How Antisemitism Signals Broader Intolerance and Hatred Webinar

Welcome. We are so glad you could join us. Before we get started, I want to point out two important elements of our webinar room. To access live captions throughout the webinar, please select the Show Caption button in your toolbar at the bottom of the screen. Second, if you have any questions for the panel or for our tech team, you can submit them using the Q&A box, which is also on your toolbar.

Once again, welcome. My name is Dimitry Anselme. I'm the Chief Officer for Growth and Engagement at Facing History & Ourselves. I appreciate being in this space with all of you tonight. I wanted to take a moment to thank our supporters who help the work of Facing History and with all of you across the country and around the world. We are grateful to all of you.

There will be time for questions and answers at the end of that conversation, so please feel free to enter your questions in the Q&A once we begin. And we will close out the evening with some suggestions of resources, ideas, and classroom materials that are available on our website on facinghistory.org.

Just a bit of history to frame it for you. In 2020, Facing History began a multi-year project to update and revise our curriculum materials and professional development for Holocaust education and contemporary antisemitism. We were doing this in the midst of a resurgence of antisemitic behavior in communities and classrooms. Since then, we have engaged more than 4,800 educators in our seminars on contemporary antisemitism and the Holocaust. We have created a new and wide-ranging collection of classroom resources, which so far has been viewed 340,000 times by users in all 50 states and 70 countries.

Tonight's webinar is part of our Combating Racism and Antisemitism in the 21st Century series. It is designed for educators and community members like yourselves to learn from and engage with scholars and experts on antisemitism. The slide that you are seeing is reflecting our pedagogical triangle. This is at the heart of our work and models for you how we think about teaching and learning.

We use this in our work with students and teachers in middle schools and high schools around the country and the globe. And this is really to tap into an approach that seeks to wrest academic and intellectual rigor, combined it with emotional engagement and ethical reflection. We think these are three core components in helping students show up and think of themselves as civic agents with voice and agency. In the words of one of our educators, we help create classrooms that empower students to think with their heads, their hearts, and their conscience.

At this time, it is my privilege to introduce my colleague and friend Leora Schaefer, the Executive Director of Facing History in Canada. She will be moderating tonight's panel. So with that said, Leora.

Thank you, Dimitry. It's a pleasure being here this evening, and I'm really looking forward to the conversation. As we get started, I'd like to help frame our conversation that we'll be having over the course of the next hour. And I'd like to start with a quote by Kenneth Stern, who's the director of the Bard Center for Study of Hate.

He said, "Antisemitism is at heart a conspiracy theory that sees Jews as conspiring to harm humanity. It's offered as an explanation for what goes wrong in the world. It appears on the right and on the left. It's also the philosophical backbone of much white supremacy. But we tend to think about antisemitism as only what people say about Jews or Israel, and not enough about how vilification of anyone amongst us can create a conveyor belt to antisemitism."

Antisemitism has a history of flaring in moments of collective fear and unrest, repeatedly resurfacing over time as a convenient solution to uncertainty, fear, or discomfort within a society. Antisemitism exists in part because Jews have served as scapegoats, those who are irrationally blamed for societal problems. And we have seen this happen in different moments of history for over 2,000 years.

Placing blame on a group can ease people's anxieties when they feel out of control of the circumstances around them. But scapegoating ultimately covers deeper inequities and dysfunction within a society or community. And our panel today will delve into exploring the broader implications of how allowing antisemitism to persist unchecked and how it threatens the foundation of democracy. We will also examine how antisemitism intersects with other forms of hate and bigotry, and how it can be a harbinger for the persecution of other minorities.

And so with that, I'm pleased to introduce our panelists for the webinar, Rachel Fish, Jonathan Judaken, and Elisha Wiesel.

So as we bring our panelists to the spotlight, it is-- I will read their bios to get our conversation started. Dr. Rachel Fish is a celebrated academic with 20 years of experience in the field of Israel history, Zionist thought, and Middle Eastern studies. Dr. Fish was the founding executive director of the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism, which was established to catalyze dynamic new solutions to stop the age-old hatred advanced by those who seek the elimination of Judaism and the Jewish people and the modern movement to destroy the world's only Jewish state.

Dr. Fish was previously Senior Advisor and Resident Scholar of Jewish Israel Philanthropy at the Paul E. Singer Foundation in New York City. She worked closely with grantees to support them and provided framing around their educational content and programming. Dr. Fish served as the Executive Director for the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies at Brandeis University, where she trained the next generation of scholars and Jewish communal professionals in Israel studies.

Dr. Jonathan Judaken's research focuses on representations of Jews and Judaism, race and racism, critical theory, existentialism, and post-Holocaust French Jewish thought. His latest monograph, Critical Theories of Antisemitism, came out in Columbia University Press's "New Directions in Critical Theory," a series that came out in June 2024. It offers a comparative history of major theories of Judeophobia.

