w/ Uri Kaufman, Author of "American Intifada"

Lio: This is TheJewFunction episode. I can't remember which, but it will be in the title. Hi, Seth. Hey, Lio Spieg. And we're very happy to have with us a great guest, which we almost had a few weeks ago, but then we didn't. And now we finally were blessed by his presence. He is a writer and analyst. He's focused on anti-Semitism, obviously, because he's here. He writes about Israel, Jewish life in America, and he's recently the author of American Intifada: Israel, the Gaza War, and the New Anti-Semitism, a sharp examination of how anti-Jewish hostility has re-emerged across U.S. institutions and culture. That's a concise subhead right there. And we're very happy to have him on TheJewFunction and talk about some of the things that stir up the left, but mostly things that stir up the Jewish heart, because that's what we're really interested in most of all. So Uri, hi, welcome to TheJewFunction.

Uri: Hi, thanks for having me. Great to be here.

Lio: It's great to have you. By the way, if you're new to TheJewFunction, that includes you. Welcome to the first season, the first 22 episodes. You have to dig a little bit, but you can find it on Spotify and YouTube, where we explain, we lay out the entire Jew function thesis and also the reason why the name TheJewFunction. You'll find it there. And in general, just like and subscribe to the show. Hit the bell and you'll know when a new episode comes up. And I want to start maybe with your book. Even before, usually we kind of get personal, but maybe we'll start with your book and then we'll get personal. But you're saying that something that's happening now in America, I think we're all seeing it. It's not just a general critique of Israel. There's something deeper that's happening, maybe even more ominous. So what do you actually mean by American Intifada? And how is this maybe different or a more evolved form of the kind of hate Jews used to face in America before?

Uri: This is a very unusual kind of anti-Semitism that we're seeing now because it's paved with the best of intentions. I would say anti-Semitism is a lot like cancer. There are lots of different kinds. Some are more aggressive than others, and some are unfortunately not treatable, but some other versions are. If you talk about a Tucker Carlson, a Nick Fuentes, a Candace Owens, they've got the pancreatic anti-Semitism stage four that spread to the liver. It's not treatable. I can't help a guy like that. Never debate a guy who denies the Holocaust, you're wasting your breath. But fortunately, there is a different kind of anti-Semitism. There is, I could call it, anti-Semitism light. It's generally from people who are center left. And that is, I think, a much more treatable form. And what really caused me to start thinking about this was right after the October 7 attack, and we all know what happened, Barack Obama, before the Israeli army even went into Gaza. Now, Barack Obama tweeted, look, we have to face facts, he said. There's unclean hands on both sides. Like, whoa, unclean hands on both sides. Where's the moral equivalency? And he said what? He said, because we have to face the fact of what he called the, quote, unbearable occupation, unquote. Now, as anyone who has even a passing familiarity with this conflict knows, there was no occupation on October 7. Israel had withdrawn from Gaza over 18 years before. So why would someone as smart as Barack Obama say something that is just patently false? And I could give dozens, maybe hundreds of examples of this throughout the book of otherwise really serious people saying things about Israel that are just laughably, demonstrably false. And even people who are just, let's say not classic anti-Semites. Barack Obama was surrounded by Jewish people at every station of his career. All his top aides were Jews. Rahm Emanuel was his chief of staff. He's a former Israeli, of course. You could just literally go down the line. Jimmy Carter, well, he's actually another story. Bill Clinton, everyone who knows him says that his daughter is literally his whole world and it's his only child. And she married a Jewish guy, a guy named Marc, I forgot his last name, Mezvinsky, something like that. These are not what you would think of as classic anti-Semites. But yet time and again, we find them saying things about Israel that are just patently false. And I think the best way to understand the phenomenon is to engage in a thought experiment. People who are listening to this podcast, I'm sure already know what happened on October 7. But just as a brief recap, you have this hideous attack, 1200 people murdered, totally unjustified, many women raped, 251 hostages, thousands wounded. Every opinion poll showed that the entire Palestinian public supported this, both in Gaza and Judea Samaria. Palestinians regularly refer to Jews as apes and pigs. And if you don't believe me, just go on Google, type in Jews, apes and pigs, or Palestine apes and pigs. Scroll with your mouse, you'll see what I'm saying is true. And then one last fact, the Biden administration budgeted billions of dollars of aid for Gaza, not for Hamas, of course, but for what they termed the innocent civilians. Okay, let's assume every one of those facts is true. Let's just change one fact. Let's assume the attackers were non-Palestinians. Let's assume they were Germans of another era, or Russians, or let's say white South Africans. In other words, let's assume they were white people, white people who say Jews are apes and pigs. Do you really think Biden would have given billions of dollars of aid to the poor white supremacists? The answer is obvious. And now hold the thought. Let's carry this all the way through. In this parallel universe, it's white supremacists who attack on October 7, not Arab supremacists, but let's assume they murdered 1,200 black people and they rape black women. And then a Republican president says, we're going to give billions of dollars of aid to the innocent civilians, the innocent white supremacists who say that blacks are apes and pigs. It never would happen. And if it did, there'd be rioting in the streets. So what's going on here? What's going on here is a classic textbook case of cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is a phenomenon that was discovered, or I could say identified, in the 20th century by a Jewish psychologist named Leon Festinger. And it says that when people have deeply held beliefs, and then facts appear that contradict the beliefs, people change the facts, not the beliefs. We all do this. For liberals, the core value, more important than anything else, is fighting racism, which, by the way, is a beautiful thing. And if we were talking about the legacy of slavery and white apartheid, we'd find a lot of common ground. The problem is these things have literally nothing to do with the Arab-Israeli conflict. It's a totally different fact pattern, but they're so used to thinking of a world in which white people are oppressing people of color, they're backing the people of color. Now, again, the facts don't justify it, so they change the facts to fit the narrative, hence the cognitive dissonance, hence Barack Obama and others saying things that are just patently false.

Lio: I want to ask a question. I mean, it's 21st century America, internet, all the rest of it. Are people that dumb?

