A Convenient Villain: From Lindbergh to Israel

Lio • 00:21 Welcome, everyone, to TheJewFunction. I'm Lio, this is Seth. Good morning, everyone. Just turn up your gear a little bit. How about that? Yeah, a little better. Today we have a slightly different episode. It's very much a Jew Function episode, but we brought on a guest who is not usually part of our roster. He looks at Judaism from a different perspective. He wrote a book called A Convenient Villain: Charles A. Lindbergh's Remarkable and Controversial Legacy Preparing the U.S. for War. And if you're asking yourself what the connection is between Charles Lindbergh and the Jews, he's going to tell us. He brings a generational perspective to the way antisemitism is constructed, how societies need a Jewish-adjacent villain, and how even beloved American leaders can privately dismiss Jews while publicly appearing to protect them, and vice versa, as we saw. So he's here. Hopefully, he will help us answer the question that we're trying to answer every time we gather, which is: What is the root of antisemitism? How do we put a dent in it? And what does that have to do with the stories that we tell ourselves as Jews and the stories the world tells about us? And whether we belong with everyone or have a special role in the mix. For that, please welcome Dr. Jonathan Reich. Reich, nice to meet you. Reich, I'm sorry. Thanks. Why did I think it was pronounced “rike”? I don't know. Jonathan • 02:00 Okay. Thank you for having me. I'm glad you decided to take a slightly different tack and learn something from history, because history has a lot to teach us. Lio • 02:08 Well, first of all, people who follow the podcast know that we are actually big fans of history. We spent the first 22 episodes covering the entire Jewish timeline, from the time of Abraham to the modern era. In doing so, we tried to look at the different events in history where Jew-hatred erupted, what preceded it, what happened afterward, and what we can learn. Are there any patterns that we can put our fingers on? And indeed, we found plenty of patterns. So if you look at Jewish history as one big social experiment—a three- to four-thousand-year-old social experiment—there are plenty of facts. You can say this is almost like a scientific experiment. You're a scientist. You like history. You like research. So, in a way, when something keeps happening for three thousand years, you can probably learn something from the statistics, right? That's what we try to do, and we arrived at some very interesting conclusions. But I want to hear your point of view first. You're a doctor, a cardiologist, and then, during COVID, you got a little bored and decided to turn your attention to history and apply the same methodology to studying it. You went after the great American hero of 100 years ago, Charles Lindbergh, right? So why Lindbergh? And what's the connection to the Jews? Give us a little. Jonathan • 03:42 I was an aerospace engineer before I went to medical school, so I have an interest in aviation. During the pandemic, I read a biography of Lindbergh, and I realized that the historian, who won a Pulitzer Prize and wrote a great book, wasn't appreciating an aspect of Lindbergh's history: that he had actually made a major contribution to America's preparation for World War II. The more I read about it, the more I became interested in his reputation as the iconic antisemite of the 20th century. How did this legacy develop? What was accurate, what was inaccurate, and what could we learn from it? So I wrote a book. It took me three years. I went to Connecticut and went through his papers. I went to Minnesota to see his childhood home. I went to St. Louis to go through the archives they have at the Missouri Historical Society. And now I've spoken all over the country. I've spoken at aviation museums. I've spoken at medical-history functions. But Jewish people remain very resistant to listening to what I have to say because the premise of the book is that Lindbergh is a convenient villain—that he is the iconic American antisemite when he was, in fact, not an antisemite—and that Franklin Roosevelt was the real villain because he interfered with the legally enshrined rights of Jews to qualify for visas to come to the United States between 1933 and 1941. Lio • 05:24 It's interesting because we also talk about Roosevelt. We didn't talk about Lindbergh, but when we go through our little tour of history, we end up with the story of the St. Louis, which I'm sure you're familiar with, and what happened there: Roosevelt denying extraordinary measures to help these Jews. Our focus was not so much on Roosevelt, although if you listen to his conversations, he did have a bit of an anti-Jewish streak in some of the things he said, the way he related to Jews and how—I think he put the quota in at Harvard or something, right? So he had that. But what Seth and I were curious about was the role of Jews, the role Jews played in working against Jews, and how sometimes we are our own worst enemy. We found the story of Rabbi Stephen Wise and his influence, or lack thereof, on the process, which resulted in the St. Louis turning around and almost 700 of the 900-something people perishing. So that's a story we know about Roosevelt. We agree with you that Roosevelt was not a great guy, but what's the story with Lindbergh? Jonathan • 06:48 Okay, so Charles Lindbergh was born in Detroit in 1902. In 1927, he flies across the Atlantic and instantaneously becomes the most famous man in America, something that was unique to a new media age in which there were movies and sound, and people could get instant exposure to news. In 1929, he marries Anne Morrow, the daughter of an American senator. In 1932, his first child is kidnapped and murdered. In 1934, the man who did it is arrested, and in 1935, he's condemned to death. The sensationalism of the media and the fact that the law had not caught up to the new media age meant there was no protection. People had no protection from the press. The Lindberghs were being harassed, and on top of the trauma of having their son kidnapped and murdered, they were constantly having their privacy violated by the press. So on December 21, 1935, the Lindberghs and their surviving son, Jon Lindbergh, get on a boat and go to England to get away from the United States. He lives in Europe for about three and a half years. While he's in England, he's invited to go to Germany by the United States Embassy in Berlin on what is essentially a spying mission. The U.S. military attaché in Berlin, a man named Truman Smith, realizes the Nazis are making major military advances, but he can't get access to them, and he doesn't understand aviation. So he finds in Lindbergh a willing tool of U.S. intelligence, because Lindbergh is going to be used by the Nazis for propaganda. Lindbergh knows this and tries to prevent it. He writes back to Truman Smith and says, “I don't want any social functions. I don't want any media present.” But, of course, his requests are ignored. In those three and a half years, in addition to being used by Hitler for propaganda, he never makes any statement in support of the German government. He does not say anything antisemitic. He gives one speech in Berlin in 1936 in which he says to the Germans, “You are going to start a war. I see what you're doing, and you're going to start a war.” Journalists who, in three years, would call him a traitor laud him as a great hero for having the courage to stand up to the Germans. He writes intelligence reports