The following is a transcript of Episode 179 of the Identity/Crisis Podcast. Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Yehuda: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Identity/Crisis, a show from the Shalom Hartman Institute, creating better conversations about the issues facing contemporary Jewish life. I’m Yehuda Kurtzer, we’re recording on Friday, March 15th, 2024. This episode is dedicated to Dan Rubin, the best friend an institute can have. 

So in a few weeks on April 3rd, I have the honor of delivering the 2024 annual Robbins Collection Lecture in Jewish Law, Thought and Identity at the law school of University of California at Berkeley. I’m really excited about this and for a bunch of reasons. The first is that a lecture like this gives me an opportunity to shape and refine some big-picture thinking. After the events of the past few months, I could really use this kind of challenge. My topic is “Our Golden Age: American Judaism in Transition.” And I want to probe how American Judaism is going to make its way through this clear inflection point that we’re at, especially the late 20th century, and the many anxieties of the future which have been accelerating these past few years. I think if you just name two dates, January 6th and October 7th, you learn a lot about how fast circumstances seem to be changing in American Jewish life. 

But I’m also excited about this event because it feels like a capstone of over a decade and half of work by my colleagues and I at the Shalom Hartman Institute in the San Francisco Bay Area. Since 2010, I’ve traveled to the Bay Area maybe 30 or 40 times. We’ve run hundreds and hundreds of educational programs, conferences, and convenings in the various communities that make up the Jewish Bay Area. We have special relationships with many of the leading Jewish professionals as well as the lay leaders. We have a wonderful relationship with Berkeley itself. We have more program activity there in any other region and more Bay Area Jews on our board of directors than are represented by any other city. 

I’m probably not the best person to testify about this, but I do think that the Hartman presence has had significant effect in the Bay Area Jewish community, seeding ideas, fostering critical conversations, and building a more knowledgeable and resilient base of Jewish leaders. I’ve thought a lot over the years about what makes it click between the Hartman Institute and the Bay Area, and I have a few theories. One possibility relates to tech. I have a pet theory that Jewish communities mirror the values and behaviors of the dominant industry of the place that they’re located. I don’t know, I think it makes the Jewish community more receptive to innovation and thinking about the future. And I think Hartman Torah is oriented also towards that mindset.

Another theory is that Hartman pluralism is well designed for a Jewish community like the Bay Area that bucks every demographic norm. You can tell in the Bay Area that people want serious Judaism and serious content. They just often don’t want the strings attached. And that kind of model works for us too.

But I think the main reason why we’ve clicked is connected to the origin story of Jews of the Bay Area. If you ask any community leaders in the San Francisco area, they’ll tell you that proudly, Jews came to the Bay Area as part of the Gold Rush. In other words, just as it became a great American city. Unlike in other places in America, there was never a Jewish neighborhood. Jews have always been part of the civic and cultural makeup of the city for nearly 200 years.

And I found as a result, and without wanting to generalize too much, that this makes long-time Bay Area Jewish leaders a little different than their peers around the country. They’re maybe a little more comfortable in their place in the larger ecosystem of the community, a little less paranoid, a little more eager to engage in big questions. That’s been my experience, at least to date. 

This is why it’s a little jarring to get a darkly comic email from a friend of mine who saw the Berkeley lecture announcement and wrote to me, “Braving the storm at Berkeley. I’m impressed.” Another friend texted me to say that multiple friends had told her they were worried I wouldn’t be able to speak on campus. You understand why I find these messages and fears so at odds with what I’ve experienced in the Bay Area for so long. 

And look, I’m not ignorant and naive about the unique historical conditions of the Berkeley campus, a site of radical activism long before now. I’m not naive about the situation on a certain elite set of college campuses since October 7th. In fact, we’ve done several episodes on the issue. For what it’s worth, I’m also not that nervous. I’m not Israeli, and the title of my lecture doesn’t mention Israel, although it does take place via the Helen Diller Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies. If there are protests, I think it’ll make for a great follow-up episode and some killer social media posts. 

I guess I’ll just say I’m a little saddened by all of this and worried that we’re going to struggle to retrieve those special elements of American Jewish life and its amazing pockets of sanity even after the dust of all of this moment clears. There’s at least one person at Berkeley who has decided that nothing right now should be treated as business as usual and who has decided to act in a dramatically different way than he usually does to call attention to the upside-downness of the campus environment. 

Ron Hassner is a professor of political science. He teaches about international conflict and religion, and he is the faculty director of the Helen Diller Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies, and holds the Helen Diller Family Chair in Israel Studies. For over a week now, he has been staging a one-man protest about what he believes to be the university administration’s failure to protect students from anti-Semitism on campus. He has moved into his office and plans to stay there indefinitely. He looks well, although a bit unkempt. He plans to stay in his office until his demands are met. And you know what? We thought this podcast might be a good way to keep him company. 

Ron, thank you for coming on the show. This is not your usual MO. This is not how you usually operate as a thinker, as a teacher, and in fact, my sense is that you have not been particularly an alarmist in the past about campus anti-Semitism. What happens that stimulated your decision?

