VP Picks, Media Bias, and Antisemitism: The 2024 U.S. Election and Its Impact on Israel and the Jewish People

8 aug · People of the Pod

00:24:52

Listen to an in-depth conversation on all the latest in the 2024 U.S. presidential election, from the vice presidential picks –Tim Walz and JD Vance – to Israel and antisemitism. Julie Fishman Rayman, AJC’s Managing Director of Policy and Political Affairs, speaks with Ron Kampeas, the Washington, D.C. Bureau Chief at the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Kampeas also discussed the importance of accuracy and empathy in reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, highlighting the need for journalists to avoid biases and misrepresentations.

*The views and opinions expressed by guests do not necessarily reflect the views or position of AJC.

Episode Lineup:

(0:40) Ron Kampeas

Learn:

AJC's Call to Action Against Antisemitism

U.S. Party Platforms Must Take a Stand Against Antisemitism

Here are 5 Jewish Issues Republicans and Democrats Must Address at their Conventions

Listen:

What the Unprecedented Assassinations of Terror Leaders Means for Israel and the Middle East

Aviva Klompas is Fighting the Normalization of Antisemitism on Social Media

On the Ground at the Republican National Convention: What's at Stake for Israel and the Middle East?

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You can reach us at: [email protected]

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Transcript of Interview with Ron Kampeas:

Manya Brachear Pashman:

This week, my colleague Julie Fishman Rayman, AJC Managing Director of Policy and Political Affairs, spoke to Ron Kampeas, the Washington DC Bureau Chief of JTA, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. They broke down the latest in the 2024 US presidential election. Julie, the mic is yours.

Julie Fishman Rayman:

Ron, thank you so much for joining us. I'm so pleased to have this conversation with you, because we get to flip the tables and someone who's really a beloved and renowned journalist in the Jewish space, and finally, I get to ask you questions. So thank you for making this opportunity available to us.

Ron Kampeas:

Thank you.

Julie Fishman Rayman:

I want to start by talking a little bit about the conventions. You were in Milwaukee covering AJC’s event, alongside a number of other things. Thank you for being there with us. What were your biggest takeaways from the Republican Convention, particularly as they related to the issues of Israel and antisemitism?

Ron Kampeas:

I think Israel was front and center, and they made it front and center because it's an obvious advantage that they have over the Democrats right now. So, you know, I think the representative moment was, in a way, when Matt Brooks, the CEO of the Republican Jewish Coalition, he was invited for the first time to address the Republican Convention, and the first thing he said was, let's hear it for Israel, or something like that, or let's hear it for the hostages. And there were cheers, and then he says that couldn't happen in a month at the Democratic Convention. He might be right. And so that was a big plus for them. On antisemitism it's a little more opaque, but it's problematic, I think, because after Matt spoke, he called us Jewish media reporters together for a little gaggle, and we asked him, naturally, about the isolationism that the vice presidential or the running mate pick JD Vance represents. And it's interesting, the way that Matt put it. He said, yeah, it is a problem. He was candid. He said, it's a problem in the party, and we plan to fight it.

And, you know, nobody prompted him, but he said, we plan to take on the Tucker Carlson wing of the party. The interesting thing about that is that he said, prevent Tucker Carlson wing from getting a foothold. And Tucker Carlson had very much a foothold at the convention. He spoke on the last night, setting up Donald Trump's speech. He was up in the balcony with Donald Trump. And of course, you know, Matt's point is that Tucker Carlson is very much an isolationist, particularly as far as Ukraine goes, but he's given hints as far as Israel goes. But it's more than that. He's platformed antisemites, and he's kind of ventured into that territory himself – antisemites like Candace Owens, Kanye West – and I think that that is something that Jewish Republicans are going to have to grapple with.

Julie Fishman Rayman:

One of the things that was discussed at AJC’s event alongside the Republican National Convention was the policy positions of not just JD Vance, but others who sort of align with that faction of the Republican Party – I guess, the Tucker Carlson faction – and sort of reading the tea leaves on Ukraine and saying, you know, at what point does the hesitancy around support for Ukraine translate into hesitancy for support for Israel? And does it? What would you say to that question?

Ron Kampeas:

You know, it's interesting that at least as far as I could track, that played out an explicit sense only at your event, at the AJC event. There were people who were asking hard questions of the panelists, and two of the panelists were very much not stumping for Trump, they were defending Trump and the Trump policies. Kirsten Fontenrose, not so much. She was more critical, and even though she was part of the Trump NSC. And so the defense that they were saying is that simply, you know, whatever you may think of Trump's position, this is Rich Goldberg has particularly said this, but I think Ken Weinstein also said it, whatever you may think of Trump's positions on Ukraine, the strength he will project in the world. And this was right after the assassination, and Rich Goldberg kept on bringing up that Associated Press photo of Trump looking very defiant after being shot, that strength is going to deter the kind of actions that Putin has taken in Ukraine.

But the flip side of that actually came up a couple of weeks later at a Christians United for Israel conference here in DC, where isolationism was very much on the mind, and what they were articulating and what might have been articulated in an AIPAC conference, if AIPAC still had conferences – it doesn't – but what they were articulating is that it's holistic, that you can't just say, like, JD Vance says, ‘Oh, I'm all for assisting Israel, but we don't need to assist Ukraine, because Russia's bad actions in Ukraine are being supported by Iran. Iran is supplying arms to Russia in Ukraine that it then can, you know, see how those arms work in Ukraine, and they can use them theoretically against Israel.’

We're seeing now, as tensions build up in the Middle East, that Russia has Iran's back. And then, you know, there's also China, which is also problematic and is buying Iranian oil and helping to prop up the Iranian economy that way. So it's not simply a matter of whether one side projects strength better than the other side, and this is the argument coming out of the Christians United for Israel thing. It's a matter of constant engagement and awareness of how all these things can interlock.

Julie Fishman Rayman:

I think that's a really great point, and I'm glad you made that connection. I know one of the other issues that was present or discussed at the Christians United for Israel conference was the issue of the hostages, and what you said before about the sort of rallying result of Matt Brooks’ comments about, you know, let's hear it for Israel, let’s hear it for the hostage families. And a similar cry might solicit or elicit at the DNC. What do you think we could expect? You know, would you expect that a hostage family will take to the stage as Orna and Ronen Neutra did at the DNC, and if so, what might the result be?

Ron Kampeas:

So that's a good question. I know that they've asked. I know that the hostage families have asked to appear at the DNC. I know that there are people who have told me that the DNC, especially like with Kamala Harris, who has spoken out for the hostages. I don't see how Kamala Harris could not have the hostages or some sort of representation of the hostages at the conference. On the other hand, the Democrats are going to have to worry about, I don't think they're going to be booed, but I think that they're not going to get the same sort of enthusiastic reception that maybe that they got at the Republican conference, and simultaneously the uncommitted movement. The movement was founded in Michigan and spread to some other states that when Biden was the nominee, particularly, they were upset that Biden wasn't doing enough to stop the war in Gaza, wasn't doing enough to force Israel into a ceasefire, and they wanted to show that they didn't necessarily have to vote for him in November, so they didn't vote for him in the primaries.

And they had different effects in different states, but certainly in states like Michigan and Minnesota, I think that they had a pretty good turnout as far as that goes. And they want a doctor from Gaza to speak at the DNC. So you know which might be fine. It might be a legitimate enterprise in their part, but you know that the Democrats are going to be accused of “both sides-ing” it, that the Republicans wouldn't have somebody like that. So because of the Democrats of different constituencies, as much as the Republicans are now, at least the Trump campaign is now trying to reach out to Arab Americans. It's much more a constituency for the Democrats, as are the Jews. It's going to be like a tightrope for them to walk. And so I don't know how that's going to be a play out, but it's certainly something we're going to be tracking.

Julie Fishman Rayman:

Talking about that, that tightrope, and also, because you mentioned Michigan and Minnesota, let's talk for a moment about the selection of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz for the vice presidential nominee. He has both spoken at AIPAC’s conferences, stood by Israel after the October 7 attacks, talked about Jewish students on campus dealing with encampments and anti-Israel protests and has really been outspoken about rising antisemitism in this country. On the flip side, he also speaks to the more progressive flank of the Democratic Party, and has urged the party to do more intentional kind of outreach to anti-Israel voters who aren't committed to voting the Harris-Walz ticket. What do you make of him in this moment, as both a campaigner and then presumably, if elected, what would you make of him as a vice president?

Ron Kampeas:

It's hard to say right now. Nobody was really aware of Tim Walz a lot outside of Minnesota until last week, but it's so funny because, you know, there was this whole push back against Shapiro from the far left because he was perceived as being – I'm talking about Josh Shapiro, the Pennsylvania Governor who was a front runner – because he was perceived as being too pro-Israel.

But Yair Rosenberg did a really good job. I also did a little bit of reporting into this about how the other candidates, who other likelies that Kamala Harris were considering, are also pro-Israel, and Tim Walz has a long list of accomplishments, but you know, a measure of how fast this summer has gone, how crazy this political season has been, is this a week and a half ago, when Yair put up his story, he didn't even have Tim Walz in it. He was looking at Roy Cooper, he was looking at Mark Kelly from Arizona, and then, because nobody was even thinking about Tim Walz then, and now, he's the running mate.

But from what you can see about him, and like, we just, JTA just did a big story about his master's thesis on Holocaust education, he's somebody who really wants to listen. His recommendation to the Republican Party, you know, he's coined this whole weird thing. That's actually why the Harris campaign noticed him, because he was the first to call the Republicans weird. I mean, the Republican candidates, but he said don't direct that at the voters, direct that only at the nominees, because we have to listen to the voters. And so I think that you can look at what he says about listening to the protesters on campuses in that context. For somebody who was born in Nebraska and lived most of his life in a town of 400 people in Minnesota, he shows, like, remarkably nuanced understanding of things that are of Jewish concern regarding the Holocaust. He's talked about how, you know, one can look at the Holocaust legitimately as an anomaly in history, but also understand it as something that could be repeated, which is actually Yehuda Bauer, the famous Holocaust historian's point. The way he boiled it down was that the Holocaust happened only to the Jews, but it can happen to anybody. And so that's Waltz's outlook, and it shows somebody who's really sort of read up on this and considered it in depth.

Julie Fishman Rayman:

Because you mentioned that Josh Shapiro had been very much in the running there, I want to get your take on the sort of social media trends of calling him “Genocide Josh” because of his pro-Israel statements and record. Is that just blatant antisemitism that we need to be mindful of, was it specific? Do you think it's just, you know, savvy opposition researchers? What do you make of that?

Ron Kampeas:

You know, we often think of antisemitism as, you know, planning to be antisemitic and putting out a statement. There are people who are consciously antisemitic, but the much greater, the much more vexing problem is that, how, it just seeps into the discourse. We have a polarized society, and it's just very easy when you're opposing somebody to grab whatever is in the toolbox to harm them. And for anybody who's Jewish, I mean, you see this and we talk about it openly, you see it when we talk about women in politics, about how attacks on them can be gendered. And nobody, at least nobody on the left, complains about that. Actually, maybe they did a little bit. You know, the Bernie Bros made gendered attacks on Hillary Clinton, and they didn't denied it.

But anyways, so you can say that attacks can be gendered, but it's hard to explain how attacks can also be antisemitic, because that's a tool in the box. And then a lot of people on the left don't want to acknowledge that. They slip into that. And I think that's what happened with Josh Shapiro. I think that there is for some reason, I mean, I can speculate as to, not even speculate – people have said why, even though he was just as pro-Israel as Tim Walz. He's like he's not less pro-Israel. But Mark Kelly did things that I'm sure Josh Shapiro wouldn't have done. Josh Shapiro doesn't like Benjamin Netanyahu.

Mark Kelly, the senator from Arizona, went to the Netanyahu speech, shook his hand afterwards and applauded, and they didn't get attacked in the same way. And if you look at some of the reasons that Shapiro was attacked, they talked about his upbringing, his going to a Jewish Day School in the Philly area, and the things that he was exposed to, they talked about his going to Israel when he was a teenager. And those are things that are part and parcel of a lot of American Jewish upbringings. And so you can say those things are indicting, but there's a point, because you're an American Jew coming up in American Jewish communities, going to be exposed to a lot of pro-Israel. But at what point does that become antisemitic? Because that's just the natural part of Jewish life.

Julie Fishman Rayman:

I want to ask you another question related to the media. I want to sort of get your take. Last week, AJC and the Jewish Federations of North America published an open letter to media outlets generally, really identifying how so many of them got the Hezbollah attack on the soccer field in the Golan so, so, so wrong that, after a dozen Druze kids playing soccer were murdered in the middle of the afternoon, Washington Post, Houston Chronicle, others, just totally misrepresented the facts. The Washington Post headlined a story “Hezbollah denies responsibility for the fatal rocket strike.” It wasn't true. Hezbollah celebrated the attack until they learned that children were killed and then walked it back. And then doubling down, a later Washington Post story showed an image of the funeral of one of the children who was killed, but the headline read, “Israel hits target in Lebanon.”

So if you only look at the picture and you only read the headline, you think it's a Lebanese kid that has been killed by a strike in Israel, not that an Israeli Druze kid was killed by a Hezbollah attack. CNN, AP, they all sort of downplayed Hezbollah's role in these really horrific murders. Is this ignorance? Is it bias? Is it both? And regardless, if we're sort of operating under this principle of journalist integrity, is this OK?

Ron Kampeas:

No, it's not OK. I don't know what went on at the Washington Post. I was witness, kind of, to one of the most foundational episodes in bad media takes, which happened right after the Second Intifada began, and the AP put out a photo of a policeman helping up a Haredi Jewish kid who had just been knocked down or even beaten by Palestinian writers in Jerusalem. And the AP captioned the photo saying that the policeman was attacking a Palestinian on the Temple Mount, which is so funny because there's a gas station in the back of the picture and there's no gas stations on the Temple Mount. I mean, if you know Jerusalem, you know the Temple Mount, you know how crazy that is. And so, like, what had happened was that I knew the guy who was handling photo editing at the AP that night when he got this picture. And at the time – this is in the early days of the Internet and computers – the picture came across at the AP’s, Israeli photo agency affiliate, and Hebrew couldn't work on that machine, so, like, the Hebrew was scrambled. They captioned it in Hebrew. It was scrambled.

So the guy calls up the other guy who's also tired, and he said, was this like some cop beating up a Palestinian on the Temple Mount? He said, yeah, sure, and that's how the thing goes out. So it's just, like, journalists can screw up in ways that speak to a certain underlying bias about the conflict. They expect to see certain things, but it's also can be stupidity and laziness and just screw ups at the last minute. I mean, I imagine that's what happened with the Washington Post front page, but it's awful, and it needs to be remedied, and people need to be more educated, and they need to pay more attention. I think you're right.

I think the way that the media has been treating the Hezbollah-Israel conflict in the north, in a way, differently than it treated, at least at the beginning, it treated Israel-Hamas. Hamas is clearly defined as a terrorist organization. Hezbollah is a terrorist organization. Hezbollah is an organization that's holding Lebanon hostage. Historically, people now think it was a big mistake to invade Lebanon in 1982. Hezbollah was partly an outgrowth of resentment of the Israeli occupation in southern Lebanon. But Israel withdrew to UN. They went to the UN and they said, you decide where the lines are. We're not going to decide where the lines are.

You decide where the lines are, and we will withdraw that to that point. In 2000 Israel did that. Hezbollah continued to attack. Hezbollah launched a war in 2006 that Israel did not want, and conflict with Israel helps uphold Hezbollah within Lebanon. And so I think that because Hezbollah is a very proficient and weathered militia, they fought a war in Syria. They fought a terrible, genocidal war in Syria. They were on the wrong side of that, but they fought a war in Syria. They're good at what they're doing. So maybe there's a reflex to see this as a conflict between two militaries, but it's not.

It's a conflict between Israel and a terrorist organization that unprovoked launched missiles inside Israel on October the eighth, even before Israel was striking back in Gaza as a means of solidarity with Hamas. And so I think that needs to be front, just as I think a lot of media, obviously JTA, but even a lot of like, you know, non-Jewish media always put out there that Hamas started this war. It needs to be reminded that Hezbollah also started its version of the war, and that Hezbollah, it's not an army that's accountable to any kind of civilian infrastructure, never mind a democratic one, like the Israeli army is accountable to elected officials. It's its own militia with a stranglehold on Lebanon.

So yeah, I think that should be evident in everything that's written about that conflict, and maybe that's what helped distort at least the initial reporting from what happened in Majdal Shams, which is just horrible.

Julie Fishman Rayman:

One of the things that AJC is always trying to call on media outlets to do is to know who to call. Right, if there is an incident related to Israel that they don't fully understand, if there's an antisemitic attack and they need more context, to understand that there are Jewish individuals and organizations who can help to provide insight and texture and understanding so that their reporting can be more accurate. That's one of the recommendations in our Call to Action Against Antisemitism in America, recommendations for media. I wonder if, you know, journalist to journalist, if folks call you and say, “Ron, this is what we're writing, is this right?” Knowing that you are just such a font of knowledge, they should, this is what I'm saying. They should call you.

Ron Kampeas:

My son asks me, I mean, very occasionally, I do get calls more having to do with my alleged knowledge of the American Jewish community and how it works and how it functions. I get calls about that. I think on Israel, less so because everybody's an expert. Everybody considers themselves an expert. Everybody flies in. I think what was an unfortunate standard. 20 years ago, it wasn't just the AP, it was all mainstream media, that you get your best takes from a foreign correspondent between three and six months into the assignment, because it takes them three months to learn it, but it takes them six months to go native, which is to sort of really understand the nuances. I think that's unfortunate, because I think going native, really understanding the nuances, sort of delving into a story, becoming familiar with it, becoming sympathetic in ways, with all sides to the story, actually enriches a story.

And I think that that's something that maybe you know, I've been doing JTA for 21 years. I've been in journalism for 35 years. I think it's great to have fresh outlooks. It's good. I think it's also good to sometimes rely on institutional knowledge and to listen to people who have been here before. It was weird at AP. I was in a position at AP when I wasn't allowed to use my institute for bizarre reasons. Institutional knowledge, you know. But it was funny, because at the outset of the Iraq War, the first day, the major Iraq war in 2002, 2003, I knew things that signal that it was going to go wrong, because I'd lived in the Middle East, and I wasn't the only one. By far, by far, there were a lot of people who knew those things institutionally. It means literally saying, like what the Israelis said in 1982, the Shiites are throwing rice and you had actual examples in 1982 of Shiites throwing rice at Israelis, and in 2003 of Shiites throwing rice at Americans. They want this. And it never works out that way. It goes awry.

But nobody was listening, because people were too invested in a particular outcome to listen to the institutionalists. And I think that that's a problem. There's a reflex sometimes to say, oh, the institutionalists got it wrong in the past, because the world is still a mess, but that's not their value. The value of the institutionalists, and a great institutionalist just passed away, Martin Indyk, the value of the institutionalists is that sometimes they can actually say, this is where I went wrong, and this is what we misunderstood, and this is how we misunderstood it, and this is how we were deep in the weeds and we misunderstood it. And that's the kind of knowledge that I think shouldn't go wasted.

Julie Fishman Rayman:

Thanks so much for that perspective. I was going to ask you as a final question, if there was anything that you wanted to raise that we haven't discussed yet. But I would also add to that question, feel free to answer that question. Or is there something that we're getting wrong now institutionally?

Ron Kampeas:

Yeah, I think that, you know, there's a lot that we're getting wrong now institutionally. I think that people are, and every side of the Israel-Hamas conflict are they retreating into sort of easy, reflexive understandings of what could go right and what could go wrong. I think that there is a value in understanding how toxic Hamas ideology is, that was, I think, grasped at the beginning after October the seventh, but has slipped away as this seems to be just a conflict, and people are retreating into Israel's bashing Gaza. We have to get it to stop bashing Gaza, which is fine, it's an outlook. It's a legitimate outlook, but it's one that's not going to register at all with any Israeli, unless you take into account how Hamas is perceived among Israelis as a genocidal organization. If it wasn't before October 7, it is now.

On the other hand, I think that sort of reflexive, we can never have a two state solution. I'm not saying, advocating, for two state solution. We never have a two state solution. We're just going to go on as we've gone with the Palestinians. I think that also reflects this kind of like a reflexive blindness that you have to account for the Palestinians, somehow. Nothing is going to be imposed on them. They have to be agents and actors and whatever happens, and it might not happen in my generation, it might not happen in my lifetime, but that has to be back of mind. And I think for a lot of people, particularly in parts of the Israeli establishment, it is not back of mind.

So those are things that I think that people can maybe, you know, if, if these competing, they're not actually enemies, I'm talking about people who are on the same side. They can be on the same side in Israel, they can be on the same side in America, but they're rivals, and they don't like to listen to each other. But if they did talk to each other and listen to each other, maybe they would find nuances that could get everybody to a better place.

Julie Fishman Rayman:

If we could do a word cloud of some of the themes that have come out of this conversation, listening is definitely one of the words that would be prominent. And I think it's not only a good aspiration, but I also want to highlight that our listening to you on these really important issues is revelatory, truthfully, and we're grateful for all the work that you're doing with JTA every day, but also for being here on People of the Pod with us and for all the wisdom that you've shared. Thank you.

Ron Kampeas:

Thank you.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

If you missed last week's episode, tune in for my conversation with AJC Jerusalem Director Avital Leibovich on what the widely reported deaths of two terror leaders last week could mean for Israel and the wider region.

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At the UN General Assembly: Jason Isaacson Highlights Israel's Challenges and the Fight Against Antisemitism
26 sep· People of the Pod
Jason Isaacson, AJC Chief Policy and Political Affairs Officer, joins us to share insights on the key priorities from the sidelines of this year's UN General Assembly. Each year, AJC experts spearhead diplomatic outreach to world leaders on crucial issues, from addressing anti-Israel bias and combating antisemitism to rallying global efforts against the Iranian threat. This year's discussions unfold against the backdrop of Israel's multi-front defensive war against Iran and its terror proxies, as well as a significant rise in antisemitism following Hamas' attacks on October 7.

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Follow People of the Pod on your favorite podcast app, and learn more at AJC.org/PeopleofthePod

You can reach us at: [email protected]

If you’ve appreciated this episode, please be sure to tell your friends, and rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

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Transcript of Interview with Jason Isaacson:

Manya Brachear Pashman:

World Leaders convened at the United Nations this week to open the 79th session of the General Assembly every year, AJC experts lead the Jewish community's diplomatic outreach on issues ranging from confronting anti Israel bias and anti semitism to uniting the world against the Iranian threat. This year's meetings come amid a backdrop of Israel's seven-front defensive war against Iran and its terror proxies and the surge of antisemitism since Hamas' October 7 attacks on Israel. Here to discuss the priorities on the sidelines of this year's UN General Assembly is Jason Isaacson, AJC’s Chief Policy and Political Affairs officer. Jason, welcome to People of the Pod.

Jason Isaacson:

Thank you, Manya. It's good to be here.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

So I want to turn first to Israel's defense of military operations in Lebanon targeting Hezbollah. For years, AJC has been pushing the UN to designate all of Hezbollah a terrorist organization. How does Hezbollah's near daily attacks on Israel and this military operation change that plea.

Jason Isaacson:

I mean, it changes it only in that it emphasizes, once again, its demonstration of the danger posed by Hezbollah, which, of course, is a threat to the security, the safety of the people of Israel, to peace across the region. But also Hezbollah has arms tentacles that reach elsewhere, reach into Europe for fundraising purposes, for narcotics trafficking, for money laundering posing a real threat to security, not just for the people of Israel, but for people elsewhere in the world.

But what's been happening since October 8, when Hezbollah started firing rockets, missiles, anti tank weapons into northern Israel, killing Israelis, civilians and soldiers, destroying property, inflaming the region, unprovoked, but they did it in response to or as an ally of Hamas, another Iranian backed terror organization has just destabilized the region, made it impossible for 10s of 1000s of Israelis to live in their homes.

They've had to evacuate the north, disrupting the personal lives of so many And now, of course, over the last week or two weeks, we've seen repeated huge barrages of rockets, missiles that have been fired into Israel, killing and destroying property. And it's intolerable. Israel cannot live with that kind of a threat on its border, and no country would tolerate this. Israel will not tolerate it.

And so we're seeing decisive action in various ways that Israel has responded to these multiple threats. In the case of Lebanon, we've seen missile attacks on rocket launchers and command centers and commanders, very precise, targeted. Of course, it is war, and there has been collateral damage, and that is terrible, but Israel has been attacked relentlessly, ruthlessly by Hezbollah. It must respond.

We've also seen very interesting, really quite clever, use of technologies that Israel has mastered in other ways to attack Hezbollah commanders and fighters. We are hopeful that this will send a very clear message to Hezbollah leadership and to their backers in Tehran that they really have to pull this back. There does not have to be a wider war in the region.

It is really Hezbollah's decision, Iran's decision, whether to return to some state of calm where we can have the people of Israel return to their homes, the people of Southern Lebanon return to their homes and get back to, kind of normal life.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

Do the diplomats you are encountering on the sidelines of the UN understand that? Do they acknowledge what you just said?

Jason Isaacson:

The word on the lips of most diplomats is deescalate, avoid a wider war. And of course, we can all appreciate that no one wants a wider war. But what is a country to do that is being attacked daily by hundreds of rockets and missiles fired into cities and towns?

It cannot just simply say, Oh, well, we're just going to restrain ourselves because, we're more moral than our terrorist neighbors. No country would do that. No country could make that decision. So yes, there is understanding of the situation that Israel is in. There is an appeal for lessening the tensions, for de-escalating. But I think that privately, it is widely understood that Israel has no choice but to defeat the terrorist enemies that are at its throat.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

I spoke of the call to designate Hezbollah a terror organization in its entirety. Does Hamas need to be added to that plea for designation? Or do most diplomats already? Or I should say, do most countries already recognize Hamas as a terror organization?

Jason Isaacson:

Unfortunately, most countries do not already recognize Hezbollah as a terrorist organization, at least not formally. I mean, they may do it sort of rhetorically, and in a meeting with us, they may say that they of course recognize that. But for reasons that they will cite having to do with their need to continue to interact with the government of Lebanon, which of course has a very strong Hezbollah component in that government, they don't want to box themselves out as some kind of interaction with Beirut.

We could point out, as we do repeatedly, that it's not necessary to exclude contact with Lebanese authorities by designating Hezbollah as a terrorist organization. Other countries find ways around that problem. France and others that have cited this argument to us repeatedly could do so as well. But it's important that Hezbollah be designated as a terrorist organization. It's also important that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of Iran also be designated fully as a terrorist organization.

Of course, the United States has done that. A number of other countries have as well, but that must be universal. It is so clear who is lighting the fires across the region, who is threatening the sovereignty, the security of a neighboring state. And for countries to not take those simple steps to try to clamp down on funding, on money transfers, on freedom of movement internationally, for leaders of the IRGC, for leaders of Hezbollah, is just turning a blind eye to terrorism. That's not tolerable.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

What about Hamas? Has that been designated by more countries as a terror organization than Hezbollah or the IRGC?

Jason Isaacson:

Hamas is widely recognized as a terrorist organization, and I think that we need to press the countries that have not yet done so to add Hamas to the terrorist but we also have to not neglect the most important part of this equation, which is, of course, the support that Hamas and that Hezbollah get from Iran. And the fact that the sanctions that have been imposed on Iran are not always widely and carefully and universally enforced.

The fact that Iran has been freed from certain restrictions that the UN imposed after the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in 2015 in terms of its missile development, a lot of sanctions have to be restored, and the sanctions, particularly on the missile program of Iran, should be restored. And the United States in the next administration, whether it is a Harris administration or a Trump administration, I'm expecting a whole new playbook regarding the approach to Iran.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

So the October 7 attacks, which happened shortly after last year's General Assembly, killed more than 1200 people. 101 hostages still remain in captivity.

Has the UN adequately condemned Hamas for the October 7 atrocities, the recent murder of six hostages, and has it called for the unconditional release of the remaining hostages?

Jason Isaacson:

No. Frankly, the UN response has been disappointing to say the least. It has failed repeatedly when efforts have been made to condemn Hamas specifically, even though we know that it is understood across the board around the world, the terrorist nature of the threat that Israel faces, no one doubts, if you have a conversation with a diplomat, that Hamas was responsible for the most horrific atrocities on October 7 and since.

And of course, is holding 101 hostages, some of whom are not alive, but those who are in the most brutal conditions. We saw what happened just a few weeks ago, when Israel was preparing to actually liberate six hostages, including one American, American, Israeli, and they were executed before the Israeli soldiers could get to them by Hamas. Everyone knows the culpability of Hamas, and yet there has been a moral failure on the part of the United Nations to condemn Hamas.

There have been a number of General Assembly and Security Council efforts to raise the issue of the hostages, to raise the issue of Hamas, and they've been deflected. They have not been allowed to move forward. There have been, of course, continual condemnations, as the United Nations has a long history of condemning Israel for its occupation of Palestinian territory, for its treatment of Palestinian civilians. That happens, you know, ritually in the United Nations.

And, of course, every year in the General Assembly, there are, you know, a dozen or 20 or so resolutions against Israel, but to call out the terrorist organization that tells 1200 people and captured 251 others, men, women, children, grandparents, and has been holding 100+ still in captivity in Gaza. That just isn't quite on the UN's agenda. It's very disappointing. That's more than disappointing. It's outrageous.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

You did mention that targeting Iran, or just recognizing that Iran is pulling the strings on all of this with its nuclear ambitions, its advanced missile program, these proxy armies and terror organizations the regime does seem to pose a profound danger to Israel as well as the broader world. But do members of the UN seem to recognize this? And what is AJC pushing them to do about it?

Jason Isaacson:

There is wide recognition, certainly in the Gulf, but also increasingly in Europe, of the danger. Posed by Iran, not only on the nuclear file, where Iran is inching closer and closer to being a nuclear threshold state, if not an actual nuclear weapon state, but also the Iranian support for Subversion, for terrorism in countries across the region, Iranian support, Iranian regime support for assassination attempts and kidnapping attempts across Europe.

In the United States as well, former Secretary of State of the United States, a former National Security Advisor of the United States, under protection by the US government because of those Iranian threats, and in Europe as well, this is recognized whether countries are prepared to impose Some economic hardship on their own countries because of imposing sanctions on trade with Iran is another question.

It's sometimes been difficult for countries to make that decision. We have been pushing countries to impose further sanctions on trade with Iran, on the missile program that Iran has been pursuing, on Iran's cooperation, collaboration with Russia in Russia's brutal war of aggression in Ukraine, which is really getting the attention, especially of European leaders.

So we have a lot of arguments that we've been deploying in our meetings over the last week and beyond the last week with the leaders around the world, but especially with European leaders to get much tougher in their dealings with Iran, to stop Iran Air from flying into Europe, which is now an action that is moving forward, but other forms of interaction just to make it impossible for the Iranian regime to continue to carry out its aggression in the region, threatening the security of countries in the Gulf.

But of course, threatening Israel in multiple ways, by supporting terrorists who are acting against the Israeli people on seven fronts, we are hoping, and we are working hard through our advocacy in the United States, at the United Nations around the world, with our 15 offices across the globe, to make that case to foreign governments that it is time to call out and to act firmly against Iranian aggression.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

I'm so glad you mentioned Russia, because I did want to ask you whether Ukraine is still a priority, whether it's still a priority for AJC, but also whether it's still a priority for the UN it's been more than two years

Jason Isaacson:

in AJC s meetings on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly. This week, we have repeatedly made the case that the territorial integrity of Ukraine, democracy in Ukraine, and frankly, the territorial integrity and democracy and security of Europe as a whole is at stake in the war that Russia is pursuing, that Vladimir Putin has launched against Ukraine, its neighbor.

The importance of the United States and our allies continuing to supply Ukraine with the means to defend itself. We're not talking about American boots on the ground in Ukraine. We're talking about America doing whatever it can, and it has done a lot to help the people of Ukraine defend themselves against Russian aggression, not only for the good of Ukraine, but frankly, for the security, the safety of Europe, and frankly, of global security.

If Russia is allowed to continue gobbling up pieces of Ukrainian territory unimpeded, unchallenged by the West, it will continue its rapacious ways, and that is just not acceptable in Europe. It's not acceptable for the security of the United States, for our interests across the world. So it is important that Russia be pushed back. It is important that we stand by Ukraine as they try to liberate themselves from Russian aggression.

And frankly, it's a signal to other countries that may have territorial ambitions, designs on neighboring states, small, weaker states. You know what we're talking about here. So it's important that the line be drawn, and we stand by that line and continue to supply Ukraine with what it needs to defend itself, and it has actually made some impressive gains. It has still a challenge ahead. Russia is much larger and has many more missiles in its stockpile than Ukraine does, but Ukraine is fighting back, and is actually taking the fight to Russia, which is so important we need to stand by our friends in Ukraine as they beat back Putin's aggression.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

So that seems to be a popular sentiment, that it's okay for Ukraine to fight back, and we support that effort. So why do they not support the efforts of Israel to fight back? Is it just geography?

Jason Isaacson:

Well, Israel has always had a difficult challenge in the United Nations. Of course, the situation with the Palestinians has been a popular cause across the globe, and it's been very difficult for Israel to make the case that it does not want to rule over the Palestinian people. It was put in that position as a result of a war in which it defended itself against aggression in 67 and 73 and ended up occupying land or administering land that had been launching pads for strikes against the people of Israel themselves.

It is hoping for, searching for, it has signed on to a process that would allow for a political resolution of the status of the Palestinians. Palestinian leadership has been such that it hasn't been able to move forward on any kind of a further settlement of that dispute with Israel. And in the meantime, the public around the world has grown frustrated and of course, has a continuing support for the underdog, less appreciation for the situation that Israel finds itself in. And that's just a fact of life that we've been we've been wrestling with for too long.

At the same time, there is an appreciation of the contributions that Israel has made and continues to make to technological advancement, public health, a variety of fields in which, certainly the countries in the region, but countries beyond the region, can benefit from further interaction with Israel. We've seen the growth of the relationship between Israel and India, the growth of relationship between India and other states in the developing world, and we're hoping that at a certain point, public opinion will follow the trend that is so evident in our contacts with governments around the world.

In many ways, what we've seen is an action in which Israel is the target, but the real target is the West. The real target is the United States, and Israel is an ally of the United States as the one democracy in the Middle East, closely connected to the United States, has been in many ways, the focal point for antagonism toward the west, and it puts Israel in a unique position.

Sort of a positive position, in some ways, in that there's an affiliation and association of Israel with the United States, which is of benefit to countries in the region that want their own strategic partnership with the United States, that want to benefit from Israel's access to the west, technologically, in education, in public health, and a whole range of sectors. But for other parts of the world, where it's easy to blame the West for their own economic situation or political situation, it's very easy to link the United States with Israel, and therefore to hold Israel somewhat to a different, harsher standard.

That's part of what's going on. Part of it is identification with the Palestinian cause, which has been very popular on the street, fueled in the Arab world by Al Jazeera and other media, but also very conveniently used over the generations by Arab governments to deflect from their own issues of governance in their own countries and elsewhere in the world, it's been a rallying cry for a range of despots and dictators and monarchs who have wanted to again, distract their countries from the real issues that they face, and target this western outpost in the eastern Mediterranean.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

Speaking of strategic partnerships, is the UN General Assembly the right forum to pursue discussions of expanding the Abraham Accords, and is this the right time, even if it is the right forum?

Jason Isaacson:

Well, in the General Assembly of the United Nations, no, because there is an automatic majority. And we just saw this on display just a week or so ago when the UN General Assembly adopted a one sided anti Israel resolution overwhelmingly by something like 50% more votes against Israel than occurred the last time a couple of years ago that there was a resolution regarding Israel the General Assembly a similar resolution. So no, not in the General Assembly itself, not in the UN system itself, but among individual countries, Israel is still quite popular at elite levels of many countries, and AJC has worked, I should say, tirelessly for decades, to open doors for Israel.

Countries around the world, not just in the Arab world, but in the developing world and elsewhere. We continue to do so, and we continue to find great receptivity to the argument that there is much to be gained by a relationship with Israel. Maybe starting out quietly, but benefiting the people of your country. Prime minister, Foreign Minister, Mr. President, Madam President, these are arguments that we are making constantly, and we're seeing the openings of trade relations, of new business opportunities, investments, exchanges, people coming to Israel to learn about how they can benefit their own societies by a different kind of a partnership with counterparts in Israel. AJC has been part of that action for a long time.

We continue to do so through our Center for a New Middle East, which was announced by AJC CEO Ted Deutch in June. We are expanding our efforts, especially across the Gulf and North Africa, to introduce societies, civil sector leaders, business people and governments, to the benefits that would accrue to them, to their societies through the embrace of this new Middle East, which has begun frankly with the Abraham Accords in 2020 and we are hopeful that the coming years will bring us greater success as well, but not just in that part of the world.

Other countries, as we have seen through the advent of I2U2 and IMEC, which were efforts to bring India into more interaction with Israel and with Europe, this corridor from India to the. Middle East to Europe and Israel in cooperation with India and the United States and the United Arab Emirates. I2U2, all of these efforts are efforts to expand the circle of Arab Israeli peace, to expand the circle of Israel's interaction with for the benefit of those countries, countries around the world. And we're seeing great success there. We continue to work hard to broaden that success.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

Jason, thank you so much for shedding light on what you've been up to this week on the sidelines.

Jason Isaacson:

Always a pleasure, Manya, thank you.
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From Rocket Attacks to Exploding Pagers: Michael Oren on Escalating Tensions Between Israel and Hezbollah
20 sep· People of the Pod
In this episode of People of the Pod, Ambassador Michael Oren dives into Israel's escalating conflict with Hezbollah, which has turned Israel’s northern border into a war zone and caused 60,000 to remain displaced from their homes. Oren emphasizes Israel’s need to defend itself on multiple fronts, including threats from Hamas, the Houthis, and Iran, warning of the risk of all-out war. He also discusses the formation of the Israel Advocacy Group (IAG) to bolster Israel's media and diplomatic efforts and shares how his vision for Israel’s future, as outlined in 2048: The Rejuvenated State, remains critical post-conflict.

Listen – AJC Podcasts:

The Forgotten Exodus:

Explore the untold stories of Jews from Tunisia, Syria, Yemen, and more.

People of the Pod:

Paris 2024: 2 Proud Jewish Paralympians on How Sports Unites Athletes Amid Antisemitism

The DNC with AJC: What You Need to Know about the Democratic Party’s Israel Platform

Follow People of the Pod on your favorite podcast app, and learn more at AJC.org/PeopleofthePod

You can reach us at: [email protected]

If you’ve appreciated this episode, please be sure to tell your friends, and rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

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Transcript of Interview with Michael Oren:

Manya Brachear Pashman:

Michael Oren served as Israel's ambassador to the United States between 2009 and 2013. As ambassador, he was instrumental in securing US support for Israel's defense and upholding Israel's right to security. His current role isn't all that much different.

After October 7, he launched the Israel Advocacy Group (IAG), which has worked to strengthen diplomatic relations for the Jewish state and support Israelis during wartime. Ambassador Oren is with us now to explain the challenge Israelis are now facing. Ambassador Oren, welcome to People of the Pod.

Michael Oren:

Good to be with you, Manya.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

Ambassador, you are touring the US with residents of Northern Israel who've been displaced by near daily attacks from Hezbollah terrorists across the border with Lebanon. As we speak, Israel is conducting a military operation in Beirut. Can you tell us what is happening and why?

Michael Oren:

Okay, let me begin by saying that Israel has not taken credit from the pager and walkie talkie attacks Has not. And so we want to avoid that type of symmetry, because on one hand, Hezbollah is very proud of the fact that they're firing hundreds of rockets and hundreds of explosive drones at civilians in Israel. Literally. Israel's not taking that credit. Okay.

So let's begin with this. October 8, a day after the horrendous Hamas assault on southern Israel. Hezbollah, out of a vowed desire to show solidarity with Hamas, opened fire on Northern Israel. To date, about 10,000 rockets, explosive domes, have been fired at Galilee. It began along the immediate border, some 18 communities along the immediate border, but it creeped downward. Creeped downward now where rockets are falling along the Sea of Galilee, which is in southern Galilee, and moving its way toward Haifa, nd the suburbs of Haifa, moving westward.

100,000 Israelis have been rendered homeless. 10s of 1000s of acres of farmland, forest land have been incinerated. 1000s of houses have been destroyed, and dozens of people have been wounded and killed, as well. Civilians, as well as military. The entire North has been transformed into a war zone. Cities that you know, like Kiryat Shmona, Metula, are ghost towns today.

One of the members of our delegation, Her home was rocketed in Metula yesterday. Is the 215th home destroyed by Hezbollah in that once beautiful, beautiful town of Metula. So that's the objective situation. Is it an utterly, utterly unprovoked attack on the land and the people of Israel. And Israel, of course, has to defend itself.

The great complaint among the people of the north, it is that the state has not done enough to defend the people of the north. And so any actions now taken, including last night, where Israeli warplanes were attacking Hezbollah emplacements and targets, not just in southern Lebanon, but throughout Lebanon, is very much welcomed by the people of the north. So they have yet to see how the state intends to return them and store them to their homes.

I'll just add one more point that is widely misunderstood in this country. There's a notion that somehow, if a ceasefire is attained with Hamas in Gaza, which is highly, highly unlikely, but if it is attained, then Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah, said, he too will accept a ceasefire, but a ceasefire will restore the status quo of October 6. And Israelis simply won't go back to their homes if the situation that obtained on October 6 where Hezbollah was exactly on the opposite side of the fence, no one's going back to communities that are opposite side of the fence, because now we know what terrorists can do to Israelis on the other side of that fence, our side of the fence.

So there is really no alternative but to drive Hezbollah back. It's to drive them back beyond the Litani River, which meanders opposite our northern border, between 13 and 20 kilometers. There's a diplomatic initiative by American Special Envoy Amos Hochstein to try to convince Hezbollah to retroactively implement Resolution 1701, of the Security Council. It's from 200. They called on his Hezbollah to withdraw north of the Litani River. Hezbollah never accepted it. Hezbollah violates it daily, flagrantly. I wish Mr. Hochstein all the best of luck. I don't know what leverage he can bring to bear to convince Hezbollah to implement 1701 but barring that, Israel will have absolutely no choice to push Hezbollah back physically from that fence.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

In fact, returning residents home, to their homes in northern Israel has become a war goal. The cabinet has just announced this week, right?

Michael Oren:

Well, it's about time. It's about 11 months too late.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

So I guess, what does that mean? Does that mean that this conflict with Hezbollah or Lebanon could escalate?

Michael Oren:

Oh, I would expect it would escalate. Yes, and that we have to prepare it for any scenario, including an all out war. Now, an all out war is no small thing. It's a war that's many times more severe than that, with Hamas in the South. First of all, Hezbollah is one of the largest military forces anywhere, not just in the Middle East. It's got upwards of 170,000 rockets hidden under villages, under hundreds of villages. It has a fighting force of terrorists that's three, four times that of Hamas. It has cyber capabilities. And it's not just Hezbollah. It's the Shiite militias that are backed by Iran and in Iraq and Syria, the Huthi rebels in Yemen. We know that they can fire Israel well. And there's Iran itself. Iran, which, on April 14, launched 315 rockets at Israel.

So the IDF estimate for rocket fire per day in any war with Hezbollah could reach as much as 10,000 rockets a day. And that will overwhelm our multi-tiered anti-missile system. We will require assistance from the United States, and even then, it will be quite a challenge.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

As you mentioned, this is all happening simultaneously with the war against Hamas in Gaza. Yes, Houthis also are firing rockets, one of which, I think at least one reached, or almost reached, central Israel just this past week. And I mean, how many fronts is Israel fighting on right now? And could this escalate? Could, though, that number of fronts grow even more?

Michael Oren:

Well, right now we're at about seven fronts, according to the defense Minister's calculation. So what is it? It the North. It is the south. It is the Huthis, very much to the south, but are capable of firing into Tel Aviv. It is the Judean Samaria, the West Bank front, which is very severe indeed.

So that's just sort of the bottom line of the fronts we're firing. We're also fighting a front against Iran, more distantly, against the Shiite and militias in Iraq and Syria. So a multi, multiple front war. And make no mistake about it, this is an existential struggle for the State of Israel.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

And you said that returning to October 6 or what the status was on October 6 is now not acceptable. I mean, was there a short window of time where that was, what the wish and the hope was? And that has shifted.?

Michael Oren:

I think it was lost on October 7. So if you were to go to Metula on October 6, you could stick your hand through the fence, and I wouldn't recommend you do this. You could stick your hand through the fence, and you would touch Hezbollah. They're right there. And the people of Matula and other communities along that border simply won't go back under those circumstances. And you can understand why.

I don't know if you have young children, I don't think you put your children in a house that's looking at Hezbollah across from a fence. Now we know what terrorists can do to Israeli families, civilians, women, babies, who are on the other side of the fence. And a fence is no guarantee against any assault.

The people from the north also believe that there are still tunnels under that fence that we haven't discovered all of the Hezbollah tunnels. There are people in our delegation from the north who believe that Hezbollah still has tunnels that have not been detected under that fence, because Hamas digs tunnels in sand, Hezbollah digs tunnels in rock, and they're deeper and harder to detect.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

You said that you wondered, if I have small children, I do. I have two small children. We go to well, they're not. They're getting less small by the day. But it made me think of a column that you wrote back in March for The Forward about how Jews are cursed to be a lonely people.

