I'm Rabbay Ami Hirsch of the Stephenwise Free Synagogue in New York, and you're listening to In These Times. Today's podcast was recorded live in our sanctuary several weeks ago. It's my pleasure to welcome Brett Stevens, the prolific New York Times columnist who writes about foreign policy, domestic politics, and cultural affairs. He's also the Editor-in-Chief of Sapier Journal, which I have had the honor of being published in twice, including in the most recent volume a few weeks ago. If you're not reading Sapier, you should be. It's critical for anyone who really wants to understand what's going on in the Jewish community. Brett is the former editor and chief of the Jerusalem Post and Pulitzer Prize winner for his work at the Wall Street Journal. In so many columns recently and in so many ways, Brett has voiced and articulated what many of us are feeling about Israel. Brett, thank you for who you are, for what you do, and for giving us an hour of your time. So let's give it up for Brett Stevens. Let me ask you first, Just a general question. How are you doing now? How are you feeling? When I saw you a few minutes ago, you asked me, How am I doing?

And it was hard for me to answer, How are you doing?

It's dependent, as my Israeli friends say. Look, I think the Jewish world is in a bad way. Because I'm now so connected to the Jewish world, I feel it acutely and I feel it emotionally. I'm just down a lot of the time, not only because of what happened or what is happening, but because of a trend line that really disturbs me. Maybe it isn't even a trend line. It's a certain mood, both among Israel's critics and haters, and as well as among its defenders. One of the things that I've noticed about the hatred of Israel is that there was always a restraint. You knew it was there, but it was being held back a bit by a perception of what was permissible. Now, I think the perception is everything is permissible. The nature, for example, of the anti-Israel protests has turned in such a nakedly anti-Semitic direction. I wrote about this last week, and the writing was sparked by a scene that was filmed at the Burgly City Council of an 89-year-old Holocaust survivor standing up simply to petition the city mothers and fathers, to have a Holocaust Remembrance Day. About as anodyne a request as anyone could make on behalf of the Jewish community.

And she was heckled and shouted down. Another woman speaking at that same meeting complained that her seven-year-old son, Jewish son, was told by other children at the school that Jews are stupid, to which the people in the audience screamed, Zionists are stupider. A third guy yelling something like, You cowards, you money grubbers, or something like that. In a way, I guess this shouldn't be entirely surprising because it's Berkeley. But What is surprising is that I'm the only guy who wrote about it. I mean, in a major newspaper, as far as I know. Just imagine if it were some other religious or racial minority that was being treated that way in a say, a Southern city. It would be national news for ages. Charlottesville was national news for ages because it was an openly anti-Semitic protest by hideous white supremacists. But what we're seeing now just almost passes notice, except in the usual places like this, the Jewish community. I think that our enemies and the most vitriolic anti-Semites in America feel like the light is green and it's going to continue to be green. In the meantime, I look at what's happening in Israel, and I see a government that is failing to meet any of its goals.

And an Israeli military that reminds me of General Westmoreland talking about how many Viet Cong were killed that day without any sense of what the strategic objectives are. So I guess I'm a Jewish optimist. Yes, things can get worse.

Let me ask you, Brett, and we're not going to talk specifically about any media outlet or colleagues of yours, but generally in the media world, and even in the high-level media world, do you find the same thing? Do you find that there is a gloves off? There's more as permitted by commentators and Even journalists who supposedly are reporting straight news than, say, before October seventh.

Yeah, since we're not talking about any specific news organizations. Look, the media, as long as I can remember, and I've been in the thick of this story for 25 years, has been anti-Israel. I mean, on balance, it's been anti-Israel. But it was anti-Israel, at least certainly when I was at the Jerusalem Post, because it saw, say, it didn't like right-wing Israel. It didn't like Sharon when I was living there, or Bibi, obviously. Then Bibi is easy to it's like, especially if you're a normal person. But it did like left-wing Israel. It held on to its Israeli heroes, Shimon Paris. A certain idea that there was a good Israel, and more had to be done to let that good Israel express itself politically. Now you have a sense, increasingly, that there's no good Israel. That's the overall tenor of, I think, media commentary. You see, I'm generalizing here, and there are all kinds of exceptions. But it also used to be the case that there were the good Palestinians who were struggling for peace, and then the bad Palestinians who were Hamas. Now Hamas has become Palestine. You see it, I think, most starkly in the nonchalant way in which casualty figures in Gaza are cited as authoritative.

