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The Honest Take is HonestReporting's long-form interview series bringing together leading voices to examine how Israel and the Middle East are covered — and what goes into creating and feeding the narratives that target Israel.
Each episode features leading experts, analysts, researchers, and journalists who work on media bias, terrorism, NGO accountability, foreign influence, antisemitism, and international institutions. These are professionals directly involved in investigating how narratives are shaped, amplified, and protected across global newsrooms.
The conversations go beyond breaking news to unpack:
• Media bias and misinformation about Israel
• How terrorist organizations exploit humanitarian and civil society frameworks
• The role of NGOs and international bodies in shaping public perception
• Foreign state influence on Western media and education
• Why context disappears in reporting on Israel and the Palestinians
This series is for listeners seeking in-depth analysis, evidence-based discussion, and accountability in journalism on Israel and the Middle East.
THT Benjamin Kerstein — corrected transcript
English (US)
00:00:00.000 — 00:00:14.680 · Benjamin Kerstein
But I don't think any of the Jews of privilege see themselves as useful idiots. I think they genuinely believe that they are a caste of saints. I mean, the finest and most moral people who have ever existed in the history of the known universe. They absolutely believe this.
00:00:18.260 — 00:00:51.820 · Ben Chertoff
This is The Honest Take, the show that goes past the headlines to find out what's actually true about Israel and about the people covering it. I'm Ben Chertoff and my guest today is Benjamin Kerstein, a writer, a fellow at the Z3 Institute, and the author of a new book whose title alone is going to start some arguments: Jews of Privilege: Elites, Anti-Zionists, and Our Secret Civil War. Today, we're asking who the Jews leading the charge against Israel actually are, where they come from, and where the line is between criticizing Israel and something else entirely.
00:00:56.120 — 00:01:06.840 · Ben Chertoff
Quick thing before we dive in, if you're not subscribed yet, hit the button. And if you've got 10 seconds, give the show a rating. That's honestly how new people find us. Let's get into it.
00:01:10.240 — 00:03:15.480 · Ben Chertoff
The day after 9/11, Benjamin Kerstein was sitting in a political science class at Boston University. The professor spent the class explaining why America had it coming. Then he wrote Israel in capital letters on the board, pointed to it, and called it the cause. Benjamin argued with him politely and got nowhere, so he never took another college class in America. He went to study in Israel instead at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba, and he ended up staying there for many years. That 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 telling people that Israel had no right to exist. The second intifada broke that. Yasser Arafat had been offered peace, turned it down, and chose violence. And everyone around Benjamin blamed Israel anyway. As he puts it in the book, it was Arafat who made him a Zionist. Jews of Privilege is half memoir and half argument. The argument is that Jews running interference for today's anti-Semitism aren't just a faction on the left, they're a class. The heirs of an old, assimilated Jewish elite that dismissed Herzl as a wild dreamer, while Zionism itself has always been a movement of the Jewish masses. And he names names. Peter Beinart, Ben Rhodes, Bernie Sanders, Norman Finkelstein, and Richard Falk. We get into where he draws the line between a Jew who criticizes Israel and a Jew of privilege, and why he thinks it's a lot clearer than people pretend. We get into what Beersheba taught him, Mizrahi Jews he didn't know existed growing up, Russian immigrants who had been through hell to get there, and a Holocaust survivor in his 90s who told him his whole life story in a doctor's waiting room. And we get into whether anyone who's crossed that line can be brought back. His answer starts with his own story. If he could change his mind, anyone can.
00:03:15.960 — 00:03:18.020 · Ben Chertoff
Benjamin Kerstein, welcome to The Honest Take.
00:03:18.740 — 00:03:19.460 · Benjamin Kerstein
Thank you for having me.
00:03:20.200 — 00:03:44.760 · Ben Chertoff
So you grew up in Brighton in Boston, where you're joining us from right now. And you write that by the end of high school, quote, I was openly telling people that Israel had no right to exist. And then a few pages later, you write that it was Yasser Arafat who made me a Zionist. Can you walk me through what got you to that first sentence and how you got to the second?
00:03:45.660 — 00:05:20.620 · Benjamin Kerstein
Well, I just, you know, growing up in Boston and going to Boston schools, and it was a very, very progressive school system. A lot of the things we're seeing now on the left today were kind of in embryo when I was in high school. And I went along with it. I didn't know any better, really. I grew up in a very, very liberal, progressive, religious environment, you know, very Reform Judaism, very liberal form of Reform Judaism. And we didn't get really much education on traditional Judaism or Zionism or anything like that. And in a way, I was also, I think, rebelling against that upbringing by rejecting Israel. And it was just all around me. It was the atmosphere, it was the air I was breathing. And I became very extreme about it. And I also had the expectation that was what my so-called friends wanted to hear. This is what they were after. This is what they wanted to hear from any Jew that was around them, was a kind of acquiescence to that. Now that's become universal. I mean, you see that throughout the United States and Europe. They want the Jew to submit to that point of view. And the Jews that I write about, which I'm sure we'll get to, have submitted to that. At any rate, that was how it happened. And then I just had a breaking point when the second intifada broke out. And that changed everything. And I just wasn't willing to put up with it anymore, basically.
00:05:20.620 — 00:05:29.040 · Ben Chertoff
Yeah, you write that you had a red line and I was not OK with killing Jews.
00:05:29.540 — 00:05:29.720 · Benjamin Kerstein
Yes.
00:05:30.320 — 00:05:48.060 · Ben Chertoff
Where does a red line like that come from in a kid who had walked away from Judaism after his bar mitzvah? Like, what was it about the second intifada that really changed your point of view?
00:05:49.700 — 00:05:52.060 · Benjamin Kerstein
Honestly, to a certain extent, I don't know.
00:05:54.840 — 00:06:02.040 · Ben Chertoff
Because I have to say, I think October 7th did that for a lot of American Jews now in a later generation.
00:06:02.400 — 00:07:49.580 · Benjamin Kerstein
Yeah. I think it was just having been raised with some kind of a Jewish identity of a certain kind. And also, we did study the Holocaust in my Jewish school when I was a kid and I think that those two things combined in a way with just a kind of natural sense of which I think a lot of Jews after October 7th felt as well that I was being asked suddenly to sacrifice my self-respect to these people. And that, in a certain sense, has nothing to do with Judaism per se or with Jewish identity. It has to do with something even more fundamental about who you are and how you feel about yourself. And I just wasn't willing to do it anymore. And I did feel that there was, you know, if you enjoy or if you are okay with killing Jews, you clearly don't respect anyone who's Jewish. You clearly have no sense of their humanity. You have no sense of their right to exist just as human beings. And so in order to be okay with that, and I'm sad to say there's still too many Jews who are okay with that, even though I think the vast majority of Jews are not, requires a sacrifice that is even more fundamental than one's Jewish identity. It requires a sacrifice of basic self-respect and a basic belief in your own right to exist. And that was not a place I was willing to go. And thankfully, it's a place that the vast majority of Jews, I think, are still not willing to go. They don't necessarily know what to do about it yet. Right. But it's pretty fundamental to what any human being is, to my mind.
00:07:50.240 — 00:08:08.460 · Ben Chertoff
You talked about having some Jewish education and some Holocaust education. I don't think you mentioned it in the book, and I think I know the answer to this question already, but you hadn't been to Israel before you go later on in your story, right? I mean, you hadn't gone as a kid for anything.
