Noam
Hey everyone, welcome to Wondering Jews with Michal and Noam.
Mijal
We have a very special guest today, a colleague of mine at the Maimonides Fund, the editor-in-chief of Sapir Journal, a New York Times columnist, Brett Stevens. He’s going to talk to us both about anti-Semitism and also share some reflections about this moment in terms of the American-Israeli war against Iran.
and what it means to be a Jew in America. I’ll just also say before Brad joins us that everyone should check out Sapir. It’s a magnificent journal. We’re gonna put the link in the show notes. You can sign up, you can receive a hard copy. You should be listening to the podcast. I’ve contributed to it, Noam has contributed to it, and we’re really grateful to have Brad in conversation with us.
Mijal
All right, welcome, Bret. Really great to have you with us.
Bret Stephens
Nice to see you, Mijal. Nice to see you, Noam.
Noam
Good to see you.
Mijal
So the first question that I want to ask you is we are recording this conversation on March 13th. And I think many of us were really in shock yesterday reading about the attempted anti-Semitic terror attack.
at a synagogue in Michigan where a terrorist tried to, you know, had a car with explosives. There were more than 100 children in that school. Thank God it was averted. But I wanted to take this as an opportunity just to get your thoughts. You gave a speech last month, I believe, at the 92nd Street Y about anti-Semitism in America. And you made a case about how we should or shouldn’t be responding to anti-Semitism. So.
In light of this news from yesterday, just to clarify, how do you think the Jewish community and Jews in America should be responding to anti-Semitism right now and what should we be avoiding as a response?
Bret Stephens
Well, whatever else I said in the speech, I did not say that we should do less to protect Jewish communities, Jewish institutions from what is sadly an unsurprising attempt to kill Jews. And so the first part is that
to the extent that the Jewish community is investing in initiatives like the Secure Communities Network. Obviously, we have to do that. That’s just been a reality for Jewish life, actually well before October the 7th and well before this current war. But that’s just the world in which we live. And we are now witnessing
I’m sorry to say the Europeanization, if that’s the term of the American Jewish experience. mean, what American Jewish communities are now living through, not just in terms of their physical security, but in terms of the ideological atmosphere of the country, increasingly resembles what our cousins in France and England and Germany have been living through for…
some time for at least the last 25 years. But it’s also a reminder that Jewish identity in the United States, and this was the point that I was driving at in my speech, cannot be wholly or centrally a function of anti-Semitism. You know, there’s an old saying that comes from Jean-Paul Sartre.
saying that anti-Semitism makes the Jew. And I think that it would be a tragedy if we were to prove Sartre right to say that the only thing that in effect enforces or generates a sense of identity for Jews is our condition in broader diasporic societies. So the right response can’t be simply, let’s invest more in securing communities and take out another $15 million ad at a high profile event like the Super Bowl. The right response has to be an investment, particularly on the younger side in Jewish identification, affiliation, knowledge.
understanding and self-understanding. And that really has been what has been, that’s what I’m talking about is something that has been increasingly absent from American Jewish life for the past 50 or 60 years. If all you know about your Jewish identity is that there was a Holocaust and that there are still antisemites, you are failing as a Jew. It’s as simple as that.
and we are failing ourselves as a Jewish community if that becomes the locus of who we are and what we invest in. So that was simply the call in my speech to make it something else.
Mijal
Brett, I’m curious. You went to Europe, actually, talking about this moment in America. I know that you were born in Mexico, right? I’m Argentinian, so I know we…
Bret Stephens
I was raised in Mexico. I actually was born at Mount Sinai Hospital, Mount Sinai for short.
Mijal
Okay, so but you you had a childhood in Latin America, in Mexico. Yeah. And you’ve spoken, I believe, of your family coming from Holocaust survivors. And so I’m just, you know, as an American, somebody who really looks at America carefully, what would what would lead you to to think, you know, coming from different places that the American experiment is at risk, especially for Jews?
