The Rise of Antisemitism within the United States Transcript

Disclaimer: This transcript is an edited version version of a transcript created using AI technology and may not reflect 100% accuracy.

The video can be found here.

Interviewer: Good afternoon, and welcome to yet another topical and timely EMET webinar. For the first time certainly in recent Jewish history in this country, American Jews are feeling that they’re in a pincer grasp between the extreme right with Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, and Kevin Roberts at the Heritage Foundation, and the extreme left with the election of Zohran Mamdani, who represents the views of many, many American Muslims. We are feeling very, very squeezed. I want everybody to know it is not because Zohran Mamdani is a Muslim, but because of the words that come out of his mouth that we are feeling a little awestruck, 30% of the American Jewish population in New York voted for Zohran Mamdani.

We are wondering just how safe we are right now. Here to discuss this is my dear friend and colleague, Dr. Eric Mandel. Dr. Mandel is the founder and director of the Middle East Policy Information Network, MEPIN. MEPIN is a research analysis read by many members of Congress, their foreign policy advisors, journalists, think tank specialists, foreign officials, and organizational leaders. I’ve been with Dr. Mandel, together with our dear friend, Sarit Sahabi, as we walk the halls of Congress, and we talk to Congress members, senators, and their staffs about the current geopolitical situation in the Middle East, and how it affects the US national security interests.

Dr. Mandel is the senior security editor of the Jerusalem Report and contributes to the Jerusalem Post. He writes about Iran, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, and the Gulf States, Turkey, Kurdistan, the US Israel relationship, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Syria. He often appears on The Hill, National Interest, Cloud World, ABC News, The Forward, JNS, i24 News, JTA, Algemeiner, Israel Hayom, Defense News, Think, and many, many other publications. It is indeed a pleasure to welcome to our program, Dr. Eric Mandel, so Eric, are the Jews of the United States feeling as safe as they felt during the Halcyon years post World War II?

Eric: Well, first of all, thank you for having me, and you are a dear friend, and I look forward that we’re going to go back to Congress again soon. I wish we didn’t have work to do but we do, so I think we’re at a time, we’re at a critical juncture for American Jewry and for our country that we love and anti-Semitism is now normalized, mainstreamed from the right and the left. It’s not just the fringes which is what I had said in previous years, and it’s a real physical threat to American Jews and the future of being Jewish in America, and looking at it from our country’s point of view, liberal democratic societies don’t flourish when Jews are under attack, so if we want to deal with anti-Semitism. We have to deal with it head on.

We can’t minimize it. We can’t sweep it under the rug, excuse it, rationalize it, even if we don’t have the answers, so what are some of those things that we don’t have the answers for, but we have to take head on? social media, for example, the online hate, or as Senator Federman recently said, social media is an accelerant for anti-Semitism. Or what you were referring to in your introductory remarks. An ADL survey showed that the majority of anti-Semitism in this country is from young people, Gen Z and millennials. How do we deal with it? We don’t have answers, but we understand that the Mandami effect was a big part of it.

Interviewer: Zohran Mamdani is rather cool and rather slick. He talks in vacuous aphorisms. He’s not really saying anything. How can we pin down what he’s saying and know the truth about what lies underneath?

Eric: A leading reformed rabbi in New York, Emil Hirsch, had said that the reason he can’t condemn things like globalize the Intifada is because that’s part of his core beliefs, and I’ll take another person… excuse me. Daniel Hartman from the Hartman Institute, a person if you will, of the center left, and he says that his vilification of Jews and of Israel is a “moral corruption” so we’re dealing not just with slick words, but we’re dealing with words and actions that are dangerous.

Interviewer: Yes. I’ve just written an article about him, and many of his statements are the statements from the Democratic socialists of New York City, and the platform is 1, divesting city pensions from Israel bonds and securities, 2, banning Israeli products from city run grocery stores, investigating real estate agents hosting illegal sales of stolen lands in the “West Bank” stripping tax-exempt non-profit status from any entities that raise funds for the Israeli Defense Forces, ending the New York Police Department’s training with Israeli occupation forces, and of course arresting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and any active IDF servicemen members for war crimes when they visit New York City.

