Hello everyone and welcome back to People Jew Want to Know
podcast. This episode is literally with
one of my idols, Vlad Hikin. Vlad leads the North American
Advocacy and Social Impact Initiative for Simon Wiesenthal
Center, a leading global human rights activism organization
that confronts anti-Semitism and hate, defends the safety of
Israel and Jews worldwide, and uses lessons of the Holocaust to
teach tolerance. In his role, Vlad spearheads
policy changes that reduce acts of anti-Semitism and hatred,
create positive changes in behavior towards Jews and other
persecuted communities, and increase public support for the
State of Israel. He partners with people in the
highest levels of government, law enforcement, and faith to
protect against extremism and denounce hatred in the strongest
terms. Prior to Simon Wiesenthal, he
served as the Director of Public Research and Knowledge at the
Anti Defamation League or the ADL.
There he led international advocacy efforts, represented
the Jewish community with social media and technology companies
in Silicon Valley, he put out cutting edge research and
delivered programs confronting anti-Semitism and extremism.
He's also a former refugee from state sponsored anti-Semitism in
the Soviet Union and a grandson of Holocaust survivors.
Vlad is a legend to say the least.
He is a true scientist, researcher, scholar.
He's just a bright, sharp mind. And while I do consider him a
friend, he knows that I'm actually, embarrassingly, a huge
fan girl. I have very little to say in the
introduction because Vlad's episode is just so good.
My one thing to share, however, is that Vlad mentioned to me
offline that in May the Simon Wiesenthal Center is going to be
putting out a report outlining the Soviet anti Zionist tactics
that have recently been picked up by Iran.
This is super interesting and just timely.
When it comes out. I'll probably review it and
share about it when it goes live.
So please look out for that. For now, enjoy this episode.
Hey Vlad, welcome to People Do want to Know podcast.
Thank you so much for being with me here.
Hey, thanks so much for having me.
I have been waiting for weeks for this conversation.
Nothing makes me happier than to speak to fellow Russian speaking
Jews, former Soviet Union folks, and I am just like eagerly
awaiting to pick your brain on quite a few things.
Without further ado, please tell us about yourself.
What do you do and how did you get there?
My name is Vlad Hikin. I serve as the head of Advocacy
for North America for the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
Before that I spent almost 11 years at the ADL, the Anti
Defamation League, in various roles.
You know, before that I was at AJC.
Before that I was at JCRC. So I've spent most of my career
in this line of work, which is really deeply personal for me.
I came to the United States as a refugee fleeing the Soviet Union
from state sponsored anti-Semitism and anti Zionism
in the Soviet Union. And I'm also a grandson of
Holocaust survivors. My grandfather on my dad's side
fought Nazis across Europe, you know, liberated multiple
European capitals and then returned home to a grateful
nation. They called him a Zionist
fascist after liberating Europe from fascism.
And that's something I think I never really quite let go of.
I held on to that resentment for the way that my grandfather, a
highly decorated war hero, was treated and others like him were
treated that, you know, on the one hand they were, you know,
helped fight for the the fatherland as it was.
And on the other hand, they were persona non grata in society
because, well, for the crime of wanting to speak their own
indigenous language, wanting the right to practice their religion
or their traditional lifeways and in the way that meant
something to them, or even just to emigrate to the land of their
ancestors. For all those crimes, you know,
Jews in the Soviet Union were harassed and interned in some
cases. There was violence, there was
purges from positions of influence, all kinds of
discrimination and marginalization and persecution.
And so I think that really shaped who I am today, how I
think about the world and certainly my career path.
You would call yourself a former refugee of anti Zionism.
Walk the listener through what Soviet anti Zionism looks and
feels like and how it manifests today.
So my story isn't unique at all. Actually it is a story that
characterizes millions of Jews who are alive today.
You know, wherever anti Zionism was embraced as a matter of
policy, in every society that embraced it, it led to more or
less a uniform set of harms to the Jewish community in that
society. You know, dispossession,
disenfranchisement, displacement, mass violence.
You know, that was pretty much the story in all cases where
Zionism took root. And so, you know, when you look
at the sort of the the Jewish population today and where those
population centers exist, that looks very different from the
way the world looked in terms of its Jewish population centers
pre 1950s, let's say, right. You know, partially that's to do
with the Holocaust, of course, that really emptied Europe of
its Jewish population. But there was another wave,
right, that took place after the Holocaust with the various waves
of, of anti Zionist purges and waves of persecution, the show
trials, right? And so on.
That took place in Eastern Europe, the, the Soviet bloc
and, and its sphere of influence, whether we're talking
about Czechoslovakia, right, with the Slansky trial, whether
we're talking about Poland in 1968 with the student uprisings
that turned into sort of anti-Semitic uprisings.
And of course in the Soviet Union itself, where, where we
both come from, where there was all kinds of things that took
place that, you know, marginalized Jews that suppress
Jewish life, Jewish religion, culture and so on.
And so, you know, this is one of my pet peeves, right?