And I actually gave a speech to our synagogue congregation just last week, talking about how I was so grateful to be part of a congregation on October 6, celebrating Simchat Torah when I woke up on October 7, because otherwise I would have felt and my children would have felt so alone. And I am curious where you were on October 7, and how you have combated that loneliness, that lonely feeling.

Michael Oren:

Hm. Well, I had an unusual experience. On October 5, I was giving a speech in Dallas, Texas, and the speech was interesting, because at the end of my remarks, I told the audience that I believe that Israel would soon be going to war. And everyone gasped, and I'd actually been briefing foreign diplomatic personnel about this for about two weeks.

And the reason I thought Israel was going to war was because of the divisions within Israeli society, the divisions within American societies, that Iranians were following very, very closely. But the most important point was that the United States was trying to broker a peace agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia, and as part of that deal, Saudi Arabia was going to get nuclear power.

And my line was that if anybody thought that the Iranians would sit quietly while the Saudis got nuclear power, they were kidding themselves, and the Iranians would start a war. All right, I had other information, but that was the major thrust. So two days later, I was coming back to Israel. I was stopping off at my mother's house in New Jersey, woke up to the messages you never want to receive on your cell phone, which is, are you okay? Are you okay? Are you okay? And learned about this.

Now for many years through the generosity of the Singer Foundation. Whenever there's a national emergency, I'm immediately put on television. So starting on the morning of October 7, I was on CNN, MSNBC throughout the day, called some friends in ElAl and got myself on the first flight out of Newark that night, and landed in a war zone the next morning and went immediately to work.

So around a small kitchen table in my house, a group of volunteers together formed an emergency NGO called the Israel Advocacy Group, because what can I say, the state wasn't doing a particularly excellent job in defending itself in the media and other forums. And what began as a small sort of a ma and pa operation around the kitchen table has now become the Israel advocacy group, IAG, dealing with international media, mainstream, non mainstream, and with track two diplomacy.

So track two diplomacy is what we're doing in Washington now by bringing the delegations to the hill. We've had meetings on the hill with both parties, both houses, and today we're in the White House. So we've gone to the White House twice with these delegations. That's tracked two diplomacy and so it's a big undertaking.

So my way of dealing with the loneliness is certainly joining with other people, especially young people, who are committed to defending Israel in every possible form. I'm very blessed because I'm a member of a community in Jaffa, a kehilla, which is just wonderful and, of course, the family, the family, the family. Tammy, my, my beloved and children and grandchildren, 6.5 and counting.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

You are heading up this Israel advocacy group that's post October 7. But before October 7, you had started a think tank. I don't know if you would call it an advocacy group. I've been calling it a think tank. Called Israel 2048. You also wrote a book titled 2048: The Rejuvenated State.

It was published in one single volume in English, Hebrew and Arabic, very, very symbolically. And I'm curious if this vision that you laid out for the next century of the Jewish state, is it stalled by all of this?

Michael Oren:

So first of all, 2048 it was a project that grew out of my time in Knesset, and I was the deputy in the prime minister's office, and sort of realizing that Israel is so bogged down in its daily crises, little do we know what a daily crisis was, that we never really think about our future. And the goal was to envision the Jewish state on its 100th birthday. Our 100th birthday would be 2048, and how can we assure a second successful century? What changes had to be made in the State of Israel? And they're pretty big, far reaching changes.

And it began as a discussion group online. We had a 2048 seminar at the Hartman Institute with Natan Sharansky for about a year, then covid hit and retreated to the room and wrote this book. It's an 80 page manifesto that covers 22 aspects of Israeli society. Its educational policy, social policy, health policy, foreign policy, America-Israel diaspora relations, of course, the US relations and the peace process.

Certainly the largest section on the peace process and our relationship with Israeli Arabs, the Haredi issue, the ultra orthodox issue, the Bedouin issue. It's all in 80 quick pages. And the idea of the book was to sort of to spur conversation, especially among young people within Israel and in the United States elsewhere in the diaspora. In the way Zionist thinkers used to think about the future Jewish state, starting in the 1880s up to the 1940s. Huge literature on what this Jewish state was going to look like. And we seem to have lost the ability to have that sort of broad discussion about our future. And it was going very, very well, the discussion.

It was not a think tank. It was actually an anti think tank. I didn't want to produce any papers. I just wanted to have discussions. When the war broke out. Looking back at this book now, it is actually a better seller now than it was before the war, because many of the problems that were revealed by the war were anticipated by the book. And it's actually more crucial now than ever before.

You know, Manya, I’m often asked, What wars does this war most resemble? Is it the 67 war where we were surrounded by enemies, the 73 war, when we were surprised by our enemies? But truly, the war that most resembles this one is the War of Independence, where we are fighting on multiple fronts, in our neighborhoods, in our communities, and everybody's in the army. And the tremendous, tremendous cost.

So really, we're in a second Israel war of independence. And that's the bad news. The good news is we get to rebuild afterward the way we rebuilt post 1948. I don't know any other manifesto that sets out the goals that we have to strive if we're going to have a successful Second War of Independence. Certainly, we have to address the Haredi issue. That's not sustainable.

We have to address the Bedouin issue, you know, the IDF secured the release of one of the hostages several weeks ago, a Bedouin gentleman. It was an extraordinary event, definitely praiseworthy, but that Bedouin had two wives, and had settled illegally on state land, and that sort of it was indicative of the type of problems we face with a Bedouin that no one's addressing.

But it's also our education system. How can we proceed and a road to some type of better relationship with the Palestinians? How can we maintain unity within Israel, within the Jewish world? Everything from the Kotel to teaching math on a high school level in a Haredi school.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

How dismaying that there are so many wars to choose from for comparison. But I, but I appreciate the one that you the analogy that you've made and the hope that that carries with it. So, Ambassador Oren, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you.

Michael Oren:

Thank you. Let me say Shana Tova.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

Shana Tova.

Michael Oren:

I also want to give a special thank you to the American Jewish Committee. Yesterday morning, we through the office under the aegis of the the AJC, our delegation of displaced northerners met with about 20 representatives of the diplomatic community here in Washington, including the German ambassador, the Czech ambassador, the Slovakian ambassador, diplomats from Spain, Italy, and for the first time, this diplomatic community was able to hear firsthand what it is to live under daily Hezbollah rocket and drone fire, to be displaced from their homes, and it was extremely important. We're very, very grateful to AJC.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

Ambassador Oren, thank you so much for joining us.

Michael Oren:

Thank you.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

If you missed last week's episode, be sure to tune in for my conversation with two proud Jewish Paralympians on how sports can unite athletes amid antisemitism, which surfaced during the Paris 2024 Olympic Games.
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Paris 2024: 2 Proud Jewish Paralympians on How Sports Unites Athletes Amid Antisemitism
9 sep· People of the Pod
Following Hamas’ October 7 massacre of Israelis, antisemitism has infiltrated nearly every part of society – including the world of sports. At the 2024 Paris Olympic Games, Israeli athletes faced death threats and “Heil Hitler” salutes.

U.S. Paralympian Tahl Leibovitz, an Israeli-American, knows this hatred firsthand, having been targeted both on and off the court simply for being Jewish. Together with fellow Paralympian Ian Seidenfeld, the Para Table Tennis champions reflect on how they’ve seen sports serve as a powerful unifying force, despite the challenges.

___

Listen – AJC Podcasts:

The Forgotten Exodus:

Season 2 out now exploring the untold stories of Jews from Tunisia, Syria, Yemen, and more.

People of the Pod:

The DNC with AJC: What You Need to Know about the Democratic Party’s Israel Platform

Follow People of the Pod on your favorite podcast app, and learn more at AJC.org/PeopleofthePod

You can reach us at: [email protected]

If you’ve appreciated this episode, please be sure to tell your friends, and rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

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Transcript of Interview with Ian Seidenfeld and Tahl Leibovitz:

Manya Brachear Pashman:

It is always a joy to watch the Olympic Games with my children. I must confess, not until I had children, did I watch the Paralympics. If you want to see strength, grit, and resilience on a heroic level, behold British cyclist Sarah Story claim her 18th gold. My son’s favorite sports are wheelchair tennis and table tennis.

So he was particularly excited when I told him that I had the opportunity to sit down with two proud Jewish athletes who competed in this year’s Paralympic games in Paris. Twenty-three year old Ian Seidenfeld and 49-year-old Tahl Leibovitz are members of the USA 2024 Para Table Tennis team. They are here to talk about their approach to the sport and what it means to be a Jewish athlete.

Ian, Tahl: welcome to People of the Pod.

Ian Seidenfeld:

Thank you. I'm happy to be here.

Tahl Leibovitz:

It is really good to be here. I'm very excited about this.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

So what drew you to this sport, to table tennis? Ian, how about you start us off?

Ian Seidenfeld:

Yeah, I don't know if I was ever interested in table tennis, but my dad was the table tennis coach, runs the table tennis in Minnesota with the Minnesota Table Tennis Federation, so it was always kind of just a part of life in that when I was four or five years old I'd want to go with my dad to work and kind of be around him and play. And it just happened to be table tennis that he was coaching. So I didn't even know what was going on, but it was something that I enjoyed to do to kind of hang out with my dad a little bit.

Tahl Leibovitz:

I was in the South Beach Boys and Girls Club that was kind of in Queens, South Richmond Hill. And I had a lot of different things. I was doing martial arts there, which I really liked a lot. And my trainer was saying, if you do table tennis it can help you with your reflexes. You're gonna be faster. And I started doing table tennis, and I kind of got drawn into it, and I really like the challenge of it. It's very similar to chess – it's like chess and running at the same time. I do a lot of jiu-jitsu now, it's similar to that. You're trying to solve things. So it's very interesting.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

Tahl, you were born with a physical disability that makes it difficult to kind of move on your feet and to straighten your arms or flex your wrists. So I'm curious how you've balanced that. How have you overcome that?

Tahl Leibovitz:

Another good question, and most people don't even ask that, and that's probably somebody that had been playing table tennis probably for like, 10 or 20 years would kind of notice I have osteochondromas, so I have limited supination and pronation. You can't really see if I'm walking, can't see any disability, but I have bone tumors all over my body. They're benign, so it restricts movement. So to answer that, I had to find a way to adapt.

So when I hold the racket, I change the grip a lot. And I would say the two things that I never thought I would become this great player. You know, you never really know. But when I was watching the best athletes in the country in the world, I started competing against them eventually. And I started trying to think, ‘Okay, what, you know, what would be difficult? How could I make their match difficult?’ Not trying to beat them, but how can I make these matches very difficult for them?

I started doing that a lot, and then I built the style. And then, of course, you know, really believing that you can compete against anyone. I say those two things, and then I don't know, I started, I don't know what happened after. It took about eight years, and I just started doing really well, both in the able-bodied and the para competition.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

Ian, can you talk a little bit about the preparation and training process for the Paralympics and other competitions as well?

Ian Seidenfeld:

Table tennis training, a lot of it happens on the table, as you might imagine. So we're on the table for two to three hour practice sessions. And then what I try and do outside of table tennis is, for me, cardio on the bike. I live near a lake, Lake Bde Maka Ska in Minnesota, and so it's a very beautiful lake to ride around and get that kind of cardio in, two to three days a week, and then playing on the table three to four days a week for myself.

A lot of it is that hand-eye coordination is the biggest part, being able to react to the ball movement much quicker than others, I think is a defining factor, along with being able to understand spin. That's maybe the biggest difference in table tennis compared to other racquet sports, is the amount of spin we can get on the ball.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

Do you have a signature move or kind of signature maneuver that you use to best your opponents?

Ian Seidenfeld:

I think my best thing is variation. Because of my disability of dwarfism, I have shorter limbs, so I can't reach or move as far as others. So I try and control the table with angle of play as well as spin and speed variation. So it's a very, we'll call it a thinker's game, trying to outsmart the opponent some ways and keep things very uncomfortable for them. That's kind of what I try and do to my opponents.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

That’s great, keep them guessing as to what's coming their way. I love that. Well what have been some of your challenges? In other words, are there particular strategies or moves that other players use that you have really tried to get better at confronting?

Ian Seidenfeld:

Yeah, there's a lot of different things. As I said, with my disability, with dwarfism, a short stature and shorter limbs, I have had people use a short serve against me, so that I can't reach the serve to start off the point. And we've kind of fought over the last five or six years for me to be able to use a paddle extension, which will basically allow me to reach the first serve and then take the extension off and play like a normal point afterwards. So that's, for me, kind of a big difference. The other big difference for my disability would be I can't play as long because my joints are very malformed, so I have higher levels of inflammation sooner. So I kind of practice less than most people.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

So it seems like that would be something that they would regulate or accommodate. I'm kind of surprised that they would even allow a short serve in that kind of circumstance.

Ian Seidenfeld:

From how my dad described the Paralympics to me when he was playing in 1988 in Barcelona, he had won a gold medal there. At the time, it was probably more about building community and acceptance among disabilities. Just because we have a disability, we're not necessarily accepting of other disabilities.

And so in those instances, you can see, back then it was, you were kind of learning to be around other people and accept their differences. I think now we've gotten to the point where a lot of it is about this higher level of competition, and so that competitive aspect has changed things a lot more. So maybe the short serves and things, tactics that might be considered underhanded are a little bit more accepted than I'd like it to be. But who am I to argue? I'm happy to just to be able to play.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

You mentioned your father, Ian. He was a champion in the 1980s. He is now the coach of the U.S.A. Paralympic team. What other mentors or support systems have both of you had along the way?

Ian Seidenfeld:

Yeah, I think family is the biggest crutch for all of us. I know for my teammate, Jensen, he's the same age as me, and so he has a very good support system with his parents and his brother. And myself, with my parents and my sister, I think we were able to confide in them very honestly and speak candidly about everything that we're feeling.

I recently had been talking to an energy coach as well, someone to kind of give better levels of positive energy, being able to stay more present in the moment and not get ahead of myself, and I tend to guide towards the negative aspects of things, getting upset or getting annoyed or frustrated. And so I'm trying my best to get out of that.

And so I have been talking to someone to kind of help with staying positive in tougher times. So it's really about being able to be honest with yourself and with other people, and not afraid to reach out. Because, as an athlete that's competing in Paris, a lot of people want to help and do their best for you, and so you just have to be able to communicate in a mature way.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

And what about you Tahl – what does your support system look like?

Tahl Leibovitz:

Yeah, you know, that's probably one of the most important things, is when you connect to people that are, you know, trying to help you along the way. Of course, my coach Sean O’Neill has been a very good mentor. He's a two-time Olympian, five-time national champion. He's helped me greatly, helped me study for, you know, when I was doing my social work exams. We also have a lot of great coaches. Mitch Seidenfeld is our head coach. We have Vlad Farcas. He's amazing. He's, you know, a really good friend and somebody that runs the program as well.

But I would say, yeah, those three individuals, and there's another person, Dr. Dov Copler, who's practicing medicine. He's helped me a lot as well. Of course, my wife, I've been married for more than 20 years, she's unbelievable, and we're, you know, best friends, and she's helped me, you know, without her, I probably couldn't make these achievements not be possible.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

I'm curious, has your Jewish identity played a role in your athletic success, your academics or your professional careers?

Ian Seidenfeld:

Yeah, my Jewish identity. So I'm a reform Jew, but I think it's a lot about the community and family that I have that's really important to me, and I've been able to look up to them and what they've done in their careers and their lives, and how they kind of view life in a lot of ways, to just enjoy it, enjoy family. And so I think I've taken a lot of that as being very important to me, being able to try and pursue both career and being consistent with my family.

Tahl Leibovitz:

I was born in Israel. You know, I was born in Haifa. Obviously, I'm very connected to Israel. And I went to a thing called the Maccabi Games that was in 1997, that was my first games. And the people, the experience, it was just so amazing. And that's the first time I had been back to Israel. I'm trying to think, I was 22 years old, I think at that time. So I would say, yeah, Israel, I feel so good there. There's a very good connection to being there. So that's the positive note and, you know, and also coming up, you know, on a negative thing. You know, being Jewish, of course, it's not easy in some ways, you know, I went through, in a lot of obstacles and different things because of that.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

So can you talk a little bit about some of the obstacles that you have encountered along that being Jewish have presented?

Tahl Leibovitz:

When I grew up – well, I lived in the street when I was a boy, you know, for maybe 13 to about 21 but it's interesting before that, even when I was, I grew up in Howard Beach, and then eventually I was living in kind of, like, by Cypress Hills in New York City. And there's, like, a shame that being Jewish, like I was, you know, is like, in some way, from my peers, like I wasn't around a lot of Jewish people, and they were, you know, they make fun of you.

They like, you feel this, and I didn't know anything really. I was only a kid, but I think having my grandfather was, like, a really good, I mean, he made a, you know, spending time with him was a big difference. He was a Holocaust survivor. One thing I learned from him, which I think is so important, I think more people should do. When you look at the Jewish community, it's like the family. There's a very strong sense of family. And I feel, even when I'm in Israel, because I'm very good friends with a lot of people on the table tennis team, the Israeli Center, I feel such a good connection, like I feel really a part of something, and that is really important.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

So in other words, being part of that sports community and a team, there's something kind of Jewish about that and that family feel. You spoke about the negative. Of course, Israeli athletes competing in Paris, some have received death threats and hate messages online, and then at the soccer match between Israel and Paraguay, spectators were yelling Heil Hitler during the Israeli national anthem. As a Jewish athlete, as an Israeli-born Jewish athlete, is this hate something that you have encountered along the way, or is this hate just reserved for the athletes representing Israel?

Tahl Leibovitz:

You know, I'll say two things to that. The first being that, you know, obviously, what happened, you know, in October of last year. You feel something. You could say whatever you want. There's no words. I feel like I've overcome a lot of adversity, but to feel that, like, that you can't do anything. You feel so badly, you know. So there's a connection, I think, you know from all of us that is the first thing. So, and you look at what's happening in the schools, Columbia University, and a lot of these things, so there is a heightened sense of antisemitism, for sure.

And I would say that does happen. I'll give you one quick example, which is very, very interesting. I had to play a league match. This wasn't even too long ago, just two months ago, so to play a league match. And there were, you know, I'm not saying these people are bad or good, but they were from Egypt. There were two players, and then they, they came in and they said, ‘Do you know where we were?’

And I was like, ‘Okay, where were you guys at?’ And they said, ‘Well, we're in the mosque, and we were praying for the destruction of Israel. We were praying that Israel would be destroyed.’ I'm about to start a match with these guys, and, you know, obviously I'm a therapist, so, you know, I have a lot, you know, patients, and I ended up winning against them. So they were not too happy. But the point is that I tend to think about, like when people bring that, they have great difficulties within themselves.

And of course, you can match that, you know, with it, with anything you know. You can be aggressive with them. But I find if people sit long enough in some of these, I don't know if you want to call it delusions that they have, because a lot of people, we're just human beings. People hate Jewish people for no reason, like, it's like, they don't even know me. It's like, you're hating somebody for something, you don't even know them. So I think when people sit with that, they tend to, you know, they spend a little more time with you. Sports can do that too. It kind of humanized people together.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

That's interesting. You have actually called your birthplace your favorite place on earth. And I'm curious, how do you honor both your American and Israeli identities while representing the United States in competition?

Tahl Leibovitz:

Yeah, that's a very good question. And I would say for me, the thing, because I've been to a lot of different tournaments, the Paralympics, a lot of different things, the most incredible experience for me has been like I mentioned the Maccabi Games. So that's one thing, and I stay connected, you know, and it's also not just what I'm doing. Look, I'm a table tennis player, I do the best I can. But, you know, there's some people that I've, you know, there's a student I work with. Her name is Estee Ackerman. She does a lot of public speaking. She was a great player.

We, you know, I trained her for many years. So you, kind of, I would say the answer is this sort of community, you know, and to and to be connected to yourself, and also to be even in therapy, you know, actually, I'll say one other thing. I could say a lot. I work for a few, I have contracted a few different places. And I said to one place, you know, after this thing happened in Israel, I said, and again, I have no special ability.

I just said, look, send me the people that were affected by Israel. I said, those are the people I want to work with now. I said, send me as many as you can, as much as you can. And then I started working with them. And it is, the truth is, it's profoundly effective. Like there were, you know, these people that can't function at work. You know, it's something, some of them were very connected, they're affected in some way, obviously. So I just give what I can. I can't change the world, but I know, like, I can give the best I can to people, and even if I do my small part, it's okay.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

So after this year's Paralympics, what’s next?

Ian Seidenfeld:

I think the goal is really to just try and feel comfortable and try and have fun out there, and the results will come. But after the Paralympics, I work for a company called Allianz, a global insurance company, and so I plan to continue working for them afterwards, and they've been, they're a sponsor of the Olympics and Paralympics, so they've been very supportive of my training, and so I plan to continue working for them and continue training for the next World Championships and Maccabi Games, and we actually have our own Allianz Olympics coming up in 2026, so there's a lot more table tennis to be played, and ultimately I hope to compete in LA 2028 so I might take a month or two off, but other than that, it'll be back to training as usual.

Tahl Leibovitz:

Well I set a goal that I wanted to try to continue to 2028 since I won my first gold medal in 1996. That was my biggest achievement. And so now I'm saying, all right, we have 2028 in LA, so I will continue to 2028. I'm in pretty good, playing pretty well, doing a lot of fitness. So I feel okay. And yeah, probably do that, and then I will see. Most likely I will retire, I think, although people keep pushing me to do another two, but that would be 2036 would be my last one. So it's a little, I’m 50 years old, almost, so, but we'll see. I think 2028, then I'll reevaluate.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

Well thank you both so much for joining us. Is there anything I have not asked you that you definitely want to share with our audience before we go?

Ian Seidenfeld:

I think when we're talking about acceptance and love and trying to overcome our differences and challenges, I think the Paralympics can be a very good representation of what we can all do together, as the Olympics was founded as well to find common ground among nations, and I think there is a lot of hate and rhetoric that's spoken throughout the US and throughout the world, that hopefully people will be able to watch the Olympics and Paralympics and feel a more, a greater sense of unity among people. And hopefully we won't have death threats and that kind of hate, that's really unnecessary. I hope.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

Well said. Thank you so much. Ian, Tahl, Mazal Tov!

Ian Seidenfeld:

Thank you very much. I appreciate it.

Tahl Leibovitz:

Thank you. Thank you so much.
- Lyssna Lyssna igen Fortsätt Lyssnar...
- Lyssna senare Lyssna senare
The Forgotten Exodus: Tunisia – Listen to the Season 2 Premiere
30 aug· People of the Pod
Listen to the premiere episode of the second season of The Forgotten Exodus, the multi-award-winning, chart-topping, and first-ever narrative podcast series to focus exclusively on Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews. This week’s episode focuses on Jews from Tunisia. If you like what you hear, subscribe before the next episode drops on September 3.

“In the Israeli DNA and the Jewish DNA, we have to fight to be who we are. In every generation, empires and big forces tried to erase us . . . I know what it is to be rejected for several parts of my identity... I'm fighting for my ancestors, but I'm also fighting for our future generation.”

Hen Mazzig, a writer, digital creator, and founder of the Tel Aviv Institute, shares his powerful journey as a proud Israeli, LGBTQ+, and Mizrahi Jew, in the premiere episode of the second season of the award-winning podcast, The Forgotten Exodus.

Hen delves into his family's deep roots in Tunisia, their harrowing experiences during the Nazi occupation, and their eventual escape to Israel. Discover the rich history of Tunisia's ancient Amazigh Jewish community, the impact of French colonial and Arab nationalist movements on Jews in North Africa, and the cultural identity that Hen passionately preserves today. Joining the conversation is historian Lucette Valensi, an expert on Tunisian Jewish culture, who provides scholarly insights into the longstanding presence of Jews in Tunisia, from antiquity to their exodus in the mid-20th century.

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Show notes:

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“Meditative Middle Eastern Flute”: Publisher: Pond5 Publishing Beta (BMI), Composer: Danielyan Ashot Makichevich (BMI), IPI Name #00855552512, United States BMI

“Tunisia Eastern”: Publisher: Edi Surya Nurrohim, Composer: Edi Surya Nurrohim, Item ID#155836469.

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“Tunisian Pot Dance (Short)”: Publisher: Pond5 Publishing Beta (BMI); Composer: kesokid, ID #97451515

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Episode Transcript:

HEN MAZZIG: They took whatever they had left and they got on a boat. And my grandmother told me this story before she passed away on how they were on this boat coming to Israel.

And they were so happy, and they were crying because they felt that finally after generations upon generations of oppression they are going to come to a place where they are going to be protected, and that she was coming home.

MANYA BRACHEAR PASHMAN: The world has overlooked an important episode in modern history: the 800,000 Jews who left or were driven from their homes in the Middle East and North Africa in the mid-20th century.

Welcome to the second season of The Forgotten Exodus, brought to you by American Jewish Committee. This series explores that pivotal moment in history and the little-known Jewish heritage of Iran and Arab nations.

As Jews around the world confront violent antisemitism and Israelis face daily attacks by terrorists on multiple fronts, our second season explores how Jews have lived throughout the region for generations–despite hardship, hostility, and hatred–then sought safety and new possibilities in their ancestral homeland.

I'm your host, Manya Brachear Pashman. Join us as we explore untold family histories and personal stories of courage, perseverance, and resilience from this transformative and tumultuous period of history for the Jewish people and the Middle East.

The world has ignored these voices. We will not. This is The Forgotten Exodus.

Today's episode: leaving Tunisia.

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[Tel Aviv Pride video]

MANYA BRACHEAR PASHMAN: Every June, Hen Mazzig, who splits his time between London and Tel Aviv, heads to Israel to show his Pride. His Israeli pride. His LGBTQ+ pride. And his Mizrahi Jewish pride. For that one week, all of those identities coalesce.

And while other cities around the world have transformed Pride into a June version of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, Israel is home to one of the few vibrant LGBTQ communities in the Middle East. Tel Aviv keeps it real.

HEN: For me, Pride in Israel, in Tel Aviv, it still has this element of fighting for something. And that it’s important for all of us to show up and to come out to the Pride Parade because if we’re not going to be there, there’s some people with agendas to erase us and we can't let them do it.

MANYA: This year, the Tel Aviv Pride rally was a more somber affair as participants demanded freedom for the more than 100 hostages still held in Gaza since October 7th.

On that day, Hamas terrorists bent on erasing Jews from the Middle East went on a murderous rampage, killing more than 1,200, kidnapping 250 others, and unleashing what has become a 7-front war on Israel.

HEN: In the Israeli DNA and the Jewish DNA we have to fight to be who we are. In every generation, empires and big forces tried to erase us, and we had to fight. And the LGBTQ+ community also knows very well how hard it is.

I know what it is to be rejected for several parts of my identity. And I don't want anyone to go through that. I don't want my children to go through that. I'm fighting for my ancestors, but I'm also fighting for our future generation.

MANYA: Hen Mazzig is an international speaker, writer, and digital influencer. In 2022, he founded the Tel Aviv Institute, a social media laboratory that tackles antisemitism online. He’s also a second-generation Israeli, whose maternal grandparents fled Iraq, while his father’s parents fled Tunisia – roots that echo in the family name: Mazzig.

HEN: The last name Mazzig never made sense, because in Israel a lot of the last names have meaning in Hebrew.

So I remember one of my teachers in school was saying that Mazzig sounds like mozeg, which means pouring in Hebrew. Maybe your ancestors were running a bar or something? Clearly, this teacher did not have knowledge of the Amazigh people.

Which, later on I learned, several of those tribes, those Amazigh tribes, were Jewish or practiced Judaism, and that there was 5,000 Jews that came from Tunisia that were holding both identities of being Jewish and Amazigh.

And today, they have last names like Mazzig, and Amzaleg, Mizzoug. There's several of those last names in Israel today. And they are the descendants of those Jewish communities that have lived in the Atlas Mountains.

MANYA: The Atlas Mountains. A 1,500-mile chain of magnificent peaks and treacherous terrain that stretch across Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, separating the Sahara from the Mediterranean and Atlantic coastline.

It’s where the nomadic Amazigh have called home for thousands of years. The Amazigh trace their origins to at least 2,000 BCE in western North Africa. They speak the language of Tamazight and rely on cattle and agriculture as their main sources of income.

But textiles too. In fact, you’ve probably heard of the Amazigh or own a rug woven by them. A Berber rug.

HEN: Amazigh, which are also called Berbers. But they're rejecting this term because of the association with barbarians, which was the title that European colonialists when they came to North Africa gave them.

There's beautiful folklore about Jewish leaders within the Amazigh people. One story that I really connected to was the story of Queen Dihya that was also known as El-Kahina, which in Arabic means the Kohen, the priest, and she was known as this leader of the Amazigh tribes, and she was Jewish.

Her derrogaters were calling her a Jewish witch, because they said that she had the power to foresee the future. And her roots were apparently connected to Queen Sheba and her arrival from Israel back to Africa. And she was the descendant of Queen Sheba. And that's how she led the Amazigh people.

And the stories that I read about her, I just felt so connected. How she had this long, black, curly hair that went all the way down to her knees, and she was fierce, and she was very committed to her identity, and she was fighting against the Islamic expansion to North Africa.

And when she failed, after years of holding them off, she realized that she can't do it anymore and she's going to lose. And she was not willing to give up her Jewish identity and convert to Islam and instead she jumped into a well and died.

This well is known today in Tunisia. It’s the [Bir] Al-Kahina or Dihya’s Well that is still in existence. Her descendants, her kids, were Jewish members of the Amazigh people.

Of course, I would like to believe that I am the descendant of royalty.

MANYA: Scholars debate whether the Amazigh converted to Judaism or descended from Queen Dihya and stayed.

Lucette Valensi is a French scholar of Tunisian history who served as a director of studies at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris, one of the most prestigious institutions of graduate education in France. She has written extensively about Tunisian Jewish culture.

Generations of her family lived in Tunisia. She says archaeological evidence proves Jews were living in that land since Antiquity.

LUCETTE VALENSI: I myself am a Chemla, born Chemla. And this is an Arabic name, which means a kind of belt. And my mother's name was Tartour, which is a turban [laugh].

So the names were Arabic. So my ancestors spoke Arabic. I don't know if any of them spoke Berber before, or Latin. I have no idea. But there were Jews in antiquity and of course, through Saint Augustin.

MANYA: So when did Jews arrive in Tunisia?

LUCETTE: [laugh] That’s a strange question because they were there since Antiquity. We have evidence of their presence in mosaics of synagogues, from the times of Byzantium.

I think we think in terms of a short chronology, and they would tend to associate the Jews to colonization, which does not make sense, they were there much before French colonization. They were there for millennia.

MANYA: Valensi says Jews lived in Tunisia dating to the time of Carthage, an ancient city-state in what is now Tunisia, that reached its peak in the fourth century BCE. Later, under Roman and then Byzantine rule, Carthage continued to play a vital role as a center of commerce and trade during antiquity.

Besides the role of tax collectors, Jews were forbidden to serve in almost all public offices. Between the 5th and 8th centuries CE, conditions fluctuated between relief and forced conversions while under Christian rule.

After the Islamic conquest of Tunisia in the seventh and early eighth centuries CE, the treatment of Jews largely depended on which Muslim ruler was in charge at the time.

Some Jews converted to Islam while others lived as dhimmis, or second-class citizens, protected by the state in exchange for a special tax known as the jizya.

In 1146, the first caliph of the Almohad dynasty, declared that the Prophet Muhammad had granted Jews religious freedom for only 500 years, by which time if the messiah had not come, they had to convert.

Those who did not convert and even those who did were forced to wear yellow turbans or other special garb called shikra, to distinguish them from Muslims.

An influx of Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal arrived in the 14th Century. In the 16th Century, Tunisia became part of the Ottoman Empire, and the situation of Jews improved significantly. Another group who had settled in the coastal Tuscan city of Livorno crossed the Mediterranean in the 17th and 18th centuries to make Tunisia their home.

LUCETTE: There were other groups that came, Jews from Italy, Jews from Spain, of course, Spain and Portugal, different periods. 14th century already from Spain and then from Spain and Portugal. From Italy, from Livorno, that's later, but the Jews from Livorno themselves came from Spain.

So I myself am named Valensi. From Valencia. It was the family name of my first husband. So from Valencia in Spain they went to Livorno, and from Livorno–Leghorn in English–to Tunisia.

MANYA: At its peak, Tunisia’s Jewish population exceeded 100,000 – a combination of Sephardi and Mizrahi.

HEN: When we speak about Jews from the Middle East and North Africa, specifically in the West, or mainly in the West, we're referring to them as Sephardi.

But in Tunisia, it's very interesting to see that there was the Grana community which are Livorno Jews that moved to Tunisia in the 1800s, and they brought the Sephardi way of praying.

And that’s why I always use the term Mizrahi to describe myself, because I feel like it encapsulates more of my identity. And for me, the Sephardi title that we often use on those communities doesn't feel accurate to me, and it also has the connection to Ladino, which my grandparents never spoke.

They spoke Tamazight, Judeo-Tamazight, which was the language of those tribes in North Africa. And my family from my mother's side, from Iraq, they were speaking Judeo-Iraqi-Arabic.

So for me, the term Sephardi just doesn't cut it. I go with Mizrahi to describe myself.

MANYA: The terms Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and Mizrahi all refer to the places Jews once called home.

Ashkenazi Jews hail from Central and Eastern Europe, particularly Germany, Poland, and Russia. They traditionally speak Yiddish, and their customs and practices reflect the influences of Central and Eastern European cultures.

Pogroms in Eastern Europe and the Holocaust led many Ashkenazi Jews to flee their longtime homes to countries like the United States and their ancestral homeland, Israel.

Mizrahi, which means “Eastern” in Hebrew, refers to the diaspora of descendants of Jewish communities from Middle Eastern countries such as: Iraq, Iran, and Yemen, and North African countries such as: Tunisia, Libya, and Morocco. Ancient Jewish communities that have lived in the region for millennia long before the advent of Islam and Christianity. They often speak dialects of Arabic.

Sephardi Jews originate from Spain and Portugal, speaking Ladino and incorporating Spanish and Portuguese cultural influences. Following their expulsion from the Iberian Peninsula in 1492, they settled in regions like North Africa and the Balkans. In Tunisia, the Mizrahi and Sephardi communities lived side by side, but separately.

HEN: As time passed, those communities became closer together, still quite separated, but they became closer and closer. And perhaps the reason they were becoming closer was because of the hardship that they faced as Jews.

For the leaders of Muslim armies that came to Tunisia, it didn't matter if you were a Sephardi Jew, or if you were an Amazigh Jew. You were a Jew for them.

MANYA: Algeria’s invasion of Tunisia in the 18th century had a disproportionate effect on Tunisia’s Jewish community. The Algerian army killed thousands of the citizens of Tunis, many of whom were Jewish. Algerians raped Jewish women, looted Jewish homes.

LUCETTE: There were moments of trouble when you had an invasion of the Algerian army to impose a prince. The Jews were molested in Tunis.

MANYA: After a military invasion, a French protectorate was established in 1881 and lasted until Tunisia gained independence in 1956. The Jews of Tunisia felt much safer under the French protectorate.

They put a lot of stock in the French revolutionary promise of Liberté, égalité, fraternité. Soon, the French language replaced Judeo-Arabic.

LUCETTE: Well, under colonization, the Jews were in a better position. First, the school system. They went to modern schools, especially the Alliance [Israélite Universelle] schools, and with that started a form of Westernization.

You had also schools in Italian, created by Italian Jews, and some Tunisian Jews went to these schools and already in the 19th century, there was a form of acculturation and Westernization.

Access to newspapers, creation of newspapers. In the 1880s Jews had already their own newspapers in Hebrew characters, but Arabic language.

And my grandfather was one of the early journalists and they started having their own press and published books, folklore, sort of short stories.

MANYA: In May 1940, Nazi Germany invaded France and quickly overran the French Third Republic, forcing the French to sign an armistice agreement in June. The armistice significantly reduced the territory governed by France and created a new government known as the Vichy regime, after the central French city where it was based.

The Vichy regime collaborated with the Nazis, establishing a special administration to introduce anti-Jewish legislation and enforce a compulsory Jewish census in all of its territories including Tunisia.

Hen grew up learning about the Holocaust, the Nazis’ attempt to erase the Jewish people. As part of his schooling, he learned the names of concentration and death camps and he heard the stories from his friends’ grandparents.

But because he was not Ashkenazi, because his grandparents didn’t suffer through the same catastrophe that befell Europe, Hen never felt fully accepted.

It was a trauma that belonged to his Ashkenazi friends of German and Polish descent, not to him. Or so they thought and so he thought, until he was a teenager and asked his grandmother Kamisa to finally share their family’s journey from Tunisia. That’s when he learned that the Mazzig family had not been exempt from Hitler’s hatred.

In November 1942, Tunisia became the only North African country to come under Nazi Germany’s occupation and the Nazis wasted no time.

Jewish property was confiscated, and heavy fines were levied on large Jewish communities. With the presence of the Einsatzkommando, a subgroup of the Einsatzgruppen, or mobile killing units, the Nazis were prepared to implement the systematic murder of the Jews of Tunisia. The tide of the war turned just in time to prevent that.

LUCETTE: At the time the Germans came, they did not control the Mediterranean, and so they could not export us to the camps. We were saved by that. Lanor camps for men in dangerous places where there were bombs by the Allies. But not for us, it was, I mean, they took our radios. They took the silverware or they took money, this kind of oppression, but they did not murder us.

They took the men away, a few families were directly impacted and died in the camps. A few men. So we were afraid. We were occupied. But compared to what Jews in Europe were subjected to, we didn't suffer.

MANYA: Almost 5,000 Jews, most of them from Tunis and from certain northern communities, were taken captive and incarcerated in 32 labor camps scattered throughout Tunisia. Jews were not only required to wear yellow stars, but those in the camps were also required to wear them on their backs so they could be identified from a distance and shot in the event they tried to escape.

HEN: My grandmother never told me until before she died, when she was more open about the stories of oppression, on how she was serving food for the French Nazi officers that were occupying Tunisia, or how my grandfather was in a labor camp, and he was supposed to be sent to a death camp in Europe as well. They never felt like they should share these stories.

MANYA: The capture of Tunisia by the Allied forces in May 1943 led the Axis forces in North Africa to surrender. But the country remained under French colonial rule and the antisemitic legislation of the Vichy regime continued until 1944. Many of the Vichy camps, including forced labor camps in the Sahara, continued to operate.

Even after the decline and fall of the Vichy regime and the pursuit of independence from French rule began, conditions for the Mazzig family and many others in the Tunisian Jewish community did not improve.

But the source of much of the hostility and strife was actually a beacon of hope for Tunisia’s Jews. On May 14, 1948, the world had witnessed the creation of the state of Israel, sparking outrage throughout the Arab world. Seven Arab nations declared war on Israel the day after it declared independence.

Amid the rise of Tunisian nationalism and its push for independence from France, Jewish communities who had lived in Tunisia for centuries became targets. Guilty by association. No longer welcome. Rabbinical councils were dismantled. Jewish sports associations banned. Jews practiced their religion in hiding. Hen’s grandfather recounted violence in the Jewish quarter of Tunis.

HEN: When World War Two was over, the Jewish community in Tunisia was hoping that now that Tunisia would have emancipation, and it would become a country, that their neighbors and the country itself would protect them.

Because when it was Nazis, they knew that it was a foreign power that came from France and oppressed them. They knew that there was some hatred in the past, from their Muslim neighbors towards them.

But they also were hoping that, if anything, they would go back to the same status of a dhimmi, of being a protected minority. Even if they were not going to be fully accepted and celebrated in this society, at least they would be protected, for paying tax. And this really did not happen.

MANYA: By the early 1950s, life for the Mazzig family became untenable. By then, American Jewish organizations based in Tunis started working to take Jews to Israel right away.

HEN: [My family decided to leave.] They took whatever they had left. And they got on a boat. And my grandmother told me this story before she passed away on how they were on this boat coming to Israel.

And they were so happy, and they were crying because they felt that finally after generations upon generations of oppression of living as a minority that knows that anytime the ruler might turn on them and take everything they have and pull the ground underneath their feet, they are going to come to a place where they are going to be protected. And maybe they will face hate, but no one will hate them because they're Jewish.

And I often dream about my grandmother being a young girl on this boat and how she must have felt to know that the nightmare and the hell that she went through is behind her and that she was coming home.

MANYA: The boat they sailed to Israel took days. When Hen’s uncle, just a young child at the time, got sick, the captain threatened to throw him overboard. Hen’s grandmother hid the child inside her clothes until they docked in Israel. When they arrived, they were sprayed with DDT to kill any lice or disease, then placed in ma’abarot, which in Hebrew means transit camps. In this case, it was a tent with one bed.

HEN: They were really mistreated back then. And it's not criticism. I mean, yes, it is also criticism, but it's not without understanding the context. That it was a young country that just started, and those Jewish communities, Jewish refugees came from Tunisia, they didn't speak Hebrew. They didn't look like the other Jewish communities there. And while they all had this in common, that they were all Jews, they had a very different experience.

MANYA: No, the family’s arrival in the Holy Land was nothing like what they had imagined. But even still, it was a dream fulfilled and there was hope, which they had lost in Tunisia.

HEN: I think that it was somewhere in between having both this deep connection to Israel and going there because they wanted to, and also knowing that there’s no future in Tunisia. And the truth is that even–and I'm sure people that are listening to us, that are strong Zionists and love Israel, if you tell them ‘OK, so move tomorrow,’ no matter how much you love Israel, it's a very difficult decision to make.

Unless it's not really a decision. And I think for them, it wasn't really a decision. And they went through so much, they knew, OK, we have to leave and I think for the first time having a country, having Israel was the hope that they had for centuries to go back home, finally realized.

MANYA: Valensi’s family did stay a while longer. When Tunisia declared independence in 1956, her father, a ceramicist, designed tiles for the residence of President Habib Bourguiba. Those good relations did not last.

Valensi studied history in France, married an engineer, and returned to Tunisia. But after being there for five years, it became clear that Jews were not treated equally and they returned to France in 1965.

LUCETTE: I did not plan to emigrate. And then it became more and more obvious that some people were more equal than others [laugh]. And so there was this nationalist mood where responsibilities were given to Muslims rather than Jews and I felt more and more segregated.

And so, my husband was an engineer from a good engineering school. Again, I mean, he worked for another engineer, who was a Muslim. We knew he would never reach the same position. His father was a lawyer. And in the tribunal, he had to use Arabic. And so all these things accumulated, and we were displaced.

MANYA: Valensi said Jewish emigration from Tunisia accelerated at two more mileposts. Even after Tunisia declared independence, France maintained a presence and a naval base in the port city of Bizerte, a strategic port on the Mediterranean for the French who were fighting with Algeria.

In 1961, Tunisian forces blockaded the naval base and warned France to stay out of its airspace. What became known as the Bizerte Crisis lasted for three days.

LUCETTE: There were critical times, like what we call “La Crise de Bizerte.” Bizerte is a port to the west of Tunis that used to be a military port and when independence was negotiated with France, the French kept this port, where they could keep an army, and Bourguiba decided that he wanted this port back. And there was a war, a conflict, between Tunisia and France in ‘61.

And that crisis was one moment when Jews thought: if there is no French presence to protect us, then anything could happen. You had the movement of emigration.

Of course, much later, ‘67, the unrest in the Middle East, and what happened there provoked a kind of panic, and there were movements against the Jews in Tunis – violence and destruction of shops, etc. So they emigrated again. Now you have only a few hundred Jews left.

MANYA: Valensi’s first husband died at an early age. Her second husband, Abraham Udovitch, is the former chair of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. Together, they researched and published a book about the Jewish communities in the Tunisian island of Djerba. The couple now splits their time between Paris and Princeton. But Valensi returns to Tunisia every year. It’s still home.

LUCETTE: When I go, strange thing, I feel at home. I mean, I feel I belong. My Arabic comes back. The words that I thought I had forgotten come back.

They welcome you. I mean, if you go, you say you come from America, they're going to ask you questions. Are you Jewish? Did you go to Israel? I mean, these kind of very brutal questions, right away. They’re going there. The taxi driver won't hesitate to ask you: Are you Jewish? But at the same time, they’re very welcoming. So, I have no trouble.

MANYA: Hen, on the other hand, has never been to the land of his ancestors. He holds on to his grandparents’ trauma. And fear.

HEN: Tunisia just still feels a bit unsafe to me. Just as recent as a couple of months ago, there was a terror attack. So it's something that’s still occurring.

MANYA: Just last year, a member of the Tunisian National Guard opened fire on worshippers outside El Ghriba Synagogue where a large gathering of Jewish pilgrims were celebrating the festival of Lag BaOmer. The synagogue is located on the Tunisian island of Djerba where Valensi and her husband did research for their book.

Earlier this year, a mob attacked an abandoned synagogue in the southern city of Sfax, setting fire to the building’s courtyard. Numbering over 100,000 Jews on the eve of Israel’s Independence in 1948, the Tunisian Jewish community is now estimated to be less than 1,000.

There has been limited contact over the years between Tunisia and Israel. Some Israeli tourists, mostly of Tunisian origin, annually visit the El Ghriba synagogue in Djerba. But the government has largely been hostile to the Jewish state.

In the wake of the October 7 attack, the Tunisian parliament began debate on a law that would criminalize any normalization of ties with Israel. Still, Hen would like to go just once to see where his grandparents lived. Walked. Cooked. Prayed.