We don't take in the media Russia's word for it when they tell us about their casualty figures or the casualty figures that they're infliting on Ukrainians. We don't even take Ukraine's word for it, by the way. We're skeptical, rightly so, because people lie about those sorts of figures to give themselves themselves propagandistic advantages. And yet we know that Hamas lies. We know they lie about everything. We know they don't distinguish between civilian and military numbers as their casualty figures. We know that we were embarrassed by what happened back in, was it October or November, with the rocket that fell to ground on the parking lot of the hospital in Gaza and the purported 500 Palestinian casualties or deaths, which turned out to be nothing of the kind. And yet we cite these figures, and now even the President of the United States says 32,000 Palestinian dead. How does something like that happen? How did we become so willfully unskeptical about the numbers and the claims that Hamas provides? I have my own thoughts about why that happens, but let's move on.

Well, let me just ask you, just either in your world or what you see on the street and what you describe, where does that come from? To what do you attribute the change since October seventh? One, what is motivating this intensity of animosity towards Israel that either was suppressed before and was there but didn't come out, therefore it wasn't realized, or wasn't there and materialized since October seventh?

Well, I think it was there. I think this was more a question of opening the lid over a sword, taking off the bandage on a gangrenous wound rather than something new happening, except as I described it, the glee. Look, there's a line I've used before, which is that of those of whom everything is expected, nothing is forgiven. And of those of whom nothing is expected, everything is forgiven, and everything is expected of the Jews. You've seen it now in the coverage of the tragic and heartbreaking strike on the aid workers. You can look back at the many, many times under President's Biden, Trump, Obama, just about any President you can think of, American troops have accidentally fired on civilians or accidentally fired on our own people. Friendly fire, everyone knows what that means. But nobody says Biden is a war criminal because 10 Afghans were killed in a strike that was supposed to be against the people who attacked the Kabul airport. Nobody says, Well, where's the accountability there? Or Obama for a strike on a hospital. I think it was a Medicine Sans Frontier hospital in an Afghan city in 2014, 2015. But not everything is expected of the United States.

When it comes to the Jews and when it comes to Israel, it reminds me of the old pass/fail in college. Typically, if you got above a C, you passed. Israel has to get an A plus or it fails. That is a form of anti-Semitism. Eric Hoffer, in 1968, wrote a famous op-ed in the LA Times where he said, Israel is the only country in the world expected to behave like a Christian nation. And that is anti-Semitism.

So you think you don't see any way to separate views about Israel from views about Jews. People cannot... They can't look at Israel in the same way as they look at any other country in the world.

No, look, obviously, there are differences. And there are a lot of people who, here in America, revile Israel, hate Netanyahu, think Zionism is wrong, want to, in a million years, consider themselves anti-Semitic or behave in an anti-Semitic way. In their mind, there is that distinction. Just as there is a distinction in the mind of a lot of white Americans who are perfectly friendly with their Black neighbors and would reject the suggestion that they're remotely racist, but will hold this or that view, which is racist. People don't have a full sense of what it is that they think and how opinions they have on matters they regard as political reflect some prejudice. This happens all the time. Those are prejudices that are so subterráne that they're difficult for anyone who holds them to see. Now, what I think is distressing to me is that I suspect that if a white liberal had views that were in fact, racist, and some person a particularly a black person, were to say to them, Let me explain to you what's wrong with that particular point of view. They would listen very attentively and more likely than not rethink the way they talk and think.

But the Jewish community has been trying to tell so many Americans, Hang on a second. When you are singling out Israel for condemnation or a level of scrutiny that applies nowhere else, that is the double standard that has always been the calling card of anti-Semitism. They'll say, That's just a bunch of whataboutism, and it has nothing to do with me, and how dare you... I mean, they reject it very emphatically, and that's problematic for us. I mean, it used to be the case up until 20, 30 years ago, I don't know when, but Jews told stories and people listened. Spielberg did Schindler's List, people watched. That's something else that I think no longer happens. And by the way, much as I love her, Dara Horne, I think, is wrong. People no longer love dead Jews. Look, she's such a superb essayist and great, great thinker. I think, The World of Dara. But she wrote this book before October seventh, People Love Dead Jews, reflecting on how everyone wants to make a monument for Anne Frank, but nobody wants to point out that there's a world out there that would make Anne Frank of every one of us in this room.

Right now, the dismissal of Israeli loss and pain on October seventh is just very striking to me. Maybe I should write an essay, People No Longer Loved It, Jews.

Take us back to October seventh. Do you remember where you were when you heard that? Oh, absolutely. Could you tell us?

I received a frantic note from my dear friend Jessica Casmer-Jacobs. Jessica was a girl from Boston who came to me after NYU, and I hired her, the Wall Street Journal. She was a book editor. Then she became just very friendly with my She used to babysit for my kids when they were little, and we've just become very close. Jessica moved to Israel and married Uri Tibun, who is the younger brother of Amir Tibun, the Haras border. Amir was in his kibbutz, I think it's Náhároz, On October seventh, when the terrorists came and they went to their safe room, and Amir called his father, Noam Tibun, former general, who said, This is my profession. Nothing can stop me. I'm coming to to save you. So Jessica called me immediately to let me know this was happening. This was early morning. And so I followed it with my throat and my heart until Noam arrived and saved his family. The reason the New York Times had the story is because I thought it would be better to write this by giving the story to Patrick Kingsley, our Bureau Chief there, for me to write it as a column.

