Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Franklin Foer, staff writer at the Atlantic, former editor of the New Republic, is trying to hold at least two thoughts in his mind at the same time, maybe three. As he writes in his latest article, he opposes the proliferation of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, the callousness of its military occupation, and the religious solitary that's infused the country's ruling coalition.

At the same time, he's alarmed by the amount of antisemitism he's been seeing since October 7th, and has come to believe it was there already growing, not just on the American right, but also on the American left, which I think it's fair to say he has considered himself a member of. Beyond that, he's becoming concerned even about what his article calls the Liberal Order in the United States.

His long new article, which displays on my screen at 46 pages, is called The Golden Age of American Jews Is Ending, and the subhead is antisemitism on the right and the left threatens to bring to a close an unprecedented period of safety and prosperity for Jewish Americans and demolish the liberal order they helped establish. Franklin Foer has previously authored books, including The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House, and The Struggle for America's Future.

He was on with us for that book last fall. He was also here during Donald Trump's presidency to talk about how former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, helped shape the new world order of corrupt foreign governments. Franklin Foer also wrote the book World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech. As editor of the Progressive Magazine, the New Republic in 2014, he edited the centennial collection of New Republic's works called Insurrections of the Mind: 100 Years of Politics and Culture in America. Franklin, thank you for joining us. Welcome back to WNYC.

Franklin Foer: Always so great to be here with you and your audience. Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Your article opens with a few incidents of antisemitism at some schools in the San Francisco Bay Area, not ceasefire rallies or anti-Israel politics, but antisemitism aimed at Jewish kids just based on their being Jewish. One story that I'll recount to the listeners was about a kid who wears a kippah, a yamaka on his head, who described walking down the halls and having other kids shout at him, "free Palestine," or when he went into the gym to play basketball, someone saying, "there goes the Jew, taking everyone's land." Do you want to talk about how much you're seeing that is part of a pattern or an increase?

Franklin Foer: Yes, because I was so surprised when I started hearing about this surge of antisemitism in the Bay Area, which I'd always thought of as a bastion of multiculturalism and progressive politics in a place where people who moved there moved there in order to live their best values. Then I started to see stuff from the Bay Area that disturbed me. In the course of debates over ceasefire resolutions that were happening at every city council in the Bay Area, you would hear people come in and talk about how the events of October 7th were a fabrication that the Israeli government had concocted, which struck me as a very anti-Semitic conspiratorial way to think about something that was objectively true.

Then I saw that there had been a menorah to celebrate Hanukkah on the shores of Lake Merrit in downtown Oakland, and it had been dismembered and thrown into the lake, replaced with anti-Semitic graffiti. When I would call people in the Bay Area in the Jewish community to ask them questions about this, they started to mention to me that there had been this surge of bullying in public schools.

The way it was described to me, and then I went there, and I saw this for myself, was that teachers like the rest of the community had become understandably impassioned about what was happening in Gaza, but then they brought it into the classroom in a way that was a pretty one-sided, simplistic explanation of a bad guy and a good guy. It was explained as if the Jews had come in and they'd taken the land from indigenous people who'd lived there. When kids started hearing about how the Jews had done bad things, they processed the information like kids do, and they ended up taking it out on the Jewish kids who were closest at hand.

One of the things that was most bizarre to me about what I was seeing and hearing is that in progressive east Bay of San Francisco, a lot of this bullying was taking the form of kids calling back to Nazi things, using Nazism as the vehicle for bullying Jewish kids. If it was an incident here, an incident there, we can say this has always happens, this is the way that kids behave, but as it was described to me in the schools, and as I met with Jewish kids and Jewish parents in the area, it felt to me like it was something closer to an epidemic.

Brian Lehrer: On the Jewish students facing antisemitism, you seem to critique progressive education generally. You're right that at every step in kids' education in the progressive community at a public high school in the Bay Area, that you see as emblematic of a pattern, they had learned about a world divided between oppressors and the oppressed, and now Jewish kids who had nothing to do with events in the Middle East were being accused of being the bad guys, your words, are you critical of what you call [crosstalk]. Go ahead. Do you want to correct something there?

Franklin Foer: I'm sorry. That was the way that the kids were describing to me how they had been educated their whole lives and why it felt so uncomfortable for them to suddenly be placed on the side of the oppressors when they felt like they weren't actually on the side of the oppressors. That framework of oppress and oppressor was what they had been taught, and then suddenly to find yourself on the wrong side of that barrier felt like your teachers were accusing you of something, felt like your classmates were accusing you of something, that's what I meant when I wrote that.