Ron: All true, Yehuda, and thank you for keeping me company. So I am the worst activist in the world. The first time I ever participated in protests, I swear this is true, was two weeks ago in San Francisco. There was a big march against antisemitism and my family and I showed up to that march like schlemiels. We brought no signs. We wore no t-shirts. We brought no flags. We’ve never marched before. We don’t do these things. We’re really a relatively apolitical family. I never ever, well, as best as I can, try not to bring politics into my lecture class. I’m a political scientist, so I study other people’s politics. It’s kind of important for me to keep my own politics in my pocket, again, as best as I can. 

So yes, you’re absolutely right. This is not my MO. But as we say in the good book, higiu mayim ad nefesh, there’s a limit to how much you can take. And things on this campus have been troubling. I will stand by what I’ve been saying in interviews for months and for years. This is one of the best campuses in the United States at which to be a Jewish scholar and student, academically speaking. We have the largest Israel Institute in the United States of America, the Helen Diller Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies. We have a fantastic center for Jewish studies. We have an amazing Hillel and a Chabad. We are the only university in the United States with its own museum, Jewish museum, I should say. The classes offered here are great. More than a thousand Berkeley students take classes about Israel every year. So academically speaking, within the ivory tower, this is a place of excellence.

Outside the ivory tower, in the plaza that surrounds campus or is at the heart of campus, there’s a different Berkeley and that Berkeley is a circus. It has always been a circus. It’s a place of protest. It’s where nude people stand and rant about the end of the world. It’s where students hand out flyers and they dance and play drums. It’s where hippies sit and smoke pot.

And about a month, a month and a half ago, a group of anti-Israel extremists blocked one of the main gates of our campus, put up all sorts of propaganda signs, which is fine. Propaganda’s legitimate. But also got in the way of students walking through, especially Jewish students. Almost sort of a kind of selectia, if you’ll pardon the word, where if you wear a Star of David or you’ve got a kippah on your head or you have Hebrew writing on your t-shirt, you get jeered at and surrounded and your photo’s taken. 

And the university did nothing because the university is smart and knows that most protests just go away if you leave them be. But two weeks later, these students escalated. There was a speaker on campus who was giving a talk about Israel. The audience was primarily Jewish. The lecture hall was attacked. They broke through the door. They smashed windows. They harmed students. They strangled a student. The police had to flee with the speaker and with the students through a tunnel to a nearby building. 

Terribly embarrassing for the university. Terribly embarrassing, I would think, for the protesters, who it is now clear are just violent antisemites, as often masking under the pretense of being Israel critics. The gate is still blocked. The speaker is coming back, although not as an official guest of the university, but just the same student group has invited the speaker back. He’s going to be here next week. And the students were deeply demoralized. 

And so I dragged a mattress into my office for two reasons. The minor reason is to push the administration to move a little faster. I know their heart is in the right place, but it’s a big sluggish bureaucracy. But the more important reason to sit in my office is for the students, to encourage them, to give them hope, to give them a place where they can come and talk, meet other students, and also to disarm their protests a little because the Jewish students, and there are many hundreds of them here, are getting restive and humiliated and frustrated.

Yehuda: What would, just on the technical side, what would be the set of changes or procedures that would result in you being able to finally go home and sleep in your own bed?

Ron: I sent the leadership of the university an email an hour before locking myself in with three requests, not demands, three requests. Number one, that the gate be cleared. And since I’ve come into the office, the gate has started opening up at certain hours of the day and then the students block it again and the university, they have ropes and chains across the gate. The university takes them down, they put it up again. It’s sort of a stupid game of cat and mouse. So I’m seeing some progress, but the gate, you know, every student needs to be free to walk across campus.

Second, that any speaker who’s booed away receive an apology from campus and be invited back. Every speaker, radical Palestinians, abortion rights activists, Israelis, Jews, Muslims, doesn’t matter. 

And my third request was that the university provide Islamophobia and anti-Semitism training to its staff. It is now optional and I requested that it be made mandatory because it seems that there’s tremendous ignorance even among campus staff about the state of antisemitism and how our students feel on this campus.

Yehuda: That’s a very loaded last request. The first one seems easy. 

Ron: No, the first one’s the hardest.

Yehuda: No, I just mean from a technical standpoint. If the university decides we are gonna keep the gate open, they keep it open, as opposed to building a whole industry of how you teach people anti-Semitism, which is also a political question, right? Of which choices you make in terms of how you teach anti-Semitism.

Ron: So oddly the opposite is true. My beloved colleague, Ethan Katz, who runs our Center for Jewish Studies is a renowned scholar of Jewish history, created on this campus a while ago, I’d say one or two years ago, an antisemitism teaching initiative. You can find it online, and people who want to support it are welcome to do that. He’s been teaching, they produced videos, they go to local high schools and shuls and colleges. That’s in place, and it is already being offered to staff. But it’s just not required. 

So all that’s required there is a little addendum that says, you know that training in anti-racism, sexual harassment, all these other things, please, you should also take this training. And not just anti-Semitism, but also Islamophobia. It’s the first request which the university is having the hardest time with, because it is extremely reluctant to physically engage students who are blocking a gate.

