The following is a transcript of Episode 60 of the Identity/Crisis podcast. Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.
Yehuda Kurtzer:
Hi, everyone. Welcome to Identity/Crisis, the show about news and ideas from the Shalom Hartman Institute. I’m Yehuda Kurtzer, president of Shalom Hartman Institute North America, and we’re recording on Thursday, June 17th, 2021. Over the last month, month and a half we’ve been talking a lot about Israel, a lot about Jewish politics, a lot about shifting ideas in the Jewish community about relationships to Israel, with a small break in the middle to talk a little bit about Canada. But it’s hard for me at least to separate from this conversation as it continues to unfold and especially a sense of really significant whiplash in Jewish environments as a result of the violence of the last month, which continued through this week, including the flag march that took place in and through the Muslim quarter in Jerusalem, thankfully much smaller than had been anticipated, thankfully did not result in major or massive escalations, but a sense that I continue to have that something has changed or is changing in the Jewish community in terms of attitudes around Israel. And the question of how are those attitudes litigated in public.
Yehuda Kurtzer:
A great metaphor to this is the old frog and the boiling water. You may sense that something is changing, but if you’re actually swimming in the water, you don’t know it’s reached a boiling point and until the frog is dead. I think that’s what that metaphor is supposed to mean. And it’s always a little bit hard to tell. And one of the conversations that we’ve been eager to have is to try to figure out how do we have that conversation, not just anecdotally or observationally, which is, I think sometimes the way in which the Jewish community talks about big issues, the feeling that something is changing, but to actually make reference to data where, and when we can actually find it. So to do that, I’m really excited to talk to a friend of mine and a colleague Eitan Hersh. Eitan is an associate professor of political science at Tufts and author of a really important, interesting book called Politics is for Power on what Eitan calls, the phenomenon of political hobbyism and the ways in which it’s actually destructive to political behavior.
Yehuda Kurtzer:
We will get to that and talk about it, but first I wanted to start with the fact that Eitan in the last year or so I think released two studies together with Laura Royden Harvard first on Antisemitism, which we’ll also get to, and then much more recently, extremely timely, on young American left-wing attitudes towards Israel. So Eitan, thanks for being on Identity/Crisis.
Eitan Hersh:
My pleasure, thanks for having me.
Yehuda Kurtzer:
Okay. So here’s the punchline of your study, and then you can kind of back us into why you wanted to do this study, what you were observing that motivated this work, but the punchline of the study, which is kind of wild is overall, and I’m quoting from you, “the young left evaluates Israel, like it evaluates US adversaries such as Russia and Iran, whereas the center and right evaluate Israel like they evaluate other us allies such as Mexico and India.” This is kind of a remarkable and clear conclusion. So first of all, tell us what motivated your investigation of this question. What was driving your own curiosity? I assume that some of the results of the timing of this relative to the recent violence was something of a coincidence. And maybe we can start to unpack a little bit what this conclusion signals to you about the story.
Eitan Hersh:
Sure. Yeah. So this is one of those great things that came out of collaborations with students. So I was teaching a class on us elections, which is my bread and butter and Laura Royden, who’s a PhD student at Harvard was my TA. And Laura is, I would say of the young online left atcharacteristic I would not ascribe to myself. And after the Barry Weiss and Deborah Lipstadt books came out, we were just kind of talking about it. She knew I was Jewishly engaged. And so we started a conversation about it. And it was really apparent in those books, which I thought had a lot of value both of them was just like you said, Yehuda, too much of a focus on anecdote that the way that Antisemitism is described or attitudes about Israel described are often like this thing happened on this campus or that sign was seen at that march.
Eitan Hersh:
And surprisingly given how much attention there is, I think to the Israel-Palestine conflict and there is toward Antisemitism there really is not that much clear data on these topics. And so Laura and I decided to try to convert what we thought were the main points or theories or hypotheses of these and other works and convert them into testable claims. Like, is this true? Is there a double standard in which Jews are held to different standards than non Jews in which Israel is held to different standards than other countries? And so we came up with this study and we want to focus on young people because on both the young left and on the young, right, we think things are really different than among older people. So we did this big representative sample of 3,500 people in the United States, but 2,500 of them were 18 to 30. So we’re thinking about what’s going on in the young right? Like people who identify as alt-right people who identify as young conservatives, how those people look different from those who are older than them and those on the left. And then the people who identify as socialist, leftist, this like 20% of young people identify with those kinds of labels where they stand out. And so we were looking kind of across the ideological spectrum among young people, and then how they differ from older folks
Yehuda Kurtzer:
Studying the young right, was the Antisemitism focus? Is that fair to say?
