Video: Safety Through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism

In their book, Safety Through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism, Shane Burley and Ben Lorber, two activist journalists, present a progressive, intersectional approach to the vital question: What can we do about antisemitism? Using personal stories, historical deep-dives, front-line reporting, and interviews with leading change-makers, Burley and Lorber help us break the current impasse to understand how antisemitism works, what’s missing in contemporary debates, and how to build true safety through solidarity, for Jews and all people.

Featuring co-authors Ben Lorber and Shane Burley

Moderated by Shaul Magid, HDS Visiting Professor of Modern Jewish Studies

This is the first event in RPL's Religion, Conflict, and Peace 2024-25 Book Series.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.

SPEAKER 2: Safety Through Solidarity, a Radical Guide to Fighting Anti-Semitism, September 9, 2024.

HILARY RANTISI: Welcome. Welcome, everyone. OK, please-- there are seats, a few seats still up front here. We have a full house. Wonderful. Thank you for helping us kickoff our events for the year. So, hello. My name is Hillary Rantisi. I'm the Associate Director of Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative, which is a program of Religion and Public Life at Harvard Divinity School.

So welcome, everyone. Just a brief word about our program so you're aware of it. And we at the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative, in our work, we center on analysis of violence, of power, and of structural injustice to examine how a more capacious, a broad understanding of religion, can give us new and fresh insights into challenges, as well as opportunities for peace-building.

And our work for the last six years has been we-- our work is through a case study and our case study is on Israel-Palestine. It will continue to be this year as well through courses, through different ways of engaging with our students and our broader community at Harvard, and in this area.

And as part of our programming, we have a new book series every year, and today is our first book in the series. So if you are not on our email list, please subscribe so you know about our upcoming books, and we hope you join us for those as well.

And today we are featuring Safety Through Solidarity, a Radical Guide to Fighting Anti-Semitism. We're very honored to have with us the authors, Shane Burley and Ben Lorder, who will be introduced shortly. And Professor Shaul Magid will lead us in discussion and moderation. I will hand it over.

Thank you for joining us. We will have opportunities for Q&A after and opportunity to buy the book, more importantly, and to have it signed. So thank you for joining us. And without further ado, please join me in welcoming our guests today.

[APPLAUSE, CHEERING]

SHAUL MAGID: Thank you. Thank you, Hillary, and also Diane, who I see in the back, for hosting this event. And thank you, all, for coming out. I want to introduce the subject and also the authors of the book, but before I do that, I do think it's worthwhile to mention the passing of Michael Lerner, who was the editor for many, many decades of Tikkun Magazine, and in many ways was the kind of architect of contemporary Jewish progressivism.

And Tikkun was something that a lot of us cut our teeth on when we were in graduate school and undergraduates, and even after. And I just think that Michael's memory should be acknowledged at a time like this.

So I want to introduce the authors and then introduce the subject. So the two authors of this book, Ben Lorder, sitting right to my left, is a senior research analyst at Political Research Associates, a social movement think tank where he studies and publishes on anti-Semitism and White nationalism.

He previously worked as national campus organizer with Jewish Voice for Peace, supporting justice-driven young Jewish communities across the country, and has written extensively on anti-Semitism, Israel-Palestine, Jewish identity.

To his left is Shane Burley, who is known for his work on the far-right and left-wing social movements. He's the author of Fascism Today, What It Is and How to End It with AK Press in 2017, and Why Do We Fight, Essays on Fascism, Resistance and Surviving the Apocalypse from 2021. An editor of the anthology No Pasaran, Antifascist Dispatches from a World Crisis, which was just published in 2022.

So for many of us when we were coming up in the academy and we would be told by our chairs or deans that we needed to have courses in Jewish Studies that would get good enrollments, the obvious choice was courses on the Holocaust.

That was true in the 1990s, it may have even been true into the 2000. At some point in time, there was a certain kind of shift and the courses became less and less-- the Holocaust courses became less and less popular, and the courses that we're going to get the largest enrollments for courses on anti-Semitism, contemporary anti-Semitism.

Centers of anti-Semitism opened up at Indiana University, at Yale University, and a number of other places. I think in the last two years, certainly post-October 7, the question of anti-Semitism has really moved into a different register, both in the scholarly world and also in our culture more generally on questions of responses to October 7, the war, the campus protests.

We all know-- we all know that story. And I think that one of the things that ended up happening is that anti-Semitism was always being talked about from people of a particular political persuasion, but not the people of other political persuasions.

I don't want to get into right and left, and what that-- how to divide that. I think what's so interesting about this book, what's so groundbreaking about this book, is that it is a book that is talking about the question of what has now become a new cottage industry in America, maybe in the world, but certainly in America of anti-anti-Semitism.

And this is a book that is engaging the question of anti-anti-Semitism from the left, and you don't really see that happening very often. And I think it really makes a very important contribution, and I want to begin to engage with Ben and Shane on this question, not only of anti-anti-Semitism, what does it mean to confront anti-Semitism, but what does it mean to confront anti-Semitism from the left, from people who are committed to that position on the left.

So I want to begin with a question to both of you. Before we get into the details of the argument in the book, and there are numerous arguments in the book, I want to begin with something that Hannah Arendt says in the beginning of Origins of Totalitarianism, which is really a book about totalitarianism and anti-Semitism.

And she describes two common understandings of anti-Semitism. The first she calls the scapegoat theory, and the second she calls the eternal anti-anti-Semitism theory. And she opposes both of these. She opposes understanding anti-Semitism as a scapegoat phenomenon, and she opposes understanding anti-Semitism in an eternalist internalist manner.

And one of the reasons that she doesn't like either of those categories is that if you say that anti-Semitism is a scapegoat theory or you say that it's eternal, it's inexorable, and as she says, anti-Semitism just becomes part of normal life. It becomes normalized, which she didn't want to promote.

So to begin, I ask both of you, although your book is not about the genealogy of anti-Semitism, I was wondering if you could speak a little bit about where you stand on this particular question in terms of genealogy and origins. You both have mics?

SHANE BURLEY: Yeah, but can people hear me OK?

AUDIENCE: Yes.

SHAUL MAGID: Yes. OK.

SHANE BURLEY: Cool. All right. Thank you so much, Shaul. I appreciate everyone coming out, and especially Shaul, moderating this. He had not a small hand of support on the book and his work was really important in doing it. So this is an interesting question. Ben and I had a conversation all day about this, thinking about this through a bit.

I think we sort of agree with Hannah Arendt, and we talked about this in the book about why both points are a problem. One of them tends to play a bigger role in what we talk about as the anti-anti-Semitism world, which is the eternalist frame. And it's really based on the idea that anti-Semitism is largely not something you can eradicate.

