The Perfect Storm - with Benjamin Birely

Speaker 1 You are listening to an art media podcast.

Speaker 1 The way that Italy has dealt with the memory of World War II is to emphasize the partisans who were anti-fascist, anti-Nazi Italian fighters, guerrilla fighters.

Speaker 1 And the story is not we were the bad guys and we allied with the Nazis. The story is our government was bad, but we had patriotic anti-fascist fighters, partisans who led the good fight.

Speaker 1 So there is this glorification of the resistance fighter, of the partisan.

Speaker 1 And when you have these three elements coming together, the Catholicism, the left-wing Soviet propaganda for decades on the Middle East, and this kind of idealization of the resistance fighter, you have a perfect storm for this new kind of anti-Semitism/slash anti-Zionism.

Speaker 2 It's 10:30 p.m. on Wednesday, October 29th here in New York City.
It is 4:30 a.m. on Thursday, October 30th in Israel as Israelis get ready to start a new day.

Speaker 2 Earlier today, the IDF announced that 37-year-old reservist Yona Ephraim Feldbaum was killed by Palestinian sniper fire in southern Gaza.

Speaker 2 He was operating an excavator in Rafah when the attack took place.

Speaker 2 Following this, the IDF conducted a wave of strikes on Gaza city, which the Hamas-run civil defense agency said killed over 100 Palestinians.

Speaker 2 The IDF announced this morning that the ceasefire is now restored following the series of strikes.

Speaker 2 On Monday night, Hamas handed over a casket that it claimed held the remains of one of the 13 deceased hostages yet to be returned.

Speaker 2 However, forensic analysis in Israel discovered that the casket contained partial remains of Ophir Sarfati, a hostage whose body was recovered by the IDF back in December of 2023.

Speaker 2 Later, it was revealed that Hamas staged a fake recovery of these remains for the Red Cross, of the partial remains.

Speaker 2 A video shows Hamas operatives placing the partial remains in a large hole and covering the body bag with dirt. Now, on to today's episode.

Speaker 2 Over the past two years, when I, like many of you, would draw attention to the anti-Semitism on college campuses here in the U.S., the anti-Semitism often expressed through violence and harassment and just overall disrupting of Jewish life, I would be told that we are overreacting.

Speaker 2 These are just crazy college students experimenting with radical ideas and acting out like, well, like the way crazy college students have always experimented with radical ideas in previous eras, in the 60s and 70s, for example.

Speaker 2 Don't worry, we were told, once the war in Gaza simmers down, so will the anti-Semitism. This too shall pass.

Speaker 2 Well, the city with the largest Jewish population in the world, outside of Israel, you might even call it the capital of the diaspora, New York City, could be on the cusp of electing as our mayor someone who's just one of those crazy young people experimenting with radical ideas.

Speaker 2 So I guess this too may not pass. Zoram Mamdani is one of the architects of the movement that over the last couple of years has tried to turn Jews into pariahs.

Speaker 2 I'm not here to recite the parade of horribles, you know them, but then once in a while, when you hear a new one of them, it shocks, as it shocked me today.

Speaker 2 Here's Zoram Mamdani in 2021.

Speaker 3 The push is to defund the NYPD and refund all of these different social services and things that actually create safety. And so I think that when

Speaker 3 we need to connect the struggles against austerity with the struggle against the funding of Israeli apartheid.

Speaker 2 He lays out that his political strategy is to tie whatever setbacks and challenges New Yorkers are struggling with must be blamed on quote-unquote Israeli apartheid. And then there's Mamdani in 2023.

Speaker 4 We have to make clear that when the hoop of the NYPD is on your neck, it's been laced by the IEF, especially in New York City.

Speaker 4 You have so many opportunities to make clear the ways in which that struggle over there is tied to capitalist interests over here.

Speaker 2 When you hear these things, you realize this is not just about someone who is trafficking in conspiracy theories. Although that would be bad enough.

Speaker 2 No, this is a man with an obsession, and he's on a mission. We keep being told that he will moderate, but I'm not sure how one moderates away from this kind of obsession.

Speaker 1 And if he were to moderate, when would that happen?

Speaker 2 Wouldn't he have already moderated? Unless his obsession with the Jews is not a bug, but a feature of his campaign.

Speaker 2 When it comes to anti-Semitism in the West, we often ask ourselves, How much worse could it get?

Speaker 2 Given what's happening right now in New York City, it's probably the kind of question we'll be asking with more frequency in the weeks and months and years ahead.

Speaker 2 Which brings me to another part of the diaspora, one that is certainly not New York City, but is home to the most popular anti-Israel movement in the West that you've never heard of.