Eitan Hersh:
On the Israel study, we also looked at the young right. We looked at the full spectrum. And the young right is very interesting with respect to Israel attitudes as well. Because if you look at the old right, and by old, I mean, in our study, it’s over 30. So sorry, Yehuda, we are both in there
Yehuda Kurtzer:
Except that I feel like I’m aging into the age I was supposed to be, but to go for it.
Eitan Hersh:
So, if you look at the 30 plus folks on the political, right, just let’s focus on the Israel study, they, and this is no surprise have by far the most positive views towards Israel. Really overwhelmingly positive use more than any other country that we asked about. We asked about seven countries. We asked even a question about, do you like these countries, cultures and religions and the older right, just a hundred percent of them love Israel. What’s fascinating about the young right is that it’s just not true on the young right. The young righ has somewhat tepid views toward Israel really dramatically different from the older right. And if you combine that with our other study, which basically focuses on this very high rate of Antisemitism on the young right when you see us in combination, super low attitudes in support of Israel, relative to the older folks on the right and just skyrocketing high rates of Antisemitism.
Eitan Hersh:
So that’s the right. The left, particularly the young left, like you said, we chose a bunch of countries that we asked the people to evaluate, because I think a lot of the discourse around Israel is like, there is a lot of attention to Israel. Israel is in the newspaper all the time. There are other countries too though. And so where does Israel stand in public opinion compared to some other countries? So we asked about India and Mexico and Russia and Iran and China and Nigeria, and really clearly on the left Israel is in the company of Iran, China and Russia.
Yehuda Kurtzer:
Worse than Iran, I think in your study.
Eitan Hersh:
Yeah. Particularly people who identify as socialists, which again, that’s 20% of young people identify as socialists. They have any negative views towards Israel, similar to those countries. Usually on most of these measures, Russia came out the worst, but Israel, Iran and China were kind of all competing for second place. And then the study is basically trying to figure out like, what’s going on there? Why do they evaluate that?
Yehuda Kurtzer:
Okay, we’ll come back to the question of the why and you have a few hypotheses, but before I do that, let’s go back to this method question, which is, I’m very taken by your observation of like everything is anecdote. I mean, I remember a number of years ago at a Hartman program and this didn’t go well. But I said to a group of lay leaders, this was maybe seven, eight years ago. I said, how many of you heard about this situation where a student on UCLA campus was questioned about her political views on Israel because she happened to be Jewish and the whole room raised their hand. And I said to them, why do you know that? Why do you know this random story? And people got mad about it. They said it portended something that was a much bigger deal, but there was something bizarre about the fact that an isolated incident with respect to one student who ultimately by the way, won the student government election and isolated incident was treated as though it was exactly the issue. So it feels to me like there’s a bigger play here at Eitan, which is how do you actually take the most contentious issues that we face and use data-driven research to influence public policy? But I’m curious whether you are looking at the consequence of a study like this, because I know how anecdotes shape Jewish public policy. I see it every day. I’m curious whether there’s an underlying argument that you’re trying to make of how should Jewish communal policymakers or institutions use actual data-driven research when it comes to making Jewish communal decisions?
Eitan Hersh:
Yeah. The thing about science is hopefully it’s iterative, right? So what I would love to do is definitely move the discussion of Antisemitism, which by the way, I should say has not been the main focus of my research. This is a totally new research area to me. Both these studies, but even about Israel, not obvious to maybe your listeners but I care about these things at a personal level, but this is new to me. But at that personal level, what I would say is, yeah, I want the conversation to not be about anecdote. And I feel that anecdote, I mean, I teach at Tufts, which is one of these liberal campuses that has flare ups in the Jewish press about what’s going on with these things. And on the one hand, I take that stuff seriously. On the other hand, do I think that student government politics at a 5,000 person undergraduate college is a number one priority for the Jewish community?