Is, is in the debates over whether anti Zionism is a form
of anti-Semitism. You know, those debates are
always had on the level of theory and it's always sort of
abstracted from the lived experience of Jewish people,
right. And, and why do we do that?
You know, if you want to know what it was like for Jews in
anti Zionist societies, there's millions of Jews alive today who
can tell you exactly what that was like.
They no longer live in the societies where all of this
drama took place because they had to flee it to to places
where they could be free, where they could be openly, proudly
Jewish and be dignified and be, you know, live in safety and so
on. This is why I say that, you
know, it's important to judge ideologies on the basis of the
material conditions that they create on the ground, rather
than the sort of beautiful self branding that always comes with
these ideologies. Because, you know, in terms of
the the language that's used to sell anti Zionism, oftentimes
it's very beautiful language about equality and justice and
all the things that, you know, normal human beings with a
functioning conscience would embrace.
And yet the reality is very different in the societies that
embrace anti Zionism. And so again, let's let's judge
anti Zionism and other ideologies on the basis of what
realities they actually create for the people that they target.
And and even in the societies more broadly, because anti
Zionism has always swept others into its maelstrom as well,
right? Like anti-Semitism generally,
anti Zionism also has harms that go well beyond the the Jewish
population in in the societies that embrace it.
It leads to, you know, anti intellectualism, anti democratic
phenomenon, right? And we've seen that whether in
Iraq or whether in, you know, the Soviet Union or Poland or
Czechoslovakia or any, you know, North Africa, it was largely the
same kind of story and the same sort of social harms that
accrued as a result of the spread of this ideology.
So let's stop having these theoretical abstract
conversations, which are fascinating to geeks like me who
love this stuff and want to debate it all day.
But at the end of the day, you know, if we are actually aimed
at protecting Jewish people, Jewish lives, Jewish culture,
you know, then what we actually want to do is look at the actual
impacts on living, breathing Jews rather than just looking at
these abstractions. You've built a career in
supporting Jewish people through different dimensions, right?
The ADL does one type of work. JCRC does another type of work.
Simon Wiesenthal does a third type of work.
Where do you think the most impact can be had right now?
What are the most effective things these legacy Jewish
organizations can do? First of all, I neglected to
answer the the second part of your question, right, which is
how do we see some of those currents that we experienced in
the Soviet Union? How do we see them manifesting
today? And I do think there is a kind
of genealogy here that links current sort of phenomena, you
know, to the Providence in in the Soviet Union.
And actually even even earlier than that.
I would say that anti Zionism of the kind that we see today, the
sort of demonological conspiracist anti Zionism really
takes root in pre Soviet Russia, right during the time of at the,
you know, at the turn of the century when there's, you know,
sort of all of these different groups vying for power, right?
Empires are collapsing. You know, the old systems of
monarchy are being challenged. And so you have a lot of
misgivings in society about, you know, a sense of uncertainty
about what the future is going to look like.
What is going to be the dominant system, Who's going to rule,
which ideologies are going to win out?
Communism, socialism, liberal democracy, monarchy, Right, all
of these different factions and groups vying for power.
And within that sort of environment arises Zionism as
one of the sort of movements, right, that is vying for power,
a specifically Jewish movement that insists on Jewish rights.
And so of course, anti-Semitism being primarily organized around
a suspicion of Jewish power was necessarily going to treat
Zionism as a lightning rod, right?
Because when you see Jews and they're organizing for power,
you know, the sort of anti-Semitic mindset, uh, leads
one to ask the question of, well, what are the Jews going to
do with that power? And you know, of course, the
answer to that is something malicious, right?
And so I think, you know, anti Zionism begins to take on these
sort of conspiracies notions about Jews wielding inordinate
and undue power over non Jews in a in a malicious kind of way
already at the turn of the century.
In fact, you know, decades prior to that, you already had people
like Vilhelmar, the guy who coined the term anti-Semitism.
He already talking about Zionism as a foul Jewish swindle, right?
Something nefarious, something malicious, something
manipulative and kind of criminal, maybe, right.
But you know, the Soviets very much developed that that older
propaganda, right? Every generation of propaganda
builds on that which came before it.
They use sort of use historical inertias to build upon and
create something that's really potent.
And they did, right. And initially it was used, I
think as a tool of domestic repression, right?
But very quickly, particularly after 1967, where Israel
basically handily defeated the Soviets, Arab allies, anti
Zionism of this again demonological kind becomes an A
product for export, right? And so it becomes a tool of
geopolitics and the Soviet intelligence begins to
disseminate anti Zionist ideas again in this sort of
conspiracist form. Not anti Zionism as you know,
sort of a sober opposition to Zionism, quasi Zionism, but
rather sort of an anti-Semitic conception of what Zionism is.
That looks very much more like the Protocols of Zion than any
actually existing Zionism, right?
And so, you know, they actually took the Protocols, translated
it into Arabic, Farsi and other languages, right, and
disseminated it across the Middle East, alleging that the
contents of the Protocols of the learned Elders of Zion, which is
an anti-Semitic conspiracy tract, probably the sort of the
ER tract that upon which a lot of modern anti-Semitic
conspiracy theories are based. They promoted the idea that the
the plot for global domination contained at the heart of the
Protocols was the plans of Zionism.