A founding member of the International Consortium for Research on Racism and Antisemitism, Judaken serves as the US Consulting Editor for Patterns of Prejudice, on the Editorial Board for Jewish Historical Studies, on the Associate Editorial Board for Critical Philosophy of Race, on the Advisory Board for H-Antisemitism, as Past President of the North American Sartre Society, and on the International Board of Scholars for Facing History & Ourselves.

And finally, Elisha Wiesel's words and actions mark him as an emerging fighter against poverty, advocate for opportunity, and student of Jewish continuity. Elisha is a recovering Wall Street executive. After retiring from a 25-year financial market career at Goldman Sachs at the end of 2019, he served in 2022 as one of the lead technologists in Mike Bloomberg's presidential campaign. In his most recent board position at Good Shepherd Services, Elisha raised millions of dollars for New York's neediest by convening "Midnight Madness."

When his father, Elie Wiesel, passed, Elisha realized how many others missed his voice. And so when opportunities for impact arise, Elisha shares his father's message and continues his legacy by standing up for persecuted communities. In the last few years, Elisha has spoken at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum about the need to protect the LGBTQ+ society, shone a light while speaking at Auschwitz on the plight of Syrian refugees being denied Western asylum, written for the Financial Times about the urgency of upholding DACA, and taken his son to peacefully march for Black Lives.

I'd like to welcome all of you to the conversation.

Thank you so much, Leora. Pleasure to be here.

Wonderful to be with all of you. And so in a typical Facing History mode, I'd like to begin with ourselves. Why have you decided to work in this space of teaching about combating antisemitism? And Elisha, we ended with your bio and so maybe you can begin us in this conversation.

I just want to say what a great thing it was to see that Kenneth Stern quote at the very beginning. Somewhere in a parallel universe, there's an evil version of this whole consortium that's starting with some Ken Roth quote about how it's all Israel's fault on everything. So I'm very happy to be in this particular universe with you right now.

Look, for me, it's pretty simple. My father loved to fight bullies. It's just what he was somehow set out to do in his life. For him, his big fight was with the Soviet Union for so many decades. I mean, he had many fights, but I think the multi-decade fight that, for me, really defined his activism, was this concept that the biggest bully on the planet, the Soviet Union, was not only destroying its own people broadly in Russia, but really picking on the Jews.

And I think that we-- I personally am inspired by that. I too, like this feeling of let's stand up, let's find the biggest bullies. We're going to get to this a little bit later as we talk about, I think, some of the themes on the modern stage. I'd argue that the Chinese Communist Party is the biggest bully on the planet right now. And I'll tell you a little bit later, when we talk about modern antisemitism and oppression of others.

You take a look at what happens on TikTok, and guess what? The same algorithm that is not letting people do #FreeTibet or Save the Uyghurs, that algorithm is boosting hatred of Israel. All sorts of videos that make terrible accusations that are blood libelous in their nature. So I think there's something about fighting the bully. And typically, the bully who has it in for us is doing it to their own people as well.

Thank you, Elisha. My mom also was-- I grew up in a house where my mother was very much part of the fighting for Jews in Russia. That very much is part of my core as well, who I am. Rachel, maybe you can continue this "ourselves" piece.

Sure, sure. Thank you for inviting me to be here this evening. And a pleasure to be with Elisha and Jonathan as well. I also am quite drawn to a good fight, Elisha. It's how I'm built in my DNA. And it's also part of the way in which my parents raised all of us, meaning when we grew up, which was located in a small town in the foothills of northeast Tennessee, we were part of a very small Jewish community, which meant that my parents had to model for their colleagues, for community members, that there are other people in the world besides the majority. And those other people need to have protection and need to be able to have access to freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of conscience.

So they, from a very early age, demonstrated why you couldn't have a prayer in the public school system in the name of Jesus. Even though they weren't lawyers, they went to the school board regularly in order to make that articulation very clear. And so we learned from them, and we learned what it meant to actually humanize Jews, Judaism, and the Jewish state.

And when you grow up, which is very much what we call the buckle of the Bible belt, you actually have to be able to do that humanization work in order to break down barriers and in order for people to actually get to know people with different ideas in the world. And that's been a huge part of the way in which I have walked through the world, and the way in which I engage with education, and why I do so much of the work that I do, because the majority of folks are truly don't knows. But when you can actually find ways to actually humanize and make connection, they are more positively predisposed to actually wanting to have outstretched arms rather than close themselves off.

Thank you. Jonathan.

So I'm also really honored to be a part of this group and a part of this discussion. And I want to second, Elisha's appreciation of the way in which Facing History's framed this, not only with the Ken Stern quote, but also the very title of the panel, that antisemitism signals broader intolerance and hatred.

I would say-- very directly, just to give you some of the stopping points along my own biography. I come to this work very much out of that lived experience. So I was born and raised a white Jew in apartheid South Africa. I emigrated to the United States, which means I came here as an immigrant. I studied abroad in France, where once again, I was an outsider. In that case, I didn't even know the language.

