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Nov. 23, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
57:29
RE-FUND THE POLICE Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep224
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In the wake of the Waukesha massacre, I'm going to take another look at this defund the police movement and its consequences.
Kyle Rittenhouse said some fascinating things in his interview with Tucker Carlson, including at one point implying that he supported BLM. What?
I'll give you my thoughts.
There's new evidence on how the Biden family has been selling out America's interest to the Chinese.
I'll give you the details. And Harvard literary scholar Ruth Weiss is going to join me.
We're going to talk about the woke contagion at America's leading university.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
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I want to talk about the Waukesha massacre, but in the context of a larger issue, which is to say the issue of how the left has created, completely unnecessarily, a crime wave in America with terrible consequences.
And now there is some effort, even in democratic cities, To backtrack from that crime wave, in a sense, the defund the police movement is giving way to a refund the police out of just sheer necessity and out of the desperation of the citizens.
There's pressure coming from within these cities, Oakland and St.
Louis and Baltimore and Portland and Seattle.
And even Minneapolis, which is where all of this kind of got started.
Now, let me start by talking about Waukesha, because the media, and by the media here, I'm referring specifically to CNN, specifically to the Washington Post.
And here's an article from Mediaite that kind of captures the narrative.
Waukesha parade suspect was reportedly fleeing another crime scene.
Authorities doubt terrorism.
So you have to ask, why are they trying to kind of cover up for this Waukesha suspect?
This guy, terrible, you know, he kills five people, injures more than 40 grandmothers.
I mean, just mowing them down in a parade, in a Christmas parade.
But The reason for the cover-up is the guy's black.
That's it. There's no other reason.
He's black and he's a convict, and therefore he falls into a protected category.
And so the media rushes to say, oh, no, no, this is not, you know, had it been a white guy, oh, my gosh, this would be, this has been unleashed by Kyle Rittenhouse's exoneration.
White supremacy rides high.
But because the guy is black, suddenly it's got to be No, no, he was running away from something else.
He didn't mean to be plowing into the parade.
Now, all of this is undercut by the fact that the Waukesha police...
Say that Daryl Brooks, the suspect, quote, intentionally drove his maroon SUV through the barricades into a crowd of people.
It turns out he was not fleeing from anything.
It turns out that this whole notion that he kind of accidentally found, I mean, it was ridiculous from the beginning, right?
I mean, who's running away from the cops and decides, you know what?
This is the fastest way for me to get away.
Let me make my way through a parade, right?
I think I'm going to really get away this way.
No. It's much easier to make a getaway in a different direction.
It almost relies on the colossal stupidity of people to believe such nonsense.
But the left is sort of shameless in putting out these lies.
Until they are just toppled by reality itself.
Now, the reason this guy was even out, Daryl Brooks, is it was a Soros DA, a guy named John Chisholm, who let him out.
Let him out on $1,000 bail.
This is a career criminal with a long rap sheet.
And think about it. You got the January 6th defendants who did nothing, walked into the Capitol, took selfies, and they've been sitting in jail for months.
So this shows you the complete breakdown of an even-handed standard of justice.
Now, so the problem on the left isn't just defunding the police.
It's also the fact that you've got these DAs who are, in a sense, in league with the criminals.
And until you get rid of them, people like Debbie and I talked about Chesa Bodine in San Francisco, and there are now about a dozen of these.
Soros realized, I can put money in these DA races, which you can win for a relatively small amount of money.
And so he essentially got thug apologists into the DA's office.
I mean, think about it. Talk about putting the fox into the chicken coop.
Now, on the issue of defunding the police, mostly you saw cutbacks in police budgets across so many democratic cities in the wake of George Floyd.
And the underlying ideology, again, was let's give the money to social programs because let's go to the root cause of crime.
Let's not just give the money to cops.
That is putting it in the wrong place.
And so you saw cutbacks in a whole bunch of places, New York City, Portland, and so on.
But now, as I say, as crime rates have skyrocketed, you're finding that cities are, they're not going back to refunding the police to where they were before, but they are putting more money toward into police departments.
In New York City, for example, the de Blasio has basically said he's gonna create a new police precinct.
He's going to put in $92 million.
This was before, of course, De Blasio stepped down.