Bret Stephens
So the American Jews exist in two separate historical streams or experiences that actually lead to different conclusions. one is the stream of Jewish history that is 3,500 years old in which our ascent
in various communities over centuries has always ended in tragedy, in dispossession, exile, massacre. And that was the case of Jewish communities in Spain, Germany, Egypt, Iran, you name it, almost everywhere.
periods of Jewish cultural efflorescence ended very abruptly. And, you know, I’ve said this before, but we have a history in which our zenith, our highest point, turns out to be a half step away from our precipice, the collapse of the community. And so that’s one Jewish experience. The other Jewish experience is very well explained in Pamela Nadel’s recent book about antisemitism.
which I really commend to people listening to this podcast. Pamela is a great scholar of the American Jewish experience. And that sees antisemitism in America as kind of operating like a sine curve, a wave, which rises, then ebbs. The first Jewish American experience in 1654 was a bunch of…
Bret Stephens
Latin American Jews, as a matter of fact, getting off a boat in what was then New Amsterdam, Sephardic Jews, and almost risking or almost being promptly kicked out by the anti-Semitic mayor of the joint, Peter Stuyvesant, who probably did not know that 300 years later, the high school named in his honor would be the place where so many great Jewish minds got a
Bret Stephens
got an education. But Stuyvesant tried to kick them out. The Dutch East India Company thought better of it and the Jews stayed. But we have experienced periodic waves as American Jews of antisemitism. Whether it was in the 1880s and 1890s, with the arrival of vast numbers of American Jews met lukewarmly by
some of the blue bloods of American society like Henry Adams, whether it was in the 1920s and 30s with quotas on Jewish attendance at schools like Columbia and Harvard, whether it was in the 1960s with the rise of militant black antisemitism, the Black Panthers and then Louis Farrakhan’s movement. It’s come and gone. I mentioned these two things, Michal, because in effect, we’re wondering right now as an American Jewish community what
historical reality we’re in. Is this the American historical experience where, we’re seeing this disturbing ascent of anti-Semitic feeling on both the far left and the far right, and sometimes the not so far left or not so far right. But this will wane over time as it has in the past. Or are we stuck in the longer Jewish experience where
Our 300 and what is it 72 year sojourn in America is coming much more to an end much more rapidly than any of us can imagine. And I think the answer will lie in the way in which we choose to respond individually and as a community. My answer.
One I gave in the speech was that the best way to respond was not to just simply try to ingratiate ourselves with communities that no longer seem to like us as they did 15, 20 years ago. It’s to adopt what I’ve called a respect strategy. And part of that is simply to do our own thing, go our own way, set our own table, and then discover allies where we least expect them.
Bret Stephens
I I just one small point. While we in America are anxiously talking about the rise in anti-Semitism, the state of Israel is forging a strategic partnership with a majority Hindu nation, the most populous in the world, that didn’t need a Hezbollah campaign to come around to seeing the value of Israel as not just as a strategic partner, but as a civilizational ally.
And Israel achieved that not by, again, not by illustrating the victimization of Jews through history, but by demonstrating to Prime Minister Modi and to probably hundreds of millions of Indians that Israel is a model of a country that can achieve great things in unexpected ways.
Noam
Bret, I want to transition from speaking about anti-Semitism in the US and how to respond to that to talking about the war in Iran and how we’re thinking about that as Americans, for the three of us as Jewish Americans. And you just spoke about historical realities and where we see ourselves in the different historical realities. You’ve spoken about the fact that historical precedent
of American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan should not be the only way to see this current war in Iran. Why should Americans see this differently and how is what’s going on right now different?
Bret Stephens
Look, every war is different. This is a point that my friend Elliot Cohen at the Atlantic Magazine, a great military historian, as well as a great American Jew, makes. The differences between what we’re doing now and what we did in Iraq should be too obvious to mention, but among other things, we do not have 150,000 troops streaming into Iran.
We are not intending a long-term occupation. We are not planning on installing a democracy, writing their laws, fixing their electrical grid. I mean, the differences are immense. Secondly, this is not the beginning of a war of choice by the United States. This is what I hope.
will be the end of a war of choice that was launched by the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979 against the United States with the seizure of our embassy. By any definition, an act of war followed by decades of murderous assaults on American citizens, whether it was in Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War.
or whether it was in Brooklyn when they tried to kill Masih, my friend Masih Alinijad, you know, first kidnap her and then kill her. So that’s another important difference. The third one is that, you know, since I’ve been a professional journalist, which began during the Clinton administration, every single American president has spoken about the dire threat of Iran.