Partway through my graduate education, I spent time on various visits in Israel. And that really transformed the focus of my work, which up until then had really been about the more abstract conception of the other, of what we call in post-structuralist or postmodern philosophy the question of alterity, to focus more specifically on ideas about Jews and Judaism and the relationship of that to French intellectuals.

And then I lived in Israel for two years as a postdoctoral fellow and from Israel moved to Memphis, which, like South Africa, was another post-apartheid space and place. And I spent most of my career in Memphis until I moved more recently to St. Louis, which is right up-- it's the next big town on the Mississippi, with very similar racial issues.

So in all kinds of ways, I am working through my own story. I'm working through my own family history, trying to work out ways in which, I think, the kinds of choices that we could have made along that journey could help lead to greater freedom emancipation possibility for more folks.

Yeah, I really appreciate how you each shared this part of you. I think it is so important, and it grounds the conversation. And for all of those, everyone who's listening and watching, I think it helps-- it helps understand the motivation and who we are, who you are. So thank you for that.

And so I guess with that, we'll delve in. We have lots of questions, and we'll see where we get in the conversation. I really hope that this will be interactive. Please feel free to not only respond to the questions as I ask them, but respond to each other if there are ways that you can do that. We'll imagine that we are sitting around a coffee table or a dining room table having this conversation.

So as we start, there's this idea that antisemitism is somehow the canary in the coal mine, a term often used, an indicator of larger societal ills. So how does antisemitism get used to mask deeper societal issues? And you each bring a different lens and expertise to this topic, so please feel free to reflect both on the history and historical examples, but also contemporary examples that we're seeing exhibited today.

So, Rachel, would you like to start us off with this question?

Sure. For me, I think that we know that whatever the antisemite needs the Jew to be is then how the Jew-- and it's an imaginary Jew-- is portrayed. So that's why we often talk about antisemitism as this conspiracy theory that continues to shift and mutate. It does not remain static. And it allows for the society that is promoting any form of Jew hatred to ultimately not deal with its own internal issues, but rather other and point in order to blame, to scapegoat, to sidestep whatever those challenges actually are.

And this is why the Jew can be negatively portrayed as the consummate capitalist in this money-hungry, greedy, nefarious way, or the Jew could be this very problematic socialist communist type of entity. So too militaristic, too pacifistic, whatever you need. And the antisemites have figured this out pretty quickly that rather than actually focus on their own particular issues, they're going to distract from them and say, look over here. Look at what the Jew is doing.

So that's a piece of that puzzle. I will tell you that the organization I co-founded, Boundless, a few years ago, did some research with some data scientists from Memetica in which we were looking specifically at the ways in which individuals who came from an ideological, hard-right position were engaging and trying to pull over other folks from different identity communities. And Jew hatred, antisemitism was the entry point.

So whether or not they were on a channel, for example, on 4chan or 2chan, about misogynistic practices, hating women, they would say things like, well, you know, it's the Jews who encouraged women to have civil liberties. It's the Jews who tried to get the women out in the workforce. But then if they wanted to focus on another injury, another particular group, then they would find a way to say, well, you know, it's the Jews who like the immigrants, and it's the Jews who say all the immigrants should come and be part of this melting pot society.

So Jew hatred is this gateway drug for all other forms of hatred. And it's very appealing to those who truly are interested in finding ways to not focus on the actual issues, but rather have them subverted in order to be able to use this form of hatred, i.e. antisemitism, and then from there, misogyny, racism, homophobia, Islamophobia, et cetera.

Thank you for starting us off. Jonathan, would you like to both share your own thoughts and expertise? But if you would like also to respond to how Rachel opened.

Yeah, I think I'll-- Rachel, I'm just going to go ahead and say a few things more specifically about the relationship between Judeophobia and social ills, kind of more directly to your question. And I guess I want to start off by talking a little bit about what my own work teaches about the underlying emotions that are the drivers in the generating of Judeophobia, Islamophobia, negrophobia, anti-Black racism, xenophobia.

But Judeophobia in particular, the underlying emotional driver, the theorists that I've looked at say, are driven in particular by fear and anxiety on the one hand and resentment and envy on the other hand. So we oftentimes talk about hatred. But I actually think hatred is a secondary, rationalized emotion. Just like when I've gone to my therapist to talk about my own anger issues, I've learned that my own issues with anger are, in fact, a secondary emotion that are masking deeper underlying issues.

So the first thing I want us to recognize is that Judeophobia oftentimes emerges in context of genuine social crisis. And if it's right to say that the heartbeat of that is conspiracy theories, conspiracy theories are oftentimes narratives for people who don't have the requisite educational tools to be able to specifically name what in fact is causing their sense of unease and fear and anxiety and resentment. And so they personalize it by projecting it onto the Jew in all the ways that Rachel sort of rehearsed for us.

