The Jewish Fear Industrial Complex

Speaker 1 It is so profoundly sad that Jewish Americans are now discussing worst-case scenarios.

Speaker 1 When American Jews are making contingency plans to flee, we must recognize this as a five-alarm fire for our entire country that requires a whole-of-society approach to solve.

Speaker 2 Jonathan Greenblatt, I'm going to look into the camera. What the hell are you talking about?

Speaker 2 Hello, hello, and welcome back to A Bit Fruity. I'm Matt Bernstein.
On the night of the New York City mayoral election, Yoni Hanowitz tweeted, Serious post. My kid is having anxiety that Mamdani won.

Speaker 2 He actually spelled it wrong, Mandami won. I'm trying to calm him down and saying it's going to be fine, but he doesn't believe me.
I have no idea what to do.

Speaker 2 Do either of you have any advice for Yoni Hanowitz, whose child is freaking out that Zoran Mamdani won the New York City mayoral election?

Speaker 3 Stop traumatizing your child.

Speaker 1 I wish there was time travel so you could go back in time and stop telling your child that one of the 9-11 planes is running for mayor. But unfortunately, there is no time travel.

Speaker 1 So now you have to live with the consequences of that.

Speaker 2 In the lead up to the 2025 New York City mayoral election, I thought I was losing my mind. And I was.

Speaker 2 While I campaigned for Zoran Mamdani alongside an organized coalition of other Jewish New Yorkers, and while Zoron was visiting synagogues, hanging out with Jews of all denominations, and repeatedly declaring his commitment to fighting anti-Semitism in the city, and we will build a city hall that stands steadfast alongside Jewish New Yorkers and does not waver in the fight against the scourge of anti-Semitism.

Speaker 2 Prominent Jewish leaders continued to warn that Zoron posed an existential threat to Jews, not just in New York City, but everywhere.

Speaker 2 Lizzie Savetsky, a popular New York-based Zionist influencer, former almost real housewife of New York, and wife of the racist plastic surgeon Ira Savecky, said to her 500,000 followers, we have to get our act together by November, or Mamdani is literally going to put our lives in danger.

Speaker 4 Zoran Mamdani founded Students for Justice of Palestine at his college.

Speaker 4 That would be like electing someone who was head of the Ku Klux Klan to be mayor of the city. That is what that is.
We're living in a constant state of anxiety.

Speaker 4 I was walking down the street yesterday after the synagogue on Shabbat, and I had three different Jewish people who follow me stop me on the street, and the fear in their eyes was just absolutely heartbreaking.

Speaker 4 I mean, this is what we're living with. We have a very real possibility of the wrong person coming into power come November.

Speaker 4 This city could very well turn into a large campus encampment where terror supporters are running rampant.

Speaker 4 It's not just that he's going to ruin the city with his policies and his socialism, but the threat to Jewish people is going to be outrageous. It will be very dangerous to walk the streets here.

Speaker 2 Her husband, Ira, suggested Jews should buy machine guns if Zoran won.

Speaker 2 Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the ADL, one of America's largest Jewish advocacy organizations, continued to warn Jewish voters that Zoran was going to globalize the Intifada, which he and other Zionist leaders continued to insist meant murder all Jews, which it doesn't.

Speaker 2 And regardless, it's not even a phrase that Zoran literally ever said.

Speaker 5 I will tell you, I've gotten so many calls from Jewish New Yorkers who are alarmed. Their kid was harassed in college, their child was bullied in K-12, their synagogue is analyzed.

Speaker 5 So here's what ABL is doing right now. If you are a Jewish New Yorker, we have your back.

Speaker 3 Local politician Maria Danzillo tweeted, Every time I hear Mamdani's anti-Semitic base shouting, tax the rich, what I really think they are saying is tax the Jews.

Speaker 3 They are obsessed with bashing Israel and wealthy Jewish New Yorkers like Bill Ackman. Connect the dots.

Speaker 1 Oh my God.

Speaker 1 I'm sorry, but you're... This is you just doing anti-Semitism and just

Speaker 1 ascribing it to someone else.

Speaker 2 The reason Zoran wants to tax Bill Ackman is not because he's a billionaire, but because he's

Speaker 2 Jewish. A Jew.

Speaker 1 If you're the one, if you are saying, when I hear someone say rich people, all I think is Jews, you are the one who is doing anti-Semitism. I'm sorry.

Speaker 1 You can't just search and replace Jew and rich in your mind and ascribe it to Zoran.

Speaker 1 It's insane. I feel like this is like the sequel to the hit tweet.
My friend saw a free parking sign and thought it said free Palestine. The Jews are tired.

Speaker 2 Eve Barlow, shout out. Yes.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 2 Throughout this whole thing, I thought I was losing my mind. I literally couldn't understand it.
Why?

Speaker 2 Especially when anti-Semitism is making a spectacular resurgence in other areas of the American political spectrum. Put a pin in that.

Speaker 2 Were all of these supposed warriors against anti-Semitism spending 100% of their time fear-mongering about a man who simply isn't anti-Semitic. Dear listener, I have some ideas about why.

Speaker 2 And what is the net effect of this type of rhetoric on the consumers of it? Well, I think a certain late 90s, early 2000s network television stars, fall from grace,

Speaker 2 can give us a pretty good idea.

Speaker 2 In the words of Leah Greenberg, a director of the progressive nonprofit Indivisible, we need to have a conversation about Jewish leaders who have decided that the path to protecting American Jews from very real threats of anti-Semitism is to whip them into an Islamophobic hysteria about shit that simply isn't true.

Speaker 2 And indeed, we do. And that's what we're going to do today.
And to do that, we have two of my very good friends here. One is a friend of the show, Matt Lieb of the Bad Haspara podcast.

Speaker 2 Matt, welcome back to the show.

Speaker 1 So happy to be back.

Speaker 2 And we also have a new friend of the show, Simone Zimmerman, who was the subject of the 2023 documentary, Israelism, which documents the ways that Israeli and American Jewish institutions indoctrinate Jewish American youth into Zionism.

Speaker 2 She is the co-founder of If Not Now, a Jewish anti-Zionist organizing group, which has done great work to heighten the visibility and influence of Jews against Israeli apartheid and occupation, one of the groups that has inspired me to speak up, and the host of the new podcast, Beyond Israelism.

Speaker 2 Simone, welcome to the show. I'm so, so, so excited that you're here.

Speaker 3 Thank you for having me. I'm really excited to be here with both of you.

Speaker 2 We're going to be talking a lot today about the ADL and Jonathan Greenblatt, which may or may not be things that the listener is familiar with right now, but will be by the end of the episode.

Speaker 2 And I'll try to make the case for why you should be aware and scrutinizing of that group.

Speaker 2 But, Simone, for people who haven't seen Israelism, can you explain a little bit of your background and how you arrived on this very Zoom call?

Speaker 3 Well, I grew up in a very pro-Israel Jewish community in LA, where the idea that I would go to the APAC conference was kind of just like part of the calendar of my Jewish year.

Speaker 3 It was like one of the commitments that I saw as what it meant to be a good Jew.

Speaker 3 I went to college thinking I was going to do Israel advocacy and very quickly was confronted by the complete emptiness, frankly, of the narrative that I was raised with.

Speaker 3 I found myself very quickly like totally unable to respond to the things that I was hearing from Palestinian students on my campus.

Speaker 3 It led me to this long journey of like questioning the Hasbarah that I was raised with and the narratives that I was raised with and to spend a lot of time in Palestine learning Palestinian narratives, meeting Palestinians, and understanding how much of the stories that I was raised with were really rooted in racism and historical denial.

Speaker 3 You know, if not now, and many of the other groups on the Jewish left that I'm part of are, there's always been a Jewish left, there have always been Jewish anti-Zionists, and we're also in a moment of a resurgence on the Jewish left.

Speaker 3 And the ADL and other groups in the American Jewish establishment are very, very desperate to delegitimize our existence, to make us seem smaller than we are.

Speaker 3 There's also a long history of that attempt to kind of like marginalize dissent in the Jewish community because they can't actually win the argument on its own terms.

Speaker 3 So they mostly operate on smear, intimidation, and delegitimization and defamation, really. I'll just put that word out there for right now.

Speaker 1 They should start some sort of league to stop that from happening to Jewish people.

Speaker 2 Anti-defamation league, more like

Speaker 2 defamation league.

Speaker 3 I guess one of my claims to fame is that in 2016, I was hired to be the Jewish outreach coordinator on the Bernie Sanders campaign for president.

Speaker 3 And within a couple of days of beginning to work on the campaign, a Jewish journalist kind of noticed me, was like, oh, that's pretty interesting that a kind of young anti-occupation activist is working on the campaign.

Speaker 3 I thought that was like quite normal.

Speaker 3 I think, again, I mean, we'll get into this, that like young Jews being part of the movement for Palestinian freedom is consistent with like a broader progressive set of commitments that we hold.

Speaker 3 But there was a very aggressive campaign from the kind of old guard of the Jewish establishment to say that I was a danger and that I should not work for the campaign.

Speaker 3 Abe Foxman, the former head of the Anti-Defamation League, was the first of these Jewish establishment leaders to call for my firing.

Speaker 3 He was later joined, I believe, by Malcolm Honlein of the Conference of Presidents and David Harris of the American Jewish Committee.

Speaker 1 Damn, you had the whole Jewish institutional community out there.

Speaker 2 Come on, sister.

Speaker 3 Totally. And yeah, they like very quickly were like, hello, New York Times.
I have an anti-Semitic to report, you know?

Speaker 3 And there's a lot to say about that, but I think one of the through lines of this conversation is that the people who claim to be these kind of self-appointed arbiters of who is and is not an anti-Semite and this kind of self-defined protectors of the Jews also are willing to throw Jews under the bus who don't adhere to their vision and don't conform with the politics that they're trying to enforce.

Speaker 3 And that's that's always been the case, but it's, I think, a very important part of this whole story that they delegitimize and defame other Jews as well.

Speaker 2 I think I want to start this talking about the ways that Jewish Zionist leaders in the U.S. have whipped American Jews into this frenzy about the election of Zoran Mamdani.

Speaker 2 As someone who campaigned heavily for Zoran, I spent considerable time with him talking about, among other things, Jewish identity and the significance of his campaign for young progressive Jews in New York.

Speaker 2 When I saw these nonprofit leaders, especially like Jonathan Greenblatt at the ADL, his shiny bald head just reflecting the lights of every podcast studio in the world.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 the rabbis coming out against Zoron and the Zionist influencers smearing Zoron and Andrew Cuomo weaponizing the idea of anti-Semitism against Zoron, all talking about how Zoron was this existential violent threat to Jews.

