Jesse, I love your work, and I very often agree with your views (“it’s complicated!”) Unfortunately I fear your views on antisemitism feel very out of step, insulated by Brooklyn and by yes, not wearing a kippah. Recall the old joke: a Zionist and an anti-Zionist walk into a bar. The bartender yells: “fuck off, we don’t serve Jews here.”
Palestinian activism is much like trans activism; you can clear your throat and clarify but it doesn’t matter. It thrives in absolutism.
Agreed. I’m pretty tired about hearing how antisemitism is exaggerated and not that bad from people who don’t wear a kippah or whose kids don’t do to Jewish schools or who don’t spend a lot of time in Jewish spaces. The experience of observant Jews and everyone else is really, really different. And if people are randomly lashing out at the random observant Jews on the street, they’d lash out at you too if they knew you were Jewish.
It is exaggerated in some quarters, in fact there are a lot of incentives to exaggerate in some contexts and situations...I think any honest participant in this discussion would acknowledge that fact.
Your problem is that there are Jewish people, both Israeli and any other nationality you want, who have reasonable, fact-based, balanced *good* opinions on the whole situation and you're not one of them.
Any time issues around Jews, Israel government's actions, and Palestine, it's best to first acknowledge that on some topics reasonable people may differ, the facts are manipulated, and there's incentive to exaggerate...that's the beginning...if you can't start there you're not going to be able to contribute meaningfully to the discussion.
I mean, you don’t know me so I’m not sure how you would possibly know that my opinions aren’t fact based. In the past two years, I had a friend wearing a kippah who was nearly pushed onto NYC subway tracks, kids in my community who had fake blood poured on them by pro-Pal protestors, relatives spit on, and lots of other stuff. All of that felt pretty real and “fact-based” to me.
I don't have to know you at all to evaluate the alleged "facts" you put out...that's a ridiculous thing to even suggest...I have to have had coffee with you to know if what you say about Jews is accurate...insane...
Annecdotal incidents are not a counterpoint to general statements of trends for a whole country of people.
If it hurts when you pee, you have to assume it must hurt for everyone, to be consistent in your logic.
I'm pretty tired of hearing how America is filled with anti-Semitism when we are doing and have done our best to reject it. Most of it from what you are saying comes from mentally ill, lower class people. The ruling class, the non mentally ill, the educated all reject it. Except of course the people like Nick Fuentes, and others who are all on the right pretty much, who just openly espouse anti-Jewish hate. But they get kid glove treatment here.
This I do not agree with! Some of the most virulently antisemitic things I have heard are from left wing, college educated people who genuinely believe things like… All “true” Jews hate Israel (?), Israel is not Jewish at all but is in fact a construction of American evangelical Christians (???), Israel has no connection to Judaism at all (??????).
A former friend of mine said sincerely that she waits for Israel’s complete destruction— total elimination as an illegitimate state. I said, girl, this would result in the death of like 35% of all the world’s Jews, a Holocaust 2.0. She said: “it’s not like that. It’s about getting rid of Zionists, not Jews.”
A right wing antisemite once asked me where my horns were. A left wing antisemite says that it’s offensive and actually harmful to use the holiday greeting “next year in Jerusalem!”, particularly in light of current sentiment and our shared desire to decolonize and blah blah blah.
I suspect we're being trolled by someone who is intentionally ignoring the demographics of the college encampments that were all over the news for several months. Or the educated NYC voters who agreed with Zamdani's rhetoric.
I agree. Big fan of Jesse in general but it's kind of like how on the Fifth Column it's almost a running joke that Kmele will always be reluctant to identify anything as racist, Jesse seems really reluctant to identify antisemitism. I'm not Jewish and prior to 10/7 was pretty pro-Palestinian. Even so I was warily eying the growing left-wing antisemitism that I saw all the time. Have people conflated criticism of Israel or Israeli policy with antisemitism? Absolutely. Have left-aligned bigots used antizionism as a flimsy screen for actual antisemitism? Yes, absolutely, and increasingly. Right-wing antisemites are still around and saying the same things they always have, but the reprehensible 'Israelis should go back to Poland' shit comes from leftists.
10/7 was a big paradigm shift for me. The protests starting before there was any Israeli response at all. The lack of compassion for Jewish victims. The tearing down of hostage photos. Most acutely for me; I'm a little older than Jesse and Katie. I was in my early 20s when 9/11 happened. We on the left were so careful to (rightfully) decry anyone blaming Islam itself for the attacks or demand ordinary Muslims denounce the attacks and declare their loyalty or whatever. So was Bush for that matter. Flash forward to 10/7 and NONE of the same grace was applied to Jewish people in America or the West in general. It became so clear to me that the modern left has an antisemitism problem or at the very least a severe blind spot when it comes to hatred of Jews.
It's as if you don't care what happens in Israel, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank. But college students did this and that! And so your whole perspective on the Israel/Palestine conflict changed.
I dunno, jumping straight to accusations of “genocide” *against* the group that just had 1,200 people murdered in horrific ways (families, babies, people just attending a music concert), as well as having it *streamed onto social media* by the murderers might make me reconsider the company I keep.
Maybe he saw the derangement on college campuses and started to question the narrative he had always heard about the conflict in the middle east, did some research, and realized that it's a bit more complicated than simply "white Jews killing brown Palestinians."
Non-religious Jew here, living in a major North American city. Haven't worn my Star of David necklace out in public since Oct 7. Doubt I'd get beaten up, I just don't want the hassle, and no, I don't feel safe doing it. Maybe that's me being cowardly. Either way though: it's such. bullshit.
That's very understandable and just awful that you have to even think about such a thing. There are a million ways in which everyday Jewish life and/or symbols are disrupted that aren't necessarily captured by "hate crime" statistics.
It really throws into stark relief how proudly and ubiquitously pro-Palestine and/or anti-Israel public expressions are made, often in very "in-your-face" effrontery ways, at least in the cities where I've been living.
I haven't heard the episode yet -- it dropped on shabbos!--but I think any educated Jew or any person with a Jewish identity--kippah or not--would dislike Jesse's takes on Israel and antisemitism.
Jesse treats his Judaism like it's some embarrassing biographical footnote. not a part of his idenity.
There’s long been a contingent of Jewish people (mainly men) who are somewhat embarrassed by their faith because they perceive religion as fundamentally anti-intellectual and faith as evangelical. The funny thing is, you mostly see this with Boomers and Gen X; younger people are less insecure about this. It would appear that, paradoxically, as our culture has become less overtly religious, there’s less of a stigma to having religious faith.
Well and I think he went through whatever things. But he clearly has "opted out" and is an atheist.
As I have said before my wife's line on the maternal line is all Jews, so my boys are technically Jews. Though they haven't done anything ritual wise, and the last practicing one would be their maternal great grandmother. Their maternal grandmother was a unitarian universalist, and their mother was raised that but is now essentially an atheist.
Yeah, I love his work, but I’m not sure how much more I can take. It’s like he’s in a little echo chamber and doesn’t know the most simple things that other people realise are obvious. Like that, this idea of the IDF being complicit in police brutality is an antisemitic conspiracy theory. The whole point is to blame the Jews for everything that goes wrong in society.
Jesse seems to have swallowed a whole load of toddle as if it is truth, and he’s meant to be this really clever guy who has critical thinking skills and helps us sift through the nonsense out there. Honestly, I’m thinking of not renewing my subscription because I just can’t take much more of this. Why should I pay somebody to be this stupid?
And Jesse won't do the least bit of research to see the history of the trope "The Jews are training the police oppress blacks" which has a long background. He just doesn't care.
He misses that the a) "boot on your neck" is specifically directed toward Black people, who (for those who participate in radical forums) blame the Police for a black "genocide" and b) Mamdani is saying that the Israel/Gaza conflict's root is "white" people opressing "brown" people.
"this idea of the IDF being complicit in police brutality is an antisemitic conspiracy theory"
No....it's an idea born of the fact that many US police departments have cross trained in "counter-terrorism" and other tactics with the Israeli state (more often their nation police, sometimes the IDF). Now I don't happen to think the US police need Israeli help in figuring out how to be shitty, but I figure they'll take it. I suppose if one believed that various US police departments would be decent "but for" Israel then that would almost certainly be an antisemitic conspiracy theory.
The singular focus on Israel as a source of malevolence wherever it is involved really smells antisemitic. As far as I know NYPD officers carry handguns of Austrian extraction (Glock) yet nobody turns blame against the Austrian Armed Forces for misbehaving NYPD officers. Ditto for any number of other sources of training or equipment.
If the focus was singular you might have a point, but whenever has the ersatz "left" shown focus? And what has Austria done since WWII that would make anyone think they are a particularly bad nation to deal with? Are they running cover for colonists who attack old women, burn fields, steal land? Are they arresting or shooting kids for throwing rocks? Are they arresting people on spurious or non-existent charges and denying habeas corpus?
I expect if it was you'd mention it to seal the deal, to crystalize how US police cooperate just as much with nation-states that are just as or even more oppressive than Israel. But you don't, because Austria isn't.
For those who dip into these theories that Israel is to blame for bad behavior by US cops, the anti-Israel focus seems monomaniacal. I don't see anyone claiming Qatar or any number of other cooperants are "lacing the boots" of the NYPD.
The usual grounds for this theory are counterterrorism knowledge sharing. Is the IDF therefore commended for lacing the boots of NYPD officers who work to prevent terrorist attacks?
"For those who dip into these theories that Israel is to blame for bad behavior by US cops, the anti-Israel focus seems monomaniacal. I don't see anyone claiming Qatar or any number of other cooperants are 'lacing the boots' of the NYPD."
In an odd way I think this points more to the lack of focus in the left. The drive to make every cause a manifestation of a sort of 'omnicause', instead of a problem that is sometimes connected to other problems in some ways but also sometimes isn't. Settlercolonialwhitesupremacyrapeculturehetropatriarchycapitalism must be abolished! Qatar, being only an averagely oppressive and trying to play a role as an Arabian Switzerland, just doesn't garner the negative attention of its neighbors. Kinda like the UAE. The thought of 'Dubai Chocolate' makes me queasy even though I love chocolate and pistachios, but it's sincerely effective marketing because the UAE has successfully marketed itself as a sort of luxury brand of a nation. Israel's hasbara has been pretty effective too for years, but despite the tone of some of the comments here there are limits to how much you can 'splain away stuff or distract people.
But yeah, the ties between US cops and Israeli cops are limited and principally diplomatic, but made hay of because of the impulse towards the omnicause imho. Doesn't mean the link is not there, but if the US stopped selling weapons to Israel it'd make a much bigger difference than convincing NYPD to not send its cops over there for a conference. Likewise increased training in deescalation and increased accountability would probably make any police force more decent. But, omnicause.
I think he’s probably in denial about the prevalence of leftwing antisemitism because it would mean accepting a lot of uncomfortable truths he’d rather avoid.
Jesse says the Boulder, CO firebombing murder and attack was carried out "just because they were protesting in favor of Israel."
The group was actually focused on doing a silent walk in solidarity with the hostages: "We do an 18 minute weekly walk to show international solidarity with the hostages taken from Israel during the 10/7 massacre, and still being held in Gaza. We will walk until they are all released."
I don't think it's quite accurate to lump that in with "protesting in favor of Israel."
This is good context to have, and you're right that it was not a pro-Israel demonstration per se. However, this group of people would be viewed as Zionists by those who consider themselves strongly pro-Palestine, and were almost certainly read as such by the perpetrators of the attack. Before the living hostages were recovered, people who didn't sufficiently throat-clear and say that they also care about Gazan civilians whenever they expressed concern for the Israeli hostages were branded as Zionists.
I consider the attack to be antisemitic in nature, even though I tend to lean in a pro-Palestinian (but anti-Hamas, to be clear) direction on this issue. The American Right may be too eager to label things as antisemitic, but even when you set that aside, it's clear that there's been a recent uptick in antisemitism, or more appropriately, the antisemites who were quiet for a long time feel increasingly comfortable expressing their bigotry in the open.
Honest question: How do you differentiate between pro Hamas and pro Palestinian?
After Oct. 7, Hamas's approval ratings and approval of Oct 7 itself in Gaza was around 70-80 percent.
So it seems Oct 7 was broadly popular and supported amongst the population.
That approval dropped as the conflict went on, but ostensibly due to the consequences not a fundamental disapproval of the action itself. In other words, but for the consequences the population would support more Oct. 7 style pogroms.
There are innocents in every conflict, for sure, but the political will, anti-semitism, and genocidal aspirations of Hamas are broadly supported by the population.
Let's get the obvious one out of the way: Palestine's demographics skew very young; minors make up 48% of Gaza's population, for instance. A child does not deserve to have her legs blown off regardless of her parents' political affiliation.
But focusing just on adults: crises and instability radicalize people, and Hamas are excellent propagandists. Hamas is also a political party, and the parties opposing it have been very weak; they are nakedly corrupt and perceived as conceding too much to Israel. You can credibly argue that Hamas has manufactured consent among the civilian populace for its most draconian maneuvers.
As far as my own perspective on this goes, I believe that Hamas is acting against the best interest of Palestinian civilians. It has refused to build bomb shelters for the entire time it's been in power, for instance. It hoards resources while the country experiences a famine. Most damningly, it views civilians as expendable, and their deaths as bargaining chips. They characterize those killed as "martyrs," because the death count futhers' Hamas political goals by increasing global opposition to Israel. That was their goal all along: to goad the hawkish Netenyahu administration into an invasion via a terrorist attack against a civilian population they knew was unprepared for war. Hamas would trade the life of every child in Palestine if it meant the dissolution of Israel. No human being deserves to live under a regime like that. My alignment is with the safety of civilians, regardless of how idiotic their politics are.
I don’t think it’s right to infantilize an entire population. And regardless whether they’ve been “duped” into supporting a death cult that openly calls for the extermination of Jews, it doesn’t change the threat they pose to Jews.
I doubt any of the victims of the pogrom on Oct 7th find solace in the possibility that their murderers and rapists consented under false pretense.
Of course children do not deserve to be the hapless victims of their parents and governments politics.
But we must remember that is Hamas and their support from the Gazans old enough to make decisions who are the architects of their injury.
Reducing everything I said about the radicalization of the Palestinian populace to them being "duped" is an oversimplification at best and a deliberate mischaracterization at worst.
I don't think the solution to people "calling for extermination" is to exterminate those people first; it supposes that this is a trolley car problem when it isn't. You do understand that the IDF's heavy-handed response in this situation is just going to further entrench the existing extremist thought in Palestine, right? It is the exact opposite of deradicalization. Even if Israel manages to eliminate Hamas, they've just created the conditions for an entirely new terrorist organization to arise in its place.