It would require police, it would require dragging them away in handcuffs. Of course they should have done this a month ago. We now understand that the people there are violent bigots and not just protesters. So they should have been dragged away. But I understand the university in its wisdom wants to be very level-headed, is negotiating with them, I think is garnering the police necessary for executing on this, has tried to dismantle it multiple times unsuccessfully. So we will see.

Yehuda: I’m going to try to formulate this question, which is the Columbia campus, which shut down Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace for at least a little while, I think through the remainder of the semester, they did so basically on procedural grounds. They said to try to avoid the perception that they were shutting down speech, they basically said you have broken university rules by blocking entryways, blocking gates, creating a dangerous situation on campus, whcih then you can say, in the reverse, that to clear the gate, for instance, at Berkeley is not trying to put hands on students. It’s to actually protect free passageway for other students. 

Why do you suppose some universities are more capable of articulating that kind of procedural concern? Because I suspect what the university is scared of in the University of California is signaling in some way that their thumb is on the scale on one side of the issue of Israel-Palestine. Well, what’s getting in the way of what feels like a very obvious procedural thing, which is, I’m sorry that we have to drag you away in handcuffs, but if you’re blocking access to a publicly available thruway, you’ve just broken the rules of the university.

Ron: Correct. So several differences. A Berkeley is a public university. The best in the world I should note. Though I’m unbiased for sure. The second reason is Berkeley is the birthplace of free speech. So free speech here is really very important and it’s very important to emphasize, nothing of what I’m doing has anything to do with Israel or Gaza or Hamas. This is really about Jews and anti-Semitism.

The issues are intertwined of course, but the emphasis here is not on protesting Palestinian students or protesting anti-Zionism. This is really about how Jewish students are treated. There are many opportunities to protest on campus. You don’t have to strangle Jewish students to get that idea across. You don’t have to break university rules, and they’re breaking many university rules explicitly. 

I’m also not sure that barring student association is a particularly effective tool. You bar them and then they come back or they change a name or they do it illegally but without the cover of a university organization. It’s clear who the organizations on our campus are. It is not clear who the individuals are because they’re cowards and so they cover their face. I don’t know of a Jewish protester on my campus who’s ever seen the need to cover their face because the Jewish students protesting here stand behind their beliefs. 

But the students who are acting violently and are breaking university rules don’t want to be identified, they don’t want to be arrested. So that makes it hard. The university is smart in not wanting Berkeley to become the symbol of the Palestinian struggle in the Bay Area. You’ll see it when you come, if the gate is blocked, and half of the time now it is and half the time it isn’t, you’ll see three bored students, none of which of course are Palestinian, sitting distracted on chairs next to the gate playing on their phones. 

So, you know, it’s not exactly sort of a mass protest and it will fizzle with time. I’m certainly going to outlast them because I’m stubborn as a mule. 

Yehuda: And you have tenure. 

Ron: So, I’m not going to, I’ve got, well, they don’t need tenure, right? They’re not gonna get fired from anything. No, the issue is not tenure. The issue is I have an espresso machine. That’s the key. I have an espresso machine and I have more food than I have ever seen in this office. There are more matzah balls coming in this afternoon for Shabbat than I’ve eaten in my entire life. And the atmosphere here is festive and joyful and communal and optimistic.

Yehuda: Incredible. 

You know, you’re being very careful, and I think rightly, both as a probably as a scholar and because of the particular nature of your discipline, to mark the difference between this is not about Israel-Palestine, it’s obviously it’s about protecting Jewish students on campus, but it’s hard not to map the two things together. I watched another interview that you had done actually some months ago, not before this protest started, in which you said, you know, you said to the interviewer, whenever there’s Middle East conflict breaks out, then students respond, and then you corrected yourself and said that’s not true. 

There could be Yemeni-Saudi conflict and it has no ramifications on this campus. It’s only when there’s violent conflict between Israelis and Palestinians and it gets mapped here. So I guess I want to just push on like, I don’t want to ask the dumb question of well, why is that the case? I know a little bit about why that’s the case on this campus. 

But how do you hold to that line of what, this is not really about Israel, it’s entirely about protecting Jewish students on campus, when presumably, you know, the difference between this form of antisemitism and many in the past is that usually antisemites are proud that they’re antisemites. Pro-Palestinian students are not claiming to be antisemites. They don’t accept that designation about themselves. They would say, no, this is not about persecuting Jewish students. It’s about standing up for Palestine. So talk through that, the desire to keep those things separate and where it gets too blurry to make it separate.

Ron: Right, so because I’m talking to your audience, I can speak in somewhat more sophisticated terms than I would if I were just giving a talk to undergraduates. I know with confidence that antisemitism and anti-Zionism are two sides of the same coin. If you’d like, and we can talk about this further, I’ve even become more stringent in my claims. I think anti-Zionism is the worst form of antisemitism. I think it’s anti-Semitism taken to its ultimate logical extreme. 

That doesn’t mean that you can’t protest one side of the coin without protesting the other, so here’s a metaphor. You and I know that there’s a tremendous overlap between xenophobia and racism, but it’s not a logical necessity. It’s simply that many people who hate strangers hate them for racial reasons, and many people who hate people of other races target foreigners. One could theoretically be a xenophobe, who’s merely concerned with unemployment, or everybody should have a green card and pass through passport control. 