And I think that if what we're talking about is what's going on today, that massive underlying-- the massive underlying generator is, in a word, globalization. Globalization is a complex, interconnected series of processes. It's one word for naming many things that are going on all at the same time that include things like the fact that it looks like the center of the world economy is shifting once again away from Europe and the United States back towards Asia, where it in fact was centered for most of human history.

It includes things like the development of mass media and social media and the fact that our capacity to move around the world is fundamentally transformed. And that means there's a lot more immigrants who are moving around the world. And globalization has a shadow side. And the shadow side of globalization is neotribalism.

So what we've seen in the last 20 years with this massive set of structural shifts that are taking place, that we can call globalization, is also a massive rise in neotribalism. And that's played out in the form of the rise of white Christian nationalism, in the form of the rise of militant Jihadism. And it's also impacted the shift within Israel. The turn towards harder forms of Jewish ethnonationalism. It's accelerated polarization and siloing. It is what underpins the ever-widening gap between rich and poor.

So in a word, I would say that a lot of what is underneath-- the earthquake that is shifting the very ground beneath our feet in this current moment is globalization. And the uptick in Judeophobia and other forms of racism is all being generated by these underlying structural shifts that are taking place in our world.

Well. Thank you. Elisha.

That's a lot to digest.

I know. I was just thinking, I'm like, I'm taking notes.

I mean, I'll maybe riff on something that Jonathan said, which I think was also present in Rachel's remarks, which is this concept of what are the drivers of antisemitism. And God forbid, we should ever have to explain it. That's their job, right? We're not here to explain why people are crazy and wanting to kill us.

But to the extent that it's envy, which is a phrase that Jonathan used, I just want to observe for a moment how misplaced that whole concept is. Not that every other misconception that drives antisemitism isn't also misplaced. But that one in particular, it really needs to get turned on its head because you think about the very first story that we open the Bible with, and before you know it, there's a murder.

And Cain and Abel, why is there a murder? They've each offered sacrifices to God. Abel's is accepted, but Cain's is not. And the amazing thing to me is before Cain even gets there, God is like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Just like, I just got to say something, Cain. I see what you're thinking. Don't do it. Don't do it. You have every chance to have the success that your brother had. You just have to try again. It's not a big deal.

I think there is at the core, some envy towards Judaism. And I think it's because we have conquered this incredible secret, that the stories and myths are based on. The Holy Grail not only granted access to Christ, it granted some form of immortality. And that's kind of what Judaism has created, the idea that you have this connection as a practicing Jew. And I want to talk about what it means to do Judaism as opposed to just identify as Judaism.

But if one actually observes the faith, and not in terms of any particular ritual, but this concept of being in a conversation with generations from thousands of years that preceded you and the conversation with the generations yet to come and the decisions that you make on what you do at your Shabbos dinner table, or the story that you tell to your kid when you have the Seder, and talk about the story of Passover and freedom from Egypt, how that is going to resonate through the generations and continue and unfold, that's the form of immortality that I believe that the Jewish faith has discovered.

And I think I understand why people might be jealous of it, because how dare we have this thing. We don't proselytize, but we live it, and we offer it to others in the choices that we make when we act as Jews.

So the whole concept that God tells Cain, you can also learn. You can also do this. It doesn't need to be a conflict. These gifts that we have that people are envious of for, we share them liberally. Look at the entire Judeo-Christian tradition. So I don't know. I'm just-- I'm reacting and riffing a little bit on that word "envy" that I heard from Jonathan. It made me have some of those thoughts.

Interesting. I'll have to sit and think about that. But the role of storytelling is certainly something that's very-- that I connect-- I connect personally to. I would like--

Conspiracy theories are stories, like just so we get that clear. Like, there is-- the one is positive, the one is negative. But they sit side by side.

I love how-- I love how this book-- can you guys see my camera? Does it work? Oh, well--

No.

No, it doesn't. It's too blurry. This is the David Nirenberg book on Anti-Judaism. And I love how he starts right out of the gate with Egypt as saying, oh, the Jews? Yeah, we kicked them out. They sucked. The ability to spin that story. And our liberation is there. They kicked us out.

Stories are incredibly powerful. I mean, I think that is something that our students recognize. They're so powerful that they're very hard to undo and to retell and to shift, which going back to Rachel, these emerging and re-emerging myths and stereotypes that we see. Those stories are powerful.

And so let's-- I'd like to shift in. I mean, Jonathan, you actually-- maybe you'll pick up this question because in your remarks to the last question, you talked about various forms of hatred. And so I'd love for you to sort of start us off by situating antisemitism into this larger issue of racism in the 21st century. What are those connected? Where's the connective tissues, I think, you talked about. But then also, where's the divergence? So maybe you can start us there.

