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| A process shaped by leaders elected to the highest offices and entrusted to a select few with guarding its basic principles. | ||
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| Former U.S. Special Envoy Ira Foreman participated in a discussion on the rise in anti-Semitism in the U.S. with Georgetown University's Center for Jewish Civilization. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Good evening, everybody. | ||
| Thank you for coming on a beautiful evening. | ||
| And of course, the second to last day of classes before exams begin. | ||
| So thanks, especially to the students who came for what I think is an incredibly timely, of course, but also very important discussion. | ||
| By way of introduction, my name is Jonathan Lincoln. | ||
| I'm the director at the Center for Jewish Civilization here at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown. | ||
| And this is our last event of the year, of the semester. | ||
| But as I said, maybe one of them on a probably more important topic than many of the others. | ||
| And it's been a busy event season. | ||
| And I encourage you all to follow us, look at our social media, also explore our YouTube channel for this and past events on a wide range of topics covered by the center. | ||
| Just a quick word on format before I welcome our very distinguished panel. | ||
| We'll have a discussion for about 30, 35 minutes or so, and then open it up to the audience for questions and answers. | ||
| It's my great pleasure to welcome two very good friends of the CJC, I would call it. | ||
| I'll start with Ira Foreman. | ||
| He has many affiliations, of course. | ||
| We were just discussing his work with the Obama administration, with the Clinton administration, of course, with the Carter administration, working on a number of aspects of different campaigns and outreach to Jewish communities in particular. | ||
| But most importantly, for our purposes, Ira is, of course, a senior fellow at the Center for Jewish Civilization, so we're pleased to welcome him back in that capacity. | ||
| More recently, he was the special envoy, the U.S. Special Envoy, to monitor and combat anti-Semitism from May 2013 through January 2017. | ||
| He's also been the Jewish Outreach Director for the Obama for America campaign and spent 15 years as the executive director at the National Jewish Democratic Council. | ||
| So we're very pleased to welcome him back today. | ||
| And Emily, Emily Tamkin, is a global affairs journalist. | ||
| She is very prolific, especially in a number of different publications, including The Forward. | ||
| She was with us last fall actually to support our humanities program with a book talk with Carolina Kraszuska, which a number of you also joined. | ||
| She's the author of two very important books, I would say, The Influence of George Soros, and one of my favorite titles, of course, Bad Jews: A History of American Jewish Politics and Identities. | ||
| I would also strongly recommend, I'm a personal fan of her writing on Substack. | ||
| I encourage you all to follow. | ||
| You can agree or argue with her writings, which are, of course, full of great information, humor, and analysis. | ||
| So, thank you to both of you for joining. | ||
| Maybe we'll get into the topic on anti-Semitism in the era of Donald Trump. | ||
| And I'll start really by asking you to situate us with regard to the current state of anti-Semitism, its increase over the years, the impact of October 7th, and what it means today. | ||
| And if that's okay, we'll start with Emily and then I'll ask the same question of you, Ira. | ||
| Please, Emily. | ||
| Thank you so much for that generous introduction. | ||
| Thank you for having me. | ||
| And mostly thanks to you and especially the students for being here. | ||
| I'm both delighted, and also, given how nice it is outside, stunned to see you here this evening. | ||
| Anti-Semitism in America today. | ||
| We should start. | ||
| I mean, you asked sort of for the general lay of the land, so I'll do that before turning to our president. | ||
| Per the vast majority of polls that you will read on this, anti-Semitism is on the rise in the United States, and it's perceived even more strongly As being on the rise. | ||
| This was true beginning in the first Trump administration. | ||
| It's certainly true after October 7th. | ||
| It's true on the, you know, it's perceived as true across the political spectrum. | ||
| We know that incidents are increasing. | ||
| We know that fear of anti-Semitism is definitely increasing. | ||
| Having said all of that, even if, having said all of that, if I believed that the Trump administration were sincerely trying to tackle that, I would still come here tonight and argue before you, just to lay my own cards on the table, that the Trump administration's approach to this will not fight anti-Semitism, right, for three reasons. | ||
| The first, he is going after, or the consequences of this are the undermining of due process, of freedom of speech, of freedom of assembly, of institutions like this one. | ||
| All of these things that I believe have historically kept Jews in this country safe. | ||
| Second of all, I do not see, and maybe in the QA one of you can enlighten me, I do not see how you say, we're going to cut hundreds of millions of dollars, billions of dollars in some cases, from research universities. | ||
| We're going to deport your classmates. | ||
| And that's, and we're doing it for the Jews. | ||
| How doing that is going to tamp down anti-Semitism as opposed to encouraging it, right? | ||
| And specifically to the university, I don't really understand how the Department of Education can issue an anti-DEI directive and say, you can't teach, you know, racism no longer okay to teach, xenophobia no longer okay to teach, but you can still teach about anti-Semitism, right? | ||
| Like, I don't think that separating Jews out as the one minority group that we're still allowed to talk about protecting, that that is helpful to Jews. | ||
| To say nothing of the fact that, by the way, there are direct consequences for Jewish education, which I think is one of the most important ways to combat anti-Semitism, right? | ||
| Like, you actually can't teach anti-Semitism without teaching about racism and xenophobia. | ||
| You actually can't, we can see the national humanities grants for Yiddish translation have been cut as part of these initiatives, right? | ||
| Jewish researchers are also losing their funding. | ||
| So, for all of those reasons, even if I believed that he were sincerely, that this administration was sincerely committed to combating this rise of real anti-Semitism, the fear of anti-Semitism, right? | ||
| Like, I would still say they're going about it the wrong way. | ||
| Having said all of that, I, just to put it very plainly, to sort of lay my cards on the table at the beginning of this talk, do not think that that is what the administration is doing. | ||
| As evidence, I will present to you that this administration is only looking at anti-Semitism as an issue on the political left. | ||
| It is presenting it as an imported issue, right, by going after people on visas, immigrants. | ||
| Anti-Semitism is not an important issue, right? | ||
