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Danish Resistance to Fascism, and Ours Today—Plus, Trump v. UCLA | Start Making Sense · The Nation Podcasts

0:08
[SPEAKER_02]: of the nation magazine.
0:09
[SPEAKER_02]: This is start making sense.
0:11
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm John Weener.
0:13
[SPEAKER_02]: Later in the show Donald Trump is demanding that UCLA pay a one billion dollar fine is a penalty for anti-Semitism on campus.
0:22
[SPEAKER_02]: That's on top of five hundred eighty four million dollars.
0:26
[SPEAKER_02]: in cuts for research grants that his administration hasn't posed, but one billion?
0:32
[SPEAKER_02]: Why not one trillion?
0:34
[SPEAKER_02]: David Myers will comment.
0:37
[SPEAKER_02]: But first, the Danes resisted fascism, we can too.
0:42
[SPEAKER_02]: Sarah Sophie Flicker will explain in a minute.
0:48
[SPEAKER_02]: Everybody who knows about resistance to Hitler knows about Denmark.
0:52
[SPEAKER_02]: The Danes rescued more of their Jews than any other country, ninety-nine percent.
0:58
[SPEAKER_02]: And Jews here learned at an early age that when Hitler ordered the Jews of occupied Denmark to wear the Yellow Star, the King of Denmark and the Prime Minister rode through Copenhagen on horseback wearing the Yellow Star themselves.
1:15
[SPEAKER_02]: And then everybody put on the Yellow Star.
1:18
[SPEAKER_02]: We're joined now by the great granddaughter of that Prime Minister.
1:22
[SPEAKER_02]: Sarah Sophie Flicker.
1:24
[SPEAKER_02]: She's an organizer who works at the intersection of culture and politics, especially on abortion rights in gender justice.
1:31
[SPEAKER_02]: She's a founder of the Women's March and Washington and co-author of the Women's March Official Book Together We Rise in New York Times Best Seller.
1:40
[SPEAKER_02]: And her new article for The Nation, The Dane's Resisted Fascism and So Can We, was number one on the most read list at TheNation.com
1:50
[SPEAKER_02]: all weekend.
1:52
[SPEAKER_02]: Sarah Sophie Flicker, welcome to the program.
1:55
[SPEAKER_00]: Hi John, thanks for having me.
1:57
[SPEAKER_02]: Like the rest of us, you learned that story about your great-grandfather and the king riding on horseback through Copenhagen, defying Hitler by wearing the yellow star.
2:06
[SPEAKER_02]: It's really an unforgettable story.
2:09
[SPEAKER_00]: It is an unforgettable story and it was some sort of light house for me and the work that I do now and I held fast to it.
2:19
[SPEAKER_00]: My whole childhood, my whole young adulthood.
2:23
[SPEAKER_00]: And I really resisted researching it because I loved it so much.
2:29
[SPEAKER_00]: And you know, in my household, the story was true.
2:32
[SPEAKER_00]: And the few times I was like, well, why are there any pictures?
2:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Or, you know, it was always like it doesn't matter.
2:39
[SPEAKER_00]: It's true.
2:40
[SPEAKER_00]: I think we all knew it wasn't entirely true.
2:42
[SPEAKER_00]: And the truth as it turns out as I began researching it is
2:47
[SPEAKER_00]: In many ways, far more powerful than the myth, because nobody wore the yellow star.
2:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Not a single person, not the king, not my great grandfather who was a prime minister for the beginning of the war.
3:01
[SPEAKER_00]: Not a single Jew, you know, I'm half Danish.
3:04
[SPEAKER_00]: half New Jersey Jew all the way through and through.
3:08
[SPEAKER_00]: My parents now live in Denmark.
3:11
[SPEAKER_00]: My mom never became a citizen.
3:13
[SPEAKER_00]: So being Danish was as animated to me and my youth as being American.
3:20
[SPEAKER_02]: Over the years, you've heard a lot of other stories about your Danish family and World War II.
3:26
[SPEAKER_02]: Tell us about your aunts and uncles.
3:28
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and these stories are all true.
3:30
[SPEAKER_00]: A majority of just regular people joined the resistance, and they joined the resistance without training, without prior knowledge of how to resist, but they just did it, and they did it.
3:44
[SPEAKER_00]: They sort of got in where they fit in.
3:45
[SPEAKER_00]: My grandfather, he was part of the resistance, and what I was told was that he would sleep with his boots on, though he could spring into action immediately.
3:56
[SPEAKER_00]: Then I had an aunt who worked in a hospital and it turns out hospitals were a major point of resistance in Denmark.
4:05
[SPEAKER_00]: They did everything from fabricating medical records of Jewish people to say that they were too ill to travel.
4:14
[SPEAKER_00]: They hid people there.
4:16
[SPEAKER_00]: smuggled information, you know, it was a hub of resistance and my uncle moans was a pretty well-known journalist in Denmark and during the war he smuggled information, you know, at a great risk and then he went on to join one of the underground illegal papers
4:41
[SPEAKER_02]: The only part of the story of Danish resistance that I know is about the escape to Sweden.
4:47
[SPEAKER_02]: How, on Rosha Schone Knight in nineteen forty three, the Nazis ordered the roundup of all Danish Jews to transport them to concentration camps.