Israel had broad international support in the days and weeks immediately following October 7th, which it then proceeded to completely squander by responding as hawkishly as it did. Again, this is exactly what Hamas wanted, for Israel to give a disproportionate military response that would destroy its standing in the global community. To be clear: a rebuttal was absolutely necessary here, but it ought to have been a lot more measured than it was.
TL;DR: Killing civilians who support terrorists is not going to get rid of terrorism, and if you think it would, you have no idea how terrorism works.
Then it is good that Israel is neither attempting to exterminate Palestinians nor targeting civilians.
There is a stark moral difference between targeting innocent men women, and children and targeting militants who commit those acts.
Hamas and their supporters are on one side of that moral line and Israel is on the other.
I empathize with the innocents caught in the middle. It’s it difficult to find empathy for those who support Hamas and pogroms.
Support for Hamas has dropped significantly as the war has drawn on. And the view that Oct 7 was correct and good has dropped as well.
You raise disproportionate force again. What in the calculus you’re using here? What is the body count of murdered Jewish civilians by an invading military before Israel is allowed to retaliate? If they are winning, what is the number dead before they are obligated to withdraw and wait for the next pogrom to cash in enough credit to renew their defense?
What blows my mind is that there are actual, real life, literally evil bad guys in this conflict. Child murdering, raping, torturers. And that’s not hyperbole. They filmed it. Broadcast it. Celebrated it. Not one bad soldier, but as a matter of military policy. They promised to do it not once, but a second, a third, a fourth…a millionth.
So Israel should say “Well, they only got a couple of thousand this time. And our defenses stopped their 100s of rockets. So let’s just hit a couple of their bunkers and call it a day. Ask real nice for hostages and bodies of our dead.”?
If the coordinated attacks by Iran and Hezbollah succeeded, do you think they and Hamas would have called it quits after some “proportional” number of Jews were killed?
Wow! I haven't listened to the episode yet--it dropped on Shabbos--but it's outrageous statement to make and patently false. Jesse wants so badly to be accepted by progressives. The sad thing is they'll see him as "jew colonizer" no matter how big a keffiyeh he tries to wrap himself in.
Ok we get it. You dislike Israel and maybe Jews or don't care but you clearly care enough to throw out a silly or even rude comment under everyone else's comment. Obviously you're triggered so do tell us what's really on your mind.
I don't understand the liberal obsession with "hate" and other speech crimes. I live in a college town, and I couldn't get to daily appointments and access services because protestors were allowed to shut down public spaces, streets, and town hall meetings whenever they wanted. My tax money was wasted on addressing their vandalism and then letting them do it again the next day. Hate crime laws didn't protect us from any of this.
The same progressive colleagues who believed that prison was too harsh a punishment even for serial child killers expressed that October 7 was somehow justified. Disagreeing with these opinions would often get you socially and professionally shunned as a "fascist." All of this began while the bodies from October 7 were still fresh and we were still waiting to confirm whether anyone we knew was missing or dead.
After a year of this, I stopped wanting to leave my house and began experiencing panic attacks every day and developed chronic pain from the stress. I lost my job, health, and social network all at the hands of well-meaning progressives. I don't care whether my life was ruined because of anti-Zionism or antisemitism, I care that the social contract is broken when a mob can waste my tax dollars and prevent me from using public facilities with impunity.
A transgender commentator once said they became a conservative because they realized that Democrats and Republicans both lie, but conservative policies allowed them to live their life in peace, and that matters more than the words people say. I wish progressives would realize that "hate crimes" are a poor proxy for quality of life. Much more important to the wellbeing of Jews and everyone else are the basics of a functional society: consistent enforcement of laws that protect the rights of all people from the excesses of mob mentality and dysfunction.
Widespread antisemitism is often a harbinger of social and moral decay and I think we are seeing that pretty clearly on the right and the left these days.
So sorry life has been made miserable by these antisocial creeps and their enablers.
I don't think OP was blaming "antisemetism" for the problems they listed...they were blaming the liberal obsession with hate crimes and speech infractions.
From OP: "I don't understand the liberal obsession with "hate" and other speech crimes."
I do think you trying to contextualize those issues listed as being caused by antisemetism is bullshit and makes every aspect of productive discussion more difficult.
When "hate" crime legislation came out, it was argued that it amounted to "thought crime" in many instances. It requires (in less obvious instances) to read the mind/heart of the alleged offender.
A crime, after all, is already a crime (and an act of crime against another might already--by definition--be 'hateful')--but the desire to add on penalties for "hate" is understandable, but fraught.
We do seem to be excusing actual criminal behavior, while also amping up penalties for "hateful" crimes.
To be fair, motive is a relevant factor even in crimes where bigotry isn't part of the equation; it can mean the difference between murder and self-defense. Granted, that's mostly just a matter of whether someone had a preexisting desire to kill another person. Once we get into the territory of why someone committed a premeditated criminal act, trying to quantify the moral depravity of it in terms of motivation becomes a lot trickier, because there often isn't an objective answer. For instance, which is worse: a perpetrator who kills for sexual pleasure, or a perpetrator who kills because they're bigoted against the decedent? It seems to me like both are equally injurious to the fabric of society, yet there isn't a big political push to create special laws that apply to the former.
Yes, motive is a factor. But when you look at the places where intent matters, the intent itself is illegal.
For example, 1st degree murder is more severe than manslaughter because the perpetrator planned to murder the person in advance. But planning to murder someone serious is itself against the law and can be prosecuted regardless of whether they succeed in carrying out the plan.
Vehicular homicide is more severe than accidentally running over someone because the driver intended to run over the person. But even if they did not succeed, trying to run someone over is itself illegal.
In other words, it is inherent to qualifier that you are wanting to do harm.
But "hate" is not illegal in itself. And there's nothing inherent in hate that necessitates the desire to carry out harm.
Most people that "hate" (or have prejudice), never commit violence. But 100% of the people who seriously plan a murder are, well, seriously planning murder.
In all other cases, the intent was a precursor to the action and the natural and inevitable outcome of the intent. This is not the case with 'hate crimes'.
I also live in a college town and experienced none of this (because it didn't happen--lawful protests were allowed, but professors were not allowed to cancel classes). This suggests to me that lawlessness like the behavior you describe is a policy choice. I'm sorry the wrong choice was made in your town.
I did argue it's better to let people reveal who they are up front, rather than hide behind speech restrictions like hate crime laws and other social taboos. I feel successful.
Hate speech and hate crimes tend to be symptoms of much deeper issues. When they are content with their country and their government, people do not feel as inclined to look for groups to scapegoat. If you look at the overall trajectory of history, the ugliest injustices against Jewish people have typically been perpetrated during or shortly after periods of political and economic upheaval or instability. This is not to say bigotry never happens in stable environments, but stability is definitely a risk-mitigating factor.
I think Jesse got lost in the "conspiracy" angle of Mamdani's quote, taking him too much in good faith that he was drawing direct attention to collaborations between the NYPD and the IDF.
The quote is below:
"I think that for anyone to care about these issues, we have to make them hyper-local we have to make clear that when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it's been laced by the IDF. We have to make, not specifically that example all the time, but just to say that, for working class people who have very little time, who have so many stresses, who are under so many pressures, there isn't that much time for symbolism. We have to make it materially connected to their life."
There are two ways to read this, both of which are quite bad!
First read, is that Mamdani wants New Yorkers to channel their hatred of the NYPD against Israel. This one strikes me as a bit odd for a NYC politician. Even Mamdani realizes he can't be openly anti-NYPD. Unless, of course, Israel is the omnicause (which maybe), but that's terrible for the future of discourse and our politics.
The second read, that I find more plausible, is that Mamdani wants to channel the hatred of Jews towards the NYPD. Using words like "there isn't that much time for symbolism. We have to make it materially connected to their life", in my opinion, supports that. Hating Jews in this climate is remarkably "easy" for so many people it seems. Easier to draw that connection to malign the NYPD than to do the inverse -- people seem more than willing to hate Jews without having to go through a conspiracy tie to the NYPD.
He's also giving the game away when he says that there isn't time for symbolism - he wants people to feel a visceral and pre-cognitive anger towards Israel, and does it via emotional switcheroo where he tells the audience to tell others that Israel is really the NYPD. Maybe Israel is also behind high rents and the affordability crisis! There's no time for symbolism, we have to make it real.
Yeah there aren't really a lot of ways to read that comment that aren't awful.
Similar to a conservative politician going out into rural areas and being like "Yeah when the IRS or the county tax assessor is making you angry remember it is the boot of the NAACP and MLK that put them there". Which yeah there are probably some cousins of that approach out there in conservative land. And I think most of us would agree those are bad people.
I'm not sure there's any coherent message beyond, he was at the DSA, the IDF is one of the horsemen of the Big Bad for the DSA, and so he launched into messaging that ties x to y in a similar way that a lot of woke arglebargle in universities and online have done during the great awokening. Getting the "read" right isn't the point; Mamdani is a man for all readings (within a certain frequency band), as it were. So, so much of this is about vibes*. The vibes themselves do of course function to make the atmosphere more foreboding and to whatever interminably debatable extent, dangerous.
*(In the spirit of making fetch happen, I'd like to make "The Genovibes in Gaza" happen, but I'm afraid it won't be taken ironically).
Disagree. A plain reading of the quote suggests Mamdani is mostly going for the first reading, that is, for New Yorkers to channel their hatred of the NYPD against Israel.
When Mamdani says "for anyone to care about these issues," the issues he is referring to are middle-east Israel/Palestine issues. He is suggesting a method for making those issues "hyper-local" and using the NYPD as an entry point for that. People have feelings and experiences with the NPYD, and those can be leveraged toward the pet issues he is trying to get people to care about.
(I believe Mamdani is fine with some component of the second reading being mixed in as well, but it's not his main point.)
Then again, I think it’s a good rule to be extremely skeptical of politicians who seem prone to conspiratorial thinking. If you believe conspiracy theories, you’re one step away from solving the One Big Problem rather than making incremental change that can help people.
> "I think that for anyone to care about these issues, we have to make them hyper-local we have to make clear that when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it's been laced by the IDF. We have to make, not specifically that example all the time, but just to say that, for working class people who have very little time, who have so many stresses, who are under so many pressures, there isn't that much time for symbolism. We have to make it materially connected to their life."
They actually mean this literally. This has been a BLM talking point. It's based on very little truth. Like a police force here taking a Krav Maga course, or a police chief there attending a security summit in Israel. Those morph into "Israel send the IDF to teach U.S. Police how to kill brown people" For example, the "Real News Network" says that "Anti-imperialist advocates say the tactics being taught to US law enforcement were battle-tested on Palestinians and spread to the US to target Black and Brown communities through a training relationship that grants Israeli forces more power and profit, causing further harm to Palestinians. "
A common thread behind these claims is the _racism_. They see the Gaza war as simply "white people" trying to oppress "brown people", which is absurd claim to make if you look at Israelis and the "Palestineans". They need to frame it this way to get the BLM folks interested.
Mamdani is using he cred as a "brown" person to incite the black community against the "white" Jews who he'll claim are the source for all their misfortunes.
I've been traveling to NY every year for a week in December ever since I left NY 37 years ago. We decided to go to FL this year instead. I'm not going to give that horrific city any of my money. Half the voters there goose-stepped to the polls to "kill the Jews."
Isn't it just the IDF are BAD and do BAD SHIT including in the eyes of his audience innocents and he's saying we don't want a police force that is trained that way by them.
I mean it's crude etc but not everyone thinks the IDF are cool.beans. I dont think it's wider than that.
At the same time the nit picking over surnames is annoying. Id you're attacking a Jewish museum then it's many things but highly likely it's antisemitic. (The only way it's.not.ia say if they are hosting a art exhibition of a hebophile and you're protesting that aspect - but let's face it that's quite unlikely or niche).
Everything I've seen of Mamdani's early comments suggests he's just your typical omnicause DSA type. And he's had to walk some of that back to be politically viable--which is what sane people should want, IMO. I'm not sure I believe the new and improved version of Mamdani, but if political reality continues to keep him moving in the right direction and hopefully saying less conspiratorial stuff, that's better than entrenchment in twentysomething faux radicalism.
I mostly agree (the people losing their mind about him rapping about the Holy Land Five like 10 years ago need to chill) but the IDF/NYPD quote was 2 years ago when he was already an Assemblyman. I am also pretty skeptical that Mamdani is going to usher in some new age of antisemitism in NYC, but he has said some gross shit fairly recently when he was already in elected office.
I never "rapped" about supporting terrrorists when I was a kid. And he was a smart kid, who went to fancy schools and had elite educated parents. No excuses for any of it.
Mamdani does what he is told and smiles like a kid on his mom's birthday...don't over analyze it he is a 2-bit stooge.
Look at the vote totals, if that beret wearing guy wasn't in the race he'd have lost to an absolutely atrocious candidate in Cuomo.
Mamdani's success can 100% be attributed to how absolutely atrocious of a candidate Cuomo was...New Yorkers are trending more progressive...for the last 70 years...it's not news...what is news is how unbelievably unlikable the Cuomo was.
Your second parsing seems more plausible, but your interpretation shifts his words from "IDF" to "Jews". IDF is a distinct organization with a reputation (not always accurate) for improper uses of deadly force. So the more natural reading is that he's using anti-IDF stereotypes, not anti-Semitic ones.
(Now, is it a coincidence that, of all the armed forces in the world, he's picking the IDF? No. But at the same time IDF has high name recognition and a high percentage of their actions are caught on video. So they're unique in more than just being mostly Jewish/Israeli.)
Since most Israelis served in the IDF any training received by any Israeli becomes “IDF” training according to DSA folks. You don’t see any other country or organization singled out ever for supplying training materials to the NYPD.
There are many other examples, many with Scotland Yard, etc. Nobody ever mentions them.
If you try to dig into the "IDF Training" it's almost always "retired Israeli intelligence officer gives a talk about anti-terrorism." It's never active IDF soldiers assigned to go to NYC and train cops.
I watched the clip (which is really cut to start at a particular point), and the Anderson Cooper video from a few weeks ago where he talks about it.
Jesse's read is fine, and yours are both wildy conspiratorial. Mamdani was clearly trying to explain how you get ordinary Americans who are busy with their lives to care about the abuses of the IDF when it's on the other side of the world, and one way is to point towards the cooperation between that institution and the one that you deal with on a daily basis.
I haven't listened to this yet but on a similar topic of journalistic malpractice, I remember when Blocked and Reported covered the Residential Schools "Mass Graves" hysteria in Canada and Jesse said something to the effect of "wow, this is really going to cause a reckoning in Canadian media". Well, I can report it absolutely did not cause a reckoning in Canadian media. It is still absolutely verboten to cast doubt on the story in mainstream Canadian media. What's weird is that it's clear journalists know the story is false but simultaneously they also know they're not allowed to say it's false so whenever the topic comes up they have to use weird oblique language where they don't explicitly say the story isn't true but also make it so the casual reader would think it was true. For example, when CBC anchor Rosemary Barton said “Yes, there have been remains of Indigenous children found in various places across the country”, the CBC issued a "correction" which said "As CBC News has reported on multiple occasions, what several Indigenous communities across Canada have discovered on the sites of some former residential schools are potential burial sites or unmarked graves." That basically sounds like instead of correcting her, they're affirming what she said but the "potential" means strictly speaking they didn't lie.