But his replacement, Adams, is a pro-police guy and, in fact, has angered BLM. In Oakland, California...
The city lawmakers did a budget cut and they have now put $3.3 million back.
Los Angeles's mayor wants to increase the budget, which was cut, by the way, for $150 million.
He wants to put $50 million back.
I see the most recently Portland City Council is unanimously passed a fall budget that takes the police budget and kicks in an additional $5 million.
So the trend is actually pretty clear.
We see it in Austin, Texas.
We see it in Baltimore, Maryland.
And the crime rates have reached intolerable levels.
So even the Democrats, kind of against their will, have got to say no to the socialists, defund the police crowd.
Here's John Jones, a community organizer in East Oakland, stating kind of the obvious.
In fact, I feel kind of silly reading this, but he goes, quote, "'When bullets are flying through your home, "'when your house is being broken into, "'you want someone to show up and respond.'" Yeah, I think if the police are pulled back, the criminals will run amok, and this should have been known beforehand.
It was known beforehand.
But essentially, you could almost say that in the wake of George Floyd, reason flew out the window.
People were willing to entertain idiotic ideas that they knew deep down were idiotic.
We're now seeing the human toll, the tragic toll taken by all this.
And so there is a little bit of a pullback.
But you still have Democrats running insane.
You still have Democrats gone wild.
So we shouldn't think of the Democrats are coming to their senses.
They're a long way from their senses.
And the best political solution is not to try to figure out how to change the mind of a Democrat, but rather how to get a Democrat out of power so he can't do any more harm.
I mentioned this yesterday, but I'll say it again.
The guy who put up the bail money for Kyle Rittenhouse, none other than our friend Mike Lindell.
And this is the kind of thing that Mike does, and he pays a heavy price for it.
This is the guy who's had his MyPillow shut down at the box store, shut down at the shopping channels.
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I want to talk about Tucker Carlson's interview with Kyle Rittenhouse, an interview that was fascinating because while we saw Rittenhouse on the stand, that is a more choreographed performance.
You have Rittenhouse, who undoubtedly had been prepared by his attorneys through direct examination.
He was obviously under the gun in cross-examination.
So you didn't really see Kyle Rittenhouse himself.
You didn't get a real window into what he was like, his personality.
And that was the cool thing about the interview.
You saw Kyle Rittenhouse be Kyle Rittenhouse.
And the first thing that struck me about it is, here is actually a really nice guy.
In fact, here is a guy who is...
Understated. Here's a guy who does not seem puffed up, doesn't seem to want to push a point, is very gentle and even generous.
Asked about, you know, Biden's lies.
Think about it. You got the president of the United States vilifying you.
And you would think that you would see a kind of seething bitterness coming out of Kyle Rittenhouse after a teenager being blasted from the president on down.
But no, he's like, well, you know, I kind of wish Biden would go back and really watch the trial.
He might get a different view.
So ordinarily, I'm a little bit scornful of...
Season Republicans talking as if the main problem is that Democrats don't know enough, and if we only give them the data and show them the pictures, they will see the light.
But this is not surprising coming from an 18-year-old, coming from Kyle Rittenhouse.
So I don't hold it against Rittenhouse.
To me, in some ways, the most interesting part of the interview was when Rittenhouse said not exactly that he's a fan of BLM. He didn't say that.
But what he said is, look, I support Black Lives Matter, the concept.
And he also said, I support their right to protest.
I think what he was doing is drawing a distinction between a peaceful protest for a cause, for reform, which of course is part of our right in a democratic society, and violent rioting, threatening people's neighborhoods, burning their stores.
And his point was, you know, you've got to draw the line.
And the cops weren't there.
They weren't helping. Now, again, Rittenhouse was understated.
Maybe they were really busy.
Maybe they had too many demands on their time.
No. In fact, the situation is far worse.
The authorities, the governor was offered aid and turned it down.
The cops were basically called back in order to enable the rioters.
So something far more insidious was going on.
And Rittenhouse didn't see the full depth of the depravity of it.
But he did see himself as wanting to help, being part of the solution, offering medical aid, and so on.
And at one point, Rittenhouse says, and this is the part that startled me the most, is he said, in effect, that he was a beneficiary of privilege.