Yeah, it's a really big-- it's a really big question. I think that one of the things that I'm really interested in as an intellectual historian, as a historian of ideas, are the very categories that we've got for how we think about these issues, OK. Because I think these categories like racism, like antisemitism, like race. These are actually entire interpretive frameworks that shape how we come to see the world.

So learning something about the history of these categories can be very informative in this regard. So I want to talk a little bit about the history of the category of racism very briefly, and about the history of the category of race. And when I do so, what you should hear is that very clearly, these various forms of-- that I mentioned, Judeophobia, Islamophobia, negrophobia, xenophobia are interlinked. They each, of course, have distinctive trajectories, but I'm going to just talk about some of the overlaps that are clear in the categories themselves.

So the very term racism is coined really only around the beginning of the 20th century. And it's popularized for the first time as a term in the 1930s. So when "racism" was first used, it was used explicitly to talk about this systematic world view that the Nazis had that underpinned their version of the racial state. It's only in the post-Holocaust period, given the devastation of the Holocaust, that initiatives were developed, including in places like UNESCO, for example, to debunk the very category of race, that it's applied more globally. And then obviously, with the development of the civil rights movement and the anti-colonial movement, it's developed more to focus on anti-Black racism and other racisms.

And so from the beginning, in terms of thinking about racism, certainly anti-Black, anti-Jewish, and other racisms were interlinked. And that begins to split off around the 1960s or so for a number of different reasons. When it comes to the category of race, that term is first coined in the 16th century. It's a Spanish term. Comes from [SPANISH]. And it was explicitly articulated in the immediate aftermath of the Spanish Inquisition and the development of laws in the Spanish Inquisition called the limpieza de sangre laws, or blood purity laws, that were developed explicitly to discriminate against those conversos or who were negatively called Marranos, those Jews who had converted to Christianity, as a way of excluding them from all of these social positions and social institutions that they were now able to assimilate into for the first time, since there was no longer the barrier of their Jewishness in the way.

So blood purity, 16th century. This is the period in which Spain is the leading imperial power in the world. You have the beginnings of the development of a shift in the slave trade towards Africa as the source of slavery in the world, and then the larger development of European colonization. And then a little bit later, the development of nation-states.

So within the two-- and let me go back to the Spanish Inquisition, which was the cauldron of all of this. It wasn't only Jews that were forcibly expelled from Spain, it was Muslims as well, right, in 1607 specifically. So my point is that if you really want to understand the very like baseline categories of what is race, where does it come from, what is racism, when did that term get applied, we're talking about an entangled history that ultimately encompasses an overlap between the history of Jews, Blacks, Muslims, foreigners, outsiders.

So for me, while there may be some differences in the kinds of stereotypes, for example, that tend to stigmatize these different groups and that distinctiveness can be important, the overlaps and interconnections between the two are built into the very categories that we've got to name what it is that we're trying to understand.

Thank you. I think that this-- Facing History would call it the universal and the particulars. And we really help our students and teachers navigate that dance that I think that you-- how you ended your comments on. I think that that's really so critical and so important that we are able to navigate the particulars as we talk and discuss the universal and the connections. And Rachel, I'm wondering if you can add to this question and bring in your voice now.

Sure. I appreciate, Jonathan, you situating the idea of race and racism within a historical context. I think history deeply matters here. I think the way in which we have seen this intersect explicitly around Jews and Jew hatred is very clear in terms of this idea of Jews not being pure of Aryan blood, for example.

And you see a racialization process, where it's no longer just fear or hatred of Jews or those who practice Judaism because of their religion, but it's that racialization process that is thrust upon. And Jews can never be Aryan. They can never be German. They are always going to be the Easterners, the Orientals, the Semites.

And so therefore, there is again that othering, whatever the antisemite needs the Jew to be. I think what is very complicated in for sure, the American landscape-- I can't speak for global society here, but in the American landscape, Jews are often perceived as being part of the white majority.

And I can tell you that where I look at the history of some of these issues of racism and antisemitism, I understand in Charlottesville in 2017, when you have individuals chanting "Jews will not replace us." That's because they are very concerned, and Jews are not white. And then you've got this perception by others who say Jews are white. And this is also a whole history that's worth thinking through and truly and exploring about when is this idea of whiteness. And it's not just for Jews, but it's in the context of an immigration story for this country.

The Irish and the Italian also become white at a certain point, just like the Jews become white. And that's really a transitioning process that's going to happen in the 1950s in the American story. And at the same time, there is a deep desire by far too many people who just want to create very simplistic, superficial narratives, and they don't want to actually think through historical frameworks.

And so what you see is, if Jews are deemed to be white, they are deemed to be powerful. They are deemed to be privileged. They are also very often deemed to be the oppressor because, again, we have a very simplistic framework around this. And so if the white Jew is powerful and the oppressor, by extension, Israel is the white colonialist imperialist outpost that is seeking to harm and displace a darker skinned people, i.e. the Palestinians.

