When Did Campuses Turn On Israel? Ben Appel on anti-semitism in college classrooms

The Unspeakable Podcast

Meghan Daum

Society & Culture

4.8 • 784 Ratings

🗓️ 20 October 2023

⏱️ 66 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This week, Meghan interrupts her regularly scheduled episode lineup for a visit from Ben Appel, a New York-based writer who’s working on a book about ideological capture on college campuses. In 2016, Ben enrolled at Columbia University as a non-traditional student. Already in his 30s, he’d grown up in a cult-like Christian fundamentalist community that pelted him with homophobia; he considered himself firmly on the political left. But the politics he encountered on campus shocked him, especially many aspects of the Palestinian liberation movement. In this conversation, Ben describes what he encountered there, particularly in classes taught by famed Islamic scholars.

In the bonus portion for paying subscribers, Ben stays overtime and talks about the ideas he explored in his 2022 viral Newsweek article, The New Homophobia. He and Meghan discuss the ways in which the new gender movement takes gay people and tries to fit them into a transgender box, all in the service of the same stereotypes that progressives spent so many years fighting.

Guest Bio

Ben Appel is a writer living in New York. His memoir, Cis White Gay: The Making of a Gender Heretic, with Bombardier Books, is forthcoming. His work has appeared in Newsweek, Spiked, Daily Mail, Washington Examiner, Queer Majority, and UnHerd.

Follow him on Substack here.

And follow him on Twitter (or X) here.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	I was so kind of just floored.
0:06.2	I'm like, I can't believe that people are talking like this.
0:09.6	Like, did we not learn anything from reducing people to the color of their skin?
0:15.1	Like, what, how is this not the most regret?
0:18.4	I can't believe this is happening again.
0:19.9	And when I would see people
0:21.4	posting things on Twitter and, you know, hearing things on, I'm like, this is going to be studied
0:26.1	because in 100 years, if we're still around, people are going to look back and they're going to be
0:30.3	looking at this and they're going to be like, I can't believe Americans did that again.
0:35.0	Welcome to the unspeakable podcast. I'm your host, Megan Dom. You may notice that I'm a few days late getting out this podcast episode. That's because the one I was going to post, which was recorded on October 5th, suddenly seemed sort of not right, considering what happened in Israel on October 7th, not to mention the whole situation over there since then.
0:57.8	I'm still working on trying to find someone to talk about that situation specifically,
1:02.7	and I don't really want to do that until we can back up from it at least a few feet.
1:07.7	But insofar as there's been a lot of interest in the response to the attacks,
1:12.8	especially the response on college campuses, I thought I would bring in someone who talks
1:17.4	very insightfully about that. He is Ben Appel. Ben is a writer living in New York who started
1:24.7	writing about these issues a couple of years ago. You may remember an article
1:28.7	he wrote in Newsweek in April of 2022 called The New Homophobia, where he talked about the way
1:36.4	the new gender movement sometimes takes gay people and fits them into a transgender box,
1:41.5	all in the service of the same stereotypes that progressive spent so many years fighting.
1:46.0	Anyway, we're going to talk about that kind of stuff in the bonus portion of this episode for
1:50.6	paying subscribers. In the main version, we're going to talk about how this anti-Semitism has
1:57.9	arisen over the last decade or so on campuses.
	...

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