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Franklin Foer · In These Times with Rabbi Ammi Hirsch

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I'm Rabbi Ammi Hirsch of the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York, and
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you're listening to In These Times
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The American Jewish story has been one of extraordinary success.
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For generations, Jews flourished in the United States in ways unmatched
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anywhere else in the diaspora.
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We entered every corner of American life, business, academia,
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politics, media, science, culture.
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We became deeply woven into the fabric of the country, and many of us came to assume
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that this was simply the way things were.
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Then came October 7th, and the reaction that followed on college campuses and
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political movements across social media and within institutions that many American
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Jews once considered welcoming homes.
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They forced difficult questions into the open.
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How secure is Jewish life in America?
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Is the hostility we are witnessing temporary, or does it
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reflect more profound changes?
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My guest today is Franklin Foer, a staff writer at The Atlantic.
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He's one of America's leading political and cultural commentators and author
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of the widely discussed essay, The Golden Age of American Jews is Ending.
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Franklin Foer, welcome to In These Times.
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So delighted to be here.
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It's good to see you again.
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We spent a couple of days together in, uh, Aspen last summer talking about all
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of the urgencies in the Jewish community.
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So one of the things, uh, we spoke about, of course, was your groundbreaking
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article in, uh, The Atlantic.
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How long has that been now?
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About 18 months?
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Almost
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two years.
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Yeah.
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Two years.
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Called The End of the Golden Age of American Jewry.
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I'm paraphrasing.
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Could you summarize what that article was about, why it was so important,
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and whether you still stand by it, and what is its central thesis?
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After October 7th, I think that there was this sense that a lot of American
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Jews had that an era had come to a close, and some of that had to do with
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the rise of antisemitism that we were seeing in the aftermath of October 7th.
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But a lot of it had to do with the fact that it felt like for a generation, like
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several generations, American Jews had grown up in a country where they were
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completely and entirely at home, that American Jews had been, in some sense,
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coauthor of a different iteration of the American dream, and that dream had
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prevailed for most of the second half of the 20th century, and it allowed
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for America to prosper and to expand its ideas of, of freedom and equality.
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And American Jewry had prospered in a way that perhaps no other diaspora
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community had ever prospered in the, the entire history of the Jewish people.
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And my article asserted that Golden Age had begun to draw to a close, even if
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we weren't fully aware of it as the 21st century started to dawn, that some of
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this had to do with shifts on both the left and the right, and the way in which
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antisemitism and conspiracy theories about Jewish power were starting to
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creep ever closer to the mainstream.
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Part of it had to do with facts that are independent of antisemitism,
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which the American elite was kind of being re-engineered, and
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there was less of a place for American Jewry in that new elite.
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It has to do with external factors.
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Some of it has to do with internal Jewish factors.
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But my piece was kind of a dirge for an era that had passed.
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I think a lot of people felt then, which is one of the reasons I think
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it got so much resonance, that something fundamental had shifted.
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Yeah, exactly.
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And I think that shift has only accelerated in the two years since
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So not only do you stand by the central thesis, the events of
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the last two years is evidence that you were on the right track.
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Tragically, sadly so, yes.
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Yeah.
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I'm paraphrasing you.
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If I'm, if I'm mischaracterizing it, mention it, but something along the
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lines of from the end of World War II to the demarcation, I mean, these
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social trends are occurring underneath the surface and it's not-- people
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aren't necessarily noticing them.
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But the demarcation line was October 7th, 2023, and between those two dates,
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the end of World War II and October 7th, 2023, when some of these underlying
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trends then burst into the public phase, that world Jewry has never had
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it so good in any diaspora community.
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That's your fundamental thesis.
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We can quibble about some of the plot points in the timeline about
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when the Golden Age began and when it ended, but that's more
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or less the fundamental thesis.
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What has brought it to an end?
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Is it just broadly speaking, in its largest dimension, you know, this is
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the story of the Jewish people in every diaspora community, and the good times
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sooner or later end anyway, and you have this ingrained bias towards, uh, Jews
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or, or assumptions toward Jews that just come back to the fore because they're so
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deep in society and in Western society?
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Or did something shift it, that it didn't have to be this way?
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Yeah, I don't think it had to be this way, to, to be honest.
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And let me just say one thing before I delve into that, which is that- Alex
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Edelman, the comedian, was asked about my piece on the Unholy podcast, and
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he said something like, "Poor Jews.
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Jews still exist at Columbia University.
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They still have a state.
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They still…" And I think that American Jewry still is incredibly prosperous,
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still is incredibly safe in this country.
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But when I talk about the golden age, I'm talking about a, an apex.
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I'm talking about a zenith in the history of American Jewry, where,
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you know, we really didn't have any objective reason to give a moment's
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thought to our safety or security, and we just existed in this, this culture
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and universe, which is, in retrospect, amazing, magical, and a little bit weird.
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It's like, it's, it's kind of incredible that Jews, you know, at best 4% of the
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American population constituted a third of the class at Ivy League universities.
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When you look at primetime television and how many Jewish characters existed
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in primetime television, there were some… There was just this, this
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aberration where we were able to feel zero sense of alienation in this country.
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We felt completely at home.