Uri: What are we, what's happening here? If there's one thing we know from psychology, it affects the most brilliant, I don't know, Nobel Prize winning physicist and it affects the dumbest person, the homeless guy on the street. We all are humans. And as humans, we all have psychology. And we see this over and over again throughout history. In fact, the Rambam, Maimonides, wrote his classic work, The Guide to the Perplexed, Moreh Nevuchim, exactly attacking this phenomenon. And he wrote in his book that the creation epic of Bereshit, Genesis, cannot be taken literally because he said, writing in the 1100s, the world is more than, at that time, 4,000 years old. And he said, and he laid down the law: when the pshat, when the translation or interpretation of the Torah is contradicted by the facts, we change the interpretation, we don't change the facts. Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi, the Judah the Prince, says the same thing in the Talmud. This is what we do now. Moreh Nevuchim, Guide to the Perplexed, was very badly received at the time. There was a Rabbi Shlomo of Montpellier who had a book burning. This is in the 1100s. Now, it's true that after the Rambam passed away, Rabbi Shlomo asked for forgiveness and he retracted. Fine. But the point is, we all do this. And it takes a very smart person who thinks out of the box to think outside their box. I mean, myself, I'm constantly engaging in thought experiments to try to isolate my own biases. So I wrote a history of the Yom Kippur War. And when I was researching it, I discovered that there was an incident in Sinai in which Israeli soldiers executed 20 Egyptian soldiers.

Lio: They did. The famous one. Yeah.

Uri: Again, the day before the Egyptians had executed a soldier and a combat reporter. So when they caught 20 Egyptian soldiers the next day, they wanted a little frontier justice. I'm not defending it, of course. Now, I'm writing this. These are not easy things to write about when you support Israel as much as I do. But then I engage in what I call the Belgium test. Would I write about this if it was Belgium? And the answer is, yeah, I would. So it's in there. I put it in the book. There are other things like that. For example, Israeli generals after the '67 war spoke of the Arabs in very dismissive terms, borderline racist. Again, I asked, what do I need to write about this for and feed into that whole racism narrative? But then once again, I did the Belgium test. I would put it in if it was Belgium. So I put it in there and it's in the book. And I'm happy to say most of the reviews that I got, the one word I always looked for was even-handed. That's the highest praise. If you achieved that, you did your job. And that's the word that came up again and again. Otherwise, it's not history. It's whatever you want to call it, public relations, propaganda. The point is it's really hard for us humans to think outside our box. So the first question you have to ask yourself is what is the box in which that person is thinking? And, for example, Jimmy Carter is maybe the best example of this. Jimmy Carter hated Israel and people ask the question, where's this hostility coming from? And he writes about it in his memoir. Jimmy Carter identified the Palestinians as the Indians. Jimmy Carter was wealthy because he inherited a plantation. That plantation was built first of all by enslaved Africans, that's number one. But it was built on land that was stolen from the Indians. And he writes about this. His great-great-grandfather, a man named Wiley Carter, bought the land for a song because it was stolen land. And he felt bad about this. So if I was Jimmy Carter and I grew up in Plains, Georgia, in basically what was a Jim Crow South where blacks had no rights, maybe I'd think the same way. But if you know anything about the history, you know that it's ridiculous. This has nothing to do with Palestine. The Jews who came to Palestine didn't come there as conquerors. They immigrated there legally. The land they settled, they bought it. They bought it from the Palestinians themselves at the price the Palestinians set, which was exorbitant. There have been studies on this. At a time in which fertile farmland in Nebraska and Iowa was going for about $100 an acre, people were paying $1,000 an acre for swamp and desert in Palestine. Now, I don't fault the Palestinians. I have a day job. I'm in real estate. We all know it's valuable, location, location, location, right? So if people thought it was worth 10 times as much, it was worth 10 times as much. But having immigrated there legally and bought the land, where's the complaint? Where's the beef? The answer is it's based on bigotry, which is ignorance and growing up thinking a certain way and then thinking inside that box and then letting cognitive dissonance do all the rest.

Seth: Uri, first of all, it's really fun listening to you speak. You have a great grasp of these things. You're even-handed and passionate. When you look backwards, you're able to Monday morning quarterback the situation. You're able to see the cognitive dissonance in Barack Obama, in Bill Clinton, in these situations. So equally, if you now, if we were 10 years from now and let's say we're 10 years into the future. And somehow we were able to—I guess there's two questions. One is what would be a good outcome in the situation we're in now? Let's say it's 10 years from now and we achieved some good outcome. And now you're looking back, what were the things? So cognitive dissonance is one definable thing. What are the other things that happened that were implemented, that people did psychologically or through policy or through PR or through books or education? What happens so that in 10 years from now, it ends up being a good situation?

Uri: What Israel needs to do is the same genius, and it is genius and creativity and brilliance, that they've brought to the field of military, I can almost say science or tactics and technology. They've got to bring that to their messaging. They've just not paid attention to the messaging. And many people have noticed this. This war is going to ultimately end up costing Israel about $100 billion. Of that $100 billion, not even $500 million was spent on PR. And if you ask me, the messaging is all wrong. The messaging has to be all about one thing, and that's hypocrisy. For example, whenever they confront Israeli spokespeople and they say, but what about all the suffering among the poor innocent civilians? The answer I find over and over is they say, but what about October 7? Okay, that's the wrong answer. That is not a response that is going to persuade people. Because the response to that is obviously, okay, October 7 was awful. We all agree on that. But how can you inflict such terrible misery on these poor people? There's a response to that. I'm just going to preface it by saying the following. The best people at gauging the pulse of a public, if you ask me, are not the pollsters, it's not the politicians, it's the late night talk show hosts. They are geniuses at this. They know exactly where to place the joke and who to make fun of. They measure the pulse better than anyone. And someone once asked, I'd say one of the best of them, Jay Leno, who every American has heard of, one of the best late night talk shows of all time. They asked him, how come Bill Clinton cheated on his wife and got away with it. And then some other politician, I don't remember who, cheated on his wife. And that was the end of him. And he said, it's simple. He said, the American people will tolerate a skirt chaser. The American people will never tolerate a hypocrite. The other guy was a Bible thumper. He was like one of those kind of guys. Okay, so here's now what the messaging should be. Ben Rhodes, Barack Obama's top aide, wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times about two weeks ago, in which he trashed Israel, all the suffering they inflicted on Gaza. By his definition, he himself, Ben Rhodes, and his boss were war criminals. Because what no one seems to ever talk about is what America did to ISIS in the war against ISIS. If you go to the U.S. Army Department of Defense Law of War Army Manual, there are literally dozens of lawyers in the Pentagon, and their only job is to go over all of America's treaties and all of the Geneva Convention protocols and then distill it into a set of regulations to guide the actions of American soldiers and officers. Section 5.20 says black on white, starvation is a legitimate method of warfare, unquote. That's a quote. That's not just words on a page, that's policy.

Lio: You can look this up. Of course, not only that—starvation, siege, there's a lot of things that Israel just didn't do.