00:08:08.780 — 00:08:35.720 · Benjamin Kerstein
No, we had no real connection to Israel. I mean, there was a little bit of it when I was growing up. And I remember my father having a certain admiration for the IDF and for things like the Entebbe raid. But he never really talked about it, you know, but I think he had something of an influence on me because he said, you know, if the Nazis ever— he was in the army, you know, and he was in the—
00:08:35.720 — 00:08:37.380 · Ben Chertoff
He was in the army here?
00:08:37.380 — 00:09:26.660 · Benjamin Kerstein
He was in the United States Army, in the military police. And he said to me, the reason I joined was because I made the decision that if the Nazis ever came back, they were only going to get one shot at me. And I do think that stuck with me to a certain extent, unconsciously, you know. But other than that, no, we had no real knowledge of it. We had no real knowledge of Zionism, of the history of Zionism. And to the extent we knew anything, it was the Oslo era and we were being taught, you know, this is the moment of peace and we need to reconcile with the Palestinians and, you know, everything's going to be fine. And I think that was also one of the reasons why the second intifada was such a huge shaking moment is that I realized that that was not true. And there was a really much deeper hatred at work amongst our enemies that was not going to be reconciled anytime soon, you know?
00:09:26.680 — 00:09:35.500 · Ben Chertoff
Yeah, I think we're similar age and those Oslo days do seem like a completely different universe from where we are today.
00:09:36.280 — 00:09:37.380 · Benjamin Kerstein
Yes, very sad.
00:09:37.740 — 00:09:38.320 · Ben Chertoff
I know.
00:09:38.680 — 00:11:04.620 · Benjamin Kerstein
I had a sense at the time also of the injustice, the way Israel was being treated, because I saw that Arafat had been offered peace and he had consciously turned it down and then turned to violence, even though he had publicly said numerous times, there will be no return to the armed struggle, quote unquote. And so I felt that Israel was in the right in this situation, very clearly in the right. And that's speaking objectively, not even as a Jew. And yet everybody was saying Israel was in the wrong and was evil. And that contradiction. And I don't like lies. I don't like hypocrisy. You know, and that set me off as well. That was a very angering thing that made me very angry at the time. But yes, I mean, before then, it was another world. I mean, there was really a sense that peace was at hand. And it is very sad that the Palestinians made the decision to literally blow that up. And I find it terribly ironic that had they said yes, you know, they would have had a state now for 30 years. None of this would be happening. Yeah. You know, and it was up to them. And they made a decision consciously as you know, they're human beings like the rest of us. They, you know, they made a conscious decision. And it's turned out extremely badly for them and unfortunately, very badly for us as well. It's a terrible situation.
00:11:06.020 — 00:11:39.220 · Ben Chertoff
Your book is called Jews of Privilege. I'd like to, for people who haven't seen the book or aren't familiar with that term yet kind of define what you mean by that. You write that the Jews who, quote, indulge in or run interference for today's left-wing and Muslim anti-Semitism are Jews of privilege, Jews of a highly specific economic, cultural, social, and political status. And on the other side, you have the Jews of Zionism. So tell me who these are. And you name names in the book.
00:11:39.520 — 00:15:32.080 · Benjamin Kerstein
I do. Yeah. I mean, Peter Beinart, Ben Rhodes, Norman Finkelstein, Richard Falk, and also groups like IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace. I don't want to delve into a history lesson here, but essentially what we're dealing with is the ideological heirs of the traditional Jewish American upper class, which is the German Jews who moved here mostly pre the American Civil War and built the first Jewish institutions and so on. And what happened in the 1880s and for about 20 years after was, as everyone knows, most of American Jews have descended from them, this massive wave of immigration from Eastern Europe rather than Central Europe. And these were, by and large, poor Jews who had never really known emancipation as it was in Central and Western Europe, who had a much stronger Jewish identity because they'd been forced to have a much stronger Jewish identity because they'd lived under essentially an apartheid system with periodic outbreaks of horrific violence. And they had retained a sense of self that their predecessors in America had essentially given up in favor of a much more liberal, universalized Judaism that essentially saw Judaism solely as a religion. And the Eastern Jews, the Ostjuden, as the Central European Jews called them, didn't see themselves that way at all. They saw Judaism as more than a religion, as an identity, as an ethnicity, as a fundamental sense of self. And the East— the Ostjuden were the Jews of Zionism from the very beginning one of the things that you notice about the early Zionists and especially Theodore Herzl who is the great visionary the great founder of political Zionism and I think one of the most fascinating men in Jewish history, they were all extremely class conscious. They were very aware of the fact that what they were saying was completely rejected by the middle class and upper middle class of the Central European Jewish community, especially the German Jewish community. Herzl was very explicit about this in his novel Altneuland. The main character talks about Zionism to an upper middle class Jewish family, and they literally just laugh at him. And I just read Stefan Zweig, who was a great German-Jewish writer who got his big break from Herzl, was not a Zionist, but was not unsympathetic to Zionist aspirations. At any rate, he talks about how he saw Herzl as this kind of wild dreamer. And then when Herzl died, Herzl died very young, Zweig went to his funeral and he saw hundreds of Ostjuden, of Eastern European Jews, wailing, crying, throwing themselves on Herzl's coffin, and he realized Herzl had been a man of the poor. And that is, I think, true of Zionism to this day. It's the movement of the Jewish masses. It's not always confined to the poor and the underclass, but it's fundamentally based on the Jewish masses. Whereas the Jews of privilege today are very, very much an elite class. They went to the great schools. They had the great connections. They came from the wealthy families for the most part, not all of them, but most of them. And they have either been born into or have adopted the ideology of the old Jews of privilege, which has always been very assimilationist and as a result, very hostile to Zionism. And that is what I think we are dealing with today is a kind of resurgence of that ideology. So.
00:15:32.080 — 00:15:32.900 · Ben Chertoff
It's interesting.
00:15:33.700 — 00:15:36.900 · Benjamin Kerstein
In a nutshell. Yeah, that's who they are.
00:15:36.900 — 00:15:54.820 · Ben Chertoff
It's interesting. You talk about Herzl, you know, who I think had he been American, he would have been in, you know, was not Ostjuden, was from, you know, relative means, which kind of like it is a choice to a certain extent.
00:15:54.820 — 00:17:24.700 · Benjamin Kerstein
Yes, he's a fascinating man because of that. He made the choice because of his own experience. He also had, I'm not comparing myself to him, but he had a, as I did, he had a shocking moment. He had a moment that shook him fundamentally, which was the Dreyfus case. And he came to the conclusion that Europe was never going to accept the Jews, as we now know they never did, and perhaps never will, not fully at any rate. And he saw the disaster coming. I think it's an exaggeration to say he prophesied the Holocaust, but he knew this wasn't going to have a happy ending. And that made him the decision on a personal level that he was going to do something and stand up for himself and his people in a way that no one from his class was really doing before. And that, I don't think he realized at first that that was going to be to appeal fundamentally to the Jewish masses. I think he hoped that his class would embrace it as well. And it was only later that he understood that he was a man of the poor, that he was a man of the unprivileged Jews, that he was a man of the Ostjuden. And he didn't have a problem with that. He was quite proud of it. Although I think he was in his own way very disappointed that his class didn't go along with him. You know, he embraced being a man of the poor. And rightfully so, to my mind.