But to him it’s just geography, an arbitrary place on a map. The memories, the music, the recipes, the traditions. It’s no longer in Tunisia. It’s elsewhere now – in the only country that preserved it.

HEN: The Jewish Tunisian culture, the only place that it's been maintained is in Israel. That's why it's still alive. Like in Tunisia, it's not really celebrated. It's not something that they keep as much as they keep here.

Like if you want to go to a proper Mimouna, you would probably need to go to Israel, not to North Africa, although that's where it started. And the same with the Middle Eastern Jewish cuisine. The only place in the world, where be it Tunisian Jews and Iraqi Jews, or Yemenite Jews, still develop their recipes, is in Israel.

Israel is home, and this is where we still celebrate our culture and our cuisine and our identity is still something that I can engage with here.

I always feel like I am living the dreams of my grandparents, and I know that my grandmother is looking from above and I know how proud she is that we have a country, that we have a place to be safe at.

And that everything I do today is to protect my people, to protect the Jewish people, and making sure that next time when a country, when an empire, when a power would turn on Jews we’ll have a place to go to and be safe.

MANYA: Tunisian Jews are just one of the many Jewish communities who, in the last century, left Arab countries to forge new lives for themselves and future generations.

Join us next week as we share another untold story of The Forgotten Exodus.

Many thanks to Hen for sharing his story. You can read more in his memoir The Wrong Kind of Jew: A Mizrahi Manifesto.

Too many times during my reporting, I encountered children and grandchildren who didn’t have the answers to my questions because they’d never asked. That’s why one of the goals of this project is to encourage you to ask those questions. Find your stories.

Atara Lakritz is our producer. T.K. Broderick is our sound engineer.

Special thanks to Jon Schweitzer, Nicole Mazur, Sean Savage, and Madeleine Stern, and so many of our colleagues, too many to name really, for making this series possible.

You can subscribe to The Forgotten Exodus on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts, and you can learn more at AJC.org/theforgottenexodus.

The views and opinions of our guests don’t necessarily reflect the positions of AJC.

You can reach us at [email protected]. If you've enjoyed this episode, please be sure to spread the word, and hop onto Apple Podcasts or Spotify to rate us and write a review to help more listeners find us.
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The DNC with AJC: What You Need to Know about the Democratic Party’s Israel Platform
22 aug· People of the Pod
This week, on the sidelines of the Democratic National Convention, AJC hosted a program on Israel and the path to peace. Ambassador Thomas R. Nides, former U.S. Ambassador to Israel, Halie Soifer, CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, and Illinois Congressman Brad Schneider (D-IL) joined us for the conversation. AJC’s chief policy officer, Jason Isaacson, who is also the head of AJC's recently launched Center for a New Middle East, was moderating the program. AJC hosted a similar program on the sidelines of the Republican National Convention last month in Milwaukee.

*The views and opinions expressed by guests do not necessarily reflect the views or position of AJC. AJC is a nonpartisan, 501(c)3 nonprofit organization. AJC does not endorse or oppose political parties or candidates.

Episode Lineup:

(0:40) Jason Isaacson, Halie Soifer, Brad Schneider, Tom Nides

Show Notes:

Watch:

Israel and the Path to Peace - AJC at the Democratic National Convention

Listen – People of the Pod:

Is Centrism the Antidote to Political Polarization and Extremism? A Conversation with Yair Zivan

Follow People of the Pod on your favorite podcast app, and learn more at AJC.org/PeopleofthePod

You can reach us at: [email protected]

If you’ve appreciated this episode, please be sure to tell your friends, and rate and review us on Apple Podcasts.

Transcript of Panel with Jason Isaacson, Halie Soifer, Brad Schneider, Tom Nides:

Manya Brachear Pashman:

This week, on the sidelines of the Democratic National Convention, AJC hosted a program on Israel and the path to peace. Joining us for the conversation was Ambassador Tom Nides, former US ambassador to Israel, Halie Soifer, CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, and Illinois Congressman Brad Schneider.

Moderating the program was AJC’s chief policy officer Jason Isaacson, who is also the head of AJC's recently launched Center for a New Middle East.

Just a reminder, AJC is a 501(c)3 nonpartisan organization, and AJC neither supports nor opposes candidates for elective office.

Jason Isaacson:

I really wanted to begin by citing some passages from the Democratic platform and some passages from the Republican platform relating to the Middle East. I'll just mention very briefly that the Republican platform's Middle East language is short and to the point. It says, We will stand with Israel and seek peace in the Middle East. We will rebuild our alliance network in the region to ensure a future of stability, peace, stability and prosperity.

And it also promises, very quickly, to restore peace in Europe and the Middle East. The Democratic platform is much more extensive. It's an 80 page document, a long section on the Middle East.

But it says that the administration opposes settlement expansion and West Bank West Bank annexation. Also opposes the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions Movement against Israel. But it's very clear that the administration believes a strong, secure and democratic Israel is vital to the interests of the United States.

It's also quite specific about the necessity of defeating Hamas. I want to start my questioning with Halie Soifer. The question that's been on the minds of political reporters and many of us in the community, Haley, as you very well know, over the last 10 months of the war in Gaza, and has taken on new meaning in light of the change at the top of the Democratic ticket.

How can a Democratic candidate for president in the current highly charged environment maintain the support of the party's pro Israel mainstream while also keeping or winning back the loyalty of the increasingly active pro Palestinian segment of its constituency. What have we heard from Vice President Harris, for whom you worked in the Senate, that suggests that she can balance these competing policy claims?

Halie Soifer:

Well, thank you, Jason, thanks to everyone. I was told to project. And for those of you who are at the Global Forum, you know I know how to project, so I will try my best. But thanks for having me.

I did have the honor of working for then-Senator Harris, starting her first month in the Senate for two years as her national security advisor. And what I can tell you is, not only does she share the views of President Biden, we know that based on the past three and a half years, and their records standing with Israel in the lead up to and of course, in the aftermath of the horrific attacks of October 7.

Giving an unprecedented amount of military assistance to Israel, standing with Israel, not only in the aftermath of these attacks, but demanding the release of all of the hostages, and continuing to stand with Israel as it faces this threat from Iran, pre positioning military assets in the region, not once, but twice in the lead up to The attacks of April 13. But also, I can tell you from personal experience, her views on Israel didn't start from day one in the White House. I saw it from day one when she was in the Senate. She came to this role with over a decade of experience working on these issues. I traveled to Israel with her in November of 2017.

This is an issue that she feels deeply in terms of the importance of the US Israel relationship, Israel security, its right to self defense, and she is a staunch supporter of Israel. Have no doubt. I'm glad you started with the Democratic platform as well, because this also elaborates on what is the strongly pro Israel views of our party.

And make no mistake, it's not a coincidence that we have three pages detailing our support of Israel in our platform. It's pages 82-85 for those who would like to look it up. And it is no mistake that the Republican platform is empty platitudes. Two, two bullet points that barely say anything. Because this is an issue of which our party is deeply committed.

And it extends beyond Israel. It includes Israel's security in the Middle East and our platform, which has never been stronger. I testified before the platform committee. I was very happy to say this very strong pro Israel platform of 2020 not only should it not be diluted, it should be strengthened.

Because, of course, we have seen the horror of October 7, we should reflect the fact that we stand with Israel in this moment. We call for the release of the hostages, and of course, we unequivocally condemn Hamas.

All of that is reflected in this platform and more, including recognition of the horrific sexual violence that was perpetrated on that day, which the vice president herself has given voice to. So in terms of questioning how she can navigate this issue, she already has and she continues to stand with Israel.

I have no doubt that when she's elected in 78 days, with the strong support of the Jewish community, that she will continue to do so as President.

Jason Isaacson:

Thank you, Haile. Brad, I'm going to turn to you. The Republican Party platform had no specific references to Iran, but the Democratic platform went on at length about the need both to halt the regime's progress toward nuclear weapons capability and to confront Iran's and its proxies, destabilizing activities across the region. The Democrats document also pointed to instances of the Trump administration's failure to respond to certain Iranian provocations. Unfortunately, the Democratic platform didn't mention the fact that Trump administration was responsible for taking out IRGC Quds Force Chief, General Soleimani.

Now talk about how you imagine a Harris administration confronting the Iranian threats differently from the Biden administration. We have seen over the last three years, Iran has continued to develop its nuclear weapons capability, although it's not yet passed that threshold apparently. Its proxies are on the march across the region. We haven't really been successful in confronting Iran. Do you see a Harris administration taking a different approach?

Brad Schneider

Great question. And before I start, let me just welcome everybody to Chicago, to our great city, and those from Chicago, can you raise your hand? And I'm also going to take the personal indulgence to say it's good to be home with Chicago AJC.

Jason Isaacson:

Thank you, Brad. I should have said that.

Brad Schneider

Look, Iran is the greatest threat to Israel, to the region, but also to the United States. Our interests here in the region, but also here at home, and so we need to stand up to Iran and understand Iran is a threat on many different aspects. It's not just their nuclear program. It is their support of the proxies, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and more. It is their efforts to expand their reach, their influence across the region, and they do so not by building up states, but by tearing them down, creating instability across the region.

Their chant is not just Death to Israel, but Death to America. I have no doubt that the Harris-Walz administration will stay focused and understands the importance of first, ensuring that Iran never, ever gets a nuclear weapon. That has to be our number one priority. Because imagine where we would have been on April 13 if Iran had a nuclear weapon. Or this past couple of weeks, if Iran had a nuclear weapon.

The second thing I think you will see is the continuation of the policy. Reflecting on April 13, Iran launched 350 drones, rockets and missiles at Israel. It was Israel, the United States, and a arrangement or alliance of other nations that defeated that attack. That sent a very clear message that we will stand up to Iran, not leaving Israel to stand alone, or the United States and Israel standing without the support of allies, but allies throughout the region.

And just as important, if you look at who those allies are and what they believe in, they are countries, Arab countries, that are looking to the future. They're looking for a different dynamic in the Middle East. You mentioned that the Trump administration took out Soleimani. The Trump administration also laid the groundwork and helped establish the Abraham Accords. That is, I believe, the framework for the future that provides security and peace, not just to Israel, but to the other nations in the region.

And so what I believe the administration, that the Harris-Walz administration will focus on is isolating Iran, ensuring Iran can never have a nuclear weapon. Thwarting Iran's effort to expand its reach through proxies and failed states, but at the same time building up and working towards a path towards peace, security and prosperity for Israel and the region. I think that reflection of forward thinking, it's not just about Israel. It's about everything.

If you were watching last night, if you were there last night [Monday night], if you've been watching this campaign as it's unfolded. Now it'll be one month tomorrow. As it unfolds, what you're seeing is a view towards a different path that gives promise and hope to a better future that is absolutely dependent on the United States. United States leadership and US leadership on a global stage will empower and help us to ensure that Iran doesn't get that foothold on the global stage and doesn't have the ability to continue with threats to Israel in the region.

Jason Isaacson:

Well, let me stay on Iran for a second with you. Do you see a Harris administration try to return to the JCPOA?

Brad Schneider

No.

Jason Isaacson:

Or has that been totally discredited?

Brad Schneider

One thing you'll see is the Harris administration. I had a long conversation with Ilan Goldberg yesterday, the recognition that we are where we are now, we all would wish we were in a different place. 10 years ago, we were focused on getting to a place to move Iran back from the threshold of a nuclear weapon, and without relitigating the JCPOA, we moved Iran further away, a year away.

Now a year away is not eliminating Iran's capacity or capability to develop a nuclear weapon, but it is buying time. And what we should have done, I will relitigate this. We should have used that time to strengthen our position, our allies’ position to improve our prospects of moving Iran further back.

Instead, what happened was the Trump administration pulled out of the JCPOA and Iran marched forward, and where they are today is far closer to a nuclear weapon than they were 10 years ago. Where they are today are talking about days away from having enough nuclear enriched uranium, highly enriched uranium, to build not one, but multiple nuclear weapons.

And they just announced that they're working on developing the triggering mechanism, the ability to convert that enriched uranium into a nuclear weapon. So the stakes are higher. The risks are higher. Iran is closer. We've got to start where we are today, and I think the new administration coming in will start at that point and look for ways to push back, to create space, and to use that space to buy time, to use that time to get us to a place where we have more security.

But we can only go there if the administration is clear. Congress is clear. It's not a partisan issue. This has to be Democrats and Republicans saying we will never allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon, and all options are available to us to ensure that Iran does not achieve their goal.

Jason Isaacson:

Brad, thank you. Ambassador Nides. We were talking earlier this morning about the Abraham Accords, and of course, Congressman Schneider just talked about that as well.

How do you see a Harris administration, building on the Abraham Accords, success, building on what the Biden administration has tried to do in normalizing relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel. Will that be a priority for the Harris administration? What would be the obstacles that it will face as it tries to move forward in that direction.

Thomas Nides:

Well, first of all, thank you for having me. And let me give a little bit of shout out to Ted Deutch. Who is– Ted, you can't leave. I see you walking back there. Because when they decided to recruit Ted Deutsch to leave the Congress to come do this, that was your biggest, happiest day. So thank you very much for your leadership.

Let me just say there were not many things I agreed about with the Trump administration, to be clear. And when my when I was being confirmed as ambassador, one of the very nice members on the Republican side asked me, Sir, it seems to be that the Biden administration won't even talk about the Abraham Accords, and they don't even call them the Abraham Accords, I remember seeing the Senate because I'm a bit of a smart aleck, and I said, Can I explain to you something? I love the Abraham Accords, okay? I love the Abraham Accords.

The Abraham Accords was, in my view, then and is today, a foundational event. And as much as I believe that the Trump administration has done all sorts of other things, the Abraham Accords, in my view, has strengthened the State of Israel. So I congratulate them for doing it and supporting it as we have. So we should all applaud that.

And as we think about the future. Because listen, what has happened here. Even after October 7, the Bahrainians, the Moroccans and the Emiratis, they didn't abandon Israel. Quite the opposite. They've stuck with, most all of them kept their ambassadors in Israel. Most of them continue to have long involved conversations with the Prime Minister about the strength of Israel.

And in fact, several months ago, when the Iranians were attacking Israel, those same countries were indirectly helping with the United States and with Israel to protect the State of Israel, not directly, but indirectly. A lot of information sharing.

So the foundation for the Abraham Accords should be the foundation for what comes next. And what comes next. Number one, we got to get a hostage deal. For any of you – I'm leaving here to go with the hostage families. I was in Israel a couple weeks and spoke at hostage square. For all of us, for any of us, we should sit and pray to get these hostages out. And for those of you who know some of the families, it breaks my heart. We've got to get a hostage deal. The time is now, okay?

And this President and this Vice President are committed to get these hostages free, so once we can get that deal done, and that means putting pressure on Netanyahu and putting pressure on Hamas. Make no mistake, this idea that this is all about Bibi. Listen, I've got my issues with Bibi on occasions, but it's not only convincing Bibi to do what needs to be done, it also is pressuring Hamas, through the proxies, to get them to do a deal.

Once there is a hostage deal, everything starts coming into place. And what does that mean? Ultimately, would have to have a plan to rebuild Gaza. Because this fight wasn't with the Palestinian people. This fight was with Hamas, and we've got to help rebuild Gaza with a new PA, with a new group of international parties, including the Saudis and Emiratis. That's a $15 or $20 billion operation to build, rebuild Gaza. Yes, we need a new PA leadership, a new what PA leadership looks like in the future. Needs to be talked about and then, and then we need to have a conversation about normalization with Saudi Arabia.

Make no mistake, it is the single most important thing that we can do, including keeping in control of Iran, is getting a normalization with Saudi Arabia. Because it's not just Saudi Arabia, it's the rest of the Muslim world, and it's in our grasp. We can get this done. Now obviously it's a little dreamy. And how do you get the 67 votes? We'll let the geniuses on the Hill, including the congressman, figure that out.

But I do believe there is an opportunity, because Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are completely committed to this. I will say one little note. Two years ago, when Joe Biden came for his 10th visit to Israel, I remember meeting him at the airport, and if you recall, it was the same it was middle of covid. It was the same time and where he decided to go to Saudi Arabia. And you remember Joe Biden during the campaign, said some fairly aggressive things about the Saudis during the Khashoggi thing and MBS.

But he was convinced by a lot of people, mostly his national security adviser and his vice president to go to Saudi Arabia. Why? Because it was good for the security of the State of Israel. He fundamentally believed that the Saudi normalization could be and should be the keys for the security of the State of Israel. So we've got to get these hostages out. We get a plan, and we need moving on a side, normalization as quickly as humanly possible.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

If you missed last week's episode, be sure to tune in for my conversation with Yair Zivan, foreign policy advisor to Israel's opposition leader, Yair Lapid, about his new book of essays “The Center Must Hold.” In that book, authors argue for a return to centrist politics as an antidote to the extremism around the globe today.
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Is Centrism the Antidote to Political Polarization and Extremism? A Conversation with Yair Zivan
15 aug· People of the Pod
“We live in a complicated world . . . We have to balance those tensions, and the way that we do that is not by running away from them and looking for simplistic answers, but actually by embracing that complexity.”

In his new book of essays, “The Center Must Hold,” Yair Zivan, Foreign Policy Advisor to Israel’s Opposition Leader Yair Lapid, who heads Israel’s largest centrist political party, argues for a return to centrist politics as an antidote to the extremism and polarized politics proliferating around the globe today.

The essays, by authors including Israel's former Prime Minister Yair Lapid, American political commentator Jennifer Rubin, former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and philanthropist Catherine Murdoch, call populism fatally flawed and prescribe centrism as the solution to political ire around the globe.

*The views and opinions expressed by guests do not necessarily reflect the views or position of AJC.

Episode Lineup:

(0:40) Yair Zivan

Show Notes:

Listen – People of the Pod:

What the Unprecedented Assassinations of Terror Leaders Means for Israel and the Middle East

Aviva Klompas is Fighting the Normalization of Antisemitism on Social Media

On the Ground at the Republican National Convention: What's at Stake for Israel and the Middle East?

Follow People of the Pod on your favorite podcast app, and learn more at AJC.org/PeopleofthePod

You can reach us at: [email protected]

If you’ve appreciated this episode, please be sure to tell your friends, and rate and review us on Apple Podcasts.

Transcript of Interview with Yair Zivan:

Manya Brachear Pashman:

Yair Zivan has served as an advisor to Israel's Foreign Minister, Prime Minister and President. Most recently, he has edited a series of essays that argue for a return to centrist politics as an antidote to the extremism and polarized politics we see proliferating around the globe today. The title of that book: “The Center Must Hold”.

The essays by authors including Israel's former Prime Minister Yair Lapid, American political commentator Jennifer Rubin, former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and philanthropist Catherine Murdoch, call out populism as fatally flawed and prescribe centrism as the solution to political ire around the globe. Yair, welcome to People of the Pod.

Yair Zivan:

Thank you very much. Thank you for having me.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

So let's start with the title of this essay collection, which is a spin, your spin on the line from the Yates poem The Second Coming. And that poem was written more than a century ago, also during a time of worldwide angst after World War One and the flu pandemic and the poem's opening line is, things fall apart, the center cannot hold. Why do you argue the center must hold?

Yair Zivan:

So I think that the play on words there is about a kind of a fatalism that says it can't and saying, Well, we don't really have that luxury if we believe, as I do, that the center is the answer to the polarization and the populism and the extremism that's tearing us apart, then it simply has to hold.

Now that's not to say that it will automatically or by default. It means we have to go out and fight for it, and that's what I've been trying to do with the book and with the events around it, is to make the case that the center can hold if we go out and make that happen.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

So what is centrism anyway?

Yair Zivan:

It's a good place to start. I'll start with what centrism isn't. Centrism is not the middle. It's not a search for some point on a map between where the left and the right happen to be at any given time. That just leaves you getting dragged around from place to place by whatever the political winds are. It's not useful as a political idea. It's also not successful as a political idea.

Centrism says, here are a set of core values that we believe should be at the center of politics. They should be the things that are at the heart of our democratic political tradition, our political instinct. And you can trace it back to the early '90s, to Clinton and to Blair and the third way movement. You can trace it back much further, Oliver Wendell Holmes is often cited as a good example of a centrist political philosophy.

But at its core, what centrism says is we live in a complicated world, and we have to manage that complexity. We have to balance those tensions, and the way that we do that is not by running away from them and looking for simplistic answers, but actually by embracing that complexity. And by saying when we find the best balance between these competing tensions, and that's not to say split the difference and find the middle.

There are times when we go more one way and more another, it's to say that is the way that we can best hold within us the complexities of running a country today. And there are some very core values at the heart of that liberal patriotism, this idea that it's good to love your country. It's good to be a patriot without being a nationalist, without hating others, without having to degrade other people in order to affirm your sense of love for your own country.

We talk about equality of opportunity, the idea that the role of government is to give everybody the best possible chance to succeed. It's not to guarantee an equality of outcome at the end, but it's to say we're going to make sure that children have a good education system and that their health care system gives them a chance to succeed, and they have a hot meal every day, and then people that want to work hard and take those opportunities and be innovative will be able to succeed in society.

It talks about the politics of hope, as opposed to the politics of fear and division, so creating a national story that people can rally around, rather than one that divides us inevitably into camps and separates us, which is what I think populists and extremists try to do.

So there's a whole host of them, and I would say one of the core ones, and maybe why it's so important and so relevant now, is that centrism is the place where you defend liberal democracy. It's fashionable today to talk about the death of liberalism and why liberalism can't possibly survive, and liberal democracy is an aberration in human history, and really we’re meant to be ruled by kings and autocrats. And I say no, liberal democracy is good. It's actually the best system of government we've ever had, and we should work really hard to defend it and to protect it.

And the only place you can do that is in the political center. You can't trust the political right and the political left to defend the institutions of liberal democracy, because they only do it up until the point when it's uncomfortable for them. The right has taken on itself the mantle of free speech, and the right is really great at protecting free speech right up until the point that it's speech they don't like and then they're banning books in libraries.

And the left loves talking about protecting the institutions of liberal democracy until it disagrees with them, and then it's happy to start bending around the edges. The Center is the place where we say the institutions, the ideas, the culture of liberal democracy, is something that's worth defending and worth defending passionately and strongly.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

So I'm curious, are these core values universal to centrism, or are they really up to individual communities? Is it, in other words, is it up to communities, nations to decide what centrism is in their region, in their neck of the woods, if you will?

Yair Zivan:

So there is always variety in any political idea, in any political approach, where people adapt it to their own systems, but the core principles have to be the same core principles. And one of the things I set out to do in this book is to say, actually, centrism is something that works across the globe. So Malcolm Turnbull, the former Australian Prime Minister, and Andreas Velasco, a former presidential candidate in Latin America, and we have Argentinians, and we have a Japanese contributor, and the idea is to say centrism as the principles that I laid out as the core idea is the antidote to the extremism and polarization that we're seeing works everywhere, and that's actually a really important part.

Now, sure, there are different issues that you deal with in different countries. Also say the threat is different in different countries, if part of what we're doing is an alternative to extremism and polarization. Then in Latin America, people are more worried today about the rise of a populist far left, whereas in Europe, they might be more worried about the rise of a populist far right. And so the challenge is different and the response is different, but the core principles, I think, are the same and they are consistent.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

So do you believe that this philosophy is eroding? I mean, it seems to be happening at the same time around the world, in various democracies, Europe, United States, Israel. But do you agree? I mean, is this eroding, or is that too strong a word?

Yair Zivan:

Look, I think one of the problems with centrist is we're often not very good at talking about our successes and pretty down on ourselves, rather than actually taking pride in really good things that we've done and in places where we win and places where we do well, the test of a political idea is not if it wins every election. No one wins every election, right? That's part of politics as a pendulum. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, but the more important thing is not whether you win every election. And don't get me wrong, I work in politics. I like to win. I like to get votes. I like to be in government so that we can do the things that we care about, right? That's why we're in politics. But the test of the idea is whether it can also survive, defeat, an opposition and a time when you're not in power and come back from that stronger. And I think centrism has done that, and can continue to do that.

But part of the reason for the book is we haven't always been articulate enough, confident enough and coherent enough in the way that we present our case, and that's something that I hope this book will have some kind of role in changing. That is to say we need to be proud of our successes and our achievements. What happens when you have a successful centrist government, the next people in the political party that come along disavow it and move away from it. You saw it in Tony Blair's Labor Party. I would argue that new labor was an incredibly successful political project, and the thing that came next was a labor party that did everything it could to run away from that rather than embrace that legacy.

And as the Labor Party reembrace that legacy, not coincidentally, it also came to power again in the UK, and you see that across the world. I think there are places clearly where we're struggling and places where we need to do a better job, but I also think there are enough examples to show that centrism can work, and the kind of politics that we're pushing for can work and can be successful.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

So where is it struggling and where is it succeeding the most?

Yair Zivan:

So look, I'll talk about something that is maybe close to our heart on this podcast, and that's the situation in Israel today, Israel is going through the most difficult time, I think, as a country that certainly in our lifetimes, if not since 1948 we October 7 was was the darkest day that any of us lived through. I'm a little reticent to talk about the political response to that, but one of the things that's interesting from a centrist perspective, is the response of the Israeli public has not been to move to the right. It's been to move to the political center. And if you look at opinion polls in Israel today, the next government, if elections were held today, would be a center center right government. And I'm confident that that will hold all the way through to whenever we have the next election. And I think that's because there is a sense in Israel that actually people want that type of governance. They want people who understand that you need to embrace compromise and moderation and pragmatism as values, rather than looking at them as kind of a political slur, as a vice, as something that we need to talk down about. And so I look at Israel as a place where, actually we lost the election.

In November '22 we elected a government that was, to my mind, very right wing. And populist and incredibly problematic. I think we've paid a very high price for that in the last 18 months or so, and now there is a move back towards the political center. Look, I think Emmanuel Macron has been an example of the success of political centrism. The fact that he struggled in the parliament in the most recent parliamentary elections is not an indictment of the fact that he managed to build a political center in France that wasn't really there before.

And the test, I guess, will be whether in two years, there is a successor from his party or not. So there are plenty of places I think that I can look out for being successful and where centrism does well. I think there's been some really good examples of political centrism in the US as well, despite the popular media narrative that everything is polarized. You look at groups like the problem solvers caucus in Congress, and you say, here is a group of members of Congress who are determined to work together, who are determined to cooperate and to find solutions to complicated problems and approach it in a really centrist way. Would I like to see centrists winning more in bigger majorities everywhere? Absolutely.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

Can you give an example of an issue, pick a country, any country, but an issue that would really benefit from that pragmatic approach, that pragmatic centrist approach, sir

Yair Zivan:

Arne Duncan, who was President Obama's Secretary of Education, who writes about a willingness to take on teachers unions and a willingness to demand standards and a sense of what is the focus of education, right? Where the focus of education should be providing the best possible education to children, something we should all be able to rally around, and yet, something that we seem to have lost along the way.

And I think education comes back again and again as a core centrist focus. That's one. The other one that I think is really interesting is the essay by Rachel Pritzker. Rachel writes about climate change and about environment, and in it, she makes what I think is a really compelling case that says we can't fight back against the need for energy abundance, because, particularly in the developing world, people need energy in order to improve their quality of life, and they need a lot more energy than they have now. And the idea that the solution to climate change is turning off the lights every so often for a bit longer, is just not practical.

Now it comes from a perspective that says climate change is real and is a problem and it's something we need to address, but it kind of pushes away from, I think, most of the orthodoxies of much of the kind of climate change movement and the environmental protection movement, and says we need something different. And that thing is a focus on technology and on innovation that will allow people to create the energy that they need in order to raise their quality of life, rather than demanding that they use less. That is, I think, a really great centrist approach. It's not a splitting of the difference. It's clearly coming down on the side that says climate change is real and it's a problem and it's something we have to address. But it's rejecting orthodoxies and offering something I think that's different.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

And this seems like such a no brainer, right? I mean, it seems like these are our values, our principles that everyone should be able to agree upon, maybe not the methodology, right? Maybe that's what's up for debate. But it seems like these are just not points of contention.

Yair Zivan:

I think we're going against the grain of politics. I think today, people don't subscribe to a real full throated defense of liberal democracy, and people aren't really willing to defend free speech, including speech that they don't like. And people are taking advantage of feelings of patriotism and dragging them to a pretty ugly nationalism or rejecting patriotism altogether. And so I think a lot of the ideas are not the most natural grain of where politics is. I was on a panel a few days ago, and one of the panelists turned to me, looked at me deeply, and said, I don't think I've ever met a centrist before.

And I thought, I think you probably have, right? And if not, then, nice to meet you, hi, I'm a centrist. But the idea that actually it's going against the trend in politics is one that troubles me. Part of what I'm trying to do is to say to people, if you are a centrist, then speak up. And it's difficult when you're a centrist, you are the biggest threat today. The fight in politics today is not between left and right, it's between the center and the extremes.

And so what happens when you come out and say, I'm a centrist? This is what I believe, is you find yourself attacked by the extremes, and that's sometimes a difficult place to be. When I put the first tweet out about my book within half an hour, I was called every name under the sun. I was a communist and a Nazi all at once, depending on who was attacking me, right?

You have to be able to withstand that too often. Centrists have been shy and have kind of hidden back and said, I don't really mean it, and actually, I don't want to have this fight. Or actually, let's not talk about politics now, rather than saying, here's a set of values I believe in, and I'm passionate about and I'm willing to fight for them, and you know what, I am as committed to them, I am as passionate about them, and I'm as willing to fight for them as the extremes are about theirs. And because I think the majority of people are centrist and are looking for that motivation, I think that allows us to win the political argument, because if we're proud enough, then people will line up behind us who already do agree with the principles, but maybe feel like they're alone or there aren't enough people that share their views.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

In other words, they're kind of anti confrontational. They avoid confrontation, or perhaps too many centrists don't want to sound too passionate about their values, because. As perhaps passion equates to extreme.

Yair Zivan:

You should be able to be a passionate centrist. You should be passionate about defending liberal democracy. You should be passionate about being a liberal patriot. You should be passionate about trying to give children equality of opportunity, right? Those things are things that it's good to be passionate about, and you should care about them.

I just don't recognize in the centrism that I see being successful, this perception of timidity, or this perception of being scared, but what you have, I think, is too many centrists who have taken that path, and you have kind of backed off and backed away from being passionate about those arguments, and that's where we lose.

So my call to centrists is to be loud and to be proud and to be passionate about the things that we really care about and where there are places where people might feel a little bit uncomfortable with it and not want to be confrontational, because maybe it goes with the more moderate and pragmatic mindset. Is to say we have to overcome it because the issues are too important for us not to.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

Do I also want to clarify, being a centrist is not at the exclusion of the right or the left, right? It's more a conversation between both, or a consensus or a compromise of both, whatever works right, whatever works best for the greater good?

Yair Zivan:

There is an element of a rejection of the left and the right, to some extent, right, particularly of the fringes, and I'm incredibly critical of even some of the more moderate left and moderate right, because they're too willing to appease the extremes on their side. They're very good at calling out extremism and populism from the other camp, but not always good enough for calling out on their own side, which I think is where the challenge really lies. The idea is not to find a compromise.

The idea is not to split the difference between old ideas. It is about saying we should be focusing on what works. And I write a line in the book, slightly glibly, that, if it works, and if it makes people's lives better, does it really matter if it comes from Marx or from Hayek, right?

The political philosophy behind it certainly matters less than if it works the way that compromise can be a successful political tool. And I think we all compromise in our lives all the time, and suddenly when we get to politics, we see it as a sign of weakness or non-committal-ness or something like that, whereas in our everyday lives, we see it as a part of being able to function as an adult in society. I think the goal of that, the way that you do that successfully, the way you compromise successfully, is by being really clear about what your values are and what your ideals are and what you believe. And only then can you go to a compromise. If I try to compromise with people without being very firm about what I believe and what's important to me, I'll just get dragged to wherever they are because they're passionate and I'm not. They're committed and I'm not. So you have to be really clear about what your values are.

And I actually think the real test about compromise is whether you do it when you're in a position of power, not in a position of weakness. In politics, people compromise because they have to. I say you should compromise because you want to. And I'll give a kind of an example, I guess. If I had 51% of the votes in Parliament, and I could pass anything I wanted, and I had a belief, a reform that I passionately believed and wanted to get through, and I could pass it 100% the way that I wanted, or I could take it down to 80% of what I want, and take 20% from other people and increase my majority from 51% to 75% I would do that because I think it's right, because I think building consensus builds more sustainable policy, because I think it creates a healthier democracy and a healthier political culture.

Because I have enough humility to say that maybe I don't know everything, and I'm not right about everything, and the other side has something useful to contribute, even to something that I'm really passionate about. That's the test of compromise. Do you do it when you don't have to, but because you think it's the right thing to do? And again, it's dependent on knowing what your values are and dependent on knowing what you're not willing to compromise on, because if you don't have that, then you don't have the anchor from which you take your political beliefs.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

In other words, kind of seeding a little bit to the other side, not because you have to, but because you need that little percentage bump to pass your legislation, but because you'll just build more of a consensus and more support on both sides of the aisle, or both sides of eight aisles, whatever, however it works. But yeah, I mean, it's really about building a consensus among lawmakers for the greater good, rather than just claiming that slim victory.

Yair Zivan:

Yeah, it creates better policy and more sustainable policy. But there's also limits to it. You very rarely in politics get 100% support for anything. And often, if you've got to the place where everyone supports it, then you've probably gone too far with the compromise, right, and you've probably watered it down too much.

There are very rare moments in politics when everybody agrees about something, and there are cases, and there are cases when we can do that, but on the really big issues, it's rare for us to get to that level of consensus, and I don't think that's necessarily desirable either. But being able to build a little bit beyond your political comfort zone, a little bit beyond your camp, I think, is a really useful thing in politics, and there are models where it works really well.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

So let me ask you more specifically. Okay, what is eroding centrism? What forces really are working against it and in the places where the center is maintaining its hold, are those forces in reverse? In other words, have they found a way to conquer those particular forces, or have they found a way to conquer what works against centrism, or has it just not reached them yet?

Yair Zivan:

So I'll start by flipping the question, I don't think it's about, does centrism work when other people aren't strong enough to attack it and to take it apart? Centrism works when it's strong enough, in and of itself, and it's defining the political agenda. The goal of what I'm trying to do with the book and with the arguments that I'm making is to say, we define what is at the core of democratic politics. Now everybody else is going to have to respond to us. So that's the first thing. Is that switch in mindset away from Are we able to withstand, where the extremes are, to a place where we say, actually, we're the solid anchor, and now we are the ones that are defining the political moment and the political issues. Where is it that we do well? Is where we're confident, right?

When we're able to stand up and be proud of ourselves, and then you're more easily able to rebuff some of those forces. Where do I think centrism struggles? One of the places where it struggles, and this is my criticism of my own camp, which I think is always important to have that kind of, I think, a little bit of self awareness. We're often not good enough at really connecting with people's fears and grievances and concerns that are genuine, right? People really are worried about technological innovation and the pace of automation, and people are worried about immigration. And you can be worried about immigration without being a racist and without being a person that should be shunned or that we should criticize.

There is a genuine reason why people are worried about these things, and we have to be better at really connecting to those grievances and fears that people have to really understand them, to really empathize with them. That is the cost of entry, to be able to suggest different policies to them. If I want to convince someone that populist politics aren't going to work, I have to show that I care about them as much as the Populists do, and not seed that ground. And I don't think we're always really good enough at doing that. Where we are good at doing that, there's a huge reward.

And ultimately, I believe that on every issue, the solutions that we offer from the political center are more successful than the solutions that are offered by the populists and by the extremists, but we have to be able to convince the public of that you can't disregard people who vote for somebody you find distasteful, even if you think that the candidate they're voting for is somebody that you have real problems with, and even if the candidate they're voting for is actually a racist or is actually illiberal and undemocratic. That doesn't mean all the people voting for them are and it doesn't mean you can afford to dismiss those people. It means you need to do a better job of listening to them and connecting with them and bringing them back to our political camp. When politicians fail to get their message across because they're not doing a good enough job, it's not because of the public.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

Yair, thank you so much for joining us and for giving us a little bit of a pathway to expressing these kinds of views that aren't heard of a whole lot.

Yair Zivan:

Thank you very much. I really appreciate it.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

If you missed last week’s episode, be sure to tune in for a conversation between my colleague Julie Fishman Rayman, AJC’s Managing Director of Policy and Political Affairs, and Ron Kampeas, the Washington, D.C. Bureau Chief at the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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VP Picks, Media Bias, and Antisemitism: The 2024 U.S. Election and Its Impact on Israel and the Jewish People
8 aug· People of the Pod
Listen to an in-depth conversation on all the latest in the 2024 U.S. presidential election, from the vice presidential picks –Tim Walz and JD Vance – to Israel and antisemitism. Julie Fishman Rayman, AJC’s Managing Director of Policy and Political Affairs, speaks with Ron Kampeas, the Washington, D.C. Bureau Chief at the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Kampeas also discussed the importance of accuracy and empathy in reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, highlighting the need for journalists to avoid biases and misrepresentations.

*The views and opinions expressed by guests do not necessarily reflect the views or position of AJC.

Episode Lineup:

(0:40) Ron Kampeas

Learn:

AJC's Call to Action Against Antisemitism

U.S. Party Platforms Must Take a Stand Against Antisemitism

Here are 5 Jewish Issues Republicans and Democrats Must Address at their Conventions

Listen:

What the Unprecedented Assassinations of Terror Leaders Means for Israel and the Middle East

Aviva Klompas is Fighting the Normalization of Antisemitism on Social Media

On the Ground at the Republican National Convention: What's at Stake for Israel and the Middle East?

Follow People of the Pod on your favorite podcast app, and learn more at AJC.org/PeopleofthePod

You can reach us at: [email protected]

If you’ve appreciated this episode, please be sure to tell your friends, and rate and review us on Apple Podcasts.

Transcript of Interview with Ron Kampeas:

Manya Brachear Pashman:

This week, my colleague Julie Fishman Rayman, AJC Managing Director of Policy and Political Affairs, spoke to Ron Kampeas, the Washington DC Bureau Chief of JTA, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. They broke down the latest in the 2024 US presidential election. Julie, the mic is yours.

Julie Fishman Rayman:

Ron, thank you so much for joining us. I'm so pleased to have this conversation with you, because we get to flip the tables and someone who's really a beloved and renowned journalist in the Jewish space, and finally, I get to ask you questions. So thank you for making this opportunity available to us.

Ron Kampeas:

Thank you.

Julie Fishman Rayman:

I want to start by talking a little bit about the conventions. You were in Milwaukee covering AJC’s event, alongside a number of other things. Thank you for being there with us. What were your biggest takeaways from the Republican Convention, particularly as they related to the issues of Israel and antisemitism?

Ron Kampeas:

I think Israel was front and center, and they made it front and center because it's an obvious advantage that they have over the Democrats right now. So, you know, I think the representative moment was, in a way, when Matt Brooks, the CEO of the Republican Jewish Coalition, he was invited for the first time to address the Republican Convention, and the first thing he said was, let's hear it for Israel, or something like that, or let's hear it for the hostages. And there were cheers, and then he says that couldn't happen in a month at the Democratic Convention. He might be right. And so that was a big plus for them. On antisemitism it's a little more opaque, but it's problematic, I think, because after Matt spoke, he called us Jewish media reporters together for a little gaggle, and we asked him, naturally, about the isolationism that the vice presidential or the running mate pick JD Vance represents. And it's interesting, the way that Matt put it. He said, yeah, it is a problem. He was candid. He said, it's a problem in the party, and we plan to fight it.

And, you know, nobody prompted him, but he said, we plan to take on the Tucker Carlson wing of the party. The interesting thing about that is that he said, prevent Tucker Carlson wing from getting a foothold. And Tucker Carlson had very much a foothold at the convention. He spoke on the last night, setting up Donald Trump's speech. He was up in the balcony with Donald Trump. And of course, you know, Matt's point is that Tucker Carlson is very much an isolationist, particularly as far as Ukraine goes, but he's given hints as far as Israel goes. But it's more than that. He's platformed antisemites, and he's kind of ventured into that territory himself – antisemites like Candace Owens, Kanye West – and I think that that is something that Jewish Republicans are going to have to grapple with.

Julie Fishman Rayman:

One of the things that was discussed at AJC’s event alongside the Republican National Convention was the policy positions of not just JD Vance, but others who sort of align with that faction of the Republican Party – I guess, the Tucker Carlson faction – and sort of reading the tea leaves on Ukraine and saying, you know, at what point does the hesitancy around support for Ukraine translate into hesitancy for support for Israel? And does it? What would you say to that question?

Ron Kampeas:

You know, it's interesting that at least as far as I could track, that played out an explicit sense only at your event, at the AJC event. There were people who were asking hard questions of the panelists, and two of the panelists were very much not stumping for Trump, they were defending Trump and the Trump policies. Kirsten Fontenrose, not so much. She was more critical, and even though she was part of the Trump NSC. And so the defense that they were saying is that simply, you know, whatever you may think of Trump's position, this is Rich Goldberg has particularly said this, but I think Ken Weinstein also said it, whatever you may think of Trump's positions on Ukraine, the strength he will project in the world. And this was right after the assassination, and Rich Goldberg kept on bringing up that Associated Press photo of Trump looking very defiant after being shot, that strength is going to deter the kind of actions that Putin has taken in Ukraine.

But the flip side of that actually came up a couple of weeks later at a Christians United for Israel conference here in DC, where isolationism was very much on the mind, and what they were articulating and what might have been articulated in an AIPAC conference, if AIPAC still had conferences – it doesn't – but what they were articulating is that it's holistic, that you can't just say, like, JD Vance says, ‘Oh, I'm all for assisting Israel, but we don't need to assist Ukraine, because Russia's bad actions in Ukraine are being supported by Iran. Iran is supplying arms to Russia in Ukraine that it then can, you know, see how those arms work in Ukraine, and they can use them theoretically against Israel.’

We're seeing now, as tensions build up in the Middle East, that Russia has Iran's back. And then, you know, there's also China, which is also problematic and is buying Iranian oil and helping to prop up the Iranian economy that way. So it's not simply a matter of whether one side projects strength better than the other side, and this is the argument coming out of the Christians United for Israel thing. It's a matter of constant engagement and awareness of how all these things can interlock.

Julie Fishman Rayman:

I think that's a really great point, and I'm glad you made that connection. I know one of the other issues that was present or discussed at the Christians United for Israel conference was the issue of the hostages, and what you said before about the sort of rallying result of Matt Brooks’ comments about, you know, let's hear it for Israel, let’s hear it for the hostage families. And a similar cry might solicit or elicit at the DNC. What do you think we could expect? You know, would you expect that a hostage family will take to the stage as Orna and Ronen Neutra did at the DNC, and if so, what might the result be?

Ron Kampeas:

So that's a good question. I know that they've asked. I know that the hostage families have asked to appear at the DNC. I know that there are people who have told me that the DNC, especially like with Kamala Harris, who has spoken out for the hostages. I don't see how Kamala Harris could not have the hostages or some sort of representation of the hostages at the conference. On the other hand, the Democrats are going to have to worry about, I don't think they're going to be booed, but I think that they're not going to get the same sort of enthusiastic reception that maybe that they got at the Republican conference, and simultaneously the uncommitted movement. The movement was founded in Michigan and spread to some other states that when Biden was the nominee, particularly, they were upset that Biden wasn't doing enough to stop the war in Gaza, wasn't doing enough to force Israel into a ceasefire, and they wanted to show that they didn't necessarily have to vote for him in November, so they didn't vote for him in the primaries.

And they had different effects in different states, but certainly in states like Michigan and Minnesota, I think that they had a pretty good turnout as far as that goes. And they want a doctor from Gaza to speak at the DNC. So you know which might be fine. It might be a legitimate enterprise in their part, but you know that the Democrats are going to be accused of “both sides-ing” it, that the Republicans wouldn't have somebody like that. So because of the Democrats of different constituencies, as much as the Republicans are now, at least the Trump campaign is now trying to reach out to Arab Americans. It's much more a constituency for the Democrats, as are the Jews. It's going to be like a tightrope for them to walk. And so I don't know how that's going to be a play out, but it's certainly something we're going to be tracking.

Julie Fishman Rayman:

Talking about that, that tightrope, and also, because you mentioned Michigan and Minnesota, let's talk for a moment about the selection of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz for the vice presidential nominee. He has both spoken at AIPAC’s conferences, stood by Israel after the October 7 attacks, talked about Jewish students on campus dealing with encampments and anti-Israel protests and has really been outspoken about rising antisemitism in this country. On the flip side, he also speaks to the more progressive flank of the Democratic Party, and has urged the party to do more intentional kind of outreach to anti-Israel voters who aren't committed to voting the Harris-Walz ticket. What do you make of him in this moment, as both a campaigner and then presumably, if elected, what would you make of him as a vice president?

Ron Kampeas:

It's hard to say right now. Nobody was really aware of Tim Walz a lot outside of Minnesota until last week, but it's so funny because, you know, there was this whole push back against Shapiro from the far left because he was perceived as being – I'm talking about Josh Shapiro, the Pennsylvania Governor who was a front runner – because he was perceived as being too pro-Israel.

But Yair Rosenberg did a really good job. I also did a little bit of reporting into this about how the other candidates, who other likelies that Kamala Harris were considering, are also pro-Israel, and Tim Walz has a long list of accomplishments, but you know, a measure of how fast this summer has gone, how crazy this political season has been, is this a week and a half ago, when Yair put up his story, he didn't even have Tim Walz in it. He was looking at Roy Cooper, he was looking at Mark Kelly from Arizona, and then, because nobody was even thinking about Tim Walz then, and now, he's the running mate.

