Closing Keynote—Bret Stephens at the Z3 Conference 2019
In this powerful and thought-provoking keynote, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and SAPIR Editor-in-Chief Bret Stephens reflects on the threats facing Jews from both the political left and right, and the existential importance of vigilance and moral clarity.
About the Speaker
Bret Stephens has been an op-ed columnist for the New York Times since April 2017. He came to the Times after a long career with the Wall Street Journal, where he was foreign-affairs columnist and deputy editorial-page editor, and where he won a Pulitzer Prize in 2013. He has been the inaugural Editor-in-Chief of SAPIR since 2021. Prior to that, he was Editor-in-Chief of The Jerusalem Post. He was raised in Mexico City and educated at the University of Chicago and the London School of Economics. He and his wife, Corinna, live in New York City and have three children.
Video Transcript
Bret Stephens
So what an honor and pleasure it is to be here. There's so many distinguished people in the audience. almost, they seem at least from this vantage, numberless, but I know who you are and I'm grateful if you don't hoot. I want to tell you
three, maybe four ⁓ stories in the next few minutes, two of which happened to me quite recently. And I want to leave you with one phrase, and I think if I can do that, I will have succeeded in my task this afternoon. The first story concerns a very unusual group of which I am the youngest member.
⁓ About 10 or 12 years ago, I got a call from a now deceased ⁓ New York City ⁓ lawyer, a big mocker, who said, you know, we have this little group that meets at such and such a hotel. ⁓ We think you should join. Why don't you come if you're free at 8.30 in the morning on such and such a date?
And it's just an hour's conversation. said, okay, ⁓ sure, whatever. ⁓ So I showed up at about two minutes late and I entered a room and there was an enormous oval table. And seated in the center was Henry Kissinger. And then on his side were a whole number of well-known and often fabulously wealthy ⁓ members of
the New York City Jewish community. And I must have been in my early 30s at the time. And I looked at them, I said, my god, it's true.
the elders of Zion.
That is not, in fact, the name of the group. In fact, it's the Altercockers of Zion. ⁓ But it's an interesting group ⁓ composed of really genuinely distinguished members who get together every four or five months or so really to talk about challenges confronting the Jewish people and ⁓ the state of Israel. And the last time I was there, which was just a few ⁓
a weeks ago, two or three weeks ago, a very distinguished senior member of the group who is a name, I won't mention it, but he's known to, I'm sure known to you all, very right wing, I don't want to say very right wing, pretty right wing, ⁓ very right wing now takes us all the way to Nick Mulvaney. Although give him time. ⁓ Made the following argument.
He basically said, the Jewish people have no real enemies on the right. All the enemies are on the left.
Right now, the crisis of the Jewish community is a crisis that is occurring, broadly speaking, within the fold of the Democratic Party. It is a crisis whose headliners are Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, AOC. It is a crisis in which an ideology of anti-Zionism matched with a program of boycott, divest, and sanctions.
is driving a knife through the Israel-U.S. relationship, is trying to make the Jewish-American Jews ⁓ choose between their Jewish identity and their American identity, between their Jewish particularism and their American universalism. It is not just tinged, but it is suffused, even suffocated by thinly veiled anti-Semitism.
And it is against that threat, this person said, that we need to bend all of our efforts. That was his argument.
About a week later, I found myself a couple of hundred miles south of here at a debate with a well-known Jewish figure of the political left.
And she made the following argument. She said, yes, of course, there are sides of the left which have aspects of anti-Semitism. But let's face it. The real threat to the Jewish community is coming entirely from the far right. It is coming from ⁓ an administration which talks about the very fine people at Charlottesville.
It's coming from the anti-immigration right-wing fanatics who murdered 11 people in Pittsburgh, another person south of here in Poway. It is coming from the new nationalists who sometimes espouse pro-Israel views but are essentially the modern face of fascism.
to her way of thinking.
The left's anti-Israelism amounted to a microaggression. She didn't worry about it. But the right, that was something to fear.
So these two experiences of listening to these two figures reminded me of a book that I read several years ago, which really left an indelible impression. And if any of you are in search of reading material, ⁓ take this name down. The author ⁓ was a distinguished post-war German historian by the name of Joachim Fest.
