Hello everyone, thanks for joining us. My name
is Gilead Ini, I am a senior research analyst at CAMERA and I'm very excited to welcome you
all to CAMERA's latest briefing this latest occasion for all of us to tune in to show that
nothing, not even a pandemic can get in the way of our ambition to learn, to listen, to talk to
each other as a community about our community. CAMERA has had a full event schedule since
early 2020 when the coronavirus went viral and of course we haven't paused eith
er. With our
vital task of holding the news media to account and defending Israel against libels and attacks
the organization has been as busy as ever reading every line of news corresponding with editors
on a daily basis and reminding journalists that facile reporting about Israel
won't actually be the easy way out. For me personally though it's been at least
nine months since I've had the opportunity to read a good book and i know that because
it was nine months ago that my son was born
naturally i also reached the conclusion that it
would be another roughly 17 years and three months before I'd have the peace of mind to read another
book. Then i learned that I'd have the great honor of moderating this briefing so i immediately ran
out got a copy of Never Alone: Prison Politics and the Jewish people authored by our esteemed
guests today Natan Sharansky and Gil Troy and i dropped everything to read it. Almost
everything, not the baby but everything else and boy am i glad to
have had pushed myself
into those pages. The book is beautifully written and yet accessible even welcoming,
it's historical but couldn't be more timely and although it's often anecdotal, its wisdom
is truly universal already. In the introduction for example, the authors point out that in a
world with little individuality, real change occurs when each person stops being controlled
by fear and starts acting independently. It was a reference to the Sovient Union of course , and
through Natan
Sharansky's story we learn where we are as a people how we got here and the dangers
and pitfalls of the path ahead. Since there are dangers, the book can be alarming but it's also
in a way reassuring because it convincingly makes the case that there is a path forward a case for
building bridges during this era of bridge burning and a case for not only listening to each other
with our varied experiences and perspectives but for passionately disagreeing and arguing
with each other. Never Alon
e in a nutshell is a gift to the Jewish people from two brilliant
and distinguished authors. About those authors Gil Troy is a distinguished scholar of
North American history at McGill university an award-winning American presidential historian
and according to The Algemeiner, one of the top 100 people positively influencing jewish
life, which i don't doubt for a second because i've had the pleasure of meeting gil a few times
while helping lead cameras student trips to israel each year we b
ring the students to
meet an array of speakers in jerusalem and without fail gil made one of the biggest
impacts yes there were other speakers on the tour with closer ties to the prime minister with
more exotic backgrounds or with larger muscles but when he started speaking he cut through the
room like a laser he showed an understanding of the challenges jewish students faced on campus
and helped inform their activism with a deep understanding of history and where bad faith
actors on campu
s tried to sap their spirit and deflate their energy gill filled them up by
reminding them of the humanity of their history of their zionist heroes and of themselves
the students always left inspired and and so did i actually even though i heard the the the
same lecture each time never fail to inspire me and speaking of zionist heroes our other speaker
today needs no introduction i could leave it with one word natan but maybe that's too casual so
i'll introduce him with his formal title mr
chess prodigy mathematician jew free thinker refuse
nick dissident democracy activist human rights campaigner prisoner of zion journalist member of
knesset honorable minister and chairman sharansky it feels like Natan has lived more lives than a
cat he spent nine years in soviet prisons alone but never alone bravely facing down what to others
looked like an invincible empire and sacrificing his own freedom for millions of people around
him nine more years in the israeli government figuring
out how to tend to his responsibility to
his constituents to the security of israel and to jewish people everywhere and nine years in charge
of the jewish agency looking toward the diaspora watching israelis and jews abroad growing together
and apart and working tirelessly to tip the scales toward the former to toward the togetherness one
of the striking things about never alone is that while these very lives seem literally worlds apart
they neatly overlap inform each other and build off ea
ch other in profound ways but i'll leave
it to the authors to talk more about all of this one quick technical note before they take
over for those watching this there's a icon at the bottom of your screen that says q a with
a couple of speech bubbles if you have a question you'd like to ask just click on that icon and
enter your question into the space that appears we might not be able to ask every question that's
raised but we'll do our best to capture all the ideas that you raise and now
to our speakers
thank you so much for being here natan and gil thank you uh live for that lovely introduction
uh from jerusalem where we're both sitting where um neighbors um friends co-authors there
was one thing you missed in our resumes gillard we're both big fans of camera and
we're both big fans of an organization that is so delightfully counter-cultural these
days that the a in your um in your camera name is about accuracy and to stand for truth to
stand for accuracy in this world th
at's become so partisan that's become so polarized and especially
when it comes to israel has become so insane is really an amazing gift to um not just to the