But from what you can see about him, and like, we just, JTA just did a big story about his master's thesis on Holocaust education, he's somebody who really wants to listen. His recommendation to the Republican Party, you know, he's coined this whole weird thing. That's actually why the Harris campaign noticed him, because he was the first to call the Republicans weird. I mean, the Republican candidates, but he said don't direct that at the voters, direct that only at the nominees, because we have to listen to the voters. And so I think that you can look at what he says about listening to the protesters on campuses in that context. For somebody who was born in Nebraska and lived most of his life in a town of 400 people in Minnesota, he shows, like, remarkably nuanced understanding of things that are of Jewish concern regarding the Holocaust. He's talked about how, you know, one can look at the Holocaust legitimately as an anomaly in history, but also understand it as something that could be repeated, which is actually Yehuda Bauer, the famous Holocaust historian's point. The way he boiled it down was that the Holocaust happened only to the Jews, but it can happen to anybody. And so that's Waltz's outlook, and it shows somebody who's really sort of read up on this and considered it in depth.

Julie Fishman Rayman:

Because you mentioned that Josh Shapiro had been very much in the running there, I want to get your take on the sort of social media trends of calling him “Genocide Josh” because of his pro-Israel statements and record. Is that just blatant antisemitism that we need to be mindful of, was it specific? Do you think it's just, you know, savvy opposition researchers? What do you make of that?

Ron Kampeas:

You know, we often think of antisemitism as, you know, planning to be antisemitic and putting out a statement. There are people who are consciously antisemitic, but the much greater, the much more vexing problem is that, how, it just seeps into the discourse. We have a polarized society, and it's just very easy when you're opposing somebody to grab whatever is in the toolbox to harm them. And for anybody who's Jewish, I mean, you see this and we talk about it openly, you see it when we talk about women in politics, about how attacks on them can be gendered. And nobody, at least nobody on the left, complains about that. Actually, maybe they did a little bit. You know, the Bernie Bros made gendered attacks on Hillary Clinton, and they didn't denied it.

But anyways, so you can say that attacks can be gendered, but it's hard to explain how attacks can also be antisemitic, because that's a tool in the box. And then a lot of people on the left don't want to acknowledge that. They slip into that. And I think that's what happened with Josh Shapiro. I think that there is for some reason, I mean, I can speculate as to, not even speculate – people have said why, even though he was just as pro-Israel as Tim Walz. He's like he's not less pro-Israel. But Mark Kelly did things that I'm sure Josh Shapiro wouldn't have done. Josh Shapiro doesn't like Benjamin Netanyahu.

Mark Kelly, the senator from Arizona, went to the Netanyahu speech, shook his hand afterwards and applauded, and they didn't get attacked in the same way. And if you look at some of the reasons that Shapiro was attacked, they talked about his upbringing, his going to a Jewish Day School in the Philly area, and the things that he was exposed to, they talked about his going to Israel when he was a teenager. And those are things that are part and parcel of a lot of American Jewish upbringings. And so you can say those things are indicting, but there's a point, because you're an American Jew coming up in American Jewish communities, going to be exposed to a lot of pro-Israel. But at what point does that become antisemitic? Because that's just the natural part of Jewish life.

Julie Fishman Rayman:

I want to ask you another question related to the media. I want to sort of get your take. Last week, AJC and the Jewish Federations of North America published an open letter to media outlets generally, really identifying how so many of them got the Hezbollah attack on the soccer field in the Golan so, so, so wrong that, after a dozen Druze kids playing soccer were murdered in the middle of the afternoon, Washington Post, Houston Chronicle, others, just totally misrepresented the facts. The Washington Post headlined a story “Hezbollah denies responsibility for the fatal rocket strike.” It wasn't true. Hezbollah celebrated the attack until they learned that children were killed and then walked it back. And then doubling down, a later Washington Post story showed an image of the funeral of one of the children who was killed, but the headline read, “Israel hits target in Lebanon.”

So if you only look at the picture and you only read the headline, you think it's a Lebanese kid that has been killed by a strike in Israel, not that an Israeli Druze kid was killed by a Hezbollah attack. CNN, AP, they all sort of downplayed Hezbollah's role in these really horrific murders. Is this ignorance? Is it bias? Is it both? And regardless, if we're sort of operating under this principle of journalist integrity, is this OK?

Ron Kampeas:

No, it's not OK. I don't know what went on at the Washington Post. I was witness, kind of, to one of the most foundational episodes in bad media takes, which happened right after the Second Intifada began, and the AP put out a photo of a policeman helping up a Haredi Jewish kid who had just been knocked down or even beaten by Palestinian writers in Jerusalem. And the AP captioned the photo saying that the policeman was attacking a Palestinian on the Temple Mount, which is so funny because there's a gas station in the back of the picture and there's no gas stations on the Temple Mount. I mean, if you know Jerusalem, you know the Temple Mount, you know how crazy that is. And so, like, what had happened was that I knew the guy who was handling photo editing at the AP that night when he got this picture. And at the time – this is in the early days of the Internet and computers – the picture came across at the AP’s, Israeli photo agency affiliate, and Hebrew couldn't work on that machine, so, like, the Hebrew was scrambled. They captioned it in Hebrew. It was scrambled.

So the guy calls up the other guy who's also tired, and he said, was this like some cop beating up a Palestinian on the Temple Mount? He said, yeah, sure, and that's how the thing goes out. So it's just, like, journalists can screw up in ways that speak to a certain underlying bias about the conflict. They expect to see certain things, but it's also can be stupidity and laziness and just screw ups at the last minute. I mean, I imagine that's what happened with the Washington Post front page, but it's awful, and it needs to be remedied, and people need to be more educated, and they need to pay more attention. I think you're right.

I think the way that the media has been treating the Hezbollah-Israel conflict in the north, in a way, differently than it treated, at least at the beginning, it treated Israel-Hamas. Hamas is clearly defined as a terrorist organization. Hezbollah is a terrorist organization. Hezbollah is an organization that's holding Lebanon hostage. Historically, people now think it was a big mistake to invade Lebanon in 1982. Hezbollah was partly an outgrowth of resentment of the Israeli occupation in southern Lebanon. But Israel withdrew to UN. They went to the UN and they said, you decide where the lines are. We're not going to decide where the lines are.

You decide where the lines are, and we will withdraw that to that point. In 2000 Israel did that. Hezbollah continued to attack. Hezbollah launched a war in 2006 that Israel did not want, and conflict with Israel helps uphold Hezbollah within Lebanon. And so I think that because Hezbollah is a very proficient and weathered militia, they fought a war in Syria. They fought a terrible, genocidal war in Syria. They were on the wrong side of that, but they fought a war in Syria. They're good at what they're doing. So maybe there's a reflex to see this as a conflict between two militaries, but it's not.

It's a conflict between Israel and a terrorist organization that unprovoked launched missiles inside Israel on October the eighth, even before Israel was striking back in Gaza as a means of solidarity with Hamas. And so I think that needs to be front, just as I think a lot of media, obviously JTA, but even a lot of like, you know, non-Jewish media always put out there that Hamas started this war. It needs to be reminded that Hezbollah also started its version of the war, and that Hezbollah, it's not an army that's accountable to any kind of civilian infrastructure, never mind a democratic one, like the Israeli army is accountable to elected officials. It's its own militia with a stranglehold on Lebanon.

So yeah, I think that should be evident in everything that's written about that conflict, and maybe that's what helped distort at least the initial reporting from what happened in Majdal Shams, which is just horrible.

Julie Fishman Rayman:

One of the things that AJC is always trying to call on media outlets to do is to know who to call. Right, if there is an incident related to Israel that they don't fully understand, if there's an antisemitic attack and they need more context, to understand that there are Jewish individuals and organizations who can help to provide insight and texture and understanding so that their reporting can be more accurate. That's one of the recommendations in our Call to Action Against Antisemitism in America, recommendations for media. I wonder if, you know, journalist to journalist, if folks call you and say, “Ron, this is what we're writing, is this right?” Knowing that you are just such a font of knowledge, they should, this is what I'm saying. They should call you.

Ron Kampeas:

My son asks me, I mean, very occasionally, I do get calls more having to do with my alleged knowledge of the American Jewish community and how it works and how it functions. I get calls about that. I think on Israel, less so because everybody's an expert. Everybody considers themselves an expert. Everybody flies in. I think what was an unfortunate standard. 20 years ago, it wasn't just the AP, it was all mainstream media, that you get your best takes from a foreign correspondent between three and six months into the assignment, because it takes them three months to learn it, but it takes them six months to go native, which is to sort of really understand the nuances. I think that's unfortunate, because I think going native, really understanding the nuances, sort of delving into a story, becoming familiar with it, becoming sympathetic in ways, with all sides to the story, actually enriches a story.

And I think that that's something that maybe you know, I've been doing JTA for 21 years. I've been in journalism for 35 years. I think it's great to have fresh outlooks. It's good. I think it's also good to sometimes rely on institutional knowledge and to listen to people who have been here before. It was weird at AP. I was in a position at AP when I wasn't allowed to use my institute for bizarre reasons. Institutional knowledge, you know. But it was funny, because at the outset of the Iraq War, the first day, the major Iraq war in 2002, 2003, I knew things that signal that it was going to go wrong, because I'd lived in the Middle East, and I wasn't the only one. By far, by far, there were a lot of people who knew those things institutionally. It means literally saying, like what the Israelis said in 1982, the Shiites are throwing rice and you had actual examples in 1982 of Shiites throwing rice at Israelis, and in 2003 of Shiites throwing rice at Americans. They want this. And it never works out that way. It goes awry.

But nobody was listening, because people were too invested in a particular outcome to listen to the institutionalists. And I think that that's a problem. There's a reflex sometimes to say, oh, the institutionalists got it wrong in the past, because the world is still a mess, but that's not their value. The value of the institutionalists, and a great institutionalist just passed away, Martin Indyk, the value of the institutionalists is that sometimes they can actually say, this is where I went wrong, and this is what we misunderstood, and this is how we misunderstood it, and this is how we were deep in the weeds and we misunderstood it. And that's the kind of knowledge that I think shouldn't go wasted.

Julie Fishman Rayman:

Thanks so much for that perspective. I was going to ask you as a final question, if there was anything that you wanted to raise that we haven't discussed yet. But I would also add to that question, feel free to answer that question. Or is there something that we're getting wrong now institutionally?

Ron Kampeas:

Yeah, I think that, you know, there's a lot that we're getting wrong now institutionally. I think that people are, and every side of the Israel-Hamas conflict are they retreating into sort of easy, reflexive understandings of what could go right and what could go wrong. I think that there is a value in understanding how toxic Hamas ideology is, that was, I think, grasped at the beginning after October the seventh, but has slipped away as this seems to be just a conflict, and people are retreating into Israel's bashing Gaza. We have to get it to stop bashing Gaza, which is fine, it's an outlook. It's a legitimate outlook, but it's one that's not going to register at all with any Israeli, unless you take into account how Hamas is perceived among Israelis as a genocidal organization. If it wasn't before October 7, it is now.

On the other hand, I think that sort of reflexive, we can never have a two state solution. I'm not saying, advocating, for two state solution. We never have a two state solution. We're just going to go on as we've gone with the Palestinians. I think that also reflects this kind of like a reflexive blindness that you have to account for the Palestinians, somehow. Nothing is going to be imposed on them. They have to be agents and actors and whatever happens, and it might not happen in my generation, it might not happen in my lifetime, but that has to be back of mind. And I think for a lot of people, particularly in parts of the Israeli establishment, it is not back of mind.

So those are things that I think that people can maybe, you know, if, if these competing, they're not actually enemies, I'm talking about people who are on the same side. They can be on the same side in Israel, they can be on the same side in America, but they're rivals, and they don't like to listen to each other. But if they did talk to each other and listen to each other, maybe they would find nuances that could get everybody to a better place.

Julie Fishman Rayman:

If we could do a word cloud of some of the themes that have come out of this conversation, listening is definitely one of the words that would be prominent. And I think it's not only a good aspiration, but I also want to highlight that our listening to you on these really important issues is revelatory, truthfully, and we're grateful for all the work that you're doing with JTA every day, but also for being here on People of the Pod with us and for all the wisdom that you've shared. Thank you.

Ron Kampeas:

Thank you.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

If you missed last week's episode, tune in for my conversation with AJC Jerusalem Director Avital Leibovich on what the widely reported deaths of two terror leaders last week could mean for Israel and the wider region.
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What the Unprecedented Assassinations of Terror Leaders Means for Israel and the Middle East
1 aug· People of the Pod
This week, two major terrorist leaders were assassinated in the Middle East. Hamas’ Ismail Haniyeh was killed in an explosion in Tehran, just a day after top Hezbollah leader Fuad Shukr was killed in an Israeli airstrike on Beirut in retaliation for the horrific rocket attack that killed 12 children on a soccer field in northern Israel.

What does this mean for Israel and the wider region? Is this a major setback for Iran and its terror proxies? Tune in to hear what AJC Jerusalem Director Lt. Col. (res.) Avital Leibovich, who visited the site of the terror attack in Majdal Shams, has to say.

Episode Lineup:

(0:40) Avital Leibovich

Learn:

What to Know About Hamas Terror Leader Ismail Haniyeh

What to Know About Hezbollah’s Escalation Against Israel

Listen:

Aviva Klompas is Fighting the Normalization of Antisemitism on Social Media

On the Ground at the Republican National Convention: What's at Stake for Israel and the Middle East?

Follow People of the Pod on your favorite podcast app, and learn more at AJC.org/PeopleofthePod

You can reach us at: [email protected]

If you’ve appreciated this episode, please be sure to tell your friends, and rate and review us on Apple Podcasts.

Transcript of Interview with Avital Leibovich:

Manya Brachear Pashman:

This week marked 300 days of captivity for the 115 remaining hostages kidnapped by Hamas terrorists on October 7. There was also a major development: confirmation that an operation in July led to the death of Hamas’ military leader Muhammad Deif. But there were two more assassinations this week, the leaders of two terror groups targeting Israel.

On Wednesday, we learned that Hamas terror leader Ismail Haniyeh was killed in an explosion in Tehran shortly after meeting with Iran Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Haniyeh had been in Tehran for the inauguration of its new president. This just a day after top Hezbollah leader Fuad Shukr was killed in an Israeli airstrike on Beirut in retaliation for the horrific rocket attack that killed 12 children on a soccer field in Golan Heights. AJC Jerusalem director Avital Leibovich is with us now to discuss these developments. Avital, welcome back to People of the Pod.

Avital Leibovich:

Thank you. Manya. Good to be here.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

So, Avital, my first question is, are we safer now than we were at the start of the week? Do two fewer terror leaders lead to less terror?

Avital Leibovich:

Well, I would say the world in general is a safer place with the absence of Shukr and Haniyeh. However, the neighborhood here is not changing. And unfortunately, we are still surrounded by vicious enemies, who still are seeking to see our erosion and eradication. So while I'm very happy with your outcome in the last 24 hours, I also know there's still a lot of reason for concern.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

So tell us about these terror leaders. Who was Ismail Haniyeh? And what was his role with Hamas?

Avital Leibovich:

Sure. So Ismail Haniyeh, who's also, by the way, has another name, which is Abu al-Abed, he actually served as the number one political leader of Hamas since May 2017. He actually substituted in this role, Khaled Mashal and other terrorists, and before that, he actually served as the prime minister of the Palestinian Authority just for a very brief, short time between 2006 and 2007. And he actually became very close to a Hamas leader called Ahmed Yassin. And basically, he really grew into the very radical agenda of Hamas. Interesting enough, his background was totally different. I mean, even worked in Israel in the city closest to Gaza called Ashkelon. So he knows the country. He knows the mentality. So in addition to this, he also began to do some terror activity after the three years of working in Ashkelon in Israel. And then he initiated different kinds of activities. Among them was the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit, a soldier who we’ll remember. And after being involved in the terror realm and the political realm, he decided to focus more on Hamas’ agenda, on Hamas’ charter. And basically, what we have seen in the last couple of years are a few things. Number one, Hania got very rich, because he received millions and millions of dollars from the Qataris.

Number two, he left Gaza and he spent the last years of his life in Qatar, in lavish hotels and apartments, enjoying great life. And this is also an indication of how much does he care about the people of Gaza.

And I want to connect to the current war and give you a quote of who Haniyeh was because I see that some of the media outlets have the nerve to call him a moderate negotiator. Therefore, I'd like to help them and share with you the following quote, which was said on October 27 — that was the first day where the IDF entered Gaza following the October 7 massacre. So he said, "We need the blood of women, children, and the elderly of Gaza, so it awakens our revolutionary spirit." This is the moderate guy that international media is referring to in their reports. He was a radical, he was a terrorist, and we had a very good opening of our day this morning when we heard the news.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

And Fuad Shukr, what was his role with Hezbollah?

Avital Leibovich:

He also, you know, this is a name which is not known, I think, to many people, but he does have a French connection and an American connection — of course, an Israeli connection. The guy was number two in the level of seniority in Hezbollah. He was actually the manager of the army in a way of the Hezbollah military apparatus.

But more than that, he was a strategist, and he knew what direction should Hezbollah take in the next years. He was in charge of developing the entire missile industry that Hezbollah had, including the accurate missiles. In other words, he was a strategist but also was a practical man. Now, here's the connection that he had to the US and to France. In 1983, he was one of the orchestrators of the attack in the marine base in Beirut.

On that terrible day, 241 American marines lost their lives, but 70 French soldiers were killed as well. So as you can imagine, this terrorist Fuad Shukr has 40 years of terror activities, primarily against Israel, but also against Israeli allies. So again, I think it was a very courageous and accurate Israeli operation. And more than anything, Manya, it shows the amazing level of intelligence, where that person was exactly in which room, in which building, in which floor, and to be able to very surgically act in the right time, at the right moment and target him, I think that shows a lot for the Israeli intelligence capabilities.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

Was Haniyeh part of the ceasefire and hostage release negotiations?

Avital Leibovich:

So if you look at the title that Hanieyeh had, which is the head of the political branch of Hamas, you could think that he had some impact on the decision making process with the hostage deals. But I can tell you that he had really no impact, very little impact. Because from the analysis that we have here in Israel, the main decision maker is Sinwar.

Now the question is, will the death of Haniyeh have an impact, number one on Sinwar? And therefore, number two on the hostage deal? Now, I'm not sure it will have an effect. I have to say. Sinwar is known as the longtime rival of Haniyeh. So in other words, he will not be mourning his death. But he had the last word with regard to any of the discussions on the hostages.

And at the end of the day, Sinwar said numerous times, that he's willing to die. And his ultimate goal is to make sure that Hamas has some sort of a controlling Gaza. He understands today Sinwar, that Hamas will no longer control the government, therefore, he's willing to compromise. For example, let's say Hamas will be giving the role of being in charge of the renovations in Gaza. Or perhaps they will be in charge of the education system and so on, in other words, just to have some sort of a stronghold inside Gaza in terms of governance of some sort. Now, if that will not be a part of any possible deal, then Sinwar has no interest to give a positive answer to a deal.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

I am curious why Haniyeh would have met with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei before his death?

Avital Leibovich:

Hamas and Iran have different kinds of cooperation. We have seen that across the region. In other words, we have seen Hamas representatives in Lebanon, working alongside Nasrallah, the health Hezbollah, but also meeting the Iranian foreign minister, when he came to Lebanon for visits. We understand that this time around there is a clear interest which Iran supports, is to target Israel as much as possible. And obviously Iran prefers a proxy like Hamas to be representative of its own goals and intentions.

And therefore you saw Haniyeh last time, was last night paying respects for the inauguration ceremony in Iran. And according to what I'm hearing, he was also hosted in a Revolutionary Guards facility. In other words, whoever targeted Haniyeh had a great level of intelligence by knowing how to get to that specific building.

But moreover, this is a very secure area, because the Revolutionary Guards are considered the body which is the most guarded of all bodies in Iran. They're the ones controlling the budget of the Iranian government. They're the ones operating Hezbollah and other militias and proxies. So in other words, the fact that it was a Revolutionary Guards headquarters, Antonia was there and despite of all this information, the security system around him cracked. I think that sends a very loud and clear message to the Iranians.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

How is the relationship between Iran and Hamas and the relationship between Iran and Hezbollah different? Can you explain that to our audience?

Avital Leibovich:

First of all, I mean, you know, Iran is the chief orchestrator of everything that we have been seeing here since October 7, but actually before that as well. Now, I would say that with Hezbollah, it's a long love story between the two. Actually, Hezbollah was founded by Iran, quite shortly after the revolution in '79.

When the country became a fundamentalist Islamist and obviously, took the wrong path, distancing itself from the Western world. Iran actually built Hezbollah, founded Hezbollah, first the military wing, and then adding three years later the political wing. And the idea was to use them in order to attack Israel. And this is very convenient.

Think about it, Iran is 1300 kilometers away from Israel. It's not convenient to fire a rocket all the way from that country to Israel. But let's say you want to use simpler means and within half an hour to take an operation out, it's easier to use someone who's bordering with Israel. So gradually, we saw Hezbollah taking over almost the entire country. And everything had to do with Iranian funding. Now, in order to have Iranian funding in terms of sanctions, Iran and Hezbollah, found alternative options like laundering money, like a whole chain of drug trafficking in Syria and other countries. So they found solutions to do that.

By the way, Iran is doing the same thing with the Houthis in Yemen, also using them as a proxy. Because you know, this is the most poor country in the region, huge unemployment rates, you can recruit 10s of 1000s and hundreds of 1000s of people, as long as you pay them a very minimal salary. Now, as for Hamas, Hamas was built a little bit later.

It's actually an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, so not directly of Iran. However, sometimes there are joint interests between different terror groups. Actually, Iran founded the Islamic Jihad in Gaza, in 79, right after the revolution, because he thought this would be the main actor controlling Gaza with the best assets and so on. But with the course of the years, when Hamas controlled Gaza, and was able to develop its terror means rockets, drones, etc, then, of course, Iran moved to cooperate with Hamas, according to its needs for Iran, it's, of course, more worthwhile to use the blood of Palestinians than the blood of Iranians to sacrifice Palestinians and not the Iranians. This is how they see it.

At the end of the day, Iran now wishes to resume to the situation of being a major empire as it used to be, a Persian empire decades and decades ago. So this is the longtime dream, I would say. And the proxies are just another, I would say detail in the path to reach that dream.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

Now, Hezbollah did not claim responsibility for the attack that killed a dozen children on a soccer field. Why not? They're usually proud of the death and destruction that they wreak. Why did Israel target the terror group anyway?

Avital Leibovich:

Look, say a few words about this tragic event that took place just a few days ago in a very small, beautiful, pastoral village called Majdal Shams, which, by the way, means the tower of sun. It's on the Syrian border, and the other side is on the Lebanese border. And, you know, people asked me if this is the first time that Hizballah ever targeted Druze or targeted Muslims. Now this specific village was targeted five times already by Hezbollah. Saturday, obviously, was the deadliest of all the five. It was 6:18 in the afternoon, beautiful summer day, lots of kids outside.

I visited the soccer field where it happens. And the rockets left, really not a chance for those kids who were playing there. Although there was actually a shelter right there, maybe two feet from where the rocket hit the ground. They really didn't have a chance to make it and go into the shelter. And unfortunately, those poor 12 year old kids, ages 10-16, died in place. We still have over 30 people hospitalized, many of them are kids as well.

And I have to say, Manya, that I saw a village who has been traumatized. People are still wearing black clothes. There are black flags hanging everywhere inside the village. The pictures of the kids are, you know, pasted everywhere, on the squares just on random villages and walls of buildings.

I also went to one of the bereaved families. And you know, you sit there with a parent who lost his 12 year old boy named Johnny [Wadeea Ibrahim]. And he tells you about his dreams. And he says to me, you know, these dreams will never be fulfilled. And he says to me, we don't even know how to digest what happened to us. So, for Hezbollah, they don't really care who they're firing at, whether it's Jews or Arabs, or Muslims or Christians, whoever, they don't care if it's in the eastern Galilee, or the Western Galilee, or the Golan. All these areas are relevant for the Hezbollah fire since October 8.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

Well, Hezbollah did not take responsibility. Why not?

Avital Leibovich:

So here is the mistake. Hezbollah actually made the mistake. Hezbollah has a TV station, which is its mouthpiece, just like Hamas's TV station mouthpiece is Al Jazeera. Hezbollah's is Al Mayadeen. Now, immediately after an attack, a Hezbollah attack, Al Mayadeen immediately publishes responsibility taking by Hezbollah always every time. And by the way, we're talking about an average of eight attacks a day, every day. And that's what they did here too. On Saturday, they immediately took responsibility in the name of Hezbollah.

Unfortunately, for them, after 20 minutes, they understood the extent of the mistake they did, and deleted, of course, this responsibility, and then they made up their own narrative. The narrative was that a misfiring of an Iron Dome interceptor, mistakenly killed the kids, like Israel's fault is that the kids died. Now, this narrative, if you think it was only the social media, then think again, they sent the foreign minister of Lebanon to the media to repeat it.

But they also did something more. They sent the head of the Druze community. It's the same blood and flesh of the Druze in the Golan. They sent him to the press to declare that it was not a Hezbollah rocket. So they understood that they will pay a price of some sort. I'm sure they understood that I'm not sure they understood the extent of the intelligence Israel had. And now of course, they're threatening to target Israel. I think the next 48 hours will reveal where we're heading.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

And you talk about the incredible intelligence that led to the precise explosion in Beirut as well as the death of Haniyeh. Has Israel taken responsibility for his death and what it claimed credit if it was responsible,

Avital Leibovich:

Up to this minute, Israel did not take any responsibility for Haniyeh's death. Of course, yes, for the Hizballah number two guy Fuad Shukr, but not for Haniyeh. As a matter of fact, the Prime Minister ordered the Cabinet members and the ministers not to speak publicly on the issue. And basically, there's been a lot of quiet from the political echelon here since the morning.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

And you touched on what my last question is, and that is, how will this elevate the tensions? Does this raise the chance of a war between Israel and Lebanon, Israel, and Iran, these assassinations?

Avital Leibovich:

So I would say we are already in a war to some extent with Hezbollah, because Hezbollah has fired more than 6000 rockets since October 8. And I've counted 43 Israeli casualties since October 8. So we are talking about an active war in a sense, I think that there is a good reason to believe that both Hezbollah and Iran will react to these two targets. I'm not sure in which way.

I do think that Hezbollah still has the notion and the strategy of not completely escalating the situation to a full scale war. I'm sure that Nasrallah is sitting in his bunker in the darkened neighborhood, seeing the footage from Gaza and understanding Israel's capability and does not want to turn Beirut into a similar kind of situation.

And he also saw the building last night and he also understood the extent of the intelligence capability. So I think he will have to react in such a way that on the one hand, he could be proud that he did something but on the other hand, would not engage in a full scale war. Iran, on the other hand, is a different story.

Because three months have passed since April 14 in which Iran decided to gift us with hundreds of drones and different kinds of ballistic missiles. And from their perspective, it failed. It failed because Israel has a great defense system. It also failed because the US led the great coalition of countries who supported the interception attempts in April 14. However, and this is a big however, Iran learned its lessons.

Iran learned why it failed in April. And therefore, my concern is that they will take these lessons and implement them in whichever reaction they will have. I'm not sure it will be tomorrow morning. Tomorrow, they will celebrate Haniyeh in the big funeral in Iran, and then there will be additional mourning days in Qatar. So it may take a few days, but I have no doubt that they will both, Hezbollah and Iran react.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

Avital, thank you so much for just explaining all of these developments and what they mean.

Avital Leibovich:

Of course, I just hope that for once they will be able to talk about positive things and not only terror and wars.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

We hope so too. We hope so too. Thank you so much.

Avital Leibovich:

Thank you and Am Yisrael Chai.
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Aviva Klompas is Fighting the Normalization of Antisemitism on Social Media
26 jul· People of the Pod
Aviva Klompas has long been a fierce advocate for Israel and is no stranger to the forces that try to delegitimize the Jewish state. Klompas, cofounder of Boundless Israel, a think tank dedicated to strengthening education about Israel while also keeping an eye on the surge of antisemitism in the U.S., joins us to discuss how she’s working to combat antisemitism and shape the conversation, both online and off.

Listen to this candid conversation, recorded on the sidelines of AJC Global Forum 2024 in Washington, D.C.

Episode Lineup:

(0:40) Jason Isaacson, Ken Weinstein, Kirsten Fontenrose, Rich Goldberg

Show Notes:

Watch:

Voices of Truth: Advocating for Israel on Social Media with Aviva Klompas and Michael Rapaport

Listen – People of the Pod:

On the Ground at the Republican National Convention: What's at Stake for Israel and the Middle East?

Follow People of the Pod on your favorite podcast app, and learn more at AJC.org/PeopleofthePod

You can reach us at: [email protected]

If you’ve appreciated this episode, please be sure to tell your friends, and rate and review us on Apple Podcasts.

Transcript of Interview with Aviva Klompas:

Manya Brachear Pashman:

Aviva Klompas has long been a fierce advocate for Israel and is no stranger to the forces that try to delegitimize the Jewish state. After leading Birthright trips, she became the speechwriter for Israel’s Mission at the United Nations where she was always looking for ways to give voice to Israel’s side of the story, amid a cacophony of anti-Israel sentiments.

After working for Combined Jewish Philanthropies, she co-founded Boundless Israel, a think tank dedicated to strengthening education about Israel while also keeping an eye on the surge of antisemitism in the U.S. Aviva might still write the occasional speech, but on Instagram and X, that’s where she’s really shaping the conversation and confronting haters.

We sat down with Aviva on the sidelines of AJC Global Forum 2024 in Washington D.C in early June.

Aviva, welcome to People of the Pod’s pop-up studio here in Washington.

Aviva Klompas:

Absolutely.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

Together with Rachel Fish, you co-founded a nonprofit called Boundless. can you tell us the purpose of boundless and the origins of its name?

Aviva Klompas:

The idea is to look at the larger issues that are plaguing the ecosystem in Israel in North America and to function both both as a think tank that does research to understand what's happening under the surface, but then to not just investigate and study for curiosity sake, but then to turn to action, and really to extract recommendations, and to pull together partners in order to take meaningful action in order to address some of the larger challenges.

So the two areas in which we primarily focus are one, education. How do we reimagine Israel education in North America, for both Jews and for non-Jews? And the area where I spend most of my time has to do with the narrative war? Understanding how did we get here? What's happening below the surface, both in traditional and on social media?

Manya Brachear Pashman:

You previously served as the director of speech reading at the Israeli Mission to the United Nations. And at that time, did you find yourself not just talking to a traditional institution but actually trying to persuade or convince, maybe even combat the sentiments of that audience?

Aviva Klompas:

Working as a speechwriter for Israel at the United Nations is certainly an experience and an education unto itself. And my former boss, Ambassador Ron Prosor always used to say to us, it's not so much politics and diplomacy as it is theater and a game of chess. And so to some extent, it's about who you can convince in these speeches and in these conversations in the halls, in the corridors of the United Nations, but the meaningful action, the real relationship building, tends to happen behind the scenes where there's no camera, and when there's no public audience. What people tend to see, the speeches that are broadcast, statements that make headlines around the world, that's really theater.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

And you mentioned, when you were onstage with Michael Rapaport, at Global Forum yesterday, you mentioned how that job is very limiting compared to your job now and your representation on social media. Can you talk a little bit about why it's important to be on social media to use that as a platform.

Aviva Klompas:

Yeah, so I worked both for the Israeli delegation. So that was working for the Israeli government. I also worked as a policy advisor for the Canadian government. And certainly when you're working for a government, there are limitations on what you can say, and what you can do. And one of the great blessings of having co-founded Boundless and working in this nonprofit is that at this moment in time, there's a lot of flexibility and latitude for Rachel and I to really hone in on what we think needs to be done and spend our time and our energy there.

The great education that I got when I was working at the United Nations, was the fact that people would always ask me, Well, why is it that Israel participates in the United Nations? This is an institution that is notorious for its bias against Israel.

So why does Israel participate? Why would it be a member of an institution that notoriously demonizes, delegitimize, vilifies, ostracizes it. No country has to be a member of the United Nations. And more than that, in order to be a member in good standing, you have to pay dues.

So Israel pays its membership dues to endure the sort of abuse that we see day in and day out at the United Nations. That's the number one question that I get asked, but it was never once a conversation that we had inside of the United Nations, because we never for a moment doubted that Israel has every right to participate in and contribute to global affairs. And that mentality is what I've taken with me throughout my career that Israel has, and the Jewish people have every right to participate in and contribute to our communities, our societies, our countries and bettering this planet.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

You also, since October 7, you have emphasized that it's very important to tell Israel's story, tell the story of October 7, day to day, hour to hour, which is how I viewed the news cycle of social media. Why? Why is it that it's so important?

Aviva Klompas:

It’s a part of that mentality that I was describing, which says, I won't for a moment accept that any of this is either normal or acceptable. I'm not going to tolerate a world that speaks to us and treats us as if we had this coming. As if what happened on October 7 was due to us. As if it is normal to be holding over 100 people hostage. As if it is acceptable that Jewish people have to hide their Jewish identity.

And I'm not interested in people that will speak with great sympathy about dead Jews, but not take any meaningful or consequential action to safeguard living Jews, which is ultimately what's most important.

And at the end of the day, the reason that I'm spending so much time and energy on social media is because I refuse to allow the normalization of what we're seeing day in and day out. And the only way you stop that normalization is two things is one, you have to use your voice, you have to stand up. And we also have to use our Yiddishe kops a bit and try to think about what's happening under the surface. What are the root causes? What are the points of origin for what's taking place? And how can we outthink them? And that's the work we're doing at Boundless.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

You have primarily focused your messaging on X, or Twitter. You recently though moved your posts to Instagram as well.

Aviva Klompas:

After a lot of people told me that I had to, yeah, a lot.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

Well, can you talk a little bit about your social media choices? In other words, is there a particular audience on X that you were trying to reach?

Aviva Klompas:

I joined X when I was actually speechwriter for Israel at the UN. And I was very at the time we're talking, I don't know, 10 or 11 years ago, I was opposed to the notion of joining social media, I thought, I don't think everybody needs to know my thoughts. That's ridiculous.

And then one of my colleagues Israel Nitzan, a good friend, and a diplomat of Israel, he was the one that convinced me said, this is very much in line with Elon Musk, I would say is, it's the town square, this is where conversations are happening. This is where politicians and diplomats and reporters are having conversation. And it's important that you participate. And that is an idea that resonates with me very deeply, is that we need to have a voice in the public square. So that's how I got started on X.

And I left my Facebook, and I did have Instagram, but I really left it for that personal private space. And then early on in the war, had to change the privacy settings because all of a sudden, it was being flooded with with requests, my Instagram, my personal Instagram, when you open it up, it's 1000s and 1000s of people that want to follow me and I'm like, It's my vacation photos and it's family. No. So that's not going to happen.

So instead, after a lot of people said to me, there's obviously a whole other audience of much younger people and different people that are on Instagram, can you just pull your posts over? So I started a second Instagram account, which is just replicating the tweets and it's @AvivaKlompas.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

I'm curious if you have developed relationships, either real or virtual with other social media influencers. In other words, did you know Michael Rapaport before October 7, before he became so vocal on social media and is that in particular and are others new and surprising friendships and partnerships?

Aviva Klompas:

So I met Michael Rapaport because I got a DM on X from him. That was three words. And they were: who are you? And I wrote back: who are you? And that's where we started chatting. And then we had the opportunity to meet in Israel and he's become a very good friend and a person that I admire enormously.

And that's happened in other instances as well that there's been other influencers that I've met as a result of this that started his online conversation. chanson turned into real world relationships. And ultimately, all of us need to have a community social media is a very lonely place and it's a dystopia. When you pull people in the real world, which is what we do at Boundless, it asked her attitudes and opinions about Israel and anti semitism, you get one set of answers.

When you look on social media you get a different set of answers. The world is much bleaker and darker. And that's because the rule on social media is if it enrages, it engages. So the most vitriolic, hateful, disgusting, vile content is the content that will trend that's most likely to appear in your feed.

I always likened social media to the Coliseum in ancient Rome, where you have people battling it out in the center of the arena. And then you have the throngs of crowds surely, lustily screaming for them for someone's demise. It is not a venue that is conducive to relationships are conversations are chasing or changing minds, if you can sort of visualize that Coliseum analogy.

And at the same time, because social media is this kind of dystopia, bleak place, you need to have a community. And that's what I have found with other pro-Israel pro-Jewish voices is that it makes you feel like you're not alone in this that you're not this like single voice that standing against an enormous tide. So I'm very grateful to the other people that have lent their friendship in this moment.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

So I want to pivot a little bit to what you put on social media, mostly the Israel-Hamas war. Why do you think Hamas terrorists are being treated as heroes in so many outlets and venues?

Aviva Klompas:

Yeah, what we're really seeing is new tactics and an old strategy. This strategy of how Israel and the Jewish people is being demonized. It's not new, the only new part of it is is the advent of social media as a way to more quickly and more spread the these lies and disinformation much further, but it really goes back to a Soviet strategy you had after World War Two, you had the Cold War, and you had the United States pitted against the Soviet Union. And you never want to fight a war on your own territory. So to the extent that you can you want to fight it on a different front, and that's really what the Middle East became. Israel as it moved away from its socialist roots and towards a capitalist roots, begins to align itself more with the United States.

That poses a threat, the Soviet Union sees Israel in the Middle East as a forward operating base for the United States. And so it begins to align itself more closely with the Arab nations. And in order to fight this battle, it begins a disinformation campaign that has a number of strategies to it that I think will sound very familiar. The first is to claim that there's no connection between the Jewish people and land of Israel to paint us as colonizers.

The second is to paint us as aggressors. And just to frame it in such a way as it is, isn't the Nakba, not the story of how a number of surrounding Arab armies attacked Israel, not the story of how Israel accepted a two state Partition Plan from the United Nations, but rather the story of the Nakba, and the demise.

And the third is to paint the Palestinians as a people that have no agency, and that all of this is happening to them and that they are victims in this colonialist, racist world. And then what the Soviets did is they begin to use that type of language that says Zionists are Nazis, and Nazis are the epitome of evil. And so all of the worst racist colonialist, etc. Accusations that's not new, we saw that from the infamous Zionism is racism resolution at the United Nations in the 1970s.

So this is a continuation of a very, very old strategy. And as we always see, it starts with the Jews, but it never ends with the Jews.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

On the morning that many of us traveled here to Washington for AJC's Global Forum, we woke up to the news of the IDS rescue for hostages. Headlines talked about the four hostages being freed, not rescued. And sadly, many more headlines focused on the hundreds of Palestinians who were killed in that rescue effort. I asked why Hamas terrorists are being treated as heroes and I ask this knowing the IDF has certainly made some tragic errors in this war. But do you get a sense that there is a concerted effort not to treat IDF as heroes?

Aviva Klompas:

So first off, I mean, I saw them being the hostages being spoken about as having been released, as if, as if commerce just opened the doors and let them go. And the level of condemnation about us going into rescue or hostages? What did they want us to do? Ask nicely. It's been eight months, we've tried a series of hostage deals in negotiations, and it's gone nowhere. I don't measure the standard of the IDF behavior by what the world says. That's going to be a failing strategy for us.

I think it's measured by the values of the State of Israel and the Jewish people. And that's why the army has a code of conduct. The people that are more outraged that Israel went to get its people back than the fact that terrorists took them and held them for eight months. Those people need to check their thinking and their values.

And that's one of the things that we need to call out all the time. And I think that's a question the mainstream media that's been reporting on it, it's been embarrassing to watch people just essentially regurgitate Hamas press releases. How about a little bit of journalistic integrity? How about asking some hard questions like, Do we even know the casualty figure? I saw it grow by 100, since yesterday. I don't think anybody actually knows the number of casualties.

And then, if you had the number, how would you assess how many were actually combatants? If you're counting journalists and doctors that hold hostages in their home as civilians…I don't understand how mainstream media have sort of suspended rational analysis in this war.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

Do you also get the impression that the hostages' stories have been downplayed by mainstream media? I mean these are truly ordinary people, ordinary families who now suffer extraordinary uncertainty, which, you know, I would argue, is worse than loss, this uncertainty. Do you feel like that has been lost in mainstream media coverage?

Aviva Klompas:

I think that for a while, we saw that the hostage family stories were prominent, and they were certainly getting a lot of attention. And now it's a lot harder. Now it's been eight months, and it's a very visual war. No war in the history of the world has had this level of scrutiny, and certainly not this level of playing out real or disinformation on social media. And people are being bombarded with very difficult and very honestly very, very tragic scenes from Gaza.

And we haven't really seen that many new images emerging about the hostages, because there's so much silence. So in that sense, I can understand why there is a level to which humans can stay interested in a topic without new information. I think that's part of what we're struggling with. And at the same time, we have seen journalists be shockingly callous to the hostage families, and that's absolutely unacceptable.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

Can you give an example of what you mean?

Aviva Klompas:

Well, we just saw a very prominent reporter from the hill roll her eyes while speaking to the sister of a hostage when she asked her to believe women.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

The New York Times broke a big story–I'm putting big and finger quotes–earlier this week that Israel's Ministry of diaspora affairs organized and paid for an influence campaign last year that targeted US lawmakers, American public with pro Israel messaging, but the story never mentioned the barrage of propaganda that pro Palestinian organizations have put out quite effectively. How do you guard against spreading disinformation as a social media influencer?

Aviva Klompas:

So I don't agree With what the Israeli government did, I think it was pretty inevitable that that was going to become public. And so I think we could have all seen that this was coming in, and it was not a wise decision to target American lawmakers. I'm not sure that I would call that a disinformation campaign. Disinformation is a deliberate attempt to spread fake information. And I don't think that was the case, but nonetheless, not wise.

The difference is, is that my beloved Jewish people believe in truth and integrity. And we believe that if we just tell the same story one more time and maybe tell it a little bit differently, people will finally listen to us. And I think after trying that for a couple 1000 years, maybe we should adopt a different approach. And we again, have to look at what's happening under the surface.

If we want to do better at social media. You're right, the other side will say anything, do anything and show whatever image, true or not. People say it immediately 6000 people were killed in the bombing, an intentional IDF bombing of a hospital, okay, based on what? It's been 15 minutes, nobody actually knows what happened. Same thing with the rescue mission. Day by day, the count of quote unquote, civilian casualty grows by 100. We don't know the facts on the ground, we're not relying on third party verification in the way that we should, and people are just soaking this up.

And the other side has realized as much, and they understand that they have the freedom and latitude to say everything. Understanding that we have to rethink what this picture looks like. In understanding social media, we have to be thinking smarter about the type of information we're putting out and what some of the challenges are.

You have algorithmic manipulation, you have bots and inauthentic activity, you have foreign intervention campaigns, you have the echo chambers that exist, we have the algorithms that even when they're not manipulated, as I said, what engages and engages. We know all of these things. But I don't think we're working hard enough and smart enough to design our campaigns and our messaging, in order to address some of them.

One of the things that we're doing at Boundless is we started with the very simple question that says, Who do we need to be talking to? Any messaging, any communications, begins with understanding who’s your audience because you need to tailor your message appropriately. And I'm not sure that we're doing that as much as we should. So at Boundless, we started with that question, we did a major study with a national research firm, and we identified six priority audiences.

And we ask them their opinion, we want to learn from them, we want to understand why do you think what you think? Why do you believe what you believe? Where are you getting your news and information, we're very open about going to them and saying, We want to learn with you, we want to understand what your challenges are. One of the things that we learned is that every minority population in this country believes that they are the victim, they believe that they are one of the most highly targeted people for hate crimes.

And the challenge that we have is that when we come we present them and say no, we're the most hated group, what we're doing is we're minimizing their experience. And we're catalyzing a sort of victim Olympics, it makes them feel defensive, it makes them feel like they're not being seen and heard. And we're not tailoring our messaging with that understanding. So we need to do a little more, a lot more, front work in order to understand who do we want to speak to? What are their values, what are their positions, what's informing how they feel, and think about different issues, before we start to construct messages.

And then we really have to think about the distribution and dissemination techniques that we have. Which are right now, they're too uniform, we need to be doing a lot more and a lot differently. And we're hyper reliant on social media. And social media has a very important role to play. But we all know that if we see social media as sort of this coliseum, this arena in which people are thrashing it out, you're never going to really have a conversation.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

Shortly after October 7, you wrote, quote, The State of Israel was supposed to be a living promise that there would always be a place for Jews to be saved for the pogroms in the Holocaust that plague Jewish history. After the October 7, mass terror attacks, that promise is broken. Do you still feel that way?

Aviva Klompas:

I've been to Israel seven times in seven months. And I think a lot about when I first went the first time I went was two weeks after October 7 And I was in Jerusalem. And that was deserted. And I wanted to go walk to the Western Wall to the Kotel and I walked through the Old City and it was unbelievable. It was the middle of the week in the middle of the day and everything there was not a person in sight. Everybody was so scared.

And I recall friends saying to me, we're having conversations as if it's the 1940s we're talking, we're whispering husbands to wives about where we would hide our children. Because exactly that sense of security, that sense of comfort had been shattered. The idea was that anybody could jump out and didn't matter where you were in Israel, the sense of safety had dissipated.

