Harvard Insider Explains Who Is Really Funding Elite Colleges & Why the Spread of Antisemitism on College Campuses Should Concern Us All
01:26:58 Share

Harvard has an anti-Semitism problem, but the problem is bigger than anti-Semitism. Our country is being influenced by people who are anti-Western. They did an experiment at one of the colleges where they put up a whole bunch of American flags, and guess what? The next day, they were all torn down. The Houthi flag reads, death to America, death to Israel, death to Jews. And that is all one sentiment.

That was celebrated on many of the campuses we're discussing. It is a large anti-Western movement, and it has profound implications for America and for Americans, and they can't afford to turn away. There is an insidious infiltration of our university system and our education system

that literally is using the Jewish cause to insert its ideology, which is explicitly anti-liberal, anti-democratic, and anti-Western. It's devastating to the structure of the academic institution if you believe in it. Hi, I'm Mayim Bialik. I'm Jonathan Cohen. And welcome to our breakdown. We're going to be talking today about something that we've been hesitant to talk about, but it's important.

It's important if you value the ideals of Western society, if free speech is important to you, if freedom of religious expression is important to you, if freedom to express your gender or sexual identity is important to you, if the ability to receive an education without threat

is important to you. We're gonna be talking in particular about Harvard and about the university system in general. What's happening on college campuses for the past few years are a lot of conversations about who can protest where, who feels safe where, and there's a vast majority of Jewish students at Harvard, a report was just released,

are experiencing intimidation, vandalism, harassment, really vile behavior that no other minority population would be allowed to endure without national outrage. Our guest today is Rabbi David Wolpe. He just wrote a piece recently called Harvard is Spraying Perfume on a Sewer. And Rabbi Wolpe, in addition to being the Rabbi Emeritus of Sinai Temple here in Los Angeles,

I was a faculty member in the Harvard Divinity School. He started one month before October 7th. He was subsequently asked to join the anti-Semitism committee by then President Claudine Gay. He was interested in trying to facilitate conversation and support the students who were experiencing harassment and intimidation.

And what he ended up discovering in his time on the anti-Semitism committee is that the attack on Jewish students was the canary in the coal mine of an attack on Western values, Western ideals. Foreign money is flowing into our top institutions by the tens of millions, and it is shaping them. It is shaping faculty that is hired. It's shaping how students are being recruited for social causes.

It's shaping the way we perceive the Western values that so many of us hold to be a critical component of the American experience. Rabbi Welby is going to talk about why he stepped down. His resignation went viral. And he's going to talk about what he could not achieve at Harvard, what Harvard and other institutions like it still need to do to make all students feel safe, and why it's not just about the Jewish conversation, but about a conversation about what we all value

in terms of freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of sexual and gender orientation expression. Also, we're going to talk about DEI. If you're concerned about foreign influence shaping our society, understanding the policies of the DEI and how it relates to these protests is kind of mind-blowing for us, and we can't wait to share it with you. So let's welcome to The Breakdown Rabbi David Wolpe. ♪ Break it down ♪ - Rabbi David Wolpe, welcome to The Breakdown.

Thank you. Happy to be here. We're very eager to hear all of the various angles of what you've kind of been thrust into the middle of. Your career as a rabbi leaves you, in many cases,

connected to much controversy, but you've been thrust into sort of a public role in terms of your faculty position and your position on the anti-Semitism committee at Harvard. How long had you been there when October 7th happened? I had been there a little less than a month. And so I really was just starting to get my orientation

in the school and in the larger school, because the Divinity School is at one end of the campus. Interestingly enough, by the way, on the exact opposite end from the business school, which may say something. But I'd been there for about a month, and I was just starting to feel like I'm beginning to get my arms around this campus. And I had been to one ceremony

That was a little bit off-putting to me, which was the opening ceremony for Sukkot, where the person who was leading it started off by saying, this is a welcoming space for anti-Zionists, non-Zionists, and those struggling with their Zionism. And I remember sitting there and thinking, also that the ceremony had no Hebrew in it. It wasn't really traditional. And I remember sitting there and thinking to myself, don't judge too quickly.

Don't be that person who comes into a new place and says you're doing everything wrong and you shouldn't be doing this. So I really just bit my lip and I didn't say a word. And I assumed that that would be the entirety of that, you know, that that episode would end there, but it had hardly begun.

So you had been at Harvard about a month before October 7th, and the day after October 7th, 33 campus organizations issued a statement at Harvard blaming Israel for what happened on October 7th, either directly or indirectly. And the following day, you received a call from then-Harvard president Claudine Gay. Some of you may know her from various government hearings. And what did you offer the then-Harvard president?

The first thing to know about that call is that she was really shaken up. I mean, imagine it in your mind and double it. In fairness to her, this was not at all what she expected or prepared for or anything. And she said to me, look, I'm a reader. Tell me what I should read because I don't know about this. So I made a suggestion of a couple of books and we talked for a little while and I

I think she was already planning to have a committee, but I said to her, like, you should gather a bunch of people who can advise you. And she said, I'm going to do that. And she put together this anti-Semitism advisory committee, which was composed of very serious people. Martha Minow, the former dean of the law school, Dara Horn, a noted author and novelist and nonfiction writer, everything.

Eric Nelson, who's a professor in government, who were all, and several others, who were all very serious about what had gone on on campus. And it was chaired by the man who is now the current president of Harvard, Alan Garber. He was at the time the provost, but he became the chairman of the Anti-Semitism Committee. And I just want to add one other thing, which is the night of October 8th, I went to the Hillel to just sort of give some...

encouragement to the students and the gathering there was it was like a shiva house i mean people were already getting messages on their slack channels they already there were some israelis there who didn't know what happened to their families um the atmosphere of crisis was almost immediate

The task of the committee, as you stated, was to encourage Harvard to enforce university policies already in place, to institute transparent punishments for those who broke the rules, and to set up a decent and responsive reporting system for infractions.

and to take anti-Semitic speech as seriously as racist or homophobic speech. Can you talk a little bit about the framework that for considering Jews are 2% of the United States population, what was required in order for you on this committee to provide a framework for what is acceptable in how we speak about what was happening to the Jewish community?

We first of all did a mini listening tour. We solicited from students what their experience was and what was happening to them. And we got Slack channel messages, some of which were eventually made public, some of which weren't because these were still, they were from undergraduate students and they had privacy concerns. And when we did, we realized that we had to make some immediate decisions

recommendations, that longer term recommendations could wait, but there had to be several things done right away. And the first and most obvious one that you mentioned was how about enforcing the rules that are already on the books?

Before we even start writing new ones, because you're not allowed to break into classrooms with protests, which was happening every day. And you're not actually supposed to walk into the library and put stickers and slogans around there and roll out banners on the floor. And you're not supposed to harass other students or prevent their going to class and on and on and on.

The trope that you and I and everybody in this world has repeated endlessly is, if this were another group, and we just kept saying, like, if this were an LGBTQ group, if this were an African American group, if this was any group other than the Jews, what would the university be doing? And that's what we want you to do. But there was and still remains this...

very weird acceptance and rejection of the Jews as a minority group, which seemed at every point sotto voce, not explicitly, but very quietly, to stymie all our efforts. MindBalance Breakdown is supported by IQ Bar, our exclusive snack sponsor.

IQ Bar is the better for you plant protein-based snacks made with brain-boosting nutrients to refuel, nourish, and satisfy hunger without the sugar crash. Their plant protein bars are packed with high-quality ingredients to help keep you physically and mentally fit. IQ Bar is totally free from gluten, dairy, soy, GMOs, and artificial sweeteners for a natural anytime snack. Try any of their nine delicious flavors, including mint chocolate chip, chocolate sea salt, banana nut, toasted coconut chip, lemon blueberry, and peanut butter chip.

