Brian Lehrer It's the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. Among the many disturbing things about the Hanukkah massacre at Bondi Beach, Australia, that killed 15 people and wounded dozens more is that the two alleged gunmen were father and son. The father, age 50, was killed by police during the incident. The son, 24, also shot by police, is now reported to have woken from a coma and been charged with crimes including murder and terrorism. Police say they appear to have been motivated by ISIS or Islamic State related anti Semitism. They say two Islamic State flags were found in the men's car. Generational antisemitism is also the focus of an article in the Atlantic. It says anti-Jewish prejudice isn't a partisan divide, it's a generational one, with young Americans on both the left and the right more likely to hold anti-Semitic views than older Americans of any politics. With us now is the writer of that article, Yair Rosenberg, Atlantic magazine staff writer and author of their newsletter,Diep Shtetl. He's also been writing recently about what he calls America's Groyper problem with respect to anti-Jewish hate, questions about antisemitism that he thinks Marjorie Taylor Greene is not sufficiently answered yet, and shouldn't get a pass just because of her changing politics.

We'll talk about those things, too. Yair, thank you for joining us. As we say, I'm sorry it's under these circumstances.

Yair Rosenberg: Those are, unfortunately, given what I write about, almost the only circumstances on which you find me on people's shows. Next time baseball.

Brian Lehrer: Next spring baseball or when the Mets make their next confounding move. The title of your article and the lead sentence is a quote from the prominent anti-Trump commentator, Tim Miller from the Bulwark, who some of our listeners know. Tim Miller said to you, the more I'm around young people, the more panicked I am. Would you explain to our listeners why he said that and why you titled your article with it?

Yair Rosenberg: He's best situated to speak to his experience, but what he was talking about was how he regularly interacts with young people. He goes and speaks on college campuses at events. He has had this experience of having people come up to him. In the case that we were discussing, this was a left-wing student coming up to him and repeating what he perceived to be anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that they learned from the Internet. He's not the only person who has said this to me. He's not the only person in politics or commentary who's had this experience and that there seems to be a generational component.

What I then did in my piece is go through a lot of data that we now have from very different sources, from conservative sources, from liberal sources, from nonpartisan sources, all of which agrees that there is a generational divide on antisemitism, that the younger a person is, the more likely they are to express anti-Jewish views. I want to make that clear because the polling data was that we look at is explicitly about Jewish people and attitudes towards Jews and beliefs about Jewish people in America. This is not about Israel or Zionism, which is a very interesting conversation to have and relates to this one. We are very careful to look only at attitudes towards Jewish.

Whether it's the Democratic pollster David Shore or the Manhattan Institute, which is conservative, or the Yale Youth Poll, all of these people found that younger voters are more likely to hold anti-Jewish views than older ones.

Brian Lehrer: Right. Just to give our listeners a little bit more on one of those examples that you cite, this Democratic pollster, David Shore, working for the Kamala Harris campaign last year, did a survey of more than 100,000 people and found that a quarter of those surveyed under age 25 held a "unfavorable opinion" of Jewish people. Again, you emphasize the question was about Jewish people, not Israel or Zionism, and that the numbers were about the same among Harris supporters and Trump supporters. The survey found the older a person was, the less likely they were to express that sentiment.

That's one example of those multiple polls coming from politically different sources that you just described. I guess my follow up question to that is if antisemitism is on the rise in similar proportions among young people from both the left and the right, do the data or does your reporting suggest that antisemitism from the right versus the left are different from each other, like having different roots or different expressions in the ways that right versus left young people think Jews are bad or anything like that.

Yair Rosenberg: It's a great question. It's the sort of question that frankly demands further service and further study to try to see if the expression of anti-Semitism is somewhat different across ideological lines. I would also note that, depending on how you slice some of these surveys, some of them, David Shore, did not find a political difference. Some of the others didn't. Some of them found, if you look at young people in particular, that there is more anti-Semitic attitudes on the right, but they want to do some more polling on that. What I was trying to show is that if you put all the data together, the one thing they agree on is the age divide, which seems to be a very robust finding. I do want to be careful with how I say it.

Like in my experience reporting on antisemitism, I do think that there are different ways it gets expressed on the left and the right, and that includes among young people. On the right, you are more likely to get notions of Jews as subversive, anti-white actors. This is the sort of thing that we see when white supremacist attacks Jews in synagogues. Nick Fuentes, the white nationalist influencer, this idea that Jews are subverting the majority culture and are basically foreigners who are disguising themselves as natives. When it comes to left-wing sources, you'll see some interesting versions of that, but usually using Israel as a proxy.

