 Okay, we're back with Community Matters, but it's also kind of bigotry in America we're talking about today. I'm Jay Feidel. This is ThinkTech. That's Peter H. Hoffenberg. He's a professor of history at UH Manoa. I've been there for 25 years. And he's also some adjunct or associate professor in Israel, in Haifa, which is one of my favorite cities. It's the San Francisco of Israel, isn't it? Where he teaches there, I guess, on occasion, maybe by remote. And you publish something, too. What do you publish? Well, I do mostly work on exhibitions, World's Fairs, Indian Art. I'm working on History of Science now. So absolutely nothing we're going to be talking about, but that's probably a good thing. Yeah. I like to schmooze with Peter because, you know, we live in a time of bigotry. And I like to talk about the Jewish situation and all the writings that are coming around and the reaction of the Jewish people to various unpleasantnesses that are happening. And so today we have a couple of things to discuss. I'd like to first discuss a PBS special. It was last week about Vilna. And Vilna was, I didn't know this myself, Vilna's in Latvia, Lithuania. Vilna was a center of Jewish learning and religion up to the war. And then as we got closer to the war, the Lithuanians started beating them up and tearing their temple down, which was the biggest temple in the area, as I understood. And it was a center. It was a really important place. And for that matter, Vilna was an important Jewish center in those days of learning, of culture, of practice, and so forth. And in this documentary, there were movie or film clips of the people in that temple, in that community. It was small streets, you know, out of old Europe. And they were very religious and they were forefathers. And it was very sad what happened because the place, the temple, and that community, was pretty much obliterated by the Lithuanians at first and then the Germans. So it was a very hard movie to watch, but you couldn't put it down. And what's interesting is it took you for a ride from that whole issue, and the decimation is the wrong word, because it was obliteration that happened rather than decimation, was the way that the Lithuanians and the Germans dealt with the bodies of the people that shot in the trenches. This was before the gas ovens and all that stuff. This was really sort of primitive, but they dug a big pit, and they sort of put the people in the pit, a big pit with steep walls, put the people, the Jews inside and shot them. And left them there. You know, that was it. They didn't care if they were dead or not, just left them there. But they had caretakers. And when they had this assembly, this kind of conveyor belt, that as the Russians got closer, the people who were doing this killing were concerned. And so they made it this very, the Germans, I guess, they made this very ornate conveyor belt, and the conveyor belt would pick the people up and drop them into a pyre where they would burn every night. You know, hundreds, thousands of people would be burning every night on this pyre, this wooden arrangement, and the Jews who were in charge, what did they call them in the camps? The copos. The copos. K-A-P-O-S. Okay, we're living down there, living in the pit with all these dead people, and their job was to put the bodies on the conveyor belt, okay? And they knew that after a time they would be the next, because they were witness to all of this. The idea was to obliterate the witnesses, too. And so they dug a tunnel, and they dug a tunnel from this hobble place where they lived under the conveyor belt in the middle of this big pit, a couple hundred feet away from the pit and escaped. Eleven of them, only eleven of them escaped, and not many of them are alive today. I think some of them were shot after they escaped. And it's the story of geology, of geologists who came to Vilna now in modern times with high-tech electronic gear to try to find where the tunnel was in order to, I guess, validate the stories, because whoever did survive talked about it, but there was no real physical evidence, because the Lithuanians built an elementary school on top of this place, and it's hard to go down under. And anyway, I mean, when I got out of this movie, this documentary, there were people who need to go back, because their relatives were there or otherwise, and find where that tunnel was and find what the monuments were of this particular place. What it raised to me, Peter, though, is why in the world with the Lithuanians, and for that matter, I don't know if the Latvians were involved in this, but also the Ukrainians were involved in such hideous, Babiar kind of murders. And it was not like the Germans' later efforts with the gas. It was mono-imono. It was personal. It was a physical killing rather than a gas killing. And they came to watch. That's the evidence. They came to watch the Jews being slaughtered in a pit, thrown in a pit, their mangled bodies. What makes that kind of semitism happen, anti-semitism happen, and it happened mostly in that area. It was before the Germans got there. When the Germans got there, it got worse. Do you have any thoughts about why that happened, why it happened there, why it happened in such brutal fashion, why it happened where you lived in a town, the Jewish guy was your neighbor, and now you were slaughtering him in the cruelest way, and his