Eitan Hersh:
No. When I think about college students, one thing that’s amazing when you look at say college students in a nationally representative survey is that the four year private elite schools don’t even show up. Right? I mean, when we’re talking about college students, we’re talking about Auburn Ole Miss, Ohio state, right. And when you see actually high rates of Antisemitism on the right among college students, and that’s because you have a totally warped view of who students are, if you’re focused on like the five campuses you’ve heard of. And so I think that it is really important for people who say care about what’s going on with respect to Antisemitism or Israel on campus to think like, what are we talking about here? Like, what is the population of interest here? And why am I interested in that one little story of UCLA or Berkeley versus like the whole populations.
Eitan Hersh:
And when I say it’s iterative, what I mean is we didn’t have a perfect study. You and I could probably sit here and brainstorm better ways to actually answer the questions that we answered in this first study. And so if I’m sitting around a table with organizations or with funders who care about this, I want them to say, oh, you should have asked it this way. And I’ll say, great, let’s do it. And then we have a conversation. We’re not talking past each other, we’re building some kind of metrics for understanding a problem that we both agree on. And the idea is that we agree on them ahead of time so that we believe the results. You know, when I released the Antisemitism paper, the main point of which is that in terms of overt Antisemitic attitudes, the attitudes are very high in the right and among racial minorities and not on the left, this was shared widely on social media, on the left.
Eitan Hersh:
And there was essentially zero engagement with it on the right. And I know, I just know that if the results had been different than who was paying attention to, it would have been different and that’s a shame. And so what I hope is that organizations that take data seriously and don’t have such a predetermined agenda step up and say, oh yeah, this is actually how we should be evaluating this stuff. We’re trying to figure out what we’re trying to test, what we care about, what we’re worried about, and then test it and see what happens.
Yehuda Kurtzer:
And presumably, Israel study is going to be shared widely on the right, because it tells a really ugly story about the perception of Israel on the young American left, which kind of confirms the suspicion of where the right thinks that actually Antisemitism, or at least Antisemitism is located.
Eitan Hersh:
That’s right.
Yehuda Kurtzer:
Okay. So I guess, good news, bad news. So let’s go back to the studies themselves. We’ll toggle back and forth between questions of study and method and the data itself. I think that’s part of the thing that we’re trying to disentangle here. So on the Israel study in particular, you came up with, I think, five different hypotheses and I appreciated it. I admired that like the conclusion section was all tentative. I mean, that’s where I kind of saw you saying, listen, I’m not a scholar of causes. I’m a scholar of data, but the causes are really suggestive.
Yehuda Kurtzer:
And for those people who are going to use this information, they’re going to really want to try to figure out if I want to fix the problem of young American left on Israel, I’m going to have to figure out the causes of how we got to this place and how we fix it. You talked about the question of prioritization. Maybe this issue matters more to them than others. And you kind of dismiss that. It’s actually not really true. You have some data to indicate. It’s not that they actually care more about Israel/Palestine, they may do about, I don’t know, housing. So that can’t really be it. You said maybe it’s because there’s more media coverage. You say it’s possible. It’s because of polarization, although that to you dismiss because there are countries that the same way that Netanyahu was aligned with Trump. So was the Nigerian leadership and it didn’t create like anti Nigerian-ness.
Yehuda Kurtzer:
You allude to the possibility of Antisemitism. And I think the most suggestive idea at the end was on the kind of racialization of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. And what I particularly liked was you say, it’s kind of like an easy story. Racial justice is an easy story for people to connect with as a means of mapping it onto a hard story. So maybe unpack that a little bit further. And maybe if you feel comfortable, I did discern like a tentativeness, but maybe you feel that you actually have a sense beyond what’s in the paper of what actually is taking place here. And what’s producing this reality.
Eitan Hersh:
We’re in tentative territory here. I mean, I think that issue ranking thing was cool. And it’s kind of cool to visualize this because you’re taking a survey on a computer and we use this ranking widget, right? So there’s like little boxes with all of these issues, education and housing and climate change and Chinese human rights abuse, and Russian interference. And we say, okay, use your mouse and click all these things in order of importance to you. And this was like in November, 2020 when they were doing it. So there wasn’t like active battles going on in Israel/Palestine, and sure enough, Israel, Palestine was like dead last or second to last for folks on the left. It was actually a little higher for folks on the right. Right. So it’s sort of an interesting way to think about how the technology of surveys is actually helpful in that you can kind of really see how someone is using these rankings.