and particularly of this regime in possession of nuclear weapons. And now we have a president who’s actually doing something about it. And we are, as we speak, maybe 13 days into this war. And the kind of elite panic that I’m seeing in certain editorial pages and so on, like, flabbergasts me. We have achieved
Bret Stephens
with our Israeli partners, extraordinary effects in massively downgrading Iran’s ability to threaten the region. And that’s a good thing. Every American should be delighted, particularly liberal Americans should be delighted by the idea that a regime that hangs gay people,
will be much farther from a nuclear weapon at the end of this war than it was a year ago. And I’m a little bit, more than a little bit dismayed by not only the pessimism that has overcome us, again, just 13 days into a war, which so far has led tragically to the death of about 11 American service members, but still in the…
exceptionally low number by historical standards, not just the pessimism, but almost, I sense, like a desire for the United States to lose this war because they don’t want to see Donald Trump or Benjamin Netanyahu vindicated one reason or another. But you get the feeling that there’s a current in American politics today that wants this war to go badly. And I find that really distressing. In fact, maybe
You the more you think about it, the more depressing it is as a comment about where we are as an American society.
Noam
Well, I mean, I want to go deeper into this right now. That’s that you just described a pretty dangerous negative description of of many Americans. It’s it’s almost like cynical, not that it’s wrong, but it’s almost like a cynical understanding of Americans that that people really do want it to go badly, that people are almost rooting against America. Why is that the case? Is what what’s causing people to view this?
through a lens that is so predominantly partisan to the extent that people can’t even think on their own. Is your read of it cynical or is it accurate or is it both?
Bret Stephens
Well, I think it’s a function of political polarization, which
means that we now identify ourselves as part of our partisan or ideological tribe before we identify ourselves as American citizens. And that should worry us in terms of the health of our democracy and also in terms of our ability.
to conduct a coherent foreign policy the way that Democrats and Republicans for all their differences conducted a coherent foreign policy during the period of the Cold War and even for several years after the end of the Cold War. I also have to say it’s not only polarization, it’s conspiracy theory. I mean, can’t tell you the number of people who I’ve come across, at least indirectly in terms of
comments I’m seeing that somehow this is a war that is being conducted to distract from a potential Jeffrey Epstein revelation. And if you believe that, and there are probably people who are going to listen to this podcast who really think that Trump just thought, you know what? It’s going to come out that I had some connection with Epstein that I don’t want revealed.
And so I’m going to just go start a massive bombing campaign against Iran in cahoots with Benjamin Netanyahu. There’s nothing I can do to help you. That’s a level of political derangement.
Noam
It’s not, but Bret, Bret, it’s not even wrong. To quote you.
Bret Stephens
It’s not even wrong to the great physicist Wolfgang Paul, or the other view, which again is exceptionally dismaying. And I’m seeing it from people who I sometimes respect intellectually on other subjects, is this idea that this is a grand case of the tail wagging the dog that Benjamin Netanyahu has effectively conspired to get.
his poodle Donald Trump to launch this war as if Donald Trump doesn’t have a record going back to 1980 and the hostage crisis, decrying the behavior of the Iranian regime, the humiliation of that particular episode in American history, or his long record in office, including in his first term.
of striking Iran or conducting a foreign policy that, as he saw it and as I see it, aligns with American interests. So you have this combination of exceptional or extreme polarization, a kind of burbling anti-Semitism, and a general mindset of conspiracy theories, which of course blends into the anti-Semitism.
This is the cultural moment in which this war is taking place. What I hope very much is that military achievements in this war leading maybe not now, but a year or two down the road to the collapse of the Iranian regime gives Americans a sense of clarity that this was something that we absolutely had to do if we were going to prevent the catastrophe of eventual Iranian nuclearization.
Mijal
And Bret, know, just just as we conclude, I want to just know I’m quoted that the quote that you quoted in your piece for the latest as a peer issue and aspirations. And I just want to recommend to all of our readers, we’re going to put it in the show notes.
The piece that you published in this last issue of Sapir was an address that you gave to Stanford’s Israel Studies Program late last year, in which you focus on the idea that certain, what I would call libels, such as Israel committing genocide or anti-Zionism, anti-Semitism being different things, that they are not even wrong. So I just wanna…
As a last question, you spoke about how so much of this moment will depend on our posture and our response to it. So I wanted to ask what you hope to convey to your readership by insisting that we really internalize that so much of the noise that we hear is not even wrong.
Bret Stephens
So just for the benefit of the audience that didn’t read the essay yet or the speech yet, Wolfgang Pauli, was a great Austrian, Jewish Austrian physicist, once reproached or said about a really bad physics paper. He said, you know, that is not even wrong. And what he meant is, I think, you know, if you ask a child what two plus two is and the child says five, that’s wrong.