jewish people but to uh democracy lovers and truth lovers everywhere so we're really honored
to be a part of this um conversation and this ongoing conversation and yeah i miss you guys uh
i always look forward it was usually around um june i think that you guys would come july and uh
it was always a great conversation because i was yo
u know the i know there are many
uh on the call who are a little bit post-college but there's nothing more inspiring
than sitting with college students these days jewish college students these days who are
standing for accuracy and truth and justice in the middle east because we know how hard it is
we know how insidious the attacks are i want to be cool i want to be accepted i want to be for
social justice too and we are but we're told that we're not and that's very very difficult
so uh th
e book indeed is called never alone and uh the book uses we call it a memoir festo or
a manifestoir where we take natan's extraordinary life and we use it to advance ideas and ideals
that as you pointed out despite us living in two very different worlds when we were
growing up he was born in the vast prison camp called the soviet union i was born in
the vast shopping center called north america i spent the 1980s studying history at harvard
he spent the 1980s mostly in the gulag he points ou
t that means that he had moral clarity
and at harvard i had the moral confusion but despite our very different experiences we
have very similar ideological perspectives and it starts with a love of the jewish people
and that's the essence of our title that for 75 years we've been saying never again and of course
we honor our holocaust martyrs but we understand that the power the beauty of being part of this
family is wherever you are you could be in the gulag for nine years you could be tol
d again and
again by the soviet kgb secret police that you're forgotten you're abandoned but natan knew that he
was never alone and that's why we call the book never alone it was originally going to be called
999 for his nine years in gulag nine years in uh israeli politics nine years in jewish agency but i
didn't like that title it's too much of an inside joke and i worried about my german friends 999
and my evangelical friends going 666 999 the devil uh and the notion of never alone is sa
ying
we're not just anti-anti-semitic we're not just anti-zionist but we are for a positive affirmative
vision of judaism and zionism and peoplehood natan so many of our students are in crisis
these days so many students on campus feel abandoned feel beleaguered feel attacked
even through zoom what's the most inspiring piece of wisdom you can offer them why should
they bother standing up against the crowd when the coolest kids in the room the professors
the entire infrastructure is telling
you israel's evil zionism is wrong give up on
those people well uh i of course i am in a very privileged situation because i know
what happens when we give up on it or i know what is life without this family
without identity and without freedom in fact i was born and lived through the
first 20 years of my life when i had neither identity nor freedom i had no identity
because we knew that we had used it is what is written in the idea of your parents view but
there was nothing Jewish in our
life no no faith no tradition no religion no uh Jewish book
no place where you could get Jewish book or reject book nobody said no britt mila and the only
Jewish thing which was was antisemitism and the message of the parents is very clear that because
you're jew because it's happened so that you're born with this word you you have to be the best
in your profession because all the professional success can maybe compensate uh be the kind of
medicine which will help you to live with this dis
ease which is called to be Jewish and of course
we also knew that there is no freedom that uh you're not supposed uh to say publicly
what you're discussing with the family and whatever you're saying publicly reading and doing
and voting it's all lies but the truth can be said only in your family and it is very uncomfortable
this double think life when you're thinking one thing as a saying publicly another thing but you
are not going to fight against this because there are no values except t
he value of survival of your
career and then when after 1967 Israel ended our life in such a almost mystical way of this victory
of Israel over the soviet union and we were so far from Israel and from its challenges its
problems and not knew so little but suddenly all people around you all of them those who like you
those who hate you they all turn to you and say how you guys did it and you understand whether you
want to not but for these people around you you are connected to Israel and yo
u want to understand
what it means and you start reading in the underground from the books which are brought
by by Jewish tourists you start reading in fact about yourself about history and suddenly
you realize that if you want your history is not beginning from bolshevik revolution and
the result is awful soviet history it's uh thousands thousands years before from the exodus
from Egypt and it still continues and it's so easy to feel that uh this struggle is and you look
at these guys who
are soldiers near the court and you understand they at 1967 and you said
they are 20 years old and they're exactly as you and they are involved in such an interesting
inspiring history and you are only thinking about your career and you discover that there
is that you're part of big family these jews who are coming from miami from new york from
london from different places in the world they're saying oh your father is from odessa
and my father is from odessa or my grandfather is pronounced
we are family we want to help so
if you only make switch in your life my mind you can have this history you will have these people
and you can have this state and this feeling of discovery of identity that what gives you strength
to fight for your freedom to say publicly think that you really think like i don't really want to
live here i want uh to live in israel the moment you say it publicly all your life changes and