| We have an issue here in our own country. | ||
| It's homegrown. | ||
| Reporting from ProPublica suggests that a permission structure has been created for right-wing extremists, for white supremacists. | ||
| And we can also look at who the president has elevated, right? | ||
| We can talk about his right-hand man, Elon Musk, doing coy little salutes, boosting the off-day. | ||
| We can talk about the literal head of the anti-Semitism task force retweeting a white supremacist saying that the president can take Chuck Schumer's Jew card away. | ||
| We can talk about the FBI director going on a Holocaust deniers podcast multiple times before being confirmed by the Senate. | ||
| We could talk about the president himself saying that his legal troubles in the interim period were because of George Soros and pardoning the Proud Boys. | ||
| So, to me, anti-Semitism is on the rise in this country. | ||
| Fear of anti-Semitism is definitely on the rise in this country. | ||
| It is not enough to say that the administration is exploiting this issue. | ||
| They are exploiting this issue while creating a permission structure for it. | ||
| Anyway, that's how I see things. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I already have a bunch of questions for you, but I'll give Ira the chance to agree or enlighten us on that. | ||
| Well, I think we're going to largely agree on a lot of things this evening. | ||
| Just to give a little sense of how anti-Semitism has kind of grown, it's really a phenomenon of the 21st century. | ||
| I think if I had to think of a starting point, I'd think of Durban in 2021, I'm sorry, 2001, just before 9-1-1, where there was this kind of the rhetoric that we hear, and we're going to call it the two-camp view of the world of the oppressed and the oppressors, really kind of rose at Durban and shocked the American Jewish community. | ||
| A lot of this kind of infrastructure that we have in the U.S. government came out of that original period and really making Israel, you know, the Soviets had already used the Zionism as racism resolution in the 70s had been overturned at the UN. | ||
| But this was really a revival of that in a very serious way. | ||
| But it didn't get dramatically worse, I think, until really the teens. | ||
| And we've seen an increase all through first the first Obama administration, the second Obama administration, the Trump administration, first Trump administration, the Biden administration. | ||
| I think it's not a steady necessarily path, but it keeps rising. | ||
| We know Emily mentioned data. | ||
| We have data on measures. | ||
| You try to measure anti-Semitism. | ||
| It's not the easiest thing, but we have measures that show that rise. | ||
| Frankly, less so in the United States than other places. | ||
| And that's one kind of like good news so far, though. | ||
| I don't think it holds if we have the type of rhetoric that we keep getting out of people on both the left and the right. | ||
| So I think that's an important kind of measure. | ||
| It's kept getting worse. | ||
| Jonathan, you were asking about a follow-up to talk about the infrastructure that came out of that. | ||
| Please, please, yeah. | ||
| I mean, I thought you would be maybe best placed to help us really, you know, as I said to you before, you know, maybe assess Trump administration's approach in context. | ||
| And what I mean by that is really, can you compare, is it even possible to compare this administration with previous administrations, including ones that you worked for? | ||
| And you already sort of started us by talking a little bit about the infrastructure created over the last few decades. | ||
| Yeah, I'll try to talk about it. | ||
| I'm going to know most about the Obama years because that's where I was inside, but I've tried to keep up on some of this stuff. | ||
| First, one of the things that you'll probably note from my remarks tonight, I love the Mark Twain quote, which is, or supposedly Mark Twain, who said, history never repeats itself, but it often rhymes. | ||
| And it's a great quote. | ||
| And I think it is really useful to think about this. | ||
| One of the things, if we look at the trajectory and where we are now, we hear people say things like, this is like 1930s Germany. | ||
| It's like right before Kristallnacht. | ||
| In fact, President Trump's proposed nominee for the special envoy to monitor and combat anti-Semitism said just that. | ||
| He said, we are right where Germany was right before Kristallnacht in 38. | ||
| And we're not. | ||
| That's not the rhyme. | ||
| We are in some bad situation here. | ||
| We have, I think there are also people who say this is the worst anti-Semitism in American history. | ||
| It is not. | ||
| In the 20s and 30s, we had worse anti-Semitism. | ||
| And it's really the period after the post-war period, we had this, maybe this unusual rise in acceptance of Jews, Jews of part of the American pluralistic system from, say, 1945 roughly until the beginning of the 21st century. | ||
| And even then, until the last 10 years or so, Jews have had a really strong, major rise in American politics. | ||
| But talking about the infrastructure, going back to Durban, coming out of Durban, I remember talking to lots of my colleagues who were running Jewish organizations at that time and had been at Durban, and it was such an incredible shock to them. | ||
| And out of that came this need or feeling of a need to deal with anti-Semitism overseas, not here. | ||
| And so in the Bush administration, there was a piece of legislation to create an office of the special envoy to monitor and combat anti-Semitism. | ||
| And there wasn't any great rush to fill it. | ||
| In fact, I think the legislation was passed in 2003 and it was at least 2006 or 7 before they put someone in that job. | ||
| And it wasn't a very high-profile job at that time. | ||
| But there was some movement of how the United States would look at anti-Semitism, how they would define it overseas. | ||
| In the first Obama administration, pretty much the same thing, although that need to define anti-Semitism was sharpened, and there was kind of a beginning of a consensus among activists in this area and Western governments on a definition that comes out to what we call the IRA definition or the working definition of anti-Semitism. | ||
| That's quite controversial these days. | ||
| I happen to be a proponent of it. | ||
| We can get into that. | ||
| But it really, I think, I got into the Obama administration in 2013 and with a sense that anti-Semitism was rising already. | ||
| I considered myself an amateur historian of the Jewish people and I thought, you know, in the 90s, et cetera, the acceptance of American Jews into the kind of the highest echelons of American society was really remarkable. | ||
| I mean, when I was born, which was right after the Roman Empire, 1952, I know my parents never thought I could run for president. | ||
| I could be head of U.S. Steel, et cetera. | ||
| And you couldn't go to white shoes law firms. | ||
| All that changed between the late 50s, the 60s, the 70s, to where some of our major industries are run by Jews. | ||