Speaker 2 The backdrop for this story, Italy. Specifically, Naples, Italy.
Our guest today is Benjamin Barley, who made Aliyah, moved to Israel, in this case from the United States, from Colorado in 2010.

Speaker 2 He completed his BA and MA in ancient history at Tel Aviv University and has worked in Israel's tech sector.

Speaker 2 In the fall of 2024, Benjamin began his PhD in Italy, specifically in Naples, Italy, where he encountered an anti-Israel movement that, well, could be in the future of many other parts of the diaspora.

Speaker 2 Benjamin Byerly on The Perfect Storm. This is Call Me Back.

Speaker 1 Benjamin, welcome to Call Me Back. Happy to be here, Dan.
It's great to have you.

Speaker 2 Like most of the audience here, you had no idea what you were stepping into when you arrived in Italy last fall. I talked a little bit about this in the introduction.

Speaker 2 So my first question is just to set this up. What brought you there? And then I want to get into that feeling of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Speaker 1 So a PhD program brought me to Naples at l'Orientale, which is actually the oldest university in Europe for the study of Asian languages.

Speaker 1 And as you mentioned in the introduction, my background is ancient history, and I specifically work on a comparative study of late ancient Judaism and Zoroastrianism, which is the religion of Iran before Islam.

Speaker 1 And Italian academia in general is one of the best places in the world to work on ancient Iran and ancient Iranian languages. So when I had the opportunity to come, it was just too good to refuse.

Speaker 2 Okay, and how did you realize that this probably wasn't the best place to be as a Jew, as an Israeli, at the time you were there?

Speaker 1 When I arrived in Italy and specifically in Naples in December of last year, and I arrived to the university to present my project, meet my colleagues, meet with my academic tutors.

Speaker 1 And the Orientale campus in Naples is not a centralized campus like in a lot of American universities. It's spread out in different historic buildings in the old center of Naples.

Speaker 1 And on one of the main buildings of the university on the gates is written in Italian to this day, Intifada until victory.

Speaker 1 And I'm not talking about a small scribble on the side or some student graffiti on the main gate of one of the main buildings, Intifada until victory.

Speaker 1 And I realized it had been up for several months and no one was doing anything about it. And that was probably the first red flag when I realized that something here is profoundly wrong.

Speaker 1 And in the following days, as I met with colleagues and I presented my project, the reception was ice cold. I was known as the candidate from Tel Aviv University, and the reception was cold.

Speaker 1 In retrospect, I realized that there was actually an organized boycott of me as an Israeli academic.

Speaker 1 So there were students and colleagues in the doctoral program that saw that a scholar was coming from Tel Aviv University and organized behind the scenes a boycott so that no one would speak to me.

Speaker 2 Wow. So I want to come back to that, but were you like an outlier in that? Like if you were an average regular, you know, Nepali Italian Jewish resident, how would they describe their daily life?

Speaker 1 So Italian Jews have much more of a room to leverage their Italian identity and much more of a space to pivot in these conversations because they're Italians. But I was known as the Israeli.

Speaker 1 And so Israel is front and center. Zionism is front and center.
There's no way to escape and hide behind an identity that you share with the other person.

Speaker 1 So Italian Jews have more room in these kinds of conversations. And I know of one other Italian doctoral candidate in the program that simply doesn't talk about being Jewish.

Speaker 1 She doesn't talk about her background, her family. She has an Italian family name.
So it never comes up. So when you're an Israeli, you have a target on your forehead.

Speaker 2 So what would a day in the life of a Jew in Napoli look like?

Speaker 1 So in Italy in general, a glimpse into the day in the life, and to kind of give you an imaginary scenario, but all based on real experiences I've had over the last year.

Speaker 1 You know, you wake up in the morning to take your kids to school or to start your morning commute to get a coffee.

Speaker 1 And immediately when you walk out of your apartment, you're scanning the street for signs, Zionists are not welcome.

Speaker 1 The main street, just a few minutes from my apartment, there's a shoe shop on one side of the street and a real estate agency on the other side of the street with signs, Zionists not welcome in English and Italian.

Speaker 1 And you have to constantly be prepared for the case that if you go into a shop, you go into a cafe, and they hear your accent, and they ask where you're from, or if they bring up Palestine, you have to be prepared for a hostile encounter.

Speaker 1 And if they know that you're Israeli or they think you might be a Zionist, you have to be prepared to be asked to leave.

Speaker 1 And when you dodge that bullet and make it through that experience, and you make your way to the metro, you are bombarded with graffiti on every street corner. Israel's a terrorist state.

Speaker 1 Israel's genocidal, intifada, Zionists are Nazis.