4:57
[SPEAKER_02]: But a sympathetic German embassy official warned Danish leaders, they told Jewish leaders, and the Danes somehow got almost all the Danish Jews, thousands of them,
5:09
[SPEAKER_02]: past SS patrols onto small fishing boats that ferry them to Sweden.
5:14
[SPEAKER_02]: Ten miles away, thousands of people.
5:17
[SPEAKER_02]: That story is true, but it was only one chapter in a longer history of resistance that you've been learning about.
5:24
[SPEAKER_02]: And a history that you think has some good examples for us facing Trump's fascist moves.
5:30
[SPEAKER_02]: One of my favorite parts of the story that you tell that I didn't know anything about was the Ten Commandments for Deans.
5:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
5:38
[SPEAKER_00]: When I finally was brave enough to release the fabricated story, you know, and as Trump took his second term and as an organizer, I thought, OK, I'm going to go against the Danish Green.
5:53
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a law in Denmark called the Yentelot, which is like the People's Law, which is you don't center yourself.
5:59
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, it really frowns upon ego.
6:02
[SPEAKER_00]: Things that are very commonplace in the US.
6:05
[SPEAKER_00]: And that was a big hurdle for me to get over because I was very much raised with that.
6:10
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think in organizing, we, and to believe collectively that, you know, it's a group of people that do the best work and so often it's not a charismatic leader or one special unique person.
6:25
[SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, in researching all this, I stumbled on it's very hard to find.
6:32
[SPEAKER_00]: This story of a seventeen year old resistance member named Arnes.
6:38
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, let's say I'm probably mispronouncing it.
6:41
[SPEAKER_00]: And he wrote down with a pen and paper that I think it's called the Ten Commandments for Dance.
6:48
[SPEAKER_00]: And they were just simple, straightforward, basically just don't comply.
6:54
[SPEAKER_02]: Don't work for the Nazis.
6:55
[SPEAKER_02]: Don't shop in their stores.
6:56
[SPEAKER_02]: Don't believe the propaganda, protect the people they persecute.
7:00
[SPEAKER_00]: And he made, I think, he wrote down twenty five copies and he handed them to the quote unquote, like notable members of his little village.
7:07
[SPEAKER_00]: And somehow these commandments went viral.
7:11
[SPEAKER_00]: other people wrote them down, you know, eventually printing presses, printed them, and I think there were probably posters.
7:18
[SPEAKER_00]: I have not been able to find an image of them, but you know, we do have them written down.
7:23
[SPEAKER_00]: I think the one that stands out to me the most is to protect whoever is being targeted.
7:29
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, that just is a baseline.
7:33
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that
7:35
[SPEAKER_00]: is always important to here.
7:38
[SPEAKER_00]: But also, you know, it's clear from those commandments.
7:43
[SPEAKER_00]: this this teenager is suggesting little things like if you are asked to to do something that benefits you know the Nazis or here would be this administration do bad work works slowly you know gum up the works be a grain of sand grind the whole thing to a halt and people did that and we don't have to fix
8:08
[SPEAKER_00]: Everything that's broken, but we can do one small thing a day.
8:12
[SPEAKER_00]: We can do a couple small things a week.
8:14
[SPEAKER_00]: We can do one big thing.
8:15
[SPEAKER_00]: We can work up our courage after doing lots of little things to do a big thing.
8:18
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, that's how these things work.
8:21
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, you know, the commandments feel so powerful because they give us permission to do the right thing.
8:30
[SPEAKER_02]: One of the great things about the Danish resistance is not just that it's size, but the variety of institutions that were part of it.
8:38
[SPEAKER_02]: When the order came to deport all the Jews from Denmark, the state Lutheran Church had a sermon read in every church supporting the Jews.
8:48
[SPEAKER_02]: hundred percent of the ministers helped rescue the Jews along with we're told ninety percent of university faculty most of the doctors you talked about the role of the hospitals and hiding Jews and helping them flee so different institutions with completely different histories all did a different thing as a part of this resistance and what about humor did the deans tell jokes about Hitler
9:15
[SPEAKER_00]: Of course, because fascists hate laughter more than bombs.
9:19
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a paraphrase.
9:20
[SPEAKER_00]: But, you know, I was really also inspired a few years ago by a book called Prankster's Versus Autocrats, which is written about the Eastern European method of creating dilemma actions, which are basically just
9:36
[SPEAKER_00]: making wild fun in all the ways that you can of of of those people threatening to do these harms because they can't handle it.
9:46
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, that's the funny thing about all of this stuff is, you know, basically these are just people with really fragile egos who are trying to assert their power because they don't know how else to feel important.
10:00
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, Hannah, a rent wrote about that in Ikeman and Jerusalem and in
10:06
[SPEAKER_00]: I had read that in college.
10:07
[SPEAKER_00]: I do not remember this whole chap or on Denmark or at least a whole huge chunk of it about Denmark.
10:14
[SPEAKER_00]: And you know, the phenomenal thing.
10:17
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, it like fills my heart every time I even speak about it that Hannah Arrent wrote about was that beyond
10:26
[SPEAKER_00]: you know, the things we've talked about so far.
10:29
[SPEAKER_00]: There's also this phenomenon that I don't know a word for it, but her sort of idea was that the German soldiers, the SS soldiers who were stationed in Denmark over time
10:42
[SPEAKER_00]: their belief system was run down by this wall of morality that they were faced with every day, you know, be it being made fun of every day because certainly people were making fun of all the the soldier station there every single day, whether it was, you know, people
11:00
[SPEAKER_00]: asking them like how do you live with yourself how are you doing this and our rents thesis was that over time they started questioning their own morals and their own belief systems and the and a big number of German soldiers stopped complying with Hitler and you think you think
11:19
[SPEAKER_02]: It's possible that we could do something similar with ICE agents and with local police.