You're often going to see things like people who have harsh opinions of Israel's conduct in Gaza or before, and some of them have trouble then separating that from their opinion of Jewish people writ large. These are impressionistic, right? This is one of those places where I would like to see more polling because one of the things that my piece is trying to do is actually say we all have our instincts on this stuff, often based on the public discourse around antisemitism, which puts it in partisan boxes and particular narratives. When you go to the data, sometimes it surprises you, and it tells you things you didn't know. You realize something like age could be more determinative and more interesting and more valuable as a way to look at it than some of these other ways that we usually do.

Brian Lehrer: On separating views about Jews from views about Israel, we have a listener text already that says, "How are you able to separate views on Jewish people and Israel's policies? Israel," writes this listener, "has been conflating anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism to accuse people holding Israel accountable of antisemitism.

Yair Rosenberg: I would just say again, the polls that we're asking simply say, Jews. "Do you have an unfavorable opinion of Jewish people?" Is what David Shore asked. If you look at the Yale Youth Poll, they asked things like, "Have Jews had a positive, neutral, or negative impact on the United States of America?" American Jews. This is very specific to a particular context. It takes a certain person to take that and make it about a country in the Middle East, thousands of miles away. Similarly, if you asked that kind of question about Muslims and then decided to answer it based on your opinion about Muslims in the Middle East.

That would be someone, or you were asked about, I don't know, Asian Americans, and you made it about China, we'd understand that that person was making a certain sort of leap that we consider to be bigoted. I'd also say that I do hear this line where people say, Benjamin Netanyahu will say things like, "I am the leader of the Jewish people." He will present himself as the leader of the Jews. The people who raise this objection and say, well, Israel conflates itself with the Jewish people. Therefore, when anti-Semitism happens to Jewish people elsewhere, that's Israel's fault. One, anti-Semitism against Jews around the world and horrific, murderous anti-Semitism long predates the state of Israel.

It's kind of chronologically strange to pin it on Israel specifically. I would say to the specific Israel point, when Netanyahu says, I care about human rights, I care about peace, when Netanyahu says literally anything else, critics of Israel, many of them will look at that and say, I don't believe you. I've written columns along some of those lines. Then Netanyahu says, "I represent all the Jewish people around the world," and someone goes and says, "I do believe you and I'm going to go torch a synagogue." I think we understand that that person is making a very selective judgment that gets them where they want to go. That's what I would say. That again is where the bigotry comes in.

Brian Lehrer: Similarly, a listener asks, are there data from past years from similar surveys, meaning, I presume, before the current Gaza war?

Yair Rosenberg: Yes, that's a very good question. Some of this data is more recent, and some of it is over time. What we see is over time, in general, certain increasing antisemitic attitudes among younger people from the data that we have. It's not all the data, because not all the data is as long-running. Some of the stuff that I cited in my piece is the American national election surveys. Those surveys have been done for a very, very long time. We see particular between 2016 and 2024 when in the last decade or so decrease in what they measure as warmth towards Jews. Again, there's an age divide on it. It does predate, say, October 7th and the Gaza conflict, this trend.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, do you see antisemitism in the younger generations in your own family or others you know? Per the many surveys cited in this article in the Atlantic, 212433, WNYC, younger listeners, do you see it in your peers on the left or on the right? Does it connect with other kinds of extremism on the rise, as far as you could tell? What do you think the antidotes might be? We'll get to that, too, or anything else. For Atlantic magazine, staff writer Yair Rosenberg, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. You can call, or you can text. You put part of this on today's media environment that spreads extremism of various kinds.

Younger people are more likely to get their news and opinions from social media sites that stoke conflict and conspiracy theories to drive audience engagement. You write. Are you arguing that the promotion of antisemitism is on the rise because it's profitable?

Yair Rosenberg: I think some of that plays a role. I do want to step back one thing because I feel like this is in the article, and I want to foreground it for listeners. When we talk about, say, one quarter of young voters in some of these surveys having anti-Jewish views, what that also means is that some 75% don't. What we're speaking of here is a minority of a minority. The general American consensus, including among young people in the surveys that we just examined, is against antisemitism, against anti-Jewish ideas. I really want to emphasize that. I don't want people to start looking around at all the young people around them.

I have so many such people in my family that I look at them with suspicion. That is not the argument of the article. The argument of the article is rather that we have a consensus that is powerful and worth protecting, that is being threatened. Then, to get to your question, one of the things that threatens it--

Brian Lehrer: Even before we get to my question, since you raised that aspect of the article, which I was going to bring up too, for what to make of what you just said. I thought it was important in the article that you said, even though these surveys showing antisemitism rising in the younger generations are depressing, they also provide grounds for what you call pragmatic optimism. Maybe put that stat that you just cited, those majority stats in the context of pragmatic optimism.

