 Okay, it's Thursday and it's a bigotry in America, I'm Jay Fidel, this is Think Tech, and my old buddy Peter Hoffenberg, who is a history professor from UH, but who is not speaking on behalf of UH, he just comes with a lot of resource, call it intellectual resource, and we want to ask him this question today, sorry. Not everybody would agree, but that's very kind of you. Okay, well, I'll say it again. I appreciate it. The American Jewish community and the Trump phenomenon is what we want to talk about, and to make it a little nuanced, we're saying it is not a binary issue. It's not a binary issue. Not at all. Not at all. The old saying is, you choose three opinions, and that's certainly the case. Exactly. So when I grew up, every Jewish person I knew was liberal, to use that word broadly. And in my view right now today, most of Jewish people I know, most of them, not all of them, are liberal. And that means they don't like Trump, they don't like what he's doing, but they're conflicted about Israel, you support Israel, does that mean you have to support Trump? The support Trump, does that mean you have to support the right wing in Israel? It's complicated, it's not binary at all, it's mixed binary, whatever it is. And so what I'd like to ask you is, what's going on here? Jewish people are all immigrants, really, except for the guys who financed the Revolutionary War, what was his name? Actually, I have a student working on that, and my memory is going, but you're absolutely right. And actually, the treasure for the Confederacy as well, so we sometimes do live up to stereotypes, as Satchel Page would say. Yeah, the thing about it is that there's a lot of Jews over the years who've been on the side you didn't think, and they've been on both sides, like people in general. So where are we here? First of all, where would you think we would be, and the second is where are we, and the third is how do you explain the changes? That's a lot for half an hour. A lot for half an hour, so I'll come back. Why don't you sort of go in with your first reaction? My first reaction, and it's not a surprising one or an unusual one, is there really are many different Jewish communities, even in Hawaii. So you're absolutely right politically, very few Jews voted for Trump. Generally Jews supported Obama, supported Mrs. Clinton. So politically, most Jews are still registered Democrats. I think what the last few years have done, and this is partially Trump, but not entirely Trump. But certainly the president gets the advantage of setting the tone, it's like the economy. No president saves the economy and no president ruins the economy, but the critics and the cheerleaders say they do. So naive, really. Right, but we could say he's certainly a president and this is not to take a political partisan stance, but let's say president Y tweets or says things that this current president is saying is going to polarize. And in polarizing, he's been successful with some key wedge issues for Jews. So there isn't really a Jewish communal response. There are Jews who need to wrestle with, as you nicely put, the non-binary aspects of this. The second point I make again, which is not profound in any way, is a lot of what we're seeing has been brewing for a long time. So Israel has been a contentious issue for many, many years. This is not sudden. But again, he's done certain things that have made it more polarizing, but so have his opponents. Right, like the Maud Squad has said things. The question of Jews being liberal on social issues, again, kind of cuts two ways. If when you say the Jewish community, you are including very religious Orthodox Jews in that, and the Orthodox community is growing, then since the foundation of their life is a religious foundation, we shouldn't be surprised if they're not socially liberal. So the Orthodox do not generally go out and support gay lesbian rights. They don't generally go out and support abortion. But that's always been the case, right? And now with this current tone, the idea of religious freedom has now grabbed people more than it did before, so they and others are free to express. So the religiosity has always been there, but the religiosity across the board is freer now. For example, Pompeo, sorry, is scheduling an important conference on human rights, and he's shifting from what has been a 225-year-old understanding ever since the American and French revolutions of human rights and is switching it to a more traditional natural rights philosophy, which would mean that freedom of religion is really the only right you have, and everything else is added on. So religiosity, which does divide the Jewish community, right? There are Jews who are atheists, secularists, et cetera. So that would be my response. There are different communities, right? Some of the issues which the media in particular grab onto have been there for a while. And as we talked about last time, to a certain degree, the governor or the ID is just gone. So people feel freer to say and do what they probably realize were not really socially acceptable before. I mean, there's almost no limit on when you think about what people say and do in public these days. It seems to be almost no decency or limit where people have to say, you know what, I really shouldn't say that. But they don't. They do. They say whatever comes to that. Right. And sometimes it's because of a juvenile sense of freedom, you know, I can do whatever I want. And on social media, there is no limit at all. And sometimes, and again, I don't really want to get into Trump bashing. I don't think that's, for us at least, that's not particularly intellectually stimulating. But if the government or the state seems to be acting in a way, that certainly gives people some sense that, OK, it's all right. If the chief executive officers, you'll be like a company. The boss is doing something, then you then say, well, the