Eitan Hersh:
Okay. Your question about the racial component here. I think there’s a view that I think a lot of Jewish Americans probably have, which is that the Israel/Palestine conflict is quite complicated. And, you know, you saw in the recent Pew study, for example, that American Jews really like Israel, but they have no problem saying that they like Israel, but don’t like Netanyahu or they like Israel, but don’t think the Netanyahu government has been working hard enough to make peace and they keep all those things in their head, or it’s possible to keep all those things in your head. I think that if you view the Israel/Palestinian conflict as a bunch of Westerners descended on this place and took it over, and it is just any other kind of colonialist enterprise, then it becomes an easy issue. Just like for a lot of people, racial politics in America actually is somewhat easy.
Eitan Hersh:
Let is they know where they stand. They can understand the history pretty well. They have some view, not that they have like some deep understanding of racial politics and American necessarily. But Americans, and I think when people from other countries come to visit America, they realize like how much of American racial politics is baked into people’s everyday attitudes that they bring to politics and to social situations. The hypothesis, or the theory that I think comes up and it came up when you had politicians in May, during the conflict, really draw the connection directly between like the Black Lives Matter movement and Israel/Palestine is you have this conflation, I think between this American issue and a foreign issue that is say Black Lives Matter. There’s police brutality against black people. It’s structural and we have to fix it. And a lot of people know where they stand on that issue. If you see Israel in that same light, like this is a white oppressive Western country, trying to oppress people who are nonwhite, then you kind of smooth over a lot of the details of the conflict. And so we don’t have that detailed analysis in our paper of like how to take that next step. But that’s something that we’ve been just chewing on I would say.
Yehuda Kurtzer:
Yeah. And there’s a piece on this actually today that came out in 972 by Alex Kane, chronicling the shift in black politics over the last five to ten years, actually and the emergence of a voice that’s doing exactly what you’re talking about and contesting, what had been kind of a consensus position with congressional black caucus and elsewhere, which was like you described broadly, pro-Israel capable of periodically criticizing Israeli policy, but seeing itself within a pro-Israel camp and a shift away from it led by Cori Bush among others. My Congressman Jamaal Bowman. I think that’s a fascinating story. Now, might somebody then say, Eitan, let me take study number two, young American attitudes towards Israel and basically use that as a means of correcting study number one on Antisemitism. Which is you’ve basically used kind of classical categories to define Antisemitism including narratives of Jewish power, stereotypes of Jewish power, images of dual loyalty or disproportionate loyalties that Jews have.
Yehuda Kurtzer:
And as a result of using that dataset, you come to the conclusion that young Americans on the right are more Antisemitic than Americans on the left. But meantime, what Americans on the right and center right, will say is no way you’re describing as the left, turning away from Israel, that itself is Antisemitic. So it comes to a question of definitions. And that’s where I get a little bit stuck like if you define the terms of Antisemitism in one direction, then, okay, it looks like right-wingers are more Antisemitic than left-wingers, but couldn’t this second study be argued as being like the patch that actually balances out the antisemitism story?
Eitan Hersh:
I don’t know. I mean, that’s why I’m going to stay close to the, okay? And so I think that we are on topics, obviously that are close to you related to definitions of Antisemitism, but it’s so fraught to then make that leap. And that strays from the data, what I would say is this in that study about Israel and actually in conversations with lefty students on campus about Israel, I sometimes perceive a theory along the lines of this, which is that Israel should just solve its problems with the Palestinians, because like Israel is a powerful country and should just basically like snap its fingers and make this issue go away. Create the two-state solution, grant Palestinians rights, and like everything will be just fine. And there is something strange, I would say about the line of reasoning behind that, which is essentially that like Israel should just obviously, goes this line of reasoning, be able to snap his fingers and solve this problem.
Eitan Hersh:
And sometimes in my head, I’m like, you know, you have a really generous view of what is possible for a government involved in a multi fronted war for survival. And maybe behind that is a view that basically Jews should really be able to figure this out because like they kind of control things. So there an Antisemitism line, you could draw behind that theory. We haven’t had, like, obviously when we ask people explicitly in the first study, do you think Jews held too much power and you don’t get a far left saying, so then people say, well, maybe the left knows how to answer your survey questions differently than the right. Like they know they’re not supposed to say it, but they mean it. That’s when you get a desire to heap, there have like really different methods of asking questions to get people’s deep seated values that you think are there, but they’re not showing. Or that’s when people go to more like anecdotal or historical narratives to answer these questions. But look, what do the papers say? Yeah. The Israel paper says the left has really negative views towards Israel, similar to how they view US adversaries. The other paper says, if you look at antisemitism as measured by like overt measures, do you see it on the far right? And you see it among racial minorities everywhere on the political spectrum.