Uri: Barack Obama starved cities. The city of Fallujah was besieged. It's described in a Huffington Post article April 29th, 2016 by a woman named Christine Alfred. By that moment, and that's early in the war, the war went from 2014 to 2021. Already in 2016, she wrote that 140 people had already starved to death in Fallujah. The rest of the city was making soup out of grass. She confronted Josh Earnest, who is the spokesman for Obama. And to his credit, he didn't deny it. He said, look, it's a tough situation, but we got to defeat ISIS. They asked American officers, why don't you parachute supplies in? And they said, because if we do, ISIS will take control of it, much as Hamas did. So how can it be Barack Obama starved cities, legal, moral, ethical, proportional, Netanyahu supplies 2 million tons of food, that's genocide? How can that be? How can it be that in December of 2016—

Seth: Uri, the fact is this. So what, it's 10 years from now, we have a good solution. First, you need to tell us what the good solution is 10 years from now that we reached, we achieved. But also, what had to happen to get there? I'm sure you could spend an hour telling us all of the evidence, but we need an answer. We only have you for another 45 minutes. So we need an answer.

Uri: The answer is, I think the answer has to be that in the area of messaging. First of all, I always find there's a wonderful old saying in the Talmud, the Gemara. The words of the wise are said nicely or politely. There's a modern Hebrew word, but that's the word they said polite in the old days. Always be polite. Never descend to that level of screaming and name calling because you don't convince people that way. There's a famous story where Martin Luther King was leading a protest and a woman screamed the N-word at him or something like that. And he just stopped and he walked over politely and he said, now, why would a lovely, beautiful young woman like yourself say something so hurtful? And she melted. What do you respond to that? If he had screamed something back at her, she would have screamed something back at him and it wouldn't have accomplished anything. So there's that. The second thing is always confront people with their biases. If they're honest, by the way, the initial reaction is usually they get mad. People get really mad when you confront them with their biases. But let me give a perfect example. Another thought experiment. The Iran deal. Let's assume every fact happened exactly the way it did. Let's just change one fact. Let's assume Iran is not run by crazy ayatollahs who say Jews are apes and pigs. Let's assume it's run by white supremacists who say blacks are apes and pigs. And they say, we're going to kill all the blacks. We're going to drop a bomb on them because a black country is a one bomb country and they got a clock ticking in Tehran. They're going to tick down to the day when they kill all the blacks. Do you really think Barack Obama would have signed an Iran deal with that country? They get to keep the first generation centrifuges, continue the research, do the research to weaponize it on a missile, which everyone says is the hardest part. They get to make weapons in five years, missiles in eight. They can enrich uranium in ten. Oh, and by the way, in the meantime, they get over 100 billion dollars to support insurgents who are killing the black people because blacks are apes and pigs. It never would have happened.

Seth: So now, but the Iran—you put the bias—how do you put the bias in? What's the strategy here? We put the bias in their face and then show them their hypocrisy?

Uri: Yeah, just—how could it be? I mean, what's so astounding is I read Ben Rhodes's—

Seth: Hold on, let's say we could do that. First of all, how do you do it? In one-on-one or in mass somehow?

Uri: Anywhere, any medium of communication possible.

Seth: What's your—Kate, listen, hold on, what you're capable of doing—you're a unique guy. I mean, you have dates, you have—I mean, people can't do what you do. You have a command of ideas and you have a command of history. And we have a very big, several thousand year old problem on our hands. So if there was a couple million of you, we would have a different strategy. But there's one of you and a lot of regular—

Lio: We'll parachute you into the—

Seth: I can't break through. Talk, listen.

Uri: What are we doing? I think, unfortunately, we are making a lot of mistakes. I feel like the messaging is just wrong. I also feel that the wrong people are on television. It drives me nuts that there are a lot of people, I'm not going to name names, who are very pro-Israel and are very pro-Zionist and believe in what Israel is doing. And I would even say to a large degree, even agree with the IDF, although not everybody, but they have this one problem. They hate Netanyahu. And it's at the point where it's pathological. There's this like BB derangement syndrome. So they're responding, but they're not really responding because they hate Netanyahu so much that they've got to pull back or they've got to find a way to demonize him. It's all just nonsense. It's all just complete nonsense. The wrong people are pushing this. The wrong people are on television. I don't know how to fix that problem, by the way. I don't know how we are. Perfect example. If you watch Christiane Amanpour, it's hilarious. Every night she's got some new guy, the professor in Vermont, the British member of the House of Lords, the so-called human rights activists who aren't—they're progressive values activists—and they're all peddling the same rubbish about genocide. If you watched it last night, she had the grandson of U Thant. He was the secretary general in '67, just lying through his hat, just making stuff up left and right. And she's always sitting there, nodding her head, her eyes open like umbrellas, and there's no one to respond. I don't know how to fix that problem.

Lio: Hold on. Let's take a few steps because there's a lot of things. First of all, going down the route of messaging and bias and all that, I'm not even sure that's the right way to go. But as we often like to say here, we need to at least create a safe space for us to operate in. And if that means figuring out what to do with the media, what to do with the left, what to do with the right, just so we are able to operate from within that safe space, then we're willing to discuss it. So I guess the question on that would be, what happened that, just let's talk about just the progressive left. Because Jews, as you said initially, Jews always shared a lot of ideals and values with the left, with the liberals, the humanistic, right? That was like a big, it's a Jewish tradition. In fact, it's almost a competition. Like we could be even more humanistic than you. We will bomb our own people just so you say that we're so nice to everyone else. So what happened in that area that started to backfire? All the integration with the left, the alliances and the moral alignment, all that, suddenly it's like falling apart. What happened there? Let's maybe just understand that. Start small.

Uri: You put your finger right on it. I'll tell you exactly what happened. What happened was, it's two words that tell you the whole thing. It's called tikkun olam. There's this new concept, let's call it 40 years ago, and I'm actually old enough to remember when this concept started gaining ground. They came up with this new construct called tikkun olam. What is tikkun olam? They said that Judaism is basically a bunch of liberal talking points. Now, there is a concept, by the way, of tikkun olam in the Talmud, in the Gemara. It means something completely different. So they just made it up. But be that as it may. When they first came out with this, I remember thinking to myself, all right, it's a nice thing. I mean, I'm kind of saying to myself, but at least they're taking their liberalism and they're couching it in a Jewish framework. I thought maybe it was a positive. Couldn't have been more wrong. This tikkun olam is terrible because what they've done is, remember, it's a bunch of liberal talking points. What is the most important liberal value today to the exclusion of everything else? It's fighting racism. So what they've done is they've created a construct of Judaism that demonizes the Jews because the Jews are the white group of privilege. And that's why you're part of it.

Seth: Wait, let me play a game with you because you're into these kind of mind experiments. Can you see some kind of similarity with what happened with the Hellenized Jews during the Hanukkah time? It's not the same. It's not the same details.