| Jews are very prominent in American politics, well outside, and it's been now for maybe 30 years, even 40 years, where Jewish members of Congress, Jewish members of the Supreme Court, people in the high bureaucracy and the kind of the power departments like justice and state and defense department, heavily Jewish. | ||
| You go to the Hill where a lot of the elite committees are, staff is heavily Jewish. | ||
| All these are things that never existed before. | ||
| Having said that, you can't look at what's happened in the last decade and not be really fearful that maybe the golden era is over. | ||
| And we talk about looking at polling, but it's not just polling. | ||
| It's one of the things that's most concerning in America, and I think can affect polling eventually, is rhetoric. | ||
| And when you have rhetoric demonizing Jews, and it's coming from different parts of society, that inevitably erodes public opinion. | ||
| And so I think we are in a very dangerous time. | ||
| It is not 1938. | ||
| But it is something, if we do not work on this, and I think we want to talk about, is the Trump administration the right way to go about this? | ||
| What are the wrong ways to go about it? | ||
| And I will then step back because I've taken more than my five minutes. | ||
| I think, no. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| And I think that we've established that we can probably spend the entire time and then some just discussing definitions and just trying to reach common, fully common ground. | ||
| But I think there is some common ground here and maybe just take the role of the moderator to say that we agree that it exists, we agree that there's problems, and we agree that the numbers have been fluctuating and there's a number of reasons for that. | ||
| But maybe to try and bring us back to today, and I'll turn to you, Emily. | ||
| I mean, of course, you know, you mentioned you've written on the detention of Mahmoud Khalil in particular. | ||
| But of course, it's not an abstract issue for us either at Georgetown, because of course we've had a colleague of ours, a postdoc fellow, detained and awaiting deportation potentially. | ||
| And this has elicited really strong reactions, obviously, on campus, elsewhere, including many Jewish students and faculty. | ||
| Again, a lot of different things to unpack there. | ||
| But Emily, maybe you could help us think, why do you think that when we look at the Trump administration, and I'm not trying to be silly about this, but why do you think that universities in particular are at the center of this issue? | ||
| And how do you see the conflation of all of this? | ||
| And we alluded to it, but we haven't really talked so much. | ||
| And obviously that's not the topic today, but the war in Gaza, of course, but all of this has an impact and maybe other aspects of the administration's agenda. | ||
| So big, big question there. | ||
| But Emily, please. | ||
| Yeah, I think, okay, so I think to get to your question, there are two questions that you have to answer leading up to it. | ||
| The first is the easiest one. | ||
| Why is the Trump administration going after universities? | ||
| To my mind, this is not such a complicated question. | ||
| You can look, just pick your country, right? | ||
| It could be India, Russia, Hungary, aspiring politicians or people who, politicians who gain power and hold certain ideologies tend to go after universities. | ||
| Why? | ||
| You know, it's sort of a group to paint as elite despite being aligned with some of the richest, most powerful people in the country. | ||
| But never mind, we know that if you had a college degree, you were less likely to vote for Trump. | ||
| They are often found in left-leaning cities like, or more liberally inclined cities like this one. | ||
| Their student populations tend to be more liberally inclined. | ||
| So it's not why Trump is going after universities. | ||
| This is not so confusing to me, right? | ||
| Second question that I think you should answer before first, before sort of going into, well, why universities on this issue, why are universities such a flashpoint for anti-Semitism, right? | ||
| Like why was it on campuses, you know, there were many protests across the country following October 7th against the war. | ||
| Why did they become such attention turn to universities given that the people writing about them haven't been on campus for 10, 20, 30, 40 years? | ||
| And I think there are a bunch of different answers to this, right? | ||
| One is, I think universities for decades now have been one of the places that people encounter pro-Palestinian thought, right? | ||
| For many Jewish students, it's the first time that they have really, you know, sort of pro-Israel, a pro-Israel worldview challenge. | ||
| For some non-Jewish students, it's the first time they're meeting Jews, right? | ||
| So you take, I'm not trying to say to the students in the room, like, you're all young and naive. | ||
| That's not what I'm doing. | ||
| I'm just saying that, you know, you're still forming your identities and your worldviews. | ||
| You're still learning what it is to protest. | ||
| You're still like, what do you want to put in that outfit? | ||
| It's all still malleable in some ways. | ||
| Not that it won't be for the rest of your lives, but and so I think it's a very, you know, there are just, there are so many things meeting on a campus point, where, by the way, you're eating and living and studying together. | ||
| Why then do universities, so that, okay, so we have why Trump is going after universities. | ||
| We have why universities in particular become such flashpoints for issues around Israel, Palestine, and anti-Semitism. | ||
| Oh, and, you know, students tend to be, younger people in general tend to be more progressive, right? | ||
| Like, this is not news to anyone in this room. | ||
| So why then have universities become the focal point for the Trump administration's approach, such as it is to anti-Semitism? | ||
| One, I think it's because they were already flashpoints for this issue, right? | ||
| So it's sort of the attention is already there. | ||
| It's baked in. | ||
| And the other, look, and maybe this is a bit conspiratorial, but I think that by using this issue, there are some liberally minded people who were either slower to react or reacted differently than they would have had it not been about anti-Semitism on campus. | ||
| I think that Eric Ward wrote basically that Trump is using the issue of anti-Semitism to divide the liberal coalition. | ||
| And I, you know, just speaking frankly, I think there's an extent to which that's true and to which it worked. | ||
| So. | ||
| Hara, can I ask the same question? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| One thing, Emily, I might say, the last thing you said, I don't think it worked, it has worked very well. | ||
| And it's one of the reasons Trump is very agitated about this, why he makes comments about, well, if I lose, right before the election said, if I lose, it's because Jews didn't support me. | ||
| That's kind of dangerous stuff to be talking about. | ||
| Talking about Jews who continue to vote Democratic as they've lost their minds or they hate Israel or they hate their own religion. | ||
| They're frustrated by that. | ||
| And what we have seen in the data is Jews in the last election continue to vote Democratic at about the same levels they voted for Obama in 12, Clinton in 16, Biden in 20. | ||