Now, he didn't say white privilege, but he implied that, look, we've got to support BLM because, A, we know about prosecutorial misconduct, and, boy, am I on board with that one.
I think that is systematic in our society.
Of course, it affects whites no less than blacks.
We see it with the January 6th defendants.
We see it all over the place.
Basically, you can't trust the system anymore.
There are just as many crooks with badges in the system as there are probably crooks on the street.
And you saw this with Binger, the prosecutor.
You got the impression that guy could get Rittenhouse.
He would do it no matter what.
If he could have planted evidence, he'd be happy to do it.
And so you've got a thoroughly corrupt gang going after this kid.
And I don't blame him. He's seen the system up close.
And think of how sad it must be to feel kind of screwed by your own lawyers while you've got a ruthless adversary trying to put you away for life.
But Rittenhouse says that, you know what?
I had a defense fund.
I had a couple of million dollars.
I could hire good attorneys.
Not everybody can do that.
And he gave the idea that he was in this respect a little bit privileged.
I mean, look, what I found was so touching about it is here's a kid from a middle class, lower middle class family.
Here is a kid who is white, whose career aspiration is to go to college and get his nursing degree so he can become a nurse.
I don't know if Kyle Rittenhouse fully realized that he's got two big strikes against him.
One, he's white, and two, he's lower middle class.
And that makes him, from the point of view of the left, the ultimate target.
That's why you saw this relentless attack on him as a white supremacist.
Because it's difficult to portray some, you know, Yale graduate who's white as a white supremacist unless you actually have documentary evidence.
But with Kyle Rittenhouse, it's an assumption.
Here you've got a kid with the baseball cap turned back to front.
Here you've got a kid in a t-shirt with an AR-15.
He's got to be a white supremacist.
What else would he be? So if Kyle Rittenhouse were black, he wouldn't get this.
He wouldn't get this unified, sustained, year-long attack.
And think of it, the purpose of that was to poison the public mind so that, in effect, every jury would find him guilty.
I think it is a stunning vindication of justice.
I agree with Kyle Rittenhouse that God is on his side.
Someone was looking out for him that day in which the jury saw and saw really based on the video evidence.
Think of the debt we owe here to the videographers.
By the way, these were not New York Times videographers.
These were basically conservative videographers.
I had Drew Hernandez on this show.
Basically, he's a youth pastor with a camera and with a video camera who decides to take an Uber to Kenosha and helps to save Kyle Rittenhouse's life.
Wow. So these days, good deeds are not coming out of our institutions.
They're coming out of ordinary people who show heroism, in this case, Hernandez and Rittenhouse.
When Rittenhouse recreated the scene in Kenosha, it was a Hobbesian state of nature.
We saw it on the video, and he evoked it beautifully in the interview.
Hobbes says that in the state of nature, life is nasty, brutish, and short.
And I think when we look at these Antifa guys, particularly Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber, these were two brutish, nasty guys.
And thanks to Kyle Rittenhouse, Their trouble, all the danger that they exposed society to was cut short.
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There's a new scandal out about Hunter Biden.
Well, really about the Biden family, because this is a Biden family racket with Hunter Biden as its front man.
Let's remember Hunter Biden funnels money to the other Biden family members he complained about.
He's like, why do I have to pay all the family bills?
Well, because you're the bag man for the family mafia operation.
Now, a mafia operation is disturbing enough, but this is a mafia operation that sells American interests to foreign countries.
This was an art perfected by the Clintons with the Clinton Foundation.
It's now been picked up by the Bidens.
And so I'm not so much into Joe Biden's slowness of mind, his dementia, his inability to comprehend.
That all may be now the product of age, but through his career, this has been a very wily crook.
A wily crook who has recruited his family knowingly into his crooked operation.
And the latest report, interestingly, comes from the New York Times.
So the New York Times, realizing that Biden is kind of safely in office, can now do this kind of reporting.
Notice that this is the kind of reporting that was suppressed right before the election because it might help Trump and hurt Biden, even if it was all true, as it's all turned out to be.
Now, in this latest episode, what we have is that Hunter Biden I formed a company along with three Americans and a bunch of Chinese guys.
The company was a private equity firm called BHR. And what was the purpose of this firm?
Well, it was essentially to enable the Chinese, Chinese investors, the Bank of China, and the Chinese government to gain access to valuable mineral assets abroad.