11:27
[SPEAKER_02]: Instead of throwing stuff at them, you say, talk to them, ask them some questions.
11:34
[SPEAKER_02]: And what do you suggest this attempted conversation should be like?
11:39
[SPEAKER_00]: There's so many beautiful videos out there right now of people filming ICE agents of
11:47
[SPEAKER_00]: of, you know, physically getting in the way of them taking people of, you know, all these various ways that people are interfering with this machine and trying to grind it to a halt.
11:58
[SPEAKER_00]: But the thing that you hear in almost every video is there will be some voice in the background saying,
12:04
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you have a family?
12:06
[SPEAKER_00]: How do you live with yourself?
12:07
[SPEAKER_00]: Why are you wearing that mask?
12:09
[SPEAKER_00]: What are you ashamed of?
12:10
[SPEAKER_00]: If you're so proud of this, show your face.
12:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Whatever it is, I think it's part of a bigger tactic.
12:16
[SPEAKER_00]: And I personally am a huge fan of the people that are throwing glitter at the exagents because glitter doesn't come off.
12:26
[SPEAKER_00]: And you know, it's a pretty good marker of someone who's up to some serious evil.
12:35
[SPEAKER_02]: So right now, you know, ICE has this huge budget to recruit tens of thousands of new members that are having a hard time.
12:42
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, they've had to increase the sign-up bonus to fifty thousand dollars.
12:48
[SPEAKER_02]: They've lowered the admissions criteria.
12:51
[SPEAKER_02]: I asked AI, how can you discourage people from applying for the new ICE jobs?
12:59
[SPEAKER_02]: And I want to tell you the AI answer.
13:01
[SPEAKER_02]: counter the recruiting message campaigns, expose the realities.
13:07
[SPEAKER_02]: Share firsthand accounts from former ICE employees to highlight the psychological toll, moral conflicts, and public backlash associated with the job.
13:17
[SPEAKER_02]: Challenge ICE's recruitment slogan slogan defend the homeland with facts about deportation rates, family separations, and civil rights concerns.
13:28
[SPEAKER_02]: Undermind the appeal by highlighting career risk,
13:31
[SPEAKER_02]: stress the long-term reputational damage of working for a controversial agency, emphasize the potential for legal scrutiny, expose internal issues, point to the high burnout rates, internal dissent, and whistleblower cases, share reports of toxic workplace culture.
13:52
[SPEAKER_00]: Wow, AI.
13:54
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, that's like it's own set of commandments right there.
13:57
[SPEAKER_00]: I have to believe that there's a way to touch people caught up in this stuff.
14:03
[SPEAKER_00]: It's so heartening to see this movement building.
14:05
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, when I stood on the stage of the women's march in twenty seventeen in DC, that was beautiful.
14:10
[SPEAKER_00]: But I remember thinking, where were you all three months ago and where will you all be a year from now?
14:18
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think we're finally moving in a direction that's building, which is the correct way.
14:25
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think, you know, we can see the tides are shifting.
14:29
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, we can see that it's not simple.
14:33
[SPEAKER_00]: And it certainly takes courage.
14:36
[SPEAKER_00]: But, you know, like people in Denmark, and I would say people here, it's like, be scared, but do it anyway.
14:43
[SPEAKER_00]: And and do a little bit, you know, download five calls have that be your first thing that you do and just that's a great app that tells you exactly who to call what to say on what day.
14:56
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that courage is contagious and inertia is sort of what allows these things to happen.
15:06
[SPEAKER_00]: And while, you know, Denmark is so different from the US, it's a tiny little country, you know, there is this history.
15:15
[SPEAKER_00]: My great grandfather came up with a term called San Francisco, which I'm saying totally wrong, but it means community mindedness.
15:22
[SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, it's a through line in Denmark and certainly they don't do everything perfectly and there's many things that I'm disappointed in with my homeland right now.
15:34
[SPEAKER_00]: But there is this undercurrent of we take, we protect each other, we take care of each other and that everybody deserves equality and dignity.
15:43
[SPEAKER_00]: And you know, I would say the thing that scares me a little about the U.S.
15:47
[SPEAKER_00]: is we have such an individual, you know, of course, like American exceptionalism and individualism and all this.
15:53
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think it's
15:56
[SPEAKER_00]: time for us to pass that aside for now.
16:00
[SPEAKER_00]: We can revisit it and talk about it later.
16:02
[SPEAKER_00]: But we don't all have to agree on everything right now, but we do have to agree that every life is a universe and that is something that I was taught as a Jewish kid, a Jewish socialist kid.
16:15
[SPEAKER_00]: Every life is a universe, and the onus is on us to protect that.
16:19
[SPEAKER_00]: And so when I think about the commandments, I, the Danish commandments and should there be US commandments, I think that has to be the through line.
16:29
[SPEAKER_00]: And there's so many ways that we can take action.
16:32
[SPEAKER_02]: And I understand you're working on a ten commandments for us right now.
16:36
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, just seemed sort of obvious when when I stumbled on the commitments and I immediately brought them to all these organizers that I work with who I respect so much and you know
16:49
[SPEAKER_00]: each with their own area of expertise.