00:17:26.160 — 00:18:10.960 · Ben Chertoff
So back to your current examples, you've got Beinart, Rhodes, Sanders, Finkelstein, Falk, Roth, regular murderers' row here. On the surface, and this is maybe a pre-October 7th, October 8th American view of these guys. They seem like your typical liberal left Jews, critical of Israel's human rights record. That's what you had written, but they are not. So where's that line? And when did they cross it? Had they already crossed it and we just didn't see it on the left between the liberal Jew who criticizes Israel and the Jew of privilege who actively works against it.
00:18:11.160 — 00:21:07.840 · Benjamin Kerstein
The line is the hate. Really. And I have many friends who are deeply, deeply critical of Israel's human rights record of the current Israeli government, especially. But they don't hate. They don't hate Israel. They don't collaborate with anti-Semites. I'm sorry to use the word collaborate, but there's no other word to use with anti-Semites. They don't reject Israel's right to exist. They don't use blood libels like genocide or ethnic cleansing. They are genuinely sincere Zionists who nonetheless are deeply, deeply concerned by the direction Israel is taking and who deeply object to a lot of Israeli policies. But they don't hate. And the Jews of privilege, I'm afraid to say, hate. And what I found when I was researching my book was horrifying to me. The degree to which they are willing to engage in the most horrendous rhetoric, in apologetics for anti-Semitism and for anti-Semitic violence. And particularly after October 7th, what I found was really troubling and really disturbing to me. Because you saw people like Peter Beinart, for example, essentially justifying an attempted terror attack on a synagogue because they had a We Stand With Israel sign on the lawn. You had Richard Falk saying that October 7th was justified. You had Bernie Sanders becoming basically the first senator to accuse Israel of genocide, running interference for Ilhan Omar when she was saying anti-Semitic things, essentially building the political architecture of what we're seeing happen to the Democratic Party now, this descent into anti-Semitism. And the others I mentioned as well went down that same very dark path. So the tell is the hate and the real tell is, are they okay with killing Jews or at the very least, are they unwilling to condemn the people who are okay with killing Jews? So I think there's actually a very clear line. I really don't think it's that hard to tell the difference between the Jews of privilege and the liberal left Jews who are sincerely concerned about what's happening in Israeli policy. I think the tell is the hate. The tell is the rage. The tell is whether or not they're okay with killing Jews. And I think that's often, you know, these people don't make much of an attempt to cover it up anymore. They did before October 7th, but they don't now because they feel the wind at their backs ideologically. They feel that, you know, the big Gentile world, the big non-Jewish world is with them in a sense. And they don't feel the need to obfuscate anymore. At least many of them don't. You know, and I mean, Falk, for example, or Finkelstein are quite open about how they feel, you know. And I think in some ways that's a good thing because we know them for what they are now. But it also makes the line extremely clear to my mind. There's no mistaking it.
00:21:08.940 — 00:22:03.620 · Ben Chertoff
Do you think, you know, you also write about groups like JVP and IfNotNow. And, you know, their leadership is one thing. They obviously know that they're in on the game there. For, like, the college student who's swept up in this, for the young Jew who, you know, whatever, is following IfNotNow, following JVP? Is it a myopia? Do you think that they are so, you know, surrounded by their privilege that they don't realize how privileged they are? They just don't know that there's any other type of Jew in the world or, you know, is there a line where that changes? I mean, I don't know. My personal views on that have changed over the past three years, seeing JVP get increasingly just, you know, beyond the pale. But I'm interested in your thoughts.
00:22:06.740 — 00:24:26.440 · Benjamin Kerstein
Well, as I said, I was raised very leftist. I'm bringing my old Marxist training here. To what extent is any class aware of the fact that its morality serves its privilege? I mean, even Marx didn't really know. He was never quite clear on whether that's the case. John Stuart Mill, I believe it was John Stuart Mill, believed that it was not the case, and that in fact that a certain class who creates a morality that is to its class advantage nonetheless believes in it very sincerely. And I think a lot of them are true believers in their views. I mean, I think that there are some who are scoundrels. You know, I think that Norman Finkelstein, for example, you know, is really a very ugly character, you know. But I think most of them— no, they're not conscious of it. They don't know, yeah, they don't know any other Jews, really. I mean, when I was growing up, we didn't even really know Mizrahi Jews existed. And we didn't know their experience in the Arab and Muslim countries. We didn't know their experience in Israel. We didn't know that they were a kind of Ostjuden, Eastern Jews who were an underclass. We didn't know that there were a lot of Jews in France who were overwhelmingly Mizrahim. We didn't really know any of these things. We were in the bubble, you know. And most of the Jews that I grew up with were very privileged. And I think that to see beyond that is extremely difficult. And to acknowledge that in some way the morality with which you were raised may simply be one born of privilege is an extremely difficult thing to do. So, yeah, I think a lot of them are myopic. I think a lot of them are also, quite frankly, malicious. I think there's a real, there is a real hatred of the American Jewish community on the part of a lot of these groups, and they'll say so, you know. And that's something that I found in my research is that they're very open about the fact that they really loathe the still-Zionist consensus, thank God, in most of the American Jewish community and especially its organizational form, their rhetoric is extremely violent. So I think I don't know what the percentages are, but it's a mix of the two. Yeah.
00:24:28.580 — 00:24:57.460 · Ben Chertoff
Actually, today, as we're recording this, we have Daniel Gordis on the show in the episode that's coming out today. And he made the point that, you know, in Israel, at least with the protests, the idea is that, like, OK, the train has come off the tracks, but how do we get it back on the tracks? And the opposite, what you describe, is like, there shouldn't be a train.
00:24:58.040 — 00:25:03.880 · Benjamin Kerstein
Yes. Yes. I think that's a very good metaphor. Yeah, that's very true. That's very true.
00:25:04.100 — 00:25:16.720 · Ben Chertoff
So one line that I found pretty fascinating is that on the Jews of privilege in Europe, in pre-war Europe, that most of those Jews stayed in Europe and that they died.
00:25:17.940 — 00:25:23.860 · Benjamin Kerstein
Yeah, and I want to make it clear that that was no fault of their own. But that is the historical verdict, sadly.
00:25:25.760 — 00:25:57.560 · Ben Chertoff
And, you know, this is something that I think is lost on a lot of American Jews, especially the Jews of privilege, especially the TikTok generation now that, you know, there was a point at which they couldn't come to the U.S. That, like, Israel was the only option. How much of this is education, do you think? You know, how much of this is that TikTok University has kind of taken over where Jewish education has stopped?