Uri: I see one really chilling parallel and it's a parallel that carried through to after the war. In the time of the Hellenists, who were the people who became the Hellenists? The answer is it was the societal elites. It was disproportionately, from what we know of the evidence—by the way, that's my next book. I'm writing a history of the Hanukkah revolt. Amazingly no one has written a good narrative history of it, so I've been researching this.

Lio: You should listen to our podcast on that. I think it's two episodes on that.

Uri: Yeah, I look forward to getting it.

Lio: Yeah, we'll send those to you.

Uri: The people, if you look—by the way, this was the same thing in the first temple era. The first temple era, the problem was idolatry. But if you look carefully, you see there was one king, Yehu, who demanded that all the idol worshipers of the whole land come to one place. He tricked them into thinking he supported it, then he actually killed them all. But they all met under one roof and he killed them all with just 80 men. It shows there were practically nobody who was an idol worshiper. How many people could fit in one room and could be taken out by just 80 men? But yet you look at the first temple era and who are the idol worshipers? It was king after king after king. It was the societal elites. And if you look at the Second Temple era, it's the same thing. The Hellenists were the elites of society. And then after that, what we know is the Tzedukim, the Sadducees is the English word. Also, they came from the societal elites. And the moral of the story seems to be a society cannot exist when its elites, when its most successful people, when its most admired people don't share the values of the Hamon Am, of the majority of the people.

Seth: Yeah, that's what we see now. That's the point. What's happening now is not something unique. In fact, you just gave us a couple examples of the exact, almost the same process happening again. So we know how it's going to play out. We're going to have a great victory eventually. They'll write about it. And then 500 years later or 800 years later, the same thing is going to happen again. So the point is, is there another option? Is there another option for us besides just repeating this? And if so, can we break out of the bonds of this? Can we live the story the way it's supposed to be? Can we have that messianic—and I'm not talking, I'm using that word very loosely—but do we have to just do the Yirmiyahu version of everything? Leo and I are set on that there is a solution to this problem. And we have to look at what happened in history, look at what's going on now, identify all the patterns and see how this thing works. The one thing we didn't hear you talk about yet is when do things work well for us? You identified all the patterns of all the negative stuff, but where's the patterns of when it works?

Uri: The pattern of when it works is you're living it right here, right now. I tell this to my kids all the time. There have been about 150 generations of Jews since Shlomo HaMelech, King Solomon, built the first temple way back in 966 BCE. Figure, 3,000 years, 20 years a generation, something like that, about 150 generations. We're the luckiest one. Think about it. All those generations, you got a strong Israel, a wealthy Israel, we're treated extremely well in America anyway. Look at it. Yeah, there's antisemitism. But we are—I heard Yair Lapid say recently that American—they asked him, are American Jews going to make Aliyah? And he said, look, you got to be realistic. They are the most successful social group in the history of humanity. And there's a lot of truth in that. Although when he said it, I said to myself, nope, you're wrong. There was one that was even more successful. It was German Jews in the late 19th and early 20th century. It was a little scary to think about.

Lio: It's not a little scary, Uri. It's very scary.

Uri: But the reality is we've never, us Jews, we've never had it so good. We've also come up with a model, it seems like, finally, after literally hundreds of years of trial and error, we've come up with a model of Judaism that seems to have legs, where we're increasing in numbers instead of decreasing in numbers. Yes, there is assimilation, but first of all, there seems to be a great awakening happening even among more secular Jews, which is beautiful. I hope it continues. But among Orthodox Jews, for the first time, we have a lot of kids. I have a small family. I only have four kids. Most people I know have more than that. And relatively few people are marrying out. Most people are staying inside the fold. So we're basically doubling like every 20-25 years. Go out 100 years, if we could just keep the trending going, there'll be what, 10-15 million Orthodox Jews in America. There'll be 20-25 million. If there's not another Holocaust in America—

Lio: Well, if there's not another—yeah.

Uri: I don't want to put some water on the fire here, but history shows that the number of Jews remain relatively consistent throughout history, even as all other nations kind of go up. China, look at China, where they were, where they are today. Jews, mostly the same.

Lio: Well, it's true, but that's what's changing. It's changing for the better.

Uri: By the way, China is about to fall off a cliff demographically.

Lio: Yeah, a lot of the countries around the world, but they're not going to descend back to the level Jews are. The interesting part is that the relationship, the ratio between the number of Jews and world population hasn't changed much. We always keep to a very specific relationship between the number of Jews, because it's not a quantitative thing, it's a qualitative thing that we're talking about. And even in that, we haven't really gotten to kind of the heart of our discussion. So I want to take you a step, a qualitative step forward before we continue, before we kind of bury the Jews of America. Just to ask, as someone who has studied Jewish history and is very much engaged in it right now and has this passion and you're connected to Israel, you speak the language, all those things. If you had to explain to someone, like let's say an alien that landed here, what is this group of people, tiny group of people that's so successful, disproportionately so. What's up with that group? What is that group? How would you define that group to this alien?

Uri: How would I define the group? I mean, that's, this tiny little infinitesimal nation that somehow has always risen above everything and is, I think anyone would have to agree objectively, by far the most accomplished social or racial group in the history of humanity. Also, it's the only religion where you can identify them readily through DNA. If you do a DNA test on you or me, it's going to say Ashkenazi Jew, Sephardic Jew from whatever part of the world. You can't do a DNA test and see Episcopalian or Lutheran. There's just no such thing. I mean, it shows that we've managed to keep—

Lio: Basically, genetically, it's kind of hard. This is a bit of a hodgepodge. Even though there are some similarities between certain groups, there's also—me and my wife, we share nothing. She's North African, I'm Romanian. There's no connection there genetically. So what is it then? It's not genetics. We're not an ethnographic group. What is it?

Uri: Are you asking what's the secret sauce? What's the secret?

Lio: Yeah. Just what is a Jew? Or if you want an easier—we can sort of give you a little help in the test and say, what is Jewishness? What is that about?

Seth: Or how about, do we have a role in the world, a unique role?

Lio: Okay, now you're jumping the gun, Seth. But okay, sure, whatever.

Seth: I'm nervous, I have anxiety because we only have this guy for a short amount of time.

Lio: The wife's got to get to the airport.

Uri: I got to get my wife to the airport, exactly. You might have nothing in common with your wife, but I have one thing in common with my wife.

Lio: No, no, no. Listen, first of all, this is good. Having the knife, the sword over your neck. This is a very good condition for a Jew to have.

Uri: To a higher authority.

Lio: 100%.