Particularly with all this talk about electric cars and car batteries, cars running on batteries, there is a demand in the world for cobalt.
Cobalt becomes a very valuable mineral because it is essential for making these car batteries.
And this is This was known even when Joe Biden was vice president.
And so they decide, listen, we're pushing for these policies, the move to electric cars, not just in America, but people are pushing for it in Europe.
There's going to be a huge demand for cobalt.
The Chinese want more cobalt.
And so what they want to do in this case is they want to purchase One of the world's richest cobalt mines, which happens to be located in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Enter Hunter Biden.
Hunter Biden basically says, listen, my company can facilitate the Chinese acquisition of this invaluable or extremely valuable cobalt mine.
And so what they do is, first of all, they do some other transactions with the Chinese.
They acquire an Australian coal mining company.
They also assist a subsidiary of a Chinese defense conglomerate in buying a Michigan auto parts maker.
So again, think about this.
We're making vital parts Now, the mining deal in the Congo began in 2016.
A Chinese mining outfit called China Mala Denim said it wanted to buy this cobalt and copper mine from an American company, which was called Freeport McMoran.
And so... Basically, the purchase was facilitated by Hunter Biden and his equity company.
It gives the Chinese company 80% control over the mine.
Now, obviously, since it's a mine in the Congo, the Congo state mining enterprise kept a part of it for themselves, but they sold the majority, which is to say the controlling stake, This is a transaction that is in total worth $3.8 billion.
Now, obviously, $3.8 billion doesn't go to Hunter Biden.
He was a 10% owner of the firm BHR when he...
And this is as of 2019 when BHR sold its stake in this cobalt mining enterprise.
So what the Bidens are doing here is they get in and they get out.
Their goal is not to own cobalt.
They don't care about it. Their point is, let's buy in, let's sell high, let's make a whole bunch of money for ourselves and leave the Chinese in control of this huge deposit of cobalt.
Now, at one point, Jen Psaki was asked about this, asked about Hunter Biden's investments in China, and she goes rather vaguely, quote, he has been working to unwind his investments.
He has been working.
And then she adds, but I would certainly point out he's a private citizen.
So in other words, what she's saying is, well, we're sort of for perception reasons trying to get his name off of these documents, but you know, it's really kind of up to him at the end.
So what you have here is you've got a Joe Biden who was collecting money left and right through his family while he was vice president.
And now is still continuing shenanigans through his family to this day.
Because to this day, Hunter Biden hasn't, as far as we can tell, fully divested his interests in foreign corporations and specifically China.
The Bidens just don't talk about it.
Of course, Hunter Biden has now emerged in his new career as an artist.
Wink, wink. Who would buy Hunter Biden's art, if you think about it, other than someone who wanted...
To be able to say to Joe Biden, hey, I'm a patron of your son.
I'm buying his art. We all know you're getting 10% of the proceeds.
And so we have not just a man with a very dim bulb in the White House, but we have a man who is thoroughly corrupt, who is enriching himself through public office.
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I'm really glad to see that Joe Biden's nomination of a woman named Saul Omarova to be the head of the office of the Comptroller of the Currency.
So this is the person who's sort of in charge of the banks.
Very important position because these days, and starting after the 2008 crash, the government has increased its regulatory power over the banks.
And it's really important to have someone in there who understands banking, who understands the free market system.
And who is not going to turn the banks into an adjunct of the state, which is to say, in effect, nationalize the banks, socialist style, without formally doing that, without transferring the name and the ownership over to the government.
But this woman, Saul Omorova, is a very bizarre and it turns out perverted character.
Ideologically perverted, I mean.
So, most recently, and this might actually have killed her nomination because even Democrats like John Tester from Montana, Democrat, on the banking committee are now kind of blanching at the idea of signing off on Saul Omorova.
Her latest idea given in testimony is to put government officials from the Biden administration on the boards of every bank.
And she says that this is an excellent idea because they would serve as quote, insiders at the bank who could quote, counteract socially harmful behavior by the banks.
So in effect, what she's saying is that we want a kind of governmental cop At every bank.
Now, since when?
What kind of justification is there for doing this?
You have private banks, which by and large raise their own equity, are accountable to their own shareholders, are lending money to citizens.
