Aaron and Matt are joined by David Klion, a writer for Jewish Currents and The Nation, to talk about the relationship between fascism in Israel and America and what it means for American Jews like Aaron, David, and not Matt.
Aaron and Matt are joined by David Klion, a writer for Jewish Currents and The Nation, to talk about the relationship between fascism in Israel and America and what it means for American Jews like Aaron, David, and not Matt.
Regunberg: Welcome, David Klion, to the Fighting Fascism Podcast. It is wonderful to have you here with us for what we've been internally describing as our two Jews and a Gentile episode.
DaSilva: And which one's the Gentile?
Regunberg: It’s so hard to tell, yeah. So Dave, to get us started, it sucks out there, there's a lot of heavy shit going on. Just like personally or emotionally, how are you doing right now?
Klion: Personally and emotionally, I'm doing okay. I mean, I find that when the news is something in my wheelhouse, even when it's disastrous, a part of me kind of activates, like a part of me feels like, okay, I know what my role is here. I know what I'm supposed to say.
A time when I didn't feel that way, for instance, was in the early months of the pandemic when I felt like I had very little useful to contribute to public discourse over, you know, public health and masking and best practices and I felt like the things I do know about were not at the forefront of anyone's mind in those months. And so I felt kind of useless and like I was kind of on a vacation from mattering.
That is not how I feel when the US goes to war with Iran or when Israel is doing settler pogroms in the West Bank. This is stuff where I know exactly what my role is. And I mean, it's challenging and it's a lot to take in and to keep track of and to stay on top of. And it's obviously horrific, the substance of all of it. But I do feel like I understand how to react to this particular set of circumstances. And I feel less like a bystander.
Regunberg: Well, we wanted to bring you on to talk about the politics of Israel and America right now, particularly in this moment of war insanity. So, you know, just a nice light topic. And there's a lot to discuss there, obviously. But since this is the Fighting Fascism Podcast, we wanted to start with a question about the role that Israeli politics have played in the rise of American fascism.
And even within that, there's like a dozen different angles or more. But maybe let's start looking at the right. I’m wondering if you have any sort of context that you could share about the multifaceted relationship between far-right nationalism in America and in Israel, both historically and today?
Klion: Well, the truth is it's kind of a global far-right relationship. And you can see Netanyahu in Israel as he's more and more fulsomely embraced the far-right there as part of his governing coalition, has also embraced right-wing autocrats in other countries, notably in Hungary and Poland and India.
In the Eastern European context, it's very interesting, of course, because the history of far-right nationalism in those countries is one closely associated with antisemitism and the Holocaust. And that has not stopped Netanyahu from having friendly appearances with those leaders and building bridges with them, even as they demonize George Soros, for instance, in a way that everyone understands to be coded. So that's something that I think progressive Jews, certainly in the U.S., have been sounding the alarm about for years now.
But you could trace this genealogy back all the way to World War II itself. I mean, if not further, you could say that the early Zionists in Mandate Palestine were actually pretty comfortable working with Nazi Germany. Now, they were working with them to get Jews out. But they weren’t boycotting them, they weren’t exactly joining the global resistance, and as is well known, they basically regarded the Jews who died in the Holocaust as being led like sheep to the slaughter. And that’s still a very common framing in Israel. So there’s a lot of ways Zionist dogma aligns.
I don't know if either of you read the piece that Alana Newhouse, the editor-in-chief of Tablet, published a week or so ago, this huge meandering essay that got a lot of commentary online. The central thesis of it was that the whole world should become more Zionist and learn from Israel, and that countries like India or Argentina under Milei actually are following that example, and that Zionism is like a gift to the world. The piece is rambling and goes in a lot of different directions, but it's basically fascist. It's basically an argument that everything you think is bad about Israel and Zionism is actually good, and the whole world should learn from its example, and we should have a fascist international, even if she doesn't use the word fascist.
DaSilva: Heck of a take!
Klion: It's a heck of a take, and it's gotten a lot of attention, a lot of praise from the right, a lot of criticism from the left. But I recommend reading it if only to see the mind of a certain rising strain of right-wing Zionism right now.
One thing that she explores that there is some validity to is she kind of traces the roots of the Zionist idea in 18th century German Romanticism that kind of led to the Volksgeist and the rise of modern nationalism. And there's certainly something to that. I mean, Zionism does emerge out of the late 19th century, but like the same currents that gave us all modern European nationalism, and European nationalism in its most extreme form is fascism. So it's not wrong to locate in the basic intellectual genealogy of Zionism the same roots as German or Italian or any other kind of fascism.
I don't want to go so far as to say all nationalism must inevitably be fascist and that there's no such thing as an alternative civic or progressive model of nationalism. I mean, until we have one world cosmopolitan government, I think we all hope that there are ways to make nationalism healthier and more multicultural. We live in nation states whether we want to or not. But certainly in emphasizing those common roots, I think she is pointing Israel in a more fascist direction.
And I think that's the direction it's been moving in for a long time. Now, in the American far right, there's also some sympathy for the basic concept of Israel and the basic concept of, you know, everyone should live in their own ethnostate and the Jews should live in theirs, right? Like, the ideas are basically compatible. The Israelis think that Jews shouldn't live in the diaspora and that they should all go to greater Israel and fight for it with ruthless military force. And American fascists who don't like Jews and don't really want them in America basically agree with this framing and basically think that the whole world should be broken up into into ethnostates like that.
