Why Liberal Religion is Losing Ground

27:46Coleman Hughes:I think that's absolutely right. You know, I've been saying that anti-Semitism, especially the anti-Semitism on the right, is just the right wing version of systemic racism on the left. And what do I mean by that? I mean, what systemic racism said was that, well, if white people are earning X percent more money than black people, if white people are imprisoned at a lower rate than black people, if white people have more wealth than black people or Hispanics or any other group, the only allowable explanations for that are that white people are dominating society and discriminating against black people.

28:27Coleman Hughes:No matter how much research, including from African American scholars, comes out suggesting that there are many things that cause disparities, many innocent explanations for disparities, especially in a multicultural society, the whole idea of a multicultural society is that you actually have different subcultures in the same society. And insofar as they're different in any meaningful way, in any way more meaningful than what you eat for dinner, you would expect them to have different outcomes. You can't have a multicultural society, a diverse society where everyone achieves the same thing. Different groups specialize in different professions.

29:06Coleman Hughes:Different groups have somewhat different values that lead to all kinds of different specializations and different outcomes. And so, as you said, that same exact logic sort of applied within the group, the umbrella term of white people in the West, which Jews are lumped in with, leads to the same exact conclusion. Why does the average American Jew have a higher income than the average American Christian? Well, they're going to come to the same conclusion. Jews must be rigging the game. It's equally unsound. but um you know no matter how many books thomas soul writes just destroying this premise a certain kind of person just won't let go of it or indians who have a higher uh income i believe even the jews do that's correct um so it's which is due to to multiple um factors it's uh you know the um I do a podcast with Brett Stevens called the Sapir podcast, which comes out of the Maimonides fund.

30:13And Sapir is this journal. And the last journal was on Jews and money. And we knew that it was a tricky thing to, I mean, it has some fascinating articles in it, but we knew that it was a tricky thing because the trope is so powerful and so deep. and yet it's really important for people to start looking at their cultural assumptions anew and unfortunately the prevailing social ethos is to just reinforce the cultural assumptions you have not to re-examine them.

30:50Coleman Hughes:So why do you think you know it seems to me that liberal religion is in decline in the world meaning you know you have conservative Muslims conservative Christians but you also have liberal Christians. You have tolerant Christians. They don't believe things literally. That seems to be, with each passing year, a smaller and smaller phenomenon as, is it that liberal? Is it the kind of strict church paradox where if you have a relaxed church where you can sort of believe whatever you want and take it a la carte, that actually doesn't keep people coming back because it attracts the kind of people that may not show up to church in the first place and may just bleed into secular culture as a result of not being strict enough?

31:38So I, again, like a lot of why questions, I think this one is kind of overdetermined. We know, for example, that a lot of Jews who came to the United States abandoned their religious life the moment they hit the shore. So we know that it's not like if you have an orthodox life, it will inevitably keep people in orthodox life. Some of them will flee. And that's why in America, for most of our history, and even up to now, reforming conservative were much larger in numbers than orthodox was, especially right-wing Orthodox. But it is also true that when you're non-literalist, and I think that's the easiest way to put it, non-literalist movements means that you engage more with the society in general.

32:31And the society in general is a very attractive society. And so if you look at other ethnic groups who came in the early 1900s, the Irish, the Italians, and so on, most of them have essentially disappeared into the larger population. They carry some cultural memories and some tropes, but nothing like it was in the first couple generations when they were really cohesive neighborhoods. Jews have held out somewhat longer, but America is a very, very powerful embrace. And, you know, if you send your kid to a university, yes there's going to be a Jewish population there but there's going to be a much larger non-Jewish population and they will meet many bright, attractive, wonderful engaging, charming people and the chances that they won't find someone to marry in that non-Jewish population grow smaller and smaller over time as the Jewish population grows smaller so non-literalist movements to keep their integrity in a time when, you know, people are generally accepted.

33:52And so I don't know what the solution is. No one does. I mean, this is something that all of the movements have struggled with greatly. And it may be that this will change. We always extrapolate from what is. And, you know, we used to think that that literalist movements would die out. And now we think non-literalist movements will die out. But it is a real challenge for anybody like myself who is not a literalist to try to sustain the enthusiasm and the care and the love of the tradition that I have in generations to follow. I'll just close with this.

34:36if you for example in a Jewish context if you want to get somebody to I don't know observe the Sabbath which means that you don't go out you don't spend money you don't do a lot of things that people would normally do on a Saturday and somebody says why shouldn't I it's a very effective apodetic declaration to say, because God said you can't. The creator of the universe told you not to. As soon as you don't believe that literally, then you have to give reasons why it's good for the person not to do it. And giving reasons why it's good is a lot harder and more tenuous and more arguable, then God said you can't.