family. They were bayoneting children in Vilna, bayoneting children. Why could that happen? Well, it's a particularly poignant, tragic example, which has a lot of characteristics, though, which are resonant elsewhere. So let me try to take each of your really important points, and then we'll put it together at the end. So as Tim Snyder and others have reminded us, much of the killing was done in a non-industrial way. We have focused on Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and other places for generally good historical reasons. But in doing so, we've privileged that and forgotten about what occurred before. And then, of course, even what occurred afterwards with long death marches when Jews and others who were removed from the camps as the Soviets or Americans were coming forward. So one important reminder, and it's also historically an important reminder, is you don't need an industrial system. After all, in Rwanda, they used machetes. Pol Pot's executioner took a hammer and hit every single prisoner behind the skull to kill them. So you don't need industry. Secondly, that area again revealed a kind of rich, painful tragedy, which I think German Jews can very well understand. There was a thriving Jewish community. But there never were the institutional protections for that community, never the integration of that community. I think that, and I'm a Litvok, so that is my heritage, and Jews from that area would never think of themselves as Lithuanian. They would call themselves Litvok, same with Latvian or Estonian or Ukrainian, whereas German Jews usually use the adjective German Jews because of the mythology of perhaps being integrated. So one is the evil that can be done by hand and personally, including people you know. There were pogroms and thefts after 1945 in Poland, where some people came home and were killed after. Well, you know, can I digress you on that point? Sure. We're called neighbors about that. Right. Yeah, there is. Right now in the Holocaust Museum, it shattered me to find this, an alcove addressing that. You know, a lot of Jews left Poland, left that whole area, and they went to this place of persons who can't eat camps in the soft underbelly of Europe. And when the war was over, 1946 or so, they tried to make their way back. They made their way back, and you know, I don't think they were interested in any problem, any controversy, but that was their home. That was their home in Poland. Well, the Poles who were there had occupied their stores, their homes, their farms, their gardens. I mean, there was everything was taken. And so the Poles thought that the Jews who were returning were going to try to recover their property, recover their farms and gardens and what not. And so they killed them. Right. And that happened very much in Poland. I don't know if your audience enjoys films or not, but there are two movies which deal very strongly with that. There's a black and white Polish film called Ida, which came out two or three, maybe three or four years ago. I apologize. And just this year there's an award-winning film called 1945 about Hungarian Jews who returned to their village. So the point, I think, and you address it very well, is that personal animosity, for variety reasons, guilt, shame, theft, et cetera, continued afterwards. So we have the non-industrial. We have the sense of personal willingness to kill a neighbor, because perhaps there never really neighbors. Or as Robert Frost said, you build fences for two reasons. And perhaps this was a fence of isolation, no institutional protections. I think scholars of the region, and that's the region we fondly call east of the Elbe, so being a German Jew, I'm on this side. I think most scholars east of the Elbe would also recognize, again, citing Tim Snyder, that this is a vast bloodland where explicit political borders really meant very little. What meant the most was, as the Israelis and Palestinians would say, were the facts on the ground. So to call it Lithuania, it was almost meaningless. It was part of Austrian-German Empire, or part of expansionary Germany, or part of the Soviet Union. The borders kept moving. And part of that, though, was to generate an extremely virulent nationalism. And that extremely virulent nationalism thought of Jews, not only Jews, but Jews as never being Lithuanian, never being accepted. Never being part of the nationalism. Never being part of the nation. In part, you could argue, because if nations have to go through certain stages or certain convulsions, like certainly we did with the American Civil War, we probably should not be too high and mighty ourselves. If they have to go through certain convulsions, many of them have gone through convulsions over generations, whereas this region was just suppressed. The convulsions were within one or two generations. So you might have recognized country at the end of the First World War, which probably had been part of an empire before the war. And then by the 30s, you're either part of the Soviet Union or part of Nazi Germany. And during the war, you may very well shift back and forth. So some may think of themselves as patriots in those regions because they fought for the Nazis against the Soviets. So I think like most peasants in world history, the Jews were caught up in the wrong place, very much the wrong place. The painful aspect, though, of it, like the PBS