Regunberg: You mentioned the disdain that is often exhibited about the victims of the Holocaust by sort of this strain. Just recently Jonathan Greenblatt, head of the ADL, gave a speech that really did feel like a fascist piece of oratory. But he used that phrase, “We are not the Jews of the trembling knees.”
And to me it's one of the most offensive pieces about this, the idea that we're going to look down upon the victims of the Holocaust. That they died because they were weak and not because genocidal freaks took over Europe and murdered them. It really gets my blood boiling.
DaSilva: That's really startling. That's the first time I've ever heard about like Jews of that time period, having that point of view on victims of the Holocaust. Like that's kind of earth shattering.
Klion: Yeah, remember that the proto-Israeli state, the Zionist colonies that became the Israeli state predate the Holocaust. And the founders of the state of Israel were committed ideological Zionists who had gone there in the decades before the Holocaust and before World War II. So they had a whole worldview that insisted this was the correct path for Jews to take. But it was a minority worldview, right? I mean, it was not what most Jews in Eastern Europe or anywhere in the world were doing.
A much more common thing that was going on in Eastern Europe and among Eastern European Jewish immigrants in the New World, especially in New York, was Bundism and other strains of left wing Jewish organizing. Bundism, which my friend Molly Crabapple has a book coming out very soon about, is essentially a left labor movement organized among the Yiddish speaking Jews of of Eastern Europe, originally mostly in the Russian Empire. And then when Poland became independent again, a lot of it was in Poland and Lithuania and then also in the diaspora.
And one of their central ideas was “doikayt,” which is this Yiddish word that means here-ness. The concept, which is the title of Molly's book, is “here where we live is our country.” It was the idea that Jews should fight for their rights as humans and citizens in Poland, in Lithuania, in Russia, in America, wherever they lived – their right to be treated fairly as laborers, their right not to be discriminated against or attacked, their right to speak and flourish in Yiddish.
And this was a very powerful vision that mobilized very large numbers of Jews in the early 20th century. What happened to it? I mean, some forms of it, I think, survived and transmogrified into the progressive, Jewish, democratic or socialist tradition that Aaron and I might belong to in the United States. I mean, some parts of it made it into the New Deal.
But in the main, what happened to it was the Nazis killed much of its social base. The Soviets repressed all forms of left wing organizing that weren't structured around the Communist Party and also repressed the Yiddish language. In America, Jews were heavily encouraged to assimilate and Yiddish died off as a secular language to a large extent.
And so Bundism is this kind of vestigial memory of what we might have been. But Zionism essentially won the argument over, you know, should we be Yiddish speakers organizing on the left in the countries we live in? Or should the center of Jewish life be this militant Hebrew colony in the Levant? And the way they won the argument was that Eastern European Judaism was slaughtered by Hitler and repressed by Stalin. It's not that much of a stretch to say that the Nazis basically made Zionism's hegemony over Judaism possible.
From the Zionist point of view, it's like, well, yeah, the Bundists were weak. Their ideas were wrong. History has proven their ideas were wrong. And now it's us.
Regunberg: We don't want to do too many Jonathan Greenblatt quotes, but he had another one recently where he, I can't remember the exact wording, but he said essentially, “You can't take the Zion out of Jews. You can't take the Zionism out of Judaism.” And then he was like, “And this idea of diasporic Judaism is ridiculous.” So there are some real fault lines here about what it means to be Jewish and what we value.
Klion: And where do you live, Jonathan Greenblatt? What language is your primary language? It's such a fake posture for so many American Jewish Zionists, you know, like they demonstrate with their own lives that they are diasporic.
Regunberg: And to be clear, the Judaism that we have is a Judaism that developed from thousands of years of diaspora. Almost everything that we understand to be Judaism is diasporic Judaism
Klion: That's absolutely correct. In fact, I think historians of the ancient Near East and of religion might even quibble with describing the religion that was practiced in Judea and Samaria, if we're going to call it that, before the Babylonian captivity as Judaism. Some might call it Yahwism or the beliefs of the ancient Hebrews or whatever. But Judaism is obviously derived from the process of exile. Insofar as Judaism is the people of the book, the books were written down in Babylonian captivity. That's where the Old Testament comes from.
And so so from the very beginning of rabbinic as opposed to priestly temple sacrificial worship, Judaism is a religion in exile. That's really foundational.
Regunberg: The other piece of understanding the role of Israel in American politics and the rise of the authoritarian right is this concept of Christian Zionism. I'm interested to hear your take on how that fits in. And I mean, it's a weird fucking phenomenon in a lot of ways.
Klion: Yeah, I've been working on this book about the history of neoconservatism. And there's actually an interesting tie in there because one of the foundational figures in neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, father of Bill Kristol, was also a foundational figure in this. He was a young Trotskyist in the 30s who became kind of a liberal by the end of World War II. And then in the 60s and 70s he moved into the right. And he was particularly notable for building the kind of networks of think tanks and fundraising and influence that made neoconservatism part of the conservative movement. Anyway, one of his big fixations was that Jews and the evangelical right should ally.
