Mark Oppenheimer: I basically have two things I want to cover. And one is politics and one is just being Jewish today post–October 7th, post latest ceasefire treaty, we hope, the one that will hold. But I want to start with politics and JD Vance, Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, who by the way, I couldn’t recognize until a week ago. I had successfully avoided all Nick Fuentes in my life. Probably you didn’t have the good fortune to do that.

Yair Rosenberg: Isn’t the story of our general last decade is people who you have successfully avoided and wished to never know anything more about become absolutely central to understanding our world and influencing events?

MO: It’s baffling. It’s truly baffling.

Hello, everybody. This is Mark Oppenheimer and you are listening to Arc: The Podcast, the audio companion to the web magazine Arc, online at arcmag.org. We’re all a production of the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis.

And this week I am hosting one of the bravest people I know. There’s just no other way to say it, except that Yair Rosenberg for about the past ten, maybe even fifteen years, has been that Jew on Twitter, or on X, or whatever, on social media who has taken, I don’t know if it’s more abuse than anyone else, but who has willingly stepped into more antisemitic abuse than anyone I can think of. If you want to talk to some guy who has had gifts of his own face photoshopped onto a body going into a gas chamber thousands of times and had those GIFs sent to him relentlessly over years, that’s Yair Rosenberg.

If you want to know who has been attacked as the leading mastermind of the worldwide Jewish conspiracy by more crazy people on social media platforms than anyone else I can think of, and what’s more, sometimes engages with those people and tries to figure out what they’re thinking, and not tries to talk them out of it, but tries to understand them rather than just flaming them back or recoiling from them, that is Yair Rosenberg. He is a staff writer for The Atlantic. And as we are in this weird moment of antisemitism coming from guests on Tucker Carlson’s show and the Heritage Foundation imploding because its director defended Tucker Carlson for having on Nick Fuentes, there’s this whole weird snake swallowing its own tail aspect of what’s going on with the far right right now having to do with how to deal with the antisemites in their midst.

And as I observed all this a little bit from afar as somebody who’s not on social media, I thought the only person who can really explain this to me, or the person who can explain this to me with his sense of humor intact is Yair Rosenberg. I worked with him at Tablet Magazine back in the day. As I said, he’s now at The Atlantic. And we spoke last week, he was at his home in New York, I was at home in New Haven and we gabbed and jived about what’s going on with the anti-Semites in the world and also what’s going on internally with the American Jewish community because these anti-Semitic currents and this sort of controversy over Israel and about dual loyalties, all of this stuff not only riles the world toward Jews, but a lot of it also riles Jews internally and has us at each other’s throats if that’s not too bombastic.

So Yair Rosenberg and I had a far ranging conversation in which we talked about all of this stuff and never got around to talk about his beautiful children or his wife who teaches Talmud or all the other stuff he’s working on. But we really stayed focused on the American right and the American Jews and where we all go from here. Here’s me in conversation with Yair Rosenberg.

So we’re here maybe a week after the Heritage Foundation semi-imploded over their president defending his friend Tucker Carlson who had platformed Nazi sympathizer and Holocaust denier and Hitler admirer Nick Fuentes. And the whole question of antisemitism on the right is all of a sudden kind of inescapable. I guess the first thing I want to ask you is, is there anything about this that you feel that the main narrative that most people are getting gets wrong? Are there assumptions that I, or my fellow not paying so much attention friends, have about JD Vance or Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes that are just like batshit stupid and that should be corrected?

YR: So I don’t know, everyone has different ideas. So it’s hard to say these people are wrong. It’s a generalization, but I would say the attention part is a key thing here, which is understandably most people were not paying such detailed attention to antisemitism on the modern American right, on the rising new right. But if you had, every single thing we’ve seen was entirely baked in and entirely predictable years in advance. If you were paying close attention to the right, and people on the right who care about antisemitism, they’ve been warning about this for years, they said, I’ve seen this happening in real time.

If you were paying attention to Nick Fuentes and sort of his benchmarks for his own success and what he would say constitutes his success, you’d see that he’d been hitting a bunch of them. You’d also just notice how he was moving closer and closer to the circles of power from this sort of fringe figure that you could safely ignore, one random person marching in the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, to somebody with a sort of fringe audience that was real but not a huge deal, to somebody who was on stage at a conference with Marjorie Taylor Greene, who then claimed she didn’t know who he was, even though she literally stood on stage with him and smiled and shook his hand and spoke at his event, to someone who’s having dinner with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago with Kanye West, right? You just watch each bit of this and then eventually, suddenly he’s being interviewed on Tucker Carlson’s podcast, the probably most influential voice on the modern American right.

All of this has been going on. It didn’t just suddenly fall out of the sky. And I wrote an article in September 2023 called “The Anti-Semitic Revolution on the American Right.” And if you read it, it talks about all of these people and it tells you that all of this is where all it’s going. And it was basically saying stakes for the 2024 election include who is basically going to just get the wind at their back in American right wing politics. And I made several arguments in that article also for why the antisemites were winning within the struggle on the right and why they probably would keep winning. And so it’s less that anybody got anything wrong and more that I think that there’s a natural inclination in contemporary media spaces to care about left wing antisemitism, which is extremely real and I’ve also written about it.