Yair Rosenberg: Exactly. When you look at these polls, what they are in fact showing. I see these polls all the time, and they depress me, but then as I drill down into the details, I realize, well, what we're seeing still is a good immune system. A lot of people, including young people, who are, when they're confronted with an anti-Jewish idea, they reject it. That's good. What we want is political, religious, and cultural leaders who cater to that consensus and try to strengthen it, rather than cater to constituencies outside that consensus who are trying to fracture it.

That could bring us back to your question about different kinds of media and, in particular, social media, and how certain people have exploited how social media works in order to advance anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, among other kinds of fabrications. Some of what I discuss in the article is we have a lot of survey data showing that there's a big divide about where people get their information. It's generational in terms of age. Younger people are much more likely to trust and get their information from social media platforms, whereas older people are more likely to get them from legacy media platforms. I'm not sitting here to judge on that.

I think that one reason that, for example, that social media platforms and influencers have grown in some of their influence is that they have correctives to what the legacy media has done, and they point out things that the legacy media hasn't done as well. At the same time, the legacy media does some things well and has certain standards that don't exist in the broader legacy context, let's say in the broader social media context, such as rules against trying to platform explicit racism and stuff like that. When you have people getting information from totally different places, they will sometimes come to different conclusions and have different influences acting on them.

In the case of social media, I talk about some of the ways, and not just in this article, that social media can sort of advantage anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. I'd urge people to think about how social media works because it's millions of people talking at once, often about some news event or thing that just happened, a cultural event, any of that, all at the same time. If you want to stand out from this cacophony, you have to say something new, you have to say something novel that's different. You could be funnier than other people. You could be prettier than other people. Your cat could be cuter than other people's cats. You could also have a more inflammatory opinion than other people.

That's the sort of thing that will stand out and get attention, both positive and negative. Or you could have information about the thing everyone is talking about that other people don't have. If there is a mass shooting and you know who did it. You can get a lot of attention like that. If you're a reporter and you have the explanation for something that just happened in the World, you can get a lot of traction for that, have a scoop. Ff course, it's a lot easier to have new information about the world and news events if you just make it up. What I write in the piece is that when there's a national calamity, it takes time and investigation to figure out why it happened and who was behind it and responsible.

It doesn't take any time to just blame, say, the Jews for it, or another scapegoat. A social media, where people are competing to stand out and get attention, engagement, and revenue from that engagement, is going to incentivize fabrications. It's going to incentivize conspiracy theories and explanations of events. That's really bad for antisemitism, which functions as a conspiracy theory, by which I mean that antisemitists don't just not like Jews because they're different and they're Jewish, although they do, anti-Semites think that Jews are behind social, political, and economic problems. They blame them for those things. If you're going to advantage conspiracy theories, you're going to advantage the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that sees Jews as behind the world's problem, maybe.

Brian Lehrer: One very prominent example of this from the news right now is the MAGA influencer Candace Owens, who had worked with Charlie Kirk before Kirk was assassinated. As CNN reports it today, Owens heavily implied that she believes Israel had something to do with Kirk's death, promoting an unsubstantiated theory that Israeli officials have denied and that some of her critics say is evidence that she is boosting antisemitism. Owens even met with Erica Kirk, who does not subscribe to the conspiracy theories. The new reports are that Owens didn't take them back after their meeting. Is she representative of something or just out on her own limb on this?

Yair Rosenberg: Well, she's recognized that the infrastructure that we have for attention on social media and our broader Internet discourse incentivizes conspiracy theories. She doesn't just have conspiracy theories about Jews. She has been arguing for years and is being sued over this. She has argued for years that Brigitte Macron, the first lady of France, was actually born a man who's transgender. This is a bizarre, bigoted conspiracy theory that she is now being sued by Macron and his wife over.

This is just one example. Then of course, she has many conspiracy theories about the Jews, because anyone who is a conspiracy theorist who sees a hidden and invisible hand behind the world's events and problems will eventually come to believe it, but it belongs to an invisible Jew. She has said that Israel or Jews had involvement in 911, in the JFK assassination. You name it, she said it. The Charlie Kirk thing is just the latest example of this. She uses things like Mossad, Zionist, Israel, Jews, Frankists. Your listeners will not know what Frankists are. That's a good thing. If you don't know, you're doing something right.

She uses all these terms interchangeably for a global Jewish conspiracy that she then blames for pretty much every catastrophe that you can imagine. She has recognized that this is actually a very good way to make money, to get attention, and to raise herself in discourse. She not long ago claimed that a secret French assassination squad was dispatched to kill her, and the squad also had one Israeli. This is literally what she said. You can look this up. She fabricates these things, puts herself at the center of these grand narratives that she invents, and draws tremendous attention to herself.

