1208: Antisemitism | Skeptical Sunday

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Welcome to Skeptical Sunday.

I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger.

Today I'm here with Skeptical Sunday co-host, writer, and researcher Nick Bell.

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Today, it's not the most pleasant topic on earth, but make no mistake about it.

Anti-Semitism is on the rise in America and in the West.

Part of this is a problem of exposure.

The internet allows people to just post whatever crosses their mind at any given moment, but it isn't limited to the internet either.

The Anti-Defamation League noted a 360% increase in anti-Semitic incidents, including 56 physical assaults, 554 incidents of vandalism, and over 1,300 incidents of verbal or written harassment.

There was also the May 2025 shooting outside of a Jewish museum in Washington, D.C., the firebombing of the protest for the release of Israeli hostages in Colorado.

One quirk of modern anti-Semitism is that it's mostly not coming from the usual suspects of swastika wearing skin heads.

Today's leading lights of anti-Semitism are soft-spoken, well-read, and armed with charts and citations.

And perhaps most disturbingly, just ignoring them is perhaps the most dangerous thing that we can do.

Today's anti-Semites are dressed, pressed, and probably more serious than ever.

All of this raises the question, why do smart people fall for dumb ideas?

And why is anti-Semitism rearing its ugly head yet again?

Here today to help me fact-check the fine print on the world's oldest conspiracy theory is writer and researcher Nick Pell.

So, Nick, before we get into it, explain why you were so insistent about covering this topic.

And by the way, quick note, as many of you already know, I am Jewish, so keep that in mind during the episode for reasons that will probably become pretty obvious.

Honestly, because I'm so tired of seeing people confront anti-Semitism in this lazy kumbaya, all people are the same.

Hate is bad, kids.

Okay, it's this like after-school, special, lazy, childish way.

It's ill-prepared to confront modern anti-Semitism and it puts people I love in danger.

Are you also a member of the tribe?

People want to know.

I'm not Jewish, but I am married to a Jew and we have a baby on the way.

So for those of you unfamiliar with Mosaic law, that means that I'm about to be the father of a Jew.

Right.

Any children we have will be halakically Jewish.

Is halakhically a 50 cent word that means half Jewish?

So according to Jewish law, there's not really such a thing as half Jewish.

Your mom is a Jew, you're Jewish.

Okay.

Your mom is a Gentile, you're Gentile.

I mean, it's kind of moot because Hitler didn't care about Mosaic law.

It was more of a racial thing in Nazi Germany.

Regardless, when me and my wife were first talking, we agreed that if we ever had kids, we were going to raise them with a very strong sense of their ethnic Jewish identity.

What does Jewish identity mean in your case, specifically?

We celebrate Passover and Hanukkah at home.

She found some like box collection thing that's about Jewish holidays that's for kids.

We'll probably get that.

I always tell my mother-in-law, Happy New Year on Rosh Hashanah.

I speak German.

I'm adamant that my children learn Yiddish around 12, 13, 14, because that's what all the European Jewish newspapers, plays, poems, novels and such were in for the last several hundred years is actually dying off since the founding of the state of Israel, which is really sad.

There's very few people outside of certain parts of Brooklyn that can read Yiddish anymore.

I think the point of this for our listeners is that a lot of people don't really know what it means to be Jewish.

Is it a race?

Is it a religion?

It's kind of a bit of both.

The sociological term is ethno-religious community.

So is that part race or ethnicity and part religion, kind of?

Is that what that means?

Yeah, if you become a Christian or a Buddhist or anything else, you're still Jewish in some sense.

It's also worth super briefly touching on.

Even the Jews we have here in the West aren't a united ethnicity.

You've got Ashkenazi Jews who are mostly Russian, German.

Austrian Empire, you know, Poland would have been part of that.

Sephardic Jews.

That's my wife.

That's most Jews in the United States, particularly in the Northeast.

Sephardic Jews, who you would see more in the American South, are Mediterranean, Spain, Italy, certain parts of the Levant.

Mizrahi Jews originate in Persia or, you know, recently in Persia.

I know they all come from the Holy Land, but so I don't want people to think that I'm minimizing that, but their traditions come from time in Persia.

There's other groups, Ethiopian Jews, Yemeni Jews.

They're not very common in the West, but they all have their own overlapping traditions.

So when someone talks about how the Jews control the world,

it's like, which ones?

All of them, bro.

No, that's, I mean, a meaningless phrase can have a meaningless answer.

Anyway, that's the nickel tour of the different Jewish ethnic communities, I suppose.

But what can you tell us about the history of anti-Semitism?

Obviously, this spans thousands of years, so maybe we try to keep it brief.

I mean, if all the Jews come from the Holy Land, Israel, or whatever you want to call it, And then you've got like Mizrahi Jews from Persia, but that, oh, no, that's recent.

That was only 4,000 years ago.

It's like, oh, God, I'm getting, you know, can we do this in less than seven hours?

Oh, absolutely.

And it's actually interesting that you, you say that, because that's a like common gripe of anti-Semites is that Jews aren't, you know, they're not really from Israel or from Poland or whatever.

As long as you stop history at a point that's convenient for you, yes.

Benjamin Netanyahu is from Philadelphia.

I know.

Fun fact.

The short version is that modern anti-Semitism can be seen broadly in three phases.

First, there's the religious anti-Semitism.

This is the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, that time period.

That revolves around grotesque misrepresentations of Jewish religious practices, claims that Jews used infant blood in their rituals and poisoned wells and things like that.

All of that's pretty obviously untrue, yeah.

Right.

There are all kinds of expulsions of Jews from places in Europe and North Africa.

These expulsions, as well as more recent ones, are often used in a way to kind of, it's like where there's smoke, there's fire thing, you know, well, the Jews have been thrown out of all these countries.

Don't you think there's something there?

The figure generally used is that Jews have been expelled from 109 countries.

When I hear that, I'm like, geez, that's, gosh, tell me why that, what's that all about?

But is that figure even accurate?

Have Jews been expelled from 109 countries?

Or is that one of those like, hey, we chose this number because it sounds persuasive, but, you know, we pulled it out of thin air.

It's not a real number.

Okay.

Count, for example, the expulsion of Jews from London as being expelled from an entire country.

The real number of countries that Jews have been expelled from is difficult to pinpoint exactly, but it's somewhere around 12.

All right.

Well, let me make a note.

London, not a country.

But it's almost like a semantic argument, right?

Because people might go, well, London was a city-state back then, so it kind of counts as a country in modern parlance, so it's the same thing.

I don't know.

But okay, as unclean as it makes me feel to play devil's advocate on this particular issue, the point still remains that Jews, we Jews, I should say, keep getting expelled from various places, yeah?

Well, first of all, I think when people have to exaggerate facts, it's because their actual facts suck.

We don't do that on this show.

We steel man all of our arguments.

And if your whole argument revolves around various straw men, your argument sucks.

Second of all, if we're using this statistic to the degree that it's even true, It's worth asking why.

I think that's a totally fair question.

Yeah, I'm curious about this.

Why did Jews get expelled?

Because it is something that seems to happen here and there.

I mean, Gabriel Mizrahi's family, you know, left Persia, went to Spain, went to Portugal.

They don't live there anymore.

They went to Mexico, right?

And it's like, okay, what's going on here?

That's like the encapsulation of the Mizrahi diaspora's like chain of.

There's a lot of different reasons, and I'm not saying this is true in all cases, but.

A bunch of the medieval and early modern expulsions are due to financial reasons.

Ah, okay.

So is this the stereotype that Jews control the banks?

Let's get rid of them or what's that about?

Yeah.

So

people kind of hand wave this, but at a certain time in history, there's a truth to Jews run the banks.

Today, it's just false.

Of the 10 biggest investment banks in the world,

again, it's very difficult to pinpoint these numbers because of the whole fuzzy area of what counts as a Jew, but I could identify three who were definitively Jewish in some sense.

One of them is the CEO of Goldman Sachs, which is a firm founded specifically specifically because other banks wouldn't employ Jews.

That's interesting.

Your bank's run by Jews.

Yeah, we all had to work here because you guys said we couldn't work there because we were Jewish.

Well, I'm still right.

Okay.

Yeah, it's like big shock.

Brandeis University is run by Jews.

The university founded because Jews couldn't get into Harvard.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, I hate to laugh, but it's like.

My buddy's dad was, he left Russia because he had a PhD in chemistry or something and he couldn't get a job.

So he left and went to the United States and worked at Dow Chemical and, you know, made a ton of money or whatever.

And my friend was telling me that like other Russian extended family in Russia that's not Jewish is like, see, the Jews, they just go internationally and make a bunch of, it's like, I couldn't get a job.

No one would employ me because I was Jewish.

So I left the country and got a job at a place that wasn't racist.

And now you're pissed off about that.

And it's like, yes, yes, that's exactly you.

Nope.

No, you got the right.

You got it right.

That's, that's why we're mad.

Like, make it make sense.

Come on.

We'll drill into the negative effects of getting rid of all of your Jews a bit later, but there's precisely one Jewish IMF governor.

He represents Israel, by the way.

Surprise.

And one member of the World Bank Board of Directors who is Jewish that I could find.