And he's well known in Germany. He wrote the first German biography of Hitler. was a significant cultural figure until he died, I think, in 2006. Fest was born in Berlin in the middle of the 1920s, 25 or 26. And he was born to a Prussian, Catholic, and politically conservative father.
who was the headmaster of the local gymnasium. But this father, to his immense credit, would have nothing to do with the Nazis and the Nazi movement, to the point that he ended up being expelled from his job. His family was reduced to penury because he would not bend to Nazi demands that he conform, salute, and so on. So the book,
Not I ⁓ is really a tribute by Fest to the courage and wisdom of his father. His father was also a great philosemite and had many Jewish friends in the intelligentsia of post-World War I Germany. And in the book, the father makes ⁓ this observation about German Jews, or as he calls them, Prussian Jews. ⁓
which I jotted down because I thought it really is what I want to share with you today. This is the observation. In their self-discipline, their quiet civility, and unsentimental brilliance, the Jews had really been, according to the father, the last Prussians. They had only one failing, which became their undoing. Being overwhelmingly governed,
by their heads, they had, in tolerant Prussia, lost their instinct for danger, which had preserved them through the ages. That phrase, an instinct for danger, stayed with me ever since I read the book. When I was a young reporter based out of Brussels, 1999, 2000,
the beginning of the second Intifada, one began to get a sense at a moment when antisemitism was supposedly all but extinct that the hatred hadn't died out entirely. You sensed it in the reaction in Europe to the decisions of the Sharon government to defend itself in the face of a campaign of terror.
You sensed it even more strongly when a French ambassador to Great Britain blamed the attacks of 9-11 on what he called that shitty little country Israel. But even then, these were sort of the early distant warnings of what was to come. And if they were happening in Europe, they seemed extremely remote.
anything that might matter in the United States when we just had an Orthodox Jew as the vice presidential candidate in a major political campaign. Well today you fast forward 18 years and you don't need such a finely honed instinct for danger to know that we have things that we need to worry about. You see it in the security that's being provided for this event.
or in the security that I'm sure is now routine at every synagogue or every Jewish event that you attend. You see it in the sense that European Jewish life is under threat as never before. And the question of its future, of its sustainability, is a real one. You see it not only in the odd attacks that have happened or the attacks that were recently foiled, like one just a few days ago,
foiled by the FBI in Colorado, but in the kind of rhetoric that once was considered shameful and now is becoming commonplace, accepted. Things that no one used to dare say, they now say openly and sometimes they say proudly, and they refuse to be ashamed of.
So as a Jewish community, we're beginning to get a sense of what we're facing, the dimensions of what we might be facing. But as the first two anecdotes I shared with you suggest, we are totally divided as to where the real danger lies.
So I am ⁓ notoriously or infamously or famously whatever known as a never Trumper. As a matter of fact, in the pages of the New York Times, I defended the president's decision, championed the president's decision to move the Israeli embassy to Jerusalem. I defended and championed his decision to get the United States out of the misconceived
Iran nuclear deal, at least in my opinion, misconceived. I'm delighted that the United States has recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. And that side of the political divide that wants to see no enemies to the right often makes precisely that case. We've never had such a good friend in the White House. The universalism.
that American Jews in their view foolishly championed has led to not just a denial, but a hatred of Jewish and Israeli particularism. We need to look for friends where we find them, including in places like Hungary and elsewhere.
Now, that argument is not totally without merit, but it's also, in many ways, a dangerous argument. Because, in fact, we do have enemies on the right. And they are not just the occasional person with terrible mental health issues and a violent and violent
streak and ⁓ violent fantasies. We need to worry about the fact that we have an administration which consistently and persistently singles out people it calls globalists whose job seems to be to run international multinational banks who control corporate media.
the message of which is fake, whose reporters and editors are the enemy of the people, and who are, in this view, conspiring, conspiring to undermine American sovereignty in part by opening borders to replace American workers with cheap foreign labor.
When the marchers in Charlottesville said they will not replace us, that's what they meant. And today we have an administration, whether wittingly or not, and however sympathetic it might be to Israel as a state or to Jared Kushner's children.