You can't really do without it. Because it has existed for a long time, even before Christianity, it's going to be with us basically to the end of time so all you can do is manage it. I mean, all you can do is manage something. You have much different, basically, answers to give. We're talking about police in those cases, sometimes military, and nation states, things like that.

And so we walk away from a bit of that and try and trace a slightly different genealogy. That being said, and with Hannah Arendt, she basically identifies a very big difference between what she calls modern anti-Semitism and what she calls religious anti-Judaism of the earlier years.

And I think some of those distinctions actually are a little bit sort of dispelled by modern scholarship. We talk a bit about this in the book, how does religious anti-Semitism of Christian Europe sort of transform into a sort of secularized version in the modern world, and there is some trajectory between the two.

They're not one and the same. They don't just work fundamentally the same, but they do have a lineage. So we talk a bit about that lineage, but we ground it in a material analysis. Where does this come from? What role did it have? Why were Jewish communities targeted in those ways and where did those ideas come from?

BEN LORDER: Yeah, Thanks. It's really good to be here. Can folks hear me?

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

OK. It's an honor to be here, especially as a recent resident of Boston. It's amazing to see so many friends in the audience and so many of the organizations that appear in the book. I wanted to give a shout out to Kavod, a radical collective of young Jews in Greater Boston.

I see a lot of [INAUDIBLE] here, folks from JVP. [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]. So it feels really good to be here. Yeah, I think, growing up in Jewish communities, I think so many of us were taught what Hannah Arendt calls the eternalist thesis, that anti-Semitism is eternal. It's part of the fabric, part of the DNA of the Gentile world, and we can't ever defeat it.

We can only build higher walls, or invest in policing or militarized nation states. This kind of framing, I was certainly taught in Hebrew school, and we say in the book, it creates a monster so overpowering that it's impossible to defeat. And basically this idea leads essentially to support for militarized ethno-nationalism in Israel.

It's kind of if you can't fight anti-Semitism might as well build higher walls, fortified borders, and hunker down behind your armies. But we really trace a different story in our book, and I think one that is desperately needed more than ever in our world.

We trace a politics of fighting anti-Semitism through solidarity, through linking up with your neighbors and other marginalized groups, and seeing anti-Semitism not as this kind of eternal monster hovering above society, but as a form of oppression, a system of oppression like any other, that has a history, that has material and political context, that's rooted like other forms of oppression in our social relationships.

And that leads to a political project to change it. That leads to building alliances with other groups seeing how anti-Semitism is connected to anti-Blackness, anti-LGBTQ bigotry, and other forms of oppression, and building movements to actually transform our world and to fight anti-Semitism on the ground or with our neighbors.

SHAUL MAGID: Thank you. We're going to have time for questions. So if you have any questions, just please write them in. So I want to ask a question now that has really exorcized many of us, certainly me and some of us in the room. And it's a bit a drop the mic question, but I think it's something that's very important and I think it's something that a lot of us on the left think about.

And the question is as follows. How do both of you view the unwillingness of some on the left to categorically condemn October 7 in relation to the question of anti-Semitism?

How does resistance to oppression-- which is really, in a certain sense, the raison d'etre of the left-- how does resistance to oppression square with anti-Semitism as a motivation for violence against civilians in the State of Israel? Do you think the left needs to self-correct on this particular question, and if so how can that be done?

BEN LORDER: Yeah, Thanks. I mean, often a shame-- it's often a shame that conversations around anti-Semitism so often go here first. And I appreciate the question and I want you to answer it, but I also want to ground ourselves in just making sure we understand that anti-Semitism is much bigger than these debates that have happened about how it's on the left since October 7.

Anti-Semitism is at the heart of the White Christian nationalist movement, and it's fueling MAGA politics in this country, I think. Our analysis is that the anti-Semitism on the left in relation to October 7 and beyond, is definitely worth talking about and fighting. And we also can't be confused that ultimately, I think the greater existential, long-term threat to Jewish safety and thriving in this country, it comes from the political right.

So just to get that out of the way. But certainly, yes, since October 7, we've seen a lot of, in my opinion, a disingenuous claims of anti-Semitism against the left that have been very destructive to our movements, and to student movements for justice, and to the genocide.

And we've also seen real anti-Semitism that has emerged in some pro-Palestine quarters, not only on the left, but also on the far right, where there is also some anti-Zionist sentiment that's very easily anti-Semitic. I would say that personally, I view the refusal-- or I view-- I tend to view the refusal to condemn October 7 more as rooted in versions of decolonial politics that I personally might disagree with, in particular the refusal to condemn the violence against civilians.

I find all violence against civilians, horrific violence against Israeli civilians, violence against Palestinian civilians, and I do think that the refusal in some ways to name that and to talk about it is a political mistake. I don't know if it's necessarily rooted in anti-Semitism.

I think it's more just a feature of a kind of what I would call a maximalist-decolonial politics that doesn't want to budge an inch that's like refuses to ask difficult questions around like, what kinds of resistance are justified and what kinds of resistance tactics are justified? I think violence against civilians is as horrendous as whenever it happens, but I don't necessarily--

I think in other contexts, we've seen a similar kind of Black and White politics. I don't necessarily think it's inherently rooted in anti-Semitism, though I certainly think it can be in some contexts.

SHANE BURLEY: Yeah, I mean, we talked about this in the book too. Like there is a long tradition of left-wing anti-Semitism. It often comes in the form of conspiracy theories. And so this is not altogether different than the way it operates on the right, where this sense of power is understood as kind of an elite cabal rather than systems of structural inequity like empire and capitalism.

And that is certainly possible in this case, and I've seen a number of examples of that. I think, though, like the Shaul's question about whether a correction is necessary, I think the bigger issue when it comes to the left is just like basically a lack of willingness to address anti-Semitism, not a lot of cognizance of it, and not a very sophisticated or committed sort of stance on how to deal with it.

That's one of the ways that we came into this. And so I think a lot of times when we're looking at the left's failure to address anti-Semitism, that is itself understood as anti-Semitism instead of just this larger failure. And I have to say, like the left is bad at a lot of things. They're not just failing at this.

When we talk about left-wing anti-Semitism, sometimes I'll remind people, I don't know if you've been on a left-wing meeting lately, but I'll hear a lot of transphobia and fatphobia, I'll hear a lot of problematic things.

And so I think this is actually where we should be confronting this in the way that we actually confront a lot of those things, which is always challenging left-wing movements to live up to their own internal politics and convictions. And we do that by, I think, bringing this analysis back. If we talk about building a movement to fight anti-Semitism or going at it as a form of structural oppression, then we need these people.