First of all, does he have the power to implement this platform?

Eric: The answer is yes and no for some of the things, so the first thing is people looked at his victory speech, and it was not conciliatory, we’ll start with that, and we have to go by what he is and his words and actions to this point. I think he’s going to have some very smart people around him, and he’ll have some screaming voices, the Linda Sarsour’s from the far left, and he’ll look like maybe a moderating voice. He’ll invite some people to come in, maybe some of the rabbis who criticized him to come in for a thinking session, well, have a discussion, but I think he’s slowly, incrementally going to change the nature of New York, because basically I don’t look at him under this word self-defined of democratic

This is a Marxist. This is Islamism, this is the red-green alliance, that horseshoe that has come together that is so dangerous that is now in the largest city with the largest Jewish population in the world, and so you now have some true threats that are there. We’ll take it just to a little bit of anti-Zionism with him, so we look at his words and actions. He basically says very clearly that the Jewish people are the only people in the world that have no right to self-determination, that the Jewish state should not exist. We’re half the Jews in the world live.
You know what that means? That means Jewish lives don’t matter.

If you have half the Jews in the world, and if you have any historical perspective of nearly 2,000 years of pogroms, inquisitions, crusades, a holocaust, then knowing that Jewish people needed a place of safety, or more importantly, it negates our ability to self-identify our attachment there. It is degrading to say that we who pray 3 times a day to Jerusalem, and we’ve done this through history, certainly diaspora, that that is a false historical narrative. We are the very definition of indigeneity, and so it’s lies turning facts upside down.

Interviewer: Right, so I know some of his statements have been bone-chilling, like, “We have to make clear that when the boot of the New York Police Department is on your neck, it has been laced by the IDF.” Of course he said that in 2023, but that was a mere 2 years ago, and he was very, very careful not to say globalize the Intifada as he was running for mayor of the 5 boroughs of New York, but one knows that when he was raised at the knee of Edward Said, and his father is a Middle Eastern Studies professor at Columbia, and his mother makes third-class documentary movies, you know that he’s been indoctrinated to believe these things, so do you believe that this is going to be a gradual suffocation of the Jewish community in New York?

Or do you think that he’s going to start by trying to curtail our voices in New York City?

Eric: I think it’s going to be gradual and I think people are going to say, oh, look, it wasn’t so bad, we can kind of excuse it. What I’ve said on my last few television interviews is, I think an indicator is going to be if he chooses Jamal Bowman to be the superintendent of education, another democratic socialist anti-Semite, who the Jewish community especially AIPAC came around to help bring a moderate Zionist Democrat in George Latimer, so if he brings somebody who’s an anti-Semite to run the United States’ largest public school system, and to bring in critical race theory, and DEI, and basically anti-palestinian racism. By the way, that’s the latest form of anti-Semitism. I wrote a piece with the chair, Betsy Corn from the Council of Jewish Presidents.

Saying that this APR, saying that any time you say anything against Palestinians, or Arabs for that matter, or Muslims, it’s immediately racist by definition, and that means that you censor anything that would be criticism back, so I think he’s going to come out smart. I think he’s going to put some groups together of some progressive Jews together, and again you had 30% of New York Jews who couldn’t care less. By the way, none of this is new about not caring about Israel, or really for that matter the safety of American Jews, but when we saw surveys pre-October 7th, the majority of American Jews in this country didn’t care about the state of Israel.

They only started really caring when their children or grandchildren started going to Ivy League schools and became intimidated both verbally and physically, that they started caring, and I think it will go back into that assimilationist mode, and say things will go on, New York will survive. There’ll be lots of excuses but that’s not what should be going on. We really need to be on the offensive here, not see how he reacts to how we act.
We need to be on the offensive, and I think we need to begin as American Jews to really feel good about what’s going on. We have to become proud to be American Jews. We have to be unapologetic in supporting a Jewish state.