35:19And I would think all non-literalist faith in every movement struggles with that difference.

35:27Coleman Hughes:I want to talk about antisemitism in general and in particular on college campuses, which I think you have experience with in the past two years. You know, I guess one place to start is like, do you have a working definition of antisemitism? and is it different from your definition of bigotry racialized or ethnic bigotry in general the definition might not be different but the causes and manifestations are different that is if you hate someone because of who they are not what they've done that's prejudice whether they're Jewish or black or Puerto Rican or Indian or anything or, or gay or, you know, whatever.

36:22It doesn't matter. So if you hate them for what they are, instead of for what they've done, that already is bigotry or Mormon or I mean, or, or white or anything. But, But anti-Semitism is different in at least a couple ways from any other racial or ethnic prejudice that I'm aware of. One is, and I'll just identify two ways. I mean, I don't want to go too deep in this, although we can if you want to. But the two ways that are really different is, one, there is a weird subhuman superhuman valence to it. That is, Jews are vermin who control the world. That's how the Nazis spoke of them. Now, I know a theory that explains why that's so, but we can leave that aside for now.

37:12Nonetheless, I don't think that's true of any other hatred, that in fact, we think of them as less than us, but they actually control us. And the second is that anti-Semitism always resolves to some kind of conspiracy. And so when you have a conspiracy, it almost, almost inevitably ends up in the Jews, which is just a bizarre phenomenon of history that has been going on now for a very long time.

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38:42Coleman Hughes:So let's then talk about anti-Semitism on college campuses, because it seems to me what we're dealing with ever since October 7th is, I guess, two separate phenomena that are not clearly delineated and are in principle actually tough to draw lines. So, you know, from my perspective, I'm basically a free speech absolutist insofar as anyone can be a free speech absolutist. Obviously, you can't incite violence and all that stuff. but if a college student says you know i don't think anyone was raped on october 7th um i don't think hamas committed atrocities now my opinion of that person's intellect goes down incalculably if they say something so stupid right and and so callous but they're totally allowed to say it that's actually in the realm of political disagreement now Now, sometimes when I read about anti-Semitism since October 7th, I hear Jewish students claiming that that kind of stuff makes them feel uncomfortable.

39:50Coleman Hughes:And I get that. It probably does make them feel uncomfortable. But you're supposed to feel uncomfortable, right? If that is actually what we mean when we talk about anti-Semitism on campus, how do you then deny that, say, an Arab student or a Palestinian student can't be made uncomfortable if they have to hear something like, oh, I don't think there's starvation in Gaza? So I've come out and said, I don't think there was starvation. I think there was hunger. I don't think there was starvation. That's going to make a Palestinian student feel uncomfortable. I don't think there was a genocide in Gaza.

40:23Coleman Hughes:I think that's a totally made-up charge. perpetrated by idiotic international rights organizations that have a bias against Israel. But that could very much make an Arab or a Palestinian student or any student feel uncomfortable. That's their problem. That's not bigotry. That's not harassment. And then on the other hand, you have actual examples of harassment. You have Jewish students, you know, allegedly followed around and, you know, go back to Poland. And you even have reports of, you know, a student who gets spat on because they're wearing a yarmulke and so forth. But there's not, like, sometimes there isn't, these two conversations get conflated.

41:04Coleman Hughes:So where is the line between anti-Semitism on the one hand and legitimate deep political disagreements where Jewish students are invariably in the minority and feel uncomfortable? I am with you 100%. First of all, I would not sanction a student for saying there's, you know um israelis are starving palestinian kids i wouldn't sanction them for saying it's a genocide um i don't i don't even think and i know it's going to get me in trouble i don't think saying israel perpetuated the genocide is necessarily an anti-semitic statement i think a lot of people say that who genuinely think that that is true and that that's not and they don't say it because even though I think that they're completely wrong, I don't think they say it because they hate Jews.

41:57So yes, all those things should be said on campus. It gets much trickier when they're said by professors. That's a different question about what is going over. I mean, academic freedom is a really difficult, like does academic freedom allow you to inculcate Nazi beliefs in your, in your, or anti-Semitic beliefs or racist beliefs in your class? That's a different question. Should somebody be able to say in class, I don't like white people, I don't like black people? Again, in theory, yes. Although in practice, part of the problem of what happened on campus was someone who said, I don't like white people would be applauded in class.