But I think the reason that happens structurally is that today’s media outlets, legacy media outlets are largely servicing liberals. And so the people who are writing them and the people who are reading them are particularly interested in themselves and the controversy is happening and roiling their own communities. There’s a lot less insight, a lot less visibility into what’s going on in the bowels of the American right. But since October 7, and I wrote this in that piece, the exact same struggle over the role of Jews, debates over Jewish influence, Jewish power, often underneath the cloak of criticism of Zionism, but pretty thinly veiled, right? All of that kind of stuff was going on on the right just the same. And it’s only just recently exploded into views such that it’s now headline news everywhere. But again, people on the American right knew this and people looking closely knew this. And so it’s sort of an example of people often see the lightning and comment on that, but they missed the gathering storm. And so that’s what I would say is my thought on that.

MO: As I’ve read some of the folks on the right who all of a sudden are paying attention because they seem to actually be startled, I think, by Tucker Carlson’s having Nick Fuentes on and then the Heritage Foundation defending it and all of a sudden some of them, like at National Review and at First Things, seem to be taking it a little bit seriously. And yet, and I don’t have any of the articles in front of me at the time or at the moment or any of the editorials, but some of the pieces I’ve read decrying antisemitism on the right, first of all, they never take on Trump and they never say if Trump put his foot down, it would help. They seldom take on J.D. Vance. And they also tend to blame … There’s a move that some of them make where they blame liberals and they say, this all goes back to kind of critical race theory, post-modernism, Foucauldianism. Once you let go of the idea of objective truth, which was a liberal project, then all of a sudden you can say anything and people will believe it. So actually, this is really a pathology of the left. Then if we get back to a pure conservatism, this would be impossible because pure conservatives are about empiricism or about truth or about the great books and not everything from Foucalt and whatever and Lacan onwards. So I’m seeing various forms of denial, which really dispirit me.

Do you think I’m right about that? Or do you think there’s actually been … Is there a real reckoning going on on the part of some conservatives that, holy cow, there are lots of antisemites in our tent?

YR: So to take that last little bit, I haven’t seen that as much. I think that’s a hyper-intellectualized deflection that I’m sure some people engage in, but of course that’s a real thing. The idea that true conservativism can’t be antisemitic. Exactly the same as true progressivism can’t be antisemitic. It’s the phrase, there is no room in the movement for antisemitism, a phrase that only gets uttered when the people are in the room, which is why you had to say it. And we see this, I collect politicians saying this on the left and on the right about…

MO: It’s the no true Scotsman fallacy?

YR: Yes. And other prejudices. So let’s dispense with that as kind of … It happens all across the spectrum.

But the other part, about how let’s not talk about that there are people at the top who have either enabled this through neglect, or through unwillingness to challenge it, or through active participation, depending on which way you look at it and which person you’re talking about. Yeah, that’s been a traditional way of critiquing Trump without criticizing Trump. You never actually name the guy.

And Donald Trump himself has a much more complicated relationship to antisemitism and Jews than say Nick Fuentes, who just hates all Jews interpersonally and as a conspiratorial actor in world events and American politics. Donald Trump is somebody who believes a lot of antisemitic ideas and tropes as other bigoted tropes, but he sees them as positives. The Jews are good at business. I want them to be running mine. They’re good at legal shenanigans. I want them to be my lawyers. The Jews look out for their own self-interest, but that’s what everybody should do. So I want those guys on my team. That’s sort of how he relates to it. And when he criticizes Jews, he often criticizes them for not conforming to those antisemitic self-interested stereotypes, mainly progressive and liberal Jews who won’t vote for him.

So this is a longstanding thing with him. It’s philosemitism in the sense of a philosemite is an anti-Semite who likes Jews, that kind of concept. And so that’s how he perceives it. And therefore, he is not out to get Jews in any particular way, but he talks about Jews in a way that activates all the people who think about these ideas in negative senses. And then he has a general principle, which is no enemies among people who support me, no matter what other views they hold. If you’re on my team, then I will basically have dinner with you. And that’s how you end up having dinner with Nick Fuentes because Kanye West came along and he was a Trump supporter and he brought Nick Fuentes along. And probably Trump didn’t actually know who he was, but the idea was he didn’t afterwards condemn directly Nick Fuentes’s ideas. Because again, all these people are part of the team. That means they’re also going to start working in politics and in your administration and all of that kind of stuff. And that began in 2016. And every single step of this way, you’re moving these people who are formerly fringe, closer to the centers of power.

And eventually, Trump either dies, right, or leaves office, and then those people will all still be there. And then you have someone like JD Vance, a vice president who wants to inherit this movement who has to figure out how do I negotiate the fact that our movement now contains a lot of these people. And JD Vance is very much a politician and very much capable of finding ways to try to broker and negotiate all these sorts of tensions in more malicious or less malicious ways. And that’s going to be a huge story, I think for American politics is what he tries to do.

