Steve Conover: Thank you for joining us for the Friends of Israel Today. I'm Steve Conover and Chris Katulka, our host and teacher is with me. I want to encourage you to take note of our website, foiradio.org. That's foiradio.org. You can listen to over nine years worth of content on the site. It features Chris Katulka's teaching and insightful interviews with a host of great guests. Again, that's foiradio.org.

Chris Katulka: Steve, earlier this month we had one of our Friends of Israel equip classes FOI Equip. And, our entire class was actually called Antisemitism Knows No Party, especially as we enter into an election year, it's important to understand antisemitism on both sides of the spectrum. And we actually had David Bernstein, who is the founder of the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values, which opposes illiberal ideologies and supports liberal values in and out of the Jewish community. And he's also the author of Woke Antisemitism: How a Progressive Ideology Harms the Jewish People. And so, David actually came on our class. We're going to highlight what he was teaching and share about the dangers of the progressive left, and how not only is it a dangerous ideology, but how it's influencing antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiments.

Steve Conover: Stay with us for that important interview. But first, in the news, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant met with senior advisor to U.S. President Biden, Amos Hochstein. The two discussed the actions needed to enable the return of Israeli communities to their homes in the north as Hezbollah continues to threaten Israel's communities on the Lebanese border. Gallant is scheduled to hold talks with U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, and Secretary of State Anthony Blinken.

Chris Katulka: Well, here's my take, Israeli prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says, "The intense phase of the Gaza War will soon end, but all eyes are on the north as Hezbollah continues to launch rockets into the Northern Galilee region." Our prayer is that the Biden administration will take a clear stance and bold action to stand with Israel against this Iranian-backed terrorist organization. David Bernstein shared with our FOI Equip class, the dangers of the progressive left and its influence on antisemitism and anti-Zionism. Bernstein shares his experience coming to the realization of how the progressive left actually interprets racism, and was shocked to find that their rubric of intersectionality has no place for antisemitism or the hatred of the Jewish people.

David Bernstein: Just thought I would say a little bit about why this is such an important and fraught moment for the American Jewish community. American Jews obviously are a diverse crowd. We're like everybody else. There are political liberals and there are political conservatives. There are orthodox conservative reform. So, we're not monolithic by any stretch, but I'd say the majority of American Jews have always been, I would say, center left liberals. And there's a good reason for that. Jews were very tied to the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. It was viewed not just as a movement to liberate black Americans, but rather, Jewish Americans and other minorities as well. And that was emblazoned on the Jewish imagination, that coalition between the Jewish community and people of color. And, I think, it created generations of Jews who felt very much connected deeply to the larger civil rights community and couldn't always see when things were going wrong.

I've been in the Jewish advocacy world my entire life, and I remember years ago going to a multicultural day in Washington DC, I was part of a larger program and we had multicultural day, and I was all about connecting with other ethnic and religious groups. So I was excited about it. And, the guy who got up, the facilitator, was the principal of the Catholic school in Washington, got up and he said, "Racism equals prejudice plus power." What? I thought racism was animus or hatred toward another racial group. What's this thing about plus power? And, I walked up to him afterwards and I said, "I didn't agree with that definition." He said, "Well, it's not really for you to agree or disagree, that's what the definition is." And I thought, "That's odd. He's not even open to discussing it." I started to think about it and I wrote my first article about this more than 20 years ago.

I wrote an article saying, If racism equals prejudice plus power, that means that Jews are a community that is perceived as powerful. So therefore, we can't be victims of racism." And it means that communities that are perceived as powerless can't be perpetrators of racism. So where does this discourse leave us? And I thought it was highly problematic, and I warned my fellow Jews at that time, and I was just a young professional staffer at a Jewish organization, that this could come back to haunt us. I wrote another memo to my colleagues at the American Jewish Committee where I worked at the time, that I'm starting to see disturbing signs within the Civil Rights Coalition, that things were changing, that there was a new discourse afoot that divided up the world into oppressed and oppressors very simplistically, and to oppressed and oppressors, and really saw no room anywhere in between. And we were going to be viewed as oppressors, because we were perceived as being white and economically successful. And so, therefore, we were going to be lumped in.

And so, I've been following the shift in the tone within my own political backyard for a long time. And, it was really after the death of George Floyd, and what followed that, I started to think there's an ideology that's really unleashed here that's quite dangerous to the Jewish community and you could feel the shift in attitudes that was leading to more antisemitism on the left. And we can talk about the differences between antisemitism on the left, and the right, and in the Muslim world if you'd like. And I wrote my book in October, 2022. And one year later, of course, we have October 7th. And, again, before I go into the slides, one last little story. After October 7th, I was in South Florida and I went to speak to a mainstream Jewish organization. And they're very nervous, these mainstream Jewish organizations about my message. They don't want to alienate anybody. They don't want to alienate anybody on the left. They don't want to alienate their traditional civil rights partners. And, they're worried that my message criticizing this ideology will do that.