42:41And someone who said, I don't like black people would be thrown out. Someone who said, i don't like jews would be okay someone who said i don't like muslims would be thrown out that was the experience um but as a as a general principle in theory i suppose all those things could be said although you'll have to suffer from social shunning but when professors say them or when um or when as you say there is uh that's why i mean that's why colleges have time place and manner restrictions. When you follow Jewish students around the campus and say you're baby killers, that's harassment. That's not protected academic speech.

43:23So the lines are difficult and they're tricky. And I went up to the demonstrations at Harvard numerous times to talk to them because I really wanted to hear what they had to say, but they wouldn't speak to me. And in fact, In fact, in one case, I was told that they were instructed not to talk to me. And that let me know that this was an organized and that this wasn't spontaneous outbursts of indignation. And so I think that there was, that you can be, you can allow that as academic freedom and still recognize that it shows a structural dysfunction in the teaching, administration, staff, and conduct of the university.

44:18Yeah.

44:19Coleman Hughes:Another one of the flashpoints is around the various slogans that people adopt in the pro-Palestinian cause or the anti-Israel cause, however you want to frame it. You got ceasefire now, which is relatively inoffensive slogan that I see how anyone could get behind who's just seeing images of war on their phone and thinks it should stop. then you've got from the river to the sea right which by itself is an abstract slogan that can in principle mean whatever you individually want it to mean right it when hamas says it it means we want to kill the jews kill and or expel the jews between the river and the sea that is all of israel not just not just settlers in the west bank all of israel so it is genocidal when hamas says it when the kids i went to school with at columbia a few years ago say it or post it on facebook i honestly think many of them if not most don't mean in their minds kill the jews of israel i think they think it's sort of a liberation most of them i what i was going to say was um first of all the ones who said it in arabic uh i was in a i was in a uh when i was at harvard i was in a restaurant right off campus and a bunch of people came in and started chanting in Arabic.

45:40And in Arabic, it is from the river to the sea, Palestine will be Arab. It's not will be free. The Arabic version is will be Arab. And that's a pretty clear declaration of there won't be Jews there. But what I would say is you're right for a while. You could say for the river to the sea, and I mean, the Wall Street Journal famously did this article asking people what river and what and most of them had no idea.

46:05Coleman Hughes:Right. You could do that for a month. But after a while, everybody was well aware of how it was being taken, even if that was not how they were intending it originally. So I think at a certain point, you have to have a fidelity to the sensitivities of your audience. And if you know that they're hearing that as genocidal, that's something you want to be aware of. and even more, by the way, globalized the Intifada, which is hard to see other than as an explicit call for violence. Since that's what the Intifada was, by universal recognition at the time, the first and second Intifada, I mean, I was in Israel during the Intifada and it was a time of blowing up buses.

46:52That's what it was. We brought millions of dollars to Israel from my synagogue and all of it was given to victims of terror and their families. And they were all over Israel because that was what the Intifada was. So globalize the Intifada is to me an even clearer case, but from the river to the sea, for a while people may not have known, but pretty soon it was clear.

47:19Coleman Hughes:Okay, I think I disagree with this because I think you're overestimating the extent to which people are actually educated. The people that couldn't name the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, it wasn't just after a month that they knew that from the river to the sea is something Hamas says and what it means. These are people that don't know. Many of them literally think that both Intifadas, the first and the second, were essentially, like they're deeply steeped in misinformation. They don't know that over a thousand Israelis, civilians were killed on buses and in bars and in restaurants, and that that's what the second intifada means to a historian of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

48:10Coleman Hughes:I think some of them are so deeply in misinformation circles that they just associate these slogans with essentially the vibes of decolonization, right? And to me, you know, political slogans, unless they are explicit, like kill the Jews or down with the Jews, I mean, that's an explicit slogan. But, you know, we had in this country a huge debate over what does Black Lives Matter mean and what does all lives matter mean? To some people, black lives matter meant let's reform the police. To other people, it meant, hold on, why are you saying black lives matter but don't all lives matter? And to some people, all lives matter was a white supremacist statement, while to others it literally meant, how could you take it that way?

48:59Coleman Hughes:I'm literally saying all lives matter. How could you take this as white supremacist? But isn't this the nature of political slogans that their meaning is contested by definition? I take the point in general. I think that it was in the hothouse of the college where every single day people were talking about what this slogan meant and people read the college newspaper and they heard from their professors and their peers. I would, the best I would concede to you is this. They may have known that others saw it as a genocidal slogan and still said, but that's not how I'm saying it. I suppose that is possible.