And it wasn't that different here in the United States. And I think to some extent, people probably still feel it. Whereas in Israel, it's been more alleviated with the notion that antisemitism, that you're not safe in your places of worship in Jewish day schools and community centers that you have to think twice before you go to a walk for Israel, you have to think twice, about whether you're going to wear a kippa or a magen david. I think really, our sense of security has been shattered.

And that's one of the great tragedies, beyond the enormous tragedy that is October 7, than the living tragedy of the hostages, is the fact that we are all shaken by this. And that it feels scary for a lot of people to be a Jew in the world right now. There's a lot to say about what social media does wrong and how harmful it is and how difficult it is.

But also, the one thing that means the most to me, about being active on social media in the last eight months, is the number of messages I get, and people that come up to me in the real world and say to me, I'm scared. And I feel a little bit less scared because you have a voice in the world, you and other people, that people are feeling very alone, that people are saying I'm in workplaces where I'm the only Jew or I'm in schools where I'm being targeted where I feel like I can't speak up in class where I have to hide my head when I am choosing to stay in my room rather than go out.

And it's a lonely, lonely feeling right now. And if the only thing that my social media is doing is helping people have a voice and to know that there's others who think this is not normal, this is not acceptable. And we're going to spend every single day raging against it. That will have been worth it.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

Aviva, thank you so much for joining us on the sidelines of Global Forum.

Aviva Klompas:

Thank you for having me.
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On the Ground at the Republican National Convention: What's at Stake for Israel and the Middle East?
18 jul· People of the Pod
Israel’s right to self-defense and security, governance in Gaza, the Iranian regime and its network of terror, the Jewish state’s relationship with Arab countries in the Gulf, and much more were among the topics of discussion at an AJC-convened panel discussion at the 2024 Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. Listen to an excerpt of the panel, moderated by AJC’s Chief Policy Officer and the head of AJC’s Center for a New Middle East, Jason Isaacson, along with policy experts Dr. Ken Weinstein, Kirsten Fontenrose, and Rich Goldberg.

*The views and opinions expressed by guests do not necessarily reflect the views or position of AJC. AJC is a nonpartisan, 501(c)3 nonprofit organization. AJC does not endorse or oppose political parties or candidates.

Episode Lineup:

(0:40) Jason Isaacson, Ken Weinstein, Kirsten Fontenrose, Rich Goldberg

Show Notes:

Watch:

Israel and the Path to Peace - AJC at the Republican National Convention

Listen – People of the Pod:

Europe at the Ballot Box: Insights and Impact on Jewish Communities and Beyond

Follow People of the Pod on your favorite podcast app, and learn more at AJC.org/PeopleofthePod

You can reach us at: [email protected]

If you’ve appreciated this episode, please be sure to tell your friends, and rate and review us on Apple Podcasts.

Transcript of Panel with Jason Isaacson, Ken Weinstein, Kirsten Fontenrose, and Rich Goldberg:

Manya Brachear Pashman:

America’s political parties are kicking off the 2024 convention season, starting this week with the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. AJC was on the sidelines of the RNC, with a live program titled Israel and the Path to Peace, moderated by AJC's chief policy officer, Jason Isaacson. Jason is also the head of AJC's recently launched Center for A New Middle East.

Joining Jason was Dr. Ken Weinstein, former longtime CEO of the Hudson Institute and the Walter P. Stern Distinguished Fellow at Hudson; Kirsten Fontenrose, the President of Red Six Solutions and Senior Director of Gulf Affairs in the National Security Council under President Trump; and Rich Goldberg, Senior Adviser at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and Director of Countering Iranian Weapons of Mass Destruction for the National Security Council, under President Trump.

Just a reminder: AJC is a 501(c)3 nonpartisan organization and neither supports nor opposes candidates for elective office. A similar program will be offered at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago later this summer. Now onto today’s episode: an excerpt from AJC’s convention program.

Jason Isaacson:

Let me begin by reading to you a couple of passages from the Republican platform, which was adopted yesterday at the Republican National Convention. This is what it said about Israel. Quote, We will stand with Israel and seek peace in the Middle East, we will rebuild our alliance network in the region to ensure a future of peace, stability and prosperity. And then there was, as you may recall, for the Republican platform, his list of 20 promises. And it's described as 20 promises that we will accomplish very quickly when we win the White House and Republican majorities in the House and Senate.

And number eight, on that list of 20 promises is the following, quote: restore peace in Europe and in the Middle East. So let's drill down with our panelists on those two statements in January 2025. That's more than six months away. It may be that the Israel Hamas war will be won over by them, and perhaps whatever conflict is so close to boiling over between Israel and Hezbollah, that that might not any longer be the case, might have boiled over, might be a thing of the past.

But let's say for the sake of argument, that hostilities are in fact, continuing, and let's assume that the Republican Party is victorious this fall. What are you expecting the Trump administration to do to, quote restore peace in the Middle East and to accomplish that, quote, very quickly. And let me begin Kirsten, with you.

Kirsten Fontenrose:

Great, thanks so much for having us. All of us like to nerd out about these kinds of topics all the time when we're just grateful that there are other people who are as interested. What I expect to see in America is a revived peace plan. So you all remember the deal of the century, the vision for peace, we will see that come back. If there's a second Trump administration. Not in isolation, it will be part of a larger context.

That will also include assurances about Israel security and governance for Gaza and the like. Why have we not seen this yet? Because no one's asked the Trump team. But that will come back and you will see that. There's an expectation, whether it's naive or not, which we'll see, that there will be a greater receptiveness among the Palestinian population for an economic plan that offers improvements in livelihood after this conflict.

If there is a marginalized Hamas, there'll be more movement in this space for reviving these kinds of ideas. So we will definitely see a revived peace plan, you won't see less attention on this issue, you'll see very top level attention on the issue. You're also going to see, I think gloves off with the Houthis in the Red Sea.

The US military has been very careful to make sure that all of our strikes so far had been from a defensive perspective. But you will see, I believe, because the world has not criticized any of these strikes, I think you're gonna see more latitude there. More room for movement for preemptive striking, for instance, because the perception is that for the whole world, this shipping interception problem is just out of hand. So I think we'll see more latitude there. And we'll see gloves come off a bit there.

And then I think you're gonna see some tough talk, frankly, with Prime Minister Netanyahu. President Trump has watched the US be yanked around a bit by the current Israeli government.

And I think you're going to see less tolerance for that recognition that Israel is a sovereign country, but more of an attempt to say the US is the superpower here, and we will be leading the ideas from hence. If we're expected to play a role, we will be leading in that role. What you will see, however, will be interesting to watch as there is division among Trump advisors about a two state solution. So you'll see that be debated out.

Jason Isaacson:

Thank you for that. Ken, let me ask you, restoring peace in the Middle East and Europe and doing it very quickly, you've had a very broad focus on a whole range of foreign policy issues at the Hudson Institute and before and since. Tell me how you see that playing out under a second Trump administration?

Ken Weinstein:

I'd say first of all, I think President Trump came to the conclusion early on, in his first term, he came in remember, talking about the deal of the century with you know, this peace agreement, he was booed at the Republican Jewish Committees event when he was a candidate.

And he quickly came into office and understood he could not trust Mahmoud Abbas, because of the incitement to terror by the Palestinian Authority and the tensions that were given out, and the pay for slay efforts that the Palestinian Authority has. Whereby people who kill Jews, kill Americans, were getting Palestinian Authority pensions in prisons, for their families and the like.

And so, Trump quickly came to understand that the challenge in the peace process wasn't bringing Israel and the Palestinians together, it was that the peace process itself was misconstrued. The peace process was being used by Middle Eastern governments, in particular, the Iranians, but also the Palestinians as a means to put leverage on Israel, exercise leverage on Israel, by a bunch of people who wanted to see the end of Israel's existence. And Trump quickly reversed that equation.

He understood that the best way to move forward was to remove items from the table such as moving the embassy to Jerusalem, which didn't have any of the backlash that John Kerry and others predicted would happen. And he quickly understood the best way to move things forward was to put pressure on the Palestinians.

Trump's a real estate guy. And so he understands leverage, he understands how to put pressure forth, and how to deter. I think we're going to see much more of that moving forward. We're not going to have a vice president of the United States who's going to get up and say, the Israelis can't evacuate Rafah, it's going to lead to 10s of 1000s of deaths.

And here I actually disagree slightly, I think Trump will actually give the Israelis the latitude they need to finish the mission, which is to destroy Hamas, and eventually bring about a transformation in Gaza, with the assistance of the Saudis. Who were absolutely critical in de-radicalizing Gaza, they have done it successfully themselves, as has the UAE.

And so I think we're going to look much more at a regional approach on these issues. Obviously, Iran is going to be, to borrow a term from Joe Biden, President Biden, in the crosshairs of the Trump administration, as they were before. You're gonna see massive sanctions again, we're gonna get them, we're gonna enforce those sanctions. And Rich can talk to this stuff far more deeply than I ever could.

And you're gonna have the Iranians on the run so that they don't feel that they can work with Hamas or work with Hezbollah, to do more damage to Israel. And already we're seeing a deterrent effect on the Northern Front. And also with regard to Hamas.

Because with regard to Hamas, we see that the fear of a Trump administration is leading to a greater willingness to negotiate with Israel. And on the northern front, I think it's less likely that the Israelis will take dramatic action before the US election, knowing that they will not be reined in by an administration that is somehow searching for a delusion of peace with Hezbollah and with Lebanon.

Jason Isaacson:

What about peace in Europe? Is is that something that you see, that you can envision under a Trump administration?

Ken Weinstein:

First, let me say something with regard to Europe and the Middle East. I think that the Trump administration, the Trump team has been infuriated by this notion of enforcing this ridiculous ICC policy with regard to Israel and those who threatened to arrest Netanyahu. I think you're going to see in places particularly, I can just think of the kinds of actions they'll take in Germany.

I think you can expect individual sanctions on the people who were behind Nord Stream as a sign to not dare mess with Netanyahu, period. And you'll see other actions like that. I know the Spanish ambassadors here with regard to Spain with that we will be taking numbers, as Nikki Haley did so effectively at the UN, and as the Biden team does not.

So with regard to Europe. Look, I think the situation with regard to Ukraine, as President Trump understands it, I think, Trump, you have to understand he comes to this. He's not a policy person. He thinks that policy people like the three of us, four us up here, we lack creativity, we have a sense the policy options run from the letter L or P to the letter Q or R. And in fact, for Trump, they run from A to Z. And so that meant fire and fury in Pyongyang, but it meant eventually potentially beachfront condominiums in North Korea and an economic vitality to North Korea, if it gave up its nuclear program.

With regard to Iran, it was maximum pressure, but it was the new Iran deal that got rid of the nuclear program that got rid of the missile program that got rid of regional activities, and that internally reshaped Iran, and led to a new relationship with Iran, with not only the region but the rest of the world. And with China, it was massive tariffs on China, but a new trade deal in the phase one that was gonna get rid of intellectual property stuff, which was at the core of what President Trump saw correctly as the engine of the Chinese economy, and the engine of the China 2025 program. So I'd say with regard to Ukraine, the President is looking at options that will, as he himself has said, he would tell the, you know, the Ukrainians on day one, you've got to, you know, we've got to end the fighting, you would tell Putin, if you don't end the fighting, we're gonna arm the shit out of Ukraine, pardon my French, as he said something along those lines. And I think what we'll see at the end of the day, is a massive program to guarantee Ukrainian security, that is going to take massive security guarantees.

But the Europeans are going to have to step up and step up in a very serious way. And we've seen since the announcement of the JD Vance nomination are ready to reaction in Europe, the Europeans, you know, have to understand they're not gonna be able to backchannel they’re not going to be able to figure out some way out of this.

They're gonna have to be big providers of security guarantees, we will do the same for the Ukrainians as well, but Europe has to take up a big portion of it. And Trump does not, he is not Joe Biden, he's not going to cut and run, as in Afghanistan, he doesn't want to be humiliated on the stage, he understands deterrence, he's going to send a very clear signal to the Russians, as he did to the Taliban.

When they were talking about when they were negotiating with the Taliban, Trump was on a video call once with the Taliban leader, and said, I want to make this very clear, you're not to strike at any of our people. And if you do, and hit the button on Play, and he showed a video of I think, the Taliban leader's kid leaving their house to say we're watching you every moment, and we will take care of you. And there'll be some kind of a version of that with regard to Putin, that's going to be very clear.

He was very blunt with Putin behind closed doors, from the White House in particular. And I think there was a good reason why Putin didn't go into Ukraine during Trump's term. And so I think that there's going to be some kind of a square in the circle solution that's going to have to come together. And I've been telling European foreign and defense ministers for the last few months, think about this now, how to do it, how to implement it.

Jason Isaacson:

Ken, thank you so much. Rich, let me turn to you. We've been talking about Iran, and you are an expert on Iran. It happened for years. I didn't see a reference to Iran and the Republican platform. But of course, we know, former President Trump's record on Iran. And Ken has been talking about that. Should he return to the White House next January, what do you foresee on this front to return to maximum pressure, or something more kinetic? And what is your sense of our regional strategic partners priorities? Are our friends in the Gulf hoping for a decisive showdown with Iran? Or are they sufficiently risk averse that they prefer a less confrontational approach? What do you think?

Rich Goldberg:

I think if you look at the top lines, right, and you compare the policy, the recipe, if you will, under the Trump administration: maximum pressure on Iran, maximum support for Israel gets you peace, gets you deterrence. And when you flip the narrative and you go to maximum deference to Iran and pressure on Israel, you get conflict in the Middle East. It's not disconnected from what Ken's just talking about in other regions of the world as well, whether in Europe, whether you're in the Indo-Pacific.

This comes down to the ability to restore American deterrence. And then you have options. There are a lot of genies that are out of the bottle due to the last three and a half years. Iran today and its nuclear program is at the one yard line of nuclear weapons thresholds. They were not there four years ago. In fact, after the killing of Soleimani, in early 2020, the rest of the year the Iranians never escalated the nuclear program again.

They waited until January of 2021. And that's when they started jumping to 20% high enriched uranium. And then they saw nothing's happening to us. So they went to 60% high enriched uranium. They started installing all the advanced centrifuges, they've advanced, so far accelerated to this incredible capacity to produce a dozen nuclear weapons in just a couple of months if they so chose. Plus Intel now coming in that the administration is trying to downplay work on weaponization. There's a lot of genies out of the bottle here that Donald Trump's going to have to try to put back into the bottle.

And that will not be easy. But the formula remains correct. Restore deterrence, have maximum pressure and isolation on the Iranian regime and provide support to your allies. Now, the Gulf Arabs, by the way, the Saudis, the Emiratis, they've made some strategic decisions due to the policies that they saw, sustained by Joe Biden. They've cut deals with the Iranians and sort of cut their own JCPOA. with Iran with the Houthis. I'm not sure they're going to be on board for what's coming next. And they need to make some preparations for the return of a Trump administration and hawkishness towards Tehran and understand that we also won't tolerate them hedging with the Chinese. Now, that comes from the fact that America is hedging on them.

And so there's going to be a lot of parts that have to come together like a puzzle, to try to put Humpty Dumpty back together again, actual restored turns and regain that peace through strength in the region. This is true in the Middle East. It's true in Europe, and it's true in the Indo Pacific. So what is deterrence? I think that's a major question. What is deterrence?

Made up of two big things, capacity and will. Joe Biden and Donald Trump both have capacity. They were the commander in chief at some point of the most powerful military on Earth. Nobody doubts that you have capacity when you are the president of the United States. But our enemies do doubt the will. And they test the will early on.

Every single administration gets tested, whether it's China, whether it's Putin, whether it's Iran, they get tested. At some point, Donald Trump got tested by the Iranians and Soleimani is dead. And that changed a lot of things in the world. And over the course of time, the unpredictability, the some of the craziness of the media went hysterical over the red button with Kim Jong Un did get the attention of people like Vladimir Putin. The Taliban tested Joe Biden, and he failed the test. And Kabul fell. And then Ukraine was invaded. And then now in China, they're expanding and starting to harass and actually attack in some ways, the Philippines and Taiwan.

And what are we seeing? Nothing. So, the minute Donald Trump becomes president, when I hear Trump say, just my election is going to start bringing about a change on the Ukraine front, a change in the world. You might have laughed at that.

I think after Saturday, you're not laughing anymore. A picture that if you're Xi Jinping, the Ayatollah, Putin, Kim Jong Un, looking at that on your desk every day of Donald Trump with his fist in the air blood dripping, right after being shot, saying fight. You're not questioning will. And that will be, I think, the big game changer.

Now, they might still test it. And there's a Chinese proverb, which is, you have to kill the chicken to scare the monkey. And I think President Trump might have to kill a chicken. He'd have to pick the chicken wisely. I think it might be the Houthis. That makes no sense to me. There is a national interest, there's a strategic importance to it. And it will game change how you're trying to get the Gulf Arabs back on side, see that we are committed to the security in the Gulf in the broader Middle East, it will send a major signal to Tehran, and it'll be part of that pivot back to maximum pressure on Iran and maximum support for Israel.

Jason Isaacson:

Rich, thank you. But before I turn back to the Abraham Accords, let me ask you, what's your sense of the Saudi and UAE and Bahraini overtures to Iran? Are they just seeking some kind of stability, some kind of channel, but it doesn't have a whole lot of meaning, or what's your sense and how should the US respond? Rich?

Rich Goldberg:

I think there is meaning to it. I think that Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince in Saudi Arabia has changed his strategic calculus over the last three years. I think that there was a game changing moment for him when the Houthis were raining down missiles, next to a Formula One race he was hosting out in Jeddah. And you’re talking about major investors, world leaders, important people all driving into a race course already there. And you're seeing a ballistic missile explode within your line of sight. And the United States does nothing.

And then Abu Dhabi comes under attack by the Houthis, and the United States does nothing. And they're saying, Wow, they're just at the table trying to give the Iranians whatever they can, they've taken the Houthis off the terror list. They're not defending us anymore. They've pulled the missile defense augmentation that Trump put in, in 2019-2020. And they're still trying to get this nuclear deal done.

What are we doing here? Why are we just waiting around for Godot? Why are we exposed? We should cut a deal here. And why if the United States can hedge on us, can't we hedge on them, and they start cozying up to the Chinese and doing things that we probably don't like very much I need to put an end to. So I think it's very real. These channels are real. They're in a hedge.

I think it's taken a while for others that are far more suspicious of Iran, like Bahrain to get on board this strategy. But everybody sort of signed up to this. There's a normalization process with Assad that I think is partially connected to it as well. All of that's going to have to change. You have Donald Trump is back in office. And I don't know that they appreciate that very much.

Jason Isaacson:

There's also a recollection of the Trump administration in this reaction or non reaction to this Iranian attack on Saudi Aramco facilities. So it's been a mixed bag. But But first, let me let me let me turn back to you. And we were talking about the Abraham accords before. That was a great foreign policy access success of the last months of the Trump administration, first of the UAE, then Bahrain and then with different terminology, but Morocco and Sudan.

As you know, the Biden administration has been vigorously pursuing an effort to normalize Saudi relations with Israel, and objective that was also very much a part of the Trump administration's vision. What are your perspectives on the likelihood of that kind of a deal being closed in the last months of the current Biden administration, if they do move forward on such a deal with the Republicans getting the Senate joined with Democrats in the Senate to support such a deal before the election? Or perhaps in a lame duck session after the election?

Kirsten Fontenrose:

Well that's the big question. So I think if you have a deal that includes normalization with Israel, Saudi us still includes normalization with Israel, it has a shot of getting through, but the closer we get to the election, the smaller that shot gets, because the more Republicans Congress will want to hold out to grant that foreign policy when to potential Republican administration.

But if you have a deal that is being discussed now, as a Plan B, that is just a US-Saudi deal, without normalization. And this is because of the Israeli government's decision, perhaps not to grant that the Saudis are fully on board, you won't get it through, there's just not enough in it. For the US. There are lots of questions about why we'd be granting Saudi assistance with civilian nuclear technology. And a security guarantee, when we're not really getting much out of it. There's nothing in this deal in terms of concrete asks on the relationship with China.

And we can really go quite far in blocking Chinese influence in the Gulf by just improving our own foreign military sales process. We don't need to grant security guarantees, the Israeli Saudi relationship is so close right now. It's normalization and everything but public statement and name and that public statement name is important for the follow on effects you have around the world globally and with other Muslim populations.

But in terms of their coordination, they're in a pretty good place. So we're not in some sort of crisis rush to make sure this happens in the next few months, unless you're the Biden team. And you're desperate for a foreign policy win, because your promises on other foreign policy fronts have not borne out.

So I think you will still see this continue, though we have doubled down on the Saudi discussion, if there is a second Trump administration. But you will not see this granting of a deal to Saudi Arabia, even though they are a phenomenal partner. And we are quite close, without more concrete asks that benefit U.S. goals as well. It's not the opinion that just having Saudi on side with nothing we've actually signed them up to, would they grant overflight rights, if things came down with Iran.

We need to make those more specific before we would do something that would require commitment of troops, large resources, equipment, perhaps to the detriment of other partners, we would be able to send those same troops and equipment. So I don't think we're going to see it in the last months of this administration.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

To hear the rest of the panel, head to the link in our show notes. Another reminder that AJC is a nonpartisan organization and will be at the DNC next month in Chicago. We hope to see some of you there.

Next week on People of the Pod, tune in for our sit down with two Jewish Olympians before they head to Paris for the Summer Olympic Games.
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Europe at the Ballot Box: Insights and Impact on Jewish Communities and Beyond
12 jul· People of the Pod
Election season in Europe is in full force, including recent elections in France, the United Kingdom, and the European Parliament. American Jewish Committee's offices across Europe have closely followed the results, which have had dramatic outcomes across the continent. Listen to an excerpt of this live podcast recording with AJC Europe Managing Director Simone Rodan-Benzaquen for expert analysis on what these developments mean for the future of Europe, European Jewry, Israel and the region, and more.

*The views and opinions expressed by guests do not necessarily reflect the views or position of AJC.

Episode Lineup:

(0:40) Simone Rodan Benzaquen

Show Notes:

Resources:

European Elections: June-July 2024; Results and AJC Expert Analysis

Listen – People of the Pod:

Rebuilding Israel’s Devastated Negev Region Post 10/7

The 2024 U.S. Presidential Election: What Does it Mean For Israel?

Follow People of the Pod on your favorite podcast app, and learn more at AJC.org/PeopleofthePod

You can reach us at: [email protected]

If you’ve appreciated this episode, please be sure to tell your friends, and rate and review us on Apple Podcasts.

Transcript of Interview with Simone Rodan-Benzaquen:

Manya Brachear Pashman:

Welcome to this live recording. Election season in Europe is in full force, including recent elections in France, the United Kingdom and the European Parliament. American Jewish Committee's offices across Europe have closely followed the dramatic results across the continent.

Joining us to share what these developments mean for Israel and the Jewish people is someone who has become a fairly regular guest, thanks to her expertise, AJC Europe Managing Director Simone Rodan-Benzaquen. Simone, welcome back to People of the Pod.

Simone Rodan Benzaquen:

Thank you very much Manya. It's very good to be with you.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

So let's start with the most recent election in France, which is home to the second largest diaspora Jewish community behind the United States. So President Emmanuel Macron surprised a lot of people by calling for a snap election after his party was pummeled by the far right in European Parliament elections. Why was a snap election his solution? And what was the outcome?

Simone Rodan Benzaquen:

So the President has said that after the European Parliamentary elections, which indeed have been a huge failure for his party, he only gained 17% of the French vote while the far right gained 33% – that he wanted to use this occasion to give back the voice to the people and use it basically as a means to clarify the situation.

Now, there has been a little bit of clarification. The one clarification, I'd say, is the fact that after the first round, where it became very clear that the far right is gaining more and more weight within the French public opinion and therefore, possibly also in Parliament, where it was expected that the far right would become the first party and possibly be able to have a government–the clarification was nevertheless that the majority of the country doesn't want the National Rally, meaning the far right to rule the country.

It has also been a clarification because it has also showed that to some extent, the National Front is probably not yet ready to rule apart from the fact that majority of the people don't believe it should be, because nearly 100 candidates were as, one could say, problematic. Some of them had a criminal past. Some of them had made antisemitic, racist statements in the past. Some of them were truly not very competent, broke down in all of the interviews or the confrontations, not being able to respond to any of the questions.

So that was, I'd say, one part of the clarification. The other part of the clarification, which is to some extent, problematic, and brings us to the situation we're in today is the fact that France is now clearly split into I'd say, three blocks: the far right, which is strong, the center and the left.

And so just to give you a little bit of an understanding of what the results look like after the second round of the of the elections, so it gave what we call the NFP basically an alliance of all of the left parties – the far left, the Socialist Party, the Greens and the Communists – 182 seats in the 577-seat National Assembly.

A majority is needed of 289 seats, so they only have, as the largest bloc, 182 seats. Marine Le Pen's national rally party has, again, despite the fact that they were expecting to win only 143 seats, nevertheless gaining 50 seats compared to the previous election.

And for President Macron's party, the results come as something probably of a relief, because they have 168 seats, down from the 250 seats it held in the outgoing parliament, but still far more than what people were expecting. So we now have basically three scenarios. We have, in theory, a left bloc that doesn't have an absolute majority, that could be the ones, nevertheless, to try and find a coalition to rule the country.

You could have something of a sort of a grand coalition which would include the moderate left, the center, and the moderate right. But France is not really used to making coalitions. It's not how we work. It's not like in Israel, it's not like in Germany, or other European countries.

Or, we could have a third option, again, one that we've not had previously, in the Fifth Republic. It's called something like a technical government as it was the case for example, in Italy, under the Draghi government.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

So what do these results mean for the French Jewish community?

Simone Rodan Benzaquen:

Now, first of all, I'd say that many Jews after the second round of the elections, probably felt, just as much of the country, a sigh of relief. In between the two rounds, everybody was talking about the fact that whether the National Rally would have an absolute majority, we would have Prime Minister Bardella from the far right ruling the country, what it would mean. And that's not happening.

So I think a majority of French Jews, again, just as the majority of French people probably seem somewhat relieved. But I think it was very quickly gained by a sense of worry, because of the presence of the far left Unbowed party in the left coalition that is now the largest part.

And so many, many questions arise, because we know that in that part of the coalition, there are very, very, very problematic elements, particularly with relation to Jews and antisemitism. And they have really made sort of, you know, “anti-Israelism,” or even antisemitism a core part of the ideology. And I think more largely, I'd say, Jews, I think are very, very uncomfortable. We were really the Jewish question, if I may put it that way, was really at the center of this election. It was all day long about which party is antisemitic, which party isn't, who’s trying to get the attention of the Jews.

And so many people around us, around me, really had the impression that they were being instrumentalized in a very, very horrible manner. And I think that the large feeling within the Jewish community is uncomfortable. They are afraid. And all of this also particularly in a context where we have an explosion of antisemitism.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

So are you saying that that question of who is more antisemitic – the right, the left – was not actually, that question was not coming from the Jewish community? It was coming from another source. What were the origins of that question? And why is antisemitism the sin that has been instrumentalized?

Simone Rodan Benzaquen:

So first of all, you have to understand that the far left party from Jean-Luc Mélenchon has really used the issue of Gaza and of the Palestinians as a weapon. It's not about the Palestinians. It's about – how can I call it – “Palestinianism” – it's really become sort of a cultural marker for that party, constantly being at the border of antisemitism. So you have, for example, people within his party who considered that the October 7 terrorist attacks were not terrorist; you have those who say that it was actually resistance; you have those who deny that babies were killed. And the other side of the political spectrum, Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella, really made the issue of antisemitism, position themselves as basically, the defenders, the protectors of the Jews, all while at the same time, still having elements within their own party that were clearly problematic.

The National Front also knows that this is the best way for them to become normalized to become a regular party that can actually be taken seriously by large parts of the French society. So basically, everybody was pulling at the Jews on all sides. And we all know that whenever you make the issue of antisemitism a political issue, or basically a political football game, or baseball game in the American context, it means that you're actually not serious about antisemitism.

And the same can be said on the left, in particular, the far left always pretends not to be antisemitic, says how is it even possible that anyone could believe they would be antisemitic while they only believe that antisemitism only exists on the on the right and on the far right?

So it's very problematic, because again, in the middle, are there actually Jewish citizens who the only thing they want is for everybody within the French society to take antisemitism seriously, and to fight it, collectively, knowing in particular that antisemitism is always the problem of society at large and should therefore be taken seriously by everybody.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

I mean, it is well known the history of antisemitism within France’s far right party. Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine Le Pen’s father, was repeatedly convicted for hate speech, Holocaust denial, and it does appear that his daughter Marine Le Pen has taken steps to distance her party from that history.

She has expressed support for Israel. She has expressed support for France’s Jewish community, as you said. Are you saying that it's really nothing more than a political strategy, a facade? Or do you think there is an authentic evolution of principles in her party, that has, a party that has some residual antisemitism from this long history?

Simone Rodan Benzaquen:

First of all, it's better to have a party to say what they say than the opposite. Let's be very clear about that. It's better to have Marine Le Pen and Bardella say the same things that they say, meaning, expressing support for the Jewish community, expressing support for Israel, than the opposite, as her father used to say, who used to consider that the gas chambers were just the detail in history. But nevertheless, I spoke about the fact that Emmanuel Macron, in his decision to call for snap elections, has wanted to clarify things. And once the focus came back to actually looking at the party and looking at the candidates of those that were actually presented by the national rally as being candidates for the parliamentary elections, you could see that the problems were still there.

So it's one thing to talk the talk, which is good, but at the same time, when you give nearly 100 seats to elements within your own party who are clearly problematic, I mean, we had a woman who wore a Nazi cap, like actually a cap from from from the Nazi era and took a picture of herself and posted it on social media. You have Holocaust deniers. You have people who actually had a library with where they sell Holocaust denying books, and the list goes on. You can't just consider that this is just residual, that this is just a small problem.

And again, I think for the party to really be taken seriously and really make sure that to know that what they're doing is genuine, they will have to have a very serious inward-looking approach.

Meaning, not using the issue of antisemitism and considering that it only exists ever on the far left, or that it only exists only within Islamist elements within the society, but actually agree and actually understand that it exists within their own ranks. Once that happens, we can take them a little bit more seriously. And we know that this will not only be part of a political strategy. In the meantime, I think we need to stay vigilant and call them out whenever that's necessary.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

So now let's turn to the left. I have to say I used the word “residual” in my previous question on purpose because that was a word that Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the far left leader, used to describe antisemitism in France. It's not rising, it's just residual. He's also called Israel's operation in Gaza genocide. I'm curious, should we be concerned about the far left’s first place result? And what could be the ramifications of a far left victory in 2027 in the presidential election?

Simone Rodan Benzaquen:

So we did a survey, our biannual survey that we do together with IFOP, one of the largest polling institutes in France. And we found that 92% of French Jews consider Jean-Luc Mélenchon's unbound party to be the main reason why antisemitism is growing in the political sphere. So 92% of French Jews consider it to be antisemitic. A large majority or 54% of French Jews when they're being asked if Jean-Luc Mélenchon was to be president of France, would they leave the country or not, 55% say they would. So this is very, very clear. French Jews are very concerned about the far left.

The different comments by himself, whether it's because he called, for example, when Jeremy Corbyn lost the election in the United Kingdom at the time, he said that the reason why he lost the elections was because of the Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom, or because of the networks of the Likud.

He, as you said, he's spoken about a Gaza genocide, but that's happening basically every single day. He considers antisemitism to be residual, all while knowing that 1,000% increase in antisemitism has happened since October 7. He has used the issue of Gaza, of the Palestinians really as a political game to create chaos within its parliament. He has had, they have had Palestinian flags. They have called Israel an apartheid state.

I mean, this is basically happening every single day. So this is why Jews in France are extremely concerned and consider the far left to be the main cause of antisemitism today in the French political sphere. Now, what is very, very concerning, and this is we’re paying the consequences today, is that when after the first round of the parliamentary elections, the traditional left wing parties, meaning the Socialists, the Green, the small Communist Party, decided to make an alliance with Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s party, this was another not only a feeling of concern for French Jews, but probably a feeling of betrayal. Because it means that the moderate left does not consider antisemitism to be a red line.

It doesn't consider antisemitism to be so important. For it not to create an alliance with a party that has very clearly made antisemitism one of its major causes. And let's be clear, in the Socialist Party, you have, for example, Francois Hollande, the former President of France, who was just elected in Parliament again, and who has, you know, indirectly considered that antisemitism is not a red line for him, and therefore, has decided to create an alliance with the far left. So for French Jews, it's both a sense of fear, but also clearly a sense of betrayal.

Because how, what is the message not only to the French left, but what is the message to the rest of society? If you consider antisemitism not to be a red line? How do you want to continue to explain to the rest of society, to French children that antisemitism needs to be fought, that this is a priority for the country as such, if you don't consider it to be a red line? So we are now living with these consequences and therefore, the question arises, who will be in the government?

Will it be, you know, will it be the far left, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, or will after the second round of the elections, the traditional moderate left decide to split off and, you know, take its distance with third party or again, continue in the same way, as they have until today, but it's a major issue, and one that we will possibly pay the price for in the future, again, beyond the very political issue, but in the country as such.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

So what role did the Israel-Hamas war play in this election and its outcome?

Simone Rodan Benzaquen:

The far left had a candidate, Palestinian woman by the name of Rima Hassan, who has a very, very radical approach to the Palestinian issue, considers that there needs to be a Palestinian state from the river to the sea. And this was really sort of the poster child of the unbowed party from Jean-Luc Mélenchon. And more largely, the issue of antisemitism played a role on the other side by all the other parties.

We know, for example, of this horrible case of a 12-year-old Jewish girl who was raped by three boys of 12 and 13 years old, who hurled antisemitic insults and raped her. So all of this has really taken a center stage in the election, which makes many French people uneasy. I mean, so many friends of mine who said, you know, I wish we would be talking about something else.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

I want to also look at the United Kingdom, another major country that also had elections last week, the UK Labour Party had a major victory ending 14 years of conservative rule. What can you tell us about that election and its results?

Simone Rodan Benzaquen:

This is major. The Labour Party led by Sir Keir Starmer really scored resounding victory in the general elections. Its majority is the largest one by any government since 1997. The party flipped seats in all corners, really, of the United Kingdom, defeating conservative candidates in constituencies that had been conservative since, really, the 19th century. The conservative vote collapsed by nearly 20 percentage points. It's the largest decline by any governing party in British political history. And voters abandoned the party not only in favor of the Labour Party, but also for other parties – for the Liberal Democrats, for reform UK, and also for the Green Party. And also plenty stayed at home.

Fewer than three-fifths of the voters turned out to vote, and it's the second lowest turnout in the past century. Now, the Liberal Democrats took 60 seats held by the conservatives. The party increased its representation in the House of Commons from 11 seats in 2019 to 72, and seats in which the Liberal Democrats were competing against the conservative really saw substantial tactical voting to ask the governing party in the seats. The Tories vote share fell by an average of 24 percentage points, while that of the Liberal Democrats increased by 12.

Also the Reform Party, Euro-skeptic, rather pro Russian anti-immigration party that was led by Nigel Farage was the biggest beneficiary of the conservative collapse in terms of vote share. Reform achieved 14% of the vote nationwide, which is basically 12 points compared with the Brexit party that Nigel Farage used in 2019.

Nevertheless, the interesting thing, though, I think, for the Labour Party in particular, is that we see to some extent that when Labour becomes a normal social democratic center left party, it can win elections, which wasn't the case under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn where the Labour Party very, very clearly lost the elections.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

But now, Jeremy Corbyn, as you mentioned earlier, very troubling history of antisemitism that spread throughout that party. So what should we know about the new prime minister Keir Starmer?

Simone Rodan Benzaquen:

Keir Starmer has made the issue of antisemitism a top priority. The party under Jeremy Corbyn had really become one could say institutionally antisemitic. And one of the first actions as Keir Starmer took over the party was the public apology to the Jewish community calling antisemitism a stain on the party that needed to be eradicated. And so I think as such, that needs to be clearly noted. Before Starmer also took over, before he now became Prime Minister, it's also important to note that the Jewish Labour MPs, like Luciana Berger, like Louise Ellman, who had left the party under Jeremy Corbyn, because basically they were being harassed, have decided to come back.

So I think it's really sort of an endorsement of Labour as sort of a renewed confidence in the party's election. So, I think overall, the Jewish community is in the United Kingdom somewhat reassured by the stance that Keir Starmer has taken, since he has taken over the party, and there is no reason to believe that he will take a different stance.

One should also probably note, even though this is, of course, his personal life, that Sir Keir Starmer knows the Jewish community very well. His wife is Jewish. She is the daughter of a Polish-British Jew, a Polish Jew who had emigrated to the United Kingdom in the 20s. Then was married to a non-Jewish woman who then converted to Judaism. So she was brought up Jewish. She is involved in Jewish community affairs.

Keir Starmer has had in the past said that he would stop working at 6 pm on Friday night in order to be able to be with his family for Shabbat dinner. And so this is, of course, an important sign. That being said, there will also be pressure without a doubt from other elements within the political spectrum.

There are other parties who did particularly well – the Green Party, the Reform Party, the Liberal Democrats, and there will be pressure, nevertheless, on many of the issues that in particular on foreign policy with relations to Israel and Gaza, that will be made. But overall, I think many in the Jewish community are reassured about the fact that the Labour Party was somehow cleansed of the most problematic antisemitic elements within the party.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

So put this all in context for us now. And how do these elections fit in with what we're seeing across the continent, from the recent EU Parliament elections to the Dutch elections?

Simone Rodan Benzaquen:

There is clearly, across the continent, a huge polarization. We see radicalization of the political spectrum. We see a certain inability of people to even talk with each other, to even share a common sense of reality, a common sense of shared values. And I think this is really what we're seeing across the European continent, and probably more widely across Western democracies. And this I think, needs to be seen, particularly also in a wider geopolitical point of view.

We are clearly witnessing these days, an assault by autocratic nations or groups across the world, who have decided to team up despite their differences and to have to attack the Western worlds for their hegemony, to attack the Western world because they want to change the world order. So of course, militarily, by the war that is being waged by Russia against Ukraine, the war that is also being waged by Iranian proxies against Israel – Hamas, of course, since October 7, but also Hezbollah, the Houthis, etc, etc.

And they're really, I think, trying to test the grounds. We see those autocrats teaming up – Russia, Iran, North Korea, China, to some extent – waging this war against the West, and we in the West, really falling apart to some extent from within both because there is a hybrid war that is being waged by those autocratic elements and countries from the outside, but also because we ourselves have our own huge problems, of course, as we know, and there I think, this is what we're seeing. This is the polarization of the political spectrum.

And the fact that the far right is gaining more and more ground is part of that. It's part of the fact that many, many European citizens feel that what they used to believe Europe was about is falling apart. There is a lot of cultural insecurity. There's a lot of fear, and to some extent, the job that by the sort of traditional conservative and liberal parties on the left and right, that should have been there to address the concerns of European citizens, whether it's on immigration, whether it's on globalization, whether it's about the middle class have not been addressed by those parties.

And so in this vacuum, and in this wider geopolitical context, the populist parties are exploiting that part. So my appeal to European and Western democracies and Western parties who care about Western values and European values is to start addressing the issues from within, stand up for themselves stand up for the minorities and in particular Jews. Knowing that antisemitism is always the first sign of societies falling apart, and deal with the very serious threats that are coming from the outside, and stand firm. Because we are at a crossroads of the world as we know it.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

Once again, thank you, Simone for joining us and informing all of our conversations on these matters.
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Rebuilding Israel’s Devastated Negev Region Post 10/7
28 jun· People of the Pod
The October 7 Hamas attack severely affected Israel’s Ben-Gurion University (BGU) and its surrounding community. The university lost over 110 people, several students were taken hostage, including Noa Argamani, and thousands of students were called up for reserve duty.

Doug Seserman, CEO of Americans for Ben-Gurion University, joins us to discuss the impact of the October 7 Hamas massacre on BGU and Israel’s Negev region. Hear about the university's emergency response and volunteer efforts, highlighting the region’s resilience and the university’s innovation in sustainability, water conservation, and energy solutions.

*The views and opinions expressed by guests do not necessarily reflect the views or position of AJC.

Episode Lineup:

(0:40) Doug Seserman

Show Notes:

Listen – People of the Pod:

The 2024 U.S. Presidential Election: What Does it Mean For Israel?

Seven Months In: What Israelis Think About the War Against Hamas, Campus Antisemitism in America, and More

What Does it Mean to be a Jewish American Hero? A Jewish American Heritage Month Conversation with AJC CEO Ted Deutch

Follow People of the Pod on your favorite podcast app, and learn more at AJC.org/PeopleofthePod

You can reach us at: [email protected]

If you’ve appreciated this episode, please be sure to tell your friends, and rate and review us on Apple Podcasts.

Transcript of Interview with Doug Seserman:

Manya Brachear Pashman:

The Negev, the vast desert region that covers 60% of Israel's territory is home to only 10% of its population. It's also home to Ben-Gurion University and many of the communities attacked by Hamas terrorists on October 7.

Doug Seserman is the CEO of Americans for Ben-Gurion University. In that role, he has worked to highlight the innovations and technology know-how that Israel can offer America and the world when it comes to sustainability, water conservation, energy solutions and ecology. But since October 7 BGU’s efforts have shifted from sustaining lives across Israel’s south to rebuilding them. Doug Seserman is with us now to discuss those efforts. Doug, welcome to People of the Pod.

Doug Seserman:

Thank you so much for inviting me.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

So compared to other Israeli universities, the BGU community was disproportionately impacted by the October 7 massacre, correct? Can you give our listeners some perspective on the scope of loss?

Doug Seserman:

Sure. So as the crow flies our main campus in Beer-Sheva is only about 22 miles from Gaza. We had a number of students at the Nova music festival site, and a number of our employees and their families live in the western Negev or Gaza Envelope area. So as a university today, we have 111 dead. That includes those murdered on October 7, as well as fallen soldiers. We've had close to 6,600 of our students, faculty, employees, administration, called up to milu'im, reserve duty, and not all of them have come back. Some 2000 are still fighting. So that was a direct and disproportional impact. Now everybody in Israel has experienced this war. Every family knows somebody, but for us, it's definitely disproportional. Literally every colleague's kids are fighting. Every younger woman who's a colleague in her 30s, their husbands are fighting. People are on their WhatsApp just trying to hear what's going to happen next. It's a very surreal situation.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

Four hostages were rescued by the IDF earlier this month. Were there any faculty, staff, or students from Ben-Gurion taken hostage?

Doug Seserman:

Noa Argamani, you may recall her name. She was at the music festival and forcibly separated from her boyfriend Avinatan Or, who's a BGU alum. But Noa is a 26-year-old information systems student of ours.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

Yes, thank you. Of course, Noa was one of those hostages recently rescued. We are so thankful that Noa is now home. 124 hostages are still being held in Gaza. We are praying and advocating for the safe return home of all hostages, and will highlight those that are part of the BGU family: Sasha (Alexander) Trufanov, Avinatan Or, Alex Dancyg, and Segev Kalfon

And Doug, how many at BGU were called up for reserve duty?

Doug Seserman:

That’s about a third of the student body. Classes, obviously, they were supposed to start on October 15, and they didn't resume until December 31. The president of the University, Professor Daniel Chamovitz, did his best to have no student be left behind. But at some point, we had to resume classes. And so today, when you go to the campus, it's, I don't want to say it's thriving, but it's functioning. There's a normalcy about life in Israel and also on campus. But there's nothing normal about this new normal.

Many of our reservists are back and they're in the classroom, but even going from being in Gaza, in conflict, to then studying for a test, you know, writing papers and things. People are traumatized, and the university has done an amazing job providing psychological support and counseling for the students and the faculty and the families who've been directly impacted. But still, it's a very difficult situation.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

In addition to those called up for reserve duty immediately after October 7, was there a sizable volunteer effort? Or was the community just too shell-shocked?

Doug Seserman:

Thank you for asking. Today when you go to campus, it's happening and it's alive and doing as well as it can. On October 7, that immediately pivoted from a university that was closing – had to close because of the war – to almost a hub for activity to support not only the faculty and students, but also the community – a logistics center, if you will. We were housing, in our dorms, evacuated families and also medical professionals from the center of the country that needed help. Soroka, which is the main hospital of the Negev and also the teaching hospital for our two medical schools. Very close relationship with Soroka Medical Center. Our medical students immediately became ER triage doctors. They learn by doing.

If you talk with some of them today, they'll tell you in this strange way that October 7 may have really accelerated their knowledge in terms of their career, etc. And then we just started doing what we could. Students mobilized, as Israelis do, to create care packages and provide clothing and anything that was necessary for these evacuated families. We had, I want to say close to 1500 members of our community that were evacuated.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

You know, I imagine it's even more than medical students getting this, you know, on the ground experience. I happened to be in journalism school in New York when 9/11 happened. I remember places in New York City all of a sudden transforming into emergency centers, like what you're describing, and I think a lot of my classmates got a crash course, right, in journalism from covering that.

Doug Seserman:

Absolutely. Even our social work and psychology students became kind of caseworkers. I mean, everybody was doing what they could and, in a way, we should feel really good about it. It's hard to say there are silver linings from October 7. But the resilience that the country has demonstrated in the university, in particular, is incredible and quite inspiring.