And so that's how it became a famous It's an amazing story, by the way.

If those of you who haven't read it, you should definitely read it.

It's one of the things that actually does give me hope, which is that on October seventh, when the state failed, the people succeeded What is it? 66, 67-year-old man gets in his car with his wife and a pistol, drives down into a warzone, rescues wounded soldiers, takes their M16s, joins his old unit, and fights his way back into the kibbutz to save his son, daughter-in-law, and grandchildren.

I love when it's... I don't know who brought out this quote, but his grandchild said- Saba Higea. I knew that Saba, which is grand My father. I knew that he would come and save us.

He says, The little girl whom I know, I mean, I'm very close to the family. She's this tall. She went, Saba Higea. Grandpa's here. As time rolls on, we will find out there are hundreds hundreds of stories of people who were living up in the north, just knew that the state wasn't there, got in their cars, and they rolled. I mean, we remember 9/11, and that one guy on the plane who said, Let's roll with the other passengers. They are central to our redemptive story of 9/11. There are thousands of such stories in Israel.

It's really inspiring. I see some people who were with us on our recent mission last week. We met with Rami David Yon, if you remember. Do you know that name? No. This is a guy who... He got some what's happened. He said some kids need some help. He was living in the area. He says to his wife, I'm going out to save somebody. I'll be back to make coffee for me. He ends up spending two days, 48 hours, saving what he estimates to be 750 people. It was so prominent that channel 12 News actually followed him for much of that day on the first day. Shave him up for coffee. Well, he said when he got back after 48 hours, he said, Is the coffee still warm? But it's just amazing stories, and there's something uniquely Israeli about that, too, I think.

It's funny. There are governments that are better than their people, and there are people who are better than their governments. I'd rather be in the second type of society.

Let me ask you about Where Israel stands now, it's been six months. The war aims were to dismantle Hamas, or at least deprive it of its military capacity to do harm. Return of all the hostages, and on the day after, Hamas is not ruling Gaza. None of those objectives have been achieved now, six months later. How do you see the situation currently?

I reject a certain fatalism that was expressed in the the other day that Hamas is unbeatable because it rests on, I think, some a cliché that Hamas is unbeatable because you can't defeat an idea. Nobody's trying to defeat the idea of Hamas, right? They're trying to defeat a military organization that gained political control. I mean, Nazism, National Socialism is an idea. It was undefeated after May 1945 because there were plenty of people in Germany who in their hearts remained Nazis. They just figured out that it was probably not a good way to go, politically speaking. So the idea was discredit and not because people lost an affinity for this ideology, but because it looked like a loser's game. Egypt figured out after 1973 that an ideology that argued for the destruction of the state of Israel was a loser's game. It doesn't mean that Egyptians love Israel at all. But the government had to make a strategic decision to change tack and go to Camp David in order to recover the Sinai. Hamas is beatable, but these really still haven't done it. I think it's a combination of factors, but most of the blame, as I see it, rests with the Prime Minister.

The American Jewish community, at least the precincts I'm most friendly with, had a fit when Chuck Schumer called for Bibi, effectively called for him to step down. I think the speech was misjudged because I think it actually did Bibi a political favor. You had guys like Naftali Bennett, no friend of his, coming to the Prime Minister's defense. But the truth is, he's absolutely right. This is a catastrophic Prime Minister. It's a Prime Minister who fails to take even the most basic responsibility for a series of failures and dreadful strategic mistakes that led directly to October seventh. I don't just mean the year that preceded it with divisions over judicial reform. I mean the strategic decision to keep Hamas entrenched in in Gaza because it served as ideological purposes. That was to say, Look, we can't give away the West bank because look at Hamas in Gaza. To that purpose, he lulled himself the belief that Hamas was essentially contained behind a 21st century Maj'Noah line. Turned out he was wrong. The fact that he then turned around and blamed the Shin'bat, I mean, sure, the Shin'bat, the other Israeli security forces have a lot to account for.

But he's the Prime Minister and has effectively, with a year's hiatus, been Prime Minister for 15 years. So Schumer was right. Israel will be a better place, but he's no longer the Prime Minister. I think in a thousand years, the Jews will remember Netanyahu and go, Bad guy.

Do you think, looking down six months from now when we mark the year anniversary from October seventh, Do you want to speculate, if not, where you think we'll be, at least what are the various possibilities of where we may be six months from now?

I hate questions like that because you'll remember the answer.

It'll be recorded.