Uri: If you were to ask me, first of all, what is the secret sauce? I would say, first of all, it is not genetic. Because if you just look in the Bible, you see that the ancient Jews were technologically inferior. They were even behind the lowly Philistines. The Philistines managed to domesticate iron long before our ancestors did. If you look at the ancient Greek sources, the Greeks were dismissive of the Jews. They say, look, they haven't discovered anything. So what changed? What changed is, first of all, the big first secret weapon is Shabbat. That's clearly. You got one day where you just got to stop. And when you stop, you can only do three things. You're allowed to eat, you're allowed to pray, and you're allowed to open up a book. So we eat, we pray, and we became the people of the book. So that's where the education comes from, right there. And it's clear from archaeological evidence that there was, except for a few bad periods of history, there was almost universal literacy going back into the first temple era, something utterly unthinkable on the rest of the planet. Famous story, Gideon, the judge, right? In the book of Judges, he got angry at a village. And it says that he said to a na'ar, a young boy, he sat him down and he said, write down the names of all the people in the village. And all the Bible critics said, what do you mean? A little kid could just write, knew how to read and write? That's ridiculous. But sure enough, in 1935 in Lachish, they found, archaeologists found, a message that was written from a military outpost in Lachish back to headquarters in Jerusalem, and it was in six different handwritings. And they said, wow, if six different guys in any old army post in the middle of nowhere could write, that means there really was universal literacy. So, yeah, the Book of Judges got it right. So that's the first one. The second one is we are the most self-critical people in the history of humanity, hands down, beyond rational debate. But long before Socrates walked the earth, go back to the first temple period. You've got Isaiah. You've got Jeremiah. You've got Moses. And the message is always the same. The people are corrupt. The people are sinners. The people are awful. And the whole concept of Judaism was different from the other nations. The other nations were idol worshipers. So what did that mean? They believed there were multiple gods. And the way you worshiped God was by showing insane devotion to that God. Human sacrifice was common, cutting yourself. We see this from the Torah. The Jewish people were the first ones to say, no, there's only one God, and that's not what God wants. God wants us to do the right thing, to be moral. So when bad things happen to us, we didn't say, well, our God is a weakling. Let's go join another God. We said, no, we must have sinned. We must have done something wrong. And when you're criticizing, you're also improving. So that's the secret. Slowly now you're improving. You're implementing change. Now, I would argue modern Israel has made a vice of a virtue. There's what they call the Tarbut HaRifat HaRashim, what they call the culture of decapitation, where they just want to fire everyone at the drop of a hat and everyone has to resign. And I don't agree with that. Interestingly, though, America does it the other way around. We are somewhat forgiving of our military leaders and our political leaders, recognizing how hard their jobs are and recognizing that they've dedicated their lives to the public. We are harsh that way with our journalists. So if you're Dan Rather and you issue a memo that's false, you're done. Your career is over. Not in Israel. Brian Williams, the number one news anchor in 2015 when nightly news actually meant something. And you tell some story that his helicopter took fire in Iraq and it was not true. Finished. The number one rated news anchor. It was the end of his career. Peter Arnett, the number one military correspondent of his era, wrote a piece out of Iraq in 2003, which was praising the enemy. Done. It was the end of his career.

Lio: Hold on. We need to laser focus.

Uri: Journalists can lie through their hat and everybody forgives them. And I have no idea why.

Lio: So I'm just summing up. Self-criticism.

Seth: We need to use a weapon, Spieg. We need to focus this.

Lio: I know, I know, I know. I'm trying. So you're saying self-criticism is the number one. Like that's what—

Uri: Self-criticism and education. Those are the two. That's it. If you can do that. Very hard to do both, by the way. It's really tough to do this stuff. But if you can do both, you're going to start winning those Nobel Prizes.

Lio: Well, so I got to throw it back at you. So you're saying self-criticism, education, that would mean that people who are educated, i.e. the Jews in America, would see that something is not working with their relationships.

Seth: 15 minutes ago, you said it was always the very educated elites who were the ones causing the problems.

Lio: Yeah. So maybe there's too much education. Maybe you can go south with too much education and self-criticism. Maybe you're missing some other component in there. This has got to be true if something was balancing that out.

Uri: Well, I'll tell you what it is. It's cognitive dissonance. When does cognitive dissonance kick in? Leon Festinger did all sorts of experiments. And what he found was cognitive dissonance kicks in when two things happen. Number one, when people get very heavily and publicly invested in a position. And number two, when it turns out to be wrong, there are other like-minded people from whom you can draw emotional support. Now, others have found that the one area of human endeavor where cognitive dissonance is most prevalent is governmental policy. And you can understand why. Everything is out there. It's all super public. The egos are really big. And there's always lots of people around you who agree. So when it all turns out that the Vietnam War was a catastrophe, you're still going to have some guy to tell you, no, no, just stay the course. Or when it turns out something else that you blew it on COVID because you thought it was better to not do a lockdown and people are dying by the hundreds of thousands, there'll be someone to say, no, it's fine. Don't worry about it. Ingest bleach or whatever. It's all good. Don't worry. So what you find is it's when the elites start taking positions, they're the more prominent ones. They get big in a way and box themselves in. No one in politics ever says, oh, I did this and I was just wrong. I made a mistake.

Lio: It happens once in a blue moon. In Japan they say it. Sometimes in America and even in Israel, the Israeli left is still arguing that Oslo was a good thing. Like how at this point can you even—come on, guys. It's time to wake up and smell the coffee.

Seth: Here's the thing. These—what were they saying in technology—it's a feature not a flaw. It's a feature not a bug. These are features. If a person is a piece of software or a piece of hardware with software running on them, you're talking about features of the software. These are not bugs. Cognitive dissonance is not a bug. For example, when I was younger, I was very annoyed that everyone in the world is just a sheep. It really bothered me. I was 18 years old. I noticed everyone just eats McDonald's, drinks Coca-Cola, just does whatever they're told. They just follow everything. And then I realized it's actually great that everyone's a sheep. Too bad there's not a good shepherd. Because everybody would do good if only somebody was educating them—

Lio: Or advertising them to do good. Then the Rambam says, right, even if a thousand blind people walk, if one can see at the head of the column, they're safe.

Uri: Well, what I remember saying is, I would rather say something that gladdens the heart of one wise man even if it angers 10,000 fools.

Lio: Fine too. That's fine too. Go on.