it is in danger and you'll be searched you'll lose your job and you at
the end of your career
but you are becoming freakers and so this feeling that as long as you are part of your family or
the as long as you a part of this history uh uh uh you're strong enough to be a free person that's
something what followed me all the life you know the punishing cell when they for years they try
to convince me that i am alone forgotten abandoned my life depends on me and my readiness to
cooperate with kgb but you know that that's lie and you simply start trying to think w
hat are all
those views that i was active together with them being a spokesman our movement are doing now and
what are those american tourists who i met and who mentioned his accomplices are doing now and
what israel is doing and what my wife is doing and you feel that you you imagine the whole
world of jews working and struggling together and it happened not imagined it happened to be a
real world and that gives you tremendous strength to fight for your rights or rights of other
jews and
for the better of the world and that's why whenever i see young jews
who are so confused and they feel as one told me for me as a liberal dude would
be better if israel will not exist another says of course they want to support israel to
sign this letter against bakoto israel but i know that three of my professors will not
like it and they are very important for my career that's why i decided to wait and not to speak for
a couple of years about it when my career will be currently they'll st
art speaking on behalf of
israel and you're thinking my god it's not in the soviet union in the times of brazil it's today in
harvard the yell in the centers of the freedom and you think but how much more shallow their life
that again they themselves already not because of the kgb but they themselves decided the
most important thing is their career and let's be quiet and how much how all their
life is losing the energy the power of this unique connection of the how cool it is to be uh
to b
e part of these people and doesn't matter how much you disagree with the prime minister with
the israeli government was about another decision but but uh this the feeling that you are inside
this village together with all your families going through the history it's so empowering
it gives you so much energy it makes your life so interesting and that's exactly our
challenge how at the challenger how uh to make this twist and jump from the life of
trying to adjust yourself to be to be accepte
d to to to change your life the one which is full
of energy and not simply you dream about tikkun alabama you're really dealing with this to
kundalini you're making a world much better place so even if we as americans i see they're canadians
on the call can't quite understand what it's like to jump from freedom from slavery to freedom
we certainly can understand the tension between being a careerist and an activist and we can
certainly understand what it's like to feel alone and cut off and
feel connected and i think
that's kind of the the trajectory we're trying to invite challenge inspire young jews and old
jews to experience and to see the positive but you said something quietly and i want to
emphasize it you you you mentioned that we have disagreements we Jews are expert at disagreeing
um we Israelis love democracy so much that we are already on our fourth election in two
years and there's fear of a fifth election when a jew comes to you a student comes to you
and says N
atan i get the family feeling i get the the the sense of belonging i get that sense of
history but I'm so embarrassed by the occupation of the Palestinians. I'm embarrassed by
our unpopularity. I'm embarrassed by our inability to to unite on anything how do you
help them out of that that that right how do you give them some sense of inspiration. Well, the
most important thing, the bottom line is of course is to to feel that there are no reasons to be
embarrassed there can be a balance for o
ne another leader or for one another decision but then you
simply start fighting against it and you'll be less embarrassed but there are so many reasons to
be very proud that you're part of all these people and i gotta say people always look or very often
look with nostalgia saying well you're lucky guys you were part of the soviet Jewry movement there
there was nothing to argue about it was clear that there is evil on one hand that good at the other
hand Jewish people against the libertari
an regime that's all today is much more difficult today
we have left and right and all these religious disagreements so we had i think we addressed it
whereas deeply in this book more than any other book that i saw the question of disagreements
incites soviet jury movement disagreements between uh refusing themselves alterniki and politiki
and those who agree that we all have to go only to israel those who think that we have
to be for freedom of immigration and those who are more about inte
rested in
the human rights of those who are this zionist struggle and disagreements
with american jewish organizations which were so high establishment against
activists uh there were so many organizations students struggle for surgery conference for
surgery and counsel for surgery and coalition for soviet jury and 35 many others and they some
of them didn't talk to one another or hated one another or uh tried to cancel one another and
sometimes i as the spokes on our mood had to put for f
oreign tourists and there is when they
were smuggling out with your documents twice because the same document i had to send to two
different Jewish organizations which are on the same street in Manhattan but they will never
exchange documents so it seemed like crazy uh but in that you understand that it's because
of these many different organizations you could reach many different groups of Jews practical
all the Jewish world and that what's important in KGB files they were all on the same
page and
you saw the organizations i think there was a list of more than 200 Jewish tourists like who came to