Yes, I have long since given up on there ever being consequences for this kind of bullshit-spewing, or anyone who got cancelled for pointing it out to ever get justice
Like many Pro-Palestine public intellectuals, you can see Jesse's bias in the way he seems so concerned about people just taking for granted what the IDF says. Yes, this does happen and should be criticized. But we can trust entities like the UN, Al Jazeera, the Iranian Govt, the Gaza Ministry of Health, etc., even less for having a clear and sustained anti-Israel bias. Yet many of the reasons why people like Jesse have the negative opinion they do of Israel is precisely BECAUSE of sources like this. Again, sources which are highly questionable.
Jesse seems much less skeptical of the Pro-Palestine side. I'm not saying there aren't legitimate sources and legitimate reasons that suggest Israel should be condemned on certain things (like settlement building). But the point is to apply your skepticism consistently so we can all come up with as objective a view as possible of what's going on.
I think with Jesse, it’s more that he doesn’t want to face the truth of antisemitism on the left because that would mean he’d have to fundamentally shift his perception of the political culture in this country. No one wants to accept that their tribe has rejected them.
Many of the reasons people like me have a negative opinion of Israel is because they are a pre-UN nation in a post-UN world. They abide the old order of taking land in war.
You're right that Israel is a pre-UN nation: it is a nation-state with an internal sense of legitimacy and purpose. Its neighbors are all post-UN states: post-colonial satrapies created as European colonial provinces slipped away from the control of the metropole, like most of the new countries that found independence in the second half of the twentieth century. "Syria" and "Lebanon" and "Jordan" are the results of Europeans drawing crayons across the map of a place they've never been.
Because Europeans are the only ones in history who've divvied up conquered territory, and Israel is the only nation-state with "an internal sense of legitimacy and purpose" in the Middle East.
How many UN Condemnations have been issued to Israel? Relative to any of the countries you mention? What's that you say... Israel has received more than all of them put together? Yet conflicts like the Sudanese Civil War are arguably the most brutal on earth?
Yeah don't get me wrong, if they went in whole hog and just pushed out or wiped out every last Palestinian within their borders rather than the sort of half-measures they do, I'd bet within 10-20 years they'd be in almost everyone's good graces. The dead don't speak. But probably every neighbor would turn on them, and even steadfast allies like the US would waver. Even if they're wealthy and well-armed, they're not big. It'd be a crazy risk. There'd be internal opposition too. It's one thing to pen people in, or respond militarily to a terrorist attack (even 60x disproportionately), or outsource violence to settlers or irregulars while giving them legal cover on the backend, but come on.
Meanwhile Sudan? They're condemned for their crimes, and under sanctions too. Israel's not under sanctions, they're just criticized a lot. I guess it's good to have friends.
Nice attempt at shifting the goal post, but you initially expressed skepticism regarding the UN being anti-Israel. You suggested you didn't know what "constituted this bias." I provided evidence of disproportionate UN Condemnations. You then responded by claiming that Sudan has been condemned too. However this does not address my point that Israel has been condemned WAY MORE.
Your point about sanctions might be worth thinking about were it not for the fact that what's happening in Sudan has been labeled a genocide by multiple governments with no debate (because it obviously is one). Or for the fact that, again, what's happened there is WAAAY more brutal than anything that's happened in the Gaza War: 400k dead and counting, total disregard for civilian life, women and girls getting raped in the streets, etc.
I'm skeptical of the UN being *disproportionately* or *unreasonably* anti-Israel. My contention is that it's anti-Israel insofar as Israel does things that are worthy of being anti-.
Has Israel been condemned MORE than Sudan? Maybe, sure. They've been doing what they do for longer too. They've existed longer as a consistent entity too. As I said, every "start" in a stop-and-start process is likely to generate a new condemnation. I don't think they draft new resolutions every X number of dead civilians.
The 400k that have been killed in Sudan is twice as much as Israel has killed in the last 50 years. Israel has never had active rape gangs that deliberately target young women and girls. The point is that Israel is condemned way more, and it's behavior (while worthy of condemnation) doesn't rise to the level of many other nations that are not condemned or condemned much less.
I'm not what "nation targeting resolutions" means in the context of UNESCO. Their website talks about Gaza, Ukraine, Iraq, Libya, Syria, etc.
I don't know where "173 resolutions against Israel [this year]" citation comes from either. The pro-Israel group UN Watch only lists 16 this year. And most of it is fair critique, or more pro-Palestinian than anti-Israeli.
In case you're wondering which direction the "mistakes" went, they aired a documentary about the war but forgot to mention that the teen narrator was the son of Hamas' deputy minister of agriculture. It's the same as the other stories: progressive bias led to coverage that couldn't be trusted by the people forced to pay for it.
From the article: "The report also found that, in the corporation’s coverage of the conflict, Israel was associated with genocide more than 14 times more than Hamas."
I wonder what a good ratio is? Because if it's tied to the number of civilians killed by each side, this seems well-tilted in Israel's favor.
Here's the actual report being referenced. It's written by by a British-Israeli who works out of Jerusalem, so this report on bias might be a bit biased itself:
The side that is openly genocidal was accused of genocide at 1/14 the rate of the side that didn't start the war and would have ended it any time in exchange for their hostages and a surrender by the losing side. The fact is that Hamas would commit genocide if they could; Israel could but they don't, yet they get accused of it 14 times more than Hamas. Deaths in a war (that Hamas started and chose to keep going) are not the same as genocide.
According to the Hamas charter, Jews will be able to live safely in some imaginary future Islamic state they'll run. I pray we never have to see the claim tested.
According to Israel, they just want the hostages back. That's why they saturation bombed the area, and why now that every living hostage has been returned Israel has withdrawn from Gaza entirely and no unarmed civilians have been killed since.
There are dozens of hostages not returned, many presumed dead but many of unknown status.
The agreement was for all hostages, living or dead.
Generally, saturation bombing means indiscriminate bombing. Israel's bombing campaign targeted specific buildings. And implemented multiple layers of warning systems prior to bombing a target, including
- phone calls and text messages
- leaflets
- radio broadcasts and regional warnings
- roof knocking
This is more than any other country in history has done to minimize civilian casualties.
In contrast, Hamas has told civilians to ignore the warnings. Have embedded militants and weapons in the civilian population. And prevented evacuations. There are reports of opening fire on civilians if they do try to flee.
The consensus is that those not yet returned are corpses. Hamas isn't claiming to hold any living hostages, even though the hostages' lives were their bargaining chips. The agreement was for the dead too, but if you're implying that Israel will just leave once the bodies are dug out give me a break. If they had really wanted the hostages back they wouldn't have started bombing in the first place.
Maybe "saturation bombing" is overstated, but the level of damage, destruction, and displacement in Gaza does not conform to a narrative of targeted attacks. And certainly Hamas does Gaza no favors, but the threat of permanent displacement must be make the argument to stay pretty seductive. And displacement is one of the goals, one of the acceptable outcomes for the government there, as we can see.
Excuse you? Israel has always been at war to seek the destruction of Hamas. During hostage negotiations, you are allowed to lie about your intentions to obtain more living hostages. You have no moral or strategic obligation to be honest with hostage takers.
Have we really always been at war with Eastasia? Or did a mad dog come loose its chain?
I think that the claim that Israel seeks to destroy Hamas is true, but I also think that for the current Israeli government at least, the real goal is Palestinians as a whole, and "Hamas" is just a sufficiently barbaric organization that they can justify doing whatever they want. Kill a man? He was Hamas. Kill a teen? Hamas Jr. A little kid? Stood too close to Hamas, it's the parents' fault (or maybe they were Hamas). Hamas is a useful tool: illegitimate, violent, genocidal, and also theoretically everywhere. If you say you're Hamas you get the bullet of course. But kill someone without open affiliation and you can still diagnose them as Hamas post-mortem. If you leave Hamas to run the territory, everyone's got a little Hamas on them. If you somehow can't, it's still Hamas's fault that your bullets and bombs hit them, because Hamas was using them as human shields, and what are you supposed to do, hold fire?
"You have no moral or strategic obligation to be honest with hostage takers."
Even after they are returned it seems. Imagine if Palestinians felt the same about the thousands of people Israel holds without even a fig leaf of criminal charges.
You are a conspiracy theorist. Your claims are unfalsifiable, and you have failed to meet the basic due diligence of explaining *why* Israel would act in the way that you are proposing.
Why do you listen to this podcast if you are incapable of skepticism?
I'm sure Jesse and Katie must know that answering emails about being Jewish under Mamdani in NYC risks some subscriptions. Kudos to them for doing it anyway. I think it's great that they engaged with subscriber feedback despite the possibility of giving further offense.
Like a lot of BARflies, I often disagree with Jesse's comments on Israel, and I think he's being more charitable regarding Mamdani's IDF comments than I would be, but I appreciate his long-standing commitment to good-faith discussion. (I appreciate Katie's, too, it's just that she doesn't come in for as much criticism in the comment section!)
I do got to say, I felt Katie's behavior in the first half of this episode was much closer to the platonic ideal of a good Talmudic-pilpulistic argumentative Jew than Jesse's was. But he did good.
The basic summary is that trying to distinguish between the two is often an incoherent exercise. I'm NOT saying the two ideas are identical, but rather trying to draw a crisp clean boundary is a lost cause and also a distraction. An analogy I use "I don't hate gay people, I only hate those who watch RuPaul's drag race".
Instead of getting distracted debating whether X belongs in bucket A or bucket B, we should instead remember the principles that prompted us to create two buckets in the first place.
I think it’s also obviously the case that a lot of genuine anti-Semites use “anti-Zionism” to put a respectable gloss on their bigotry, and the more sophisticated among them are pretty clearly leveraging the energy of more good faith “anti-Israel’s-current-policies” protesters in a calculated way (and yes I think that includes some folks at the DSA).
If you’re involved in any significant way with anti-Israeli / free-Palestine protest movements, you’re going to be rubbing shoulders with a lot of genuine Jew-haters, and in some sense benefiting their cause.
I don’t really know what to do about it, because you should be able to criticize Israel without being an inadvertent anitsemitic fellow-traveler. They should be separable positions. But in practice that’s easier said than done, and more often stated than executed.
I guess I would just want people waving Palestinian flags and wearing keffiyeh to be aware of and sensitive to that dynamic rather than just sneer back “I’m just an anti-Zionist”.
Yes. The most audacious example is how protests happening in the West openly chant "Falasteen Arabiya" (Palestine will be Arab) in Arabic, instead of the sanewashed English translation "Palestine will be Free".
The solution is extremely obvious to me: protestors should explicitly disavow those elements! The only explanations for why they might be extremely reluctant to do so is either 1) keeping unambiguous anti-semites within the coalition is more important than kicking them, for some reason or 2) they secretly agree with them.
Do the protests even happen without the unambiguous antisemites? I’m very much not saying that the majority of the protesters are antisemites, but I do think the majority of the organizational energy comes from groups that either are unambiguously antisemitic, or so chock-full of antisemites that they may as well be.
Of course when you start talking about international socialism and antisemites, the question of “who is using who” gets murky.
This is a genuinely difficult question to answer fairly, and it's the subject of a pending draft I've been wrestling with. The problem is two-fold:
1. What is the denominator? Who exactly should count as part of the "movement"? Should it be only those who physically attend a protest, or should anyone with an errant opinion on the matter also be included?
2. What is the numerator? How much evidence do you need before you're comfortable labeling someone an antisemite? I think the folks knowingly chanting "khaybar khaybar ya yahud" absolutely fit the bill, but what about the ones who are more guarded or more reliant on dog whistles?
This problem isn't limited to just the antizionism movement, but really any instance where you have a fluid motte-and-bailey dynamic. Other prominent examples that come to mind are the 2020 stolen election claims and most trans activism.
I was the listener who wrote the email that was shared at the top of the episode. I really appreciate the fact that Jesse and Katie engaged with my criticism in good faith. Thank you both.
Because a substantial portion of my words were read on air, I am going to share the entire email I sent here, so that they are available in their full context.
"Hi Jesse,
I have been a premium subscriber to BARPOD since 2023. I am also, unlike you, someone who wears a kippah and tzitzit in public. I have no judgement about your level of observance. I myself spent most of my adult life unobservant and only returned to more active engagement with my Judaism following the October 7th attacks. I mention this difference between us only to say that I have a deep understanding of what it is like to move through the world both as a visible and a non-visible Jew. Those two experiences are not remotely the same.
The comment you made in the last episode--"I don't feel at all unsafe in New York City as a Jew"--was, frankly, obtuse. I'm glad that you don't feel unsafe as a Jew in New York City. However you're not moving through the world as an identifiable Jew, so what possible relevance does your anecdote hold? All you've done is use tokenism to shout down the legitimate fears of your fellow Jews who do feel unsafe because unlike you, we are visibly identifiable as Jews in public.
I likewise take issue with your inability to see the ways that anti-Zionism contributes to this lack of safety. You are so thoughtful and nuanced on so many other topics, and yet it seems you've never made any attempt to grapple intellectually with this one. It's great that elites like yourself and Mamdani can separate "even deranged" criticism of Israel from antisemitism, but you must be aware that broad swaths of the population do not practice such fine-grained semantic distinctions.
The concern isn't the deranged criticism of Israel. It's the deranged monomania, the single minded obsessiveness with an extremely complicated conflict in a tiny country on the far side of the world, and the way that omnicause creates a permissive environment for non-elites who conclude that if Israel is the root of all evil (even lacing the NYPD's boots), then the best way to fight it is to confront the Jews in their midst.
I've personally had someone scream "FREE PALESTINE" at my wife and I while we were simply walking to our Synagogue, doing nothing more provocative than being an identifiably Jewish couple in public. A man screaming "Free Palestine" burned elderly Jews alive in Boulder, and another man screaming "Free Palestine" shot two young Jews in Washington DC. Two weeks ago, a 59 year old man in New York City had his kippah knocked off of his head by an assailant who then broke his nose and caused a brain bleed. In June, an Orthodox man walking to Shul in Crown Heights was beaten unconscious by someone yelling about Gaza.
You know of these examples, which are only a sampling of what our community has endured. I'm sure you are also aware that Jews suffer far more hate crime assaults than any other group in New York City. Yet despite this, you still feel comfortable using your platform to say "I don't feel at all unsafe in New York City as a Jew." I find that very disappointing, and I hope it's something you'll put more effort into reflecting on going forward."