49:48But I don't think after a month of saying from the river to the sea and hearing how the Jewish students, and not only the Jewish students reacted to it, that they were unaware of the fact that some people saw it as genocidal but you know this is it is a minor point on in the in the pretty

50:08Coleman Hughes:slippery highway to hell in your in in in defense of what you're saying i assume you remember the video of norman finkelstein trying to convince yeah people on his own side the students i mean right say what you want about norman finkelstein this guy really has devoted his whole life to the cause of Gaza, right? So none of those students have an inch on him in terms of caring about this issue. He wrote the book on it, and I think he's wrong about most of what he says. But he gives this long, impassioned, pretty good speech on why ceasefire now is a good slogan and from the river to the sea is a bad slogan.

50:48Coleman Hughes:And what does he, it's not two seconds that he leaves the bullhorn, that they get the bullhorn and just start chanting from the river to the sea. The subtext being, fuck you boomer we know what we're doing get out of here with all these arguments about responsibility and yada yada yada we're perfectly comfortable being understood to be violent in some in some way right i think that that was that was part of the strategy you know yeah um okay one other topic i want to hit with you you know recently you know i've been thinking about the word zionist right this is a word that just gets thrown around all the time I get called a Zionist on the internet, and I don't know what it means.

51:32Coleman Hughes:I literally don't know what it means. And I also have this argument with other people that support Israel's right to defend itself, Israel's right to exist, who self-identify as Zionists, and I ask them what it means, and I'm not really satisfied by their answers either. And so here's what I mean. You know, if you were to talk, you know, nobody, let me put it this way. The word Zionist meant something very specific between 1880 and 1948. It meant somebody who wanted to establish a Jewish state somewhere in historic Palestine, right? I would have known what you meant if you called yourself a Zionist in 1880 or 1920 or even 1946.

52:17Coleman Hughes:Once the state is there, going on 80 years, recognized by the United nations. Why does there need to be a word for a person who thinks it should continue existing or have the right to defend itself, right? If Australia got attacked by terrorists, I would be defending Australia's right to defend itself, right? But there's no word for that. There doesn't need to be a word for it. In practice, the word Zionism just allows the enemies of Israel, I think, to portray it as not a real country. In other words, as still a colonial project that's hoping to one day be a country. Right. And then it just basically becomes a slur rather than a meaningful word.

53:03Coleman Hughes:So that's why I've never identified with the word Zionist, and I don't actually know what it means. So this is kind of a chicken and egg problem in the sense that do people say that Israel is the one established country in the world that doesn't have a right to exist because people call themselves Zionists, which suggests there's a question? Or do people call themselves Zionists because it happens to be the one country that people still debate whether it has the right to exist? I agree with you. Nobody calls themselves a Frenchist because they believe that France has a right to exist. But that's essentially what Zionist means, which is a very, it's a sort of very anodyne and one would hope one day would be a completely unobjectionable term, which just means somebody who believes that Israel has a right to exist like every other nation.

54:05And this is why Anat Wilf, for example, says that she really believes that the Arab nations around Israel, some of them are, and all of them should be Zionists because it would be good for them too to be Zionists. And that one day she hopes the Palestinians will be Zionists. And that means that they would live side by side within Israel that they recognize the same way France lives next to Italy and nobody ever says, you know, Italy shouldn't exist because it's very bizarre that, you know, Germany started two world wars, but nobody says there shouldn't be a Germany and nobody says there shouldn't be a China because of the Uyghurs or there shouldn't be a Rwanda because of the Houthis and the Tutsis.

54:45And there shouldn't be a Myanmar because of the Rohingya. It's just, it's a real historical anomaly that clearly reflects a large measure of anti-Semitism, that there's one country in the world that not just shouldn't have a different government or different borders, but it should not exist, period. period. And so I think that Zionist, at least from my understanding, is because that belief exists, there has to be something of a pushback to say, no, I am one of those people who believes it should. And one of those people who believes it should is called a Zionist. Well, that's

55:27Coleman Hughes:interesting. I mean, that's interesting because I think there are a lot of people that would say Israel does have a right to exist, but would recoil at being called a Zionist. So that means in their mind, those are not the same thing. That's a bad PR. Then we have bad PR. Maybe we need a different word. Right. Which, let's just call such a person a rational human being. I'd be happy with that. Where are you on enlightenment values as a rabbi? Do you like enlightenment values? Do you believe that enlightenment values are a good foundation on which to build a society? And do you think there's a relationship between enlightenment values and Judeo-Christian values, or do you think there's an opposition between them?