that are critically important in terms of the United States winning World War II. And in January 1939, he tries to get Jews out of Germany, something that is not widely known. Very few people realize this, but it was all publicly available. No one decided to write a book about it. He comes back to the United States in 1939 and becomes a political figure advocating for isolationism and opposing U.S. entry into World War II. Now, Charles Lindbergh, over the course of his life, had never said anything antisemitic to anybody. He'd had business arrangements with Jews that had gone badly. His best friend, Harry Guggenheim, was Jewish. The man who prosecuted his son's murderer, David Wilentz, was Jewish. His publisher was Jewish. His wife's publisher was Jewish. The man he hired to make the movie of his life, The Spirit of St. Louis, was Jewish. None of these men ever said that Charles Lindbergh said anything antisemitic to them. There's no record that he ever used a slur against Jews, Blacks, or anybody. He was very progressive in terms of African Americans and their rights. He may have been the only U.S. public figure who stood up for the Japanese when they were being sent to internment camps. So how does he get this reputation as the iconic American antisemite? He gives one speech on September 11, 1941, in Des Moines, Iowa. In that speech, he asks a fundamental question about American foreign policy: Why is it in our interest to go to war for what the Jews want? Is what the Jews want in America's national interest? And why should 130 million non-Jews go to war? It was a legitimate foreign-policy question. Now, you can quibble about the wording, and I'm happy to go over the speech word by word with anybody who wants to. But this is a question that had been asked since the Spanish-American War, when we allegedly went to war for Cuban rebels in Cuba and Filipino rebels in the Philippines. Was it in our interest to protect these people? It's a question that George Marshall, the Secretary of State, is going to ask in 1948. It's a question that Henry Kissinger is going to ask in 1973 about the Soviet Jews. So I don't believe that this was an antisemitic speech. Lio • 11:27 Let's put a pin in that. I want to ask specifically about the point you just brought up because we hear the same question asked today: Why is America going to war because of it? Now, I live in Israel, and I try to educate myself on facts and on the cultures around me. I'm not trying to assume anything. I understand that whatever I see in the media is probably 10%, or even less, of what's actually happening between politicians and the common and mutual interests, or lack thereof, of two huge countries—two big superpowers in their own right: America as America, and Israel in the Middle East. Maybe back then it was a different question, during Lindbergh's time, but today you have to be really naïve to think that America is going to war for the Jews. Israel is doing what America wants to do but can't do in the Middle East in many respects. The public interest of the West has been, de facto, entrusted into the hands of Israel because it's willing to stand up to the radicals who have already been playing on America's home court since September 11, probably, and maybe before that. So I think it's a strange thing. Seth • 13:06 But why do you think—hold on one second. You could make it even more simplified: The message that the public gets through the media is never the true story. Simply that. Lio • 13:23 So what was it? People were buying it back then? People are buying it today? Jonathan • 13:28 What was the Jewish interest in 1939 and 1941? One, it was not necessarily to enter the war. What the Jews wanted was for Jews to be allowed to leave Europe. That was our primary interest. Unfortunately, that was not what Americans were hearing because American Jews were not speaking up for themselves. The shame of the conflict with Lindbergh was that our interests were not contradictory. Lindbergh never advocated restricting immigration. A lot of isolationists did, but Charles Lindbergh never did. He actively recruited people to the United States who had expertise in medicine, science, and aeronautics. He would do that his entire life. The Jews had tremendous expertise. One hundred Jewish physicists who got out of Germany prior to 1941 won 11 Nobel Prizes. There was tremendous academic and intellectual expertise among the Jews of Germany. Had that argument been made to Lindbergh, I don't see why he would have opposed it. The conflict between the Jews and Lindbergh was not entering the war. The conflict between Lindbergh and the Jews was that nobody understood what the Jews really wanted. For that, the blame is, in some respects, ours. To some extent, we see that today when you talk about the Jews—excuse me, Ron, John—you talk about the Jews— Seth • 14:57 —as having some unified voice. Was there a collective Jewish opinion here in the United States, and also in Europe, about what they wanted? And who was representing them? Because what we understood was that there were different voices. Jonathan • 15:07 Okay, so Eleanor Roosevelt, in 1937 and 1938, starts saying that the Jews aren't Americans yet, and that if we wanted to be Americans, we had to not complain. The Jewish philosophy, according to B'nai B'rith, was that we would take our suffering in silence. There are Jews with access to Roosevelt: Felix Frankfurter, Louis Brandeis, and Henry Morgenthau, who was the Secretary of the Treasury, were all Jewish. They had access to Roosevelt, and they were all asking for immigration. They were not asking for the United States to enter the war. Felix Frankfurter is the quintessential American Jew of the era. He comes over from Austria before World War I at the exact same age as my great-grandfather. He gets through Harvard. He becomes a Supreme Court justice. In public, he makes no identification with being Jewish. He marries a non-Jewish woman. He has a non-Jewish funeral. But in private, he's asking Roosevelt for two things. One, he's asking for a boycott of German businesses. And two, he's trying to get the Jews out of Germany and Austria. Unfortunately, in public, he's not saying anything. Very few Jewish people are saying anything in public. So Lindbergh does not know that this is what the Jews are actually advocating for. Now, there were Jews—you're right, Seth—who did not want to advocate publicly, or who argued that Jews should not be given special treatment. But the Jews were not asking for special treatment. We can get into Roosevelt and the immigration laws. The Jews were asking for equal application of the law. That was our right as citizens of this country: to petition our government to address our grievances. Unfortunately, there were a lot of Jews who didn't feel that we should. There were a few who did. For example, Jack Warner, the co-founder of Warner Bros., was making anti-Nazi movies, and he said his justification was being Jewish. The same was true of the star of his movies, a man by the name of Edward G. Robinson. He was saying, “I am doing this because I am Jewish.” Therefore, Lindbergh's question is perfectly legitimate. If someone today attacked David Axelrod for being Jewish, it would be ridiculous. They'd be an antisemite because David Axelrod doesn't go around saying, “I'm Jewish, and therefore I believe this.” But in the 1930s, they were saying that. Therefore, it was appropriate for Lindbergh to ask: Is Jack Warner's interest in the interest of the United States? I don't believe there was