These are the people you're going to organize with. This is how you're going to build power. So we have to invest in that to a degree. I think looking at October 7, I mean, the violence of it, I think it's harder when we try and frame that and fit that into an anti-Semitism narrative.

One of the things we do in the book is that we give anti-Semitism contours. It actually is a pretty specific ideology with a specific lineage, and I think what ends up happening and what other framing we hear from anti anti-Semitism organizations, is there's an assumed sense of what Jewish flourishing and Jewish life looks like, and anything that's a threat to that is then labeled anti-Semitism categorically. And

I actually think there's a lot of things that could be a threat to Jewish people or Jewish life that maybe don't fit that kind of boundary, and that the harm ends up being that if we address it simply as anti-Semitism, we can't see it as for example, a political issue, or one of inequity, or one of a colonial situation with internal contradictions.

And instead we end up framing it as this one of illogical hatred and we kind of pull ourselves back into the eternalist framing. And so I think a lot of times when I think about post-October 7, or I'm thinking about anti-Semitism-related, I actually think more about people's reactions around the world to it and the problematic way some people explain.

And again, I think Ben said, part of the unwillingness comes from the weaponized claims of anti-Semitism or the fact that it's lodged so heavily at pro-Palestine protests, and it's used to absolutely destroy campus movements, anti-imperialism movements more broadly.

So there's a sort of cynicism that ends up sort of embedding itself in there. And I think that's also something we're trying to cut through, because I think to have this conversation, if people have tools to actually deal with this issue and talk about this openly, then hopefully you can shift that a bit.

SHAUL MAGID: Great. Yeah I mean, I think you're right. Just from having read the book, I think that if one is wed to that eternalist argument, then the book is kind of superfluous because it demands of the reader to step outside, even as a heuristic exercise, to step outside of that model, to really get at what you're doing.

Which really leads to my next question. Given that the book's argument really is that anti-Semitism is best approached through the context of solidarity with other oppressed groups, I have a two-part question.

The first one is, where do you see groups like the ADL, the Anti-Defamation League, whose raison d'etre is fighting anti-Semitism-- that was actually its reason for coming into existence-- where do you see groups like the ADL err in their public presentation of the phenomenon?

[LAUGHTER]

Because they have the loudest voice, and that's what is dominating the conversation in some way that your book is trying to resist, push against, challenge. So that's the first part. And second, how do you navigate the solidarity movement with groups that now view Israel in particular as on the oppressor side of the oppressor/oppressed ledger, which is also often how the left understands conflict?

SHANE BURLEY: Yeah. I mean, so I think one of the things we do is we talk to people that have done specific forms of organizing about [INAUDIBLE]. So for example, we talked with a number of rabbis and community organizers in Charlottesville, who are organizing events of Unite The Right.

And one of the things that happens-- there was a sequence of events that happened before Unite The Right. It wasn't just that. There was a Klan rally before that, there was other alt-right rallies there was spread, some historically Black churches. So the one synagogue in town partnered with historically Black churches, created a clergy collective where they'd would share resources and try and create a plan to create safety.

They would share resources, they would share the buildings, they would go back and forth, they would work with activist groups, and they reached out to the ADL. The ADL is the organization that most synagogues are put in contact with to develop safety plans. The ADL said, so stay at home, the cops have us covered.

The groups that didn't say that was, If Not Now, The John Brown Gun Club, other groups that came out, militant anti-fascist groups, those are the people that were willing to come out defend the synagogue. And so what they did was they created a permanent relationship. They acknowledged, with all of their neighbors, that we have the same threat here. There is alt-right people and neo-Nazis coming to town.

They are going to be threatening all of us, and they did right? Very viscerally in the streets. So they knew right there that sort of had to build that alliance. So that right there was a sort of strategy. And we talked with people in other communities that had sort of similar situations.

How do you look at a sort of common threat and then look at other people that maybe cross communal lines, maybe you didn't know before, but you acknowledge this common interest? That ends up being that sort of question of how are you going to build a strategy.

Because if we're talking about anti-Semitism as something that operates politically, people in power use it, they mobilize conspiracy theories, they do it to gain support, and it ends up victimizing communities. That's something that we have common interests with.

If the far-right, for example, takes power in different places and mobilizes against reproductive rights, attacks, voting rights, attacks all kinds of other things, increasing police violence, things like that, we all have a vested interest in that. And so those community alliances should start to become obvious.

I think your other question, when it comes to defending Jewish communities as Jewish communities, I don't there's much of a question. If anti-Semites are threatening a synagogue, I'm not litmus testing the synagogue, I'm in politics, defending the synagogue. I think it's different when you're talking about large global issues, and we're talking about political organizations like the Anti-Defamation League.

Part of what the Anti-Defamation League has done-- in our final chapter, we tell the history of the Anti-Defamation League. Oh, it's truncated history. But when the Anti-Defamation League was founded, it was founded to fight anti-Semitism, but it was founded to fight it in a very particular way, in a way that was different than the Jewish left.

It was much more tied to establishment Jewish organizations, a lot more middle-class, or upper middle-class, or even upper-class Jewish communities that didn't like things like the Bund, didn't like Jewish anarchists, didn't like militants coming up who had their own vision of how to fight anti-Semitism.

It was the Communist Party, it was the Bund, it was other things like that. So the Anti-Defamation League always positioned itself to the right as an alternative to the left. And so in a lot of ways, we're actually reviving that older pre-tradition of actually bringing that question of anti-Semitism and Jewish safety back to the egalitarian conditions.

How do we build the social movement? How do we work with our neighbors? That kind of thing, instead of just handing this question back to this professionalized organization that's going to partner with the FBI, that's going to partner with the State of Israel, and they have their own vision of what it looks like to keep Jews safe. And so we are kind of offering that vision, but it's ran parallel to the ADL all the time.

BEN LORDER: Yeah. I mean, I feel the litany of ways that the ADL gets the fight against anti-Semitism wrong is too large to-- the list is too large to capture here. And I feel like most people in this room probably have a pretty good idea. I mean, since October 7, the ADL has been at the forefront.

We're 11 months into a genocide that needs to end, that needed to end a long time ago. We need a ceasefire, we need an arms embargo, we need a radical rethinking of US support for Israel. And the ADL, has a monopoly on the anti-Semitism conversation in a way that makes those objectives a lot harder to maintain.

The ADL has really been at the forefront of pushing falsities, like falsity that anti-Zionism is inherently anti-Semitic, or the falsity of, I believe that Jonathan Greenblatt called US student encampments Iranian fronts, with all the militarist language that entails. Jonathan Greenblatt once called on the National Guard, I think to come and attack the Columbia student encampment.