Speaker 1 And then when you get to to the metro, you open up your phone and you're reading the latest news story of a prominent Italian Jewish intellectual whose father was a Holocaust survivor and he was boycotted at a conference and wasn't allowed to speak because pro-Palestine activists drowned him out and wouldn't leave until he got off the stage.

Speaker 1 You pick up the newspaper and there's story after story after story about Gaza and a cartoon that is talking about the Catholic church in Gaza that was shelled by the IDF.

Speaker 1 And the cartoon jokes that that the IDF was really aiming for baby Jesus.

Speaker 1 Then you check your phone while you're on the metro and you have text messages from friends that were at the LGBTQ Pride the week before and the Italian Jewish LGBTQ organization, not Israeli, not defined as Zionist or political, Italian Jews with a star of David, a rainbow star of David were booed off the stage and bottles were thrown at them.

Speaker 1 And then you end the day by trying to just watch a football game, a soccer game, and the football fans are chanting free free Palestine, Israel is criminal, Palestine is immortal, which might surprise some of your listeners, but it's actually become one of the main chants of the pro-Palestine movement in Italy.

Speaker 1 So you're dealing with this relentless bombardment all throughout the day, everywhere you turn, of this pro-Palestine, anti-Israel sentiment.

Speaker 2 So, I mean, there's, God, there's so much I want to get into here.

Speaker 2 Okay, so we've seen versions of this, not that extreme or that prevalent, but we've seen, I mean, you know, in the West, in the U.S., we've seen versions of this anti-Israel, anti-Semitism sentiment rearing its head in bizarre ways.

Speaker 2 I say this is a New York City resident who may be living under a mayor mamdani come January. So, um, and he's like a vessel.

Speaker 2 He's like, he's not just a vessel, he's also an arsonist on many of these issues and represents a movement that is, you know, a lot of what you're describing is familiar.

Speaker 2 So if we've been bouncing around the U.S., bouncing around Europe, for our listeners in Canada, for our listeners in Australia who've been dealing with versions of what what you're describing, what makes Italy different?

Speaker 1 So there are a couple of things that make Italy different and really representative of something that's happening in Southern Europe in general and also in parts of Latin America.

Speaker 1 And the pro-Palestine movement here, the Palestinianism, is a political and cultural movement that's gone totally mainstream.

Speaker 1 So unlike in other parts of the West, we're not talking about a movement that's centered primarily in leftist political circles, though it's certainly propelled by leftist political circles.

Speaker 1 But it's not just on the left and it's not just in academia and it's also not being driven by a large Muslim immigrant population.

Speaker 1 Italy max has 5% of its population are Muslims, half of what it is in France.

Speaker 1 So what makes it different here is this mainstreamed cross-generational, cross-cultural movement that also crosses regional divides, which is a big deal in Italy, the differences between regions.

Speaker 1 There are some things things in Italian culture that don't transfer regions at all.

Speaker 1 But the pro-Palestine movement is something that crosses generation, it crosses politics, regional divides, class divides, which makes it, in my opinion, fundamentally different than what we're seeing in other places in the West.

Speaker 2 And what were the conditions that you think created this perfect storm of anti-Semitism in Italy, of all places? There must be some historical aspects to this.

Speaker 1 Absolutely. And there are so many layers to this perfect storm.
And that's exactly the term to describe it. So I think there are three root causes.

Speaker 1 One being the Catholic historical and cultural background. Many Italians, obviously, are secular and they're not religious and they aren't actively practicing Catholicism.

Speaker 1 But Catholic antisemitism, we have to remember that until the Second Vatican Council and the Nostra Itate Declaration, which actually was published 60 years ago this week, and kind of reoriented the Catholic Church's position on non-Christian religions and non-Christian religious groups, especially Jews, the Catholic theology was fundamentally anti-Jewish.

Speaker 2 Okay, I just want to explain this thoroughly for our listeners. So, when you just say the Second Vatican Council, that's 1965.

Speaker 1 Absolutely.

Speaker 2 That's sort of like a before and after. So, I just want listeners to understand what you mean by that.

Speaker 2 So, for simplicity's sake, just discussing it here, the Catholic Church officially separates and renounces the anti-Semitism that you're describing that was, you know, coexisted or with Catholicism through this Second Vatican Council in 1965.

Speaker 2 So, that that was like an inflection point.

Speaker 1 And that was long ago. I mean, 60 years ago, in terms of cultural movements and sentiment, that's not very long.

Speaker 1 So while the average Gen Z Italian Catholic is not going to say to you, oh, the Jews killed Jesus, but there's still going to be an archetype in the background.

Speaker 1 The Jews represent something fundamentally foreign.