Seth: But we are—it's not a problem that everybody just follows stupid stuff blindly. The problem is not that everyone just follows. The problem is that they're not following in a good direction, in a direction that's fruitful for everyone. So we're not going to change the fact that cognitive dissonance matters. The good cognitive dissonance would be, even though you have every reason to hate the other, we're still choosing to love. Or even though we have every reason to fight our fellow Jew, for some reason we're still going to love. But here is thousands of reasons why you should be against Netanyahu, or thousands of reasons why you should be against the ones on the left. No, we're still going to love. So we have to use all of these things that you pointed out throughout history. All of them are actually features of a Jew or of a human. They're not actually flaws. We have to figure out now, and hopefully you with that brain in the next 10 minutes can figure out, how do we use them the right way? Because what we're saying is that it is possible that anti-Semitism is a result, is pushing us out. If we're doing the thing that we're supposed to be doing, then anti-Semitism doesn't need to rise. You said Jews have had it better than anyone else in the world. Oh, wait, there was a time when Jews had it better. That was Nazi Germany. So it's obvious what's going to happen next. It's obvious if we don't—this could be the most unintelligent thing you've said in the last hour. If you think that now is the one time in all of Jewish history that the same pattern isn't going to repeat itself. Well, you're living in Princeton.

Uri: So obviously you don't think it's going to happen either. I mean, you know, you got me there.

Lio: Look, hold on. I want to build a bridge here on my screen. You guys are on both sides of my picture because Seth already took like three steps ahead. And I want to just make sure that Uri is with us because he's a smart guy. I want to make sure that you're on the ball. Basically, what we're trying to do is to start, turn the gaze inwards. In other words, the problems with the left, we've had a guest last week who wrote a book about the national conservatives, the Tucker Carlsons, all those guys who are rising and anti-Semitism going crazy, untreatable, as you said initially. Same thing on the left. And we could say, you guys love to write books. You should write books. But we can just look at history. Same pattern, that Jews always band with a certain group to champion a certain cause, usually on the left, to the left of the map. But at the end, they end up against the wall. It's always happened in Russia. It happened with the Million Women March. It always happens. So the question is not, will it happen? The question is, it's going to happen. Now what? Or why do we keep going down the same road? Why are we trying to solve our problem of anti-Semitism? Why are we trying to alleviate our discomfort by forming these alliances outside of our people instead of looking inwards for a second and saying, what's been happening before? Every time there was a big conflict or a big pogrom or a big war, what was the climate like on October 6th? What was the climate like before Hitler rose to power? What was the climate like before the temple came down? It was always one thing. And you know the answer, Uri. You tell me. What do you think?

Uri: Oh, it's always unfounded hatred.

Lio: Oh, I see what you're saying on that respect.

Uri: Okay. I thought you were talking about the solution, not the—

Lio: Well, no, no, no. I was making it to what Seth was saying. We can, again, we can look at the symptoms. We can look at how it plays out on the left, on the right. That's okay. Just to give us a sense of how fast are we—

Seth: To prove the—

Lio: Yeah, to prove how far are we on the doomsday clock.

Uri: Oh, I don't think we're on a doomsday clock at all.

Lio: Okay, so this is good. So I want to hear why you don't think we're on a doomsday clock and why America is still great, maybe. But in addition to that, I want you to also talk about that. Do you feel, as I just mentioned, that there is an issue that is at the heart of this negative attitude toward Jews, which lies with Jews? I want you to comment on that.

Uri: Okay, so there's a lot there. First of all, I want to just reject the premise that history has to repeat itself. If the Zionists prove one thing, it is that history does not have to repeat itself. When they looked at the task of building a state out of nothing in the 1890s. Look at all the things they had to do that were totally unprecedented. Get a people to revive a language that was forgotten, turn it into a spoken language again. Never done before, probably never happen again. Imagine a bunch of people who say, you know what, let's get together and speak Celtic and start and go. Or even Latin. It would never happen. Or let's all just go to this place in the middle of the desert and we'll buy land. It can happen. So we can break the cycles of the past. That's first of all.

Lio: Correct.

Uri: I do also—what gives me the most optimism is the fact that I am now 61 years old and my whole life, because I do read the New York Times, all I have seen is a war of words against Israel. One piece of garbage after the other, and writing nonsense about Israel is rewarded. I have a whole chapter of the book talking about this, "Lies on the Prize." Tom Friedman got famous lying about Israel. And it's very profitable. And I'm sure that Charlie Munger always said, you show me the incentive, I'll show you the outcome. It's great. But yet, despite all this, somehow Israel remains super popular among the population at large. And maybe it does reflect that disconnect between what the elites think and what the public at large thinks. So if the public is educated enough, the public actually does know right from wrong. And it doesn't matter that, for example, the New York Times wrote in 2007 that Israel is occupying Gaza, even though they withdrew, which is ridiculous. And it reflects every story they did about Israel. And it's a lie. And they said there was a draconian blockade of Gaza. And it was a lie.

Lio: Yeah, but the New York Times was lying since the time of the Holocaust. So it's not, it's no surprise.

Uri: But the point is, it's still the most prestigious journalistic arm in America. It's probably the most prestigious—I would say it's probably the single most important journalistic outlet on planet Earth, except maybe for the BBC.

Lio: And it was also lying.

Uri: Also lying. Yeah. They even have studies to prove it. Mind you, when their reporters lie, that's it. They're finished. They're done.

Lio: So why are you optimistic? So everybody lies.

Uri: I'm optimistic. I can't help it.

Lio: That's good. That's good. Are you planning to leave America? Is there a reason for concern? Should we make room for you here in the safe room?

Uri: I'm not packing my bags just yet. I do own a place in Israel. Although I do rent it out. I am hopeful to own another place in Israel soon. And I do want to divide my time between the two places. But no, that is not out of a fear that I have to pack my bags and get out of America in a hurry. I don't see that happening. Certainly not in my lifetime. It would have to be a very different place than it is now.

Lio: Okay, so I want to bring up that last piece of the question. But before that, I'll just read a little quote from Albert Einstein. Because of all your thought experiments, I just thought it was apropos, specifically about that issue of separation among Jews, not just separation, separation to the point of getting at each other's necks, to the point that we're going the opposite of the one decree that was given to us, which is to be as one man in one heart or love your friend as yourself, right? V'ahavta l'rei'acha kamocha. Those are the sort of the highest decrees. And when you talk about sages and what they write about Jews, and what our role is, as Seth mentioned, and why the nations have this attitude toward us. And you said it's self-criticism and education. Yeah, but that's only one side of the equation. The other side was the heart. The heart, that connection, that search for this unity. This one man and one heart. This is something that's at the heart of what made us a people. So Albert Einstein was asked about this, and he wrote a book about Zionism. You probably know that book. He wrote, if we Jews should learn—I'm paraphrasing because it's in Hebrew, I'm translating on the fly—if we Jews should learn some lesson from this dark age, then it is the following: we're all connected by a shared destiny. We forget this fact willingly and easily during times of quiet and security. We're too much accustomed to highlight the differences that separate Jews from different countries and different religious streams. And very often we forget that hate and unfair attitude towards Jews all over the world touches each and every Jew. So even Einstein saw that the way people treat us as a group, it doesn't matter. You can't separate yourself. You can't be a better Jew. You cannot raise yourself above your circle. There's a saying, right? You can't be a better Jew than others. We're together in this. Like it or not, there's something that binds us together. It was an ideology from the times of Abraham, and it just kept growing stronger and stronger. And people who joined the fold, they're part of that ideology. It's not about the customs and traditions because not everybody keeps them. It's not about the genetics because it used to be about the mom. Then it was about the dad. Then about the mom again. It's not about those things. It's an ideology, and it's an ideology of one man and one heart. That's what at least hundreds of Jewish sages say. And all the patterns in history that we saw, everything that you listed and we listed here, every calamity was preceded by Jewish disunity, very deep Jewish disunity. So putting everything aside, how do you feel about that? Do you feel that we Jews live up to this ideal of love and care between us, unfounded love, without judgment? Are we able to live up to this?

