Transcription
We oppose white supremacy. We opposed male supremacy. So what is problematic about just saying instead of using these vague terms like "I'm not a Zionist," why not just use the straightforward term, whether or not you're a Jewish supremacist?
The main Israeli human rights organization that Selma put out a report. It says two things. Let's stop talking about Israel and the occupied territories. There's one state there. There's one state. It goes from the Mediterranean to the Jordan. It incorporates the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem. There's one state. It's a state of Israel. And they said the foundation of that state is Jewish supremacy. An unequal Jewish supremacy. Palestinian Israeli Arabs have more rights than West Bank Arabs. And then Gaza Arabs. West Bank Palestinian Arabs have less rights than Israeli Arabs, but more rights than Gazan Arabs. It's unequal. But the bottom line is it's one state based on Jewish supremacy.
And I found that formulation resonant because I don't think it's particularly useful to describe yourself as an anti-Zionist because no two people agree on what Zionism is. So why shouldn't we be direct? Israel is technically a Jewish state as a legal matter. It's a state of the Jewish people. But there's nothing Jewish about Israel. In my opinion, it's an alien. It's a kind of an, you know, the fancy word, an excrescence. It's like an excrescence on the Jewish history and the Jewish experience. So I don't feel Israel as being a Jewish place.
If you even right now, it was kind of an astonishing fact when you consider how much Jews are saturated with propaganda by other Jews. 40% of American Jews think Israel is committing genocide. So when 40% of American Jews say they think Israel is committing genocide, it's kind of an acknowledgment that Israel is not Jewish.
There is a large number of Jews outside Israel who give Israel blind support. Not because they give a darn about Zionism. I doubt they've ever read a book on the subject. It wasn't Zionism. It's this belief that Jews are better, Jews are superior, and all life, not just Arab life, all life is lesser than Jewish life. And that Jews can do no wrong. They can't do any wrong because the whole world resents them for one simple reason. They're envious of us. All the non-Jews envy us because we're so smart and we're so successful and we're so clever. That's a very deeply entrenched belief among Jews. Overwhelmingly, it started with the spectacular secular success of Jews in the western world and then with the accumulation of wealth, power, organization. It's a very hard, speaking personally, it's a very hard thing to resist because there does seem to be evidence of it.
Do you know there's all these debates about whether Jews have a higher IQ or they say Ashkenazi Jews have a higher IQ than any other ethnic or racial group. Whether it's true or not, I have no clue. I It's genetics. What do I know about genetics? But then again, what do most Jews know about genetics? They don't really know. They know their success. They know their success. And it does breed a feeling of Jewish supremacy. You know, I have to be careful about that. Not because I in any way recoil from the truth, but because you can end up with this conspiratorial view of the world where the Jews control everything. And because one wants to be factually accurate and also one doesn't want to fuel certain stereotypes, you have to be careful. That doesn't mean you run away from the facts, but you have to be careful.
Jews are the wealthiest ethnic group in the United States, which is a significant fact. Obviously, money is power. Secondly, and it's not trivial, Jews are very well organized. They always had a tradition of forming communal organizations. That's always been very essential to the Jewish community. So there is the organization, there is the money. And then there was for a long time after World War II there was, and I don't want to say this in a kind of heartless way, but there was a certain immunity that was granted to Jews because of the Nazi Holocaust. And so it was very difficult to criticize Jews on any account because of looming over every question was the Holocaust. So you have concentrated wealth of a significant degree. You have organization of a significant degree. And then you have the immunity to any criticism. Well, you put those three together, it's a lethal brew. It's a lethal brew. It's a problem.
Oh, I should say there was a fourth aspect. The fourth aspect, again, we have to be careful about language. The fourth aspect is Jews were spectacularly successful in the 20th century. Every Jew will tell you, I grew up in that milieu. The great avatars of modernity. Freud Jewish, Marx Jewish, Einstein Jewish. Every Jew knows that. Every Jew knows that. And then Jews represent about 0.000000001% of the world's population. 20% of the Nobel laureates are Jewish. That can't but go to your head. You know, it's very intoxicating. So now you have the money, the organization, the immunity, and the, let's call it secular giddiness, the arrogance, the notion, well, we really are a chosen people. Not as it was understood biblically that you have to bear the sins of humankind. No chosenness in the, let's call it supremacist sense. So when you combine those four factors, you can have a problem. And that problem did arise with the question of Israel.
