Travis Khachatoorian: You're listening to Sagecast, the podcast of Pomona College. This season's episodes were tackling the difficult with faculty and staff who are making a difference in the classroom and the world. I'm Travis Khachatoorian. Marilyn Thomsen: And I'm Marilyn Thomsen. Oona Eisenstadt is Fred Krinsky professor of Jewish Studies at Pomona College. Recently, she taught a course on antisemitism, a difficult issue that has arisen across the world for two millennia. Travis Khachatoorian: We spoke with her in the studios at KSPC. Here's that conversation. Welcome to the podcast, Oona. Oona Eisenstadt: Thank you. Travis Khachatoorian: It's so great to have you on here today. You've dedicated your career to Jewish studies and studies of Jewish philosophy. I'm curious what fueled your interest in studying that path? Oona Eisenstadt: Well, I'm the child of a couple of professors, a professor of political science and a professor of philosophy. And when I was young, I rebelled against the whole academic enterprise and I went to work in a factory, and I worked my way up to being a factory boss. I did that for six years. Marilyn Thomsen: What kind of factory? Oona Eisenstadt: Oh, I was making photo polymer printing plates for corrugated cardboard boxes, so a packaging factory. And then, I came to my senses and decided to reenter academia and I was going to be an English major. And then, I took a course in the religious studies department on religious themes in modern literature. And I thought that they were talking about books in the way that I wanted to talk about books. So, I just eased my way into the religion department where I felt welcomed. I felt like the people there were speaking the same language. And then I took a graduate course on the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, who his lifespans the 20th century and he's very influential in continental thought and in the ethical turn in continental thought, and the linguistic turn in continental thought. And that was when I fell in love with Jewish philosophy, with 20th century Jewish philosophy and with French philosophy. So, it was all just drifting like an autumn leaf, honestly, and following the path of least resistance. And I guess Levinas sort of radiated out into other areas in Jewish philosophy, which radiated out into other areas in Judaism and Jewish studies. Antisemitism that we're talking about right now, I should say is not one of my areas of expertise. But because it's on the rise in the world, I did feel that I was duty bound to offer a course in it. And that's when I discovered how just weird and frightening it is and has been as a historical phenomenon. Marilyn Thomsen: So, we hear the term, but let's unpack it. How do you define antisemitism? What is it? Oona Eisenstadt: Well, I mean, there are lots of people who define it in different ways. So, I should probably say right now, that every single answer I'm going to give can be prefaced by, scholars disagree on that question. And maybe if I've said it now, I don't have to say it again. And you can understand that everything I'm saying is controversial. I don't know how to define it. Look, there's a big problem with definitions, especially in the world of social justice activism. And that is the tendency to believe that one needs to define something before one can address it, coupled with the tendency to believe that having defined it does anything to address the problem at all, which it really doesn't. So, you get all these people drawing up definitions of antisemitism as if that will help them eradicate antisemitism. And I really think that a lot of that is wasted effort. And a lot of it is kind of wrongheaded because the phenomenon is old and it's complicated, and people grab on often to the wrong end of the stick. So, let's just stick with the simplest possible definition, hatred of Jews. Travis Khachatoorian: How has antisemitism evolved over the years? Oona Eisenstadt: Okay. Well, there are people in the ancient pre-Christian world who have in their writings, in their polemical writings, some statements about Jews. "They stick to themselves. They won't eat with other people. They have these dietary rules. They won't marry us. What's the matter with them?" None of that is really antisemitism debatably, but I think there is some consensus on this point. What we call antisemitism starts with the Christians, and it starts with the split in Christianity between the old religion, Judaism, and the new religion, the child of Judaism, Christianity. You have Jesus, he is a Jew, he probably does not intend to start a new religious tradition. He's a reforming Jew. He's got a lot to say about the way Judaism should be and the way people should act. And he's got some pretty new radical, interesting ideas, but he probably was not someone who wanted Judaism to end or wanted to start a new different tradition. He was someone who wanted Judaism to change fairly radically. But after he died and St. Paul began to form the church, form a new separate religious tradition, what Paul found was that Jews were not really attracted to the new religion for the most part. The people who were attracted to the new religion were the people Paul thought of as Pagans, Romans and Greeks. So, Paul started to slant the way he was presenting the new tradition in the direction of favoring Romans and Greeks, and somewhat disfavor Jews, and certainly disfavor Jewish practice, like circumcision. That's the background. After Paul, you have the gospels. They're purport to be written by eyewitnesses, but they aren't. So, for instance, the Gospel of Matthew, which is the most relevant gospel, was written