Speaker 2 I couldn't believe it. Like, I felt like we were living in separate realities.
On the morning of the election, Donald Trump posted on Truth Social,

Speaker 1 any Jewish person that votes for Zoran, Mamdani, a proven and self-professed Jew hater, is a stupid person.

Speaker 1 I never said I was good at impressions.

Speaker 3 I feel like you really started very strong and then he got a little Italian at the end.

Speaker 1 I gave up on it halfway through.

Speaker 3 He became kind of Cuomo-like, actually. All right.

Speaker 1 All right. Let me try again.

Speaker 1 Any Jewish person.

Speaker 1 Now I'm just... Fuck, I can't do it.
Any Jewish person.

Speaker 2 Oh, that, yeah, that's it.

Speaker 1 There it is. Any Jewish person that votes for Zoran Mamdani, a proven and self-professed Jew hater, is a stupid person.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that was good. You really have to like curl your lips, I feel like, to get it accurately.

Speaker 1 Any Jewish person. All right, I can't do it.

Speaker 2 The point has been made. So I was actually at a meeting event thing with Zoran when that post went up.

Speaker 2 And Zoran and I, and a couple of other Jews in the room, made this response video to it where we were all just like, this is nuts, and we deserve better leaders than ones who tell Jewish people what it means to be a good kind of Jew.

Speaker 6 I'm looking forward to being a mayor for every single Jewish voter, whether they're voting for me, whether they're voting for someone else, whether they're not voting at all.

Speaker 6 Because at the end of it, they're New Yorkers.

Speaker 6 They deserve not only protection, they deserve to be celebrated, they deserve to be cherished, and they deserve someone more than just a president who's looking to try and define what it means to be a good Jewish person in this city or in this country.

Speaker 3 I've got a couple thoughts about this.

Speaker 3 First of all, you know, both Andrew Cuomo and Eric Adams, so much of their campaign, you know, Eric Adams was actually running on a, his party was the stop anti-Semitism line.

Speaker 2 Sure.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Wow.

Speaker 3 Yeah, totally normal stuff. In Z-Way's interview with him this week, where she's like, fuck Mary Kill, like, where he just goes, capitalism, Israel.
Mary F. Kill, communism, socialism, capitalism.

Speaker 1 I would marry capitalism, Israel.

Speaker 1 Socialism and communism, I would kick to the curb. Yeah, like

Speaker 1 very strange since Israel was not at all in that section.

Speaker 2 It's in his contract that he has to say Israel once a sentence.

Speaker 3 Anyways, I think that there's like, there's something so transparently cynical and disgusting about the way that these politicians have decided to use Jewish people and the kind of alleged fight against anti-Semitism as just part of their political messaging.

Speaker 3 And the most important thing is that it relies on a very deep well of Islamophobia and racism that they are constantly drawing from, right? I mean, all the kind of 9-11 conspiracies.

Speaker 1 Yeah, well, just in terms of what his tweet was.

Speaker 2 The Donald Trump one?

Speaker 1 Yeah, the Donald Trump one in general.

Speaker 1 For someone who's not a New Yorker, who's, you know, living in Los Angeles and has never lived in New York, I was watching it from the perspective of just

Speaker 1 a Jewish person who lives in the United States and is seeing the way in which the hatred of Jews or supposed hatred of Jews or anti-Semitism was being used as a cudgel, specifically against Zoran, but also against Muslims and Arabs and any brown person, whether it's a South Asian brown person or a Lebanese brown person, it was being used in order to justify the most blatant and vicious Islamophobia that I think I've seen since like, you know, September 12th, 2001.

Speaker 1 Not just like people, because people have been Islamophobic, you know, for a long time, but by liberal mainstream media, just the general sense of we're going to ignore this type of rhetoric in order to push instead a narrative of a virulent anti-Semitism spreading throughout.

Speaker 1 And I look at that as a very dangerous thing when it comes to, you know, Jews in America and our relationship to the rest of the country.

Speaker 3 And then also, like, the kind of flip side of the kind of singling out of Jews.

Speaker 3 Like, I will just say, I feel so disturbed by the idea that people in our community think it's good for us to be the topic of conversation this much.

Speaker 1 Yes. It is very weird.
It is quite a gamble. I do not understand

Speaker 1 the short-sightedness of it at all.

Speaker 1 The short-sightedness of being so heavy-handed when it comes to policing anti-Semitism, you know, in a way that it's like clearly you are tarring people who are not anti-Semitic, who are just critics of Israel as anti-Semitic.

Speaker 1 I'm like, this is neither good for us nor for anyone.

Speaker 3 I think we'll get into this, but I think we should really ask the people who are the most active proponents of that kind of mentality and approach. It makes you wonder what their actual interests are.

Speaker 3 Right. Like,

Speaker 3 do you not care about the city being affordable? Do you not care about any of the other issues that this campaign has been about?

Speaker 3 It really drives home how much, I'm sorry to say this, but that there is a segment of wealthy and overwhelmingly white people who have made fighting anti-Semitism their pet project.

Speaker 3 And it kind of reveals that they are so disconnected from so many of the other issues that animate like people's sense of safety and well-being.

Speaker 2 And we're going to talk about what the actual interests are of the people and groups whipping up this sort of racist hysteria and why it's my belief that not only are they spreading anti-Palestinian and broadly Islamophobic racism across the population, but also making Jews less safe in the process, perhaps.

Speaker 2 on purpose.

Speaker 2 I really want to spend now a good chunk of this episode talking about one of the biggest, most influential, and moneyed arbiters of this, of everything we're talking about, which is the ADL.

Speaker 2 The Anti-Defamation League, currently led by Jonathan Greenblatt, is one of the largest Jewish institutions in the U.S., period.

Speaker 2 It is one of the groups that pressured Bernie Sanders to get rid of Simone after 30 hours.

Speaker 2 Notably, the ADL made headlines in the last week when the morning after Zoran was elected, it announced it would launch the Mamdani Monitor to track actions and appointees within Zoran's administration that, quote, impact Jewish community safety and security.

Speaker 2 It also said it's setting up a tip line for New Yorkers to report incidents of anti-Semitism.

Speaker 2 Any group is free to monitor and, in fact, probably should monitor any administration, any politician for any traces of any sort of bigotry, right? Like that's, I'm not categorically against that.

Speaker 2 I'm actually for it.

Speaker 2 But this level of like specific monitoring of Zoran Momdani and giving the Momdani monitor a name and setting up a tip line in relation to his election is unprecedented for the ADL.

Speaker 3 For me, this has been a real moment of joy in New York City and then also real fear when we're looking at the kind of national political landscape.

Speaker 3 And it's notable that at the same time as this election was happening in New York, we were seeing story after story of very real, very virulent anti-Semitism entering the mainstream in the MAGA movement.

Speaker 3 Nick Fuentes going on Tucker Carlton, Candace Owens doing what Candace Owens does.

Speaker 3 And to my knowledge, the ADL does not have a special tip line for anti-Semitism in the MAGA movement. In fact, what they're actually trying to do is still play nice with them.

Speaker 3 They took Turning Points USA actually out of their list of extremist organizations. They dropped the civil rights line from their mission.

Speaker 3 So, what we're seeing at the same time is the ADL doing very blatant kowtowing to the right and making nice with the right while escalating in their attacks against the left.

Speaker 3 And let's be clear, there is no evidence of anti-Semitism in the Mamdani administration or in anyone affiliated with them.

Speaker 3 All of their allegations of anti-Semitism are all guilt by association nonsense. There is no anti-Semitism in this project.

Speaker 3 So the insinuation that there is calls into question the entire legitimacy of the organization.

Speaker 3 And I think we should talk about what does it mean that when you are so aggressively committed to imposing your ideological viewpoint on the progressive movement because of its pro-Palestinian sentiment, what that has actually resulted in is the ADL doing misinformation about anti-Semitism, downplaying where the real threats to Jews come from.

Speaker 3 I mean, I'm reassured to see that the criticism of them is getting much more mainstream, but I think this is just one really disgusting incident in a much longer arc in this this fall from grace, as what was once a civil rights organization and has now basically just become a pro-Israel bullying outfit.

Speaker 1 What's also interesting with the Mamdani monitor specifically is that, you know, he's saying now New Yorkers have a place to go in order to report instances of anti-Semitism.

Speaker 1 When the isn't that the whole thing with the ADL? The entire thing with the ADL, their entire reason for being is to collect the data of incidents of anti-Semitism and report on that data.

Speaker 1 And, you know, the idea of them having a tip line should not necessarily be news.

Speaker 1 The fact that they're very specifically laying out like this cute alliterative name, the Mamdani Monitor, to me, that speaks to their need to create the narrative before he even takes office that he is going to be doing a bunch of anti-Semitic stuff and that any instance of anti-Semitism that happens for the next for his tenure is due directly directly to him being elected mayor.

Speaker 1 It's like an effort to get people ready for a wave of anti-Semitism that they claim has already started and we see, you know, with our own eyes, especially those of you in New York, is vastly overblown and for the most part coming from psychopaths on the right.

Speaker 2 You mentioned that the ADL used to be a civil rights organization. And for the listener, I have to assume the average listener who has no idea what the Anti-Defamation League is.

Speaker 2 Could you talk to me about the ADL?

Speaker 3 Yeah, look, we have in the American Jewish community, like we have basically a network of institutions. I mean, the ADL is over 100 years old.

Speaker 3 I mean, the founding of the organization was this famous story: the lynching of Leo Frank.

Speaker 3 Leo Frank was a Jewish factory owner in Atlanta, Georgia, who was falsely accused of the rape and murder of a young girl in his factory.

Speaker 3 And so he was actually kidnapped from jail by a white supremacist mob and he was lynched by them. And this incident was considered part of the revival of the Klan in the South.

Speaker 3 And so the ADL being founded as a group that is not only committed to stopping the defamation of the Jewish people, but also fighting for civil rights for all people, the ADL's history was very much about fighting against anti-Semitism and for safety and protection for Jews as part of fighting for civil rights for all people.

Speaker 3 That That has always been their stated mission.

Speaker 3 Now, over the decades, the ADL, I think, has called into question their commitment to that mission because they have, for many decades now, aligned themselves with anti-civil rights forces.

Speaker 3 So during the McCarthy era, they actually failed to stand up for the Rosenbergs and actually participated in a lot of the anti-communist crusade.

Speaker 3 In the 70s, they were helping spy on Arab American activists. In the 90s, they were helping the federal government spy on anti-apartheid activists.