worker can't do that. That's a kind of hypocrisy. And we have that sort of tension now. Just listening to your reaction, I'm reminded of W. Bush. When he gave his inaugural remarks, he talked about faith-based, faith-based everything, really. Right. I mean, he was directing it at faith-based. What's this? This hasn't happened before, not even with Republicans before. All of a sudden, we're into faith-based, and I thought of all those megachurches in the South and in Southern Baptist and what have you who are devoted to, you know, religion above all. I remember there was one, gee, it was a supreme, this is more recent, a Supreme Court candidate who was considered, who said that religion is more important than a constitution. Right, the Bible. She said the Bible. So not even religion, not the Koran or Hindu texts, but the Western Bible is where, yes, she made the short list. And shortly after Bush was in office, the Department of Justice changed its attitude. The Department of Justice, for example, under Bobby Kennedy, was all about, you know, religious freedom. I mean, everybody has freedom, and you protect, you know, anybody who is being attacked on the basis of religion. What is that called? Religious freedom from the First Amendment. You're protected from religious discrimination. Right, and the Department of Justice, up to that point, up to the Bush administration, would go after anybody who had attacked religion, religious freedom. But W changed it around. He said, from now on, we are going to defend churches, we're going to defend them. Oh, yeah, it was the establishment clause. So up to that point, you know, the Department of Justice had been enforcing the establishment clause, which regrettably has declined since then. Excuse me. What was that almost 20 years ago? And so regrettably, what we have now, what we had then under Bush was the Department of Justice was protecting churches and advancing religion, and that's what we have now. And I think the Department of Justice is doing that, on PS, by the way, it's not only the human rights, you know, contortion, but yesterday I saw that the Department of Justice, under William Barr, was trying to return to the death penalty. They have. He's identified five individuals who will be executed, right? And that's not inconsistent with a kind of, excuse me, social and philosophical conservatism, which need not be religious-based. But it seems to be in the history of the United States is quite often based upon religion, or at least justified. There may be other reasons. I mean, we could have a long discussion about racism, I mean, inevitably most of those folks who will be executed will be of color and certainly almost all will be poor. We could also argue that religion might be covering something else, but certainly in the language. I think one difference might be, and you're absolutely right about the faith-based, particularly faith-based social welfare programs. I looked at part of what shrub was trying to do was to reduce the welfare state. So rather than have food stamps, the government would support a church or synagogue hosting a food bank or something like that. And in his usual way, he went sort of halfway and then dropped it. But this administration and these Supreme Court justices want to push it, but as they push it, it's quite clear that they have a hierarchy of freedom. And this gets back to the issue you asked me to talk about. For some Jews, religious freedom is the most important freedom. For an Orthodox Jew, with all due respect, to be able to worship, to live close enough to the synagogue, to walk on Shabbat, that's the most important freedom. And that might very well be matched by non-Jews, and that's the most important freedom. Liberal more secular Jews certainly want to feel safe in their synagogue. The Tree of Life was really a shock to everybody. But I think if you asked non-Orthodox Jews what the hierarchy of freedoms would be, for example, many would choose a woman's right over her own body, right? Or the right to housing or something. And religious freedom would not be so high. Well, that's because the Jews are not so religious anymore. Right, so when we say, though, different Jewish communities, there is a growing religiosity. The two groups that are sort of growing are those who are religious and those who are not identifying themselves as Jews. Yes, the Reform and Conservative movements are both sort of struggling a little bit. Reform movement is more conservative than it used to be. I mean, my father would be shocked. Our first Rabbi, Rabbi Magnin, wouldn't eat shrimp. But not because of being kosher. He were eating a party that somebody already dipped into the dip, but he was going to get the flu. So he always said, don't eat, don't dip twice. Exactly. But now you meet Reform rabbis who do keep kosher. So the Reform, most of the Reform movement is getting more religious, more traditional as well. So that's a major shift within, oh, it's a major shift. Because you started out at Ellis Island. Everybody came in Ellis Island. They were religious. They were identified, identifiable. Their community is religious and more recite, or wherever they settled in the country, looking for other Jews, looking to share the Jewish religion and practicing the Jewish religion and teaching their kids the Jewish religion. But somewhere along the line, a little affluence changes that. And then the nuclear family goes every place in the country. That changes it. And people want to assimilate and intermarry, and that changes it. Before you know it, I don't know when this happened, but I think it was the 70s to the 80s anyway, where people started really denying their Jewishness and are not talking about it. Going through their whole professional life, their whole academic life, without telling anybody that they were Jewish, changing their names. Right. But there was a cost also. I