00:25:57.780 — 00:28:32.760 · Benjamin Kerstein
An enormous amount, I think. And certainly the Jewish education I grew up with profoundly failed to teach us the history of Zionism. You know, it was very much kind of cliched talking points about Israel to the extent that there was talk of Israel at all. And that is strange to me, because when you're dealing with very liberal Jews, very secularized Jews, who nonetheless are looking for some kind of Jewish identity, it's all there in early Zionism. I mean, someone like Ahad Ha'am, for example, should be a hero to these people. You know, even someone like Herzl should be a hero to these people, because these were very liberal, very secular Jews who were nonetheless looking for a way into—who had a strong Jewish identity, wanted a way to express that, and also wanted a way to stand up for it against anti-Semitism, but also against the power of assimilation and the general ethos of kind of dissolution that was taking over the Jews at the time. And when you read Ahad Ha'am write about assimilation, he was very much against it, but his arguments are fascinating, where he says, no, what we're giving up is not just the Torah or the mitzvot or stuff like that. We're giving up the entire great legacy of Judaism. We're giving up the great poets. We're giving up the great philosophers. We're giving up, you know, the great thinkers. We're giving up everything, you know, if we assimilate. And I think that's a very powerful argument for liberal Jews in the United States who want to remain Jews, want their children to remain Jews, but at the same time do not want to become Orthodox. And at the moment, the only Jewish community in the United States that's growing is the Orthodox because they have a fence around the law. It works, you know, very well, you know, very well and more power to them in that sense, you know. But liberal Jews don't seem to know quite how they're going to remain Jews and in what form they're going to remain Jews. And yet secular Zionism is there waiting for them, you know. And I wish that they were educated better about what it is and what it can give them. In a way, perhaps that's Zionism's fault because the great leaders of Zionism have always made aliyah for good reason. It's a massive part of their ideology. But it's robbed the diaspora of that tradition in some ways. And I really think it needs to be rediscovered.
00:28:34.020 — 00:28:58.840 · Ben Chertoff
I want to get back to the book for a moment. One of the beautiful parts about it is that it is really half memoir. It reminds me of my experience as well. And you write that the day after 9/11 in a Boston University political science class, something happened that made you write, you know, I never took another college class in America after that. So what happened?
00:28:59.840 — 00:31:25.640 · Benjamin Kerstein
Well, there was this fellow, the professor, and along with basically giving this long speech about how America deserved what it got. And this wonderful uprising of the wretched of the earth and the third world and all the rest of it. He literally wrote Israel in capital letters on the blackboard, pointed at it and said, the cause. And I wasn't willing to sit with that. I wasn't willing to have him say, who was really responsible for 9/11? It was the Jews, which was what he was saying in so many words, you know. And even more ironically, you know, 9/11 was committed by a group of Israel-hating Muslims, you know, and Jew-hating Muslims. So, it was this remarkable reversal, you know, of guilt, a remarkable reversal of causality in order to blame the Jews. And I got extremely angry, as I should have. I didn't really express it. I tried to be very civil in my disagreement with him. And his answers to me were all, well, I'm just criticizing Israeli policy. And I could not convince him of how deeply that had hurt me, how deeply what he said had really offended and really, I don't know what the word is. It really fundamentally insulted me and my people to my mind. And he just refused to understand it. He just refused to care. And I realized then that this man who was so allegedly progressive and compassionate and all the rest of it was a hypocrite and a liar. But also that there was no way I was going to get through to this man. It was impossible. There was no way ever that I was going to convince him of anything. And I realized this was going to be the case if I stayed in American academia and if I studied in America. Because, again, all of this stuff at the time that we're seeing now was in embryo back then. But it was there and I was very aware of it. And so I began a journey looking for where I was going to go. And I won't go into the massive details of it. People can read it in the book if they are good enough to do so. And I ended up saying, well, I'm going to go study in Israel. And that's what I did. And then I stayed for 20 years thereafter, you know, and will probably return quite soon. So.
00:31:26.680 — 00:31:49.640 · Ben Chertoff
One of the things that you write about specifically with that is, you know, you didn't go study in Tel Aviv. You went to Beersheba and that was formative for your experience in Israel. What did you get there that most tourists who just go to, you know, the King David Hotel or just stay in Tel Aviv miss?
00:31:50.220 — 00:33:18.380 · Benjamin Kerstein
Well, I mean, first of all, it was pure coincidence that I ended up in Beersheba. It was not intended in any way. That was just the program that would seem most appealing. But what I got there was, first of all, Hebrew, because if you're in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, you can just speak English forever and never really learn Hebrew. But in Beersheba, you've really got to have it to get along. And the second thing that I got was life among Jews who were not from the Israeli elite, if you like. And I believe on a certain level, all Israelis are unprivileged just because it's a much harder life in Israel than it is in the United States. But these were the unprivileged of the unprivileged, if you like. It was the Mizrahim, it was the new Russian immigrants, people like that, you know, who were living many times in poverty or in the lower middle class and who were struggling, and yet had tremendous dignity and tremendous sense of self and of who they were and of great self-respect and who had struggled their way up out of history to belong in the Jewish nation. You know, and the Mizrahim especially had an enormous effect on me, first of all, because these were Jews that I had never encountered before. And like I said, we didn't even really know they existed when I was growing up. And they were both very much the same and very different from me. And I hope in the book, it doesn't appear that I fetishized them. I hope I didn't. No.
00:33:18.520 — 00:33:19.140 · Ben Chertoff
I don't think so. But.
00:33:19.140 — 00:33:32.760 · Benjamin Kerstein
It was an enormous experience of the vastness of the Jewish world and of the unprivileged of the Jewish world. Again, Mizrahim means Eastern. These were like my great-grandparents who were Ostjuden. They were Eastern Jews.
00:33:33.060 — 00:33:34.100 · Ben Chertoff
They were like the Ostjuden.
00:33:34.240 — 00:35:39.340 · Benjamin Kerstein
Yes, exactly. The far Eastern Jews. Right. And so that gave me an enormous sense of what, and also what these people had been through. And it's a myth that they were not ethnically cleansed from the Arab and Muslim world. And I know this because they told me. You know, and they told me stories of what they had been through and what had happened to them when they had to leave and things like that. Quite horrible things. In fact, Einat Wilf, who I'm sure you know of, a wonderful writer, Israeli politician, she said to me, you know, you have to understand that the only reason there was not another genocide is because Israel existed. So there was only an ethnic cleansing of the Mizrahim. I'll step back from that. And also the Russians, many of whom had gone through unmitigated hell in order to come to Israel and had been led by some of the most extraordinary Jewish people of the 20th century, the great refuseniks like Natan Sharansky, who had gone to the Gulag because of their belief in their right to go to the Land of Israel and escape from this place where everybody hated them anyway. You know, I mean, to me, it's astonishing that, I mean, the Russians didn't want the Jews anyway. Why did they prevent them from leaving? You know, but that's another question. So I really encountered the Jews who had not had it easy in the biggest way. And no Israelis have had it easy, you know, and especially people like Holocaust survivors and things like that. And I encountered, I describe in my book, I had an extraordinary encounter with a 90-year-old Holocaust survivor, purely by coincidence, who told me his life story sitting in the waiting room of a doctor's office, and I was just dumbfounded by what this man had been through. And in many cases, you don't really encounter that in the United States. You only encounter it in places where there's a very concentrated Jewish population, like New York City, and let's face it, there aren't many of those in the United States. Not really. It certainly didn't really exist in Boston when I was growing up. So that was the great gift of Beersheba. And I think also in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, I would have just stayed in the Anglo bubble. Yeah. Beersheba, I couldn't. You know, and that was, again, an enormous gift. Very great.
00:35:39.440 — 00:35:44.520 · Ben Chertoff
It's interesting because you write about having leftist teachers in Beersheba.
00:35:45.940 — 00:35:51.320 · Benjamin Kerstein
Yes, [inaudible] is famous. Ben-Gurion University is somewhat unfairly famous for that.