The ADL has been at the forefront, along with anti-Semitic Christian Zionist groups like Christians United for Israel in trying to pass a repressive anti-Semitism legislation that would codify a bad definitions of anti-Semitism to repress Israel-critical speech. And this does the opposite keep Jews safe.

When you define anti-Semitism as basically any criticism of Israel that Jonathan Greenblatt doesn't like, it makes the work of building inner solidarity and actually fighting it increasingly hard. It isolates our Jewish communities and makes it harder to build the relationships we need between Jewish communities and justice movements.

And it's what we call a strategy of vertical alliance. The mentality, not only of the ADL, but of our establishment Jewish institutions, is that allying with state power is the way to keep Jews safe.

Allying with administrative power to repress student movements on campus, allying with increasingly the Republican Party, but also like a bipartisan effort to squelch academic freedom and free speech in this country, all in the name of Jewish safety.

That's the opposite of the strategy we need, and I think everyone here, the popularity of these conversations right now, we all know a radically different approach is needed. And it's high time that groups like the ADL stop being able to hold the mic and monopolize the anti-Semitism conversation.

And we see-- in general your second question, Shaul, I think an oversimplistic oppressor/oppressed binary, is sometimes oversimplistic. It doesn't always capture the texture and fabric of our lives. I think all of us at one time can hold a oppressor relationships and oppressed relationships.

But overall, I think as someone who wants the entrenched apartheid and supremacy to end in Israel, and who wants a radically different future beyond Zionism, essentially, I think part of the work of fighting anti-Semitism in solidarity is being real about structural oppression in Israel-Palestine and fighting for a radically different vision of for equality between Israelis and Palestinians.

And so I really don't see a contradiction with groups who want to radically challenge supremacy in Israel-Palestine. Yeah.

SHAUL MAGID: Thank you. I want to push both of you more on something that you both raised, because it actually was my next question, but I think it's also a question that is really at the top of the conversation at this point. I mean, I do also want to talk about White nationalist anti-Semitism. And that's something that doesn't get talked about that much because of the realities on the ground.

So I want to push each of you, maybe tell us what you each think anti-Zionism actually really means, because it means different things to different people. And it also has a long history. In fact, its history is as long as Zionism. So I want to-- I'm going to get a little bit more out of you from that.

And in your views like what are the real fault lines in the equation between the two? Like what is the price that's paid socially when you equate those two things? And what is the price paid socially when you disaggregate those two things?

Where do you think the lines get crossed? Where does one move into the other? And how can we better navigate the differences and more nuanced conversation about the relationship between these two phenomena, which are arguably-- well, some people want to argue that they're actually identical, and then some people want to argue that they're not.

So I assume that your positions are both that they're not identical. So then the question is-- so then the question is, what are the real differences? Shane.

SHANE BURLEY: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: Can you answer through your microphone, please?

Go ahead and move this up?

SHAUL MAGID: Yeah.

SHANE BURLEY: You hear OK now?

AUDIENCE: It's still quiet.

SHAUL MAGID: I think you can hold it--

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

SHANE BURLEY: Hear me OK now?

SHAUL MAGID: Yeah.

SHANE BURLEY: All right. So yeah, we had this-- so this was the first question last night, how do you define Zionism? And so if we're defining ourselves of away from Zionism, we're talking about Zionism being what we describe as an ethnic supremacist Jewish state, one that maintains its hegemony by like maintaining a Jewish majority.

So the alternative to that anti-Zionism would be-- I think, broadly, there's a big tent. The term is almost problematically a big tent because there could be all kinds of forms of opposition.

But if we're thinking about more from the left and more from the traditions of people that we talk to in the book, we're talking about people that want one land for all people. The historic Palestine, democratic for everyone, shared, just like sort of any democratic country. And so it's a more of a universal vision of what the future could be.

Again, that's a land of Jews, of Palestinians, of anyone that lives there. So it's not this sort of area that's cleared out of Jews, which is often, I think what the framing or the assumption is when anti-Zionism is assumed to be anti-Semitism.

And so part of what ends up happening in these discourses is that Zionism is assumed to be the natural Jewish position, the one of Jewish communal organizations, therefore all Jews, because they often speak as though they're speaking for all Jews, and therefore opposition to Zionism or having a different political perspective, is considered inherently threatening to that.

And then there's lots of conflation of Judaism with Zionism, the Zionist vision of politics with the Jewish vision of the land. And I think all those things end up rallying together into one sort of coherent narrative that you hear from large established organizations.

And then when we're talking about anti-Zionism, or counter-Zionism, or non-Zionism, we're actually talking about a sort of diversity of Jewish opinions and non-Jewish opinions about what an alternative to this framework could be.

So the question is, is that anti-Semitic? Well, this is going to be really unsatisfying to some people, but it's anti-Semitic and it's anti-Semitic. It's anti-Semitic when it comes from very clear places of ideological anti-Semitism.

So when people have a really outsized vision of Jewish power, when they believe a elite cabal is controlling the US, when even when it's coded as Zionist, when people have a sense that Israel's hand is in basically driving all forms of inequality around the globe, that historically it's they're controlling it, that the US has been captured by foreign interests. All of those planned historic anti-Semitic tropes when they use it to demonize Judaism.

We talked, I think, last night of an event I was at many years ago where someone declared that the Talmud had predicted Zionism because of all the things that apparently said about Gentiles. Those are things that-- and we see that we see this in different forms.

Occasionally, we see on the left, we see it really heavily on what we call the anti-Zionist far-right, or the far right that claims that they're anti anti-Zionist. And so I think when we're talking about it, we should actually look to what the ideologies are here. What are people actually asking for? How are they actually treating Jews and Judaism? How are they talking about it?

And I think one of the real problems with the equation of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism is actually we have stopped asking those questions. We end up knowing very little about what people are asking for and what they want.

BEN LORDER: Yeah. Yeah, no. I would just add to that sometimes it's no surprise to me why Palestinians are anti-Zionist. The movement that has called itself political Zionism is responsible for the historic and ongoing dispossession of Palestinians from their lands, from their livelihood, from their property, from their lives.

It is Zionism is the name that often folks give to that movement. So anti Zionism is very, very clear for Palestinians, I think. And for large parts of the contemporary left, I think anti-Zionism is very clear. It's an injustice-driven movement that calls for an end to systems of domination and for full equality from the river to the sea.

And that's something that we certainly support, and we certainly see Jewish and Palestinian liberation as inherently intertwined in that way. But I think it's difficult often because the word Zionism, at the same time, can mean so many different things to so many different people.