Speaker 1 And I would even say borderline sinister, because for generation after generation after generation, there's this legacy of religious antisemitism in Italy and also in other Catholic countries in Spain that also has a massive pro-Palestine movement that sees Jews not in a racialized sense, like in Northern Europe, as a biological racial problem, if we think of Nazi anti-Semitism, but as a kind of a metaphysical problem, an archetypal representation of evil.

Speaker 1 And so that's built into the Catholic cultural background. And 60 years is not enough time to root that out entirely.
So that's one route.

Speaker 1 And another route is people forget that post-World War II, Italy had the largest communist party and the largest communist movement in Western Europe.

Speaker 1 And the Italian Communist Party was deeply influenced by Soviet propaganda, especially on the Middle East, especially on Arab nationalism and on the question of Israel.

Speaker 1 You have an Italian left that they haven't discovered Palestine since October 7th.

Speaker 1 They've been promoting this anti-imperialist, anti-Zionist, left-wing Soviet brand of anti-Semitism since the 60s and 70s.

Speaker 1 And so that also merges with this archetypal background of the Jew as something dangerous and sinister that you have in the Catholic memory.

Speaker 1 And then you have years of left-wing, Soviet-aligned propaganda on the Middle East. And then the third route is you have how Italian society has dealt with the legacy of the Holocaust and fascism.

Speaker 1 Because the way that Italy has dealt with the memory of World War II is to emphasize the partisans who were anti-fascist, anti-Nazi Italian fighters, guerrilla fighters.

Speaker 1 And the story is not we were the bad guys and we allied with the Nazis. The story is our government was bad, but we had patriotic anti-fascist fighters, partisans who led the good fight.

Speaker 1 So there is this glorification of the resistance fighter, of the partisan.

Speaker 1 And when you have these three elements coming together, the Catholicism, the left-wing Soviet propaganda for decades on the Middle East, and this kind of idealization of the resistance fighter, you have a perfect storm for this new kind of anti-Semitism slash anti-Zionism.

Speaker 2 So we often focus, I mentioned, we focus on anti-Semitism in the U.S., in Australia, in Canada, obviously France, the U.K., it's really bad in much of Europe, in part because of the size of the Jewish communities there, which at least in Europe and Australia and Canada, those communities pale in size in comparison to the Muslim communities, but they're still vibrant communities.

Speaker 2 Right. I mean, France has something like 350,000 Jews.
That's a size of, I think it's the largest Jewish community actually in Europe. And then the UK is the next largest after that.

Speaker 2 So, I mean, these are, again, small relative to the Muslim communities, but still big communities. We don't hear a lot about really small Jewish communities.

Speaker 2 So I want to talk to you about how Italy's Jewish community has been dealing with this hatred. But before that, can you just give us a primer on Italy's Jewish community?

Speaker 2 Because it's just something we don't know much about. We don't hear much about.

Speaker 1 If you think about a big picture, it's kind of wild because the Italian Jewish community is really the original Western European diaspora community. It all started in Rome.

Speaker 1 And even Ashkenazi, before what we know of as Ashkenaz in medieval Germany and France and the Low Countries, Jews moved moved to Ashkenaz from Italy.

Speaker 1 So when we think of what is the Western European diaspora, what is the European diaspora, it all goes back to Italy. The Jewish community today is max 35,000 people.

Speaker 1 The estimates vary between 25,000, 35,000. You're talking about a country of 59 million people with 35,000 Jews.
That's 0.05% of the population. And most of them are centered in large cities.

Speaker 1 But I think the most important point to remember is that this small community that a lot of Americans don't hear about is quite possibly the oldest Jewish diaspora communities in Europe.

Speaker 1 The Nussach Italchi, the Nussach of Rome, is not Ashkenazi, not Sephardi, because it predates both.

Speaker 1 The way that Italian Jews are davening or praying in Rome is how they were davening 2,000 years ago before there wasn't even a Nusak Ashkenaz and a Nusach Svarad.

Speaker 1 In the Middle Ages, after the expulsion from Spain, you have a wave of Sephardi immigrants.

Speaker 1 So you still have Italian Jews with Spanish last names that integrated and intermarried with the local Italian Jewish population.

Speaker 1 And in the 15th and 16th centuries, you had some Ashkenazing that came from the north, but today don't make up a community.

Speaker 1 And then interestingly, post-Six-Day War, there was a wave of Libyan Jews from Libya fleeing anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism in Libya.

Speaker 1 So you have a large Libyan Jewish community in Rome and a large Persian community in Milan.

Speaker 1 So for such a small community, you have a wide array of Jewish experiences, some dating back 2,000 years, some dating back 60 years.

Speaker 2 And how has this very small community, as you said, 0.5%, been dealing with what you're describing?

Speaker 1 So I think it's fair to say, like any Jewish community, especially any small Jewish community, there's a variety of reactions. There are those who are in denial.

