PART 2: The Jewish-Mamdani Vote - with Donniel Hartman & Yossi Klein Halevi

Speaker 1 You are listening to an art media podcast.

Speaker 1 People are committed to Israel, but are troubled with many of the things that Israel is doing. And they're trying to maintain a relationship, being committed and troubled at the same time.

Speaker 1 But for many of them, they've lived for 15 years with a government that doesn't reflect their liberal values.

Speaker 1 When you add a Ben Vir and a Smotrich to the the equation, they're asking themselves, what future does my relationship with Israel have?

Speaker 1 Doesn't mean that they're voting for Mamdani as an expression of an anti-Israel. They're just tired.
They don't want to have an Israel-centric relationship.

Speaker 1 And they'll therefore vote for somebody because he reflects other liberal values.

Speaker 2 New York is the capital city, not just of American Jewry, but of the diaspora.

Speaker 2 To have a representative of of the camp that turned Jewish students on campus into pariahs as the mayor of New York is a violation.

Speaker 2 And the fact that so many Jews turned their backs on the rest of the Jewish community, never mind Israel, they turned their backs on American Jewry, they turned their backs on their fellow New York Jews.

Speaker 2 That's what's eating at me.

Speaker 1 This is part two of our conversation with Daniil Hartman and Yossi Klein Halevi about Zoran Mamdani and Jewish voters in New York City who voted for him and how that is perceived over here in the U.S., in the diaspora, and from Israel.

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Speaker 1 I was listening actually before we recorded this podcast to your most recent episode of For Heaven's Sake, where you guys were trying to make sense of not just Mom Dani's election, but by this peculiar voting block in the New York City electorate of Jews that voted for Mom Dani.

Speaker 1 And you guys were wrestling with this issue.

Speaker 2 Here we go again, Daniil.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I'm sorry, guys. It's like that line from the Godfather.
The more I try to walk away, they suck me back in. I felt that the whole discussion was, I think, unnecessary overreaction.

Speaker 1 Meaning, I don't think there should be overreaction to the election of Mamdani. But I think we are so worried, so many of us, by this narrative, and it predates Mamdani.

Speaker 1 We're obsessed with these young Jews who've turned on Israel.

Speaker 1 And I cannot tell you how many times I could give interviews and they say, well, young Jews are, you know, protesting against Israel for the first time. They're breaking with Israel.

Speaker 1 And I'm seeing the same thing with the reactions of Mamdani. CNN comes out with one exit poll, one.
This is the whole debate.

Speaker 1 Your whole discussion, and for heaven's sake, was based on this one CNN exit poll that said some 30% of New York City Jews voted for Mamdani. Now.

Speaker 2 Do you have any other facts?

Speaker 1 All I know is this. Early exit polls are typically, not always, are typically unreliable.

Speaker 1 It usually takes a few weeks for the very thorough exit polling to come out, where there's a bunch of survey data done, where there are serious follow-ups with people who voted for Mamdani, because all those polls are usually doing is just catching people walking out of the vote.

Speaker 1 Oh, are you Jewish? And they don't ask what that means. Are you Jewish? That could mean many things, obviously.
I don't need to tell you guys this.

Speaker 1 So what you really need to do is you need to go precinct by precinct, which hasn't been done yet. And you know which precincts are heavily Jewish neighborhoods and which aren't.

Speaker 1 And I suspect when the thorough exit polling is done,

Speaker 1 the number is going to be significantly lower than 30%. Let me start with that.
Now, okay, so it's 20%. You know, that's still not nothing, right?

Speaker 1 And that's one in five Jewish voters voting for Mamdani, given what Mamdani represents, is shocking. However, of that subset,

Speaker 1 how many of those voters are the students in Harvard Yard standing with students for justice in Palestine saying, I'm a Jew and I'm here because I'm against Israel, because I'm anti-Zionist?

Speaker 1 You see, Dan, I think you're conflating two issues. Okay.
Okay. Everybody knows, and I think here you're underevaluating a serious problem that we have.