16:53
[SPEAKER_00]: And we realized, oh, these commandments are so applicable to the US if we just play around with the language a little bit.
17:02
[SPEAKER_00]: And then because we have the benefit of technology, which doesn't always feel like a benefit, but for these purposes, it can be, you know, there's plenty of good things we can do.
17:12
[SPEAKER_00]: with technology.
17:13
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, we are thinking that there could be a QR code that takes you to a resource page with a menu of options where people can, you know, when we think about resistance, it sounds like something you need to know something about or you need to have studied.
17:31
[SPEAKER_00]: You don't.
17:32
[SPEAKER_00]: I think about this all the time.
17:33
[SPEAKER_00]: I have three kids.
17:34
[SPEAKER_00]: If you're a mom and you've organized a birthday party, you know how to organize.
17:40
[SPEAKER_02]: One last thing, the Danes resisted Hitler almost unanimously.
17:45
[SPEAKER_02]: And since then, scientists tell us that Danes are just about the happiest people in the world, lately they've ranked number two on the world happiness index, according to the scientists of world happiness.
17:59
[SPEAKER_02]: This year, the United States is number twenty-four.
18:03
[SPEAKER_02]: And by the way, Mexico is number ten, far ahead of the United States.
18:09
[SPEAKER_02]: The Danes aren't together.
18:11
[SPEAKER_02]: They take care of each other and it makes them happy.
18:15
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean, it's not perfect.
18:17
[SPEAKER_00]: Again, you know, and I don't want everyone coming and screaming at me about all the ways that Denmark is imperfect.
18:23
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm well aware.
18:25
[SPEAKER_00]: But they have a very robust social safety network.
18:31
[SPEAKER_00]: And you know, my great-grandfather, Prime Minister Stowning was the first working class Prime Minister of Plinmark.
18:38
[SPEAKER_00]: And he, the person that kind of brought democratic socialism to Denmark.
18:44
[SPEAKER_00]: And when you have a child, the father takes paternity leave.
18:48
[SPEAKER_00]: The mother gets robust maternity leave.
18:50
[SPEAKER_00]: A nurse comes to your house with supplies and checks in on you.
18:55
[SPEAKER_00]: My dad is choosing to live the last decades of his life there with my mom.
19:02
[SPEAKER_00]: And he has some health issues.
19:05
[SPEAKER_00]: There are people begging to come to their house, to clean, to do physical therapy, to drive him to nature, whatever it is.
19:16
[SPEAKER_00]: These are things that we deserve nice things.
19:19
[SPEAKER_00]: And we deserve to live with dignity, enjoy, and equality.
19:25
[SPEAKER_00]: And I've been working on the Mom Donnie campaign in New York.
19:30
[SPEAKER_00]: And I just, the night of the primary was just,
19:35
[SPEAKER_00]: such a joyful night like joy I haven't felt in a while politically.
19:40
[SPEAKER_00]: And I just remember repeating people like, look, we can have nice things, we can have nice things and it's, I just hope that people who are socialism dubious maybe take a little time to do some research because it's actually a really beautiful way to live and makes people feel happy and seen.
20:02
[SPEAKER_00]: and they want to take care of each other because that's sort of implicit to the whole system.
20:07
[SPEAKER_02]: Sarah Sophie Flicker, you can read her wonderful article, TheDane's Resisted Fascism, and so can we at thenation.com where it was number one on the most popular list all weekend.
20:20
[SPEAKER_02]: Sarah, thanks for all your work and thanks for talking with us today.
20:24
[SPEAKER_00]: John, thank you so much.
20:25
[SPEAKER_00]: It's been really wonderful.
20:40
[SPEAKER_02]: Donald Trump is demanding that UCLA pay a one billion dollar fine is a penalty for anti-Semitism on campus.
20:49
[SPEAKER_02]: That's on top of the five-hundred eighty-four million dollar cut in grants his administration ordered, mostly for medical research.
20:59
[SPEAKER_02]: For comment, we turned to David Myers.
21:01
[SPEAKER_02]: He's a distinguished professor at UCLA where he teaches Jewish history.
21:05
[SPEAKER_02]: He's written for the LA Times op-ed page, the forward and the Atlantic, and he's been an activist working for a midies piece for decades.
21:14
[SPEAKER_02]: David Myers, welcome back.
21:17
[SPEAKER_02]: A one billion dollar fine for not doing enough to protect Jews on campus.
21:23
[SPEAKER_02]: Why not one trillion?
21:25
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, if Trump really cared about anti-Semitism, why not let UCLA off the hook for a billion?
21:30
[SPEAKER_01]: You're right, by that logic, why settle for a billion, to ask a billion dollars of a public university is really an act of really breathtaking audacity, but I think it reflects a strategy to dismantle the remarkable edifice of higher education that has been built up so festinously and successfully over the course of centuries so as to further the political agenda of the Trump regime.
21:58
[SPEAKER_02]: I want to go back to the beginning at UCLA, the Gaza encampment on campus.
22:04
[SPEAKER_02]: It was in the Plaza outside Powell Library.
22:06
[SPEAKER_02]: That's what all this really is about.
22:08
[SPEAKER_02]: It was up for about a week at the end of April last year.
22:12
[SPEAKER_02]: And there was that terrible night of violence.
22:15
[SPEAKER_02]: You and I talked about it here right afterwards.