anything antisemitic in the question he was asking. The problem was the answer. The problem was that we didn't say to Charles Lindbergh, “Our primary interest is not entering the war. Our primary interest is equal application of the law for immigration.” I think Lindbergh would have agreed. Lio • 18:12 And so they just labeled him an antisemite based on that speech? Jonathan • 18:17 Yes. Lio • 18:18 And from that point on, everybody whom this title served embraced it. Seth • 18:29 Like with Elon Musk, for example, saying he's an antisemite because of something like that. Jonathan • 18:37 If you read the speech from September 1941, Charles Lindbergh says three remarkably philo-Semitic things. First, he says that the Jews are being persecuted in Germany. Now, that doesn't seem, from our perspective, to be a question, but there were a lot of people denying that the Jews were actually being persecuted in Germany. Newspapers were burying it. There was very little access to news in 1941. People got their news from newspapers, or when they went to the movies on Saturday morning, they saw a newsreel. So not only does Charles Lindbergh come out and say, “Yes, the Jews are being mistreated in Germany,” because he'd been to Germany and seen it with his own eyes, but he says that anybody who does not agree has no sense of dignity. This is remarkable. This man is admonishing his own supporters. This man is saying that if you believe in a conspiracy theory—that the media is conspiring to convince us Jews are being mistreated in Germany—you have no sense of dignity. That's a remarkable thing for a public figure to do. The second thing he does is say he admires the Jews. Nobody in 1941—no non-Jewish figure in 1941—came out and said they admired the Jews. They said, “Yeah, okay, I don't like the Jews, but the Jews are being mistreated in Germany, and it's inhumane.” The third thing he does is say that the Jews have the right to advocate for their own interests. No antisemite ever said that. No antisemite ever came out and said the Jews have the same democratic rights as every other American. This was acknowledging that the Jews had a legitimate point of view, but saying, “I disagree with it because I don't think it's in our national interest.” He said, “We can't let the prejudices of other peoples lead us to destruction.” Bad wording, I agree. It terrified the Jews of the era. But his point was that it was not in our national interest to sacrifice a million men to enter a war unless our nation was going to be attacked. Of course, we were attacked 90 days later, but no one knew that at the time. Seth • 20:36 Jonathan, Lio and I always peel back the costumes and the characters in history and look for patterns behind them, the data behind the history. Do you see in this story something relevant to our lives today? Jonathan • 21:00 Absolutely. Before we do that, let's talk about Roosevelt. Let's talk about what Roosevelt did. According to the Immigration Acts of 1921 and 1924, every country in Europe was given an allotment of visas for immigration. The State Department was very clear—and Roosevelt has to take responsibility for the State Department because he appointed these people and knew what they were doing—the State Department decided they were not going to issue those visas to Jews. So between 1931 and 1941, Germany and Austria together had about 580,000 visa spots. Half of them weren't used, and half of those that were used were used by non-Jews. So the total number of Jewish people who came to the United States from Germany and Austria, out of 580,000 available visas, was about 125,000. Seth • 21:52 Between which years? Jonathan • 21:54 Between 1933, when Hitler comes to power, and 1941, when we enter the war. So there were about 580,000 slots. Half of them weren't used, and half of the ones that were used were used by non-Jews. Now, qualified non-Jews were certainly entitled to visas. I'm not saying that every visa had to go to a Jew. But they didn't have to wait. They didn't have their documents invalidated. Non-Jewish applicants for U.S. visas did not have to go through the same security checks and review that Jewish applicants did, because the review was a way to prevent Jews from getting visas. As an example, if the State Department wanted to know if you were married and you gave them a ketubah, they would say that didn't count. “That's not a civil document. That's a religious document.” But if a German had been married in a church and gave a church document as proof of the marriage, they accepted it. So by the State Department's determination, if you used a ketubah to prove you were married, you were not really married. Your children were illegitimate, and they could reject you for low moral character. This was a standard that applied only to Jews. Now, a couple dozen of the non-Jews who were given visas turned out to be spies. Between 1933 and 1941, the Germans did send a fair number—a couple dozen spies—to the United States, and they did some real damage. Of the ones who weren't spies, who were simply Germans who came to the United States for economic reasons, a lot of them pledged their support to Hitler. A lot of them pledged their support to a foreign government. There was a rally in Madison Square Garden in February 1939. Twenty thousand German Americans attended, and they all raised their right hands and pledged their allegiance to a foreign government. So yes, non-Jews were entitled to visas, and I'm not saying that every non-Jew who came to the United States between 1933 and 1941 was either a spy or a traitor. But a percentage of them were. None of the Jews were. But because they weren't vetted, because the State Department saw no reason to vet them, they were allowed in. Lio • 23:51 I'm sorry, who was creating this policy? Jonathan • 23:56 The Assistant Secretary of State was a man named Breckinridge Long. The documents showing that he was preventing Jews from receiving visas are all in the public record. You can find them on the internet. He uses the euphemism “German-intending immigrants” for Jews, and he says, “We are going to prevent German-intending immigrants from coming to the United States.” He does this for every country in Europe. So the number from Germany and Austria is 580,000. The number from all the countries in Europe is about 1.5 million. That means that a quarter of all the Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust were legally entitled to visas that were denied to them by the Roosevelt administration because they did not want Jews coming to this country. Lio • 24:47 But it doesn't stop with visas. We see later reports from pilots flying right over Auschwitz, not bombing Auschwitz for a variety of weird excuses, but bombing factories right next door. They didn't bomb the railway leading to Auschwitz. They didn't bomb the gas chambers or crematoriums. I mean, they could have bombed the place itself, even with the Jews there, to prevent more Jews from being sent there. Jonathan • 25:13 In 1943, Breckinridge Long testifies under oath before the U.S. Congress, and he lies under oath. He says, under oath, “We gave 580,000 visas to Jewish immigrants.” That was the total number of visas that were available. The actual number of visas was about 125,000. Because he committed perjury under oath, the Roosevelt administration is forced to conduct a review. So the Treasury Department, which was headed by a Jewish man named Henry Morgenthau, does an investigation, and the report is made public. So in 1943, the American people became aware