Well, that doesn't matter so much, but you'll actually remember it. Look, a number of possibilities. My own belief is that there's a better than even chance that Israel will be in a war with Hezbollah. It's intolerable that 60,000 Israelis from Kyriya Shmana and other places in the north have no home. They're refugees. They're living in hotels. It's intolerable that Israel can't sufficiently secure its peripheries to make it possible for Israelis to live up to the last millimeter of sovereign Israeli territory. So something has to give. Hezbollah is now a stage three cancer. It's only going to get worse, and the Israelis have to act, which is why I think they were wise and correct to strike the target in Damascus, because those IRGC commanders were not only supplying Hezbollah with missiles rockets and so on. My understanding is they're effectively building a third army of conscripts and people from Shiaids from Afghanistan and elsewhere to create yet another front on the Golang against Israel. I think there'll be a wider war. I think it will be war on a scale that dorfs what we've seen so far. I think the heart of Israel will be a target, Rana, Tel Aviv, Haifa.

It'll be a war that Israel hasn't seen the likes of since 1948. By the way, it's a war Israel will win.

Let me ask you, do you think Israel's Western allies, in particular the United States, will be supportive of Israel in that war?

Yes, for a couple of reasons. First of all, as much as I don't the moon music lately from the White House, generally speaking, I think the President has been outstanding in his support. You have to look at Biden's support in the context of past American presidents. George W. Bush was supposed to be a great friend of Israel, but after 34 days of war with Hezbollah, he pulled the plug on it, effectively, just as Obama did in 2014. Reagan, during the Lebanon crisis, The Ford administration, what is so-called reappraisal relations with Israel. Eisenhower. In fact, the only President who really stood by Israel as well as Biden has was Richard Nixon. Takes all kinds. I think that That deserves to be recognized, and especially deserves to be recognized by people like me who aren't seen as greatly sympathetic to the administration. I think I should be the first to say this. Secondly, if you look at the menu of options available to the United States, the only thing that's going to mollify the Israel haters is a complete American boycott. Do you really see the administration doing that, either strategically or even politically? If the United States were to absolutely boycott Israel, cut off all arm supplies like Canada has.

There are now zero Canadian canoes on their way to- I think I read there was 112 $12,000 of military deals between Israel and Canada. We could make them the difference right here. We could do a collection here. That's like 60 canoes. It would be political folly because it would be a gift to the Republican Party. There are a lot of Jews, by the way, who would actually pull the lever for the Republican Party if Biden took a hard line anti-Israel turn, which he's not going to do, but it would be a strategic error. It Look, Biden came into office and he had this big show of making reappraisal relations with Saudi Arabia. How did that work? He ended up being humiliating for the President because then when oil prices shot up and we had a huge inflationary issue, part energy-related. He had to essentially go begging the Saudis. Israel is a small country, but it's not an infant. It provides a whole set of goods for the United States. It is a genuine partnership between countries. Israel has options in the world, just as the Saudis have options in the world. What if the Israelis were to say, Oh, I guess when you cut off arms with us and you ended the Bilateral Arms Treaty, you know what we're going to do?

We're going to start selling cyber technology to China. Let's do that. That would end this immediately because Israeli cyber tools would be grave threats to American national security, which is why the administration so upset about the so-called Pegasus program. Now, I hope Israel doesn't do that. God forbid, it shouldn't be driven to do anything like that. The relationship between Israel and the United States is not because we feel sorry for the Jews, it's because it's good for the United States.

Are you worried about some of the voices now in the Democratic Party that at the very least, want to condition weapons, supplies on certain policies? In particular, I thought it was noteworthy that I saw that Nancy Pelosi joined that group. What do you think that means? How do you interpret that?

A large part of the Democratic Party is turned against Israel, and I think in doing so, it's turned against the best traditions of the Democratic Party, which are represented by President Biden. That's why I think every Jew who is a Democrat has to work within the Democratic Party to make sure that the candidates who are running for congressional seats are like the Tom Swozis of the world. They get You can hate Israel for a million reasons, or deplore, it's not hate it, but deplore many Israeli policies. But the only country that is remotely standing up for liberal and progressive values in the region is Israel. The only one, and it's such a simple thing I'm not going to say, but you don't want to be an LGBTQI+ person in Gaza at any time or Ramam. Because the treatment of gays and lesbians in the Palestine Authority is horrendous. You don't want to be woman there. You don't want to be a political dissident. You don't want to be an artist expressing yourself freely. All of the freedoms that progressives claim to champion here in the United States are precisely the ones that the Palestinians, both in Fatah and Hamas, violently suppress, including freedom of the press.

I do not understand how the left has become not just a critic of Israel, but in so many instances, anti Zionist against the state itself. I say this, by the way, as a center-right guy, we need a revived left-wing Zionism. We need it. Israel has not prospered by the collapse of the Labor Party and what it has traditionally stood for. But it has to be in the Zionist family. The moment it becomes anti-Zionist, it's out of the conversation, it's useless, and it's completely hypocritical.