Again, it's a very difficult number to get.

So if it's, you know, four, I'm sorry.

I did my best.

There are two central banks in the entire world headed by Jews.

And again, one of them is Israel's big surprise.

Again, not surprising.

So you said there's some truth to this in history, though.

In fact, for some of what we're talking about, there's a kernel of truth that gets blown up into a gigantic lie.

I asked Nick on here to, again, steel man anti-Semitism for a couple of reasons.

First, I thought it was way more valuable to have a conversation about what intellectually sophisticated, in air quotes, I suppose, anti-Semites actually believe rather than like the cartooned version of anti-Semitism.

Second, Nick is, what do you call it, intellectually curious, and that leads him to dive pretty deep deep into topics that he doesn't necessarily agree with, of course, but nonetheless finds interesting.

I mean, I guess I'm similar.

Yeah, I find weird, marginal, bizarre, and yes, even hateful beliefs interesting.

I mean, some of them are just weird and stupid.

There was a group of communists who wanted to communicate with dolphins called Posadas.

What?

Really?

That's extra dumb.

Yeah, they also thought aliens would.

necessarily be communists.

Yeah.

Is that weirder?

I don't know.

The dolphin thing's pretty weird, too.

Yeah, it's all weird.

It's a fun thing to Google that like when I was 15, I knew about it.

And when I would tell people about it, they just thought I was insane.

And now it's like, hey, they got a Wikipedia entry.

This is verified real.

Okay.

Why did you tell me that?

Because I like, yeah, I just, I find weird beliefs interesting.

Some of it's just weird.

Some of it has, you know, some kind of intellectual merit to it and it's worth exploring because it doesn't fit in this neat little box or they may be right about this one thing and you incorporate that into your thinking, but they're wrong about everything else.

I've done super deep dives on absolutely idiotic ideas that I 100% disagree with because I find the psychology and the motivations of the person who believes these things interesting.

You know, it's just good to know things.

I agree.

From my perspective, I just see anti-Semitism as growing in terms of acceptability and influence.

I mean, I've been in conversations with people online and like five years ago, you'd say like, wait, do you hate Jews?

And they'd be like, no, that's not what I'm saying.

And now they're like, yeah.

And what?

What are you going to do about it?

And I'm like, oh, that's weird.

I did not, I'm not going to do anything about it.

You're clearly just like a weird, insane person.

One guy, one guy, I thought of you during the, this guy was arguing with me and he was like pretty masked off.

And I was like, mask off, eh?

And he's like, yeah.

And by the way, I don't see any Jewish astronauts.

And I'm like, so is your argument that Jews haven't really accomplished much because there are no Jewish astronauts?

Is that, is that what you're saying?

Because maybe there are no Jewish astronauts, but if that is sort of supposed to to indicate that like Jews haven't done anything, I

like gestures broadly at every industry on planet Earth.

You know, like, okay.

Yeah, let's do Nobel Prizes next.

Yeah, exactly.

Nobel Prize winners.

Exactly.

It's so ridiculous.

Anyway, I wanted to do my part to raise the red flag about all of this without being alarmist.

I also wanted to make sure people knew that anti-Semites weren't toothless Klansmen living in the hills someplace.

Those folks obviously exist, I guess, but I don't, they're not the biggest threat to Jews in America and the West, right?

They're probably shooting guns off the back of their porch somewhere, daydreaming about, what do they call it, societal collapse, but they're not influential.

They're not doing anything.

And the only person that they're convincing to join their fold is their sister cousin, right?

So who cares?

Yeah, I agree.

Anti-Semitism is becoming more acceptable in what you might call polite middle-class circles.

It's becoming more of an issue.

I mean, I genuinely worry about my wife and my mother-in-law.

So in the case of Jewish banking, what's the truth that underpins the lie here?

Because you said that there's not that many bank directors that are Jewish.

So where does this come from?

Christians were prohibited from lending money at interest through most of the Middle Ages, most slash all.

So if you wanted to borrow money, you had one of two options.

You could offer a return, a percentage of the return on your investment.

You might get blacklisted for paying a loan on time because one of the ways they got money was you being late, which sucked.

Nobody wanted to do that.

So the other option was you could go to the Jews and the Jews were allowed to loan money and interest and thus offered a obviously superior financial product because we don't do the weird medieval Christian form of money lending anymore.

We just do the interest thing.

So when you say offer a percentage of return on investment, basically it'd be like instead of taking a loan from a bank, you're basically saying, hey, you give me the money.

And if my business is successful, I give you a return on that.

And if it's not, you lose all the money.

So there's massive risk for the lender.

And then you have to do the math and see if the return is worth the risk.

Whereas with interest, it's like, okay, I have to do the math here, but I'm going to earn this much just based on time.

So whatever.

Yes.

So it's just a way easier way to calculate everything.

Yeah, it was like 10% of your spice holdings from wherever in exchange for the money for your ships, merchant.

Yeah, like it's not like people weren't getting loans to open like a cobbler shop.

They were getting them to like send 20 ships to Turkey and come back with spices, whatever people, scarves, silks, you know, like.

So the lender is basically like, also you're an insurance company and they're an investor.

And it's like, I can't even imagine that that would be very successful.

You have to pick so carefully who you loan out to at that point.

Whereas if you're just loaning on interest, you can kind of afford to like lend smaller amounts to people who are higher risk at higher interest and you just change the math.

Everybody hates it who has to borrow because there's all these slimy ways that they would use to make money.

Like I said, like there was sometimes penalties for paying back on time, but that was what the contract specified how the lender made profit was if you didn't pay back on time, you had to pay some exorbitant amount of money on top of the loan.

And it's like, this guy pays his loans on time.

Don't lend to him.

Right.

So the Jewish product, the loaning on interest, it's like, pay me back early.

Fine.

You just, you still owe me interest from the moment you took out the loan.

So I make a little bit of money.

Pay me back early.

I don't care.

I still make money.

Yeah.

Now I get it.

So how does this lead to Jews getting expelled from countries in Europe, though?

Connect the dots for us here because it seems like you need money lenders.

They're offering a great product.

How are they like, get these extremely useful, wealthy people out of here as soon as possible?

The biggest borrower in any country in Europe, especially during the Middle Ages, is going to be the king or the local lord.

And many, many times would they get in over their heads and decide it was just easier to expel all the Jews than pay back their loans.

And to do that, they would spread accusations that Jews were up to no good, poisoning wells, torturing Gentile children in religious rituals, or just the old standby, they killed Jesus.

Okay, I shouldn't laugh, but I didn't see that coming.

So basically, these kings and dukes, they're defaulting on loans and they're like, man, how am I going to pay this back?

And someone's like, yo.

Don't do that.

Just tell all 300 of them to leave and tell people that they're poisoning their kids.

They'll push them out with their own pitchforks.

Right.

They'll drive them out for you.

So modern European history is mostly about Jewish emancipation.

The more recent expulsions are in response to the founding of Israel.

And most of the Arab states, in fact, expelled their Jewish population in or around 1948.

And in that case, they're not even saying, oh, the Jews did something.

They're just, what, mad that Israel exists at all?

And they keep losing wars, trying to wipe it off the map at this point in time.

But if I'm not mistaken, expelling an entire minority, doesn't that usually have serious negative consequences?

Yes, particularly when they're a model minority, market nominant minority, however you want to put it.

But yes, I think from a moral standpoint, I think that doing immoral things causes people to suffer in some meaningful way.

But from a practical standpoint, it's not the wisest move.

What are the consequences then, say, of throwing out all the Jews in your country?

Spain expelled all its Jews in 1492, and anti-Semites absolutely love to correlate this with the beginning of the Spanish golden age.

But the fact is that local economies collapsed because of a lack of financiers.

You need liquid capital in a society if you want any kind of growth.

And Jews are the only ones allowed to lend money and interest, which is, as we've discussed, simply a superior financial product.

So within a generation, Spain was eclipsed by Portugal, which took in nearly all of Spain's Jews.

Ah,

okay.

What about the Nazis?

I mean, they obviously didn't expel their Jewish population.

I know, I think, didn't they try to initially?

Were they going to ship everybody to Madagascar or something?

But other countries,

Madison, Uganda, there was a bunch of different places discussed where we just move them somewhere.

And then it became

Eastern Europe and.

Right, Eastern Europe.

But other countries, they didn't want boatloads of refugees, Jewish or not.

So what were the consequences of Germany for ostracizing and persecuting Jews, Nazi Germany?

So Jews were less than 1% of the population of Germany, but they made up about a quarter of the doctors, lawyers, and academics.

So they lost Einstein over this, and that's just the most famous example.

The Arab states had a similar experience to Spain.

You throw at all the Jews, you're going to see a massive outflow of capital and a massive brain drain.

It's not limited to Jews.

Africa had a similar problem.

when decolonized African countries thought it would be smart to expel all their Indians, as in subcontinental subcontinental Indians.

It wasn't just financiers and exporters, doctors, lawyers, scientists, academics.

I mean, Joseph Stalin couldn't find a doctor when he was dying because he became an anti-Semitic paranoiac at the end of his life and just started killing off Jewish doctors.

Note to any anti-Semites who might be listening: it's bad to expel Jews if you want decent doctors and lawyers around.