or Nova Show mentioned, is this was the Jerusalem of the North. This was a center of learning, a center of flourishing. But look, anti-Semites hate Jews who have low IQs, anti-Semites hate Jews who have high IQs, anti-Semites hate Jews who can paint. They hate Jews who can't paint. So just because it flourished meant a great deal to Jewish history and Jewish tradition, but not necessarily to that region. There are other times and other places where flourishing Jewish culture has meant something to the regime. For example, Maimonides in Islamic Spain. It's not a Jewish state. It's an Islamic state. Maimonides as a font of Arabic, Hebrew, even Christian learning was appreciated. That doesn't mean all Jews were appreciated, but he was appreciated. Both of them led to the Inquisition. So in that case, you can't really predict whether or not Sanhedrin is going to be anti-Semitic, whether it's flourishing or not. In this case, it's another important reminder that the Shoah destroyed not only individuals and not only families, but really destroyed a civilization. Yes. Eastern European, east of the Elbe Jewish civilization really for 500, 600 years had provided literature and learning the Hasidic movement, which believes in the joyful nature of life and the joyful nature of God's relationship to man. That all grows out of the forests of that region. And that, though, was one of the goals of Hitler. It's also one of the goals of Stalin, which is not just destroy individuals or families or institutions, but destroy entire civilizations. Even though those civilizations were not at war with you, those civilizations had no intention of hurting anyone. No, but you're absolutely right. But again, caught up in a war, they were considered to be, like, for example, the tragedy of the Armenians in the First World War, who happened to be very close to the Russian front, were assumed to be Fifth Column. What usually happens, as we know historically, is those crises don't create the idea that you are a Fifth Column. The Fifth Column is already around in people's minds. They already think of these people as not being nationalists. And a crisis like war gives them primarily an opportunity to do legitimately, and I'm using that completely, tell me the truth. Legitimately, what perhaps they were restricted from doing beforehand. Rafael Lemkin, the Polish Jewish attorney who coined the phrase genocide, genus, people, cheat day, murder, argued two things are necessary. And we've studied genocide now since 1942 when he coined that. And I think people like Bauer and stuff have more nuanced views. But in the end, his two pillars, Lemkin's two pillars, still exist. A group is isolated, denigrated, institutionally, socially found to be lesser for one reason another, found to be a threat. So maybe they're in a ghetto. Maybe they're removed from positions of employment. Secondly, though, a major crisis like a war allows then the state and neighbors to do to those people what they might have thought of doing before, but didn't take that final step. And it's one of the reasons people today, very strong-minded people say that words matter. Because by using words, you're alienating or lessening somebody, by keeping people from employment for one reason or another. I'm sorry to be very contemporary, but by deciding two people can't just sit at a Starbucks, these are all sort of the preconditions, which are not just about people not being equal. They're actually about intolerance. And some people being, I mean, you can be different in a society, but equally different. Perhaps that's a possibility in a liberal society. And that difference can be accentuated. Right. And I'm sure you know it. You have a bigotry or worse. But it seems like in democracies and other kinds of regimes, to be different implies some kind of hierarchy. I mean, the goal is to be different without a hierarchy, to appreciate difference, appreciate cosmopolitanism, but no hierarchy. But inevitably, it seems whatever, and I leave it to the sociologist and the evolutionary biologists, it seems like tribalism in one way or another differentiates. And so Lenkin would say that you need to be wary when a group can't have a certain position in society because they are that group, or a certain person is depicted not as an individual, but just as a member of that group, as if whatever is wrong with that group must dip, selfie, fact will be wrong. Profiling. Yeah. And that's where certainly the conversation you started with comes in, that although the Jewish culture was flourishing in Vilnius, it was not thought to be a superior culture as local Christian culture, either Eastern or Western Orthodox. It was different and less. Yeah. This takes us directly to the book that you mentioned that you sent me an article about what is it? Semitism in three open parins. When we come back from this break, OK, Peter Hoffenberg is going to tell you about Semitism in three open parins. And the fellow who wrote it and what it means and some of the profound things that it says. We'll be right back. Hey, aloha, Stan Energyman here on Think Tech Hawaii where community matters. This is the place to come to think about all things energy. We talk about energy for the grid, energy for vehicles, energy and transportation, energy and maritime, energy and aviation. We have all kinds of things on our show. But we always focus on hydrogen