If you look at some of the voices, I’ll just say one more thing. Roger recently wrote a piece on this stuff. Chris Rufo has been writing about this, both of them critical of antisemitism and groyperism and Fuentes. They both landed on this position that sort of JD Vance is going to be have to be the one who sets a piece and comes up with a way to relate to the grievances that people have without accepting their bigotries. And I think that that is correct. I also think his choices of late have been pretty dispiriting and suggests one direction at a certain level of capitulation and evasion. And so, but that’s definitely something that the right has been talking about. They’ve gotten to the point where Vance is going to be the guy who has to figure this out.

MO: I have to say, I was reading your piece of earlier this week or last week about all of this and about how, you talk about Vance as this extraordinarily effective communicator. What I remember from the last election was when he would stop in at restaurants he never knew what to order. He was like, on the campaign trail, he was kind of hopeless, that he is neither a beautifully effete, decadent, cultured, urbane snob, nor is he a real person of the man of the people at this point. He’s just a kind of shell of a politician. I don’t think he’s the great communicator you think he is.

I would also add that I think it’s weird that everyone’s saying, “Oh, the vice president is the natural heir to this mantle.” The vice president almost never is the heir to anything, whether it’s Al Gore or Kamala Harris or Dick Cheney or they never become anything afterwards. They sort of retreat to their fishing cabin somewhere and try to stay relevant for the rest of their … I mean, Biden, there are exceptions. Of course, there are exceptions. The first George Bush got a term, and obviously Biden got a term. But actually, if anything, you don’t want to be the vice president if you have higher ambitions…

So I guess, what would you say to my problematization of this assumption that Vance is the obvious dude? Why is Vance the obvious dude?

YR: Yeah. So I think that the point about vice presidents being overrated as heirs to movements, especially this one, which is so personalized around Trump, I think is absolutely correct in this situation. I think if you listen to Trump when he’s asked about who he thinks is his heir apparent, he throws in Rubio and he’s happy to do it like a reality show and people will compete for favor. He has no incentive to name somebody until the very last moment. And nobody has Vance’s skills. I’m probably going to write on this point in a more generally speaking, Trump has this incredible amoral transactionalism that enables him to play a lot of—

MO: Nobody has Trump’s skills, you mean.

YR: Yeah.

MO: You said Vance’s skills.You mean Trump skills? Nobody Trump’s skills. Right. Okay.

YR: Yeah. Trump has this incredible amoral transactionalism that enables him to promise opposite things to opposite constituencies. And they all kind of believe him because they say, “Hey, he has no principles. He might give me some of what I want.” Vance, like pretty much every other normal politician in American and other politics, markets everything under a brand of coherent moralism. Now his version of that is like national conservatism, very right wing.

But Kamala Harris did the same thing, Mitt Romney did the same thing, Obama did the same thing. We are coherent personalities with a worldview and everything fits. And if things don’t seem to fit, that’s a hypocrisy problem, right? That’s an authenticity problem. Trump never has an authenticity problem because people think he’s authentically self-interested and double dealing. And that means everyone kind of wants in on his casino because they think that they can be the ones to win in the house. Of course, the house always wins. And so I don’t think anybody can do what Trump did for this coalition and hold all these people together.

And Vance, when I say that he’s an exceptional communicator, what I mean is that he has a very specific set of skills, which is not going into a diner and hobnobbing with people. It’s not the giant arena filling speeches charismatically holding everyone’s spellbound. He’s really good at finding ways to convince particular audiences that he’s one of them and that he can basically, and he can then sort of weave different threads together that other people might find contradictory.

So first he convinced, you know, shellshocked MSNBC liberals that he was the Trump whisperer for the heartland and got on every single liberal show talking about this stuff as an anti-Trump guy from Appalachia. Then he convinces Don Jr and Tucker Carlson that actually he’s a true blue Trump convert and first that he should be a senator and get the nod from Trump for that. Then within two years, he should be the vice president. This is insane. Then he goes on stage and debates Tim Walz and says, “Actually, ah shucks. I just want everyone to get along.” And he out Tim Walzs Tim Walz.

And I think people should look at that and recognize that there is a real set of skills there. It’s a very specific stat. And the question is, does it work for this particular task? And it’s hard to see and hard to know, but it’s not unreasonable when people look at him and say, “Maybe he could.” And that doesn’t mean, by the way, again, as I said, the choices could be really dark and dispiriting the ones he decides to make. I’m just saying he might actually get to make those choices.

MO: Okay. What’s a groyper?

YR: Great question. So one of those things that you wish you never had to know and now people have to know. It’s the name of Nick Fuentes and his followers take for themselves. These are basically far right white nationalist types, disproportionately skewing young and online, speak in irony-laced memes, very much opposed to what they see as political orthodoxy on the American right, not just opposed to all the horrible things that they hate about the left: LGBT people, diversity initiatives, et cetera, et cetera. And I mean, frankly, what Nick one says, and these people are, is a reheated form of white nationalism with internet aesthetics. It’s David Duke, if he had a Twitch feed. And this is really important. It matters to be able to optimize this stuff for the current form of way of young people speaking, but it is not fundamentally in worldview, very different from anything that white nationalism has been saying for decades.