Yes, they are under government regulation.
They've got to maintain certain standards and so on.
But clearly what Saul Loma Rova wants to do, and this is a quote from her, it's to quote, end banking as we know it.
And she has actually previously said that what she wants to do is to destroy the oil and gas industry.
So you have here a radical leftist.
She goes, quote, talking about the oil and gas industries.
We want them to go bankrupt.
If we want to tackle climate change.
Now, again, when this came up in her hearing, she said, well, that was very poorly phrased.
Well, is there a different way to say it?
It looks to me to be rather well phrased.
And what she doesn't mean is that she didn't mean it.
What she means is I meant it, but I wish I hadn't said it now that I've been nominated for a position.
By the way, this is a woman who studied at Moscow State University.
She wrote her thesis on Karl Marx.
She was and probably is now a kind of card-carrying communist.
Now, when she was asked about her thesis, which, by the way, she scrubbed off of her website, she goes, quote, it did not reflect my views then, it does not reflect my views now.
And it's the first part of that statement that really raised my eyebrows.
It did not reflect my views then.
What? You wrote a thesis which didn't reflect your views when you wrote it?
Obviously, it did.
Now, it's one thing to say I changed my mind and offer the reasons why you changed your mind and why you're no longer a communist or why you no longer think that Lenin and Stalin were wonderful, but it's a whole other thing to say that you didn't mean it when you said it because what you're basically saying is you're a thoroughly dishonest person who wrote a thesis that you didn't believe in when you wrote it.
And, but we're dealing here with a very slippery character.
And even when you watch her testify, you can see her kind of writhing cobra style under questioning.
So the Republicans are unified against her.
I don't think she's going to get a single Republican vote, but it looks like even her Democratic support is weak, if not crumbling.
And I think if we want to protect our currency, we want to protect the banks, we want to protect our free market system, we should block our As best we can, the nomination of Saul Omarova.
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Feel the difference. Guys, I've been really looking forward to my conversation with Professor Ruth Weiss.
She was, for many years, the Professor of Yiddish and Comparative Literature at Harvard.
Previously, she taught at McGill University, and she is the author of a number of books, a number of scholarly books, but most recently, a very profound and moving memoir.
It's called Free as a Jew, a personal memoir, Welcome to my show!
I want to actually start by asking you about your family getting out of Europe as Jews and fleeing ultimately to Canada, to the Montreal area of Canada, where you are raised in freedom,
raised in the kind of multicultural environment of Canada, where But it seems from the very beginning with a full awareness of some of the terrible things that were happening in Europe and forging in Canada a very strong Jewish identity.
Can you talk a little bit about that, about how you develop a Jewish identity but displaced?
One developed in Canada in exile, so to speak.
Talk a little bit about your formative years and how you came to see yourself as a Jew, but also as a fighter for Jewish causes.
I'm so grateful to you, Dinesh, really, for having me on your show, but also for reading the book.
And obviously, I'm so glad that you found something of interest in it.
I'm sure not too dissimilar from some of your own experiences, which is a good match.
Yeah, my life is rather miraculous in the real meaning of that term.
To have been born in East Central Europe as a Jew in 1936, as I was, and to have made it out in 1940, out of Europe in 1940, while the war was already on, is, you know, a miraculous achievement on the part of my parents.
And really a matter more of luck than anything else.
It is true my parents were amazing.
Which I recognized really mostly in retrospect.
How astonishing it was.
My father had been a penniless student.
Then he studied chemical engineering.
And because of a series of fortuitous circumstances, he was sent to build a rubber factory in northern Romania, in Chernovitz, when he was a very young man of 30 years.
And so he became, you know, from sleeping on straw on the floor as a student, he became a factory builder, owner.
He loved the production of rubber, which is what he was in.
The factory stood all through the war.
I think it still stands.
Kaurom, it employed hundreds of workers, produced everything.
Anyway, my father...
And my mother, who had also not lived very luxuriously.
She was already an orphan.
Her parents had died and so forth.
Suddenly, they were wealthy people in a society of cosmopolitan Jews in the very cosmopolitan city of Chernovitz, which was sometimes called the Jerusalem or the Vienna of Eastern Europe and so forth.
Really a wonderful thing.