Not that everybody wants lawyers around, but doctors, anyways.

Right.

So, this is probably also a great place to discuss the whole Jews are communists trope because how are we moneylenders and doctors and lawyers and businessmen, but also were communists?

Like, for God's sake, just pick a lane.

I don't know.

Yeah, it's a very bizarre trope because it's just not true.

And it's kind of one of the easiest ones.

You could spend 90 seconds on Wikipedia and see that this isn't true.

There's two ways of looking at this.

Let's start with Jewish membership in communist organizations.

For a wide variety of extremely complex historical, cultural, and social reasons, a number of prominent Jews were involved in socialist and communist movements, which at a certain point in the 19th century are kind of the same thing.

There's not very really much, if any, daylight between communists and socialists throughout a lot of the 19th century.

By the way, one big reason for the

involvement of Jews in left-wing movements is that European right-wing movements tended to be explicitly anti-Semitic.

Big shock.

Jews are not on board for your we hate the Jews political movement.

Okay, but what about communism specifically?

Weren't the sort of figureheads of this also Jews?

Is that where this comes from?

Karl Marx was ethnically Jewish, halakhically Jewish, but he was raised Lutheran and personally he was anti-religious.

Most Jews were not communists.

No leader of the Soviet Union was Jewish.

Lenin was basically a Russian mutt.

His ancestry is just all over the place, but not Jewish.

Stalin was a Georgian.

Khrushchev and Brezhnev were both Ukrainian.

And Gorbachev was mixed Russian and Ukrainian.

Other than Marx, zero Jews there.

And Marx was like, yeah, I'm Jewish, but we have a Christmas tree in the house.

So it's okay.

Where does the Jewish, so he's as Jewish as I am.

Where does the Jewish communism trope come from then?

I mean, something tells me it wasn't Mao Zedong who threw that one out there.

Like I said earlier, membership, big shock when you're a legally oppressed minority, you tend to side with political parties that criticize your legally enshrined oppression.

There were prominent communists who were Jews, Zinoviev, Trotsky, Luxembourg, but these people are like, these are the Waluigis of communism.

They have zero influence on actually existing communism in the world.

They have big cults in the West among dissident communist groups of communists who don't want to identify with the Soviet Union.

But in terms of actually existing communist countries, they have negative influence.

I see.

So there's either this undue emphasis placed on what are, comparatively speaking, minor figures like Zinoviev, who I'm sure most people even know who Zinoviev is, or they move goalposts to, well, Stalin counts because his wife was Jewish.

Cool.

That makes you Jewish then, Nick.

If you become Jewish when your wife's Jewish.

And that makes me Chinese, I guess.

That's interesting.

The other goalpost shift is to say that Jews ran the hated security services and secret police.

Of the Soviet Union?

Of the Eastern Bloc country.

So

Berea, who was perhaps the most notorious monster in Soviet history, was Georgian.

One Jew, precisely one, ran the NKVD, which was the precursor to the KGB.

That was for three years during the Great Purge, and Stalin had him executed.

There's a couple examples outside of the Soviet Union in Soviet satellite states.

I'm not going to mention them by name because they're people no one has heard of.

So do you see Jews?

Yes.

Are they running the show?

I'm not seeing any evidence for that.

It's also interesting because are we Jews supposedly bad because we're communists?

Are we supposedly bad because we're capitalist?

Are we money grubbers who are dominating the West through finance?

or are we evil communists who want to force everyone to own nothing?

Make up your damn mind already.

So we'll explore this more deeply in a bit, but the short answer is both.

Of course.

In the view of modern anti-Semites, everything Jews do is in the service of Jewish supremacy, even if it's entirely contradictory and they would be working against one another.

So in any event, the next stage of anti-Semitism after religious anti-Semitism is what we would call racial anti-Semitism, though it's somewhat more complicated than just the Jews are a race and they're bad.

The Dreyfus affair in France is a very early example of racial anti-Semitism.

The short version is that the French artillery officer named Alfred Dreyfus was accused of spying for Germany.

He was almost certainly not guilty of spying for Germany.

The issue here is very much rooted in race because it views Jews as some kind of unassimilable other.

In the case of Dreyfus, they're saying Jews are inherently German.

They have a German character about them.

They have German loyalties, which in 19th century France is very, very, very bad.

Why was that?

People don't tend to think of Nazi Germany and think, all right, there's a country that loves Jews.

This is before that, but at the time, Germany and France were the main geopolitical rivals on the continent.

But there is racial anti-Semitism in Germany.

And in Germany, it has a slightly different character where they're not so much seen as like, oh, they're the French fifth column in our country.

They're just seen as other, and we'll never assimilate them.

And if they do try to explain it, it's to claim that they're some kind of Asiatic race, that they're from like Central Asia.

That's a new one to me.

I have not heard that.

We don't have a ton of time to go into it, but during the Middle Ages, a Central Asian kingdom may have had a mass conversion to Judaism to avoid picking a side between Islam and Christianity.

Anti-Semites will argue that all modern Ashkenazi Jews are descended from these people who are called Khazars.

It's called the Khazar origin theory.

Yeah, I've heard of this.

So the claim is that these people, myself included, I guess, aren't even the Jews of the Bible, but some other group masquerading as them that like had converted or secretly blah, blah, blah, became Jews.

Yeah, correct.

So they'll they'll use dna evidence that jews have asian genetic makeup assuming this is true sort of doesn't really matter because like i said jewish law regarding who is and is not a jew is matrilineal so you'd expect some kind of genetic drift over time i mean i just don't really understand what saying a bunch of people converted to judaism in the middle ages is even supposed to prove no also it is interesting because i do have like 0.4

yakut Yakut, which is like this weird region in the middle of nowhere, Siberia, whatever, adjacent, which is apparently super dangerous part of the former Soviet Union slash Russia.

And my mom's like, I knew it.

That's why your eyes look like they're on upside down sometimes.

Cause like Genghis Khan bred one of my, I don't know, like super

15 generations ago, whatever, 100 generations ago, whatever ancestors.

And my mom's like, aha, because apparently we have all this family that looks a little bit Asian-y and it's like, why?

But even still, even if we accept that weird theory, who cares?

So 400 years ago, or I don't even know, 600 years ago, some group converted.

And yeah, there's going to be a lot of even if this is true, who cares?

Yeah.

Throughout this episode.

Yeah.

Getting back to racial anti-Semitism.

Is this totally a German thing or is it kind of all over the place?

It's kind of all over.

And weirdly, Jews aren't immune to anti-Semitic rhetoric around this time.

There's a whole current among secular Jewish intellectuals in the 19th century that uses language that's not terribly different from what you might have read in German racialist magazines.

In fact, the Nazis sometimes quoted these very Jews in their propaganda.

So Heydrich Heine was one of them who called the Talmud a spiritual ghetto.

Ludwig Berne viewed Jews as a burden on progress.

Otto Weiniger said, the Jew is nothing.

He is a counterfeit human being.

To reiterate, because these are German-sounding surnames, these are Jews talking about other Jews.

Gosh.

More than that, they're all highly intellectually influential.

These aren't like random Twitter schizo posters of their day.

Right.

Ludwig Berne is considered the founding father of the German free press.

And in the case of Weiniger and Born, they're liberals.

I see.

So racial anti-Semitism.

Is this the stage that gives us the Nazis and concentration camps and all that stuff?

Is that kind of where this comes from?

Yeah.

And like I said, the Nazis didn't care if your dad was Jewish and your mom was a Gentile.

They certainly didn't care if you were Jewish and you converted.

If you had Jewish blood, they considered you a Jew.

They had a very complex system of determining who was and who was not a Jew.

And it had nothing to do with your beliefs.

It was entirely based on race.

I mean, during the Inquisition, you could convert.

I see.

But this is not an option for people in Germany in 1936.

Okay, or at least the Nazis' idea of race, I suppose.

So So is this the era of the protocols of the elders of Zion and the International Jew?

And for those of you who don't know, these are two early 20th century foundational texts for anti-Semites, right?

Yeah, they're kind of like Fisher Price, My First Anti-Semitism.

Okay.

It's what every anti-Semite dips their toe into these at some point.

Have you read either of these books, or are they books or pamphlets or whatever they are?

They're books.

I've read them both, as well as a lesser-known gem called Bolshevism from Moses to Lenin, which also has some

real book.

And, you know, I've heard people breathlessly reference it as if it's the Encyclopædia Britannica of Jews or something.

People are going to go, why did you read those?

So why?

I think the better question for people asking that is, why haven't you?

It's not really disputable that the protocols are an important.

historical text.

That doesn't give it a morally positive value.

I've read Mein Kampf.

I've read the Communist Manifesto.

I don't endorse any of the ideas in either of those books, but it's simply not up for debate that they're historically important.

And on that basis, you know, I would recommend that people who want to know about the history of any idea read its foundational tags.

Sure.

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Now, back to Skeptical Sunday.

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion has always been, for one thing, it sounds like science fiction, but it sounds like fascinating to me because, well, it's fake.

It's provably, laughably fake, a forgery.

Everyone, in air quotes, knows it's fake, but people still quote from it like it's a legit text.