MO: I’m going to take a quick segue for a second. I don’t know a soul, I don’t know a man my age, fifty-one or forty or thirty or twenty, who is heavily online and whose worldview comes from online influencers. I guess I live in a very specific space where I don’t encounter them. Do you know anyone like this?

YR: I do. I also, I’ll put it this way, I do people that usually younger than me, but the younger you get, right, we have so much data on this at this point going back years, the more likely you’re getting your news, not from traditional legacy media outlets, but from social media apps, TikTok predominantly, but also X, also Instagram, all the usuals, right? All that kind of stuff, right? YouTube, of course.

MO: I just literally meant like, where do I find them in sort of southern Connecticut, if I wanted to find an online, groyper sympathetic 26-year-old, are they employed? Do they have their own apartments? Is the stereotype that they’re losers living in their mother’s basement entirely true? Or are they working day jobs as nurses and accountants and physical therapists and then they come home and they gripe?

YR: So it’s actually a very good sociological question that deserves more, again, because this topic did not get enough attention. There was not enough investigation in a serious way about this stuff. I would say first of all, there is something important to say we haven’t said, which is I think there are far fewer of these people than they make themselves seen. They’re kind of like the pufferfish of American politics, which is a really effective thing to be if you can be. And lots of political actors attempt this and some of them succeed. AIPAC is another great example of a pufferfish in American politics.

MO: AIPAC?

YR: Yeah.

MO: The pro-Israel lobby.

YR: Yeah. At making themselves seem more powerful than they are, which is a very effective tactic as a lobby. In point of fact, they pick their spots very well and they also were working with public opinion for many years that was already on their side. Now when it’s not, suddenly it’s a lot harder to do what they were doing.

MO: Suddenly they’re the pufferfish.

YR: But so the Fuentes people, in sheer numbers, they’re not huge. They are very, very online. That means that they can punch above their weights in online discourses, give tons and tons of internet comments, tons and tons of likes, give a lot of viewership stats and make it seem like they’re more important than they are. That is really effective because the perception of power, especially in politics, becomes, often, power.

But at the same time, it’s also a weakness because you can sort of … We’ve seen this in American politics again and again since 2016, people overestimate the power of something that’s virality over reality and then you have elections and you have primaries and you discover that everybody ran to the left and then this guy, Joe Biden just wins the primary. Ron DeSantis decides to launch his campaign with a Twitter space with Elon Musk instead of, I don’t know, some scenic place in Florida because he’s become internet infected and he’s running a campaign on online means at Disney and then he just gets completely trounced by Donald Trump. So the internet poisoning can massively distort people’s understanding of this landscape. So I say, you ask, “I haven’t met all these groypers.” It’s because there aren’t as many of them as you might think even as they punch above their weight.

MO: I’m going to go on a groyper hunt and try to find one and write a story about a genuine, authentic groyper.

YR: And these people, before they called themselves like gropers, they were like in 2016, I was talking to these people and interviewing them because they were the sort of people who were trolling me on Twitter. The earliest iterations of these people were trying to photoshop me into gas chambers. And I asked them questions about what’s your deal? You’re supporting Trump, but Trump’s got a Jewish son-in-law. His daughter converted to Orthodox Judaism and he seems supportive of Israel. What is going on with this? And they said, “Well, yeah, he’s the best we’re going to get. And we’re not stupid. We understand that nobody’s perfect.” This is the line I would get. But he’s our entryway.

And they were right. They were completely right. And I think it’s actually, I wrote about this at a time right after the election, I said, they get something pragmatically. These people got something pragmatically about politics that the American left has so much trouble with, which is simply settling on somebody who is your best shot at the moment and will actually be in some way advancing your concerns and then working the next four years and the next four years to go further as opposed to trying to get everything and losing entirely.

MO: All the time.

So if these guys got power, not the groypers. Let’s say the worst case scenario, whatever it is, comes to pass with Carlson and let’s say Vance is who Carlson wants him to be. It turns out he’s actually groyper sympathetic. He’s actually willing to empower and enable antisemites. Let’s say that all of these young staffers one hears about who are far to the right of the older people who are their bosses continue to ascend in power. What’s the darkest end game you imagine for say ten or fifteen years from now? And I get asked this, like you, I sometimes give paid speeches where I talk about what’s going on. And just the other day, I was giving a talk at a synagogue literally three, four days ago and was asked by someone whose parents had to flee Germany in the 1930s, when is it time to pack our bags?

And I was struggling because on the one hand, I didn’t want to be dismissive of his very real fears. And on the other hand, I have trouble imagining the scenario that is physically unsafe for Jews in America right now. Or I can imagine renegade attacks like the one at Tree of Life Synagogue, but I don’t think there’s anyone pushing policy to round us all up and put us in ghettos or to strip us of our assets or whatever. But is that an end game? I mean, give me a reality check of if everything goes badly, where could we be fifteen years from now if the Groper support are running things?

