Facing Hate: A Modern Challenge for an Ancient Hatred

DANIEL BRAUNFELD: Welcome, and thank you for joining us. My name is Daniel Braunfeld, and I'm the associate program director for special projects at Facing History & Ourselves, and I'm honored to introduce and moderate tonight's installment of the Facing History in Ourselves Facing Hate series, a webinar series designed to unpack the complexities of contemporary antisemitism in a forum where our network of educators and supporters can learn together. We know that educators are still within the first few months of a school year, which as of yet is another completely unprecedented school year.

And thank you so much for joining us after what we know is a long day of supporting students. Antisemitism persists in many forms, and our students are interacting with antisemitism in rapidly changing ways, in ways that were much different than any of us experienced when we were younger. So as educators, we continue to be on the front lines of helping our students recognize antisemitism and develop their voice to be able to stand up against these ideologies.

We are grateful to the sponsors who have entrusted Facing History to work and remain engaged in this important work on contemporary antisemitism over the coming years. We have a lot to discuss tonight, and I'm looking forward to welcoming our guests, but before we begin our conversation, we want to make sure everyone is comfortable with the technology and the platform so that you can submit your questions and so that you can get technology help if that arises. So please take a minute to watch this housekeeping video about how to use our ON24 platform.

SPEAKER 1: Welcome to our professional learning webinar. Before we get started, we'd like to run through some important items to help you engage with the webinar. We invite you to join us on social media and tweet about this webinar using the hashtag FHONLINE. Please select the captions button to access the live captions of today's conversation. If you have any questions throughout the webinar, whether for our presenters or for our team, such as a technical issue, please use the questions window.

The most common technical issues are no sound or a frozen screen. If that happens, please try refreshing your browser. You can also find the resources we will be discussing today in the resource list. Please feel free to access these resources at any time during the webinar. And now, onto your facilitator. Thank you for joining us, and we hope that you enjoy the webinar.

DANIEL BRAUNFELD: So here's our road map for this evening, and we hope everybody is now comfortable and has what they need to be able to engage with us tonight. After a brief introduction and some framing, we will introduce Dr. Rachel Fish and Yair Rosenberg for our conversation, Facing Hate, A Modern Challenge for an Ancient Hatred. We'll have time at the end for questions from the audience, which you can continue to submit through the widget, and at the end, we'll have opportunities to talk about how you can continue to learn with Facing History and part of our community.

Before we do that, I'd actually like to know who's with us tonight. So in front of you should be a poll that asks, how familiar are you with Facing History? Are you brand new to this community? Maybe you're just a little bit familiar, or perhaps you're very familiar with Facing History. I put that in the category of you have the t-shirt and swag.

I know that I first joined Facing History as a student teacher at a Boston Public School system almost 20 years ago, and it has forever changed how I think about my classroom, think about working with students, think about education, also how I think about my responsibilities in the world. So to our veteran educators, to our returners, the 64% of you who are coming back, thank you so much for continuing to partner with us. I often describe Facing History as building educator muscles, that with time and practice, we continue to get stronger in our ability to create the classrooms that students deserve. So thank you for coming back and joining us.

To our brand-new community members, welcome to a global network of over 400,000 educators. At Facing History, we use the lessons of history to challenge teachers to stand up against hatred and bigotry, and this has been the core of our work for over 45 years, and it remains as important as ever. At the heart of our work, at the heart of our community is our approach to education.

We think about the habits of mind and practice that young people need in order to develop into informed, empathetic, and active participants in society, and we work to create curricular resources and support classrooms grounded in intellectual rigor, emotional engagement about issues that impact real people, and ethical questions about the universal questions of human behavior and agency. In the words of one of our educators, we help create classrooms where students are empowered to think with their heads, their hearts, and their consciences.

And that work begins with how we can reflect on our own practice as educators. Tonight's conversation is grounded in two questions. The first is, what do we, as educators, need to understand about antisemitism and why it continues to exist in the modern era? So we want to turn back to our audience again. And as you think about your school and conversations about antisemitism in your school and community, how often does this conversation come up?

And as you're thinking about how often and in what context, perhaps it's also helpful to think about where and when this issue comes up at school. Is it reserved only, for example, as a conversation about the Holocaust or the diary of Anne Frank? How are we thinking about contemporary antisemitism within the context of our students and the world they're living in? 50% are saying that it is almost never talked about.

So how do we help prepare ourselves and our educators-- excuse me, and our students to think about, what is our responsibility and opportunities, and what are the tools that we can develop as educators to help our students confront and engage with this ever-present conversation? A part of that is asking of us to unlearn. What are some of the orthodoxies that we've held onto, that we need to unlearn in order to help our students recognize and confront contemporary antisemitism effectively?

So we have given, in those two questions in just the last few minutes, a lot for our panelists to respond to. So without further ado, it's my pleasure to welcome Dr. Rachel Fish and Yair Rosenberg, and thank you so much for joining us tonight. I will do a brief introduction before we get into our conversation.

Rachel Fish, Dr. Rachel Fish, is a celebrated academic with over 20 years of experience in the fields of Israeli history, Zionist thought, and Middle Eastern studies. Most recently, Dr. Fish was the founding executive director of the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism, and she was previously the senior advisor and resident scholar for Jewish and Israel philanthropy at the Paul E. Singer Foundation of New York City. And she served as the executive director for the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies at Brandeis University. And on her website, she is described as a scholar and as a warrior.