00:35:51.740 — 00:36:29.780 · Ben Chertoff
For having left— Yeah. But it brings up the point that this isn't a political left-right, the Jews of privilege. It's different from that. And I'm interested to, you know, from an American point of view, we see JVP, we see Peter Beinart as just being like far, far left. But that's not, you know, when you go into the Israeli society, you see that that's not really accurate. You can't paint that onto the rest of Israeli Jews. Can you explain the difference there and what you learned from your leftist teachers?
00:36:30.080 — 00:40:09.680 · Benjamin Kerstein
I learned an enormous amount from them. And again, the issue was the hate. They didn't hate Israel, even if they wanted to very fundamentally change it. Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, who was in some ways the most impressive person I studied with, was always going on, we need to make Israel a state of all its citizens and very, very critical of Zionism itself. Yet he would sometimes say to me, tni li lihyot Yisraeli, like, allow me to be Israeli. You know what I mean? He was like, hachi Yisraeli she'yesh. He was like one of the most Israeli people I've ever met. And I was sometimes like, I'm not, who are you kidding? You're the most Israeli person I know. You know what I mean? So there wasn't that hatred for Israeli society and Israel in general. Although there are some, a handful of Israeli leftists who do hate. And I really don't want to deal with them because I find them very unpleasant and distasteful. But, you know, I learned an enormous amount from them about the complexity of Israeli society. And yes, I think American Jews very often make the mistake of trying to graft the American political scene onto Israel, whereas Israel has a very, very different political history and very different political spectrum. For example, the fact that, I mean, the Israeli right was the dissident movement for many decades, whereas in the United States the right was the establishment for a century or so. You know, and, you know, there's obviously something hugely different in that between American political society and Israeli political society. But, I mean, also someone like Benny Morris, who was still deeply on the left when I studied with him, but who had undergone a wrenching moral struggle when the Second intifada broke out and had concluded that no, the Palestinians never wanted peace, and we're going to have to contend with that fact for many, many years to come. And he went through a horrible personal ordeal, both in reaching that conclusion and in saying that publicly. And I deeply, deeply admired his integrity, and I realized that that was also part of his integrity as an intellectual and as a historian. He felt, and you can argue about his conclusions about 1948 and the Palestinian refugee issue, but he had arrived at what he believed to be the truth, and he felt that truth needed to be said even in the face of great discomfort with that truth in Israeli society. And you can, again, argue about whether it was the truth, whether he got it right, whether he got it wrong, but I admired that intellectual courage that he had. And I don't admire anything about the Jews of privilege. I really don't. I find them, it's not just that I find their ideology dangerous. I find them deeply distasteful on a personal level, and I think it's hard not to, really. You know, the violence of their rhetoric, the violence of their hatred is extremely off-putting, I think. And I didn't get that from the leftists I studied with. Even someone like Oren Yiftachel, who I probably disagreed with most profoundly, taught me very important lessons. Maybe not what he intended, you know, about things like demography and about political geography and the way that populations, the people who actually live in a certain area will determine it politically and nationally on a certain level. You know, I probably reached conclusions that he wouldn't have liked, but I'm extremely grateful for the fundamental lesson. So that would be the difference, I think. And even, you know, today, I mean, you know, a lot of the people who are on the far left today, especially the Zionist left, again, they're the most Israeli that there is, you know. So and that's not true with the Jews of privilege at all. So.
00:40:10.360 — 00:40:25.920 · Ben Chertoff
You write that the Jews of privilege are talking about ideals, but the rest of us are talking about the horrors of life, which— So what's a concrete example of that? I can think of several, you know, just being in a bomb shelter must—
00:40:27.600 — 00:43:39.320 · Benjamin Kerstein
Well, I mean, part of it is, for example, the demographic issue, which is verboten for the Jews of privilege to talk about. But, for example, OK, you know, a lot of the things that Israel does in the South to deal with illegal Bedouin construction are very, very unpleasant. But it is a fact that if the Bedouin population there grows big enough and diffused enough, it's very possible that that will lead to a kind of separatism, a kind of informal partition of Israel itself, and we could end up with another Lebanon, which is not even a functioning state. You know, which is where everyone is at each other's throat all the time, where you can't govern the country and where a terrorist organization essentially dominates much of their politics. I'm not saying that the Bedouin would become terrorists. I don't want to, you know, impugn that community in that way, but it's a possibility. And the Israeli government would be very, very remiss if it didn't deal with that possibility. And these are the horrors of life. These are the questions we don't want to face. These are the questions we don't want to deal with because there are no good answers. There just aren't. There aren't any pleasant answers. So what are you going to do? Now, you have myriad options. You could negotiate with the Bedouin community. You could engage in demolitions. You could take a stronger stance. You could take a more conciliatory stance. There are innumerable options. But if you don't acknowledge the problem, then you're going to be in real trouble. Those are the horrors of life when you have to choose between a very bad option and a catastrophic option. And Israelis have to deal with that every single day. And the Jews of Privilege don't have to deal with it at all. Because their privilege insulates them from the consequences of the horrors of life, although I think in the end they'll be horrendously disabused of that notion. And that's something, though, that they will never admit to or deal with. So, you know, and it's also the reality of history. What Israelis have come from, they have clawed themselves out of history by their fingernails. Again, that man I met in a doctor's waiting office, and I just, I saw the number on his arm, and he noticed me noticing it. I was afraid that he would be upset, and instead he told me his life story. And he was like, you know, yeah, I was in this concentration camp, and then they death marched us to another one, and then we were liberated by the Americans, and then I illegally, quote-unquote, made aliyah. And I fought in 1948. I fought in 1956. I fought in 1967. And they said, you know, you can really leave the army if you want. He said, no, no, no, I'll stay and fight and I fought in 1973. And then I finally left the army and, you know, now I'm 95 years old and I don't look it, do I? And I was like, no, he looked 75. You know what I mean? But this is, this is the horrors of life. And Israelis know these things intimately, very, very intimately. And the Jews of privilege don't, I think. These are stories to them in many ways. It's a kind of soap opera they watch. And that's a very, very dangerous way to view the world. Because the horrors of life exist everywhere. And we know that now they exist very much in the United States, as we've seen over the past three years. And American Jews are going to have to contend with them as well.
00:43:39.600 — 00:44:03.100 · Ben Chertoff
In terms of personal history and ancestry, this is, and I'm talking about Bernie Sanders, Finkelstein, George Soros, not what you would traditionally say was the, you know, German, Jewish mid-19th century immigrants. They were not, in that sense, Jews of privilege.
00:44:03.520 — 00:44:04.680 · Benjamin Kerstein
No, very much not.
00:44:05.360 — 00:44:25.980 · Ben Chertoff
But in terms of ideology and in terms of where they are now, like, where is that line? How do they, again, it's a choice, clearly, that they've moved here. How much of this is ideology? How much of it is just the privilege of being an American these days? I mean, how quickly they forget.