YR: As someone who has reported on a lot of extremist political movements that have been ascendant over the time I’ve reported on them, my general rule of thumb is if you want to know what they’re going to do in power, you should just listen to what they say or not and look very carefully at what they call that surround and what their general game plan is because extremists mean it. Politicians are one thing and people in the normal center reft and center right are one thing. These are people who have a certain level of flexibility and certain levels of guardrails and restraints. Extremists, they know exactly what they want and they will impose it if they have the opportunity and they will push everything to get there. So I say that in context to say Israel, where if you were paying attention to say Bezalel Smotrich and his longstanding manifesto about what he wanted to do, he has been very successful at moving Israel in that direction since gaining any sort of power. All of that, these people were not hiding it.

So in the United States context, if you look at current right-wing discourse, it has coalesced in a sort of what might seem like a jokey or ironic way, but I think is genuinely held by a certain group of people around this idea that we should denaturalize and deport people who we see as subversive threats to the body politic. And today that often centers around leftists and particularly leftists of color. You’ll see a lot of people pull this card on say Mehdi Hasan, the very left wing political commentator who was an immigrant from Britain, and say denaturalize and deport. But they’ve talked about, let’s deport these people. Once we’re already engaged in this, that Trump is already doing, mass deportations, and using all sorts of powers to enable that and redirecting so many resources towards this, it naturally then says, well, who’s within that circle of people that we’re going after and how far could we take this?

Now in practice, none of that stuff’s happening now. They’re not deporting Mehdi Hasan tomorrow, but this is now a part of the discourse. This is now how they’re talking. So if you’re telling me what’s our worst case scenario, I don’t think it’s necessarily physical violence so much as you become one of the targets. You, the Jews are subversives, right? You have all of this power and influence and you use it for ill, for Israel, for leftist causes, and now we’re going to start expropriating maybe some of that, but we’re going to start deporting people we don’t like. We’re going to expand the circle of deportation, so to speak.

MO: Presumably they would extend that even to people born here. It wouldn’t just be—

YR: Oh, that’s what I was saying. They say denaturalize and deport right exactly. And then the idea is basically, yeah.

MO: You’d have to revise the Constitution. It would be a constitutional amendment changing the criteria for citizenship.

YR: Do I think any of that is likely? No. Do I think that we’ve entered, as often as the case in our current world on so many bad scenarios, both political and non-political, where this is a non-zero chance now? Yes. And that’s the sort of thing. So that’s what certain extreme vigors are talking about. That’s what they want.

MO: Thanks for listening to the first part of my conversation with Yair Rosenberg. We’ll be back in a moment, but while I talk into your earbuds, why don’t you go and subscribe to this show, rate this show, review this show, and do what you can to spread the word. We are so grateful to have you as a listener, and the more that you can help turn other people on to Arc: The Podcast, the better.
In the meantime, I want to tell you that we have some terrific upcoming guests. The one whom I’m really excited about right now is Kelsey Osgood. That’s an interview I recorded a while ago, but we’re finally going to get around to playing it. I interviewed her about her book, about seven female converts, people who had left one religion for another, and she talked to a convert to Judaism, a convert to Quakerism, a convert to Mormonism. It’s really fascinating, and I can’t wait to play that episode for you in the weeks to come.

Meanwhile, go over to arcmag.org and you can see David Sugarman’s terrific essay on his visit to the old, somewhat dead Jewish city of Vilnius. That is to say the city’s alive, but the Jewish community there is mostly dead and Jewish culture there has not persisted, but it’s a beautiful piece about a trip he took from one Jewish home, New York City, to another Jewish home, Vilnius, and so much more over at arcmag.org, Arc: Religion, Politics, Et Cetera. That’s our business. We’re so glad that you’re in it with us. And now back to the second part of my conversation with Yair Rosenberg.

What do you think of Mamdani? All of a sudden, now I get asked this a lot. I haven’t paid a lot of attention to the New York mayoral race because unlike many New Yorkers, I think there are cities other than New York. I don’t think it’s my job to spend all my time obsessing over New York City politics, despite, of course, having been born there, because everyone did time in New York City, and mine was as a—

YR: You at least escaped.

MO: Mine was as a zero to two year old. And so I haven’t paid that much attention, but the other question I get asked is, “Is it time for us to leave New York City?” I get asked this by Jews. And again, I have trouble getting to a scenario where I don’t think Mamdani is going to have policies that involve denaturalizing, stripping the juice of New York City citizenship or their property, nor do I think he’s going to tell the police to stand down on antisemitic crimes. My hunch is, if anything, it would be the opposite right now that he’s trying to prove that he is highly sympathetic to the concerns of the very numerous Jewish New Yorkers, but maybe I’m being Pollyannish. I don’t know. What do you think he thinks about Jews and what do you think his maritalty will mean for them?

YR: I haven’t had the opportunity to talk to him or meet him, and I certainly can’t see into somebody’s heart or mind.