With over 20,000 five-star reviews and counting, more people than ever are starting their days on the right foot with IQ bars, brain and body boosting bars, hydration mixes, and mushroom coffees.

When IQ Bar sent us their ultimate sampler pack, one flavor stood out for me, which is coconut chip. Those are two things that I like and I want them together. Mint chocolate chip. I cannot get enough of these bars. I have said it before. I'll say it again. I have researched bars. I have shopped for bars. So many bars are filled with ingredients I just absolutely will not touch.

When I got these, I was like, oh my gosh, finally a bar that I can eat all day long. Also, the IQ Mix for hydration is great with three times as many electrolytes as sports drinks. Great for pre-workout, morning hydration, hangovers, and more. And right now, IQ Bar is offering our special podcast listeners 20% off all IQ Bar products, plus free shipping to get your 20% off text BREAKDOWN to 64000.

Text BREAKDOWN to 64000. That's BREAKDOWN to 64000. Message and data rates may apply. See terms for details. Miami Alex Breakdown is supported by Shopify. Starting your own business can be intimidating and downright stressful, thanks to all the hats you suddenly have to learn to wear. When we started this podcast, for example, it felt like we had to figure everything out on our own. Booking guests, filming, branding design, releasing episodes. It was very overwhelming. Every day seemed to introduce like a new decision that needed an answer right away.

We so wish that we had Shopify then, but thankfully we have it now. Finding the right tool that not only helps you out, but simplifies everything can be such a game changer. And for millions of businesses, that tool is Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world. 10% of all e-commerce in the U.S. from household names like Mattel and Gymshark and brands that are just getting started to an indie podcast like Mayim Bialik's Breakdown. Get started with your own design studio with hundreds of ready-to-use templates and

Shopify helps you build a beautiful online store to match your brand style. Accelerate your content creation. Shopify is packed with helpful AI tools that write product descriptions, page headlines, and even enhance your product photography. Get the word out like you have a marketing team behind you. Easily create email and social media campaigns wherever your customers are scrolling or strolling.

And best yet, Shopify is your commerce expert with world-class expertise in everything from managing inventory to international shipping to processing returns and beyond. If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Turn your big business idea into with Shopify on your side. Sign up for our $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash breakdown. Go to shopify.com slash breakdown. MindBalance Breakdown is supported by Spot and Tango.

When Archie first came into Jonathan's life and my life, he was dealing with allergy issues. He had itchy skin, and that's what led us to switch to Spot and Tango's on kibble. It's been a total upgrade, and Archie eats it like it's his favorite thing in the world. I think it is his favorite thing in the world.

You're a close second. Spot and Tango's Unkibble's everything regular kibble isn't, made with real human-grade ingredients and personalized to what your dog actually needs. It's dry food you can feel good about, and it's pantry-friendly too. Archie can totally taste the difference with Spot and Tango's Unkibble. It's made with 100% whole fresh ingredients like real USDA meats, fruits, and veggies, but it's 40% less expensive than frozen food.

I really appreciate the whole food ingredient. I always want him to have the healthiest food and I know that there's not filler in there and there's just stuff that's going to keep him healthy. And we've seen a huge change in his allergies, which has been the greatest thing.

And also with Spot and Tango, there's no more guessing how much to feed Archie. Spot and Tango creates a custom plan based on your dog's age, weight, breed, and activity level, and they include a pre-measured scoop so you get it right every time. Upgrade your pet's bowl with Spot and Tango Unkibble. For a limited time, go to spotandtango.com slash break. Use code break to get 50% off your first order. That's spotandtango.com slash break. Code break to get 50% off your first order. Spotandtango.com slash break. Code break.

A lot of people, when kind of told about the things that are happening on university campuses, want to say it's not really a big problem. It's only happening with a small number of, you know, those active super left students. Most of the kids just want to go to school. They don't want to be involved in this. What can you tell us about the particular experiences that Jewish students are having and what it means on a larger scale for what the university allows?

Well, I think there is some truth to the fact that a lot of people were not involved in the protest and did not care about the protest. And really, all they wanted was to go to school. And I remember sitting next to a woman who was a Chinese poet at this arts and literature society, the Signet Society.

And I asked her, like, are you involved in this at all? And she said, no. And I said, what do you do? She goes, I'm a poet. I said, that's beautiful. And what are you going to do when you leave here? She said, go into Goldman Sachs. So I think that was basically the feeling of a lot of people. But what is underappreciated is how much the accepted opinion on campus became

Zionists are bad. Derivatively, there is something suspicious about the way the Jews conduct themselves and think of themselves. And that was extremely widespread. So even though the activists were few in number, the climate of opinion was and remains on a lot of campuses not so small.

Can you talk a little bit, some people may not know, for those of us who've been following this news since October 7th, and for those of us who went to college in the 90s and experienced it firsthand, can you talk about some of the things that students experienced? Yeah, can you be more specific for people who maybe have not wanted to think about what it actually looks like? Yeah, which I totally understand. But there were things ranging from

Negative comments in person, like baby killer, which a lot of people were called genocide lover, supporter of genocide, racist, meant against Arabs, racist.

And by the way, this was said to people who were just like I would walk around campus with a kippah. Nobody said anything explicitly to me, probably because I looked like a faculty member and that was a little risky. But the few students who did got these comments without anyone knowing what they felt particularly about Israel or Zionism or Gaza. And then there were some students who were pushed.

There were students who lost even second-order friends, by which I mean some people said, my friend will no longer speak to me because I'm friendly with the Zionist, even though I'm not Jewish. And so there was a lot of social pressure. And then there were

really venomous and noxious messages at Harvard among students that were just rife with anti-Semitic images, including swastikas and accusations that the Jewish community stands up for genocide, except for the few who were at the protest. And it's worth remembering, I don't want to suggest, you know, there was not, people didn't come after Jews with pitchforks on campus.

But remember what it's like to be 18, 19, 20 years old in a social circle and to go away from home and to know that people on campus will look at you as though you're a terrible person if you wear a Jewish star or you wear a kippah. So one person had said to me they were in a class on public health. The School of Public Health was one of the

most egregious offenders, where the entire class was about what Israel had done to the Palestinians. And she came up to the professor afterwards and said, you know, you didn't say anything about any Israelis who have ever been victims of any kind of terror or even what happened on October 7th. And the professor said, yes, you're right. You're right. I should have mentioned that. And I said to her, why didn't you say anything during class? And she said, well, I didn't want to put a target on my back.

Well, I, yeah, I mean, I think many of us can relate and those of us in the public eye, you know, weigh it even in heavier terms.

I think some of the most disturbing things that many of us were seeing were these kind of Zionist free spaces, Zionists not welcome here, students being restricted from going to class, certain buildings, including buildings of egalitarian Jewish gathering, which for many of us are only home away from home for worship, for socialization, those buildings being

attacked. You know, the upside down red triangle has been seen as this is a target center. You know, besides the social pressure, which I think is very significant, and I even feel it as an adult, this notion that there is a restriction of your movement, a restriction of which classes you can take. What is that like for Jewish students? And what did you see?