There's been studies that show that a large majority of American Jews identify as Zionists, but when you ask them what that means, and you boil it down and you ask questions like, does Zionism mean to you that you support a state in Israel where there's inequality between Jews and Palestinians? Only a very small minority, would answer yes to that question, most would say no.

For my family, for my grandparents, and for my parents, they would probably answer, yes, I identify as Zionist, but for them it means a kind of a Jewish pride. It means a desire for Jews to be safe, especially for my grandparents' generation after the Holocaust.

We were at our event in Chicago, someone raised their hand and said, I'm offended that you identify as anti-Zionist because I identify as a Zionist. And for me, my Zionism means full equality between everyone in that land. And so I said to them, OK, my anti-Zionism means I support full equality. So maybe that's enough arguing over this word. Maybe this word is a distraction.

So I feel like the variance of meaning around the word Zionism make it really hard, and so I do think in many contexts it isn't worth arguing over that word. Maybe via the shibboleth of anti-Zionism has limitations, but at the same time, I want to be very clear that for most who define themselves as anti-Zionists, it's a call for full equality that I would certainly support.

SHAUL MAGID: All right. I want to open it up for questions. I just wanted to add one thing. I read somewhere and I don't remember where that somebody asked a Zionist how to define Zionism, and the definition actually speaks to some of what you said. He said that Zionism is like a person jumping out of the third floor of a burning building and landing on someone's head.

AUDIENCE: Wow.

SHAUL MAGID: Which is kind of an interesting way of understanding the complexity of both of this. And finally, again, to what it reminded me-- and then I want to it up-- as a good illustration. And I will say-- and I say this because I think it really it just gets to the heart of a lot of what you've been saying.

Ahmad Tibi, some of you may know, he was Palestinian-Israeli parliamentarian, Knesset member, and he was, or maybe he still is actually, the longest standing Knesset member in the history of the country. And he got up at some point, I think it was in the Israeli parliament, I'm not really sure, and he asked a very kind of piercing question.

He said I'm a Palestinian-Israeli. My family has been living here for a long time. I'm actually a member of the Israeli government, and I hold Israeli passport. You tell me, he said to his audience, how am I supposed to sing the Israeli national anthem? Because he said, the Israeli national anthem, for those of you that know Hatikvah, the Israeli national anthem doesn't really only exclude me, the Israeli national anthem erases me.

And yet he's not saying this from a place of hatred. He's saying, I'm an Israeli citizen. There is a national anthem for the country of which I am a citizen that doesn't acknowledge my existence. So I think in a way that kind of captures a lot of the complexity of what you're saying. Would that be an anti-Semitic statement? I mean, hardly. Would it even be an anti-Zionist statement? I don't really know.

AUDIENCE: Yeah, you could say that.

SHAUL MAGID: So I think I want to open it up because I want to get I want to give us a good half hour for questions. I just wanted to say that what this book does is it really offers an alternative set of resources and conversations about a subject that is real and that has an impact on many of our lives, Jewish or not Jewish, pro-Israel or not pro-Israel.

And it does offer an alternative to the conversation that's happening by groups like the ADL, and complexifies in interesting and important ways all of the kinds of issues that many of us spend a lot of our time thinking about and talking about.

So I want to thank both of you for doing that and for offering that up. And it's also like-- it's got an awesome cover. It goes back to 1930s radicalism.

[LAUGHTER]

So thank you for that.

[APPLAUSE]

So can I ask you, as is always the case, that hopefully your question will end with a question mark and it won't be too long. And so go ahead, and then you say one.

AUDIENCE: Hi. Thank you so much for writing this book, first of all. I'm about halfway through it and it's fantastic. And there are groups out there that have been doing this work in the Jewish community in this way that you suggest for quite a while. And to have it all kind of actually distilled into a book like this, and accessible to everyone, is a great contribution.

So my question is not really about this on a conceptual level. I think I'm with you on that. It's a very practical question, which is, so when we're talking about the ADL monopoly on fighting anti-Semitism, I'm dealing with this at my own institution. I think many, many people are right now, which is that every university now feels like it has to have a training on anti-Semitism, every workplace. This is going on all over.

The ADL has these sort of off the shelf products. It's a little video. You can put it on your website, you can make all your employees do it, and I've kind of looked at everything else that's out there. There's a few webinars, there's this and that, but nobody else is kind of filling that. We really need something.

Can you guys make the [INAUDIBLE].

[LAUGHTER]

--somebody else. Like, how do we get that? Because I think it's really crucial to think on that level. So I'm just wondering if you have any thoughts on that, do you know of anything that maybe I don't know about? Or in anything that's in the works, I'd love to hear about it.

SHAUL MAGID: Yeah.

SHANE BURLEY: Should we take a few questions or--

BEN LORDER: Yeah, take a few.

SHAUL MAGID: Yeah, take a few. Let's take a few, I say. Yeah.

AUDIENCE: All right. Thanks. Hi. Yeah, related to that, thank you so much for writing this book, thoroughly enjoyed it. I think it's a very important read for Jews and non-Jews alike. And connecting to the previous question, I recognize there are probably maybe some majority of Jews in this room. I'm not sure, but it's a decent guess.

I wonder also on your tours and in your experience, how many non-Jews have been engaging with the book? Do you have any data on that? And are there any plans to make sure that this reaches the non-Jewish community? Because I think it's just as important for the Jewish community as the non-Jewish community.

SHAUL MAGID: All right.

SHANE BURLEY: Good question.

SHAUL MAGID: We'll take another take another question.

AUDIENCE: Yeah, sure. So I've not read the book, so maybe you deal with this. In my experience, I'm a Rabbi, there's a lot of Jews in between the ADL and JVP. They're the ones I mostly deal with and think about.

And I guess my question is-- one only can have-- and all of your premises I agree with. Let me just start with that. But solidarity implies mutuality. And one of the most problematic tropes. To me, that is Semitism is the good Jew, and the good Jew is the Jew we tolerate because they agree with us or conform to our conception.

It seems to me on the left, there is a good Jew and a bad Jew. So I'm curious if in the book or in your work, is a Zionist-- or a Zionist who does not identify as a Jewish supremacist is there a place for that on the left? And what's the challenge to the left, or is it always the Jew that has to change themselves in order to fit?

Because to me that's not solidarity. That's choosing a side, but it's not actual solidarity and mutuality, given where a very large number of American Jews are people of goodwill and they think people are willing to learn and be open, but not JVP.

So this question of the good Jew and fitting in, and what does solidarity actually look like, if it's mutual?

SHAUL MAGID: Do you want to take a question, you should answer.