Yair Rosenberg is a senior writer at Tablet magazine, where he covers the intersection of politics, culture, religion. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and the Guardian, and his writings have received awards from the Religious Newswriters Association and the Harvard Center for Jewish Studies. He has covered everything from national elections in America and Israel to observant Jews in baseball to the translation of Harry Potter into Yiddish, and his latest project is Antisemitism Explained, a video series that tackles the biggest questions about anti-Jewish prejudice-- excuse me.

Thank you both for joining our conversation, and welcome to the Facing History family. So I want to start-- at this point and in the work that I do, I get to watch and attend a lot of webinars about antisemitism. And many of them, especially in the contemporary status, begin with FBI statistics about increasing rates of hate crimes against the small Jewish minority population in the United States and around the world.

But I actually don't want to start there and instead want to use Professor Deborah Lipstadt's framing from the introduction of her book, Antisemitism, Here and Now, where Lipstadt writes, "Numbers should not be what drives us. What should alarm us is that human beings continue to believe in a conspiracy theory that demonizes Jews and sees them as responsible for evil."

So as we get started in this conversation, and if we're going to jump over the FBI for a minute and think about what drives us, I want to turn it over to you and ask, what is driving you? Why are you writing about, teaching about, making films about, lecturing about this topic of antisemitism? And Rachel, why don't you get us started?

RACHEL FISH: Sure. Thank you, Daniel, and thank you to Facing History for the opportunity to be with all of these educators this evening. And educators, thank you for all you are doing. So what drives me? What drives me is that I really believe, in a very profound way, that there's an opportunity to call people in in order to help them become more sensitive to understanding about Judaism, Jews, and the state of Israel.

And I believe that there is a lot of ignorance that exists and that we have a responsibility in order to educate those individuals. And part of that is because of where I grew up personally. I grew up in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains of Northeast Tennessee, and there are very few Jews. And we understood at a very young age what it meant to be different and why we had to be able to articulate who we were over very mundane issues because people didn't understand what it meant to be Jewish.

They wanted to feel our heads, Daniel, literally, to see if we had horns. There were issues with hatred, most of it surrounded by ignorance, but still hatred, whether it was coming from friends, peers, colleagues of my father's. So we grew up with this, and in some ways, for me, it is part of the longer trajectory of engaging in thinking about, how do you teach individuals?

And this remains a persistent problem. And as a persistent problem, I feel a real sense of responsibility to engage in it and not walk away from it and recognizing that it's here to stay. You don't eradicate it, so how do you confront it?

DANIEL BRAUNFELD: Thank you so much, Rachel, for the personal and professional explanations of why you're here. And actually, you might notice I'm taking notes, and we're going to come back to some of the things that you're raising. The horns comment is certainly something that I resonate with, but I don't want to play scorekeeping with how these tropes affect different people. Yair, welcome, and I'd love to invite you to think about your why as well.

YAIR ROSENBERG: Hi. It's great to be here. Thank you for having me. The answer to the question of why I got into covering antisemitism is the same answer as to why I got into covering pretty much anything I cover in journalism, which is that I felt the topic wasn't being covered as well as it should have been by the people who were already doing it, if they were doing it at all. And in good Jewish tradition, there are two responses you can have when you feel the media isn't adequately addressing an issue.

One is that you can kvetch. You can write some letters to the editor. You can post it in the general comments, and you will change approximately nothing. Or you could do the much harder thing, which is to actually try to show how you do it yourself, and putting your money where your mouth is. And it's easy to complain, it's harder to do. And that was true for a lot of things I cover.

You heard in the introduction, I don't just write about antisemitism, I write about a lot of things when it comes to Jews, when it comes to religion and the intermix of religion and politics. And the reason I do that is because I felt that was a hole waiting to be filled. And I think that's certainly true when it comes to truly understanding antisemitism.

And I think, as we go through with this conversation, it will become clear, from both myself and from Rachel, about all of these things that people-- this is one of those issues that a lot of people feel they understand very well, and very well-meaning people do, but the reason why it's still around, the reason why antisemitism persists is largely because we don't know as much as we think we do. And so I'm hopeful that tonight, we'll be able to discuss a bunch of those things and walk out with a clear understanding of what it is we're supposed to be doing something about so that we have more effective strategies for tackling it.

DANIEL BRAUNFELD: Thank you both. And what I'm enjoying already about this conversation is the differences in the variety of where we sit. Yair is a journalist, Rachel is a scholar and an educator, and I work with-- former classroom teacher who continues to work with educators and schools, and we work with adolescents. And Rachel, your comment about identity and your comment about, how do we think about-- help our students think about who are they, and what do they need to know about themselves and be able to speak about their experiences, and how can we support educators in creating the classrooms where students can talk about the experiences they bring with them?

And you both spoke about a really challenging obstacle, which we will get into. One is hatred from friends, which is just a dissonant comment. What does it mean that there can be comments of hate coming from the people you care about? And I will come back to that, about where does this antisemitism thing lie? And this idea of well-meaning people. We know from a lot of spheres of work that well-meaning isn't enough. What does the education mean, and what does it mean to create these kinds of classrooms so that young people can think of-- challenge what they believe, think about the biases they bring in, and be able to connect to their own experiences?