One thing about Ben-Gurion University that’s unique is, yes, we are an educational and research institution and one of the leading universities in Israel, and we're quite proud of those accomplishments. But we have a particular and very unique mandate to develop the Negev region. And it's almost in what we call the Ben Gurion DNA, to activate the social justice aspect of being a Jew, honestly. But it's particularly manifest at the University and we're proud of it.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

Well, you know, let's talk a little bit more about that innovative spirit that I hear a lot about, that characterizes Israel and, obviously, BGU. And I mentioned earlier how BGU has introduced, you know, all of these technologies, innovative solutions for environmental concerns.

I think David Ben Gurion said “making the desert bloom” – that was his goal and what the university aims for – but has the aftermath of October 7 highlighted other faculty, other fields? You talked about psychology and social work. Can you talk a little bit about how this kind of innovative spirit has been applied and has really shown itself since October 7?

Doug Seserman:

Yeah, absolutely. I'm happy to do that. And it's important to note also that Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, it was important on October 6. When you visit the Beer-Sheva campus, it's, in a way, it's startup nation on steroids. You have Ben-Gurion University and Soroka hospital, the advanced technology park that has 3000 employees and 70 multinational companies, right across the high speed train station to get you to Tel Aviv in just over an hour.

And you have the IDF moving south and their IT and computing base literally adjacent to the university. It's an amazing place. I actually feel like a lot of people visit Israel, and they don't really go south. And the truth is, you haven't seen the future of Israel until you spend time in the Negev. And you don't really understand the Negev until you've spent time at the University.

But in terms of areas that the University excels at, that are important in the aftermath. I mean, it's everything. But some of the things I would highlight is our strength in engineering, computer sciences, IT, cybersecurity. The cyber capital of Israel is actually Beer-Sheva. This IDF base that's adjacent to us, I call them 22nd century defense systems, remote sensing satellite defense technology.

Hatzerim Air Force base is in the Negev, that's where all members of the Israeli Air Force get their wings, but they actually get their degree, their educational degree, from Ben-Gurion University. So when we think about the future, listen, it takes a village. And you can never do wrong by doing right. So I'd encourage your listeners to just get involved in something in Israel that's consistent with their values.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

I know the South has supplied much of Israel's kind of homegrown food, vegetable crops, barley, wheat, dairy, but obviously, I mean, many of the Palestinian and Thai workers who tended those fields, they're not returning anytime soon, neither are the residents of those kibbutzim. Has BGU played a role in filling that gap?

Doug Seserman:

The answer is yes, and doing our best and not enough. And very proud of all the volunteers and that you're seeing, especially also from the diaspora coming to Israel to help pick fruit and etc. We had faculty that basically stop because they weren't teaching and they had time, they just started going into the fields and helping the farmers, both with their hands and their heart.

At the end of the day, there's a very close relationship and literally hundreds of our students and faculty and administration has been involved in volunteer efforts. At the end of our board of governors meeting last week, we had a whole afternoon dedicated for volunteers who came from around the world to volunteer as well.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

I want to go back to campus real quick and talk a little bit more about the students. I know that BGSU has a really robust diversity and inclusion effort that covers Druze, other Arabs, women, disabilities, Ethiopian immigrants, ultra-Orthodox Jews – it's a very diverse campus. And I'm curious how this diverse student population views the scenes from some American university campuses. I mean, has there been vigorous debate on BGU’s campus about how Israel is fighting this war? And does it look any different?

Doug Seserman:

Now that's a big question. I can say this: we're extremely proud of the diversity on campus and sometimes what we call a shared society. We have Sarab Abu-Rabia-Queder, who's the Vice President of Diversity and Equity and Inclusion in Israel. That DEI term has become controversial, in the United States, but in Israel, you know, in our campus, it's a thriving concept.

We have approximately 20,000 students. Most of them are Israeli. We have about 1000 international students that study in English, mostly from China and India, but also from North America. And then we have about 2000 Arab-Israelis. So of the Arab-Israeli, a number of them are Bedouin. We're by far the largest university for Bedouin students in Israel. So we have robust discussions underneath that framework of the diversity, VP of diversity, to try to bring students together. Sometimes there have been, before October 7, protests, peaceful protests, with Arab students protesting and Jewish students also there. And we've never had issues.

You know, there's a way to have civil discourse, and free speech and academic freedom is critical. I mean, it's a hallmark to a just society. So you know, you have to be able to have peaceful protests. Now going back to what's happening on American campuses. You know, I'm personally embarrassed. I wrote an op-ed recently in The Times of Israel about what do you do when your alma mater no longer reflects your values?

I'm a proud Wildcat from Northwestern University. And we had a terrible situation on campus. And then our president Michael Schill, who's a smart guy, and also a Jew, negotiated with the encampment leaders and created a precedent almost like, it's not negotiating with terrorists, but it's compromising and rewarding, enabling bad behavior and creating a precedent that the way to make change is to be lawless and create hate speech.

So something's happened in the US that on college campuses, that's absolutely out of control. But at the same time, freedom of speech, and especially in academic institutions, must be protected, but it has to be safe. We teach chemistry on university campuses all across the country, perhaps we should be teaching morality. And maybe that should be a required course.

Now, I don't even know what that looks like. But I think people have lost a sense for the difference between proper behavior and improper behavior. And they sometimes use free speech to do hateful and wrongful things. And that's, that's not appropriate.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

In other words, you're suggesting social chemistry lessons? How do we get along? How do relationships work?

Doug Seserman:

I love that. I think what's happened is we all are talking in echo chambers. We've no longer figured out how to understand the narrative of the other, and how to find some sort of central place to move forward where people can agree to disagree, but you can move forward in some kind of democratic and civil way.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

So I don't want to lose sight of the fact that you head Americans for BGU, right, the arm of the university that works to garner American support? Has October 7 presented some unexpected challenges in that realm?

Doug Seserman:

You know the answer, to that is yes. And also, unfortunately, opportunities at the same time.

There's been an October, I call it October 8 awakening, some people are calling it October 8 Jews – people in this country and in the diaspora are waking up, that something is happening out there with antisemitism, and the relationship between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. And as an American diaspora Jew, you have sort of like three options.

You can do nothing, and no miracles are going to come from that. Or you can kind of wait and see and no miracles are gonna come from that. Or you can kind of double down your efforts and get involved with institutions that matter, can make a difference. And that's what we're encouraging.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

Well, Doug, thank you so much for joining us and for giving us a snapshot of what people are trying to do to rebuild Israel’s south and help it recover after October 7. Thank you so much.

Doug Seserman:

Thank you so much for having me.
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The 2024 U.S. Presidential Election: What Does it Mean For Israel?
21 jun· People of the Pod
In AJC’s signature AJC Global Forum session, the Great Debate, Halie Soifer, CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, and Morgan Ortagus, former Spokeswoman for the Department of State under the Trump administration, engaged in a debate on the 2024 presidential election and its impact on the global Jewish community, Israel, and the future of democracy. Listen to this session, moderated by AJC’s Chief Policy and Political Affairs Officer Jason Isaacson, recorded live on the AJC Global Forum 2024 stage in Washington, D.C.

*The views and opinions expressed by guests do not necessarily reflect the views or position of AJC. AJC is a 501(c)3 not for profit organization and does not endorse political candidates for elective office.

Episode Lineup:

(0:40) Jason Isaacson, Morgan Ortagus, Halie Soifer

Show Notes:

Listen – People of the Pod:

Seven Months In: What Israelis Think About the War Against Hamas, Campus Antisemitism in America, and More

What Does it Mean to be a Jewish American Hero? A Jewish American Heritage Month Conversation with AJC CEO Ted Deutch

Follow People of the Pod on your favorite podcast app, and learn more at AJC.org/PeopleofthePod

You can reach us at: [email protected]

If you’ve appreciated this episode, please be sure to tell your friends, and rate and review us on Apple Podcasts.

Transcript of Debate with Morgan Ortagus and Halie Soifer:

Manya Brachear Pashman:

In AJC’s signature AJC Global Forum session, the Great Debate, Halie Soifer, CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, and Morgan Ortagus, former Spokeswoman for the Department of State under the Trump administration, engaged in a debate on the 2024 presidential election and its impact on the global Jewish community, Israel, and the future of democracy.

Moderating the debate was AJC’s Chief Policy and Political Affairs Officer Jason Isaacson. Here’s Jason now to explain the format.

Jason Isaacson:

We had a coin toss, and Morgan won the coin toss, and will go first. Each of them will have two minutes to provide opening statements. There will be the opportunity for a minute of rebuttal afterwards, then we'll plunge into a series of questions that I'll be posing to each of them. Morgan, you’re up.

Morgan Ortagus:

Thank you so much for having me. I want to start this discussion today really telling a few stories from my time in the Trump administration, but also talking about this from a policy perspective.

For those of you who don't know me, I've actually served in multiple administrations, including in the Obama administration, as well. And I say that to provide the context that I think the State of Israel cannot have a relationship with just one political party in the United States, just as we pray for the success of Israel. I pray for the success of our leaders, whomever wins in November. And I think no matter what happens today, in this debate in November, we must stand with our ally, we must stand with the State of Israel.

You know, what's amazing is, I think about four years ago, I was standing in the Oval Office after many, many months of having worked with Secretary Pompeo, Jared Kushner, and the entire team on something that you all came to learn about called the Abraham Accords. And in that moment, I was pregnant with my daughter Adina Ann, this beautiful Jewish baby. And I thought to myself, the Middle East has entirely changed for her. This is going to be so radically different.

Fast forward three and a half years later, to see October 7th and what happened that day, the worst killing of the Jewish people in any single day since the Holocaust. It felt like everything I had worked on in Abraham Accords had been shattered. But I am here to say that there is hope, with the right president, with the right policies.

And that's what I really want to talk about today. With the right policies, we can get back to an era, not only have a strong America, a strong Israel, and a much stronger Middle East, happy to debate the policies. I'm not a campaign person.

But I do believe that under the Trump administration, under Mike Pompeo, we had the right policies that were best for Israel, and best for the Middle East. So I guess as the famous song goes, all I'm here to say is give Trump a chance.

Jason Isaacson:

Morgan, thank you. Halie Soifer.

Halie Soifer:

Jason, Morgan, AJC, thank you for having me. And thank you for your efforts advocating for the Jewish people for Israel and defending democratic values. I'm grateful for your work, which has made a difference, and particularly grateful for the leadership of your CEO, my friend, Ted Deutch.

This is the third time I've joined AJC's Great Debate in advance of an election with Joe Biden and Donald Trump on the ballot. The first was in 2019. The second was 2020. But 2024 is different for three reasons. First, the stakes of this election are higher. Second, the positions of the two candidates have never been more clear or divergent. And third, both candidates have been president before and can and should be judged on their records.

Unlike the last debate, this is no longer a hypothetical in terms of what kind of President Joe Biden or Donald Trump would be. We know the answer. Joe Biden has sought to restore the soul of America by taking unprecedented steps to combat antisemitism and bigotry, while Donald Trump has emboldened, echoed and aligned with dangerous extremists and antisemites.

Joe Biden is a self declared Zionist who has stood with Israel for more than five decades, including after October 7, when he pledged his staunch support of Israel and the Jewish people. While Donald Trump is a self declared dictator on day one, who marched Israel's leaders and praised Hezbollah after October 7.

Best summarized by his former national security adviser John Bolton, who told the New York Times, Trump's support of Israel is not guaranteed in a second term. Joe Biden is an ardent defender of democracy, while Donald Trump incited a deadly insurrection in order to stop the peaceful transfer of power in the last election, and is preparing to weaponize the US government as an act of political retribution. If he wins the next one. And let's not forget, he's also a twice impeached 34 Time convicted felon. So three times is clearly a charm. There's plenty to debate and I'm happy to be here. Thanks.

Jason Isaacson:

Very good. Thank you, Halie. You can each rebut the others statements. Morgan, would you like to say a word?

Morgan Ortagus:

I think the only response I would have to that is do you feel safer as a Jew in America today than you did four years ago? That's it.

Jason Isaacson:

Halie, would you like to say anything in response?

Halie Soifer:

Sure. Four years ago, I mentioned I joined this debate. We did so via zoom, where we were in our home stuck for more than a year. It was an unprecedented pandemic that really epitomized Donald Trump's leadership. He was ignorant, chaotic or erratic, and demonstrated a reckless disregard for a fundamental Jewish value pickoff nephesh. The sanctity of life. Since Joe Biden has become president, we emerged from this dark period, the economy has grown. Unemployment is at a 50 year low. And yes, anti semitism has risen, including after the horrific attacks perpetrated by Hamas on October 7, and our unequivocal condemnation of this violence and of rising anti semitism is something on which I'm sure we agree, Morgan, and you know, who else agrees with us, Joe Biden. On May 2, he said in response to the campus protests, there should be no place on any campus or any place in America for antisemitism. It's simply wrong.

Jason Isaacson:

Thank you. Okay. Let's get into the questions if I could begin with you, Morgan. As you know, in election after election over the last century, a substantial majority of Jews have voted for Democratic presidential candidates over Republican candidates, the sharpest differences were under FDR in the 1940s and the Johnson Goldwater election of 1964, when Democrats were reported to have scored 90% of the Jewish vote, but Harry Truman, Bill Clinton, Al Gore and Barack Obama weren't far behind, and Joe Biden was reported to have led Donald Trump four years ago, according to Pew by 70%, to 27%. AJC's latest polling shows a somewhat narrower gap, but still has President Biden beating former President Trump by more than two to one among American Jews. If these numbers are predictive and accurate, how does the Republican Party break through that traditional Democratic predisposition among Jewish voters and why does it matter?

Morgan Ortagus:

I think there's a couple ways to unpack that first, I think there's a big difference between saying the right thing and doing the right thing. There's no doubt that the Biden administration, the Biden-Harris administration is great on the rhetoric. But I would say that the policy is lacking. First of all, I think most Jewish voters care about Israel care about antisemitism in this country. But let me just also say that I think Jewish voters, Jewish moms and grandmas in this audience, Jewish parents, you care about things that I care about in Nashville, Tennessee, which is the price of groceries, which is filling up your car with gasoline, which is all of the things that matter to all of us as consumers.

And it is not a good time in America for the American family. People are making real decisions, whether to fill up their gas tank or whether to fill up their cart full of groceries. That happens in real America in Nashville, Tennessee, where I live. I would also say that, you know, Lindsey Graham said this to me once and it really made me laugh. He said about Trump, I've never seen somebody so willing to cut off their own arm just to spite him. And he certainly incites a lot of heated emotion and passion.

But again, I would get back to the question that I asked you, do you feel more safe as a Jew in America today than you did four years ago? Do you think our policies are stronger at protecting Israel, with standing with our ally than they were four years ago, I would argue that we have turned the Middle East on its head in the past four years by beginning at the beginning of this administration to spend the past three and a half years, chasing the Islamic Republic around the world, begging and cajoling and pleading with them to get back into a nuclear deal, giving them billions of dollars in sanctions relief by not enforcing those sanctions. That was three and a half years of policies that led to events like October 7. We also saw multiple times at the UN, including yesterday, ways in which that I think the Biden administration has sold Israel down the river. has not stood up for them at the United Nations or on the world stage. And so I'm quite simply argue that the Middle East is chaotic today, specifically from the policies of the past three years that were put in place by the Biden Administration.

Jason Isaacson:

Thank you, Morgan. Halie, you can respond if you wish. You have a minute.

Halie Soifer:

Well, as a Jewish mom, I can say I absolutely feel safer knowing that Joe Biden is in the White House because he shares our values, our fundamental values, our Jewish values, defending democracy, and of course, support of Israel.

A lot of Republicans mentioned Donald Trump's move of the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in 2017. Something we agree with–Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. What we don't mention enough is that in August of 2020, Donald Trump said he did that for the evangelicals, which demonstrates two things.

One, Donald Trump's Israel policy has always been based on his self interests. His own former national security adviser has revealed that in an article in The New York Times in early April, and also it’s clear that Donald Trump has great animus toward the vast majority of Jewish Americans, those who vote for Democrats because of it.. He has called us disloyal. He has called us uninformed. He has said we hate Israel, we hate our religion, we should be ashamed of ourselves. We're loyal to our values, which is why the overwhelming majority of us support Democrats.

Jason Isaacson:

Halie, I want to ask you a different version, or the pretty much the same version of the question that I asked Morgan at the beginning, why it matters where the Jewish vote is. Remembering that the Israeli newspaper Haaretz had a piece after the 2020 election, that maintained it was Jewish voters in Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona who actually made the crucial difference in that tight race moving those swing states and their deciding Electoral College votes into the Biden column. Although polling and voting history is obviously on your side, there are signs of slippage for President Biden in our own polling and in other samples. Some of that may have to do with the President's being seen as inappropriately pushing the Israeli government in ways that didn't want to go in the conduct of the war against Hamas. And in a post conflict path to Palestinian statehood. Some of it may be factors that have nothing to do with Israel or with the Jewish community, but reflect attitudes in the general population. Why the slippage and how are you addressing it?

Halie Soifer:

Well, Jason, you're right. The Jewish vote absolutely matters. The states you mentioned, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona determined the outcome of the 2020 election and may do so again in 2024. Joe Biden won those three states in total by just over 100,000 voters. And in those states the Jewish vote, and even more said the Jewish vote that supported Joe Biden was exponentially higher than the margin by which he won. So where are Jewish voters in 2024? Well, 74% of Jewish voters supported Democrats in our last election in the 2022 midterms. It's the same amount approximately three quarters who have supported Democrats historically, and it's the amount I predict will support Joe Biden in this election for two reasons. One, Joe Biden represents the vast majority of Jewish voters on every key issue, domestic policy, democracy, abortion, access, guns, climate change the economy, antisemitism, and foreign policy, Israel, Ukraine and defending democracy abroad. And too, Jewish voters overwhelmingly disapprove of and oppose Donald Trump in 2016, in 2020, and they're going to do it again in 2024. Because there's even more reasons to oppose him now, going into a potential second term.

AJC's new poll only confirms this. The poll indicates that both Joe Biden and Donald Trump have essentially the same amount of support–61%/23%--among Jewish voters as they did among that same group of voters in 2020, when it was 64%/21%. Donald Trump has not broken 25%. It also shows that Jewish voters trust Biden more than Trump on Israel by a two to one margin and on antisemitism by three to one margin.

So AJC is consistent in its polling, and it's consistent with what we've seen in other polling as well that Jewish voters will continue to overwhelmingly support Democrats and Joe Biden, especially with Donald Trump on the ballot.

Jason Isaacson:

Morgan, you may respond.

Morgan Ortagus:

Again, you know, I'd say there's a big difference between rhetoric and policy action. The truth is, the reality is, there has never been a more unsafe time in America, for Jews, especially young Jews on college campuses. Today, the antisemitism unveiled and unchecked during the Biden administration should scare all of us. The fact that Jewish students have to make decisions if they want to wear a yarmulke, if they want to wear a Star of David, if they want to openly embrace Judaism in the United States of America is a stain on the Biden administration.

And something that I think that there has been no real action. In 2019, again, I'm going to keep going back to policy because when you have bad policy, you have to run on rhetoric. When you have good policy, you can talk about things that we did like the executive order to combat antisemitism in 2019. That executive order focused on criminalizing antisemitism, basically bringing it up to the level of any other persecution against, you know, sex, gender. We could go through everything in Title Six. That's incredibly important because we have real world ramifications for antisemitism that this administration has ignored.

Jason Isaacson:

Thank you, Morgan. Let me ask you another question. And I'm going to turn to a foreign policy issue again. Since President Trump in May 2018 pulled the United States out of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, calling it a horrible one-sided deal that should never ever have been made. Iran has marched closer and closer to becoming a nuclear threshold state with a stockpile of enriched uranium calculated to be more than 6000 kilograms as of last month, more than 20 times the limit that was set in the nuclear deal. But enough of that uranium enriched to a near weapons grade level to fuel at least three atomic weapons.

It's been said that the maximum pressure campaign waged in the last year and a half of the Trump administration had little effect on Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons capability. How would you answer the charge that pulling the US out of an unsatisfactory nuclear deal actually made the problem worse? How would a second Trump administration approach this threat from Iran?

Morgan Ortagus:

Thanks, now we're getting to my favorite subject. So you don't even have to listen to President Trump on this. You can look at Senator Schumer, Majority Leader at the time in his speech and his debate why he did not support the JCPOA. We know of course, that the JCPOA was never brought before the Senate because it was a bad deal that would never get passed, including by Democrats. Let's also remember that under the JCPOA, we left the deal in 2018 in the Trump administration, at the time and during the entire Trump administration. Iran never exceeded the 5% enrichment. In fact, it didn't happen until the Biden administration and under Biden, they've gone up to an 84% enrichment strategy with zero ramifications. That's enough material to get a bomb within eight months if we wanted to.

More importantly, Americans and Israelis are dying at the hands of Iran. And why is that? Because once again, you have a Democratic administration who have not enforced sanctions, they got billions of dollars in sanctions relief. About three weeks before October 7, this administration negotiated a deal that I didn't think that could be worse than the JCPOA. But they actually managed to top themselves by promising to give Iran $6 billion for returning five American hostages home. Now, I love getting American hostages home. In fact, in the Trump administration, we got two American hostages home from Iran, guess how much we paid for those hostages, zero. And so there is a way to negotiate to be tough with Iran and to protect Americans.

But Americans are dying in places like Jordan, from Iranian made drones. We know that American ships are being taxed on a daily basis, again, from material that is supplied to the Hussein's by Iran. And so whenever you reward enemies, like the Islamic Republic of Iran and punish friends like Israel, the Arab states, then you end up with a chaotic Middle East. So the Middle East is on fire today principally because of the appeasement of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Iran will likely get a nuclear weapon in the next administration, if it isn't stopped. President Trump will stop it. President Biden will just beg and plead them to stop.

Jason Isaacson:

Thank you, Morgan. Halie, you may respond.

Halie Soifer:

We talked a lot about, of course, the horrific acts of what happened on October 7. What I don't think we talked enough about is what happened on April 13, when Iran launched over 300 projectiles at Israel and an unprecedented direct attack. In the end, Israel survived that attack relatively unscathed. Miraculously, because Joe Biden had deployed two aircraft carriers to the eastern Mediterranean preparing for such attacks, and had encouraged a coalition, Arab partners, to stand with Israel and directly intercepted over 100 ballistic missiles. It was the first time the US military had been deployed to prevent a direct attack on Israel.

Following the attack, Biden took steps to hold Iran accountable, including imposing new sanctions and exports control on Iran. The sanctions targeted leaders and entities connected to the IRGC, the Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps. During the Biden administration, the US has sanctioned over 600 individuals and entities including Iran and its proxies. And the President has directed the administration to continue to impose sanctions that further degrade Iran’s military. This is on top of the Trump era sanctions against Iran that Biden kept in place. So Joe Biden has demonstrated great strength in defending against the threat of Iran, especially as it relates to the threat posed by Israel.

Jason Isaacson:

There are increasingly loud and influential voices in the Democratic Party, expressing harsh criticism of Israel's conduct of the war against Hamas in Gaza and among constituencies on which democratic election victories have often depended. There's opposition to Israel more generally, not just to the current war, but to the legitimacy of the Jewish state.

Over the last two years, according to Gallup sympathy for Israelis over Palestinians has slipped among Democrats from a majority to a minority position, although there is still a plurality with more favorable views of Israel versus Palestinian Authority. For comparison among Republicans sympathy for Israelis earlier this year was recorded by Gallup is more than 10 times that for Palestinians. How can President Biden and the party counter the critics and assure that US support for the Middle East's sole democracy remains bipartisan. And how do you respond to the charge that Trump criticism of Israel in progressive circles contributes to attacks on supporters of Israel and incidents of antisemitism?

Halie Soifer:

Antisemitic and anti-Israel views have been expressed by elected officials on both sides of the aisle. Neither party is homogenous in their view on either issue. When antisemitism and or anti-Israel views have emerged among Democrats in Congress, JDCA, our organization has condemned it, and in some cases endorsed a primary opponent to anti Israel, Democratic incumbents.

There are two such primaries that we're engaged in right now as we speak in New York and in Missouri, to elect Democrats who share our values. There are some Democrats who have opposed or proposed conditioning aid to Israel, something which JDCA opposes. But House Republicans, including their entire leadership, recklessly delayed essential military aid for Israel that Joe Biden pledged in October for six months, at a time when it could not have been needed more.

When it comes to antisemitism, there is a sharp difference between how it is handled by the two parties. The Democratic Party marginalizes those who have used antisemitic rhetoric, while the Republican Party has elevated extremists and antisemites, one of whom is at the top of the ticket in the past three election cycles, including this one. Leadership matters, and the words and actions of our leaders matter.

When the American people were faced with the same choice for president in 2020, on the debate stage, President Biden implored Donald Trump to condemn white supremacy, we all remember it. Trump blatantly refused, he could not, would not condemn this insidious ideology that motivated the perpetrator of the worst massacre of Jewish Americans in our history two years earlier at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. What did he do instead, he incited dangerous right wing extremists, the Proud Boys to stand back and stand by from the debate stage. And less than four months later, they heated his call on January 6.

This election is a binary choice. There are two names on this ballot, two men vying to be leader of the free world. One has been a staunch friend and ally of the Jewish people in Israel, since he was first elected to the Senate in 1972. And the other who has always done and will continue to only do what is good for himself.

Jason Isaacson:

Morgan, I think you may want to respond.

Morgan Ortagus:

You know, I will concede, I don't watch MSNBC. And maybe they're just not covering what I see going on in America on a daily basis, which is a Charlottesville every single day in this country, which is the calling for not only supporting Hamas and other terrorist organizations, but calling for the genocide and the extermination of the Jewish people blatantly and openly every single day in this country. You also see yesterday in New York City, while there was a memorial to what happened on October 7, people there openly demonstrating support for more October 7, support for more terrorism.

And while that was happening, the United States was shamefully at the United Nations calling for a ceasefire resolution that made us look like we were Hamas’ personal lawyer. If you're a party that doesn't have the moral clarity, to stand by the Jewish faith to just stay defending itself against terrorism, how can you claim to have the moral clarity on anything. I was in Israel three weeks ago Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu told me that in fact, the Biden administration is slow walking military aid that he needs. Just last week in the Congress, the Biden administration was whipping votes against bipartisan ICC sanctions, which are undermining again the leadership of a democratic elected Jewish state.

We’ll remember famously that after the attack that he talked about a few minutes ago from Iran, Biden famously told Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu for Israel just to take the win essentially. At every turn, then not only tie one hand behind Israel's back, they tie both hands behind the back as they tried to defeat the terrorists that invaded them and by the way, killed Americans on October 7, and the last time I checked, we still have five Americans that are held captive eight months later by a terrorist organization behind enemy lines. Bring them home.

Jason Isaacson:

Morgan, you're up. Your last question and President Trump and other leaders of your party had been harshly critical of a range of diversity and equity programs, affirmative action and college admissions and educational curricula that cast a negative light on aspects of American history. And these stances have earned the support and loyalty of among others, individuals and groups with extremist views on race and ethnicity. How do you answer critics, including President Biden, who charge that this so-called anti-woke agenda lends legitimacy and support to forces of intolerance? As you know, there are also accusations that divisive rhetoric can fuel antisemitism. And the example of Charlottesville, which we've been talking about is often cited. How do you counter that, in a minute, if you may.

Morgan Ortagus:

I’ll be very quick and say that I agree with Halie that there is antisemitic problems that happen on both the left and the right, and we must be countering them. And every time it happens, again, I'm a foreign policy professional. I look at the policies. I don't necessarily get involved in domestic politics. But I will say that what we have seen, especially on college campuses, is that DEI and intersectionality are the parents of antisemitism and fostering intolerance. Can anybody look at our college campuses and say this isn't true. I don't think President Biden and vice president Harris are doing enough to rein in anti-Jewish Jewish violence in this country.

Let's look at Biden's so-called efforts, is there more or less antisemitism in our universities? Are there fewer encampments? How about what's happening to the American flag? The last I've seen, the Iranian people have more respect for the American flag and the Israeli flag than liberals on university campuses today. Many students who had to start college online and COVID have gone back to going online because it's unsafe to be Jewish in America in an American university today.

Jason Isaacson:

Thank you, Morgan. And Halie, we're not going to have rebuttals to these questions.

Halie, your last question: the Iranian threats, foreign policy question. The Iranian threat isn't confined to its accelerated nuclear program. Iranian proxies in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq firing missiles and drones at Israel sometimes with deadly effect. The Iranian supported Hutus in Yemen regularly attack ships in the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean. In recent years, Saudi Arabia and the UAE have come under attack from Iran or its proxies and vessels of many nations, including the US Navy, have been targeted or damaged or seized. Iranian agents abroad from the IRGC, Hezbollah, Hamas and other groups have been implicated in assassination plots, including in our own country.

Critics charge the Biden administration, which yearned from day one to return to the 2015 nuclear deal has failed to confront Iran forcefully over these multiple threats. What's your response? In a minute, if you could?

Halie Soifer:

Ok, in order to answer this, you have to go back to May of 2018 when President Trump against the advice of many in the US intelligence community and Israeli security establishment, withdrew from the Iran nuclear agreement. While the JCPOA was not a perfect agreement, Iran was in compliance with it. According to international observers and American intelligence officials. It was effectively verifying restrictions on Iran's nuclear development, as AJC itself said at the time in its own press release, despite our many reservations, we had hoped to see the deal fixed, not next. It was with the same objective. And given the fact that Iran was at that time weeks away from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability.

The Biden administration explored whether it was possible to reenter the JCPOA and reach a better deal if Iran came back into compliance. In the end, it wasn't possible because Joe Biden refuse to capitulate to Iranian demands, including lifting the terrorists designation on the IRGC, Joe Biden should be praised, not criticized, for working with our allies to explore whether the resumption of a multilateral deal that would contain Israel's nuclear aspirations was possible, and for standing up to Iran, not just by refusing to give in to their demands, but by continuing to implement sanctions against Iran. And as I mentioned, in an unprecedented act, defending Israel against an unprecedented direct attack by the Iranians on April 13.

Jason Isaacson:

Halie, thank you. We're gonna go directly to closing statements and Morgan, having won the coin toss, you go first.

Morgan Ortagus:

Okay. You know, Halie just talked about working with allies. How about last week at the IAEA, whenever the E three, the UK, France, Germany, had to actually go and beg and plead us to stand up against Iran at the IAEA which we didn't do. We just talked about the ICC in which bipartisan sanctions are before the Congress that the Biden administration is not only not supporting, they're whipping against and the multiple votes at the UN either abstaining or actually working on ceasefire, right. solutions that undermine the State of Israel.

Listen, I would say there's a far big difference between bad rhetoric and bad policy. If you want pretty tweets, vote for Biden, if you don't want dead Israelis and dead Americans vote for Trump. When you look at the people that Biden has empowered in his administration look no further than his Iran envoy, Rob Malley, who was fired, who was under FBI investigation, and also the State Department inspector general investigation because of his leaking of classified information and potential ties to Hamas.

These are not the people that we will promote and support in the Trump administration. President Trump will defend Israel, he will stand by Israel and things like October 7 won't happen under President Trump. You will have peace like under the Abraham Accords and you will have an Iran that is curtailed because we will actually stand up to them and we will stop them from getting a nuclear weapon.

Jason Isaacson:

Morgan, thank you. Halie Soifer, your closing comment?

Halie Soifer:

Well, you will soon hear from Joe Biden's National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, there is no stronger champion of the US Israel relationship. You will see that Maya Angelou famously said when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time. Whether it's acquainting Neo Nazis with peaceful protesters declaring very fine people on both sides as Donald Trump did after Charlottesville, dining with white supremacists, Nick Fuentes and Kanye West in Mar-a-Lago, quoting Hitler, and reportedly saying he did some good things. Donald Trump has shown us exactly who he is, time and time again. Don't believe me listen to his own words. As has President Biden. And the contrast could not be more stark. This past weekend, President Biden welcomed the heroic rescue of four Israeli hostages and pledged to not stop working until all the hostages are home.

Donald Trump also mentioned those who he refers to as hostages. Are they the more than 100 Israelis and Americans and others being held by Hamas? No. He's referring to incarcerated January 6 insurrectionists. That's who he is. And the American people, the Jewish people, and Israel, deserve far better from a US president and we have far better. He's currently in the White House. President Biden recently said that democracy begins with each of us. He's right. It could also end with each of us. And we each have a responsibility to defend it at the ballot box in November.

Jason Isaacson:

Halie, Morgan, thank you. That closes our great debate. Our community, our country have a big decision to make this November. AJC will continue to provide information on the issues that are at stake. And we thank you guys very much and we thank all of you for your attention to this important debate.
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Jews in the U.S. Military: Veterans’ Stories in Honor of Jewish American Heritage Month
24 maj· People of the Pod
Explore the unique experiences of Jewish U.S. military veterans with Dave Warnock, U.S. Army Veteran, and Andrea Goldstein, U.S. Navy Veteran and Reservist. If you missed this conversation when it first aired for Veterans Day, here’s your chance to honor Jewish American Heritage Month and pay tribute to those who serve our country.

Our guests share what inspired them to join the military, how their Jewish heritage played a significant role in shaping their service, and what advice they have for IDF soldiers fighting now against Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Warnock and Goldstein are members of AJC’s ACCESS Jewish Military Veterans Affinity Group, a space to convene young Jewish professionals who have served in the American military.

*The views and opinions expressed by guests do not necessarily reflect the views or position of AJC.

Episode Lineup:

(0:40) Dave Warnock, Andrea Goldstein

Show Notes:

Learn more:

What You Need to Know About the ICC and the Israel-Hamas War

Listen to AJC’s People of the Pod:

Seven Months In: What Israelis Think About the War Against Hamas, Campus Antisemitism in America, and More

What Does it Mean to be a Jewish American Hero? A Jewish American Heritage Month Conversation with AJC CEO Ted Deutch

Follow People of the Pod on your favorite podcast app, and learn more at AJC.org/PeopleofthePod

You can reach us at: [email protected]

If you’ve appreciated this episode, please be sure to tell your friends, and rate and review us on Apple Podcasts.

Episode Transcript:

Manya Brachear Pashman:

Earlier this month, during my conversation with AJC CEO Ted Deutch about Jewish American heroes and Jewish American Heritage Month, we paid tribute to those who serve our country in a multitude of ways – teachers, doctors, nurses. As we approach Memorial Day and the end of Jewish American Heritage Month, we thought it would be appropriate to re-broadcast an episode that aired last fall. Guest hosting is my colleague Dr. Dana Levinson Steiner, Director of ACCESS Global at AJC, where she oversees an international program to engage young professionals, including a number of Jewish military veterans. Dana, the mic is yours.

Dana Levinson Steiner:

Thanks, Manya. I'm so happy that we're here today. It was just over two years ago that we formed the ACCESS Jewish Military Veterans Affinity Group, which is a space for us to convene young Jewish professionals who had served in the American military. And here we are now recording our first People of the Pod podcast episode in honor of and commemorating Veterans Day.

With us today are: Dave Warnock, U.S. Army Veteran, joining us from his home in Seattle, Washington, and Andrea Goldstein, U.S. Navy Veteran and Reservist, who is based in Washington, D.C. Dave, Andrea, thanks for joining us today.

Dave Warnock:

Happy to be here, Dana.

Andrea Goldstein:

Yeah, I’m glad to be here.

Dana Levinson Steiner:

To kick off the conversation, please tell us a little bit about your journey as an American Jewish military veteran. What inspired you to join the United States Armed Forces? Dave, let’s start with you.

Dave Warnock:

For me, there are two kind of main things when I look back on what propelled me to join the US Army. The first one was my great grandfather, Saul Fink. The family legend is like he emigrated over from the shtetl. His family settled in Harlem. And when he heard about what was going on in Texas at the time, and 1916 and 1914 with the Pancho Villa incursions, he felt so propelled by patriotism and love of America that he had to run away from home and enlist at 16 years old. Which he did. Joined the Horse Calvary, a proper Jewish cowboy chasing after Pancho Villa in New Mexico, in a forgotten war. And he made sort of a career out of the army. So that's the legend that he was propelled by patriotism, maybe hated the tenement, maybe just wanted to get out of Harlem, get some fresh air, see the American West, I don't know.

But his service propelled him forward in American society, through the US Army in a way that I think would have been unavailable to a lot of Jews at the time. It's not to say that it was an easy journey. He was certainly discriminated against; he shortened his name from Finkelstein to Fink for reasons that are not kind of lost to history. One joke is that it couldn't fit on the nametag. But through this service, he was elevated in society, he became an officer in World War I. He served through World War II and in the army of occupation in Germany. And his stature, sort of the patriarch of my family, loomed large. My middle name is Solomon, I'm named after him. So that kind of tradition was part of it. Another part was, I enlisted in 2004. So three years after 91/1 when I was a freshman in high school, and that terrorist attack really did propelled, cemented my decision to serve you know, if that didn't happen, I don't know what I would have done differently. But those are the two main reasons that propelled me to join. And I joined the Army and I volunteered for the infantry because I wanted to be a soldier.

Dana Levinson Steiner:

In a lot of ways, it is our family that inspires us to make these kinds of decisions and we learn so much from our family history and our family lineage. Andrea, I'd love to hear a little bit more about your journey too and I'm curious if family played a role in your decision to join the Navy.

Andrea Goldstein:

My family decision to do the military was much more related to growing up in the United States, growing up in New York at a time actually, probably when we didn't have the NYPD outside of synagogues. I didn't really think about being Jewish, at least in New York in the 90s. But my family came here in mostly two waves, most in the early 20th century, and then another wave right before the Holocaust, and found everything they were looking for. And depending on which wave, either second generation or third generation where a sense of precarity and being American was gone. We just were American Jews. And I am currently sitting in a home that has embroidery on the wall that was sent to my great-grandmother, by family members who ended up–who perished in the shoah. This country really gave us everything and I wanted to give back to that.

The value of tikkun olam is very central to everything that I do. And so serving my country and wearing the cloth of the nation to me felt like really the only way to do that.

9/11 was not a motivating factor for me, despite growing up in New York City and being in New York City on 9/11. My desire to serve in uniform predated that, in fact, 9/11 led me to really not so much reconsider, but really give even more thought to my military service, because I knew I would be serving in conflict zones, which, with the peacetime military of the 90s, that wasn't clear. But I ended up joining through an officer program. I didn't initially have any family support, because it was such a shocking choice. I had great-grandparents who'd served during World War Two great-uncles, but not from a military family at all. And what became very understood by my family, because it was, what was motivating me was, this desire to serve my country and wear the cloth of the nation, no matter what.

Dana Levinson Steiner:

I want to pivot a little bit, I want to get back to questions of Jewish identity in a moment. But when we're thinking about American Jews serving in the US armed forces, while there isn't a ton of data, the most recent-ish data suggests that just about 1% of the US armed forces, or the US military, is made up of American Jews. It's tiny, only 1%. And that 1% is of an already really small number of American Jews who already live in this country.

So, you know, thinking about this statistic and also acknowledging American history in serving in the military. What do we make of this small number? And what would you like to tell young American Jews who may be considering joining the military but may have doubts or concerns?

Andrea Goldstein:

So there are a couple of things I would say to that. I would comment on that data–first of all, that's only commenting that that only includes self reported numbers because we don't collect demographic data on, it’s seen as completely religious affiliation. The military does not collect demographics on Jews as being an ethnic group. So it's actually quite difficult to self-report your religion. So there's going to be an undercount, there are people who are Jewish, who may even practice privately, who are not reporting. And it also doesn't capture Jewish families.

So it doesn't capture the number of people who may be not Jewish themselves, but their partner and spouse is Jewish, and they're raising Jewish children, and they're observing Jewish holidays with their families. So there's a lot that we really don't know. What I would also say is, if you were to overlay where the military struggles to recruit from, with the parts of the country where most Jews live in the United States, you would see probably some very interesting geographic trends.

The military has become a family business. There has also been, there have been some comforts that the military has had in where they recruit from. And that typically is not New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Chicago, Washington, DC. So in addition to being one of the very few Jews that I know, in the military, I think I know probably even fewer people from New York City, especially officers.

Dana Levinson Steiner:

Dave, I'm curious, your thoughts on some of these numbers? And also maybe what you would tell–you and I have talked about this before about wanting to really engage in conversation with young American Jews about this experience and what it can mean for them, you know, acknowledging this number a while not perfect, I would imagine it's not so massive. So tell us a little bit about what you think and also maybe what you would tell a young American Jew who might be considering enlisting.

Dave Warnock:

Sure. First off, my mom was also very surprised when I joined, perplexed, flummoxed, aggrieved, perhaps she would have much rather me not join the army. But I just have to get that out there because she's certainly going to listen to this. Yeah, so, you know, I don't know where that number comes from, you know, the infantry's a different representation, I would say Jews were less than 1% of the infantry. But when I was at basic training, like for one station unit training, as they called it back then, after your red phase, like your hell phase, or whatever you want to call it, you are allowed to go to religious services on Sunday.

So I went to Jewish services on Sunday, because, you know, it is the army. And I want to do it, like in my basic training company, there were no other Jews. So the company’s like 200 guys, and then when you go to religious services, they're all of a sudden, like, 200 guys, they're like, Oh, my God, why so many Jews all of a sudden in every company in Fort Benning, except for mine? And then I realized is because they serve Kiddush lunch and you could get snacky cakes after services. And it turns out there were like three actual Jews at the services.

Andrea Goldstein:

I had a completely different experience in officer candidate school where we were allowed to leave on Friday nights.

Dana Levinson Steiner:

Oh, interesting. Dave, what was your experience?

Dave Warnock:

So again,, this is like 2005, things might have changed. But when you joined a Combat Arms significant you just went to one station unit training and it was a fairly intense experience. Think about Full Metal Jacket, whatever, people screaming at you, doing lots of push ups. And all your time is blocked out and accounted for. So you've trained on Saturdays and religious service time was Sunday morning. That's the time you got, so if you want to go to services, you had to do that. Something to consider if you join certain aspects of the military is, religious accommodations will be difficult. You know, I served with guys who were vegetarian. And there's one vegetarian MRE. You ate that a lot, like our rations for the field. So you eat that vegetarian ration a lot. Get real used to it.

Certainly that is a consideration and it would be difficult to be religiously observant. In the infantry. I actually there was one guy in my company on the latter half of my service who was a religious Jew. And he basically got a lot of exceptions by his rabbi to serve. Because it was hard. The army would accommodate him to an extent, like, for example, we had to shave every day. And so he was allowed to use an electric razor. But it's something to consider if you are religious, that serving in the US military will be challenging.

But you know, I encourage people to consider it. I don't regret my service, it's difficult to imagine my adult life without it. I'd say, I'm proud of it, too. But it carries costs. You know, when I was 19, on my first tour in Iraq, I was wounded, it took me six months to recover and get back to the line. The, almost five years I was in, I rarely saw my family because I was stationed in Germany and deployed to Iraq twice. So I was overseas, essentially, for the entire time of my service. And that's something to consider, but this is all my perspective.

But the experiences you get, that will propel you forward in life in a way that I don't think you get through other things, certainly, when you're 18, or when I was. That being said, you know, a lot of soldiers in my unit did die in combat. A lot of guys, when they got out, they did struggle with PTSD and suicide. So it's not all sunshine and roses. But for me, it was the right decision.

Andrea Goldstein:

Military service is really incredible. My field does have more Jewish folks, especially in the reserves where I'm still serving. What's been very interesting is as an intelligence officer, the active duty component doesn't have a lot of Jewish people, but the reserve component, my last unit, we had enough people to have a minyan in a unit of 50 people. And I have found, similarly to just living in society. I mean, your exercises are not–you’re going to have exercises that take place during Rosh Hashanah, you're going to be deployed around Christian holidays so that people can be home for Christmas. Maybe you'll be lucky if that's around Hanukkah.

But I've also found people to who I've worked with to be incredibly accommodating up until, up to the extent that they can. So maybe I was going to be away for Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur. But people would change their shifts with me on watch so that I could run the service because I was the lay leader, or so that I could break my fast at the end of Yom Kippur war.

And I experienced people being really curious and asking a lot of really good, in good faith questions. And I've had incredible experiences that range from serving with a lot of incredible, not just our military, but partner militaries. The most rewarding was my time with NATO where I got to teach in Norway and Greece and in Sweden and get to have these incredible experiences with people as the people who– actually the Germans all notice my last name, which was really interesting. And that's a whole other story. But you also see things you can't experience anywhere else. And it's not just the–I saw a meteor shower in the middle of the ocean, on my 26th birthday from the middle of a ship. Like there are certain experiences that you don't think about when you're going into the profession of arms. But you will get to experience these incredibly vibrant experiences just because you've, you've made this choice to go where no one else does. And so it's incredibly rewarding.

I've also found that as a millennial, I mean, there are some very realistic things about the economic environment that we graduated into. And because of my military service, I have no debt, and I own a home. I have a master's degree that the GI bill paid for. So there's some other things.

Dana Levinson Steiner:

You talked about sort of the things that you learned and the experience that you got as a young person. Dave tell us maybe a little about some of the more rewarding experiences or things were really profoundly important to you in your service.

Dave Warnock:

I got out when I was 23. So 13 years ago now and memories once so vivid that I thought I would never forget him kind of faded away a little bit. One thing that I'll never forget, that was quite challenging, because after I was wounded, I was kind of serving in the rear just like in a limited duty capacity, like back in my garrison. And it was a tough tour, you know, lots of us got wounded, we had lots of members of our battalion killed. And I was asked by chain of command, as much as one can be asked in the military to escort a soldier's body back to his parents and to his burial in Arlington Cemetery. And I did that, and that was, I can't even describe just what that moment felt like to do that to be present there. It's kind of like a unit liaison. I didn't know the soldier, we were in different companies. But that was something I'll never forget. Actually escorting a soldier back to his parents.