Again, for those unaware, it purports to be a record of a secret meeting of Jewish supremacists, cabal, if you will, to use modern parlance, talking in in detail about their plans to take over the world.

And in reality, it was a piece of anti-Semitic propaganda, probably produced by agents of the Russian Imperial Secret Police.

So prior to the Soviet Union, the Tsar's secret police, basically.

It's also heavily plagiarized from a book called Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu by somebody named Maurice Joli.

You're right.

It's a proven forgery.

There's no evidence that it's legit.

People will still claim that it's legit.

It's not really debatable whether or not it's legit.

And then the International Jew, published by Henry Ford, yes, that Henry Ford, plagiarizes the protocols pretty heavily.

The thing about most of these foundational screeds of racial anti-Semitism is that so many of them parrot one another.

It's like a conspiracy website citing another conspiracy website as its source.

Sure.

So how do historical currents like religious anti-Semitism and racial anti-Semitism, how is that different from what we see today?

I would call what we have today intellectual anti-Semitism.

And it's why I get sort of shook up when people treat anti-Semitism in a lazy or cartoonish way, because it's not mouth-breathing hillbillies cooking meth in a prison toilet who are the primary disseminators of anti-Semitism in the world today.

It's smart.

handsome, successful, capable, friendly, likable people.

And this is what makes modern anti-Semitism so dangerous.

They're not selling weird pseudoscience about skull measurements.

They're not selling discredited blood labels.

To be fair, you know a lot more about this than I do, but I think you have a strong point that, you know, like this ain't your dead is anti-Semitism and that a more sophisticated and intelligent response is probably warranted here.

What even is intellectual anti-Semitism?

How is that different?

And as you argue, how is it more dangerous than other forms of anti-Semitism?

Because, well, let's take a step sideways into the academic world for a moment before we get into the juicy stuff, like how Jews supposedly run even the porn industry.

You can't really talk about intellectual anti-Semitism without talking about one man, Kevin McDonald, who has been called the marks of the anti-Semites.

Is that a crazy YouTuber?

Who is this guy?

He's a retired professor of evolutionary psychology from California State University, Long Beach.

Wow.

Okay.

I didn't really expect to hear that to your earlier point about it not being YouTubers and mouth-breathing Klansmen.

okay yeah and i got another surprise for you i've met him i had lunch with him once i am dying to know how you met the world's foremost anti-semite or intellectual anti-semite and just had a blt with a guy it was chinese okay and well never mind then

when i was a journalist speaking of air quotes i'll put some air quotes around that but when i was a journalist I attended a lot of weird stuff with weird speakers, many of whom I didn't necessarily agree with.

And in the course of that, I had lunch with Kevin McDonald and he was a nice guy.

It seems like an obvious question that I'm sure a lot of listeners are asking right now.

If he's the main guy behind intellectual anti-Semitism, how can he also be a nice guy?

Where are you going with this?

So people have to put aside this like Star Wars villain of what an anti-Semite is if they're going to get anything from this episode.

McDonald is highly intelligent, soft-spoken, affable.

He's, dare I say, avuncular in his manner.

I don't think he mentioned Jews once during our lunch.

He was telling me about his house and how CSU Long Beach gives him all this make-work stuff to do because they can't fire him because he has tenure.

What do you want me to say?

He was nice.

That's why he's so dangerous.

I see.

He's not a frothing at the mouth weirdo on the Donahue show.

He could be your neighbor.

Throwback.

Yeah.

Fair point.

And I think you're correct that smart and otherwise nice people can harbor stupid and even kind of awful, well, quite awful beliefs.

And that's kind of what makes all this stuff so dangerous.

That's why people love those photos.

And I guess certain people love those photos of like Hitler with a little girl, Hitler playing with dogs, because you're like, this person is a complete monster who's totally irredeemable.

And you're right about that.

But then it's like, oh, wait, he has a human side where he was just like a normal person.

That's even scarier, right?

So I don't really see my listeners giving a lot of credence to anything a guy waving a swastika flag around says or has like SS tattoos on his neck.

But I do know that people can be taken in by stupid and dangerous ideas if they are packaged in a compelling way.

You got statistics, you got a pie chart, you got some clever arguments, and you got a good rhetorical style.

That goes a long way, man.

Yeah, exactly.

And McDonald is kind of ground zero for all of that with regard to this brand of high intellectual charts and graphs, anti-Semitism.

His professional pedigree certainly isn't anything to sneeze at.

His advisor in grad school was a man named Benson Giddensburg, who was one of the founders of modern behavioral genetics.

He was the secretary archivist of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, and he also served on the board of that organization.

Yeah, so he's smart and accomplished.

You already said that, but what's his deal?

What specifically makes his anti-Semitism more intellectual than previous iterations?

The main thing McDonald is known for is a trilogy of books called The Culture of Critique.

Okay, and what are these books about?

It doesn't sound like the International Jew, or maybe it evolves to that.

Well, they're not really about one thing.

I mean, it's got to be 3,000 pages long, the whole thing.

It's long, it's dense.

He explores different ideas throughout the trilogy.

The first one is called A People That Shall Dwell Alone, and it explores Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy.

Meaning, what exactly?

I don't even know what a group evolutionary strategy is or how it could relate to Jews.

Like, we're all working together to evolve.

What does that mean?

He frames Judaism as a way that Jews survived, reproduced, and maintained social cohesion within often hostile societies.

So he identifies characteristics like high investment parenting and a strong preference toward cultural intramarriage, marrying people within your, your own culture as opposed to people outside your culture, and a very high value placed on verbal intelligence.

Honestly, that all sounds like kind of a good thing.

I'm not really sure what the problem is.

Yeah, I think having a moderate sense of cultural and social solidarity is a good thing.

I certainly think that high investment parenting and valuing high verbal intelligence, these are good things.

But here's the problem.

First of all, he frames this not so much as a conspiracy, but like, it's almost like he's making the case that Judaism isn't, it's not really a religion.

It's just a way that Jews out-compete your kids.

I see.

And thus he ascribes to it a sort of goal orientation.

And how you prove that other than Jews are successful, I don't really know.

And this is something that we're going to see throughout is that most of this is would be a compliment if you applied it to any group other than Jews.

Right.

I've noticed this myself, actually.

The stereotypes are all like, oh, Jews are so successful.

Oh, they run Hollywood.

Oh, they run Wall Street.

It's like, okay, so we're really smart and capable and hardworking.

What's the problem here?

Yeah.

I mean, you'd think that that would be the reaction, but.

you know, of the eight major film studios in Hollywood, five or six are headed by Jews, depending on how you count.

I think as recently as 2018, it was all eight.

In the case of Hollywood, it's kind of like a first mover effect because Jews moved into the film industry very early.

It's like Irish cops or something.

But

either way, this doesn't make Hollywood a Jewish conspiracy to ruin America.

It just means Jews have done very well in the entertainment industry.

And so what?

Who cares?

Why is that a bad thing?

Why is this some nefarious plot?

Because it's Jews and, you know, not whoever else.

Yeah, I think there's this kernel of truth behind all this, that Jews are overrepresented or whatever in these powerful positions.

Well, I'm going to stop you right there because I take issue with the term overrepresented.

And it is, hang on, bear with me, people, because it's relevant to this.

It's not just some, you know, crackpot right-winger thing.

But I don't accept the grammar of this, like overrepresented according to whom?

What is the proper amount of Jewish representation in any given field?

I think people are talking about with respect to their percentage of the population.

Like if we're, I don't know, what are like 4% of the population is probably way less than that.

If we're 4% of the population, how come it's like 28% of executives in Hollywood?

I don't know.

Those numbers are made up, by the way, but I think that's what people are talking about.

So are black people overrepresented on the Supreme Court?

Because it's two out of nine.

I don't think so, to be fair.

I don't think so.

Right.

I don't think that the Supreme Court has to, or Hollywood or anything else has to

mirror the population dynamics exactly at every, you know, right.

That doesn't make sense.

And I think that we kind of begin flirting with totalitarianism the second we assume there's some appropriate level of representation in certain fields for people of certain backgrounds.

I think the minute you accept these kinds of rhetorical priors, McDonald has already won.

Because you end up saying, well, yeah, they're overrepresented, but, and it's like, they're not.

Jews are not overrepresented in Hollywood.

They're not overrepresented on the Supreme Court.

They're not overrepresented in Wall Street.

They're just successful.

And that's fine.

Good for them.

That's okay.

When does the full-blown anti-Semitism start, assuming that it's not present in his first book or work here?

Yeah, I mean, I've talked to people who've read only the first book and were like, that guy's an anti-Semite.

I had no idea.

So it's not quite as present in the first book.

Though I wouldn't say that it's fair to say that it's absent either.

I wouldn't let him off the hook quite that much, but you may not pick up on it in any event.

So he starts dipping not so much his toe, but like his whole foot into anti-Semitism with the second book, Separation and Its Discontents.

This book frames anti-Semitism as a rational response to Jewish success.

So from a sociobiological frame, it could be tempting to use any means necessary to keep other groups from being successful, right?

There's a few problems with this.

First of all, it assumes a zero-sum game and economic growth, in any event, is not zero-sum.