Speaker 3 And of course, in the 2000s, after 9-11, they were also part of efforts to spy on Arab-American activists. And there's like, there's a long history of like.

Speaker 1 Cozying up to power. I mean, they have

Speaker 1 unfortunately a history of being people who work with federal law enforcement.

Speaker 3 Yeah, exactly. Working with federal law enforcement and against movements for racial and economic justice.

Speaker 1 Which is, for a lot of people, that is a confusing thing. I think that in general, the ADL is always lumped in with sort of the

Speaker 1 Jews that were, you know, instrumental during the civil rights movement in the 60s, whereas the ADL's actual history is

Speaker 1 a lot less cool.

Speaker 2 Being raised Jewish, the narrative that I was told about the ADL was that it was sort of this like intersectional civil rights group, and they played this instrumental role in the civil rights movement in the 60s.

Speaker 2 They were part of liberal progressive causes like the fight for gay marriage. But when anything came to Israel, it was just like, we need to protect apartheid.
We need to defame Arabs in globally.

Speaker 2 Like that, it didn't make sense to me.

Speaker 3 Well, I think they have been part of a lot of kind of, I guess what we could call like mainstream civil rights coalitions, but they've always been willing to kind of also undermine civil rights to promote their Israel advocacy agenda.

Speaker 3 And I think the more extreme the conditions on the ground in Israel-Palestine have gotten and the more like extreme they need to be to defend Israel in the U.S., the more they've been willing to actually undermine civil rights here.

Speaker 2 A lot of this just reminds me of like an organizational personification of Deborah Messing, which, like, sorry.

Speaker 1 Oh, come on, Matt. Oh, my God.

Speaker 1 I'm unwell. Let him cook.
Let him cook.

Speaker 2 But, like,

Speaker 2 a few weeks ago on this podcast, we spent hours analyzing the way that, like, Deborah Messing spent decades really standing up for every group of people until it came to Palestinians.

Speaker 2 And then you saw as her inability to extend that desire for civil rights to Palestinians, everything else crumbled underneath that. And I feel like on a structural level, that is the ADL.

Speaker 2 The ADL is Deborah Messing.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I think it's a lot of like the ADL used to be a group that would be like, curriculums on diversity and inclusion, like get the Jews in there.

Speaker 3 Like we're going to be be in the room supporting that, like anti-Semitism and racism, like learn about all these things together.

Speaker 3 And then the more anti-racist activists were talking about Palestinian rights as part of that platform, then they became willing to join the coalition that was about dismantling DEI.

Speaker 2 The most aware that I've ever been of the ADL has been post-October 7th, where it feels like the ADL has become an organization that almost exclusively defends Israel from criticism, especially from the left, while constantly ignoring or making excuses for anti-Semitism on the right.

Speaker 2 I would go so far as to say it makes Jews less safe, and I feel like here is where we have to talk about the Nazi salute.

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Speaker 2 Famously, during the inauguration of Donald Trump at one of the inaugural events, Elon Musk was giving a speech where he did a little seekile.

Speaker 1 He did two. He did two little sequiles.

Speaker 2 The ADL, which had really, I would say at this point, lowered the bar for things worth condemning as being being anti-Semitic, did not condemn Elon, but forgave him, issuing a statement that said, This is a delicate moment.

Speaker 1 It's a new day, and yet so many are on edge. Our politics are inflamed, and social media only adds to the anxiety.

Speaker 1 It seems that Elon Musk made an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute, but again, we appreciate that people are on edge.

Speaker 1 In this moment, all sides should give one another a bit of grace, perhaps even the benefit of the doubt, and take a breath. This is a new beginning.

Speaker 1 Let's hope for healing and work towards unity in the months and years ahead.

Speaker 2 And also, Miss Rachel is Hamas, by the way.

Speaker 1 Exactly. And also, could you fire Simone Zimmerman for existing?

Speaker 1 It is so wild

Speaker 1 to watch that video and read that tweet at the same time. Because if you watch the video of Elon Musk, he is doing Nazi salute to both sides of the room, just in case the other side missed it.

Speaker 1 And for the ADL to be like, whoa, whoa, we all need to take a deep breath and just relax for a second and think about how the real enemy are Arabs.

Speaker 3 The history of the ADL's whitewashing. of Elon Musk's flirtation with neo-Nazism is like quite a thing to behold and has been going on for a while.

Speaker 3 There was a really crazy incident November 2023 where, I mean, Elon Musk is doing this all the time.

Speaker 3 So like this is really like Tuesday for him, but you know, we've all watched kind of on Twitter his descent into like really overt like neo-Nazi ideology.

Speaker 3 And like one of the kind of core conspiracy theories at the core of neo-Nazi ideology is the great replacement theory, right?

Speaker 3 That like Jews are helping bring in brown and black people into this country to destroy the white race and undermine our civilization. And Musk has been a booster of that ideology.

Speaker 3 There was basically an incident where like Musk was getting a lot of heat for boosting some really overt anti-Semitism.

Speaker 2 I know the tweet you're referring to.

Speaker 2 My brain is filled with tweets. Elon was boosting a tweet that was blaming Jews for boosting anti-white hatred.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 3 This was like one of many moments where a lot of people were like, maybe we shouldn't be on Twitter because it's like overrun with anti-Semitism and da-da-da.

Speaker 3 And then like days later, Elon Musk was like, we're going to ban the words decolonize and revert to the sea from Twitter. And then Greenbot was like, thank you so much.
You are such a great friend.

Speaker 3 You know, and also, by the way, like, it should be noted that every time he speaks about a lot of these like right-wing leaders, there's a part of me that's like, you are in a social network with these people.

Speaker 3 I've seen interviews where he was like, oh, Elon Musk is a nice guy. You know, I've hung out with Elon Musk.

Speaker 3 There's clearly some like i i i'm trying to say this in like a not anti-semitic way but i'm just like there's clearly some cabal some cabal yeah exactly but

Speaker 3 like i'm just like you're listening to it and you're like oh you're still trying to get invited to hang out with elon musk and also that's the same way that he talked about kevin roberts of the heritage foundation right you're like you're still trying to get invited to hang out with these guys which is why you speak about them with such respect even though these are some of the most important anti-semites in this country.

Speaker 3 And then when it comes to like Zoran Mamdani, again, not an anti-Semite in any way, shape, or form, you have no problem defaming and smearing these people and talking about them like they are the greatest threat to you.

Speaker 2 And I think it's important to note that regardless of how Jonathan Greenblatt personally interpreted what he calls Elon Musk's awkward gesture, white supremacists and neo-Nazis around the country were celebrating that moment.

Speaker 2 And Rolling Stone did a piece on it at the time, called, Right-Wing Extremists Are Abuzz Over Musk's Straight Arm Salute. Here's a quote from that.

Speaker 2 Andrew Torba is the founder of the far-right Christian nationalist social media platform Gab, which pioneered AI-powered Nazi chatbots.

Speaker 2 He shared the clip on his account with the caption, Incredible things are happening already, LMAO.

Speaker 2 Far-right author Keith Woods, whom the Southern Poverty Law Center has called a self-described ethno-nationalist and and anti-Semite, shared the clip in a post on X writing, okay, maybe Woke really is dead.

Speaker 2 And so when you have the ADL, which has positioned itself as an authority on calling out anti-Semitism, not calling this out, but in fact making excuses for it, it's like this is a group that is fomenting right-wing anti-Semitism.

Speaker 1 What's the point of you?

Speaker 1 If you indeed, you know, as you purport to be, are an institution that like monitors anti-Semitism and reminds people on an institutional level that like it's bad to not take the opportunity to call out the most obvious Nazi salute I think any of us have ever seen is really it's really telling.

Speaker 1 Why would you not call out these people? And it's because, well, they are in power and because generally they align with our interests.

Speaker 1 So, you know, if you say, I thought your interests were stopping anti-Semitism,

Speaker 1 then you would be wrong.

Speaker 2 One of the things things that the ADL is perhaps most known for is tracking anti-Semitism around the country and sort of these statistics that the ADL puts out about the number of anti-Semitic incidents that have taken place around the country year over year.

Speaker 2 Like I listen to a lot of the podcast interviews that Jonathan Greenblatt does because understanding, well, first of all, because I hate myself,

Speaker 2 but also because understanding how he does his job informs the way that I do mine.

Speaker 2 And by the way, side note, in a lot of those interviews, he'll get asked about the growing number of anti-Zionist Jews who disagree with him and who disagree with the mission of his organization or the threats posed to the ADL by the declining kinship that American Jews feel with the Ethno-Services of Israel.

Speaker 2 And he always just like, he always downplays our existence. He always insinuates that anti-Zionist Jews are an irrelevant part of Jewish life.

Speaker 8 I know you've looked at a lot of the polling as I have, you know, that Israel's lost a lot of support, even among Jews, especially among among young Jews.

Speaker 8 Do you ever worry that you might have positioned the ADL in such a way that the younger generation of Jews won't see you as defending them and the things that they believe in?

Speaker 9 Well, it's interesting. 90% of Jews in the polling that I've seen, of the surveys that I've seen, believe in the right of the state of Israel to exist,

Speaker 9 i.e. they are Zionist.
And so to young Jewish people, the vast majority of them identify with and feel positively about their Jewish identity and have a strong association with the state of Israel.

Speaker 9 All the data shows this.

Speaker 8 So you think young Jews who might

Speaker 8 self-describe as anti-Zionist or have problems with the state of Israel at the moment, you think that they should

Speaker 1 come on. No, but

Speaker 1 come on, please.

Speaker 9 Like, I have problems with policies of the state of Israel.

Speaker 7 But when you talk about the young Jews that are defined as anti-Zionist Lulu, like...

Speaker 7 There are young Hispanic people who support President Trump's policies at the border, but the vast majority and the mainstream organizations fighting for the rights of immigrants don't agree with that.

Speaker 10 But there are some who do.

Speaker 7 There are some who do. Look, there's blacks for Trump, and there's a whole movement among a portion of African Americans who deeply believe in the president.
But, like, would you say to the NAACP CEO?

Speaker 10 Why don't you represent them?

Speaker 8 No, it's less than why don't you represent them? It's more a question of as an organization that helps define anti-Semitism and has defined it as anti-Zionism.

Speaker 8 At a moment when these things are being debated, I mean, I hate to come back to this, but we've seen expressed that a lot of, and I've heard it from them, a lot of younger Jews, and I've heard it from the members of the Jewish community that they're.

Speaker 1 What else are you seeing?