mean, there is that gentleman's anti-Semitism, law firms, which would not hire Jews, just as someone not hire Protestants. There's Arthur Miller novella called Focus, which he discusses the anti-Semitism that he experienced in the naval yards during World War II. And to tell the story, he tells the tale of a man played by Bill Macy, William Macy in the film, who is not Jewish. But he buys glasses like you and I. When he puts the glasses on, people think he's Jewish. Isn't that interesting? But what Miller was saying is there was, during American history, a time when being publicly Jewish came at a cost. And I think Catholics can appreciate that. I mean, the history of Roman Catholicism in America has generally been Roman Catholics, most of the time, particularly the Irish and Italians, living together in New York, not being hired by Protestant firms. So you're absolutely right. Part of it was to become American, to assimilate. And as that happened, they weren't so religious anymore, except you're Arthur Dark. We were all high holy day Jews. And as soon as the drosh was done, we went to the LA Open to watch. So let's talk about how that impacts their political connection. So right now, I mean, there are a lot of people who support a lot of Jewish people who support Trump. There were a lot of people who supported other Republican presidents along the way. A lot of people in the state of Hawaii supported Linda Lingle. I mean, she's Republican. So I think there's been a big change, not hard to say when it started, of Jewish people who were liberal and democratic, who believed in human rights, who cared about the underdog that disadvantaged the other racial underdogs, the Blacks, for example, and passionately about that. But somewhere along the line, it started to evolve to something. Where and when did this happen and why did it happen? OK. So that's, I think, a common perception, certainly a perception the media would like us to see. And in a way, it's a perception that Trump and his allies are trying to exploit. I think if we step in. So it is a reality. It's a reality, as my beloved father would say, all worlds are real. But the reality is that come November 2020, 65% to 70% of Jews will vote Democrat, if not more. So what we see is, I think, the Republican strategy is probably not to get Jews to vote Republican, but to get Jews to stay home. That's more likely. So if the Republicans and Trump can paint the Democratic Party as a party of AOC and Ilhan, they're banking on Jews saying, basically, to hell with it. I'm not going to vote for Trump. I'm just not going to vote. Or, you know, going and leaving the president. I think there's a make that much difference. There are only a small percentage of Jews in this country. It's the contributions to the political campaign. But it's also, as we talked about that, it's a classic case of anti-Semitism, focusing on a small group that you think has disproportionate power. It's as if Pelosi worries that Ilhan will ruin the party and Trump hopes Ilhan will ruin the party. And we're talking about, really, a small number. But that's, as we talked about, that's one of the classic narratives of anti-Semitism. It's not worrying about wave of immigrants as anti-Asian sentiment has been or anti-African-American sentiment about social disorder. They're classic racist ideas. It's a small number of Jews. I mean, Adelson, he's one individual. Small number of Jews will have a disproportionate amount of power. It's as if David and Goliath had kind of intertwined and merged. So to answer your question, though, there are, yes, there are members of the Jewish community who see in, perhaps not as much what they like about the Republican Party, but have some concerns about the Democratic Party. Now, what are those concerns? Again, they're ones that are pretty long-standing. But again, things are just out in the open. So I don't think anybody will tell you that all Jews have always agreed about Israel. That's just not true. But it was more true before than it is now. Well, what I think has changed is that even if we disagreed about what Israel was doing, Israel had a right to exist as a Jewish nation and a Jewish society. And that's really what's at stake here. That's what we have to be very careful about. So if one believes right that Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state and is surrounded by folks who would like to remove all Jews from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean, and there are people in the Democratic Party who seem to agree their old fears are going to come fruition. Now, there is no way the United States, even if Trump were not present, would abandon Israel. Obama wasn't going to abandon Israel. Mrs. Clinton wouldn't abandon Israel. Biden wouldn't abandon. I mean, Israel is not going to be abandoned. The question would be, should the US assert influence in certain ways, make Israel more open and more democratic? I think the Palestinian, the tragedy of Palestinians is nobody treats them well, which is not excuse Israel. But the Saudis don't treat them well. The Palestinians were primarily in Jordan. They were kicked out. So those are issues though, which for Jewish voters, they got to go in the booth and say, well, am I convinced that Trump moving the embassy is a good or a bad thing? Am I convinced that the current legislators would like to stomp down on BDS? Is that a good or a bad thing? And you kind of have to weigh it. Well, let me ask you a cause and effect thing. Both cause and effect. Why is Trump, the Trump administration, so infatuated with the right in Israel and moving the embassy in Israel, which is a provocative thing to do? Maybe that doesn't get you anywhere. It's very provocative. Nothing I say here represents my employer or my family. It was more than provocative. It was a move to basically kill the peace process. I guess so. So what's the cause of that? Why