It was as simple as there were places you couldn't walk through Harvard Yard because of the encampments. They roped them off and Zionists were not welcome, which is the central public space of Harvard. And yes, there were parties that had Zionist free spaces and there were

posters that went up on buildings, which they had no right to do. And you didn't have to observe them, but it was scary. And so most people did, and they didn't want to go into a place where they weren't wanted. And you would also, I had the experience of being at one of the diners at Harvard at, I think it was at lunchtime. And 30 people came in, surrounded all the diners and started chanting,

From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free, except they chanted it in Arabic. And in Arabic, it means from the river to the sea, Palestine will be Arab, which is an explicitly eliminationist slogan. And everybody sitting there eating, many of whom were Jewish, had to sit there and either listen to that or leave the restaurant. So it was in terms of the harassment and expulsion of students, it was entirely a one way affair.

I have to say one dean said to me, he said, please don't repeat this and don't give my name. I am now repeating it, but not giving his name. He said, but we're not worried about any of the Jewish students because they don't break the laws. And I thought, listen to what you're saying. Like, do something about those who do. I want to just clarify the experience of someone sitting in that cafeteria, because what you're saying is,

If it was any other population set, any other race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, you're hearing chants that you should be killed. Right. That's what's happening. They're not just sitting there hearing some foreign chant. They're hearing a foreign chant that says you should die. You should be killed. Everyone should be exterminated.

And if it was any other population, race, ethnicity, orientation, that would absolutely not be tolerated, whether they break the law or not. There would be a national uproar. There would be a national uproar. If you said in this, let's take the exact same phrasing. If you said from the river to the sea, there should be no gays, people would go nuts.

But I'm trying to use the exact language they used because it means exactly what you're saying. We all know that and they know that too and everybody admits it. But they didn't say we should kill and exterminate. They just said it should be free of all these kinds of people. And no one, nowhere else, no other place in the world, no other group would on a college campus would that be permitted. We know this.

Can you speak a little bit, and I know this isn't necessarily your specialty, but everything kind of falls under your specialty, I think, once you've kind of held this position. Where does free speech come into this conversation? What's the difference between free speech and hate speech? I mean, for me personally, and I have been threatened, shouted down, intimidated physically and verbally, both as just a regular Jew and as a public Jew.

It's terrifying. I mean, it's absolutely terrifying, especially if people are yelling things at you about you that are not true, like you're a genocidal baby killer. It's one of the things that, you know, I've had shouted at me. What can you sort of tell us about what this does when...

When we are then faced with, gosh, well, people can say whatever they want. People don't have to like Jews. What's the difference? First of all, every college has what are called time, place and manner restrictions. Time, place and manner restrictions means you can protest in a certain certain times. Not always like not in the middle of finals.

in a certain manner and at a certain place. Harvard Yard is now verboten for protests from now on. I hope that will continue. Also, manner protests, protests that are hostile towards other students have never been permitted on campus before. And one of the things that made this protest different was other protests like Occupy Wall Street protests or Vietnam War protests were not protests against other students. This was.

So it's not actually a function of free political speech. It's a function of specific attacking speech against other students. Also, as a proxy for being disgruntled, upset, or even outraged at the policies of the Israeli government, which is not necessarily affiliated with any students simply because they're Jewish. Well, that is also true. The fact that there were, the fact that there have been, I say this all the time to non-Jewish friends, I ask them, does your church have security?

Does your mosque have security? And almost none of them do. Every synagogue either has security or wishes they could afford security because the attack on Jews as a religion is not distinguished by these, the kinds of people who are protesting at Harvard from attacks on the policies of the Israeli government.

So what I would say is, yes, you can express whatever you want. There are issues about what professors do in classrooms because ideological indoctrination and education are different things. And also there are manner restrictions because if you're part of a community and a university is a community, then you're allowed to put restrictions on the way that you can behave in that community.

Um, if you, uh, you know, if you get out of your car and scream and threaten someone because you don't like the way they drive, then that is actually a violation, especially if it's threatening behavior. So you can do the same thing on a, in a, uh, in a college campus, you have to give as wide a latitude as you can. Um,

But you can't say anything to anyone at any time. That's harassment. Yes, it's harassment. One of the things that I talked about with Rabbi Chaim Seidlerfeller, my Rav from UCLA, I wrote a piece about the attacks on Hillels. There was a very, very disturbing and increasing attack on Hillels.

any Jewish college institution, including ones that were an umbrella for secular students, for peace-loving students, for all kinds of students. It's the place where we hang out. It's the place where we eat. In many cases, there's a kosher and halal meal plan that you can get at Hillel's. And when I was talking with Rabbi Chaim about the attack on Hillel's, one of the things that he reminded me of in this piece that I wrote

was that the foundation of the university environment is supposed to be an openness and an ability to have dialogue, even about things that we find impossible to agree on. That the foundation of an academic institution, and the reason that institutions like this exist, is to facilitate conversation even in difficult times, especially in difficult times.

And the new trend of shouting down, which in many cases is being supported by faculty and professors, is first of all astounding. And second of all, it's devastating to the structure of the academic institution if you believe in it. Can you talk a bit about what is going on that faculty is in many cases supporting violent protest?

Hateful speech calls for annihilation. Can you talk a little bit about what the hell is going on with the administration and the faculty of these organizations?

So I want to say there are two pieces to this, and the second piece is really important. The first piece is it isn't just, in some ways it's worse than that. It isn't just that students and sometimes faculty will literally shout people down exactly as you said, again and again and again, but that when you approach them, they will not speak to you.

I went to the protesters. I thought, I'm an adult. I'm a rabbi. I can talk to them. If they're upset at me, that's okay. I can take it. They said, I'm sorry, we're not allowed to speak to you. We're not allowed. So there also was an organizing principle here that, I mean, it's the same reason why when the tents that appeared all over the country were the same brand of expensive tents everywhere all over the country. They were not ramshackle, which is let's just go out to REI and get a tent.

There were there were handbooks that they found afterwards. This was all organized. And I made more than one attempt, not only with protesters, but with some students from Pakistan who were part of the Divinity School. And I gave them all my number and I said, please, let's like have the opportunity to talk. Never heard from them. And part of this is.

There is an enormous amount of foreign money that is supporting this, promoting this, creating this. I talked about the fact that when I said to Claudine Gay, who was the president, what about the money you take from Qatar? She said, we only take money from families. And I said to her, the family that rules Qatar is a family like a mafioso family. It's not a family like your family or my family.

But I've just learned recently, in fact, that not only does Qatar do this with colleges, they are now having conferences where they bring teachers in K through 12 to Qatar, full business class, fully paid, four seminars there, and then they give them teaching modules when they go home. So our country is being influenced by

by people who not only dislike Jews, derivatively, or maybe even more than that, are anti-Western in their orientation, because they did an experiment at one of the colleges where they put up, I don't remember if it was Columbia or it was Penn, they put up a whole bunch of American flags, and guess what? The next day, they were all torn down.

This is not, this is bigger in some ways than anti-Semitism. It is a large anti-Western movement and it has profound implications for America and for Americans and they can't afford to turn away. I don't think this conversation is good for my health because like, no, but it's like, it's not that I don't know it, but hearing you talk about it in this way, the first thing I think of is I'm being paranoid.

Right. And that's what I was told my whole life. And that's what I told my grandparents my whole life who fled the pogroms and the Holocaust of Eastern Europe. I said, you're being paranoid. Everything's fine. This is the melting pot. We have made it. The streets are paved with gold. Right. And my whole life, my fear was that I would be accused of being paranoid like that generation. And that's the generation that we need to just have

All those ideas die out. We're OK. We blend it in. Look at us. And what you're saying is that there is an insidious infiltration of our university system and our education system in general that literally is using the Jewish cause to insert its ideology, which is explicitly anti-liberal, anti-democratic and anti-Western.