| The numbers haven't changed much. | ||
| And just five days ago, there was polling that came out that looked at approval ratings in the Jewish community, an 800 sample by Mark Melman, a very serious bolster, that showed those numbers basically holding up. | ||
| Approval for Trump, the only place where he's improved from the first term is fighting anti-Semitism. | ||
| Now, roughly 30, his approval numbers are in the low 30s. | ||
| Everything else is in the 20s. | ||
| And his disapproval rating is about 57. | ||
| That's the good news from Trump, and he's not been very happy about it. | ||
| But otherwise, again, I think we're going to agree a lot. | ||
| Let me just start. | ||
| I thought it was really good, Emily, that you brought out your kind of worldview and your assumptions. | ||
| I want to talk about a couple assumptions that I have when I start looking at this whole area of why the universities. | ||
| One of the assumptions is, and I think I found that really an education at the State Department, anti-Semitism is correlated with time and place. | ||
| And there is no one single form of anti-Semitism. | ||
| Oh, if you're in Hungary, for example, the only serious anti-Semitism is right-wing anti-Semitism. | ||
| But for most of Western Europe and the United States, we have multiple forms. | ||
| You can define them in different ways. | ||
| The general way, most often, it's not perfect, is right-wing anti-Semitism, left-wing anti-Semitism, Islamic anti-Semitism. | ||
| But there are also categories we can't define anti-Semitic incidents, whether they're coming from right-left or radical Islam. | ||
| They're coming from really some strange places. | ||
| That's one. | ||
| And anyone who tells you that anti-Semitism is only a problem amongst their political enemies, they're either lying to you or they're stupid. | ||
| They don't know what they're talking about. | ||
| One or the other, or maybe both. | ||
| Because one of the things, not only is it there multiple forms, but it morphs very quickly. | ||
| So, for example, when I started the State Department in 2013, we were beginning to see lots of radical Islamic violence against Jews in France. | ||
| And of course, that accelerated with the Gaza War in 2014. | ||
| But there was right-wing anti-Semitism, Marie Le Pen's party, but also there were already indications of the extreme left, not the Socialist Party that was in government at the time, but the extreme left, who now is Malenchon, who was there at that time, also had anti-Semitic views, even though opinion polls showed a little less among radical left than radical right or Islamic communities. | ||
| Today, I would tell you, probably the most prominent form and maybe the most dangerous right now is that radical left, Malenchon. | ||
| If he does ever come to power, he is anti-I mean, I don't say this very often. | ||
| This guy is an out-and-out anti-Semite. | ||
| We don't have to guess a lot. | ||
| He's told us a lot of his opinions. | ||
| Also, anti-Semitism is something that I always thought: well, you're an anti-Semite if you hate Jews. | ||
| Well, not really. | ||
| That's not a great definition of anti-Semitism. | ||
| Classic case is, and you hear a lot of this on the left, Jeremy Corbyn was called an anti-Semite often when he was the leader of the Labor Party. | ||
| And And his response is, how can I be anti-Semitic? | ||
| I've spent my life fighting racism. | ||
| Tony Blair had a great response to that. | ||
| He says, yeah, Jeremy Corbyn is an anti-Semitic Semite. | ||
| He just doesn't know it yet. | ||
| And that is very true. | ||
| People don't have to say, in my heart, I hate Jews, to do things and say things that damage the Jewish people and also damage individual Jews. | ||
| And frankly, as Emily alluded to, damage our democracy. | ||
| When I talked to French Jews in 2014 when they were really under a lot of pressure and you were seeing large numbers in immigration to Israel, they would go through how the government was actually pretty good with them, et cetera, how most Jews wouldn't leave because it's very difficult to leave your country, your culture, your language, your family. | ||
| But they were most worried about civil society and whether civil society would stand up for them. | ||
| And then this one guy, I remember this line very vividly. | ||
| He said, but ultimately it's not about us. | ||
| It's about the very values of the French Republic. | ||
| And I think that's a great lesson for us. | ||
| It's about the very values of American democracy. | ||
| Finally, one of the things I think, one of my assumptions is if you are using anti-Semitism as a political weapon, you are not fighting anti-Semitism. | ||
| You are actually damaging the fight against anti-Semitism. | ||
| We don't win this fight by having it as a partisan issue. | ||
| We don't win this fight as a Jewish community. | ||
| We don't win this fight as progressives. | ||
| Or we don't win this fight even with the U.S. government. | ||
| We need a kind of broad coalition in this country of people standing up and saying this is wrong and willing to put the kind of haters back under the rocks that they've crawled out from under in the last 10 years. | ||
| The taboos about saying things that wouldn't have been said in 2010 or 2000 are now broken to a large degree. | ||
| And I think the Trump administration has, both the first and second certainly have something to do with it. | ||
| Let me just say about universities. | ||
| A couple things that many agree with Emily on, but one, the manifestation today of anti-Semitism, it's most prominent is in the college campuses and universities. | ||
| But right-wing anti-Semitism is very much of a problem, and I would bet, I haven't looked at the numbers recently, but I would bet if you looked at violent incidents in the United States still over the last, say, three or four years, violent incidents would still be more from the radical right. | ||
| And as I said, this stuff can morph. | ||
| And if you don't attack the anti-Semitism that is out there, whether it's from the left and it's your allies, or whether it's from the right, it's from your opponents, or whether it's from the Islamic community, and you don't want to demonize Muslims in fighting anti-Semitism at all, because we need Muslim allies in this as well. | ||
| If you do this game of playing the partisan card, you're ruining your chances. | ||
| But at universities right now, it is the most visible sign. | ||
| Universities are also one of the enemies, as Emily very well put it, of the Trump administration. | ||
| And if you look at the Orban playbook for destroying democracy, you go after the judiciary, which is happening here. | ||
| You go after the universities. | ||
| In Orban's case, it was Soros' Central European University, but it didn't have to be Soros. | ||
| Soros was a boogeyman that he specifically thought was really worthwhile making the boogeyman in Hungary. | ||
| One of the reasons was he was Jewish. | ||
| And though Orban never said Jew, if you looked at the posters that they ran during the campaigns of Soros' puppet master, the graffiti on it was all Jews. | ||
| Everybody knew who this guy was. | ||
| And he used an American Jewish pollster who told him, Finkelstein said, This is the guy you want to make as your boogeyman. | ||