Jesse will not change. For whatever reason, he has mild contempt for Jewish people and the Jewish religion. As another commenter said, it would be interesting to go back to his childhood and discover why, but we're not here to analyze him. We each have to determine if we want to continue supporting Barpod, knowing that 50% of the creators are willfully blind to this issue. He does good work on other topics, but anything involving a Jewish perspective is not one of them.
I don’t think he’s shown contempt for Jews so much as dismissiveness about what I consider legitimate concerns about antisemitism. Jesse grew up in Newton, MA, a very Jewish suburb of Boston. I’m a bit older than him. I too grew up in up in a very Jewish suburb of a large American city. Growing up there, it was easy to believe that antisemitism was no longer a real threat. The first time I heard anything mildly antisemitic was when I went away to college. Things have escalated significantly over the past few years. Not all anti-Israel demonstrators are antisemitic, but it’s clear that, as an organized movement, they don’t think Israel should exist. And, the movement tolerates, and too often encourages, antisemitism. In October 2023, one could make a reasonable argument that college students are generally ignorant and immature and probably didn’t know the history of “from the river to the sea” or “globalize the intifada.” However, three years later, if you’re still participating in protests that feature these slogans, you’re either calling for the destruction of Israel and attacking Jews throughout the world, or being willfully ignorant. When being anti-Zionist has become practically a loyalty oath among a very public segment of leftists, why wouldn’t Jews in left-leaning cities become more concerned?
I'm not Jewish, but have been in disproportionately Jewish circles since college, and think being not Jewish maybe gives me more sense of what is going on since there is less self censorship than with Jewish people. I thought the idea that "it could happen here" was insane in the US until recently. I have generally thought, until recently, that the US is very pro Jewish and the exceptions were Christian evangelicals who wanted to convert Jews (even if being pro Israel), but often didn't know many (I grew up knowing only a small number of Jews and recall watching Fiddler on the Roof in high school and hearing other students ask "what's the deal with Jews?" "They don't believe in Jesus." "Weird"). I am really worried in a way I have not been before with the Groypers and apparent acceptance of anti semitism in large parts of the right and the extreme anti semitism (based on both Israel and being anti perceived white people) on the left. The younger generation as a whole -- likely in large part due to TikTok -- is trending anti semitic. I think Jesse is being weirdly delusional about this. Like how have the college protests not rung warning bells?
Here’s the thing: What students joining the protests in October of 2023 didn’t already know that 1,200 Jews were murdered for being Jews? Why did they think these protests were going on?
I have no intention of canceling my subscription. I think Jesse engaged in good faith with my feedback. I don't demand that the hosts see eye to eye with me on every issue. There's nothing intellectually healthy about secluding oneself in an echo chamber.
I also don't necessarily agree that Jesse has contempt for Jewish people, though I agree he can come off that way. I think he just has the same blind spot that a lot of liberal Jews have to the way antisemitism has rapidly become pervasive on the left. He is, in that way, not much different from someone like JD Vance, who seems blind to the way antisemitism is quickly also taking hold of the right.
50% of the creators? Didn’t Katie go on Megyn Kelly and say Israel was ‘slaughtering children’ in Gaza? As a Jew you literally have no moral choice except to immediately unsubscribe from this 100% antisemitic podcast. Anyone who doesn’t is a useful idiot playing straight into the hands of Hamas.
My comment was satirical. If you can’t see what it was satirizing, perhaps you also think it’s fine to insult, mind read and try to ideologically coerce Jesse for daring to come to slightly different conclusions than you. Because that is exactly what the sleazy comment I was responding to did. IMHO Jesse has gone out of his way to be fair and seek mutual understanding amidst these inevitable disagreements, and some of the commenters in this thread could profit by his example.
Satire doesn’t show up well in print. Frankly, what you wrote is really similar to the kind of takes I frequently see in my neighborhood Jewish WhatsApp group, so my inclination was to treat it as genuine.
“Stop Asian Hate” was brought up but I think you forgot to mention or was not aware of the fact that it became completely ignored when left leaning people realized that the perpetuators of those hate crimes were largely black males, and that went too against the narrative that even progressive asians stopped voicing their support for it, leading it to fizzle out.
Antisemitism has a similar PR issue. The people who care about hate crimes in general — progressives, don’t care because it gives them more social capital to be pro-Palestine.
Not to comment on the specifics of the Brooklyn case, but it is entirely possible that a Jew will be involved in an antisemitic hate crime. The essence of left-wing antisemitism is holding Jews inherently suspect, if not downright guilty, of "zionism", "colonialism", all-encompassing evil, unless they go out of their way to prove they're one of the good ones by loudly proclaiming their anti-zionism. Just like some Jews in Columbia could serve as enforcers making sure their fellow Jews are sufficiently anti-zionists, and (re last episode) Singal was accosted as a "zionist" by someone who claims to be Jewish himself
Yes, I was confused about this. "Self hating Jew" is a trope, perhaps more common in the past when some people hid their Jewish heritage out of fear of discrimination or distaste for Judaism or Jewish culture. To prove how un-Jewish they are, they can express anti-Semitism.
So some asshole from Chicago (where I live) who was apparently Hispanic, but I don't think his ethnicity matters, more importantly he was DSA and radicalized by that, so he could have been Jewish or anything, shot attendees at an event at the Jewish Museum in DC, an event I expect was attended by various non Jewish people. He yelled Free Palestine at the time. To me, this is obviously anti semitic and even if the people murdered were not Jewish (they were) or even if the murderer had been a Jewish DSA asshole, it's clearly intended to target people for being (or likely being) Jews. Are we going to try to argue that this only counts if the murderer wasn't acting out of "globalizing the intifada" motives or if he was wrong to assume the murdered people were Jews? Does it not go to the heart of a hate crime that he was trying to intimidate Jews?
A couple of the most publicized anti semitic hate crimes of recent years were either hoaxes or something else, perpetrated by a lone Jewish actor.
People need to keep their heads screwed on about hate crime hysteria as there is a ready ecosystem that wants to amplify and track these things and letting them set the narrative is unlikely to help foster the type of social trust that keeps everyone, especially minorities, safe in society. Mutual suspicion is made worse by organizations that think their exagerrations are politically expedient.
That is compatible with the view that these incidents are also on the rise and we need to be educated about how much they are rising and where.
This was quite a famous one that was in the news for a while before the perpetrator was caught.
If Wilfred Reilly, who looked into about 400 publicized hate crime incidents is to be believed, the majority are hoaxes or lies. I certainly believe that is the case when they take place on college campuses.
Are you seriously bringing up this incident from 2018 and not the dozens of incidents from the past 2 years. Is it because you refuse to believe it's happening or another reason?
That’s not “a couple of the most publicized anti semitic hate crimes of recent years.” I would argue the most publicized anti semitic hate crimes of recent years were:
- Pittsburgh Tree of Life Synagogue massacre: It was real.
- Chabad of Poway shooting: Ditto
- Washington, DC murder outside the Jewish Museum: Ditto
- Colorado attack on a hostage march where a Holocaust survivor later died: Ditto.
And they all happened more recently than the hoax bomb threats in your link. As a dotty old guy from Delaware one said: Come on, man.
Those are all real and I stated that total incidents could genuinely be rising. Against a backdrop of info from NGOs publishing hate crime stats in the hundreds it’s important to know which ones (bomb threats, graffiti, and the like being the most common) are likely real.
One very famous case that resulted in dozens of incidents getting put on the books by these orgs as multiple hate crimes had a single Israeli point of origin, which is why I point it out due to how much it skewed the stats. I recall the tree of life shooting vividly and how disturbing that was and would not want to take away from that.
Wilfred Reilly does not discount the increase in anti Jewish hate crimes. (It is true lots of hate crimes, including some anti Jewish ones, are hoaxes. That consideration would likely end up increasing the percentage of anti Jewish ones if implemented.)
I can't wait to hear this to listen to Jesse give his take on how the BBC isn't antisemtic at all. Maybe they'll do a good job, but this is far outside their wheelhouse, and they seldom impress me when they speak on topics they aren't experts in.
Katie asked at one point why it seems like the Jews "don't count" when it comes to identity politics. It's because identity politics is not about identity and all about politics.
Amala Ekpunobi says the most racism she ever faced was from the left after coming out as a conservative. Look at how Ana Kasparian and Sydney Waston were treated by the "feminist" left after sharing their stories of sexual assault. Look at how Brad Polumbo was treated by the mainstream gay movement.
I was sent to a mandated DEI training that was supposedly about racial justice and the facilitator spent a significant portion of the time just trashing Cuban-Americans. Why? Because apparently as refugees from communism they were too conservative to deserve the respect of other "Latinx" groups. When I tried to report this to the HR manager who arranged the training, she flat out ignored and dismissed me.
Jesse got soooo close when he asked why the left didn't care about antisemitic hate crimes making up as more than all the rest combined. But he just can't see the secret ingredient (which Katie identified trivially, of course!)
I think they could have gone deeper into Jesse's comment about feeling silenced by pro-Israel propaganda. There is a famous framework of antisemitism that describes it as a Venn diagram of three connected but separate categories: the Christian right, Islamist fundamentalism, and the radical left (populism, anti-religious communism, mob authoritarianism). Many Jewish families have experienced only one or two kinds of antisemitism; therefore it's easy for them to use their status as Jews and legitimate victims of prejudice to publicly dismiss victims of the other kinds. One of the heartbreaking aspects of the past two years has been watching the Jewish community tear itself apart, denouncing each other without trying to understand the hard-learned lessons from people with different experiences. I will never forgive the Left for encouraging this behavior, celebrating Jews who denounced other Jews and disproportionately platforming fringe Jewish groups instead of pausing and doing due diligence to check whether these people were reputable, representative, and relevant to the issues at hand. The Left will move on to another cause of the day but the toxic media pressure during one of the worst times of our lives has permanently damaged many Jewish institutions, families, people, and communities. I kept thinking the past two years that the Left claims to care about "restorative justice" but they never seem to stick around to clean up the aftermath of a grieving family or community that was goaded into tearing itself apart for a good soundbite under threat of being cancelled.
This actually isn't true. Anti-black hate crimes are, by far, the largest in number of victims. Anti-jewish is a distant second.
The jump between 2021 and 2022 is HUGE. Like a straight up spike. But we see the same spike across all targets (white, gay, asian, black, etc). This is likely due to the changes in reporting guidelines and victim/incident counting in 2020.
Prior to 2022, hate crime targeting jews was on a steep decline. . . as were hate crimes in general across all victim targets.
When you tried to report, you were blocked. Fair enough, I suppose. No, I think it's because Jews are seen as white and wealthy and part of the ruling class and not the "marginalized."
Why does this only apply to Jews, and not rich and powerful white LGBTQ people?
Something I've noticed, both on the right and the left, is a blindness to the fact that Jews are an ethnoreligion. Whether we're "just" an ethnic group, religious group, or synonymous with Israelis varies on whatever flavor of antisemitism the speaker subscribes to.
I cannot believe that Jesse does not know that this whole idea of the IDF training police to be brutal against black people is a long-standing antisemitic trope which goes back to the black lives matter protests. It’s a massive dog whistle against Jews. Please do your homework. There is just so much work that has been done on this particular topic. How can you be so ignorant?
Yes, I recall that JVP had a whole campaign where they were using US-Israeli police trainings/exchanges to blame police shootings of black people in the US on Israel.
Law enforcement in America never thought to be terrible to Black people until the joos taught them how. Pre-1948 cops were really nice to Black people, didn’t you know? In the 1800s, they would even escort Black people who got lost back to their houses with their nice white owners.
Help all. I am writing to Jesse. They need to get someone on the show who is good at identifying antisemitic BS online, who can help pull Jesse out of his rabbit hole, preferably someone entertaining. Suggestions please here!
Hmm, lots of good experts. Progressives like Jesse could learn a lot by reading about antizionism in the Soviet Union. Izabella Tabarovsky is very good on this topic, but not sure if she has the Blocked and Reported vibe. Noam Dworman or the hosts of Ask a Jew would probably be better.
I am open to being persuaded by Jesse's arguments. I think he's a smart and thoughtful guy. BUT I also think he should walk around NYC with a kippah or at least a Star of David necklace for a week or two and see if he's treated differently. This would be a very easy social experiment that might either confirm his current beliefs or change them.
Jesse, I love your work, and I very often agree with your views (“it’s complicated!”) Unfortunately I fear your views on antisemitism feel very out of step, insulated by Brooklyn and by yes, not wearing a kippah. Recall the old joke: a Zionist and an anti-Zionist walk into a bar. The bartender yells: “fuck off, we don’t serve Jews here.”
Palestinian activism is much like trans activism; you can clear your throat and clarify but it doesn’t matter. It thrives in absolutism.
Agreed. I’m pretty tired about hearing how antisemitism is exaggerated and not that bad from people who don’t wear a kippah or whose kids don’t do to Jewish schools or who don’t spend a lot of time in Jewish spaces. The experience of observant Jews and everyone else is really, really different. And if people are randomly lashing out at the random observant Jews on the street, they’d lash out at you too if they knew you were Jewish.
It is exaggerated in some quarters, in fact there are a lot of incentives to exaggerate in some contexts and situations...I think any honest participant in this discussion would acknowledge that fact.
Your problem is that there are Jewish people, both Israeli and any other nationality you want, who have reasonable, fact-based, balanced *good* opinions on the whole situation and you're not one of them.
Any time issues around Jews, Israel government's actions, and Palestine, it's best to first acknowledge that on some topics reasonable people may differ, the facts are manipulated, and there's incentive to exaggerate...that's the beginning...if you can't start there you're not going to be able to contribute meaningfully to the discussion.
I mean, you don’t know me so I’m not sure how you would possibly know that my opinions aren’t fact based. In the past two years, I had a friend wearing a kippah who was nearly pushed onto NYC subway tracks, kids in my community who had fake blood poured on them by pro-Pal protestors, relatives spit on, and lots of other stuff. All of that felt pretty real and “fact-based” to me.
I don't have to know you at all to evaluate the alleged "facts" you put out...that's a ridiculous thing to even suggest...I have to have had coffee with you to know if what you say about Jews is accurate...insane...
Annecdotal incidents are not a counterpoint to general statements of trends for a whole country of people.
If it hurts when you pee, you have to assume it must hurt for everyone, to be consistent in your logic.
I'm pretty tired of hearing how America is filled with anti-Semitism when we are doing and have done our best to reject it. Most of it from what you are saying comes from mentally ill, lower class people. The ruling class, the non mentally ill, the educated all reject it. Except of course the people like Nick Fuentes, and others who are all on the right pretty much, who just openly espouse anti-Jewish hate. But they get kid glove treatment here.