And so that that is partly why today when you speak to a lot of
anti Zionists, the Zionism that they're talking about, most
Zionists wouldn't recognize, right?
It's, you know, almost completely divorced from Zionism
as we know it and instead replaced with this conspiracy
theory about global domination and, you know, manipulation of
the media, control of governments, right, and various
other kinds of conspiracy theories.
And so the the Soviets, you know, wielded anti-Semitism as a
geopolitical weapon against the democratic West.
And those currents very much took on a life of their own.
Soviet intelligence influence operations were based in a kind
of propaganda that was always intended to take on a life of
its own and to turn the targets of the propaganda into its
distributive system, right? In other words, so it's not just
about convincing and spreading, it's about turning people into
the propagators of this conspiracy theory of the
propaganda itself, right? So it's this kind of viral or
self propagating form of disinformation, right?
And so today we very much see a lot of the ideas that were sort
of workshopped and pioneered and propagated by Soviet
intelligence that have become Derriger on certainly on parts
of the left, but also in parts of the right.
And this is something that a lot of people miss.
I think that, you know, we tend to think about left
anti-Semitism and right anti-Semitism and I think that's
a mistake in in many ways because it's foolish to think
that ideas remain quarantined to the ideological sector in which
they initially arise. That never happens, right?
When we study anti-Semitism historically, what we see is a
tremendous cross pollination of ideas from left to right and
back again, right? So I think it's important to
think about anti-Semitism as having a core architecture, but
dressing for the occasion, as I like to say, right, if it if it
comes to seduce the left, it's going to dress one way, right?
It might, it might Don a hammer and sickle armband right, and
speak in the language of the left, in the values of the left,
in the ideological frameworks of the left.
If it comes to seduce the right, it's going to speak a different
language, it's going to dress differently for that occasion,
right? It might wear a swastika armband
and it might speak in in the language of nationalism and and
patriotism and the values of the right, conservative values,
right and so on. If it comes to seduce
Christians, it's gonna speak in the language of the gospels.
If it comes to seduce Muslims, you get the point.
So it's important to understand anti-Semitism as this highly
protein, fungible, adaptable ideology that can really be
used, you know, to explain any grievance in the world.
And that is really, I think how anti-Semitism should be
understood not merely as a kind of organic social prejudice, but
rather as a as a kind of interpretive model or an
analytical framework that alleges to explain how the world
quote, UN quote really works, right?
Not the way that the sheeple understand it, but you know,
what's really going on behind the scenes, as it were.
And so if you understand it that way, you can understand that it
is a highly portable ideology that purports to, to basically
bridge the gap between the world as it exists or as we perceive
it and the world as we wish it was or think it ought to
function, right? So when you look out on the
world, you see various things that you're unhappy about,
right? No matter your vantage point
from the left, from the right, from a Christian perspective, a
Muslim perspective, whatever it is, you see, you know, innocents
dying in wars, you see people don't have enough to eat.
You see environmental destruction, you see political
corruption. You see all kinds of things that
we wish we didn't see in the world, right.
And the mind naturally wants to know what is the cause of this?
What is the cause of this suffering?
What is the cause of this injustice?
The utility of anti-Semitism. And I think it's important to
ask not only what is anti-Semitism, but to what end?
In other words, what what utility does it hold to for
those that embrace it? And I think one of the, you
know, a tremendous end, this utility that anti-Semitism holds
is its explanatory power, its ability to allay sort of a
psychological anxiety around not knowing the source of the
threat, right? If you are somebody who's
struggling to put food on your family's table, the first
question in your mind is how do I stop this?
How do I end this deprivation, right?
How do I change my economic situation so that I can feed my
family? And that necessarily requires
some sense of well, how did I get here?
What caused me to be in these dire straits?
anti-Semitism comes along and gives you the answer.
It's the Jews, the Zionists, the globalists, the rootless
cosmopolitans that are the cause of your suffering, the cause of
the suffering of your people, of your society, of your nation, of
the world, Right. And so that puts us back into
the sort of control seat. It puts us back in the driver's
seat because it tells us, OK, yes, these things are going
wrong. But now we've identified the
source of the problem. And if we strike at the source
of the problem, we can correct the problem, right?
In other words, anti-Semitism alleges that Jews or Zionists or
whatever euphemism you want to use stands between US and that
better, brighter, more just and equitable world that, you know,
we want to see, right. So if you want to get to that
world, what do you have to do? Well, you have to remove the
impediment, which is the Jews or the Zionists or, you know,
etcetera. OK, so Jewish institutions, what
can what can be done I. Think this this is a great segue
because you know, if the Jewish mind works in very similar ways,
we too are seeking the cause of the problem.
And you know that are facing us in this case specifically
anti-Semitism. There's a way in which we want,
you know, a sort of panacea, right?
And that makes sense. We want to feel safe.
We want to feel secure. We want to feel dignified and
respected in our society, right? And unfortunately, though, I
don't think there's a silver bullet to anti-Semitism.