It can only be judged by therefore the same sort of, you know, the rhetoric, the history, and the campaign that was run. And like you, I do not think that he has any desire for there to be violence against Jews or Jewish institutions. I think that would be catastrophic just for his mayoralty. I think no mayor wants anything like that. I think that he is an ardent anti-Zionist in a way that is fundamental to his political journey. It was also not the center of his campaign for mayor at all. Andrew Cuomo wanted to make it the center of the campaign, which was bizarre since people are not voting on Israel in New York City mayoral election. So you’re spending all this time on an issue that is not determining people’s votes. And to the extent that it was a democratic primary in particular, well Democrats don’t very much like Israel right now.

And so Mamdani is a committed anti-Zionist, not in the sense of Israel needs to end the occupation, the settlements are wrong, must end. Perhaps we should sanction this or that thing, perhaps Israel is an apartheid state, all that. No, Israel should be gone as a Jewish state. Jews don’t get one. And that obviously is extremely deeply profoundly troubling to many, many Jews. It’s why many progressive rabbis, people who were affiliated with J Street and others actually ended up on the other side of this and were very concerned. And again, but this is not in any way since he has animus towards Jews in New York or wants anything bad to come to them. And so what’s going to end up happening, I think that will be something to see, and we can only know when it happens, is he wants to draw a bright dividing line between antisemitism and anti-Zionism that in practice, those of us who have covered this for a long time know doesn’t really exist. There’s a lot of gray area and blurred lines. There’s a lot of people who use anti-Zionism as a veneer under which to pursue like Nick Fuentes, under which to pursue antisemitic agendas. And so how you reckon with that, especially since by winning as a proud anti-Zionist, whether despite this not necessarily being his intention, Mamdani will have energized certain people who think of themselves as just anti-Zionists, but are in fact also anti-Semites. And they will be empowered to act and think that they have the wind at their backs. And then they do something that then he has to respond to. And then we will learn how he sees himself in this space and what he’s made of.

But I think people who like, you know, the sort of the femurmongering campaigns that were done against him, the late associations of him with 9/11, all of that kind of stuff was just obviously fundamentally disingenuous, wrong, and also just sort of was completely missing what any of the issues were on this topic, which is not wanting violence towards anybody, but rather whether or not the coalition that he brings into power and the sorts of ideological constructs he has around antisemitism, whether they’re fit for purpose on this issue. And we’ll find out.

MO: So that brings us back to the Jews actually because there are lots of Jews who voted for him. And a lot of those Jews are not particularly Jewishly affiliated, but a lot of them are. And a lot of them attend congregations that are now, if not explicitly anti-Zionist, are sort of agnostic on the question or consciously make space for people who are anti-Zionists, non-Zionists, post-Zionist, diasporist, whatever you want to call it. Those are all different things. And one of the things I also find myself explaining to audiences is you really can’t take it for granted that the anti-Zionist Jews are people who want to break from Judaism because increasingly a lot of them don’t. I mean, a lot of them do. And the people who say, “My Judaism is my anti-Zionism.” Their only connection to Judaism, the only time they show up as Jews is to use it as a platform to criticize Israel.

But actually, there really are significant clumps of Jews who are quite explicitly anti-Zionists and have a practice and pray, celebrate holidays, belong to congregations, whatever that means. Do you see this as heading towards a real schism where the most meaningful divide in American Jews ten years from now, twenty years from now is between the ones who feel like love for Israel and the ones who feel contempt for it? Will this be smoothed over in some way? Will they continue to coexist in some congregations? What do you see as the end game there?

YR: Oh, this is where I get to say, I report on the present, not the future. I have no idea. I’ll just say, I can talk about the present and say, I think it’s important for Jewish communities to include and acknowledge people who have different views on Israel, including harshly critical ones, including ones to whom Israel is something that they find as a deeper, profound shame right now. And that is not always something that the American Jewish community has been good at. That was true before the Mamdani election is sort of difficulty.

And to the extent that people who have that view, like you said, want there to be positive Jewish content to their lives. Not that their Judaism is defined as being against something specifically Israel and other Jews who are supportive in some way of Israel, but people who actually want to be part of the Jewish community and want a seat at the table. They don’t want to push other people away. So that’s a good thing. And that’s how I’ve always seen it. And that has been challenging for some Jewish communities, not as challenging for others. So I can tell you what I’d like to see rather than what I know is going to happen.

MO: Okay, what would you like to see?

YR: No, that’s what I’m saying. What’d you see is the ability for people to have those conversations as someone who studied Jewish history, we’ve had much bigger divides in which people still maintain relationships. And the original Zionist movement, which was tons of people with totally different views, some of whom wanted there to be a state of Israel, but it would be national, some of it wanted it cultural, some want it not at all. And all these people still did manage in other ways to be part of the same community. And the stakes were so incredibly high. This is like World War II time.

MO: But I think one of the things going on, I think there are a number of things going on when I talk to say rabbis, as I just talked to a rabbi of a very large and successful congregation who has made it his brand that basically non-Zionists are not welcome here. We are Israel proud. And he says that he tells people, and he certainly, if he doesn’t tell them explicitly, it’s very clear in his public statements, in his community, that if you’re not down with Israel, if you don’t love Israel, you won’t feel comfortable here and you should find another temple. And that position I think has grown his community. I think he has gotten a lot of people to join as an act of Zionism. People wouldn’t necessarily even join congregations in his town. He’s lost a few people and gained way, way, way, way more.