It also, you know, speaking honestly, there was a certain amount of resentment at the Jewish resentment mixed with envy of the Jewish success story in the US. Jews historically have contributed large amounts of money to cultural institutions, hospitals, things of that sort. That was a kind of Jewish tradition. So if you go to a library in the United States, a major library, they have a list of donors, overwhelmingly Jewish. You go to a cultural place, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, they have the list of donors, usually a plaque, overwhelmingly Jewish. So on the one hand, that's a good thing. They're giving money to cultural institutions, universities, as against to saloons and bordellos, you know. So, it's a good thing. But there's an underside. It means you have a lot of power in these institutions. And now that power was mobilized in a quite brutal, unabashed way. That is, for example, at universities where Jews gave huge amounts of money, at least by my standard. If you look at the most recent Harvard report on anti-semitism, it mentions in passing, one Harvard alumnus gave Harvard $200 million. Another alumnus gave Harvard $300 million. Bill Ackman, a major hedge fund manager, he gave Harvard $50 million, which the universities were very reluctant to lose. And so the screws are turned. Unless you crush the student encampments, we're not giving you money. Unless you rein in, tame the Middle East studies programs, which are replete with sympathizers for Palestinians. In the United States, they created this field called Israel studies. You know why they created it? Because they lost the battle in the Middle East studies programs. So the Israelis, the Jewish supporters of Israel, they realized that battle has been lost and so they created their own field called Israel studies. So across the board, I know people in the cultural institutions and they told me the pressure in places like Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, which is the major performing arts institution in New York, the pressure not to criticize Israel was just overwhelming.
So, that power, the exertion of that power. Now, it was my friend Jamie Stern Winer who I'll mention, as he said to me, but you have to whenever you talk about this issue, you have to make sure you point out that that problem arises because of the huge concentration of wealth in our society, not just Jews, but in society in general. The billionaire class gets its way in everything. They buy elections, they buy everything, they buy legislation. So ultimately, it's a problem of the maldistribution of wealth in spectacular ways. I mean, the levels of polarization now in our society, as Bernie Sanders would point out, the three people standing behind President Trump at his inauguration, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk, three individuals controlled more wealth than half of our country, than 180 million Americans. Three individuals.
I was just going over the statistics with my students, and it was funny. You would see the charts of distribution of wealth. Top one-tenth of 1% control 15% of the wealth. One-tenth of 1%. Top 10% control about 30% of the wealth. And then when each of the graphs, they have this very thin line at the bottom. It looks like the border of the graph. It looks like the border. And you know what that thin line is? What percentage of the wealth? This thin line. No, you know what it's called? It's called the bottom 50%. They start one-tenth of 1% control 15, and then they go to 10% and then they go to 30%. And then you get this barely perceptible. The bottom 50% of our country, you know what percent of the wealth they control? 2.5%. 2.5% of the wealth. So the Jewish case is an extreme example because Jews represent about 2% of American society, roughly 2%, but they're wildly overrepresented in like what's called the Forbes 500. So yes, it's an extreme case, but it's an extreme case of the maldistribution of wealth in our society in general and the fact that the rich get their way in everything.
How do you speak frankly about these questions without feeding conspiracy theories and anti-semitic tropes? And I think it's very hard to find the right language which is faithful to the facts and doesn't feed the pernicious stereotypes. I'm not sure how do you do it. I was recently on a program of a person decisively of the right, or MAGA-right as it's called, and a friend of mine criticized me afterwards on the grounds that you were agreeing with her too much. I tried because the conspiracy theories were coming at me like a barrage, fast and furious. Which ones do you attack or which ones do you outrightly reject? I let a large number of them pass me by. I was going to use the occasion to focus on a couple. Number one, the Nazi Holocaust happened. We're not going there. I will agree with a lot of what you say about Jewish money, Jewish power, the horrors of Gaza, but we're not going to Holocaust denial. I said, if you want to believe it, it's your right. However, if you want to be taken seriously, you have to refute a very large body of evidence. And so she started to say that all these people who claim to be survivors, they're fakes. And she said, "Elie Wiesel, he's a fake. He took the identity of somebody," some strange theory. And I said to her, "Well, actually, you're right. A lot of the survivors are fakes. And you know why they're fakes? They're fakes because very few people survived. That's why they're fakes. The Final Solution was very efficient. My mother had a sprawling family. My father had a sprawling family. At the end of the war, one that was it. Everybody else was exterminated. So if you tell me these survivors are fakes, I said, 'I agree with you, but I'm not going to run to the conclusion that the Nazi Holocaust didn't happen. It did happen. That's why there are so few survivors.' And I agree with you. A large number of them were fakes. They are fakes. And I could tell you, I can go through the stories, you know, from after World War II."