We have to become educated, knowing who we are as Jews, civilizationally, traditionally, culturally, and we then can share those facts to dispel those myths to whoever’s open-minded, and so we have a list of things that we can do, that we have to do and get out in front, so we need to, 1, stop being quiet. When we hear it, speak up. We need to organize unfortunately, to fortify our institutions, synagogues against physical violence, but we have to call out those Tucker Carlson dog whistles when we hear them. We have to build as much as we can those relationships with interfaith communities with minority communities. We have to be able to defend Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.

One of the things I would have when we would go through Congress very often is people would say 2 states, and I say, no, 2 states for 2 peoples, 1 being a Jewish state. The idea is many of these people will say, oh, yes, I’m for 2 states. When I’ve been talking about Mandami, but that they really mean is 1 Arab-Jewish state in the West Bank and Judea and Samaria and in Gaza, and the other binational state which is the demographic destruction of Israel, so a lot of this comes back to something called the IHRA definition. The International Holocaust definition of anti-semitism, and what that says is that if you say you have a double standard against Israel, that you have against no other country, then you’re an anti-Semite.

That if Jews, amongst all people in the world, are the only people who don’t have the right to self-determination, that’s anti-Semitism. If you call them Nazis, that’s anti-Semitism in addition to all the other classical tropes, and we’re hearing a lot of those classical tropes from the right. Women in the Nick Fuentes and with Tucker Carlson did not go after Fuentes in that interview. Although I have to say Ben Shapiro, to his credit, has done an amazing job in that regard, so there are things we can do, and we also need to know to be comfortable, and again so much gets back to educating ourselves.

Interviewer: Exactly. The Qatari Educational Foundation has showered the public school system with billions of dollars, teacher training workshops. There’s a curriculum guide by Audrey Shabas that has been out since the early 2000s, and we have got to work with Zionists and the Department of Education of various universities, who can do an alternative curriculum guide, not just for our Jewish students, many of whom are woefully ill-informed, but for the John Smiths out there, for the Barbara Does out there who are not Jewish, that don’t understand that Israel is actually our moral beacon in the Middle East. We keep saying this, it’s the only democracy, we have shared values, and every other country that’s surrounding this is really a patrilineal theocracy.

We really have to tout what it is about Israel, and why it is so unique to the United States.

Eric: You talk about educating our young people, so in response to pressures of President Trump, so they’ve brought in basically trainings about anti-Semitism of new freshman students, and then you see groups like CAIR, the Council of American Islamic Relations, fighting in Northwestern, just taking one example. Where they’re saying that we can’t say anti-semitic things even though they won’t say they’re anti-Semitic things takes away from our civil rights. That’s part of the anti-Palestinian racism agenda of what it is. If you say anything that could be somebody who aligns with Jew hatred, you can’t say that because that’s my free rights, and I really don’t mean that, and they play around.

Just as an aside, there are so many universities. Everybody’s taking their eye off of this because it’s not on television all the time, but from Northwestern to Pomona to Fashion Institute of Technology, everywhere, these things are still going on, and the reason I bring it up is for 10 years, I was the chair and co-chair of Stand With Us, and I would bring up all the time to my friends what was going on in college campuses. They said, oh, you’re overreacting because they didn’t see it on their mainstream media, or legacy media or newspapers, and we’re getting a little bit back that because it’s not being reported then it’s not really happening, and it is happening, and it still needs to be fight and every day that gets closer to the end of the Trump presidency, where they have in their justice department, have prioritized fighting anti-Semitism.

Whether through stopping DEI or the other things like that, or having actions against universities, whether for funding, is getting closer to a time where the next administration may not be so vocal, Democratic or Republican.

Interviewer: Right. I’m very worried about that. I’m very worried about our support for Israel. Just down the road from us and the University of Maryland, they had the student government pass two resolutions. The first resolution was on Yom Kippur. They passed the resolution for BDS. The second one was anybody who has served in the IDF is forbidden to speak in the University of Maryland, and I think that a student supporting Israel organization, the night of our dinner, November 19th, they’re flying in Yosef Haddad who is an Israeli Arab. Who is very, very grateful for when he served in the IDF, and his life was saved by Jewish soldiers in the IDF, so we are unfortunately up against the masses, and what bothers me so much about that generation is the lack of critical thinking.