This should upset people. It should upset people. It upsets some people. And by the way, I went through the exact same transitions. My father was a rabbi. And I remember when I started off in the rabbinate, I thought, okay, anti-Semitism was part of his rabbinate, but it's not going to be part of mine. You know, my father was one of those people who like you could be watching TV and a football player would make a good reception. He would say, wow, that's a great reception. My father would go, ah, he's an anti-Semite. He had a comprehensive knowledge of

of everybody's opinions about the Jews everywhere in the world. But I will say this to make people feel a little bit better. The reason that America is different and has always been different is not because we have a constitution or not because Americans are nicer or any of those things. It's that for most of Jewish history, Jews were the identified other. There were Russians and Jews. There were Frenchmen and Jews. There were Germans and Jews. There aren't Americans and Jews. There are so many different groups.

That in fact, what the Jewish people needs to learn to do is to actually create allies. We're much better at identifying enemies than we are at embracing friends. And the truth is we have a lot of friends. Do we? And so we need to make common cause. We really do. We have a lot of friends. And the reason that it's important to say that also is because the people who are our friends

feel resentful if we don't acknowledge their goodwill. So I think we need to also look at that side of the ledger and see who will partner with us to make this better, because we have to make the case to them that this is bad for America. It's not just bad for the Jews.

Lane Ballack's Breakdown is supported by BetterHelp. As we talk about here frequently on the podcast, there's still stigma out there surrounding mental health, and in particular, around men's mental health.

Strength comes from maintaining a healthy mind, and men today face immense pressure to perform, to provide, to keep it all together. It's no wonder 6 million men in the U.S. suffer from depression every year. It's often undiagnosed, but we're here to say it's okay to struggle. Real strength comes from opening up about what you're carrying and doing something about it so you can be at your best for yourself and everyone in your life. If you're a man and you're feeling the weight of the world, Jonathan and I talk a lot about how it can be extra hard in a culture that

really doesn't emphasize men speaking about their emotions and talking things out, but it's important to talk to someone. Depression in men can look like addiction. It can look like anger. It can look like withdrawal. But what's really happening is something much deeper, and it's so important for us to get to the bottom of it. It's important to talk to a loved one, a friend, a therapist.

We're here to tell you that with over 35,000 therapists, BetterHelp is the world's largest online therapy platform, having served over 5 million people globally. It's convenient. You join a session with the click of a button. You can fit therapy into your busy life and switch at any time. As the largest online therapy provider in the world, BetterHelp can provide access to mental health professionals with a diverse variety of expertise. Talk it out with BetterHelp. Our listeners get 10% off their first month at betterhelp.com slash break. That's BetterHelp.

Better H-E-L-P dot com slash break. Lion Bialik's breakdown is supported by Thrive Cosmetics. I've been really liking this new makeup trend of lining the top lid with a bold color like a yellow or a deep blue. It seems like a simple trick, but it makes a real statement while still looking sleek and professional. It strikes me every time I see it. I may have to try it myself soon. Whether you're all about simple mascara and gloss or you love to play with bold shapes and colors, there's always a trusty favorite that you use for every look.

Thrive Cosmetics makes certified 100% vegan and cruelty-free products you can depend on for everything from simple daily wear to show-stopping self-expression. And it's all made with clean, skin-loving ingredients, high-performance and trademark formulas, and uncompromising standards. One of the things that we love about Thrive Cosmetics is they give back to a ton of causes that are important to so many of us, like cancer, domestic abuse, homelessness and poverty, and racial and social justice. For every product purchased...

Thrive Cosmetics donates products and funds to help communities thrive. One of my favorite Thrive products is their Liquid Lash Extensions Mascara. It gives me fuller lashes without the heaviness and clumping, and it's super easy to remove, slides right off with warm water, and doesn't leave smudges.

Thrive's unique formula creates tubes around each eyelash to lengthen them, and nourishing ingredients support longer, stronger, healthier-looking lashes over time. Try your new trusty favorites with an exclusive set for our listeners. New customers can get the Liquid Lash Extensions Mascara and a mini-size Brilliant Eye Brightener at a special set price with free shipping at thrivecosmetics.com. That's thrivecosmetics, C-A-U-S-E-M-E-T-I-C-S.com. In some ways, this isn't about us at all.

We are the face and a foil for a much larger campaign. And if people are listening or thinking about this issue and saying, whatever, who really cares about the Jewish people? You know, it's a small group and I just don't want to care about this. The reality is, is that we are the front of a much larger attempt to undercut Western values, ideology, and really attack American core values.

Look, I will, as evidence for exactly what you say, I will just direct people, which I almost never do, to the Houthi flag, which reads, death to America, death to Israel, death to Jews. Allah is great. That's the flag. And that is all one sentiment.

That was celebrated on many of the campuses we're discussing. The Houthi flag was flown. They said, make us proud, turn another ship around. I mean, it's like a very, we're in the upside down. I want you to talk a little bit more about this anti-Western component. You know, many in the Jewish community would kind of be astounded when we would see signs like,

queers for Palestine. You know, we would see various groups for whom the values of Western culture are extremely important. The right to be who you are, the right to practice whatever religion you want to, the right to practice no religion, the right to be any gender or sexual identity that you would like, all of the things

What are people not understanding about what this anti-Western and in many cases, you know, cutter funded, you know, kind of institutionalization? What are they not understanding about how bad that is for those of us who value equal rights, women's rights, rights for gays, rights for trans people? What are people not understand? Where is the disconnect? Right.

I'll give you one diagnosis that is not Wilf's, which I think has a lot of traction. She says like underneath it is a utopianism. If we could just I mean this what the Nazis thought if we just get rid of the Jews, everything will be perfect.

And there is a sense in which if we just get rid of the Zionist colonialists, the world will be great. There is no vision for what Palestine would actually be. I never heard that in any of the protests. I never heard someone say, so we can establish a Palestine that will have this kind of government and this kind of... Just this sense of, it's almost like an impurity that exists in the world. If we could just get rid of that, everything will be fine.

And that's why it overrides people's values because it's utopianism. You know, it's like when Lennon said to make an omelet, you got to break some eggs and, and the same idea here, it's like, okay, bad things will happen along the way, but eventually everything will be great. And that's one piece of it that I think is that by the way, especially appeals to young people and maybe some of them will grow out of it. That is part of my hope. Um, but then the second part of this is that, um,

The sense of solidarity and joy that people get by protesting together and raising the hackles of those around them should not be underestimated. I walked by that encampment every day. They were having the time of their lives. And everything they screamed that made people angrier made their lives better.

And there is an element to which this is a big middle finger in the face of everything that these kids, despite the fact that they are the 99.9% most privileged people in the world, think agrees to them. So there's some of that too. There's some of just the obnoxious adolescent absurdities. The problem for me is much more with the faculty. Like they were the ones that I found

inexcusable. Like a 20-year-old who says something stupid, maybe they'll grow out of it. But a professor at Harvard who abets that is evil. I don't know another word for it. It's just evil. Can you talk a little bit about what you saw and what was reported about faculty involvement? And how far back do we trace where these faculty are getting their information and their support? Harvard Divinity School had a division called the Religion and Public Life

That was a relentlessly, and this was all driven by faculty, a relentlessly anti-Israel program. And the ideology, I mean, there are various ways to trace it. You can trace it. I would say the two major sources are, first of all, French deconstructionism, which is very popular on campus still. It's the only place that still exists. People say the only place you can find a communist is on a college campus.