That is way too simplistic of a narrative. It is completely and factually problematic, and it flattens so much complexity and nuance. And that's part of the challenge, because here in the framework of America-- I'm going to say something that is not going to be deemed politically correct, but we have an obsession with the race conversation.

Now, appropriately, there's a history and a legacy of racism that has to be dealt with in this country. But what it means is that very often racism and the issues of race are transposed onto every other issue in the world. And this is no different in that way.

Thank you. I'm going to ask Elisha to respond to a different question, if that's OK. I'm monitoring the time. I want to make sure we have some time for the audience, for participant questions. But Elisha, can you speak to how do you see antisemitism, racism, and other forms of hate contributing to the fragility of democracy? This is such an important question, and perhaps you could share some of your thoughts on this.

I mean, our enemies always attack where we're weakest. And that's written pretty broadly. Right now, we're in a world where the machinery of democracy is kind of changing a little bit. The concept of the press as this very valuable estate, compromised. Social media, now you have the town square-- compromised. You see clear evidence that whether it's Russian bots or whether it's China's algorithms through TikTok, in every possible way, advantage is trying to be sought. And I think the enemies of democracy are trying to capitalize on this in every way they can.

And do I think it's that we're the only target? Absolutely not. Are we collateral damage? Not quite, either. We're a target among many. So I think that's just the nature of the game with our changing institutions and our changing landscape right now. I think that's where the battle is.

Thank you. I'm-- I'd like to ask one other question before we move to audience questions. And if you haven't posted your question, this is the time to do it. But we're-- I'd like to bring in one other voice, Debbie Lechtman, a writer and educator who also wrote on the idea that we began with. We began talking about this canary in a coal mine.

But she responds that often antisemitism is referred to as this canary in a coal mine, the first telltale sign that a society is deteriorating. But she says, here's the thing. Antisemitism is wrong because it hurts Jews, not because it might eventually hurt someone else. Jews are just as deserving of caring and sincere allyship as any other marginalized group.

I'd love before we go to some other questions from the participants. Rachel, would you like to respond to this quote? To this piece about Jews. It's not just a warning sign.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, when I hear it and hear you read it, the idea here that antisemitism is wrong because it hurts Jews, not because it might eventually hurt someone else. To me, this is about the particularism of what Jew hatred is. So there's often a tendency in general by many of us to say, look, we take a phenomena and then we universalize it. And there can be value to extrapolating beyond the specific.

But I think it is very important to recognize that everyone has a particular-- that particular history, the particular lives, the particular challenges. And that particularism has to be understood in its uniqueness. Now, there can be aspects that allow for greater abstraction. But if you don't understand from where you come and the challenges around what one may have encountered because of their identity, then you ultimately don't actually understand their experience.

And what's really challenging, I think, around some of the conversation about antisemitism in the 21st century is that for far too many Jews who have been targeted, either because of their religion or because of their identity with the people, or because of their affiliation with Zionism and the Jewish state, there is a sense that you're supposed to believe everyone, but you don't have to believe the Jews because antisemitism died with the Holocaust. And now it's considered, quote unquote, "ancient history" by too many individuals. It feels very far away.

And we know that that's just not true. We know that it has continued to morph. We know that Jew hatred continues to exist. And we know that antisemitism doesn't live in a world isolated from other factors, intellectual ideas, societal pressures, and other forms of hatred and envy, as you heard from Jonathan in the very beginning. So it's in relationship with all of this. But Jew hatred is concrete and has to be understood in its specificity.

This question, if I can buzz in, reminds me a lot of the whole thesis of Dara Horn's book on People Love Dead Jews, which is, you know, the Jews are this-- like, 6 million died. Wow, we really need to think about what that means for the rest of the world so, like, that doesn't happen again to anyone else. Oh, wait, there this fledgling state of Israel that was born, and there's 7 million Jews there, and it's faced God knows how many wars aimed to completely crush it out of existence.

What we have to-- no, we can't think about them. I mean, come on, that's not what we're here for. So I think that fundamental thing is very well captured by that thesis. So I appreciate the question.

And can I just chime in here a little bit on this one too? Because--

I like it. We're buzzing in now. It's good.

Now we've got it going.

When I first heard this question, I'm like, duh, like, obviously. But then I realized that actually the question is speaking to an underlying emotional response on the part of Jews who feel lonely and abandoned, more so in the context of the post-October 7 Hamas assault and the ways in which the broader war has unfolded.

And I think Dara Horn has some insights in her book, unquestionably. But one of the things that she's a part of are really prominent Jewish voices that emphasize all the time that the Holocaust is unique. Israel is unique. It's the only democratic state in the Middle East. And antisemitism is different from all other racisms in really important ways.

Deborah Lipstadt says the same thing. Bari Weiss says the same thing. This is part of the problem. Part of the problem is Jews are constantly taught to articulate their understanding of antisemitism as if it is unique rather than part of an entangled history. And so that's one thing, that internal Jewish conversation and the ways in which it's contributing to the abandonment of the Jews.