They are just mouthing the words of their professors, and they’re never stopping to analyze. They’re not stopping to read about the other side, but unfortunately, Israel has become in the eyes of far, far too many of them, a pariah state.

Eric: Yeah, listen, educators, and we’re going to go back at least 30 years. Became propagandists and activists, and they’re not educators anymore, and you see who the people are when we think about the encampments and the professors who were there, and we think about the ones who didn’t agree but were too cowardly to speak up, and then we saw the intimidation, especially after the BDS stuff that professors who could say anything, any tiny microaggression, that they ended up being on the outs, losing their jobs but now as things have flipped you have people like Bernie Sanders talk about a main senatorial candidate, who has a Nazi tattoo on it and minimizes that.

If that’s not a macroaggression that should be pointed out and trying to minimize it, so people play fast and free to advance an agenda, and the agenda in a growing part of the Democratic Party, we could spend time talking with the Republican Party, is being highly critical of Israel, and if this Congress goes Democratic in the next election in 2026, and if there’s a Democratic president in 2028, supply lines to Israel can be stopped for wars. Pressure could be put on that Israel cannot prophylactically, preventatively attack Iran even if they’re going to have two thousand ballistic missiles they could send all at once, because we’ll stop sending you arms and things like that, so all of these things are interrelated, they’re complex.

Israel’s enemies, the enemies of Jewish people in the United States, the vast majority still do care about Israel, although it’s an older cohort, have to increase their voice and have to talk about what anti-Semitism is, to be able to defend it, we get the education, and to really be knowledgeable. I hate to say it but about certain foreign policies if we talk about this, there’s this default that immediately if you defend Israel. Well, you say Israel can do everything, it’s just criticism. Listen, if criticism was the gauge we use to see for anti-Semitism, 100% of Israelis would be anti-Semites, because they criticize their own government and their policies more than anybody that I know. It’s not about that. Don’t be misled into that.

This is about Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, and in this world of our children who went through the universities about universality, they feel uncomfortable with Zionism. The particularism that’s there. They’re not proud of the Jewish identity. They think that Judaism is just a religion, which is how the Palestinians who want to destroy a state of Israel, how they define being a Jew. Except when I travel in the Middle East, they don’t refer to Israelis. They refer to Jews, and so that I think speaks volumes.

Interviewer: Right. When you’re talking you mentioned Bernie Sanders, who unfortunately is the chairperson, or the minority chairperson of the Judiciary Committee, and for the last decade we’ve been working on the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act, but it’s been held up in the Senate Judiciary Committee by Bernie Sanders, and this is an act that talks about the use of the IHRA, the International Holocaust. Remember, it’s the line’s definition of anti-Semitism so that university deans and college presidents and principals of high school will be able to recognize anti-Semitism when they see it, and it’s a very, very straightforward, easy definition, but unfortunately, we have certain people, Jews among them, even though they are not proud of their Jewishness like Bernie Sanders.

Who have served to block this kind of legislation.

Eric: First of all, I agree with you 100% about the AAA, but I want to pick on some people here. We’re just amongst friends. I’m going to talk about the current minority leader Chuck Schumer. When he was the majority leader, he refused to push this for political reasons. Now he’s a minority leader. He could be championing this. He wrote a whole book recently on anti-Semitism. If you really believe what he wrote there, he should be championing it. He could bring along a few Democratic senators. The majority, maybe every Republican senator except for maybe Rand Paul, would agree to this, and this is not a violation of somebody’s civil rights to be an anti-Semite, and so I say to, and I wrote a piece for The Hill in August, 2024. Please, Mr. Schumer, step up, and he can at this point in time, but except that I think he’s too frightened about a senatorial challenge from AOC, and wants to play that.

I have to tell you something, when we all meet our maker and there’s no choice, we have to be able to look and say, what did we really do? and I make a direct call to Senator Schumer, step up now. You’re going to win in New York, because I do believe the people of New York overall are not AOC, even though there may be the majority of the city is but upstate New York isn’t, and you really have to, your legacy should be about the thing that you said you were the show mayor for. You are the person who is the watch person for American jury. American jury is in bad shape now. IHRA is not a perfect definition, but it is by far and away the best, and you need to have a definition so you can have consequences, whether at universities or in workplaces, everywhere.