In practice, those things are difficult to distinguish, but I think it’s entirely possible for me to say, I’m here in my office right now because of Jewish students only. I’m not here because of Israeli students. I’m not here because of the IDF or Gaza. I have hosted in this office, first of all, not just Jewish students, but students from all backgrounds. And not just Zionist students. JVP students sat in my office a couple of nights ago for two hours in what turned out to be a fascinating conversation between them and Zionist students, a conversation they’d never had before. I sat in the background, I listened. This is about Jewish students regardless of their views on Israel. 

The fact that the attackers cannot distinguish between criticism of Israel and attacks on Jews is unfortunate and that is why I think education is important. So they screwed up. Their posters, their messages, though propaganda-like in nature and false, are entirely legitimate. Many people conduct false propaganda on this campus, including people who claim that, you know, Jesus Christ is about to return in four days and, you know, we will all be resurrected. You’re welcome to hang these all over the Berkeley campus. We have a venerable tradition of protest. They started slipping when they got in the way of students of Jewish appearance and students who they knew to be Jewish leaders, they slipped more when they physically confronted Jewish students. And when they started hitting them and attacking them and breaking glass and threatening them, they crossed a very simple line. 

I mean, this is clearly now, this is not an appropriate way of saying, you know, even the moronic claim, I would, you know, I want Israel to not, I can’t quite phrase it because it’s so stupid, I want Israel to not exist or I’m going to wish that Israel were never made, I don’t quite know how to say that. Even that can be expressed in ways that do not involve attacking Jewish students.

So I’ve got to draw that line. I think that’s quite important. I have a different beef with unsophisticated Israel criticism and anti-Zionism, but that’s not why I’m here right now.

Yehuda: That’s not gonna make you lock yourself in your office. So that makes sense to me. It’s the crossover from criticism of Israel, even trench and stride, anti-Semitic criticism of Israel, which can manifest a whole bunch of ways, then mapping it, associating it with students who are Jewish and who just happen to be Jewish, and certainly the violence problem. 

What happens if the students are more careful, and they only associate their very strident attacks with students who are Israeli or who are identifying Jewishly in ways that identify them with the state of Israel. And I’m not trying to be, I’m trying to figure out like what were the lines of where we would consider these behaviors to be worthy of condemnation because they’re bad prima facie or worthy of condemnation because we see ourselves on the other side of the issue.

Ron: That’s a great question. And because you’re trying to pose a hard question, I cannot escape by giving you the legal answer. You’re not interested in, well, depends, are they breaking rules or not. And if they break a rule, it doesn’t matter so much why they’re doing it, but they need to be reprimanded, right? So hitting any student, regardless of your reason, not cool. Trespassing on university property, breaking doors, threatening police officers, not cool. I don’t care if you’re doing it because you’re a flat earth theorist or a vaccine denier, right? It makes no difference. 

You’re asking me a harder question than that and that is exactly where does one draw the line and that’s hard. So here’s a real-life example. A year ago, our campus slid down the dark path towards bigotry when law students in the law school banished from their organizations all speakers who are “Zionist.” Now you and I know that that’s code for Jews.

And I said to those students, you know, this is the equivalent of you banishing from your organizations all students who are feminists. We hear you say that and we know that you mean women. Or if you banish from your organizations all students who did not support Black Lives Matter, you know, we would know that your main target of attack is African Americans. It’s a dog whistle. 

The dean of the law school, Erwin Chemerinsky, who is Jewish and Zionist and is a wonderful scholar and one of the smartest people you’ll ever meet, and I hope you will meet him, said, this is despicable. It’s disgusting. It’s bigoted. And it’s legal. And I’m not gonna do anything about it. I’m gonna talk to them. I’m gonna express to them/ Publicly he wrote op-eds and he met with them and he said, you know, I’m disgusted by what you’re doing. But you’ve drawn the line very carefully.

My hope in part is that students watching this observe and notice that the line is very finely drawn. There’s a pilpul here that is unsatisfying from a propaganda point of view. So again, if I hate women, if I’m a misogynist and I say to you, you who don’t, I don’t hate women. I only hate feminists, you’ll think, you know, I’m done with Ron Hassner, I’m not talking to him anymore, right? But I’ll say, I don’t understand you, why are you upset, I haven’t said anything against women. This is too fine a line to write. And so, yeah, but would I then have locked myself in my office? I might have, but then I would have had a different conversation with people. I would have said, I’m not locking in my office in a protest against antisemitism, I’m locking in myself in my office in a protest against anti-Israel bigotry. As I say to students who ask me, not all Israel critics are antisemites. Some of them are just assholes.

Yehuda: Ron, I’m gonna ask you an absurd question.

Ron: Great.

Yehuda: And in some ways an obscene one. And it goes to your second demand, I’m sorry, you said request, not demand, about how the university should treat invited speakers to campus. And by the way, here, I’m informed on this by Jon Haidt and Greg Lukianoff and their approach to free speech, which is actually if students show up, protest, and even yell, for a short piece of a person who shows up and then they quiet down and leave, that actually is kind of a best case scenario. I think I’m quoting them correctly, which is they were able to be heard, but they ultimately didn’t prevent the other viewpoint to be heard. 