But my father And his father were very far sighted, although this is odd, because as I say, my grandfather had been blind for 40 years.
So he really saw whatever there was to be seen on the world scene.
And so my father made preparations that in case the Russians, in case the Soviets crossed the northern border, as he was certain they would, We would flee immediately.
And he had put everything into motion so that when the Soviets crossed the border of Romania into Romania, in June of 1940, we were on the next train out of Chernovitz, out of this life of really luxury that my parents had enjoyed,
happiness that they had enjoyed, and off from We've been that easy for the next four months as stateless persons, which is what we were because my parents had no papers.
They only got permission to get out of Romania on condition that they never returned.
My parents could not return to Poland where they had come from.
So we were fleeing.
And because the family had done the same thing, my father's brothers had done the same thing, set into motion by my grandfather, we made it to Canada.
On a ship, by the way, which was its last crossing as a passenger ship.
I had thought that it was torpedoed on its return journey.
I subsequently learned that it was not torpedoed.
It was commissioned, however, as a war ship.
And so it stopped taking passengers across the Atlantic.
And of course, you know, who could have come after 1940?
So those are the circumstances of my birth and of my being alive to tell you this story.
And as you rightly say, we came to Montreal, Canada.
That too is a long story of why my grandfather had figured out that textiles, which is the business that the family was in, except for my father who had preferred to go into rubber production, that if you wanted to produce textiles in Quebec,
which is, you know, province of Canada, you might be able to get into the country Which, by the way, had the worst record of allowing Jews in of any country in the, quote, civilized world.
The year that we came to Canada, there were only about 240 Jews admitted into the country.
And the book that was written about that policy is called None is Too Many.
None is too many, because that was the official policy of Ottawa, of the government of Canada.
But there were so many defunct textile mills in Quebec, in the province of Quebec at the time, that when the family said that it would buy one and had the money to pay to buy one, and that they had the know-how to run this textile factory in a place where there was very, very high unemployment. That's how we got into Canada.
Let's take a pause. And when we come back, I'm going to pick up your life in Canada, talk about your discovery of books and how you actually entered into a very different life than your parents had by becoming a scholar and an academic.
Thanks.
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I'm back with Ruth Weiss, long-time professor of comparative literature at Harvard, author of the new and fascinating book, Free as a Jew.
Ruth, when we left off, your family had moved to Canada, and you make an interesting observation about Canada.
You say that in America, we have this idea, or at least we had this idea, of the melting pot, of people, in a sense, relinquishing their ancestral ties And quote, becoming American, something I'm very familiar with myself.
But you say in Canada, the idea was different.
You preserve your ethnic identity.
This was true whether you were Catholic or whether you were French-speaking or English-speaking.
And this was also obviously true of the Jewish community.
So there was a flourishing Jewish community in Canada.
Talk a little bit about that, but also particularly about your discovery of the life of the mind as something that became, for you, a career aspiration.
Yes, well, it's a large segment.
But absolutely, what you're saying is very right.
You see, there was not a public school system in Quebec, in Canada.
There was a confessional school system, Catholic schools and Protestant schools, and formerly Jews, and this is the law at the time in the 1930s and 40s, Jews for the purposes of education were considered Protestant schools.
Now, this meant that a lot of Jews who came to Montreal, and it was a growing Jewish community, they said, but we're not Protestant.
So if there are already Catholic schools and Protestant schools, why not build Jewish schools?
And even those who were not subsidized by the government, that is what a lot of people did.
So, Dinesh, I had...
A miraculous, again, childhood education in this sense, that the kind of people who became the principals of our Jewish day schools, of our Jewish elementary schools, were the kind of people who in another generation earlier would have been rabbis, in a later generation would certainly have been professors and writers and intellectuals of the highest level.
I never had more intelligent, more educated, more sophisticated educators than I did in my elementary school.
My elementary school principal, when he retired, translated Marcus Aurelius into Hebrew.
Wow. Yeah, how fascinating.
You can imagine. So the interest in books and the knowing You know, being introduced to literature and literary discussion was something that happened to us in elementary school, and it was also reinforced in our home because my grandmother, my maternal grandmother, had run a large Jewish, Yiddish publishing house, Yiddish and Hebrew publishing house in Vilna.