Brian Lehrer: Are you critical of what you call progressive education in the way you mean it in that paragraph?

Franklin Foer: I think there's a lot of benefits to it. I think that there are ways in which politics invariably enters the classroom and it's useful, but I think that there are ways in which teachers sometimes use the power that they have when they're standing in front of a room of kids in order to sermonize or in order to inject politics into discussions that extend beyond the curriculum. I think that that's a lot of power, and I think sometimes it's abuse.

Brian Lehrer: Let me jump ahead in a way to, what to my eye is the most sweeping argument that your article makes, which is that though right and left wing antisemitism may have emerged in different ways for different reasons, both are essentially attacks on an ideal that once dominated American politics, a distinct strain of liberalism that combined robust civil liberties, the protection of minority rights and an ethos of cultural pluralism, but America's ascendant political movements, you write mega on one side, the illiberal left on the other would demolish the last pillars of that consensus that Jews helped establish.

They regard concepts such as tolerance, fairness, meritocracy, and cosmopolitanism as pernicious shams. Can you elaborate on what you call the illiberal left in that regard? You think Many of today's progressives don't believe in tolerance and fairness and cosmopolitanism, because I think many Americans on the left would take strong issue with that and call it a major false equivalency with the mega right.

Franklin Foer: I do think that those tendencies exist on the left. I think they exist frankly across all parts of the political spectrum now. I think maybe that they grew up on the left and they grew up on fringes of the left and fringes of the right. I think that they've come to swallow a lot of American politics and I'd say even parts of the center behave in that kind of illiberal way, as we've seen play out, I think over the course of the last couple months as well.

I think it's very fair to say that part of the way in which the left has emerged over the course of the last couple of decades means that there is this sense that all oppressions are interconnected, and that if you don't take the party line position, if you don't vote along the ticket and oppose all forms of oppression, then you can't possibly be a person of good moral standing. Just to give you some examples of how this has played out with regards to Jews, so on campuses, there are lots of examples where a group attends to sexual assault survivors or LGBTQ coalitions have disinvited or kicked out or purged Jewish members who support the existence of the State of Israel.

They don't support settlements, they're not religious zealots, they are not messianic. If you asked a lot of these kids, they would say that they probably oppose the war in Gaza or oppose the Netanyahu government but merely having this position that they support Israel's right to exist means that they've been kicked out of those coalition's and to me, that is a very worrying sign of bigotry and neoliberalism.

Brian Lehrer: Here's a text message that has already come in and listeners, we are opening the phones and our text message stream for your comments and questions for Franklin Foer from The Atlantic, 212-433-WNYC. His article on what he sees as the end of a golden age for Jews and American liberalism. You can agree or disagree, of course, share your experiences of any kind, amplify or challenge, offer solutions, ask him questions. 212-433-WNYC. Call or text, 212-433-9692. To the last point, you were just making Franklin somebody simply texts, "But they did take the land from the Palestinians."

Franklin Foer: Are you blaming American Jews for taking the land from the Palestinians? That seems to me both incredibly unfair, because as Jewish Americans, they are not citizens of Israel. That's what ends up happening is that critiques of whatever Israel does, end up getting visiting on Jews, and we've seen this with other ethnic groups, the ways in which this can dangerously play out when Chinese Americans get blamed for whatever China's COVID policy is, or we've seen this before, during wars and the ways in which Japanese Americans get punished for what the Japanese government is said to have done. That's a very, very dangerous thing. I think it's also very telling that in our political culture, it's American Jews who most get tagged with the behavior of another government.

Brian Lehrer: You write that the Palestinian leadership has long record of abject obstructionism, historical denialism, and violent irredentism, but American Jews heap blame on recalcitrant right-wing Israeli governments too. In other words, not just other people, American Jews also heap blame on right-wing Israeli government. You do get into the Middle East aspect of it, not just the antisemitism against individual American Jews aspect. Do you mean to suggest with that framing, that you think Palestinian leadership is getting off too easy on the American left?

Franklin Foer: I think it does happen. As you wrote, I support a two-state solution. I believe that the only plausible way out of what we are seeing in the Middle East is where the two groups, two states find a way to coexist over time. Not an easy thing to do, not something that's going to happen in the short term, but I do think that the American left, it overlooks oftentimes this very long and complicated history where to turn this into a story of Angels and Demons is a travesty to the actual record of events that has transpired.