And what we’re trying to, it sounds like what you’re trying to avoid is actually chased off of campus and made to a place where a person can’t be heard. So here’s my obscene example, and I’m gonna take back the analogy as soon as I say it. Part of the reason you and I would say that when an Israeli speaker is chased off of campus, is not because we are purist about free speech, it’s also because we believe that the allegations against Israel are false.

Ron: No, I disagree. I am a purist about free speech.

Yehuda: Well, okay, so would we, so now here’s my absurd analogy. In the midst of the Darfur genocide, if a representative of the Sudanese government showed up on the Berkeley campus, would it be fair play for the students to chase that person off of campus and say, your voice cannot and should not be heard during a moment when we feel that you’re culpable for this kind of war crime?

Ron: So first of all, as someone who studies Israel and holds a chair in Israel Studies, I will confirm what you said, it is an absurd comparison. 

Yehuda: I know. And I take it back.

Ron: And the word genocide is not relevant to what we’re talking about, thankfully. 

Yehuda: But it is relevant because that’s the allegation. That’s the allegation that critics, that the,

Ron: Yeah, and it’s an irrelevant allegation. Okay, yes, yes. Well, let’s go with the metaphor. Yes, of course you should listen to him. If Adolf Hitler came to my campus to talk about the causes of the Holocaust, I’m not saying we should go and listen, not you and me, although I’m a little curious. But everybody should be allowed to speak and the most important people who need to speak are the bigots, the liars, the propagandists. We need to know who they are, we need to know what they think. 

I’ll be oblique about this but I’ll say broadly, Jewish students have invited to campus speakers, in the distant past and in the recent past, who I would not have invited. Because they’re not serious people. I want to listen to scholars, I want to listen to decision makers, I want to listen to people who have responsibility or authority. You know, just clowns who come here and tell me about how wonderful Israel is and how, you know, everybody who criticizes Israel is insane. I’m not a fan of those, but everybody, including those people, should be allowed to speak. You don’t have to attend. You don’t have to like it. Yes, stand outside. I’m not a fan of screaming. I believe you’re better heard if you make a persuasive argument. Screaming suggests to me that you’re out of good arguments. God help you if you interrupt. I want to know who the bigots are. 

By the way, Yehuda, just to take your absurd example a step further, I don’t believe that antisemitic graffiti should be erased. I think it should be framed. Framed and an explanation added and an arrow pointed to it and everybody should be made to walk by and see it. I’m actually really worried that when antisemitic graffiti goes up on campuses the first thing the campus does is remove it so that Jew haters can say antisemitism? I’ve never seen any antisemitism. Here it is! And every incoming student in their first week of campus will be walked by the corner of First Avenue and Second Street, point to the anti-Semitism and say, this is what America looks like in 2024, these people exist. 

Here is the representative of the government of Sudan, listen to how he speaks about his fellow Sudanese people so that you understand what evil looks like. That’s my view. Maybe that’s easy for me to say, so very progressive students will say that I have the privilege of living without fear and therefore I can afford to have dangerous speech aimed at me because I know that I’m safe.

Well of course I know that I’m safe, I’m a Zionist. There’s a place I can go to where I know I will always be safe no matter what. I’m a member of a minority that is, despite everything we’d hoped for, very clearly being attacked. That minority is scared. I think they need to grow a spine and in fact part of the extreme progressive movement’s goal is to create a generation of spineless, fearful individuals who want to run away from speech that’s uncomfortable. 

I’m a liberal with a big L. Speech is good. All speech is good and needs to be heard and needs to be said and needs to be pointed to so that you can say there goes a bigot. There goes an Israel hater. Hear him talk. Louis Farrakhan, bring it on. Bring it on. I hope Jewish students will not scream while he speaks. I hope that they and their allies will listen when Louis Farrakhan speaks so that they can hear what anti-Semitism sounds like in 2024.

Yehuda: I remember actually Farrakhan’s a good example because I remember that Farrakhan came to Yale at some point in the late 90s at the time. My brother was, I think he was the student head of the Hillel. And they spent a long time thinking about how should the Jewish community respond to the presence of Farrakhan in the Yale campus. And what they did was, and I’ve never actually seen other campuses do this, they didn’t protest, they didn’t make big, what they did is they created a massive Jewish festival in the middle of the quad while he was speaking. And it was their way of saying, we know that there are people who hate us, we’re gonna show up and be present and be visible without actually taking the lead from being on the defensive. 

Listen, if you’re gonna use Hitler as your example, then you’re good because at least you’re consistent. 

Ron: I try to be.

Yehuda: You went further than, right, you went further. And by the way, I think a comparable argument might be, or an additional argument might be, the whole premise of a university community that’s committed to speech is that once you have a set of stakeholders who are inviting somebody in because they want to hear it, that already makes it impossible to suggest that a voice can’t be heard. 

So in this particular case, once somebody has invited me to come speak or an Israeli speaker to come in, that there’s a constituency on the campus. So unless the university is willing to make rules of which constituencies are tolerable on its campus, once somebody has been invited in, they can’t be kicked out. 