Now, he didn't mean entirely on Israel. He had come to this very kind of moralistic family values strain of conservatism that was also heavily developed by his wife, Gertrude Himmelfarb, who was a historian of Victorian England and a major neocon in her own right. But they had this idea of public virtue. They were both influenced by Leo Strauss. They had both studied with him at UChicago in the late 40s. And they thought tha the public needed strong moral values and convictions to avoid mob rule and dissent into the forces that had given the world Hitler and Stalin. And so for that reason, as much as anything else, they thought Jews should work with evangelicals because they thought that evangelicals would essentially be a civilizing force in this kind of middle American body politic. They also saw the Israel parallel, as did the Podhoretz family, the other major wing of neoconservatism, which was always very focused on Israel, at least from the late 60s on.
Of course, Bill Kristol is now noted for being a very passionate Never Trumper who has moved left on virtually everything. It's still kind of mind boggling to a lot of people. But I think one area where he's kind of split from where he was 10 or 20 years ago and where his parents were for so much of their careers is understanding that the evangelical movement is not actually a force of moral stability. They're basically the polite face that the white supremacist South and Bible Belt put on once white supremacy was no longer a legitimate politics in America. And that's why I think a lot of people in the kind of George W. Bush era right thought, well, evangelicals, they're not going to vote for Donald Trump, this multiply divorced, disgusting, vulgar man who clearly doesn't have any faith at all. But of course, they all did. In fact, they're his base. They're very enthusiastic. I think that was a wake up call for a small but influential group of conservative intellectuals who always saw the evangelicals as something other than what they were.
But on the other hand, if your view of evangelicals was that they should ally with the Jews because they support Israel, because they want to see the rapture, well, then that alliance is going very strong. And for, let's say, a quarter to a third of American Jews who've been voting reliably Republican for the last however many decades, I don't think they have any problem being on the same team as the evangelicals.
They want the same thing, which is Israeli supremacy. Plus, a lot of them are very, very religious Orthodox Jews who essentially also share with the evangelicals a desire for communal religious autonomy to set up their own theocracies within America and not be interfered with. And so I think that's something they and other religious dogmatists all align on.
DaSilva: Ted Cruz, I think, when he was on Tucker Carlson, kept reciting that the Bible says that the friends of Israel will be rewarded or whatever. There's obviously many moments when you listen to politicians and you're like, what are you saying? You're quoting the Bible as your logic for like international diplomacy? Anyway, it's hard to take it at face value when it's coming from the actual senators and whatnot.
Klion: I think this alliance with evangelicals was a hard sell and remains a hard sell for a lot of American Jews, because for the elder Kristol’s generation, they had actually experienced antisemitism as a foundational dynamic. I mean, you'd rather be in early 20th century or mid 20th century America than in Europe, if you were a Jew. But still, I mean, they were outsiders. They were outside the mainstream growing up. There were antisemites on the radio. There were antisemites in government. You couldn't get into country clubs and top universities. And so from their point of view, anything that reinforced the Christianness of America was hostile to the Jews.
But from the point of view of the 70s and 80s and beyond, as Jews really made it in America and assimilated and achieved wealth and status and influence in all kinds of fields, I think they started to be like, well, maybe we need to stop worrying about that.
Whereas I think a lot of us, even if we accept the premise that Jews have come a long way since the mid 20th century and that many of us are privileged in various ways, I think still have a healthy distrust of theocracy, of reactionary values. We understand that those things can easily turn on the Jews and feel an ideology of solidarity with all oppressed peoples and all minorities that comes out of the early 20th century and earlier Jewish experience.
And I still think that's the basic worldview of the majority of American Jews, though I doubt it's the basic worldview of the majority of Jews worldwide. I think in many countries, the Jewish community leans right. And then, of course, there's Israel, where it leans very, very, very right. More than I think a lot of American Jews have come to terms with. But in the United States, which has nearly as many Jews as Israel, I do think that sort of social justice, Bundist heritage lives on in a kind of lib form for more Jews than not. But there's a large minority that does not live for.
Regunberg: One other thing that's wild to me about the evangelical Zionist alliance is that the apocalyptic nature of it is, maybe antisemitic isn't the right word, but it is fundamentally hostile. I mean, the vision is that Jews need to be in control of the promised land for the end times, at which point we will rot in hell, I think, and they will ascend to heaven, right?
DaSilva: I'm pretty sure, that's my understanding of it as well. Yeah.
Klion: Well, that's my understanding. But a clever Jew who has bought into this alliance might say, well, I don't believe that's going to happen. And to be honest, I don't believe it's going to happen either. But yeah, these are enough other reasons that these are not people I would want to get in bed with.
Regunberg: I just mentioned the word antisemitism. Dave, both you and I have thought and written about the different roles that antisemitism, both real and weaponized, plays in this. So I would love to hear a bit about how you are thinking right now about the connection between American Jews, Jewish institutions, antisemitism and the actions of Israel's government.
Klion: Yeah, well, let me rewind a little bit because my feelings about antisemitism at this precise moment are a little different than what they have been for the past few years, which is not to say I think I was wrong the past few years. So for the past few years – and it started before the October 7th, 2023 attacks, but I think it really picked up after that – the mainstream Jewish discourse pushed by all leading Jewish institutions, including obviously the ADL, has been that there's an unprecedented surge of antisemitism in America. That the antisemitic demons we thought we'd put to rest a generation or so ago are back with a vengeance. And I have strongly resisted this and continue to think that that was incorrect and bad faith fear-mongering serving Israeli propaganda purposes. Most of what it described and most of what seemed to bother the people pushing that narrative the hardest was entirely inbound support for Palestine and criticism of Israel, which the ADL and its allies to varying extents basically want to criminalize. They wanted to define antisemitism in such a way as to stifle all legitimate criticism of Israel.