Speaker 1 There are those who are trying to organize and ensure community safety, and they're focused on collaboration with the police and with the government and protecting the schools and the synagogues and the local institutions.

Speaker 1 And then there are those that are trying to take more of an advocacy or activism route and counter the anti-Israel sentiment and anti-Jewish sentiment.

Speaker 1 But when you're talking about a community of 30,000 people and a portion of them are assimilated and not affiliated and you're in a core community of maybe 20, 25,000 people, options are limited.

Speaker 1 We're talking about a community that doesn't have the same kind of infrastructure, the same kind of legacy organizations, the same kind of funding that communities in America and the UK or France have.

Speaker 1 So the community, I think, is doing its best with very limited resources.

Speaker 2 Are they politically organized as a community?

Speaker 1 They are politically organized as a community. The key word being politically organized, but not in terms of activism.

Speaker 1 So it's a community that's very much focused on close alliances with particular politicians and particular political parties and lobbying the government, but it's not a political organization where you see the Jewish community playing a really active role like we're seeing now in New York in elections or canvassing and campaigning and on social media, in the media.

Speaker 1 The community isn't big enough and doesn't have the presence to do something like that. And you also have to remember this is a community that survived the Holocaust.

Speaker 1 So there is a kind of instinctive knee-jerk reaction not to make too much noise, to defend the the community, preserve the community, but not to approach it too aggressively, as maybe in the US we'd feel more comfortable doing.

Speaker 1 So when you're speaking to Italian Jews that are Gen X, boomers, over 45, there's much more of an instinct to say, this will pass, we'll get through this, it's not as big of a deal as it might seem.

Speaker 1 There's a lot of exaggeration, it's not so bad. And where you see the alarm bells really going off are with very young Italian Jews, Gen Z.

Speaker 1 So we have an inversion of what we see in the US in a way where those who are most concerned aren't 45-year-old, 55-year-old Italian Jews, but they're 20-year-olds who are realizing that they don't have a future.

Speaker 1 And one of the most common conversations I have with Italian Jews who are 18 to 22 when they know that I've come from Israel is, how do you make aliyah? What is Masa? How did you learn Hebrew?

Speaker 1 How do I learn Hebrew? How do you work in tech? Is it really easy to get a job in Israel? What is the cost of living in Israel? Do I have to go to the army? How does that work?

Speaker 1 Those are the conversations I'm having with 20-year-old Italian Jews. I'm not having these ideological, what does it mean to be a Zionist? I'm a Zionist.
It's very practical.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's not ideological.

Speaker 1 And then when you speak to older Italian Jews, it's more of a, no, no, no, this will pass. It's fine.
So it's a very interesting inversion of kind of where is the worry? Where is the panic?

Speaker 1 And it's not with the parents, it's with the young students.

Speaker 2 Yeah, the corollary to that, though, because I've seen this when I talk to Jewish communities in the UK and France, many of the older Jews are worried about it, but you know, it's harder to be mobile when you're older.

Speaker 2 So younger people also just have that like flexibility. They're willing to take risks.

Speaker 2 Whereas it's a much tougher pill to swallow for someone older to say, wait a minute, I've lived here my whole life. I built my career here.
I'm retired here. And now you're telling me I got to uproot.

Speaker 2 And yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, and also it's for a community who the older generations either survived the Holocaust or they survived anti-Jewish riots in Libya and came to Rome, the bar for when we need to get out is very high.

Speaker 1 And there's this approach that, well, we survived the Holocaust, we survived Libya.

Speaker 1 If the store says no Zionists are allowed and the students are praising Intifada and the media is talking about Hamas as resistance, okay, it's not the worst thing that we've gone through.

Speaker 1 It could get much worse. Yeah.

Speaker 2 So you spoke about how the left has influenced anti-Semitism in Italy.

Speaker 2 Obviously, Italy, as you referenced earlier, has this history with fascism, Mussolini, its alliance with Germany during the Second World War.

Speaker 2 Do you see much, quote-unquote, what historians would call kind of classic anti-Semitism, which you could trace back to Italy's fascist era?

Speaker 1 So this comes up in neo-fascist groups, which you have everywhere, far-right groups that glorify Mussolini and the fascist period.

Speaker 1 And you do find in these groups, especially in sports, because somewhat like in Israel, Israel, but not like in the US, Italian sports is very political.

Speaker 1 So often there's a strong corollary between your politics and which team you support.

Speaker 1 And you find very classic right-wing anti-Semitic chants in football or soccer stadiums and in football clubs on the right. And you have a kind of a fetish for Nazi memorabilia.

Speaker 1 But the kind of racialized World War II, Nazi allied anti-Semitism, and we have to remember there were racial laws in Italy. Italy instituted racial laws against Jews.