Economic growth and innovation benefits everyone.

You benefit from the salt polio vaccine and toilets, high-speed internet.

This is kind of the miracle of modern capitalism, which to get back to your earlier point, you know, are Jews evil because they're communists or capitalists?

Well, according to McDonald, it's both.

Anything and everything Jews do is in the service of Jewish supremacy.

Where does the third book go?

I know he's got his trilogy here.

Where does that go where the first two stop?

The third book is the one that's actually called Culture of Critique.

This is a favorite of modern anti-Semites and one of the three that most have actually read.

A lot of people skip straight to that one.

Here he says that Jews use leftist intellectual movements as a weapon against other cultures as a means to subvert them through constant critique.

Okay.

First of all, it's unfalsifiable because again, right-wing Jews are just using different tactics towards the same goal.

The book book was written 30 years prior to the rise of Stephen Miller, the deputy White House chief of staff.

But I'm sure he has, he being McDonald, has some convoluted theory about how the most fire-breathing right-winger in Trump's inner circle is somehow serving the same interests as Bernie Sanders.

I didn't even know Stephen Miller was Jewish.

Jewish excellence, baby.

There's a somewhat notorious bit of laziness with regard to the all-encompassing Jews always act in the service of Jews theory, because McDonald mentions Noam Chomsky once in Culture of Critique in a footnote, which is kind of a huge deal because Noam Chomsky is indisputably the most important Jewish public intellectual of the last 50 years, whether you like him or not.

I don't like him, but it's not, it's just not disputable that he's the most important Jewish intellectual.

And Chomsky hates Israel.

So this is like heads, I win, tails, you're a Jew.

How does he even, I'm imagining Stephen Miller and Bernie Sanders just hanging out knitting gloves.

And like, I mean, I can't imagine two guys who would hate each other more sitting in the same room.

And they're like, we got everybody fooled.

I mean, it's just so, it's like a ridiculous image, gloves aside.

Yeah.

So his argument is that these are just competing factions of Jews arguing over tactics, but you're absolutely right.

It's this kind of.

self-fulfilling prophecy whereby everything a Jew does can somehow we can somehow like reverse engineer the way that this benefits Jews.

I I think McDonald is also a case study in why we should engage with seemingly intellectually sophisticated anti-Semitism.

Why can't we just ignore this kind of bullshit?

Well, the academic community tried to do that with McDonald.

He sent a people that shall dwell alone to every prominent evo-psych and sociobiology professor in the country, and no one bothered to respond to it.

Steven Pinker wouldn't even deign to read it.

He said it was beneath academic evaluation.

I mean, Steven Pinker's also Jewish.

Hey, can you read this book about why Jews are bad, Dr.

Finkelstein?

Like, no.

No, thanks.

Might have got a full inbox.

Come on.

Isn't it beneath academic evaluation?

I mean, the idea that Judaism is an evolutionary strategy, why do you think serious academics should even engage with this kind of stuff?

I think that if you accept Evo-psych and sociobiology as legitimate fields of scientific inquiry, which it's above my pay grade, whether or not they are.

Yeah, same.

I know CSU Long Beach thinks it's legitimate enough to employ the world's foremost anti-Semite.

Right.

You know, so I think that, sure, they think it is anyway.

But assume that these are legitimate studies and legitimate areas of inquiry.

How is Jewish success not a legitimate subject of inquiry within that discipline?

I just don't consider Jews so fragile that they can't be examined under the same microscope as other groups.

Okay.

And again, like he wasn't some crank with a weird YouTube channel who was like, hey, Steven Pinker, go check out my YouTube.

You know, he was a professor at CSU Long Beach.

It's just like, it's not Harvard, but it's a real university, it's a real research university.

And I suspect that being ignored caused his ideas to metastasize to some degree.

Interesting.

I mean, yeah, his feelings got hurt, so he became worse.

Are you saying that he was basically so mad at Jewish professors like Steven Pinker, episode 593, by the way, who wouldn't read his book that he just seethed so hard he became like an Olympic level professional anti-Semite?

No, that's not what I'm proposing.

I mean, it might be true.

I only had lunch with the guy once, but it was Chinese food.

So you should, you should know.

I don't really do that kind of armchair psychoanalysis.

I don't think it's really that beneficial.

But what I'm saying is, is that the junk in his book could have been corrected at an earlier point in his career.

And no one bothered to engage McDonald in any serious way until 2018.

Okay, now I see where you're going with this.

Right.

Okay.

So what happened in 2018?

A guy named Nathan Kaufness wrote a review of culture of critique that just absolutely eviscerates the book.

It's not a cheap takedown.

It does exactly what we're trying to do here, which is to play fair with McDonald.

engage his ideas in good faith and mount a response that's based in reality and fact, not these empty platitudes of kumbayan after school specials or appeals to emotion about how it's so dangerous to even ask these are just questions that man dare not ask right because it's like you you say like is it true the jews ran the banks and like certain people will say you're basically a nazi for asking that or you know this is why there were concentration camps because people talked about this and it's like no right i agree with you that's not exactly there's a few steps in between so we're going to link to that paper in the show notes if anybody wants to read it so did mcdonald ever respond to this like takedown of his book?

He did respond to it.

He responded extensively.

It doesn't, in my opinion, frankly, read like someone making a serious defense of his ideas.

It reads as very defensive and reactive.

And to your earlier point, you know, who knows?

Maybe that would have been his reaction in 1994 when the book first came out.

Maybe that's just what he's like as a person.

But you know what?

We'll never know.

And bad ideas need better responses than silence.

Why have Jews historically outperformed other ethnic groups in the West?

That is a totally legitimate topic of inquiry.

And when you refuse to respond to bad explanations for Jewish success, you're ceding the playing field to those bad explanations.

Or you bury your head in the sand and say, well, it's just not true.

And it's like, it is.

Yeah.

You can look at income figures.

It's true.

And asking why is fine.

It's absolutely fine to ask why that is.

But when you refuse to engage with bad ideas, bad answers about why this is, you create McDonald not as this obscure professor at CSU Long Beach, but now he's this, you know, keeper of dangerous secrets that no one dare discuss.

And by the way, when people start reading it on that basis, there's no response.

There's no response to any of the things that he says.

So otherwise, smart, thoughtful, rational people go, I don't know, I think maybe he's got a point.

Yeah, nobody said anything.

Where's the challenge of this?

I mean, does that mean people are sort of accepting that he's got a point here?

Yeah, I can see that.

Or they're just too afraid to engage with it.

And they're just so embarrassed by how right he is that they just, they can't, there's no answers to any of this.

It's like, I think Coftis was like a grad student when he wrote this.

You know, it's not like, it's not the hardest thing in the world to take down.

This reminds me of people say stuff like, and I don't know what this is.

It's a quote from somebody, but it's like, if you ever want to know who your secret master is, just look at who you're not allowed to criticize.

And children with cancer.

You're not allowed to criticize Jews.

Children with cancer rule the world.

That's actually a really good response.

Children with the cancer.

Yeah, because it's like, you're not allowed to criticize Jews.

And it's like, I'm pretty sure we're talking about a lot of people criticizing Jews all the time.

That's literally what this entire episode is about.

It's about thousands of years of people criticizing Jews.

So, yeah.

It's funny because it's always the guy who says, well, you're not allowed to talk about Jews.

And it's like, dude, you don't talk about anything anything but Jews.

Right.

Your entire personality is Jews.

Right.

Your entire personality is about how much you hate Jews.

What do you mean people aren't allowed to talk about Jews?

People talk about Jews all the time.

Yeah.

And the reason your kids don't talk to you is not because you're criticizing the Jews.

It's because that's all you do is, and that's your entire life.

And nobody wants to hear that on Christmas morning or at Thanksgiving.

Yeah.

Okay.

So what about the academia thing that McDonald talks about?

Is this like the Jews run Hollywood trope that's sort of mostly true?

Like Jews also run academia.

Just real quick, I just want to put a button on the last thing I said.

Like Kevin McDonald is absolutely wrong and he should be systematically and rationally called out for exactly why he's wrong, not shamed for being wrong.

Gotcha.

That's the difference.

So yes, a lot of Jews, as people who, you know, have maybe met a few know, many Jews are very smart and many of them work in academia.

And the issue here becomes, yeah, there's a lot of Jews in academia.

Are we waiting these positions at all?

Is an associate professor who works, you know, 70 hours a week for $12 an hour, is he the same as the dean of faculty?

What about how influential their ideas are?

Certainly, Noam Chomsky or Steven Pinker count more than someone you've never heard of because they haven't.

Somebody I've never heard of.

Right.

How widely published are they?

Yeah.

You know, are they just kind of like a research grunt or are they publishing papers?

Sure.

So the TA, who's technically an academic, is not the same as Steven Pinker or Noam Chomsky or whoever.

And yeah, lots of Jews in academia were nerds.

Literally everyone knows this.

So then we get into McDonald's argument about the leftist Jewish intellectual trope.

Academic Jews are absolutely all over the map, ideologically.

Do they skew left?

Maybe.

I think there's probably some evidence that they do, but who cares?

It's self-defeating in a way, because McDonald's argument is that no matter what their broader worldview is, it's in the service of the Jews.