Help us understand what's happening in the intellectual world, in particular in universities. Of course, it goes without saying we have many, many families who have kids in universities who are thinking about sending their kids to various universities. The kids themselves are looking at this. We're hearing reports that they actually are looking more carefully at the atmosphere on campus in connection with Jews or Israel in terms of selecting where they should go. What is your advice to parents, to young Jews, to the Jewish community, and the university scene?

Yesterday, I was speaking to a group of Yale students, and somehow Melville the story, Bartleby the Scrivener. I raised the story. Have all of you read Bartleby, the Scrivener? Yeah. Okay. I spoke to about 35 Yale students. Not one of them had heard of it. I mean, come on, Yale. Pathetic. Pathetic, pathetic. That the cream of the crop, not one person even had an intuition about the great American writer's greatest short story. I just draw my own conclusions about the state of American higher education from there. These schools, I know this because I now have two of my three kids are now in college. I glanced at what the questions were about when they had to apply. The The questions are all about, tell us about your victimhood and tell us about your identity. So the school is self-select for people who are either are or are pretending to be victims and for whom identity rather than character or achievement are the driving criteria of self-worth. I think it's just downhill from there. By the way, how surprising that the pro-Palestinian movement has gained such traction on campuses where victimhood and identity are the calling cards I wanted to ask you, what is the connection?

Is there a connection? Yeah, because Palestinians are seen globally as the most victimized identity of the world. That's Valarized on college campuses. Look, first of all, I think Jews have to stop becoming slaves to prestige. The prestige that we once knew about, where does your son go? He was at Harvard. I'm like, Come on. They don't say that.

They say, I went to school in Boston.

No, they say, I went to school near Boston. We have to move away from that. Did you hear about the violent anti-Israel protest at the University of Nebraska? Did you hear about it? No. Yeah, because it didn't happen. There are lots of places where you can get a terrific education. You can get a terrific education at Purdue, another school where you don't hear anything like that happen. We can try to go to schools that are making a conscious effort to reach out to Jewish students, Washington University, two Wayne, or two that come to mind. And by the way, there's going to be a huge opportunity. I'm almost reluctant to say this, it's almost like a a private equity opportunity. I don't know how that plays on 68th Street on the west side. If I were over on the east side, we'd be talking here.

But first of all, we have all types here, and secondly, they're tower. They're very talented.

This is what I mean. There are a lot of college campuses on America, I think between 3,000 and 4,000. The US is facing a demographic cliff because starting in 2008, financial crisis, people stopped having babies. So demography is moving like this. The Harbards and Yields of the world with large endowments are going to be fine. But there's a whole universe of schools with beautiful campuses and nice histories that are in real They're in real trouble. They are in real trouble, in part because they have been trying to provide essentially a second-rate version of a Harvard or Yale education. The value proposition for these schools, I think, is dubious. I'm not going to mention some of the campuses I have in mind because I might insult someone, but there are at least 50 schools in New England that fit this bill. What if we made an effort to approach these schools? Say, We want a critical number of seats on your board. You want to appoint a president who believes in the value, I don't mean of Jewish education, I mean of a true liberal arts education, that believes in free speech, that exercises real vigilance about the difference between speech and conduct, and becomes a place where Jewish students are going to flourish and are not going to feel afraid to wear a kippah or star of David around their necks.

Let's start with a minute. Let's start with 10 colleges and go from there. The history of Jews in America is that when the cool kids didn't want us at their table, we went to another table, and then we were the cool kids. Mainstream banking did want us. We came up with investment banking. We weren't always wanted in the arts. We went to Southern California and started this thing called Hollywood. One thing or another, in one industry or another where we were not liked, where there were quotas against us, where we were told to stay in our lane. We went elsewhere and we applied this spirit of independent thinking and entrepreneurialism. Many Jews took incredible risks in their private lives with their finances to start thriving businesses. We should be doing that philanthropically, not on behalf of ourselves, but on behalf of the collective Jewish community and our children.

I assume that that applies to philanthropic support of some of these institutions of higher learning that are not sympathetic to the Jewish community.

Look, I have great admiration for guys like Mark Rowan who are trying to change the culture at the University of Pennsylvania, which historically was a school every other Jewish parent I knew had a kid at Penn. Maybe every parent here has a kid at Penn.

That's a knowing laugh out there.