visit us to bring information to get information they were from different organizations KGB didn't
care didn't know what organization these Jews belong this because after all it was one struggle
of all the Jewish people for the freedom of soviet Jews for bringing down the iron curtain and that's
how KGB saw it and in that that's how we saw it so it was a good lesson for me that you
should never
try to fight for having one opinion one there are people who say can't you be one organization
you are there are only few hundreds of refusals why do we need so many different competing
organizations and definitely American Jews can't you really unite in one big organization and
to speak to your government with other voices so with you no it's impossible Jews will not speak
in one voice you will not speak to himself or herself in bad voice we know that every journey
is too sil
ly but uh uh as long as we remember that in the end we uh we had the same journey
together and we are we have mutual trust and mutual future and we can survive only together
as long as we remember and have this big picture that all our disagreements are not the reason to
be embarrassed uh there's a reason to to uh try to reach to uh to come with new and new ideas and
to reach more and more uh people so we had unity but not uniformity or unanimity and um and this is
actually an important les
son i think for today too which is that we actually need a coalition that's
pro-Israel that's Zionist from left to right some are pro-occupation some are are our pro settlement
it doesn't matter when we all yell on yesterday when we all coalesce on yom hat sumot and yom
hazicaron around the power of Jewish peoplehood and Israel itself i see a lot of that excellent
question so i'm going to turn it over to Gilead in a minute. But just one last metaphor I'd like us
to to leave our friends, our
viewers and hopefully readers with. Everybody now is an expert in chess
because we've all watched the queen's gambit and toward the end of the book you talk about being in
punishment cells. You're in the gulag, the soviet prison system for nine years you're in solitary
confinement for about four or five of those years but you're in punishment cells. You're in a
sensory deprivation chambers for about 405 days when the soviet union wouldn't had rules
limiting people to 15 days at a time, and
you survive by playing chess in your head.
That becomes a lesson to us about how to work together even when Israel and diaspora seem to be
on different pages even when left and right seem to be on different pages. How to connect the dots?
how does that work? because you mentioned queen's gambit i have to say it's it's a very good film
and I'll tell you why uh you know well when we were writing our book queen's gambit didn't uh was
not there yet so we couldn't use this comparison but we do
write that in fact chess was my first
escape to freedom because of the soviet union when you cannot live by uh to speak open on
your mind and here in the age of five my mother teaches me to play chess and says in the chess you
can fly you can be free and really something where you where you are the only world in which you are
not punished for your initiative to the contrary and where there are no borders and you you
can win against everybody if you only will uh will try hard and that's how
i was playing
became the champion of the school in the champion of the city and played simultaneously with that
uh dozens of people that start playing black without looking on the board simultaneously
and i think that in this film but i cannot be judged about many things about American
life but the fact how this girl finds through chess freedom of your mind how to run away from
that prison well it was uh i could feel it very strongly both as a chess player and the one for
whom chance was i
mportant for the at the first escape now in punishing cell i uh i was supposed
to to become intellectually too weak and weak and weaker because it's dark it's cold three pieces
of red three cups of water and now nobody talk to and you can become crazy but i'm playing thousands
of games in my head and you're winning each time and not only your winning each time but
because you have enough uh time to find the better option but then you turn the boards you
are playing black white and then you
turn the ball but then you're playing on it for the other side
and now you're trying to improve the play with the other side and then you're turning world
again and again and again and after a few days in fact there is no you in every game you're
white or your black and you do your best to win but then at some moment and say it doesn't
matter you are white and then it will be black and they'll be white again the important
thing that all the pieces are your partners or your your tools for su
rvival and the
the for for for me for victory over this the the evil which tries to destroy and that's
how i feel about Israel uh gold jury and in through my professional work and when in prison
i had to feel myself connected to all the Jews of the world and then the government I've had
all the time to think how i am bringing the god of the government to Jewish people and then on
Jewish agency how I'm bringing uh Jewish people's interests and pains to Israel and turning the
board again and
again once i am Israeli once again diaspora and together somehow it doesn't matter
because this feeling together is one family that was important and we can win only together and
the power of jews of the world depends on israel israel the best defense of israel is world
jury and it's very important all the time to to feel yourself both and that's the image which
we used in our book yeah and we're we're muscular moderates we're not these kumbaya people saying
oh just everybody has an opinio
n what we're saying is you have strong opinions you have strong
principles but and this is a counter-cultural idea also in the university today we can learn
by seeing the other perspective we can learn by saying huh how does it look from the left or from
