March 14, 2025 • 38 mins
In this episode, David Hazony discusses his journey from an Israeli family in the U.S. to becoming a prominent voice in Jewish thought and leadership. He shares insights from his latest anthology, 'Young Zionist Voices,' which captures the perspectives of a new generation of Jewish leaders. Hazony reflects on the impact of significant events like October 7th on Jewish identity and community, the misunderstandings surrounding Zionism, and the need for institutional change within the Jewish diaspora. The Karol Markowicz Show is part of the Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Podcast Network - new episodes debut every Wednesday & Friday.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hi, Welcome back to the Carol Marcowitz Show on iHeartRadio.
It's actually my one hundred and fiftieth episode today, and
I just want to say thank you to all of
my listeners. I really wasn't sure if this kind of
show would work. People love their news of the day,
and The Carol Marcowitz Show is very much not about that.
I record a lot of these episodes several weeks out.
(00:26):
I tried to get to the bottom of people's personalities
and their stories and not what they think about you know,
what did Trump say today? So it was a gamble
and I love that it's working out, and so many
of you are listening. We've been clearing a million downloads
every quarter with only two episodes a week, and I
just feel so fortunate for you all. Thanks so much
(00:49):
for tuning in. So last weekend, I was laying by
a resort pool Lazy River when a mom and her
approximately four year old by me, and the child was
like kind of playing and he said to his mom,
you're stupid. The mom responded, Hey, buddy, if you want
(01:09):
to talk to me like that, we're going to get
out of the water. I of course tweeted about it
and it's the sort of thing that went, you know,
semi viral, four thousand plus likes, lots of responses and retweets.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
Most agreed with me. But somewhere in the.
Speaker 1 (01:24):
Vein of what's your problem, this was handled perfectly. The
mom gave the kid a warning, what more do you want?
And to me, I don't see the parenting in this exchange,
and I say the words my kids aren't perfect a
lot because they're not. Obviously, no one is perfect, but
they're pretty close. If a kid can call his mom
(01:46):
stupid and get to continue about his day, I think
back to when my kids were a handful, and believe me,
they've been a handful each of them, and we'd have
to leave a restaurant or something. They were not calling
us stupid or anything close. They were maybe acting up,
being loud in a restaurant, or like turning around and
staring at people. We really did cut down on all
(02:09):
kinds of antisocial behavior very early, because we thought, we
want to have these kids out in public with us.
We want to travel, we want to go out to eat,
and we don't want them to be monsters. One other
thing I tweeted about it is parents use this singsongy
voice that they learned on the internet, and this fake
gentle thing that kids know how to dismantle when they
(02:31):
should be lowering their voice to a growl and saying,
talk to me like that again, and you'll wish you hadn't.
I just hate that whole trend. It's supposed to be
gentle parenting, but it just sounds like acting to me buddy.
Calling your kid buddy rubs me the wrong way too.
It's not that I think you can never call your
kid buddy or people say, oh, you know, you shouldn't
(02:53):
be buddy with your kid. That's actually not it for me.
I don't mind that so much, but when they just
called you stupid. I also tweeted that I had a
friend once ask my husband and I which one of
us spanks the kids to get their good behavior. The
truth is we don't spank.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
We don't have to.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
I like to say I murder them with my eyes
if they misbehave. I'm not bragging here exactly. It started young,
and my kids know what.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
Is expected of them.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
They know what behavior we won't tolerate. Spanking also is
very after the fact.
Speaker 3 (03:32):
To me.
Speaker 1 (03:33):
It's the kid has done something and now you spank
them to not have them do it again in the future,
and they're going to have to remember that for next time.
For me, it's more like in the moment, it's my
eyes that will make them shape up. And my last
point on X was I feel like a lot of
parents think their kids will become a different person when
they get older. Maybe, but in my experience, if you
(03:54):
don't lay down the law when they're four, you'll have
a much harder time at fourteen. They need to respect you,
and that starts young. And that last point is really everything.
There are lots of ways to parent. Maybe mine is wrong,
maybe it won't work for you. I can't say, but
I can tell you that people don't change all that
(04:16):
much unless you make them change. And the way your
kid is to you today is largely how they'll be
in the future. If they don't respect you now, they're
not going to respect you as time goes on. A
lot of people seem to think you can just not
fix bad behavior at four years old because they'll grow
out of it. I haven't seen.
Speaker 2 (04:35):
Evidence of that, to be honest.
Speaker 1 (04:37):
If you excuse something today, you will likely excuse it tomorrow.
I always love hearing from listeners, but would particularly love
to hear from you on this What do you think?
Am I right or wrong? Thanks for listening. Coming up
next an interview with David Hazzoni. Join us after the
break and welcome back to the Carol Markowitz shaw On iHeart.
(05:00):
My guest today is David Hazoni. David is an award
winning editor, translator, and author, and director and Steinhardt Senior Fellow.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
At the Z three Institute.
Speaker 1 (05:10):
His newest work, Young Zionist Voices, A New Generation Speaks Out,
brings together the next generation of impassioned Jewish leaders.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
Hi, David, so nice to have you on.
