{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"The Honest Take","title":"A Caste of Saints: The Jewish Elites Who Turned on Israel, and Why the Line Isn't Hard to See | With Benjamin Kerstein","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":4234,"description":"The day after 9/11, Benjamin Kerstein sat in a political science class at Boston University while his professor explained why America deserved what it got. Then the professor wrote ISRAEL in capital letters on the blackboard, pointed at it and said, \"The cause.\" Kerstein argued with him, civilly, and got nowhere: \"His answers to me were all, well, I'm just criticizing Israeli policy.\" He never took another college class in America. He went to study at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheva instead, and he stayed for twenty years.\nThat isn't where he started. He grew up in Boston in a very liberal Reform home, and by the end of high school he was openly telling people that Israel had no right to exist. The second intifada broke that. He watched Yasser Arafat turn down peace and turn to violence, and he watched everyone around him blame Israel anyway. As he writes in his new book, it was Arafat who made him a Zionist.\nJews of Privilege: Elites, Anti-Zionists, and Our Secret Civil War is half memoir and half argument. The argument is that the Jews running interference for today's antisemitism aren't just a faction of the left. They're a class: the ideological heirs of an old, assimilated Jewish upper class that dismissed Herzl, while Zionism has always been \"the movement of the Jewish masses.\" He names names, from Peter Beinart and Ben Rhodes to Norman Finkelstein and Richard Falk, and he says the line between them and Jews who criticize Israeli policy isn't hard to find: \"The tell is the hate.\" Do they know they're being used? \"I think they genuinely believe that they are a caste of saints.\"\nBeersheva taught him what his bubble hadn't. He met Mizrahi Jews he didn't know existed growing up, Russian immigrants who had \"gone through unmitigated hell\" to get to Israel, leftist professors who wanted to change Israel but never hated it, and a Holocaust survivor in his nineties who told him his life story in a doctor's waiting room: a death march, liberation, and then 1948,...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/MWvudMeeQbLLprkXao5bQURkY3G_5oMcfe3JeW4xoBg/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS81Nzg1/NjYxZjIyMzBiODU5/OTczZmQzNjUzMmZi/YWIwNC5qcGVn.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}