Barry Weiss
speaker
976 appearances
13 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Mar 2025
Barry Weiss’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
No, no, what... But you also do write novels.
I love this idea of giving history sort of a holiness or a sanctity. If we wind back the clock to 2016, and maybe we'll start to hear some things like this again on cable news, maybe it's happening right now on MSNBC, the comparisons were being made to the 1930s. This is the 1930s, and Trump is a kind of neo-Hitlerian figure.
Other historians, I'm thinking of, you know, Walter Russell Mead has compared this era to a kind of pre-World War I era. Neil Ferguson, a free press columnist, has said it's a kind of new Cold War that's starting to get very, very hot in places. At the risk of sort of forcing you to make a crude comparison to this moment, What does this moment remind you of?
Because everyone's sort of reaching for a way to explain it. And the only way they seem to be able to do that is to look to the past.
But... Well, let's just touch on it. Yay or nay? What did you think that was? We're talking about Elon Musk, of course.
Nay. Okay.
And I think that my view on the last election was... And I think one of the things that's so amazing about that incident is the people that were most up in arms about it have had either nothing to say about the explosion of anti-Semitism over the past year and a half especially. But... Or they have literally apologized for it. So like, forgive me if I'm not tearing my hair out.
I fully agree with that. I also wonder, just thinking about the ways that words have been leeched of their power, I wonder if the Jewish community sort of made the mistake of calling. I remember that when I was 16 or 17 years old,
that Hebe magazine, which was like this kind of dirtbaggy, really fun, I don't know, radical magazine, that the ADL put out a press release about how it was a danger to the Jews, it was made by Jews, because it was anti-Semitic. And now looking back, it's not only quaint, it's sort of tragic.
Maybe the ways that we overuse that word, and now that we're in a moment where we so need it, it doesn't feel available to us in the same way.
Why do we want to do that?
I wonder if there is an analogy to the following situation. If you go and walk through the University of Pennsylvania or Yale or Harvard or Princeton or some of the greatest museums in the world, which are in this city, or you look at the people that founded organizations like Human Rights Watch, and I could go on. You guys get the picture. These are Jews who have donated, who have
poured themselves into these institutions, in many cases founded the institutions themselves. And yet right now those institutions are playing host and are in fact dominated by a profoundly anti-Jewish ideology. Has there ever been, in your language, a ruling class that has overseen their fortunes so poorly as the American Jewish community over the past several decades?
Because I don't understand the impulse to suicide.
Is that the nature of things, though? I guess that's what I'm getting at. Is this just sort of the tragedy of history, the tragedy of institutions as they start out with one mission, they inevitably drift, they inevitably decay, people then go and start new ones? Or is there something unique and particularly rotten that happened here that we're now seeing in full?
So it's like we're jealous of jihadis?
So, given your study of history, do you think that we would be a healthier, more self-confident society if we had a religious revival?
This is a perfect transition to talking about Jerusalem. The word was carved into your ancestors' bed. Sir Moses Montefiore, people who have been to Jerusalem will, of course, know the windmill in that beautiful area of the city. Tell us, let's start personal. What is the meaning of Jerusalem to your family? You're wearing a ring on your finger that has the word, Yerushalayim, carved into it.
Tell me, take us into your family.
What did he write about it? Tell me about it.
Showing 341–360 of 976 · page 18 of 49
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