Speaker 1 It is absolutely clear that the percentage of Jews who are part of Jews for justice in Palestine and those other groups is minuscule.

Speaker 1 I'm not worried about this anti-Zionist phenomenon. It might grow, and I don't know the exact percentage, but I agree that it's still very, very small, maybe 5%.
It's not a big deal.

Speaker 1 And there are those who, even those who don't want to have a relationship with Israel, are very careful to say, I'm not anti-Zionist, I'm non-Zionist.

Speaker 1 Like, I just want a Judaism which is not centered around Israel. Fair enough.
But the larger sphere is a sphere that I spent most of my career with. And I call them the troubled committed.

Speaker 1 People are committed to Israel, but are troubled with many of the things that Israel is doing. And they're trying to maintain a relationship, being committed and troubled at the same time.

Speaker 1 But for many of them, they've lived for 15 years with a government that doesn't reflect their liberal values.

Speaker 1 When you add a Ben-Gir and a Smotrich to the equation, they're asking themselves, what future does my relationship with Israel have?

Speaker 1 Doesn't mean that they're voting for Mamdani as an expression of an anti-Israel. They're just tired.
They don't want to have an Israel-centric relationship.

Speaker 1 And they'll therefore vote for somebody because he reflects other liberal values. That's what I was trying to say.
It's not that there's an anti-Zionist wave capturing the Jewish world.

Speaker 1 We do see a significant wave of anti-Semitism on the right and on the left, whatever that might be. In the Jewish community, people are on defense.

Speaker 1 But what's most dangerous for us as Jews is not when Jews become anti-Zionists. It's just when they don't care anymore, when they become untroubled, uncommitted.

Speaker 1 It's just too different from my my Judaism. It's too different from my values.

Speaker 1 And when I'm going to make choices, whether it's good for Israel or not, it's just not going to be central to what I decide. That is not a minor, insignificant group of people.

Speaker 1 That trouble committed before you get to Mamdani, where were these trouble committed on October 8th? Where were they? Yeah. Unequivocally with Israel.
Okay.

Speaker 1 Unquestionably. Not even a peep, nothing, completely.
It was February 15th. That tells me everything you need to know.
Of course, but February 15th, where were they? But why? What's February 15th?

Speaker 1 Those who condemned Israel on October 8th were anti-Semitic. Those who blame us for October 7th, those who deny our right to defend ourselves, you're outside.

Speaker 1 By February 15th, May 22nd, wherever it might be. Oh, you're just saying months into the war.

Speaker 1 You're just picking dates.

Speaker 1 Exactly. Who are saying, what does it mean? This is a just war, but what does it mean to fight a a just war justly? They're struggling.
They're worried.

Speaker 1 They're adding into their prayers and shules also for humanitarian aid. They're realizing that I love Israel, but I'm committed to the fact that all people are created in the image of God.

Speaker 1 Can I give you my response to those people? Fair enough. These are largely people.
And this is going to be harsh, what I'm going to say.

Speaker 1 Whether they're young or old, they need to grow up. Okay.
Because what they're really uncomfortable with is not Israel. They're uncomfortable with war.
War is ugly.

Speaker 1 They operated from a sense of survival. But of course, any country in that situation also loses a little bit of its innocence.

Speaker 1 Any country fighting a war, especially the kind of war Israel had to fight after October 7th, is going to lose a little bit of its innocence.

Speaker 1 And then you layer on top of that that this is the first war fought in the social media age. Right.

Speaker 1 When I was in Iraq, in Qatar and Iraq in 2003 and 2004, I thought that was the first war in history that had never been covered like any war before. We had

Speaker 1 hundreds of cable stations there. We had, there was a first war fought with Al Jazeera and Al Arabia and LBC, all these pan-Arab channels.
Every move, these reporters were embedded with the U.S.

Speaker 1 troops. I was like, oh my gosh, no war has ever been covered like this.
It was nothing. Child's play relative to the way that this war, where everyone had like a media company in their pocket.