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I have a friend who's a sports fan who, um, uses this metaphor to translate my
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piece, which said, "For the 20th century, the late 20th century, we were playing
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a home game, and, like, in, in the last couple years, it's starting to feel like
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we're playing an away game." And I think that, that distinction kind of captures
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what I'm talking about, about a, about the fall, which is not that we're on a…
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You know, n- the state isn't about to turn on us.
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We still have incredible prosperity in this country.
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We're not on trains headed to concentration camps.
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There are no pogroms that are kind of headed at, at, at
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us that are, um, widespread.
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But still there is a fall, if that makes sense.
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And, you know, why did this happen?
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Is the second part of your question.
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Is this like you were s- you were basically saying, is there something
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about antisemitism just means that it's inevitably gonna recur?
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And I don't believe that to be the case.
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I think that part of what happened in the late 20th century was that
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there were a set of political and cultural and institutional
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arrangements that American Jews played a central role in constructing.
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I use the small L liberal description to just, to capture the ethos of that era.
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And I think what's happened in the 21st century is that style of liberalism
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has come under assault, both from the right and from the left, and its
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prestige and legitimacy has declined.
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And as liberalism's legitimacy has declined, Jews have almost invariably lost
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that golden age position that we held.
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Because we were one of the forces in American society that were m- most
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closely associated with that kind of liberalism, I guess what we would
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call today classical liberalism.
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Yeah.
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It's not even just classical liberalism.
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It was kind of an American version of it that emphasized, yes, equality,
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freedom, democracy, pluralism, um, the importance of having strong
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institutions that had some sort of emphasis on meritocracy as a value.
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But there were ways in which American Jews refined that, and Americans
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refined that c- classical liberalism to fit into an American context,
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which is different than just kind of Adam Smith or John Stuart Mill.
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It was a very American version of that ideal.
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I've been thinking about this for years, you know.
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Why do Jews do so well in societies that are open and free and liberal?
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N- not in a capital… Not capital, you know, not a party necessarily, but
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a philosophy, a liberal philosophy.
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And some of the principles that you mentioned, in my view, are so
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ingrained in Judaism, th- this idea of reason and evidence and science
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and openness and intellectual pluralism and debate and the search
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for truth, respect for establishments.
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Meritocracy is a very big deal in Judaism for thousands of years.
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The whole rabbinic system is based on that.
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So I, I always felt that because these values were so ingrained, so part of what
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is now Jewish civilization, that when Jews encountered societies that allowed
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them to express themselves in this way, there was a dramatic overlap between
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the ethos of Jewish civilization and the ethos, in our case, of American society,
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that itself was at least partially responsible for the enormous success,
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disproportional success of American Jewry.
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And I think that a lot of those, uh, principles are anathema to antisemitism
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because when you have a high degree of trust, when you have, um, a
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high degree of reason in the public square, it's harder to gravitate
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towards conspiracy, and it's harder to construct a boogeyman out of the other.
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And when there is a society that generally has an openness, I think that
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openness tends to extend towards the Jew.
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What was it about American society that distinguished it, say, from the United
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Kingdom or Europe w- who w- that are also open, liberal, democratic societies?
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It's hard to construct a blood and soil version of Americanism just given that
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the elite that came here was an elite that had migration as part of its origin story.
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I think you have a, a form of Protestant Christianity that took hold in the United
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States that tended to be a little bit more philosemitic than the established
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churches back in the old world.
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I think that you had just, you know, had so much mobility within the
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United States in general after people got here that there was a bit more,
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at least in the kind of non-racial context, openness to the stranger.
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We had an economic caste system as related to race, but as far as American
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Jews were concerned, the economic caste system was actually pretty wide
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open to them because there, there weren't the American aristocracy such
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as it existed, was always just new.
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There, there was a greater fluidity here, and that there was a greater comfort
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with new entrants into that system.
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And do you think when the dimensions and the horror of the Holocaust
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became more widely known after World War II, that played a role at all?
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For sure it did, that there was a concerted effort among both
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Jews and Christians to combat anti-Semitism as it existed.
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There's a terrific, uh, little Frank Sinatra film that I
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encourage people to Google.
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It's on YouTube, and Frank Sinatra confronts a bunch of
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anti-Semitic bullies in about 1945.
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It's a very young Frank Sinatra.
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And the bullies take the dimension of the way that anti-Semitism
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existed in places like New York City and Boston in the 1940s.
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I think we should, we… When we think about the golden age, I think we have
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to also recall that in the early 1940s, there was probably more physical violence
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against American Jews than at any moment in our history in this country.
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There was more employment discrimination against Jews
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than any moment in our history.
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And the golden age itself, and this dramatic reversal that we experienced
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where we went from being excluded to being included was something that happened
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in a startlingly short period of time.
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That's something that we tend to bury in our collective memory
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because it makes the golden age seem more precarious than it was.
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And as it turns out, that golden age was more precarious than we thought it was.
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You're a keen observer of American politics.
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It's an important year in American politics.
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We're approaching the midterms.
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Where do you think American politics stands now?
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It seems to people that i- if it's not unprecedentedly polarized, i- in our
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recent memory, people don't remember this kind of tension and anxiety in society.
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Is that right, or is that just kind of the natural reaction of
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anybody living through any period?
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Yeah.