I think some of the people who say that, who take that position, it’s a branding thing. They realize that that’s a lane they can occupy where they will get congregants and so forth and so on. Some of them, it’s completely sincere. They think there’s actually something so pernicious about anti-Zionism or self-loathing that it will actually undermine you can’t have real community or real spirituality in a space where these people exist. And I think for some of them, they are deer caught at the headlights, which is they didn’t think in their time in the rabbinid, they would ever have to deal with meaningful numbers of anti-Zionists. They just figured that the sort of consilience of loving Israel and being Jewish in America was so, the overlap was so… the fit was so perfect that they wouldn’t have to deal with this. And now, I mean, I feel that a little bit maybe with some of the New York rabbis, like the Elliot Cosgroves or something, where they maybe hope this too will pass and they can get back to just presuming that they are talking to fellow Zionists because that really is what it is to be Jewish.

So I don’t know. I see it as being several different kinds of moves that rabbis are making.

YR: Well, you could have synagogues that aggregate around Zionists and anti-Zionist lines purely because that is now American religion works where people go and they sign up, it’s pluralized and that includes within religions and denominations and they find the place where people are like-minded. And that’s happened with political sorting and all sorts of things in Christianity as well as you know well, better than me you’re reporting. That doesn’t mean though that there aren’t other ways that these communities can interact and have… That can be one way that you divide. And then in other ways, there are other things that these Jews do together. In some sense, I always feel that the perfect Jewish community is the one where it’s big enough that everybody who needs to do their own thing can do their own thing, but small enough that everybody still knows each other, which is why coastal Jews have a real problem because there are too many Jews on the coasts. And so whenever you want to do your weird thing, you can find a large enough group that you never have to talk to any of the other people. And so what you want is you want to be able to do your thing, but also have to be together with the other people for other things. And that would be what I think is the healthiest version of this.

MO: I think you put that very, very profoundly and perfectly. And it names something I’ve often thought when I’ve spoken to the Jewish community in Fort Wayne, Indiana or Eau Claire, Wisconsin, or even here in New Haven where we have more Jews than that, but we have to stick together. We don’t have the luxury of separating out into this little political lane and this political lane. We wouldn’t have critical mass. And I think you’re right. New York, LA, Miami, they’ve got critical mass to exclude whomever they want. And it’s probably not good for the soul.

Can I conclude with a few quick questions, a few of my traditional lightning round questions?

YR: For sure.

MO: So if you’d become something else for living, if you had done something else for a living, besides be a writer/tweeter/public intellectual, something within reason that you might’ve been able to do. So not an Olympic sprinter or the world’s leading sculptor, I’m assuming, I don’t know how fast you are, but something that you could have done had you made some different choices, what might that have been?

YR: A couple. I mean, kid Yair would’ve been making computer games in some fashion. I did that when I was a little kid. I made pretty bad computer games, but they were computer games and I enjoyed it and I’ve always loved that kind of thing. It’s tremendously difficult to actually make a good one.

Another one would’ve been somehow to do the music that I do as a hobby now, but to be doing it in some form as a more of a calling, which could be as some sort of musical artist or could be as a cantor, right? These are things open to people who sing and compose certain types of melodies. So those are two possible things.

Although I think the more likely path would’ve been I’d be writing about different things, which is something I really wish I was. I really wish I wasn’t called…it wasn’t desired that I’d be writing about antisemitism. And it wasn’t a desire about writing Israel-Palestine because these would’ve been solved problems, non-problems. And then I would be writing about film, culture, other types of things, human interest things that I find very much what we’re actually trying to live for rather than these other things that are very important, but largely because they impede us and our ability to live.

MO: Right. Yeah. I feel the same. I think I’d be writing, but about other stuff.

Do you believe in God? And if so, what do you mean by that?

YR: I do believe in God, but most of the time I’m angry at him these days. And so I guess that’s how you know that there’s something there. I do think there’s a tremendous Jewish tradition of being upset and wrestling with that. The version of God that I believe in changes a lot. So I like to say, what do I mean by that? I mean that something created, the universe, something is responsible for consciousness and that there’s more to the world than we understand and perpetually is and that there’s more mystery and things than we can quite grasp and all of those things. And then I have a particular tradition and way of approaching that that comes from my family and my heritage that I find fulfilling. So that’s sort of the way you get from me to my Jewish practice. But yeah, you can’t cover the things I cover and think that, and not have a lot of questions and sometimes really angry ones.

MO: Can you tell us about a song that when you hear it makes you nostalgic or takes you back to a specific time and place?

YR: It’s not a song, but it is the way that people sometimes recite the Shema to the traditional Torah trop. So when synagogues sometimes say it out loud, they will not just chant it. It’s the specific chant is the way you would say it if you were reading it from the Torah and people know it. They sometimes learn it in school and the whole congregation will say it out loud, maybe just the first paragraph, sometimes the whole thing, depending on the synagogue. And my dad started seeing that tradition of doing it out loud at some point in my childhood in our synagogue. My dad is a synagogue rabbi in Queens. And so it went from being something people said silently to something that the whole congregation said together. So now whenever I do say that prayer or hear that prayer, I can bring myself back to that moment or to other places in my life, like school or elsewhere, where the congregation was doing that and it’s a powerful thing.