| It's also historically true, at least in the 20th and 21st century, that students are often in the vanguard of radical change in this country. | ||
| And so you see often, especially on the left, you see universities as the first who will do demonstrations, etc. | ||
| And usually revolutions or changes don't come unless they are joined by working class or other parts of society. | ||
| Certainly not just with elites, because then you have populists who can say, look, it's the elites who are doing all this. | ||
| Finally, I think, and Emily has also alluded to this very strongly, this is not about, I can't say that Trump doesn't care about anti-Semitism. | ||
| I can't get inside his head. | ||
| I know, Emily, there are a lot of other instances you could have told of things that Trump has said are very damaging or people he's associated very damaging. | ||
| I don't think it's very useful for us to talk about Trump, is he an anti-Semite? | ||
| Let's just see what he does. | ||
| And I think that conversation, sometimes it's useful to have. | ||
| In this case, it's not. | ||
| But if you ask my guess, his priority is attacking institutions like universities, and anti-Semitism is a good tool. | ||
| Doesn't mean he may not think it's important. | ||
| He has Jewish daughter, grandchildren, etc. | ||
| But he also has said things that are really problematic for Jews. | ||
| So I think this is really about attacking universities and less about forcing combating anti-Semitism. | ||
| Now, to be honest, universities in this calendar, in this academic year, 2024 and 25, were already moving to deal with some of the problems on campus and the ideology on campus. | ||
| And one of the other things that's happened on campuses, but not just campuses, it's happened among certain elite medias, it's happened among NGOs, it happens among the political left, like Democratic Socialists, is this what I would recommend. | ||
| There's an essay, about 100 pages, in a magazine called Fathom. | ||
| You can get it online, called Institutionally Anti-Semitic, which looks at anti-Semitism in the Corbyn era in the UK. | ||
| And it describes what he describes, Johnson, who wrote this, as a two-camp view of the world. | ||
| It's like you're either oppressed or an oppressor. | ||
| You're either an imperialist or an anti-imperialist. | ||
| And the good guys are the anti-imperialists and the oppressed. | ||
| And everybody else is a bad guy. | ||
| They wear a black hat. | ||
| And classic priorities of progressive and liberal movements, things like democracy, things like anti-totalitarianism, gender and sexual equality, other equity, et cetera, all these things have been pushed aside. | ||
| And the only thing that counts in this kind of philosophy is the two-camp view. | ||
| Are you with the oppressor or not? | ||
| And it gets to the ridiculous point where someone like an academic like Judith Butler says, Well, we have to look at Hamas and Hezbollah as members of the progressive union around the world because they are anti, they are anti-oppressor. | ||
| They are for the oppressed. | ||
| Now, it doesn't matter. | ||
| And the protester in Iran who's protesting for democracy or women's rights, etc., they are on the evil side because they're with the imperialists. | ||
| This two-camp view of the world has been propagated not just in academia, but in lots of places. | ||
| And I don't look at it as a conspiracy there. | ||
| It's coming from many, many different sources, and it's been quite successful. | ||
| The really stupidity of that view can be pointed out in many different ways. | ||
| One is how Jews are not indigenous to the Middle East. | ||
| People do somersaults to wipe out history, things that the head of the Muslim authorities on the Temple Mount in the 20s would acknowledge that they're the dome of the rock. | ||
| It sits with the Solomon's Temple. | ||
| So that today, that would be heresy. | ||
| Jews are really, you know, there are various arguments, but Jews are really just Khazars. | ||
| They are from the Crimea area and that converted to Judaism. | ||
| The original Jews kind of frittered away. | ||
| I realized I fully ignored the second half of your question about Trump's Israel policy, but maybe in the interest of time, we can let the audience. | ||
| So I defer to our. | ||
| I wanted to give you the opportunity to respond here. | ||
| I have maybe one last question to start with. | ||
| I'm just before we go to that. | ||
| If you have some thoughts on that, I was just quickly going to add as an addendum to my first overly long answer that I think, you know, I talked about young people coming with different viewpoints, and one of the things that I think a lot about is intent versus impact, right? | ||
| So a student protester says, like, well, that's not what I meant when I used that phrase. | ||
| And a Jewish student says, okay, but that's what I heard, right? | ||
| And actually, I think that both of those things matter. | ||
| And the way that you make things better is not by deporting one of them. | ||
| It's by providing additional educational opportunities and doing that upfront and allowing for nuance and allowing space for discussion, which is totally antithetical to the approach that's being taken right now. | ||
| I would also say, I would also recommend on Trump's Israel policy the work of a political scientist named Yelena Sabotic. | ||
| Yelena, I'm so sorry if I said your last name wrong, who basically talks about pro-Israel anti-Semitism, right? | ||
| The idea that basically it's the idea that like I'm not an anti-Semite because of look how supportive I look at how supportive I am of Israel. | ||
| It's basically like I have a Jewish friend and he's the state of Israel, which is not, I don't think, like a great compelling line, but it's one that's used. | ||
| And it's not that surprising, right? | ||
| Like the current government of Israel at least is all too happy to go along with that and say, yes, that's true and we agree. | ||
| You're not anti-Semitic because look how supportive you've been of our particular version of what it means to support Israel. | ||
| And I also think it means that, look, and there are, I think the vast majority of American Jews looked at the campus protests and said that at least some of them had at least some anti-Semitism, right? | ||
| You can, I think American Jews disagreed, we know propolling that American Jews disagreed how much the anti-Semitism was sort of the impetus versus a byproduct, how much of the content was anti-Semitic, you know, which phrases counted as anti-Semitism, but most were uncomfortable with at least some of what they read in the news. | ||
| That being said, to conflate speaking up for Palestinian rights with anti-Semitism is so damaging. | ||
| It's frankly, it's racist. | ||
| It goes completely against the spirit of the academy, in my opinion, and just the spirit of human dignity in American democracy. | ||
| And I think that that's what Trump is encouraging. | ||
| I think phrases like, using phrases like terrorist sympathizer to justify action against anti-Semitism not only conflates Jews with Israel, but conflates support for Palestinian rights with terrorism. | ||