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I mean, I think we could probably reach back and find some
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antecedents if we wanted to, but that shouldn't really matter.
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I mean, I think the fact is, is that what we're seeing is, are breakdowns
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in the fabric of the culture of American democracy that seem to
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me that are very hard to repair.
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I mean, I take one of them, which is the just excessive gerrymandering, and
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to have this race to the bottom where the rules of democracy are being broken
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because you have both parties making these extravagantly drawn maps in order
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to get the voters that they want to have.
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There's something Just so broken about a system that allows a politician
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to basically reconstruct the system so that they are inherently not
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having to compete in an election.
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And the fact that our elections have become so uncompetitive is a pretty
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shocking breakdown of the system.
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The other thing that I look at, and I, I'm just experiencing this in Washington,
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DC, where I live, is, you know, we used to have The Washington Post,
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which had an incredible Metro section.
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And after Jeff Bezos gutted the paper, this is the first mayoral
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election that we have where there is no Washington Post endorsement of the
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mayoral candidate, and there is not extensive coverage of the election.
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And so I get pieces of mail pushed through my slot that have, um, very
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serious charges that the candidates for mayor are leveling against one another.
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And I, I encounter very smart people on the street, and they believe what is
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being presented to them in these mailers.
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And that's just … I don't understand how we can make good democratic decisions
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if we don't have good information.
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And so at the very local level, I mean, in these all congressional races,
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which are gonna shape the contours of our nation going forward, you know,
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we-- people are making decisions based almost wholly on partisanship.
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They're doing it with zero literacy about the candidates or kind of
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the issues at stake, and they're being swayed by the most manipulated
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forms of information possible.
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I mean, social media looks like it's the gold standard compared to
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a lot of the dreck that gets pushed through mail slots or the campaign
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ads that people use to make decisions.
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And why is that happening?
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Do you have-- Have you studied that?
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Yeah.
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Is it technology or?
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Yeah, it's technology.
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In a nutshell, um, local news was premised on monopolies that existed becau-because
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local newspapers had classified ads and because there just weren't other
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competing sources of information.
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And then news media made kind of a ridiculous short-sighted decision
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in order to give their content away for free on the internet just as
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Craigslist was emerging and crushing their, uh, classified ads business.
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And big tech was allowed to kind of come in and displace, like, a, a lot of very
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important American media institutions.
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And social media is just an inherently manipulated environment.
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The whole algorithm exists in order to manipulate people's attentions.
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I have a hard time disentangling our democratic decline from the poor quality
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of information that citizens get and the fact that we're moving into a, a
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post-literacy world where, you know, it's, it's imagery, it's podcasts.
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It-- Um, sor- apologies, Rabbi.
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But it's like podcasts can obviously have depth, and it's possible to find
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deep things on YouTube, but most of what people are exposed to is done,
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you know, in less than 30 seconds.
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And it's, as I said, it exists in this manipulated environment,
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so it's impossible to ha- for the average citizen to make decisions
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based on any kind of depth.
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So you mentioned, uh, democratic decline, if you can explain that a little bit more,
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but in this context, because technology is only gonna get more powerful, the
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algorithms are gonna get more powerful.
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We haven't even spoken about AI, which I'd like to, to relate to
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as well, and this is in a context where the way you characterize it
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is we are having democratic decline.
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What's, what's the next 10 years gonna look like?
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It's our institutions have been gutted.
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If you look at the relationship between the national legislature and
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the national executive right now, the Senate and the House have ceded so
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much of their powers to the executive.
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If you look at the state of the bureaucracy in Washington, D.C.,
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it's been so degraded and run down over the course of the last couple
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years that, um, those institutions in Washington, D.C. actually played a
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role in the dissemination of objective knowledge that became the basis for
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good policy deliberations that were independent of the political will
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of the executive, and I think that that is-- that's an enormous tragedy.
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So, you know, when I think about what we need to do moving forward, there's a need
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for the restoration and the reformation of institutions across American society.
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And I'll just give you an example kind of adjacent to democratic decline, which is
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our universities, which I think for a long time people understood that there were
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fundamental problems in our universities, that our universities had slipped away
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from a lot of the small L liberalism that we had talked about earlier in the show.
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And yet there was this reluctance to actually go through the process
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of trying to reform and restore universities so that they'd adhere
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to a lot of their core values.
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And what happened was that those universities ended up losing a
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lot of their popular legitimacy.
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And rather than being kind of venerated in a bipartisan way because they were
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an enormous strength of the American system, they became a political
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punching bag just as they were becoming overly politicized themselves.
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And only now, after they've suffered this huge fall, have universities
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begun to go through this kind of long, hard task of reforming themselves.
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And to their credit, a lot of these universities have taken very
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important steps to correcting.
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Uh, my colleague David Brooks wrote an excellent piece about how
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there's a lot of good news to be seen in the American university.
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I think you could say the same thing about media, that media needed to
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undergo some of that sort of same reform process, and it's certainly true of our
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bureaucracy and of our political system.
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And it's, it's always striking to me how, how there isn't really a
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political reform movement that has a broad base that, that makes an argument
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for restoring American institutions.
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Instead, we end up with populism, which is anti-institutionalist
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by almost its very definition.
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On both sides, right?
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On
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both sides.