the right if we tend to be from the right or from the left and that's the challenge and that
actually leads to a stronger more resilient series of principles uh thank you natan will
now turn to gillard thank you both um i'll begin with a ve
ry softball question because as you were
speaking i was curious natan i know you're still in the game by still being involved in institutes
against countering anti-semitism are you still playing chess after all these years uh yeah well
the things go to today because of internet at any moment when you have few minutes you can always
find somebody more or less on your level uh in any part of the world and to play so sometimes i
i i'm doing it but frankly speaking it's much less dramatic than
games of the punished excel yeah
yeah and i'm smart enough not to play with him uh uh kind of a basic question that relates
to sort of the the bottom line of the book why is the relationship between israel and the
diaspora between jews and israel and jews abroad even important right what what would we
lose if that relationship falters and what do we all gain by by
strengthening that connection well uh gil you want to start because that's
something that we deal a lot in our book sure well t
here are actually two dimensions to this question
one is why is it so important and two why is it so contentious and we deal with both sides of that so
why is it so important it goes back to the themes that you keep on hearing never alone is about
community and continuity and family who better than one another to look out for each other the
israelis need the most effective most aggressive allies uh to fight against delegitimization who
better than camera who better than students who better
than diaspora jews and in the modern world
where so many jews are lost ideologically are lost judaically are drifting what better inspiration
do we have and we see this when camera comes with its delegation we see it with 750 000 people who
participated in birthright when you come to israel so could we cut one cut off from one another yes
but would israelis lose that sense of peoplehood also by the way the justification for the state
because it is a jewish state and would we lose all these
amazing allies absolutely and would american
jews and canadian jews and british jews lose a source of inspiration a source of anchoring
a source of history that helps explain who we are and this anomaly that's so confusing to our
non-jewish friends that we're both a nation and a religion and that's expressed in jerusalem
it's expressed at the cartel it's expressed in everything about israel so why give it up but now
why are there constant tensions and this actually gets to one of the fun th
ings about the book
that natan and i both had been on the speaking circuit and been writing for many many years and
we should come up with our own little explanation natan talked about how both american jews
or diaspora jews and israeli jews have have different survival strategies israelis are living
in a very tough neighborhood in the middle east creating a democracy but have to
figure out as a majority culture how do you survive in a very rough neighborhood
american jews are living in le
t's say a kinder softer gentler neighborhood but are saying how do
we as a minority survive surrounded by a majority so inherently there are certain differences i
for a while have been talking about how israelis are more davidian more like king david focused
at the end of the day on survival against goliath survival against the philistines sovereignty and
you sometimes have to make very tough choices american jews are more isaiah focusing on
their universal ideals of peace and justice and b
rotherhood and universalism now of course
when you drill down into isaiah it's also about jewish peoplehood when you drill down to david
he's also playing the harp so we see that yes superficially there are differences and that's
where we clash but underlying it are overlaps the book is very new uh the queen's gambit might
not make an appearance but the coronavirus does make an appearance and so i wonder since
some of its themes are are timeless could the same book have been written a
deca
de or two ago or was it written now to urgently address some sort of new forces some
some new fissures among the jewish people and a new zeitgeist in the diaspora or in israel
or in the west well look i uh 30 years ago almost immediately after going out
of prison i wrote book via no evil which in some way though you know in a much more
practical way day to day describes survival and resistance in the prison could this book be
written then of course not because i didn't have my experience in
the government and i didn't
have my experience uh in the gym series 15 years ago i wrote book whether it was ron
dermott the case of democracy where my being in the government and experience with oslo agreements
uh and uh comparing it with my our experience as listened to the soviet union brought me to feel
that people in the west forget the real power of freedom they live in freedom they take
it naturally they don't so uh that then also i could write the book which is based on my
compari
ng my experience in the soviet union and israeli government but uh this book which
mainly dialogue between jewish people and israel could not be written i think i decided to write
this book just because on one hand there in the the most difficult moments of the crisis on the
crisis of the courtroom on one hand uh when the old jury or a big part of world jewry is
the feeling that israel betrays them and cries of iran when the prime minister of israel
tells me but these jews really don't like
israel they like israel only their imagination but not
the one which has to fight for its right to exist so this moment of this big mutual distress
which we described of course in the book that's the moment when i thought that the time has
come to compare all these three experiences and to write the book about the dialogue uh between these
and jewish people and of course i was lucky to to propose to gil who has also experienced
as an activist but also as a historian one of the things that