This is the agenda that's been pushed by bad faith actors like Bari Weiss, but it's also been pushed by people who are Democrats like Deborah Liptstadt or Chuck Schumer, who I just think have done a terrible disservice. First of all, they're wrong about Israel and they're wrong about Palestine. Second of all, I think they really cheapened the concept of antisemitism. They cried wolf a lot. Some of them directly mobilized the power of the Trump administration and the Republicans in Congress to brutally suppress what they deemed antisemitism. This is how we ended up with Mahmoud Khalil being kidnapped from Columbia and illegally held in Louisiana and numerous other cases like that, the crackdowns on campus protests, the efforts of people like Josh Shapiro to shutter Palestine encampments at colleges like Penn. All of this, I think, was reprehensible and a real abuse of the concept of antisemitism. And the fact that it was being done in defense of what I think is clearly a genocide in Gaza makes an additional mockery or disgrace of our history as Jews. I mean, it basically turns us into the perpetrators of the thing we were taught never again. Well, some of us were taught never again, and we thought that meant no more genocides. Others were taught never again and they thought it means Jews can do whatever they want, kill anyone, repress anyone, and commit genocide themselves if they feel they have to.
Now, it's not that I've denied altogether the existence of antisemitism. I mean, certainly the Tree of Life massacre, which was in 2018, that synagogue massacre by a neo-Nazi, that was as straightforward a case of antisemitism as exists. And, you know, the marchers in Charlottesville who Trump was championing, that were saying “Jews will not replace us.” I mean, that's antisemitism.
The general framework that was pushed by a lot of the people I mentioned over the last decade has been that there is such a thing as antisemitism of the right and antisemitism of the left. And they have often argued – Greenblatt has said this, Bari Weiss has said this, even Chuck Schumer has said a version of this – that while the antisemitism of the right, by which they mean Charlottesville or Tree of Life, is blatant, obvious, clearly Nazi coded. And all decent people can resist it – which, let's put a pin on that for a second, because it's pretty clear that the people who run our country do not resist that and have indulged it and stoked it at every turn.
Regunberg: How many like heil Hitler Republican staffer group chat stories do there have to be?
Klion: Right, how much more of that do we need as evidence? And Bari Weiss has certainly traveled in or broken bread with those circles herself. So that was disingenuous to begin with, but then they would go on to say, well, the antisemitism of the left in a way is worse. And by the antisemitism of the left, they basically mean Ilhan Omar, they mean Rashida Tlaib, they mean all Palestine activism, all criticism of Israel, and to their mind all socialism, because socialism is inevitably Stalinism and Stalin repressed the Jews. Bari Weiss is saying in her 2019 book, How to Fight Antisemitism, when she draws this comparison between the antisemitism of the right and the left, what she's basically saying is that Ilhan Omar criticizing Israel bothers her more than the Tree of Life shooting. Which is wild considering that the Tree of Life is a synagogue that Bari went to, I think she had her bat mitzvah there. But she's basically kind of waving off that kind of antisemitism as obvious, universally abhorred – which it is not – and trivial compared to the antisemitism she has devoted her career to fighting, which is not antisemitism, it's criticism of Israel.
So that would have been my frame for discussing all this for the last several years at least. But lately, I do actually believe antisemitism is surging. Now, I have yet to feel personally affected by it. And when I was talking earlier about the antisemitic world that Irving Kristol or that my grandparents, probably your grandparents grew up in, the world of Ivy League quotas and Father Coughlin and Henry Ford and all that, we are very, very far, I think and hope, from living in that America right now. That is not the America you and I grew up in. And it still, I don't think describes what America is like for Jews. But I can see how we get closer to that, in particular to the sort of Father Coughlin part.
I think that there has been a real mainstreaming of actually antisemitic rhetoric, certainly on the right. But it saddens me to say this, but in some precincts of what you'd call the left or the pro-Palestine left too. I don't think it's the dominant strain of pro-Palestine activism or of the left at all. But I do see it certainly on Twitter sometimes. And I want to be clear what I mean here. I do not consider saying “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” antisemitism. I do not consider waving Palestinian flags or watermelon emojis, I don't think that saying Israel doesn't have the right to exist or that Israel is an apartheid state or that Israel committed genocide. I mean, those last two are simply facts and the academic consensus at this point. I don't think any of that is antisemitic.
What do I think might be antisemitic? I think when you start referring to Zionists as vermin and non-human and cockroaches and stuff, that rhetoric is not only extremely close to how past generations of Nazi antisemites have talked about Jews, but you know what you're doing there. Lke humanistically as progressives, it's one thing to criticize apartheid or genocide. It's another thing to compare any category of human beings to insects or to rats or vermin in your public rhetoric. You know what you're doing. People who follow and signal approval of that, they know what they're doing too, unless they're really ignorant.