22:18
[SPEAKER_01]: April thirty.
22:19
[SPEAKER_02]: April, thirty of twenty twenty four, mob of Zionist militants came from off campus and attacked the encampment, remind us what happened.
22:30
[SPEAKER_01]: April twenty eighth, which was a Sunday, there was a counter-demonstration, pro-Israel counter-demonstration directly across from the propelstein-Gazan camp.
22:41
[SPEAKER_01]: And already there saw on the fridges of the two encampments, tensions beginning to boil over.
22:48
[SPEAKER_01]: I was present for hours, really trying to separate the two groups.
22:53
[SPEAKER_01]: The far greater part of Hustildi came from the pro-Israel side in terms of what I experienced.
22:59
[SPEAKER_01]: And in some sense, this was maybe for some kind of a testing of the
23:06
[SPEAKER_01]: capacity to harass and in the next two days actually undertake significant acts of violence against the propelstein encampment.
23:15
[SPEAKER_01]: because that's what we saw two days later.
23:18
[SPEAKER_01]: In any event, what did happen on the thirty of this is that a group of violent pro-Israel thugs set themselves upon the encampment, tearing down some of its walls, throwing in smoke bombs, beating people with wooden planks as well as their fists, and really remarkably
23:37
[SPEAKER_01]: They were permitted to do so for almost four hours without any police intervention.
23:43
[SPEAKER_01]: Even though there was a contingent of University of California police observing from the distance.
23:49
[SPEAKER_01]: It's ironic that what has emerged out of all that we have been talking about so far and we'll talk about is the allegation of anti-Semitism.
23:59
[SPEAKER_01]: I believe that there were acts of anti-Semitism on our campus in the aftermath of October, seventh, twenty, twenty, three.
24:06
[SPEAKER_01]: And I also believe that there are acts of anti-Palestinian discrimination.
24:11
[SPEAKER_01]: on our campus after October seventh.
24:13
[SPEAKER_01]: What happened on April thirty of twenty twenty four was by far the most egregious act of harassment and intimidation that I've witnessed in my career at UCLA my thirty four years at UCLA and certainly in that terrible period that began with ten seven.
24:29
[SPEAKER_02]: After the encampment was taken down by the police, a small group of Jewish students and one Jewish professor sued the school.
24:37
[SPEAKER_02]: And the Trump Justice Department investigated and concluded that, quote, Jewish and Israeli students at UCLA were subjected to severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive harassment that created a hostile environment by members of the encampment.
24:55
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm sure you know this by heart right now, and that this was a violation of the Constitution's equal protection clause and also a violation of the Civil Rights Act of nineteen sixty five titled six.
25:07
[SPEAKER_02]: I wonder if you agree with with that and with the Department of Justice statement that even after Jewish students complained of a hostile environment, UCLA acted with quote deliberate indifference towards Jewish students.
25:23
[SPEAKER_02]: and that the result is that UCLA is guilty of quote putting Jewish Americans at risk.
25:29
[SPEAKER_01]: That wasn't what I observed on campus and that's not what I understood to be the case as I took a step back and tried to analyze what had gone on.
25:38
[SPEAKER_01]: I believe there were acts of antisemitism.
25:42
[SPEAKER_01]: The most memorable one that comes to mind is a paper mache pig holding a bag of money and a figurine in a in a in a cave with a star of David at the bottom of the of the paper mache statue.
25:58
[SPEAKER_01]: placed out in front of the meeting of the Board of Regents.
26:01
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think there were indeed episodes like that and other instances in which pro-Israel line students were subjected to harassment or required to divert their path to class by going around the voice quad.
26:15
[SPEAKER_01]: I think those things did occur, and I'm not in agreement with the strategies that were reflected in them.
26:22
[SPEAKER_01]: But between that and the claim that they're serious and pervasive anti-Semitism, there's a considerable distance.
26:28
[SPEAKER_01]: And that I did not see.
26:30
[SPEAKER_01]: I did not see the pervasiveness of it.
26:33
[SPEAKER_01]: I saw what I would consider egregious acts of anti-Semitism.
26:37
[SPEAKER_01]: I'll be very isolated.
26:40
[SPEAKER_01]: and the whole narrative of the ongoing continuous pervasive, unrelenting nature of anti-Jewish harassment intimidation is not something that I saw or heard of from the students with whom I spoke.
26:55
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I was surprised by the nature of the claims made by the three students and professor in the lawsuit.
27:05
[SPEAKER_01]: I was also surprised that there was a kind of conflation between their commitment to Zionism and what they described as their religious faith as if the two were identical, something which really stood at the center of that lawsuit.
27:19
[SPEAKER_01]: And I was surprised, frankly, at some level, that UCLA agreed to settle.
27:22
[SPEAKER_01]: At another level, not.
27:25
[SPEAKER_01]: Insofar as the question of whether there was merit to these claims of serious, pervasive discrimination, I am quite skeptical about that.
27:34
[SPEAKER_01]: Insofar as UCLA wanted to put an end to the lawsuit and demonstrate its vulnerabilities in combating antisemitism, I completely understand it.