And if you're a Jew, everything you do is somehow about helping Jews.

That's right.

When I shell a mattress on this show, hashtag it's for the Jews.

Like,

I want you to buy these dick pills for the Jews.

You don't show dick pills.

No, I don't.

I don't.

But I was trying to think of another sponsor that's not a real one, and I came up pretty dry.

Well, I guess I'm one of the capitalist Jews because, well, here are some ads.

We'll be right back.

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Now for the rest of Skeptical Sunday.

We talked about Jews in Hollywood, and there does seem to be something there.

What about the trope of Jews running the porn business?

You know, to Hollywood adjacent, actually.

North Hollywood, mostly.

Van Nice.

Yeah, that's the valley.

It's the Silicon Valley, not the Silicon Valley.

Both of which I've lived in.

It's funny, I never put that together.

There's this quote that gets thrown around a lot in anti-Semitic circles by a guy named Al Goldstein, who ran a sex magazine creatively called Screw.

And it's supposed to be this epic smoking gun of evidence of Jewish animosity toward Gentiles and porn as a tool of that.

Sounds like good reading.

What does Jewish smut peddler Al Goldstein have to say?

The quote is basically about how jews love porn because they hate jesus and hate christians look is this quote legit i mean it's actually ridiculous it's legit he said it but who cares

is al goldstein the head rabbi now he's some weird sex pervert who happens to be halakhically jewish who gives a shit what al goldstein has to say why is he like he's the emissary of the jews uh-huh he's not he's some random guy who cares big news lots of people are assholes and say mean things about other groups of people.

Oh, man.

Okay.

But as a whole, are Jews in a similar position of power in the porn business as they are in Hollywood?

Now it all seems all decentralized.

So maybe before.

Not really.

Not even, you know, during what you might call the golden age of pornography.

There's this one story that gets circulated around a lot, and I'll put it in the show notes, but it's from a Jewish magazine called The Forward.

And it claims that a rabbi owns Pornhub.

That doesn't sound right.

Does a rabbi own pornhub?

No, a rabbi does not own pornhub.

Pornhub is owned by a private equity firm called, ironically, ethical capital partners.

That's right.

I forgot about that.

The guy in question is named Solomon Friedman.

He was ordained as an Orthodox rabbi, but from what I can tell, he's been a lawyer his entire adult life.

So he's a rabbi in the same way that you're a lawyer.

Okay.

And you know what?

He's not the CEO.

He's the VP of compliance.

So yes, the true puppet masters of any private equity firm, the VP of compliance, sending cease and desist letters and making sure that the IRS.

So that's porn hub.

What about the massive rest of the industry?

A zillion years ago, a guy named Ruben Sturman had 80% of the porn magazine market cornered.

Wow.

Porn comes in magazines, too.

Yeah, I forgot about all that.

Yeah, that's exactly it.

Sturman's relevance today is porn magazines.

Do they even still make those?

I would guess they do.

I doubt it.

Maybe for sale at gas stations.

They might.

Yeah, probably.

So, other than you know, Goldstein and his one magazine, Sturman, who I believe has since passed and owned 80% of a now mostly defunct sector of the adult entertainment industry, you got Michael Lucas, who's a secular Soviet Jew and, like many secular Soviet Jews, is a

very outspoken neoconservative.

He is a hawkish conservative man.

So, if you're going to make the case about Jewish subversion and Zionist influence, this is your best case.

And it's one guy, and he makes gay porn.

Somewhere there's some rabid anti-Semite coming up with a list of people in the porn industry who are Jewish.

The claim that anti-Semites are making isn't lots of Jews do porn.

This is almost impossible to quantify in terms of how many and what percentage.

The claim they're making is Jews run the porn business, which is demonstrably false.

And as you said, is kind of like a bit of a non-sequitur as it becomes more decentralized.

We've got an episode about OnlyFans coming up for anyone interested.

But the other thing is, I want to say, this is like the, oh, the Jews did the slave trade trope.

Oh, I don't know if I heard that.

Is that true then?

Not really.

Were Jews involved in the slave trade?

Yes.

Were they the primary force of the secret puppet masters?

No, there's just not evidence for that.

So the porn thing, like the slave thing, is like Jewish pornographers are not why you are cranking your hog to gangbang super cuts for eight hours a day.

You and you alone are to blame for that.

I find it really rich when anti-Semites have this complaint, like, oh no, the Jews sold me a product that I use.

Well, then stop buying it.

Stop buying it if you think it's evil.

And it's really that simple.

If you think porn is evil, stop watching it.

I think porn is bad.

I don't blame other people about it.

I just don't watch it.

Daddy Chill.

There's no comment.

There's no comment from me there.

I do think you're right, though, that there's this tendency to blame things for Jews as a group for things some Jews might tangentially be involved in.

And I also think there's definitely a tendency to see everything a Jew does as somehow nefarious and in the service of Jewish interests.

regardless of what side of the fence it comes down on.

I also get these emails like, you're a shill for Israel.

And then 10 minutes later, somebody writes in to tell me how I'm like a, I don't know, terrorist sympathizer or a CIA plan.

And it's like, guys, make up your mind already.

You can find broad patterns in any group.

The problem is when you associate those broad patterns with the entire group at an individual level.

So 78% of Jewish voters went for Harris in the 2024 election.

That's pretty decisive, but it also means that over 20% of Jewish voters went for Trump, which which is a ton of people in a country of 350 million.

True.

There's also differences between Jews when you drill down into those numbers.

Like Jewish men went 30% for Trump.

Orthodox Jews went 75% for Trump.

There is so much more going on in the nuances of this than most Jews vote for Democrats, ergo, all Jews are hard left.

It's true.

This doesn't add up.

Many slash most of my Jewish friends are the most conservative people that I know that would never consider consider voting for a Democrat.

I was like, oh, there's Jews on the right?

And they were like, we literally have whole groups at our law school alone.

Like the Federalist Society was like half Jews, right?

I was like, okay.

I don't want to go too far down the rabbit hole because I think it's a little obscure for most people.

But in preparing for this episode, I did read some quotes from the Talmud from anti-Semitic websites that seem to specialize in.

well, Talmud quotes for some bizarre reason.

Well, I hope you washed your hands when you were done.

Well, I had just picked up one of Al Goldstein's magazines because I needed a deep dive into intellectualism.

Anyway, I needed a good scrub, if you know what I'm saying.

Anyway, yeah, the entire experience was a little unsettling, both because I hated going to those websites and giving them any traffic and because I found the things they said,

well, that they said were in the Talmud, they were kind of disturbing, right?

But I definitely left with the experience that they were either making it up or I was being misled in some way.

Well, it could have been both.

Yeah.

Because both exist.

But more broadly, anyone who doesn't know what the Talmud is, the Talmud is a collection of commentaries on the Torah.

That's the first five books in the Old Testament.

The Talmud was written by Jewish rabbis between the years 200 and 500 AD.

I think the most important point to make right off the bat is the Talmud is not the Jewish Bible.

There's tons of self-contradictory stuff.

in the Talmud because the Talmud is designed to represent different points of view.

Individual rabbis are then fully allowed to pick and choose what they agree with and what they don't agree with.

And there's parts of the Talmud that like none of them agree with.

The rabbis probably get their ideas about what's right and what's not from their rabbi or whatever seminary they went to.

Right.

Okay, so I'm not going to get into what I read because I don't really want to give it any traction on the show.

And I think given what you've told me, we don't even have to if we want to discuss misconceptions about the Talmud generally.

The The Talmud is a complicated text.

First of all, you may not and probably are not interpreting it correctly because I don't know anything about it.

I'm reading it verbatim and being like, wow, that's kind of a weird thing, crazy thing to say.

Yeah.

That's it.

You're not privy to a 1500 plus year long conversation around the Talmud, which is necessary to understand really any single part of it.

Each passage builds on 20 other passages from the Talmud, and those are building on a Torah.

So you walk in and read one passage that's totally taken out of context that's been selectively cherry-picked to terrify you.

And that's congratulations, you're going to be terrified.

You can't really understand Talmud without studying all of it.

And it's insanely long and incredibly dense.

If you ever encounter somebody who like isn't a rabbi that told you that they read the Talmud, they were lying to you.

Like you don't read the Talmud unless you're a rabbi.

Most Jews, even observant ones, they have no idea what's in the Talmud.

They count on their rabbi to tell them what to do and what not to do to be a good Jew.

They don't sit down and read Talmud and then figure out what they're supposed to do on the basis of that.

Got it.

So anti-Semites quoting Talmud are just misrepresenting the Talmud, not because the quotes they're using are manufactured.

Well, they might be.

Okay.

There's also like quotes from the founding fathers on Jews.

Anytime you see that and Google them, a lot of times they're they're just completely invented.

I see.

Okay, so maybe there's quotes, but because they're presenting it as this is what all Jews believe, and it's like, maybe it's what some Jews believe or no Jews believe, it's not technically Jewish law, and it might not even be widely believed among Jews at all.

Correct.

There's a ton of heterogeneity among Jewish belief.

There are Jews who believe in reincarnation.

It's not common, but it's a thing.

There's Kabbalah.