I think there is no reason why that needs to be done. I think it's a tell. And I think it's becoming a lot more common. Now, I also think these conditions in which we have, you know, Tucker Carlson saying stuff like this on the right, and then we have some voices saying it on behalf of Palestine too, who are far less influential, I should say, than Tucker Carlson. But this situation we find ourselves in is absolutely the product of all of these Jewish institutions and leaders that I've been criticizing, and the way that they've treated antisemitism for years, for several reasons.
First of all, they committed the full weight of Jewish institutional life to defending an indefensible, monstrous genocide. They made being Jewish synonymous in the eyes of much of the public and much of the Jewish community itself with this genocidal apartheid state. A good example of this, the Reform Synagogue Temple Israel that was just attacked in Michigan, that someone drove a car into. The reason it's called Temple Israel is because it was founded at a time when Reform Judaism actually was not all Zionist, when that was being contested, and it was founded to be a pro-Israel temple. If you go to their website, the Israeli flag is in the logo of their temple. They have programming activities, for instance, advertised on their site where if you're a congregant, you can go stay at a five-star hotel in Israel and do meet and greets with members of the IDF while they facilitate settler pogroms and murder innocent Iranians, Lebanese, and Palestinians.
So I'm not saying that it's okay to drive a car into a temple like that. We're still theoretically a free and pluralistic country, and I don't think stochastic terrorist violence against places of worship is a good direction for our society to go in. But at the same time, I've been saying for years, the entire Reform movement is explicitly Zionist and has been for a few generations now. The temple I grew up going to in Washington, DC still has an Israeli flag on the bimah, which is very common. I think that doing that, first of all, supports something that should not be supported and turns Jewish religion and peoplehood and community into a very evil political project. It also makes Jews less safe. I mean, the guy who did the Michigan attack, multiple of his family members were killed by Israel.So this guy wants to get revenge and he's in Michigan. So can he attack Israel? No. Can he attack the Israeli embassy? That's probably pretty hard. So who does he decide to attack? He decides to attack the large synagogue in the next suburb over that has the Israeli flag all over it. Now, is that okay? No. But is it inevitable, given this just untenable alliance between synagogues and institutional Judaism and Israel and what Israel is doing that has gone on for years now without anyone really budging in most cases? I think we're going to see more of that.
Regunberg: Yeah, I think it's worth really underlining here that pointing out how antisemitism has been spreading and has been going from this thing that you and I grew up with where like, there are some virulent antisemites out there, but there's not a mass politics around antisemitism. Pointing out how that is happening is not to justify or legitimate it happening. On the contrary, it is to affirm that this is a real problem and taking a problem seriously requires actually understanding where it's coming from.
Klion: Yeah, and I think that for those of us who have been warning for years, saying first of all, stop supporting Israel because what Israel is doing is fundamentally wrong. And second of all, and we haven't emphasized it as much, we don't want to center ourselves or whatever. But second of all, you're really making Jews less safe when you do this. You're really painting a target on all of us. Literally in the form of the Israeli flag, you're painting a target on all of us. You've associated the central symbol of our religion, the Jewish star, with the state that has plummeted in popularity in the last year on both left and right for totally understandable reasons, has plummeted in global popularity for totally understandable reasons. And as we have this conversation, what else is happening? The US and Israel are at war with Iran.
Regunberg: Sorry, before we get to Iran, I just want to underline here, that what you're talking about – that Jewish institutions have been conflating Israel with all Jews and saying that criticizing Israel is antisemitic – it is functionally the same game that folks like Nick Fuentes play, right? Nick Fuentes has grown his base dramatically in the last few years. A large part of how he's done that has been his weaving together of people's legitimate outrage over what Israel's government has been doing with his own classic Protocols of the Elders of Zion-style antisemitism. But like when he criticizes Israel and says, “This is on all Jews,” that's the same thing Jonathan Greenblatt says.
Klion: Yeah, when you say anti-Zionism is antisemitism, you're saying that to be a Jew is to be a Zionist, which aside from speaking for every Jew who doesn't feel that way, or as is often the case, writing us out of being real Jews or valid or good Jews, it is also saying, well, then how are we not collectively to blame for everything that Zionism does, right? And at the very least, how can you say our institutions that support Israel, like a synagogue that is literally explicitly pro-Israel, and doing meetups with the IDF, which is a genocidal army?
I mean, there was someone online pushing back against me for making this point who said something like, “So you're saying if a Russian Orthodox church in America supported Putin it would be okay for a Ukrainian American to drive a car into it?” And I was like, okay, two things. First of all, do you know of any such churches doing that? That's not a thing I've heard of. I've been to Russian Orthodox churches in this country. I know Russians. They don't really make a big point of saying they're pro-Putin and advertising that. Whereas as a matter of fact, thousands of synagogues across the United States and the entire diaspora are explicitly pro-Israel and explicitly champion the exact leaders of Israel and the exact things that Israel is doing. That varies by denomination and individual synagogue, but it's not at all uncommon for synagogues that are, in some cases, facilitating the illegal settlement of the West Bank directly on their premises. So A) do you know of a Russian church that's doing that? Because I don't. But B) if you found me one, again, I wouldn't say it was okay if some Ukrainian who lost his whole family in Putin's war did that. But I wouldn't be surprised either. And I wouldn't say it was okay that the church did that and that they should continue to do that or they’re surrendering to anti-Orthodox sentiment or whatever. I mean, it's nonsensical. When you associate yourself with evil things deliberately, there may very well be blowback for that. And I think that all Jews and all Jewish institutions certainly need to think very hard about this right now.