This I do not agree with! Some of the most virulently antisemitic things I have heard are from left wing, college educated people who genuinely believe things like… All “true” Jews hate Israel (?), Israel is not Jewish at all but is in fact a construction of American evangelical Christians (???), Israel has no connection to Judaism at all (??????).
A former friend of mine said sincerely that she waits for Israel’s complete destruction— total elimination as an illegitimate state. I said, girl, this would result in the death of like 35% of all the world’s Jews, a Holocaust 2.0. She said: “it’s not like that. It’s about getting rid of Zionists, not Jews.”
A right wing antisemite once asked me where my horns were. A left wing antisemite says that it’s offensive and actually harmful to use the holiday greeting “next year in Jerusalem!”, particularly in light of current sentiment and our shared desire to decolonize and blah blah blah.
I suspect we're being trolled by someone who is intentionally ignoring the demographics of the college encampments that were all over the news for several months. Or the educated NYC voters who agreed with Zamdani's rhetoric.
Hmm, I have my concerns with this generation's crop of ivy league students but I wouldn't necessarily call them mentally ill
ah, "the lower class," acceptable receptacle of a nation's worth of neurosis.
I agree. Big fan of Jesse in general but it's kind of like how on the Fifth Column it's almost a running joke that Kmele will always be reluctant to identify anything as racist, Jesse seems really reluctant to identify antisemitism. I'm not Jewish and prior to 10/7 was pretty pro-Palestinian. Even so I was warily eying the growing left-wing antisemitism that I saw all the time. Have people conflated criticism of Israel or Israeli policy with antisemitism? Absolutely. Have left-aligned bigots used antizionism as a flimsy screen for actual antisemitism? Yes, absolutely, and increasingly. Right-wing antisemites are still around and saying the same things they always have, but the reprehensible 'Israelis should go back to Poland' shit comes from leftists.
10/7 was a big paradigm shift for me. The protests starting before there was any Israeli response at all. The lack of compassion for Jewish victims. The tearing down of hostage photos. Most acutely for me; I'm a little older than Jesse and Katie. I was in my early 20s when 9/11 happened. We on the left were so careful to (rightfully) decry anyone blaming Islam itself for the attacks or demand ordinary Muslims denounce the attacks and declare their loyalty or whatever. So was Bush for that matter. Flash forward to 10/7 and NONE of the same grace was applied to Jewish people in America or the West in general. It became so clear to me that the modern left has an antisemitism problem or at the very least a severe blind spot when it comes to hatred of Jews.
It's as if you don't care what happens in Israel, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank. But college students did this and that! And so your whole perspective on the Israel/Palestine conflict changed.
I dunno, jumping straight to accusations of “genocide” *against* the group that just had 1,200 people murdered in horrific ways (families, babies, people just attending a music concert), as well as having it *streamed onto social media* by the murderers might make me reconsider the company I keep.
But you do you.
Maybe he saw the derangement on college campuses and started to question the narrative he had always heard about the conflict in the middle east, did some research, and realized that it's a bit more complicated than simply "white Jews killing brown Palestinians."
Non-religious Jew here, living in a major North American city. Haven't worn my Star of David necklace out in public since Oct 7. Doubt I'd get beaten up, I just don't want the hassle, and no, I don't feel safe doing it. Maybe that's me being cowardly. Either way though: it's such. bullshit.
That's very understandable and just awful that you have to even think about such a thing. There are a million ways in which everyday Jewish life and/or symbols are disrupted that aren't necessarily captured by "hate crime" statistics.
It really throws into stark relief how proudly and ubiquitously pro-Palestine and/or anti-Israel public expressions are made, often in very "in-your-face" effrontery ways, at least in the cities where I've been living.
I haven't heard the episode yet -- it dropped on shabbos!--but I think any educated Jew or any person with a Jewish identity--kippah or not--would dislike Jesse's takes on Israel and antisemitism.
Jesse treats his Judaism like it's some embarrassing biographical footnote. not a part of his idenity.
There’s long been a contingent of Jewish people (mainly men) who are somewhat embarrassed by their faith because they perceive religion as fundamentally anti-intellectual and faith as evangelical. The funny thing is, you mostly see this with Boomers and Gen X; younger people are less insecure about this. It would appear that, paradoxically, as our culture has become less overtly religious, there’s less of a stigma to having religious faith.
I would go so far as to say he is clearly not actually Jewish.
Well, if someone has a Jewish mother, I'm obligated to consider him as a fellow Jew.
Well and I think he went through whatever things. But he clearly has "opted out" and is an atheist.
As I have said before my wife's line on the maternal line is all Jews, so my boys are technically Jews. Though they haven't done anything ritual wise, and the last practicing one would be their maternal great grandmother. Their maternal grandmother was a unitarian universalist, and their mother was raised that but is now essentially an atheist.
I know plenty of athiests who come to shul every week and have a deep understanding of Judaism. It's a matter of caring or not caring.
Yeah, I love his work, but I’m not sure how much more I can take. It’s like he’s in a little echo chamber and doesn’t know the most simple things that other people realise are obvious. Like that, this idea of the IDF being complicit in police brutality is an antisemitic conspiracy theory. The whole point is to blame the Jews for everything that goes wrong in society.
Jesse seems to have swallowed a whole load of toddle as if it is truth, and he’s meant to be this really clever guy who has critical thinking skills and helps us sift through the nonsense out there. Honestly, I’m thinking of not renewing my subscription because I just can’t take much more of this. Why should I pay somebody to be this stupid?
And Jesse won't do the least bit of research to see the history of the trope "The Jews are training the police oppress blacks" which has a long background. He just doesn't care.
He misses that the a) "boot on your neck" is specifically directed toward Black people, who (for those who participate in radical forums) blame the Police for a black "genocide" and b) Mamdani is saying that the Israel/Gaza conflict's root is "white" people opressing "brown" people.
"this idea of the IDF being complicit in police brutality is an antisemitic conspiracy theory"
No....it's an idea born of the fact that many US police departments have cross trained in "counter-terrorism" and other tactics with the Israeli state (more often their nation police, sometimes the IDF). Now I don't happen to think the US police need Israeli help in figuring out how to be shitty, but I figure they'll take it. I suppose if one believed that various US police departments would be decent "but for" Israel then that would almost certainly be an antisemitic conspiracy theory.
https://www.amnestyusa.org/blog/with-whom-are-many-u-s-police-departments-training-with-a-chronic-human-rights-violator-israel/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/dec/08/us-police-agencies-idf-files-blueleaks
https://deadlyexchange.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Deadly-Exchange-Report.pdf
The singular focus on Israel as a source of malevolence wherever it is involved really smells antisemitic. As far as I know NYPD officers carry handguns of Austrian extraction (Glock) yet nobody turns blame against the Austrian Armed Forces for misbehaving NYPD officers. Ditto for any number of other sources of training or equipment.
If the focus was singular you might have a point, but whenever has the ersatz "left" shown focus? And what has Austria done since WWII that would make anyone think they are a particularly bad nation to deal with? Are they running cover for colonists who attack old women, burn fields, steal land? Are they arresting or shooting kids for throwing rocks? Are they arresting people on spurious or non-existent charges and denying habeas corpus?
I expect if it was you'd mention it to seal the deal, to crystalize how US police cooperate just as much with nation-states that are just as or even more oppressive than Israel. But you don't, because Austria isn't.
For those who dip into these theories that Israel is to blame for bad behavior by US cops, the anti-Israel focus seems monomaniacal. I don't see anyone claiming Qatar or any number of other cooperants are "lacing the boots" of the NYPD.
The usual grounds for this theory are counterterrorism knowledge sharing. Is the IDF therefore commended for lacing the boots of NYPD officers who work to prevent terrorist attacks?
"For those who dip into these theories that Israel is to blame for bad behavior by US cops, the anti-Israel focus seems monomaniacal. I don't see anyone claiming Qatar or any number of other cooperants are 'lacing the boots' of the NYPD."
In an odd way I think this points more to the lack of focus in the left. The drive to make every cause a manifestation of a sort of 'omnicause', instead of a problem that is sometimes connected to other problems in some ways but also sometimes isn't. Settlercolonialwhitesupremacyrapeculturehetropatriarchycapitalism must be abolished! Qatar, being only an averagely oppressive and trying to play a role as an Arabian Switzerland, just doesn't garner the negative attention of its neighbors. Kinda like the UAE. The thought of 'Dubai Chocolate' makes me queasy even though I love chocolate and pistachios, but it's sincerely effective marketing because the UAE has successfully marketed itself as a sort of luxury brand of a nation. Israel's hasbara has been pretty effective too for years, but despite the tone of some of the comments here there are limits to how much you can 'splain away stuff or distract people.
But yeah, the ties between US cops and Israeli cops are limited and principally diplomatic, but made hay of because of the impulse towards the omnicause imho. Doesn't mean the link is not there, but if the US stopped selling weapons to Israel it'd make a much bigger difference than convincing NYPD to not send its cops over there for a conference. Likewise increased training in deescalation and increased accountability would probably make any police force more decent. But, omnicause.
I think he’s probably in denial about the prevalence of leftwing antisemitism because it would mean accepting a lot of uncomfortable truths he’d rather avoid.
Jesse says the Boulder, CO firebombing murder and attack was carried out "just because they were protesting in favor of Israel."
The group was actually focused on doing a silent walk in solidarity with the hostages: "We do an 18 minute weekly walk to show international solidarity with the hostages taken from Israel during the 10/7 massacre, and still being held in Gaza. We will walk until they are all released."
I don't think it's quite accurate to lump that in with "protesting in favor of Israel."
https://www.cbsnews.com/colorado/news/run-for-their-lives-organization-boulder-colorado-attack/
This is good context to have, and you're right that it was not a pro-Israel demonstration per se. However, this group of people would be viewed as Zionists by those who consider themselves strongly pro-Palestine, and were almost certainly read as such by the perpetrators of the attack. Before the living hostages were recovered, people who didn't sufficiently throat-clear and say that they also care about Gazan civilians whenever they expressed concern for the Israeli hostages were branded as Zionists.
I consider the attack to be antisemitic in nature, even though I tend to lean in a pro-Palestinian (but anti-Hamas, to be clear) direction on this issue. The American Right may be too eager to label things as antisemitic, but even when you set that aside, it's clear that there's been a recent uptick in antisemitism, or more appropriately, the antisemites who were quiet for a long time feel increasingly comfortable expressing their bigotry in the open.
Honest question: How do you differentiate between pro Hamas and pro Palestinian?
After Oct. 7, Hamas's approval ratings and approval of Oct 7 itself in Gaza was around 70-80 percent.
So it seems Oct 7 was broadly popular and supported amongst the population.
That approval dropped as the conflict went on, but ostensibly due to the consequences not a fundamental disapproval of the action itself. In other words, but for the consequences the population would support more Oct. 7 style pogroms.
There are innocents in every conflict, for sure, but the political will, anti-semitism, and genocidal aspirations of Hamas are broadly supported by the population.
Let's get the obvious one out of the way: Palestine's demographics skew very young; minors make up 48% of Gaza's population, for instance. A child does not deserve to have her legs blown off regardless of her parents' political affiliation.
But focusing just on adults: crises and instability radicalize people, and Hamas are excellent propagandists. Hamas is also a political party, and the parties opposing it have been very weak; they are nakedly corrupt and perceived as conceding too much to Israel. You can credibly argue that Hamas has manufactured consent among the civilian populace for its most draconian maneuvers.
As far as my own perspective on this goes, I believe that Hamas is acting against the best interest of Palestinian civilians. It has refused to build bomb shelters for the entire time it's been in power, for instance. It hoards resources while the country experiences a famine. Most damningly, it views civilians as expendable, and their deaths as bargaining chips. They characterize those killed as "martyrs," because the death count futhers' Hamas political goals by increasing global opposition to Israel. That was their goal all along: to goad the hawkish Netenyahu administration into an invasion via a terrorist attack against a civilian population they knew was unprepared for war. Hamas would trade the life of every child in Palestine if it meant the dissolution of Israel. No human being deserves to live under a regime like that. My alignment is with the safety of civilians, regardless of how idiotic their politics are.
I don’t think it’s right to infantilize an entire population. And regardless whether they’ve been “duped” into supporting a death cult that openly calls for the extermination of Jews, it doesn’t change the threat they pose to Jews.
I doubt any of the victims of the pogrom on Oct 7th find solace in the possibility that their murderers and rapists consented under false pretense.
Of course children do not deserve to be the hapless victims of their parents and governments politics.
But we must remember that is Hamas and their support from the Gazans old enough to make decisions who are the architects of their injury.
Reducing everything I said about the radicalization of the Palestinian populace to them being "duped" is an oversimplification at best and a deliberate mischaracterization at worst.
I don't think the solution to people "calling for extermination" is to exterminate those people first; it supposes that this is a trolley car problem when it isn't. You do understand that the IDF's heavy-handed response in this situation is just going to further entrench the existing extremist thought in Palestine, right? It is the exact opposite of deradicalization. Even if Israel manages to eliminate Hamas, they've just created the conditions for an entirely new terrorist organization to arise in its place.
Israel had broad international support in the days and weeks immediately following October 7th, which it then proceeded to completely squander by responding as hawkishly as it did. Again, this is exactly what Hamas wanted, for Israel to give a disproportionate military response that would destroy its standing in the global community. To be clear: a rebuttal was absolutely necessary here, but it ought to have been a lot more measured than it was.
TL;DR: Killing civilians who support terrorists is not going to get rid of terrorism, and if you think it would, you have no idea how terrorism works.
Then it is good that Israel is neither attempting to exterminate Palestinians nor targeting civilians.
There is a stark moral difference between targeting innocent men women, and children and targeting militants who commit those acts.
Hamas and their supporters are on one side of that moral line and Israel is on the other.
I empathize with the innocents caught in the middle. It’s it difficult to find empathy for those who support Hamas and pogroms.
Support for Hamas has dropped significantly as the war has drawn on. And the view that Oct 7 was correct and good has dropped as well.
You raise disproportionate force again. What in the calculus you’re using here? What is the body count of murdered Jewish civilians by an invading military before Israel is allowed to retaliate? If they are winning, what is the number dead before they are obligated to withdraw and wait for the next pogrom to cash in enough credit to renew their defense?
What blows my mind is that there are actual, real life, literally evil bad guys in this conflict. Child murdering, raping, torturers. And that’s not hyperbole. They filmed it. Broadcast it. Celebrated it. Not one bad soldier, but as a matter of military policy. They promised to do it not once, but a second, a third, a fourth…a millionth.
So Israel should say “Well, they only got a couple of thousand this time. And our defenses stopped their 100s of rockets. So let’s just hit a couple of their bunkers and call it a day. Ask real nice for hostages and bodies of our dead.”?