Yehuda Kurtzer:
Yeah. I’m just not sure it’s as subtle. Your argument is subtle here, which is they’re not coming to the conclusion. Well, Jews should be able to snap their fingers and have the power to be able to make this change. It was something about reading this where I said, you even said in the conclusion of the Israel paper, that the young left doesn’t report on surveys that they hold overt Antisemitic attitudes, it’s possible that they do, but knows not to agree with explicit Antisemitic statements on surveys. Instead they might channel their Antisemitism as a criticism of Israel, which they know is still acceptable to express. I couldn’t help but look at some of the charts when someone says like I view Israel is basically Iran, China and Russia. They’re basically saying, is it sucks and I hate it. And I, I guess that’s okay. You know, live and let live. But there’s a part of me that says no, at a certain point, when a person that they have a basically irrational hatred of the Jewish state that I don’t know, walks like a duck?
Eitan Hersh:
Yeah. I’m not going to go there because we would want to know more about the inputs that go into their decision making. Right? One of the things we do in the paper is make this analogy to how people might evaluate Mexico. And for me, I don’t know for you, but for me, this is helpful because I understand if I ask someone on the left, what do you think of Mexico? And they say, I love it. I know that they’re not thinking about the politics of the Mexican government. When they say that they love Mexico because they love it’s culture. It’s familiar, it’s nearby. They like Mexican food. They like Spanish language. They have friends. It’s a total cultural evaluation. So they tell me I like Mexico. That’s how they’re thinking. If I say it to someone on the right, do you like Mexico? And this person is just like deep in the Fox News and online right world where they just see so much news about immigration and the drug trade and all that.
Eitan Hersh:
When they’re saying, I don’t like Mexico, they’re not saying I don’t like Mexican culture and Mexican people. And they’re saying one might argue, you’re saying, I don’t like the politics. Now, if we ask the left psychoanalyze, the right, they might say, oh, they’re racist for making the evaluation that way. That is the reason that they’re paying attention to Fox news, the reason that they obsess about those political arguments is because they’re essentially racist. Okay. So let’s put that aside. Now let’s talk about Israel. So when someone’s evaluating Israel, you might think they just go right to the politics. They don’t maybe hate Israeli culture or people or Jewish culture or Jewish people. They just hate the politics. But the reason they’re having a negative valuation is because that’s all they’re focused on because maybe their newsfeed, their social network is obsessed about the political part of it, not the cultural part. Then we can, again, psychoanalyze them, just like we, the way analyze the right with respect to Mexico and say, oh, why, why are they so obsessed? I don’t think like, think about Israeli culture and music and things like that. And so we can kind of read into that, but that next stage is for a different paper, right? Like we can only do so much at the time. And so we can’t really go there. I mean, you can go there,
Yehuda Kurtzer:
But that’s what I’m trying to figure out because I want to go there. Right? But I also am very aware in my own work that we’re trafficking all the time in affectively derived theories, experiences that are rooted in anecdotes. And we could talk about ideas, but it’s actually oftentimes connected to impressions. That’s what I’m trying to figure out. How to move from a next step on this. Listen, I will say I’ve argued oftentimes in the past, it’s not interesting or useful for the Jewish community to ask the question is so-and-so and Antisemite. It’s not useful because then you wind up with this weird thing of like, well, she can’t be an Antisemite, I had Shabbat dinner with her once, or he can’t be an anti-Semite, his son-in-law’s Jewish. And you’re like, that’s not useful. The question is, are there Antisemitic attitudes being expressed in their ideas, in their policies? Are they catalyzing Antisemitism to emerge in the world?
Yehuda Kurtzer:
So I’m with you that you can only study something like Antisemitism through expressions that people kind of know to be Antisemitic and their willingness to embrace it. That’s why the Israel thing is so tricky though, because it can’t simply be, I don’t like it. There’s something else here underneath the surface of this. And I’m trying to, I guess a push, I would say to you is what would be the study that would help to figure out whether when people have such a negative view towards Israel and it can’t be reduced entirely to its politics, how would you study that question to figure out whether our definition of Antisemitism actually has to change?