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In, in both parties.
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Yeah.
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So this is, uh, this leads me to my, uh, question to you.
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Uh, you know, liberals tend to look at the last 10 years and the weakening
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of the democratic guardrails and the decline of institutions, and
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they tend to put all of the blame or much of the blame on Donald Trump.
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How, how do you see it?
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Donald Trump has walloped institutions and democracy in a way
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that there, there are no equals.
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There are no equals to kind of the damage that he's inflicted on the system.
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But I think part of his ability to inflict that kind of damage had
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to do with fundamental weaknesses in the system to begin with.
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And I think that merits, on the part of liberals, a degree of introspection
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about how the system became as weak and vulnerable as it did become,
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and that there were deep flaws and faults that Trump was able to exploit.
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But I think the headline story really does become the way in which, under the Trump
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administration, norms and institutions have been gutted in such a way that
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it's very hard to imagine a restoration to some sort of pre-Trump status quo.
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For those of us who care about institutions, who care about governance,
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who care about a civil society, it's gonna require a great deal of
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creativity to reimagine what comes next
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Even if the Democrats win the midterms, whether that means taking back the House
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or possibly even the Senate and the presidency in '28, it's not as if there's
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gonna be a Democratic president and even a Democratic Congress and everything
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will go back to what it was pre-Trump.
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Yeah.
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Well, that's part of what happens when you have, um, a fragile ecosystem that you
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think is much stronger than it actually is, is that once that ecosystem-- Once
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central nodes in that e- ecosystem are destroyed, it becomes hard to restore it.
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And also, I think the problem of norms is that when norms are gone, it's
23:38
very hard to restore them because once Trump has begun to go after political
23:43
enemies, there's this temptation to replicate that on the other side.
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Or, uh, once Trump installs cronies in certain positions, there's going to
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be a temptation to, to be retributive.
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And, you know, we'll, we'll see.
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I'm very pessimistic that we'll be able to somehow escape a cycle of retributions,
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that we're gonna return to some sort of American Eden of democratic hygiene.
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I think that Pandora's Box has been opened, and I have no faith that
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we're gonna land in a great place.
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Well, we have the midterms, uh, in, I guess, less than, uh, what
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is that, four or five months?
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Do you have any, if not predictions, you know, the-- There's a statement in Judaism
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that prophecy is the domain of fools, so-
24:35
Yeah.
24:36
Thank you.
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We're-- Not that I'm asking you.
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So please,
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please, Frank, be a fool for us.
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Like, I'd like you to…
24:41
No.
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So if you're not prepared to venture a educated guess on what the outcome is
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gonna be, w- how do you see all of this unfolding over the next few months?
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Right now, Democrats have about an eight to nine-point advantage in the
24:56
generic ballot, and that- I think if that were, if that were to hold today, and
25:03
if gerrymandering were to kind of take basically the shape that it's assumed at
25:09
this moment, that would give the Democrats back the House of Representatives.
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And it's strange to believe that maybe the Senate is in a stronger position
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for the H- the Democrats in the House.
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I'm not sure that's exactly the case, but they don't have to overcome
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exactly the same headwinds that they have to overcome in the House.
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But look, Trump is profoundly unpopular right now, and he's unpopular on
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issues that are his core issues.
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And I think what we're seeing in the aftermath of the Iran war is that,
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first of all, the Iranians aren't especially keen to bail out Trump.
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And so right now it doesn't seem as if they're rushing to cut a deal w- with
25:52
Donald Trump, that they have some sort of upper hand in the negotiation with him.
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And then secondly, it's the effects, the rolling effects of this war are such that,
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uh, a lot of the shortages, a lot of the, um, supply chain issues that we're having,
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experiencing as a result of the Strait of Hormuz being shut down are just starting
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to kind of roll through the system now.
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Your argument is it'll intensify, exacerbate, and get
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worse in the coming months.
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Yeah, or it's not gonna … It's not like Americans are gonna suddenly start
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to feel better about their economic situation between now and November.
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Talk a little bit more about the Iran war.
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What is the impact of that for the American Jewish community and
26:43
American-Israel bilateral relations?
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Headed into the Iran war, I would have said Israel s- was sitting in
26:51
a very strong regional position, that the Sunni-Israeli alliance was
26:58
kind of a game changer for Israel.
27:00
It had been motion for many years, and the fact that Israel and the
27:05
Gulf countries were kind of stitched into an air defense system, regional
27:11
alliance against Iran, I would've said kind of suited Israel incredibly well.
27:15
I thought Iran's proxies were relatively weak.
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Iran, it seemed to me, was relatively weak.
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And in s- course of this war, what's been exposed is that Iran was proved
27:29
to be weak in many regards and has been weakened in other regards.
27:33
But the fact that the Revolutionary Guards in Iran are able to claim
27:38
victory because they survived what was essentially k- kind of an all-out air
27:44
assault on their country, and that the United States proved that it was, was
27:49
basically unwilling to send ground troops into Iran, means that they have greater
27:55
faith in their ability to survive a war.
27:58
Which means that I think ultimately the, in, in the wartime conditions
28:03
there have allowed them to punish, brutally punish their, their
28:07
opposition, which they had been brutally punishing even before the war began.