27:43
[SPEAKER_01]: The great irony is that hours after the settlement was announced, the Department of Justice issued letter telling UCLA that it planned to cut
27:54
[SPEAKER_01]: five hundred and eighty four million dollars of research funds enormously significant to the welding of the university and from that matter the welding of our city and country because much of that money was going to medical research so that's sequencing of the settlement announcement and then the DOJ proceeding with this massive punitive act against UCLA leads one to ponder what could the possible motivation be if not something other than combating at the scientists
28:24
[SPEAKER_02]: One other thing about the DOJ finding, they concluded that UCLA allowed pro-Palestinian activists to, quote, enforce what it termed a, quote, Jew exclusion zone, namely the encampment
28:41
[SPEAKER_02]: outside the library.
28:42
[SPEAKER_02]: Now my understanding is that Jews were not excluded from the encampment.
28:47
[SPEAKER_02]: Lots of Jews joined the encampment because they support Palestinian rights and they oppose with the Netanyahu government was doing in Gaza.
28:56
[SPEAKER_02]: So what about this DOJ finding of a Jew exclusion zone at UCLA?
29:03
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I think you've hit the nail in the head by calling attention to the fact that there are many Jews in the encampment and many Jews who were a campman in Jason who felt considerable sympathy with the propelstein movement may not have been in the encampment.
29:22
[SPEAKER_01]: And that I think bespeaks the diversity of opinion within the Jewish community around
29:27
[SPEAKER_01]: Israel Palestine and the post-Tin-Seven World.
29:31
[SPEAKER_01]: And so often, in this discourse that has emerged, the focus is exclusively on those who represent the pro-Israel position.
29:39
[SPEAKER_01]: Where are people who were identifiably pro-Israel prevented from access from gaining access to the encampment?
29:48
[SPEAKER_01]: I believe they were.
29:49
[SPEAKER_01]: Where are people
29:50
[SPEAKER_01]: subject to questioning about their political beliefs in order to get into their campment or the ways in which they might or might not behave well in the camp.
29:59
[SPEAKER_01]: I believe they were.
30:01
[SPEAKER_01]: Was it a significant inconvenience?
30:03
[SPEAKER_01]: It depends how you understand significant.
30:05
[SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, people had to go around the Royce Squad if they didn't pass
30:09
[SPEAKER_01]: if they weren't willing to pass through the entry point of the encampment, that was an inconvenience.
30:17
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, I understand though that this is not the only time that students have been forced to walk around something in order to get to their destination.
30:26
[SPEAKER_02]: There are movie shoots that you see a lay off and that requires destruction.
30:31
[SPEAKER_01]: There are movie sites all the time.
30:33
[SPEAKER_01]: So was it an inconvenience?
30:34
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, I think it was.
30:35
[SPEAKER_01]: Did it amount to pervasive and severe?
30:39
[SPEAKER_01]: anti-Semitism.
30:40
[SPEAKER_01]: My own senses, no, it didn't.
30:43
[SPEAKER_01]: Were there acts of anti-Semitism on a campus in this period?
30:46
[SPEAKER_01]: There were.
30:47
[SPEAKER_01]: Was it pervasive and serious?
30:49
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't think that case can be made.
30:51
[SPEAKER_02]: So as you said, UCLA agreed to settle this case.
30:56
[SPEAKER_02]: They paid three Jewish students in a medical school professor, six and a half million dollars, although the money went all kinds of Jewish organizations, not just to them.
31:06
[SPEAKER_02]: And then as you say, Trump cut federal funding to UCLA research by five hundred eighty four million dollars as a punishment he says,
31:17
[SPEAKER_02]: for the harassment around the encampment that some Jewish students reported.
31:22
[SPEAKER_02]: The medical researchers, of course, who have had their funding suspended didn't have anything to do with the Gaza encampment, and many of them, in fact, are Jewish themselves.
31:33
[SPEAKER_02]: Among those whose grants were cut, according to the New York Times, was Judea Pearl, a UCLA computer scientist, the principal investigator of a one point two million dollar
31:46
[SPEAKER_02]: suspended grant to apply genetics to large-scale electronic health records.
31:52
[SPEAKER_02]: He said, quote, I've been a principal investigator for NSF for maybe fifty years, close quote, who is Judea Pearl?
31:59
[SPEAKER_01]: So Judea Pearl is a distinguished computer scientist, a long-standing member of the faculty, father of the murdered Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl
32:12
[SPEAKER_01]: who was brutally killed in Pakistan by terrorists.
32:18
[SPEAKER_01]: And Professor Pearl has been a very strong advocate for Israel, for Zionism, and for the position that anti-Semitism is a very serious problem on our campus.
32:30
[SPEAKER_01]: And he himself had some exchange within, believes that this attempt to shake down the university has no merit.
32:37
[SPEAKER_01]: He certainly would like the university to do more to combat what he sees as antisemitism.
32:43
[SPEAKER_01]: But even someone from his perspective, as far as I understand it, believes that there's no connection between the attempt to find the university a billion dollars or cut five hundred eighty four million dollars in research grants.
32:55
[SPEAKER_01]: and the attempt to combat anti-Semitism.
32:57
[SPEAKER_01]: It's what I think of as a conceptual non-secretor.
33:00
[SPEAKER_01]: It doesn't make any sense.
33:01
[SPEAKER_01]: There's no evident connection between the two propositions.
33:05
[SPEAKER_01]: It seems as I said at the outset to be a case of trying to bring the University of Heal in order to advance a political agenda, which is to remove other significant bastion of liberal democratic values at a time of what seems to be a kind of takeover of
33:21
[SPEAKER_01]: The American Democratic way imperfect as it is, but at this point we should fight for it to the last.