My parents never made American friends. They weren't able to. Not because of language, mindset, mindset. And so all of my parents' friends were people they met, they knew before the war. However, how did they survive? Well, Germany and the Soviet Union divided up Poland, the Hitler-Stalin pact, and a large number of Jews fled from the German side to the Russian side. The estimates are about 200, 300,000 Jews fled. My family could have fled. My mother's side could have fled because my mother's father was in the Polish middle class. He owned a tobacco store. He was fanatically religious. My mother said, "Worse than a 100 rabbis." It was fanatically religious. And the question came up, should you flee? And my mother said, my father said, "God will never let anything happened to the Jews." And my mother adored her father. Adored her father. But she, he would always say, "So stupid. So stupid. He believed in God. So stupid." So the ones who survived, they had fled to Russia. And you know what that meant? It meant they escaped the Holocaust. They're not Holocaust survivors. They escaped it. They were in Russia. None of them would dare. They wouldn't dare to say to my parents that we're Holocaust survivors also. They would be ashamed to say that. Ashamed. No, Russia was not a bowl of cherries. And it was during World War II. And the estimates are about 27 to 30 million Russians were killed. But it wasn't Auschwitz. It wasn't Maidanek. It was not. It was different.
But when the Holocaust industry, you know, this enterprise took off, everybody wanted to be a Holocaust survivor because now it was a source of pride. Do you know when I grew up being a Holocaust survivor was a source of deep shame? Strange to say that now. You know why? Because the assumption was, first of all, it was said of the Jews, first of all by another Jew, by the way, that the Jews went like sheep to slaughter. It was a badge of shame. Jews went like sheep to slaughter. Why didn't they fight back? You know. And number two, the assumption was, if you survived, you must have done something dirty. My mother used to get so angry when people innocently asked her, innocent. It really was innocent. I think it was innocent. They would ask, "How did you survive?" Which she always thought there was a dirty undercurrent to that. Like, he must have done something dirty. So it was a badge of shame. But then when the Holocaust industry took off, everyone wanted to be a Holocaust survivor and everyone wanted to be a survivor of Auschwitz. Everyone wanted to be a survivor of Auschwitz and everyone wanted to say they saw Mengele, you know, the doctor of death in Auschwitz. They saw Mengele. It's all complete crap. Complete nonsense.
You know, I'm of the generation my parents passed through the Nazi Holocaust and they were totally anti-Israel, but my parents deeply felt the Jews needed a homeland because their feeling was they were abandoned during World War II. I don't quite agree with their formulation. I don't quite agree with it, but certainly I understood the feeling, as my parents put it. One, nobody wanted us, and two, quite a few people weren't all that sad at the thought that we were being killed. So, they were very emphatic. The Jews needed a homeland as the expression was back then. And my parents tended to use the political language. They needed a place of refuge. If and when it came again to nobody wants us, they needed a place, a place of refuge. So my point is the idea of a Jewish homeland state had very broad support. And I think the events of the past two years, they do have to call into question whether that whole experiment of Jews with a homeland, was it a complete and total disaster which discredited the entire idea as well as its undertaking from the beginning?
Israel is a visibly very ugly place. It's not the horror. It's not the kibbutz scene. It's child killers. Not just kill children, target children. Targeting children in the skull and in the chest. It's not like it's some specialized branch of Israeli society. The Israeli army, for better or for worse, it's a citizen army. What does a citizen army mean? It means it's representative of Israeli society. So when this representative of Israeli society goes into Gaza, it's representative Israelis who are targeting children. You know, can I mentally grasp that? Actually, no. Actually, no. I know this is probably not the right way to formulate it, but the experiment didn't work. It's an abortion. It didn't work. You have to be honest about that.
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