My mother was brought up in a literary home, and when we came to Montreal, She turned our home into, I guess, what you would call a literary salon.
Now that sounds much too fancy, but it was very difficult to publish Yiddish books because there was really no marketplace, no store marketplace for them.
So the way that Yiddish books were published is that she would sell them in advance, People who wanted to get a copy.
This was called in Yiddish.
And she would take the orders for these books.
And then upon publication, That money would then be used to get the books published and to pay the authors something for their work.
And then the people who had bought the books would get copies.
And my mother would then have a festive gathering in her home for at least the local people who had bought it.
So into our home came really the most amazing Yiddish writers of the time.
A few of them lived in Montreal, but most of them just came on speaking tours to the city, and they always came among other homes to be fetid and ours.
How fascinating. Let's introduce people a little bit who might not be familiar with what Yiddish literature is.
Now, many people are familiar with Fiddler on the Roof, the Broadway musical, but of course that was based upon Sholem Malaikum's work.
And you've written extensively about these themes.
Talk a little bit about Fiddler on the Roof, but talk about it as an affirmation of And also some of the challenges of a society which is trying, as you put it in your words, to quote, tame the lure of eras.
That's what you say. In other words, that the family is a conservative institution.
And talk about how this particular story dramatizes that.
Yes, well, I guess that one could say that the series of stories collected about Tevye the Dairyman, which is its title in Yiddish, Tevye the Dairyman, must be the most famous work in Yiddish literature itself, even before it was used as the basis of Fiddler on the Roof, which then of course made it internationally famous.
Sholem Aleichem was an amazingly interesting writer, and this I think he realized when he created the character of Tevye, I think he realized that this was his masterpiece, partly because even though he was a sophisticated writer, And Tevye was just a dairyman whom he met every summer when they went on their summer holidays.
He made the relationship between these two men, the basis of this work, And he created the first chapter in 1895, when he himself, Sholem Aleichem, had actually spent that summer at their dacha, at their summer retreat.
So it was based, he was very excited when he wrote this.
And he said, you know, I'm going to let him speak for himself.
I don't have to speak for him.
He can speak for himself.
Well, of course, he was projecting into this dairyman everything that he wanted to have said.
And I think that, strangely enough, this dairyman This became the projection of Sholem Aleichem himself.
So, for example, he gives Tevye, the dairyman, seven daughters, who, by the way, in the course of things, turned out to be just five daughters.
He didn't keep it all going seven.
But Sholem Aleichem himself had multiple daughters and children.
So a lot of the problems that he then ascribes to Tevye the Dairyman are problems that were actually arising in his life and in the life of Jews.
So the most interesting thing about this dairyman, whom he created in 1895, is he realized that he had a gem.
And in 1899, When the life of the Jewish people in Eastern Europe was changing very rapidly and not necessarily for the better, he kept coming back to this character and he gave him another episode and another episode.
And then in 1904, another episode involving one of the daughters.
In 1905, excuse me, 1906, another episode involving yet another daughter.
And so it went All the way until the year he died in 1980.
So you see, this is the only work I know of that sort of cumulatively becomes a novel, but one written in real time over 20 years, each episode confronting the most serious social, political, economic problem of its time.
Ruth, let's take a pause.
When we come back, let's probe this theme further, particularly in the context of tradition and modernity.
And a question that interests me that runs throughout your book, what does it mean to be a conservative?
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I'm back with Professor Ruth Weiss, author of the memoir, Free as a Jew.
Ruth, we were talking about Fiddler on the Roof and Sholem Aleichem, and one of the tensions running throughout that work, and you see it in the musical, is the tension between tradition and modernity.
Now, you use the phrase conservative.
You identify as a conservative.
But it seems that originally, and for much of your early life, you were a conservative in the cultural, perhaps literary sense.
And only later, and you talk about this, you became sort of a neoconservative.
You became identified more with a political conservatism.
Can you talk first about what does it mean to be a cultural conservative?
And then if we can, we'll talk about political conservatism and its link to cultural conservatism.
Well, you know, since our lead into this was speaking about Sholem Aleichem and the character of Tevye, He is perhaps our most interesting example of what you're describing, because Tevye has a very liberal personality.
Culturally, you might say, of course, he loves his daughters.