| I think as As Jews and as good students of history, we know that phrases, how slippery language can be, how malleable language can be, we know what it meant to be a, you know, that you could be a Bolshevik sympathizer, you could be a communist because your cousin had a card at one point. | ||
| You know, we've seen this movie before. | ||
| The ending's not particularly good. | ||
| I don't think that we should buy tickets to the sequel. | ||
| Well, thank you for that. | ||
| I think that perhaps each one of your comments we could unpack into a separate event on their own. | ||
| No need to study for your exams, we're moving in. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, there's a lot to say. | ||
| I did have one more question, which I think is important. | ||
| And I think there are a number of ways, before we go to the audience, so please think of your questions if you don't have many already. | ||
| But there are a number of ways of looking at this sort of from the inside as well, inside the Jewish community. | ||
| You've both alluded to it a little bit, but I think that one issue that is perhaps quite well covered in the forward and elsewhere, but maybe not in larger mainstream media discussions is really this issue of the reactions of Jewish leadership and organizations. | ||
| And I guess my question, and then maybe we'll start with Emily and then go over to Ira, but is anyone fully comfortable with the Trump administration? | ||
| Are there some elements of the organized Jewish community that are, and also, what does this really say about the state of Jewish leadership in the United States in general? | ||
| Again, another issue on its own, but maybe quickly, what I would say is that the short answer is yes. | ||
| There are some who are supportive of this. | ||
| Beitar, which is a far-right Jewish organization, said, not only do we think it's great that you're taking names that we suggested and deporting them, which is, it's not actually, to the best of my knowledge, been confirmed that that's where the names are from, but no matter they made a list, said, here you go, please deport. | ||
| They then also went and made a list of Jews that Israel should not allow into the country. | ||
| So they're like gung-ho about this approach. | ||
| But we should also say that organizations that are considered more mainstream, like the ADL, I mean, they've said, yes, yes, we should respect due process, but the ADL, Jonathan Greenblatt is on TV saying that, you know, well, universities, they do get a lot of federal funding. | ||
| And, you know, his initial comment about Mahmoud Khalil's arrest was, we hope that this will cause other, it was something like, we hope that this will lead other students to think more carefully about how they speak. | ||
| You know, the head of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations went to Israel and said, well, we think that every major Jewish leader supports how aligned Trump and Israel are. | ||
| And in fact, as Ira Femeh said, most American Jews, per the polling that we have available, do not support Trump. | ||
| And 31% per this latest JEI poll said, yes, we approve of his handling of anti-Semitism. | ||
| 31%. | ||
| So, you know, this is sort of controversial, so I wasn't going to say it, but now I am. | ||
| So the Jewish Council for Public Affairs wrote a letter and the reform, Reconstructionist, and Conservative movement signed on to that letter and they said, basically, we don't like your, we don't support this approach to anti-Semitism. | ||
| The head of Jewish Federations of North America then sent his own letter to the Jewish Federations saying basically this letter is no good because it doesn't reflect the diversity of American views. | ||
| Now, what was interesting about this to me is that the diversity of mainstream American views. | ||
| Okay, so now this poll's out. | ||
| We know that the amount that supports what the Trump administration is doing on anti-Semitism is about a third. | ||
| The reason I find this so interesting is that that's the same number of American Jews per a recent American Jewish committee poll that says that from the river to the sea is not anti-Semitic. | ||
| That's roughly the same number that says that Israel is an apartheid state. | ||
| Now, I'm not endorsing any one of these policies. | ||
| I've already disendors the first one. | ||
| But I don't see heads of major Jewish organizations saying, well, we need to include that view because it's within the mainstream. | ||
| So to me, two things are interesting. | ||
| One, when institutional Jewish leaders sort of say, well, we need diversity versus when they say, well, we need unity. | ||
| And two, look, we can just say it. | ||
| Like, I think that there is a tension right now between some, not all, major mainstream Jewish leaders for whom the most important thing is support for Israel and this particular version of supporting Israel and the majority of American Jews who we know, poll after poll after poll tells us, are mostly concerned with American democracy. | ||
| And that's a tension that I think it will be painful for Jewish communities to resolve. | ||
| Thank you, Ira. | ||
| Well, and then we'll go to the audience. | ||
| I'm going to start with going back to history and rhyming. | ||
| For those of you who are kind of history buffs, might remember the white or have read about the white paper that was issued by the British in Palestine in 1939, which essentially cut off any immigration to Palestine from European Jewry. | ||
| Already it would have been limited, which was a real trauma for the Jewish leadership. | ||
| And Ben-Gurion, who was not just the first prime minister, but kind of the unofficial head of the community at that time, had a great quote, which I think is really apropos for us in the Jewish community now. | ||
| He said, and this is a member on the eve of World War II. | ||
| Everybody knew it was coming. | ||
| Everybody knew Hitler was not going to just stop in Czechoslovakia. | ||
| And he said, we shall fight the white paper as if Hitler isn't there, and we shall fight Hitler as if the white paper isn't there. | ||
| And I think we should have, my personal opinion, we should be fighting anti-Semitism as if the threats to constitutional democracy are not at stake. | ||
| And we should be fighting for institutional constitutional democracy and pluralism and freedom of speech as if anti-Semitism didn't exist. | ||
| We should have the power to hold both things in our hands. | ||
| And this is the dilemma that Jewish organizations face. | ||
| When you talk about Jewish organizations and what they do and what they think about, first have to look at American Jewry. | ||
| And we've talked about the polling data, et cetera. | ||
| And it's clearly that, again, American Jews are still largely Democratic. | ||
| But we're still part of America. | ||
| America is polarized. | ||
| And we are polarized. | ||
| We have a minority conservative Republican point of view. | ||
| And I'll be frank, they are louder than the rest of the community. | ||
| So you hear their points of view more often. | ||
| And you have this kind of still continued support for Israel, but polling also shows that BB is very unpopular and is perceived to be part of the problem here. | ||