Ron: Yeah, and you’ll note that my three demands are in tension with one another, unless one thinks hard about it, because on the one hand I’m saying, oh no, antisemitism, this is terrible, on the other hand I’m saying free speech for everybody, and on the third hand I’m saying speak to others about antisemitism. 

So on the face of it, so Ron, are you for freedom or are you against freedom? And the answer is, again, because I’m a liberal, I’m not afraid of words. I think words are always safe. I think words are always important, I think information is always good and I want to have more information rather than less. 

What I am protesting, and mind you protesting by means of action, not by means of speech, is actions against Jews. You may speak to Jews in any way you like, say what you want, I will never censor anti-Semitic speech. I will point to it, I will highlight it, I will reflect it back, I will mock you for it. But you cannot raise your hand and you cannot block with your body. And I’m doing that by means of action. 

Speech needs to be free and this campus and especially the current chancellor has an excellent reputation for protecting speech at tremendous financial cost. Like when Milo Yiannopoulos was chased off campus, then invited back and our campus became a fortress. I mean, there were thousands of police here. It costs our university millions, and the man is despicable, and I’m very, very glad the campus did that. Listen to a bigot. There goes the bigot.

Yehuda: Yeah, it might be when the history of this actually gets written. I wonder whether one of the turning points will be vis-a-vis the Jewish communities’ response to things like this. Do you remember when Ahmadinejad came to Columbia in the early 2000s? And do you remember that the Jewish communal response was, how dare the university invite Ahmadinejad to come speak and, right? 

Ron: That’s also speech. You can say, I wish he weren’t invited. I don’t like him.

Yehuda: But I think that has lingered in the pro-Israel position, which is actually, I think our community struggles with being very absolutist when it comes to anti-Israel speech and very eager for more liberalism when it comes to pro-Israel speech. And I think that was probably the turning point on that issue, at least on the campus that I’m nearby here.

Ron: Correct, if a Hamas representative comes to campus to speak, and that’s going to be disappointing and awful, you know, murderers, and he is booed off stage and must escape under police protection through a tunnel, and I bet he’s good with tunnels, I will demand that the university apologizes to him and invites him back. This is the last sacred vestige for conversation, for information, for speech. 

It’s absolutely crucial that it happened because how else will we know that Hamas are a murderous bunch of genocidal maniacs? It’s very easy then for somebody like Bibi Netanyahu to say, well, you know, I don’t know how bad these guys really are, after all, they’re taking our money and look, they’ve been very quiet for the last five years. Listen to them. They are telling you about their intentions. They’re conveying information to you. If you shut them up and are not listening, you won’t know. 

And I said the same thing to students in my office who had a very, very hard time talking to JVP students. I have a very hard time even listening to JVP students. And I said, listen to them. They are telling you what their plans are and that hairs on the back of your neck should stand up. Listen carefully and also, learn what counter arguments to bring to the next conversation, right? Don’t be caught off guard when they make some sort of twist in the argument. And the same is true for JVP.

Yehuda: So I guess I share with you the sense that words are essential. The liberal commitment requires us to always be in the business of persuasion and never to turn from persuasion to violence when we’re trying to create the, like you defeat the whole purpose. 

I actually read something amazing from Rabbi Moshe Feinstein about this in 1939 who said that what made Amalek Amalek was that instead of inquiring about the Israelites and the fact that they didn’t believe in the redemption, they just attacked first. He said, it’s a sign of weak arguments when people replace the capacity to argue with violence, the instinct of violence. It’s a beautiful idea. 

At the same time, Ron, you and I, all of our power, you as a professor, me and my line of work, derives from words. So we simultaneously want to argue that words can’t hurt people, that they can’t be dangerous in and of themselves, but they’re also a tool that we exercise as a means of using power. So I don’t, I don’t want snowflakes either. 

Ron: Can I just say how awesome it is to talk to you? I mean, I’m just like, why didn’t we talk earlier? Yes, yes, you’re right, you’re right, you’re right. And I’ve…

Yehuda: So, how do we be honest about the fact that we want other people to have spines, and at the same time, we know that we have the power through persuasion, because we’re actually pretty good at using those words.

Ron: I did not grapple with that dilemma until a week ago. Until a week ago I held those two contradictory ideas in my head. I spoke to students under the impression that I was being persuasive. There were hints all along that I was not being persuasive and I can give you some examples as I’ve said to others before if my arguments about the Middle East were in any way persuasive, 350 Berkeley students a year would make Aliyah, and not a single one does. 

I present my students with information and I think if I’ve kept to my word, they themselves decide whether they’re going to act on those words or not. They very rarely remember what I say, even the next semester. 

I’ve actually tried this. The students who take my second class all have to take my first class. And so in the middle of the second class I ask them some very simple questions about the first class. Nothing, they remember nothing. Two months later, the most dedicated students don’t remember the names of places, dates, events, theories. They remember nothing other than the fact that they enjoy being in a classroom with me and maybe a certain affinity towards reading a particular kind of book, watching a particular kind of movie, having a particular kind of debate. 

I resolved that tension in my head, Yehuda, a week ago when for the first time in my life, I stopped talking and took action.