Regunberg: Another response that you hear to this argument – or it's not even an argument, it's just kind of an observation and analysis – but a response you hear is, “There's always going to be antisemites. There were antisemites before Israel, there would be antisemites if everyone was condemning the genocide. You're putting the onus on the victims when this is just a constant.”
It is true that there's always been antisemitism. But a mass politics around antisemitism is something that again, thankfully we have not had to worry about in this country for a good amount of time. We've been very blessed to grow up in that world, and my sons are not blessed to grow up in that world. And that is, as you laid out, in large part because there is a legitimate backlash to the actions of Israel that's been growing in this country. And there's a large portion of the US population that has been metabolizing that anger towards Israel into a resentment against Jews as a whole. In part because the institutions that say we represent Jews are saying, “Yeah, we are the same. We're the same, you can’t say we’re not.”
Klion: I think there are three big things that have pushed the antisemitic analysis basically into the mainstream on both right and left recently. One is the accumulated death toll in Gaza and the whole world seeing this live stream genocide. One is the current war in Iran, which is wildly unpopular. It started out unpopular, it has been very divisive within even Republican elites, with the more MAGA oriented antisemitic-adjacent wing of the GOP saying that this is a war for Israel that they can't support, and they're furious at Trump now. So there's a civil war among conservative elites right now over this. And there kind of is among Democrats too. I mean, I think the overwhelming majority of Democrats oppose this war, but you still have leadership figures like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries who are enthralled to the Israel lobby, and so that's created a huge tension on our side too.
Regunberg: Yeah, because when your opposition commits us to an incredibly unpopular, despised war that is only going to become more unpopular and more despised, why would you draw a strong contrast with that? That wouldn't be good politics!
DaSilva: Just quibble over the laws governing it, not over the actual war itself.
Klion: Right. Why didn't he seek approval from Congress first, or whatever nonsense? But anyone with any sense of historical perspective can see the alarm ringing here. Everyone in America is about to pay or is already paying way higher gas prices. That's going to translate into higher food prices, higher consumer goods prices, higher prices for flights anywhere. It's also going to affect the entire world. It already is.
This whole war of choice that they started and that both Israel and the United States have explicitly said Israel started this war, at the highest levels of government. And I've literally seen the usual antisemitism scolds in the US be like, “It's anti-Semitic to say that Israel dragged the United States into this war.” And I'm like, I'm sorry. First of all, no, it's not. Second of all, how much more evidence do you need than Netanyahu and Rubio and Trump saying that?
Rubio voiceover: There absolutely was an imminent threat. And the imminent threat was that we knew that if Iran was attacked, and we believe they would be attacked, that they would immediately come after us. And we were not going to sit there and absorb a blow before we responded.
Klion: Or you could read the mainstream reporting in The New York Times or wherever that makes it very clear that what started this war was the Israelis identifying this opportunity for a strike and saying, essentially, we're going to do it, are you in or what? It is not a huge stretch at this point, with everything we've been talking about, for someone like Tucker Carlson to go on his show and say, “American troops are dying for Israel. The global economy is in chaos because of Israel. You, my listener, whoever you are, are paying more at the pump, paying more for everything. Your cost of living has gone up. Why? For Israel.” And then it's also not a stretch to say, “Why does everyone support Israel? Well, because there's an Israel lobby that includes most of mainstream institutional Jewish life in this country,” which is just facts. As we've been discussing for the last hour, it's just facts.
And so now I am scared. Now I am scared that as our whole political system revolts against this horrific situation that's been created, that people like Greenblatt have walked us into every step of the way, that the blowback will be felt against all Jews. And I mean, I do think those of us who are left-wing Jews and see all this, we can certainly say don't blame all Jews. We can agitate in our own communities to do better. And we are. But like, I am very worried about the blowback this is going to cause.
And because guys like Greenblatt have been abusing the term antisemitism so much, it doesn't work anymore. It's not going to do anything. Everyone's sick of hearing it.
DaSilva: I also think the Fuentes/Carlson playbook is so easy and also so easily digestible, and the algorithm just pumps it, you know. I just think it's such an easy wormhole to go down. It's not even a wormhole. It's just like such a basic thing that is just going to make people more unsafe and is really scary.
Klion: The result is, I think we're in a scary moment. But I think the exact institutions who we would look to for leadership or for judgment about how to fight back against antisemitism now are almost all corrupted and helped get us here.
Regunberg: In the same way that it is not helpful for Jewish voices to say that criticizing Israel is antisemitic, equating Jews and the government of Israel. I think we're starting to see some of that on the Epstein stuff as well. The corporatist group Third Way recently had an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal where they criticized “Jew haters on the left” for pushing “age-old tropes about Jewish wealth and influence with labels like Epstein class.”
Klion: Popularized by Jon Ossoff, who is Jewish, right?