Through the economy of how social media works, where people get paid for engagement, she profits off of it to the tune of what I think was Fortune magazine recently reported millions of dollars in terms of her media empire. That's one person who's really figured out how to exploit some of this. People are then influenced by this. People, again, who are on the social web tend to be more skew younger. They're more likely to be influenced by some of this. A phenomenon that Tim Miller, who we cited at the top here, discussed on his podcast with Chris Hayes, the MSNBC host, is the idea of younger people who are watching content on social media that is critical of Israel, a perfectly reasonable thing that people do.

Then an algorithm will then recommend them stuff that's critical of Jews and they're watching suddenly Candace Owens. That's how you go up this sort of algorithmic escalator from anti-Israel stuff online to antisemitism online.

Brian Lehrer: August in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC with Yair Rosenberg from the Atlantic. Hello, August.

August: Hi, Brian. Thanks for having me. I just wanted to offer that I went to college. I'm 24 years old. I went to college during the height of COVID, when we were having a lot of conversations culturally about race and about redefining and reassessing how we protect marginalized classes and defend people who need defending in our culture racially. All the same people, it made sense at the time to do that and to reassess that, and I was totally in support of that. I am Jewish and totally appalled by what the Jewish state has been doing the last few years.

What's interesting to me is that all those same young people who were really enthusiastic about and passionate about racial justice and social justice have not seemed to have the same fervor for Jewish people. Do not see them as a protected class, even though we're just 80 years out from the Holocaust. I don't think that they're anti-Semitic consciously. A lot of the folks that I know, progressives that I know, young people. I think that it's an interesting and kind of indicting in some way that they don't feel the need to protect Jews the way that they feel the need to protect other marginalized folks.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting observation, August. Thank you very much for your call. What do you think about that, Yair?

Yair Rosenberg: That's certainly a sentiment that I've heard from American Jews, particularly on the left, many of whom are critics of Israel, some of whom are more defensive of Israel. They do feel that the left has a set of ideological principles to which they themselves subscribed and believed in. Then felt that they weren't fully applied to the Jewish experience. You have things that were commonplaces on college campuses that say the impact of an action matters or a statement matters more than its intent. If you said or did something that harmed a marginalized community, even if that wasn't your intent, you still have some level of culpability.

That's something that wasn't applied to various campus protests. Maybe someone could argue it shouldn't have been applied. When people are chanting, "Globalize the intifada," some of them may mean that same nonviolently, and some of them may mean it violently. It depends on the person. Many of them might have meant it just purely as a political slogan. A lot of Jews understood it as a violent slogan threatening them. If you were to apply the "impact matters more than intent" standard that had been applied on campuses before that, you would end up in a particular place that many people didn't end up in on the left.

Now, people can change their minds, but it is strange when you change your mind when it comes to the Jewish community and not necessarily to other communities, or specifically when Jewish issues arise. These are sorts of things. The arguments that I have heard in my reporting, when people said, this is what I experienced on campus.

Brian Lehrer: We just heard from August, who recently got out of college. Here is Jenny in Queens, who says she's a college professor. Jenny, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Jenny: Hi. Thanks for taking my call. The first thing I want to say to set the context is that I grew up in Rockland County and live in New York City. For someone like me, it's really easy to distinguish between Jewish people who have always been a big part of my everyday life. I'm not Jewish, but the New York metropolitan area, it's true for most people that it's sort of integrated. That's not true in most of the country. I just wanted to throw that in as one important piece, that conflating what's going on in Palestine with what Jews do may be much easier for people who don't know Jews. I think that's maybe one thing.

What I told your screener was that I'm a college professor, and many of my students are so upset about what Israel has been doing. When Jewish faculty, and Jewish administrators, and also Jewish politicians don't strongly condemn Israel, that really takes them aback. They don't. They lose trust. I'm not justifying antisemitism, of course, but what I'm trying to point to is that it's very hard to sort of try to be so clear about Jewish people versus Israel when there are actual Jewish Americans who are defending Israel in everybody's everyday midst. That becomes very confusing for young people who don't have a strong basis in making the separation.

Brian Lehrer: Do you see anything similar or is it even an analogous question, Jenny, to ask when people commit acts of terrorism in the name of Islam, let's say, or a country like Iran does something horrible somewhat in the name of Islam, that students in your experience then have a hard time not conflating Muslims with those acts. We certainly see that among some politicians in this country. We're going to be talking about that in our next segment. Right after the Bondi Beach massacre, there's a member of New York City Council who says we should expel all Muslims from Western nations. Obviously not okay. I'm just curious if you see it being applied similarly in both directions, if we can even say those scenarios are analogous.