33:29
[SPEAKER_02]: So the governor said the state will fight the one billion dollar fine in the five hundred eighty four million dollar cuts in research funding with lawsuits.
33:39
[SPEAKER_02]: But there's also some talk from the office of the president of the university about negotiating with Trump's people in search of a settlement.
33:47
[SPEAKER_02]: Of course Columbia agreed to pay the Trump administration two hundred twenty million dollars.
33:53
[SPEAKER_02]: Harvard is in court and also in negotiations over a settlement and the New York Times reported on Tuesday they were considering paying Trump five hundred million dollars.
34:05
[SPEAKER_02]: But of course those are private universities with endowments in the billions.
34:10
[SPEAKER_02]: UCLA is a
34:11
[SPEAKER_02]: public taxpayer supported school.
34:15
[SPEAKER_02]: UCLA argued in federal court and San Francisco just on Tuesday that what Trump is doing is illegal and unconstitutional.
34:22
[SPEAKER_02]: And the same argument has been made by dozens of lawyers and found to have merit by dozens of federal judges that it's against the law for the president to
34:32
[SPEAKER_02]: refused to spend funds appropriated by Congress.
34:34
[SPEAKER_02]: Namely, the research funds that he has cut clearly illegal.
34:39
[SPEAKER_02]: The president just lacks this authority and the courts agree with that interpretation of the law.
34:45
[SPEAKER_02]: But that's going to take a while.
34:47
[SPEAKER_02]: The government will then appeal this and it'll get to the Supreme Court.
34:51
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't know in twenty twenty six or something like that.
34:54
[SPEAKER_02]: And in the meantime, eighteen hundred NIH grants are suspended.
35:01
[SPEAKER_02]: Can UCLA wait until twenty twenty six or twenty twenty seven for this to be resolved?
35:07
[SPEAKER_01]: Not without paying an enormous cost, and not without an enormous cost to the public, which will be the principle victim of this criminal operation.
35:17
[SPEAKER_01]: It's really hard to see how we go on with that massive loss.
35:22
[SPEAKER_01]: We will find a way.
35:23
[SPEAKER_01]: I will say that UCLA is an aggregation of some of the greatest scholarly talent that I've ever witnessed in my life at every corner of the university.
35:32
[SPEAKER_01]: and people I think are feeling at once deeply dismayed by this assault upon such an important pillar of higher education in the United States and at the same time quite resilient.
35:43
[SPEAKER_01]: We're not going to submit to the attempt to tear down our university.
35:47
[SPEAKER_02]: The LA Times report on the litigation
35:51
[SPEAKER_02]: Had a subhead, negotiation still possible.
35:55
[SPEAKER_02]: The alternative, of course, is a deal.
35:58
[SPEAKER_02]: You referred to the deal that Harvard is about to make.
36:01
[SPEAKER_02]: We are told Harvard would agree.
36:04
[SPEAKER_02]: This deal is Harvard would agree to pay five hundred million.
36:09
[SPEAKER_02]: not to the government directly the way Colombia's deal works, but that Harvard would agree to spend five hundred million on vocational programs and research.
36:22
[SPEAKER_02]: And in addition, Harvard would see its research funding restored and avoid the appointment of a Trump monitor.
36:30
[SPEAKER_02]: Important goals, of course, Harvard has a what, sixty some billion dollar endowment.
36:37
[SPEAKER_02]: UCLA is a public institution supported by taxpayers through the legislature and the governor.
36:42
[SPEAKER_02]: Can you imagine UCLA making a deal like the one hard for it is working on what would this be?
36:48
[SPEAKER_02]: UCLA would give millions of dollars to belayed trade tech college or something like that.
36:53
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, supporting vacation education is where the cause and I encourage the fellow government to do that with its, the resources that it collects from us in the normal ways, not by shaking down institutions and really attempting to cripple them in the name of this, this very patently transparent political agenda.
37:15
[SPEAKER_01]: I suspect given the way things have gone with other institutions that there will be some settlement.
37:22
[SPEAKER_01]: My fervent hope is that it is not at the level of what has been discussed in Herbert's case, a half a billion dollars because, well, Harvard has a fifty three or fifty four billion dollar diamond.
37:33
[SPEAKER_01]: We have nowhere near that.
37:35
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I also have to say that
37:37
[SPEAKER_01]: It's just patently wrong that we are compelled to proceed to these absolutely outlanders, audacious and baseless claims.
37:48
[SPEAKER_01]: And yet, in the way things have been unfolding, he has tremendous leverage.
37:52
[SPEAKER_01]: He's in enormously powerful president.
37:55
[SPEAKER_01]: perhaps the most powerful in all of American history is aggregated to himself all sorts of rights that don't belong to the executive.
38:02
[SPEAKER_01]: I fear that in this environment a settlement will be reached and it will be very large.
38:07
[SPEAKER_01]: California is a big target.
38:09
[SPEAKER_01]: UCLA is a top-rated public university in the United States.
38:12
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a win.
38:13
[SPEAKER_01]: These are not just money-making propositions for Trump.
38:17
[SPEAKER_01]: These are enormously significant symbolically.
38:20
[SPEAKER_01]: If you take down Harvard and you take down UCLA, you have significantly disabled higher education in the United States.
38:27
[SPEAKER_01]: It'd be very hard for any institutions after that to resist.
38:30
[SPEAKER_02]: And there's one other problem with making a deal with Trump.