SHANE BURLEY: Sure. Yeah, it's what do we do. Why don't we do three with these three, and then we'll-- and then we'll go around again.

SHAUL MAGID: Yeah. OK, let's have one more first.

SHANE BURLEY: Take one more.

SHAUL MAGID: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: I was raised in a very interfaith, and ecumenical, and respectful house, and one of my grandparents was Jewish, and she was also the longest living grandparent of all of my grandparents. And I had a class in college, in ecumenical studies. It was a world religions class.

And I decided that I wanted to convert to maybe a Unitarian Christianity, but I have never quite fully been able to be respected by the Christian. Just about every part of Christianity, they would always ask me if I was Jewish, and I would say that, I'm trying to become-- I'm trying to become an ecumenically Christian.

And I was even baptized and it was in a weird way. I won't say which sect, but it was in a weird way that was like almost to cause me a rift in the Christian community. And I will never forget the strength of my Judaism and there are certain customs and traditions and kosher law, which is very important and wise to me.

But there are some other certain customs that I don't totally agree with, or I guess I would be a reformed Jew if I was still Jewish. And I don't-- I'm not doing this because I disrespect Jews, and I still respect Judaism, and there's no way that I'm turning back on Jewish people, but I don't-- I mean, I can't--

I guess my question is, how do you-- why do you think Jewish people aren't converting? Is it because they're told because they're not Christian to birth like me, I guess, that they can't convert. Does the Jewish community as a whole, generally-- the Orthodox community, believe that Jesus was not--

I mean, they believe he was a person, a good person, but it's the it's the theological idea or the premise that he was not the Son of God, or do they get it? Do they sort of--

SHAUL MAGID: Yeah. Yeah. I'll give you another 10 seconds to finish the question.

AUDIENCE: And the other part of the question is, how can I-- I still want to-- I mean, I do not believe all the stories of the Bible. They're not 100% true in both-- and they're great stories. And I think the Holocaust was disgusting and we shouldn't be doing it to Palestinians either.

SHAUL MAGID: Yeah, I think we got what you-- OK. Go ahead.

SHANE BURLEY: Sure OK. There's a lot that's there. So the first question about resources and training-- wait, I think I can actually get this question every time we do an event. It's almost like, well, we have to do this HR thing and the ADL gave us these resources. We've tried to do craft trainings and do some of those, but it's not at the scale that the ADL, and I think people--

I think we're just really early. I think that's what it comes down to. I think that the rift has actually opened and people are now asking that. Tons of universities reaching out and stuff like that, so I think people are looking for that now.

So I think that will change in the next two or three years now that real serious questions have been raised about the ADL, about whether or not the tracking methods are legitimate or how the relationship with the police, that kind of thing.

So I'm hoping that a year from now, we'll have much better answers than we have right now. I think to your question, I'll leave it to the Rabbi on the panel to answer any theological questions. I think about people who have come-- I mean, I think part of what we've done is connect with local groups, and that includes synagogues and Jewish groups.

And I think they're the most well-positioned, so they do come on force. Yeah, I think your assessment of the crowd is probably accurate, but it's not only them. And I think other political groups have co-sponsored events. Like DSA has sponsored events, anti-fascist groups those sponsored events, and they are also sharing them and doing those sorts of things.

And so I think-- my hope is that it does get wider. And we talked with a number of people that were very serious of like, do not write this book at Jews. Jews do not need to hear this.

[LAUGHTER]

I actually do think Jews need to hear this. But I think so we're doing our best to try to get that out there as well.

SHAUL MAGID: We'll have to look at this one more question.

BEN LORDER: Oh yeah, the-- yeah, your question on--

SHANE BURLEY: Yeah. So we actually talked about the good Jew, bad Jew binary quite a bit, and this is not-- this is something that people mentioned on the left quite a bit, but it exists on the right very heavily too. Being that in that case, the good Jew is the strong Israeli soldier or the person that gives money to the ADL, and the bad Jews, the JVP member.

[LAUGHTER]

Usually the JVP member. But again, I think this gets to a question of litmus testing too. I don't think it's appropriate to begin relationships with Jews and demand that they answer questions about Israel and Zionism. And I think one of the things that we should acknowledge, too, about Zionism, is that actually it comes a lot of ideas that we encounter all the time.

I mean, how many people do you encounter that are American Patriots, or are really invested in American capitalism and statecraft? We're about to have an election. You're going to see a lot of jingoism from people you think are on the left, or could describe themselves on the left.

And so I think we confront it in some of those ways that there's like, I come in with politics that a lot of people would probably think is pretty radical and maybe they're personally uncomfortable with, and I try my best to meet people where they're at. There are certain limits to that. I think there are some environments when that may not be appropriate, and I think you shouldn't navigate that all the time.

But also I think when people ask that question, I think they're also asking a question about safety, and support, and things like that, and I think that is also one where we should take a bigger, further step. And when it comes to for example, things like synagogue safety and security, those questions become really superfluous because everyone should feel like they can depend on their community for those sorts of safety.

And of course, one of the ways that you bridge that divide when you hear those criticisms is when people know that you're there to support them. And I think one of the situations that lets people-- they rely on Israeli nationalism and Zionism so heavily is when they don't see that support.

A person who asked a question last night confronting us about Zionism. Their next question was, well, when I go by all the synagogues, there's police out front, and I don't see that in front of mosques and churches.

And I was like, well, I think what you're saying is you feel unsafe and you don't have community around you. Like, what if that was different, would you feel differently about those questions? So I think to a certain degree, we have to make people feel different about those questions by giving them real material networks where they can depend on them.

SHAUL MAGID: You want to say--

BEN LORDER: Yeah. I mean, I don't have tons more to add. I think the answer to your question is a really good one, I think. In the book we interview, a queer leader who talked about beginning to try to educate their leftist communities about LGBTQ oppression in the 80s and how much resistance they got then, right? And how it was really an uphill battle at the beginning.

And it took a lot of queer folks coming together and demanding that this was an issue for the left to care about, and demanding that left communities look at their internalized homophobia, their internalized transmisogyny, obviously that's still all very ongoing.

But how it took a committed core coming to the left and making that change. And I think that's where we're at now with anti-Semitism, education and awareness, on the left. And so yeah, a lot of our events do have a lot of Jews, but there's also a lot of non-Jews who are coming.

And in our left movements, I think we have a lot of allies. Even progressive folks who might not fully get it or have some unlearning to do, we've seen a lot of people who care about this, and who want to understand, and who want to challenge their internalized biases.

We interviewed a group in New York who started to do anti-Semitism education with their partners. And when they got folks together during the Q&A, they heard a lot of anti-Semitic stuff from their partners, just these biases that we all grew up with because anti-Semitism is part of our culture. It's the air that we breathe.