| So if you're a Jewish organization, having run a Jewish organization, although a political one, you really look for consensus. | ||
| You don't do things in general. | ||
| It's not to say you don't have principles. | ||
| And I wouldn't charge any of these people, whether it's Eric Fingerhut or Greenblatt, with not having principles they care about. | ||
| But you're also trying to keep your organization together. | ||
| I always thought you need to have 80% of your leadership and your grassroots behind you if you're going to take a controversial step. | ||
| So again, because we live in a polarized time, you see this equivocation. | ||
| And at the extremes of the Jewish world, on left and the right, you don't have that problem because you have a smaller constituency, but they are fairly consistent. | ||
| So you have an anti-Zionist, strong not in terms of great numbers, but prominent certainly in universities like Jewish Voice for Peace, or if not now. | ||
| On the right, you have Beitar and ZOA, the Republican Jewish Coalition, for different reasons, less ideological and more political, that also support Trump out now. | ||
| And the rest of the community has this problem. | ||
| The letter put out by JCPA, I would agree with, and yet they are also very concerned about anti-Semitism. | ||
| They're trying to do Ben-Gorians' white paper and anti-Semitism, essentially. | ||
| The mainstream defense organizations, so the big ones, ADL and AJC, are always interesting to watch because they tell you a lot about Jewish public opinion. | ||
| Because again, they're trying to deal with consensus. | ||
| They may get it wrong at times, but they are doing that. | ||
| And I think that's what we're seeing. | ||
| We don't have, you know, it's impossible in this type of world to have a leader of the Jews. | ||
| It's very difficult. | ||
| We are a part of a very polarized country in a polarized time. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Please, from the audience, I see we have a question in the back there. | ||
| Please, if you could speak up, Suzanne. | ||
| Thank you so much for coming to speak with us. | ||
| Your insight is just so invaluable right now. | ||
| Everything is so messy, for lack of a better word. | ||
| Specifically, I'm very curious. | ||
| You mentioned different forms of anti-Semitism, particularly on campus, and different rhetoric. | ||
| One thing that I think has always been controversial is that the BDS movement is inherently anti-Semitic. | ||
| And obviously, it's relevant right now on campus because we just had the Gulf student government referendum to divest from Israel. | ||
| That was controversial for a couple of reasons. | ||
| It included disaffiliation with universities in Israel, which people thought was academic censorship. | ||
| Also, the focus on just Israel as opposed to like Qatar, for example, being kind of a double standard. | ||
| But I'm curious just to hear your thoughts on how you would kind of categorize or analyze a referendum like that and the BDS movement broadly in terms of anti-Semitism. | ||
| I was going to say this is why I gave you that big background before you came here. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, you can go first and then I'll. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So this gets to also the question I brought up is, is anti-Semitism, do you hate Jews? | ||
| And I would guess that many of your colleagues supporting BDS would tell you, no, I don't hate Jews. | ||
| I have friends who are Jewish, or I'm anti-racist. | ||
| I can't possibly be. | ||
| The question is, what is the damage? | ||
| Now, on the one hand, I believe they have the right under our Constitution for freedom of assembly, freedom to petition the government, etc. | ||
| And that should not be taken away. | ||
| And that should not, for speaking out, there should not be revoking of visas, being sent away, being suspended from a college, et cetera. | ||
| But if you break the law, that becomes different. | ||
| And it doesn't, and by the way, it does not negate their position. | ||
| You know, Martin Luther King had this whole thing about civil disobedience, if we have civil disobedience, we're breaking the law. | ||
| And we're willing to go to jail. | ||
| We're willing to take the consequence. | ||
| So I would say that a lot of the things you brought up, such as the double standard, why is Israel, I mean, I think I have a lot of problems personally with a lot of the things Israel does at times. | ||
| I'm a strong Zionist. | ||
| But why Israel is the either in this world, this two-camp worldview, either the manipulator, the puppet master behind the United States and 8 million people in Israel is the puppet master versus of a 350 million people in the United States and France and Germany and all these other things. | ||
| Or alternatively, they're just doing the work of the big Satan, the United States, et cetera. | ||
| And why we don't question all these other countries? | ||
| Israel should, you know, when Israel does things wrong, it should be treated like other countries, both in terms of criticism, but also weighing it compared to other entities. | ||
| So, again, if BDS, you know, we can have very strong views of what BDS is doing is inappropriate, et cetera. | ||
| We don't have to call them anti-Semitic. | ||
| We see people as doing anti-Semitic things or perpetrating violence or vandalism. | ||
| We can call that out. | ||
| One of the things I say, I think we overuse the term anti-Semitism often. | ||
| Anti-Semitism is important, but it's a very strong thing. | ||
| It's like, it's the term racist. | ||
| Essentially, you call someone anti-Semite, you call someone racist, you've hit them in the face with a two by four. | ||
| Now that sometimes may be appropriate, but most of the times if you want to have a dialogue with them, it's not appropriate. | ||
| Even if you might think that they are doing anti-Semitic things, and you can use other language about inappropriate things or double standards, et cetera, pointing out other inconsistencies in their arguments. | ||
| So that's kind of how I would take and look at what's going on in campuses, et cetera. | ||
| Emily. | ||
| Yeah, I mostly agree, actually. | ||
| I think, well, first of all, I think it's constitutionally protected. | ||
| So I just want to say that. | ||
| The short answer to your question is, do I think it's inherently anti-Semitic? | ||
| No, I don't. | ||
| And I think we can, I think there obviously are adherents to BDS or members of the BDS movement who have said or done things that I would consider to be anti-Semitic. | ||
| But if we want to play out the question, why the double standard? | ||
| Like, why do you want to dive, like, why Israel and not China? | ||
| We can play it out, right? | ||
| Like, maybe it's because there's a deep discomfort, a deep-seated deep discomfort with Jews in power or a desire to block off buying from the Jews. | ||
| Or maybe it's because you've, you know, your family is in the West Bank, or because you get on social media every day and you see some new horrible story out of Gaza and you have no power and this feels like a lever that you can pull to try to make some part of it stop, right? | ||
| Like maybe it's that. | ||
| And I think, so that's my answer to, is it inherently anti-Semitic? | ||