Jenny: I do think there's an analogy. I think what's profoundly different is that at least in my milieu, where I live, where I teach, there are not a lot of Muslims. It's very abstract. It's far away. Your speaker said something earlier about a Middle Eastern country that's thousands of Miles away. Iraq is like other places are. That's different from the interaction with a population that's very much integrated into one's everyday life. I don't know if this is making sense, but I think there is an analogy, and it may be applied to people in parts of the United States that are very different from this part of the country, the New York metro area.

Brian Lehrer: Jenny, thank you. Thank you very much for your call. Yair, any thoughts on that exchange?

Yair Rosenberg: Yeah, there were two very interesting points she made. The first one, which I definitely agree with from my experience, is that a lot of anti-Jewish prejudice is in part stems from people having no interactions with real Jews. People learn about Jews from the Internet, from social media, from television, fictional portrayals. This is not a great way to learn about a minority community. Jews are just 2% of the American population, and they're clustered in very specific parts of the country for the most part.

A lot of people have never met a Jew, which means they can accept a lot of stereotypes and strange ways of thinking about them because they don't have a personal connection for understanding who Jews really are and the diversity of their opinions and the complexity of their thought and their communities. That brings us to her second point, which is she says that some of her students lose trust, and it sounds like in Jews because they don't see Jewish politicians condemning to their satisfaction Israel's conduct in Gaza. That's an example, I think, of those students not being particularly well schooled in the diversity of Jewish opinion on many things, including on Gaza.

Because of course, one of the loudest critics in Congress of Israel's conduct in Gaza since the beginning has been Senator Bernie Sanders, a Jew who ran for president, pretty prominent guy, now, calls it a genocide, did it just the other day. There are a whole bunch of Jewish congresspeople who have been extremely critical of Israel's conduct in Gaza. Then there are others who have been more defensive, like Senator Chuck Schumer, although he also called for Benjamin Netanyahu to resign. For students to say that Jewish politicians, one, are collectively accountable for Israel.

Second of all, because why are Jewish politicians, in particular, being held to this standard but they're not saying I've lost faith specifically in the concept of a non-Jewish politician or a Christian politician because they didn't have these views. That's a little strange. Like you said, you should have the same standard for everyone. Also, it's not an accurate representation of how Jews have talked about this. Whether as politicians or in their communities, there are a lot of different views on this. I'm sure you've heard them on the show. For them to jump from not knowing about the Jewish community to then having negative opinions about the Jewish community, it makes sense.

It's what her first point was. To me, the first point explains the second in a way. The better people actually know the Jewish community and realize that they're just as complicated and just as fractious and just as confused and just as diverse as many other communities in this country. The healthier their understanding of Jews will be, and I think the healthier our public discourse on Jews will be.

Brian Lehrer: The Bondi Beach massacre, briefly, before we take a break and then get to some of your other reporting, including as it pertains to the Middle East itself, maybe it's kind of the opposite of your article. Bondi Beach, very different context, of course. Reportedly, Islamic State-linked terrorism. In the context of Australian politics, not the United States, which are different, but still so disturbing to imagine this father and son allegedly so bonded in anti-Jewish extremism that they colluded together to plan this attack. Apparently, usually at very least, a parent would try to talk their child out of something like this, if only for the risk involved to the kid's life, if nothing else.

Or maybe the 24-year-old son would say, dad, terrorism, really? Does the father-son conspiracy alleged here say anything to you beyond it being maybe a horrifying outlier of a spectacle?

Yair Rosenberg: I do think, as you said, the horrifying level of animosity and hatred that is required to bond people together to do this thing, and I would add, to do it in Australia, where it's extremely hard to do a mass shooting. They have much, much stricter gun laws. They do not have shooting of this sort. It's the worst one, I believe, in what they say in 30 years, that requires a certain level of motivation and extremism that demands attention.

A lot of the criticism in the Australian discourse from the Australian Jewish community is that there's been an escalation of attacks on the Jewish community since October 7th something if we discussed, under the guise of people who say they're mad about Israel, but somehow seem to be taking it out on Australian Jews, vandalism, attacks on synagogues, on individuals. The community has progressively put itself behind walls and tried to get more security, and warned that things like this were coming. The response instead has often been to say, "They're about to try to pass stricter gun control laws in Australia." Those might have merit politically, but it doesn't seem that that was the problem here.

To put it on the other side, Prime Minister Netanyahu came out after this attack and said that the reason this happened, in part, was because that Anthony Albanese.