Regunberg: Who is Jewish. And then there was a somewhat related example recently where Neera Tanden said, “The Jews in Germany were murdered precisely because they were wealthy.” That was actually a regurgitation of Nazi propaganda. But this is interesting to me because there's this old idea that antisemitism is the socialism of fools, right? That the reactionary right has used antisemitism and the way it can rhyme with a critique of wealthy elites to undermine actual socialist critiques, right? Because instead of blaming the larger exploitative system, you can just get people who are angry about that system to just blame this particular minority group. It almost feels to me like corporate Democrats, like Third Way and Neera Tanden, are doing the inverse of this. They're trying to reframe protecting wealthy elites as standing up for an embattled minority and they see fighting antisemitism as a tool in that project. So they are in essence using Jewish vulnerability as a shield for the 1%, which again is not doing anything good for Jewish vulnerability.
Klion: I think that's absolutely right. The through line here, what has to be done is we need better leadership. As Democrats, we need better leaders. As Jews, we need better leaders. We need leaders who recognize the things we're saying and who stop making things worse, which is not the leadership class we have.
DaSilva: Maybe this is a good time to bring up the non-Jewish perspective. I'm kind of curious what you guys see as the role of someone like me in all this, not to make everything about me, but that is what I do.
Like, how angry can I get at Israel? Because – and this is something I've been thinking about for a while – there's a couple of pieces to this. First, certainly a couple of years ago, I didn't really want to be labeled an antisemite. It's probably personal cowardice, to an extent. But it also is just not something I really wanted to invite into my life. But the other piece I think is actually more important is, if I'm in a group of other non-Jewish folks who are maybe a little less informed on things, who are not listening to this podcast or reading your work or just not paying attention, I don't want to like... If we take the structure that Israel equals American Jews, I don't want to be criticizing Israel to people who have that in their brains and then accidentally be contributing to antisemitism. So I don't know. Sitting it out doesn't feel great, but I don't know.
Klion: The answer is always educate yourself, right? And you're obviously someone who has, so then it's like, how do you translate what you've learned into people who know a lot less than you do so they can understand it? And I think the bullet points to hit would probably be like, look, many Jews oppose the conduct of the state of Israel. Many Jews are anti-Zionist. Many Jews are fighting in the trenches right now, basically, to change their institutions, or challenge them or to set up new ones. I personally don't want to overstate this because I know a lot of people who want to believe that's like half of us or whatever. And I'm not going to say it necessarily is, but depending on how you look at it, the numbers vary. Most American Jews don't want to go to Israel. Most American Jews lean left, at least left of center. Most American Jews, I think, believe in a basic level of the progressive consensus about equal rights for all and basic human dignity and pluralism.
So why do so many Jews who believe that nonetheless support Israel, at least in a loose sense? Why are there so many liberal Zionists, which is something I've written critically about? And I do have liberal Zionists in my life who I argue with constantly. Well, because there's a billion dollar industry with powerful donors behind it that propagandizes to Jews from when we're very young, telling us a lot of stuff that's just not true, that's also being told to everybody else about Israel. And so I think a lot of people were just kind of taught, I guess we're supposed to support Israel. I would say you'd be amazed how many American Jews are kind of confused or lost about this themselves. The younger generation, the ones in college or their twenties right now are shifting against it pretty dramatically. Not to say everybody is, but there's been real movement there. All the institutional leadership is well aware of it.
If you really wanted to get into it, you could go back to some of the Bundism stuff I was talking about earlier, and you could say, look, Zionism has been dominant in American and global Jewish life for really about a half a century. Jewish history is a lot longer than that. Not even from the beginning of the Zionist movement in the late 19th century or the emergence of the state of Israel in the late 40s. It's really after the ‘67 war when Israel becomes this centerpiece of diasporic Jewish identity. There were diasporic Zionists before that. But that's when our parents' generation of Jews start to have this really, really powerful sense of identification with Israel. That's not how most of them grew up. It's not how their grandparents or how our grandparents were. That's a recent and one would hope eventually reversible development. At least that's what some of us are trying to fight for. And I think emphasizing, as progressives, that we have to resist the impulse to collectively stigmatize any group of people, right? I mean, it's like saying that all Muslims or Arabs support Islamist terrorism. It doesn't mean that there are zero who do, but we have to fight for the rights of everybody and not let a whole group get smeared. The way that Jews were smeared as communists in the McCarthy era in many cases, the way that, Italians might've been smeared as mafiosos, to use a somewhat antiquated example.
Anyone who is saying that Jews qua Jews are all to blame for this, that is antisemitic. But anyone who is saying, “Why are so many Jewish institutions supporting Israel, that's messed up” is correct and onto something. And I think that's an important distinction to draw.
Regunberg: Just to end on a bit of a hopeful note, I had a piece in the Boston Globe recently that was laying out a lot of this. The title was “American Jewish organizations are making a dangerous mistake,” about their conflating Israel and Jews and refusing to break with the Israeli regime. I've had pieces in the past on this stuff and the ratio of like feedback or emails and stuff I get, I was expecting it to be on the negative side. And I definitely got some “You’re a Judenrat” emails and stuff. But the ratio of messages from Jewish people that were positive and saying “This is how I've been feeling, but I've been sort of scared to say it out loud.” Obviously it's the extreme of anecdata, but it was nice to see. I think it's not unreasonable to think that there is a significant sea change building among our community.
Klion: I have matching anecdata and there is, as I said, actual data that supports it. I do think that a shift in the actual rank and file of American Jews is happening. It's happening pretty rapidly over the last year, I think. It is one of the few encouraging signs. And I think that’s one reason why it's very important to insist on a distinction between what actual Jews think and value and care about and what the institutions that claim to speak for us do.