Speaker 7 Like, I understand anecdotally, you may have heard it from some people.

Speaker 9 I believe there may be a bit of a selection bias there.

Speaker 7 Like, let me ask, have you gone to any of the mainstream synagogues? Like, again, you can go to Brooklyn and find three synagogues.

Speaker 8 Or, by the way, and I appreciate you answering the question.

Speaker 1 I am simply from the things that i've but you're giving your you're giving the audience a very narrow bias i'm asking that's where all jewish young people are i'm asking a question and you're responding and saying that's not what you think it is and you're not worried about it he likes to correct whoever the interviewer is who's talking about anti-Zionist Jews and He likes to say, no, no, no, they are a small minority.

Speaker 1 Remember

Speaker 1 that we Jews actually are a monolith. We all believe monolithically in the same thing.
We all believe Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state. We all are Zionists, essentially.

Speaker 1 He reinforces that idea, which

Speaker 1 is an anti-Semitic idea.

Speaker 1 I feel like I'm insane every time we talk about the ADL and Jonathan Greenblatt or the state of Israel in general because of how anti-Semitic all of these points that they're making are.

Speaker 1 That is straight anti-Semitism to deny the existence or the impact of anti-Zionist Jews. It's just like you are just saying, no, no, no, no, Jews are a monolith.
We are all the same.

Speaker 3 The only number I ever hear him use is 95% of American Jews are Zionists. Like, by the way, we have so much polling at this point that disputes those numbers, that complicates those numbers.

Speaker 3 I would love to hear him comment on the 40% of American Jews who said they believe Israel is committing a genocide and the 60% who said they believe it is committing war crimes.

Speaker 3 And again, it's just like, this is a man whose job requires lying, lying about the state of anti-Semitism, lying about what American Jews actually believe.

Speaker 3 The other thing he actually says about us is he'll compare us to black Republicans.

Speaker 1 I just want to say it's so particularly dangerous the way in which he does this and the way in which he, of course, ignores the, like you said, the data that just says 40% of American Jews think a genocide is being committed.

Speaker 1 The way in which he ignores it to just go back to this, like, wherever he got the statistic about 95% of Jews being Zionists, it is actively tying Jews as a group to an ongoing genocide.

Speaker 1 This is a danger to those Jews. This is a danger to Jews.
It just makes you wonder, does he care if Jews in America are safe or not?

Speaker 1 And I think it's pretty clear that if given a choice between the Jews of America or the Jews in the West and the state of Israel's policies, he chooses the security of the state of Israel over anything else.

Speaker 2 Another thing that he does though, perhaps more than anything else, is emphasize the extent to which anti-Semitism, the way that he defines it, is on the rise in America.

Speaker 2 And every podcast he does, he'll throw out some wild statistics.

Speaker 2 Like anti-Semitism in 2025 is up 13,000% from the year before, clearly with the intent of making the listener think that it's like unsafe for a Jewish person to leave their home in America.

Speaker 2 Can Can you give me some insight into these numbers that they constantly push out?

Speaker 3 Yeah, well, first of all, like, I think we should ask: why is it that your organization's budget keeps growing by the millions and yet this problem that you claim to be tackling keeps getting worse?

Speaker 3 Like, maybe you're really bad at your job.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 You're like failing to stop this problem.

Speaker 1 It's like a doctor who's an oncologist who's just keeps getting paid more and more, and he just keeps putting cancer into the patient.

Speaker 2 You know, yeah, that actually is a great metaphor.

Speaker 1 It's like at this point, it is so clear that the organization is not cutting the spread of anti-Semitism, but in fact, increasing it.

Speaker 3 And the other thing is like, their numbers are cooked.

Speaker 2 Explain.

Speaker 3 Their data is simply not trustworthy. Jewish Currents has done some reporting on this.

Speaker 2 Which I will link in the episode description.

Speaker 3 I think there's a lot to say about kind of the different ways that they've cooked their numbers, but one of them is just like simply, if you put more resources into tracking this thing, then your numbers go up because you just are getting more incidents, right?

Speaker 3 So, that's like level one.

Speaker 1 That's a charitable way of looking at it.

Speaker 3 Can you give the less charitable way?

Speaker 1 I mean, number two is expanding the definition of anti-Semitism to mean criticism of Israel, which is essentially what they've done to a degree that, I mean, is ridiculous.

Speaker 1 There is, of course, room for the idea that, you know, criticism of Israel can be anti-Semitic, but the way in which anti-Semitism is defined, at least by the ADL, creates essentially a new definition of anti-Semitism so that the tracking of it all goes under the banner of anti-Semitism when some things might just be criticism of Israel or criticism of Zionism or criticism of apartheid.

Speaker 1 Like if you're putting Drew a swastika on someone's dorm room door in the same category as someone had a Palestinian flag on their own door, then we have a real problem with the numbers.

Speaker 1 Then the numbers are in fact cooked.

Speaker 3 Just like two things I would add to that is Currents did an audit where they would have like a swastika drawn on a desk alongside the synagogue hostage situation in Collyville, right?

Speaker 3 So it's like these two things are not the same. Like a gunman walking into a synagogue is not the same thing as someone drawing a swastika on a desk at a school.

Speaker 3 The ADL isn't tracking like how many other racist slogans were also written on that desk, right?

Speaker 3 They are just collecting the data about about anti-Semitism to show how bad it is very specifically and exclusively for us.

Speaker 3 And then the Israel thing that you're talking about, it's 100% true, but this is part of what I mean by how they're cooking the data.

Speaker 3 So right after October 7th, the ADL put out this data of anti-Semitic incidents since October 7th, and they counted every pro-Palestinian march

Speaker 3 in America as like part of those incidents, right? Including, by the way, protests that were led by JVP and If Not Now, who like they have now also accused of anti-Semitism.

Speaker 3 But then the other thing that's really interesting, even in the data that Jewish currents agreed was anti-Semitic, the ADL's own data did show that organized white nationalism was responsible for more incidents in 2023 than every year since 2017, and that there was a clear correlation between anti-Semitism and anti-LGBT organizing.

Speaker 3 So like if you actually talk to the like extremism researchers at the ADL, they would probably explain to you that yes, the most virulent forms of anti-Semitism in this country are coming from white nationalist movements who happen to also be anti-queer and also Islamophobic.

Speaker 3 But then the organization has decided to like basically muddle that data by mixing in all of this pro-Palestinian activism and saying that that is the biggest threat to our community.

Speaker 3 So it's, it's almost more complicated or like even more sinister, I guess, than them simply being a pro-Israel advocacy group.

Speaker 3 Because I'm like, you know, some of the data about what is actually going on with anti-Semitism, and you're choosing to downplay it and misinform our community because you are so committed to Israeli apartheid that you are willing to lie about what you actually know is happening.

Speaker 2 Just a few weeks ago, Jonathan Greenblatt was giving this speech where he said,

Speaker 11 This year,

Speaker 11 ADL's Global 100 survey of anti-Semitic attitudes around the world found a 46% shift. 46%

Speaker 11 of the adult population, 2.2 billion people, harbor elevated levels of anti-Semitism. That's nearly double the rate that we saw a decade ago.

Speaker 11 For the first time since we started tracking these attitudes in the 1960s, the younger generation is more likely to hold elevated anti-Jewish views than their parents or grandparents.

Speaker 2 And I

Speaker 2 just don't get it, right? Like, you devote your organization to defending what every major human rights organization has ruled a genocide.

Speaker 2 You make weekly speeches about how criticism of that genocide is actually an attack on Jews, thereby tying Jews to the war crimes of 77-year-old ethno-state, whether we want to be tied to it or not, and then complain that the world hates us.

Speaker 2 And I am left with two conclusions. One is that Jonathan Greenblatt is stupid, which I personally don't think he is.

Speaker 2 And two, is that Jonathan Greenblatt intentionally feeds this cycle, which creates more anti-Semitism because constant hysteria about the rise of anti-Semitism guarantees the future of his organization and his career, which he makes more than $1.2 million a year.

Speaker 2 That's my hot take.

Speaker 1 I mean, I think that's right. And I think also if we are looking at the sinister motives behind it, because I agree, I don't think he's stupid.

Speaker 1 I think he is very specifically pushing this narrative because, well, number one, I think that he understands the future of Israel and the future of Zionism is going to be only supported by the right wing of this country, of the United States.

Speaker 1 He understands that you cannot anymore sell an ethno-state to

Speaker 1 liberals. There are still, of course, liberal Zionists who are holding on to it.

Speaker 2 Deborah Messing, hang in there, sister.

Speaker 1 Yeah, don't worry.

Speaker 1 Israel will be normal again someday. No, but he sees, you know, that cozying up to the right is important for this continued institutional power.

Speaker 1 He's not wrong in terms of he sees how any other institution that is a civil rights institution, at least in name, is being attacked as being a woke DEI distributor and being, of course, neutered as much as possible and attacked by the Trump administration, by the right wing.

Speaker 1 So he understands at least who ideologically lines up with him.

Speaker 1 But I also think, in a more sinister sense, he understands that if, given the choice between the two, between actually stopping anti-Semitism and protecting the interests of the state of Israel, he sees the state of Israel as being the ultimate protection against anti-Semitism.

Speaker 1 So he's willing to sacrifice the safety of American Jews in order to reach that end. And I think that is a really dark way of looking at it, but I think that is borne out to be completely true.

Speaker 1 Because at this point, I am not totally unconvinced that Jonathan Greenblatt wouldn't be happy if all the Jews of America were forced at gunpoint to go to Israel.

Speaker 1 I mean, that's me being very cynical, but I can't help but look at it that way.

Speaker 2 Wait, I'm going to pee really fast.

Speaker 3 Pee time.

Speaker 3 I feel like we're only like halfway through Matt's script.

Speaker 1 He edits it down to a nice, like, good chunk. But yeah, you know, we have lots to say.

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Speaker 3 So, speaking of getting all the Jews to Israel, there's this video that I saw on Instagram recently, which is from Ben Kaspit, who's like a pretty well-known, I think, kind of centrist Israeli pundit.

Speaker 3 He wrote a biography on Netanyahu. Like, this is like a pretty serious mainstream guy.
And there is a video going around of him in Hebrew on a radio show. He says, I would vote for Zoran Mamdani

Speaker 3 because I want there to be anti-Semitism in the diaspora, because I want all Jews to come to Israel. And the guy says, you're in favor of pogroms around.
And he's like, yes,

Speaker 3 that is good for us.

Speaker 3 And I think it's just like, I mean, it's very rare that someone says the quiet part out loud.