So I'm so glad that you have set the table for Facing History, perhaps even better than I did in my introduction. But before we dive into any one of those pieces, I was having a conversation with someone recently about the many different legal and structural definitions that are being written and published and signed by NGOs and different government organizations that work to define antisemitism.

And as much as I think that it's important for us to understand that there are structures in place to put formal definitions of antisemitism into the world and there's a role for that, I want to take the conversation out of that space and into the everyday. How is it that each of you-- what are the principles or the forms you use to help come to a working definition or a working understanding of this term antisemitism?

YAIR ROSENBERG: So I'm happy to go first on this one. This is why, so this way, I can say everything, and then Dr. Fish will have nothing left, and I will steal her thunder. So I could go-- we could go the entire hour just on this, I'm sure. But I will give two points that I think are just practically useful if you're-- I go and speak on college campuses. I speak sometimes to junior high students and even younger. And you try to give people-- you boil it down to something that they can take away.

What are some principles that if they walk out of that room, they will understand a significant insight about antisemitism? And I'd give you two. One is that antisemitism is not simply a social prejudice. It's a conspiracy theory. We heard that at the beginning from Daniel when he cited Deborah Lipstadt, who's going to be the Biden administration's envoy for combating antisemitism.

What does it mean that it's a conspiracy theory? It's a theory about how the world works. It's cast Jews as these string-pulling puppet masters who are responsible for the different evils in the world through their control of the different mechanisms in the world, the government politics, the media.

Obviously, this is not how a lot of bigotries work. Most bigotries actually construct their victims as parasitic and powerless, and antisemitism sometimes does that, but often, it constructs Jews as the powerful and the privileged, whether that's true or often when it's not. And that's totally different than perhaps somebody who has spent a tremendous amount of time studying other forms of racism.

When they show up to this conversation, they think they might know everything that there is to know, but this is something totally different. This conspiracy theory about how the world works, it's a mistaken understanding of how the world operates, not just a broken approach to a particular group of people. So that's one.

And the second one, very quickly, is something that actually antisemitism shares in common with other forms of prejudice, which is if someone is applying different standards, different moral standards, to a Jew or a group of Jews that they do not apply to equivalent non-Jews, group or in singular, then that person is applying an antisemitic approach to those people. That is a bigoted double standard. And this is, of course, very common. You will see anti-Black racists constantly have totally different standards for themselves and their moral conduct and their political conduct, what they are allowed to do in society, versus what the Black folks they discriminated against are allowed to do.

The same true of anti-Muslim bigots, the same is true of anti-Jewish bigots. And if you teach people that you must have a set of principles, whatever your moral principles are, they must be applied equally and evenly to Jewish people, and they should be treated just as you are treated, and groups of Jews should be treated in the same way as groups of non-Jews, that really changes the dynamic. And if you interrogate a lot of things, you can discover where that's not happening, and you can fix it. So those are the two things that I would put to start the conversation.

RACHEL FISH: I do agree with Yair very much, and I do think that conspiracy element is so important to understand because it also allows antisemitism to remain relevant throughout different periods of history. So what do I mean by that? It's anachronistic to talk about antisemitism as a concept or term when we talk about Judeophobia, during the period of the development of Christianity, what was happening in the early periods in Christiandom of Europe.

And yet, we see there was clear hatred towards Jews and towards adherents of the tradition of Jewish beliefs. That then morphs over time. By the 19th century, we see that because of the social emphasis, the society's emphasis on the pseudoscience of eugenics, the hatred transforms. And now it's not a hatred just because of your identity as a Jew, which would be your DNA, which is immutable, but now, it's also your identity as a people.

So one's about religion, one's about peoplehood. And then we see it transform again when it's about the collective identity as it is represented in the state of Israel. So this is part of the conversation as well is that this, as a conspiracy theory, also needs to resonate within the societies in which it exists, and so that transformation continues to happen. And that also makes it quite unique, I would say, in some ways.

DANIEL BRAUNFELD: So I want to point out something that got said, and I thank you both for giving us some foundations. I appreciate that as an education organization, our goal is to not say, here's the single definition, but here are different definitions that we can understand in a collective. But Yair, you used the language of applying antisemitism as opposed to being an antisemite, and I don't know if that language was intentional about applying an antisemitic lens to something, but I want to raise that up for a minute.

What's the difference, or how do we help students think about this difference between I am or I am not an antisemite versus I am applying or engaging in an antisemitic lens, conspiracy theory, ideology? Pick the word that comes after it. Why is that an important distinction?

YAIR ROSENBERG: Yeah. I wasn't actually thinking in those terms when I formulated that, but I'm glad you did bring that up because maybe I was doing it subconsciously because it's certainly something I believe. I teach this stuff in many settings, and a lot of people, again, feel very uncomfortable in these conversations because they worry that they're implicated by them or that they might have some misconceptions about Jews. And what I try to do when I educate is create a safe space and explain to people, of course we all have blind spots about communities we don't know very much about.

Jews are only 2% of the American population and 0.2% of the global population. Most people have never met one of us. That makes it really hard to actually understand Jewish people, and it means you're more likely to only know things based on stereotypes or what you see on the internet or see on TV. These are often very poor ways to understand people. And no one should feel guilty about having those misconceptions and blind spots because we all have them.