here in Hawaii. Because it's my favorite thing. That's what I like to do. But we talk about things that make a difference here in Hawaii, things that should be a big changer for Hawaii. And we hope that you'll join us every Friday at noon on Stan Energyman. And take a look with us at new technologies and new thoughts on how we can get clean and green in Hawaii. Aloha. Do you want to be cool? If so, watch my show on Tuesdays at one called Out of the Comfort Zone. I sang this song to you because I think you either are cool or have the potential to be seriously cool. And I want you to come watch my show where I bring in experts who talk all about easy strategies to be healthier, happier, build better relationships and make your life a success. So come sit with the cool kids at Out of the Comfort Zone on Tuesdays at one. See you there. Jonathan Weisman. Weisman. Jonathan Weisman is the operative term. And the book is called Semitism with Three Perennes on either side. And I just had my eyes dilated. So being Jewish in America in the age of Trump. So that takes us to modern time. And you told me you just finished reading this book. And you sent me an article about it. And I think it's really an important book for Jews and for people who want to understand this kind of social friction, if you will, to have this conversation. So tell us about the book. So let me start with the fact that we all know who write books that editors and publishers sometimes change the title to get people's attention. So I think that actually the most important part of this book is not who is the chief executive right now. The argument has several parts to it. Some of which appeal to American Jews and some of which appeal to everybody who thinks of themselves as an engaged citizen. Let me begin with the title because the title is important. It's called Semitism Inside of Three Open Parentheses. And his first major argument is connected to this, that there is beyond what most of us realize a vast network of hate online, vast. It's not just anti-Semitic and it's not just racist. It's violently misogynistic. So it's essentially the same as stalking with threatening to do violence to women. And the three paragraphs open parentheses are ways for people online to identify Jews by their name. So Jonathan Weisman, nobody knows if he's Jewish or not. Nobody knows if he goes to school or not. Now he happens to be, but that's almost irrelevant because he was essentially outed as a Jew. And he's a long time editor at The New York Times. He's been at The New York Times. He's been at various other newspapers. And he noticed that a whole bunch of folks he knew, most of them are Jewish, but it's a matter of picking a name. We're identified to try to avoid the hate speech legislation. So rather than saying dirty Jew online, you put a name in three open parentheses. And that's how the book starts. And let me give just a brief summary because I know that the viewers probably don't want a whole book report, but the brief summary is a couple of very important pieces. And again, for a moment, just remove the subtitle. One is that this vast network of online hate has brought together groups that otherwise would not know about each other and may have found in this hate a common denominator. Different generations, different regions, people who may hate different ethnic groups and know nothing about the other ethnic group. So this is, if your viewers are economists or engineers, this is network theory. And network theory has linked people easily and repeatedly and enduringly because it's online. Facilitated for sure by the internet. Certainly. Now, one of the major questions a historian would ask is how much of this existed before? And we're putting pieces together and putting the pieces together makes it potent. Or the other possibility that putting pieces together has not only made it potent, it's attracted a lot of people. And historians ask that question about technology and stuff. So he begins with that proposition and the proposition that we saw last week with Zuckerberg. There's really very little that online companies can do or will do. There's a very famous woman game designer who is viciously attacked and had to get a temporary restraining order. And she has started a 501C3 for people who would like to be able to themselves make an effort to control. So that's how it begins. It begins with this notion that this is vast network of hate. Sometimes there are people who will sit in their rooms eating potato chips and doing nothing. Other times though, like in a small Montana town, they will motivate people to take action. So that's as a lawyer, you can appreciate that constitutional. I mean, when does it become yelling fire in the theater and when is it just sitting and muttering in the theater? Yeah, the question is, is this harmless that he raises that? I noticed that in the article he sent me. Is this harmless or maybe not? There's nothing harmless, hate is hate, but he skirts what's become, you know, a really interesting question. Is there a difference between speech and action? Right, for a while a lot of legal theory has said, going back to Katharine McKinnon, that speech is action and you need to address speech the way you address action. And I don't think he takes a stand, particularly on that. He does say though that we need to be wary because for some people, like