Speaker 1 So that kind of racist, right-wing, classic anti-Semitism is not something I've encountered a lot in the mainstream.

Speaker 1 It's almost always tied to Palestine and Jews as colonizers, invaders, imperialists, oppressors.

Speaker 1 and much less of the classic, you know, Jews control the media and have all the money and are somehow an inferior element in our society.

Speaker 1 That kind of anti-Semitism you'll only find, at least I've only found on hard right groups.

Speaker 2 But there is this with Napoli, like the football club, there's this, I remember hearing these stories about football, I don't want to apply broad brush here, but Napoli football club fans visiting the spot where Mussolini was buried or where Mussolini was killed.

Speaker 2 Like there's something about honoring Mussolini. Am I right about that?

Speaker 1 So this surprises a lot of people, but Mussolini's tomb is a place that people go on pilgrimage to. You can go to his tomb and people bring flowers.
There are fresh flowers every day.

Speaker 1 Mussolini's tomb is really kind of a symbolic representation of the lack of a de-Nazification or a de-fascist process after World War II. All of the fascist architecture was preserved.

Speaker 1 It was not taken down.

Speaker 1 The buildings that were built in the 20s and 30s in Italy have a very classic fascist style, and many of the buildings bear the fascist year because during the fascist period, the government started counting a new number of years.

Speaker 1 So the first year to the fascist period, the second year, and buildings we'll have.

Speaker 1 The local post office is a beautiful fascist building around the corner from my apartment, and it has fascist year in big letters on the building. All of this is still up.

Speaker 1 Monuments to soldiers in World War II are still up. There was never a process here of kind of cleansing the public space of fascist monuments and fascist symbolism.

Speaker 1 So this is a part of the Italian landscape.

Speaker 1 Now, I don't know of a story of Napoli specifically, the football team, being connected to Mussolini, because the Napoli football team is a very left-wing fan base.

Speaker 1 And it would interest you that their ultras, so their hardcore football group, are called Fedain.

Speaker 1 And Fedain, of course, are Arab guerrilla fighters. It literally means in Arabic, one who sacrifices himself for the struggle.

Speaker 1 And the reason why is in the 1970s, there was a period of political violence in Italy.

Speaker 1 And a lot of football teams were aligned with the Red Brigades, which was a communist Marxist group, that used the image of the Palestinian guerrilla fighter as the representation of fighting all oppression.

Speaker 1 So, because Napoli is in the south in Italy, which is historically poor and has this kind of identity politics of being disadvantaged and kind of oppressed by the north, they have taken on the image of the Palestinian resistance fighter as their local symbol.

Speaker 1 So, the ultras are called the Fedayin.

Speaker 1 One story that really kind of sums up my experience and what I think it means to be a Jew here and what it means to be an Israeli here is earlier this year, Napoli won the national championship in the football championship, the soccer Serie A championship, which is a huge deal.

Speaker 1 It's a huge part of the local culture. And I went to watch the game.
It was on Shabbat, so I couldn't go to a bar and I couldn't go over to a friend's house to watch it on a TV.

Speaker 1 So I went to the main square in the heart of Napoli, the main piazza, to watch the game on the big screens with thousands of people, thousands of Neapolitans from all different backgrounds, young people, middle class people, working class people.

Speaker 1 And the patriotism in the crowd and the excitement, I mean, it's infectious. I was even chanting and yelling and getting into it as if I was from here.

Speaker 1 And when Napoli won the game and won the championship, I look around and people are waving Palestinian flags left and right. And they're chanting in Italian, free Palestine.

Speaker 1 Israel is is criminal, Palestine is immortal. And I'm talking about middle class, working class, young guys, their girlfriends, groups of young guys.
I'm not talking about leftists.

Speaker 1 I'm not talking about woke college kids. I'm not talking about Muslim immigrants.

Speaker 1 I'm talking about the heart and soul, the guts of the city celebrating their football championship with Palestinian flags and chants about Palestine. Because it's been so internalized.

Speaker 2 So now I want to make sense then, given everything you've said, I want to make sense of Italy's prime minister, Maloney.

Speaker 1 Giorgio Maloney.

Speaker 2 She's been prime minister for three years now, exactly. She's interestingly the first woman.
She's both the first woman to hold the premiership, the prime minister, to become prime minister in Italy.

Speaker 2 She also is now like one of the longest serving prime ministers, given the frequency with which governments fall in Italy and how dysfunctioned politics are.

Speaker 2 So she seems to be quite an impressive politician and her finger on the pulse, at least, of the populism of Italy and the populist right.