Speaker 3 It is very clear at this point that a big part of advancing Zionism is keeping Jews paranoid, afraid, and even physically unsafe around the world.

Speaker 3 And that is a core part of the propaganda strategy. It's a core part of the foreign relations strategy.

Speaker 3 And by the way, it's also part of the strategy for how they keep Israeli Jews fearful and paranoid is they're like blasting them with all this propaganda about all the alleged anti-Semitism in the diaspora so they don't watch what's happening in Gaza and they don't think about leaving the country.

Speaker 3 It's like really, really sick and really sad.

Speaker 2 It is really sick.

Speaker 3 I think also, I don't pretend to understand what Greenblatt's motives are. I mean, I think it's pretty clear that he's beholden to an incredibly old conservative like donor class, presumably.

Speaker 3 And also that at this point, like, as you said, he's made the calculation that it's important for them to be in the good graces of the American right, even if that risks losing all credibility.

Speaker 3 But the other thing that I kind of see from him and from so many of these other kind of like right-wing Zionist figures is it feels to me like white grievance politics, but with a kind of Jewish flavor on it.

Speaker 3 Because I actually don't think that Greenblatt wants Jews to move to Israel. That's not really what I hear from him.

Speaker 3 But what I do kind of hear is like it's the victimhood complex and that it does serve him in some way to kind of keep the volume dialed way up for wealthy white Jews. Yes.
That

Speaker 3 you are in danger. Like I saw a clip the other day of him on some TV show where he like looked at the camera and was like, I want you to know Jews in New York, the ADL is here for you.

Speaker 1 We have your back. We have your back.

Speaker 3 Right. And I'm like, you are just looking at like Lizzie Savetsky and like the like congregants of the like five Upper East Side congregations that you consider to be the only legitimate Jews.
Yes.

Speaker 2 You have segued me perfectly into a tweet that I wanted to bring up from Jonathan Greenblatt from last month leading up to the election, where he said, It is so profoundly sad that Jewish Americans are now discussing worst-case scenarios.

Speaker 1 When American Jews are making contingency plans to flee, we must recognize this as a five-alarm fire for our entire country that requires a whole-of-society approach to solve.

Speaker 2 What are you talking about?

Speaker 2 I'm so like, this actually kind of boils my blood a little bit. Jonathan Greenblatt, I'm going to look into the camera.
What the hell are you talking about? It's fine.

Speaker 2 It's fine.

Speaker 1 This is what he does, and this is what the institutional Jewish community in America has been doing now very openly for two years, which is trying to compare the treatment of Jews in the United States right now to the treatment of Jews in Europe in the 20s, 30s, and 40s.

Speaker 1 Yes. Like this idea that it is in some way comparable to the actual fleeing of Jews out of Europe or Jews being exiled from wherever they were in the pale of settlement.

Speaker 1 Like this conflation is totally insane and not grounded in reality at all. It is a narrative that is being pushed by these institutions.
to tell everyone Jews are scared.

Speaker 3 Jews are scared. And to make the Jews themselves scared.
Exactly.

Speaker 1 And to make Jews scared. Like, oh, you weren't scared this whole time? You should be scared.

Speaker 1 Which brings us back to that tweet that we talked about at the beginning: the child who's having a panic attack over Mamdani, where it's like, it's not just the father, the person who posted that tweet who's at fault here.

Speaker 1 It's the fault of our actual institutions, of Jewish institutions, whether it be in New York or, you know, across the country, telling Jews everywhere, you should be afraid.

Speaker 1 And I don't see how that is anything but anti-Semitic to whip Jews into a frenzy of fear.

Speaker 3 It actually just shows like a profound lack of care for the well-being of Jews. Like, you just want the average Jewish person.

Speaker 3 And, like, this is by the way, like, this has been their messaging for a while. I mean, I'm now forgetting the name of Greenbot's memoir, but if somebody wants to Google it, it's like never is now.

Speaker 3 Yes. Right.
And they're like, it is 1936. Like, they've been saying that for years, but saying it about all of the wrong things.

Speaker 2 Exactly.

Speaker 2 Because the reason that they're saying that like, oh, we're on the precipice of anti-Semitic fascism is not because there's a fascist in the White House or anything, but because of like protests at Columbia University to divest from apartheid.

Speaker 2 I got to say, it's kind of reminds me of the like, my child is scared of Zoran Mamdani, but sort of in the other direction, like when those protests were really at their height, my grandma, who I am so close with in love, called me.

Speaker 2 My grandma, who was born in the 1930s, you know, she called me and she was like, I don't remember it ever being like this for Jews in this country.

Speaker 2 And I really felt like upset because I very gently was like, basically, like, it's fine. I mean, it's not entirely fine, not for the reasons Jonathan Greenblatt thinks, but like, we're okay.

Speaker 2 Like, you can go outside. Like, someone isn't going to be standing there with a swastika poster.
This Jonathan Greenblatt tweet where he's like, it's a five-alarm fire and Jews are fleeing.

Speaker 2 It really, it really reminds me of this one tweet from Megan McCain.

Speaker 2 So in 2020, following the protests in response to the murder of George Floyd, Megan McCain tweeted, My neighborhood in Manhattan is eviscerated and looks like a war zone.

Speaker 3 De Blasio and Cuomo are in utter disgrace. This is not America.
Our leaders have abandoned us and continue to let great American cities burn to the ground and be destroyed.

Speaker 3 I could never have fathomed this.

Speaker 2 And then her neighbor who lives in her building, a TV executive named Kristen Bartlett, tweeted, Megan,

Speaker 3 we live in the same building and I just walked outside. It's fine.

Speaker 3 Perfect. Also, I just want to like respect that you have a screenshot from when this was posted.

Speaker 1 Been saving that one on your phone.

Speaker 2 Baby, I hold on to tweets. That's why my brain is so fucked.
And then the cherry on top of this exchange is that as it turns out, Megan McCain at the time wasn't even in New York. She was in Virginia.

Speaker 3 Oh my God.

Speaker 1 Incredible. I mean, that fits in so perfectly with just this kind of like what I would call charitably concerned trolling.

Speaker 1 She does the same thing where she is saying Jews have never been more scared in their lives. They are fleeing every day.
I'm talking to a crying Jew.

Speaker 1 And it's like, girl, you're in Virginia. It's like, girl, you you are not Jewish.
And you have Jewish people telling you all the time, responding to her, saying, like, what are you talking about?

Speaker 1 I am walking around my city of, you know, Brooklyn, and I am not at all feeling unsafe.

Speaker 1 And yet, people like Megan McCain and a lot of the like Christian Zionist influencer class continue to talk about how Jews in general are fearing for their lives. They're all fleeing in private.

Speaker 1 They've said to me that they have plans to flee. And it's just so clearly bullshit.

Speaker 2 Megan McCain loves to tweet, like, check in on your Jewish friends.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yes.

Speaker 2 And then when Jews are in her mentions, being like, I'm fine, she's like, not you, not you.

Speaker 1 Not you, not you, not you.

Speaker 2 But as you guys have said, like, so much of this feels just like classic conservative fear-mongering that freedom and equality for all people will unleash hell.

Speaker 2 into the streets with the ultimate goal being to maintain the status quo of oppression. Like in this case, it's the oppression of Palestinians and of Muslims more broadly.

Speaker 2 But a lot of this feels similar to the way that homophobes and transphobes talk about what could happen to like capital S society if gay marriage was passed or if trans people could get access to health care or any number of other pushes for equality.

Speaker 1 I mean, it's the same playbook and it's also to placate the same donors. It's the same sort of like right-wing economy that exists out there, which is just so much more

Speaker 1 lucrative, I think, for anyone who is a political operative. I think the ADL knows which side the bread is buttered or whatever that phrase is.

Speaker 1 Jonathan Greenblatt understands who, at the very least, his financial allies are. And that includes people like, I think, Bernard Marcus, who's like the Home Depot guy.

Speaker 1 He's like one of the biggest donors.

Speaker 1 And he himself has like, apparently in a private meeting with the ADL, he basically said that white supremacy is a non-issue, don't worry about it, and does not believe in the idea of even addressing that from a civil rights organization that specifically was founded because of an act of white supremacist violence.

Speaker 1 These are the people that are funding the ADL, you know?

Speaker 2 So we're going to circle back. to our friend Deborah Messing in just a second.

Speaker 2 But in between that, I want to talk a little bit about some of the influencers who really disseminate the similar talking points that groups like the ADL distribute to a lot more people than like Jonathan Greenblatt as an individual reaches.

Speaker 2 And I think whose careers as influencers are propped up by this sort of similar peddling of fear and chaos, frankly.

Speaker 2 And I want to read a couple of election reaction tweets from said influencers, some of whom we've talked about on this podcast. So the first

Speaker 2 is our girl, Lizzie Savetsky, who, by the way, did you see her like standing outside of a polling place on the Upper East Side, like screaming at Mom Donnie voters?

Speaker 12 Why do you guys like crime so much?

Speaker 1 You don't like crime crime. You don't?

Speaker 12 You like crime? You like radical Islam? You know that Zoron has tweeted multiple times about defunding the police. You want to defund the NYPD? I do.
Yeah, I do. That's good.

Speaker 12 I'm so glad to hear that you hate this city.

Speaker 3 You want Sharia? You want Sharia Laura?

Speaker 1 Just the idea of her trying to present the case of her side by yelling at random voters about how much they hate Jews or how much she hates Islam.

Speaker 1 I've never seen someone so out of touch with what she looks like.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I like just like her being like, I'm really endangered. Therefore, I am going to walk up to the people who are endangering me and harass them.

Speaker 2 Lizzie Savetsky's entire project online does, I think, comport well with Zionism and Israel because she's basically like, I am a victim. I am in danger.
I'm so in danger.

Speaker 2 She said previously that she thinks she needs to hire a bodyguard when she goes outside. But then her content itself is her going up to people and yelling at them and antagonizing them.

Speaker 2 And I'm like, oh,

Speaker 2 you're Israel. So in that way, she is a good spokesperson.
But on the night of the election where Mom Donnie won, Lizzie tweets, This will get ugly.

Speaker 1 We will feel the hits, and we will answer boldly and unapologetically. Prepare, protect, and pray.

Speaker 1 Mark my words: this is only the beginning of the vicious storm that will rage through our great nation. Buckle up.

Speaker 1 I love the mix. There's a mix of like threats and being threatened at the same time.

Speaker 2 Prepare, protect, and pray is giving a

Speaker 2 what is it? Deny, depose.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and defend, yeah.

Speaker 1 Exactly.