Speaker 1 Could you imagine, say, the Vietnam War with TikTok? Okay. You had the messiness of war with this crazy social media age.
And I think it makes a lot of people uncomfortable.

Speaker 1 So even if they say principally at an academic level, you know, of course Israel has a right to respond on October 8th. Once it gets going, it's not about the relationship with Israel.

Speaker 1 It's about the relationship with war. Here, my experience is different than yours.
And as you said at the outset, we respect each other, but we don't always agree. And that's good.
Nor should we.

Speaker 1 Life is interesting that way. Listen, I fought in war.
I was a tank commander. I killed people.

Speaker 1 I had to go as a tank commander with half my body out of the tank in very, very narrow alleyways in which every single window was my death.

Speaker 1 Because all someone has to do is this wasn't back in the war in Lebanon. This wasn't bombed.
This wasn't cleared out. Nothing.

Speaker 1 All someone had to do was wait for my tank to pass and to stand up from the window and shoot me with a pistol and I'm dead. I know what I did and I know how complicated and messy war is.

Speaker 1 I accept that. And I also accept that many people,

Speaker 1 especially with everything that you said, don't like that. When I tell people I walk around with a gun, they don't like that messiness.
I walk around with a gun because I refuse to be a victim.

Speaker 1 I don't fit into classic American distinctions and dichotomies and polarities.

Speaker 1 All of Israel is a country that understands that in order to live, sometimes we're going to have to kill. And even when the war is just, there's no such thing as simple, clean realities.

Speaker 1 There is a mess, and I accept it. I think, Dan, though, you are not giving some of the people who are struggling to have a deep relationship with Israel.
You're not giving them enough credit.

Speaker 1 You're telling them to grow up, and I appreciate some of that is there. But some of that is Israel also has to grow up.
And we have to ask ourselves, how did we not fight this war?

Speaker 1 How did we talk about this war? What are the things that we could have done that could have ensconced our commitment to our moral principles? Small little thing.

Speaker 1 When the war in Lebanon starts, Prime Minister Netanyahu gets up and says to the Lebanese, I have no war with you. I have no claim on Lebanon.
I have no claim or animosity towards you.

Speaker 1 This war from the beginning was a confused war. It wasn't just confused for the reasons you said.

Speaker 1 It was also confused because many of the people who were in major positions in Israeli life from the beginning wanted to recapture Gaza. From the beginning had a different vision of the story.

Speaker 1 And so our just war was tainted by a whole slew of other things. Even when we did humanitarian aid, we couldn't take credit for it.
We asked the Americans, say you forced us.

Speaker 1 So there's things that are going on, and I know the people you talk to and I talk to similar people, but they're going to remain unknown.

Speaker 1 There is a sense amongst many of the troubled committed that Israel has relinquished moral aspirations.

Speaker 1 You could fight a messy war, but still tell me what your aspirations are. The individual soldier in the field has core principles on the basis of which they fight.

Speaker 1 I could tell you every Israeli soldier, I'm not saying we don't make mistakes, but every Israeli soldier is trained to fight a war justly. Does that mean we always did it right?

Speaker 1 Does that mean that everybody was perfect? No. But it is ingrained in your training.
In Israel, it's a part of core discipline, who you fire against, who you don't.

Speaker 1 But the larger discourse that world jury saw, besides the TikTok and besides the impossible conditions, was in Israeli society.

Speaker 1 And this goes back to the original point that I made, where unfortunately security and liberal principles have been presented as opposing, and they're not.

Speaker 1 And Israel is strongest when we advocate for both. At the end of the day, we're going to fight.
At the end of the day, we're going to do what's necessary. But who are we? You ask, what's our story?

Speaker 1 It's not choosing between the two. And now, for some reason, I have to choose between the two.
And anybody who raises a moral consideration is betraying Israel, is pro-Hamas.

Speaker 1 That doesn't serve us well. And I think a lot of North American Jewry are actually very mature.
They are fighting for an Israel that they can have a relationship as Jews because they're liberal Jews.