I think it’s worthwhile because we really have that for other type of minority populations, but just remember the majority of hate crimes in this country for more than a decade, religious hate crimes are against Jews. You add up everybody else and it does not equal what it is for Jews.

Interviewer: Right. All right, so I’m going to turn to some of questions from our audience. One is, what is your opinion of Palestinian Media Watch and also Memory, who’ve been following and exposing the vicious propaganda from the PA, and Memory does throughout the Arab world for years and posting their emails for years.

Eric: I think Itamar Marcus at Palestinian Media Watch does an amazing job. I think Memory does an amazing job. I’ve heard all kinds of criticism about Memory that they’re an arm of the Mossad, crazy stuff, but nobody says that what their translations are which is what they’re really about. Exposing what’s really said in the Muslim and Arab world, especially Palestinians, is false. Even the New York Times has used it because it is accurate, and that is what you’re dealing with. Just as one aside I’ll just say, I don’t think people in our country understand that we are dealing with a war still against Islamism, Muslim Brotherhood, its violent form, Jihadism, and whether it’s in the Palestinian world or it’s in the Shiite world from Iran, or in the Sunni world in ISIS or Hamas.

We have to realize that 9/11 can’t be forgotten and that these type of things, and why this is so important for this stuff to come out. The problem is it only goes into echo chambers to people like you and me who care. I care about it because I speak to Congress as a person who talks for American national security interests and being pro-Israel, not perfectly, not 100%, is in our interest at this time and for the foreseeable future, and Jihadism needs to be remembered that it is still out there, and we have, going back just another half a degree of separation. The Qataris, who are the financier of the Muslim Brotherhood, infecting K-12 universities, and I have to tell you, going for 15 years, at least going through Congress, when I bring up the Qataris and what they’re doing, people don’t want to hear it on both sides of the aisle.

It’s become a little too cozy with the current administration for all the wonderful things I think they’ve done in anti-Semitism. I think being too much in bed with the Qataris hurts and threatens American Jury and certainly America fundamentally when you can have an authoritarian Islamist regime having influence on our education system. It’s kind of crazy.

Interviewer: It is. It is crazy. There have been certain pieces of legislation that mentioned foreign influences on education. Right now as the law stands, government is not allowed to give $250,000 or more to an educational institution, but nobody knows about that and the Qataris give a great deal more than $250,000 to educational institutions. They’re showering, unfortunately, our legislators, think tanks, and universities with loads and loads of their Qatari money that they get from their gas, and it is a huge problem. This piece of legislation specifically did not mention the Qataris, and one has to wonder why not.

All right. Another question is, at the organized Jewish community, the AGL[?], the federations, the JCRCs have failed miserably in protecting the Jewish community over the last several decades. What could be done to change this? I do have to mention William Dara just wrote an exceptionally brilliant piece about what has been happening with Nick Fuentes and with Tucker Carlson, and how we have to be a little afraid of the encroaching anti-Semitism on the extreme right as well. Could you address this?

Eric: Yeah. I think there’s a problem with Jewish organizations in general. They don’t play nicely together. I think when they work together I think there’s a fear that somebody’s going to take away funding, and I think that is so myopic a point of view. I think we have to start working together, and we have a big tent. That doesn’t mean groups like Jewish Voice for Peace is in the tent, and by the way you can be Jewish in an anti-Semite, just to throw that out, but I think it’s incredibly important that we work together first, and by the way the Council of Presidents I think tries to do that very hard.
and Dara and my friend Betsy Corn had written a piece about some practical things about fortifying institutions, and getting funding, it’s hard getting funding from the administration now or Congress now to increase security at our places.

I think our emphasis should not be about attacking Jewish institutions. Our emphasis should be attacking those that are doing the threats to us and putting our focus there, and not shooting ourselves in a circle. I think these institutions may have been not done as good a job, but it’s not because they didn’t want to, and they’re going to need to think out of the box and start dealing with all the challenges, and now the fact that it’s from the right and left, whether you’re a right-wing organization, left-wing, center-left, center-right, there’s no excuse for not working together, but let’s point our guns if you will, at the people who are committing anti-Semitism and forcing it.