Speaker 3 Feels very Christian, like Republican to me.

Speaker 1 Oh, 100%.

Speaker 2 Because she is a Christian Republican who happens to be Jewish.

Speaker 1 Yes, exactly.

Speaker 2 Another influencer, one who I've talked about less on this podcast, but one who is so influential at nearly a million followers.

Speaker 2 She has been, especially in the two years since the genocide began, one of the leading propagandists for Israel, Noah Tishby, who I think is actually much more effective than Lizzie Savetsky because she's much more calculating.

Speaker 2 She comes across with a cooler demeanor.

Speaker 13 Noah, politics aside for the moment, to me, far more frightening and far more stark than his progressive policies and plans with no backup, his lack of experience, et cetera, is his blatant and rife anti-Semitism.

Speaker 14 Yes, it's horrific, to be honest with you. And this is not just terrible for Israelis and for the Jewish community.
This is terrible for Americans.

Speaker 14 Let me me start with the first thing that to me is the most violent and the most vile, which is his whitewashing of what Intifada is about.

Speaker 2 But she, nonetheless, tweets in all caps the morning after the election.

Speaker 3 We've survived anti-Semitic leaders before. We'll survive Mamdani now.
Amisra Chai.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah, you did her. That was good.

Speaker 1 That was good. I love this tweet so much.
She goes, we've survived anti-Semitic leaders before. Girl, you are Israeli.
Who are you talking about?

Speaker 3 Well, okay, here's the thing. Lizzie Savetsky is like a right-wing Republican, right? Her whole thing is like white lady Republican grievance politics, but as an American Jew.

Speaker 3 Noah Tishby is doing a different game. Important to note, she actually used to be an official employee of the Israeli government.

Speaker 3 She was actually for a time the Israeli government's special envoy on anti-Semitism. Yes.

Speaker 3 Like this is a person who's like like a trained propagandist for the Israeli government, whose whole shtick is that anti-Israel sentiment, like accountability criticism of Israel is the anti-Semitism, right?

Speaker 3 And then she actually lost that job because she very lightly criticized something that the government did. Yes.

Speaker 3 And so then she had to kind of pivot to being an influencer, but she's still on the same beat, right? And she's one of these people who positions herself as like vaguely liberal.

Speaker 3 Like, she's not actually aligned with the Netanyahu government, but she's still doing essentially propaganda for them.

Speaker 1 And I think it's important to note that, like, in both of these cases, like, I don't believe for a second that Lizzie Savetsky is afraid.

Speaker 1 And I don't, I don't believe that Noah Tishby is either. You know, I don't think she's worried about surviving a, quote, anti-Semitic leader.
Their mission here is not telling everyone they're afraid.

Speaker 1 Their mission is to spread fear amongst these communities, amongst Jews and amongst people who are regular Christian Americans who see anti-Semitism as a bad thing.

Speaker 1 And they want to let these people know Jews are afraid and Jews themselves, you should be afraid. That is their entire motive here.

Speaker 2 So we've covered, I think, in a good amount of detail, these institutions and people that, for one reason or another, but typically for self-serving interests, whip up this racist hysteria, especially among Jews, so that Jews everywhere will recommit themselves to Zionism, to the state of Israel, to making excuses for violence and genocide and racism against Arabs in the U.S.

Speaker 2 And what I want to pivot to is just like, do you see my cat? She's joined me. And what I want to talk about just briefly is the other side of this exchange of rhetoric.

Speaker 2 Who are the people receiving this and what happens to them?

Speaker 2 Well, we've talked about the crying eight-year-old who is so terrified that Zoran Mamdani won because his father's a racist who instilled racism in him.

Speaker 2 And I've mentioned my grandma who, you know, might see stuff on the internet and like not know better.

Speaker 2 And I also just want to revisit Deborah Messing. And I just have to say,

Speaker 2 we.

Speaker 1 One track mind, baby. Fuck yeah.

Speaker 3 We respect the commitment.

Speaker 1 How can I tie this to death?

Speaker 2 Listen, I just have to say,

Speaker 2 six, oh my God. If you're watching the video version of this podcast, there's two cats on you now.
There are two cats now on me.

Speaker 3 Hey, guys, you want to talk about Deborah Messing? What do you have to say?

Speaker 2 He's got nothing left to say.

Speaker 2 Six weeks ago, I made an episode of this podcast about Deborah Messing and her sort of fall from grace, hee-hee, ha-ha, as like a liberal Hollywood icon to someone who is now spewing the most racist far-right rhetoric so many times a day on Instagram.

Speaker 2 It is unbelievable, all because she prioritized her belief in Israel as an ethnostate and all of her other liberal beliefs sort of collapsed underneath the weight of that.

Speaker 2 But at the time, just a month and a half ago, I really had to make the case for why I was making that episode.

Speaker 2 Because it's not like Deborah Messing is a supremely relevant celebrity in the year of our Lord 2025.

Speaker 2 In the days leading up to the mayoral election in New York City, for whatever reason, the internet just collectively woke up to the fact that Deborah Messing had gone a little crazy.

Speaker 2 And I thought it was like the fog had cleared in front of me.

Speaker 1 And very vindicating, I think, for you.

Speaker 1 I think it was kind of amazing to watch everyone finally see what you've been

Speaker 1 trying to tell people forever.

Speaker 2 I've been trying to sound the alarm.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's so funny.

Speaker 2 In the 24-hour period leading up to the election, Deborah Messing posted 91 Instagram stories. Among them was one where notably she wrote that Zoran Mamdani is quote, an actual communist jihadist.

Speaker 3 And another one where she wrote that in Judaism and Christianity, we are committed to speaking the truth. In Islam, they are commanded to lie if it means spreading Islam.

Speaker 3 Do not disregard this fundamental ideological difference. Now, take a look at Mamdani.
Apply Apply that basic rule. Listen to his words.
Then watch his actions. He's revealing their goal.

Speaker 3 Mass conversion. These two opposing civilizations cannot exist.

Speaker 2 Just shockingly racist.

Speaker 1 Incredibly.

Speaker 2 She also posted another one, and this was so vindicating for me as someone who's waiting, who has been waiting for a very long time for Deborah Messing to just come out as a Republican.

Speaker 2 NYC Republicans, you guys are going to save our city.

Speaker 2 Now, I have to say, I have to say, I talk a lot on this podcast about grifters, someone like Lizzie Savetsky, someone like Noah Tishby, someone like Jonathan Greenblatt in his way.

Speaker 2 I think they are creating Jewish fear to grift off of, whether it's money, social capital, followers, whatever. Deborah Messing, to me, is not a grifter.

Speaker 2 When it comes to cynical grifters versus like true believers, I think Deborah Messing falls squarely into the latter category, right? Grifters are calculating and savvy.

Speaker 2 She is pretty clearly just a mess. And I don't think her fear is justified.
And I think, to be clear, it's entirely rooted in like racism. But I do believe that Deborah Messing is experiencing fear.

Speaker 2 And I see her as a shining example of the target consumer of the type of rhetoric spewed by the people we've been talking about in this episode, who, by the way, Deborah often reposts from.

Speaker 2 And after two years of stewing in this type of rhetoric, she has completely lost her mind.

Speaker 2 She's a fanatical racist, and she also believes that Zionism and its torchbearers at the ADL are necessary to keep her safe.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it is, I think, the most shocking of all of the 91 shocking stories was the,

Speaker 1 you know, we are commanded to speak the truth in Judaism and Christianity and

Speaker 1 Islam, you are commanded to lie. Like, this is particular

Speaker 1 post-9-11 anti-Muslim bigotry. There's a concept that I remember being spread around early on in the war on terror, this idea of a taqiyya, which was the secret Islamist.

Speaker 1 The idea of a Muslim may seem moderate, but they are commanded by the Quran to not reveal that they are, in fact, a fanatic jihadist or whatever, which is complete bullshit.

Speaker 1 And I hadn't seen it for a long time, you know, since 9-11. I mean, it was like it was around during the War on Terror, and everyone kind of like

Speaker 1 stopped spreading these kinds of memes. And after October 7th, it all came back.

Speaker 1 And seeing Deborah Messing post something that an incredibly racist grandmother would have posted, you know, on September 12th, 2001, to me, that shows that this is indeed a deeply rotted brain.

Speaker 1 This is someone who is living in deep fear and not just, I think, a run-of-the-mill grifter.

Speaker 1 I think someone who has been grifted and someone who is being, I mean, I hate to say that she's a victim, but in a way, she is a victim of the scare campaign that has gone on for years against, you know, Jews in general from the institutional Jewish community.

Speaker 3 I mean, also when we're talking about like, where did Deborah Messen get all these ideas? I mean, we know that she's been taken on these propaganda trips to Israel.

Speaker 3 We know that she's like very actively embedded in this network of like pro-Israel propagandists. And they are feeding her this steady diet of anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian racism.
Yes.

Speaker 3 And I also found that post to be the most shocking of these.

Speaker 3 The immediate place that my mind went to hearing this, I've also heard that kind of Islamophobic, basically conspiracy that you're talking about, Matt. Like I've heard people say stuff like that.

Speaker 3 But what it sounds like to me is the same logic that fuels classical anti-Semitism. Yes.

Speaker 3 There is a school of thought in like the school of studying anti-Semitism that basically says that the way that Muslims are scapegoated as this other that is kind of coming in to try to undermine and subvert our societies has a lot of deep parallels in the ways that classical anti-Semitism said that Jews were going to do a lot of that.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 3 I mean, I think, again, it goes back to like, Deborah's not listening to this, but it's like a question for people who buy into that kind of thinking.

Speaker 3 Like, do you want to live in a society where that kind of like kind of blanket stereotyping and conspiratorial thinking about other groups of people is allowed?

Speaker 3 Because almost always anti-Semitism does come back into that.

Speaker 3 So, like, when this whole conversation is about how we actually deal with and think about anti-Semitism, to my mind, a society that normalizes such racist conspiratorial thinking is one in which any group could potentially be unsafe.

Speaker 3 Because if you're willing to believe that about one group of people, why wouldn't you be willing to believe it about another? And, like, by the way, you could take a lot of that thinking.

Speaker 3 That's what Nick Fuentes thinks about Jews. He thinks that we can't coexist in Western civilization.

Speaker 3 He thinks that we're the ones who are actually lying, trying to subvert this society, cannot coexist in this white American Christian nation.

Speaker 2 Which tees me up perfectly because I have spent this episode talking about the way mainstream Zionist institutions and people and leaders and influencers have enriched themselves by inflating threats to Jewish safety from pro-Palestinian groups.