Speaker 1 So some of them grow up. Some of them stop putting impossible conditions on a battlefield, which by definition goes beyond anything we could imagine.

Speaker 1 But still, if we would actually off air do a careful analysis of what Israel could have done and how it spoke, I think part of what we're asking Israel is to go back to your core identity.

Speaker 1 Your core identity is that we are going to be a country that's committed to doing whatever is necessary in order to live. But part of our security is also based on who we are as a people.

Speaker 1 And when I was told, you don't shoot anybody anybody who raises their hands, you don't shoot anybody who doesn't have the means to harm you, and that as a soldier, you have to do everything in your power to protect civilians and to protect prisoners of war.

Speaker 1 That wasn't being weak and that wasn't being wishy-washy on security. That was saying, I am going to fight as a Jew.

Speaker 1 And I want to tell you, Dan, when I went to war and I fought Syrians and I fought Palestinian terrorists, part of the greatest source of my strength is that we knew who we are and what we stand for.

Speaker 1 And the era which is now dominant where security and morality are somehow in conflict, that is a false narrative that we have to find a way to overcome.

Speaker 1 Daniel, I want to bring Yossi back in, and then I know we got to wrap. I just want to say one thing.
I said earlier that people are uncomfortable with war.

Speaker 1 And for all the reasons you just said, and I'm not by any means defending everything the Israeli government did on a number of those issues that that you just described i also think israel's a democracy israel is a democracy with coalition politics that's fighting a war again this is come back to my point like grow up you know this amazing story yoav gallant told me where when the protests began on u.s college campuses blinken was visiting israel And Galant is like floored by these, what he's seeing about what's happening on U.S.

Speaker 1 college campuses. And he says to Blinken, he's like, what is going on? What's going on on your campuses? And Blinken's response was, look, people are really uncomfortable with what you're doing.

Speaker 1 It's very controversial in the U.S.

Speaker 1 And Galant's response was, this is not a problem with what we're doing. You have a problem with how your country is raising its children, that they think that our response is the singular

Speaker 1 flashpoint in the world that they need to storm their campuses over. Like, this is about you.
This is not about us.

Speaker 1 Now, what Blinken was really saying, which he didn't say is, we got to manage these people because they're our voters, right?

Speaker 1 If you look at every problematic thing the Biden administration did after October 7th, and by the way, I have given them enormous credit on this podcast for what they did.

Speaker 1 But they did a lot of things that were problematic.

Speaker 1 And almost every single one of them was a function of them managing their coalition politics and them heading into an election, which is to say, war is messy. Politics is messy.

Speaker 1 War and politics mixed together is messy. And you want to hold Israel to a different standard, which I get and I do too.

Speaker 1 And maybe that is the right impulse, but it feels a little disconnected from reality.

Speaker 1 I know we have to wrap up and I want to let Yossi, who's patiently observing this whole debate, and I'll do what you don't do, Daniel, for heaven's sake, where you say final thoughts, Yoshi, and then you just give your own final thoughts.

Speaker 1 I'm actually going to let Yossi give

Speaker 1 his final words. What is your reaction to what Daniil calls the troubled committed?

Speaker 1 Are they really troubled-committed, or are they committed but troubled troubled with what I would call life in the dangerous neighborhood, which is what Israel has to deal with?

Speaker 2 So at the Hartman Institute, we would really call them more the untroubled committed.

Speaker 2 Because if you have a few qualms, but you basically feel that the moral system is intact, everything is working pretty much the way it should, then you're basically untroubled, committed.

Speaker 2 And I agree with Daniel that the most important work, I think, is there's an Israeli mainstream that needs to be put back together, and there's an American-Jewish mainstream that needs to be put back together.

Speaker 2 And that's a mainstream that allied with Israel on the basis of what we could call the two flags on the Bima of American synagogues.

Speaker 2 And what those two flags represented, the American flag and the Israeli flag, were this notion of a Jewish and democratic state.

Speaker 2 These were the two commitments that brought the Israeli mainstream and the American Jewish mainstream together.