38:34
[SPEAKER_02]: We know that negotiating with Trump doesn't end with making a deal.
38:39
[SPEAKER_02]: Lots of, even in his real estate days, banks stop wanting to deal with him because deals with Trump are just one more step in the negotiation and the idea that this is a normal agreement where both sides fulfill their responsibilities
38:57
[SPEAKER_02]: This has not applied to Trump in the past.
39:00
[SPEAKER_02]: So I don't quite see where the confidence comes at Columbia or Harvard or Brown or any of these other places that they're actually going to get there.
39:08
[SPEAKER_02]: Monior, the Trump will come up with new findings of new offenses.
39:12
[SPEAKER_02]: What do you think?
39:14
[SPEAKER_01]: I have no confidence that he won't continue to litigate it over and over again, and claim violations and therefore withhold funds.
39:22
[SPEAKER_01]: He may be a master of the art of the deals he understands it, but he's not someone who respects the ethics of a deal-making at all, meaning you engage in difficult often, brutal negotiations, your shake hands, and it's over.
39:34
[SPEAKER_01]: And as you said, that's just not the way he operates.
39:36
[SPEAKER_01]: And there's something enormously unethical in his version of deal-making.
39:44
[SPEAKER_01]: And not only fearful of the fact that there won't be continued demands made on institutions that have already agreed to settlements, but there'll be continuous demands that there be monitors over the operation of research and scholarship at our institutions.
40:03
[SPEAKER_01]: Some institutions have made deals to first stall the possibility of having monitors imposed on
40:09
[SPEAKER_01]: this are that domain of their scholarly operation.
40:12
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm not at all convinced that that demand will be surrendered because I think behind Trump there is someone who has a vision which is more than just money-making.
40:20
[SPEAKER_01]: It's really about the opposite of viewpoint diversity as they soften claim.
40:24
[SPEAKER_01]: It's due viewpoint uniformity.
40:26
[SPEAKER_01]: What the left is always acute stuff.
40:28
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that's really what they're after.
40:30
[SPEAKER_01]: And if monitors are an effective way to achieve that, I'm quite convinced that we'll see that in our time.
40:36
[SPEAKER_01]: So I have no confidence that the deals that are made, either in financial terms or in terms of the degree of scholarly supervision, intellectual supervision, will be upheld on their end.
40:47
[SPEAKER_02]: You're part of a group called Jewish Bruins in Defense of UCLA that has just been organized.
40:54
[SPEAKER_02]: Tell us about this group and about your open letter.
40:57
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so really just a small number of people, and I with whom I spoke just this past weekend felt it was important in symbolic terms to demonstrate to the wider public that as Jews, as proud Jewish members of the UCLA community,
41:18
[SPEAKER_01]: We do not accept the terms that had been imposed upon UCLA that in exchange for repairing some broken system that permits anti-Semitism, we should pay a billion dollars in fines.
41:36
[SPEAKER_01]: We don't accept that paying the United States government at this point in time will do anything to diminish anti-Semitism on our campus or on society.
41:47
[SPEAKER_01]: And at the centre, we don't accept that anti-Semitism is raging and rampant on our campuses.
41:54
[SPEAKER_01]: So we put together a letter and here I have to say that our intention was to appeal to people from my perspective to Judea Pearl's perspective.
42:04
[SPEAKER_01]: So we didn't talk about whether we think anti-Semitism is or is not a serious and pervasive problem.
42:11
[SPEAKER_01]: We just said, we find the association made between this request for a billion dollars and claims that they sell them.
42:18
[SPEAKER_01]: As I said, it's the mud campus to be specious.
42:21
[SPEAKER_01]: And we just put the letter out yesterday and we have several hundred signatures.
42:25
[SPEAKER_01]: And if people are interested in signing on, if you have a connection to UCLA, you can go to my Facebook page and find that letter and encourage you to sign it.
42:37
[SPEAKER_02]: The website is called Jewish Bruins in Defense of UCLA.
42:41
[SPEAKER_02]: It's a Google Doc.
42:43
[SPEAKER_02]: Here's the link, site.google.com slash view slash Jewish Bruins one word.
42:52
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it is important that we stand up.
42:54
[SPEAKER_01]: We as Jews stand up in defense of UCLA.
42:58
[SPEAKER_02]: David Myers, he's a distinguished professor at UCLA who teaches Jewish history.
43:02
[SPEAKER_02]: David, thanks for all your work.
43:05
[SPEAKER_02]: Thanks for talking with us today.
43:07
[SPEAKER_01]: It's always going to be with God.
43:17
[SPEAKER_02]: Start making sense.
43:18
[SPEAKER_02]: The podcast from the nation magazine is recorded in Los Angeles at our Blive Avenue Studios.
43:24
[SPEAKER_02]: Renee Reynolds is our associate producer, Alan Minsky is our producer.
43:29
[SPEAKER_02]: Jack Merkinson is executive producer.
43:32
[SPEAKER_02]: Oscar Sunkara is president of the nation.
43:35
[SPEAKER_02]: Katrina Vandenhuvul is editor and publisher of The Nation.
43:39
[SPEAKER_02]: Our theme music is from Barcelona, Afrobeat, licensed by Creative Commons.
43:43
[SPEAKER_02]: You can find out more about StartmakingSense at TheNation.com and you can subscribe to StartmakingSense on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
43:54
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm John Weener.
43:56
[SPEAKER_02]: Thanks for listening.