Uri: It depends which Jew and it depends which era. So you said disaster is always preceded by disunity, but sometimes successes as well. Go back to 1948, the Altalena affair. Soldiers under the command of Yitzhak Rabin on Ben-Gurion's orders opened fire on Menachem Begin's ship. By the way, they were shooting at them even when they were flailing in the water, which forget everything else. By the way, to his credit, one of the last interviews, Yitzhak Rabin said the fact pattern didn't even remotely justify shooting at them. And they fired on them when they were flailing in the water, which is a flagrant violation of Geneva Convention going back to World War I. But yet when it happened, Menachem Begin said, we're not shooting back. We don't care. These are our brothers. We're going to stand with them no matter what. And that's the greatness of Menachem Begin. I'll even do you one better. When Menachem Begin entered the national unity government of 1967, he didn't ask any questions. He was marginalized throughout the war. He didn't complain. He understood what his role was. His role was to show unity. And that was it. And I don't have to remind you who the chief of staff was. It was Rabin. The same Rabin who killed 16 of his guys. Rabin had had a mental collapse. And according to Chaim Bar-Lev, he did not recover from that until after the war. And I researched the '67 war for my Yom Kippur war book. And you see Moshe Dayan's name coming up over and over. You see a lot of other names. The one name you never see is Rabin's because he was basically on the sideline, yet he emerged this great hero. Menachem Begin could have leaked that to the press. I'm sure he knew about it. Wouldn't a normal person have wanted to just get even with this guy who killed 16 of his men? But he didn't. He kept his mouth shut because it was not in the interest of the people. That's what was needed exactly. And that was such a great man. And why when he passed away, like a million people went to his funeral, because he really was this truly great man who could rise above it. It was all about the public. I look at these opposition leaders today, the Yair Lapids, the Benny Gantzes, they don't live up to that. They left the government. Try to imagine Menachem Begin in the middle of the Yom Kippur War putting forth a motion of no confidence in the Knesset or saying half the things that Yair Lapid said, that Golda has to resign. Look at the polling. Look at the polls. Or try to imagine Menachem Begin leaving the government in the middle of the 1967 war like Benny Gantz did because they're not listening to me. He's not taking my advice. I've been rendered irrelevant. I'm leaving the government. He wouldn't have done it. It never would have happened.

Lio: But the truth is, this is why—

Uri: I said this to my wife when Benny Gantz left the government. I said, he's finished. That's it. He just killed himself politically. The public will never forgive him. He's dropped like a brick in the polls ever since. And now he's at what's called the achuz hasima, the minimum threshold. I don't think he's getting in. He may or may not get into the Knesset.

Lio: Okay, okay. Leave the politics. Get back to the point. You are actually proving the point. When we stick to that collective unity, even on top of such—and you picked a really horrific act of transgression. I'm saying even, you and your wife, I'm sure that there are squabbles there. There's conflict. There's friction. But there's always—

Uri: Me and my wife—

Lio: No, no, no. Listen, first of all—some people's wives. It's that—but those who are able, and by the way, this is more common in religious societies. I'm not saying they're immune to that, but those who are able to always rise above that, to understand I'm an egoist, you're an egoist. We both have, right? But if we're able to cover that with love, we reach a deeper connection. That's a truth of nature that you see when you're married long enough. Most people, they never stick around long enough to figure out this truth. They leave the first time the kitchen blows up. But if you stick around, you see that this is true. When you raise children, you see the same thing. Your kid could be a terrible kid, but if you love them, that love can do a lot of good over time. You won't see it right away, but you will build something better on top of those frictions. So what we're posing to you is a very deep question. What is it that we need to do now as Jews in order to work on that point, which I think just by kind of circling around it is at the heart of what we're seeing today? You can argue that you can't change the bias and people are plagued by cognitive dissonance and the left is rising with anti-Semitism. The right is rising with anti-Semitism. What can you do? You can't change the world. But can we maybe change a few million Jews?

Uri: I don't think we have to. It's funny you say that. Can we change a few million Jews? They say that when the Labor Party lost the election in 1977, one of the top labor politicians, Yitzhak Ben-Aharon, came out and said, the nation has spoken. We need a new nation. He was only half joking. We don't need a new nation. We do need better leaders. And it's right there in Pirkei Avot. I don't know if I'm going to be pronouncing things in the Hebrew, in the Israeli accent or the American accent—Pirkei Avos. It says in Pirkei Avot, the difference between a machloket l'shem shamayim, a well-intentioned disagreement, is Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel. In the Talmud, they argued over everything under the sun, but it says also they married one another, they were friends. But what's a bad example? The story in the Torah of Korach, which ended badly. Why? What's the difference? It's because Korach, when he disagreed with Moses, Moshe, he didn't say, I don't like this policy. You should have done it that way. It's like, why are you guys getting all the jobs? Why don't we get the top jobs? It was all personal. It was all personal advancement. That's the difference. We need leaders who say, well, like the example of Menachem Begin, it's not about me. He was willing to commit political suicide. He was willing to commit physical suicide. Why? Because he was a great man who rose above. What was the quality? Begin made a lot of mistakes, but he was a truly great man. It was always about the public. Always, always. He'd commit political suicide time again if he thought it was in the public interest. He didn't care. This is what I'm going to do. This is what's right.

Seth: Let's do a thought experiment. What if that quality, what if we can nurture that quality in the nation of Israel? That we are not in it just for my self-benefit, but we're in it for the klal.

Uri: Yeah. What would that look like?

Seth: What would it look like?

Uri: First of all, it would look like Yair Lapid saying what Menachem Begin said in 1967. I'm joining the government. I'll take any role.

Seth: No, no, 10,000 feet. Forget about the people. Just the 10,000 feet. What would the nation look like? What would the world look like if the Jews were able to be invested with that quality?