We have an administration that is championing that rhetoric.
Since this is Silicon Valley, the 1.0 version of this rhetoric may not exactly know where it aims.
but those of you who are on the right.
should know that the 2.0 and the 3.0 versions will know where they aim. They will find their target, and that target will be the Jews.
Those of you on the right, cultivate your instinct for danger against those who you imagine are on your side.
Now those of you on the left.
It is with justification.
It is with justification that you look at this administration and the new wave of nationalism and the rhetoric that is coming out now on both sides of the Atlantic with a wary and fearful eye. It is also with justification that you look at some of the rhetoric that is coming out of the government of Israel with a wary and fearful eye.
You are absolutely right when you say that Israel, Israel's reach must not exceed its grasp if it is to remain a Jewish and democratic state. You are absolutely right to be fearful when as an election slogan, the prime minister of Israel offers to annex large swathes of the West Bank and who aims at some kind of end state with the Palestinians
that makes it absolutely impossible to separate from a people from which the Israeli people must at some point be separated if it is to survive. You are absolutely right to be furious that the Prime Minister of Israel would make common cause with the Prime Minister of Hungary at the same time that that Prime Minister is having Hungarian citizens walk on the face of George Soros as an act of political protest.
But you are not right about everything.
When the left tries to pretend that there is a significant distinction between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, you are doing two things that are dangerous and wrong. You are legitimizing anti-Zionism, which even if it were wholly separable from anti-Semitism, would be a foul and disgraceful point of view.
Nobody calls for the elimination of the Czech state, the Danish state, the Bangladeshi state, the Zimbabwean state, and yet common on campuses around the world and especially, if I may say, in this state, California, they call for the elimination of one state, one identity. Let's assume that Jewishness had nothing to do with it. Nine million, 10 million Israelis
have developed this thriving culture, this vibrant democratic system, this unique ecosystem of values, tastes, abilities. And that's the state they want to eliminate. Anti-Zionism alone is a disgrace. So when the left separates anti-Zionism from anti-Semitism, they're legitimizing what shouldn't be legitimized, but they're doing something else.
They are cloaking something that needs to be unmasked. They are cloaking the antisemitism that defines the overwhelming majority of anti-Zionism.
Now, I grant you, it is possible to be an anti-Zionist and not be an anti-Semite. When you draw the Venn diagram, the circles don't fully overlap. There will always be nine Meshuguna rabbis outside of APAC policy conference bussed down from Muncie.
Protesting. So I accept the theoretical distinction. Just as I accept that theoretically there may be a distinction between segregationists and racists, between champions of apartheid and racists. I just don't think that in real life too many segregationists or champions of apartheid weren't racists. And it behooves us as a Jewish community to call that out.
and especially
Not just us, because everyone knows that I'm on that right side of the divide. It behooves you liberals. It behooves you liberals. Why? Because you're so attentive to microaggressions. You're so attentive to racist dog whistles. You're so attentive to mansplaining. And by the way, rightfully so. Rightfully so. But if you're going to call out
The veiled prejudices when it comes to racism or misogyny or homophobia or what have you, at least be consistent and call out the veiled prejudice when it comes to hatred of Jews.
And another thing I have to say to the left.
You need to appreciate that while we need, while the state of Israel ultimately needs a separation from the Palestinians, and we hope to see one day a thriving, democratic, liberal, progressive Palestinian state living side by side with Israel. One day we hope that. Israel's security concerns are not a fantasy.
What's happening in Steroid, what's happening all up the coast, what's happening to the communities in the north, isn't some kind of paranoid fantasy cooked up by Israeli generals in order to maintain control of an occupied population. These threats are real. The left likes to say, we want Israel to remain a Jewish and democratic state. But the democracy of Israel has been moving away from the left's vision for good reasons for the past 15 years.
So the left ought to at least think as to why that is, and it ought to be sensible to the reality that Israel is a country that doesn't simply face the antagonism of its enemies. It doesn't face the possibility of being defeated by its enemies. It faces the genuine prospect of being eliminated by its enemies. And if you care, as a person of the left or the right, that that should never happen again,
You can't simply be dismissive of the reality that Israel's job is to protect its people, not protect your vanity.
