ben what would you like to see Jaeger do more of an additional subscriber fewer pictures for the Atlantic um yeah so I you know I I think that you know I'm not going to respond to criticisms of my own handling of issues because I think that my work will speak for itself and my handling of various issues speaks for itself as well I will say that the the one thing that I that I I hold I try to be as consistent as I can about societal forces and I've never declared it on the base of racism and break my own rule but I've never declared that racism doesn't have lasting impact into today nor have I declared there are no racists in American society or anything of the like uh I'm talking more about the roots right of the structural analysis I I understand but the structural analysis has and this this is where I'm fully consistent the structural analysis does not alleviate any individual of doing the right thing under any circumstances anti-Semitism does not alleviate the duty for Jews to do the right thing and racism does not alleviate the duty for black people to do the right thing and individual agency