Brian Lehrer: Australia recognized-

Yair Rosenberg: Recognized the Palestinian state.

Brian Lehrer: -a two-state solution, including a Palestinian state.

Yair Rosenberg: Exactly. Recognized the Palestinian state. That inflamed the situation and somehow led to this attack. Now, here's the thing, we've had similar violent anti-Zionist attacks here in the United States. There was a shooting of two people outside the DC Jewish Museum. There was a firebombing of a rally for hostages in Boulder, Colorado, that burned an older woman to death. As everyone knows, neither Donald Trump nor Joe Biden recognized the Palestinian state. There doesn't seem to be any real relationship here. There is a tendency sometimes to try to look away from the fact that some people are very heavily motivated by anti-Semitism and try to find other hobby horses in which to pin this sort of thing, but I think we should resist that.

Brian Lehrer: You're saying resist? Netanyahu's trying to lay it at the feet of the politics.

Yair Rosenberg: Making it a politics he already held beforehand. Similarly, people who have gun control politics, it can be perfectly fine politics, but it doesn't seem to have been the reason that this happened on the.

Brian Lehrer: On the age-old stereotype that you cited of Jews having too much power. Listener writes, "People feel the Jewish community has outside influence on US Politics because of our government's absolute support of the genocide." I know that's a controversial word, but the listener calls it the genocide. The concept there, people feel the Jewish community has outside influence on US Politics because of our government's absolute support. Meaning it's not just stereotype, it's the situation on the ground. How do you react to that text?

Yair Rosenberg: If you wanted to take it without even disputing the claim that the United States has had unconditional support for Israel's conduct in Gaza, which wasn't true. Biden held up various arms shipments. Donald Trump reportedly put a tremendous amount of pressure on Benjamin to finally get to a ceasefire, the one that we have now. Clearly, it's not quite as simple as that, but let's take it at face value. The fact is, is that again, as we said earlier in this Conversation. American Jews are 2% of the American population, and they're not united, as you've heard from callers here and as we've discussed on their opinions of Israel or its conduct in Gaza.

The notion that there's a united Jewish community that is somehow controlling the entire country and its politics, neither of those things are true. The Jews themselves don't have a united opinion and Jews are 2% of the country. There's a 98% right of the country that makes decisions democratically on these things. Of course, there are many reasons that people support Israel. President Joe Biden, ardent Zionist, by his own admission, not Jewish. Many, many people support Israel. If you can't understand why and you then come down to Jewish control, it means you haven't done your homework.

There's a lot of good history and sociology explaining why many Americans, and particularly American Christians, have been supportive of Israel and its positions in the conflict with the Palestinians for many decades. Just to give one example, if you go back decades of polling on the Israeli Palestinian conflict by, say, Gallup, you would see that for decades when pollsters forced people to choose, "Do you have sympathy for the Israelis or the Palestinians?" I hate this question as a reporter on this subject because, of course, you should have sympathy for both. They would force people to choose and you'd get a five-to-one answer in favor of Israelis for decades as soon as they started the poll.

That started to change significantly in 2016. Now you have much basically a statistical tie since October 7th. When October 7th happens, at the time there's overwhelming American support for Israel, which is in line with historical American sentiment, not American Jewish sentiment, the 2%, but the other 98. Then American politicians then act in accordance with what the American voter sentiment is. As American voter sentiment has shifted against Israel, you started to notice the majority of American Democratic senators voting against armed shipments to Israel. You've started to notice dissent even in the Republican caucus about American support for Israel.

What you're seeing here is not conspiracy, is not Jewish control. You're just seeing democracy at work. Democracy doesn't work perfectly. It sometimes takes time for signals to filter down to politicians. I don't think that the listeners, the assumptions behind the listener's text are true. That being said, I think it correctly reflects a conspiratorial mindset that is accepted by a significant number of people and that can lead then to anti-Semitism because people misunderstand how their country works and what influence Jews have over it.

Brian Lehrer: When we come back in a minute, I want to spend our last few minutes getting to some of your other reporting, including what you call Four Simple Questions for Marjorie Taylor Greene, and some of your reporting on the Middle East itself right now, including the state of the ceasefire and what the next steps could be. Stay with us.

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Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Few more minutes with Yair Rosenberg, Atlantic magazine staff writer and author of their newsletter, Deep Shtetl. You have an article related to what we were talking about in the last section from last month. People are underestimating America's Groyper problem. For those who don't know, what's a Groyper?

