S8 Ep290: WESTCHESTER AND THE AMERICANIZATION OF JUDAISM Colleague Josh Hammer. Growing up in a secular Jewish environment, dropping out of Hebrew school, and the later discovery of conservatism and Edmund Burke leading to religious observance. NUMBER 2

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John Batchelor

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🗓️ 9 January 2026

⏱️ 9 minutes

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WESTCHESTER AND THE AMERICANIZATION OF JUDAISM Colleague Josh Hammer. Growing up in a secular Jewish environment, dropping out of Hebrew school, and the later discovery of conservatism and Edmund Burke leading to religious observance. NUMBER 2
1936 RAMALLAH

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0:00.0	This is CBSI on the world. I'm John Batscher, spending time with Josh Hammer. My colleague,
0:06.6	his new book is Israel and Civilization, Treblinka. You visited Treblinka, and before we get to the
0:12.6	site of the massacre in 23, I've not been to Treblinka. What is it like? What is the experience like
0:19.7	visiting? What does it look like today? What's left of it, Josh? So there's not much left. There's really not much left at all, actually. In fact, so Treblinka is north, northeast of Warsaw. It's toward Lithuania. So when the eastern front for the Nazis started to collapse and the Soviets started making their march on Berlin roughly around the time that the Western Front started to move from Normandy ever close to Germany as well.
0:47.0	At that point, the Nazis actually tried very hard to hide their war crimes.
0:50.7	They essentially tore down all the infrastructure.
0:53.0	So there's actually, it's not like
0:54.3	Auschwitz. There is no, there's no actual physical gas chambers or anything of the sort of left.
0:59.6	Rather, there was a very crude memorial that's over the entire field, a very large memorial that was
1:05.7	actually built by the, by the communists, by the Soviets when they occupied Poland back in the 60s, 70s, sometime
1:12.2	around then. But there are still, there are still stones where the train came from Warsaw,
1:17.8	the train of death from Warsaw, because most of the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto were exterminated
1:21.7	at Treblinka. It was the closest death camp to Warsaw there. But, you know, more generally,
1:26.8	John, that was my first, and I suppose thus far, only experience
1:30.2	going to the site of one of these concentration camps there.
1:33.6	And we started the day in the Warsaw ghetto.
1:35.9	We went to Treblinka afterwards.
1:38.0	The thing about Treblinka is it's a really, really, really tiny town.
1:42.4	It's absolutely tiny there.
1:44.0	And, you know, driving there off the highway, going through these houses... it's a really, really, really tiny town. It's absolutely tiny there.
1:49.5	And, you know, driving there off the highway, going through these houses, your heart just sinks to the bottom of the earth because you find yourself just asking this question over
1:53.9	and over and over again, which is, you know, the folks here knew what was happening.
	...

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