And so they heard their comrades and their friends start to repeat these things, but they also wanted to unlearn it. And I think that's the beauty and the potential, is being able to see that we do have allies in non-Jewish communities who want to unlearn this stuff and who want to learn, and to integrate anti-Semitism into an analysis of the broader systems of oppression.

So I think we're getting there and we're in a much different place than we were about even four or eight years ago. So, yeah.

SHAUL MAGID: Yes, in the back there? No. Yeah, the woman who just had her hand up. Yeah.

AUDIENCE: Me?

SHAUL MAGID: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: Oh, OK. Hi. I have a lot of questions, but I chose one, which is, how do-- I haven't read the book, I admit. How and do you-- and if and how do you address the United States or empire role in anti-Semitism in general and in Israel-Palestine specifically? And I know that the right isn't really talking about that, and I know that the left, of course, has identified that the US plays a role.

But it's still-- mostly what I hear is it frames it as the United States is helping Israel in whatever Israel is trying to do, where we know that the United States, at least originally, had its own very clear interests in supporting not only Israel but every country it supports. So do you address that, and how would you talk about that?

AUDIENCE: One question from back here?

SHAUL MAGID: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: Just thinking about the nature of coalitions and how they seem to me to function best when there is a clear, tangible goal at stake and then there's mutual interest in that goal, the Charlottesville example that you gave seems great, that there's clear, mutual shared goal around safety and activism. They come together in a way that achieves that goal.

But then also, I thought your example about the Zionism and anti-Zionism at this talk was so poignant, because there actually is a shared vision, and yet there's not clear coalition-building going on. And when I think about enduring coalition-building, I either think about having a grand goal that needs to be achieved or a series of smaller goals that people can agree on. And I'm just wondering, does that resonate with your sense of what's possible at this moment? And do you think that there is a uniting goal that could be achieved that would keep Jews safe?

SHAUL MAGID: One more question, and then we'll do another wrap-up.

LILA: Thank you so much. My name is Lila. I really appreciated these two frameworks you offered of the maximus decolonial politic and then the vertical alignment. And given that we're here in this room with students and faculty and administrators at Harvard, I'm curious if you could speak to finding the middle place between those two, specifically in campus organizing, and what strategies of solidarity you've picked up from your research that can be of service to all of us here.

SHAUL MAGID: So you were going to wrap up there or go another round?

BEN LORDER: Yeah, these are all really good questions. I think that your question about the US's role in an empire, I think that's a really key piece of the analysis that's important actually to guard against the anti-Semitic forms of anti-Zionism that do exist. I think it's really important not to see Israel or some sort of Zionist cabal as the hidden hand that's solely responsible for the US supporting Israel.

In reality, Israel is basically a military outpost of US dominance in the Middle East. The US supports Israel because for decades it was a beachhead in the Cold War. And then since then, since the early 2000s, the US has supported Israel as kind of a frontline defender in its "clash of civilizations," quote unquote, against radical Islam.

And the US is, for the most part, led by white Christians, and I think a large way the white Christian West supports Israel for its own sort of philosemitic reasons. You can also look at the arms industry, the military industrial complex, the massive base of Christian Zionists in this country that have their own anti-Semitic fantasies of supporting Israel to bring about the end times.

So if we look at these larger structural factors that undergird US support for Israel, that's actually our whole analysis is, don't imagine that there's a Zionist cabal pulling the strings from behind the scenes. Look at these broader structures of US empire and dominance. And yeah, so that's super important.

Yeah, I feel like your two questions are related. I think all coalitions need to be flexible, and I do believe in a diversity of tactics. I think there are going to be more radical and militant wings of a student movement and of all movements that are not-- their messaging and their tactics aren't always going to appeal for folks who are still on a journey of unlearning their support for Israel.

Like, I was at the DNC, and I was at the march on the DNC, and the march on the DNC that demanded a ceasefire at an arms embargo, that's not going to appeal to everyone. There's also an inside strategy, with the uncommitted movement inspiring. But I think the demands are very clear. They've been clear since October 8. It's like a ceasefire that we still desperately need and ultimately an end to US support for this horrific genocide.

But I think there can also be many-- there can be many organizations that are working to meet the American Jewish community where they're at, to meet Jewish students who are still on a learning journey and meet them where they're at. And they might not be totally aligned with some other groups.

And I think there's room for a lot of tactics, and the more that you can work together and those of us who are progressive on this issue, the less infighting that we can do, the better, I think.

SHAUL MAGID: Shane, just before you answer-- I know that we're short on time, and I know there were some questions up here. So do you mind if I ask a couple more?

BEN LORDER: Also, if anybody has a question about right-wing anti-Semitism, right-wing nationalism-- It's the thing we haven't actually talked about at all. I think it's very important. I've heard about those.

[LAUGHTER]

SHAUL MAGID: I know, exactly. Yes, please. Please make them as quickly as you can because you we're kind of short on time, but I just want to be getting in as many questions as we could.

AUDIENCE: Oh, go ahead. Go first.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

AUDIENCE: OK. I'll try to do this quickly. Hi, I'm non-Jewish. I'm speaking for the community of all those people.

SHAUL MAGID: You're speaking for, like, 99.999% of the time.

AUDIENCE: Yeah, it's hard.

[LAUGHTER]

But coming from that standpoint, I think it's been really interesting to hear you folks speak about essentially the essentialization of anti-Semitism within the constellation of oppressions. And I guess I'm curious what your vision of popularizing that is and, I guess to your question, especially for folks who may be sympathetic to a broader coalition-based sense of safety but who feel that because of history and because of their own experiences, that without a very particular, maybe right-wing version of Zionism, that they will not feel safe.

SHAUL MAGID: OK, thank you. So could you back up here since he was so polite and--

AUDIENCE: Rochelle, Rochelle.

SHAUL MAGID: This way. Politeness sometimes pays.

[LAUGHTER]

AUDIENCE: Thank you. Yes, my question also is around coalition building, and what do you do about fanaticism? I have family that is Haredi in Israel, and I stand out every week in solidarity with the Palestinian groups in Lexington. And my nieces and nephews have asked me, what am I doing?

And my question about coalition building is, are we really talking about secular and non-Orthodox Jews, or are we talking about an ability to build coalitions with deeply religious people who feel attachment to the land? Personally, I see parallels between the right-wing Jewish Israelis and Iran, and I don't support fanaticism. But I'm curious where the limits to this coalition-building are.

SHAUL MAGID: OK, Shane, go ahead.