Eitan Hersh:
It’s a good question. I don’t know. I mean, part of me wants to say isn’t it beside the point that is focus at the matter at hand. So in other words, you know, someone at our study and was like, what’s really going on here is the reason why the left hates Israel is more response to birthright. And I was like, .0001% of the population will have ever heard of that. Like, there’s just no way. It’s very hard for me to like, believe a theory that’s related to the birthright program. That affects attitudes. I guess what I see as like, some people just say like focus on the concrete thing. So there was an Antisemitism problem in America that when it turns violent, usually comes from the right. And so focusing on right-wing militias and things like that is like a bigger priority than focusing on campus student government politics. What’s going on with people who start to believe a Louis Farrakhan conspiracy theory and attacks Jews at a supermarket. Like that’s a higher priority than radical liberal college students whining about Israel on campus. And so one answer to your question is like focus on the real stuff, not on these attitudes. I think that if one’s priority is not combating Antisemitism in those ways, but it’s wanting people to like Israel. I just think that’s a different prescription. I guess. I just don’t know how to solve that problem.
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Yehuda Kurtzer:
So let me switch over and I’ll talk a little bit about your book. People should buy it. That’s number one, it’s a good book. It was to read it and buy it. If you want to get the TLDR version of it, there’s a piece in the Atlantic that Eitan wrote. We could put that in the show notes. Also on the problem of political hobbyism. And I want to connect that from this conversation to the argument you make in the book that a lot of people think that they’re doing politics, but what they’re really doing is doom scrolling on their phone. They’re thinking about politics, they’re arguing with their friends. They’re, re-tweeting something, but that the real work of politics is actually accumulating power. And the only way to do that is through actual mobilization. How do you want people to read your social science work of a study like this?
Yehuda Kurtzer:
And then to turn it into actual politics? I want to ask less diagnostically and more prescriptively. You want people to stop thinking that they’re doing politics or responding to major issues by simply talking about it, engaging them like we’re doing on the show, but to actually like take data and then figure out how to mobilize around it. So how do you imagine that that’s supposed to work for instance, and let’s take in the Jewish community, what should Jewish political responses to a challenge like the Antisemitism challenge look like that’s not merely people debating the correctness of a survey or using the survey like this to dunk on the right. There’s something else that’s supposed to happen as a result of the accumulation of knowledge.
Eitan Hersh:
Yeah. I mean, the biggest motivation for the book is that the politics that we see all around us in terms of how people engage in politics, doesn’t actually look anything like politics. That is you have all of these people, you know, and I know who spent an hour or two a day on social media or reading the news or worrying about it. And they spent exactly zero time in organized political life. Zero time volunteering attend zero meetings. But political power goes to those who are organized and can bring people to an election who can bring people to policymakers. There was a great message that quote I heard from Abraham Foxman after the previous Pew study, the 2013 Jewish pew study, the quote was something like that. So they asked Foxman, “Hey, it looks like the American Jewish people are way to the left of you and the organized Jewish community on Israel.
Eitan Hersh:
What do you think of that?” And Foxman gave us a quote on at the Forward. He goes, “oh, I don’t represent the Jewish people. I represent Jewish people who care.” And that actually at the time made me mad. I was like, what’s the matter with you? My politics are a little different than Abraham Foxman. So I downloaded the Pew data and I started defining cares in different ways. People who are members of a synagogue, people who engage in Jewish practices and sure enough, Abraham Foxman is entirely correct. The more conservative attitudes towards Israel are exactly in line with the population who cares, defined, buying into communities. What I see on college campuses, or at least the college campuses that I’ve been affiliated with is that there’s been a real sea change since say you or I were in college, Yehuda, where the population of Jewish students who say even attends Hillel, like they do not have the same Jewish upbringing.
Eitan Hersh:
They don’t have the same educational upbringing. It’s not like, you know, I think when I was in college, it was still like, you go to Hillel and it’s like a reunion for your Ramah camp. Okay. But I think more and more, it’s like a place where people are just discovering their Jewish identity. And I think that it’s a real mistake for Israel to be front and center in that Jewish identity, because I think Judaism is a lot richer than just that. And so what I would say is that any time people are organized, that’s where they get power. And so whether that means being in a synagogue or it means being in a community, having some shared values and being able to convey shared values to the public, to policymakers, to other people and make an affirmative case for what you’re doing. Like that’s what politics is all about.