Interviewer: One of our listeners asked why the Jewish community sticks with Donald Trump. I think that you gave an incredibly sophisticated and nuanced response to Donald Trump. He has done some very, very outstanding things for the state of Israel. I was and perhaps you were too, Eric, in Israel during the war within the war, the twelve day war with Iran, and I don’t think that Israel could have gotten nearly as far without the support of the United States, so how do you respond to people that attack us for some allegiances to Donald Trump?

Eric: I don’t have an allegiance. I work on both sides of the aisle, and I call the facts as they are and where they are. We can go back in time where the Zionists were of the Democratic Party, and you go back to the 80s, and they weren’t so much Republicans, and times have changed. President Trump, no matter whether you’re a Democrat or Republican, you can’t be blind to what he did in his first term regarding the embassy move and recognizing the Capitol and the Golan Heights and closing the PLO office, and fighting against pay-for-slay incentivizing terrorism, and there is no other in my opinion, Republican or Democratic president who would have done what he did regarding Iran.

I don’t think what he’s doing today, really getting America, coming from people worried that he was going to be an isolationist, being involved with an American place in Kiryat Gat with forty other countries to maybe monitor a ceasefire. Now there are reports that they’re going to have may bring in thousands of American troops to be there. By the way, I happen to think that’s a mistake. I think Israel wants to fight for itself, by itself, and I don’t think American soldiers should be in harm’s way. I think that will accelerate anti-Semitism, but the idea of the motivation of that, of what the president did, is incredibly important.

That we have many Democrats who we can thank for speaking up. You can thank a Richie Torres or Senator Fetterman. These people have done amazing jobs.
When I go and I talk to a representative, Jimmy Panetta from California, who understands the issues in all their nuance, and understands the importance of the US, Israel relationship. There are many of those people but I want others not to be afraid that they’re going to be primaried out, and so I think to say, look at the president, thank him for what he’s done regarding Israel. You can certainly have criticism, you don’t have to vote for him, but to deny or claim that he’s somehow an anti-Semite with everything that he has done for the Jewish people, and really going back to it, what he’s done on university campuses.

I’ll tell you something, the heavy hand of saying funding, which is why something I’ve said for 20 years, you have to go with the university funding to make them care and make a difference. Kudos to him for doing that to protect Jewish students.

Interviewer: Right. In terms of just if we could delve for a few minutes into foreign policy, because the ramifications for the state of Israel, if God forbid, there’s somebody in the White House in 3 years that doesn’t quite have the kind of feeling for better or for worse, that this administration has for Israel. I’m very concerned about the makeup, the “international makeup” inside the Gaza Strip of different states who have now not stood up to the plate. The United Arab Emirates are afraid to take on Hamas. Many people want to take on such as Turkey, but I don’t know if they really will because Erdogan is such a strong supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood, and I’m very afraid of Qatar and the Qatari influence on the Trump administration. Could you just say a few words about that?

Eric: Sure. I’m afraid about the Qatari influence because of their money, their trillions of dollars in natural gas reserves, how close they’ve been to the Iranian regime which they share the world’s largest natural gas fuel[?] with.

The Turks, this is a member of NATO, the second largest army in NATO. This is the muscle. If the Qatari is the financier of the Muslim Brotherhood, Turks are the muscle. I think the Turks are looking to replace the Iranians in the Middle East in a neo-Ottoman way. I think they want to have control in Syria. I think they want to be involved. They want to get into Gaza.

This is a direct existential threat against Israel, and I would ask the president, so I will be critical of the president here, that your relationship with President Erdogan and the Emir of Qatar, I think it needs to be revisited in a more practical way, and I think if you think that they’re going to be America’s friends for the long run, I think it is… in fact, right now I don’t see them. I think you see them more as frenemies than as friends.
I think it should be rethought, and so I worry about those 2 countries a lot.