that the United States State Department had been illegally preventing Jews from getting visas. That's why I say Lindbergh is a convenient villain, because it was not a secret that the Roosevelt administration had been doing this. Now, you mentioned the St. Louis. The St. Louis was in June 1939. Nineteen thirty-nine was the only year in which the German visa slots were filled. So in 1940 and 1941, there were slots, and no one used them. When Roosevelt refuses to answer—because he does not say anything; he refuses to answer—the State Department says, “We have no visa slots for these people.” But there were visa slots because the U.S. Virgin Islands had visa slots for these people and offered them to the U.S. government. “They can come to the Virgin Islands.” The U.S. government says, “Those are only six-month visas. After six months, they won't have any place to go.” So there was a place for the passengers to go. They all could have gone to the U.S. Virgin Islands. The governor of the U.S. Virgin Islands was very happy to take them. The Dominican Republic offered 100,000 visa slots to Jews. The Roosevelt administration blocked that also because they knew that the Dominican Republic could not accommodate 100,000 Jews. It was mostly agricultural, and these were Jews coming from Germany who had never lived in a tropical environment. They weren't going to become farmers. The Roosevelt administration knew this, so where were they going to go? They would wind up, in the end— Seth • 27:20 Jonathan, was there any difference between admitting Orthodox Jews versus secular Jews, or was it just a blanket policy? We understood that there was some pushback against having Orthodox Jews come into the United States and “giving Jews a bad name.” But was there any difference here, or was it all one? Jonathan • 27:41 Not that I've seen. Now, I'm aware of a number of Jews who were baptized at birth, or who could get certificates, and who got immediate visas. Fritz Lang was a very famous movie producer who was born in Austria in 1890. The Germans don't know he's Jewish. Goebbels offers him a very prestigious position at a film studio, but he realizes somebody is going to out him—that he's really Jewish. So he steals his wife's jewelry, crosses into France, and gets a visa immediately. Here's a man who has a criminal record who gets a visa immediately because people don't think he's Jewish. He comes to the United States and starts making anti-Nazi movies. The Roosevelt administration tries to suppress his movies. The other movie studios try to take the editing equipment away from him. So I'm aware that there were a number of Jews who were able to successfully hide their Jewish identity and were given visas. Another one is Enrico Fermi, the famous physicist. He was not Jewish, but his wife was. He was able to get a visa immediately to leave Italy because he wanted to get his wife out of Italy. Then he educated nine men who won the Nobel Prize. So you've got the 11 Nobel Prizes won by Jewish physicists. The nine that Enrico Fermi trained mean one out of every three Nobel Prizes in physics was won either by a Jew who escaped Germany or somebody who was trained by somebody who escaped Germany. The intellectual loss caused by the actions of the State Department is mind-boggling. Think about every discipline of science. Think about every country in Europe, not just Germany. All the doctors and scientists, engineers, metallurgists—everybody. Seth • 29:30 This is some kind of phenomenon of humanity, though, like the burning of the Library of Alexandria. There was this possibility of something, and then, because humanity was not mature enough or capable enough—like you're saying, imagine what could have been. Jonathan • 29:54 We had 2.5 million people displaced in the Dust Bowl. So we had 2.5 million Americans—American citizens, American children—who had no medical care. Now, I've done research on this as a physician. Of the 2.5 million Americans who were displaced by the Dust Bowl, about 75,000 of them were provided with healthcare. There were thousands of doctors in Europe. There were thousands of Jewish doctors in Europe who could have provided medical care to these children. The 1930s were not the 1890s. We had insulin. We had penicillin. We had theophylline to treat asthma. The asthma during the Dust Bowl was awful because of all the dust. Thousands and thousands of American children died simply because Jewish physicians in Germany were not allowed to come over. Think of the loss of human potential among non-Jewish Americans who were denied medical care because of the State Department. It's mind-boggling what the United States lost because of Roosevelt's actions, not because of Lindbergh. Lindbergh—go ahead. Lio • 30:53 So is your case—I haven't read the book, obviously—but is your case that the real villain was Roosevelt, and that Lindbergh was actually a great guy who was misunderstood and misframed by— Jonathan • 31:10 Everybody is human. Charles Lindbergh was a human being, and he had his faults. In the run-up to World War II, he makes a lot of very specious arguments, and some of it sounds like German propaganda. So I'm not going to say Charles Lindbergh was a great guy, because it was in the United States' interest to enter World War II. He was wrong. He never admitted he was wrong. He spent the rest of his life making excuses. So Lindbergh certainly had his faults. When it comes to the Jews—look, Roosevelt was a great president. I'm not going to deny that. The Depression, he won World War II—I can't deny that. People are complicated. But when it comes simply to the issue of the Jews and the oppression of the Jews in Germany, yes, that's the argument I'm making. Charles Lindbergh is a convenient villain. It is easy to blame him. But he was actually asking a question ahead of his time. The question could not be asked in 1941. Lio • 32:04 Right. But are you drawing the same line to today? Is Israel a convenient villain? Are the Jews simply convenient villains in the eyes of Western society? Jonathan • 32:16 I have three lessons about today's advocacy and Lindbergh that I prepared and would like to tell your listeners. Lesson number one: Advocate for ourselves. Lindbergh gives this speech in Des Moines. There's terrible criticism of him. The non-Jews jump into this argument. The non-Jews who had been ignoring antisemitism in our universities, in housing, and in immigration are suddenly appalled by Lindbergh's antisemitism. The press realizes that this is hypocrisy. The press realizes that people who were antisemites and are suddenly supporting us are only doing it for political purposes. The criticism of Lindbergh suffers because many of the non-Jews who are suddenly on our side look like hypocrites. Now, I talk a lot in my book about Dr. Seuss, Theodor Geisel. Theodor Geisel is a beloved author of children's books, and he was an advocate for the Jews. Consistently, he was not an antisemite. He puts out a lot of cartoons criticizing Lindbergh, including for the antisemitism in the speech in September 1941. But Dr. Seuss also put out a lot of cartoons that were very critical of the Japanese and depicted them as rats and traitors. My point was that in the 1930s and 1940s, everybody had some issue. Everybody had some skeleton. You have to advocate for yourself. Today, I don't see Jews advocating for themselves in certain instances. The one that's very personal to me is college campuses in the United States. I'm a graduate of Columbia University. I graduated with a degree in engineering, and