probably in the late 70, maybe 75, 76, 77. And in the Gospel of Matthew, you have a scene in which Pontius Pilate is asking the, quote, unquote, Jewish mob, whether he should kill Jesus or whether he should kill Barabbas, the thief. And the Jewish mob say, "Let Barabbas go. Kill Jesus." And he says, "Really? Are you sure? Because I don't think this guy's really done anything wrong." And they say, "Let him be crucified. Let his blood be on us and our children. Let his blood be on our heads." In other words, we're responsible and our children are responsible. Well, very unlikely that a Jewish mob ever said this. We know that the Romans killed Jesus. Crucifixion was a standard method of execution in Rome, but why place the blame on the Jewish mob instead of on Pilate and the Romans? Well, at that time, the church needed to appeal to the Romans and it didn't need to appeal to the Jews, who'd already shown they weren't interested. So, this line, "Let his blood be upon our heads and upon our descendants," essentially becomes the Jews killed Christ. And from then on, already you have a problem. You have people picking up on that line. Obviously, you have sort of [inaudible 00:08:14] hostility between Jewish groups and groups that are still Jewish-y, but following the new religion. But that minor hostility is massively fueled by the need for the new group to reassert itself against the old group, and this line gives them the fuel they need to do that. By the early Middle Ages, you're already finding the Jews characterized as anachronistic, as nonbelievers, as the epitome of the heretic, as even demonic. At the same time, the Jewish temple has been destroyed by the Romans in the year 70, and the Jews are now in diaspora. They're spread out everywhere, and they don't have a homeland. I mean, some of them actually did stay. There are Jews living in Israel today who are descendants of people who never left. But they're also all over the Arab world. They're in Spain, they're in the Far East. So, when you have a people who is living all spread out and who don't have their own homeland or their own place to be, they become the essential other for you. They're very easy to demonize and to blame and to be scared of and worried about. Think of something like the Roma people, who are pejoratively called Gypsies. I mean, they're everywhere. Who knows who they are? Who knows where they came from? They don't have a homeland. They wander all over the place. Obviously, they're crooks, they're thieves, they're dirty, they're liars. This is just the hatred of the other who's on your land. Marilyn Thomsen: And there were times where Jewish people had to wear a yellow star- Oona Eisenstadt: Yeah, this is all through the late Middle Ages and the early modern period- Marilyn Thomsen: Why? Oona Eisenstadt: ... in European cities. Well, by this time, you already have more or less full-blown anti-Judaism/antisemitism. Marilyn Thomsen: Where did the ghetto from? Oona Eisenstadt: And you have a lot of doubts about these people. Marilyn Thomsen: Yeah. Where did the ghetto come from? Oona Eisenstadt: Okay, so the ghetto is the result of sort of state-sponsored antisemitism. If these hated people are living in your land, at least they won't be mingling with the other people. So, you build a ghetto, you make all the Jews move there, and you close the doors at night, so that if they go out of the ghetto for their daily business, they have to be back in at night before a certain curfew. You make them wear an armband, you restrict them from doing various jobs. I mean, this is all also complicated by church councils that declare that Christians are not allowed to lend money and charge interest. And you can't have a growing mercantile society without lending money at interest. I mean, I don't know anything about economics, but economists will tell you that this is absolutely necessary for economic growth. So, you have a situation by around the year, let's say 1000 or 1200, under which rulers, princes are inviting Jews to move in to their nations, so that they can be bankers, so that they can lend money at interest, but also, putting them in ghettos and restricting their movements. And then once in a while, the ruler will need some money and there will be, "We'll institute a kind of riot against the Jews," or, "We'll expel them all and just take all their money." Because if you run out of money, you can always turn to the Jews. Marilyn Thomsen: That happened in England, didn't it? Oona Eisenstadt: It happened in England. 1290, I think, something like that. All the Jews were expelled from England, and there weren't any Jews in that nation for about 350 years after that. The most famous example is the Spanish Inquisition, which was probably not as much fiscally motivated as religiously motivated. There's a fervor of Catholic feeling where the idea was that you could convert, or be killed, or be expelled. And all the Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492. You know what they say? The child's rhyme, in 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue, you can add, and the Jews were kicked out of Spain too. And then, that's an easy date to remember. And those Jews who had gone west had mostly settled in the Iberian Peninsula, and they all then moved back east again. So, you get a lot of influx of Jews to countries that are now Arab countries. Countries where I must say, they were treated pretty well for the most part. The Jewish Muslim cultural coalition of the early modern period was very strong. Lots of cooperation in learning and in developing new medical techniques and in philosophizing together. Except for some periods, those