WTH is Going On with the Explosion of Antisemitism on the Left? Ruth Wisse Explains
What the Hell Is Going On
AEI Podcasts
4.4 • 633 Ratings
🗓️ 31 October 2023
⏱️ 70 minutes
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Summary
There are Charlottesvilles happening every day in America. This time, they’re everywhere, driven by an explosion of antisemitism. And these Charlottesvilles are happening at Harvard, Columbia, and Stanford among other elite havens of academe. This is not the alt-right, fringe antisemitism of years past. The modern version has taken on the flavor of the leftist elite: it equates Zionism with racism; it coalesces the extreme aspects of BLM, feminism, and other groups against a common enemy; it is pro-nothing and entirely anti. The Nazi movement had its roots in professors, Nobel Prize winners – this too, is finding roots in elitist bodies who can intellectualize their way around the pernicious evil of the Hamas attacks. The only way to stand up to a culture of hate? Intolerance of it, and imposing consequences on those who profess it.
Ruth Wisse is the Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature and Comparative Literature Emerita at Harvard University. She immigrated to Canada from Romania in 1940 and is a preeminent scholar of Yiddish and American culture, literature, and politics. She is the author of several books, including her memoir Free as a Jew.
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| 0:00.0 | This podcast is brought to you by the American Enterprise Institute. |
| 0:03.1 | If you like what you hear, please subscribe, rate, review, and share. Thanks for listening. Here's our show. What the hell's going on? What the hell is going on? What the hell is going on? I don't know what the hell he's talking about. You don't have to know what the hell is on it. What hell's the matter with these guys? We don't know what's going on. Hotels gone on. |
| 0:01.0 | Who in God's name knows what it's all about. |
| 0:23.6 | Hi, I'm Danielle Pletka. |
| 0:29.6 | And I'm Mark Teeson. |
| 0:31.6 | Welcome to our podcast. |
| 0:32.6 | What the hell is going on? |
| 0:34.6 | Mark, what the hell is going on in this country? What the hell is going |
| 0:39.6 | on in this country is we are having a miasma of anti-Semitism. It is in the wake of this Hamas |
| 0:47.1 | attack on Israel. It is absolutely shocking what we are witnessing on college campuses across this country, in cities, in Times Square, |
| 0:58.1 | in Sydney. It was happening abroad as well. It is, it's like we've lifted a rock and all these |
| 1:05.6 | just vermin and worms and bugs are like scurrying everywhere. We didn't realize they were there. |
| 1:12.7 | We didn't realize how many of them were. |
| 1:15.2 | We didn't realize how acceptable it seemed to be. |
| 1:18.6 | You know, I remember not too long ago when they had the anti-Semitic, |
| 1:25.3 | the far-right, alt-right anti-Semitic protests in Charlottesville |
| 1:29.4 | and the universal condemnation of this far-right movement and Trump's, you know, association with |
| 1:37.2 | and trying to wrap it around Donald Trump's neck. |
| 1:40.7 | And so, therefore, everybody was against it, right? |
| 1:42.9 | Because these were right-wing anti-Semites, |
| 1:45.3 | and there was anti-Semitism infecting the Republican Party. And of course, there were no members |
| 1:50.2 | of Congress there. There were no conservative academics. These were a bunch of alt-right |
... |
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