Uri: I think you'd see a much better Israel. I think you'd see an Israel that's much less contentious. I think you'd see an Israel that was much more successful. I once saw a satire years ago, it was hilarious, where God Almighty declares, I'm going to create a people who are geniuses in every sphere of human endeavor—literature, science, you name it—except one: political science. And let's see what happens. And it's like, it just pretty much hit the nail on the head. I think Israel would be a lot better off, unquestionably.

Seth: About the world's attitude towards us?

Uri: That's a whole different conversation. I don't think the world cares whether there's judicial reform in Israel or not. There's that argument, well, we need a strong Supreme Court to prevent the Hague. And it turns out it's complete nonsense because they still indicted everyone for genocide.

Lio: You're right that they don't care in the traditional sense. But don't you think that if Jews—Jews are always secretly held to a higher standard as well, not so secretly.

Uri: Unquestionably.

Lio: Right. So deep down, everybody's looking up to us. You could say sometimes they look at it from the negative, as it is the case right now. But they also look at Jews from the positive. After the Holocaust, we were like the underdogs. Everybody loved—it was fashionable to love the Jews, to see them succeed despite all the odds. So people have this innate—and this is something that we see also throughout history—they have this, they look up to the Jews. And it was, Greek philosophy was Greeks coming to Israel during a certain peaceful period, by the way, we talked about it, and they learned the wisdom, the Jewish wisdom. They call it philosophy because they didn't have a name for Kabbalah at the time or whatever it was called, but it was their version of what they got from the Jews. People want to do that. We have, in fact, an entire episode on TheJewFunction, episode number two, dedicated to anti-Semites writing literally love letters to Jews. Like, please, give us Jews who are leading the blind, who are this and that. People who wrote terrible stuff about Jews. And yet they dedicate chapters, including Henry Ford, including even Hitler, alluding to some of that innate greatness that is unacceptable in their eyes. The point is, if people feel that, then maybe if we manage to show that—you know what? With everything, we can even do it between us. We can demonstrate that highest quality of care, of love, of respect, above the friction. Because that's what's killing the world today. It's that social friction. There's nothing else. The world has everything. We live better than, you said it yourself, better than any other period in history, right? It's now. What's killing us? Social friction. I can't stand you and therefore I'm going to—I don't know how to rise above that. I need an example.

Seth: There's enough food, there's enough money, there's enough medicine, there's enough land, there's enough water, there's everything today. It's just this. What's missing.

Uri: Because that's—I think your reading of history is all wrong. That's not what makes what makes people crazy. It's not a lack of food or a lack of this or that. What makes people crazy is inequality. And they've—

Lio: No, no, no, no. You're right.

Uri: What takes the donkey down is not the weight. It's the distribution of the weight.

Lio: No, no, you're right. We didn't say that. We said people are egoists. That's what we're saying. And the ego is always going to look for something. And the question is, even about the distribution, still, what prevents us from distributing things lovingly? Like in your family, I'm sure, every kid gets all the food they need, right? There's no question.

Uri: Absolutely.

Lio: And if you expand it a little bit, with your son's wives or your daughter's husbands and their kids, everybody's still going to get. It's for some reason when we leave that unit, it starts to get a little murky. With Jews, we had tribes and the tribes also lived. We were able to do it for a little bit. And yet all the texts, all the Jewish texts talk about that quality. You maintain that quality, everything else will flow. That's what you said for the machloket l'shem shamayim, right? The argument for the sake of—what's shamayim? What's up there? There's nothing. It's not a bearded guy upstairs. It's a force of love and bestowal. That's what all the sages are writing about. They always wrote about that. So how can we be more like that, that quality?

Uri: That's what we're asking. It's a simple question. It is the ultimate question. It's more than anything. It's about arguing with the right intention. Why are you arguing? Are you arguing because you want everyone to think you're smarter than everyone else? Or are you arguing because you want to get at the truth? Why do we have this disagreement? Is it because I'm trying to advance myself, my own selfish interests? Or am I trying to advance the overall good? Maybe we need better leaders. I don't know. I actually think we're not doing so bad. We could be doing better. We can always be doing better. But at the end of the day, and I always want to try to end anything on a positive note, I am very optimistic for the future. If I had said to you on October the 8th that we're going to be sitting here a little over two years from now with a booming Israeli economy, Bashar gone, the leadership of Hezbollah gone, the leadership of Hamas gone, the Iranian nuclear program maybe not gone, but certainly badly set back, no one would have believed that Israel would have had the outcome that it had. It's sad that it never seems to get a decisive victory like America achieved, like Britain achieved, but that will come. The trending is all in our favor. We just have to be smart about this and continue to respect each other, which is more important than even loving each other. If we just do that, the hard part's been done for us. We've been handed this incredible country. We just got to not screw it up.

Lio: I hope we don't. Do you think, last question, I know you got to go, do you think there's a way to instill that in people? Because a lot of times I hear a lot of people, good people, well-intentioned people say yeah, if we just respect each other, if we just—it's a little bit—and yet I notice about myself that if this is not something that I place first on my to-do list the beginning of every day, then it's not happening. I'm going back to being a little beast that's about me, me, me. Is there—

Uri: I don't know that there's some magic solution. I do think we can rise above it. We've risen above it before. We did it in '48. And we shall rise again. We will do it again.

Lio: Amen. Uri, I know you gotta run. I put a quote in the chat, very short one. I picked it for you. We pick a quote from the sources for every guest here. If you can do us the honor and read it for us, it's from Rav Kook. He's a great guy.

Uri: How would I define the group? I mean, that's—since we were ruined by unfounded hatred and the world... Ah, it just went away. I can't see it.

Lio: Ah, since we were ruined—

Uri: By the unfounded hatred and the world was ruined with us, we will be rebuilt by unfounded love and the world will be rebuilt with us. Ah, beautiful thought. He was one of the greats.

Lio: He was. He was.

Uri: Rav Kook.

Lio: Thank you so much. Thank you so much for being with us. I encourage everyone to listen to the show at half speed so you can actually get something. This was great.

Uri: Get my book.

Lio: Yes.

Uri: Best at half speed.

Lio: Yeah, we'll put the link in the chat. It's on Amazon probably and everywhere else, right? I imagine. American Intifada. Get it. He's such a great storyteller. I'm sure there's a lot of great bits there. Good luck with your next book.

Uri: Thank you.

Lio: Please stay in touch with us. We'd love to have you again if time permits. And we'll see everyone. This is TheJewFunction. Like, subscribe, comment. Spread this talk to more people. Thank you, Uri.

Uri: Thanks, guys. It was great. Thank you. Bye-bye.

Lio: Bye-bye.

Guest: Uri Kaufman, author of American Intifada: Israel, the Gaza War, and the New Anti-Semitism