I'm active in the Jewish Columbia Alumni Association. So I was very familiar with what was going on at Columbia's campus. I applaud Trump for going after Columbia University. Now, as a physician, I don't like people turning down or canceling medical grants. But somebody had to do something, and Trump was the only one who was willing to go after Columbia University. He forced a lot of changes, and I'm very happy about that. Lio • 34:33 Right. Jonathan • 34:34 But he can't carry water for us. We have to advocate for ourselves. The issue that I don't hear in the press is that this was not a free-speech issue. The press wants to frame this as a free-speech issue. People have the right to protest on behalf of Palestinians. They absolutely do. If you do it legally and get a permit, you can protest all day long, for all I care. They were attacking Jewish students. They were attacking Jewish students verbally. They locked them in a library and banged on the windows. They took over a building. They vandalized the building. They trapped janitors. Hold on, excuse me. Excuse me for a second. Seth • 35:10 These are all effects. If you pour half a billion dollars of Qatari money into Columbia University, there's going to be something at the end of the pipeline, right? To just look at what's happening on the street and try to fight that, without realizing where it came from— Jonathan • 35:26 It's kind of missing the point, right? I don't hear Jews saying, “We're all for free speech, but we're against harassment. If my kid can go to class without being harassed, you can protest until the cows come home.” I don't have a problem with that. At UCLA, there was practically a riot because they wouldn't let Jews go to class. We're not making that point. That's lesson number one from Lindbergh's life: We have to advocate for ourselves. Lio • 35:59 Okay, so just on that lesson, I agree we're not advocating for ourselves. The big question would be: What would we say? And the second question would be: What can you say when there's a growing voice from within American Jewry that supports those violent protests and opposes Israel? There's so much distorted information, a loss of connection with the bedrock of Jewish thinking, with the purpose of Jewish existence in the world. You end up with people who are very shallow intellectually. They have a thing about human rights and humanity and all that, but it lacks perspective, historical context, basic knowledge of their own tradition, the facts on the ground, and the culture. So much is lacking, and you end up with a cartoon of what it means to be a great humanitarian. These are the people who now rise against Israel. There are growing numbers among the youth on the left, and now it's starting on the right as well. They're completely turning against Israel like never before. Jonathan • 37:24 There's a certain percentage of people you simply can't talk to. There's always going to be a certain percentage of people with whom you have nothing in common, whom you can't talk to because your values are so different. My experience dealing with Jews who don't like Israel or want to protest against Israel is that they're not in favor of assaulting people. They're not in favor of beating people up or banging on windows and intimidating people. I think there is a percentage of people who don't support Israel with whom we can agree: Protest in peace, but leave my kid alone. That percentage may be getting smaller, but I think we could reach an agreement with some of those people and have a reasonable discussion. If people want to accuse Israel of war crimes or atrocities, that's their First Amendment right. It's not their First Amendment right to say something is genocide unless we're trying to eliminate a people. Obviously, we're not. They sit on the Supreme Court. Lio • 38:29 Exactly. But we see that facts have nothing to do with it. I hear people chanting all kinds of nonsense that is not based on fact at all. So I guess that's the point I'm trying to get to in terms of your first lesson: We have to advocate for ourselves. What would we say? What can we say? What should we say right now, at this point in time, that someone like Lindbergh did not say? Now that we are the convenient villain again, I would say, what can we say now? What do we need to say? Jonathan • 39:01 The first thing we need to do—this was lesson two—is defend our right to petition our government. After these recent elections that elected Democratic Socialists, you saw attacks on AIPAC. There were a lot of people saying, “We have to make AIPAC illegal.” We have the same right to lobby as everybody else does. We need to defend AIPAC. We need to say that we have the same right to petition our government as everybody else does. If you say AIPAC needs to be investigated when you have no evidence that they did anything wrong, then you are denying us our rights as American citizens. That is, by definition, antisemitism. You can vote for whoever you want, but you can't say we don't have that right. The other thing we need to be saying, which we're not saying—and this even applies to the Israeli government—is that recently, a United Nations Special Rapporteur put out a report about Israeli war crimes. The first argument has to be that the United Nations was complicit on October 7. I didn't even see the Israeli government say that. What I saw the Israeli government say was, “Well, what about what Hamas did?” Whataboutism is never a good argument. You can never win an argument by saying, “What about somebody else? What about what they did?” because it's not analogous. The United Nations started out on October 7, 2023, by drawing a moral equivalence between what happened on October 7 and what Israel had done previously. Secretary-General Guterres said in his first statement— Lio • 40:38 Yeah, he's a big antisemite, though. I mean, it's not a fact— Jonathan • 40:40 The United Nations is not entitled to express its opinion, in our view. We will not take its opinion seriously because it was complicit on October 7. I don't even hear the Israeli government saying that. Lio • 40:54 Well, the ambassador to the UN just said something. Jonathan • 40:58 I read the official response to that report, and I did not see that in there. It was all about— Lio • 41:03 No, this was just now. He just said it now, also about making these allegations about sexual crimes. He said, “Unless you retract this, there's no—we're not talking, because this is nonsense. You're not basing your allegations on anything from the ground, just on reports from who knows whom.” Jonathan • 41:28 That's interesting because I did some research. Pramila Patten is the UN Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, and she watched 50 hours of video footage from October 7. Lio • 41:42 She heard the girl who came to testify. She's talking to her, and she's just looking at her with dead eyes, right? Jonathan • 41:50 Right. Her report said there were “reasonable grounds to believe.” That's what she took from 50 hours of video. In the Congo, when there was sexual violence, she didn't use the words “reasonable grounds to believe.” She said there was serious and credible evidence to support allegations of sexual violence. The U.S. representative from Washington State, Pramila Jayapal, said that rapes had to be taken in context. There's no other example of any public figure ever saying that sexual violence—I Googled this. I looked. Could I find another example of anybody, not just a U.S. congresswoman, but anybody, saying that