And when his first daughter comes to him and says, I don't want my marriage arranged in the traditional manner, I want to choose for myself.
He finds it very hard to accept this, but he yields.
So Tevye yields, and that is a very liberal tendency.
He yields to love.
He yields to love.
He is a lenient personality.
Milky, by the way, in character.
It's not accidental that he's a dairyman.
Judaism makes very strict distinctions between milk and meat.
And in Jewish literature, when you see someone as a butcher, you know what's coming because of that distinction.
Clearly also, when he makes him a dairyman, he has a milky personality.
But here's the interesting thing about Tevye.
In each successive episode, something in him has to harden.
Why? Because these daughters, each of them is asking for something more and more radically anti-Jewish, so that the third of them actually converts to Christianity.
And at that part, the father in him comes into conflict with the Jew.
And here is the hardest part.
He considers her dead.
He goes into mourning for her, insists that the family break with her.
Now, this episode, you see, bothered the creators of Fiddler on the Roof.
They are American Jews.
They couldn't take that.
So at the end of their work, the end of Fiddler on the Roof, they have this intermarried couple coming along and saying, you know, you have to make your peace with us, to Tevye, because, you know, the Christian son-in-law says, I wouldn't stay here when they're against the Jews either.
So the two of them going off together, and Tevye at the end of Fiddler on the Roof makes his peace with it.
How wonderful. Not in the original.
Never in the original.
In the original, the daughter leaves her husband and comes home to her father.
And the only reason she can do that is because he had stood firm as a Jew.
So being a Jew, to Sholem Aleichem and to his readers, was everything.
And there are certain things that you don't compromise.
You don't just say, you know, turkey, turkey, you're a fish or something, you know, and just turn it over to something else.
But the American Jews can't see that.
The ones, the writers, they couldn't even understand what the problem was when it was presented to them as something that they had, you know, so debonairly transformed, changed something really important in the original work.
They hardly understood what the big deal was, you see, because really?
You would break up a family because of intermarriage?
What is that about?
Yeah, I mean, part of what you're showing me just through this analysis is kind of why we read books, because they expose us to experiences that we otherwise might not have.
We're living, as you say, in a kind of ecumenical time in which some of these conflicts are difficult to grasp, but isn't that exactly why we need to grasp them?
Now, let me have you fast forward a little bit, just because of time.
Talk a little bit about presenting this kind of wonderful corpus of not just the Jewish, but more broadly, the Judeo-Christian, the Western tradition.
What do you think has happened to this kind of knowledge in the university today?
You are at the premier college in the country, Harvard.
Do you think that these colleges are still, you may say, connected to the great issues of this tradition, or have they just become uprooted and deracinated from it?
Well, it's a great question, but I think that at the root of it, it's not even so much which works one is studying.
It is not even, you know, how you interpret it, but it's just the reading of text itself that you would take literature, for example, to be instruction in how better and better and deeper and deeper to read.
That is what literature used to be when I went into the field.
You took a work and you kind of got into it with the class together in discussion.
Words, paragraphs, chapters, characters, everything.
That has been really sacrificed to the idea of theory that you then impose on literature.
Oh, I'm going to give a course on gender.
Now, what fits into this course on gender?
Oh, I will take a book which really shows you about the liberation of women.
You see what I mean?
That the whole idea of teaching, and I'm taking literature here only as an example, the teaching of literature became really an ideological pursuit more and more, and that these texts were meant to be only a way of getting across your own biases and prejudices Which to my mind, we're not going in the right direction anyway.
So I think at root, the whole idea of what education consists of, really, that had changed dramatically by the time I left Harvard.
And this was quite shattering to me.
Well, Ruth, with your permission, I'd like to make a proposal to you.
And that is, let's have you come back and let's pick a single book that you have, that you discuss right in your memoir.
And let's devote an interview just to talking about it, because I want people to see through conversation the kind of stuff that happens in a real classroom.
I think these real classrooms have become more and more rare in America today.
And so I want to thank you for joining me for now, but with your permission, we'll circle back, as they say, and let's have a conversation about, maybe we'll talk about Bellows Herzog and talk about it as a kind of classic work, very much along the lines of how you describe it.
So thank you so much for joining me.
It would be a delight, and I thank you.
I look forward to having you back.
Thank you very much. Okay.
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