But the other is the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union did an enormous amount of work in seeding anti-Semitism and anti-Westernism and chaos through the world and still does with Russian bots on social media. Undermining the West, and the Jews are a very effective lever for undermining the West, has been a Soviet goal.

For as long as there's been a Soviet Union. And so we have, let me just say, what that means is we have three separate enemies and people should be aware of this. There is jihadism, there's radical Islam, there's hard left antisemitism, and then there's far right antisemitism.

And, and they, and weirdly, the three or maybe not so weirdly the three converge in a lot of their tropes and a lot of the way that they speak about Jews and even about the West.

So this this report that Harvard finally released after almost two months, it took them two months to gather what I think many of us could have gathered in just about the first week after October 7th. They released a report with some not surprising statistics, you know, over 50 percent, nearly 60 percent of Jewish students had experienced discrimination, stereotyping, negative bias, racism.

Around 75 percent expressed discomfort expressing political opinions and believed there was an academic or professional penalty for expressing such views at Harvard. What's interesting is nowhere in the report was it mentioned about the tens of millions of dollars that is coming in from Harvard.

From Qatar, from a country that seems to have a very, very strong incentive to infiltrating campuses. Can you talk a little bit about what else we can understand about the role of foreign governments in fomenting this kind of hatred, intimidation, and illegal activity on campuses? The role of governments is twofold.

First of all, it reduces the diversity of voices in campus because now college campuses don't have to care about the $10,000 donor. They don't have to care about the person who gets $15,000 or $5,000 or $20,000. And they used to have to care about those people who had obviously a diversity of views. Now they can make that up easily, more than make that up by grants from foreign governments.

which swamp the voice of the small donor. So first, it eliminates some of the diversity of audience that you have to appeal to. And everyone knows that it keeps you on your toes and makes you better when you know that your audience is not just one. It's that it's a diversity of people. It makes you rethink the way you present your message. The second thing I want to point out is the Islamophobia report was issued at the same time. And the Islamophobia report

talked about the influence of donors over Harvard, by which it meant Jewish donors, because those were the only ones that withdrew their donations during the year. But the anti-Semitism report didn't talk about the much greater potential donors and actual donors in Middle Eastern countries. But these countries have, I mean, imagine if you have an ideology, and Qatar does, and Oman does, and Yemen does, and they're very similar.

Imagine if you have an ideology and you are able to advance that ideology at Harvard and Oxford and Stanford and Berkeley and Yale and Columbia. It's like capturing the golden fleece. It's the perfect way to show the world that not only is this ideology respectable, but it is going to become the ideology of the elite class of the West.

I mean, one of the things that I approve of that the administration has done in their interventions in colleges, some things I don't like at all, some things I think are really great. One of them is that they insist on transparency in foreign donations, which I can't swear to this, but I understand from people in the field was actually already a requirement. It just was never observed.

Can we talk a little bit about how this foreign money then trickles down into shaping belief and organization? Because some would say, okay, great, you get this foreign money, you get to do whatever you want. How is it being funneled both in terms of shaping ideology, which speaks to the perspective of faculty? And then let's talk about shaping actual practice, as you mentioned, handbooks and tents. So it does two things. First, it hires faculty.

It gives grants for chairs and for visiting faculty and so on. And one or two influential faculty members can change the feel on a campus. I mean, Edward Said at Columbia changed the nature of Columbia. You know that. No, he changed the nature of many aspects of the entire country. Yes. And if someone doesn't know, let's give a snapshot about who Edward Said is.

Edward Said was a Palestinian, although he didn't live most of his life in Palestine. He was an intellectual who wrote a book called Orientalism that argued that the West was prejudiced against the Arab world and had, and as a result, looked down on them. And in fact, for him, Israel was a primary example of that. It was an example of the West inserting itself into the Arab world illegitimately.

That's a quick, but he was a very influential theorist and Orientalism is still taught all the time in college campuses.

But I even think about the textbooks, the programs, the extracurricular programs, the movies that are shown at student gatherings, the trips that are taken. All of that is part of a constant attempt. This is special pleading, I grant you, but...

My presence on campus was really important for the Jewish community, and that's just one year, one rabbi in one program. But I was in HDS all year long. There was a constant anti-Zionist movement.

I was on campus every single day. I was never asked by anyone at HDS to speak about Israel or Zionism or Gaza or anything ever. Now, why was that? I don't think that was because they thought, well, he has nothing to say. I think it was because...

Nobody in that campus was disposed to want to present, because they knew the backlash they would get, any other view except the view that was prevailing and subsidized.

Let's talk about what that, quote, other view is. You are someone that I uphold as a liberal, progressive, peace-loving, deeply thinking, deeply feeling rabbi and leader in this country, recognized as a person with high intellectual and compassionate esteem.

You are not a person who has presented yourself as someone who does not believe in the rights of Palestinians, does not believe in statehood for the Palestinian people, does not believe in civil rights for the Arab world. Also, the notion that being a Jewish person who believes in the existence of a Jewish state independent of political conversation, the notion that that is an alternative or fringe view is

is absolutely, it's upside down. It's the emperor wears no clothes. Well, I will tell you, I mean, first of all, thank you for those kind words. I mean, I was part of the Muslim Jewish Council. I still am officially of the AJC. And we had wonderful dialogues with Muslim co-religionists. It broke down after October 7th. But the voice of

that they did feature on Israel in the Divinity School, was a very fine scholar and a very lovely man, but an extreme leftist who wrote a book called Diasporism, arguing about Judaism's validity for being in the diaspora and not in Israel, named Sha'o Magid. I don't have a problem with Sha'o Magid.

saying something at Harvard, but that he was the voice of the Divinity School, tells you that in fact, 90% of American Jews, what we can call sort of the standard view of most American Jews, found no purchase in the Divinity School at Harvard. And that's just insane.

I think there's also still so much misperception about the word Zionism and this sort of definition. The fact that, you know, when you see a sign, when my kid goes to college, when there's a sign that says Zionists not welcome here, the vast majority of Jews in the United States

identify with the term Zionism as simply the belief that Israel has a right to exist. There is no other country in the world that when anyone disagrees with their policies, their government, or even wartime behavior, that we call for the annihilation of an entire country. It doesn't happen. It

couldn't happen. The world would not let it happen. And yet here we are in this sort of like bizarre alternate reality where denigrating and delegitimizing the Jewish state is really the veil behind which we see that Western ideology is not a... They're coming for the Christians next, I promise.

Well, I think that's true. And I will start with your first point, which is I visited Rwanda, where one half of the population virtually slaughtered the other half of the population. Nobody after that said, OK, that's it. We're done. No more Rwanda. It wouldn't have occurred to anyone to do that.

Nobody says, look what China did to Tibet, no more China. Or look what Russia did to Ukraine, no more Russia. No, Israel is the only country. And the subsidiary point to this is if somebody said, I hate France and I think France shouldn't exist, but I have no hostility towards Frenchmen, you would say that's ridiculous.

So when you say, I hate Israel and Israel shouldn't exist, but I have no hostility towards Jews. When Israel is the only country in the world where Jews actually have sovereignty, it just doesn't track. If you say, look, I'm fine with the other 40 Muslim countries that exist in the world, but the one Jewish country is actually the source of all

of all anguish and pain and evil. I mean, how can people not see, especially after thousands of years of discrimination, this is not a new one, after losing a third of our people less than what, a generation or about a generation ago, it's not possible to say, I think Israel shouldn't exist and think that antisemitism has no part in that view. It's just not possible. - I wanna turn back to Harvard for a second

and the role of money and influence. We talked about faculty, we talked about programs, student centers are being funded by the same money. And through those student centers, is that how organizations are supporting handbooks, tents, talk a little bit more about those organizations and how those are fueling some of these protests and the ideology.