28:12
But I think more troublingly for Israel over the long run is that there's
28:18
something to me dangerous about the narrative that Netanyahu dragged
28:22
the United States into war, because I don't believe that is the case.
28:24
I think that Donald Trump is an adult who makes his own decisions, and that
28:29
there is something borderline dangerous about the narrative that, uh, the
28:36
kind of, the malign deceiver Bibi Netanyahu dragged Donald Trump into war.
28:42
That said, the war is inherently unpopular on both the Democratic
28:47
side and among younger Republicans.
28:51
And I think that among younger Republicans and among Democrats, there's this sense
28:55
that the war is associated with Israel and that Israel is associated with
29:01
Donald Trump and foreign adventurers, and that is just not good for Israel.
29:07
Part of my hope has always been that after Trump, that Netanyahu and Trump
29:11
are so connected, and that for Democrats and, and in this kind of partisan
29:16
environment, once you get past Netanyahu and you get past Trump, that there'd be
29:21
a way in which a lot of the political heat here and a lot of the intense
29:25
partisan feelings wouldn't be projected onto Israel in quite this sort of way.
29:29
But I'm not so confident about that
29:32
headed forward, to be honest.
29:35
For you and I, it's kind of astonishing to watch how Israel went from being
29:39
kind of the ultimate bipartisan issue To being an issue where it's kind of,
29:44
it, it's ultimately hard to see where its kind of core political allies
29:49
exist beyond older evangelicals.
29:53
And that really is a huge turnabout.
29:56
And I think there should be an inquest about this kind of i- within Israel,
30:02
because it demands explanation and it demands some sort of strategic pivot.
30:06
In the blink of an eye, historically.
30:09
It just- Yeah … basically happened overnight.
30:12
Yeah.
30:12
Just to follow up on, uh, what you said, uh, a few minutes ago.
30:17
Do you think that Israel has lost the Democratic Party?
30:21
And do you think the Democratic Party is moving away from American Jewry?
30:25
Yeah, I do.
30:26
But I also think, I think Republican Party is, too.
30:30
So for Jews, the Democratic Party has felt like home.
30:34
This is kind of part of the American Jewish story, so that feels more intimate.
30:39
I look at the way in which a lot of the debate is being conducted right
30:43
now, and there's so many legitimate and important reasons to criticize
30:49
kind of the Israeli government.
30:51
And yet, a lot of the policy discussion isn't being conducted
30:55
as a policy discussion.
30:57
It's being conducted using tropes.
31:00
I mean, I think that the litmus test around AIPAC, to me, like
31:05
AIPAC is, is, has never proved itself to be more ineffectual
31:08
than it has been in recent months.
31:10
Like it's really, it's failed in its attempts to intervene
31:14
in Democratic primaries.
31:15
It's squandered kind of its bipartisanship over the course
31:19
of the last couple decades.
31:22
To describe it as kind of this juggernaut of a political force is just not accurate.
31:27
If it ever was, by the way.
31:29
Yeah.
31:29
And so to have that be the litmus test within a lot of these primary elections,
31:35
it ends up becoming this debate about whether a Jewish cabal of money men is
31:41
shaping American politics, and whether you- you're on the si- the side of the
31:46
people against the Jewish cabal or not.
31:49
And I don't think that most of the people who subscribe to that are
31:55
consciously antisemitic, but they've, they're falling into antisemitic
32:01
tropes.
32:02
So you mentioned, uh, s- since the end of, uh, World War II, uh, Jews have supported
32:08
the Democratic Party in every way by, say, two-thirds to three-quarters who vote for
32:16
Democratic, uh, candidates and offer all kinds of other financial and other forms
32:21
of support disproportionate to, uh, the size of the Jewish community H-how do you
32:29
think that will unfold in years to come?
32:33
Do you think the rising antagonism to Israel in the Democratic Party will change
32:39
electoral habits in elections to come?
32:44
Yeah, I do.
32:44
At the very least, I think it means that American Jews are going to
32:48
be less partisan than they were.
32:51
I don't believe that at the presidential level there's going to
32:55
be a massive shift in the near term.
32:59
I mean, and some of that depends on… I, I, I don't even know if I believe that
33:02
prediction, but I, I mean, I think it depends so much on who gets nominated.
33:07
Yeah.
33:07
I mean, like, if, if Marco Rubio were running against AOC, for example,
33:11
that would shift the American Jewish vote in all likelihood, right?
33:16
Yeah.
33:17
I mean, I, I don't know how extreme that shift would be,
33:19
but there would be some shift.
33:21
And if Josh Shapiro were running against JD Vance, I think that that would
33:25
shift the vote in the other direction.
33:28
And so I think what we're describing is more… I think that there'll be a
33:32
larger homeless tribe of American Jews.
33:37
Maybe they defy polarization in this country, and they become
33:41
something closer to swing voters.
33:43
But I, I do think that there's going to be a Jewish right that will grow and will
33:47
be consolidated, and then I think the Jewish left is moving even further left.
33:53
And so to some extent, we're seeing the same sort of polarization that everybody
33:58
else is witnessing in the country writ large within our own community.
34:05
I live in New York, and, uh, I was fairly active in the, uh,
34:09
lead-up to the mayoral campaign.