would he do that? I've wondered myself, why in the world would he do that? It's just obviously negative. It doesn't help anybody that I can see. So we have like in politics, you got to get try to put yourself on the other side to see why they're saying. I mean, not to agree. So I've told you how my personal opinion, which is only my personal opinion, shared by a lot of friends, but I'm not representing them either. I think most political scientists and journalists would say they're a couple of reasons. His base includes very active evangelical. An evangelical? No, and with friends like that, I wish the Saudis would have said, but that's part of the issue. But that's been an issue for a long time. If you just generically, if one more member of the Jewish community and said the most important thing is that Israel be strong and Israel have unwavering support from the West, it's a good move. What in the embassy in Jerusalem says the US is saying Jerusalem is not an international city. Jerusalem cannot be the future capital of a Palestinian state to Jewish city. And most, I am wary of overgeneralizing, but let's say if we talked about a voting bloc, the voting bloc of evangelicals who ironically vote for somebody who's had 4,000 affairs and 16 immigrant wives. I mean, they don't care about that. But they do like Pence. I mean, that was very smart to put Pence in there as the vice president. Their idea, as you know, and all your viewers and audience know, that the second coming is around the corner, and the second coming will be in Israel. And non-believers will either die or convert. This is a big plan. And no, it's it. But we used to have an Israel Day here. Most of the booths were not Jewish. Many of the booths were Messianic Jews or Christian communities who love Israel. And they love Israel not as a Jewish state or society. They love Israel as a stepping stone in the pilgrimage towards the second coming. Now that also affects apropos your other comments. That means, you know, if Israel is most important to me and women's rights are not most important to me, then I'm happy making peace with these conservative Christians because we agree on the most important issue, which gets back to our previous conversation among Jews, what's most important? So, you know, liberal Jews living in Hawaii would say, not only do the Palestinians need to be recognized and need to be treated decently, you know, women's rights, social issues. Well, all the liberal issues are all conflated. Right, but you know what? Liberal is kind of, again, kind of a charged. They are issues of an open, tolerant, modern society. You know, you can take away conservative and liberal. I mean, do you want to live in a society where difference is really respected and not just given a token conversation about, but also, you know, diversity within the group. Are you willing to really make a claim for individuals to be really different and get along? Which they can't. Is that the way the Jewish community feels? I mean, I'm putting the Orthodox out of that. The Orthodox are really rather cool in this way, in the sense that, you know, most Orthodox Jews live among themselves. They don't seek to convert. They don't seek necessarily to influence. So in a way, they are very consistent with this idea that separate could be equal. Just let us live peacefully. You know, assimilated Jews like us, you know, we're now out in the big community. And we have to decide, you know, is this the big community we like? It's not binary. No, it's not by any means at all. No, I mean, I don't think, I think even back when the first Jews came, it wasn't binary because please remember that along with the religious Jews came anarchists, communists, and labor organizers. I mean, you could read Marx and the Talmud the same day and that was not seen to be inconsistent. You know, it's the second daughter on the roof from Mary's, you know, the revolutionary. So they've always been these tensions. But again, you somewhat knew how to behave with others and that is not an excuse, as some people would say, for hierarchy, like, keep people down. No, that's not what I mean. I mean, just to kind of decency. So, you know, because when people talk about civility and decency, they sometimes really mean you should stay where you are. You know, you're out of your place and I don't mean that at all. I mean, just knowing words that will get a conversation going, not knowing words that'll get somebody to hit you. And it just seems to be we're more in the get somebody to hit you mode. Somehow I think that World War II and the Holocaust and being oppressed in so many ways over the centuries forms a community that is tolerant, a community that is empathetic with other people who are being oppressed. And that has defined, you know, my people that I know who are Jewish anyway. So here we are, we're on the cusp of an election. We're on the cusp of a Marvin under Adelson, who supports Trump, where Jared Kushner is out there doing what I suppose some people think are, you know, things that are pro-Jewish. I'm not sure that's true, but that's what some people do. I mean, the group we've talked about before, especially if you support Netanyahu. I mean, if you think Netanyahu is the key to having a secure Israel, then you're definitely in... With Jared and Trump camp. With Trump, yeah. So, gee, you know, the problem to me is where is the Jewish community going in terms of supporting, in terms of funding, in terms of voting, to the extent they do. In this very confused situation. Because what's happening, and I speak from my own point of view, really, I'm very non-binary about the whole Israel thing. And I really wish that he hadn't done the thing with the embassy. I wish that, you know, it was the old time, without the evangelicals in the mixture. It's a Jewish state, come on. Everybody else should get their fingers out of it. Right, everybody, yeah. And