If there was, you know, we probably would have solved this
thing a long time ago. I think the way to think about
it, rather than than thinking about, you know, what is, what
is the one thing that can solve anti-Semitism?
You know, if we can just find that one message, that one
intervention, that one piece of educational content or that one,
you know, whatever it is, right, then we'll, we'll save our
people, right. I think that rather the
important question to ask is for every individual, you know,
where are you best positioned to have an impact?
That is the, the core fundamental question that I
think each one of us has to ask because really this fight
requires all of us. You know, it's not going to get
solved by, you know, a few dozen folks at an NGO working on this
thing. It's, it's too big, it's too
powerful. It's got too much historical
momentum for, you know, for a few NGO workers to really solve
this issue. So it's going to have to involve
all of us and and it's going to have to involve us really
thinking about our position, the skill set, the assets that we
bring to this fight, right. That could be funds.
If you're a person of means, there's a lot of things that
could use your funding right, be it research, be it the creation
of different kinds of interventions.
You might have relationships and connections, right, that could
be leveraged in service of fighting anti-Semitism.
You might have a membership on certain boards or have a
standing in certain groups or organizations.
You know that again where that work can be done.
You know if you are, for example, if you if your politics
are lean left, you're not going to be as effective fighting
anti-Semitism in. In right wing political spaces,
as you are on the left, right, because you're going to be seen
as an outsider, you don't have the cultural capital in those
spaces to really convince people that, you know, maybe these
George Soros conspiracy theories are trending a little bit into a
an anti-Semitic direction, right?
Because the truth is people have tremendous blind spots where it
comes to anti-Semitism in their own backyard, right?
Everybody can readily identify anti-Semitism across the
political spectrum over there, right, with those people who
have those politics. Where we struggle is to identify
anti-Semitism of the people who share our political ideology
viewpoint, right and so on. But that's actually where we
need to do the work because again, you're not going to be as
effective in spaces where you're seen as not what part of the
family, right? You're not, you're not on the
inside. You're an outsider.
So do the work where you're positioned to to have greatest
impact. And there's really no, no end to
the kinds of interventions we need here, right?
Because it's not a unilateral kind of issue here.
It's not simply a policy issue. It's not merely an education
issue. It's not merely a media literacy
issue. It's not merely a national
security issue. It's it's a whole bunch of
things that that come together to create this problem.
And so the solutions are similar going similarly going to have to
be, you know, sort of multidisciplinary, if you will.
There's, you know, those who have skills in, for example, in
in social media, right? That's a very useful skill.
People who have skills as educational curriculum
designers. That's a really useful skill.
People who know how to do research right that's a really
important skill. There's so much that we don't
know about anti-Semitism, how it functions, why it functions, its
harms right. There's there's still very scant
research into this phenomenon, which you know, is one of the
oldest and I would say Moat historically most successful
phenomena that has seduced people across eons, across
generations, across cultures, political ideologies, religious,
etc. And so one of the things that I
say is what can we learn from anti-Semitism, right?
How can we reverse engineer this incredibly successful
psychosocial phenomenon, right? So I would sort of encourage
movements, groups, organizations in individuals to think about it
in those ways, right? To think about where are you
best positioned to have an impact?
What do you bring uniquely to this fight?
You know, critically to think about anti-Semitism in those
terms, right? Not merely as a kind of organic
social prejudice, but as an interpretive model that helps
explain the a, a complex and and often scary world to people.
And if you approach it that way and understand why it's been
successful, what makes it so successful, then we can
potentially reverse engineer some of that right to use it
against to fight anti-Semitism, right?
Which is part of how I think about my work, certainly at the
Simon Wiesenthal Center and and previous to that at ADL.
There are kind of camps forming now around what to do with the
word Zionism. So there are all these for
example activists that are saying we need to reclaim the
word Zionism. Like where your Zionist AF shirt
out and proud explain to people what Zionism is and then there's
another camp that's like that ship might have sailed.
We need to use other language to get the message across.
Like let's talk about Jew hatred.
Let's set Zionism aside and still explain kind of the
negative impacts of all of this. What do you think I?
Mean this debate has been going on for years and there's
certainly very strong opinions. And I do think terminological
debates are important. You know, terminology matters.
How we define and explain our world, you know, the terms we
use to, to sort of explain our world.
It really does matter. I perceive a kind of desperation
in these debates, though, a real sense, again, going back to to
what we just discussed. You know, there's a there's a
real desperation to find that one thing, right, that one
explanation so that people finally get it.
There's been such tremendous gaslighting of Jews around the
issue of anti-Semitism, right, that it's all in your head.
Oh, you're making it up or, or even, you know, oh, you're just
using the the charge of anti-Semitism.
You're pulling the anti-Semitism card, right, in order to cover
up Israeli crimes or, you know, whatever the case may be.
The amount of gaslighting to which Jews have been subjected,
I think has led to this real desperate attempt to find this
one sort of rhetorical maneuver, this one explanation, this one,
you know, sort of terminological tool that we can use so that the
rest of the world finally sees us and sees what we're
experiencing, right? And sees that no, this really is
anti-Semitism. We're not making it up.