Another memory I'll never forget is like, because I have a photo of it. And it's on the wall in our living room is, the photo of me and my fire team. I was a sergeant on my second tour. And so I led like a small unit of four guys. And I have a picture when we were leaving Iraq for the last time. And just that sense of accomplishment of, everyone came home safe from my team on that tour. And that's why it's hung up on my wall. It's you know, we're smiling. We're happy. We're leaving. Yeah, so those are two things that tend to stand out in my service.

Dana Levinson Steiner:

So Andrea, you started off by saying that the value of tikkun olam, repairing the world is one of the things that really guides you. And what I want to ask both you and Dave is how has your identity as a Jew, also shaped your experience as a veteran, we talked a little bit about, you know, in the beginning about your experiences as Jews or maybe your family, being involved in the military not being involved, being surprised. But tell us a little bit about how your identity as a Jew has shaped your experience as a military veteran and as someone who served in our armed forces.

Andrea Goldstein:

So I left active duty in 2016 and stayed in the reserves but left full time service because I felt like I had reached a ceiling on what I could really do for others and that be my full time job. I wanted to keep serving, I wanted to keep serving my country. But a lot of that actually had to do with the way that I saw a lot of my teammates being mistreated by systemic issues, whether they be cultural or policy. And I wanted to spend a lot more of my time actively putting putting more good into the world versus preventing bad things from happening. Because that's what you do in the military, especially if you’re in intel, you try to stop the bad you don't do anything that actively promotes the good. And so I've spent the last seven years in my civilian career, either in nonprofit or public service, doing just that.

And about half of that time has been active either actively helping veterans, particularly women veterans, and people who have experienced sexual violence or other kinds of institutionalized harm, and currently serving members of the military. And I also firmly believe that our institutions need to live up to the ideals that we profess. And I want our nation to represent the ideals that my family came here believing it had.

And so that's what I've been doing with my time. I spent two and a half years on the House Veterans Affairs Committee and helped write over 100 laws that particularly supported women veterans, members of the LGBTQ community, sexual trauma survivors, people living with PTSD, to help them get improved access to healthcare and benefits. And I'm also very proud that I've also had the opportunity to work with the IDF and provided some insight into the way that we've made some policy changes here in the US.

Dana Levinson Steiner:

Dave, tell us a little bit about your Jewish identity and how it plays into this experience.

Dave Warnock:

Well, my unit was very diverse in many ways, not gender, because the unit was closed to, or at the time that the MLS was close to females, so the unit was, the job was all male. And, you know, part of the pipeline and being new and being a private is your identity is kind of like stripped away and melted down, you're built up as part of this team, your individualism is kind of knocked away. So when that process happens, you know, whatever is the more like forefront of your identity kind of consumes it. In a sense that, like, if you have a very pronounced southern accent, everyone's going to call you a country guy, or whatever. And if you're from New York, there's a guy from Queens, so like, everything about him became like, you're the New York guy.

And for me, it was like I was the Jew. Because that was the most forefront and center thing of my identity. Also, when you shave my head, I have a really big head. So it was all like, all my nicknames were either about having a big head or being a Jew. And then eventually, when I started to grow my hair back and settled more on the latter.

So it was always very central to my service, because that was me, I was like the company's guy who was Jewish. And that was not meant in a derogatory term was more of like a statement of fact. And I think the only thing I really had to overcome was like, in 2005, when you're serving with people, like when I said it was diverse, you could be serving with people from all over the country, the US territories and guys from parts of the South I’ve never heard of, guys from the center of the country place have never been soldiers from Puerto Rico and Guam, like all over the world are serving in the US Army and then we have immigrant soldiers from, you know, Colombia, Nicaragua, Vietnam, like it was a very wide swath of representation and not very many of them had even met a Jew before.

So in a way I was like the first Jew a lot of them had ever met. And I think, you know, rewind back 2005. If you know anything about Jews you probably know like Woody Allen and Jerry Seinfeld, which are exactly like pictures of guys you want in a foxhole with you. So I had to sort of maybe work a little harder to prove myself in the basic soldiering tasks, but like that didn't take very long.

A lot of guys asked me questions about Judaism, because they genuinely didn't know. And I think one of the benefits of my service is, these guys take back their experiences with me, which I hope are positive, and then like, go back to wherever they're from. And they're like, if Judaism or Jews comes up, they're like, Hey, I served with a Jewish guy, he was pretty cool.

But I think that was very important to me, and why it's so important for Jews to continue military service, because you just meet people from all over the country that you never would have met before. And it broadened my experiences too, serving with those guys.

Dana Levinson Steiner:

I think, hearing the story about how in many cases you might have been the first few that these folks have met is really important. I think in a lot of ways it helps to demystify, or in most important cases, maybe even act against antisemitic ideas or stereotypes. So I think that that's really important. And Dave, you and I have talked over the years, about how sort of the term of calling you a Jew was like a term of endearment. It wasn't in terms of a term of antisemitism. And in spending a lot of my time with this ACCESS Military Veterans Group, I've gotten to learn some of the interesting elements of how you communicate and what that can look like.

So I have just one more question for us. And I think it's really important to acknowledge this moment that we're in. On October 7, Israel experienced one of the most horrific tragedies in its 75 year history. It was and continues to be a horrific day for Israelis and the Jewish community around the world. As of today's recording, over 300 soldiers have been killed and tens of thousands have been called up for active and reserve duty.

So a question I have for both of you is, what is a message that you have, or that you can share, Jewish veteran to Jewish veteran. And I should even say just veteran to veteran because one of the amazing things about Israel is that there are many who serve in the IDF and who've been called up for reserve duty or who are in active duty who are not Jewish. They're a part of the Druze community. They're Arab Israelis. I think that's really what makes Israel such a remarkable country.

So tell us a little bit about perhaps your reactions to that day. And also a message that you have for your fellow soldiers in Israel.

Andrea Goldstein:

I'm struggling to react because – the horror, rage, I'm just going to start crying on this podcast and not be able to actually give words. I was actually in touch on WhatsApp with several women who I've had the opportunity to work with who are veterans and reservists in the IDF. And there's definitely this kind of secret community of women around the world who have served in combat roles. Even if they weren't in combat, occupational specialties in their countries, where we know what we did, and our service has often gone unacknowledged and erased. And that service is also particularly called upon during the most desperate times, which we are in now. And the message that I have is we see you, we’re with you and we want to run towards chaos with you.

Dana Levinson Steiner:

Thank you so much, Andrea. Dave?

Dave Warnock:

I mean, I can't say anything that hasn't already been said. You know, shock, anger. My wife and I are expecting our first child soon. And I didn't think we'd be having a daughter, be worried about like, I just thought, ignorantly, that these sorts of things were perhaps in the past. All I can say to those who are going to go serve is, keep your head on a swivel. Watch out for your battle buddy. All the things we used to say to each other then are still true now.

Dana Levinson Steiner:

Thank you. I think just knowing that you are in community with them, and that they have love and support is so powerful. And as I think both of you know, our ACCESS chapters are all over the world, including in Israel, where a huge number of our ACCESS leaders have been called up for active and reserve duty. So we're thinking of them in this moment.

And we're thinking of all soldiers as we approach Veterans Day, and we're so grateful for the two of you sharing your story with us and sharing your time with us and giving a voice to the more than 1%, we will hope, of American Jewish veterans and perhaps even encourage some folks who may have been thinking that this is something that's been on their mind. Maybe perhaps it might be the moment for them to lean into that into that journey as a Jewish member of our armed forces. So thank you both for joining us. Wishing you a restful and restorative weekend. And Shabbat Shalom.

Dave Warnock:

Shabbat shalom, thank you.

Andrea Goldstein:

Thank you so much, shabbat shalom.
- Lyssna Lyssna igen Fortsätt Lyssnar...
- Lyssna senare Lyssna senare
Seven Months In: What Israelis Think About the War Against Hamas, Campus Antisemitism in America, and More
16 maj· People of the Pod
Jacob Magid, U.S. Bureau Chief for the Times of Israel, provides his take on Israel's efforts to destroy Hamas in Gaza, the U.S-Israel relations, the anti-Israel campus protests, the Israeli public’s reaction to rising antisemitism abroad, and the challenges he has faced as a journalist since October 7.

Episode Lineup:

(0:40) Jacob Magid

Show Notes:

Learn more:

Everything You Need to Know About Rafah, Its Importance to Hamas, and Protecting Its Civilian Population

Listen to AJC’s People of the Pod:

What Does it Mean to be a Jewish American Hero? A Jewish American Heritage Month Conversation with AJC CEO Ted Deutch

The Chaos at Columbia: What It’s Like to be Jewish on Campus Right Now

Follow People of the Pod on your favorite podcast app, and learn more at AJC.org/PeopleofthePod

You can reach us at: [email protected]

If you’ve appreciated this episode, please be sure to tell your friends, and rate and review us on Apple Podcasts.

Episode Transcript:

Manya Brachear Pashman:

How important is American support for Israel? What message is the protest movement on American college campuses sending to Israel? Jacob Magid: is the U.S. Bureau Chief for The Times of Israel. Our colleagues in Washington D.C. hosted him this week in front of a live audience of about 200 guests. But we had some questions of our own and he joins us now. Jacob, welcome to People of the Pod.

Jacob Magid:

Hey there, thanks for having me.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

So there have been a lot of reports in the media lately about a strain in US-Israel relations, especially after Biden's announcement of a delay in the transfer of heavy munitions and concerns over Israel’s plans in Rafah. Yet this week, Biden announced that it green-lit the transfer of over $1 billion in new arms for Israel, seemingly quelling any concerns about this rift. But what is your take on the situation? Is there a rift between President Biden and Prime Minister Netanyahu?

Jacob Magid:

It's interesting, because I think in the weeks and months immediately after October 7, support for President Joe Biden was at record highs. As at the same time, support for Donald Trump was plummeting, given the comments that he was making, shortly after October 7, kind of mocking Israel for not being able to foresee what what occurred on the seventh, as opposed to Biden who made this trip right after October 7, sent those aircrafts to the eastern Mediterranean, and warned Israel's adversaries not to get involved in the attack. I think there was real appreciation for what Joe Biden was doing. And I think it's amazing how much seven months can do because we've seen that support for President Biden completely, I'd say, plummet.

There was a recent poll taken before this threat. But you can only imagine that it's only going to go down further, showing that now. Whereas earlier in the war, a plurality of Israelis supported President Biden over Trump in another election. Now those numbers have switched back, I think Israelis still do remember the steps Donald Trump took to re-open the Embassy in Jerusalem, to the Abraham Accords, the Golan Heights, all these different steps that he took when he was president. And I think that's more on their minds. And then they compare it to President Biden, they couldn't imagine President Trump taking those kinds of steps that he has taken, a public threat to withhold weapons that's a little bit harder for them to picture. And it's just more fresh on the minds of many Israelis when they're thinking about this current president.

But I would note that it's not really clear what President Trump would do in this kind of scenario. I think there are a lot of US officials and Israeli officials I’ve spoken with who say that at least Prime Minister Netanyahu might prefer President Biden to President Trump because he's seen as someone who's more predictable, in regards with his ties with Israel, that while things have gotten bad, Netanyahu can also always frame himself as trying to stand up to the Americans.

Whereas you'd have a much harder time doing that to Trump because I think he's a lot more beholden to him, will have a lot harder time saying no to Trump, I think Donald Trump, imagining a presidency where he's returning to the White House, I can't imagine he would be prepared to allow a war to continue for seven months, given his specific foreign policy agenda items, be it with Saudi Arabia or other places.

But right now Israelis, for right or wrong, I think are very much shocked by the step that the President took. I don't think they saw a lot of the lead up that maybe the Biden administration was feeling, that there was a lot of warning given. And I think there's a degree of betrayal that I think a lot of Israelis feel right now.

But again, things change so rapidly in this war. So that could switch again. And the Biden administration lately has been making a point to say this is just one shipment that we're holding. The vast majority of aid is still going to Israel, and we still have Israel's back. We're still determined to help them get rid of the threat of Hamas. But right now, Israelis, I think, are looking at it a little bit differently.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

How are Israelis viewing the possibility or the prospect of a more major Rafah operation and is there actually a difference of opinion among the Israeli population about how long this war should continue?

Jacob Magid:

Given the fact that over the past few weeks, we've seen, Israeli troops returned to areas that they were already fighting in several times, like in the Gaza City neighborhood of Zaytoun. IDF troops returned to again last week. This is the third time they were there and soldiers have been killed each time. And Hamas has managed to regroup and return to these areas the IDF previously cleared.

But we haven't seen beyond leaks from the military establishment that has been frustrated with the Israeli government, with Prime Minister Netanyahu for not really forging some sort of plan for the day after in Gaza, some sort of body to replace Hamas be it the PA or anyone. Just something is what they're looking to be able to advance in order to complement the military achievements on the battlefield, you need some sort of diplomatic alternative as wel, diplomatic achievements.

So I think we're getting to a point I would imagine where Israelis are going to start voicing some more frustration with the way the war is being handled. But I think it's going to start with a decision by Benny Gantz, the National Unity Party and also his deputy Gadi Eisenkot, two former IDF chiefs of staff who are highly respected among Israelis.

A poll show that they're the strongest, most popular party right now in the Knesset. If elections were held today. That if they take that step to leave the government and demonstrate that they no longer have trust in the government's ability to get a hostage tool to wage the war, I think then you'll see a bit more frustration amongst Israelis and with the path that Netanyahu has taken, be it in Rafah or other places where they just don't trust that the war is being managed well.

But until that happens, and I think Benny Gantz is very hesitant to take that step, because he knows that there are people he's able to straddle being at playing at both kind of dancing at both weddings right now, where he is very appreciated by both the more left wing people that might appreciate him being in the government to prevent the more far-right flank from taking steps that they don't agree with. And then on the right also for being a team player. And as Israelis like to say in Hebrew, to go under the stretcher and take part in the military offensive, I think he's able to beget appreciation from both.

But once you take that step of crossing the Rubicon and leaving the government, and I think you'll lose some of those people that appreciate you. So I'm not sure when Gantz is going to take that step. But I don't think this war will be able to go on for months more without him leaving the government. I think that if we're two months on and there's no hostage deal, I would expect, I think, that step to be taken.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

Are Israelis growing more and more impatient, as the hostages remain in Gaza?

Jacob Magid:

Yeah, I think they are. I think we're seeing an escalation of these protests that are led by the hostages' families. And they're increasingly willing to be aligned with separate protests that were much more definitive at one point about just toppling the government and demanding new elections. I think that a lot of these families of the hostages are starting to believe that the only way to get their loved ones back is to have a new government in place.

Now, that's still not the feeling amongst all families of hostages. Obviously, there's 132 families that come from different backgrounds and feel different things about this government. But I think there's definitely a feeling of desperation amongst them. And I think there's a lot of sympathy amongst the broader public with how they feel about this government. And I think at some point that that will dictate the direction that things take.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

Jacob, you mentioned earlier that the Biden administration's comments or threats, you refer to them as there's a sense of betrayal. Is there also a sense of despair? In other words, how critical is America's support in this war?

Jacob Magid:

I think, Israel, at least official Israel since Biden's comments, has insisted that Israel can continue fighting the war on its own, that it doesn't need, obviously would love the US support them, it's very important, but that it has no qualms with going into Rafah or just in general fighting this war on its own.

It believes it's an existential war, and that it has the means to continue fighting without necessarily US support. That's been the implication of these comments that Prime Minister Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant have been making different framing of how they've responded to it. I think Gallant is a bit more sensitive to the US concerns than Netanyahu might appear to be. But that's basically the implication.

However, if you look just I mean, even Ron Dermer, a few days, I believe it was yesterday, he issued a speech basically saying that we have proven that we can fight on our own when we need to. But I think he neglected the point that I think it was April 14, when Iran fired 200 missiles and drones at Israel at the same time.

It wasn't Israel intercepting all these drones on its own. It required support from the US, from its European allies, from even Jordan and Saudi Arabia, which is less known, but that these countries were needed to come to Israel's aid in order to to really intercept all those rockets, all those missiles and drones.

And then I don't think it's totally accurate to say that we can do this on our own, we would have had a very different picture. I think on April 14, that night, had those rockets been able to penetrate Israeli airspace and harm civilians.

So I think, yes, Israel does have the means to continue fighting in Rafah on its own, and then Gaza on its own, but the question of Lebanon is a lot trickier, given how difficult it has been to fight against Hamas. And we've seen as I mentioned, that the Hamas fighters have been able to return to areas that were previously cleared by the IDF that this has taken seven months, and we're not on the edge of victory, as Netanyahu claims that we are.

Just imagine how difficult it's going to be against Hezbollah. Which is even according to Israeli estimates, is far far far stronger than the kind of–it's a full fledged army in a way that Hamas might not necessarily be, as much as we underestimated Hamas.

But I think nobody’s under estimating Hezbollah and the firepower that it has, and the Iran backing that it has. And I think that Israel will need the US support in order to fight that kind of war.

I think there was this feeling of betrayal. The Biden administration just sees it differently, that they feel that this war has been going on for seven months, and there's really no end in sight. And they are concerned about the civilian casualties. That of course, I think Hamas inflates the numbers. And we can talk about that shortly.

But it's undeniable that the level of destruction that's been caused to Gaza. And there's just this feeling that without a strategy without a diplomatic path that Israel doesn't seem willing to approach, maybe it's starting to slowly talk a little bit privately about some sort of Palestinian Authority involvement in Gaza.

But this feeling that we can't just kind of continue throwing our head into the wall without any real broader plan beyond this military approach, and that there is an understanding or a hope in the Biden administration that Israel will some at some point, at least, I think the military establishment is starting to get there, that it'll extend to the political establishment as well, except that we're not trying to do this out of spite.

I think there's a real belief that this is not the best way to go about it going into Rafah the way that Israel wants to go to it. That's how the US sees it. And that we do need to look at other approaches in order to maintain the US support that we the US says that we want to continue giving that we do believe in this eliminating the threat of Hamas.

That's different than eliminating Hamas entirely, which is how I think Israel framed it at the beginning of the war. So we're talking we're with you on eliminating the threat of Hamas. But let's take different steps to go about it. And we're still willing to continue providing our support in the meantime, not just for Hamas, but also the broader threats you face. The US have been very clear that they're not going to walk away from Israel on those.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

So you talked about protests by Israelis and hostage families in particular. Of course, we've had our own protest movement here in America, predominantly on America's college campuses. But they’re very different. Most of the American protests are calling for a flat out ceasefire and criticizing Israel’s response to the massacre on October 7. Very few if any call for a return of the hostages and many have been dominated by loud pro-Hamas and antisemitic elements. I'm curious how the Israelis have viewed those protests and what message they are sending?

Jacob Magid:

I think that Israelis are similarly disturbed, if not more disturbed by what they're seeing on these campuses. And I think it reinforces a lot of what they feel like the necessity of the evil that they're up against and Hamas is kind of similar to the evil that is being framed on college campuses. And the need to frame it as an existential war to some degree, whether or not that is accurate. I think it's debatable. But there is a growing sentiment of solidarity, I think with Jewish students in the US that of what they're feeling is comparable, maybe not into military scale by any means, but definitely into the ideological scale of what Israelis are facing in Gaza.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

Are they surprised by the growing sense of antisemitism abroad?

Jacob Magid:

I don't think entirely surprised. I think the fact that they live in Israel is testament to the belief that this is where they believe that Jews should be. I think there's less of an understanding I think amongst mainstream Israelis have the value and the necessity and even the it's totally okay for Jewish lives to take place abroad. I think there's a lot less of an understanding of the the Jewish experience abroad. I think there might be a little bit more understanding amongst diaspora Jews of the experience in Israel as much as possible, I think are two very unique experiences.

There's not a Birthright for Israelis to come to America to really understand. I mean, a lot of them do after the army. But there isn't that same experience that I think that American Jews and many others are given privy to this real access and, and window into Israeli society. So I think given that I think I think there's just oftentimes when I've spoken to Israelis about this is there's just this assumption that, yeah, of course, there's a lot of antisemitism out there. And that's why you're supposed to be in Israel.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

You work here in the United States, but what are some of the challenges you’ve faced as a journalist for an Israeli outlet, since 10/7?

Jacob Magid:

I have found myself frustrated trying to cover these campus protests where students aren't willing to speak to me because I work for an Israeli outlet. That was something I'm used to dealing with when I was over in the West Bank and covering Palestinian issues. And there were certain Palestinian officials who were willing to speak with me on background, as in not in name when it's published.

That's something I'm used to, but now it's having to deal with that with American college students who aren't even, like there's no reason to be going to want to be anonymous, unless you don't like recognize the legitimacy of my newspaper, which I guess is fine, but even though I don't necessarily agree with them, I want to be able to tell their story and I’m unable to fully do so because I'm not getting full cooperation.

So yeah, it would be definitely easier to work for in that regard a different news outlet where I wouldn’t have to identify myself but it's just kind of I think shows the absurdity of the times of it.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

So we’re speaking to you on Israel’s Memorial Day, before the transition into Independence Day. Are Israelis observing these days differently after October 7?

Jacob Magid:

Oh absolutely. I spoke with a few family members and friends about the experience right now in Israel, they're just starting to transition to Yom Ha’atzmaut. There are some who are adamant about the need to celebrate this day, that the deaths aren't going to be in vain, that's our purpose. If we felt that it was always the case that we are supposed to celebrate Yom Ha’atzmaut right after Yom Hazikaron, the silver platter to make those soldiers and those who have fallen, their lives, give them meaning. And a reason to celebrate. That technically should stand true this year as well, even though the loss on October 7 was of a magnitude that Israel hadn't seen before.

But of course, I think given the fact that we have hostages, who are still being held in Gaza, given the fact that the war is still going on, I think a plurality of Israelis, I'm sure are not going to be celebrating this year, the way they had. I think there are still interestingly parties happening; scheduled in Tel Aviv. I'm sure the clubs will be filled in a lot of these cities. I think that's still a sentiment that resonates. But I think Yom Ha’atzmaut is not going to be the same as it was in previous years.

And Yom Hazikaron I think we saw what was happening in a lot of these ceremonies on military cemeteries across the country where government members were speaking. It's happened in the past where they've been heckled, but not to the degree that I think that we saw this year.

From the Prime Minister down, a real feeling of anger, because this isn't just the average Israeli who might support the war, might support Netanyahu. These are people who lost the those closest to them, fighting a war that hasn’t gotten to the total victory that Prime Minister Netanyahu has promised, or just a feeling of resentment.

There's a pretty good example, a couple of weeks ago, where two names of casualties were determined dead by the IDF.

One was Elyakim Liebman, from the settlement of Hebron, and one was [Dror Or] I believe from the Gaza periphery. And we saw over a dozen Knesset members, coalition members and ministers head to the funeral of Liebman, who was a real hero, who fought off terrorists during the Nova music festival as a security guard.

Whereas this other person from the Gaza periphery, [Dror], who came from a community not necessarily aligned ideologically with the government.

Nobody made any calls to them. Nobody visited, reached out to the family. And I feel like there's a real feeling of resentment and just dissonance between a government that a lot of Israelis feel like just doesn't represent them in increasing number.

I think, even if they agree maybe with the broader goals of the war, that they don't feel like Netanyahu and the broader government is handling it in the way that they appreciate. Even earlier President Biden was seen as someone who was more in touch with the hostages and than Prime Minister Netanyahu was. He reached out to them before Netanyahu did.

So there's that real dissonance there. And I think that that anger came out during Yom Hazikaron. And I think is, is going to probably carry over, beyond into Yom Ha’atzmaut, and until there's some sort of breakthrough, either a hostage deal, or some sort of end to the war that Israelis would like to see.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

Well may that war end very, very soon and may the hostages come home. Jacob, thank you so much for your work here, and for joining us.

Jacob Magid:

Thank you Manya. Thank you very much for having me.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

If you missed last week’s episode, be sure to tune in for my conversation with AJC CEO Ted Deutch about Jewish American Heritage Month and what it means to be a Jewish American hero today.
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What Does it Mean to be a Jewish American Hero? A Jewish American Heritage Month Conversation with AJC CEO Ted Deutch
10 maj· People of the Pod
AJC CEO Ted Deutch reflects on Jewish American Heritage Month, highlighting the historical contributions of Jewish Americans and discussing the concept of heroism in the face of rising antisemitism. Ted also shares what it means to be a hero today, especially in the wake of 10/7, and who he considers to be among his own heroes.

Episode Lineup:

(0:40) Ted Deutch

Show Notes:

Learn more:

Join AJC in Celebrating Jewish American Heritage Month

Quiz: Test your knowledge of the rich culture and heritage of the Jewish people and their many contributions to our nation

Listen to AJC’s People of the Pod:

The Chaos at Columbia: What It’s Like to be Jewish on Campus Right Now

Follow People of the Pod on your favorite podcast app, and learn more at AJC.org/PeopleofthePod

You can reach us at: [email protected]

If you’ve appreciated this episode, please be sure to tell your friends, and rate and review us on Apple Podcasts.

Episode Transcript:

Manya Brachear Pashman:

Amid the recent rise of antisemitism and the unease that brings, we are marking the month of May as Jewish American Heritage Month. This is a time when so many of us in the Jewish community are feeling misunderstood, unwelcome, and confronting hatred. But the American Jewish experience is so much more than standing up to hatred and bigotry. Over the past 370 years, Jewish Americans have served in government, the military, they've won Nobel Prizes, headed universities and corporations, advanced medicine, the arts and justice. Here to celebrate Jewish American Heritage is AJC's CEO Ted Deutch.

Ted, welcome back to People of the Pod.

Ted Deutch:

Thank you very much.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

Ted, you began serving in Congress in 2010 A few years after a Jewish American Heritage Month was first proclaimed in 2006 Can you tell us a little bit of the history behind Jewish American Heritage or what we like to call JAHM.

Ted Deutch:

Well, Jewish American Heritage Month has been around for almost 20 years. Congress passed a resolution that was led by my former colleague Debbie Wasserman Schultz to acknowledge the important contributions that Jewish Americans have made throughout our history. And in 2006, President George W. Bush designated the month of May to be Jewish American Heritage Month, and there have been presidential proclamations every year since.

This year, President Biden proclaimed May to be Jewish American Heritage Month and outlined the history of the American Jewish community and the fact that Jewish American culture is so inextricably woven into the fabric of our country. He talked about the importance of Jewish American suffragettes and activists and leaders marching for civil rights and women's rights and voting rights. He talked about the contributions of, of Jewish men and women in uniform and on the Supreme Court. And throughout multiple administrations. It's an acknowledgement that we are really forming an important part of the fabric of this country. And we have to spend time thinking about that, particularly in a moment when so many are really taking positions and saying things that challenge our contributions that are made, and that really put so many of us in the Jewish community on edge, make us feel at risk. This is an important opportunity to really stand proudly as Jewish Americans.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

You know, during the month of March, Women's History Month, I always discover a new role model, a particularly amazing woman that I never knew existed. And the same is often true during Jewish American Heritage Month. But in reverse, I discovered that people whom I always thought to be amazing, and heroes in my book are Jewish. Do you have heroes growing up who you discovered were, or maybe you already knew, were Jewish?

Ted Deutch:

It's interesting. Our community is, I think, always looking to elevate those from our community who make a meaningful impact in society.

I remember when I learned about Eddie Jacobson, that was one of those moments for me. Eddie Jacobson was a friend, business partner of Harry Truman. And, he played such a really interesting role during the war when, when he was focused on the plight of the Jews in Europe. His friendship led him to go advocate with then-Senator Truman to urge the us to do more for the Jews who are being discriminated against, harassed. Ultimately those who were being sent to concentration camps.

That was a relationship that he had, and was able to use to help strengthen his own community.

And what he did that I think was even more important than that, was following the war when he understood that there was this opportunity for the rebirth of the modern state of Israel. He went to urge his, again, his friend, then-President Truman, to to meet with Haim Weitzman, the leader of the Zionist movement, and President Truman was reluctant, but because of that relationship, that that personal relationship, Eddie Jacobson was able to convince the President to take that meeting, which then ultimately led to the recognition of the State of Israel by the United States just minutes after it declared, Israel declared its independence, being the first country to to recognize Israel.

He’s a hero in the history of the Jewish people. He played a really important role, I think, in the history of the country. And I think most people had no idea or may never have heard of him.

There are also the heroes within the Jewish community that in Jewish American Heritage Month we have the chance to think about people who impacted us, impacted the way we work to strengthen the Jewish community who maybe aren't famous at all.

When I think about the people, the Jewish leaders that I was privileged to know when I was a college student. Our [University of Michigan] Hillel director, Michael Brooks, and the professors who helped guide us where, at a moment years ago when we were facing antisemitism. When the student newspaper ran this series of outrageously anti-Zionist, antisemitic editorials, unfortunately, sounding familiar, the support from these heroic adults, for those of us who were students, to go out and to hold rallies and to protest outside of the student newspaper, to make sure that people understood what the facts were–that kind of heroism really resonates because it's a reminder of what we can do for young people now at a moment when they're looking to others in the community to help support them.

It really carries right through to, to the work that I get to do every day, that I'm so privileged to do and, and really the ways that all of us can work behind the scenes to help lift up the voices of Jewish young people today.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

It's interesting that you kind of bring up who the heroes were for yourself when you were younger. I mean, I'm sure I'm sure you've been to baseball games, Yankees, Cubs, Mighty Mussels, whoever your team might be.

Ted Deutch:

The Mighty what?

Manya Brachear Pashman:

The Mighty Mussels, they're in Fort Myers, Florida. It's also the name of my son's baseball team. They're named after minor league teams. But I'm sure you've been to these games where the announcer calls the heroes to stand, be recognized by the crowd. And everyone knows that the announcer is calling on veterans, right members of the military, first responders, and they are undoubtedly heroes. But in those moments, I often wish they would list all the many types of heroes when they do that. The doctors, the nurses, the teachers, God bless them.

How do you define hero?

Ted Deutch:

Well, you're exactly right, and what those moments feel like. And first of all, I think it's important that we acknowledge injury, Jewish American Heritage Month, the contributions of Jewish Americans throughout our nation's history, in defending our country, we've talked before, I mean, I talk a lot about my father, who graduated from high school and enlisted in the Army to go fight the Nazis, and earned a Purple Heart in the Battle of the Bulge. And all of the people like him who, whether it was in World War Two, or Korea or Vietnam, right on through the wars, in the Middle East wars in Afghanistan and, and in Iraq, the contributions from Jewish Americans who were proudly Jewish, as they served our country, those are really important to remember and every time at a sporting event where they ask the heroes to rise, I think it's important to think about that, you know, down here in South Florida, when they do that, at sporting events, it's not unusual, especially if they're recognizing someone from World War Two or the conflict in Korea in particular, it's just not that unusual for the veterans to be Jewish Americans. And there's always an extra amount of pride that you feel when they make those announcements. I do think it's important to think about all that we've contributed in defense of the country.

But you're right. There are so many people who are heroes, who serve our country in other ways. We had a moment during COVID, where I think everybody recognized the heroism of our first responders, our doctors and nurses and people went in when COVID was raging, and people knew so very little about it. And every day, they went to work to take care of people and help save lives. And there was that moment. And I think it's important that we have more moments like that.

It's true for police officers and firefighters and first responders. Again, too often, I think we sort of take for granted the work that so many people do, putting themselves out in service of others.

And you mentioned teachers, there's just no question that the contributions of teachers and so many Jewish teachers among them, who have committed their lives to helping prepare the next generation, to help them become citizens in our country and understand our history and learn what they need to be able to thrive in our society and in their lives. They're doing an incredible service, and should be recognized as well.

And so when we think about Jewish American Heritage Month, look, I'm all for thinking about, getting back to athletes. I'm all for thinking about Alex Bregman from the Astros. And for those of us who are hockey fans, it's the glory days for Jews in hockey, and Zach Hyman and the Hughs and others, but it's the people that we've not heard of whose names we don't know, who come from our own families that we need to hold up and think about as the real heroes for the work they do every day in their lives.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

It has been seven months now, since terrorists attacked Israel on October 7. And I'm curious if in your opinion, the last seven months have changed what it means to be a hero, especially in the Jewish world.

Ted Deutch:

Well, there are all kinds of people in the Jewish world right now who are doing heroic work since 10/7 in ways that either weren't necessary, or were unappreciated before 10/7. Because the challenge There's so much greater.

We were just talking about people who served the country. IDF soldiers are heroes and what the IDF has done since 10/7 to defend Israel in the face of the horrific attacks by Hamas is heroic, and the loss of life is painful. And so even as we mourn those soldiers who have been killed, we have to take a moment to appreciate the heroism.

But there are others, the hostage families who traveled to New York and Washington and around the world and we at AJC are so privileged to work with so many of them to help give them voice and make sure that they're heard. But as they struggle now, for more than 200 days that their loved ones have been held captive deep below Gaza, they continue to go out and advocate for the release of their loved ones. And to help people understand that these are real people, and we feel like we've gotten to know them. And that's because of the heroic actions that their loved ones have taken.

There are people in social media who have become heroes for every day just going to battle against the lies and misinformation on so many of the social media outlets. In the United States, on college campuses right now, what we've seen from so many students, whether they're on our Campus Global Board, high school students from our LFT program, but wherever they are, the ability for students to stand up and to say, in the face of these protests that are often directed at the Jewish community, the language is horrific, and it is dangerous and unacceptable.

And in the face of all of that. the number of students and young people who are standing up saying, I am a proud Jew who loves Israel. And I'm going to fight back in all of the ways I can to make sure that people know who we are, to make sure that they understand the truth of what's happening now.

There are so many young people now who are doing heroic things, and will continue to do heroic things, I have no doubt, for the rest of their lives. And I think it's important to stop to acknowledge that.

I know these days, it's not popular to talk about heroes in politics. But if you pause for a moment and think about what Richie Torres has done, as a member of Congress, a progressive member of Congress, standing firmly in support of Israel and Israel's right to defend itself and speaking with a moral clarity that we wish others could follow. Ritchie's a hero. John Fetterman, staring down the protesters day after day, the way that he does, is a hero.

At a time when there is so little bipartisanship, the fact that Speaker Johnson decided to move forward with the aid package for Israel and Ukraine and Taiwan with humanitarian aid and got that done, we should be celebrating his contributions.

There are a lot of people that we really need to stop and be grateful for. And obviously, they're not all Jews. But it's a moment when the Jewish community, as we're thinking about our own heroes, should pause to be grateful for those who have really been helpful to the community.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

Now you've just mentioned a lot of the people who've had a high profile since October 7. Any ordinary or overlooked heroes that we might not think to recognize?

Ted Deutch:

Being a parent of a Jewish child shouldn't be heroic. And yet, seeing parents find more ways for their kids to really understand who we are, as a community find more ways for them to be involved, by more ways for them to learn, especially after 10/7, really teaching more and more about who we are as Jews, to our kids, that's heroic.

I don't think it should be heroic to be a rabbi, or a Hebrew school teacher, or someone who works at a day school or in the Jewish community. But in this post 10/7 world, that work in so many instances is heroic, because of all of the baggage that comes with, with the protesters, with the challenges to the community, with the things that we see on social media, to get up every single day, and to be there as leaders in the Jewish community in synagogues, in schools, in the organizational world. As we prepare to get ready for camp season. All of these Jewish professionals are doing heroic work, and the community is so much better and stronger for it and for them.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

How did October 7th change you and your approach to either public service or service to the Jewish people?

Ted Deutch:

First, there's an urgency with which I try to meet every single day, since 10/7, I think it's something that we all feel. I think a lot about the way that we felt on 10/7, that morning when we were learning about what happened and the fragility of Israel. And the notion that the Jewish community and Israel are so inextricably linked became more powerful than ever, and that both felt at risk that day and the days after.

It's just required a constant and urgent focus on trying to make sure that people understand what's actually happening, putting out meaningful and factual information and pushing back against false narratives, something that we've tried so hard to do, literally since 10/7. Hlping people understand that the protests didn't start when IDF soldiers marched into Gaza to defend Israel and Jewish people. They started after Hamas slaughtered 1,200 people on October 7. These were protests in support of this vile terrorism.

And helping people understand that when Iran launched close to 350 missiles and drones, it was part of an ongoing effort through Iran, with Iran to the head, but that includes Hamas and Hezbollah, and the militia in Iraq and the militia in Syria, and the Houthis, and others throughout the region, all to target Israel, again, urgently making that clear every single day.

So there's an urgency, there is a passion to make sure that the commitment in the community, the way that people have stood up and said, You know what, there are a lot of things that are important, but man our community needs, it needs us to focus on ourselves. That ultimately, the only people that we know that we can count on are the Jewish people.

And yes, we're going to continue to work with our friends and allies and partners. That's important. But working hard to retain the sense of unity within the Jewish community is also something that was never really a priority. But now that we've seen what that unity looks like, and what it means when we all stand together, in the face of this Hamas evil in the face of these protesters celebrating terrorism, and calling for the destruction of Israel, that's a unity that we have to desperately try to hold on to, and to bring people together around, not just while this war is going on, but on into the future.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

Ted, thank you so much for joining us.

Ted Deutch:

I hope people will use this as an opportunity to share their own stories, their family stories, the stories of the people that they know deserve some attention for what they've done to strengthen America.

And I hope that they'll go out and they'll tell the story and they'll get others to listen. Our contributions to America have been so rich and varied and instrumental to the kind of country that we have and the kind of country that we know we need to continue to be. These are stories that everyone needs to hear. So I very much appreciate the opportunity.
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The Chaos at Columbia: What It’s Like to be Jewish on Campus Right Now
3 maj· People of the Pod
Noa Fay is a Jewish student leader at Columbia University, the epicenter of the anti-Israel protest movement that has unfolded on American college campuses in recent weeks. Pro-Hamas, antisemitic, and anti-Israel demonstrators have occupied academic buildings, set up overnight tent encampments, and staged demonstrations, while Jewish students have faced increasing threats, antisemitism, and violence. Noa shares her first-hand perspective on what it's like to be Jewish on campus right now.

*The views and opinions expressed by guests do not necessarily reflect the views or position of AJC.

Episode Lineup:

(0:40) Noa Fay

Show Notes:

Learn more:

WATCH: Press Conference at Columbia/Barnard to Urge Action from University Leadership
AJC – along with our partners at Hillel International, Columbia/Barnard Hillel, UJA-Federation of New York, and Jewish students – called on universities and their leaders to keep Jewish students safe on their campuses during a press conference last week. Watch the press conference.

AJC Campus Library
Resources to help Jewish students feel safe on campus and become well-informed and effective advocates for Israel and the Jewish people

Listen to AJC’s People of the Pod:

What It’s Like to Be Jewish at Harvard Among Antisemites and Hamas Supporters

The Good, the Bad, and the Death Threats: What It’s Like to Be a Jewish College Student Right Now

Jewish College Student Leaders Share Their Blueprint for Combating Antisemitism

Follow People of the Pod on your favorite podcast app, and learn more at AJC.org/PeopleofthePod

You can reach us at: [email protected]

If you’ve appreciated this episode, please be sure to tell your friends, and rate and review us on Apple Podcasts.

Episode Transcript:

Manya Brachear Pashman:

Nearly seven months since the Hamas-led massacre on Israel that ignited Israel's current war with Hamas, chaos has unfolded on the campuses of Columbia University, Barnard College and other universities across the nation. Most recently, student demonstrators have built tent encampments on university quads and occupied academic buildings.

They also have targeted Jewish students with antisemitic signs, slogans and in some cases, physical assaults to protest the war. But that's not all they're protesting. With us to discuss her perspective as a Jewish student leader on campus is Barnard College senior Noa Fay.

Noa, welcome to People of the Pod.

Noa Fay:

Hi, thanks so much for having me.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

Well, thank you for joining us. And I'm sorry that you have been experiencing this on campus in recent weeks. We've seen plenty of images from the chaos there. But can you describe it from your vantage point, kind of walking through the crowds and seeing it up close? What do you see? What do you hear?

Noa Fay:

It’s important to understand not only the amount of antisemitism, and that sort of violence that we're seeing–which has been incredibly painful, really, for every Jewish student at this point, I really believe I mean, it's just been absolutely horrifying.

You know, I mean, it's pogrom style stuff that we're seeing. It has felt like now that everybody is affected, people are taking this seriously. But in reality, the Jewish students, we've been dealing with this literally since October 7, and it's taken up until now to even seem to get somebody's attention.

So I think it's important to understand that, when I talk about this chaos, what I'm really thinking of is– there is, first of all, just so much press everywhere, which is just a bunch of people that are really swarming everyone and, you know, up and down Broadway, it's very disorienting.

But more importantly, on top of that, we have a very significant police presence. I mean, it really is a police state. I can't even get to certain dining halls. I can't study in certain libraries. I can't get to my own gym. I mean, it's a really, really chaotic situation.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

Are they protesting the war? Is that the message that you're that you're hearing? Or are they protesting something else?

Noa Fay:

No. No, no, no. They sprinkle in a few things, I think, dedicated to the war. But by and large, these are anti-Israel demonstrations. And at this point, anti-Jewish demonstrations. So they are using the war to, I think, gain credibility. And the war is definitely fueling their ire, I guess you could say, but this is not about the war. And it's never been about the war.

There was a very strong anti-Israel community on campus. And that was way before October 7, this was during ceasefires that were already taking place between Hamas and Israel. And still, we had this exact same rhetoric. The only difference now is that it's gained a lot of traction. So, no, it's not about the war at all.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

I was going to ask you, you headed to Barnard three years ago, you're a senior now. Did you get warnings? Did people prepare you for Jewish life on campus? And was it helpful advice?

Noa Fay:

Yeah, so people did advise me. I did have people tell me not to go anywhere near there. But I just didn't think that it was that serious. And honestly, I did take this anti-Israel movement seriously, obviously, I had dealt with it in high school, and I had come to learn that this was somewhat of a popular ideology within my generation. And so I was aware of this.

But I basically wasn't daunted, I was honestly happy to debate these students, to basically point out why they're wrong. So I wasn't nervous about it at all.

Of course, we could never have predicted that this would be the situation. But that's just to say, I did have somewhat of an idea, but I didn't take it seriously. And I'm clearly, I'm not the only one, none of us took it seriously, and here we are.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

You mentioned before we started recording that before you started at Barnard, your parents similarly did not think that antisemitism was going to be an issue for you on campus.

What are you hearing from your family now? How has this environment affected you personally?

Noa Fay:

My family, they've been very concerned. They've been talking to me about transferring, because I'm in a plus one program with our School of International and Public Affairs. So I'll be here for one more year finishing up my master's degree. And my parents have a few times now really asked me about transferring and stuff. Which I will say, I don't really have an urge to do that at all. But they are very concerned.

But more than that, I have family in Israel and my family in Israel–they are the ones who are asking me if I'm physically ok. Which is just…again, not the only one who's been having that very bizarre, sad experience. My friends have the same issues. They're their family and Israel, their family is calling them to say, Are you as a Jewish student doing okay, at Columbia University in the city of New York?

So it's just, everybody's very concerned. And rightfully so. It is just, honestly, the more we all talk about it, the fewer words I have to really describe because it is just such an experience that it leaves you speechless. It really does because it is that disturbing.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

You are black, Native American, Jewish. How does that inform your perspective on the messages that you hear such as you Jews are not indigenous to the land of Israel?

Noa Fay:

Right. Oh, my gosh, please. That's one of the worst ones. I'm just absolutely mind boggled by that. I will say that. I think that combination of identities for me, it gives me a bunch of different perspectives with which to use to understand a lot of political issues and social political issues.

But I think for me, the number one I guess, benefit that all of these identities gives me in terms of analyzing antisemitism and just taking in everything that's going on right now, is that, and I've been trying to stress this to people but I think definitely the students who are demonstrating against Israel, they either ignore me or they don't take me seriously or whatever, but I am trying to stress that if only they would take me seriously because I am a person of color, from a few groups, which means: I know what it is like to be discriminated against.

So please, because of that, if you can't hear me when I say I'm Jewish, so I know what it's like to be discriminated against, please hear me when I say I am black, and I am Native American, and I am a woman. Of course, I know what it feels like to be discriminated against.

So please trust me when I say, I am Jewish, and I am now facing discrimination because I'm Jewish.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

I mean, are there people in these crowds, perhaps including your friends, that are holding multiple perspectives?

In other words, they want the hostages released. They’re sad about the devastation in Gaza, and what's happening to the civilians there. In other words, they're not calling for a ceasefire or calling for death to the Jews. They're just holding all of this and spending the night in tents with their friends.

Does that exist?

Noa Fay:

So I have been told that it does. And in fact, a friend of mine, who has also been struggling with the same issue where her very close friends are participating in this and she's trying to understand it. She has told me, and so have other people, that the issue is that different people identify different parts of this movement to be significant to them, which is to say–apparently, this is the argument that's going around–is that everybody believes the movement means something different to everybody. That's what I'm being told. And I can understand that.

My response, though, is that, I don't know that I need to know what it means to you. Because no matter what it means to you, you are putting aside the fact that this is a violently antisemitic movement, simply because I don't know, you want to protest police presence, which is necessary to begin with. So it's kind of a difficult argument for me to follow.