the Palestinians should be better off too, if everybody got their fingers out of it. I'm thinking back to my own time, in Hebrew school, back when I was a kid, where the kibbutz was, you know, the sort of the exemplar, the petri dish, how you rebuild Judaism after the war. But we don't have that anymore, and there's so much assimilation and change. And I'm hoping that the Jews will stay together in some fashion, although I think these stresses, these political stresses, you know, don't really give us, they confuse it. Hence the thing about binaries. So how does this really, how is this gonna work? The Jews moving, you feel there's a dynamic here, they're moving toward Trump. They're moving philosophically toward Trump. Are they tolerating him too much? Shouldn't they be out there in the streets with pitchforks against a guy who is racist? All right, why do they tolerate him? Why, and why does some of them move in his direction? Okay, some move in his direction, I think in part for the issues talked about about Israel, and particularly his very cozy relationship with Netanyahu. So it would have been interesting to know if it were a labor prime minister. Okay, but the two of them have a sycophantic relationship. I mean, it was bringing it to, when Boehner invited Netanyahu to speak before the joint session of Congress, that undermined Obama and undermined the Iranian nuclear deal. So this has been going on even pre-Trump, and the marriage was with Netanyahu and Likud, and some Jews, certainly. I think probably, as you say, there are some who are exceedingly influential, but as a community, the community most Jews do not support Trump and only, as far as Republicans go, support moderates. And particularly for today, Linda Lingle was a moderate Republican. I mean, in today's world. I mean, she struck me much more as an old-time Republican, much more of a free marketer. She's getting her signals from old-time Republicans. Right, I mean, much more of a free marketeer and not so interested in the social issues. Most of the people who funded her and elected her. But that was more the old-time party. So I would say that, attention to your question, there are some active public people who recognize themselves as Jews, or others recognize as Jews that support Trump because of Israel. I think some of it is because of dissatisfaction with some of the left, some of the left. So for example, when there's a tweet war or a piece of legislation, which they perceive to be either anti-Israel or at times they have anti-Islamic comments, they associate that as 180 degrees from Trump. And you could see Pelosi's problem. She's got to try to control that. So I would say it's the initial question. It's a question of whether they feel the Democratic Party is safe for Jews and Israelis. Third question. I think that most, the statistics all show though that when push comes to shove, most Jews will not only vote Democratic, but if you look at the people who are protesting the camps, and I'll use the term camps. I mean, they are camps on the border. They were protesting camps, significant number of Jews and almost every major Jewish organization in one way or another. See, I guess part of the difficulty is the labels. To me, it's not, it's literally the traditional way of opening up society. But it may not be liberal in the Democratic Party way. At the end of the day, the thing is visceral and it takes on what you studied at home with your parents. Well, the visceral aspects are important here, I think. The rise, as we've talked about before, of ethno-nationalism. I mean, at some point, Jews have got to realize that if a party allows dangerous idiots with Tiki porches, a march, and the president says there's some good people there, you got to really wonder. That's the kind of ethno-nationalism which Jews are fooling themselves. They might like other parts of the program, but they're fooling themselves if the ethno-nationalism of Bannon, Trump and his supporters wins out. I mean, Miller, who supports the strict immigration policies, I mean, there's no role for him. He's a West Side Jew. He's a court Jew and he will pay. I think that's been a question of ethno-nationalism. Globalization, and that's a whole other conversation, but as it affects Jews, Jews you know have been associated with international finance forever. And those who lose their jobs or perceive they're losing their jobs because of globalization and the economy, you remember the PR piece that went out for the Trump administration that had Janet Yellen and other, and it had former Treasury Secretary who was Jewish. There was an international conspiracy, but in this case it was globalization. All those things have always been there. It just, that door's box has opened now. And when those happen though, when those happen you'll feel a bit like European Jews who in the 30s thought that they were safe. I do feel, I do feel one, I feel it was a parallel. But a bit like, I really don't think. Well, but Bear's watching, don't you think? Bear's watching. Well, you know the principle. If you refer to Hitler, you lose the argument. You know that. Hitler may his name be erased. You're right, but there's a Jewish tradition in discussion. If your argument depends upon referring to the Third Reich or Hitler, you lose the argument, so let's say, should we bear, should we watch? We should always watch because true freedom, and I don't mean this silly, true freedom is always true freedom. Going back to Nathan Hale. I mean, to be the individual, to be able to have the orientation you want in public. And those are at risk, not necessarily from the government. They're at risk from society. The price of liberty. Yeah. The eternal vigilance. Peter Huffenberg, thank you so much. We gotta do this again. Of course, absolutely. Next time it's global. All right, fair enough. Very good. Thank you so much. It was a pleasure.