sexual violence had to be taken in context? It can't be found. I think we should label people who engage in moral equivalence as “Jayapals.” We should say, “You're a Jayapal.” I think we're too deferential to our critics in some respects. Seth • 43:03 Maybe we're also not even looking at things through the right lens. Lio and I have discussed many times how the West doesn't understand the Arab mentality. When you try to negotiate, you can't use this Western mindset of, “Let's try to make something fair. Let's try to do something good,” when people have a completely different mindset. We can say whatever we want. We can do any kind of ceasefire. I'm sure I'm not educating you on this. You understand what I'm talking about. It's a completely different mindset. There's an English expression: Don't put a fox in charge of the henhouse. So this woman you're talking about, if she's a fox—there's also the Aesop fable about the scorpion who wants to cross the river, right? Lio • 44:00 He gets—the frog, right? Seth • 44:04 So that's what we're dealing with. It's not something where we have to stand up for ourselves or try to convince them. It's never going to change. Water will always look for the lowest point. The scorpion—it doesn't matter what he tells you—given an opportunity, he's going to strike. So if we understand that we're talking about very strict laws of nature, and these people operate—as if it's a movie, or just a play, or if you go through history and see this—rather than calling a person by their name, if we could identify them as forces that cannot help but move in certain directions, that's what we really want to get into. Saying that on the streets of New York City we should fight back—okay. But if there's already water running down the hill, trying to stop it at the bottom may be necessary, but it doesn't solve the problem. You're a historian. You know a lot about what's going on. We want to understand the forces that are at play behind all this and what we can learn from that today. Where do we stand now? If all these things play out—we know the UN is not our friend, we know all these things are happening, we know people are conspiring against us—you've seen the movie already. You know the story already. You've researched this for years and years. Where are we today? How does this play out, and what does that mean for us? Jonathan • 45:41 Well, the big difference, I think, between today and the 1940s is that the Jewish voice is fractured, and people can find a Jewish voice to listen to that agrees with what they have to say. A good story from the 1940s is that when the United States invades North Africa in November 1942, the Jews of North Africa are in concentration camps. The Vichy French have them in concentration camps, and the United States Army does not free them. There are a lot of reasons why the U.S. Army says it won't free them. They're afraid of an Arab revolt. The truth is, they don't want to feed them. They don't want to be responsible for them. They've got enough things to do fighting the Nazis, and they don't want to be responsible for them. But by February 1943, the U.S. Jews, the American Jewish Congress, and the World Jewish Congress, in a unified voice, come out and say, “You are not freeing the Jews from the concentration camps in North Africa.” Then the U.S. Army frees them. Sometimes Jewish pressure does work, and sometimes Jewish pressure can accomplish change. In this situation, those of us who understand, who are Zionists, have to be unified among ourselves because we have nobody else. I don't think we can fix the fracture in the Jewish world. We can't get those Jews who disagree with us to say what we want. They will be recruited by the media to undermine our argument. But that doesn't excuse us from not fighting harder. Lio • 47:21 Jonathan, do you look at history, take an even wider step back, and look at the history of the Jews and the relationship between the Jews and the rest of the world over the years? Being a Jew yourself, being in Israel and seeing things firsthand there, and then coming back with all those perspectives, do you feel that the Jews represent an anomaly? That it's not the exact same story you can find with every other small minority? There's a different story happening with Jews, for whatever reason. Jonathan • 48:08 Absolutely. Lio • 48:09 Okay. Absolutely. And what's the source of that? Jonathan • 48:13 In the book, I make two biblical references. I don't know that there's another book about Charles Lindbergh that makes biblical references. First, I make reference to the burning bush, to the story in Exodus. The lesson of the burning bush is that Moses has to advocate for us—that he has to go do it. You have to go do it for yourself. The other reference I make is to the Book of Numbers, in which the Jews who left Egypt are not allowed into the Promised Land. Now, I know there were some Jews born in Egypt, like Joshua and Caleb, who do go into the Promised Land. But the vast majority of that generation has to die off. The point is that people born into slavery can never truly be free. Our grandparents' generation could never truly be objective. Having lived through the Holocaust, they could not be asked to identify who was really at fault and who wasn't at fault. But from our perspective, we can see it because we didn't live through it. We can really look at it objectively and see who truly undermined our interests and who didn't. Now, we don't have the gift of 80 years. We have to do that now. We have to see now who's undermining our interests and who truly represents our interests. I think the dividing line between antisemitism and an unpopular opinion has to be understood by Jews. We can't waste our energy going after people we disagree with. We have to use our energy going after the people who truly wish to do us harm. We're threading a very—go ahead. Lio • 49:46 No, no. Finish that. Jonathan • 49:48 In this upcoming midterm election, we're threading a very, very narrow needle. On the right and on the left, there are people who seek to do us harm. In the middle, there are people who have made statements critical of Israel. James Talarico, who is running for Senate in Texas, is an example of someone who has been very critical of Israel but has not used the word “genocide.” He has not strayed into antisemitism. These are people we can support. We can disagree with them. Netanyahu won't be prime minister forever. There'll be a new government. If we fight everybody, then we won't fight anybody. I think this is the lesson, at least for American Jews, as we enter the midterms: Find the difference between a Graham Platner, who just dropped out of the Senate race in Maine, who was truly an antisemite, and a James Talarico, who's running for Senate in Texas, who was critical of Israel but not an antisemite. I think we have to find those people. Jon Ossoff is a Jewish senator from Georgia who's running for reelection and who may very well win. Because he may win in a red state—red meaning a Republican state—he may be a very important candidate for president in 2028. He has said things critical of Israel. That cannot be our litmus test. Our litmus test has to be whether someone crosses the line into conspiracy theory, into an antisemitic conspiracy theory. Lio • 51:17 We agree. I think the Israeli story is just an instrument, just as there was the religious card 2,000 years ago, then the race card, and now the Zionist card. That's fine. There will be different cards that people take out of the deck to