It's not in our heads. We're not using it to manipulate
people. It really is happening in the
way that we described. I lament the fact that that we
we have these debates in this way.
I'll also say that I, I think I don't know that there's like a
perfect descriptor here, right? Because, you know, the those who
want to just use Jew hatred, well, anti-Semitism and and
including in its anti Zionist form can't really be reduced to
hatred, right? As I already said, it's more of
an analytical model, right? It's more of a particular way of
of trying to make sense of the world than it is a an emotion,
right? Hatred is an emotion.
anti-Semitism operates beyond sentiment, right, beyond sort of
feelings. It's really again a way of
trying to understand the world. So I'm not sure that describing,
you know, anti Zionism as just Jew hatred is really accurate.
On the other hand, it might be more effective, right?
What's what's most accurate is not necessarily what's most
effective, right, rhetorically speaking.
And so, you know, when you say Jew hatred, people get that they
understand it viscerally sometimes, right?
And so, you know, there might be a good reason to go with a
descriptor that's maybe less technically accurate but more
rhetorically effective, right? Like calling it Jew hatred.
So I don't know, these debates are complex.
I think whatever the case may be, all of this, we can't guess,
right? We can't guess at this.
We actually need to subject any of these hypothesis to rigorous
scientific testing, right? You know, when you describe
something as Jew hatred, how does it land versus if you
describe it as anti-Semitism versus if you describe it as
anti Jewish prejudice or you know, any other descriptor that
you might come up with which one gets through to people?
What is the effect of using one term over another?
There's research happening right now that seeks to get at those
kinds of questions, but really we really need a lot more
research into these questions. There really is just not
insufficient research into anti-Semitism and its
corollaries. And so I, you know, if you are a
Jewish philanthropist that's listening to this, there's a lot
of good places that you could direct your philanthropic funds
to help us better understand this phenomenon, which, you
know, again, has been around for thousands of years and yet
remains really poorly understood.
There I have two favorite gaslights.
I don't know if that's a noun. I have two favorite gaslights
that I hear that always drive me nuts.
The first one is, well, that's not how Zionism is defined.
That's not how I define Zionism, as if Zionism is like can have a
personal definition. That's my first favorite
gaslight. My second favorite gaslight is
from our very own community. It's to me a form of
internalized anti-Semitism. Have you seen the movie?
So be bore. Yeah, with Constantine Hebensky,
so very famous Russian actor and producer and director, and he's
like, I don't know, Tom Cruise, Bradley Cooper level in Russia,
and he's a Jew. And he made a film that was
nominated for the International Oscar about the revolt of Sobie
Board. It's all based on a true story.
And as I got to see, this was years ago.
I got to go to a premiere in New York City where he took a Q&A
afterwards. And that was like the first time
I ever met, you know, a celebrity like that in my life.
I was so excited. I planned a question.
And as I watched the movie, I felt this kind of vibe that,
like, the Jews walk themselves to their own slaughter kind of
vibe. And that here was this
character, this protagonist played by Constantine Hibianski,
who wouldn't stoop like the rest of those Jews.
And he mobilized everybody to stage a revolt.
And if it weren't for him, all of them would have been dead.
And so that's the kind of vibe I picked up on.
And I asked him. I said, you know, are you
telling me that the Jews could have done more and with this
film? And he basically said that the
Jews are very old people, a very wise people, but they didn't see
it coming. And that's a big mistake on on
our part effectively, which is the most kind of common
internalized anti-Semitism in the former Soviet Union
mentality. They have been the Jews
themselves have been convinced they did something wrong, you
know, when it comes to the Holocaust.
And that's another form of gaslighting.
That's so profound, yeah. Well, I mean, look, this is a
really important point that you're making, which is that
nobody is immune to anti-Semitism.
I'll repeat that. Nobody is immune to
anti-Semitism, including Jews, right?
Jews are just human beings who live in a society.
And if that society happens to be suffused with anti-Semitic
undercurrents, right messaging, you know, cultural norms, social
dynamics, etcetera, for centuries.
And if you live in that society, you can't help but be influenced
by the same thing that the rest of the society is going to be
influenced by to varying degrees lesser, more.
But but at the end of the day, Jews too are susceptible to
anti-Semitism. And you do know, in the Soviet
Union, you know, and this kind of brings us full circle, right?
There was one of the prevailing ideas about Jews is that they
were unwilling to fight, right? That they were unwilling to
fight to defend the, the fatherland, the homeland, and
generally that Jews are not that they're weak, that they're Neba
she, they're not soldiers, they're not fighters.
They're not, they don't have physical prowess, They're weak.
They are cowardly, right? They're, they're not the kind of
people that you think are going to take up arms to defend the
nation. And so it was very common to
hear in the Soviet Union, including from, from elected or
elected officials. It's that's, that's silly to say
in the Soviet Union, but but from the from the government
itself, you would hear these messages that Jews did not fight
the Jews, you know, basically sat out the war.
The truth is, of course, that like my grandfather, there were
many, many, many Jewish war heroes, highly decorated, you
know, veterans of the Second World War.