But at least the answer is in the proper category of thinking. If the child says banana, that’s not even wrong. It doesn’t even rise to the level of the question itself. And I find that in a lot of the conversations about Israel today in the public, the kind of conversations we’re having, the ideas we’re trying to bat away, are in the not even wrong category. You mentioned
Israel committing genocide. I the very definition of genocide is killing people as such. Killing Tutsis in Rwanda because they are Tutsis. Killing Jews in the Shoah because they are Jews. That is what genocide is.
That was an example of not even wrong. think another example I mentioned is the idea that Israel is a settler colonialist state. We in America are a settler colonialist state. You and I are having a conversation in English in land that some previous generation of English speaking people, sometimes French speaking people or Dutch speaking people forcibly seized from a native Indian population. The same is true in Canada. The same is true in Australia. The same is true.
in New Zealand, and many other places. In Israel, they’re speaking Hebrew, and they are speaking a language that was spoken there in the time of King David. So that is a sort not even wrong idea. By the way, there are a whole category of arguments that I think are merely wrong but are worth debating. I think the idea that Israel is an apartheid state is wrong.
Bret Stephens
But we should be able to engage that kind of debate. Now, I gave the speech, Mijal, to inaugurate the new Israel Studies Program that was funded by the Jan Koum Foundation for Stanford University. And what I was trying to suggest in the second half of that speech,
is that an Israel Studies program can be done poorly or it can be done well. If it’s done poorly, it will end up being, in effect, what a friend of mine called an anti-Israel Studies program, which is to say you collect a bunch of Israeli scholars or scholars on Israel who are essentially Israel haters and populate an Israel Studies program to defame
the state for ideological purposes. Sadly, there’s some evidence in other branches of academia that things like that happen. The second possibility I mentioned is that the program could essentially become a token program for Stanford University, a place where primarily Jewish students go to study. They do good work, it’s essentially a-
an object in the Stanford catalog or the catalog of any number of universities that have these programs and say, look, you know, we’ve satisfied some rich Jewish donor because we have this program and it does good work, but it does it in a circumscribed way. But my hope for that program is that actually Israel studies to my mind is a humanity unto itself. It’s a humanity unto.
itself. And what I mean by that is Israel, the broad study of Israel in the best sense, is not just the study of a country. It’s not just a field for a political scientist or an economist or someone who looks at development. It’s a study about a civilization
Bret Stephens
in which Israel and the previous 78 years of its history is just a kind of a capstone on a much broader project that involves issues and debates that are not just ethnic or religious, but are philosophical. And the image that I offered in that essay is a picture
an Orthodox Jew on a motorized scooter getting to the corner of Ahad Kham and Herzl Street in Tel Aviv. If you can just imagine that image.
in terms of its significance and what it means, what comes together in those four elements, you can see why this is something that has, this is an area of studies that has something to teach all of the humanities. It’s not a specialization.
Bret Stephens
It’s actually foundational. And that’s where I hope a great Israel Studies program can go. And I would add something to this just to bring this full circle, Michal.
I want young Jews, whether they’re religious or not, whether they apprehend their Jewishness from a shul or from conversations with parents or from visits to Israel, whatever it is, I want them to understand that they’re participating or they have the opportunity to participate in this astounding civilizational project that
has a story to tell that is unlike any other story on the face of the earth.
I’ve said this to my kids, but being Jewish is like getting a million dollar check in the mail. And the only decision you have to make is whether you’re going to cash it or whether you’re just going to put it in a drawer until that check goes past its expiration date and you no longer can cash it. And what we should be engaged in as people who are, you know, the three of us deeply involved in Jewish thinking and
creating opportunities for thriving Jewish futures. The most important thing we can do is not to spend $600 million a year, roughly that, quote, fighting anti-Semitism. The most important thing we can do is telling our kids, cash that check, cash it soon, all right? Because if you don’t do it, you’re going to get to the age of 45 and say, gosh, well, you know, I was born Jewish, but I really don’t know very much about it, and my life is busy.
Bret Stephens
And it’s just not a real part of my life. And we’ve let too many of our children miss that opportunity. So my plea in the speech that I gave at the 92nd Street Y on this podcast, wherever I’m speaking, again, cash the damn check.
Noam
Amen.
Mijal
That’s beautiful and it’s a very powerful way for us to end and a reminder for all of us as to what we should aspire to. Brett, thank you so much for joining us.
Noam
Thanks so much, Brett.
Bret Stephens
Thank you, it’s an honor to be with you guys.