Yeah. Right. My My experience of university administrators is that their central characteristic of their being is cowardness. They are cowardly towards whoever they think scares them the most. For a long time, it was the DEI bureaucracies in a lot of these schools. And now they're terrified of wealthy donors who aren't going to provide the next $50 million, whatever, whatever state-of-the-art building or in doubt share. And so on. And so by all means, particularly wealthy Jews with influence in these institutions who care about Jewish issues, they should be exercising that influence to change the tenor of those colleges. But I think that unless you change, frankly, unless you get rid of tenure, you have such an entrenched... I'm not going to name names here, but I am somehow bizarrely on an email collective of about 20 names, most of whom are professors that a school near Boston. The subject has lately turned to Israel. I am alarmed by what passes as intelligent commentary about Israel. And really sad advice. By the way, very brilliant, lovely people whose views on the subject make Bernie seem like a Likudnik. You have a problem that goes much deeper than getting a president who is going to show up at the Hallel house and say the right things.

These institutions, in my mind, are so rotten. Look at Harvard. Harvard has now cashiered or had two resignations of the head of their anti-Semitic Task Force. How hard can it be to get an anti-Semitic Task Force that submits a report that says, Making Jews feel unwanted is add, okay, and we will endeavor to do better, but they can't do it. That tells you something about the culture that they're dealing with. It's not simply a matter of putting in a handful of new people at the top. That can do a lot. I look at university leaders like Daniel Diermeier, my friend at Vanderbilt, who sets the right toe. But I suspect that at every university, they're dealing with rot that goes to the foundations of the very house.

You aren't saying or are you that Jews should walk away from these elite IV league?

Yeah, of course I'm saying that.

Rather than fight from the inside to try and change it.

I don't know about you. My education was great. I went to the University of Chicago, one of the schools, I think, that has not lost its mind and always had a consistent set of principles. To this day, I feel the echo of my education in Chicago ring through almost every column I write because it really taught me how to think. But for the most part, 10 years after you're out of whatever, Harvard, Yale, nobody cares. Nobody cares. The addiction I'm going to say this as a a broad statement, but I think that the Jewish addiction to these tokens of prestige is harming our community. It's harming our community. You know what? The greatest Jews all went to City College.

That's true.

They were proud of it. They were proud of it, okay? Because they were the unclubbable ones.

I want to move on to two other issues before we run out of time. First of all, Ukraine, it's almost like a forgotten war. I think I read, I think you mentioned you're banned from Russia.

Yeah, I was banned for life from Russia in 2022.

One, why were you banned? And two, how does that make you feel?

When the order came down, I told my wife, she was so proud of it that she framed the notice and took down my Pulitzer and put it in place. I felt great. So you feel good about it? Absolutely.

I love the one. Why were you banned? Did they give you a reason?

I mean, look, the first anti-Putin editorial I ever wrote was actually in 1999. My friend Garry Kasparow, he said, The first time I wrote an anti-Putin article was January third, 2022. I said, Mine was December 31st, 1999. How about that? So he's now jealous of me. The only reason he has to be jealous of me. I don't know exactly. The Russian government doesn't call you up and say, Hey, listen, we're so sorry. We considered your... You're just put on a list and you're barred. I've been writing anti the Putin editorials for a very long time. In fact, I wrote an article in 2006 in the Wall Street Journal. It was called Russia: The enemy, for which I received no end of grief from Columbia professors, as a matter of fact. We're all Putin apologists. There was a lot of, let's face it, there was a lot of Putin apologies on the left. Some of you are probably subscribers to The Nation, that wonderful magazine of ideas. In the tank for Putin. For ages, Katrina Van der Huyel's late husband, Stephen Cohen, I think even won a prize from Putin. I just point that out. Those of you who think it's a terrific publication.

Look, I was banned because I've been consistently anti-Putin all this time. I think one of the greatest disgraces, and it's not a disgrace for our time, it's a disgrace for all time, is the Republican Party's dereliction of duty when it comes to the need to support our brave friends in Ukraine.

What do you think is at stake for the United States and the West? What is at stake? What are the consequences of this dereliction?

I think the free world is at stake.

Could you elaborate?

I think the collapse of Ukraine is going to be a geo-strategic debacle first order. It's going to encourage the Chinese to move on Taiwan. It's going to lead to either a direct confrontation between NATO and Russia, if now or soon in a few years time, and the abandonment by the United States of our commitments in Europe. We are moving back to the America first mentality of Father Coughlin. We have our own Father Coughlin in the person of Tucker Carlson, who is the chief whisperer to the demogog who was and likely is going to be the next president.

I was going to ask you a follow-up, but that was too enticing to me. Do you think Donald Trump is going to be elected president in November?

I certainly hope not, and I will bend every effort I can to make that.

But do I understand from your last answer that you think that's more likely than not?

Look, again, what was Neil's forest line? Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future. I'd be thrilled to be proved wrong, okay? But yeah, I think he's going to win.

Why do you say that? What are the key driving issues that are going to determine the election?