And I now understand, having sat in this office for eight days, that wonderful as your podcast is, I’m told my lectures are okay, I think our power is very limited until we do physical things to actually change things. I think every cup of coffee I make in my office matters more than a lecture I give or a speech I make. 

I’ve become increasingly frustrated with my colleagues, who, you know, they want to write yet another pamphlet and sign yet another statement and speak to yet another opportunity. So I’m talking to you now because I’m enjoying it and I’m conveying, I think, useful information or some people will find it useful, but none of that matters. The only thing that matters is doing. Words are two steps removed from doing. I speak and maybe that influences how you think, probably not. And maybe how you think influences what you’re going to do, probably not. Two steps removed. 

There was a Jewish time, less than a hundred years ago, when Jews talked and talked and talked and talked and talked. They met and they exchanged and they signed and they agreed and they speechified and none of that mattered. The only thing that mattered was planting trees and tilling fields and building houses and moving your body from one place to another. 

I’m not afraid of words. Jews used to be afraid of words. Jews now have a country. They have leadership, they have borders, they have an army, they have a police force, they have confidence. This is why I say that anti-Zionism is the worst form of anti-Semitism. You can scare Jews and you can terrify them and if you’re lucky they’ll run from place to place. 

Anti-Zionists are the only ones who want to ensure that you have nowhere to run. Right? They want to lock the last door, they want to trap you in the corner, they want to do you in. So in my mind, in my mind it’s action first and foremost. I mean this is Marxism. I’m conveying the basic principles of Marxism. Philosophers have spent generations of taling and it’s time that we act. 

Yehuda: If it is in fact the case that your argument that actions are more powerful than words, then the real reason why you should feel that anti-Zionism threatens the Jewish condition is because Zionism is the material and embodied rendering of Jews acting in the world in ways that are totally different than other expressions of Jewish civilization. 

And in fact, so much of the intellectual foundations of anti-Zionism are about returning Jews to an almost pre-embodied condition, a deterritorialized condition. That’s George Steiner’s, you know, we are the people of the book, and that means that our homeland is the text as opposed to an actual homeland. So it’s not just that you don’t have a place to go, it’s that you’re actually trying to turn Judaism to being something that is connected to beautiful, spiritual ideas as opposed to prose, crude actions. 

And Ron, at the same time, here’s the book that’s sitting on my desk right now. I’m going to hold it up so you can see at least. This is The Zionist Idea by Arthur Hertzberg. Just happens to be sitting here, and I can’t shake the belief.

Ron: I have it on my shelf, Hertzberg’s book, yep.

Yehuda: And this is probably also still why you’re in this line of work, that it’s true. Zionism would have been a really interesting project of the shelf, like most books in Jewish history, if people hadn’t actually picked up and turned it into an actual political program, moved to the Middle East, planted trees, created a civilization. But the ideas still matter.

Ron: The ideas matter because the ideas are the germ. But remember, we started by talking about speech. So I see it as three different levels. Interestingly enough, I had a conversation with one of the many rabbis who’s come to visit me in the office, desperately wanted me to put on tefillin. 

Yehuda: Let me guess what denomination he was of.

Ron: And I said, you know I’m not ready for that spiritually, emotionally. And he said, because his denomination is Zionist, he said, first of all do the action. Then we’ll talk. Then we’ll talk about spiritual, by the way, Yohanan Ben Zakkai said the same thing. Right? First, then we’ll talk. 

Yehuda: Same thing, yeah. Blow shofar first, then we’ll talk about it, yep.

Ron: Which is his, you know, and he too said it for reasons that, if you’ll pardon the, the anachronism, were Zionist. First of all we need to survive. So I think speech is important, that is why I need it to be free, and because I think it’s harmless. 

After speech comes thought, which I think is much more important. Speech hopefully modifies thought. Usually it doesn’t by the way. I mean it goes in one ear, comes out the other. And thought, sometimes, rarely, compels action. So that in my mind is the pyramid. 

So of course the thought matters and of course the speech matters. How do I know it matters? I observe whether it leads to action or not. The greatest idea in the world, the most eloquent speech, is insignificant if it doesn’t lead to action. And the most stupid utterance ever made turns out to be of great significance, if people then move and break things as a result.

Yehuda: I guess one last question, which is kind of a footnote in this whole story, which is a few days after October 7th, I guess in anticipation about what was about to happen, you released a statement together with a really unlikely conversation partner, a gentleman named Hatem Bazian, who’s I believe a lecturer on the Berkeley campus. He’s also deeply connected to Students for Justice in Palestine, although I’ve never been fully able to disentangle how,

Ron: He was one of the founders. As a graduate student, he was one of the founders.

Yehuda: Yeah. Not a big fan of the Hartman Institute. Outspoken critic of our work with the Muslim Leadership Initiative over the years.

Ron: Nor should the Hartman Institute be a big fan of him.

Yehuda: Yeah, well, I would just say he started it. Anyway, I guess I’m curious, and you put out a statement, just three or four lines, basically saying, you could almost read it like, we want to kill each other, but we won’t do that on our campus. 