Interviewer: In Syria, Ahmed Al-Sharaa just visited the White House yesterday. Of course, he wasn’t let in through the main entrance but a side entrance, but nonetheless, it seems that President Trump wants to remove the Caesar sanctions. Do you have any cautionary words about that?

Eric: I was in the State Department in the last year speaking to people in the Syrian desk, our State Department, saying distrust and verify, and I think the reason is because he has a long history of who he was, and he is being very practical. Let’s hope but not expect him to be what he says he is. I think what we need to do is get quid pro quos here. One, protect our allies, the Kurds in the North who are with us against ISIS. Protect our allies and the minority communities, the Christians, the Druze, the Alawites, and you’ll know granted we’re not looking for Jeffersonian democracy, but we’re not looking for more massacres there, and I think one of the things that we can do is if we say, and we’re looking for a base for the United States South of Damascus, is the quid pro quo for that and to help, and they’re going to need hundreds of billions of dollars to repair.

I think we should do that through Saudi not Qatari money, or Turkish construction companies, is you must keep Turkey at arm’s length. Keep Qatar out as your primary financier. Use the Emiratis and the Saudis, so the Israelis are worried.They are worried about Turkey and Syria. I’ve been with military intelligence and Northern command not too long ago on the border. It’s a lovely, beautiful border, but I think if the president can get everything South of Damascus demilitarized, then Israel can make a concession in moving out of the areas it moved into in the buffer zone, some of them. There are 9 areas that are there because you’re going to have to give them something, but I don’t see Israel giving up the Syrian Mount Hermon. That’s too strategic.

Interviewer: Right. I must say, as an American Zionist and someone who plans on making Aliyah[?], I am very, very proud of Israel’s conduct in trying to protect the Druze and the last skirmish. Of course, Israel gets very, very little credit for this but they are fighting a war on so many fronts, yet they knew that when our Druze brothers and sisters were at risk, the IDF went in there to give them some support, so I have to tell you that I am very, very concerned about the future of the American Jewish relationship with Israel. Too many of these Generation Zers do not feel the passion that you and I feel. I feel it’s time that we all instilled a little bit of pride in what it means to be a Zionist.

We have 3,000 years of a precious legacy that we carry on our shoulders. The faster we assimilate and intermarry into American culture, the faster this is disappearing, so I think that all of us should go back to our roots, teach the beauty. The beautiful morality that it is that we’ve been passing down from generation to generation. Try to convey this as best you can to our children and to our grandchildren, and know that we have every reason to be proud of who we are and what we’ve been through, and as we step into the future, that this legacy should endure. Do you have any final words, Eric?

Eric: I wanted to give people something to take home, and I talked about some action calls that they can do in organizing, so I think one of the things that people have a real hard time doing, especially talking to their millennial and Gen Z children, is why anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism, and I think what you want to say is anti-Zionism at its core is a direct assault on the Jewish people’s identity and history. So if someone, Mandami or somebody else, says the Jewish people among all people in the world do not have a right to their own country, self-determination, that is anti-Semitism, and if you use the epithets that have used against Jews over these 2,000 years of a diaspora, that Jews are evil, racist, now genocidal, they control the world.

That’s anti-Semitism, that’s not separated from anti-Zionism. It is anti-Zionism, it’s anti-Semitism, and the person who says it is an anti-Semite. Absolutely clear, and you should say it, as I said unapologetically. That doesn’t mean criticism, but when you’re directly assaulting our identity and history and our right to it, then that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.

Interviewer: That’s very, very true, and as the government is opening up, we will once again be on Capitol Hill as we are almost every single day. I thank you so much, Eric. There are still a few spots to come to our Rays of Light in the Darkness dinner, where we will be honoring Ambassador Yechiel Leiter, the Hungarian Ambassador Takás, Senator John Fetterman, Leo Turell, and Anila Ali, and we hope to see every one of you there. Eric, I can’t thank you enough. It is always a pleasure to walk the halls of Congress with you. You are an absolute font of brilliance. Thank you so much, Eric.

Eric: Please keep up the good work. What EMET does it’s indispensable for the Jewish community and for the United States.

Interviewer: Thank you so much.

[END]