You have forsaken all of these basic human rights issues, for something else that you have identified is more important. So that's why even if these students do have different explanations, which I know they do, it's ultimately, you can't get around the problem. That is, they're saying they don't care that it's antisemetic. That's what the message is.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

I'd like to take this back to the classroom, which is why you're getting at Barnard to begin with, I mean, have you gotten support from the faculty, from the staff, from the administration? Or have faculty members accused you of exaggerating the antisemitism you're experiencing?

Noa Fay:

So I have mostly not really opted to rely on faculty because I know that it's a bit of a gamble, shall we say?

I've had one unfortunate experience with a professor. This is a course about slavery, American slavery. It was an amazing course up until this anti-Israel rhetoric made its way in here. But in this class, this professor has consistently communicated his anti-Israel sentiments and he's also done so by bringing in guest lecturers who have very outwardly demonstrated their anti-Israel nature.

One guest lecturer came in and denied the rape of Israeli women on October 7. I was shaking. I was shaking in my seat. Just because like, what do you say to something like that? I mean, it was just horrific.

And then another example is that another guest lecturer who came in celebrated Aaron Bushnell, the man who set himself on fire over all of this in front of the embassy, I believe it was, and she said he was a true patriot. That's a direct quote.

And then obviously throughout all of this, everything that sprinkled in is, you know, Israel's, a genocidal state, it’s colonialist, settler, imperialist, oppressive, all of these things, these are all the exact words that were used. And this is being told to a group of, as we know, very impressionable students. And I mean, obviously, all of that is just problematic in itself.

But we can also identify it being problematic because at the very least, we don't have an Israeli coming in saying the, the Jewish side of the story and the Israeli side of the story. So it's just a baseline, poorly done, in terms of in terms of attempting to, quote, educate students about this issue.

And because we have that lack of representation of perspectives. We know, it's indoctrination. It's indoctrination. And I and this is to say, I mean, this is I've had, honestly, my whole experience with all of this antisemitism stuff, including what I just described with this professor, that my experience has been mild compared to people who I mean, I've heard about really, really horrific things.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

Where are these protesters going awry? What's the solution here that would allow them to have adequate free speech, but not cross the line into harassment?

Noa Fay:

Yeah, I'm so glad you asked about this, because I am done with this freedom of speech debate. We know this is not an issue of freedom of speech. And we know that because we have students here who would be expelled in a second, if they're not black and say the N word, or if they celebrate the KKK, or anything like that.

In fact, pulling from my high school experience, which was a private institution, just like Columbia. And because of that, they were able to rightfully dismiss a student who called his black peer the N word, and told him to go back to the cotton fields.

For some reason, we've forgotten about this, that no one is entitled to an Ivy League degree. In fact, that's the entire point. Is that it's the most exclusive, elitist selective thing ever. So if the Ivy League had previously selected you, out of literally thousands of applicants, and you come here, and then you show that you are not worthy of that selection, in whatever way, the University reserves the right to say, Oh, you are not one of us, and you don't abide by our rules. These are our rules. This is our society that we get to dictate.

And if you're not fitting into it in the way that you said you would implicitly or explicitly via your application, then the university absolutely has the right to tell them you're not allowed here and actually we're going to select from the thousands of applicants who would give anything to be in your position. That is the ultimate element of remember to check your privilege.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

I will say an Ivy League education is very expensive. I'm still paying for my graduate education at Columbia. And that brings me to this question. Are you learning anything? Are you getting anything for your tuition this year? Or is this experience infringing on that?

Noa Fay:

That's a great question. My friends and I literally just asked ourselves that the other day, and I responded by saying, Well, I've definitely learned that I'm surrounded by antisemites. So that's number one, which is, you know, for better or for worse, it's definitely good to know.

But I mean, really, my answer is that I personally have learned so much at this institution. This, first of all, helps me realize why I feel so strongly about everything that I feel strongly about, which means that it is forcing me to think more deeply about my own values and why I have these values. And number two, is that it definitely has strengthened my debate skills, and just my ability to engage with people who are not only sitting across the table from me, in terms of, you know, arguments and ideology and stuff, but with people who are quite literally against my very existence. So I think that's a good way to look at it.

But I think that as of right now, most of us, us being the Jewish community at Columbia, most of us are not at that point yet, because this is all happening right now. This is a very, very raw thing. And so I think it will be quite a while until we can all identify the potential positives from all of this. And I don't think we should have to identify the positives. This is a very negative and upsetting situation. But I think that it can be helpful to acknowledge at least the different ways in which this makes us stronger.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

Well, Noa, thank you. Thank you so much for joining us and sharing your experience. I hope things calm down for you there, and that you're able to walk across campus at ease again soon.

Noa Fay:

Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.
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Her Mother-In-Law Was Murdered at Tree of Life: Now Marnie Fienberg is Countering Antisemitism One Seder at a Time
19 apr· People of the Pod
Ancient texts, traditional foods, and friends and family: the markers of many Passover tables across America. But what if you added something new–or rather, someone new?

Marnie Fienberg founded 2ForSeder, a program to combat antisemitism and honor her mother-in-law, Joyce Feinberg, who was one of the 11 victims murdered inside Tree of Life. The initiative is simple: extend a Seder invite to two people of another faith, who have never been to a Seder before, to build bridges and spread Jewish joy.

Episode Lineup:

(0:40) Marnie Fienberg

Show Notes:

Learn more:

2ForSeder.org

Listen to AJC’s People of the Pod:

What the Iranian Regime’s Massive Attack Means for Israel and the Region

Meet Modi Rosenfeld – the Comedian Helping the Jewish Community Laugh Again

A Look Back: AJC’s Award-Winning “Remembering Pittsburgh” Series

Jewish College Student Leaders Share Their Blueprint for Combating Antisemitism

Follow People of the Pod on your favorite podcast app, and learn more at AJC.org/PeopleofthePod

You can reach us at: [email protected]

If you’ve appreciated this episode, please be sure to tell your friends, and rate and review us on Apple Podcasts.

Episode Transcript:

Manya Brachear Pashman:

A few weeks ago, we re-aired excerpts from our award winning series Remembering Pittsburgh, which marked five years since the 2018 shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue. One of our guests in that series has returned today. Marnie Feinberg founded 2ForSeder, an initiative to honor her mother in law, Joyce Feinberg, who was one of the 11 victims murdered inside Tree of Life. As we approach Passover, Marnie is with us now to share why there's no time like the present to invite first timers to the Seder table, a superb way to introduce people to the beauty of Judaism, like Joyce often did. Marnie, thank you for joining us again.

Marnie Fienberg:

Thank you so much for having me.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

So we spoke a little about this project, when you joined us last fall. We have a little more time now to unpack why this initiative is such a meaningful way to preserve Joyce's legacy. Can you tell us about her Seders?

Marnie Fienberg:

My mother in law as most mothers and mother in laws, she trained me on how to actually hold the Seder. So as you know, holding the Seder is almost like your second bat mitzvah, it's a rite of passage. And it's also a very important thing that, you know, not only are you trained to do it, but you have to incorporate things from, if you have a partner or from their family, you incorporate things from your own life to your family traditions. And all that kind of comes together in this wonderful magical night that is really grounded in the Haggadah.

But Joyce was of course instrumental and teaching me my mother lives kind of far away. And Joyce and I actually did Seders together for more than a decade. And they started at her house and gradually kind of came over to my house. But she really she helped me every single step of the way, to the point where when she wasn't there anymore, I almost didn't know how to do it. And I'm every time I'm thinking about the Seder and making a Seder. It's it's with her in my head as it has to be. But I still, you know, all of the traditions that she taught me we still utilize those once again, combined with the ones that I learned from my own family and she is a vise still a vibrant part of our personal Seder.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

So was Joyce in your head still when you found 2ForSeder?

Marnie Fienberg:

Oh, absolutely. Well, I am a Jewish woman. And I can't sit still. I need to do something. We have tikkun olam kind of almost in our DNA. Yes. So I really wanted to not only bring her back, which I think is a natural sort of a feeling. But I also wanted to push back on all of the antisemitism that had removed her from my life.

And people were constantly coming up to me, I mean, the community in Pittsburgh and the community where I live in Northern Virginia, everybody was very supportive. But they were constantly asking me, What can we do? And it took me a little while to realize they didn't, they did mean, what can I do to help you? Of course, they did mean that. But what they really meant was, what can we do to stop this from ever happening again? I don't have the answer for that.

But I thought that the seder kind of came into my mind because I was really inspired by what Joyce always did that she brought students or faculty, you know, because she was a campus researcher, and my father in law was actually at Carnegie Mellon. He was a professor there. And they always had people who weren’t Jewish at our at the table. And the discussions were always not only very interesting, but you always saw a very different perspective, when they participated in something in a ritual that you knew so well. And it really created bonds of friendship, even with people who I didn't know. Which was wonderful.

So that's what I really wanted to encourage, you know, this was 2018 when she was murdered. So 2019 was the Seder and I just wanted to encourage every Jew in America and in Canada, because Joyce was Canadian, that they, if they if they were holding the Seder, invite to people who had never been to a Seder before, start that dialogue, invite them to the intimacy of your home, and make them part of your family for that one night.

And that will really help them understand the joy of Judaism, the happiness and the reason that we are Jewish is, it's right there in the Seder. In every Seder I've ever been to, it's always there, and to share that with someone who is not Jewish, starts the dialogue to understanding about the differences between us, the similarities, all these great things, that this is a thing that combats the hate that took my mother in law.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

These are uncomfortable times, they were certainly uncomfortable back in 2018, when the Tree of Life happened, but they're uncomfortable times again for the Jewish community. For everyone really? Who's watching what's been going on in Israel since October seventh. What does the Seder offer? And how do you avoid some of the pitfalls that can arise? When you do bring people perhaps have different perspectives around a dinner table?

Marnie Fienberg:

I'm glad you asked that question. Because my family and Joyce, you know, we feel very strongly about what's happening in Israel, we have a lot of family over there. A lot of friends, like everyone else, we all know someone in Israel. And it's a part of what's going to happen in your Seder this year, I assume almost everybody's going to do something to remind them about, you know, that the hostages are still not freed, that there are people that are starving, but are being helped. This is a difficult situation, it's not a simple, straightforward thing. And the Seder Absolutely, is a reprieve from that for a moment. I think the idea of the Seder is about reaffirming your Judaism, because it takes you on that journey from when we were a tribe, to a nation. It's that little piece in the middle. But it's when you reaffirm your Judaism every year. So it's still important to do it. It's so important to do it your way. And if you want to have a reminder of the hostages, an empty seat at the table, something on the Seder plate, there's so many different ways that you could do something. I think that all of those things would be absolutely important right now, something that reminds you that we're doing this, not just for our family, but we're going to be doing this for those families that are missing those members right now. So I think that the the Seder in general will be healing to some extent for everybody who participates. So inviting someone who's never been to a Seder before. I think it's important, not only do you explain the Seder, which you really do need to do, you have to explain it before you start. And then they can participate and feel comfortable. But also explain to them that if you are going to be doing something to remember the hostages and all the people that were lost, let them know ahead of time that that's what you're going to be doing. You don't want to surprise your guests, your other guests will know exactly what you're doing by the guests who are not Jewish. Don't assume that they know, make sure there's great communication, and everything should go very smoothly.

Manya Brachear Pashman

So I appreciate you kind of mentioning some of the rituals that we can do to honor the hostages and to remind the guests that the hostages are not free. But what about guests who come to the table who have been watching what's going on and disagree. They have really strong emotions and opinions about what's going on there between Israel and Hamas. And I asked this because I know Joyce worked at the University of Pittsburgh, as you said her husband Steven was a professor at Carnegie Mellon. And they often invited students to dinners and Seders. You might have seen the dean of Berkeley Law School has an annual custom of inviting students to his home for a dinner with students. And recently a group accepted that invitation showed up, but then got up from the table and pulled out their megaphones right there in his backyard. So it's hard to believe that that level of rudeness is possible. But it does appear to be a real risk. So can you offer some tools or tips on how to avoid that kind of a response? Or how to respond if you get that kind of behavior?

Marnie Fienberg:

Absolutely. And, you know, it's interesting, I think that we feel a heightened sense of that this year. But it's interesting, that is one of the most asked questions that I always get: How do I ensure that my guests don't veer into politics or if they have disagreements or things along those lines? Probably not the first year so much. But the other years, we've always had questions along those lines. So my recommendation is that you lay some ground rules ahead of time. So as the leader of the Seder, you're not just the head mom or the head Dad, you are the facilitator of what's going on around your table. And while some of us will have five people around the table, some of us will have 30 people around the table, and some of us will be in the backyard with I don't know how many people that the Dean had. But regardless of any people you have, you still have to manage their expectations. It's very important. So when you lay ground rules, it's your choice. You may want to actually have a lively debate. Many Seders are a lot of fun when there's a lot of debate. And if you know the guest, and you know that that's what they're interested in talking about. And the rest of your guests would be okay with it. That is your choice and you should manage that but even with that You might want to say, look, we're going to venture into politics, we can't talk about X, Y, and Z. Or I'll let you know when we've gone too far. Or, hey, this now it's time to bring out the dessert, because that'll stop everybody from talking. I don't know, that's going to be your choice. There is the other side of the coin. And this is actually I live in Washington, DC, where politics is always quite a big deal. But other politics, right, all sorts of politics. So one of the ground rules we always have at our Passover Seder is to have no politics at all, this is a little island, we're not going to talk about the fact that you might be one party, I might be another party, he is going to be another party and y'all work for those parties. I mean, it's not like these are just opinions. So one of our ground rules is always this is a time to focus on once again, the joy of Judaism, the joy of reaffirming my beliefs, and being with my family. And really kind of feeling like this is a very, very special time. And I personally have never wanted politics at my table, because I want that joy to fall through. But when I've been to other tables, it's been very different. So my ground rules are always this is a politics free space. If you'd like to talk about politics, let's go out for drinks after Passover.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

So it's a great point about being in Washington. But again, there's a chance that politics will be brought up at every table, whether it's California or Nebraska, or Texas or Maine. So if it does get tense if people ignore the ground rules, for example. Any suggestions on what to do?

Marnie Fienberg:

Yes, actually, we do have a couple of tools in our toolkit. So two first Seder, if you go to our website to crusader.org, we actually have two kits, when you hit the signup button, it's two free kits for you. One is for your guests to kind of set expectations about the Seder, not about politics, it doesn't touch about that. But it's still important. But the host kit actually has 20 discussion cards in it. And I would actually recommend it if you've started out with a little bit of excitement with politics, and you don't like the way it's going, or if you want to say, look, I really want to avoid it. But I know, this is a lively crew, which I mean, you know your people, right? So I would actually print them out, put the discussion cards out on the table, and actually start picking up some of them and you know, send them around the table and start having discussions about them. So they are more about the Seder. And some of them are pretty surface level, like, what do you think about the taste of matzah, and you're having a discussion about how all these things are cooked with matzah and how crazy that is and how difficult it is and what a genius your chef must be, you know, so you get to compliment the host or hostess. But on the other side of it, there's some deep waters that it goes into, to really talk about the philosophy behind the Seder in some deeper things. So you can really choose what you want. There's 20 different discussion cards. And I think when people are having a very tense discussion, if you say, look, I like where this is going. But it's just not appropriate for today. We've got an alternative here. Let's keep talking. But let's talk about these topics. It won't always work. But it tends to work me most people really, you know, they have strong opinions about many things. And that is what the Seder is for, right? We're supposed to be learning, we're supposed to be growing from each other. So if you can change the topic, if you're uncomfortable with it, the discussion cards are a wonderful tool to help kind of guide that.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

And those can be downloaded at the 2ForSeder.org site.

Marnie Fienberg:

Yes, yes, exactly. There's a host toolkit. And it's the last 20 pages of the host toolkit. You

Manya Brachear Pashman:

know, I'm so glad Ramadan has passed so that in a Muslim guests are able to come and enjoy these saders Without the concern of breaking their fast. But I know that a little has been written about how Jewish Muslim relations have been on edge. And honestly, I have a few Jewish acquaintances who were nervous about attending if tars during Ramadan or weren't invited to as many if tars during Ramadan this year, just because of the potential for tension. Are you hearing any concerns about or from the Muslim community? Or are you hearing that people are sadly turning down invitations for similar reasons?

Marnie Fienberg:

Yeah, I think that as you said, this is a very challenging year. And if you don't feel comfortable, you're not going to a particular place. And I have Muslim friends and normally I am invited to if tours across the month, and I received very few invitations this year, which was interesting. We're still friends. The friendships haven't ceased or anything like that, but the invitations were not their part. To the reason what I did ask part of the reason they felt that they shouldn't be celebrating when people are starving and Palestine so they actually toned down their celebrations out of respect which that's a longer conversation, but I respect that and I appreciate that. Would they be coming to my table? I don't know. We have a community Seder a community to for Seder that we hold every year. So most of to First Aiders about home Seders, you know, so the idea of doing it in your home that is the primary core of twofer Seder. But we've started a nice little thing on the side, where we do a community to for Seder, where everybody we actually invite interfaith groups. The spirit of twofer Seder is about building a bridge. And I hope actually in the past, if you've done too, for Seder before, thank you, but be I hope that those bridges are holding during these troubled times. And if you can't build them during a difficult time like this, you know, I'm hoping I'm praying that next year, there won't be no war, and we'll be able to mend some of these fences and you will be able to invite and accept invitations to Iftar invitations to your Seder for your Muslim friends, I think it's important to keep trying. That's one thing that we are obligated to do as Jews, that may not work, but you'd have to keep trying.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

One thing I've noticed over the years, and the many Seders I've attended is the diversity of traditions and the customs some families put an orange on the table and have a glass for Miriam, other stick to Elijah. So make sure the Afikoman is chocolate, others play it straight. Some change the lyrics of the songs to fit Beyonce tunes, I won't lie I've done that. But does that present a challenge to the purpose or the goal of two for Seder? You know, the goal being to teach a newcomer about Passover? How do you do that? When it's you know, the traditions can be so different.

Marnie Fienberg:

This is also very–well not the Beyonce piece. But that's a very common question. First of all, I want to say I would really like a copy of that, please.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

I'll dig it up for you.

Marnie Fienberg:

Thank you. But that's the whole point that the Seder is blue door for door right we are Lincoln a chain from generation to generation and the core of the Seder the Haggadah, regardless of if you do a traditional haggadah that is, you know, four hours long starts after sunset, maybe you eat by midnight, you know, if you're doing a modern Orthodox or an orthodox Seder, or if you're doing a very, very modern said Seder, which just has the basic four pieces in it. And Tiktok you're done. I'm starving. It's been 10 minutes. Welcome to my my dad. Actually, that's the way he does his. But I've been to all different types, because you know, almost all of our Jewish families, we have a variety in our family, we have Orthodox, we have reform, we have everything in between, right? That's what it's about. It's about the magic of what you bring to your Seder. The haggadah is going to ground you, you've got the grounding story about our journey to becoming a people. That's the core, but what you do a round it, that's you, you are bringing you and your family and all the things that bring you joy, into your Judaism, into your Seder. And these things are critical.

If you just read the Haggadah, and then you walked away, it wouldn't be joyous it would be yes, I was here. But the joy behind it is removed. So the idea that you know, you almost always have children at your Seder, and there's a rule for the children. Why is that? There's a role for the adults to teach the children. There's the food, there's thinking about the future when you sing Eliyahu with the door open so that your neighbors can hear you and wonder what is going on. I mean, all of these things. There's personal ways to put a stamp on those. But we're going to do those. And even if you do it to Beyonce, once again, very excited to hear that. It's really bringing that modern tinge to it. When we're going to hand the hat over to our children. When they do it. They're going to do something different and there'll be wondering who's Beyonce? That's okay, that's okay. But they're still going to do the for questions. They're still going to do the monkey, they're still going to do the Eliyahu all these pieces will still flow. I have proof of this. When I was working to create the community to for Seder. I wanted to create our own Haggadah, and I use of course haggadot.com To start off with, but I really wanted certain things that weren't in there and and I got stuck and I'm sitting here staring at the screen and my teenage daughter walks in and And she actually wanted to help me right there. I know you don't believe me, but she sat down. She said, How can I help? And I was walking through some of the more traditional lines. I don't know why they always took my heart, you know, where they say, you know, in God with an outstretched arm and outstretched hand and the old language, right? Should I keep it in the Haggadah, or should I not? And she looked at me like I was nuts. And she said, of course, you have to, you must, it won't be the Haggadah without it. And that really made me feel like this is going to pass down, at least in my family. These words are so intrinsic to who we are, somehow it gets passed down. It's amazing.

Manya Brachear Pashman

My last question is, who will be coming to your site or table this year?

Marnie Fienberg:

So I'm holding two Seders, although I'm going to three. The first one is the community Seder that is being held in Temple Emanu-El in South Hills right outside of Pittsburgh. And I'm gonna be sort of emceeing it. And we're going to be using the Haggadah that we talked about. And that will be I think there are three different churches that are joining and all sorts of different folks. And one of the tables is actually just teenagers. So I'm really excited because, you know, sometimes to first seders is of interest to adults, and not so much the younger set. Although at our last community Seder, we had a lot of college kids, we had a huge table of college kids, which was great. So I think that that's gonna be a wonderful Seder. The next Seder is going to be the second night we'll be at my house, my friend is holding it the first night at her house. Second night will be in my house, we're having 25 people's the current count, although, you know, it's Wednesday, so somebody's gonna have too late of a night or whatever, so they won't be able to come. But we're really excited because this is more even though there will be some family coming in. This is more of like, a friend Seders the second night for us. So it's going to be a wonderful night. Who's gonna be my two for Seder. This is once again through my daughter. She has a friend who is actually Korean, and her family is going to be joining us. I'm so excited her families, they're wonderful folks. And the one thing I'm nervous about is that they are amazing cooks, and I'm not sure if my cooking is going to stand up to their skills. So hopefully it'll all work out. But it's gonna be a lovely night as it always is.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

That sounds truly lovely. 25 people, Marnie, you are a brave woman, a brave hostess.

Marnie Fienberg:

I wish there was one more that was coming, but she will be there in spirit.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

Yes, absolutely. And thank you because I know it's a lot of hard work to put together a Seder. But again, so important it is such an anchor, I think for families and preserving our traditions. So thank you for all that hard work that's going into that Seder.

Marnie Fienberg:

It is my pleasure and I think every single person who's putting together a Seder and participating in to for Seder, if you've done it before, thank you, if you're interested in doing it again, we've got little kids to help you but just be you and it's about inviting new people every year. And that's how we're going to help really make an awareness about what it really is to be Jewish, not what you hear, you know, the negative rumors, replace those with positive Jewish joy.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

Well, thank you so much, Marnie. The website to download discussion cards and toolkits, all the instructions that you need to host a Seder with a guest is at two, the number two for seder.org Marnie, thanks again for joining us.

Marnie Fienberg:

Thank you so much for having me. This was a great discussion.
- Lyssna Lyssna igen Fortsätt Lyssnar...
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What the Iranian Regime’s Massive Attack Means for Israel and the Region
17 apr· People of the Pod
AJC Jerusalem director Lt. Col. (res.) Avital Leibovich shares how the IDF — and its neighbors and allies — defended Israel with remarkable success. In the early hours of April 14, sirens and explosions were heard across the Jewish state. In an unprecedented, first-ever direct attack on the Israeli people, the Iranian regime launched a wave of more than 300 drones and missiles.

Episode Lineup:

(0:40) Avital Leibovich

Show Notes:
Take Action:

Join AJC in urging Congress to call on the EU to designate all of Hezbollah and the IRGC as terror organizations.

Read AJC’s Explainers on Iran:

Get the Facts About Iran’s Unprecedented Attack on Israel

‘Crimes Against Humanity:’ Another UN Report Finds Sexual Violence by IRGC and Other Authorities in Iran; Similar to Crimes by Hamas

What is Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Why is it Designated a Terror Group by the United States?

Listen to AJC’s People of the Pod on the Israel-Hamas War:

Meet Modi Rosenfeld – the Comedian Helping the Jewish Community Laugh Again

A Look Back: AJC’s Award-Winning “Remembering Pittsburgh” Series

Jewish College Student Leaders Share Their Blueprint for Combating Antisemitism

Matisyahu’s Message to His Fellow Jews and to the Israel Haters Trying to Cancel Him

Follow People of the Pod on your favorite podcast app, and learn more at AJC.org/PeopleofthePod

You can reach us at: [email protected]

If you’ve appreciated this episode, please be sure to tell your friends, and rate and review us on Apple Podcasts.

Episode Transcript:

Manya Brachear Pashman:

Few of us slept well on Saturday night into Sunday knowing that Iran had launched a wave of more than 300 drones and missiles in its first ever direct attack on Israel. In the early hours of Sunday, sirens and explosions were heard across the Jewish state. Here to talk about how Israel definit itself from what many feared was inevitable, Director of AJC Jerusalem Avital Leibovich, who also serves in the Israel Defence Force Reserves.

Avital Leibovich:

Thank you.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

So can you share with our listeners what it was like to hear that Iran had launched this wave of missiles and drones? Did Israelis immediately pack up and head for shelters?

Avital Leibovich:

I think that was one of the most dramatic nights in Israel's history. You know, we're living in an era in which everything is televised and broadcasted. And when those drones have been launched from Iran, that has been broadcasted. So you can imagine millions of Israelis sitting at home, counting the hours until those drones will hit the Israeli airspace. In addition to that there was a lot of uncertainty of which type of drones we're talking about, what kind of explosives will they carry? Will they make it or not? And also, will these drones be accompanied by other weapons? So yes, there was huge concern. It was a sleepless night, sometimes between 2am until seven in the morning, Israel has been paralyzed with this unprecedented attack. Now 200 drones that have been fired at the same time to Israel. This is something that the world have never, ever experienced, there was never a country in the world that has been attacked simultaneously by 200 drones.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

Well, we also know that there were in addition to drones, there were ballistic missiles, there were cruise missiles. And we know that some of those ballistic missiles could have been fitted with nuclear warheads. And certainly, we know Iran's nuclear capability has been developing rapidly for more than a decade. Was that a concern?

Avital Leibovich:

Look,unlike terror groups, you know, they rely on funding of different countries, proxies and so on. Iran is a country with its own budget with its own economic means, and has been investing in technologies and procurement and development of weapons of different kinds for decades. So we saw some of the outcome of the Iranian weapons in Ukraine. When Iran sold some types of drones to Russia to hit Ukrainian civilians. We understood the capacity, the capability. And of course, Israeli intelligence followed closely the Iranian capabilities.

Now, when you have so many options, the warheads of ballistic missiles can vary. And therefore there was also uncertainty with regard to what would those ballistic missiles carry? Will they carry conventional weapons? Will they carry non conventional weapons? In addition to that, the attack came after more than six months of the war in Israel. So the level of stress and the level of uncertainty was high to begin with.

We're talking about six months in which Israel paid the heavy price of more than 600 soldiers and officers who were killed, and more than 1200 civilians. So it wasn't an isolated evening. It really came in the course of a very long war. And now, Israel is facing the big question of retaliation, yes or no, when and how?

Manya Brachear Pashman:

You know, we have long talked about Israel and Iran being in a proxy war, Hamas and Hezbollah being two of those terror proxies that want to destroy Israel and are already engaged in conflict, as you've said, as you pointed out, to do just that. Yet, it really was unthinkable that Iran would dare to directly launch missiles at Israel. How did this attack change the thinking and do Israelis think it is an indication of more to come?

Avital Leibovich:

Israel changed its thinking twice in the last six months. The first time was October 7. Israel never believed that Palestinians who entered Israel on a daily basis from Gaza as workers, would be collaborators of Hamas and would supply them with intelligence information about communities, about homes of people, about police stations in cities and so on. So we understood that we are, we need to change the concept, the operational concept, the strategic concept as well.

And the second time was when Iran attacked Israel a few nights ago. And here for the first time, Iran shows to take a risk, and fire over 350 targets more than 60 tons of explosives at Israel from its own sovereign territory. So whether it's proportionate or not, whether it's a retaliation to something or not, this does not change the fact that this is a precedent and as a president, Israel, of course needs to change the way it reacts and it plans. I know that the cabinet has met a few times already, since the attack of Iran. And the cabinet is discussing different ways in which it could retaliate, prepare, better prepare the storages of munitions that we have. So they are different opportunities for Israel.

And one of the questions I want to ask Manya is, how is the world looking at this? Because this is not an ordinary thing. And you know, one of the statements that came out yesterday, was from the G7 ministers meetings. And I was certain that the statement will primarily include practical steps against Iran, which is not only a problem for the Middle East and Israel, but for the entire world. And one of the leading statements said that, no, we have agreed to, to convince Israel not to retaliate. And I'm thinking to myself, haven't we learned anything? Do we want to wake up in a few months and discover that Iran has turned into a country with nuclear capabilities, with five bombs with six bombs?

Now, October 7, have never would have happened if it wasn't for Iran. Hezbollah attacking Argentina, the Jewish Community Center, decades ago, and murdering a lot of Jews and diplomatic staff would not have happened if not of Iran, and a lot of terror attacks all over the world as well. So how many proofs more does the world need, in order to take concrete action concrete measures against this terror global inciter called Iran.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

In addition to the United States, Israel's allies and neighbors really stepped up Saturday night, the United Kingdom, France, Jordan, they all helped down some of the drones that were headed Israel's way. But the attack undoubtedly depleted some of Israel's defenses. And so what does Israel need now from its allies, particularly, you know, in the way of action by governments in the United States and the EU? What does Israel need to make sure it can defend itself if God forbid, this happens again, or another October 7, happens again?

Avital Leibovich:

It's not a secret that the US and Israel are very strong strategic allies. And this has two main reasons for it. The first and maybe the most important one is the shared values that we hold between us. And the second is the mutual interests. The US needs a strong Israel in the region with strong capabilities, whether its intelligence or others. And Israel needs also a very close coordination with the US. So when we are maneuvering between these islands of terror in the region, we can work together to overcome those islands of terror. Now, in this situation, I think the coalition that work together, the countries which you mentioned, preformed an amazing, orchestrated, successful operation.

And part of it comes because Israel is now a part of CENTCOM, the central command. This is the command that actually gathers all the countries from the region. So in addition to being a part of that command, we share knowledge, technology,intelligence, we exercise together with other militaries. And this is the basis for future cooperation, like we've seen a few days ago within that coalition. So I think those steps are very important. I would say that continued US support for Israel’s strength. And obviously, we did not plan to fight for so long. And such a long period of fighting demands a lot of ammunition. So the US support, both in budget, but in also resources, military resources, is critical for Israel to succeed and continue to defend its people and in the country.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

My last question, Avital, kind of references what you just said a moment ago about how the world just doesn't seem to realize the global threat that is posed by Iran. Does Israel's success matter not just to Israel, but to the world at large?

Avital Leibovich:

You know, Israel's success is based on the air defense system that was built for decades, with Israeli technology, Israeli know how. The ability to intercept different kinds of rockets and drones is something first of all technology we shared with the US, and we work in partnership, but also comes out of a lot of investment.

Now, I believe that today in 2024, the world needs to aspire for a more stable Middle East. The Abraham Accords, was a part of that direction. And furthering and enhancing the Abraham Accords, expanding the Abraham Accords in the future, will just help the world to see a more stabilized area.

Now, Iran has to be dealt with, there is no question about that. I do expect sanctions and putting on the terror list, the Revolutionary Guards and Hezbollah in its entirety, you know, Lebanon doesn't have a president for more than a year, because Hezbollah never approved the candidates, for example. So Hamas needs to be on the terror list. The Houthis need to be on the terror list, the Houthis are a problem for the world disrupting cargo movement in the Red Sea.

So these are all terror groups, proxies, with different sizes with different intensities of weapons, all imminent in one troublemaker, and that is Iran. So my expectation after a few nights ago, is that the world, the Western world, the modern Western world will gather together and take concrete steps. So we do not wake up surprised in a few months and find a nuclear Iran ready to launch the rockets with nuclear warheads and we don't know exactly where–to Europe to Israel, elsewhere in the world.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

Well, Avital, I'm glad you're safe. Thank you so much for joining us.

Avital Leibovich:

Thank you for the opportunity and am yisrael chai.
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Meet Modi Rosenfeld – the Comedian Helping the Jewish Community Laugh Again
16 apr· People of the Pod
Israeli-American Comedian Modi Rosenfeld, who took part in the inaugural AJC’s Voices Against Antisemitism Campaign, just-released a stand-up comedy special, Know Your Audience, which reflects a principle he has always subscribed to. But what happens when you know your audience is suffering a trauma like no other? Listen to this conversation with Modi, who was in Israel on October 7, on how he jokes about antisemitism and what he sees as his mission in this difficult moment: helping the Jewish community laugh again.

Episode Lineup:

(0:40) Modi Rosenfeld

Show Notes:

Learn more:

AJC's Voices Against Antisemitism: Meet the Celebrities Standing Up for the Jewish People and Israel

modilive.com

Photo Credits:

John Cafaro

Credits – Standup Clips:

On Antisemitism

Jewish Boyfriend

Listen – People of the Pod on the Israel-Hamas War:

A Look Back: AJC’s Award-Winning “Remembering Pittsburgh” Series

Jewish College Student Leaders Share Their Blueprint for Combating Antisemitism

Matisyahu’s Message to His Fellow Jews and to the Israel Haters Trying to Cancel Him

Unheard, Until Now: How Israeli Women Are Powering Israel’s Resilience

Follow People of the Pod on your favorite podcast app, and learn more at AJC.org/PeopleofthePod

You can reach us at: [email protected]

If you’ve appreciated this episode, please be sure to tell your friends, and rate and review us on Apple Podcasts.

Transcript of Episode with Modi:

Manya Brachear Pashman:

Comedian Modi Rosenfeld, known by his fans as simply Modi, is nearing the end of a live national tour, co-hosts his own podcast, and he recently released his first televised stand-up comedy special titled Know Your Audience. It’s a principle the Israeli-American comedian has always subscribed to. But what happens when you know your audience is suffering a trauma like no other. Here with us to talk about how we can and why we should laugh again is Modi Rosenfeld.

Modi, welcome to People of the Pod.

Modi:

Hi, People of the Pod.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

You were born in Tel Aviv and grew up on Long Island. Tell us how you found your way to comedy.

Modi:

I was actually just doing investment banking. And I used to imitate the secretaries. And my friends said this is really funny, you should do it on stage. And they set up an open mic night. And that was about 30 something years ago. And that's how the comedy began.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

The special that I mentioned was filmed nearly a year ago. It was filmed before the Hamas terrorist attack and the war. You talk about COVID, you talk about marrying your millennial husband, you talk about Shabbat elevators. I'm curious if you do feel like the material still resonates in the current climate?

Modi:

Ever since October 7, I've been doing my shows and not mentioning the war itself. Until the very end where I sing Hatikva with the audience. I feel like the audience needs a moment to just laugh and not think about the war. And not think about what's happening in Israel and just have a laugh about being Jewish, being Jewish, about non-Jewish people.

Sometimes I tell the story about how I was October 7, while I was in Israel. And then sing Hatikva with the audience, people seem to, they're very touched and moved by it. And it reminds them, now, let's just remember where our hearts and where our prayers and where our thoughts are.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

So let's talk about where you were on October 7.

Modi:

The war began at the end of the holiday of Sukkot and I was in Israel. I had six shows, sold out shows in Israel that were absolutely amazing. One of the highlights of my career. Thursday was the last show. Friday we were there for Shabbat and Saturday we were scheduled to fly out to Paris to do four shows there. And obviously Saturday morning, the alarms went off and the bombs went off.

We were staying at the Setai Hotel, which is in Yafo, the Arab part of Tel Aviv. Bruno Mars was also staying at the hotel. He had three concerts in Israel and at 12 in the afternoon we saw them whisk him away to a private airplane to be taken out of Israel.

And I said to Leo, my husband, I said Thank God they got put on Mars out of the hotel. He said why? I said because if a bomb hits this hotel and me and Bruno Mars die, I would get zero press coverage.

And so that was you know, something light in the day, but it was a very, very stressful, scary day for everybody. We were on a scheduled flight to go to Paris. And it had a four hour delay. And we finally took off and got to Paris. And then we had to make a decision. Do we do these shows? Because the war was so fresh, people were just learning about what's happening and watching it on their phones. But the sold out shows were full. And that's when I began to do Hatikvah at the end of the shows, and I've been doing it ever since.

You know, we just had an hour and 20 minutes of laughter, they just had the best time. We were all laughing. And then you just focus again, you know, yeah, we're laughing. But in Israel, there's a whole different experience happening. And even though in Israel now, the comedians there are also performing and doing shows. You've got to find a respite from being in the war.

Because we are, you know, everybody's on their phones, you’re 24 hours in the war, receiving news and footage and all kinds of information. And then you finally get to just take a few minutes to laugh.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

When you said that you were actually an investment banker, that you found comedy kind of as a career later on, but what role did humor and comedy play in your upbringing, in your family life, your childhood?

Modi:

Only later on in life that I realized that my father more than all is a very funny person, just by having no editing skills. I never was a class clown. I was always funny with friends, but you know, when you're a table comic, and you're a real comic it’s two different things.

If you can be funny with your friends at a table, you know your audience, you know everybody at the table, you know what they've gone through, you know what we all know that they went through. And so it's easier to get a joke out. When you're on stage, you don't know everybody, and you don't know what they've all been through, or how they know each other.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

So how do you kind of unite your audience? How do you try to kind of find that common denominator?

Modi:

People are kind of seeing the Jewish world through my eyes, through the eyes of a Jewish person. And they learn things, even though sometimes it gets a little specific, I always translate. My goal in comedy is to make people happy, is to bring laughter into the world, which I call Moshiach Energy.

When you're standing in front of an audience of 500 to 1500 to 2000 people and you see them all laughing together. For me, that's Moshiach Energy.

How I pictured the world would be when Moshiach is here. You know, the Messianic era, just people just happy, united, laughing, not arguing. And even though you can create that for an hour and a half, you wish you could create it for 24/7.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

So how else have you adjusted your live shows to reflect the current situation in addition to adding the anthem? Do you talk about antisemitism?

Modi:

I was always talking about antisemitism, not as a lecture, not as a type of Noa Tishby, but more as a comedian. Here's what's happening, here's how it's funny. You're bringing light to it, but you’re bringing it with punch lines that are appropriate. And this was before the war, it's in my special, it’s before the war.

I don't know if you remember there was a politician in Turkey that stood up and screamed that Allah was going to kill all the Jews and destroy Israel. And then he drops, has a heart attack. I mean, the jokes sometimes just write themselves.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

A few weeks ago, we spoke with musician Matisyahu, who also has been on a national tour. He has encountered protests at most of his concerts, actually. And some concerts have even been canceled because of security concerns. Have you encountered any of that?

Modi:

In general to answer that, I would say not in the form he's had. We've had a lot of security at our shows, especially the European shows. Since the war I’ve performed in Berlin, Dusseldorf, Frankfurt, Vienna, Brussels, Amsterdam. I call it the Reparations Tour.

And we've had an enormous amount of security both from hired security and local police and guards from the city. Our last show in Paris, we had four shows in Paris, the fourth one, the police asked us to cancel because there was a huge pro-Palestinian riot across the street.

And the reason I stay riot and not protest is because it was unauthorized, and they were out of control. They had tear gas thrown in there. And that was one of the incidences.

In Brussels there was a mixup in people knowing that the security would be there. So we lost about 100 people that were going to come to the show. So the show went from 900 people to 800 people. That's the worst that's happened.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

And did you indeed cancel that fourth Paris show because of the riot?

Modi:

The Paris police were so wonderful with providing security for all the other three shows, when they asked us to cancel that show, we listened to them, and we did it. And we actually moved it to the following day to a matinee.

But they said this is not going to be a good idea for this insane amount of, that kind of protest to be–it was catty corner across from where our theater was.

It was the Republic Square, which our theater was at the Apollo, which was you can see it. And so they said it's not a good idea to have Jews walking into a theater at that moment.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

Makes sense. Was it a coincidence that it was that it was located there? Or was it connected to your show in any way?

Modi:

No, no, no–the Republic Square is, I guess, an iconic place to do something like that. My theater happened to have been across the street from it.

This was the Thursday after the Saturday, which was less than a week. Our first show in Paris was on Monday after the Saturday of the beginning of the war. So you couldn't understand how fresh this was.

All the news was coming in. Everybody was finding out exactly what was going on. We didn't have all the information, we had no idea about people that were locked in bomb shelters and people that were missing, they had no idea if they were killed or kidnapped and then just doing comedy there you know, literally I'm in the back of the theater looking at people watching their phones, trying to get information on what's happening on the war and then the lights go down and the comedy starts.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

How have you been affected by the war?

Modi:

We have family in Israel that are affected by just being in Israel and the change in their lifestyles that happened. Directly, we have family that their their kids are in Gaza. Ellie Beer from United Hatzalah is a close friend of mine, his son is fighting in Gaza. So when I speak to Ellie, I'm like, how's your kid doing?

When you're in Israel, you speak to people, it's like one degree of separation between you and anybody that's truly affected by the war.

When we did the 100th episode of my podcast at the 92nd Street Y, my podcast, which is called And Here's Modi. I'm so used to performing at fundraisers and charities where they show a movie of something horrible, and then they bring me out, and they go, and here's Modi:. And here I am the Monday after the war, doing a show.

We did a Q&A with the audiences, a pre Q&A, sent questions in, and everybody kept asking who would you want as a guest on the podcast and I said, Omer Shem Tov, which is one of the hostages. His photo for some reason I see it everywhere. And I wish he could be in front of me at the podcast and not in a tunnel somewhere being held hostage.

I truly go to bed every night thinking I'm gonna wake up. When I open my phone up, it's gonna say today, all hostages were released, ceasefire has begun. And there will be an end to this soon.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

I think that that is what we all pray for, and hope to wake up to every morning. I’m curious if you've returned to Israel since October 7, I know you've been on tour, traveling a lot, but have you had a chance?

Modi:

I have been in every Jewish community from California to Florida to New York to Chicago to everywhere, with the tour. And again, it's, I think, for me, that's more important than being in Israel, because I'm connecting with these communities who are not in Israel, and bringing them a little bit of unity.

The community gets together, you see people –for some reason, all our shows are starting a little late, everybody just sees each other in the lobby and like, Hi, how are you? Good to see you. And then they come into the show.

I think that's more important for me to be doing that than running around Israel, saying how ridiculous this war is. Everybody's doing what they can do. And I'll be in Israel in June, and I'll be doing a show in Yerushalayim, and then I'll be back there in September doing a larger show in Tel Aviv and doing whatever I can do to help there.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

You often interact with audience members in your show. Have you had any interesting encounters with individuals in your audience? Especially since October 7?

Modi:

I'm not one of those comics who does the where are you from, what do you do and make a whole hour about trying to get something funny out of that. That's totally not my style. I do ask if anybody's not Jewish and this way I know–if you see my comedy special you see there's an extra layer of the joke. Me translating it to the person who's not Jewish.

I will tell you in that aspect, beautiful things have happened. People who are let's say in an intermarriage or even converted to Judaism come up to me afterwards and say, Wow, I never felt so welcomed and accepted and feel a part of the tribe and they tell me their story about how they ended up in the Jewish world.

Like my husband, who was born Catholic. And now he is coordinating with your organization, with every other UJA, JJJ, JJC, JJABC, JABC JJBC. You know, and he is on the phone speaking to people about a motzei shabbos show, a pre-shabbos show, after yuntif, before yuntif.

He's coordinating with the Jewish world to make sure that they're laughing. And it's an amazing– that's one of the nicest things that I've been seeing. People who ended up in the Jewish community that weren't Jewish, feel so welcome from the show.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

What makes you proud to be Jewish, Modi?

Modi:

What makes me proud to be Jewish is, I just think that the contribution of Jews to the world is significantly larger than the size of the people that we are. And I talk about that now in the new part of my show, you know, how just everywhere you go, whether something to do with medicine, education, culture, there's always a Jewish name on the building. A part of being Jewish is not only helping the Jews in the community, it's helping the community. So not just creating something–the Lubavitcher Rebbe always spoke about that, whatever you are in the community, don't just help the Jews there, help the community in general.

And you see that, you know. You go to any hospital, any museum, and you just see the Goldberg Pavilion, you see the Horowitz Wing, and they just give and help create all of that. In comparison to the size that we are in the world, we do a lot more. And something, that makes me proud.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

I think that you're absolutely right. And I think that your contribution of comedy and humor, and laughter, especially at a time like this is really so appreciated.

Modi:

You can bring humor into the world by, I always say: be the friend that brings their friends to the comedy show. If you see me coming to a theater near you, another comedian, coming to a theater, buy a few tickets. By the time the comic gets there, you'll see how all your friends are looking for tickets, and they're gonna want to have a good night of laughter.

And now you can just make a night at your house, you can put my special on the TV and have a bunch of friends watching and make an evening of it, and make sure to send it and make sure that people who can't get to a show like the elderly and your parents, grandparents that don't have a way to get to a show or don't know how to set up Amazon or go to my website, help them, sit with them. Watch the comedy show with them. That's Moshiach energy.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

Well, thank you so much, Modi.

Modi:

Thank you.

Manya Brachear Pashman:

Last week, we re-aired excerpts from our award-winning series Remembering Pittsburgh, which marked five years since the 2018 shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue.

Next week, one of the guests in that series returns. Marnie Fienberg founded 2ForSeder, an initiative to honor her mother-in-law Joyce who was one of the 11 victims murdered inside Tree of Life.

Ahead of Passover, Marnie will share how inviting newcomers to our Seder table can be a powerful way to push back against antisemitism.
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