helped us in writing the
book was at the very beginning my son yoni who's 23 uh read fear no evil and he said why didn't
they just shoot him and i realized that when natan wrote fear no evil everybody knew what the
soviet union was everybody knew that communism was trying to convince the world that it was
a force for good and and everybody knew sort of the rules that the soviet union government
that soviet union the soviet government played this generation your generation fortunately
has g
rown up in a world where the soviet union collapsed and disappeared and the only
dictators you know are nazis in hollywood and so that question helped us in a broader way also
contextualize and explain some of the rules and the craziness of the soviet union to help in
a way that wasn't necessary and fear no evil to bring people into the complexity of the
soviet experience and it also i think uh inspired us to continually think of the 18
year old the 20 year old the 22 year old student in un
iversity being bombarded with
all kinds of negative messages and we were hoping that this book would specifically speak
to that generation would specifically explain why be jewish why be proud why not just defend
israel but celebrate israel and celebrate zionism let me combine two questions that we have
from the audience on a related topic here uh one question is from someone doing their
undergraduate research now on the unique form of soviet anti-semitism and their attack on
jewish memory
and they ask i'm curious how would you view the soviet weaponization
of memory and attack on jewish memory as informing the anti-semitism we see on college
campuses today and maybe natan would feel that and the second part that i'm i'm combining here
is if you could give one piece of advice perhaps gil would answer that to a incoming college
student incoming jewish college student before they in the diaspora before they get to campus
what would that be in a on one foot yeah well uh about e
ight cities of the soviet union uh uh
first of all uh you can understand communism it was like uh official ideology communist ideology
or bolshevik ideology or marxist leninist ideology but it was like a faith a meaning that well it
gives a bad name to faith but meaning that it was not a faith it was like a religion and this
religion everybody had to accept this dogma of struggle and dictatorship of the proletariat
for creating equal society for everybody and uh there should be no god in th
is religion
except marx anderson stalin or later and that's why strong identities whether it is
national identity or religious identity they've your enemies of the uh of the regime that's why
regime was fighting against strong identities very quickly became clear that one of the
strongest identities or the one which is really global and the it is jewish identity and very
quickly soviet union which started from condemning anti-semitism and continued official contamination
with all these yea
rs start fighting against jewish identity and that's why i grew already
second generation of soviet jews in absolutely assimilated by force now at the same time what was
good in soviet union was that their anti-semitism didn't uh there was no difference between their
hatred to jewish state and they hated to jewish people when uh israel was under attack
as a zionist agent everybody knew that jewish neighbors have a problem when there was
campaign against uh uh cosmo jewish cosmopolitan they
were accused that their real influence is
coming from abroad everybody knew that again uh aggressive possession of
the soviet union told israel so nobody had any doubt that it is the same
that attack on the israelite attack on jews are simply a communist ideology fighting for
being the only religion among soviet people now the power of the raising of making the people
to forget was unbelievable i grew i was born a few years after the second world war i grew among
the places which were all
the killing fields of holocaust tens of thousands of people were killed
practically in every place where i was during my childhood i was playing a few miles from the place
where 75 000 people were killed only a few years ago and we grew knowing nothing about holocaust
so after the crime of nazis there was a crime of soviets to try to raise it why because they
understood that that can be very important part of jewish identity and so there was war communists
soviet union defeated francis that
that's a regime of course there were victims who were
killed no word about holocaust no word about those people killed around you they are all killed
only because of the rejection so that whether so anti-semitism was like the only
type of jewish identity which survived but only when we start feeling uh our dad with
the real with the positive information not only with uh uh with desire to escape anti-semitism
then you have real strengths to fight and what is really important when uh when i
have to spend
a lot of efforts today to uh what we all have trying to convince people that some forms
overtaking israel so some anti-zionist extremism that is type uh type of anti-semitism
as you know sometimes very difficult to convince the jews that there is deep connection that's
why i had to invent my 3d definition that's why international definition of wednesday is
so important and but i have to say everybody who had experience in the soviet union they
understand they understand the m
ilitary they don't have to to be convinced and also they understand
the danger of double things that when there is anti-semitism and they try us to forget to be
afraid to speak publicly about your jewishness that is the beginning of the end of freedom
for everybody and that's why for these people it is much easier to understand the danger
of this phenomenon of doubling and fear over being uh proud jews publicly
until in today's campus culture can people imagine how heartbreaking
it must ha
ve been for me to sit with my friend who was
in the gulag for nine years who believed growing up in a dictatorship that
anti-semitism was the tool of the dictator and show him the latest crises of anti-semitism in