If the coordinated attacks by Iran and Hezbollah succeeded, do you think they and Hamas would have called it quits after some “proportional” number of Jews were killed?
Well said.
Wow! I haven't listened to the episode yet--it dropped on Shabbos--but it's outrageous statement to make and patently false. Jesse wants so badly to be accepted by progressives. The sad thing is they'll see him as "jew colonizer" no matter how big a keffiyeh he tries to wrap himself in.
100%. I wish I could just give my subscription money to Katie.
Nitpick much?
Ok we get it. You dislike Israel and maybe Jews or don't care but you clearly care enough to throw out a silly or even rude comment under everyone else's comment. Obviously you're triggered so do tell us what's really on your mind.
If the difference didn't matter, you wouldn't prefer that it were categorized as protesting in favor of Israel.
Not really. People supporting the hostages do not all support Israel.
I don't understand the liberal obsession with "hate" and other speech crimes. I live in a college town, and I couldn't get to daily appointments and access services because protestors were allowed to shut down public spaces, streets, and town hall meetings whenever they wanted. My tax money was wasted on addressing their vandalism and then letting them do it again the next day. Hate crime laws didn't protect us from any of this.
The same progressive colleagues who believed that prison was too harsh a punishment even for serial child killers expressed that October 7 was somehow justified. Disagreeing with these opinions would often get you socially and professionally shunned as a "fascist." All of this began while the bodies from October 7 were still fresh and we were still waiting to confirm whether anyone we knew was missing or dead.
After a year of this, I stopped wanting to leave my house and began experiencing panic attacks every day and developed chronic pain from the stress. I lost my job, health, and social network all at the hands of well-meaning progressives. I don't care whether my life was ruined because of anti-Zionism or antisemitism, I care that the social contract is broken when a mob can waste my tax dollars and prevent me from using public facilities with impunity.
A transgender commentator once said they became a conservative because they realized that Democrats and Republicans both lie, but conservative policies allowed them to live their life in peace, and that matters more than the words people say. I wish progressives would realize that "hate crimes" are a poor proxy for quality of life. Much more important to the wellbeing of Jews and everyone else are the basics of a functional society: consistent enforcement of laws that protect the rights of all people from the excesses of mob mentality and dysfunction.
Widespread antisemitism is often a harbinger of social and moral decay and I think we are seeing that pretty clearly on the right and the left these days.
So sorry life has been made miserable by these antisocial creeps and their enablers.
I don't think OP was blaming "antisemetism" for the problems they listed...they were blaming the liberal obsession with hate crimes and speech infractions.
From OP: "I don't understand the liberal obsession with "hate" and other speech crimes."
I do think you trying to contextualize those issues listed as being caused by antisemetism is bullshit and makes every aspect of productive discussion more difficult.
When "hate" crime legislation came out, it was argued that it amounted to "thought crime" in many instances. It requires (in less obvious instances) to read the mind/heart of the alleged offender.
A crime, after all, is already a crime (and an act of crime against another might already--by definition--be 'hateful')--but the desire to add on penalties for "hate" is understandable, but fraught.
We do seem to be excusing actual criminal behavior, while also amping up penalties for "hateful" crimes.
Yes- this was the position of my late father- who was a very smart Supreme Court commissioner.
To be fair, motive is a relevant factor even in crimes where bigotry isn't part of the equation; it can mean the difference between murder and self-defense. Granted, that's mostly just a matter of whether someone had a preexisting desire to kill another person. Once we get into the territory of why someone committed a premeditated criminal act, trying to quantify the moral depravity of it in terms of motivation becomes a lot trickier, because there often isn't an objective answer. For instance, which is worse: a perpetrator who kills for sexual pleasure, or a perpetrator who kills because they're bigoted against the decedent? It seems to me like both are equally injurious to the fabric of society, yet there isn't a big political push to create special laws that apply to the former.
Yes, motive is a factor. But when you look at the places where intent matters, the intent itself is illegal.
For example, 1st degree murder is more severe than manslaughter because the perpetrator planned to murder the person in advance. But planning to murder someone serious is itself against the law and can be prosecuted regardless of whether they succeed in carrying out the plan.
Vehicular homicide is more severe than accidentally running over someone because the driver intended to run over the person. But even if they did not succeed, trying to run someone over is itself illegal.
In other words, it is inherent to qualifier that you are wanting to do harm.
But "hate" is not illegal in itself. And there's nothing inherent in hate that necessitates the desire to carry out harm.
Most people that "hate" (or have prejudice), never commit violence. But 100% of the people who seriously plan a murder are, well, seriously planning murder.
In all other cases, the intent was a precursor to the action and the natural and inevitable outcome of the intent. This is not the case with 'hate crimes'.
I think that's why it feels different.
Hate crime legislation was always a bad idea for exactly this reason.
I also live in a college town and experienced none of this (because it didn't happen--lawful protests were allowed, but professors were not allowed to cancel classes). This suggests to me that lawlessness like the behavior you describe is a policy choice. I'm sorry the wrong choice was made in your town.
People protested and you lost your job, health, and social network? I think that's probably on you and not the protestors.
Is there a particular reason you're being a prick in these comments?
I did argue it's better to let people reveal who they are up front, rather than hide behind speech restrictions like hate crime laws and other social taboos. I feel successful.
Hate speech and hate crimes tend to be symptoms of much deeper issues. When they are content with their country and their government, people do not feel as inclined to look for groups to scapegoat. If you look at the overall trajectory of history, the ugliest injustices against Jewish people have typically been perpetrated during or shortly after periods of political and economic upheaval or instability. This is not to say bigotry never happens in stable environments, but stability is definitely a risk-mitigating factor.
I think Jesse got lost in the "conspiracy" angle of Mamdani's quote, taking him too much in good faith that he was drawing direct attention to collaborations between the NYPD and the IDF.
The quote is below:
"I think that for anyone to care about these issues, we have to make them hyper-local we have to make clear that when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it's been laced by the IDF. We have to make, not specifically that example all the time, but just to say that, for working class people who have very little time, who have so many stresses, who are under so many pressures, there isn't that much time for symbolism. We have to make it materially connected to their life."
There are two ways to read this, both of which are quite bad!
First read, is that Mamdani wants New Yorkers to channel their hatred of the NYPD against Israel. This one strikes me as a bit odd for a NYC politician. Even Mamdani realizes he can't be openly anti-NYPD. Unless, of course, Israel is the omnicause (which maybe), but that's terrible for the future of discourse and our politics.
The second read, that I find more plausible, is that Mamdani wants to channel the hatred of Jews towards the NYPD. Using words like "there isn't that much time for symbolism. We have to make it materially connected to their life", in my opinion, supports that. Hating Jews in this climate is remarkably "easy" for so many people it seems. Easier to draw that connection to malign the NYPD than to do the inverse -- people seem more than willing to hate Jews without having to go through a conspiracy tie to the NYPD.
He's also giving the game away when he says that there isn't time for symbolism - he wants people to feel a visceral and pre-cognitive anger towards Israel, and does it via emotional switcheroo where he tells the audience to tell others that Israel is really the NYPD. Maybe Israel is also behind high rents and the affordability crisis! There's no time for symbolism, we have to make it real.
Lol Mamdani is like “these working class voters are so dumb they can't understand it's the Jews, we have to spell it out for them”
It’s worse than that. It specifically “the *blacks* aren’t smart enough and we need to spell it out”
Yeah there aren't really a lot of ways to read that comment that aren't awful.
Similar to a conservative politician going out into rural areas and being like "Yeah when the IRS or the county tax assessor is making you angry remember it is the boot of the NAACP and MLK that put them there". Which yeah there are probably some cousins of that approach out there in conservative land. And I think most of us would agree those are bad people.
Exactly, the problem isn't that it's pushing conspiracies between the IRS and the NAACP. The problem is it's using prejudice to advance your cause!
I'm not sure there's any coherent message beyond, he was at the DSA, the IDF is one of the horsemen of the Big Bad for the DSA, and so he launched into messaging that ties x to y in a similar way that a lot of woke arglebargle in universities and online have done during the great awokening. Getting the "read" right isn't the point; Mamdani is a man for all readings (within a certain frequency band), as it were. So, so much of this is about vibes*. The vibes themselves do of course function to make the atmosphere more foreboding and to whatever interminably debatable extent, dangerous.
*(In the spirit of making fetch happen, I'd like to make "The Genovibes in Gaza" happen, but I'm afraid it won't be taken ironically).
Disagree. A plain reading of the quote suggests Mamdani is mostly going for the first reading, that is, for New Yorkers to channel their hatred of the NYPD against Israel.
When Mamdani says "for anyone to care about these issues," the issues he is referring to are middle-east Israel/Palestine issues. He is suggesting a method for making those issues "hyper-local" and using the NYPD as an entry point for that. People have feelings and experiences with the NPYD, and those can be leveraged toward the pet issues he is trying to get people to care about.
(I believe Mamdani is fine with some component of the second reading being mixed in as well, but it's not his main point.)
Then again, I think it’s a good rule to be extremely skeptical of politicians who seem prone to conspiratorial thinking. If you believe conspiracy theories, you’re one step away from solving the One Big Problem rather than making incremental change that can help people.
Mamdani's statement
> "I think that for anyone to care about these issues, we have to make them hyper-local we have to make clear that when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it's been laced by the IDF. We have to make, not specifically that example all the time, but just to say that, for working class people who have very little time, who have so many stresses, who are under so many pressures, there isn't that much time for symbolism. We have to make it materially connected to their life."
They actually mean this literally. This has been a BLM talking point. It's based on very little truth. Like a police force here taking a Krav Maga course, or a police chief there attending a security summit in Israel. Those morph into "Israel send the IDF to teach U.S. Police how to kill brown people" For example, the "Real News Network" says that "Anti-imperialist advocates say the tactics being taught to US law enforcement were battle-tested on Palestinians and spread to the US to target Black and Brown communities through a training relationship that grants Israeli forces more power and profit, causing further harm to Palestinians. "
A common thread behind these claims is the _racism_. They see the Gaza war as simply "white people" trying to oppress "brown people", which is absurd claim to make if you look at Israelis and the "Palestineans". They need to frame it this way to get the BLM folks interested.
Mamdani is using he cred as a "brown" person to incite the black community against the "white" Jews who he'll claim are the source for all their misfortunes.
I've been traveling to NY every year for a week in December ever since I left NY 37 years ago. We decided to go to FL this year instead. I'm not going to give that horrific city any of my money. Half the voters there goose-stepped to the polls to "kill the Jews."
Isn't it just the IDF are BAD and do BAD SHIT including in the eyes of his audience innocents and he's saying we don't want a police force that is trained that way by them.
I mean it's crude etc but not everyone thinks the IDF are cool.beans. I dont think it's wider than that.
At the same time the nit picking over surnames is annoying. Id you're attacking a Jewish museum then it's many things but highly likely it's antisemitic. (The only way it's.not.ia say if they are hosting a art exhibition of a hebophile and you're protesting that aspect - but let's face it that's quite unlikely or niche).
Everything I've seen of Mamdani's early comments suggests he's just your typical omnicause DSA type. And he's had to walk some of that back to be politically viable--which is what sane people should want, IMO. I'm not sure I believe the new and improved version of Mamdani, but if political reality continues to keep him moving in the right direction and hopefully saying less conspiratorial stuff, that's better than entrenchment in twentysomething faux radicalism.
I mostly agree (the people losing their mind about him rapping about the Holy Land Five like 10 years ago need to chill) but the IDF/NYPD quote was 2 years ago when he was already an Assemblyman. I am also pretty skeptical that Mamdani is going to usher in some new age of antisemitism in NYC, but he has said some gross shit fairly recently when he was already in elected office.
I never "rapped" about supporting terrrorists when I was a kid. And he was a smart kid, who went to fancy schools and had elite educated parents. No excuses for any of it.
Fair point!
Mamdani does what he is told and smiles like a kid on his mom's birthday...don't over analyze it he is a 2-bit stooge.
Look at the vote totals, if that beret wearing guy wasn't in the race he'd have lost to an absolutely atrocious candidate in Cuomo.
Mamdani's success can 100% be attributed to how absolutely atrocious of a candidate Cuomo was...New Yorkers are trending more progressive...for the last 70 years...it's not news...what is news is how unbelievably unlikable the Cuomo was.
Your second parsing seems more plausible, but your interpretation shifts his words from "IDF" to "Jews". IDF is a distinct organization with a reputation (not always accurate) for improper uses of deadly force. So the more natural reading is that he's using anti-IDF stereotypes, not anti-Semitic ones.
(Now, is it a coincidence that, of all the armed forces in the world, he's picking the IDF? No. But at the same time IDF has high name recognition and a high percentage of their actions are caught on video. So they're unique in more than just being mostly Jewish/Israeli.)
Since most Israelis served in the IDF any training received by any Israeli becomes “IDF” training according to DSA folks. You don’t see any other country or organization singled out ever for supplying training materials to the NYPD.
For example a couple of years ago Qatar provided training to the NYPD: https://dohanews.co/nypd-exchanges-expertise-with-qatar-police-ahead-of-2022-world-cup/
There are many other examples, many with Scotland Yard, etc. Nobody ever mentions them.
If you try to dig into the "IDF Training" it's almost always "retired Israeli intelligence officer gives a talk about anti-terrorism." It's never active IDF soldiers assigned to go to NYC and train cops.
I watched the clip (which is really cut to start at a particular point), and the Anderson Cooper video from a few weeks ago where he talks about it.
Jesse's read is fine, and yours are both wildy conspiratorial. Mamdani was clearly trying to explain how you get ordinary Americans who are busy with their lives to care about the abuses of the IDF when it's on the other side of the world, and one way is to point towards the cooperation between that institution and the one that you deal with on a daily basis.
I haven't listened to this yet but on a similar topic of journalistic malpractice, I remember when Blocked and Reported covered the Residential Schools "Mass Graves" hysteria in Canada and Jesse said something to the effect of "wow, this is really going to cause a reckoning in Canadian media". Well, I can report it absolutely did not cause a reckoning in Canadian media. It is still absolutely verboten to cast doubt on the story in mainstream Canadian media. What's weird is that it's clear journalists know the story is false but simultaneously they also know they're not allowed to say it's false so whenever the topic comes up they have to use weird oblique language where they don't explicitly say the story isn't true but also make it so the casual reader would think it was true. For example, when CBC anchor Rosemary Barton said “Yes, there have been remains of Indigenous children found in various places across the country”, the CBC issued a "correction" which said "As CBC News has reported on multiple occasions, what several Indigenous communities across Canada have discovered on the sites of some former residential schools are potential burial sites or unmarked graves." That basically sounds like instead of correcting her, they're affirming what she said but the "potential" means strictly speaking they didn't lie.
We can’t have the mere facts getting into the way of our ideological narratives!