justify their feelings toward the Jews. The question is broader for us because we're not just trying to deal with the symptoms of Jew-hatred. We're not trying to play whack-a-mole with these different manifestations as they come up. We're trying to find a systemic reason for antisemitism—or, rather, for Jew-hatred—for that sentiment and why it always remains. It's always there. It's never gone away. Even during the best of times, it was always under the surface. It just needed a little spark to ignite it, and now the flames are rising. I think there are bigger questions here. It's not just about who we're voting into power in the U.S., but whether the U.S. is even salvageable. Can Jews dream of enjoying the same equal status—or seemingly equal status, I may qualify—that they've enjoyed for the past 80 years? Or is it all downhill, and should we cut our losses and maybe leave? I'm not ready to move on. Jonathan • 52:57 I'm not going anywhere. This is my home. I was born here, and I intend to fight it out. I don't think the destiny of the Jews in the United States has been predetermined. Lio • 53:11 Well, we just had a guest—I'm sorry. We just had a guest here last week, a New York native, born and raised in New York, Jewish, who taught at NYU for 26 years and started a school there. And that's it. Two months ago, she left after two years of harassment. She went to Connecticut. Jonathan • 53:37 She didn't leave. Lio • 53:38 Well, okay. I'm just saying, for me it's even harder. To leave New York and stay in America—if you're a New Yorker and you love the city, where would you go? Nothing comes close, and she had to leave. My point is, it doesn't look too good. Also, the demographics and the work the Muslims are doing—it's not so— Jonathan • 53:51 I took out my Jewish star, which I wear, and I see patients with it. I've never had a negative comment. Even the Arab patients I see, the Muslim patients I see, are very happy to see a Jewish doctor. Lio • 54:07 It's true that in some cases, you have to see a Jewish doctor, a Jewish lawyer, right? Jonathan • 54:14 I'm not that pessimistic yet. I could be wrong. I could be wrong, and it may be much worse than I think it is. But I'm not ready to throw in the towel. I think we just keep fighting. The only way they win is if we quit. Those of us who agree with each other have to band together and fight. I don't know that I can answer your fundamental questions about antisemitism. Lio • 54:38 No, no. We're not looking for that. We're looking for your personal perspective. You're not a child. You've been around. You've moved around the world. You see that human nature is good in some places, and it's not so good in other places. But you also see that humanity as a whole is subject to a lot of different forces that can steer it and take it into really dark places. When something really big unfolds, there's not much you can do. You have to roll with it until it plays itself out. That's usually when big wars start or big calamities happen. When a volcano erupts, that's it. There's nothing you can do. You can't just put a lid on it. You have to move out of the way, let it cool, and then you can come back. I feel like Seth and I have been covering this topic for almost two decades, right? Give or take. We're not that old, but it's been on our minds since we were very young. I'm asking you: Doesn't it feel strange that every few years, a Jew has to stand up and defend his right to exist as a human? Something is not working out. Something in the program is not working out. That's what we're asking. Have you ever asked yourself—I'm appealing to your doctor side, so put on your doctor hat for a second. I'm going to bring network science into this a little bit because we talk about it. The network of humanity obeys the same laws as every other network: the internet, the electrical grid, airports, phone lines, the human body, nervous systems. They all represent networks, and networks all operate the same way. They have a lot of nodes and a few hubs, right? You can kill off or lose a lot of nodes—not a problem. But if you start losing hubs, the network starts to hurt. You're a heart doctor. You know that the human body is the same way. It has a lot of nodes, a lot of cells, and some tissue that you can lose—not a problem, relatively speaking. But if you start losing a hub, like a heart, a liver, a lung, or a brain, that's already a problem. You cannot live without a hub. It's very hard to do it. So we argue that the Jews are hubs in the network of humanity, and something is not right when the network keeps applying this pressure. It's like an autoimmune disease. The body is ganging up against the hubs for whatever reason. The only reason we can come up with—if you look at history and look at Jewish sages—is that they say the hubs are not doing their job. They're not working correctly relative to the rest of the body. Now, clearly, you can say, “Well, we've given you science and medicine,” as you said, great physicists, chemists, physicians, Nobel Prizes. Yes. But maybe that's not what the body needs. Maybe that's not what humanity needs. Jonathan • 57:46 Nobody will ever care. No antisemite will ever care what advances we've made in science. Lio • 57:54 Exactly. Jonathan • 57:55 It won't matter. The Jews who fought in World War I for Germany—it didn't matter. Lio • 57:57 Exactly, exactly. That will never matter. So the question is, I'm asking you to take a leap of imagination or faith, whatever you like. What do you think? What is our role in humanity? What is our function, as this podcast is called? What do you think it is? It's not just to fend for ourselves. I don't accept that. That's not a purpose. That's a symptom of something. Jonathan • 58:24 Well, the Jews are certainly unique, as you've pointed out in your other podcasts. We continue to survive, we continue to thrive, and they can't get rid of us. What is our purpose in the human body? Our purpose in the human body is to have our children, raise them as Jews, see our grandchildren, and pass away as individuals. That's our job. The role of Jews in humanity is above my pay grade. I don't know why this keeps happening. I don't know why it's always under the surface or why it keeps happening. But what I have learned from studying the life of Charles Lindbergh is that the vast majority of people on this earth do understand the difference between disagreement and hatred. I do think that if we make our arguments, and if we make them credibly, no matter how limited our access to the microphone is—if we use that access to make our arguments—I don't think the vast majority of Americans are going to think we're guilty of genocide. They may disagree with Israel. They may say, “We shouldn't give them military support until there's a different government.” But I don't think they're going to abide by the views of the far right and the far left. I think we can fight for that, and I think we can win that fight. Ten years from now, put me on your show again, and we'll— Seth • 01:00:04 We definitely will. Here's something that shocks people like me. You're successful in so many fields. The way you understand this topic—you weren't an author. You weren't a historian. You spent three years on it, and now you have this huge breadth of knowledge about the topic, right? It also boggles my mind that doctors today, when they go to medical school, don't have to take any nutrition classes, right? It's the same kind of thing. When you zoom out, we need to ask this question—the big question: Why is it all