So, the guy who I know for a long time, good friend, great guy, he's the director of the office there, introduces me and he says, "David's about to say some things that are a bit controversial." What a way to be introduced. Ty, thank you for not doing that. But here I'm out, it's an important conversation to be had. I gave my spiel. I gave my talk. After my 20 minutes or so, we started going around the table, it was in this law firm conference room, and we got to the one person that everybody was most worried about. It was this very progressive law partner, high-powered person, who'd been very involved in social justice, left-wing causes. And, everybody's agreeing with me, much to the surprise, and we get to the one person we're not sure about, and that person says, "I don't know who I am anymore. I don't know where I fit in into American society anymore."

They were so shocked. The people that they thought they were their friends who had abandoned them, some of the people that they thought they were friends were denying the idea that Israeli women were raped on October 7th. They couldn't believe that those are the people that they thought they were allies with were seeing the most horrible things, and were justifying this mass murder. And I think it's been a real wake up call for American Jews, and I still think many of us are still trying to make sense of it.

Chris Katulka: Bernstein continues by giving a definition to the ideology of the progressive left and explains how even though Jewish people are the most targeted group for hate crimes, according to an FBI report, because of the progressive left's prejudice plus power model of racism, Jewish privilege prevents them from being an oppressed group or target of racism.

David Bernstein: I want to start out by defining what it is that I'm talking about. What is this ideology? In the most simplistic way of talking about it, it's an oppressed versus oppressor ideology. It's an ideology that says, there are two classes of people in the world, there are people who are the oppressors and there are people who are the oppressed. If you are white, you're an oppressor. If you're a man, you're an oppressor. If you are black or brown, you're oppressed. If you're a woman, you're oppressed. If you're heterosexual, you're an oppressor. If you're homosexual, you're oppressed. So on and so forth. It fixes identity to either privilege or oppression. I'm going to show you exactly what I mean by that. I want you to look at this slide here. It's called the intersectionality wheel of privilege. This is used in diversity, equity, and inclusion programs around the United States. You'll find different versions that look almost the same.

So in the center is power. Okay? As you can see there. And right around there are if you're white, if you're salaried, if you're a citizen, these are things that give you power. Okay? You're Christian, you're able-bodied and the like. You go one room outside of this, you're never married, you're a manual laborer, you're middle class, you have less power. Then you go one rung out of there, you're visibly black or brown, your body size, your gender, your sexuality, those things give you less power. So, all those things are fixed to power, or privileged, or oppression. So if you're any of the things on the outer rungs, you're on the oppression scale. If you're any of those things in the inner rungs, you are part of the powerful, and privileged, and so forth. That's how this ideology works.

And you can imagine when you're a group like the American Jewish community that's perceived as being one of the most successful communities, even if we have a history of oppression, even if we suffer more hate crimes than any other community by far, and we do, the FBI statistics show that by far Jews are the most targeted community by hate crimes. It doesn't matter, because we're mapped into this power structure at the very center of power. That's where we fit in. And because so many of us didn't understand it, we didn't really know where the antisemitism was coming from.

Chris Katulka: I hope that you've enjoyed listening to David Bernstein so far. David actually was one of our teachers on our most recent class for FOI Equip. FOI Equip is actually a free resource that we want to share with you. It's a free resource for learning and engaging with the scriptures from a Jewish perspective. You can actually sign up today to receive vital information on how you can join our free live online FOI Equip classes, where you can hear from our expert staff as we teach on the scriptures, we unravel the colorful world of Jewish culture and customs, celebrate the Feast of Israel, and reveal God's prophetic plan and so much more. Now listen, if you want to be a part of FOI Equip, like I said, it's free. We want to give it to you. And all you have to do is visit our website and Steve will share with you how you can be a part of FOI Equip.

Steve Conover: Yeah, please consider doing an Equip class. We know you'll benefit greatly from it. You can visit us at foiradio.org to learn more. That's foiradio.org.

Chris Katulka: How did our college campuses become such hotbeds of hatred toward Israel and the Jewish people? Well, in this next segment, David's going to share how students at elite universities are being trained by professors to view the world. It's not through a lens of truth, but through an overly simplistic view of perceived victimhood separated from history and truth. He challenges us to look below the waterline to see the underlying issues that lead to the rise of antisemitism on the progressive left.