And it's a Kabbalistic sect would would potentially believe in reincarnation yeah so Kabbalah is like this basically like mysticism where you like use magic to talk to God I'm I'm simple oversimplifying it but I remember a rabbi being like

whatever bro when I asked about it this is like a Hasidic rabbi and he's like yeah the Kabbalah that Madonna's learning is not the thing and it's not as simple as like lighting candles and chanting and you're talking to God like that's not how this works you got to be like a basically you need like a PhD in everything beforehand and I don't even think think this rabbi believed you're directly talking to God.

I think he was kind of just, yeah, like, okay, whatever.

Some people will pay money for that kind of thing.

I think you're supposed to be like a married man over 40 who's also a rabbi to actually like study Kabbalah or something.

But yeah, I used to be friends with a girl who was from a, raised in an Orthodox family who were part of a Kabbalistic tradition.

There's all kinds of, all kinds of belief among Jews.

There's a joke of that's like,

how do you get three different opinions on Jewish law?

You ask one Jew.

Yeah.

Well, there's, we always say two Jews, three opinions.

Yeah.

Right.

Exactly.

So this is a great pivot to the problem of serious intellectual anti-Semitism.

It's ultimately very intellectually lazy, despite its veneer of academic gravitas.

And I think that like many of the leading lights of intellectual anti-Semitism, shall we say, they're not dumb, as we've been saying.

And there's like, without calling out anyone in particular, there's no way that they don't know that the Talmud is like, it's a long book that's a history of discussion about Jewish law, none of which is definitive or authoritative on its own, and none of which is considered directly inspired by God in the same way that Torah or the Christian Bible would be.

Got it.

Yeah.

And I think, doesn't Islam have this, right?

I forget what this stuff is called, but there's a whole lot of commentary in some of his hadith.

Yeah.

Some people will go like, look at what they said about these people in the hadith.

And other people are like, yeah, my particular strand or whatever you want to call it, like sect of Islam is like, yeah, that guy, we don't like that guy.

And that's just kind of like, all right.

So you ignore mostly those books because you're like, yeah, that guy was a little bit of a crazy person.

But then another sect is like, we primarily read him.

And it's like, oh, so you're the ones that are giving the rest of us like a bad name, right?

It's kind of like, we have that too.

So So this has always been kind of my problem with anti-Semitism.

It's just, it just comes across as so stupid.

Like I know Jews have a lot of power in Hollywood in certain positions.

It doesn't bother me.

I like movies even when I don't.

I'm not seeing some unconscious plot to create the downfall of the West.

And people might be like, well, you're a Jew.

It benefits you.

Fine, whatever.

But the Jewish banking thing, I knew a little bit about, but I just assumed, okay, well, I guess we're good with money.

You know, maybe not me, but like, so some of us are.

But it sounds like that's not even true at all.

And I mean, we didn't discuss how represented they are in terms of the lower ranks of the finance industry, but at the top level, Jews are not running the banks in 2025.

It reminds me of that episode of The Office where they go clubbing and Michael tells the girl that he's a bank teller and everyone's like, what?

And then they do the face to camera and he's like, Ryan told me to tell everybody, any girl that I met that I was in finance.

It's like, okay, the Jews are running the banks.

I mean, the manager of my local chase is Jewish.

He doesn't have enough power to override that $30 overdraft fee, though.

Sorry.

But at the end of the day, it just comes across as all this criticism, it comes across as resentful and bitter.

And it really is kind of like they hate us because they ain't us, if you will.

I think that's a fair evaluation.

People may roll their eyes at this, but Frederick Nietzsche, who I believe to be the finest philosopher in human history, pegged anti-Semitism as what he would have called resentement, which is resentment of your betters, basically.

It's absolutely classic Nietzschean resentement.

You reframe your failures as some kind of moral virtue and say that actually excellence is bad and victimhood is good.

I see this a lot.

This is a, I don't want to go down this rabbit hole, but you see a lot of these people who they're 20 somethings off and they're very resentful.

They're like living in their parents' basement and they'll have some job that they hate.

And instead of being like, yeah, I'm in training for this and I'm going to move up to that.

They're like, at least I'm not participating in the capitalist system that oppresses people.

And I'm like, yeah, because you can't.

You're still farting around trying to get your GED at age 29 and you play video games all day.

Like you would love to contribute to the capitalist system that is oppressing other people because then you could buy more games to play and porn memberships to crank it to in your mom's basement, pal.

But yeah, you see this stuff like on Reddit, you know, at least I'm not doing this.

And it's like, oh, how sad.

But it's also a bit of an intellectual black hole because once you decide that anti-Semitism is true, you just start seeing the rationale for it absolutely everywhere.

Yeah, give them a hammer, all they see is nails.

Yeah, and it becomes people's entire personality.

I mean, back when you could follow people on Reddit, if people were really crazy, I would be like, oh, what else is this person wrote?

And it's like, oh, I see.

The last three months are all threads about Jews.

That's why we think somebody's a robot.

And you're like, no, they're not a robot.

They're a loser.

It's kind of the same thing.

Yeah.

My experience with these types is that they just can't go 10 minutes without talking about Jews.

I mean, there was like, I used to be friends with a, a semi-famous writer whose name I won't mention, who went all the way down this rabbit hole.

And I stopped talking to him and engaging with him when I was on, you know, vacation in Italy.

And I wake up to an email from this guy.

And it's like three pages about how Jews are responsible for mass migration to America.

Oh, God.

Are they?

Are we?

To get back to the point of there's a kernel of truth in there?

I have no idea how many Jews were even in positions of power to make that happen when this became the policy in the 1960s under the Hart Seller Act.

I believe that it's true that Ashkenazi Jews largely supported an end to national quotas because their families were in six different countries.

You know, so I got family in Russia and Poland and in Austria, and I want all my family to be here.

And I also believe that it's true that Sephardic Jews, who, by the way, have been in America a lot longer and form a non-trivial portion of the upper crust of southern society, there was a Sephardic Jew in the Confederate cabinet.

In the Confederate cabinet?

That I did not know that.

That's interesting.

Yeah, Judah P.

Benjamin was variously...

Attorney General, Secretary of War, and Secretary of State for the Confederacy.

You don't think of the deep south as like a Jewish, Jewish area at all.

all kind of the opposite and again it's a non-trivial portion i'm not people walk away from this and think are they overrepresented in the south nick yeah they're probably not even that um but you know like there's a certain segment of southern upper crust society that is sephardic jewish they

to my knowledge Again, it's a hard thing to get numbers on, but to my knowledge, Sephardic Jews generally opposed Hart Seller, which was the act that ended national quotas, because they have long-standing prejudices against Ashkenazi Jews

who they view as like hillbillies from Eastern Europe.

Yeah.

And they didn't want coming into the country.

So the only way you square that circle is by somehow making each and every possible position on any possible issue an expression of Jewish interest, which is stupid.

You've argued with me privately that right-wing anti-Semites aren't really that dangerous.

I don't know if I totally agree, but I understand your point that you're more likely likely to become socially ostracized, unemployable, and a pariah than you are to lead some terrorist attack on a synagogue.

Well, there was that one terrorist attack in Pennsylvania in the last 10 years.

So I think that we should definitely acknowledge that if we're specifically checking, name-checking terrorist attacks on synagogues.

But I do think the elephant in the room is left-wing anti-Semitism.

Right-wing anti-Semites are generally considered weirdos and people want nothing to do with them.

Left-wing anti-Semites have representation in Congress.

Anti-Semitism is coded as anti-Zionism and becomes a completely acceptable position in the Democratic Party and is increasingly a shibboleth for primary candidates in Democratic Party primaries.

Shibboleth, man, points for using that on the show.

Good word.

Yeah, you mean the anti-Israel stuff, which we're not getting into that Israel stuff.

That is a whole nother podcast that I probably can't even run.

So I do mean the Israel stuff, but it's not limited to criticisms of Israel.

Al Sharpton incited a racial pogrom against Jews in 1991 in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.

He called them diamond merchants at a funeral, no less.

Al Sharpton also reportedly said, and I'm quoting here, if the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulcas back and come over to my house.

End quote.

Wow.

Sharpton had a daily and now weekly hour-long show on nbc he is something of an elder statesman in the left wing of the democratic party whose ring you have to kiss right people do not have to uh go kiss kevin mcdonald's ring to get the republican party's nomination for congress critter from the 7th district of montana it is not a comparable thing yeah i wasn't aware of that quote but that what about people say like hey that was 40 years ago is there anything more recent from Sharpton specifically, no.

But the current Democratic nominee for mayor of America's largest city, Zoran Mamdani, which is the name of the candidate, not the city, has defended the slogan, globalize the Intifada.

Yeah.

You know, kill Jews everywhere.

Citations in the show notes, people.

Don't get mad.

Citations.

He hasn't personally said it or endorsed it, but he has defended other people.

saying it.

I see.

Okay.

Which is, you know, you're just outsourcing it to other people to do your dirty work for you.

So I I say at the very least, anti-Semitism is not disqualifying for public spokesmen and candidates in the Democratic Party.

But also the relentless obsession with Israel on the part of some Democrats does seem suspect to me.