Speaker 2 But it's not that I'm not concerned about Jewish safety. I just don't think it's threatened by diverse campus activist groups calling for Palestinian equality.

Speaker 2 And I'm worried about the amount of space people like Greenblatt and Tishby are taking up in the conversation about anti-Semitism.

Speaker 2 While in the background, right this very moment, to your point, anti-Semitism is having a meteoric rise within the MAGA movement.

Speaker 2 And so we need to talk about groipers, which even saying that word, I'm like,

Speaker 2 I didn't know what a groiper was until very recently.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it feels like just saying the word, you feel slightly assaulted.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 3 I don't like it. Yeah, it's like people who didn't like saying the word moist.
It's like the same feeling.

Speaker 1 Exactly. Yes.

Speaker 2 This all feels like the flip side of the conversation we've been having.

Speaker 2 Can you guys talk about Groipers and Nick Fuentes and all of these figures who have way more clout within the mainstream right than I have ever remembered them having?

Speaker 1 You know, I'm not an expert on Groipers, despite, you know, I don't know, being a straight white male on the podcast.

Speaker 1 But I do know that the Groipers kind of come out of the sort of alt-right movement, sort of very online, very 4chan-based Christian nationalist movement.

Speaker 1 And Nick Fuentes, he is like the leader of the Groupers. A big portion of it is incel-based as well.

Speaker 1 This idea of regular chauvinism and regular misogyny, but like to a degree that is, I think, embarrassing, I think, for a normal person to see someone outwardly support.

Speaker 1 Fuentes has been openly anti-Semitic for a long time. And of course, you know, anti-black, you know, anti-woman, all that stuff, anti-whatever.

Speaker 1 And the fact is, is that he himself has always been kind of relegated to the sidelines of this kind of right-wing discourse, although he has had more and more in the last few years these brushes with sort of mainstream Republicanism and conservative institutions.

Speaker 1 I think he attended an event at Mar-a-Lago.

Speaker 3 He did. He went to Mar-a-Lago with Trump and Yay.

Speaker 1 And, you know, is someone who has been gaining more and more legitimacy since October 7th because of the fact that he was able to tie sort of this growing pro-Palestinian movement into his own ideology and kind of twist it to be just about Jews and Jewry and, you know, being this like the ultimate enemy.

Speaker 2 And he has been rising up lately alongside figures like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, who are collectively forming this anti-Zionist right,

Speaker 2 which is, and I try to explain this to people, actually about hating Jews.

Speaker 2 But, right, and this is just tying it all together, it's really hard for me to explain that these are anti-Semitic people because people like Jonathan Greenblatt have watered down what it means to call someone anti-Semitic in a way that makes this conversation impossible.

Speaker 1 It makes anti-Semitism more possible because

Speaker 1 you cannot engage honestly.

Speaker 2 That ties in to the most recent inroads that Nick Fuentes has made into the mainstream American right when he recently did an interview with Tucker Carlson, who, by the way, has one of the most listened to podcasts in America.

Speaker 2 And because the Heritage Foundation, which is the largest conservative think tank in America, has deep ties and a relationship with Tucker Carlson, they were asked to denounce or affirm the interview that Tucker Carlson did with this white nationalist neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes.

Speaker 2 And there are a lot of right-wing Zionists who work at and donate to the Heritage Foundation.

Speaker 2 Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, put out a video on Twitter, which I'm sure he now regrets, defending Tucker Carlson and the Nick Fuentes interview, which has now created this turmoil and sort of civil war inside of the Heritage Foundation.

Speaker 15 My loyalty as a Christian and as an American is to Christ first and to America always.

Speaker 15 When it serves the interests of the United States to cooperate with Israel and other allies, we should do so.

Speaker 15 But when it doesn't, conservatives should feel no obligation to reflexively support any foreign government, no matter how loud the pressure becomes from the globalist class or from their mouthpieces in Washington.

Speaker 15 The Heritage Foundation didn't become the intellectual backbone of the conservative movement by canceling our own people or policing the consciences of Christians. And we won't start doing that now.

Speaker 15 We don't take direction from comments on X. We also don't take direction from members or donors, though we are inherently grateful for their support.

Speaker 2 Ben Shapiro, obviously probably the most famous right-wing Zionist in media, said that Kevin Roberts' statement on Tucker Carlson is a quote, betrayal of the Heritage Foundation's history and principles.

Speaker 2 And this is the thing with right-wing Zionists, which I'm just going to say Zionists. How? How is it a betrayal?

Speaker 2 The Heritage Foundation and the right in general has been so happy to go after every other minority group.

Speaker 2 Why would you think that Jews had some protected status within these extraordinarily bigoted fascist institutions?

Speaker 2 Well, it's because you bought into the belief that Zionism, which is about the protection of an ethno-state, genuinely was also about the protection of Jews.

Speaker 2 And here we see, plain and simple, that that that is not the case.

Speaker 3 I don't know why we're surprised when the Heritage Foundation, who are the authors of Project Esther,

Speaker 3 like actually made very clear that they have substituted any real definition of what anti-Semitism is for just anything that is anti-Israel.

Speaker 3 Project Esther is like an addendum to Project 2025, basically, using the fight against anti-Semitism as part of this broader Project 2025 to kind of like dismantle liberalism and liberal institutions in america and to kind of go after and criminalize the entire progressive movement progressive institutions democratic institutions like all under the guise of fighting anti-semitism so like the people who already bought into project esther like made their bed with the christian far right i'll say like the civil war has been very fun to follow.

Speaker 3 Obviously, love to see divisions in our opposition. But we should know, like, Kevin Roberts' first statement said, you know, we should be free to criticize Israel.

Speaker 3 We're not going to be silenced by the globalist class. America first is always our priority.

Speaker 2 The globalist class.

Speaker 1 Wow. Yeah.
Yeah, straight up.

Speaker 3 And then he had to like do a little backpedaling about Fuentes when there was a lot of fight. Because then there were a bunch of these right-wing Jews who were like, whoa, wait a second.

Speaker 3 We're like in bed with overt anti-Semites.

Speaker 1 Yeah, like, wait, wait, I never thought the leopard would eat my face.

Speaker 3 And after we saw Roberts kind of backpedaling a little bit, then Greenbot, you know, got up and thanked him and said he really appreciated it.

Speaker 3 And to me, this reveals something about how, again, it's like, okay, Greenblott clearly wants to be in the room with Roberts. He still wants to be able to pick up the phone and call.

Speaker 3 You can always tell based on his tweets, like who he still wants to have meetings and sit at the table with.

Speaker 3 Seems like Greenblatt has made the calculation that he's like trying to hang with the Heritage Foundation. Pretty gnarly, if you ask me.

Speaker 3 I think the other thing about this, and it's bigger than the ADL, but I think this does go back to kind of like the failure of like centrist liberal institutions to understand the moment that we're in.

Speaker 3 The kind of old school ADL establishment playbook is we call out anti-Semitism wherever it rears its ugly head.

Speaker 3 David Feldman, who is a scholar in the UK who's done really amazing work on anti-Semitism, he talks about anti-Semitism as this like reservoir of ideas that exist in the culture, kind of just like racism, like that there are these animating ideas and beliefs that are latent in our culture that people can draw from and believe.

Speaker 3 And so somebody can say something that is anti-Semitic, just like someone can say something that is racist. And that is

Speaker 3 different than being an anti-Semite, who is somebody whose ideology and worldview is actually motivated by those ideas.

Speaker 3 And I think for me, like I actually listened to the Nick Fuentes on Tucker Carlson. I also listened to the Candace Owens interview.

Speaker 3 And you listen to these people and you're like, these are anti-Semites. Like, this is like, this is a worldview driven by the idea that Jews are this nefarious other trying to undermine our society.

Speaker 3 I mean, like Fuentes is like, the Jewish organized Jewry are the ones who are the reason that we don't have good things in this country. And Jews cannot assimilate into this society.

Speaker 3 And then Candace Owens is just like, These people are straight up evil monsters, right?

Speaker 3 Like her whole thing is that there's like a secret cabal that is, you know, of bloodthirsty, evil child killers, molesters.

Speaker 3 Like it's, she has every, every trope like in the book is like part of this actual belief system that she has that she is actively infusing into the culture.

Speaker 3 What we're talking about is on a level of danger and influence that far surpasses like any random mistaken tweet we've seen from somebody in the progressive or in the Palestine movement.

Speaker 3 And yet somehow Greenbot talks about these very powerful anti-Semites like they are nice people who just did an oopsie and talks about the activists on the left, like we are a danger to civilization.

Speaker 3 This is why I keep saying that it requires them to actually like lie and misinform people because it's so upside down world and the priorities are so twisted.

Speaker 3 And by the way, the other thing to then get into about this is that Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens hate the ADL.

Speaker 3 And they hate the ADL because the ADL has obviously tried to get them canceled because of their Israel politics.

Speaker 3 And then they use that as evidence that the ADL is part of this cabal, this censorious, evil, baby killing cabal that is trying to run our country and destroy our institutions, etc.

Speaker 3 Then what it takes us back to is that like the commitment to Zionism and to defending Israel from criticism over all else muddies the water about anti-Semitism and is also like helping fuel anti-Semitism because these people are then taking all of that and saying, look, here's, I have even more proof now.

Speaker 3 Matt, you and I have talked about this like a fair amount.

Speaker 1 All the time.

Speaker 3 We've gone down these rabbits holes together because it's like, it's so crazy making to watch like Israel's committing a genocide.

Speaker 3 And then we have like Jews around the world who are like standing up and fighting it. And then you have all these Nazis who are like, yes, Israel is committing a genocide.

Speaker 3 And by the way, let me tell you that it's actually because of the Talmud that they are doing that.

Speaker 1 This alliance of right-wing white nationalists and Zionists has always been a shaky alliance because for years, I think Israel and a lot of the pro-Israel proponents, they understood that what the right wing of Israeli society and Israel in general wanted is the same thing as what the right wing of white Christian America wanted, which is an ethno-state.

Speaker 1 They understood this alliance to be pretty solid because, in fact, I remember one time Richard Spencer, who was like the prominent Nazi of 2016, 2017, described himself specifically as a white Zionist, meaning that like what he wanted was a white Christian ethnostate, the same way Israel has their own Jewish ethnostate.

Speaker 3 Right.

Speaker 3 They're all like, we would love to have a place that builds a lot of walls, that keeps out immigrants, that kills brown people, that outlaws human rights organizations, that criminalizes free speech.

Speaker 3 Like, let's fucking go.