So Students for Justice in Palestine, which is one of the most prominent of them and has been banned on some campuses, gets an enormous amount of foreign money and uses it liberally. And it not only provides information and provide programming, but also works for recruitment.

Because remember that people on campus are like also seekers and they're looking for community and they're looking for, you know, places to go to eat and places to go to be and all of those sorts of things. So if you have enough money to spread around the college campus, you have a very, very good chance of building up a cohort of students who will

be drawn to whatever ideology their community is a part of because most people believe what people around them believe. That's the, that is the secret of how you create everything from political parties to cults, which is, you know, you can predict how people will vote by the neighborhood they live in more accurately than you can predict how they'll vote by what they say.

Because we tend to, we're herd animals, we tend to act, especially when we're young, especially when we're first away from home. And you're, you know, adolescence is a sort of torture time. And you want to be accepted. And to be socially accepted and embraced is the best feeling in the world. And if all that takes is to hate Israel, that's a small price to pay. Two follow-up questions. The first is likely oversimplified, but I think it's important to state.

Does Harvard have an anti-Semitism problem? Yes. Do they acknowledge that problem? Some of them actually say, I mean, Alan Garber, the president, said that Harvard has an anti-Semitism problem. So I'm on good authority to say it has an anti-Semitism problem, but the problem is bigger than anti-Semitism. It has an anti-Semitism problem that ripples out beyond anti-Semitism because

The problem is not that Harvard has a lot of people that hate Jews. The problem is that Harvard has two deep, interconnected ideologies. Let me start with DEI. DEI, which is diversity, equity, inclusion. Basically, the idea is if a group is underrepresented, it is because of discrimination.

And the reverse of that is if a group is overrepresented, it's because they've got an unfair advantage. So the way that I express this once online is you can't get an even lawn with fertilizer. You can only get it with a lawnmower. And the same thing here. If you want to get a representative lawnmower,

sample in a college, you can't do it by incentivizing people of different minority groups. You have to do it by eliminating the minority groups that are overrepresented. So the first thing that happens is that the Jews have to go. And the same thing is happening to Asians, right? There are too many Asians in college campus because they're just doing too well. And obviously that's not fair. So we have to get rid of them.

So DEI, by its very nature, encourages discrimination against Jews. Intersectionality suggests that if one group is impacted, then they have solidarity with every other group that is impacted, which is one of the reasons why you see alliances across different ethnic groups for Palestine. And the third piece of this is anti-colonialism, as if Israel was this colonial power that

which is not true for any number of reasons, not the least of which is that colonial powers are people who come from one place and have a place to go back to, like the French were a colonial power, but they'd go back to France. The British were a colonial power, but they had Britain. They were not refugees who were going back to an ancient ancestral home. That's not a colonial power. So there is almost a conjuries of ideology, a sort of

combination of many different ideologies at work that is bigger than just Jews are bad. You know, I just did March of the Living, where you go and I visited several concentration camps and so on. And all I could hear was the echoes in my mind. I mean, I could hear other terrible things too, but I could hear echoes in my mind of people at Harvard who would say things like, go back to Poland, as though that was actually the home of the Jews, right? Poland, which is a graveyard.

Jews. And you recognize that the Jewish historical experience is irrelevant to people who are sort of newly born in this anti-colonial, anti-Semitic ideology. And I'll say one other thing, which is that anti-Semitism, and I know we're not going to do a whole thing about anti-Semitism, but one piece of it that is extremely important that

to recognize is not only that antisemitism is almost always a conspiracy theory, but also that Jews are the only people who are simultaneously subhuman and superhuman. The Nazis thought of them as vermin who control the world. And some of that same, you're less than us, but we're also scared of you, persisted in the antisemitism that we saw on college campuses.

We hate the Jews. They're terrible. They're awful. They're subhuman. Look what they would do to other human beings. But also look at all the control they have. Look at how they run the banks and the movie industry and the Zionist occupied government, which is what they call the American government on the right. So it's a deep psychological distortion that is very hard to stamp out.

If we acknowledge that Harvard is aware that they have this problem, what is the solution? Is it simply cutting off funding? Is it moderating who the professors are? Because then you're trying to have the same problem of controlling ideology to push it in the opposite direction. The anti-Semitism report makes many sensible suggestions about

you know, first of all, enforcing the rules. And I agree that being transparent about the money is really important. I think hiring people who represent a certain ideological diversity would be a really good thing. You know that if someone like someone of our ideological stripe came in and interviewed for a job in the English department, there is not a snowball's chance that we would succeed.

Because the people who are judging it, as soon as they hear that we have, you know, that we're in one way or another, get the hint that we're Zionists, they're not going to hire us.

And so part of this is changing hiring practices. But that's just a euphemism for they don't want to hire a Jew unless the Jew denounces the right of Israel to exist. Like, that's such a weird euphemism. Like, and I see this as I walk around the streets, you know, of the world that I live in. I get it. My existence as a Jewish person who does not call for the destruction of the state of Israel is seen as some sort of threat to Western society.

When in fact, it is actually the root of Western society and Western society grew out of exactly that, which is the Hebrew Bible, which I'll just remind your listeners is all about the Israelites getting to the land of Israel. That is what the Bible, that is the theme of the Bible is let's take this people and put them in this land.

And they weren't in Eastern Europe. Sorry, just to clarify for people who don't know their Bible history. We were a bunch of wandering tribes. There were many wandering tribes. I mean, each year I see these, you know, you have no roots in the land of Israel, said by people who then want to go to Bethlehem to celebrate the birth of Jesus, who...

was Jewish in the land of Israel thousands of years ago. And we existed thousands of years before Jesus, I would like to also remind people. Yes. I wrote a book about King David. King David was a good thousand years before Jesus, and King David was the founder of Jerusalem. So it's, I mean, it's absurd and counterproductive to make an argument that is...

So it's so painful to hear clear contradictions of fact asserted because of ideology, but I don't know how else to combat it.

And in the dramatic theatrics that are playing out on university campuses, what we're seeing is a celebration of Hamas, a celebration of Hezbollah, a celebration of the Houthis whose entire existence and the call to worship

The call to be a member of these organizations is a celebration of the death of Western culture, meaning when you are waving that flag, that is why people find that intimidating, because you're waving the flag of an institution that does not support the right of you to be gay, of you to celebrate and to express yourself as any individual Western person.

person. So that is intimidating to many people who identify as Jews. No question. And as an addendum to Jonathan's question, think about what happens to right-wing speakers when they come to these campuses. They, in fact, don't want to hear them and don't think they have a right to express their opinion. And

And so they get shouted down and many of them don't have the chance to speak. And so, yeah, there is there is a censoriousness in the in the hard left that matches some of the censoriousness of the hard right. It's also grouping. It's grouping moderates with far right because the and I understand if people want to protest people from the IDF like that.

There is a time and a place and a manner in which you are allowed to protest certain government officials that you don't agree with. But to group moderates in that shouting down category is an assault on Western democracy and the foundation of the academic institution. You have to believe certain things or you're not a good person.