I think there are three major factors. Number one, Americans think, was I better off in just before the pandemic? I mean, people understand the pandemic was a a unique circumstance. But was I better off in 2019 than I am today? And the answer is, I'm worse off today. I think, quite frankly, there's a lot of liberal happy talk about the state of the economy based on one factor, which is the availability of jobs, which is great. I don't want to downplay it. But when people say when inflation is cooling off, it doesn't erase the fact that rent, the median rent in the United States, I just looked this up because I was just chatting with Gil Collins yesterday. The median rent in the United States is up by 20%, this is the day Joe Biden took office. The A year mortgage rate, which was at 2.7% when he came to office, is now north of 6%, so financing costs have gone way up, and a basket of groceries is about 25% higher. Yeah, you can say, Well, wages are now beginning to rise, but they've lagged, and they're still lagging. You've got a situation which Americans feel economically like they're running to stand still, to quote the old Q2 song, which is about a hair-on addiction.

That's another story. The second factor is I think, frankly, Democrats have been derelict in their thinking about the border. You walk around here. I grew up in Mexico City. The fact of my biography. People don't often know. My family was from Mexico. But left-handed, right of center, Mexican Jew. Well, it There's two things that I think rankle. A, it's now a crisis in every city in America. Go out to Bennett field all over here, you see this Latin American style poverty. Second, we're not enforcing the law. I feel keenly for these immigrants. My heart goes out to them. My mother was a refugee to this country, although my mother was a refugee who waited for five years to get a visa under Harry Truman's Displaced Persons Act in order to come here. There's a feeling like there's for the law and indifference by the part of elite Democrats. I was very abused when DeSantis, who strikes me as a jerk of the first order, flew a few migrants up to Martha's Vineyard. The Vineyard had a connipcion thing. Really? Go to El Paso or any of these towns along the border when sometimes 10,000 people a day are coming in.

Those people need to be housed, taken care of, fed. There are kids have to be at school at some point. I think Democrats have neglected the issue very badly. The third thing is, I don't feel as safe in cities in America as I used to. Now, you can say, Well, it was worse in the 1990s, but most Americans don't remember the early 1990s. Now, you have to be at least 40 years old to have any memory of the crime that we experienced in the city back in the worst days of the '80s and '90s. I'm a 6'1, reasonably big guy. I'm on the subway and I'm like this, looking around. We keep being told this story that, Oh, streets have never been safer. So something is miss. Something is wrong when a Democratic governor deploys National Guard to the subway and then tells us everything is fine and safe. I don't quite know what that is, and I would love for criminologists to look carefully at the data, but I think there is an interesting disparity between crime that police reports and crime that the victimization survey by the FBI reports. People self-report a much higher numbers of criminal acts, but they're not taking it to the cops.

That's a hypothesis, by the way. I could be wrong, but something is not right there. All of this tells me that it's not going to go well for the incumbent. Also, Trump has so There are so many negatives. The fact that his support for him is solid, that he's ahead, essentially, or even in all these polls, tells me that people have priced it all in, the noise the craziness, the this and the that, and they're still saying, better. Oh, last thing. It's heartbreaking to say this, but the president is feeble. Anyone who's had relatives who've had dementia knows it's One way, it's not like he's going to get better soon. So they're worried about that.

You've taken a look at the voting patterns of American jury since the end of World War II FDR. In very high numbers, in substantial majorities, American Jews have voted for Democrats across the board from the President down on Congressional election. And in 2020, 78% of American Jews, if I remember the numbers correctly, voted for Biden. Do you think that's likely to change this year and in future years?

Look, I'm going to vote for Biden. What's the choice? If Nikki Haley were in Canada, I'd vote for Nikki, but of course, I'm going to vote for Biden. It's like you can have the two-day-old moldy mayo sandwich, or you can eat the dog shit with glass in it. I'll go for the sandwich. I borrowed that line from David Sideris, by the way. I need to... But yeah, of course, I'm going to vote for Biden. I think most Jews will because They understand a couple of things. They know a demagogue when they see one, and they know that even if this demagogue was sympathetic to Israel in the first term, that he's a man with no loyalties, and an isolationist president is eventually going to turn on Israel as well. At least Biden believes in democracy in the free world and abides by the results of elections, so I'll take it. My bigger fear is this, Ahmi, which is that Republicans and Democrats used to provide a pretty good home for Jews. There were plenty of Republican Jews who thought, This is a better party in terms of its lower taxes, less regulation, strong foreign policy, generally good on Israel.