Speaker 3 (05:21):
Hi, Carol, thank you so much.
Speaker 1 (05:23):
I feel like I've known you a long time on
the old internets, but I would love to know how you.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
Got into this world. Where did you get your start?
Speaker 3 (05:31):
Wow? So you're always a young Zionist, that's right. So
I was born into an Israeli family in the United
States at a time when there weren't a lot of
Israelis in America. It wasn't like today where you have
sort of these big, you know, movements and organizations and
(05:55):
whole communities that are of Israeli Americans. The concept Israeli
Americans didn't exist as a label. And in fact, when
I was a kid, my non Jewish friends didn't know
what Israeli was. This is the nineteen seventies. Israel's only
been around for thirty years, and so like, you know,
a fourth grader is like, Hazoni, what is that? And
I said, it's Israeli, Like there's no such thing. It's Italian.
Speaker 2 (06:18):
That's kind of Italian.
Speaker 3 (06:19):
Actually, yeah, I mean, I guess my grandfather's original name
was Hasanovic and all my grands that's real Italian. Yeah,
And all my grandparents moved to the Land of Israel
in the nineteen twenties nineteen thirties, and it was very common,
especially going through the nineteen fifties, it was very common
(06:42):
for people to Hebraisize their last names as part of
this sort of new resurgent Jewish homeland. Hasanovich became Hazoni
and that's what I got.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
Where did you grow up?
Speaker 3 (06:57):
So? I was born in Princeton, New Jersey, and I
was there to well ninth grade, and then my father
was a professor there and then he moved to Boston University.
So I moved to Brookline, Massachusetts, where I went to
high school, and then I started college in at Columbia
University in New York became I spent a year in
(07:18):
Israel studying in Yeshiva, kind of got religion, as they say.
Then finished my degrees at Yeshiva University, and then after
I moved to Israel in ninety four, I got a
PhD at Hebrew University in Jewish philosophy.
Speaker 2 (07:35):
And I was committed to this whole Jewish thing.
Speaker 3 (07:38):
I'm yeah, I'm on board, and you know, I look,
I'm actually from the tribe of Levi. I'm not even
strictly you know, the word Jew comes from Judea, from
the tribe of Judah, and I always like to say, well,
I'm kind of Jewish, but I'm really a Levi and
that confuses everybody, and.
Speaker 2 (08:01):
Kids in Princeton don't know what to do with that.
Speaker 3 (08:04):
No, no, they're just like, now you're Italian. So I
actually got started while I was doing my graduate degree
in Israel. I got started in the think tank world.
I was one of the original people at the Shalem
Center in Jerusalem, and I ended up editing its journal,
(08:25):
and I spent a lot of time, a lot of
years kind of watching how books and the ideas in books,
and you know what we call public intellectuals, how they
really helped shape the debate how a single book can come.
So for just for example, we had an unknown historian
by the name of Michael Orn came to us in
(08:47):
nineteen ninety seven and said, I want to do a
book on Israel's War of Independence nineteen forty eight. And
the think tankers were like, you know, that's the wrong book.
It's thirty years after the Sixth Day War. The archives
are all opening up. The bad guys are out there already,
the new historians they call them, saying that that Israel
(09:10):
deliberately started the war in order to capture territory. What
we really need is a definitive history of the Sixth
Day War. And he agreed to do that, and the
book became Oxford University Press's first ever bestseller. They didn't
know what to do with it, and he became a
very famous person. And I've kind of seen over and
over again, how you know, two thousand and eight, whenever
(09:33):
it was a book comes out called Startup Nation, right
by Dancy Noor and sault Singer. Before that, people would
talk about Israel, like you know, it's the only democracy
in the Middle East, and it's David against Goliath and
all of these sort of conflict related concepts. Excuse me.
(09:54):
It along comes this one book and it creates this
whole other lens through which we can understand the country.
And now everybody knows the expression startup nation, what percentages?
I do. I like to do this. I'd just like
to ask people in a room, how many of you
actually read the book.
Speaker 1 (10:10):
I read it.
Speaker 3 (10:11):
It was very okay, but I read.
Speaker 1 (10:13):
It, but I read it only like in the last
five years, and so it's kind of an It's not
not that it's outdated, but there is.
Speaker 2 (10:19):
A newer, you know, version of it out now. But yeah,
it was. It was great and it was eye opening
even reading it so late.
Speaker 3 (10:29):
Yeah. So, so I've just been very aware and sensitive
to the mechanics the craft, how you know, an idea,
how a book can kind of either capture a moment.