The thing that you need to learn to do is to fill those in over time, and what we need to do, as in my case, as an educator, is to create a space where people feel comfortable growing and they feel less defensive. And so there's a big difference between holding an antisemitic idea or accepting a stereotype uncritically and being an antisemitic person. And the difference between those things is whether that person is going to be able to grow in.

Today, we live in a society that often likes to reduce people to their worst moment or their worst tweet or the worst thing you can screenshot about them on the internet. Especially I think that's true of young people, and they're very afraid of that. And I think creating a supportive environment where they can actually move past that and they can ask the questions they have and not feel, if I ask this question, do Jews believe x, are Jews like y, that if I ask the wrong question, it's going to dog me forever. But rather, I will get a good answer, and that will make me a better person, and I will be able to grow.

DANIEL BRAUNFELD: So I'm going to always look to the other person to see if you want to jump in, and maybe we can have a hand signal or something. Like, no, that was fine. We don't need to add--

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

RACHEL FISH: That was fantastic. If I were grading Yair, I'd give him an A. It was excellent.

DANIEL BRAUNFELD: So then the piece that I want to take back then is, I said at the beginning that Facing History uses the lessons of history to confront bigotry and hatred. And even the name of our program is A Modern Challenge, Ancient Hatred. Can you talk a little bit, Rachel, you started to get into this, about why do we need to understand that long arm of history and the manifestations, the different ways that anti-Judeophobia anti-Judaism has manifested?

That there is a timestamp on the word antisemitism of one that was created. How does understanding that larger context-- or let me say, to what extent does that prepare us to confront the modern challenge, and to what extent, in our question about unlearning, does that just get in the way?

RACHEL FISH: So it definitely doesn't get in my way because I believe that history matters. I think that history is very important. I think that we need historical scaffolding to understand where terms and ideas originate. And then, of course, the historical factors, the personalities, the particular moments in time, the ideas that then have a direct impact on those concepts and then the way that plays out.

The other reason is because unfortunately, we're living in a world in which everything is quick, it's flashy. You have two seconds to grab someone's attention, especially on social media, and that's not the real world. That is not how ideas and history unfolds. So I do believe very strongly that to place things within a historical context and to provide a very serious deep dive into history helps individuals understand that this didn't just happen with fill in the blank, the Holocaust.

Or this just didn't happen now because of President Trump. Or this didn't just happen because of the attack on the Tree of Life Synagogue or what we saw in May, the first time that occurred in that way. It's just not accurate. All of these ideas have actually been at play for quite a long time, and it's our responsibility to understand from where they come and then try to make sense of why they persist in the forms that they persist.

 

 

The other piece is that most people don't understand, to Yair's point, what they're saying. Like, truly, they're don't know. And they say things because it's been absorbed, whether it's from culture, whether it's from politics, whether it's from conversations that they've had with individuals, but they absorb these ideas and language around it.

And if you can actually hit pause and say to someone, you know, what you're saying actually has a deep history, and it's a troubling history, let me tell you why, then you can have a meaningful engagement and conversation with someone if they're willing to listen and engage in that meaningful kind of Buberian I thou way, a real opportunity to grow and be transformative and so on and so forth. But you have to be able to have some ability to hit that pause button. And if you don't know history, it's very hard to hit that pause button and help people situate.

So let me just give you an example. You made reference to it, Daniel, the term antisemitism. When does it come about? It comes about in the 19th century by a German named Wilhelm Marr, who coins the term anti-[SPEAKING GERMAN]. And he uses this term in 1879 specifically for the purpose of being able to replace the previous German phrase [SPEAKING GERMAN], Jew hatred, or hatred of Jews. Why? Because [SPEAKING GERMAN] sounded very crass, sounded very dirty in the German intellectual elite society that it was.

So if you can replace it with something that sounds pseudoscientific, a bit more sanitized, then it doesn't sound as bad, and you can actually push different policies top down, bottom up that have the same ultimate purpose of marginalizing prejudice, discrimination, othering, et cetera. But it sounds less offensive. So that matters. That's an important component to the conversation.

Now, if I use the term today in the 21st century, as Yair said, when you're 2% of America's population, and we did this when I was with the Kraft Initiative, we actually interviewed 10,500 13 to 35-year-olds, demographically, ethnically, religiously representative across the country. And we asked them, what is antisemitism? So the majority of folks say, IDK. I don't know. We then had individuals who said, well, what's a Semite?

Which is precisely a very good question because it's not a term that you hear very often, and most don't understand that it's a categorization based on a linguistic and geographical location. But other people said, well, I'm anti-racist, I'm anti-homophobic, I'm anti-Islamophobic, so I'm probably an antisemite. And you're thinking, no, no, no, no, no. You're an anti antisemite. But it matters because they don't even understand the terminology and don't have a sense of where it's coming from and what it means. So this is part of understanding history.

DANIEL BRAUNFELD: So Rachel, thank you for that. I know it was an answer to my question, and it's a self-fulfilling prophecy as an organization that values history of being able to help students. And I think about the question, why do I believe what I believe? And saying, wait a second. What are the ideas that I-- how do I pause long enough, as you were talking about, hit this pause button to be cognizant of the ideas that I'm holding onto long enough that I can begin to interrogate them?

And that there's a role for history in helping us unpack and confront the ideas, the casual ideas, that have real power and cause real harm but might be even coming from our friends or the classmate next to us. So I appreciate coming from your side of this, the relationship between history and confronting the present. And I want to actually bring Yair as an additive to that question. Because you also used this language of unlearning.