00:44:27.440 — 00:46:55.660 · Benjamin Kerstein
Yes, it's partially that. And I want to say with Soros, by the way, I was very reluctant to criticize him because he is a Holocaust survivor and God knows what that man went through and what trauma that he's still living with. But I felt I needed to because he had said essentially that the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe was the fault of George Bush and Ariel Sharon, in other words, of America and Israel, and I felt that needed to be criticized. But he was the only one I was very reluctant to criticize. But the others, yeah, I think we're seeing very much the phenomenon of the parvenu, someone who comes from an underprivileged background who wants to move up in the world and move up into the elite and learns their language, learns their way of thinking, adopts their morality, which, again, serves their class interests, adopts their worldview, and will do almost anything to be accepted. Will do almost anything to make them love him or her. And I think that you very much see that with Bernie Sanders. And let's face it, I mean, Sanders is an elite now. He's a very wealthy man for a socialist. You know, he's leading a political movement, and he has consented to lead that political movement, which in many ways is running against the Jews and benefiting immensely from anti-Semitism. Why has he done so? Because it's moved him up in the power structure. Why has Norman Finkelstein done it? Well, it's made him a celebrity among some very ugly circles, but nonetheless a celebrity. Peter Beinart is from a privileged background. Ben Rhodes is from a privileged background. But, you know, a lot of this is ideological adoption. But why are they adopting it? They're adopting it because of this phenomenon of the parvenu, this way to move up in the world, this way to be accepted again. Very assimilationist. Very, very much about dissolution of the self in order to belong. And of course, what's horribly ironic is that it doesn't work. You know, as Beinart found out after he spoke at Tel Aviv University, he was faced with this torrent of abuse, much of it racist, from his own side, and capitulated in the most craven way. And, you know, the others are going to face the same thing at some point. In the end, if they accept you, they can always spew you out. It's up to them, you know, in terms of what they're going to do. And so it's a losing game that the Jews are privileged to play, strangely enough. But it's one they very much believe in. And for the ones who come from unprivileged backgrounds, it's extremely important to them. Maybe more important even than to the ones who were born in it.
00:46:57.820 — 00:47:27.620 · Ben Chertoff
The assimilationist part of that that you just talked about, the irony is that so many of them are now actively working in this, you know, what many have called the Red-Green Alliance. It's, you know, the alliance between radical progressivism and radical Islam and Muslim extremism, which is not an assimilationist philosophy at all.
00:47:27.680 — 00:47:29.140 · Benjamin Kerstein
That's what's terribly ironic about it.
00:47:29.500 — 00:47:40.580 · Ben Chertoff
Yeah. How does this develop? I mean, how does that work with the Jews of privilege that they have moved in with, as you call them, these strange bedfellows?
00:47:41.500 — 00:50:18.520 · Benjamin Kerstein
I think that it comes very much from their embrace of very universalist, a very universalist form of Judaism that the Jews of privilege historically have always embraced, which is a very assimilationist creed. I mean, if you're a total universalist, that means you're just like everybody else. You think just like everybody else. So you belong, you know. Everybody else might feel differently. And you're going to be very careful about making sure they don't do anything about that. But, you know, you nonetheless feel like you belong. So they're part of the progressive wing of the Red-Green Alliance, and in embracing that progressive part, embracing the red part, they have to embrace the green part. Because the idea that Muslims, and especially Muslim extremists, are the wretched of the earth rebelling against the imperialists, against the colonialists, against the evil Zionists, against capitalism even, against globalism and things like this, which is ironic. I mean, the red part doesn't much like globalism either, which is now seen as a thing of the right, but it was actually a thing of the left for many years. At any rate, as my professor said, this is like the wretched of the earth in a just rebellion. And so they have to see also the intifada, which means rebellion or uprising against Israel as being inherently part of this. And therefore they have to embrace the green side, which is the vanguard of the war against Israel. So I think that's very much the reason why it's necessary for their alliances. And those alliances are what gives them their political privilege. If they didn't do it, they wouldn't be allowed to belong to the progressive movement as it is at the moment, sadly. And I wrote an essay about this once called The Rise of Barbaric Progressivism. This is the descent that progressivism has been on, with some very brave exceptions, since October 8th, essentially. So the Jews of privilege have no choice if they want to retain their privilege. They've got to privilege radical Islam as well, as much as they privilege progressivism. And that's in some ways the darkest thing, because there's a suicidality to it that many, many people have noted. You know, I mean, they've noted it in regard to other parties, too, like Queers for Palestine and things like this. It's like, well, these are the people who would kill you. Why are you siding with them? Well, they have to side with them in order to stay on the red side of the Red-Green Alliance because otherwise they'll be purged and people have already been purged. Peter Beinart was almost purged. That's why he prostrated himself and apologized in such a craven way. So I think that's the reason why.
00:50:19.280 — 00:50:35.040 · Ben Chertoff
Yeah, I can't help when you talk about the suicidal empathy there and the suicidality of the alliance. I can't help but think immediately of Brad Lander, who, you know, as we record, this is now in the West Bank protecting olive harvests.
00:50:35.900 — 00:50:37.440 · Benjamin Kerstein
Is he really? I didn't know that.
00:50:38.080 — 00:50:41.800 · Ben Chertoff
Yeah. He posted that on his social media yesterday.
00:50:42.560 — 00:50:43.940 · Benjamin Kerstein
That's going to work for him with his base.
00:50:44.540 — 00:50:49.320 · Ben Chertoff
Yeah. You know, just stay there. But I didn't say that.
00:50:49.600 — 00:50:50.460 · Benjamin Kerstein
No, of course not.
00:50:50.580 — 00:51:30.220 · Ben Chertoff
But so, you know, he is a Jewish Democrat who, as he says, you know, identifies as a progressive Zionist. But, you know, he— his bedfellows are not. So, like, what do you make of these guys end up in the front of the protests, you know, in the front of all these marches? It's Brad Lander. It's the Hannah Einbinders. It's the Jews of privilege who are so useful. Do they— I mean, do they know that they're just— I hate the term useful idiots, but useful idiots?
00:51:32.300 — 00:52:16.720 · Benjamin Kerstein
No. No. They don't know it at all. I think that they, again, this is an issue of, you know, how much does a class understand that its morality is serving its class interests? That's unknowable to a certain extent. But I don't think any of the Jews of privilege see themselves as useful idiots. I think they genuinely believe that they are a caste of saints. I mean, the finest and most moral people who have ever existed in the history of the known universe. They absolutely believe this. And so do most of their non-Jewish compatriots, by the way. Now that's very humorous, but it's very sincere. And no, they see themselves as fighting the good fight, as standing up for the wretched of the earth, as standing up for an oppressed people in the form of the Palestinians.
00:52:19.520 — 00:52:55.020 · Benjamin Kerstein
And everything flows from that. I mean, if they did not have their moral righteousness to work off of, they could never justify the things they say and do. They could never justify, you know, even just being Palestinian nationalists. And they are Palestinian nationalists, is what's funny. Because if they were not Jewish, they'd just be run-of-the-mill, hardline Palestinian nationalists. It's the fact that they're Jewish that makes them special. You know, and they know that on some level. But no, they think that they're genuinely wonderful people and that they're on the right side of history. And it's all the arc is bending towards justice in their favor.
00:52:56.180 — 00:53:00.780 · Ben Chertoff
Right. We had Ben M. Freeman on the pod.
00:53:01.120 — 00:53:01.680 · Benjamin Kerstein
Ah, Ben's great. Yeah.
00:53:01.960 — 00:53:08.150 · Ben Chertoff
Yes. Yes. Who wrote the introduction to your book, of course.
00:53:08.150 — 00:53:09.350 · Benjamin Kerstein
Very generously wrote the foreword to my book, yeah.
00:53:09.440 — 00:53:28.220 · Ben Chertoff
Yeah, the foreword. He made the point that, you know, we don't have a Sanhedrin anymore. You're Jewish by birth. You aren't un-Jewish at a certain point. But like, at what point do we say to the Peter Beinarts, like, no, you're out of the tent?