Speaker 1 Right. And so they've always gone hand in hand in that sense.

Speaker 1 But I think that the problem with this alliance to me is not just that, like, you see now, obviously, right-wingers who are becoming openly anti-Semitic and using Israel as a tool to get there, but also that the immediate threat is not necessarily to Jewish Americans, but the immediate threat is to literally everyone else.

Speaker 1 The threat is to black Americans as anti-blackness is, you know, what this country was founded upon, or anti-Arabs, anti-Muslim.

Speaker 1 These are the people who are actually at the front of the firing line when it comes to this ideology.

Speaker 1 Jews have been, I think, somewhat protected in this kind of like tent of whiteness or whatever for a while. And we are certainly down the line going to be attacked as well.

Speaker 1 But when you look at anti-Semitism and the definition of it specifically is not being about being anti-Jew, but being like you said, Simone, being this like collection of conspiracy theories about who is secretly trying to subvert the society, who is secretly organizing in order to hurt the host nation and to raise themselves up.

Speaker 1 If you look at it as that type of ideology, kind of devoid of specifically being about Jews, then what you are seeing is anti-Semitism from the pro-Israel camp and anti-Semitism from the actual white nationalist Nazi camp being the exact same thing.

Speaker 1 When you look at that, to me, I don't have a fear of camps for Jewish people in the future from all this.

Speaker 1 I have a fear of camps for black people, for gay people, for trans people, camps for all of these other groups that the right has for years claimed is working secretly behind closed doors to destroy our white Christian nation.

Speaker 1 And I think it's important to understand that definition of anti-Semitism is universal and not specific to just Jewish people in America.

Speaker 3 I just also want to go back for a second to like just comparing this to the freak out about Zoran Mamdani. Let's take anti-Semitism and Jews out of this for a second.

Speaker 3 Like Zoran's campaign is about building a city that is affordable. He wants people to be able to like afford their rent and their groceries and enjoy public transit, afford childcare.

Speaker 3 We listened to Tucker and Fuentes, which again, by the way, that interview was so creepy because if you didn't know anything about these guys, it really like they watered down their extremism in such a sinister way until they got to the last 20 minutes or so of the podcast.

Speaker 3 And I will say, like, as a woman listening to this, it really made my hair stand on end because

Speaker 3 the end of the podcast is where they start talking about their views about gender. and about women.
And like these guys have some of the most regressive and scary views about gender.

Speaker 3 I don't listen to to a lot of right-wing podcasts, but like the things that they believe about like the type of domination, gender domination and conformity that they want to see in this country.

Speaker 3 Again, when we talk about like the conversation about Jews and anti-Semitism, what really, really insults me about Greenblat and all these other groups, they talk about Jewish interests as if we aren't also people who want to live in cities that are affordable, as if we don't have women in our communities who want to have our reproductive rights protected, who want to have our rights as women, as equal citizens in this country protected, as if we don't have queer and trans people in our communities who are going to be endangered by these religious fundamentalist movements and their visions about gender, right?

Speaker 3 Like the idea that the only thing that you as a Jewish person should care about is whether or not they like this country overseas that, by the way, is committing a genocide that you also deny is happening.

Speaker 3 It's so insulting, but it's also that that's when you start to see how dangerous it is because they're willing to let all these other things go in favor of advancing this one pet issue that they have.

Speaker 3 And again, like it does then make you question, like, are these people who just really don't feel endangered in any other way and feel like they can be hysterical about this one thing?

Speaker 2 That was a good note. That was a good note.

Speaker 3 Listen, we're two and a half hours in and we're just like, we're just cooking now.

Speaker 1 Yeah, we are.

Speaker 2 We are. We've hit our stride.
I want to wrap this up.

Speaker 2 I usually do a sort of call to action, but for people who are authentically concerned about anti-Semitism, who may be well-intentioned, but peripherally are absorbing this like ADL-fueled narrative about Zoran, I guess, what does the average person do to combat anti-Semitism that isn't like the Mom Donnie monitor?

Speaker 1 I've always

Speaker 1 thought and always believed in the idea that your solidarity, being intersectional, is the only thing that actually does protect any minority groups in our country.

Speaker 1 If you are worried about anti-Semitism, then you need to be attacking the ideas within that type of hatred. You cannot be spreading those ideas.

Speaker 1 If you're worried about attacks against Jews in the United States happening,

Speaker 1 you need to understand that attacks against Jews happening are

Speaker 1 one of the symptoms of attacks against all sorts of these discrete and insular groups in America that are being attacked.

Speaker 1 It's not about saying anti-Semitism doesn't matter, but it's about understanding that the people who are spreading fear of anti-Semitism are themselves

Speaker 1 anti-Semitic and racist. You know what I'm trying to say?

Speaker 1 It's like, so what do people do instead of calling the Mamdani monitor, organize with people who are not racists, who are openly and outwardly not racist. I don't know how you combat it otherwise.

Speaker 1 Rather than saying, no,

Speaker 1 we need very specifically to only care about this one thing, if that's all you care about, if it's just Jews and the safety of Jews, you're going to find yourself with some really unsavory bedfellows.

Speaker 1 And I guarantee you, they do not have your safety. or the safety of your community at heart and what they are trying to achieve.

Speaker 3 Well, I agree with all that.

Speaker 3 I think what I would just add is, first of all, we should just like remind people that so much of this is based in a ton of misinformation and smears and, you know, remind people to be really skeptical of the sources that they're being sent about these things.

Speaker 3 I can't tell you how often I've been hearing from people, as you just talked about earlier, Matt, who are just like getting straight up misinformation about like Zoharan and what he stands for and what his campaign has stood for, right?

Speaker 3 So like that's thing one.

Speaker 3 Thing two is that I can't believe we're just talking about this now at the end of this conversation, but I guess I'll just say like the ADL and groups like them, they operate on a theory of anti-Semitism that it's basically like this virus that's just in the water that will always be there forever and ever.

Speaker 3 So the only thing you can do, if you actually listen to those people and what they say you should do, it's mostly just like, be proud, stand up. be yourself, right?

Speaker 3 Which then also like leads to, as we've talked about, so much of this like overt racism, but also then like the Lizzie Savetsky like going to harass people.

Speaker 12 I'm so glad to hear that you hate this city.

Speaker 3 I think what I just wanted to add to what Matt said so beautifully is that, like, Jews will be safer and better off in societies in which there is less racism, in which there is less conspiratorial thinking, in which there is less street violence, in which people aren't resentful of some powers that are hoarding wealth and committing foreign wars and all these things.

Speaker 3 And, like, I think there is one group of people right now in our society to go back to this far right that we're talking about, right?

Speaker 3 What the far right is saying are the sources of all those things are the Jews.

Speaker 3 If you want to fight anti-Semitism, you should want to fight all of the conditions that are leading people to feel, to feel that kind of resentment, to not getting the things that they need, and to also living in social conditions where violence and scapegoating.

Speaker 3 are so normalized.

Speaker 3 So for me, it's like fight alongside other communities because all of us will be safer and better off in a society where none of these things are allowed to happen, not just for Jews, but for any person.

Speaker 2 I just got chills.

Speaker 2 That was really good. And I literally had here, and if not, you may end up like Deborah Messing and you don't want that.
But honestly, that was, I don't know, I can't end with that.

Speaker 2 Like, Simone, you just.

Speaker 1 I'm pro you ending with the Deborah Messing callback.

Speaker 3 I just, I just want to say, like, if also if you're a Jewish person who's listening to this and are actually like, where do I go? What do I do?

Speaker 3 There is a vibrant Jewish left that exists in this country that you could be a part of and learn from. There's groups like Jews for Racial and Economic Justice in New York City.

Speaker 3 There's Jewish Voice for Peace and If Not Now, and Ben the Ark on the national scale. There are vibrant communities of Jews who are fighting for these values.
And so you can be a part of those.

Speaker 3 And the more that you can also support and be part of those organizations and movements and uplift them, as actually a lot of my friends at Jewish Currents have been saying, so much of the hysteria that we are seeing right now is actually from an older generation of Jews who are panicking that they have lost the narrative and lost the control.

Speaker 3 So actually, like the hopeful way to end this, I would say, is knowing that there is a way in which we are winning the narrative in the U.S. right now.

Speaker 3 And we are growing and we are a force to be reckoned with. And they are doing everything in their power to deny our existence and our power.
But guess what?

Speaker 3 We just won the New York mayoral election, baby.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Like, I don't know, that's so dorky of me.

Speaker 1 No, no, you're right.

Speaker 2 Like, Deborah Messing's going to hate that.

Speaker 3 We just won the freaking mayor election, you know, like they are freaking out because we actually won something.

Speaker 3 So like, let's also be not just proud of that, but think about what does it mean to then like continue to build a formidable movement that is really a force to be reckoned with.

Speaker 2 And if not,

Speaker 2 you may end up like Deborah Messing.

Speaker 1 No, I'm just kidding.

Speaker 2 I need to stop making this woman a focal point of my life.

Speaker 3 Listen, Listen, Matt, here's the beautiful thing. Deborah Messing crashed out.
Everybody found out that she crashed out. You have been vindicated.
You get to move on.

Speaker 3 You get to move forward with your life.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I saw that there's some like Zionist on Instagram made a post about me that I happened to see because it was sent to me.

Speaker 2 And I was reading some of the comments, which I know I shouldn't do. But one of the comments was just like, yeah, and he has an unhealthy obsession with Deborah Messing.
And I was like, you know what?

Speaker 1 They got me there.

Speaker 1 Totally. They got you there.

Speaker 2 Can't argue with that.

Speaker 1 Oh, man.

Speaker 2 Matt and Simone, thank you so much for going down this rabbit hole with us today. Where can people find more of both of your excellent work?

Speaker 1 Well, you can find me every week, sometimes twice a week, if you're a patron, on Bad Hasbara, the world's most moral podcast. Yeah, I'm on Instagram and stuff like that at Matt Lieb Jokes.

Speaker 3 Well, I'm on Instagram and Twitter, although I don't usually participate in the Nazi site much anymore.

Speaker 3 But my handle is Simone RZIM in both places, and the Beyond Israelism podcast on Zatayo were out there too.

Speaker 2 And if you've made it this far, which I have no idea how long this episode will be once it's edited, but God bless all of us. Thank you so much for listening.
It means a lot.

Speaker 2 We put a a lot of work into this show, and I'm proud of it. I hope you enjoy listening to it.
I love you so much. And until next time, stay fruity and sane.
Stay sane. It's hard out here.

Speaker 2 All right, that's where I'm going to cut it.