It's the second question of our program. What is it that we need to unlearn in order to be able to better tackle this? And I think the people who are following along at home, if they've been taking notes, can probably already think of some things they need to unlearn. It didn't just start blank is one thing. If you use that language of well, it started in blank, you probably need to unlearn that. But Yair, are there other things that, as you're talking with young people and the stories that you write about, are there things that if you could walk into a classroom or wave a magic wand, what would you hope people could unlearn in order to move forward?

YAIR ROSENBERG: It's a great question. I recently put together a video series called Antisemitism Explained, very modestly titled. And it's six videos on YouTube that answer six questions in accessible forms for particularly young people and anyone else who is troubled by it. And a lot of it is actually about unlearning misconceptions that people walk in the door with.

And so I'll give you one of them, which is antisemitism cannot and should not be reduced to the Holocaust. I think as a result of some of the really remarkable and wonderful efforts that many, many institutions have gone to in order to educate people about the Holocaust, it has had this unintended consequence of-- and this is not just educators. This is so many movies made by Hollywood. When people think of antisemitism, they think of the Holocaust.

But the effect of basically making these two things synonymous and making people think that antisemitism is something like the Holocaust is not unlike making people think that racism is something like slavery. What that really teaches someone, if you think about it, is that the prejudice is something so incredibly extreme, so far removed from my experience so very long ago, that I couldn't possibly be implicated in it in any way, and it has no particular relevance to me. And as long as I'm not a Nazi, or as long as I'm not a slaver, then I don't really have that much to worry about.

And I think, frankly, you see echoes of this kind of discourse in our current public discourse in the way people talk about what education looks like when it's anti-racist. And people really believe this because they've been taught that that's what it is. But in point of fact, of course, the Holocaust wasn't some sort of antisemitic aberration, some extreme thing, and this is the be all and end all. It was the culmination of centuries of European attitudes, literature, ideology, stereotyping, and mistreatment of Jewish people, which had inquisitions and crusades and so many other different things.

And of course, there was many other things about Jewish life that are wonderful and we're celebrating, and that's important. Those are the other things I cover as a journalist, the things that are the positive substance of Jewish life. But you have this whole history of antisemitism and ideas, and that builds a foundation. That is what creates the ability for a Holocaust to happen. That makes it make sense to a population. And you can get rid of the Holocaust. You can say that's bad. We made a bunch of movies, and we proved it to ourselves that it's bad.

But the whole foundation is still there. It's just the thing you built on top of it isn't there. But there's not as much as you think stopping people from building more and from accessing all those foundations, which we haven't done nearly as much about. And this is a structural metaphor, and I think probably plenty of people in this room have done some studies of things like structural racism, and it's a similar concept.

And so I would teach people that antisemitism is, in its way, structural, and I would teach people that it isn't reducible to its worst manifestation. And when you do that, you accidentally erase most of the manifestations. And so that's just one. I could give you 10 more, but that's what I would start with.

DANIEL BRAUNFELD: So you have both. So I want to name-- again, I'll name something and then ask a question. There is this balance, and Yair, you just said this, this double work that is necessary of, how do we not reduce the millennial-long history of the Jewish community to its worst moments? That there are-- how do we also think about-- Rachel, you spoke earlier about positive identity and understanding who you are in your story.

And Yair, you're saying that when we think about this in other spaces, the value and the need for adding complexity to a community story, that it isn't only about this one moment of victimization. And on the other hand, we have that if you don't deal with the foundation level ideology, the structural ideologies that support antisemitism, it's not going to go away. And we're not going to be actually confronting the issue.

So we are-- I want to ask you about that intersection. When we talk-- put loosely, how much of this is the responsibility of those within the Jewish community, and how much-- to understand this problem and talk about positive identity, and how much responsibility is this about the 98% of the American population or the 99.98% that you didn't include before to say, wait a second, how do we think about the way our responsibility lies in terms of thinking about and confronting antisemitism, whether in our schools or in our communities?

RACHEL FISH: Look, I'll say very quickly, and Yair, then please jump in, just like racism is not solely a problem for the Blacks, the African American community, or people of color, and homophobia is not solely a problem for the LGBTQ+ community, antisemitism cannot solely be a problem for the Jewish community. Meaning, yes, Jews, of course, have to address it, but it's not only incumbent upon Jews in order to be able to acknowledge what these structural challenges are and how they persist and manifest.

There has to be a responsibility by humanity writ large. We live in an age of great sensitivity. I say that in a way that is not a negative. Our premise for so much education right now is, how do you include? Where do you find opportunities to be inclusive? How do you create greater sensitivity around differences? How do you help people understand these differences?

And whatever strikes they exist, whether it's gender, whether it's race, whether it's religion, whatever it may be. So there is an opportunity here all the more so, I would say, to leverage this moment to say, just like everyone needs to learn about A, B, and C, you also need to learn about antisemitism. There's no reason it should not be included within that conversation.

I also do believe that-- and I feel that I have to say it because confronting antisemitism, confronting racism, confronting other forms of hatred, yes. But I don't believe you can eradicate it. I just don't. I think it is built as part of human nature. I think hatred is part of human nature, envy is part of human nature. And to your point, Yair, about conspiracy theory, there is a major piece of envy that is included in the conversation about antisemitism. You envy the Jews because they are so all-powerful.