34:12
I thought that 30% number of, uh, of New York Jews who voted
34:15
for Mamdani was rather high.
34:16
I saw a recent poll by the Jewish majority of 26%.
34:20
That sounds more right to me.
34:23
And then if you, if you look at the percentage of New York Jewish voters
34:28
who voted for Mamdani who are active in American Jewish life, right?
34:33
They're members of synagogues or Jewish-
34:35
Yeah
34:36
… establishments, um, the percentage is even much lower, I'm sure-
34:40
I'm sure … than, uh, 26%.
34:42
Where you would have expected, you know, exactly the opposite.
34:46
Even if you take the 30% number, you would have expected 70% of New
34:52
York Jews voting for the Democratic candidate, whoever that was.
34:56
It was complicated because he ran against a very flawed candidate in, uh, Cuomo.
35:01
There were three people running.
35:03
All that being said, all that being said- It is a
35:05
one-party city.
35:07
So my question to you: Do you think Mamdani represents something
35:12
long-term that affects not only the Democratic Party but the way the
35:17
political system in America relates to the American Jewish community?
35:22
If I look at the way that the left has decried Israel as kind of this Global
35:30
pariah that is kind of evil beyond other evils in the global s- scene,
35:36
and it becomes a litmus test issue.
35:40
I do think that that is the future of the left.
35:43
I mean, you've seen this in the way that Rahm Emanuel has started
35:47
to reposition himself on the question of military aid to Israel.
35:52
And you see in the way that, that, that kind of preemptively
35:55
Netanyahu is positioning Israel relative to this question.
35:59
I do think that even in the nexus to the 2028 election, I think military aid to
36:06
Israel is going to be one of those litmus test questions for Democratic candidates.
36:13
And that, I think, is kind of on the same trajectory as Mamdani's rise.
36:21
And do you think that wing of the party will be increasingly
36:24
influential in years to come?
36:26
Yes, I do.
36:28
I think if you look at, at kind of at the local municipal level, the
36:34
Democratic socialist candidates are surging almost everywhere in the nation.
36:41
DSA has tapped into something within some deeper resentments, anxieties,
36:48
anger, sense of hope that exists within younger people, and it's kind of a
36:55
failure of conventional Democrats to kind of figure out how to navigate some of
37:02
those underlying issues, just as it was a failure of conventional r- Republicans
37:06
to understand and navigate a lot of the populism that Donald Trump was channeling.
37:13
And so I think back to, to Franklin Roosevelt, who said, "I'm that kind
37:19
of radical because I'm that kind of conservative," and that he understood
37:24
that in order to have kind of conventional liberalism kind of make its pivot
37:30
into an era where there was so much economic anxiety and frustration, he
37:36
needed to reform the Democratic Party and liberalism in order to respond to
37:42
that sense of aggravation and s- sense of despair that people felt in a way
37:48
that, that was ultimately hopeful.
37:51
And I keep waiting for kind of y- y- you know, some sort of talented
37:56
candidate to be able to come in and to bridge th- those issues.
38:01
And the Israel question overlaid on that is insanely complicated, just given
38:07
the way in which Israel's reputation in this country has just plummeted.
38:12
Tell me about the American Jewish community.
38:14
What's your sense?
38:15
How are we doing?
38:17
What are we doing well, and what do we need to work on?
38:21
There's no more philanthropic community in the history of the world
38:25
than the American Jewish Community.
38:27
And so that there is all this money flowing in all sorts of
38:30
directions, some of it insanely inefficient, insanely silly.
38:36
But there is a lot of innovation that's happening beneath the surface in American
38:41
Judaism, that there are a lot of people who are applying their creativity
38:45
and talents to do creative things.
38:47
And like liturgically, I think that there are within conservative and, and
38:53
Reform Judaism, there's a lot of, a lot of interesting things happening, a
38:57
lot of spiritualism that exists that's, that's kind of being tapped into.
39:03
I think that the October 8th Jews are a fascinating phenomenon, and it's, it's
39:09
interesting to s- to watch the organized Jewish community figure out how to bottle
39:14
some of that energy and enthusiasm that's emerged in the aftermath of October 7th.
39:20
But writ large, I would say, given that we're entering into this era
39:26
of post-liberalism, that I don't think there's a lot of strategic,
39:30
good strategic thinking about where the community needs to head.
39:36
I don't think that there is a good response that the community has generated
39:42
to Israel's plummeting reputation and the way in which that is going to be a
39:51
millstone for American Judaism unless we find some sort of way to navigate that.
40:00
So you think Israel is gonna continue to play a central role
40:04
on the American Jewish agenda?
40:07
It's too central to the way that kind of mainstream Judaism thinks
40:11
about itself for it not to be.
40:13
It's also too central to the way in which antisemitism rears its
40:18
head in this country, and so I don't see any way around that.
40:23
Do you?
40:24
I mean, I'm just curious.
40:25
I think, uh, there are very, very substantial challenges within
40:29
the American Jewish community.
40:31
I'm of course very concerned about the decline in the standing in the
40:36
West in general, but especially in the United States for Israel over
40:40
the last two and a half years.
40:42
I still can't get my hands around it all because I- as I said earlier, I
40:47
think when things happen so quickly in society, it was all bubbling up under
40:53
the surface and people weren't just noticing it, and it took something
40:57
to release this, this energy.