56:15To the extent that enlightenment values are based solely on the products of human reason, I think that they are fragile and dangerous because reason breeds monsters just like the sleep of reason breeds monsters. And I really do believe that an underlying value structure to society is essential and salutary and important. And that I'm certainly not anti-Enlightenment. I think science and technology and reason have given tremendous boons to the world, but I don't see religion and science as in opposition. They have moments of clash, but generally I think they can live in very harmonious quarters together.

57:12So I would say I like living in an enlightenment society that has a foundation of religious values. And to me, at least, that's what America and that's what Europe has been for a long time, although increasingly is not. And that's what America still is, although there are challenges on both sides to that. But I think that that is kind of the ideal combination. Will Herberg, many years ago, the theologian, talked about cut flower ethics. He said, what happens is if you remove the religious soil, the ethics of a society will stay for a while, just like cut flowers, but eventually they will wither and die.

57:57And that's my fear is that people do not realize how much of what we take for granted as sort of normal ethics have actually a religious foundation. And without that religious foundation, you get some of the anomie and purposelessness and meaninglessness that I think are creeping and dangerous tendencies in America. Okay.

58:22Coleman Hughes:So final question. Is it true? I read that you, I didn't know this about you, that you battled two brain tumors and lymphoma? One brain tumor, and then I had to have two operations because then the first operation didn't go as well as it should. I had that and lymphoma. Yeah. Wow. So did the experience of battling those cancers change any of your beliefs about the American medical system? Did it make you more a fan of American doctors and hospitals or less a fan? Did it change anything there? I just want to say, first of all, I mean, you know, I'm a fan of yours and have been for a long time. And this is one of the reasons why, because everybody who starts the question with you've had tumor and lymphoma, they always want to ask, did it make you feel differently about God?

59:17You're the first human being that has said, how does it make you feel about the American medical system? Which is great. I had a very fortunate bout because I survived. So I felt very good about one of the things I learned from it, which I think everybody who goes through enough medical trauma learns, is we do not, we just do not value nurses the way we should because the doctors are great. The nurses make all the difference. And boy, a good nurse is like an unbelievable blessing. So I think my experience with the medical system was that it was in extremis good. but anything a little bit less than extremist was hard to get, hard to navigate.

1:00:27It's just very hard to navigate. And if you're not lucky enough to have people who are really savvy and capable, if I had been by myself, I think it would have been a very hard go. I don't think we make it easy for people, even if the care is available, we just don't make it easy for people to find their way through a very difficult system. But I was very lucky in both cases because I got great medical care, partly because I was in L.A., partly because I knew a lot of doctors by virtue of being the rabbi in a large synagogue. and partly because I had people in my family and my network who looked out for me.

1:01:14So I had a sort of optimum situation and it still wasn't easy. And there were still things that fell through the cracks. And I still remember, I tell people now who have brain surgery, apparently after you have brain surgery, your brain starts dumping salt. That doesn't always happen, but it often happens. And no one told me that. So I went home after my brain surgery and I thought I was going insane. I really did. I've never had a feeling like that in my life. It was like I was withdrawing from heroin, never been on heroin, but it felt like that. And when we called the doctor, they said, well, don't you have salt tablets at home?

1:01:53And we said, no, we have salt tablets at home. And they said, you got to get to an ER right away because you could have another seizure, which is how all this started with a seizure because your brain is dumping salt. And I thought somebody should have mentioned that. Like a little thing. It's like a small detail. Somewhere along the way. But that's why, like, yeah, we could be doing better in the things that are not immediately urgent and, oh, this is the best medicine. But, you know, I also have an enormous amount of sympathy for the fact that healthcare gets more expensive and more complicated and more ramified and more specialized.

1:02:32and we have not yet figured out a way to do this well. And especially for people who are less fortunate, we have an enormous amount of work to do to make, to give ourselves a decent healthcare system.

1:02:48Coleman Hughes:Yeah. Okay, on that note, Rabbi David Wolpe, thank you so much for doing my podcast. Before you go, can you point my listeners in your direction on Twitter, website, or your latest book, or your upcoming book, whatever you want to plug? Sure. Rabbi Wolpe on Twitter David J. Wolpe on Instagram and Rabbi Wolpe on Facebook those are all my socials and I have a bunch of books you can find on Amazon my most recent book was a biography of King David and I'm writing a book now about the religious values that America has lost but it probably won't be out for at least a year and a half two years so I'm still working on it alright thank you Rabbi thank you Coleman great pleasure

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