MO: So before your dad’s change, I presume they said the first two lines out loud, but then silently, and then he added in the whole.

YR: We’re going to say either the first paragraph or depending on the mood, write the whole thing out loud.

MO: Oh, interesting.

YR: And so I hear him and I hear the congregation, the people I know, some who are still with us, some who are not, right? It’s a powerful thing.

MO: And then finally, what’s some culture that you’re enjoying right now? Or at some point in the past, if you had to recommend a book and a movie or a record album or a video game, what are some recommendations for people?

YR: I wish I had vastly more time to do these things. I generally get my fiction reading done on Shabbat and I purposely don’t read things that have to do with what I do. Sitting on my desk is the latest Philip Pullman novel. So Philip Pomman wrote this original Historic Materials trilogy, which is a huge phenomenon, big part of my childhood. And then he wrote a sequel trilogy much later and the first two books have been out for a little bit. And after a few years, he just came out with the final one of the second trilogy. It’s been long enough that I’m currently rereading book two before I can read book three, so I can’t tell you if it lives up to the billing, the reviews seem to be good, but that’s one of them.

And then something that I have watched that I appreciated. This is not as recent and it’s not as original, but I did really appreciate Andor, which is this Star Wars show that is really a show that happens to be Star Wars. And it is about the politics of sort of incremental dissent of authoritarian ideas and regimes and then different ways resistance movements rise up against those and fight amongst each other. It’s really like, it is trying to reckon with the way this really works rather than the fantasy version of it. And it’s just great drama. It’s really well acted. It’s everything that all the Star Wars subsequent content has not been. And so I got to that very late, like lots of other people, but this just tells you how much time I have on my hands.

MO: As the father of young children, you don’t have endless time on your hands. I’m pleased to learn that you’re in the endless divide and battle between the sci-fi and the fantasy nerds, you are both.

YR: Oh, for sure.

MO: Yair Rosenberg, staff writer for The Atlantic, major dude, mensch, father, songwriter, thank you for joining us.

YR: Thank you for having me, Mark.

MO: That’s me talking with Yair Rosenberg. You can find him on Twitter, other social media platforms, and always at theatlantic.com. That’s where he writes his newsletter called Deep Shtetl, a play on Deep State, if you get it, Deep Shtetl, and longer pieces as well. So check out Yair over at The Atlantic magazine.

It’s time for celebrity birthdays. Why do I do them? Because when I was growing up and I listened to morning zoo radio, they did celebrity birthdays, and I feel like we should know. November 21, Goldie Hawn has her birthday. Scarlett Johansson is November 22, of course, also the day that JFK was shot. Miley Cyrus is November 23. Christina Applegate, November 25, Tina Turner would’ve had a birthday on November 26, but of course she’s no longer with us. Jon Stewart, November 28, and the divine Bette Midler, December 1.

Fun fact about me, when I was an infant in New York City, my dad and some of his straight male friends used to go to the Continental Baths, the famous gay bathhouse, to see Bette Midler perform, which is pretty much the coolest fact I know about my dad, who’s a cool dude. He’s a cool cat. But the fact that he and other straight male friends in the mid-seventies had both the confidence and the interest in cool pop music. I mean, Bette Midler was not a superstar at the time. She was a kind of underground phenomenon with a huge gay following. The fact that they had all that and would go see her at the Continental Baths is just a kind of mind blowing fact about my dad and who he was in 1975, 1976. Anyway, she was born December 1, 1945.

Religious holidays coming up, the presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary is November 21. In the Sikh community, the martyrdom of Guru Tegh Bahadur is November 24. Of course, Thanksgiving observed here in the United States on November 27 this year. So whatever faith tradition you come from, it is the American civil religion that we have days of Thanksgiving. They used to proclaim more of them than they do now. And I think, I don’t know, I think we should go back to having the president proclaim national days of Thanksgiving. That would be super cool. Meanwhile, you can always observe just the big old national holiday of Thanksgiving in late November, and maybe take some time this year to think about what you’re thankful for. I think that’s a nice practice, and I try to do it on Thanksgiving. I have a lot to be grateful for myself. I hope you do too.

Send me an email at mark.o@wustl.edu and I would love to read your letters on air. Recommend guests for me, give me feedback. I love hearing from listeners.

Arc: The Podcast is a production of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at WashU in St. Louis. Our director is Abram Van Engen. I’m also very grateful to Debra Kennard, Sherri Pena, Mark Valerie, and all my colleagues at the Danforth Center. Arc: The Podcast is hosted by me, Mark Oppenheimer. The producer is David Schugerman. He edits the show. We’re grateful for the intern help of Caroline Coffey, Avi Holtzman, and Ben Esther, a terrific team. We are online at arcmag.org and you can subscribe to us on all of your favorite platforms.

Until next time, I wish you much thanksgiving. I’m Mark. See you again soon.