[LAUGHTER]

You take this one. We have--

SHANE BURLEY: Thanks, everybody.

[LAUGHTER]

And so your question, we actually used the phrase "horizontal alliances" to talk about what does it mean to build power amongst people on an equal playing field rather than trying to build a channel up to those in power who are supposed to act on their interests. And we do that with a broad base.

And this is not something particularly new. The right has money. The left have people. And so it's about having the largest coalition possible. I think this gets, in the way, everyone's questions about coalition building. If we're talking about refit, replacing how we talk about anti-Semitism, we're trying to put it back into a framework that people actually do understand.

People build social movements all the time, so we talk in the book about how does anti-Semitism relate to structures of power, to capitalism. Why do these ideas repeat? How do these populist conspiracy theories form? They form out of alienation and inequality. Why?

And I think when we look at that, we actually get to real structural elements. There's deep inequalities in society. There's deep political alienation, and there are things that we can do about them. We actually have lots of ideas from the past and contemporarily, including ideas from the left, from Jewish feminism, from anti-fascism about how to fight anti-Semitism within that. So people have answered or tried to answer these questions before and trying to bring those together.

The question about the limits of coalition-building, boy, if I had the answer to that-- I think that this assumption, the Orthodox Haredi Jews are sort of cut out of this is a problematic assumption to make and one that we're paying for decades now with wider slopes of Orthodox communities that I don't think are naturally that way.

That being said, I do live in the real world where there have been limits there, and so I think creating spaces where you can start to address that-- I'm a religious Jewish person. I do connect with them on certain religious things. We can talk that language, and I think that's useful.

But I don't think it's particularly useful to just wait for people to come along to take action. So I don't think it's actually-- and I think it's not also just a matter of picking up secular Jews and progressives. Lots of religious Jews actually do care about this issue and have a different relationship to the land, or maybe they feel connected to land but not through political Zionism.

So there's different channels there, and so I think it's useful for us to maybe walk back from the labels that we've assumed the politics on and say, maybe we can divide that up. Maybe there are actually opportunities. And we do talk with Orthodox folks about coalition-building.

Sometimes the Israel question isn't the question they're ready to answer, but for example, talking with a lot of-- I spend time in Crown Heights with [INAUDIBLE] folks. A lot of them have what I guess other people would call progressive ideas about prison reform, and the mass incarceration is sort of a barrier to teshuvah.

And there is a number of folks there involved in-- that even within the Haredi community are advocating for like school justice or queer rights. There's folks in there in those spaces that are advocating but also want to stay. And so I think there's definitely avenues there that we should try and reach out when we can.

But again, I think one of the questions is-- with the what makes a good demand, we have a very immediate demand right now that people have built coalitions on. Ceasefire is actually the perfect crossover demand and now arms embargo and taking that a step further. I don't think there's a reason to back away from that.

The fact that it hasn't worked I think is actually a testimony to how radical the demand was that we didn't realize it as such, and so I think the question is not at this point about how to back away from that but how to make it more common sense and available and to push back on the voices that have made it so marginal.

SHAUL MAGID: So we're really running out of time, but Ben did bring up a good point in that a third of the book is really about white nationalist anti-Semitism. So if you allow me-- if you wanted to weigh in on that piece of it-- because I'm afraid that if we advertise this.

AUDIENCE: Microphone, microphone.

SPEAKER 1: Oh, I'm sorry. If we advertise this as, oh, this is going to be a panel about white nationalist anti-Semitism, it would be, like, half the number of people.

[LAUGHTER]

And I understand. We're living in the world. But I do want you to address it because I think it's also-- it's related to something beyond itself.

BEN LORDER: No, it's completely related. At the end of the day, the way to take back the anti-Semitism conversation from the right is for us to articulate our own analysis of anti-Semitism and how it fits into the broader structures of oppression that we face. And the reality is that today we're on the cusp of a Christian nationalist movement and a white nationalist movement that is aimed to seize power in our society.

It has been building up for decades, and the conspiracy theories that are increasingly explicitly anti-Semitic at the heart of MAGA are driving all forms of oppression. The right is able to mobilize millions to attack Black Lives Matter by saying it's a George Soros conspiracy at the heart of Black excellence and thriving. The right is basically driving up anti-immigrant politics by saying it's a globalist conspiracy.

Anti-Semitism fits in to this architecture also of transphobia, anti-blackness, anti-immigrant xenophobia. And for non-Jews and Jews and everyone in this room to be able to speak that language and say, here's our analysis of anti-Semitism, here's how we all have a stake in combating it-- this isn't only a Jewish issue. The right is using these conspiracies to come after all of our communities and to come after multiracial democracy itself. So building our language to take it on, our political project is a way to also sculpt out a new vision of Jewish safety and thriving in diaspora.

SHANE BURLEY: Yeah, I think--

[APPLAUSE]

SHAUL MAGID: Last word, Shane.

SHANE BURLEY: If you look at the data on anti-Semitism through 2023, 2024, even after October 7, there is actually really clear organizations that led it. And if you had read the reports, you would have assumed it was Students for Justice in Palestine, but it was the Goyim Defense League, an open neo-Nazi group that overwhelmingly had the most events, the most propaganda, the most threats, things like that.

And so if we're looking at just the sheer numbers, part of the distraction here ends up with turning away from where there's actually a rapid increase in white nationalist organizing that has gotten uncovered since Trump left office. And so we're actually seeing a sort of threat that might be larger than it was in 2016, 2017, yet we're having a different conversation.

And so I think just looking at that, plain and simple-- and if we're talking about shifting people's sense of where safety is, we don't have institutions that really deal with that unless we're talking about each other. And I think that ends up being a different conversation, so I want to shift it to that.

And like Ben talked about, we have a whole section of the book where we really talk about the relationship of anti-Semitism to other forms of oppression. What gives things its scaffolding, its intellectual coherence? And once we acknowledge that, we start to see that these things are really tied together.

We can't actually talk about the massive assault on trans healthcare without talking about why the right thinks trans healthcare exists, because a cabal of globalists is manufacturing this to attack Western society. This is actually how these things have become coherent, and it's become much more frequent and common on the right. And so I think we have to understand that if we're going to understand the rightward push at all.

AUDIENCE: Wow.

SHAUL MAGID: Well, thank you all very much.

[APPLAUSE]

I want to thank Ben and Shane for coming and for their book and really encourage you to buy the book. It's more than a good read. It's really an important book. So thank you very much, and have a good night.

AUDIENCE: That was great.

[APPLAUSE]

SPEAKER 2: Sponsor-- Religion and Public Life's Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative.

SPEAKER 1: Copyright 2024, the President and Fellows of Harvard College.