The other really important thing, just to tack back to what Rachel was saying about the ways in which Israel-Palestine is reduced to the American Black-white binary narrative, that she talked about oppressor-oppressed, privileged and powerful and powerless and all of those dynamics. That's another way in which Jews-- there's a splitting off of people of color and Jews, on the other hand, who are part of whiteness, dominance, oppression, privilege.

And I want to suggest that this is part of a longer-term strategy for the disruption of the central role that Jews have played in anti-racist coalitions, going back to the beginning of the 20th century. And that one of the things, in fact, that racisms do always is divide and conquer, is to pit racialized subjects against one another. And in a whole manner of different ways, part of what is going on at present as well is the splitting up, the fracturing, the fragmentation, the polarization of a broader anti-racist coalition that is committed to the fight against racism in all of their forms, including antisemitism.

I think that there's-- Elisha, you were just-- let me ask-- let me ask a question from the audience because I think it picks up on this. And then, Elisha, maybe you can use this question to also respond in the way you were about to.

Because there's a question-- this participant writes, "people tend to care about things that affect them directly. One way to motivate people to stand up to antisemitism is to help them understand that it has a flow-on effect to them. How would you explain to a class of 14-year-olds-- 14-year-old students. What is their skin in the game?"

What would-- what do you say? How that interconnectedness. I don't know. Elisha, does that-- does this open up an opportunity for you to respond? Can you link what you were-- what you were about to say?

No, what I'd say was totally different. But I can take 5 or 10 seconds and think about it.

[LAUGHTER]

Let me just be super quick, and then we'll tack back to you. It's just-- I don't know if the questioner is using that title "skin in the game" intentionally, but there's a really very well-known article by Eric Ward, who's an African-American, who very clearly shows that at least in terms of like hard right, explicitly neo-Nazi, neo-Confederate white supremacy, that its scaffolding is built out of Judeophobia and antisemitism. So, you know, we all have skin in the game.

Thank you.

Look, I think the way to talk about-- you asked specifically, I think, about the Israel-Palestine conflict and how to talk about it with 14-year-olds who might--

Oh, sorry. No, it actually was about-- I can read the question again. I mean--

I saw the question pop up, and I saw some of that in there, but--

Yeah, there's a question. This specifically is how to encourage 14-year-olds to respond to antisemitism in a way that helps them understand that they have skin in the game, as Jonathan quoted.

Look, I think if you're talking to-- first of all, it might not be the same exact message to a Jewish 14-year-old or an ally who's 14. I mean, I would say that, to start with the ally, one of the things that I find most powerful that I've seen allies do is simply show up and express curiosity. You have to remember that as part of this process in the 1950s that Rachel alluded to, where Jews were desperately actually trying to be a little bit less Jewish and be a bit more American, that was a very conscious effort on the urbanized Jewish populations.

Having an ally come in and say, well, like, actually, what does it mean to be Jewish? And I think that there's a fair amount of Jews that we'll all know who'd be like, whoa, actually, I don't know. Let me do a little research here. What does it mean? What does Shabbat look like? What does a holiday look like? What's kosher? What are the core principles of Judaism that activate it? What does it mean to live an ethical life according to Judaism?

That's an incredible opportunity. So when allies ask questions, often the Jew that they're going to ask a question to is really getting an incredible opportunity, because they're not going to be as defensive about actually answering the question. It's going to be more of a good-faith exercise.

The story that I'll tell about teenagers responding to the antisemitism that's going on in the world. My own son at one point was like very distant. He'd had his bar mitzvah. He was totally checked out of Jewish things, was not really so interested. But October 7 was a little bit of a wake-up call for him. And he put on his yarmulke the next day and went to school on the subway system, and like my jaw dropped. I'd never seen him do something like that before.

I think the instinct is there. I think young people, as they understand just how precious what we have actually is and how under attack we are. I think that there's an instinct there that one can tap into and foster and ask questions and encourage the curiosity.

The point that I really wanted to make circles back, though, to where I began this entire hour, which was this talking about the Soviet Union as the bully. I think Jonathan did an excellent job laying out for us where the concepts of race were introduced. But if you want to look for the fingerprints on where did this whole concept of Jews are white, Palestinians are Black come from, where did that big lie originate? It really started in the '50s with the Soviets, and the ultimate "Zionism is racism" resolution in 1975.

That didn't come out of nowhere. In the same way that my father was working for decades, since he published The Jews of Silence, to talk about Soviet Jewry, well, the Soviets were working on "Zionism is racism" as a way to deflect criticism of themselves for how they treated the Soviet Jews, but also as a response to America. They were very into pointing out America's underbelly, its racism, its experience that it was having with Jim Crow all the way through in the 20th century, all of those problems.