Eitan Hersh:
I’ll say that I open up that book in the introduction with a story about the Ku Klux Klan. And I talk about the Ku Klux Klan in 2018. So that’s just three years ago. Now in North Carolina, basically running an opioid clinic, they went around and said, you know, do you have an opioid addiction? It’s not your fault. We the White Knights of the KKK here to help you. And I tell that story early in the book, because I want readers to be like, holy shit. Like that’s how the KKK is organizing? I thought they were just doing their like torches in their marches. Like, are they actually trying to recruit people and build rapport in the community by providing social services? And like, if they’re doing that, who’s not doing that. And I’m sitting here doom scrolling on Twitter. I’m not…. And a lot of people that have that moment of like, oh, power goes to those who are organized and we should be scared of people who we don’t like figuring that out better than we do. And so I think that the real message of the prescriptive messages, like you have to be organized into real communities.
Yehuda Kurtzer:
Yeah. I mean Hamas is in some ways the same story. As you see it, is there an inverse relationship between the type of organizing that you’re talking about and noise, or is it okay to do both? And I’ll give you an example. What, I mean, I felt throughout the rise in Antisemitism over the last number of years, that not only is the geschrieing that takes place in the Jewish community about Antisemitism not organizing, being mad about it, but in some ways being angry about Antisemitism has the risk of being counterproductive. Because first of all, it’s a tell that you’re not really scared if you’re really scared, you go underground, you renew your passports. If you simply yell back at the people who are accumulating power, who hate you, all you’re doing is signaling your further antipathy from them and mobilizing them even further. But there’s gotta be some balance between yeah there is a role for making your voice heard in the public square, which is not quite organizing, but there are ways in which social media influences the way people think. So it’s not irrelevant from a mobilization standpoint to be on social media. But like, what is the relationship between these two things between actual organizing and the work of raising one’s voice in the public square, which is what I think most Jews in the Jewish community think, quote, unquote, responding to Antisemitism is being angry about it.
Eitan Hersh:
Yeah. So, I mean, you kind of can think about this as a hierarchy of things you can do given your time and all that. When I say to folks who are like, well, what’s the bare minimum I should be doing in politics. It’s like just vote in every election, which sounds easy. 95% of people think they should vote in every election, but we know that doesn’t happen particularly at state and local elections and actually does a voting right. Is something that requires you to figure out who you want to vote for, which requires changing your news diet. And now, so we’re starting to think about the next thing, right? You need to actually have a news diet that reflects how you can weigh in. So I would say my news diet is majority state and local. And I would say that most people, I know their news diet is 90% plus national only.
Eitan Hersh:
And I think that’s quite bad in part it’s bad because they’re not learning what they need to learn to vote at the active, but it’s bad for another reason. And this is kind of getting at what you were saying in a way it’s bad, because I only pay attention to a caricature of my nemesis, right? Say I’m a Democrat. And I think about Republicans, I think about like Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley. I don’t think about the people who disagree with me, who live in my building, right? Who are A. People I have to get along with and B. People who are not as extremely different from me as those who are in other states, but also like our ticket to changing policy in a way that I can actually influence. And so I think like the caricature nature of national politics is really damaging to how people both perceive their role in the world.
Eitan Hersh:
And also like, think about politics. In the book klI put a lot of emphasis on like, if you want to get someone else to agree with you on something, and that could be about Judaism and Israel, or it could be about abortion. It could be about anything. Like there is a path to doing that. And it’s basically empathy. I encounter someone who disagrees with me and I think about, well, where do they come from? What are they thinking about? What are their incentives? And I want to move them to my direction. So I pay a lot of attention to what they care about. And the main thing that happens on social media is just self-expression. So it’s not empathy at all. It’s not trying to convince someone of something it’s just like blurting out your feelings. And that is like, it’s so obvious that that’s not the path to convincing anyone of anything clearly in any other part of our life, like in our jobs, we don’t try to convince our boss of something by like shouting at them. But in politics, it seems to be like the standard operating procedures. Like you make a straw man out of their case and you just yell at them. It’s stupid, right? If you can bring this back to Jewish politics or Israel politics or campus politics, I mean, there are in any ecosystem, people who are extreme in their views and they’re not going to be convinced of anything. And then there’s a whole lot of people who are just trying to figure things out. And if you approach those people with empathy and you dignify the fact that they maybe are trying to figure things out, you can convince them of something. And if you just crawl into this silo and think only about your worst enemy, like you’re just not going to get anything done.