And of course they used them, you know, where it was useful,
for example, the anti Zionist committee of the so of the
Soviet public right, which was this body that was formed by the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union to basically put a kosher
stamp of approval on their anti-Semitic and anti Zionist
policies and to promote anti Zionism among Jews and and, you
know, to run interference basically against charges of
anti-Semitism. You know that that group was led
by a highly decorated Jewish war hero, General Dragunski, right.
So it's not that people didn't know that there were actual, you
know, highly decorated war heroes among the Jews, but there
was this prevailing notion and this constant messaging that
Jews did not fight, the Jews could not fight, that they were
cowardly, right? And all this, all these things.
And I think you're right that Jews to, to varying degrees,
internalized this idea. And you do see it coming up.
The truth is, of course, that many Jews did see it coming,
right? Those Jews were called Zionists.
They left and they now have families in Israel and those who
who didn't see it coming, well, many of those are no longer with
us, unfortunately. But the reality is that
somewhere between 30 and 40,000 Jews, I think, took up arms
outside of the traditional armies, right outside of the Red
Army and so on, the American military, that they took up arms
as resistance fighters, right, as partisans.
And in fact, that was my first sort of nonprofit job was the
the Jewish Partisan Educational Foundation, which is, you know,
dedicated to preserving and disseminating and teaching about
the history of Jewish resistance during World War 2.
Because, you know, Jews didn't go like sheep to the slaughter.
They did resist in many ways, both in armed conflict, but also
in many other forms, right? Cultural resistance, right, and
so many other acts of, of bravery and defiance.
And that's a really important story that needs to be told
because it does shape how people regard Jews.
You don't gain respect from the world by basically laying down
your arms and and going like sheep to the slaughter.
That's not a narrative that's going to win friends for the
Jews, right? It makes Jews seem kind of
pathetic and and not people you really want to ally with.
We got a chance to talk about this offline, the fact that
there is a form of internalized anti-Semitism happening today,
specifically when it comes to Zionism, especially progressive
circles. What are you seeing now on the
ground? I think this is something that
we really haven't tackled as a community.
You know, the internalized depression is something that is
a factor in many minority communities.
But I think we, you know, the Jewish community, I think is a
little bit behind other communities that have been
marginalized and suppressed to bear, you know, subjected to
various kinds of racist propaganda, stereotyping,
essentializing and so on. In terms of our sort of
recognition of this phenomenon, in terms of our understanding of
this phenomenon, research into this phenomenon basically
doesn't exist. There's really quite little out
there that is scientifically rigorous, you know, in terms of
inquiry into this phenomenon of internalized anti-Semitism, the
processes of it, the harms of it, right, the impacts of it.
So, so that's one of these sort of lanes of research that I
would offer really needs a lot of support work and funding and
so on, because we really don't know so much about how this
works or the effect that it has on us.
You know, I often use the example that let's say you are a
Jewish woman in a corporate environment who, you know, is
really kick ass at her job, right?
Just killing it every day and then you know, it's time, you
know, for your review and it's time for you to potentially be
promoted or get a raise. If you are operating in an
environment in which Jews are seen as materialistic, money
driven, acquisitive and so on, are you going to advocate as
powerfully for yourself as you otherwise would as a Jewish
woman? I would offer that often times
the answer is no, because we don't want to be seen as
fulfilling those stereotypes, right?
And so the question that arises, what is the economic harm to the
Jewish community when you extrapolate from the individual
onto an entire community? What is the economic loss from
just that one very narrow impact of internalized anti-Semitism,
right? The way that it conditions us to
act in ways we wouldn't otherwise act, right?
So this is something that that really needs to be studied to a
much greater degree and, and understood much more deeply.
You know, in the 1954 Brown V Board of Education case, it
really turned on this key piece of research, right?
That was funded by the Jewish community and carried out by a
couple of black psychologists, the Clarks.
And what they sought to understand was the pernicious
effects of segregation on the minds of black children, right?
And So what they came up with was of the doll test.
And you can go to YouTube right now and punch in doll test and
you can see a recreation of this experiment.
But the basics of it was that they took tiny little black
children, you know, 5678 years old, and they put in front of
them a black doll and a white doll.
And then they asked them a series of question, which is the
good doll? Which is the naughty doll?
Which is the smart doll? Which is the stupid doll?
Which is the beautiful doll? Which is the ugly doll?
Now, which doll looks like you? And it is one of the most
painful things that I forced myself to, to witness on a
yearly basis because it reminds me of why I do this kind of
work. It is so painful to watch these
tiny little children already having internalized at the age
of, you know, 5-6, seven years old, these ideas about
themselves that they are somehow less worthy, less smart, less
capable, less beautiful, simply because of the color of their
skin. And there's a parallel
phenomenon that Jews also experience, right?
And, and all groups that have faced marginalization and
oppression and persecution face these kinds of things, whether
you're a woman, whether you're black, whether you're Jewish,
internalized anti-Semitism is real.
And it it does shape our behavior.