democracy as bad as that was because unfortunately he'd been dealing with this for 20 30 years it
was even harder for me as someone who loves the university i would say i would say look at
me um a case of arrested development i got to university and never left i became a professor
and for me to share with my friend the information about this new generation of students who approach
one another with a totalitarian heavy hand and bully one another into submission and
to share with him uh a study from the um from the cato institute that 63 of americans
not just in university 63 percent of americans feel at one point another during the course of a
typical month that they have to hide their beliefs can you imagine how devastating that is as an
american who believes in fr
eedom who's proud of democracy and can you imagine how devastating
that must be as a soviet refugee as someone who escaped that to see it happening in the centers of
freedom in the universities which is supposed to be the capitals of free thought i don't like to
be a hysteric but this is a real crisis i don't like to be pessimistic because voldemort said you
can't be a zionist and an and a pessimist and i'm a zionist so i'm an optimist but this is something
we really have to deal with and i
want to reach out to our students on the call i want to reach
out to our jewish and non-jewish participants on the call and if you ask me to give one piece
of advice i would say be an anti-propagandist be a skeptic be part of that party of people who
aren't fanatics who have that ability to turn the chess board around in their head and you know i'm
a zionist i should be telling you no be an israel advocate it's more important for me that you'll
be a skeptic than you be an advocate it's mor
e important for me that you'll be a free thinker
and not a double thinker it's more important for me that you'd be an individual thinker and not
a group thinker and the best way i can summarize it is with a purposely awkward term because
sometimes awkward term sticks in your head be an anti-propagandist say i want to question my own
side as well as the other side i want to question the bullying culture it's not just a canceled
culture it's a coercion culture i want to be part of that party
that goes back to jon stewart
mill and betty ferdin and martin luther king and john kennedy and thomas jefferson all with their
flaws that questions that struggles that anguishes and if i'm allowed one last piece of
advice don't let the haters and the bullies define your existence the best way to get out
of it is to find communities through camera through hillel through uh i see a christian
zionist on the call through other like-minded people don't let them run your lives don't
spend the w
hole time fighting against them also celebrate your own ideals your own
culture your own community a related question at the start of your book you look at how
the soviet union cultivated citizens with no individuality whose voices merged into one
because the government prohibited deviant expressions as you as you described it and the
solution which you described as a solution was to live without fear and act independently and
i admit that as i was reading all of that in the in the intro in
the first chapter my thoughts
often drifted to modern day america where people feel increasingly worried about consequences
for disagreeing with certain orthodoxies but i also felt a little bit guilty comparing
these two times and places because i didn't want to minimize you know sort of that that
uh holocaust denial by comparing everything to the holocaust i didn't want to minimize the
oppression faced by those behind the iron curtain living here in this free and outspoken america so
can
a free country ever resemble the ussr and to the extent that we do have a problem here is it
more difficult to address because we can't focus our fire on the obvious source on this government
this regime that kept the chains in place i always was insisting that there is chinese wall
between the world of dictatorship and the free world and whenever i was told that russia is going
back to where it was i was saying no it cannot because well of course it's very bad putin took it
uh many steps
back all the democracy in russia but there is no millions in gulag and all millions
working for kgb so this fear doesn't control the mind of the people the way it's controlled and
that's what all the difference even more so about free society uh i propose criteria where they feel
living fear society free society town square test you can go to earn square and express your views
and they're not afraid of being punished by prison life then you're in free free society if not
you of yourself so
it seemed very clear in the last 15 years it becomes more and more
complicated because we see the phenomenon of double think united states of america that
we're speaking about which is typically phenomenal of the people living in fear under
the cage and we see this cancel culture which by definition cancel cultures comes from the
regimes which were trying to cancel to prohibit the big parts of cultures so but so it seems like
there is some similarity where is the difference the difference i
s that there the
return regime it was the fear of kgb and it is a massive force with the with
the army with good luck with the prisons uh so here it is fear of uh public
opinion of being not popular so uh your your narrow professional circles so what
it means it means that it is a decision which you make not the system makes for you but you
make and the moment you make this decision uh to to take care of your career and and not
to speak publicly on mind you are giving away part of american
democracy or american freedom
so the world freedom or everybody's freedom and so the the difference is that now it's up to every
individual to decide whether you want to continue living in absolutely free society or you're ready
to make compromise with with your own freedom gill you want to yeah so um you know this is
part of it is we always emphasize that yes there's a huge difference between totalitarianism
