Jamie Kirchick on Europe’s Coming Dark Age

The Tikvah Podcast

Tikvah

Judaism, Politics, Religion & Spirituality, News

4.6 • 620 Ratings

🗓️ 14 June 2018

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Once the beating heart of world Jewish life, Europe has given way to the United States and Israel as home to the overwhelming majority of Jews. In fact, 21st-century Europe is once again shedding its Jewish population as it becomes an increasingly harder place for them to build their lives.

How did this come to pass? How can it be that less than a century after the Holocaust wiped out most of European Jewry, the continent’s remaining Jews face an increasingly hostile environment?

This is just one of the many question Jamie Kirchick tackles in his new book, The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age. In this podcast, Kirchick joins Jonathan Silver to discuss the book. They begin by examining the roots of Europe’s current economic and geopolitical discontents. But the conversation soon turns to the present situation faced by Europe’s Jews as the continent struggles to deal with a growing immigration crisis and resurgent populism on both the Left and the Right. As they explore the post-Cold War history of Europe, the decline of its cultural confidence, and the perilous future of European Jewry, Kirchick and Silver push us to consider the prospect of a Europe without Jews and what that would augur for the continent and the world.

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, as well as Midnight Three by Sirus Music.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Today, Israel and the United States are the homes of the two largest Jewish communities in the world.
0:14.9	And so it can be kind of surprising when you realize that this is relatively new in Jewish history.
0:20.2	Just a hundred years ago, at the dawn of
0:22.7	the 20th century, only about one million Jews lived in the U.S. and less than 100,000 Jewish women
0:29.2	and men lived in Israel. What are today the most populous, powerful, important centers of Jewish
0:35.2	life were then outposts at the periphery.
0:39.5	When less than 100,000 Jews lived in the land of Israel and about a million Jews lived in the
0:44.2	U.S., nine million Jews lived in Europe.
0:47.8	Europe was the center of Western Jewish life for more than a thousand years.
0:53.0	So our question today is, what's the state of the European
0:55.7	nations now and of the Jews who live there? Welcome to the Tikva podcast and great Jewish essays and
1:01.7	ideas. I'm your host, Jonathan Silver. My guest today is James Kirchick, known to his friends as Jamie,
1:08.5	and he's the author of The End of Europe, Dictators, Demagogues,
1:12.5	and The Coming Dark Age. That book is the subject of today's discussion. If you like listening
1:18.0	to the Tikva podcast, you can subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher, where I hope you'll leave us a rating
1:22.9	and a review. And if you'd like to learn more about our work at the Tikva Fund, you can visit
1:27.0	our website,
1:28.0	tikvafund.org, or follow us on Facebook and Twitter. Here now is my conversation with Jamie
1:33.5	Kirchik. Jamie Kirchik, welcome to the Tikva podcast. Thank you. I thought I'd just begin by reading
1:39.3	a quote from the book to set the context. Europe is undergoing convulsions, greater than anything it has experienced
1:45.8	in decades. Just five years after winning the Nobel Peace Prize, the European Union, one of the
1:50.8	most ambitious political projects in history, is crumbling. Threatening its very existence is the
	...

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