00:53:30.300 — 00:55:29.180 · Benjamin Kerstein
Well, we have to say you're out of the tent. But no, they're, I mean, the rabbis say, and I don't like to use the word, but even the meshumad remains a Jew. We have to contend with the fact that these people are part of our community, and that there is something dysfunctional in our community that allows them to reach this point. I don't like saying that. It's not pleasant. But it's something we— I think, again, it's the issue of assimilation. We have to contend with the nature of assimilation in our community, and I, by and large, am against assimilation. I don't necessarily mean religiosity. We already talked about this. But we have to contend with the way that and the extent to which our community has embraced the idea of assimilation. And we need to look at the fact that this group of Jews is, in some ways, a consequence of our dedication to assimilation. And what are we going to do about that? And no, so from that point of view, I don't think we can read them out. We do have to say you're out of the tent. And I think the red line, again, is very clear. It's the hate and whether you're okay with killing Jews. If you're across that line, you're out of the tent. We don't want to hear from you. We're not interested. But we do have to contend with the fact that they're Jews, and we can't deny that they are. Again, if the rabbis say that they're Jews, who are we necessarily to disagree with that? But again, as my book outlines, we need to understand they're a very specific kind of Jew from a very specific ideology, a very specific class, and that one of the ways we can contend with them is to understand that. I don't believe that we should pronounce a kind of herem on them where we say, you know, cursed are you in lying down and cursed are you in rising up. I mean, I don't think that's going to do us any good, you know. And I don't like to read anybody out of the Jewish community because we need to deal with why we have these extremists. The Jews of privilege are there and the Kahanists are there. These are two ends of our spectrum and we need to, you know, understand where they come from.
00:55:30.020 — 00:55:46.280 · Ben Chertoff
To what extent do we need to work to bring them back to the tent? Or is this something that they need to come to on their own? Or is this something that we need to just, again, like, how do we keep the next generation in the tent?
00:55:46.580 — 00:55:49.020 · Benjamin Kerstein
Well, I mean, if I can be converted, anybody can.
00:55:50.100 — 00:55:51.360 · Ben Chertoff
Okay. All right. Well, yeah.
00:55:51.600 — 00:58:29.480 · Benjamin Kerstein
You know, they are in some ways like someone who's in a cult, you know, and so, you know, there's people have this idea of deprogramming people who are in a cult. That's not seen as anymore as being a particularly good idea. But you can coax people out of a cult in a certain way. But I do think that a lot of them are too far gone, really, to waste much energy on. Finkelstein is gone. I mean, Richard Falk is gone. Peter Beinart is gone. You know, there are some others maybe who could be brought around, but where I think with the young people, there are some who can be reached. The ones who hate, the ones who are okay with killing Jews, maybe you can reach them. I'm not sure. But the ones that you talked about as being myopic, they can be reached. And I do think we should be trying to reach them. We shouldn't be reading them out of the tent. We should be trying to contend with why they are, why they believe what they believe, why they're doing what they're doing and try to reach out to them in some way. But I think what we need to do within the community that does not hate Israel or Zionism or other Jews is to teach them what I was not taught, which are things we've been talking about this entire time, you know, about Zionism, about liberal Zionism, the legacy of secular Zionism, of Jewish secularism. We need to teach them everything that Ahad Ha'am warned we were jettisoning. You know, and obviously, you know, Torah is a big part of that, but also is, you know, the secular study of the development of the Talmud and the Kabbalah and the great poets of Spain. You know, the great philosophers like Saadia Gaon and the Rambam, you know, and going on to the secular era, the great Jews of the secular era, like Einstein's Zionist writings. People forget that Einstein was a Zionist. People forget why he was a Zionist, you know, the great early Zionist thinkers and things like this. These all need to be part of what we're teaching. Actually, Einat Wilf, again, and I did a very small part in assisting her in writing a book called Teaching Zionism, where she really outlines what—she taught a course on Zionism in a couple of places, a couple of universities, and she outlines the curriculum and what it was meant to say and meant to teach. And I strongly recommend that everyone who's interested in this read this book, Teaching Zionism, because she really goes through what needs to be taught, I think, and can really bring the Jewish community together around these types of ideas. So that's, I think, what we need to do. And we do need to reach out to the people who are myopic, people who hate, people who are OK with killing Jews. I don't think we should waste our energy, unfortunately.
00:58:31.040 — 00:58:59.780 · Ben Chertoff
That was my next question was if one of them called you tomorrow. Could you have a conversation with any of them? And what would you say? And this also goes to the more moderate case, which would be if there's a college student who's listening to this, who has friends who are also Jewish on the other side of the divide. What do you say? I mean, that's a smaller gap, obviously. But I'm interested in, like, if you could talk to any of these guys, who would you talk to? I'm assuming it's not Finkelstein.
00:59:02.160 — 00:59:44.840 · Benjamin Kerstein
No, I actually had to think about this because I was like, OK, when I'm promoting this book, going out and talking about it. Am I going to do debates? Am I going to appear in hostile forums? Who am I going to talk to? Who am I not? And I made a decision that I, again, had certain red lines. I was not going to debate or discuss with anyone who denies Israel's right to exist. So that rules out Beinart. I'm not going to discuss with anyone who accuses Israel of genocide. So that rules out Sanders and Rhodes and Finkelstein and Roth. And so, not Roth, Falk. So I could have a debate with Kenneth Roth, for example. And I can think of some other I could probably have a debate with.
00:59:44.840 — 00:59:46.580 · Ben Chertoff
Kenneth Roth, who's Human Rights Watch.
00:59:46.580 — 00:59:49.680 · Benjamin Kerstein
Yes. Yes, he either is or was head of Human Rights Watch.
00:59:49.860 — 00:59:49.960 · Ben Chertoff
Yeah.
00:59:50.040 — 01:00:58.080 · Benjamin Kerstein
So, I'm sure you deal with him constantly. I could, you know, Hannah Einbinder, I'm sure I could have an argument with a lot of the Hollywood Jews who have embraced anti-Zionism. I could probably have a debate with, I could probably have an argument with, but I wouldn't. Most of the Jews of privilege I deal with in my book, I'm afraid, are beyond the pale to me. I'm not going to, I think at a certain point, and a great anti-Zionist Jew, who I actually mentioned in my book, Noam Chomsky, said this once, which is that if you enter a debate on certain issues and legitimize that debate, you've already lost your humanity. And I must say that Chomsky, that may be the only thing he was ever right about. And yeah, I'm not going to legitimize what I consider to be monstrous ideas like that Israel should be destroyed or dismantled or that Israel has committed genocide or apologetics for anti-Semitism. I'm not going to legitimize that by engaging with it. But yes, and as you asked about students, yes, I would certainly talk to them. Absolutely.
01:00:58.720 — 01:01:12.560 · Ben Chertoff
That's very good. How would you open that conversation? How would you, I mean, you mentioned that you had thought about that, you know, am I going to debate these people? Did you think about what you would say?