Brian Lehrer: I guess, part of the thinking there by people who are much more critical of Israeli than Palestinian leadership, and you cite, for example, the 30 student groups at Harvard, who signed a letter holding Israel solely responsible for October 7th. Their argument would be that Israeli and Palestinian failures or violence are not equivalent, because the power they hold is not equivalent, the argument goes.

Israel has the big military and the West Bank occupation, and the long blockade of Gaza, and look at the ratio of Palestinian civilian deaths to Israelis, murdered on October 7th, so let's not have a false equivalency, the argument goes and stay focused on who really has the power and who's really being victimized more by far. Do those who make that argument have a point in your view?

Franklin Foer: I think that there are elements in that narrative that I can accept as being true. I think that it is true that oppression happens in the West Bank. It is true that Israeli settlement occupation makes it harder for there to be a peaceful solution. It's also true that when Israel and Palestinians were on the cusp of actually getting a deal done, it was Palestinians who walked away from the table and Hamas launched a wave of terrorism that essentially undermined the possibilities of a deal happening because it destroyed all of the political conditions that would have enabled it to be possible.

That if we look back to the beginning of the State of Israel, I don't think you could say, it's clear that there was one side that had more power than the other side. I just think that the history is complicated, and everybody who-- It's just my point of view. When you suddenly start to reduce it to just a pure morality tale, you're dangerously veering away from the actual objective historical record.

Brian Lehrer: Cynthia in Levittown, you're on WNYC with Franklin Foer from The Atlantic. Hi, Cynthia.

Cynthia: Hi. I'm just so upset by what's going on with Palestine and what's going on here in America. I just think it's a false equivalency to compare MAGA with your anti-Semitic, which has risen since he's been elected and still is rising. They had people that are running for office, that are anti-Semitic. They had people that went to CPAC so high healing doing the high Hitler with the far left, which is, to me wanting a Palestine and Israel to live peacefully.

I'm half Jewish. My Jewish friends are pro-Israel, and I'm thinking, why aren't you concerned with what's going on here? It's just unbelievable what he said about Democrats being anti-Semitic, Trump yesterday. There's no fear here what's going on. I do agree with The Atlantic writer when he said about college, I felt like anyone being mistreated, but my fear lies with the Jews that are not being concerned with what's going on here and comparing it to the nasty MAGA party.

You have people that go to see [unintelligible 00:17:33], people that talk to Charlie Kirk. It's just like it's happening, and I don't understand why there's no fear here among the Jews that are living in America. That's what I really have to say. I think it's both equivalency.

Brian Lehrer: Cynthia, thank you very much. Thank you very much. Franklin?

Franklin Foer: Well, I agree with her in large part. I think if you look at my article, that one of the things that I try to do is I try to situate what's happened after October 7th, in a much larger historical context. I would say that, if we look at the rise of antisemitism, if you went back to the 1990s, there were lots of sociologists and historians who basically said antisemitism was a fringe phenomenon that really didn't matter to the future of American Jewry.

Then we turn to the 21st century, and you begin with the fall of the Twin Towers, you extend through the Iraq War, you extend through the financial crisis, extend all the way through, everything that's happened over the course of the last decades. In an atmosphere of rolling crisis, where you have these things that are sometimes very, very difficult to understand, like the pandemic and the shutdown, one of the responses that exist deep within the Western brain is to blame Jews for what's transpiring.

When I would talk to experts on antisemitism, people who tracked it closely, there were things that were happening that I totally missed, at the time. For instance, that even though politicians very responsibly talked about the financial crisis of 2008, in public opinion, there were substantial portions of the population that blamed the Jews for what had happened, or you take something like the pandemic, where one day society locks down because government officials decide that that is what's in the best interest of the people, people who don't understand why this is occurring, end up falling back on this impulse to blame the Jews.

This is not everybody. These are fractions of the population, but they're meaningful fractions of the population. Then the election of Donald Trump happens and Trump as Cynthia indicates, winks at anti-Semits and actually engages in anti-Semitic behavior himself. In the last campaign ad that he ran, he posted the faces of Lloyd Blankfein Janet Yellen, George Soros all of whom are Jewish, and described them as globalists who were bleeding the people dry.

Then he says they're very fine people on both sides after Charlottesville, where guys with tiki torches are chanting, Jews will not replace us. There's no doubting that Trump and the right are responsible in no small measure that they really do pose a huge threat to the future, in my opinion, of not just, American democracy, but also American Jewry.

That is an essential piece of the narrative. At the same time, we have this tendency in American politics.