Speaker 2 And I remember when she was elected and when she was running, and when she was elected, observers, analysts who follow European politics, Italian politics, were horrified about her ascendance because she was this crazy right-wing, quote-unquote, crazy right-wing populist.

Speaker 2 And here she is. She's, like I said, her government now, something like the third longest government in the history of the Italian Republic, which is like, so there's some stability there.

Speaker 2 And she's very pro-Israel. She did not join the parade of European governments this past summer that recognized the Palestinian state.

Speaker 2 So she's bucking this trend on the continent as it relates to Israel. How do you explain that? How do you reconcile that?

Speaker 1 So she's bucking the trend, but she's not pro-Israel in the way that maybe many people, especially in the U.S., would think.

Speaker 1 She's pro-Israel in the way that a liberal Democrat used to be 20 or 30 years ago.

Speaker 1 Maloney's position, and because she has the pulse on Italian populism, both left and right, is she always mentions in all of her interviews and speeches, we need a two-state solution.

Speaker 1 Palestinians deserve freedom and dignity. She talks about the kids in Palestine.
She talks about her government bringing kids for medical treatment in Italy.

Speaker 1 When she talks about political pressure, she says, I understand why people want to boycott Israel, but I understand the role of political pressure, but we need to apply it to Hamas first instead of Israel.

Speaker 1 So she's not pro-Israel in this way where she says, We stand with Israel against terrorism. We stand with Israel against Islamism,

Speaker 1 you know, bomb them and rah-rah Israel.

Speaker 1 Her position is very nuanced in the sense that she tries to toe the line between saying, yes, Palestinians deserve the right to freedom and dignity, and what's happening in Gaza is awful.

Speaker 1 Several times this year, she said Israel's gone too far and it's losing legitimacy.

Speaker 1 Israel started with legitimacy after October 7th, but is going too far, especially after the shelling of the Catholic Church in Gaza. She was very vocal about that.

Speaker 1 So she's tried to do this dance between being pro-Israel and closely aligned with the Trump administration, but she's not pro-Israel in the sense that one might imagine in terms of, for example, Republican politicians in the U.S.

Speaker 1 And I think that that also encourages, in a way, the anti-Israel sentiment in Italy.

Speaker 1 Because her premiership has been largely successful, the left can't tackle her or can't attack her on a lot of issues. But what they can get her on is Israel-Palestine.

Speaker 1 And there's actually an Italian group that's trying to take her to the International Criminal Court of Justice for complicity in genocide.

Speaker 1 And she is constantly asked by center-left and left-wing reporters about her complicity.

Speaker 1 A lot of the anger and frustration on the left about her ability to serve this long is channeled further into anti-Israel sentiment. So it's a very unique animal.

Speaker 1 When we look at Maloney, we're really looking at a unique animal when we think about how European politicians are pro-Israel because she's not pro-Israel in the classic sense.

Speaker 2 Okay, Benjamin, before we wrap, and I have a feeling you're going to be back on this podcast because I feel like we have a lot more ground to cover with you on other issues as well.

Speaker 1 But I just want our listeners to understand who you are beyond what I...

Speaker 2 how I described you in the bio, in the intro, and how this experience in Italy might have changed you.

Speaker 2 Because I feel like listening to you talk, you were on this, you went there with a specific purpose and you wound up in like this discovery journey that you probably didn't plan for.

Speaker 2 So it's a bit hard to put you in a box. You're American.
You're Israeli. You made Aliyah.
You're on the political and ideological left in Israel, at least. You're religious.
You're a religious Jew.

Speaker 2 So it's hard to describe how you, you know, kind of walked into anti-Israel Italy and how you walked out, meaning how has it changed you? What did you learn?

Speaker 1 Right. Yeah, it's definitely difficult to put me in a box.
box.

Speaker 1 And I would say that I carry within myself a lot of worlds because, as you said, Med Aliyah after high school, so grew up in the U.S., in Colorado, very American, very middle-America-American.

Speaker 1 Me'd Aliyah became very Israeli. And my political journey in Israel started very hard left and has moderated quite a bit over these experiences, both in Israel and outside of Israel.
I'm religious.

Speaker 1 I'm also gay. which is a whole other topic that we could do many episodes on.

Speaker 1 So in one sense, it's difficult to think, wait, how did this guy guy end up in Italy dealing with anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism?

Speaker 1 But it also makes sense because and all these other things, why not add another crisis, another identity crisis to the list?

Speaker 2 Why try to simplify it?

Speaker 1 Let's just make it even more complicated. Yeah.
You know, I went from being gay and religious in Jerusalem to being Israeli and quote-unquote Zionist in Italy. So it's...
Right.

Speaker 2 So the Italians, you're not only gay, but you're Zionist and right-wing.