Muslim countries were pretty good for Jews. Travis Khachatoorian: So, you said you're teaching a course on antisemitism, correct? Oona Eisenstadt: I have done, yeah. And I will again. Travis Khachatoorian: So, what prompted you to want to delve into this subject into great depths? Oona Eisenstadt: Well, it's pretty interesting, hey? I guess I was prompted in the first place by the fact that antisemitism is on the rise. It's something like doubled... Antisemitic incidents in America have doubled in the last few years. And it used to be that people would speak about the Jews maybe in private, say nasty things. You can ask anybody you know who's Jewish, everybody has heard... Oh, forget it. I don't want to get into the kind of antisemitic remarks and jokes that make Jews feel a sinking dread that you hear all the time. So, there's that. But then, there's the fact that if you start following it up, it's completely fascinating. The fact is that these days conspiracy theories are on the rise as obviously... Marilyn Thomsen: Why do you think that is? Oona Eisenstadt: Why are conspiracy theories on the rise? Marilyn Thomsen: Right. Oona Eisenstadt: That's a question that I don't know the answer to exactly. I mean, I think that when people feel as if they don't have a place in society and they don't know what's going on, they feel a lack of control, they want to find an explanation. I think you have to start there. But you'd have to ask someone who studies widespread conspiracy theories for a more complicated answer. I think, basically, alienation and economic degradation are on the rise, and people are afraid for the future in a million different ways. People have always been a little afraid for the future, but these days, it seems to me more reasonable than in many other times. Anyway, the point is all these conspiracy theories have antisemitism somewhere in their theoretical basis. Chemtrails, that's the Jews. Faked moon landing, that's going to be the Jews. It is fascinating that theories now so out there and so well-developed that you find it everywhere. Marilyn Thomsen: What is it that makes conspiracy theories about Jews so powerful? Oona Eisenstadt: The thing about the stereotype of Jews is that it's not a simple stereotype that says they're bad people, or they're dumb, or they're lazy. It's a kind of mixed stereotype. They're conniving, they're bad, but they're also clever. So, you've got this kind of stereotype fully formed, and because you have that and because there's a lot of, quote, unquote, evidence for it, I mean, people have been writing this for millennia. People have been producing documents in which Jews connive. The evidence is there. You can just count it. You can riffle the pages. So, if there's something that you can't explain, the Jews can form a nice explanation for you. There's a theorist who works for the Southern Poverty Law Center, who did work there, called Eric Ward, who wrote a very influential piece that I strongly recommend to your listeners called Skin in the Game. Very well-read piece. In which he describes his experience going to... He's a Black man, but he went to white supremacist rallies to try to figure out what was going on at these rallies. And he found, basically, that antisemitism was operating for these people as an explanation of something that they were otherwise unable to explain the answer. "The Jews, this is a Jewish conspiracy. The Jews want to undermine the old patriarchal white supremacist foundations of American society, so they are pulling the strings for these other groups." In other words, if you want to go on believing that the people you think are inferior are inferior, even though they have made social gains, you can blame the social gains on the Jews. Travis Khachatoorian: One of the most dramatic and tragic instances that immediately pops to my mind of antisemitism is the synagogue shooting in Pennsylvania. I'm curious, just when those kind of news stories come out, how does it affect the Jewish community? Oona Eisenstadt: I know that many synagogues in America have had to put locks on their doors, hire security guards, put gates up around their grounds, and even there will be sometimes armed police outside synagogues in large city centers at times of worship. And that's not right. It's really not okay, but it's probably necessary. It's probably a necessary step. So, I think that that sort of fear, it's really a terrible thing to experience. I think though, that much closer to home things do happen. I mean, while I was teaching antisemitism last spring, there was an incident in LA in which some Jews were beaten up on the streets for no other reason than that they looked like Jews, and some guys were looking for some people to beat up and these guys had the beards. And that's right down the road. So, I was able to see the distress among my students. We've also had antisemitic flyers disseminated in the city of Claremont twice this year. "The Jewish mafia. The Jews own everything. The Jews run everything. The Jews are our enemy. The Jews are pedophiles," this kind of thing. And when those reach students, they're also viscerally distressed. Marilyn Thomsen: What about when people are not part of the Jewish community? What can they do to show support at times like that and other times as well? Oona Eisenstadt: Yeah, I mean, one of the things that I think about a lot is the fact that because one of the things about Judaism is a deep concern for social justice. The God in the Hebrew Bible says, "[inaudible 00:20:51], remember, remember that you were strangers in a strange land. Be kind to the stranger." And that's become a kind of social justice