Stormtrooper, one of the online connections, what is speech is a call to action. So he mentions an event that everybody knows about, of course, Charlottesville and how Charlottesville was in part possible because of this networking. Okay, so that I think is of interest really to everybody. To American Jews, he has a couple of particular points which I think are really rather interesting and they're not without controversy. Sure, okay. So one is going back to the old idea that Jews are kind of the canary in the mine and if there's hatred towards Jews, there's gonna be hatred to other people. Yes. Okay. And if that's the case and historically that's often the case, then like we saw yesterday when Starbucks asked the ADL to organize the tolerance training, American Jews need to reach out and make connections and build bridges with other groups who also, right, who also are feeling hatred and hearing hatred. And that's a proper role for the Jewish people. It has been a proper role. But it's not without controversy. So, well, for example, I don't know, do you want to get into the controversy? We only have a minute or two left, but yes, of course. So let me do one controversy and then we'll get to a second point if we only have a minute or two left. Some of those bridges might be built, made with groups who are not necessarily tolerant of Jews and certainly not tolerant of Israel. So that leads to a second, and I have 30 seconds. So for American Jews, the more controversial point. And his point is that the emphasis, the emphasis on Israel being the source of American Jewish identity has put Jews in a position where they may tolerate the intolerance of others because of their support of Israel. They want to support Israel. It's a very interesting, it's controversial. I'm happy to come back and talk about it. But it's a very interesting point. Connected to that though, is ironically his plea. And I think this is significant, is what makes somebody a Jew. I want to just close with an explanation. There's always stuff to talk about. We need you to come back. There's one explanation. I was looking for that particularly profound point and it springs off this quote about Israel and the connection with American Jewry and Israel. Do you want me to read that? Yeah, can you read it and explain it? So in the United States, oh, I'm sorry, I apologize. If the United States becomes a country hostile to Jews, the alliance between the United States and Israel will not last. Wow, what does he mean by that? So if the U.S. becomes a place, Allah, Philip Roth's novel, it when Lindbergh becomes President of the United States, America as a Western democracy and a liberal cosmopolitan democracy must include Jews and Jews must participate in that. And that participation is really better for an alliance with Israel. And that trumps really whether or not somebody, sorry about the word, trumps, but I mean, little T, okay, as a verb, that trumps the selling of a plane, okay? And that trumps also the willingness of allying ourselves as Jews with certain people who are politically powerful now, but really don't have the interests of Jews in mind. And that is particularly the messianic Christians who support Israel. They don't support most of the other things that Jews support. So if you ask most Jews, most Jews support public secular education, most Jews support abortion, most Jews support liberal in the old fashioned sense. Right, okay, very much so. These guys are not. Yeah, okay. And they're the ones behind Trump when he wants to move the capital to Jerusalem, right? They are, but they're behind a lot of things. I mean, that's, and one of his arguments is if we make Israel the do or die issue and just outright material support, we're actually potentially gonna end up with a country which is hostile to Jews. And that's not gonna. It's a very difficult question. It's a very important, I think underneath it all, and I'm happy to come back and talk to you about it. Underneath it all is really the kind of classic diaspora question, which what makes you a Jew? Yeah, next time. Is it Israel? You know, is it Israel? Is it support civil rights? Is it reading Torah? That's a great debate. What makes a Jew? All of these things and maybe different mixtures and measurements. The balance is difficult. The balance, yeah. So the name of the book was Semitism. He's a journalist. He writes very clearly. It's not a particularly difficult book to get through. I think for your audience, if you're not interested in the Jewish side, just take a couple minutes to see how he charted this real network of hate. And the network of hate ends up in a circular way connecting people who we might thought of as being kind of kosher. And they're really not, not so kosher. It's a very complicated business. Well, the connections are anti-government. It's almost anybody's anti-government, right? Anti-cosmopolitan. So anti-globalist, anti-universalist. So it makes for some very strange bad fellows. Jonathan Weisman, Semitism, being Jewish. And we all know how this works in America, in the age of Trump. Right, so for your audience, one second. The Trump is in there because the argument is that the election allowed these ideas to flourish. They were there before, but there's no check on them. There's no governmental check. Much more to discuss. Definitely. Thank you very much. He's very professional.