I’m curious if you could say a few words about the motivation for that, because I think it’s material to this whole protest, which is your track record of, I’m willing to sit alongside and listen to even people who I truly despise, until it crosses a line and is Bazian still now an ally to this protest that you’re engaging with?

Ron: So Bazian was not an ally in the first place. I chose him for that statement. When I coined the statement and reached out to him, I reached out to him because he is not just the opposite of what I stand for politically, but he’s also the opposite of what you and I have been talking about. He is a scholar and in the sense that he’s a scholar, I respect him, but he’s mostly an activist. He’s mostly a rabble rouser. He’s mostly an organizer.

It was the most difficult thing I’ve done as a scholar was reaching out to him because I knew and he made sure to remind me that I had to humble myself in order to get him to sign that statement. You know, I asked about the well-being of his family in the territories. I waited for him to ask about the well-being of my family, I’m still waiting. After much reluctance and letting me hang, he eventually agreed to sign the statement. Everybody reading the statement who knows who Hathem Bazian is, says, wow. Those are really, you know, fire and water here, signing a statement together, and that’s why I chose him. His opinions on the Middle East are not different from mine. They are abhorrent. They’re absolutely abhorrent. October 7th didn’t happen. Didn’t happen. It was a national liberation attack against military personnel and Hamas is the legitimate leader of the Palestinian people. The world would be perfect if only Hamas could rule. Awful, just absolutely awful. 

But we respect one another as colleagues. I know it doesn’t sound like it given what I’ve just said, but as colleagues, as scholars, we respect one another’s work. He’s a good teacher. He is not an ally. To my tremendous disappointment, when our statement failed, and it failed two weeks ago, two and a half weeks ago, when anti-Israel students, I don’t like calling them Palestinian students because they aren’t, and I don’t even like calling them pro-Palestinian students because they’re not doing anything that’s pro-Palestinian. Their entire action consists of a sort of anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish activity. When they raised their hands against fellow students, he did not reach out to say, oh boy, right, everything we dreamt of fell apart. He hasn’t done that. 

So no, he’s not an ally, sadly. Sadly, it’s very, very hard to build alliances. I’m very often in this sort of, when I’m in my mode of being focused on Israel, I try very hard to build connections with scholars in our Center for Middle East Studies, Arab scholars, Muslim scholars, and there are many on this campus who are reasonable, unlike Dr. Bazian. Right now, that’s not my focus. Right now, my focus is on Jewish students and allies of Jewish students. He can’t be much of an ally in that sense.

Yehuda: Last word, something you’ve learned about yourself from being in one place for nine, eight or nine days as you get ready for, I guess, the second Shabbat.

Ron: Yes, and as I said to you, all hell is about to break loose here because delegations are arriving. If last Friday is any example, I had, I think, at some point seven challahs on my tiny little coffee table, right? It’s not a dining room table. So what I’ve learned about myself, I’ve always known that I really appreciate a little bit of peace and quiet. I’ve had none. I thought this was going to be sort of a monastic experience. I’m going to lock myself in my office and contemplate anti-Semitism. 

There are people in this room, sometimes 6, sometimes 10, sometimes 50, from 8 o’clock in the morning until midnight, non-stop. Except now I put a big sign on my door. People have only knocked three times since you and I started talking. Boy, I really miss all of it. I go to sleep on the floor of my office exhausted. And it doesn’t stop on Shabbat. It doesn’t stop on Sunday. So that’s one thing I’ve learned about myself. 

I understand now why many of my colleagues who have dumped their scholarship to focus entirely on activism. I get it now. It’s like, you know, it’s getting emails from Brazil, from Australia, with gratitude of people saying, you know, finally somebody’s doing something. You know, you can easily get drunk on this. 

I would like to say one last thing. These emails are wonderful, and I take great support from them. I always encourage people who write to direct their efforts at Jewish institutions. Please don’t send me more food. I can’t, I don’t have room for more food. I take great comfort from those messages, and they’ve all been positive. All of them. Not a single person who said, ah, maybe you should have done this other thing instead. They’ve all been tremendously positive.

But they indicate to me, Yehuda, a certain poverty in Jewish leadership and charisma in the early 21st century. If the great light onto nations, if the person, you started by saying, somebody finally stood up, if that person is a Nebbeshtic professor sleeping in his clothes on a mattress in his office, that’s not a good thing. That’s not a compliment for our Jewish community. I’m not doing a hunger strike, I’m not martyring myself, I’m not giving great speeches. All I did was bring them, everybody can do this. Everybody can bring a mattress into their office. 

And yet, there’s this sort of, I feel people are sort of clinging to this symbol. And I say to myself, where are the hunger striking rabbis? Where are the thousands marching on the Sacramento Capitol to protest this? Where are the students creating human chains from one side of campus to the next? I’m it? Like this is it? Look at me. This is kind of pathetic. So I’m glad that it’s being received well by the Jewish community. I really wish people would talk less and do more.

Tessa: Thanks for listening to our show, and special thanks to our guest this week, Ron Hassner. Identity/Crisis is produced by me, Tessa Zitter, and our executive producer is Maital Friedman. This episode was edited by Gareth Hobbs at Silver Sound NYC. Our theme music provided by Socalled. 

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