Yes, I have long since given up on there ever being consequences for this kind of bullshit-spewing, or anyone who got cancelled for pointing it out to ever get justice
All I could think of in that BBC Patterson analysis was how CBC is even worse!
It’s enough to make one want to commit suicide. Luckily, Canada is here to help!
Thinking two incompatible things at once? If only we had a word for that...
Like many Pro-Palestine public intellectuals, you can see Jesse's bias in the way he seems so concerned about people just taking for granted what the IDF says. Yes, this does happen and should be criticized. But we can trust entities like the UN, Al Jazeera, the Iranian Govt, the Gaza Ministry of Health, etc., even less for having a clear and sustained anti-Israel bias. Yet many of the reasons why people like Jesse have the negative opinion they do of Israel is precisely BECAUSE of sources like this. Again, sources which are highly questionable.
Jesse seems much less skeptical of the Pro-Palestine side. I'm not saying there aren't legitimate sources and legitimate reasons that suggest Israel should be condemned on certain things (like settlement building). But the point is to apply your skepticism consistently so we can all come up with as objective a view as possible of what's going on.
I think with Jesse, it’s more that he doesn’t want to face the truth of antisemitism on the left because that would mean he’d have to fundamentally shift his perception of the political culture in this country. No one wants to accept that their tribe has rejected them.
Many of the reasons people like me have a negative opinion of Israel is because they are a pre-UN nation in a post-UN world. They abide the old order of taking land in war.
So you must have a negative opinion of most Middle Eastern countries then, since many (like Syria) are much more pre-UN (as you put it) than Israel.
Wars started by whom?
You're right that Israel is a pre-UN nation: it is a nation-state with an internal sense of legitimacy and purpose. Its neighbors are all post-UN states: post-colonial satrapies created as European colonial provinces slipped away from the control of the metropole, like most of the new countries that found independence in the second half of the twentieth century. "Syria" and "Lebanon" and "Jordan" are the results of Europeans drawing crayons across the map of a place they've never been.
Because Europeans are the only ones in history who've divvied up conquered territory, and Israel is the only nation-state with "an internal sense of legitimacy and purpose" in the Middle East.
The UN is anti-Israel? Well it's also against Russia, North Korea, Myanmar, Sudan, Yemen, Iran, and more.
Not sure what that constitutes as bias against other than war crimes and violations of international law.
How many UN Condemnations have been issued to Israel? Relative to any of the countries you mention? What's that you say... Israel has received more than all of them put together? Yet conflicts like the Sudanese Civil War are arguably the most brutal on earth?
Yeah don't get me wrong, if they went in whole hog and just pushed out or wiped out every last Palestinian within their borders rather than the sort of half-measures they do, I'd bet within 10-20 years they'd be in almost everyone's good graces. The dead don't speak. But probably every neighbor would turn on them, and even steadfast allies like the US would waver. Even if they're wealthy and well-armed, they're not big. It'd be a crazy risk. There'd be internal opposition too. It's one thing to pen people in, or respond militarily to a terrorist attack (even 60x disproportionately), or outsource violence to settlers or irregulars while giving them legal cover on the backend, but come on.
Meanwhile Sudan? They're condemned for their crimes, and under sanctions too. Israel's not under sanctions, they're just criticized a lot. I guess it's good to have friends.
Nice attempt at shifting the goal post, but you initially expressed skepticism regarding the UN being anti-Israel. You suggested you didn't know what "constituted this bias." I provided evidence of disproportionate UN Condemnations. You then responded by claiming that Sudan has been condemned too. However this does not address my point that Israel has been condemned WAY MORE.
Your point about sanctions might be worth thinking about were it not for the fact that what's happening in Sudan has been labeled a genocide by multiple governments with no debate (because it obviously is one). Or for the fact that, again, what's happened there is WAAAY more brutal than anything that's happened in the Gaza War: 400k dead and counting, total disregard for civilian life, women and girls getting raped in the streets, etc.
To clarify:
I'm skeptical of the UN being *disproportionately* or *unreasonably* anti-Israel. My contention is that it's anti-Israel insofar as Israel does things that are worthy of being anti-.
Has Israel been condemned MORE than Sudan? Maybe, sure. They've been doing what they do for longer too. They've existed longer as a consistent entity too. As I said, every "start" in a stop-and-start process is likely to generate a new condemnation. I don't think they draft new resolutions every X number of dead civilians.
The 400k that have been killed in Sudan is twice as much as Israel has killed in the last 50 years. Israel has never had active rape gangs that deliberately target young women and girls. The point is that Israel is condemned way more, and it's behavior (while worthy of condemnation) doesn't rise to the level of many other nations that are not condemned or condemned much less.
You can see the disproportion here: https://unwatch.org/2024-unga-resolutions-on-israel-vs-rest-of-the-world/?utm_source=chatgpt.com. Though UN Watch does have a more pro-Israel bias, the same observation has been backed up by other scholars: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/271216417_The_preoccupation_of_the_United_Nations_with_Israel_Evidence_and_theory
I was skeptical at first, but when you look into it the bias is pretty stark.
Like UNESCO only ever adopting nation targeting resolutions that name Israel. Like 100% of the time with very, very few exceptions.
This year the general assembly adopted 173 resolution against Israel. 80 against all other countries combined.
I mean...it's just a little hard to believe there's not just a wee bit of bias going on.
I'm not what "nation targeting resolutions" means in the context of UNESCO. Their website talks about Gaza, Ukraine, Iraq, Libya, Syria, etc.
I don't know where "173 resolutions against Israel [this year]" citation comes from either. The pro-Israel group UN Watch only lists 16 this year. And most of it is fair critique, or more pro-Palestinian than anti-Israeli.
Interesting that Jesse and Katie missed a connection between their two main stories. One of the accusations against the BBC includes their anti-Israel bias. A report issued last year indicated that the BBC breached its own editorial guidelines 1,500 times in the first four months of the war (https://www.timesofisrael.com/from-tears-for-arafat-to-death-to-the-idf-how-bbcs-israel-coverage-has-gone-from-bad-to-worse/).
In case you're wondering which direction the "mistakes" went, they aired a documentary about the war but forgot to mention that the teen narrator was the son of Hamas' deputy minister of agriculture. It's the same as the other stories: progressive bias led to coverage that couldn't be trusted by the people forced to pay for it.
holy shit that’s depressing.
From the article: "The report also found that, in the corporation’s coverage of the conflict, Israel was associated with genocide more than 14 times more than Hamas."
I wonder what a good ratio is? Because if it's tied to the number of civilians killed by each side, this seems well-tilted in Israel's favor.
Here's the actual report being referenced. It's written by by a British-Israeli who works out of Jerusalem, so this report on bias might be a bit biased itself:
https://asserson.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/asserson-report.pdf
The side that is openly genocidal was accused of genocide at 1/14 the rate of the side that didn't start the war and would have ended it any time in exchange for their hostages and a surrender by the losing side. The fact is that Hamas would commit genocide if they could; Israel could but they don't, yet they get accused of it 14 times more than Hamas. Deaths in a war (that Hamas started and chose to keep going) are not the same as genocide.
According to the Hamas charter, Jews will be able to live safely in some imaginary future Islamic state they'll run. I pray we never have to see the claim tested.
According to Israel, they just want the hostages back. That's why they saturation bombed the area, and why now that every living hostage has been returned Israel has withdrawn from Gaza entirely and no unarmed civilians have been killed since.
As for me, I have a bridge to sell you.
There are dozens of hostages not returned, many presumed dead but many of unknown status.
The agreement was for all hostages, living or dead.
Generally, saturation bombing means indiscriminate bombing. Israel's bombing campaign targeted specific buildings. And implemented multiple layers of warning systems prior to bombing a target, including
- phone calls and text messages
- leaflets
- radio broadcasts and regional warnings
- roof knocking
This is more than any other country in history has done to minimize civilian casualties.
In contrast, Hamas has told civilians to ignore the warnings. Have embedded militants and weapons in the civilian population. And prevented evacuations. There are reports of opening fire on civilians if they do try to flee.
The consensus is that those not yet returned are corpses. Hamas isn't claiming to hold any living hostages, even though the hostages' lives were their bargaining chips. The agreement was for the dead too, but if you're implying that Israel will just leave once the bodies are dug out give me a break. If they had really wanted the hostages back they wouldn't have started bombing in the first place.
Maybe "saturation bombing" is overstated, but the level of damage, destruction, and displacement in Gaza does not conform to a narrative of targeted attacks. And certainly Hamas does Gaza no favors, but the threat of permanent displacement must be make the argument to stay pretty seductive. And displacement is one of the goals, one of the acceptable outcomes for the government there, as we can see.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/01/gaza-riviera-trump-administration-weighs-post-war-redevelopment-plan.html
Excuse you? Israel has always been at war to seek the destruction of Hamas. During hostage negotiations, you are allowed to lie about your intentions to obtain more living hostages. You have no moral or strategic obligation to be honest with hostage takers.
"Israel has always been at war to seek the destruction of Hamas."
https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up-hamas-now-its-blown-up-in-our-faces/
Have we really always been at war with Eastasia? Or did a mad dog come loose its chain?
I think that the claim that Israel seeks to destroy Hamas is true, but I also think that for the current Israeli government at least, the real goal is Palestinians as a whole, and "Hamas" is just a sufficiently barbaric organization that they can justify doing whatever they want. Kill a man? He was Hamas. Kill a teen? Hamas Jr. A little kid? Stood too close to Hamas, it's the parents' fault (or maybe they were Hamas). Hamas is a useful tool: illegitimate, violent, genocidal, and also theoretically everywhere. If you say you're Hamas you get the bullet of course. But kill someone without open affiliation and you can still diagnose them as Hamas post-mortem. If you leave Hamas to run the territory, everyone's got a little Hamas on them. If you somehow can't, it's still Hamas's fault that your bullets and bombs hit them, because Hamas was using them as human shields, and what are you supposed to do, hold fire?
"You have no moral or strategic obligation to be honest with hostage takers."
Even after they are returned it seems. Imagine if Palestinians felt the same about the thousands of people Israel holds without even a fig leaf of criminal charges.
You are a conspiracy theorist. Your claims are unfalsifiable, and you have failed to meet the basic due diligence of explaining *why* Israel would act in the way that you are proposing.
Why do you listen to this podcast if you are incapable of skepticism?
Yes, thank you.
I'm sure Jesse and Katie must know that answering emails about being Jewish under Mamdani in NYC risks some subscriptions. Kudos to them for doing it anyway. I think it's great that they engaged with subscriber feedback despite the possibility of giving further offense.
Like a lot of BARflies, I often disagree with Jesse's comments on Israel, and I think he's being more charitable regarding Mamdani's IDF comments than I would be, but I appreciate his long-standing commitment to good-faith discussion. (I appreciate Katie's, too, it's just that she doesn't come in for as much criticism in the comment section!)
I do got to say, I felt Katie's behavior in the first half of this episode was much closer to the platonic ideal of a good Talmudic-pilpulistic argumentative Jew than Jesse's was. But he did good.
From a devout Muslim woman no-less!
I wrote an essay on the topic of antisemitism vs antizionism: https://www.ymeskhout.com/p/slicing-the-kosher-hate-salami
The basic summary is that trying to distinguish between the two is often an incoherent exercise. I'm NOT saying the two ideas are identical, but rather trying to draw a crisp clean boundary is a lost cause and also a distraction. An analogy I use "I don't hate gay people, I only hate those who watch RuPaul's drag race".
Instead of getting distracted debating whether X belongs in bucket A or bucket B, we should instead remember the principles that prompted us to create two buckets in the first place.
I think it’s also obviously the case that a lot of genuine anti-Semites use “anti-Zionism” to put a respectable gloss on their bigotry, and the more sophisticated among them are pretty clearly leveraging the energy of more good faith “anti-Israel’s-current-policies” protesters in a calculated way (and yes I think that includes some folks at the DSA).
If you’re involved in any significant way with anti-Israeli / free-Palestine protest movements, you’re going to be rubbing shoulders with a lot of genuine Jew-haters, and in some sense benefiting their cause.
I don’t really know what to do about it, because you should be able to criticize Israel without being an inadvertent anitsemitic fellow-traveler. They should be separable positions. But in practice that’s easier said than done, and more often stated than executed.
I guess I would just want people waving Palestinian flags and wearing keffiyeh to be aware of and sensitive to that dynamic rather than just sneer back “I’m just an anti-Zionist”.
Yes. The most audacious example is how protests happening in the West openly chant "Falasteen Arabiya" (Palestine will be Arab) in Arabic, instead of the sanewashed English translation "Palestine will be Free".
The solution is extremely obvious to me: protestors should explicitly disavow those elements! The only explanations for why they might be extremely reluctant to do so is either 1) keeping unambiguous anti-semites within the coalition is more important than kicking them, for some reason or 2) they secretly agree with them.
Do the protests even happen without the unambiguous antisemites? I’m very much not saying that the majority of the protesters are antisemites, but I do think the majority of the organizational energy comes from groups that either are unambiguously antisemitic, or so chock-full of antisemites that they may as well be.
Of course when you start talking about international socialism and antisemites, the question of “who is using who” gets murky.
This is a genuinely difficult question to answer fairly, and it's the subject of a pending draft I've been wrestling with. The problem is two-fold:
1. What is the denominator? Who exactly should count as part of the "movement"? Should it be only those who physically attend a protest, or should anyone with an errant opinion on the matter also be included?
2. What is the numerator? How much evidence do you need before you're comfortable labeling someone an antisemite? I think the folks knowingly chanting "khaybar khaybar ya yahud" absolutely fit the bill, but what about the ones who are more guarded or more reliant on dog whistles?
This problem isn't limited to just the antizionism movement, but really any instance where you have a fluid motte-and-bailey dynamic. Other prominent examples that come to mind are the 2020 stolen election claims and most trans activism.
Very good essay!
I was the listener who wrote the email that was shared at the top of the episode. I really appreciate the fact that Jesse and Katie engaged with my criticism in good faith. Thank you both.
Because a substantial portion of my words were read on air, I am going to share the entire email I sent here, so that they are available in their full context.
"Hi Jesse,
I have been a premium subscriber to BARPOD since 2023. I am also, unlike you, someone who wears a kippah and tzitzit in public. I have no judgement about your level of observance. I myself spent most of my adult life unobservant and only returned to more active engagement with my Judaism following the October 7th attacks. I mention this difference between us only to say that I have a deep understanding of what it is like to move through the world both as a visible and a non-visible Jew. Those two experiences are not remotely the same.
The comment you made in the last episode--"I don't feel at all unsafe in New York City as a Jew"--was, frankly, obtuse. I'm glad that you don't feel unsafe as a Jew in New York City. However you're not moving through the world as an identifiable Jew, so what possible relevance does your anecdote hold? All you've done is use tokenism to shout down the legitimate fears of your fellow Jews who do feel unsafe because unlike you, we are visibly identifiable as Jews in public.