| I would say, however, the complicating factor is that this is a university. | ||
| And this is my own, and this is not to say that it's not constitutionally protected. | ||
| This is not to say that it's inherently anti-Semitic, right? | ||
| Like My research background is in Russia and Eastern Europe, and I studied Soviet dissidents when I was in college and grad school. | ||
| And to me, academic boycotts, even the most, you know, to me, academic boycotts end up cutting off ties with some of the loudest dissident voices within the society that you're trying to protest. | ||
| Now, maybe you want to say, okay, yes, I think that's worth it, though, because I'm so appalled. | ||
| I personally think that even if you look today, right, like the book The Holocaust and the Nakba, which has been really useful to me personally, like Emma S Goldberg is an Israeli historian, right? | ||
| So I think that you end up cutting off people from whom you could learn a lot by pursuing a wholesale academic boycott. | ||
| I would just add one thing, just as a director of a program that has Israeli academics, Israeli students as well, and connections with academics in different universities in Israel, elsewhere. | ||
| And very often our engagement with Palestinians comes through a lot of these academic institutions and certain joint, you know, for example, some of the peace movement activists that we've hosted here. | ||
| So it's important to keep that in mind, that, you know, exactly to your point. | ||
| So thank you for that, Amo. | ||
| Now, going back to my role as moderator, if there are other questions, please. | ||
| Please. | ||
| Well, a few thoughts. | ||
| I know they'll lead to questions. | ||
| First, about the unity. | ||
| The issue of unity, maybe we understand it in different ways. | ||
| The way I look at it, unity is not persuading the other party to adopt your position or vice versa. | ||
| When we talk about unity, we look for shared positions. | ||
| Say, well, I don't know, respect for the Constitution, for the Bill of Rights, for the law, the process. | ||
| As long as you have established, as soon as you've established this joint position, then you can talk about differences. | ||
| Second, about anti-Semitism, especially anti-Semitism in universities. | ||
| This is a problem that's fairly obvious. | ||
| But I'm a bit concerned about many in the Jewish community who would accept the stated assistance in fighting anti-Semitism from, shall we say, the unreliable party. | ||
| And there's a danger in the Jewish community being unwittingly or wittingly essentially end up being used for a totally different political goal, unrelated to Jews. | ||
| And the Jews will eventually suffer. | ||
| We don't want to be seen as pawns in this political struggle. | ||
| Not sure I believe that you can say there is a Jewish community writ large. | ||
| And it in some ways contradicts your initial point: we can't force that. | ||
| I can't force people at Beitar to give up their belief that Trump can do literally anything to get rid of these anti-Semites. | ||
| And partially it is, I think also, it's the larger question of polarization in a society where your opponent is not your opponent. | ||
| He or she is your enemy. | ||
| And until we get over that, we're going to have a hard time finding any common ground. | ||
| So the other piece that I think it gets to is there's a really interesting book by Daniel Hartman called something, where are the Jews and where are we going? | ||
| It's paraphrasing it, where he talks about it is necessary for ethnic or religious groups to set up a wall, who's inside and who's out. | ||
| And he would argue for a very broad wall. | ||
| But, you know, we do it all the time. | ||
| Almost no one in the Jewish community, for example, says that Messianic Jews are part of the community, even though they personally believe. | ||
| I generally believe, if you say I'm Jewish, you don't have to give me personally your ancestry, et cetera, or your conversion certificate, etc. | ||
| I'll accept that. | ||
| But there are boundaries, and where those boundaries are put are really important because essentially a lot of us are reading other people out of the community. | ||
| Not sure that's terribly helpful, but the boundaries, there are certain boundaries. | ||
| I don't think it, you know, frankly, I'm a very strong Zionist. | ||
| I don't think it's anti-Zionist are the people that you throw out of the community. | ||
| I mean, if that was the case, in the teens and 20s and 30s, the vast majority of the American Jewish community was not Zionist, was anti-Zionist at some level. | ||
| So these things are not immutable, even though I may have strong feelings about a Jewish homeland for various historical and other reasons. | ||
| Anyway, so those are just some thoughts, just not necessarily disagreeing or agreeing with you, but I think those are some important things we should be thinking about. | ||
| I agree with, I think most of what you said. | ||
| I'll just clarify and then add. | ||
| When I say unity, I think sometimes the word unity is used in certain Jewish communal spaces to say, you're not welcome here, right? | ||
| And it's interesting to me when the word is unity and when it's, no, no, we need diversity. | ||
| That was the point I was trying to make. | ||
| In terms of what you said and what Ira just said, I mean, look, I wrote a book on American Jewish identities and how we render ourselves legible to the wider whole and also to one another. | ||
| And here at it, no, I'm not going to read you my book. | ||
| What I will say is that I think one of the challenges of being a committed pluralist as an American, as a Jew, as both, is that you need to accept as legitimate people who do not accept you. | ||
| So I will tell you that the nastiest emails I have ever gotten in my life were from other Jews who were not happy with how I was writing about Jewish issues, who said that I've, you know, I'm not Jewish, I'm not a real Jew, I need to stop writing about this. | ||
| They are totally within their rights to hold those positions and to hold those positions as Jews. | ||
| And I am within my right to continue showing up here as a Jewish person and giving you this lovely Jewish talk. | ||
| So I think, and I think that, I do think that it works for Jewish communal spaces and it works for America right now, right? | ||
| Like if we're really about pluralism and liberalism, then you have to be about it. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| And we're at the hour. | ||
| So please join me in thanking our distinguished panel. | ||
| And thank you for coming. | ||
| And just to say also thank you for helping us at the Center for Jewish Civilization at Georgetown in general with this incredibly thoughtful and insightful talk. | ||
| This is exactly the type of interaction, the type of engagement, and type of discussion that we hope to have more of. | ||
| So thank you. | ||
| The CJC is a great institution, and I think probably I'm guessing I'm going to talk to Emily too. | ||
| We're only too happy to do anything that can help push you along. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| Thank you for having us. | ||
| Thank you all for coming. | ||
| good luck on your exams. | ||
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