41:00
And I still can't get my hands around why it was October 7th, the worst massacre
41:07
of Jews, that released this energy of hostility to Jews and, uh, to Israel.
41:14
And again, that's without regard to legitimate criticisms of- Yeah … uh,
41:19
any Israeli policy or so on and so forth.
41:21
By the way, any Israeli prime minister, at least in the first year of the campaign
41:27
in Gaza, would have, uh, responded in the same way, or they would have been
41:31
gone in, uh, in a matter of weeks.
41:33
Yeah, I agree with that, and I also think that I can no- I can- I
41:38
was gonna call it a normal Israeli government, but, like, a more centrist
41:42
Israeli government wouldn't have had the likes of Smotrich and Ben-Gvir
41:48
saying the most indefensible things.
41:51
I think that the struggle for kind of the soul of Israeli society is
41:55
a real one, and that just as we are experiencing democratic decline in
42:00
this, this fight to kind of restore our own insti- and preserve and
42:05
protect our own institutions, something similar is happening within Israel.
42:10
And I actually think it's kind of incumbent upon American Jewry to rush
42:15
towards that and to kind of care about that and participate in that actively,
42:20
not just because it's important for Israel, but I think it's important for
42:24
us and our own souls and the own-- at the own case that we make to kind of the
42:30
American people about our relationship to Israel, that the fact that there is
42:36
press oppression and settler violence and the failure to protect minority
42:42
rights within the country is something that I find deplorable, shocking,
42:48
and worthy of our moral fervor.
42:53
In addition to all the moral arguments and, you know, the ties of history
42:58
and destiny that, uh, Jews have with each other around the world and the
43:03
miraculousness of the reestablishment of Jewish sovereignty after two thousand
43:08
years, in addition to all of that, I think what you're saying is American Jews have
43:14
a direct self-interest in the standing of Israel because Israel, as you said a few
43:20
minutes ago, will continue to play such a central role in the American Jewish ethos.
43:25
Exactly.
43:26
There's sometimes a desire to either bury one's head in the sand about this or to
43:32
kind of react in a way that kind of falls back into some of the tropes of American
43:37
identity politics, which is just kind of to, to spring to a sense of incredible
43:44
defensiveness that precludes the possibility of persuasion and dialogue.
43:49
And if I had one message for the leaders of the American Jewish
43:53
community, it would be, don't give up on the possibilities of persuasion.
43:58
I think this is one thing that Israel has done terribly, which is that
44:02
Israel prices in global antisemitism, which is real, like, it's, it exists.
44:07
It… And, like, they just kind of a-- once you assume that the entire world
44:12
is arrayed against you, you cease to go through the effort of presenting your best
44:18
case to the world and trying to persuade.
44:21
And I think that Once you wall yourself off from the possibilities of
44:25
persuasion, it skews one's moral calculus because you're no longer considering
44:31
how a global audience would respond.
44:33
And it also just, it's just strategic stupidity.
44:37
It's like, y- you know, the more isolated Israel becomes, the harder its
44:43
existence becomes over the long haul.
44:46
And Israel is miraculous, Israeli capitalism is miraculous, Israel's
44:50
Israeli innovation is miraculous, but I think it's a mistake to believe that
44:56
you can exist in, um, in an island.
44:59
They don't exist in an island.
45:00
Yeah.
45:00
No person, no society, no country is an island entirely unto themselves.
45:05
Even the United States, as we're seeing now with the difficulties
45:09
of concluding this war with Iran.
45:11
Right.
45:12
Well, and I think that the bet that Netanyahu made on Trump and on Rep-
45:16
the Republican Party over the long run is going to prove to be an incredibly
45:21
self-defeating one for the state of Israel, because what it means is, is
45:24
that it shifted all of its eggs into one basket, and it didn't begin to
45:30
consider the possibility that that one basket could end up rejecting those eggs
45:39
My last question to you is what, w- Frank, what are you working on now?
45:42
Are you working on a book or are you working on a big article?
45:45
W-
45:46
I'm working on a book about American Jewry, about the
45:48
golden age of American Jewry.
45:49
It's a cultural, political, intellectual history of the story about how, how our
45:54
people kind of went from being on the margins to, to kind of doing so much to
45:59
reshape the American dream, which was kind of also an American Jewish dream,
46:03
and to explain so much of the world.
46:07
When I went out and I talked about that article, uh, was just kind of if
46:12
you grew up in the 21st century, the kind of the, the miraculous Jewish
46:17
existence in the 20th century was something that was almost a foreign
46:20
country to a lot of younger people.
46:23
And so I wanted to both recapture what had gone down, and then to explain in
46:29
greater detail kind of why it dissipated.
46:32
But it's, it's a very joyous thing to work on because I'm going back
46:37
and I'm writing about, um, a history that was so exuberant and where there
46:44
was so much, so much excitement and so much creative fervor that, that
46:50
was generated out of American Jewry.
46:53
When is the book going to be published?
46:55
When do you think?
46:55
You know better than to ask an author that question.
46:59
You're still, you still got a ways to go.
47:02
Yeah, yeah.
47:02
All right.