01:01:14.380 — 01:02:32.960 · Benjamin Kerstein
I would say, do you realize what you're giving up? Do you realize what you're jettisoning? Do you even know really what you're rejecting? And I would see what they have to say then, you know, and if it appears to me like they're operating out of guilt or having been the victim of emotional blackmail, as I think is a major factor in this that we haven't discussed really, but this is the tactics of the Red-Green Alliance. Emotional blackmail is a huge part of it. You're a bad person if you don't reject Israel. Anyway, if I felt that, if I felt that they had been lied to, that they had been miseducated, things like that, I would start to talk about that with them and to say why I felt that they'd been led astray. Why I felt that they had been, as Malcolm X would have said, bamboozled by these people. And if I felt that they were beginning to understand that, I would then say, you know, you don't have to live like this. You don't have to have this existential guilt that you're feeling. You don't have to reject yourself. You don't have to reject your own community. You don't have to listen to these people. Look what they're asking of you. Look what they're demanding of you. These are not people you need to respect. It is demands you need to respect. And then we would see what happens. Maybe that would change their mind. Maybe it wouldn't. I don't know, but that's a discourse worth having.
01:02:33.900 — 01:03:37.260 · Ben Chertoff
This also came up in my discussion with Ben M. Freeman, and I'm no Torah scholar, but there is, in the Exodus story, there's some, one of the sages writes that something like only 20% of the Israelites in Egypt actually left to become Jews. Which I have to think like, you know, American Jews, how many of us would actually leave and stand up for this? And is there, yeah, or, to make aliyah, to like in, if we were to get to the point where you have to make a choice to survive, you can either go this one way and, you know, it makes me think of the Inquisition or whatever. Like, you can live in your privilege or you can be a Jew. I mean, is there, do you think there is a hope for us there that Jews of privilege could make that choice?
01:03:38.640 — 01:05:25.080 · Benjamin Kerstein
No, I think the Jews of privilege would choose conversion if this was the Inquisition. They don't have to because we live in a secular age. But if this was, yeah, if this was the Inquisition, I think they would convert and not become marranos. You know, not become anusim, crypto-Jews. Yeah. Right. How many of American Jews would choose to remain Jewish in that case? And perhaps make aliyah? I really don't know. I really do not know. I wish I had an answer for you. I have no idea. If the situation gets bad enough, it's very hard to move to Israel. Tough place. It's hard to get a job. It's hard to make a living. You have army service for either yourself or your kids. You have constant war. You have Iranian missiles, ballistic missiles coming down on your head, you know, you have to spend weeks in bomb shelters, things like that. I can understand why there's a reluctance on the part of American Jews to make aliyah. It's a very comfortable life in America, you know. What happens when it becomes uncomfortable enough to force them to leave? I don't know. I really do not know what they'll do, whether the majority of them will go or whether the majority of them will just in some way capitulate. I wish I knew. I really have no idea. I do think that religious Jews, Orthodox Jews, and the majority of strongly identified secular Jews like you and me will make aliyah. What the rest will do, I don't know. Maybe they'll simply assimilate out of existence. Maybe they'll find some way to be crypto-Jews of a kind in a hostile America. I have no idea. I really don't know. And I wouldn't try to predict that. You know, it's a fool's game trying to figure out what the Jews will do.
01:05:25.260 — 01:05:25.360 · Ben Chertoff
Right.
01:05:25.500 — 01:05:26.680 · Benjamin Kerstein
It's definitely a fool's game.
01:05:28.140 — 01:05:35.080 · Ben Chertoff
You know, I guess the flip side is, though, that in these times of crisis, it does bring us together. And we do now have a place to go.
01:05:35.820 — 01:07:21.800 · Benjamin Kerstein
Yes, that's the all-important thing. And I wrote an essay about this on my Substack, which is called No Delusions, No Despair, for those who want to see more of my writing. And again, I was working off Zweig again, Stefan Zweig, where he was writing about encountering all these Jewish refugees in England. While the Holocaust was underway, and talking about these people who just had nowhere to go and their desperation and what this meant to see the Jews, first of all, suddenly forced together to become a people again when they had been completely diffused and assimilated and scattered in Europe. And then to understand that there was nowhere to go. The whole world was telling them, don't be here. And if that's true, then they're saying, don't be. You know, and I realized then the role of Israel as a refuge, that at least there's somewhere to go, you know, now. And that it is, and our first priority in many ways as Jews, whether in Israel or the diaspora, should be to protect and defend that refuge, because we do need it. And American Jews may need it. They don't know you. You know what I mean? Yeah. And so that really brought home to me how important it is that we have a place to go. And Einat Wilf, again, actually said to me, you know, if Herzl could come back today, we had no idea what he would say about Israel. No idea. We can't predict it. But we do really know one thing, which is that he would be absolutely devastated by his failure to save the Jews of Central and Western Europe. He would be absolutely devastated by it. And that's what we need Israel for, to prevent that from happening. He tried with everything he had. He killed himself trying, you know, and thanks to him, we now have the place to go and we need to do everything possible to preserve it.
01:07:22.120 — 01:07:26.840 · Ben Chertoff
The Z3 Institute, what is that and how can people learn more about that?
01:07:27.000 — 01:08:30.760 · Benjamin Kerstein
Z3 Institute is a wonderful initiative that is one of the more unabashedly Zionist Jewish organizations in American Jewish organizations today. And the general idea is that, you know, it's located in Palo Alto and Silicon Valley and they're very much interested in taking the lessons of the tech industry and applying them to Israel advocacy and the connection with Israel. And that today we've reached a point of Zionism 3.0, where Israel and the diaspora are now intimately connected and need to work together in order to protect and defend that refuge I was talking about, but also to advance each other as communities and to emphasize the joy as much as the oy, as they say, and to help develop stronger Zionist and Jewish identity on both sides of Israel and the diaspora. So, and I work at their institute, which is kind of their think tank, and we write, we publish books, and we somehow get paid to sit around and think about these things. And it's wonderful. Really, it's a wonderful initiative.
01:08:32.860 — 01:08:35.200 · Ben Chertoff
Benjamin Kerstein, thank you so much for joining us.
01:08:35.380 — 01:08:36.400 · Benjamin Kerstein
Thank you. It's my privilege.
01:08:40.340 — 01:10:28.360 · Ben Chertoff
Toward the end, I asked Benjamin what he'd say to a Jewish college student on the other side of this. He didn't open with an argument about Israel. He opened with a question. Do you realize what you're giving up? That question runs through this whole conversation. What he wasn't taught growing up wasn't just the history of Israel. It was the poets, the philosophers, the early Zionists who were as liberal and as secular as anyone listening to this and still found a way to be fully Jewish and to stand up for it. His answer to the Jews of privilege isn't to read them out of the community. It's to teach the next generation all the things he had to cross an ocean to find. And underneath all of it is something hard to argue with. Herzl wore himself out trying to give Jews of Europe somewhere to go, and he didn't live to see it. We have it. In Israel or in the diaspora, keeping it standing is now everyone's job. If this one gave you something to argue about, do me a favor and leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's genuinely the one thing that helps people find the show. Subscribe on YouTube, Apple, or Spotify so you don't miss the next show. And follow @HonestReporting on Instagram, X, Facebook, and TikTok for the work behind these conversations. Benjamin's book is Jews of Privilege: Elites, Anti-Zionists, and Our Secret Civil War, with a foreword by Ben M. Freeman, who you may remember from this show. The book is out now, and you can read more of his writing on his Substack, No Delusions, No Despair. I'm Ben Chertoff, this has been The Honest Take, and we'll see you next time.