I'm admitting that I have been guilty of this myself at various moments, which is to say that, again, there are angels and demons and that it's a competition. Just because I view Trump as an existential threat and I'm worried about what he would do to American democracy, doesn't mean that I should simply overlook antisemitism when I see it happening by people who I would consider to be in other circumstances, political allies. That is a real danger. I wish that we were able to call it out wherever we see it.

Brian Lehrer: How do you identify politically at this point yourself in your life as somebody who's been in the public eye as editor of the New Republic, for example, among the other things that you've done? If you use labels like liberal or progressive or becoming more conservative, has it changed from, say, when you were editor of the New Republic a decade ago?

Franklin Foer: In some ways I've become more liberal than I was when I was editor of the New Republic a decade ago. I think that I care a lot about economic inequality and the continued prevalence of racism. I still strongly identify as a liberal with both capital L and a small L sort of way that I believe that government is a necessary force in American life in order to provide for people the things that the market is not capable of providing. That the government is necessary for checking powerful private bastions of economic and political power.

Brian Lehrer: We are talking to Franklin Foer, these days, an Atlantic staff writer whose latest article is called, and I lost the title of the article, I have that right in front of me. There it is. The Golden Age of American Jews is Ending Antisemitism on the right and the left threatens to bring to a close an unprecedented period of safety and prosperity for Jewish Americans, and demolish the liberal order they help to establish.

Listener writes, "I'm a professor at a liberal arts college with many Jewish students and also happen to be Palestinian American. I totally agree with the need to disambiguate Jewishness from the state of Israel's actions and the need to criticize Palestinian leadership and especially Abbas' tenure. This, referring to you, is actual historical revisionism. Wouldn't the logical end of this argument be to say that Israel's actions have led to rising antisemitism and the conflation of Jewishness and Israel's actions."

The writer goes on, "Then perhaps that Israel should not say they stand for all Jewish people, and a lasting solution would be to have a secular democratic state that does not say anyone of one faith is entitled to come and live in the lands and homes of others." It goes on a little bit more. There are three questions, at least, in there. Let me get you to the first one, which is, is the logical end of this argument not to say that Israel's actions have led to the rising antisemitism and this conflation of Jewishness and Israeli actions because they claim to be the state representative of the Jewish people?

Franklin Foer: I think as I documented in my piece, that's just not simply the narrative of recent American political history that you have. Even long before October 7th, long before this war, you have this tendency, it begins with the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel to turn Israel into a Pariah state. Which was not just a way of turning settlers or people who had a maximalist liberal vision of what Israel should become into Pariahs, but that ended up trying to turn academics, cultural groups, performers into pariahs.

That as a practical matter in the American context, and especially on the campus context, what ended up happening is that it wasn't just Zionists or Israelis who ended up getting socially ostracized or boycotted, that it became very mainstream Jewish groups which exist primarily for the sake of convening for rituals, for Shabbat dinners, and the like. It quickly escalated into something that I think maybe subconsciously or maybe unintentionally became anti-Semitic.

Brian Lehrer: You write that the idea that everybody could live in one pluralistic state there is naive. You want to go there briefly?

Franklin Foer: I just think that we have a vision that everybody agreed to not so long ago for two states that coexisted. I think that there is a Jewish state. It exists. There's no possibility of changing that fact. In any attempt to change that fact, I think, would be very, very bad for the Jewish people who live there. I just don't see any alternative to two states coexisting.

Brian Lehrer: You allude back to the domestic context to Jews' perceived relationship to whiteness. Nazis in Germany consider Jews distinctly not white. Today, in sectors of the left Jews are treated as the epitome of whiteness you write in the context of privilege. Any analysis that focuses relentlessly on the role of privilege will be dangerously blind to antisemitism.

Unpack that a little for us because in the context of American power and privilege, despite the millennia of global antisemitism, which is obviously real aren't most Jews in the US, meaning basically white Jews, benefiting from the same privileges as other white Americans in the context of race today in the United States? I think that's the critique on the academic left that you are critiquing.

Franklin Foer: Right. Antisemitism, and the Jews in general are something that I think tend to break people's brains because the idea of Jewish people predates a lot of the taxonomies that we've developed in order to classify, divide, to describe the dynamics of humanity. What antisemitism is, is it's not really about an oppressor or oppressed relationship. It's in fact an accusation of privilege.