I want to talk about your resignation because we've kind of couched all of this. And, you know, I don't mean to kind of bury the lead here, but you resigned from your position in December and your resignation statement was really brilliant. And what it said is that the system at Harvard, along with the ideology that grips far too many of the students and faculty,

The ideology that works only along axes of oppression and places Jews as oppressors and therefore as intrinsically evil is itself evil. Parts of the university epitomized an ideology that I believe is injurious to higher education and devastating for Jews. Why did you resign from your position on this committee? So this is what happened. Um, I, I was on the committee and, uh,

I was the only person on the committee who really whose primary loyalty wasn't really to Harvard. They were all either faculty of Harvard or on the board of Harvard. And I was I kind of dropped in. And and it was clear we kept making suggestions. Some of the suggestions that you mentioned.

Please, like, have a hotline where students can call, just a hotline so that everybody knows what's going on. Nothing got acted on. Again and again and again, we were told, and I can now say this because it's become public, the advisory committee was all supposed to be private. Several of us wrote a letter threatening to resign. And it was the only time that the chairman of the board, Penny Pritzker, came to one of our meetings.

And she said, please don't resign because they knew it would look terrible for Harvard in the midst of this crisis if the anti-Semitism committee resigned. Said, please don't resign. President Gay made a presentation. Things are going to get better. And so we said, OK, we'll give you like we'll give you a chance. We don't want to make Harvard look. We want it to get better. Fine. Then came the hearings. So I was in New York at the Maimonides Fund for the hearings. And in the first five minutes, I turned to the person I was watching it with and said, this is a disaster.

And I watched all five hours and there were so many chances, so many chances to redeem that hearing, to bang the table and say, this is not what our university stands for. So why didn't they? What were they so afraid of? I have two theories about why, but let me just get to the postscript and then I'll tell you what I think. So the day after the hearing, I...

knew that I had to resign because this was unless everything changed immediately. But I had to wait till I got back, got back to Boston because I needed to tell the other members of the committee I would not I would not sandbag. So I got back to Boston and I got a call from Claudine Gay. And I said to her, look, I I'm I'm in an impossible position.

I said, and I know that you are too. And I'm sorry that my getting out of my impossible position is going to make yours worse. That's not what I want, but I don't have a choice. And she said to me in that conversation, what could I do?

Let me count the ways. So I gave her like four or five things, but it was clear by the end of the conversation that none of them were going to happen. What were the things? Like, I'm serious. Like, what could we have done? I said, immediately set up a hotline, immediately sanction the students who have violated the law. Make the discipline transparent because even the people they said they were disciplining, they wouldn't say what they were doing. And in fact, in the end, almost nothing happened. I said, and set up a committee of...

of people outside of the DEI structure to examine the DEI structure. My friends on the committee and I said, look, I gotta resign. Martha Minow, God bless her, the former Dean of the Law School, whose father was the founder of PBS, Newton Minow. She said, "My father always used to say to me, David, don't take a job that has accountability, but no authority."

And I thought, wow, that's exactly what I did. And she said, so it makes sense. And they were all very supportive. And I wrote the resignation thing. And honestly, I did not think that it was going to go viral. I thought that it would be like my community would like it and I would be done. And then other people would take the responsibility.

But I think people were so fed up and so angry. And like somebody basically saying what they felt about Harvard was cathartic. And so that's why I resigned. The reason, I think, by the way, that they were not more forthcoming, all three of them. It's not only that they were all advised by the same law firm, which would be shut down tomorrow. But also, they were all facing lawsuits.

And I think the lawyer said to them, you may not say anything that will give fodder to the people who, and also, and I have one other diagnosis. Okay, so this comes from being a synagogue rabbi. Here's the thing about being a synagogue rabbi that a lot of people don't appreciate. Why should they? They're not synagogue rabbis. You hire a synagogue rabbi for like, you know, how there are like five basic personality traits. One of them is agreeability.

synagogue rabbis have to be agreeable. You have to like your synagogue rabbi with rare exceptions or they won't survive. And then you ask them to take stands that are disagreeable. And most rabbis find it really hard to do. Some can do it, but it's very hard to do. Well, college presidents are the same. You become a college president. When people say, why did Claudine Gay become college president? It's not because she was a black woman. There are a lot of black women. It's because the faculty liked her.

She was popular with them, and she was not prepared to say something, I think, that would make all of them dislike her.

Leadership is supposed to combine agreeability and also courage. And that is really hard to find. But that's what this moment needed. And unfortunately, there were college presidents who had it. I will single out my friend Daniel Diermeier at Vanderbilt. He had it. As soon as students protested, he brought in the police and he said, keep this up.

you're gone. Not because protests should not be allowed, but because the level of protest that is violating the rights of students on campus cannot be tolerated in an academic atmosphere. He allowed other protests, but...

But it's rare to be able to have both of those qualities. And I don't think that the people in question have it. One of the things you said was that more times than I can count, I went to administrators and insisted that what they were treating as a slow burn was in fact a five alarm fire. When did you go to the administration and what were you met with?

So I knew from my synagogue that when something started to go wrong,

And ignoring it, never. It just never worked. It always would get worse if it had any legs at all. I mean, if it was a silly, I didn't get my parking space, it would go away. It's a very serious matter at High Holy Days time. It's true. And so, and I saw, because I wasn't from Harvard, I didn't have the mentality that a lot of people at Harvard had, which was, we'll be fine. We're Harvard. And in case you didn't understand what I meant, what I mean is, we're Harvard.

And they really felt that way. And I kept saying, it doesn't matter that you're Harvard. I'm telling you, I hear from the Jewish community outside of Harvard, who were, after all, my main contacts in the world. And I see by the increasing protests on Harvard York, they were getting bigger. This is not going away. It's going to get worse. And every time I said that, they would say, we've had protests at Harvard before. We know how to handle this. And I felt like I was screaming into the wind.

What do you think about the Trump administration taking aim and pressing this issue? Now, I want to separate that from the risk to scientific research, which I think is very dangerous, and the risk to advancing our status in leading scientific research around the world. But what do you think specifically on this issue of the Trump administration taking action?

First of all, I agree. They use a sledgehammer instead of a scalpel and a scalpel would be a much better tool. And I do think that tremendous threat that the universities feel did move them in a way that almost nothing else could. The fact that

what they're focusing on, the anti-Semitism that they're focusing on as powerfully as they are, I agree, has tremendous backlash potential. So what I would say is I think there are different ways to do it that might not lead to the same bad consequences as we have seen there have been some serious good ones as well. So I have mixed feelings about it. One of the things that is scary to me about your resignation is

is that while I understand why you had to resign, it also makes me feel like who's going to defend us? And I know that being, you know, a rabbi for almost 30 years of your life at one of the largest and most respected institutions here in Los Angeles was already, you know, a mighty torch that you had to bear for us.

Your position at Harvard was, for many of us, a real opportunity to have the voice of moderate and peace-loving Zionists have our place. And I don't mean to put this burden on you, but if you don't defend us and if reasonable, intellectually sound people entering the university system to try and help are not accepted, what is the solution? Is there not a place for us there? Um...

I mean, had I thought that I could make a difference inside, I would have. I think that actually my voice got louder by being outside. But I don't know. I mean, I hope there is a place. I think Alan Garber wants to make such a place. I really believe that. But time will tell because it's not only going to be Harvard. We have the same question about Penn, about Stanford, about Berkeley, about Harvard.