Speaker 1 Right, and complicit in genocide and complicit in apartheid. Right, right, right, right.
Yeah. A walking representation of all that is evil in the world.
So it's quite a mix. Right.

Speaker 1 But I think the question of how this has changed me is the question because it is, it's profoundly changed me.

Speaker 1 I say to people that Italy has taught me, again, I'm not born in the Jewish community in Italy. I didn't grow up in Italy.

Speaker 1 So my perspective is that of an American Israeli Jew who came here from the outside. But that experience has taught me what it means to be a Jew in the diaspora.

Speaker 1 Because the American diaspora is something unique. It's something unique.

Speaker 1 And for all of the challenges and all of the problems and the new anti-Semitism and the fear and the frustration, the anger, there's a lot of American Jews, there's a lot of organization, there's a lot of institutions, a lot of infrastructure.

Speaker 1 Compared to Italy, America literally is the golden state. I mean, it literally is the land of everything.

Speaker 1 Because when you're talking about a community that's 2.4% of the population in the country to 0.05%, it's a completely different diaspora experience.

Speaker 1 And to live in Italy has taught me what it means to be a micro-minority and not only to be a member of a micro-minority, but the micro-minority that is a topic of national conversation every day, that you are associated by default with this state that is 24-7 on the news.

Speaker 1 And that identity is framed as something dangerous and subversive in the world. And the reality that you're living in is hostile.

Speaker 1 Even the most left-wing Italian Jew is aware that the environment is just hostile.

Speaker 1 Walking around, talking about being Jewish, being Jewish, being Israeli, you are walking around in a hostile environment. You have to be on guard 24-7.

Speaker 1 You have to be careful about who you trust, who you speak to, how you speak to them. And this is a diaspora experience that I didn't have in the U.S.
as a teenager before making aliyah.

Speaker 1 And it's not a diaspora experience that most of my American Jewish friends are living in.

Speaker 1 As someone who became Israeli and spent my entire adult life in Israel and my academic journey in Israel, all my professional life in Israel, I think Israelis sometimes, not necessarily in a bad way, but Israelis lose focus of the global Jewish experience.

Speaker 1 And in my, especially in my left-wing days in Israel, there were times where it's very easy to fall into kind of a post-Zionist mentality, even after October 7th.

Speaker 1 I still, I know some left-wing Israelis that are kind of in a post-Zionist mindset, but living in Italy has taught me that not only is Israel a necessity in terms of safety, but a necessity in terms of culture.

Speaker 1 When I talk to these young Italian Jews who are 20 years old and they're asking me, you know, how can I learn Hebrew? What Israeli media should I watch? What song should I listen to?

Speaker 1 It's not just about safety. It's about wanting to be a part of a culture that they can be a part of and they're safe.
culturally safe.

Speaker 1 Because in Italy today, every musician, every artist, everything is Palestine and anti-Israel. And so if you are openly and proudly a Jew, you have to navigate that.

Speaker 1 And Israel represents not only this safe haven in terms of our bodies, but this kind of cultural safe haven that, ah, there's this place where Jews can be Jews and partake in culture.

Speaker 1 And being Jewish isn't a liability in those spaces.

Speaker 2 This has been quite illuminating. There's so many topics you just sort of touched on that weren't the focus of this conversation that could each be their own episode.

Speaker 2 So I think we will be, pardon the phrase, calling you back.

Speaker 1 And I also want to say to American Jews, it's also a lesson in solidarity, that when we think of the diaspora, the diaspora is not just london and new york and melbourne and miami the diaspora is also rome madrid mexico city santiago chile and there are small jewish communities that are dealing with the same rise in anti-semitism but magnified 10 times with 10 times less infrastructure and community support and 10 times less spotlight i mean no one's paying attention absolutely so podcasts like mine and jewish organizations like some of the ones i'm involved with don't they don't don't have the time or the resources to pay attention.

Speaker 2 So these communities can feel even lonelier than they already feel.

Speaker 1 Absolutely. All right.
Thank you for this, Benjamin. Thank you very much.
It's good to be here.

Speaker 2 That's our show for today. If you value the Call Me Back podcast and you want to support our mission, please subscribe to our weekly members-only show, Inside Call Me Back.

Speaker 2 Inside Call me back is where nadavayal amit segel and i respond to challenging questions from listeners and have the conversations that typically occur after the cameras stop rolling to subscribe please follow the link in the show notes or you can go to arcmedia.org that's arkmedia.org call me back is produced and edited by elon benatar Arc Media's executive producer is Adam James Levin Aretti sound and video editing by Martin Huergo and Mariana Liz Burgos Our director of operations, Maya Rockoff.

Speaker 2 Research by Gabe Silverstein. Our music was composed by Yuval Semo.
Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.