David Bernstein: I like to think of it as an iceberg. Okay? There's the part of the iceberg that's above the waterline. That's where you see antisemitism, that's where you see these raucous protests on college campuses yelling all kinds of things above the waterline. But what a lot of people didn't understand in the Jewish world is that there was a whole reality below the waterline.

This was an ideology that first was introduced in our universities in the late-1960s. You can call it postmodern theory. It's this idea that knowledge is not something that we actually know, but knowledge is something that's produced by the powerful people in society to keep themselves powerful. And that they embed knowledge and discourse in the way that we talk about things in order to perpetuate their power. And that leads to what you might call social justice ideology or woke ideology, which divides up the world into the powerful and the powerless. And you see things like cancel culture for example, because if you're somebody who's part of the powerful, what right do you have to talk about your position on racism? You don't. You're powerful. You're just trying to perpetuate your own power.

And so, that becomes a source of cancel culture. It's really just above the waterline that we see anti-zionism, anti-Israelism, and antisemitism, I think, for the Jewish community especially and for its friends, we've got to start fighting this phenomenon, not just above the waterline, not just what manifests itself, but below the waterline, the ideologies that produce this antisemitism and anti-Israelism. There's a one-minute video that illustrates my point about looking at it below the waterline, so I’d like to share, see if it works.

Speaker 4: Some of the high schools that didn't walk out spent their lunches phone banking Congress. Over at the Columbia School of Social Work, students were holding a sit-in in solidarity with Palestine.

Speaker 5: Yesterday, we held a nine-hour sit-in at the School of Social Work, where we were threatened with sanctions. And today, we're here, because it is part of the Shut it Down for Palestine Movement that's happening all across the world today. And, we are here, because we are going to do a Die-in. Currently, the School of Social Work uses a PROP framework, which is power, race, oppression and privilege, where we learn about decolonizing social work, which we think is hypocritical when we are being silenced on Palestine, which is a colonized place.

David Bernstein: So, I've shown this video to a few Jewish groups, right? And, immediately, they noticed the Die-in, they noticed these protestors, they noticed this young woman in a Kaffiyeh here, and they're looking above the waterline. But, what they fail sometimes to see, what I'm trying to get people to understand, is that, she was talking about this PROP program, right? What she was talking about is her own social work program. She's a social work student at Columbia University. And, in her social work program, she's being learned to decolonize social work. Now, what in the world does it mean to decolonize social work? I think we all know what it means to decolonize India, right? We know what it means to decolonize a country that was formally a colony. What does it mean to decolonize social work? What she is saying is that, "My entire field is colonized. It's colonized by what you would call white supremacy." Okay?

This idea that the white culture is dictating how we should treat people in society. And she's saying, "So I'm going to decolonize that." What does that mean? She's going to teach her clients not to adapt to our system, so that they can lead more productive lives, which is what social work traditionally did, and help people along, groups along that were facing obstacles to a justice society. But rather, she's going to teach them to recognize the systems of oppression that they're under in society and to resist that oppression. That's what her entire field is turning into, it's decolonizing social work. So, she's taking that lens of oppressed versus the oppressor here, and she's applying it to her own field, and to her own university, and she's saying, "My university's a hypocrite, because when I tried to then go and protest Palestine, which is colonized, you didn't live up to your own values."

So you see what's happening here is that we've basically educated a generation... Our elite universities have educated a generation of college students and graduate students to see the world in this way, and they're then applying this simplistically to everything in life, but also, to Israel and the Palestinian issue.

Chris Katulka: Next, David details how antisemitism shifted in the progressive left mentality. Since they see everything through the prism of white supremacy, the Jewish community has been lumped into white privilege, and thus they become the target of power and influence, which gives rise to new ways of looking at antisemitism using old tropes.

David Bernstein: Another manifestation of this sometimes comes in a form of the term “equity.” Now we all know equality, the idea that we all have the equality of opportunity in society. But, equity is this idea that anytime that there's a group that is not achieving on average as the same as other groups, then it must be discrimination. So, the highest goal of society is to get every group at the same level. When I see racial disparities, I see racism. And Kennedy's view racial inequity is when two or more racial groups are not standing on approximately equal footing. So, in other words, if there are 13% black folks in society, there must be 13% black scientists. And if there's not 13% black science, it means that there's discrimination against black people in science, period. No other explanation. The flip side of that is if you are a group that is overrepresented in the sciences, in the laws, in medicine, in business, then you must have gotten there by riding on the wave of white supremacy, and it puts groups like Jews immediately in suspicion, because how else did you get your place in society?