coming from the top down and coming from peers and professors so la javdil but wh
at's most important
is a historian i'm very sensitive to false analogies but the other thing is you have to learn
from the past and we should be studying the soviet totalitarian system which again as i said earlier
it came from a really beautiful idea it came from the beautiful idea of equality just as i said at
the beginning that much of what we see today comes from beautiful ideas of fighting racial injustice
and wanting to be social justice warriors and and and and coming from something
positive but when
done without breaks and done in a bullying fashion becomes negative and toxic and so we should
use the example um as warnings to to be careful and and again it's very easy to finger point it's
very easy to say oh what are they doing wrong let's also ask what are we doing wrong are we
listening to one another enough are we modeling the kind of behavior that we want to see in the
university square in the jewish synagogue or the jewish spaces and the more we become tolerant t
he
more we learn from one another the more we switch that chess board around and the more we build
bridges even with those who dare to disagree with us the better off we are and the other thing is i
think we have to pull out we need like a a a world a network of double thinkers um all of us who
are swallowing our pride and all of us who are allowing ourselves to be bullied have to stand up
and say i'd kind enough and then we'll see that it's a very small minority i call twitter dumb
domb p
eople think that life is about twitter it's not uh we saw joe biden you can love him or him
but he was elected by main street not by twitter twitter told us it was going to be all the
far left leftists in the democratic party there are many more mainstream people today
we call them the silenced majority if you're a part of that stop being silent so gil is it even
possible to maintain bipartisan support for israel in this increasingly um polarized atmosphere or
is that polarization as you su
ggested not really reflecting that the actual state of the country
but more the state of um you know social media and as a historian do you think there's anything we
can learn from other divided errors in american history which i assume they're you know this isn't
the first one that we've experienced absolutely so first of all for decades it wasn't just that
the bipartisan support for israel was a gift to israel it was israel's gift to the united states
of america a healthy democracy needs
some issues on which left and right can agree and just today
i think i saw that in the us congress over 300 members of congress and it was 50 democrats
and 50 republicans signed a petition saying we don't want to uh condition israel we want
unconditional support for the state of israel we make a mistake when we allow the tribes and
we and and and the aocs and the marginal people to run the conversation and we think they
represent a trend we do the same thing in the jewish community by the w
ay right what do we do we
take the three people and jewish voices of peace right 50 000 people go on birthright two years
ago twelve people from jewish voices for peace on purpose come and walk out and everybody's talking
about those twelve not the forty nine thousand uh nine hundred and eighty eight did i get my math
right i mean it's insane so we we ourselves are addicted to the margins we ourselves are different
to the radicals and yes we there are examples to learn look there's a warnin
g we have the most
powerful warning in american history about the civil war but what happened we had a president
who called out the better angels of our nature we had a president who spoke about the
mystic accords of memory that unite us we had a president abraham lincoln who emphasized
that which we commit to and that which unites us not also the way that which divides us and we
don't just do it from the top down we have to do it in our own conversations we have to do it
in our own intera
ctions and so yes there are many examples of look in the 1960s everybody said oh
america is a sick society america's falling apart and then you can love him or hate him but ronald
reagan came with a song of mourning in america and bill clinton i'll be bipartisan talked
about centrism and and and so there have been presidents there have been leaders who
built up the center and i call them muscular moderates because they also had strong opinions
but there also were those who played the divisi
ons i'm sorry in that time please i only want to add
one thing we write about it also in our book that in order support of israel will be bipartisan we
have to fight our enemies bipartisan anti-semitism and this is such a uniting everybody's thing but
if people on the left will fight anti-semitism on their rights and will deny the importance of
anything to the left and people on the right will fight to only anticipate the left
and will deny the importance when this by the way is rising from
both sides at the
same time if you will not be bipartisan meaning uniting our efforts against both of these
anti-semitism how we can expect from america not to be white to be bipartisan that's my command
i feel like people in the audience could keep watching this for an hour and i know you know our
time is limited there are a lot of great questions that have gone unanswered i think i'm seeing some
of them are answered in the book so if you haven't already read never again never alone pleas
e read
the book and then we'll talk again yeah yeah there'll be more talks and and um there'll be more
events with with gil natan and at the same time camera will be holding uh you know continuing this
lecture series on may 6 we have cameras curriculum expert steve statsky giving a briefing on a topic
of urgent importance which is indoctrination in public schools so i hope everyone can join
us for that and um you know thank you both so much for taking the time to join us and
i look forward
to seeing everyone next time.
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