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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As you were talking before, you said he foresaw a world where Jerusalem was just at the center of life for the Jewish people, meant so much to the Jewish people. The Jewish people have yearned for Jerusalem for 2,000 years. We are living during a time of just an unbelievable historical anomaly, where Jews have returned to political sovereignty. I'd love for you to talk a little bit about how
how, I would say, miraculous it is that we're alive for that. I don't know if that's too religious a word. And also, if you could reflect a little bit on what being powerless as a nation, as a people, for 2,000 years has done to the Jews.
Because that seems to me to be something quite exceptional, to sort of maintain our status as a people, devoid of land and devoid of political power, only to return to it.
Exploding genitals for one second.
And a tyrant, though.
But maybe let's talk about that a little, because it seems to me that so many of the paradigms that I grew up with, the two-state solution, land for peace, the idea that both the Israelis and the Palestinians fundamentally wanted the same thing, all of that is shattered or let's just say uncertain.
Is the reason for that because we were putting sort of a Western gaze or a Western paradigm on a profoundly anti-Western environment?
Let's go deeper and be explicit. Do you mean like UNRWA when you're referring to that?
So the UN draws the borders in 1947, just to gloss the history. The Israelis accept the partition. The Palestinians reject it. A war... you know, of many Arab states begins. There have been tons of wars since then. I just want to, like, draw you out a little bit more when you're saying that there are international organizations, because you said a pretty radical thing, an important thing.
You're saying there are organizations that exist in the world to keep the conflict going and to keep Palestinians immiserated.
But there's no UN organization specifically dedicated to those refugees.
Draw that out a tiny bit more. I'm imagining some of the Columbia students that took over Hamilton Hall and were calling it a human rights violation that they didn't get their gluten-free crackers. They would be shocked to find out that they have some philosophical or political DNA with crusaders. So just a few more sentences on that one.
One of the things that I think is the result of people not knowing history is that they take kind of a very American rubric and slap it on to a faraway place that they couldn't locate on a map. And I think if you went to the average Columbia student that found themselves
cheering, or I'll be more generous, you know, standing up for Hamas, sorry, that's what they were doing, they would say that the reason that they're doing it is because, again, to put it very crudely, they see the conflict as sort of whites versus blacks. Palestinians are American blacks before the civil rights movement or maybe even further before that.
And Jews, Israelis, are sort of like the white oppressor class. And this is a meme. It's really, really sticky and very powerful and something that you see absolutely everywhere. Obviously, it bears no relation to reality. But talk a little bit about, like, how do you dispel that kind of thing? It is such a profoundly... compelling idea.
It's captured in a more erudite way in Ta-Nehisi Coates' recent book, The Message. And it's something that people, young people, are being educated to in our most elite schools. What do we do about that? How do you, like, you can't go up to that person and be like, read this book, when they're seeing every Twitter and Instagram, you know, slideshow that's giving them an opposite message.
You gave an interview recently where you talked about being unable to sleep. You were asked a question about whether or not you're ever able to take off your historian hat. You said no, and you said, that's the reason I'm having trouble sleeping lately. What is keeping you up? Is it the West? Is it Israel?
But let's choose maybe a dichotomy that's a little more uncomfortable. Jews in Hungary report being safer than Jews in England. And that is a reality. What are we meant to take from that?
I guess the question I've been thinking about a lot personally is just, how do we learn to be Jews inside history? I feel that my generation wasn't necessarily given the tools, and we're now having to feel our way toward them. And when you're being a historian, you have the privilege of sort of remove an observation and skepticism, and you're looking back.
Yeah, that would be a word for it. But you're also a Jew living in 2025. experiencing all the things that we WhatsApp each other about. How do we be Jews in this historical moment?
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