happening? Lio and I feel we need to connect with people like you who have such capabilities, such understanding, and such an ability to see through things in a different way. There was a whole history of this guy, Charles Lindbergh, and you said, “Wait a second. Let's look at this from a different perspective. Maybe the story we were told—maybe there's a lot more going on here than just the surface level.” People are complicated. History is complicated. Let's try to look at it another way. We're asking you—I don't know if we can do it now, but I hope we can do it in another conversation—to ask the bigger question: What is really going on with the Jewish people? What can we understand from this process, not just the last hundred years, but the last 3,000 years? If we look at that history and those cycles that keep happening, what is our role in them, and what can we do today? We need people like you, with your experience and skills, to delve into these questions because our future—we understand what happens. You're not ready to leave yet, but I'm sure many Jews in Europe were also not ready to leave. Many Jews in Poland were not ready to leave when it was time to leave. I'm not saying that's where we are today, but we've seen this story play out many times in the last 3,000 years. We need friends like you. We need to be connected, and we need to dive into it. I'd love to see another book about what is behind the scenes of who we are, what people didn't know about who we are, and why this is all happening. Jonathan • 01:02:55 Remember that Polish Jews had been stripped of rights as early as 1936. Yes, they didn't leave. But nobody has said, “My kid can't go to medical school because he's Jewish.” They were saying that in Poland in the 1930s. If that happens, then I'll be ready to leave. I don't think we're there. I think we keep fighting. Lio, let me ask you a question. How do Israelis feel? Do they feel like they can see the end, or are they very confident that they can defend their own interests, select their own representatives, and represent themselves on the world stage? Lio • 01:03:34 I can tell you that a great number of people in Israel right now feel very confident. Israel has grown tremendously in its stature as a superpower. There's just no question about it. Say what you want—I mean, not you, but whatever anyone wants to say. When you look at the war on the front and this new stance of power, kind of shaking off 30 years of very unhealthy progressive thinking that just doesn't fit with reality, and starting, first of all, to assert itself in the neighborhood, so to speak, I think that created a great sense of confidence among many Israelis. On top of that, there's a general return to a lot of the values that are at the heart of what it means to be Jewish, right? There's a group within society, probably a group of more radicals—20% to 30%; a smaller group, although not a tiny minority—that is still entertaining the idea of being a country for everybody, and saying, “We're just like everybody,” and, “Oh, our dark religious past,” and all that. Those are silly people. I'm using very soft words because trying to sever yourself from 3,000 years of history is a recipe for disaster. You don't understand anything about anything. I'm not even saying you have to understand the inner meaning of things. Again, Seth and I have been studying the words of true sages, and I'm going to let you read a quote from the Book of Zohar in a second because we ask every guest to read a quote. But the majority of Israelis are embracing these roots because they understand that this is the source of our power. Whether I understand it or not, whether I perceive it as simple religion or religiosity, and whether people understand that there's something deeper happening, people have been holding on to something that understood reality in a way nobody else does. So there's a strong awakening. Now, does that mean there will be no more struggle? No. Struggle is part of the work. I think most people are realizing that there's no such thing as absolute peace. You always have to assert yourself. As you said, you have to make yourself heard. But there's a feeling that we need to do something between us that we aren't doing yet. As you said, it's not the medicine. It's not the technology. Nobody cares about that. But people care about something, and more and more voices in the world are saying that. Jordan Peterson was here a year and a half ago, and he was saying, “For whatever reason, the whole world is looking at you, and you have to make it work because we don't know how to do it without you.” He's not the only one. So there's something there. We're not there yet collectively. People are still looking at Judaism as simply an authentic, strong religion that survived everything. But Seth and I know that behind that, there are some deeper truths that are slowly floating to the surface. So I think we're not naïve. We know things aren't going to be handed to us on a silver platter. Just today, we lost Senator Lindsey Graham, who was a tremendous friend to Israel. I was shocked. I looked this morning. One second you're up, and another minute you're down. These things will continue to change. But I heard something very nice today. Someone said there's a difference between a gyroscope and radar. There are two types of people: those who operate by gyro and those who operate by radar. Those who operate by radar look at what's around them, what's outside of them, and try to navigate between it. Those who operate by gyro—I'm using a flying analogy, right?—have their own center, and that's what keeps them stable and steady. I think that's what we as Jews need to do: Look less at what people are saying and thinking. The world is clearly going through a nervous breakdown. We need to find our center and find it together. Jonathan • 01:07:57 If you're confident—if Israelis are confident about the future—then I'm confident. I'm not going to worry. If you're not worried, I'm not going to worry. And remember, it was the gyroscope that kept Lindbergh from flying straight into the ocean. Lio • 01:08:14 Exactly. Jonathan • 01:08:15 Because it was pitch black, and he couldn't see anything. He had a gyroscope, and he knew he was level. Lio • 01:08:18 See? I knew I would be able to use it somewhere. Jonathan, I put a quote in the chat. Please do us the honor and read that out loud, obviously, for everyone. Jonathan • 01:08:31 Specifically, unity and unfounded love among us can lead us to concurrence with nature's systems, and only then will the nations of the world recognize Israel's merit. Thank you. Lio • 01:08:43 Thank you so much, Jonathan Reich. The book—where can people find the book? Jonathan • 01:08:50 A Convenient Villain. My website is convenientvillain.com. You can see speeches, other podcasts, and book reviews. You can buy it on Amazon. You can buy it at Barnes & Noble. Or you can email me at convenientvillain@gmail.com, and I'll send you an autographed copy. Lio • 01:09:06 Amazing. I already included a link to Amazon in the description of the podcast. I hope you enjoyed this conversation. It was a little different from our usual conversation. But if you liked it, please like, share, and subscribe. Leave a comment. Invite more people to talk about these things, because asking questions and going deeper really holds the key to our survival, we believe. Thank you so much for being with us. Jonathan • 01:09:28 Thank you. Lio • 01:09:30 Thank you, Seth. Thank you. Seth • 01:09:34 Good luck, everybody.