Regunberg: One more thing I've been trying to understand, and I’m curious what either of you guys think: Why do we think there's no major anti-war mobilization happening in our country right now? Is it just like burnout from everything or what? The amount of outrage that I think there is about this versus the amount of movement action and mobilization feels like there's a pretty big delta.
Klion: It's a good question. I'm not sure there is none, but I agree there's not mass rallies in the streets on the scale of the beginning of the Iraq War. But in a way, I feel like that actually speaks to the very, very different political circumstance here, because when people talk about the Iraq War demonstrations, with millions of people and the biggest demonstrations in history to that point and so on, something that I think gets lost in that is the Iraq War was popular in the United States.
There was something like 70% support at the outset. After 9/11, George W. Bush had 90% support, which I think for a brief period made him the most popular president in the history of polling. And the leaders, and not just the leaders, large swaths of both parties supported the Iraq War, supported the Afghanistan invasion, almost unanimously – shout out to Barbara Lee – and supported the Patriot Act. There were principled critics, mostly on the left, of all of it speaking out at the time, but they were lonely. They were in the minority. And those rallies, they were huge because a lot of people were by that point, a year and a half into the War on Terror era, were starting to speak out, but they were in the minority. They knew they were in the minority. They knew that a lot of the country had gone mad with vindictive rage after 9/11, and that included the country's bipartisan elites, it included media and political elites.
We're in an utterly different situation right now. This war is totally unpopular. Only certain precincts of the media even support it, and even they often have some doubts or reservations. Clearly, a lot of leaders, though they're cowards and haven't broke with him for the most part yet, but like clearly a lot of them are not happy with it. You get the sense JD Vance is having some second thoughts about what's going on here and what he signed on for and how it's going to affect his political career. I think that right now the attitude is people know that there actually is real opposition to this and everybody does know that nobody thinks this is a good idea. Political rage is going to boil over. The Republicans are – if we have remotely fair midterms in November – then I think they're going to get wrecked because of what they've done, possibly in seats that you would have thought they could take for granted. And I think it's going to have effects on primaries in both parties too.
The other thing about the Iraq war was they spent like a year selling it to the public. They had the Colin Powell speech at the UN and they had the “coalition of the willing,” which actually did have a number of important countries in it. They really made an effort. They had Judy Miller in The New York Times and Jeffrey Goldberg in The New Yorker and Marty Peretz in The New Republic making the case for the war. For Iran, they didn't do any of that, you know? Other than diehard neocon, and the Israel lobby, nobody thinks this is a good idea. Even some people who do think it's a good idea in theory have been out saying this is not the way to do this, this is insane. So yeah, I think politically the attitude is this is watching the Trump administration destroy itself.
One thing that does scare me and ties into our antisemitism discussion is these videos circulating of Tucker Carlson interviewing Mike Huckabee or interviewing the editor in chief of The Economist and grilling them on their support for Israel really effectively. And you've probably seen respectable left-wing media figures, people I like, like Mehdi Hasan, sharing those videos around.
Regunberg: It is very dangerous when the only people with big platforms speaking common sense that people know is true are bad anti-Semites.
Klion: It is totally dangerous. I watched the Tucker Carlson Economist clip and here's what I'll say.
He did do an excellent job of grilling the woman and she did look like an idiot and we do need more people speaking to establishment figures like that. But at the same time, somewhere in the middle of it – and it hasn't gotten enough discussion – just within this interview that everyone's sharing around there's this point where he's like, “I don't believe in killing anybody because I'm from Western civilization. Unlike Eastern civilization, which believes in collective punishment.”
So first of all, that's not true. Second of all, what the fuck is Eastern civilization? That's not a thing. Western civilization is only debatably a thing, but Eastern civilization is just like, what does he mean, Buddhists? Muslims? Who is he even talking about? Third, it's obviously racist and it's obviously a dog whistle – or calling it a dog whistle almost understates it – but he's obviously pitching that at his neo-Nazi fan base and their whole notion about Western civilization. And it's also ludicrous because clearly Western civilization does believe in collective punishment. Why else have the United States and all these other countries been supporting the Gaza genocide?
Regunberg: It reminds me of how for years or decades the Democratic Party refused to call out elite impunity and refused to talk about the corruption of our political system because they're part of it, and it created this big old opening for a con man like Trump to come in and say he's gonna drain the swamp and gonna be your voice. It's the same thing.
DaSilva: Yeah, it just leaves that opening. And there would be so much more moral high ground if it came from uh Jewish institutions, right? Like it would be so much more powerful, I think.
Klion: Well, but also in Tucker's case, I think we have to criticize mainstream media. Like you turn on CNN and you've got Dana Bash who is like a straight-up unapologetic propagandist for Israel as the mainstream anchor on CNN. You've got Jake Tapper who's basically that too. It's very possible CNN will soon be owned by Bari Weiss who in record time has turned CBS News from a reputable news organization into part of the Israel lobby, and people have joked, like, does it even matter if Bari Weiss takes over CNN? They already follow her line on all of this stuff.
So the reason everyone is so excited about seeing white supremacist Tucker Carlson say this stuff is because they never see that on mainstream American television. And that is the opening that's been left.
Regunberg: Dangerous stuff. All right, we've taken enough of your time. Thank you again so much, Dave.
Klion: My pleasure.