Going back the millennia the way that the Jewish people get described by anti-Semites is that they are a group that holds too much power that they achieved through nefarious means, that they are a secret cabal whose loyalties don't flow in the direction of the common person, and that they operate in a self-serving way. When we say that something is anti-Semitic, it's not even necessarily an accusation about somebody's motives.

It is a description of the way in which they are describing Jewish people. It's a vocabulary. It's a set of mental habits, and it goes back really deeply into not just the founding of Christianity, but there's a lot of evidence that it predates the founding of Christianity. I happen to think that there is value in descriptions of power that rely on oppression and oppressors.

It is true that Jews are on the whole, though not entirely, a fairly relatively prosperous people within the American context. None of that should allow us to let antisemitism flourish, even though it doesn't really fit into a lot of the basic taxonomies that we use to describe power and that have become very popular on the American Left.

Brian Lehrer: Listener writes, "Foer's notion that antisemitism skyrocketed after 9/11 is perplexing. I see 9/11 as ushering open and extreme anti-Muslim, not anti-Jewish stances."

Franklin Foer: I don't understand why we can't have both of those thoughts in our head at the same time. Obviously, after 9/11, there was a rise in Islamophobia, and what happened after 9/11 from an anti-Semitic perspective is that you started to have on the fringe these narratives about how Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service caused the twin-towers to collapse, that the whole event was an Israeli fabrication.

Then more broadly on the left, you had a theory that it was a small group of Jewish warmongers who had dangerously led American foreign policy to the place where Osama bin Laden would want of it to have attacked it. Then you had people start to say that it was those same Jewish warmongers with due loyalties who were pushing America into the invasion of Iraq.

Brian Lehrer: We've only got about three minutes left. I'm curious to ask you two things. One, what did you think of Chuck Schumer's senate floor speech, and two, how's the reaction been to your article, which has been out, I guess a week or so now? It's officially in the April issue of The Atlantic but published online already. Has it been like a lot of what we've been hearing and the text messages I've been reading and on the phones?

Franklin Foer: I just want to remind everybody that before Chuck Schumer gave this speech about Netanyahu, he also gave a very, very powerful speech about rising antisemitism in the American context. Even though he is the leader of the Democratic Party, made the same argument that I made in my speech, that the threat comes from both the right and there is a dangerous strain of antisemitism that has taken hold on the American left, and he urged everybody within his own party and within the nation as a whole to take both of those threats seriously, because they were manifesting themselves in harassment and in instances of physical abuse.

I think that that was an extremely important speech, the speech that he gave about Netanyahu, I happen to agree with the sentiments that he expressed in that I think that Israel can't move beyond Netanyahu soon enough and that his reluctance to think about what comes after the war. The impulse that he has, which is maybe to continue the war or to appease his right-wing base in order to ensure his political survival is, in fact, really dangerous for the state of Israel.

In terms of reaction to my piece, I'd say most of the reaction has been from American Jews who've expressed very similar sentiments to the ones that I've expressed and who have come to me with their own stories about antisemitism that they've experienced. I've got to say this is something that felt for a long time like it was out there, and it was hard for me to take seriously as a problem, even as I saw the data suggest that it was a problem.

Then it started to come home that the-- My rabbi who lives right next door to me was walking down our street in Washington, DC and somebody rolled down their window and started shouting anti-Semitic slurs at her. That at the foot of my street somebody spray painted MPD, Metropolitan Police Department, KKK IDF, and whatever you think about the IDF, they are not the same as the KKK and that to me is a gross anti-Semitic conflation.

Brian Lehrer: Are you optimistic now at all that now that this has broken out into the open this way, that it may actually serve to dampen anti-Semitism in America now that you are writing articles like this and other people are too, and that it's more, like I say, out in the open than before?

Franklin Foer: What I worry about is that our political culture is so broken and I worry about the results of this next election, and I worry about the way in which our capacity to disagree with one another ends up escalating instantly into hyperbolic accusations, and everybody becomes inflamed in ways that just allow us no escape from the vitriol and the hatred. What's happening to American Jews should not just concern American Jews, it should concern all Americans because I think it is symptomatic of a society where conspiracy starts to take hold, where trust is diminished, where a lot of our basic, most elemental democratic practices are failing us.

Brian Lehrer: Franklin Foer, staff writer at The Atlantic, his latest article, The Golden Age of American Jews is Ending antisemitism on the right and the left threatens to bring to a close an unprecedented period of safety and prosperity for Jewish Americans and demolished the liberal order they helped establish. Thank you for sharing it and discussing it with us, Franklin.

Franklin Foer: Thank you.

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