And I don't think it's suspect just because I think Thomas Massey's, who's a Republican Congress critter from Tennessee or Kentucky, he has a weird fixation on Israel that, yeah, I find that suspect.

I see this bandied about a lot, the idea that Israel is somehow running American foreign policy.

And it strikes me as wrong, but I'm also not really sure how to respond to that.

They're like, oh, you know, AIPAC, they control everybody.

And I'm like, do they?

Because that sort of sounds like the whole Jews control the world thing, except you're limiting it to the U.S.

But then it's like, but the U.S.

controls the world because they're the hegemon.

It's like, okay, so, but again, where's the kernel of truth in this?

if any?

There kind of isn't one.

You know, a country with a GDP of Maryland and the population of Michigan is not running running the country with the world's largest military and nuclear arsenal.

And if you argue that it is, you are woefully misinformed at best.

That is the generous approximation of that view.

Israel gets tons of foreign aid from the United States.

I'm personally opposed to foreign aid, period, but I don't understand why people want to focus on foreign aid to Israel.

By the way, American Aid to Israel is an American jobs program.

70% 70% of the aid that the United States government gives to Israel is earmarked for spending on American munitions.

We give them money and then they have to spend it on American military hardware made by Americans.

Right.

So basically, we're giving them coupons to use at Northrop Grumman.

Yeah.

Okay.

So, yeah, there's all kinds of lobbying in Congress, which is a topic all by itself.

Where do the pro-Israel forces fall in the spectrum here, though?

Like, I went to the APAC conference in college because they bust us over there there and it sounded like a fun trip to New York.

But we just sat there and then, I don't know, clapped at speeches and then like went out drinking.

APAC is less than 1% of all PAC money.

That includes all APAC-affiliated groups.

So it's not like there's some dark money that, you know, well, they're really 70 when you count all the puppets.

Okay.

No, it's 1%.

All APAC-affiliated groups.

Indisputably, it's a major player in foreign relations PAC spending, but so is Lockheed Martin.

So is Boeing, so is Raytheon, ExxonMobil, Coke Industries.

You can say, I don't like that either.

I don't like that.

But why is the focus on APAC?

I mean, it's like when people are like, those bankers at Goldman Sachs, and it's like, this is the only bank that you want to mention is Goldman Sachs.

You know, like, why?

Why is that the one that you're going to focus on?

Yeah.

Meanwhile, HSBC is laundering money for the cartels, but it's the Jews.

Yeah.

I hear what you're saying.

There were all those protests after the Gaza war started with a lot of disturbing rhetoric, both from Randos protesting at Yale and Congress members that definitely had my anti-Semitism radar sort of beeping a little bit at the time.

Yeah, it wasn't Nazis standing outside at Columbia asking people if they were Jewish.

It wasn't Nazis preventing Jewish students from going to Shul.

It was lefties.

It's gross and it gets a total pass under the guise of anti-Zionism.

Democrat-friendly media runs cover for this and repackages it.

as this is just some acceptable view of the world.

And I think like people, oh, you're saying you're not allowed to criticize Israel.

You're absolutely allowed to criticize Israel.

You're allowed to criticize anything you like.

What I'm saying is, is that an outsized amount of attention on Israel in a world that includes the People's Republic of China and the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, I find that suspect.

I find that strange.

Yeah.

But your belief about all this is that we should openly discuss it and fairly and honestly argue about it.

The thing that troubles me about that, even as somebody who's very much in favor of fair and open inquiry, I don't know, there's a part of me that's like, maybe even discussing this is bad for Jews.

And I know people say that.

Do they have a point?

I would suggest that people read a book by Hannah Arendt called Eichmann in Jerusalem.

I would argue that it's one of the most important books of the 20th century.

And it explains precisely how your normal neighbors that you, you know, grill with on Labor Day weekend weekend become the people ratting out and Frank in the attic.

And it's not because they're won over by strong, convincing, academically sound arguments of anti-Semites.

It's a very good book.

I really cannot recommend it enough.

Again, it's called Eichman in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt.

It's also worth mentioning a man by the name of David Cole.

He was huge in Holocaust denial circles for decades, and he stopped being a Holocaust denier because of his own open inquiry into the subject.

We have a link in the show notes.

He's very candid about his past and his trajectory and spends quite a bit of time debunking this stuff as it crops up.

There is a certain type of smart person who is attracted to weird and forbidden ideas because mainstream narratives just don't add up for them.

But this is also exactly the type of person who is going to read both sides and come to a final conclusion that's probably the right one.

I spent like the whole 2000s being a 9-11 truther.

And I'm not, you know, it was a bunch of Saudi guys and the CIA got caught with his pants down.

And what happened on 9-11 is basically what they in capital letters said happened.

I didn't stop being a 9-11 truther because I got bullied hard enough that I gave it up.

I stopped because there was this one friend of mine who was just constantly sending me stuff that was like, here's why this thing that you think is either not true or is nonsense.

And it was just kind of, and then I read a book and was like, yeah.

You got persuaded by facts?

That's impressive.

That never happens.

It doesn't ever happen.

What do you think people should do about the growth of anti-Semitism in the West?

I think you need to resist the urge to censor and shout down because I think that that has a tendency to metastasize the problem.

You need to pick your battles.

You don't need to be arguing with every guy with a Pepe the Frog PFP on Twitter about this stuff, but you do need to engage seemingly good arguments directly.

You should learn the talking points that these people are using so you know how to dismantle them.

And don't lie to protect the truth.

Learn how to tell the truth better.

All outward appearances to me say canceling people for bad ideas just makes those bad ideas stronger.

Definitely some good food for thought here.

In general, I think that the solution to bad ideas is good ideas, not fewer ideas.

And when it comes to something like modern anti-Semitism, especially the kind that's dressed up in academic language or political activism, the answer isn't to ignore it or panic over it.

It's to understand it.

Ask what it's really saying and what it's trying to hide.

Because under the charts and the citations and the intellectual posturing, it usually comes down to the same old thing, resentment.

A need to explain away failure or powerlessness by blaming somebody who looks like they're doing better than you.

That's not a truth that needs protecting.

That's a pattern that needs exposing.

Thanks, Nick, for explaining why today's anti-Semitism doesn't come with jack boots.

It comes with just enough footnotes to fool people.

Thanks, everyone, for listening.

We did go a little bit long.

I hope the ride was worth it.

Topic suggestions for future episodes of Skeptical Sunday to me, Jordan at jordanharbinger.com.

Advertisers, deals, discounts, ways to support the show, all at jordanharbinger.com slash deals.

I'm at JordanHarbinger on Twitter and Instagram.

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This show is created in association with Podcast One.

My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Tadis Sedlauskis, Robert Fogarty, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi.

Our advice and opinions are our own.

And yes, I'm a lawyer, but I'm not your lawyer.

Also, we try to get these as right as we can.

Not everything is gospel, the Old Testament or the new, even if it's fact-checked.

So consult a professional before applying anything you hear on the show, especially if it's about your health and well-being.

Remember, we rise by lifting others.

Share the show with those you love.

If you found the episode useful, please share it with somebody else who could use a good dose of the the skepticism and knowledge we doled out today.

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Anyway, share this episode with them and R.I.P.

your inbox.

Anyway, in the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn.

And we'll see you next time.

What's it like to earn the trust of a ruthless drug cartel knowing the whole time you're going to bring them down?

Robert Maser went undercover as a money launderer inside Pablo Escobar's operation, building fake businesses, fake friendships, and even staging a fake wedding, all to stay alive.

In my view, I felt as though that my background tended to give me an opportunity to be able to more convincingly pose as a corrupt businessman, as a long-term undercover agent.

Information became my heroine.

I had to get the next big piece of information, and the risk had to be higher.

than the last risk, or I wasn't accomplishing my mission.

There was a half million dollar contract on my life.

You got to take that serious, that I came within three minutes of being murdered.

There's some people who aren't very happy with me.

The bad guy's smarter than you.

Don't ever forget that.

It's amazing to think that the people who were in charge of the Honduran government operated clandestine cocaine labs in Colombia and Honduras, provided a gateway for hundreds of tons of cocaine to the U.S.

and Canada, put millions of dollars in political figures, killed hundreds of people involved in human rights defenders, environmental defenders, competing traffickers.

They conspired with corrupt senior military and law enforcement leaders.

They sold military-grade weapons to the cartels, and they provided military escorts for caravans of drugs.

And this was going on just under the nose of all of us and has been and continues to and will continue to.

It's not going to stop.

To hear more about the high-stakes world of undercover ops and the razor-thin line between playing the part and becoming the role, check out episode 987 with Robert Mazer.

When you fly SJC, you can zip from curb to gate in minutes, faster than fast, so much faster, you'll wonder where the time didn't go.

Fly simple, fly SJC.

Visit flysjc.com.

A mochi moment from Mark, who writes, I just want to thank you for making GLP1s affordable.

What would have been over $1,000 a month is just $99 a month with mochi.

Money shouldn't be a barrier to healthy weight.

Three months in and I have smaller jeans and a bigger wallet.

You're the best.

Thanks Mark.

I'm Myra Ameth, founder of Mochi Health.

To find your Mochi moment, visit joinmochi.com.

Mark is a mochi member compensated for his story.