Yair Rosenberg: For those who don't know, you're lucky and you're doing something right, that's the first answer. Second of all, Groypers are the name that the followers of this white nationalist influencer, Nick Fuentes, take for themselves. These are basically people who believe that there should be a white ethno state in the United States and that minority should either be repressed or otherwise deprived of rights or deported. That minorities can include Jews, can include Hispanics, immigrants, Latino, those sorts of. You can go down the list. Nick Fuentes himself marched at Charlottesville at the Jews Will Not Replace Us rally. He has said heinous things about Jewish people, about Black people.

You can go on down the list. I don't want to repeat them on this show, but they are available on the Internet. His followers, who are disproportionately young, which takes us back to our beginning conversation and disproportionately online, call themselves Groypers.

Brian Lehrer: You think people are underestimating the problem rather than just saying, "Oh, that Nick Fuente, he's such a racist and anti-Semite"?

Yair Rosenberg: The concept of the article was a specific thing that happened recently on social media, which was that Elon Musk's ex rolled out a new feature that was able to tell you where an account was registered and where it was posting from. People discovered that a fair number of influential accounts that intervened in American politics in various ways were, in fact, not American at all. You had accounts promoting, saying things like, "I'm not going to send my tax dollars to Ukraine," and the account is based in Asia or in Pakistan specifically. Then you have other people cosplaying on different sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict who turn out to be based in Eastern Europe or somewhere else that has nothing to do with Israel or Palestine.

What they were doing, all of these people, was farming engagement basically and making money off of getting people angry at each other and catering to different political bases while not actually being part of those bases at all.

Brian Lehrer: Rage bait for profit.

Yair Rosenberg: Exactly right. One of the things that people saw is that a fair number of some of these accounts that were supporters of Nick Fuentes. There was a significant contingent of these people who appear to be American far right nationalists who are, in fact, not American at all and were just playing to this crowd and stoking it for profit, like you said. There's a temptation that people had in the wake of this to say that America's far right problem is sort of anti-Semitism problem. The Nick Fuentes problem is overstated. It is largely a foreign implant. It's not internal to us. It's a foreign phenomenon and it's an online illusion.

Once you turn off your screen, it goes away because this is basically just foreigners making it look like this stuff is big. If you've been with us from the beginning of this segment, you know that actually we have a lot of polling showing that antisemitism is a domestic phenomenon in the United States and in particular among young people. You don't need foreigners to have that. In fact, the argument I made is that these foreigners would have no success getting engagement and money from Americans for their scheme if Americans didn't already have sympathies for these ideas. You can't create demand where it doesn't exist.

What they were doing is they recognized that this was a growing constituency that they can make money off of, but it's a real American constituency. That's how you get people chanting, "Jews will not replace us in Charlottesville." It's how you get someone massacring Jews at the Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018, the massacre of people at a Jersey City Kosher Supermarket in 2019, the attempt to murder Governor Josh Shapiro. There's other attacks we've talked about in Boulder, Colorado and Washington DC in the last year. None of that is foreign run. That's homegrown. It's very comforting to tell a story where this is blamed on people outside America as opposed to understanding that we in America have certain problems that we ourselves have to deal with.

Brian Lehrer: Related, I guess, is your article Four Simple Questions for Marjorie Taylor Greene. It looks like you're not totally buying her turn away from Trump as being a turn away from her past anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. She does explicitly now denounce Nick Fuente's antisemitism as she labels it explicitly like that and disowns the so called Jewish space lasers remark that she got associated with years ago. Where are you on this?

Yair Rosenberg: First I want to say that it's very important that we create space for people to change their minds and to grow and not hold them forever to the worst thing they ever said or did. That's something I've written many, many times. I've seen it. In my life I've seen people who've held anti-Semitic views change. That's very specific to me in my reporting. That's really important. That being said, people should not offer cheap grace or be cheap dates for people who say a few things that they like and then basically don't change really who they are fundamentally in any real way. There's a lot of things that Marjorie Taylor Greene has not really accounted for before or since her most recent turn.

One of the most obvious ones is that she's been one of the most active advocates of the idea that Joe Biden stole the election in 2020 from Donald Trump. This anti-Democratic conspiracy theory that led to an attempt to stop the election results. Just one example in 2023, not too long ago, when House Minority Leader at the time Hakeem Jeffries observed that Joe Biden had won the 2020 election, Greene yelled back in the chamber of Congress, "No, he didn't." She's continued, she's never disavowed this. Surprising to me that people haven't asked her to explicitly say what's going on with that. She's similarly, just the other day put forward a bill to ban transgender care in a very draconian, wide reaching way.