47:03
Well, listen, uh, first of all, I will be, we, the, uh, Jewish community,
47:08
we'll be eagerly awaiting the completion of your work, and we'll gobble
47:13
up the book as quickly as we can.
47:16
Thank you for having me on.
47:17
Thank you for engaging with the issues that you engage with in your
47:21
podcast in such depth, and it's, you know, I think the idea of, I mean,
47:26
as you said, it's like the idea of conversation, argument, discussion,
47:31
like this is, these are Jewish values.
47:33
This is part of our contribution to American democracy, and it's so healthy
47:37
for our own people to just be able to engage in an introspective way.
47:45
I agree.
47:46
I agree with that.
47:47
And, uh, you know, I missed the classes in rabbinical school about podcasting.
47:51
I ne- I never studied it.
47:55
So to hear some complimentary things from you about my podcasting skills,
47:59
that, that makes me really feel good.
48:02
Okay, good.
48:04
Keep up the good work, Frank.
48:05
Thank you.
48:15
In this, the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary year of the birth of
48:18
the United States, Franklin Foer's groundbreaking essay in The Atlantic,
48:22
which he is now expanding into a book, gives us an opportunity to
48:26
look back at what Frank and we mean by the Golden Age of American Jews.
48:31
From the beginning, America offered a bargain to the Jews.
48:35
Fulfill the obligations of citizenship and receive the
48:38
government's blessings and support.
48:41
As the first president, George Washington, wrote in a famous letter to the synagogue
48:46
in Newport, Rhode Island, "Happily, the government of the United States,
48:51
which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires
48:57
only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves
49:00
as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support."
49:06
By and large, America has lived up to its promise to the Jews.
49:11
It has not been perfect.
49:12
There were periods of pervasive antisemitism, but never
49:16
like European antisemitism.
49:18
We do not live here with daily reminders of wholesale Jewish destruction or
49:23
government discrimination, as do our counterparts in every significant
49:28
Western European Jewish community and every significant Muslim country.
49:33
Our ancestors were drawn to America like a bee to a flower because they
49:37
knew deep down, at the core of their being, that this country was different.
49:43
Jewish songwriter Irving Berlin, a cantor's son, captured this feeling of
49:48
our immigrant forebearers when he wrote, "God bless America, land that I love.
49:54
Stand beside her and guide her through the night with a light from above."
49:59
Irving Berlin is a good example of how enmeshed Jews are in American society.
50:03
The anthem of American Christians during Noel is White Christmas, written by Irving
50:08
Berlin, the Jew, the son of a cantor.
50:11
Christian Americans didn't mind that a Jew wrote it.
50:14
In fact, if they even know, they thought it was rather cool.
50:19
America embraced the Jews.
50:20
Americans held us in high regard.
50:23
They sing our songs, and we write their songs.
50:27
We are good spouses, good breadwinners, good parents, and good
50:31
citizens, contributing mightily and disproportionately to the well-being
50:36
of the country When we say the golden age of American Jews, we mean this.
50:43
In the last decade of the twentieth century and the beginning of the new
50:45
century, Jews, who were less than two percent of the population, made up
50:51
forty percent of American Nobel Prize winners in science and economics, twenty
50:56
percent of professors at the leading universities, twenty-one percent of
51:01
senior civil servants, forty percent of the partners in the leading law firms
51:05
in New York and Washington, twenty-six percent of reporters, editors, and
51:10
executives of the major print and broadcast media, and fifty-nine percent
51:17
of the directors, writers, and producers of the top grossing motion pictures.
51:23
Looking back, we might say that the golden age of American Jews reached
51:28
its symbolic and political peak when twenty-six years ago, one of the two major
51:34
American political parties, the Democrats, nominated as their vice presidential
51:39
candidate an observant, self-proclaimed Orthodox Jew, no less, Senator Joe
51:45
Lieberman, to be a heartbeat away from the presidency of the United States.
51:51
The Gore-Lieberman ticket actually won the popular election by
51:54
seven hundred thousand votes.
51:56
Lieberman's religious observance did not apparently impede him at all.
52:00
Even his inability to drive to his own inauguration because it fell on Shabbat
52:04
that year was counted to his credit, emphasizing the strength of his faith,
52:10
a political asset in this country.
52:13
I remember so well watching an interview that Senator Lieberman gave during the
52:17
final stages of the two thousand elections on Meet the Press, where he was asked
52:21
how, if he could not drive, would he participate in his own inauguration?
52:27
Lieberman gave the classic Jewish response that resonated with Americans.
52:31
He said, "If my mother were here, she would say, 'Sweetheart, you should
52:38
only have such problems.'" On this, the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary
52:43
year, the first thing we should do is celebrate American exceptionalism.
52:50
Life has been better for Jews in this country than any other diaspora community
52:55
in the entire history of our people.
52:57
And then, after we have celebrated, we should get down to serious work.
53:03
We've lost a lot of ground, and these losses are intensifying.
53:09
History has bequeathed to us the central lesson.
53:13
How a country treats its Jewish population is a barometer, the ultimate test of the
53:18
health and moral vigor of that country.
53:22
And therefore, after celebrating America, we should try our best to
53:26
recapture what was lost, not only for the good of the Jews, but for
53:31
the good of the country we love.
53:35
Until next time, this is In These Times.