This is the Tom Hartman Program.

Welcome to the program.

On the line with us is Yasha Monk.

He is a professor at John Hopkins University, a senior fellow of the Council of Foreign Relations,

the founder of Persuasion, contributing editor to the Atlantic publisher of Desite, host of the

Good Fight Podcast on Pandora, and author of the new book the identity trap a story

of ideas and power in our time professor monk welcome to the program thank you

so much i find your book fascinating, the idea that you open the book with kind of the story of your

own family and your grandparents going to jail for supporting essentially communism and how their perspectives have changed as kind of

a meta to how the world's perspectives have changed and gone through a series of changes

over time about groups that identify as essentially separate from country.

You want to talk about that?

Yeah, of course. I mean, my grandparents were born in Dettles in the Austro-Hungarian Empire

in the country of what today would be the Ukraine

and they you know suffered from deep discrimination as Jews

that moment in history and so like many Jews at the time they were really attracted to these communist ideals

because they thought that it's what promised them that we would only look at people's social class, or we would see workers of the world uniting

and they would overcome the kind of aspects of identity

that often motivate deep discrimination and injustice.

Now, the communist regimes they helped to build turned against that ideal in terrible ways.

When my parents were about 18, 19 years old, they were thrown out of Poland by the communist regime at the time going on a big anti-Semitic campaign.

But when I grew up, I thought of myself as being on the left without embracing the communist ideas of my grandparents, because I thought

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