You want that power. You don't want to not have that power. Those are human attributes, characteristics. You can help people understand when they are feeling those ways. You can help them attempt to become more knowledgeable. You can help them for sure become more educated, but I'm not at all of the school that believes that you can just erase this and it can go away.

YAIR ROSENBERG: Yeah. The way I like to talk about it is the goals of educating about antisemitism and fighting it is not eliminating it because that is extremely unlikely to happen. We have far too much history to be that naive about it. But it's instead ameliorating it, meaning making sure that fewer people are susceptible to it, likely to fall for it, and then mitigating it when it does inevitably happen. So amelioration and mitigation.

And those are, I think, a more healthy framework to think about it than hoping that-- an impossible utopian goal that can also lead to people being depressed because when you don't succeed in eradicating something and you really, really want to, you can feel, what's the point? But there is tremendous upside. I like talking about it like there are certain things-- and we probably won't tackle them in this conversation because we don't have the time, and they could take a whole lecture in and of themselves, but say, antisemitism and untangling it from, say, the Israel conversation.

So say that's the 10% of antisemitism we can't agree about. Well, there's that other 90%. And if we got rid of the other 90% or dramatically reduced it, that would be a tremendous accomplishment, even if we still couldn't agree about the other 10%. And too often, we get obsessed with the things we can't fix and leave over what is actually the majority of things that we actually can.

DANIEL BRAUNFELD: So I'm really glad you said that because I was thinking about students in my own classroom who, at some point, would say, Mister, what's the point? If this just keeps happening, if this history is such of pick your category where they would get to a point where there is this reasonable question of, why should we continue to try? And what is so important in the work of Facing History is that we don't create classrooms that are just doom parades, that how are we simultaneously realistic?

We don't want to puff kids up unrealistically. How do we get students to think about civic agency and their civic voice, seeing models of what that looks like? I really appreciate the language of ameliorate and mitigate, and we don't need to agree on the eradication, but 90%'s a pretty good goal. I would take that and not feel like a failure in the morning if we could get there. So I want to get with that if we're not going to give up.

And if we're going to hope our students, say, not throw their hand-- neither say, I don't have to worry about this because I'm not a Nazi, which you referenced earlier, and not give up because what's the point of trying? So we're going to avoid both of those poles. The second half of the title for this program is-- excuse me, the first half, is A Modern Challenge. We've spent a lot of time talking about the ancient hatred piece, but based on the work that you do in your respective spheres, what are some of the modern challenges, plural, that you encounter, that you see with young people?

Rachel, I know you already brought up a definition, a term challenge that people don't even know what the word means. What are some of the other challenges that you are observing young people or need to climb before they can tackle that 50%, the 70%, the 90%? What are some of those modern challenges that you're observing?

RACHEL FISH: Look. You know, I'll jump in here. Part of it is the conversations that are taking place today are also heavily politicized. And so antisemitism itself becomes a conversation that is both coming from the hard right and coming from the hard left along the political spectrum, and most individuals have a much easier time calling out that form of hatred when it's on the opposite side of the aisle from which they stand on.

But Yair, I think you've made the point in several of your pieces that you need to be looking around you within your own camp before you're ready to yell across the aisle at the opposing political position. And I think that's been very, very hard because we are living-- and that's not just about antisemitism, but it does manifest or get illustrated in this way because we're living in a very divisive time. I also think, as Yair said, we live in a society that is very unfortunately focused on cancel culture.

So someone says something, perhaps out of ignorance, perhaps out of just insensitivity, and either they're immediately canceled and they are shunned, and it's really hard to dig out of that, and unfortunately, whatever people, especially young people, put on social is screenshot, it's shared, it's archived by someone. And it follows them, and that's really unfortunate, especially when it is someone who is in their identity formation when they are trying to learn and grow and make mistakes. This doesn't help.

There's also a piece in which it's actually very hard to be upstanders for a lot of young people. And I know that's language that Facing History uses. And the reason it's so hard to be upstanders is sometimes even when you do want to say something in order to counter for the purpose of ameliorating and mitigating a stereotype, the problem is is that the people around you, there's a herd mentality, and it takes a very strong individual these days to say I'm going to swim upstream, and I'm going to say what needs to be said irrespective of what the folks around me actually believe, know, or think. That's not easy anymore.

I'll say one last thing that I think is a major challenge for this ancient hatred, which is that we now have these devices, and these devices and what appears on them, particularly on social media feeds, whether it's Instagram or TikTok or Snapchat, are disseminated very quickly. The algorithms create silos, so you see only emotionally divisive material most of the time. You are not seeing the full picture.

And unfortunately, this is a device that is attractive much more seriously than the books behind me. And so we're competing in a very challenging way with, how do you get people's attention so that you can do the deep dive that Daniel, Facing History does, that you want to do as an educator in order to help students make meaning of history so that they then can understand not just the historical moment, but why it matters and remains relevant and resonant for us today. And that is very challenging to do.

YAIR ROSENBERG: I mean, I don't really have anything to add. That was a very comprehensive overview of I think the things that make this conversation so difficult. I mentioned this before. I'm mentioning it again only because, why did I make a bunch of YouTube videos about this that are six minutes long? I did it because you have to meet people where they are and the way that they consume information. And my hope is that I had a very modest goal, which was it should be better than what they normally find on YouTube when they search for answers about antisemitism, which is an easy way to get to success.