It does impact our sense of self worth, our sense of dignity, our
sense of, you know, what we're capable of, what we should
strive for, what we can achieve, right?
And and so I think especially at a time like right now when you
know, young Jewish people, but really all of us are being
subjected to just a torrent, a tsunami of anti Jewish content
that is conditioning us to think that Jews are, you know, less
honest, less dignified, less worthy, less humane, less
ethical than other people, Right?
That repetition over and over and over again, like a steady
drip of poison into our social media feeds over time.
That has an effect. And we don't know the scale and
scope and depth of the harms of that effect because it hasn't
been studied. But we know it's incredibly
pernicious. We know that it has tremendous
harms to the Jewish psyche, to Jewish people, to the Jewish
community writ large. And so, you know, we really need
to understand this phenomenon better, but also we can't wait
to get that research. We have to start acting now.
And so I think it's really important to almost repeat this
as a mantra, right? Particularly for young Jewish
people, but really for all of us that this isn't true.
It's not about us and it's not our fault. anti-Semitism is
based on falsehoods. It doesn't approach the Jew as
the Jew exists. It creates A fictitious
villainous Jew on to whom we project all of our misgivings
about society, about the world. Right.
As we previously discussed, the Jew of the anti-Semitic
imagination is a caricature. It's not really about us.
anti-Semitism really at its heart isn't about Jews.
It's about all of the psychological drama, the
misgivings, the sense of disempowerment,
disenfranchisement, dislocation, etc that the non Jewish world
has and then projects on to Jews, right?
So it's not true, it's not about us, and it's not our fault,
right? The anti Jewish virus.
Does not arise from within the Jewish society.
It's a malady of the non Jewish world.
So that's where the work needs to be done, right.
It's the non Jewish world that needs to heal from this virus
with which it's been infected and that's we can't do that for
them. What we can do though, is focus
on the again, the degree to which we've been infected with
that same virus, that same internalized anti-Semitism.
Unless we critically self analyze and look at, you know,
to what degree we have internalized some of these ideas
and sort of sentiments and ideological inclinations
ourselves. Unless we do that, it will sort
of sit in the background, right, and sort of do harm to us
without us ever recognizing it. So, you know, I think we have to
set aside this pretense that anti-Semitism is something that
comes from outside, right, That we are the guardians at the gate
trying to keep this this thing out.
We have to recognize that the call is already coming from
inside the building. It's already burrowed its way
into our psyches, right? Even the most proud Jews, even
people who have spent their entire careers fighting
anti-Semitism. I still would not get too
comfortable thinking that no, no, not me, not me.
Couldn't be me, right? I'm impervious to it.
No, all of us. All of us.
The proud Jew, the disconnected Jew, the unaffiliated Jew, the
Jew who spent every single, you know, Shabbat in synagogue and
the one who's barely ever set foot in synagogue.
All of us are susceptible to internalizing these ideas.
And so we really have to be vigilant about this.
We have to be vigilant with ourselves.
We have to be vigilant with, with our, our kids, our young
people in our lives, right? Because if we, if we aren't, we
risk losing an entire generation because we think about
anti-Semitism in the most extreme forms, right?
The Holocaust, genocide, mass violence, right?
But it's a spectrum. And one of the ways that
anti-Semitism operates is simply by raising the cost of being
Jewish, doing Jewish affiliating Jewishly so high that Jews just
start to opt out. You know it's not worth it if
being openly and proudly Jewish and affiliating with Hilal on
campus means I'm going to be called a baby killer every
single day on campus, right? And subjected to the most ugly,
nasty slurs and smears. At some point I might decide,
you know what, it's not worth it, and I might start to opt
out. I might take off my Star of
David. I might stop identifying as
Jewish, stop going to Jewish events, stop affiliating with
Jewish organizations and so on. And we really risk losing an
entire generation. But there's two parts to that
equation, right? On the one hand, it's the cost
of being Jewish, which anti-Semitism always seeks to
raise that cost, right? Raise the price of entry into
Jewish identity. But the other factor of that is
counterbalanced by the value of being Jewish.
In other words, Jewish people are willing to pay the price of
being Jewish so long as what they get for their Jewish
identity is something meaningful, valuable, right,
that has utility for their life, right?
So that also is AI think a challenge to Jewish
organizations to ensure that we have a Judaism, a Jewish
culture, a Jewish communal infrastructure, programming,
etc. That brings meaning to people's
lives, that brings value into their lives, that helps them
understand how to make their way through the world, that gives
them a sense of belonging, that gives them a sense of cultural
richness and so on. If we don't do that again, we,
we really risk losing an entire generation.
And if we lose an entire generation, we risk losing it
all right, because that line of continuity is so important.
We've we've maintained this, the Jewish story, we've written the
Jewish story across generations, right?
And it would be such a shame if we close the book on the Jewish
story in this generation. So my part of my mission is not
to allow that to happen, right, To ensure that, you know, at
minimum, right? For my part, I don't work on the
sort of cultural production side of things.
I don't work in, in a synagogue or a Jewish cultural
institution. I work primarily in an
institution that seeks to keep the price of being Jewish down,
which is to say to fight anti-Semitism, right?