So the Russians were always on attack. And to do that, they attacked America with claims of racism. And they attacked Israel, America's ally in the Middle East, culminating with "Zionism is racism." So the fingerprints on this whole narrative are very visible to be seen.

Yeah. I would just add for those who are interested, they should listen to or read the writings of Izabella Tabarovsky, specifically on what Elisha is talking about. We need people to have more education to understand the ways in which the Russians and then the Soviets actively engage in a massive disinformation campaign before we ever used that terminology with very clear intent. And that intent has long-term implications that normalizes various mutations of Jew hatred.

Thank you.

And just to jump in one-- just one very simple point. Show 14-year-olds pictures of Jews. They don't all look like the people on this screen. OK? Half the people in Israel, half the population, I might call Arab Jews. They are-- they are Jews of color. That is true of the French Jewish community. That's the largest community left in Europe. Some-- at least 15% of American Jews, likewise.

So partly you can understand the skin in the game if you understand something about the spectrum of what Jews actually look like. So you can begin the conversation with, what is a Jew? And then what is the abstract image of the Jew that comes up when you're just first-- we first use that word. And let's talk about the differences, because they're very likely going to be big differences. And then it becomes an opportunity to explore where those stereotypes about Jews come from.

Can I say one more thing, Leora? I know you want to wrap, can I-- I'm begging you. One last thing.

Sure. Yeah.

So here's the last thing I would say about that 14-year-old. And it's the language of Facing History, which you have to teach every child, way before they're 14, to be upstanders. Bystanders is not an option. Just full stop. And the only way I know how to do this is I don't care what your religion is, what your ethnicity is, what nationality you come from. What I care about is that when you see anyone engaging in a form of bigotry, prejudice, and discrimination, how you call in or call out depends on the moment, but it is an upstander responsibility.

Jews don't solve antisemitism alone. People of color don't solve issues of racism alone. LGBTQ community does not solve homophobia alone. And we are way too divided in this country. And we have to find ways to build bridges, to humanize, and to absolutely learn it is our responsibility to be good neighbors.

Maybe that's actually-- I have two minutes before I have a responsibility to wrap this up, and I think I'm going to end. I always-- in Facing History, we talk about safely in and safely out. And I think that I have a responsibility. We have a responsibility to end this evening with a little hope. And maybe, Rachel, that your last message was a bit of hope.

But what in this moment-- and literally this is headline right now. One thing, what is giving you hope in your work on combating antisemitism right now? This is a fire round. Maybe, Jonathan, what's giving you hope?

I want to echo what Rachel said. Like, Facing History gives me hope. But I'll say beyond that, all those people who are articulating a third narrative, the narrative that goes beyond the binaries, beyond the polarization, that is attentive to nuance, to historical depth, and that is attentive to the humanity of each and every one of us. Those kinds of narratives are what we need now more than ever. Third narratives.

Thank you. Elisha, what brings you hope?

It's a-- we're always a new generation, making new decisions. And when I sit down and I study Talmud as part of the Daf Yomi cycle, and yesterday morning or two mornings ago, there's this incredible passage talking about, well, there's a biblical verse that says the sins of the fathers are visited upon the sons. And one rabbi says, well, no, that's only if the sons are repeating the sins of the fathers. And then it says, ah, but there's a passage that says, the sins of my brother will drag me down. And they say, no, that's only if you had the power to prevent them from sinning and you didn't act.

So this is a dialogue that is a very, very old dialogue. And the fact that we are still connected to those thousands of years that came before us, are still studying it, both in theory but also in practice as we talk about how to be in the world, that gives me a lot of hope.

Thank you. And Rachel, what brings you hope in your fight right now?

What gives me hope? I think for me is that I see the value of Jewishness as being countercultural. We preserve the dissenting opinion. We actually return to that dissenting opinion to continue to argue with it. We say, take a break from all technology. That's our day of rest.

Like, everything about this is countercultural. That's--> the value proposition that I think is so exciting and inspiring. And it's for me, very much part of a very real laboratory of what it means to live Jewishly, whether it's in the Jewish state or in diaspora communities. And it gives me a lot of hope because I think it allows for creativity, renewal, energy, enthusiasm, and a hell of a lot of resilience.

Thank you so much. Here's what brings me hope is that we have people working alongside Facing History & Ourselves to do this good work, to bring your voices to our classrooms, our teachers, our students, our communities. So I am-- all of you give me hope. And I want to express deep gratitude to all of you for taking the time.

To our three incredible speakers for sharing your knowledge and your voice, and your person with us this evening. And I want to thank everyone who's joined us for this hour of learning together. Thank you all, and we hope to see everyone again soon.

And before-- don't cut-- you can cut my camera, but don't cut Rachel's. I just want to comment on that sweatshirt. There's a deal brewing. May we all see the hostages return safely in the next 48 to 72 hours.

And peace in the region. Thank you all.

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