I likewise take issue with your inability to see the ways that anti-Zionism contributes to this lack of safety. You are so thoughtful and nuanced on so many other topics, and yet it seems you've never made any attempt to grapple intellectually with this one. It's great that elites like yourself and Mamdani can separate "even deranged" criticism of Israel from antisemitism, but you must be aware that broad swaths of the population do not practice such fine-grained semantic distinctions.
The concern isn't the deranged criticism of Israel. It's the deranged monomania, the single minded obsessiveness with an extremely complicated conflict in a tiny country on the far side of the world, and the way that omnicause creates a permissive environment for non-elites who conclude that if Israel is the root of all evil (even lacing the NYPD's boots), then the best way to fight it is to confront the Jews in their midst.
I've personally had someone scream "FREE PALESTINE" at my wife and I while we were simply walking to our Synagogue, doing nothing more provocative than being an identifiably Jewish couple in public. A man screaming "Free Palestine" burned elderly Jews alive in Boulder, and another man screaming "Free Palestine" shot two young Jews in Washington DC. Two weeks ago, a 59 year old man in New York City had his kippah knocked off of his head by an assailant who then broke his nose and caused a brain bleed. In June, an Orthodox man walking to Shul in Crown Heights was beaten unconscious by someone yelling about Gaza.
You know of these examples, which are only a sampling of what our community has endured. I'm sure you are also aware that Jews suffer far more hate crime assaults than any other group in New York City. Yet despite this, you still feel comfortable using your platform to say "I don't feel at all unsafe in New York City as a Jew." I find that very disappointing, and I hope it's something you'll put more effort into reflecting on going forward."
I can feel your pain and I'm so sorry.
Jesse will not change. For whatever reason, he has mild contempt for Jewish people and the Jewish religion. As another commenter said, it would be interesting to go back to his childhood and discover why, but we're not here to analyze him. We each have to determine if we want to continue supporting Barpod, knowing that 50% of the creators are willfully blind to this issue. He does good work on other topics, but anything involving a Jewish perspective is not one of them.
I don’t think he’s shown contempt for Jews so much as dismissiveness about what I consider legitimate concerns about antisemitism. Jesse grew up in Newton, MA, a very Jewish suburb of Boston. I’m a bit older than him. I too grew up in up in a very Jewish suburb of a large American city. Growing up there, it was easy to believe that antisemitism was no longer a real threat. The first time I heard anything mildly antisemitic was when I went away to college. Things have escalated significantly over the past few years. Not all anti-Israel demonstrators are antisemitic, but it’s clear that, as an organized movement, they don’t think Israel should exist. And, the movement tolerates, and too often encourages, antisemitism. In October 2023, one could make a reasonable argument that college students are generally ignorant and immature and probably didn’t know the history of “from the river to the sea” or “globalize the intifada.” However, three years later, if you’re still participating in protests that feature these slogans, you’re either calling for the destruction of Israel and attacking Jews throughout the world, or being willfully ignorant. When being anti-Zionist has become practically a loyalty oath among a very public segment of leftists, why wouldn’t Jews in left-leaning cities become more concerned?
I'm not Jewish, but have been in disproportionately Jewish circles since college, and think being not Jewish maybe gives me more sense of what is going on since there is less self censorship than with Jewish people. I thought the idea that "it could happen here" was insane in the US until recently. I have generally thought, until recently, that the US is very pro Jewish and the exceptions were Christian evangelicals who wanted to convert Jews (even if being pro Israel), but often didn't know many (I grew up knowing only a small number of Jews and recall watching Fiddler on the Roof in high school and hearing other students ask "what's the deal with Jews?" "They don't believe in Jesus." "Weird"). I am really worried in a way I have not been before with the Groypers and apparent acceptance of anti semitism in large parts of the right and the extreme anti semitism (based on both Israel and being anti perceived white people) on the left. The younger generation as a whole -- likely in large part due to TikTok -- is trending anti semitic. I think Jesse is being weirdly delusional about this. Like how have the college protests not rung warning bells?
Here’s the thing: What students joining the protests in October of 2023 didn’t already know that 1,200 Jews were murdered for being Jews? Why did they think these protests were going on?
Agreed.
I have no intention of canceling my subscription. I think Jesse engaged in good faith with my feedback. I don't demand that the hosts see eye to eye with me on every issue. There's nothing intellectually healthy about secluding oneself in an echo chamber.
I also don't necessarily agree that Jesse has contempt for Jewish people, though I agree he can come off that way. I think he just has the same blind spot that a lot of liberal Jews have to the way antisemitism has rapidly become pervasive on the left. He is, in that way, not much different from someone like JD Vance, who seems blind to the way antisemitism is quickly also taking hold of the right.
50% of the creators? Didn’t Katie go on Megyn Kelly and say Israel was ‘slaughtering children’ in Gaza? As a Jew you literally have no moral choice except to immediately unsubscribe from this 100% antisemitic podcast. Anyone who doesn’t is a useful idiot playing straight into the hands of Hamas.
This is the kind of unhinged crying wolf that makes people dismiss us when we sound the alarm about legitimate concerns of antisemitism.
My comment was satirical. If you can’t see what it was satirizing, perhaps you also think it’s fine to insult, mind read and try to ideologically coerce Jesse for daring to come to slightly different conclusions than you. Because that is exactly what the sleazy comment I was responding to did. IMHO Jesse has gone out of his way to be fair and seek mutual understanding amidst these inevitable disagreements, and some of the commenters in this thread could profit by his example.
Satire doesn’t show up well in print. Frankly, what you wrote is really similar to the kind of takes I frequently see in my neighborhood Jewish WhatsApp group, so my inclination was to treat it as genuine.
“Stop Asian Hate” was brought up but I think you forgot to mention or was not aware of the fact that it became completely ignored when left leaning people realized that the perpetuators of those hate crimes were largely black males, and that went too against the narrative that even progressive asians stopped voicing their support for it, leading it to fizzle out.
Antisemitism has a similar PR issue. The people who care about hate crimes in general — progressives, don’t care because it gives them more social capital to be pro-Palestine.
Not to comment on the specifics of the Brooklyn case, but it is entirely possible that a Jew will be involved in an antisemitic hate crime. The essence of left-wing antisemitism is holding Jews inherently suspect, if not downright guilty, of "zionism", "colonialism", all-encompassing evil, unless they go out of their way to prove they're one of the good ones by loudly proclaiming their anti-zionism. Just like some Jews in Columbia could serve as enforcers making sure their fellow Jews are sufficiently anti-zionists, and (re last episode) Singal was accosted as a "zionist" by someone who claims to be Jewish himself
Yes, I was confused about this. "Self hating Jew" is a trope, perhaps more common in the past when some people hid their Jewish heritage out of fear of discrimination or distaste for Judaism or Jewish culture. To prove how un-Jewish they are, they can express anti-Semitism.
So some asshole from Chicago (where I live) who was apparently Hispanic, but I don't think his ethnicity matters, more importantly he was DSA and radicalized by that, so he could have been Jewish or anything, shot attendees at an event at the Jewish Museum in DC, an event I expect was attended by various non Jewish people. He yelled Free Palestine at the time. To me, this is obviously anti semitic and even if the people murdered were not Jewish (they were) or even if the murderer had been a Jewish DSA asshole, it's clearly intended to target people for being (or likely being) Jews. Are we going to try to argue that this only counts if the murderer wasn't acting out of "globalizing the intifada" motives or if he was wrong to assume the murdered people were Jews? Does it not go to the heart of a hate crime that he was trying to intimidate Jews?
To your point about the victim’s religions not mattering for an accusation of anti-semitism, the man who was killed was Christian.
A couple of the most publicized anti semitic hate crimes of recent years were either hoaxes or something else, perpetrated by a lone Jewish actor.
People need to keep their heads screwed on about hate crime hysteria as there is a ready ecosystem that wants to amplify and track these things and letting them set the narrative is unlikely to help foster the type of social trust that keeps everyone, especially minorities, safe in society. Mutual suspicion is made worse by organizations that think their exagerrations are politically expedient.
That is compatible with the view that these incidents are also on the rise and we need to be educated about how much they are rising and where.
Source for that claim about hoaxes?
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-44641427.amp
This was quite a famous one that was in the news for a while before the perpetrator was caught.
If Wilfred Reilly, who looked into about 400 publicized hate crime incidents is to be believed, the majority are hoaxes or lies. I certainly believe that is the case when they take place on college campuses.
Are you seriously bringing up this incident from 2018 and not the dozens of incidents from the past 2 years. Is it because you refuse to believe it's happening or another reason?
That’s not “a couple of the most publicized anti semitic hate crimes of recent years.” I would argue the most publicized anti semitic hate crimes of recent years were:
- Pittsburgh Tree of Life Synagogue massacre: It was real.
- Chabad of Poway shooting: Ditto
- Washington, DC murder outside the Jewish Museum: Ditto
- Colorado attack on a hostage march where a Holocaust survivor later died: Ditto.
And they all happened more recently than the hoax bomb threats in your link. As a dotty old guy from Delaware one said: Come on, man.
Those are all real and I stated that total incidents could genuinely be rising. Against a backdrop of info from NGOs publishing hate crime stats in the hundreds it’s important to know which ones (bomb threats, graffiti, and the like being the most common) are likely real.
One very famous case that resulted in dozens of incidents getting put on the books by these orgs as multiple hate crimes had a single Israeli point of origin, which is why I point it out due to how much it skewed the stats. I recall the tree of life shooting vividly and how disturbing that was and would not want to take away from that.
Wilfred Reilly does not discount the increase in anti Jewish hate crimes. (It is true lots of hate crimes, including some anti Jewish ones, are hoaxes. That consideration would likely end up increasing the percentage of anti Jewish ones if implemented.)
I can't wait to hear this to listen to Jesse give his take on how the BBC isn't antisemtic at all. Maybe they'll do a good job, but this is far outside their wheelhouse, and they seldom impress me when they speak on topics they aren't experts in.
It's fine - they just didn't mention that part of the memo at all!
Katie asked at one point why it seems like the Jews "don't count" when it comes to identity politics. It's because identity politics is not about identity and all about politics.
Amala Ekpunobi says the most racism she ever faced was from the left after coming out as a conservative. Look at how Ana Kasparian and Sydney Waston were treated by the "feminist" left after sharing their stories of sexual assault. Look at how Brad Polumbo was treated by the mainstream gay movement.
I was sent to a mandated DEI training that was supposedly about racial justice and the facilitator spent a significant portion of the time just trashing Cuban-Americans. Why? Because apparently as refugees from communism they were too conservative to deserve the respect of other "Latinx" groups. When I tried to report this to the HR manager who arranged the training, she flat out ignored and dismissed me.
Jesse got soooo close when he asked why the left didn't care about antisemitic hate crimes making up as more than all the rest combined. But he just can't see the secret ingredient (which Katie identified trivially, of course!)
I think they could have gone deeper into Jesse's comment about feeling silenced by pro-Israel propaganda. There is a famous framework of antisemitism that describes it as a Venn diagram of three connected but separate categories: the Christian right, Islamist fundamentalism, and the radical left (populism, anti-religious communism, mob authoritarianism). Many Jewish families have experienced only one or two kinds of antisemitism; therefore it's easy for them to use their status as Jews and legitimate victims of prejudice to publicly dismiss victims of the other kinds. One of the heartbreaking aspects of the past two years has been watching the Jewish community tear itself apart, denouncing each other without trying to understand the hard-learned lessons from people with different experiences. I will never forgive the Left for encouraging this behavior, celebrating Jews who denounced other Jews and disproportionately platforming fringe Jewish groups instead of pausing and doing due diligence to check whether these people were reputable, representative, and relevant to the issues at hand. The Left will move on to another cause of the day but the toxic media pressure during one of the worst times of our lives has permanently damaged many Jewish institutions, families, people, and communities. I kept thinking the past two years that the Left claims to care about "restorative justice" but they never seem to stick around to clean up the aftermath of a grieving family or community that was goaded into tearing itself apart for a good soundbite under threat of being cancelled.
This actually isn't true. Anti-black hate crimes are, by far, the largest in number of victims. Anti-jewish is a distant second.
The jump between 2021 and 2022 is HUGE. Like a straight up spike. But we see the same spike across all targets (white, gay, asian, black, etc). This is likely due to the changes in reporting guidelines and victim/incident counting in 2020.
Prior to 2022, hate crime targeting jews was on a steep decline. . . as were hate crimes in general across all victim targets.
Frankly, I don’t *want* to be put under the DEI umbrella because I don’t believe one’s dignity should be farmed out to administrators.
When you tried to report, you were blocked. Fair enough, I suppose. No, I think it's because Jews are seen as white and wealthy and part of the ruling class and not the "marginalized."
Why does this only apply to Jews, and not rich and powerful white LGBTQ people?
Something I've noticed, both on the right and the left, is a blindness to the fact that Jews are an ethnoreligion. Whether we're "just" an ethnic group, religious group, or synonymous with Israelis varies on whatever flavor of antisemitism the speaker subscribes to.
I cannot believe that Jesse does not know that this whole idea of the IDF training police to be brutal against black people is a long-standing antisemitic trope which goes back to the black lives matter protests. It’s a massive dog whistle against Jews. Please do your homework. There is just so much work that has been done on this particular topic. How can you be so ignorant?
Yes, I recall that JVP had a whole campaign where they were using US-Israeli police trainings/exchanges to blame police shootings of black people in the US on Israel.
Yes, exactly. Sometimes I just despair at how ignorant people are. Jesse seems to live in an echo chamber.
There are none so blind as those who choose not to see.
Law enforcement in America never thought to be terrible to Black people until the joos taught them how. Pre-1948 cops were really nice to Black people, didn’t you know? In the 1800s, they would even escort Black people who got lost back to their houses with their nice white owners.
Thank you for illustrating antisemitism. I presume you don’t actually believe that, but I appreciate the illustration.
It’s a joke… of course the deadly exchange theory is antisemitic.
Help all. I am writing to Jesse. They need to get someone on the show who is good at identifying antisemitic BS online, who can help pull Jesse out of his rabbit hole, preferably someone entertaining. Suggestions please here!
Hmm, lots of good experts. Progressives like Jesse could learn a lot by reading about antizionism in the Soviet Union. Izabella Tabarovsky is very good on this topic, but not sure if she has the Blocked and Reported vibe. Noam Dworman or the hosts of Ask a Jew would probably be better.
I am open to being persuaded by Jesse's arguments. I think he's a smart and thoughtful guy. BUT I also think he should walk around NYC with a kippah or at least a Star of David necklace for a week or two and see if he's treated differently. This would be a very easy social experiment that might either confirm his current beliefs or change them.