But hopefully, it's better than just that. But that is really, really challenging, and it's what I think about a lot when I spin to Twitter and social media is, how do I take this material, which is actually sometimes dense, sometimes difficult, sometimes nuanced, and turn it into something that people can share and digest that isn't debasing it or devaluing it or turning it into something that actually erodes its wisdom and content? And that's a big challenge, but I think that we can do it.

That's the thing. It takes a lot more effort than the people who are sharing the demagogic stuff and the people who are sharing the misinformed stuff. It takes more work. But the work is rewarding, and it actually can work, and one can do it. And what I like about what Facing History is doing is that it's trying to help people brainstorm ways to do that in the classroom context.

And think about, how can we take this complicated topic and make it something that grabs people's attention, that holds their interest, and that has them walking out wiser and better than they were before? And yeah, it's really hard, but both my parents are teachers, that's the whole point. And so I admire what you're all doing, and I'm happy-- I think we're up to questions, so I'm happy to answer any of those.

DANIEL BRAUNFELD: No, it's a great transition. And no, I guess I have to share you with everybody else now. One of the questions that comes up is-- that came up earlier actually in the conversation is this question about young people. And if young people were here-- and I'm going to actually edit the question. I hope the person doesn't mind.

If there were young people in the audience and you were going to provide them with tools, but those tools were in the form of questions, what questions should young people be asking themselves if they're going to hit the pause button? What are the kinds of questions you would hope young people asked as they are trying to evaluate the comment from their friend? And again, I'm really harping on that hatred from friends in the first 30 seconds of the conversation. What questions would you want young people to walk away from this conversation asking themselves?

YAIR ROSENBERG: I mean, if I could force people to ruminate on a particular question, it wouldn't even be specifically about antisemitism. It would be, what is it like to be Jewish? What does it mean to be Jewish? Because once you actually answer that question, once you have encounters with Jewish people and Jewish experiences and Jewish texts and Jewish history, you become much less susceptible to the demonic caricatures that are promulgated by antisemites about Jews and Jewish experience and what the Jews are up to.

A large part of the reason why people fall for that stuff is because they don't actually have that background. And again, in part because it's hard to meet a Jew. It's hard to find out the answers to these questions. But people with a serious interest in who Jews are with a real healthy curiosity about what it's like to be Jewish, and there are many different ways. One of the things that we discover is that Jews fight amongst themselves tremendously.

There's a wonderful joke, which I will steal some of your time to tell, which is a guy gets marooned on a desert island, and then he realizes quickly he's not going to get rescued. So he starts making provisions for living there for a while. Eventually, a couple years later, somebody shows up on the island, and he happily shows them all the things that he has constructed on this island for himself. Here's the hovel where I live. Here's the storehouse for the food. And here's the synagogue. And the visitor asks, OK, but what about that identical building right across the street? And he's like, oh, that's the synagogue I don't attend.

And the idea, of course, is that there are so many different ways to be Jewish, and people hold very strongly to them. But when people are outside of a community, they often produce minority groups to one monolithic thing. And they say all Jews are x, all Black folks are y, all Muslims are z. And it's never true. And simply understanding who Jews are in their diversity and correcting from the same level of complexity and diversity that we give to ourselves can work wonders and can really change the way people relate to this issue and their susceptibility to antisemitic ideas.

RACHEL FISH: I think that's excellent, Yair, and I think the heterogeneity of the Jewish community, the Jewish experience, Jewish identities is so important in this conversation. I also think there are other questions that someone can ask, even if they aren't capable of finding a Jew, Yair. Like, what makes you hold that position? Or why are you saying that you think one community is all x? Whatever that is.

Or you could ask, do you have a particular intention when you use language like that? Do you understand the historical history, the historical framing of that word? Do you know what that trope is? Have you actually seen that trope being utilized? You can ask those kinds of questions. Same as young people should be using those same critical thinking skills when they see things on social.

They shouldn't just hook, line, and sinker absorb them all. They can look at them and say, who's writing this, for what purpose, who's the intended audience, what facts are included, what facts are excluded, what narratives are being built, is there a call to action? And those are the kinds of questions you ask your students, Daniel, through Facing History to interrogate, to ask, to sharpen all the time when they're looking at various primary sources.

So we want them to be able to keep those skills and have them at their fingertips literally. So whether it's on social or in the conversations with their friends, they actually feel prepared to ask those questions at any given moment. And it's not to play gotcha. I can't emphasize that enough.

It's to actually hit that pause button because when you can engage in a meaningful discussion, half the time, someone will say, well, that's what I just heard from this group, so I was just saying it. And they don't even fully understand from where it's coming from. They don't understand the framing. They don't understand the political agenda. So it gives a real opportunity to engage in an educational way.

DANIEL BRAUNFELD: So if I repeat back those questions, what does it mean to be Jewish, and baked into that question is use the heterogeneity, the complexity, the disagreement within this community, and if you better understand that, you can easily recognize and debunk not only simplified single narratives, but the absurdity that some of these narratives come packaged in. Asking what makes you hold that position, and what is your goal of using that word, that phrase, that idea.