And it's corollaries. But that is, you know, how I see
my mission, right, is to ensure that Jews live in an environment
where they can be Jewish and where the cost of being Jewish
does not rise above the value that Judaism and Jewish identity
brings into people's lives. Vlad, what an honor to have you
tell me how can people connect with you and learn more about
your work? Sure.
Thanks very much. Yeah.
So I go through periods of being active on on social media.
I think recently I've been less active, but you know, I'm, I'm
on Twitter X whatever it's called these days.
You know, I'm, I'm on Instagram, although I don't post much
there, but you can connect with me through through the Simon
Wiesenthal organization, wiesenthal.com.
Come see us at the Museum of tolerance, right.
Wiesenthal Center runs the Museum of tolerance in LA.
We have a incredible new exhibit going in slated to open in 2027.
This is an exhibit on contemporary anti-Semitism,
right? We deliberated for some time,
but we ultimately arrived at the decision to focus on
contemporary anti-Semitism, which is to say largely post
1945, which is to say post Holocaust.
We didn't want to do a 3000 year retrospective on anti-Semitism
because we didn't think that that's what the world needs
right now. What the world needs is to
understand the anti-Semitism that threatens Jewish
communities today, not the anti-Semitism that threatened
our great, great greats, right? And so the exhibit is really
going to focus on the contemporary occurrence of
anti-Semitism, including some of the stuff that we've discussed
today, right? Including the practical
implications of anti Zionism, right?
To show the story of what happened to Jewish communities
in Iraq, in Syria, in Lebanon, right in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt,
etc. As well as of course the Soviet
Union and the Eastern Bloc countries to show that story,
right? To actually force people to
reckon with the practical implications of anti Zionism.
Not just again, it's, it's sort of self branding or self
promotional content. So come, come see our exhibit
when it opens next year. We, we really are working with
some of the top contemporary scholars and thinkers on
anti-Semitism, on various diasporic communities and, and
how the events that ultimately led to this mass migration,
right, this exodus from from around the anti Zionist world,
how that all sort of unfolded. So it's a, it's going to be an
incredible exhibit. I encourage all of you to come
and check it out. And of course, you know, around
the exhibit, we're also planning a whole host of different
events, panels, lectures, film screenings and so on.
So it's really going to be, I think, a an important cultural
moment. And we really hope to be able to
use the exhibit, you know, not just as a nice, you know, come
and see it, but but really to to begin to bring decision makers,
institutional decision makers, community leaders to the exhibit
so that they hear the the story of the Jewish experience with
contemporary anti-Semitism across the world, Right.
And we hope that that they will also have the opportunity to
hear directly from some of the people that lived it.
Because again, there's millions of people alive today, be they
Soviet Jews or be they Mizrahi Jews, who can tell you what it
was like from personal experience to live in an anti
Zionist society. And so we hope very much to
bring that into the world and bring decision makers and
communal leaders to the museum for this kind of experience so
that they really understand what it was like for Jews in practice
over the last century dealing with anti Zionist societies.
If you need a panel moderator, call me, I will come to LA.
Absolutely, Absolutely. I have one final question for
you. It's one that I ask every guest.
Who would you like to nominate for People Jew want to?
Know great question. Well, you've already had my my
friend and colleague Melissa Mott on so that would be that
would be one person I would recommend.
You've had a lot of great guests.
So a lot of people that that come to mind are folks you've
already had. One person I might recommend to
you is Y'all Feinberg are Y'all is a friend and a colleague,
collaborator, a Co conspirator perhaps.
He is the head of the the first graduate program in
anti-Semitism studies at Gratz College.
It's the first of its kind in the United States.
And but more than that, a Y'all is building the field of
anti-Semitism studies, which is so deeply important.
You know, again, this is a field that is very nascent in terms of
the research. It's really still in its early
stages and y'all is is somebody who is broad minded enough to
think beyond his own immediate institution and has really been
somebody who has gone out and and sought to assist others who
are looking to set up their own programs in the study of
anti-Semitism. And I just can't say enough
about how important that is because we really need in this
fight people who really have a deep and sophisticated
understanding of anti-Semitism beyond sort of the simple
platitudes of, you know, anti-Semitism is Jew hate.
Because although rhetorically it might be effective in certain
contexts, it doesn't really help us understand anti-Semitism in
its complexity, in its mechanics and dynamics and how it moves in
the world. So it's a really important thing
that he's doing. You know, I, I've agreed to
serve on the faculty for, for the program at grads college and
of course support all the efforts to build the field.
But I, I really think y'all would be a fun guest because
he's not only incredibly knowledgeable, not only somebody
who's doing incredibly important work, but also is a lot of fun.
I think you guys are going to have a really a blast doing a
podcast together. So if you'd like, I'm happy to
make that introduction. Thank you so much, this has been
incredible as always. My mind is blown.
You know I'm your biggest fan and I really appreciate your
time today. This has been nothing short of
iconic mic drop. My hat's off to you.
Thanks for doing this. You're very kind.
I really appreciate it. Thanks everyone.
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