Columbia about a lot of these institutions and we'll have to wait and see whether in fact there is such a place. Many people that I know, you know, even again, people who call themselves liberals of all varieties are feeling like

the elite institutions, the institutions of the western part of the United States are simply cesspools for hatred, for divisiveness, and for a lack of academic integrity, even in terms of conversations. It, in some cases, worries me that many people are saying, I'm

I'm going to go to a conservative part of the country. I'm going to go to the South. I want to avoid all of this liberal nonsense. I want to get away from it. Is that sort of what you see as a dividing line now for a lot of students, even people who are not Jewish? I tell people that there are good reasons. If you have a good reason to go to Harvard, if there's a particular professor you want to study with, if there's a particular field you're interested in,

There are still many wonderful people there and tremendous resources there, and you shouldn't write it off. I don't want to lose the IVs, and I don't want to lose the IVs to Jews if it's possible still to rescue them. But you have to be willing to be in an atmosphere that is not entirely agreeable, and you have to be willing to maybe have some backbone and to stand up. And so there are a lot of other wonderful institutions, both

institutions that are established and new ones that are being created. If you want to send your kid to a place like Vanderbilt or UATX or a place that's trying to create something, and there are many, many others. I don't, by any means, that's hardly an exhaustive list. There are many institutions where Jews can flourish. You talk about false moral equivalency. One of the things that came out with the Harvard anti-Semitism report was this concurrent, uh,

report on Islamophobia that I guess the university just they could not contain themselves and just release a report on anti-Semitism. They also had to point out about Islamophobia, which the statistic you give 68 percent of religion based hate crimes are committed against Jews.

close to 9% are committed against Muslims, which does not mean that it is not a real problem. It does not mean that we shouldn't take it seriously, that any denigration of Muslim people, of Arabs is completely unacceptable. And for me as a liberal person, something we absolutely need to address.

But this notion of false moral equivalency is something that Sam Harris also talks about. This compulsive, compulsive, you know, clinical need to make everything the same, to mention the Holocaust in the same sentence as the establishment of the state of Israel as an affront to all of the Arab and Muslim world. What is it about this moral equivalency that has kind of taken over, in many cases, the academic world in particular?

I think that the way you get status is by being a victim. And so if somebody calls someone else a victim and not you, you feel like you've been denigrated. And so you have to say, well, you're also a victim, just like they're a victim. But of course, once you do that, what you do actually is eliminate the real issue on either side. Because anti-Semitism is a different problem. Society has to take anti-Semitism on its own

Because we've also seen again and again and again the tremendous historical damage that anti-Semitism does to societies. From Spain in the 15th century to Germany in the 20th century, anti-Semitism is a horrible cancer that eats away at the soul of a society. And it isn't only on Jews. In fact, it's not primarily on Jews.

to worry about this and to try to make it better. First they came for the communists and I did not speak up. Yes, exactly so. Yeah. Exactly so. And we are right now in the time of the Omer and the Omer is the time in between the leaving of Egypt and the coming to Sinai. And that means that people are in the wilderness and they haven't gotten the message yet, but we will soon. Amen. Amen. Rabbi Wolffy, where can people find out more about you?

Just Google me. I'm on X. I'm on Instagram. I'm on Facebook and I'm on email. Thank you for the beautiful work you do. We appreciate it. Great pleasure to talk to you. Jonathan, I want to ask you a funny question. If you had been brought in to serve,

on this committee and you saw a complete lack of accountability and an inability of the university to enforce the already established rules about how other students should be treated, what the time and manner is for protest, what would you do? It's interesting he said that his voice means more because he left. It's striking to me that you need a committee to enforce already existing rules.

Like the rules are there, either enforce them or don't. But like, what is the committee supposed to do? I mean, it's it brings out the most paranoid thinking that I have. Like, why is this so hard? I don't know why it's so hard. And, you know, the the easy answer is that like the Jewish cause and the hatred of Jews, which is, you know, the oldest hatred in the world. It's kind of like when people looked at what happened on October 7th and they were like, I don't think those women were raped. It's like there's only several things that

That it means when we see women who have just been raped and all of a sudden Me Too did not apply to that community. It's kind of what feels like is happening here. Like these rules apply, except when you actually have to apply them to a community that a lot of people don't want to support.

All these rules apply, except when there's such an overwhelming number of people breaking the rules that to discipline them would be to remove such a significant portion of the student body and potentially upset a significant portion of the faculty as to crumble the structure of the university, which goes to his point that.

It's putting perfume on a sewer. If the sewer is the thing that is a, you know, I don't know what the percentage is, 35%, 20%, removing that amount of the student body and potentially the faculty, what's left?

Well, I think also then it does become an issue of are people allowed to have other opinions as professors? I think so. Right. And I think that's what's interesting. Also, when you talk about the funding coming in from Qatar and from these kinds of countries, there's a very singular ideology that they're interested in. When you talk about Jewish donors, there's all kinds of Jewish donors. There's Jewish donors who are on the far left.

There's Jewish donors who are on the far right. You can't kind of compare those entities in terms of donors and who gets a voice, but we do need a diverse representation of opinions. However, if those opinions that, let's say, are on the, quote, far left,

and they are refusing to engage in conversation with other academics and other professors, and they're encouraging students to shout down other students, to be violent, and to eliminate the possibility for conversation, to me, that's an indication that you're interested in something other than being a faculty member. That's the formation of small militia.

We're not engaging in discourse. We're not trying to come to new ideas or overcome our differences. We're promoting extremist behavior on college campuses and to...

have extra credit to motivate students to participate in ideological issues is really not part of a curriculum. When I published my piece in The Atlantic about the attack on Hillel's, this was exactly the point that we talked about. When I was a student at UCLA, I was shocked that

Muslim Student Association, that was the organization at the time, we didn't have SJP yet, the Muslim Student Association would not talk to us. And they would hold up signs and stand there stone-faced. And we would try and engage with them. And they would just stare straight ahead. And it was like, what's happening? Like, we're trying, like, can we talk? Can we bring Palestinian students and Jewish students together? Can we have a forum? It was a

The policy of shouting people down and shutting people down was already something that was so foreign to me and that clearly has gained so much momentum and is antithetical to the reason that we're supposed to be in an academic environment. We're supposed to be able to engage with people who don't agree with us so that we can find a way to exist. That's what's going to happen with the Palestinian and Israeli people. Guess what? They're going to live together. They're going to share that land. That's what's going to happen. There's no other solution.

There's something conspicuous missing from today's conversation, and I do want to address it. We do not talk about politics in this episode. We do not talk about what led up to October 7th from the perspective of the Muslim world. We do not talk about the policies of the Israeli government. We do not talk about the policies of the IDF. What we talk about is the things that happened

on university campuses following October 7th, specifically beginning with a celebration of the massacre that occurred on those days and the trickle-down effects and what we can understand about what's happening on campuses in terms of how we treat all people and how we value Western ideals. We are not here to discuss...

the rights of any particular people to any particular portion of land. It's simply not what this conversation is about. Many people don't feel comfortable having any conversation the way we're going to have a conversation unless we address injustice 1948, 1973, 1967, 1917. That's not what we're here to do today. We're here to talk about where we can all come together in understanding what's going on at the university system, how it impacts all of us

Jews, non-Jews, people who know about the conflict in the Middle East, people who don't. This is about Western values. I know the comment section of this episode is probably going to be somewhat mind-blowing. We appreciate positive discourse. We appreciate the celebration that Jonathan and I are here to try and understand how we can cooperate together, how people can coexist. We are lovers of peace, believers in peace, and believers that all of these things can be tackled.

with the right things in place, the right kind of perspectives in place that we don't have to agree on everything, but we do need to be able to talk about it. We appreciate you being here with us and check us out on Substack and from our breakdown to the one we hope we never have. We'll see you next time. It's my and Bialik's breakdown. She's going to break it down for you. She's got a neuroscience PhD or two. And now she's going to break down. It's a breakdown. She's going to break it down.