A whole bunch of these other views that she hasn't really flipped on in any significant way. It's sort of surprising to me, I think that people are just looking at this person and saying that she's reformed because she walked back from some of the more extreme things over what seems to be basically just a beef with Donald Trump, because Donald Trump, it seems, didn't want to support her bid for running for Senate, didn't want to offer her a position in the Trump administration. She was once one of his biggest fans. Then it seems she had a falling out when he didn't promote her career the way that she hoped.

There's a lot of reporting on that that suggest that some of this is what is motivating it. I know that Alexandria Ocasio Cortez has claimed that explicitly as well. I don't mind people growing and changing. I don't feel like we've seen nearly as much change as sometimes is advertised.

Brian Lehrer: Another of your articles, and relevant, even though it was written before Bondi Beach, because of the Bondi Beach attack, it was in the news recently that Australia joined with Canada and others in recognizing, at least in principle, a Palestinian state. You had an article after that called the Real Reason to Recognize Palestine, which had some criticism, but also some praise of that action. What's your thinking on that, briefly?

Yair Rosenberg: In that piece, I recognized that there are people who are critical of that move because they felt that it was symbolic, it did not actually create a Palestinian, Palestinian state. They felt that it didn't resolve fundamental problems that the Palestinian people live with day by day. There's still ongoing settler violence across the west bank, basically with impunity, right at the time the Gaza war was ongoing, et cetera. I acknowledge that, but then I said that there is still value in this move.

The argument that I made is that there have been extremists in this conflict for decades who have opposed the two state solutions and said that basically by doing things on the ground, whether it's mass violence in the form of suicide bombings by Hamas and then an October 7th attack by Hamas because they reject a two state solution and want to expunge the Israelis or the Israeli settler, which feels that if we just take more and more land, eventually there will be no possibility of dividing the land at all. I pointed out that this is not true because the two state solution, all that it needs is a line on a map, right? That is fundamentally what the two-state solution is.

The only thing that stops us from drawing that line on the map and saying on one side is Israel and on one side is Palestine, and everyone on one side is now an Israeli citizen and everyone on the other side is now a Palestinian citizen is political will. You can't kill the two-state solution. It's an idea. What you had was all of these countries coming together and saying that the international community is not abandoning this idea and in fact we are going to hopefully take more steps to try to make that the ultimate pathway and the ultimate outcome, despite these spoiler factions that are trying to say that we can just dictate on the ground, someone's going to win and saying, "No, we don't accept that as an outcome."

I think people underestimate the power that the international community might have down the line if they took this idea of recognition seriously to basically say that, "This is how we're going to treat this territory. We're going to draw a line and we're going to treat one side of it as Israel and the other side as Palestine. No one can stop them from doing that. This was not something that fundamentally changed anything in the moment, but it had potential to be a first step towards something much more foundational. That was my argument in the piece.

Brian Lehrer: Lastly, on the Middle East, you wrote an article giving Trump credit for pressuring, I should say on the ceasefire. You give Trump credit for pressuring both Netanyahu and Hamas into the current ceasefire. The next steps are said to be Israel pulling troops out of Gaza and Hamas disarming. Reportedly, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner are working on that right now. Do you see a path to those things actually happening?

Yair Rosenberg: I think that's a very hard lift. The easier part of this ceasefire agreement was getting the guns to stop, not entirely, but to stop the full scale war. There are still skirmishes, there are still Palestinians and to a lesser extent Israeli soldiers being killed, but you no longer have a full scale war. Most Gazans no longer fear for being under Israeli attack on a day-by-day basis. At the same time, Israelis are no longer like tons of troops have already been moved out of Gaza. They are no longer on war footing. You can tell that's a huge difference, but there is still Israel in half of Gaza and Palestinians marginally in the other half.

That isn't going to change until say Hamas is disarmed and there's an alternative to Hamas governance. Then the Israelis would be pulling out of Gaza progressively while that happens. That's what the plan says. It's extremely hard to see how you do that because Hamas doesn't want to give up its weapons and Israel doesn't want to leave unless Hamas does. I would also add that there's an Israeli hard right faction that disproportionate power over Benjamin Netanyahu and his political future and his coalition that wants Israel to stay in Gaza because they aspire to actually resettle Gaza, to put Jewish settlements into Gaza.

If Israel were to fully pull out of Gaza, they wouldn't be able to do that. These people think long term and they're also thinking about that. You have a lot of factions that are conspiring against what is called phase two of the Trump ceasefire. The easy thing is to say I'm skeptical that it will happen, and that is what I feel. Also, I think we should all hope that we get to a better outcome for everyone involved.

Brian Lehrer: Yair Rosenberg, Atlantic magazine staff writer and author of their newsletter, Deep Shtetl. Thank you very much for joining us today.

Yair Rosenberg: Thanks for having me, Brian.

 

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