So what should you do?
⁓ Number one, and I mean this quite sincerely, hold conferences like this. This is amazing. I don't know, I met the person, one person to whom I'm indebted for being on this stage. There are many of you. Thank you. Thank you. We scribblers and intellectuals rely on people like you to put together amazing conferences like this, and they matter.
on a somewhat larger stage.
We need to remind ourselves of something called the liberal international order, what it means, and why the United States ought to defend it. Harry Truman became president in 1945. In 1947, he enunciated something called the Truman Doctrine, which was that the United States, as the world's preeminent liberal democratic power,
would seek to secure our freedom and our prosperity at home by defending people at the far edges, at the far frontiers of freedom, being threatened by despotic enemies. And in 1948, he came to the defense of the people of West Berlin. And in 1948, he recognized the state of Israel 12 minutes after its declaration. And in 1950, he came to the defense of the people of South Korea.
all extremely unpopular decisions at the time. None of them made any sense from a purely transactional point of view. But think of the extraordinary dividends that were reaped when America decided to define its interests according to its values, rather than do what this president might try to do, which is define our values according to our interests. That liberal democratic order.
which is now being threatened by a new fad championing nationalism, whether in one country or another, that liberal democratic order is under threat. If you care about America's role in the world or the fact that Israel is nestled safely and securely under the protection of a great nation like ours, you should champion it, you should defend it, and that goes especially to my friends on the right. The second thing, or the third thing I should say, is we need
We need to defend American values for a universalism that has the ability to embrace particularism, not least Jewish particularism. And we need to defend Israeli values that are also able to broaden their sphere and embrace what is universal.
America and Israel are not the same country. They are not the same concept. Israel is the homeland of the Jewish people. It is defined by a sense of nationhood. And that is fine and fair. It is finer and fairer when that sense of nationhood is generous and broad-minded and embraces diversity in different communities, including
the Arab community, the Druze community, and everyone else who's coming to Israel to seek protection for themselves in a majority Jewish state.
And we defend American values by never forgetting where each of us, or our mothers and fathers, or our grandfathers and grandparents came from. We are a society defined centrally by immigrants and immigration, and by immigrants who did not come here via Norway with PhDs. They came here humbly, poorly, without language.
without skills being looked down upon by a previous generation of Americans. And yet look what we became. Look what we became. Around you, you're gonna see people, maybe not in this room, but when you go to a restaurant, you will see people who'll be serving you, who'll be busboys. And you should look at them and say, those people and those humble jobs, they're my grandparents. They're us.
When we champion them, we defend ourselves. Last point I want to make, last anecdote I want to share.
Sometime around 1947 in a bombed out European city, Milano, that had been under Nazi occupation just a few years ago, a few years before, 30, let's see, a 40 year old woman and her seven year old daughter walked in to what in Italian is called a drogeria, just means a grocery store, corner shop.
buy some groceries. And the mother spoke fluent Italian, but she spoke it with a faint accent. And as she went to pay for the groceries, shopkeeper looked at this woman and said, why don't you people go back to where you came from?
Where would they go? That mother had been born in Moscow and had fled the Bolsheviks, the enemy on the left, after her father had been arrested by the NKVD. And then they'd gone to Berlin until 1933.
And then they'd had to flee again, this time the enemies on the right. They'd arrived in Italy just before the race laws. And the race laws took place. And thanks to the kindness of strangers, they were able to make it through the war.
In 1947, they couldn't go back to Russia. They would never go back to Germany. Italy didn't want them. Israel was still a glimmer on the horizon, although an increasingly visible one. Where would they go? A few years later, Harry Truman, greatest president of the 20th century, passed the Displaced Persons Act, and they had a place to go. And they arrived in America in 1950.
with $7 between.
Needless to say, these two women are my grandmother and my mother.
Our role is to make sure that America should always remain a country that will welcome them and everyone like them, regardless of their race or religion, and that failing that...
And failing that, God forbid, should it ever fail, that there should be one other state, Israel, that will always welcome them. So preserve your instinct for danger. And remember that your role as Americans and as Jews comes down to three words, protect and protect and protect. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