Speaker 2 What worries me, Dan, about the future of the American-Jewish-Israeli relationship, and this is something that I think we all have in common, we've all devoted our lives to making sure that American Jewry stays in relationship with Israel.

Speaker 2 When I moved to Israel in 1982, the year that... Daniel was in the Lebanon War.

Speaker 2 I had just joined Israeli society, and my commitment was trying to make sure that American Jews stayed in relationship to Israel. And that was the beginning of the crack.
You'll both remember that.

Speaker 2 The first Lebanon War was really the time when the relationship was starting to waver. And so what worries me in the relationship are several things.

Speaker 2 First of all, what's happening on the extremes in both communities. And that's really tearing.
the entwinement of the Israeli and American flags. And I'm using that as a metaphor.

Speaker 2 I'm speaking speaking about the entwinement of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.

Speaker 2 That in Israel, the far right is tearing apart democracy and seeing democracy as being a threat to Israel's ability to fight war against terrorism.

Speaker 2 And in American Jewry, a small but growing fringe has basically detached from Israel as a Jewish state, sees the Jewishness of Israel as illegitimate. So that's one piece of it.

Speaker 2 But what Daniel is really talking about is a very powerful shift within the mainstream. And holding that mainstream together involves reaffirming the moral integrity of the Israeli project.

Speaker 2 Now, when you have settlers burning Palestinian villages, with almost no response. We saw a major assault happening yesterday.

Speaker 2 The Israeli prime minister and our defense minister 24 hours later have not yet commented.

Speaker 2 Now our commander-in-chief of the IDF, Samir, has come out and said this is intolerable and we're not going to put up with it.

Speaker 2 And the IDF often plays the role in Israeli society, especially in the last few years, of holding together the Jewish and democratic components of our identity. And that's very counterintuitive.

Speaker 2 You know, in Western societies, the military is not necessarily the repository of democratic values. In Israel, the IDF still is.

Speaker 2 And so we are in a struggle now for holding on to the mainstream loyalty for Israel.

Speaker 2 And, you know, going back to what you were saying about Mamdani, I take, if it's 20%, I take that 20% very seriously. Where I agree with both of you is that the 20% was not a vote against Israel.

Speaker 2 But what it was for me was a vote of indifference, not just to Israel, but to the acute anxieties, the desperation that so many American Jews and Jews around the world feel toward the rise of Mamdani in the most Jewish city in the diaspora.

Speaker 2 New York is the capital city, not just of American Jewry, but of the diaspora.

Speaker 2 To have a representative of the camp that turned Jewish students on campus into pariahs as the mayor of New York is a violation.

Speaker 2 And the fact that so many Jews turned their backs on the rest of the Jewish community, never mind Israel, they turned their backs on American Jewry, they turned their backs on their fellow New York Jews.

Speaker 2 That's what's eating at me. And so the work that we have to do in the end, and here I agree with Daniel, the work is not primarily with the anti-Zionist Jews.

Speaker 2 It's who are those Jews who simply didn't care one way or the other and empowered the camp that declared war on the mainstream American Jewish community.

Speaker 2 That's what I refuse to accept and I refuse to sweep that under the rug. This is not a blip.
This is a major moment in the history of American Jewry.

Speaker 1 So that's a cliffhanger. I'm going to have to have Yossi and Daniil back on and we're going to pick back up and because we just got into, we just dipped our toe in a big topic.

Speaker 1 And I know Daniil is probably going to respond to some of the things I said. I'm plugging.

Speaker 1 I'm plus.

Speaker 1 I know. I know.
I know. I'm having a heart attack here.
Daniel, I really got the last word this time. You did, Yossi.
Yeah, finally.

Speaker 1 If I did nothing else for the, for heaven's sake, cast, as I finally got Yossi the last word.

Speaker 1 Gentlemen, thank you for this. We will link to your podcast in our show notes.
And we will, I really, I mean this genuinely.

Speaker 1 We will do this again soon great because we got we got we were just getting started yeah that's right it was a pleasure thank you take care all right thanks guys

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