Yehuda Kurtzer:
And to Antisemitism too. I mean, there was a little bit of like, you know, invite a Nazi sympathizer for Shabbat dinner stuff around the 2016 election. Does that extend to these issues that you’re talking about when you have such, I get it when it’s, while you’re on this side of this zoning issue or you support this policy. Well, the best way that you’re able to convince somebody is by actually talking to them and open up the risk, by the way that they’re going to convince you a little bit of the merits of their position, that’s the risk that’s involved. Do you think it extends to Antisemitism? Is it a plausible political solution or a political strategy for American Jews in America? To say, what we need to do is deepen our community relations, put ourselves in that kind of vulnerable position in order to enlist and convert over the antisemites to maybe like us a little better. It sounds bad.
Eitan Hersh:
Look, it depends what you mean by Antisemites. I think that there are students and faculty on a liberal college campus who have views about Israel that I think are mostly, maybe naive and stupid and not malicious, but they come across that way sometimes. And do I think that as a person, I can be empathetic to where they’re coming from and respectful of who they are and also present some of the new ideas. Yes, I do. Do I hope that my students think that about their peers? Yes. I think a lot of people aren’t in social situations where they have those opportunities, but if they are, I think, yeah, they should take that seriously. And even they should take seriously, like more extreme versions of this. You know, you think about social media. Most people don’t realize that, but 20% of young people get their news mainly from gaming platforms from Twitch.
Eitan Hersh:
And if you don’t know a bunch about this, this is like people just watch other people play video games basically. And it’s a big group, right? It’s a big group of people. And I’ve now been on two Twitch streams, like where people are literally playing Call of Duty, like shoot them up games. And then also talking about politics and I’ll talk about politics just for power. And this book and 70,000 people will see it within 24 hours and people are commenting. It’s a weird environment. People are commenting. And one person’s comment thing is like, oh, Professor Hersh sounds kind of smart. And the next one is professor Hersh, like could do some more Rogaine. And the next one is like listen to the Jew and it’s a mess, but what a mistake to ignore a platform like that, where 20% of young people are getting all of their news and that, by the way, does lean toward reactionary anti-political correct politics, right? That’s just in the social media world, but like it’s interesting AOC recently, or maybe, I don’t know, a few months ago when on one of these gaming platforms and she played a video game and she talked about importance of voting and she shouldn’t be the only one doing that. And so I would say, yeah, if you want to convince someone of something, you have to go where the ducks are and then you also have to come with a more generous spirit. Thann I think we sometimes present
Yehuda Kurtzer:
Powerful place to stop. Thank you, Aidan so much for coming on the show this week and being conversation. And for all this research, I’ll just say, personally, I appreciate that you are coming into some of this work without it being your backgrounds. Like you’re a professor of politics and political science. And you’re asking a set of questions and bringing a set of disciplines into a Jewish community where data is something of a controversial subject it’s used and misused and all sorts of ways. I’m grateful for your work. And I hope that even though it may not be your next book, I hope you’ll return to it. And I hope you’ll continue to contribute to the Jewish community’s conversations. And thanks to all of you for listening to our show, Identity/Crisis is a product of the Shalom Hartman Institute. It was produced this week by David Zvi Kalman and edited by Alex Dillonn with assistance from MriMiller and Sam Hainback and music provided by so-called. Recently, we’ve received a lot of requests for transcripts of the podcasts.
Yehuda Kurtzer:
And so as of last week’s episode, we’re making transcripts available on our website. They’ll typically be available a week after each episode airs to find them and to learn more about Shalom Hartman Institute, you can visit us online shalomhartman.org. We always want to know what you think about the show you can rate and review the show on iTunes to help more people find it. And you can write to us at [email protected]. You can subscribe to Identity/Crisis in the apple podcast app, Spotify, SoundCloud, audible, and everywhere else. Podcasts are available. We’ll see you next week. And thanks for listening.
