Carl Gershman on What the Jewish Experience Can Offer the Uighurs of China

The Tikvah Podcast

Tikvah

Judaism, Politics, Religion & Spirituality, News

4.6 • 620 Ratings

🗓️ 12 January 2023

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Uighur people is an ethnic group historically located in central and east Asia; the bulk of its population lives western China. In recent years, the Chinese Communist Party has severely restricted Uighur religious life and has detained many Uighurs in mass re-education and work camps. On this week's podcast, inspired by a conversation he had with the Dalai Lama of Tibet, the democracy activist Carl Gershman joins us to think about whether the Jewish experience can offer anything to the Uighurs. Gershman, who founded the National Endowment for Democracy in 1984, talks with Mosaic editor Jonathan Silver about the plight of the Uighurs, how Jews have improbably survived throughout the ages, and what survival strategies the Uighurs might be able to apply to their own situation today.

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The grand drama in world politics revolves around the competition between the American-led order and China, the 5,000-year-old empire fueled by a dominant economy with advanced artificial intelligence, quantum computing,
0:22.6	naval, aviation, and military capabilities, a grand strategy that leverages infrastructure
0:28.3	and technological investments to secure trade routes, supply lines, energy resources, and
0:34.7	political influence in virtually every capital on the planet Earth.
0:39.4	China is governed by its Communist Party, which deprives its subjects of rights and liberties at
0:44.4	home, surveils and purloins intellectual property and technological breakthroughs abroad,
0:50.4	and its supports, through financial and other means, some of the most dangerous adversaries
0:55.5	threatening the United States and Israel.
0:58.6	Welcome to the Tikva podcast.
1:00.1	I'm your host, Jonathan Silver.
1:02.2	Today we look at one particular group of Chinese nationals, who are oppressed by their
1:06.6	own government, the Uyghur people, an ethnic minority of Muslim Chinese, who also live in
1:12.2	Kazakhstan, Turkey, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and elsewhere. The Chinese Communist Party
1:18.1	closely monitors and severely restricts their religious life, and many, possibly around a million,
1:24.3	are detained in mass re-education camps. The Uyghurs of China are oppressed by their
1:29.6	government, and Carl Gershman, recalling a conversation that he had with the Dalai Lama of Tibet,
1:35.0	wonders if there are strategies of national survival that the Jewish experience can offer to the
1:40.9	U.S. Gershersman founded the National Endowment for Democracy in 1984,
1:46.1	after having previously served as the U.S. ambassador to the UN Human Rights Council in the Reagan
1:51.0	administration. If you enjoyed this conversation, you can subscribe to the Tikva podcast on Apple
1:56.4	Podcasts, Stitcher, Google Play, and Spotify. I hope you leave us a five-star review to help us grow this community of ideas.
2:03.7	I welcome your feedback on this or any of our other podcast episodes at podcast at tikfafund.org.
	...

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