Another source of antisemitism, this is from the black conservative economist, Glen Lowry, I think really gets it right here. One consequence of a fixation on group disparities understood to be the necessary consequence of oppression or racism is that groups that do well will come under suspicion. Their success will be thought to be the flip side of the disadvantage of the groups that do poorly. If African Americans are underrepresented in this or that venue because of systemic racism, and Jews, let's say, overrepresented in that very same venue, how can it be otherwise, but that the overrepresentation of the Jews is somehow the bitter fruit, the necessary consequence of that very system of repression that excludes African Americans? It strikes me that it does feel resentment, and envy, and a antipathy that can easily express itself in violence.

Few years ago, and one of the first times I really saw this really play out, this is a quote by Whoopi Goldberg. So she's talking about the Holocaust here. "Well, this is white people doing it to white people, so you all are going to fight amongst yourselves. If you're going to do this, then let's be truthful about it, because the Holocaust isn't about race, it's about man's inhumanity to man." In other words, she had this view of racism, that racism could only be committed by people that she thought were white against people who are not white. And in her view, Jews were white, and they must've been white in the eyes of Nazi Germany as well. But of course that's not true. The Nazis had completely racialized the Jews. They saw the Jews as an inferior race, a very dangerous race, and they had to be exterminated.

So she's applying this American view of racism to something that happened decades ago in Nazi Germany. And you can see how it really gets you off track. One of the ways this also manifests is it insists that Jews are white, and because they're white, they're powerful. Okay? So this is my colleague, Pamela Paresky. "Jews who have never been seen as white by those for whom being white is a moral good are now seen as white by those for whom whiteness is an unmitigated evil." So, when being white was considered good earlier in American history, Jews were considered other. But now, that being white is a moral evil, Jews are considered white.

Chris Katulka: Finally, David boils everything down, showing why the younger generation are more prone to be anti-Israel, the younger generation who view the world, of course, through a progressive left way.

David Bernstein: This is a different antisemitism and it also plays itself out, of course, in the way that Americans are understanding Israel, particularly younger Americans. I'll tell you, in May of 2021, when I first started my organization, the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values, there was a conflict between Israel and Hamas, and I had been an active veteran in previous conflicts, not literally a veteran, but I had been following them closely, and I would always analyze the media coverage. And so, in 2008, during Israel's first conflict with Hamas and Gaza, and then in 2014, and then in '18, so I was used to the sort of trajectory of the conflict. And it was very predictable. In the first few days, the mainstream media would always say, "Israel has the right to defend itself against rocket fire or tunnels." Or whatever was going on at the time. And of course, it does.

Within two or three days after the Israelis were fighting back and striking back at Hamas and the death toll began to rise among Palestinians, they would immediately say, "That's enough. This is disproportionate force. Israel should stop defending itself, stop fighting back against this threat." And, within a few days, the conflict would be over, because Israel would then be under pressure by whatever U.S. administration was in power. That was not the same in May, 2021. In May, 2021, Israel got no leeway at all, the fightback. It was understood by many that Israel was the oppressor and that the Palestinians were oppressed. Israel's the white guy and Palestinians are the brown people. That's how it was understood at that time, and you could really feel the difference, and see the difference in that way that that conflict played out.

And I think we're really seeing that even more so now in the wake of October 7th. Israel might've been given a couple days, because the attacks of October 7th were so horrendous. But, it didn't take long at all for people to insist that Israel stop defending itself, and allow Hamas to survive after it cut short the conflict.

Steve Conover: Thank you so much for joining us for today's episode of The Friends of Israel Today. Our special thanks to David Bernstein for joining us today. And you can visit foiradio.org to learn more about our Equip program, where you can learn the Bible from a Jewish perspective for free.

Chris Katulka: During these challenging times in Israel, it's crucial to deepen our understanding of biblical teaching about Israel and the Jewish people. I hope that you believe FOI Radio provides that essential teaching of timeless truths and support for our Jewish friends. Would you please consider making a donation to help us continue this vital work and to reach more lives with the biblical message of God's heart for Israel and the Jewish people? To give, go to foiradio.org and click on the donate button. Again, that's foiradio.org.

Steve Conover: Your gifts are so appreciated. Again, that's foiradio.org. Our host and teacher is Chris Katulka. Today's program was produced by Tom Gallione, edited by Jeremy Strong, who also composed and performs our theme music. And I'm Steve Conover, executive producer. Our mailing address is FOI Radio, PO Box 914, Bellmawr, New Jersey, 08099. Once again, that's FOI Radio, PO Box 914, Bellmawr, New Jersey, 08099. Our web address once more is foiradio.org, or you can call our listener line, that number is 888-343-6940. Again, that's 888-343-6940. The Friends of Israel Today is a production of The Friends of Israel Gospel Ministry. Passion for God's Word. Compassion for God's Chosen People.