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American Prestige

Special - The American Jewish Divide w/ Jamie Beran (Preview)

American Prestige

Daniel Bessner & Derek Davison

History, Politics, News

4.8705 Ratings

🗓️ 12 November 2025

⏱️ 5 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Subscribe now to listen to the full episode. Danny talks with Jamie Beran, CEO of Bend the Arc, about the political and generational tension reshaping the American Jewish community. They discuss the fallout from Zoran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign in New York; the role of legacy institutions like the ADL; how debates over Israel-Palestine, antisemitism, and safety are redefining American Jewish political identity; and what these shifts mean for progressive movements and Jewish organizations navigating rising authoritarianism in the United States.

Transcript

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0:00.0

So what do you think was going on there?

0:02.7

Because the reaction was not only outsized,

0:05.4

but the thing that to me is so strange is, like,

0:08.5

one could arguably say that the far right in Israel has, quote, unquote,

0:11.9

one, not from a universalistic humanist perspective,

0:14.9

but the project of colonization is clearly proceeding apace

0:18.5

and Likud and people to their right.

0:24.6

So I just don't understand this sort of, I would almost argue,

0:32.1

feigned notion that Jews around the world are in danger.

0:36.6

To me, it just reads very strange and anachronistic. I could understand why someone would feel that way

0:39.7

in the immediate post-Holocast period.

0:42.9

I understand that.

0:44.0

It's not so crazy to think that.

0:47.2

But it seems like from the perspective of the 2020s,

0:50.2

it's kind of a bizarre and strange thing to believe.

0:53.1

And I do believe that a lot of people really

0:55.5

felt that. So what do you think was going on there? And it was expressed, this is related,

1:01.4

because it was expressed vis-à-vis the criticisms of Momdani in his campaign. Yeah. So I think

1:06.1

there's a few things going on. I mean, one I think is why was Mom Dani such a target, right? What was the threat?

1:12.5

And I think at the big picture level, he's offering an antidote to Trump's regime that we need, right?

1:20.8

We so badly need. And in a time where, you know, the MAGA movement is doing everything it can to divide us

1:27.1

and make us afraid of our neighbors and using anti-Semitism as a smokescreen as we discussed, you know, Zoran is a leader that's able to bring people together across difference and strengthen our communities. And that, I think, scares them. You know, I think that, like, the only thing that can actually effectively defeat MAGA is an undivided, you know,

...

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