I was one of those. Then plenty of Democrats who said, Yeah, but no good on choice and other social issues, and Democrats are pro-Israel, too. But as the parties have moved to the extreme, Jews who are, I think, congenially closer to the center, have become homeless. It's very hard for Jewish pro-Israel Jews to feel at home in a party where at least most visible voices, not necessarily the majority voices, but the visible voices are people like AOC, or Jamal Bowman in my district. On the other side, on the Republican Party, notice that all the never Trumpers were Jews. These were people who had positions in office, we're big donors to the party, and they feel homeless as well. We're getting back to the depressing theme in this conversation. We're becoming a community that is estranged from the two major political currents in American life. I think most Jews desperately want to be players in those parties, and we feel like we have a lot to say in long histories, but they're strangers to us. Very, very difficult. I know plenty of liberal friends who on October seventh or October eighth, when the left really started coming out in favor of Hamas, looked around and said, What just happened?

Which is just the way I felt when Donald Trump took over the Republican Party in 2016.

One very brief question before my last question, which is you mentioned Gail Collins. That exchange that you have with her, is it on a weekly basis?

Yeah, pretty much every week.

It's just a fabulous thing. I think at one point, several months ago, you mentioned to me that that's a very popular column.

Yeah, it is. Our numbers, because the times tracks these things very carefully, digitally, our numbers are phenomenal.

Do you think that says something about people's desire to want to actually have a dialog?

Yeah. Look, I think if you look for our conversation on social media, it's nowhere. Twitter doesn't notice it because social media has algorithms that are built for outreach. What we're in the business of doing is Just shooting the breeze. Two friends over a proverbial glass of wine, although we do it on a Google Doc. But we are in real life, real friends who get together for real wine and cheese. Just a giggle. People are hungry for a different conversation. I think they miss a period in American life when people could disagree agreeably and have a laugh and think that there are more important things in life than the earned income tax credit or whatever it is.

My last question to you is, are you optimistic? What Give us an optimistic message of hope for the next phase of American Jewish history that we're entering into now.

This is the 370th year of a Jewish life in North America, 1654 to 2024. I'm not going to do that. I'm trying to come up with something nice to say, but it's just not in my mood. But I'm going to tell you something. In 1922, the most important man in Germany was Walter Ratenauer, and the greatest philosopher in Germany was Husserl. The greatest scientist in Germany was Albert Einstein, and the greatest doctor in Germany was Adolf Meyhoff. That was 1922. They were all Jews. Eleven years later, the third Reich. There's a pattern in Jewish history where our zenith comes right before our precipice. I worry not only about the explosion in anti-Semitism at a moment, it should be a zenith moment when the Senate the majority leader, secretaries of state, treasury, Homeland Security, chief staff, to the President, so I'm all Jewish. But I worry about not just the new anti-Semitism. I worry about a culture in the United States that lends itself to thinking anti-Semitically. We're a country riddled by conspiracy theories. Very few of them are anti-Jewish. But if you believe anything about anything, then you'll believe anything about the Jews. And anti-Semitism is a conspiracy theory.

I worry about the way in which we now no longer talk about success in America, we talk about privilege. And so people who we used to admire as successful people who would pull themselves up, we now see as privileged people who have more than their fair share. And that's dangerous for successful minorities. I worry about the assault on independent thinking and heterodox thinking. That has been the calling heart of the Jewish people for so long. The gad flies, the dissidents, the nosayers, the think different people. Now we have this highly censorious cancel culture world, and it's taken its grip not here in this room, but among so many of our children, products of Columbia and schools near Boston and so on. I call those attitudes not anti-Semitic, but anti-Semitic their prejudicies. They are what lead to anti-Semitism. They're a step away from it. I think that's one of the reasons we have the problem that we do. We don't just have to fight anti-Semitism. We have to restore America to what it once was. We have to restore America to a country where the concept of merit really meant something. We have to restore America to a country where the belief that what matters most of all is the content of your character, not your identity.

We have to restore America to a country that believes in free speech and free enterprise. We have to renew faith in an America that understands that this country is based on a set of values which centrally flowed, not just from the Enlightenment, but from Jerusalem. And that used to be America. And so I think the task is not simply to fight our corner of the battle against prejudice when it comes to prejudice against Jews, we have to fight for what we understand America to be, because that was the America in which we used to thrive. I think that That's really the task before us.

I want to thank you for an exhilarating hour. For who you are, Brad, and for your fierce honesty and your fearless willingness to go out and tell the truth as you understand it. All of us are very inspired by your example.

Can I say something nice about you?

We've stopped the podcast. Turn it back on, guys.

There's an old line that no man as a hero to his ballet. Few writers are heroes to their editors, which is to say that when your job is to edit people's prose, you get to see how they really think, and most of the time it's Dreck. One of the joys now having edited Ami twice is what a beautiful, beautiful writer you are, not only in terms of the depth of The depth of the thinking, but in the clarity and energy and eloquence of the expression. I really want to hand it to you because every time I get a piece from you, I don't have to worry about it. It's good. I just want to thank you.

All right. Well, that's a good way to end it.