Hey everybody, welcome to Crooked Conversations. I'm John Loveett. I want to introduce the

host of this week's Crooked Conversation, Rabbi Sharon Brouss is in the house. She serves

as the senior Rabbi at E-Car, a Jewish congregation here in Los Angeles. Welcome.

Thank you. I'm impressed you pronounce both Brouss and E-Car correctly, so we're already

off to a good start.

I will be lying to say that I hadn't prepared in my mind, Brouss in the house. It's why I had

to say it in full. You talked to Eric Ward, the executive director of Western State Center.

Can you tell us a little bit about what this conversation entails?

So Eric is an absolutely fascinating guy. He's an African-American man who several years

ago embedded with white nationalists in order to learn more about the Aryan nation and about

this attempt to militarize and ultimately create a white ethnic state here in the US.

And the reason that they allowed him to entry into their community is because they said

we share the same common enemy, the Jew. And he came to understand that at the heart of

white nationalism is anti-Semitism, which is something that I think even a lot of Jews

don't understand. And so he's really spent the last couple of years traveling around the

country talking to Jews and non-Jews alike about the dangers of anti-Semitism not only to

individual Jews and to Jewish communities, but also to democracy because what we know

to be true about anti-Semitism is that historically it's been used to undermine movements for social

justice. That there's this sense that if there's a Jewish puppet master that's controlling

all of the mechanisms of the economy of government, a film, Hollywood, then the rest of us

are essentially powerless against this kind of monster. And so we stop fighting back against

authoritarianism. And it's a really compelling and important message I think for us in this

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