And doing it-- and just to echo what you just said, Rachel, of not in the goal of got you, but how do we really begin to pause and then do something with this? And what I would ask is as-- hopefully I can squeeze in a question and a half-- is I think what I've learned from both of you, your videos, your writing, your lecture presentations, all of which I've had the pleasure of watching, and Rachel, you brought this up, is that it isn't how do we move beyond, how do we unlearn the antisemitism over there versus the antisemitism over there, but this is an idea that manifests itself across a political spectrum, across demographics, across age groups.

And so the half a question I ask is, since I just repeated the three questions you offered, is there anything you would add if we're going to agree that antisemitism is across the political spectrum and not only there or there or there? But if we're going to look at it no matter where on the spectrum we are, is there any other question you would add to, what does it mean to be Jewish? What makes you hold that position, and what is your goal of using that language?

RACHEL FISH: If I'm looking across the political spec-- go.

YAIR ROSENBERG: Let's-- yeah. [INAUDIBLE] You can ask your question--

RACHEL FISH: Well, here. I would just say--

YAIR ROSENBERG: --and I'll ask mine.

RACHEL FISH: Yeah, yeah. So I'm just going to say quickly, if I were to look at the political spectrum question, I would want to say, what are the intellectual factors that have contributed to the way in which antisemitism manifests in these polls, in these positions? What historical moments and what intellectual ideas? Because they're different, and yet they come to the same endpoint. And so that's one of the pieces I would want to ask. Go ahead, Yair.

YAIR ROSENBERG: Yeah, exactly. And then I would ask a practical question on top of it, which is a question that I think a lot of people think about, which is where can you make the most difference in combating antisemitism? And if you think about this question honestly and seriously, you realize the question of is antisemitism more in this community or that community is a secondary question because the only community where it really matters for your purposes is the one that you can influence.

We are much more-- we have credibility and people listen to us in our own communities and our own families and the places where we are respected. If we show up to people who we are their ideological opponents and with whom we do not see eye to eye on countless other issues, we may be 100% right in our critique, but we will have 0% impact. Whereas if you approach a tough conversation within your own community about something like antisemitism, it's not just true about antisemitism, you are much more likely to be heard. It's a much harder conversation.

There's a reason people are constantly pointing out the flaws in their ideological opponents, but not among themselves. It's because that's an easy conversation to have. But the hard conversations are where change happens. And I'm not pretending that that's easy, and that's a difficult thing.

I am a Jewish journalist, so for me, the tough conversation is not talking about antisemitism, but it's all other sorts of prejudices within my own community and other sorts of flaws and how to have that conversation in a healthy and productive way that makes us better. But that would be the question I would ask is, where can I make the most difference fighting antisemitism? Is it in my community or is it in someone else's? And I think implicitly, there's an answer to that question.

DANIEL BRAUNFELD: So the educator in me wants to just return to where we started, and I want to put back up the two questions we said we were going to tackle at the very beginning of this. The first is, what do we, as educators, need to understand about antisemitism and why it continues to exist in the modern era, and what do we need to unlearn in order to help our students recognize and confront contemporary antisemitism effectively?

And Yair and Rachel, I just want to thank you both so much for helping me and helping our community begin to tackle not only frameworks for understanding and thinking about how history and identity influence where we are, but the tools of intellectual critical thinking, the questions we can begin asking ourselves, the frameworks we can begin using to understand not only the long arm of history in this conversation, but its modern manifestations. And just thank you both so much for your time and for being with us for tonight.

RACHEL FISH: Thank you.

YAIR ROSENBERG: Thank you for having us.

DANIEL BRAUNFELD: So to our audience, everybody who joined us tonight, we hope that you continue to learn with us at Facing History and Ourselves and our community. On our website-- excuse me, for our educators and people joining us for the first time, we support educators in a variety of ways. We have classroom resources, lesson plans that look specifically at that history of antisemitism that Rachel and Yair were speaking about.

How do we help our students put a historical context to what we're talking about so that we can then help our students respond to current events like rising incidences of antisemitism? How do we put history in ourselves into conversation with each other? We also have educator resources for your own edification, a book we published called A Convenient Hatred, The History of Antisemitism. And we hope that you will join us for additional online learning opportunities. A mini class will be running in a few months of Brave Classrooms, Taking on Antisemitism in Schools.

A workshop will be running in November, Teaching for Equity and Justice. Our next iteration of the Facing Hate learning series, which you show, will be receiving more information about following this event and our on-demand webinars where the recording of this event and other webinars we've had on this topic on contemporary antisemitism will live. Again, I want to thank everybody for joining us, and thank you for all that you do with your communities and helping your students ask difficult questions so that it can dive into modern challenges for ancient hatreds. And we hope everybody has a good evening.

SPEAKER 1: Thank you for joining us for this learning opportunity. The resources from the webinar can be accessed from the resource list window. You will receive an email with links to these resources after the webinar. Your completion of this webinar gives you one hour of professional development credit, and you can download your certificate of participation via the window below. You will also see a very brief survey. Please take a couple of minutes at the end of the webinar to fill out this survey. We really value your feedback.

We will keep the webinar open for the next five minutes so you can download your certificate, complete the survey, and open the resources. Thank you for joining us, and we look forward to seeing you at another online professional learning opportunity soon. From all of us at Facing History and Ourselves to you, take care. Wherever you're joining us from, we wish you peace, health, safety, and community.

[MUSIC PLAYING]