mantra for Jews of all of all stamps, but obviously, particularly for social justice minded students, who are likely all ready to be inclined that way. So, I think that for that reason maybe they partly want to downplay incidents of antisemitism because they are very well-aware that they need to stand in solidarity with African Americans, with movements like Black Lives Matter, with the LGBTQ community, with the trans community, with people who are under much more immediate threats. And they know that if they start talking a lot about antisemitism, that maybe they will be perceived as weakening their commitment to some of these other groups. That said, what that means is that they sometimes suffer a kind of fear and distress in silence. And what I do think is that if non-Jewish students at the 5Cs reach out to their Jewish classmates when they hear of something like this, it will have just immeasurable impact on the psychic lives of the Jewish students and on community feeling. I mean, if you hear that Jews are beaten up somewhere and you have a friend who is a Jew, you can send a text saying, "Hey, dude, I heard about this thing. This sucks. What's wrong with people? Are you okay?" That's all you have to do. And community harm is addressed primarily not by the big causes or punishment, but by people reaching out to reform the community ties. Travis Khachatoorian: I was looking at your biography. You started teaching Jewish studies at Pomona in 2004. Oona Eisenstadt: Yeah. Travis Khachatoorian: So, over the course of the last two decades, the advent of the internet has changed everything. I'm curious your perspective when you go online or read reports online, just how that has affected antisemitism, both speaking openly about it to address it, but also bringing it to the public's attention of how many people are actually speaking this way. Oona Eisenstadt: Yeah. No. Okay. I think you've nailed it there. I think that's right. So, I think that before the internet, there were probably lots of antisemites who were voicing their hatred of Jews or disdain for Jews in their own communities or in their own families. And maybe they were less censored in their own communities and families than they are now. Intolerance is less socially acceptable now. On the other hand, with the internet, you can go anywhere and be anonymous. And so, that's then where it goes. So, it leaves your own little community in Texas, and it goes out onto the web, both in QAnon or on the dark web or whatever. I'm not all that worried about that, mainly because I can't do anything about it. But also, onto things like YouTube comments sections. Look up a video on Jewish history and flip through the comments section, and it won't take you long to find someone saying, "Hitler should have finished the job," or, "Jewish history is garbage because the Jews are all liars," et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So, it's more or less, yeah, anonymity gives a real spur to the haters, and of course, yeah, spreads everywhere. Travis Khachatoorian: So, when you look at the next generation coming up, they're very different in some aspects, and some aspects they're the same as every generation before it. I'm curious, does that give you hope that things will be less divisive and there'll be more acceptance when it comes to Jews and other issues of that facet? Oona Eisenstadt: Yeah. So, the short answer to that question is no. One of the things about Judaism is that it doesn't incline a person who studies it to a lot of historical hope. Things have been good for Jews in some periods and bad for them in other periods, but it's always cycled back to the bad. I think that Jews are really inured against thinking about moral progress, since after all, I mean, the 20th century, which seemed to so many people, so hopeful in terms of the spread of cultural tolerance and moral maturity, brought the Jews devastation in the Holocaust. So, no, I'm not inclined to think that history is on an upward trajectory at all. I think that as we run out of resources, as climate change takes us in the direction of more hostility, as the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, I think that people are more inclined to take their frustrations out on anyone who presents as a target, and that'll certainly be the Jews. Now, my own students, let me make it clear, I love my own students. I mean, people here are super smart and super great. They fill me with joy, but do they fill me with hope? Not really. We teach so few people and the world is large. Things are crummy. And I don't hold out any hope for the future. Marilyn Thomsen: So, how do you get through your day? Oona Eisenstadt: Oh, well, I mean, present mirth and present laughter. I mean, there isn't anything that I can't draw... Well, there isn't much that I can't squeeze a drop of joy from, even discussing terrible things with my students. My heart leaps when they make an insight and when they say something that's smart, when they say something, as does happen, that I haven't thought of. That's great. Yeah, I mean, it's one day at a time. Marilyn Thomsen: One day at a time. Travis Khachatoorian: Oona, I love hearing your perspective on the show. It's a topic that needs to be talked about in the open air more often. So, thank you so much for coming on to Sagecast. Oona Eisenstadt: Thank you. Marilyn Thomsen: Thank you so much. Learned a lot. Oona Eisenstadt: Thanks. Thanks a ton. Travis Khachatoorian: Heavy subject, but important to talk about. Thanks for listening to Sagecast. Marilyn Thomsen: And thanks to our audio engineer, Erica Tyron and KSPC for hosting our conversations. Join us next time. Bye.