Take for example, Darrel Horn's People of Dead Jews. Okay,
that was a book that just sprung up out of nowhere,
very well written, very well researched. But the most important
(10:51):
thing was the title, because the title just grabbed what
so many people were already feeling. And you see, you know,
and it's not just in our world, it's also in
the world in general. All these expressions that people use,
tipping point and clash of civilizations and long tail, all
of them go back to books. So in twenty nineteen
(11:15):
I spent four years in Washington, I moved to Israel
ninety four. I spent four years in Washington during what
people in DC call Obama two, meaning twenty thirteen to
twenty sixteen, and then I came back to Israel. And
in twenty nineteen I connected with my old friend Adam Bellow,
who had just come off of a thirty year stellar
(11:37):
career as a commercial book publisher, and he was starting
a new publishing house called Wicked Sun Books, which had
a sort of Jewish facing market. And then he said
to me, you know, anthologies are actually really important. And
I said, what do you mean important, Like do they sell?
(11:58):
And he said, well, well, yeah, you know. And I said,
but who goes into a bookstore and says, show me
your anthologies. He goes, no, no, no, no no. If
you pick the right niche then you can kind of
capture a moment. And then everybody has to have the
book on their bookshelves. And he said, what's your niche?
And I said, well, you know, I've been Orthodox and secular,
and I've been left and right politically, I've been Israelian American,
(12:20):
and I've been young and old. So how about like
the whole Jewish people? And he laughed and I laughed,
and we ended up producing how.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
About we leave out the old people, just a young
Xiet voice.
Speaker 3 (12:31):
So so we started thinking, how could you like do
like a Talmud for today, like capturing kind of the
entire people in a single volume, And we got to
work on something that ended up being called Jewish Priorities
sixty five Proposals for the Future of Our People, which
contains within it essays where the audience is us as
(12:53):
a as a collective, the totality of the Jewish people,
but each person is coming from a very different perspectivity
of ultra Warthodox to secular. And you have left and right,
and you have young influencers and veteran writers, and you know,
people from the entertainment industry, people from business, people from journalism,
literary just sort of and of course rabbis and scholars,
(13:15):
and it just came together as it's really kind of amazing,
beautiful collection that was scheduled to publish on October twenty third,
twenty twenty three, so long come yeah, so October seven.
So we had this whole huge launch planned out. It
(13:36):
was very festive. It was like imagine having the whole
Jewish people over for dinner. And then all of a sudden,
October seventh hits and every single one of the events
that we had planned reached out to us and said,
we want to do it anyway. We're going to pivot
on the vibe, on the marketing, but right now, in
(13:56):
the thick of this horrific trauma, the thing we need
is for the Jewish people to come together and for
anything you can kind of represent that. So I came
to America to We did a full day festival in
Philadelphia at the Whites Museum, We did a nine speaker
event of the Striker Center, New York, and we did
something at the Z three conference out in Palo Alto.
And it was my first exposure to how American Jews
(14:21):
were experiencing October seventh because it was different, meaning there
was obviously a lot of overlap. A lot of people
have a lot of connections back in Israel. But while
we were, you know, going through a really collective trauma
coupled with a collective mobilization and going off to war,
and really it was the most together moment that Israel
(14:43):
had experienced in my lifetime. But American Jews, we're going
through something very different. You know, you walk out, you
wake up in the morning, you walk out into the street,
and my personal world has collapsed. But everybody else life
is going on. How did the buses keep running? And
where people having fun in bars? And it's just it
became a much more private and it was much more
(15:05):
scary because of that.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
So, I mean the riots and the protests and yeah,
insanity on the streets certainly didn't help that feeling.
Speaker 3 (15:16):
Well, it created a sense of paralysis for a lot
of people, a sense of I mean when I say people,
I was in New York. I was talking to very
big philanthropists and they were saying to me, we don't
know what to do. And so some of the mobilization
did happen for Israel, right, but it was almost like
(15:37):
a deflection. It was like they didn't want to see
the crisis that was coming to America. For their perspective,
if they could do something, it would be to help Israel,
which is great. But so I wrote an essay right
afterwards called the War against the Jews that came out
on November seventh that basically said, the war's coming to America,
(16:00):
and resources and especially kind of thinking needs to be
switched into a kind of global diaspora war footing, and
here's what that would look like. This essay got a
lot of traction, especially in philanthropic circles. I got a
lot of people reached out to me, and at the
(16:21):
same time, we started to notice that there was another
kind of mobilization, there was another kind of pushback, and
it was happening almost entirely among young people. So you'd
see on campuses as diverse as like from Harvard to
UCLA to Tulane University, pen you'd see students fighting back,
Jewish students recognizing this as anti Semitism and not just
(16:45):
criticism of Israeli policy, and looking for ways to fight back.
And we decided at that moment that the next book
we would do would try to bring together some of
these voices into a single volume. It's called Young Zionist Voices.
It just came out in November, has thirty one essays.
(17:05):
All of them are written by people under the age
of thirty, a lot of them from campuses like Chabas Kestenbaum,
de La Kocha of people at Columbia University, people at
George Washington, Stanford University, Julie Steinberg, but also a lot
of young professionals, young rabbis. We have about ten who
live in Israel. Half of them are kind of Israeli Israelis,
(17:27):
including one Osbinon, who was a fighter in the ego's
Special Forces unit that my son also serves in and
fought during October seventh. And he's also kind of like
a philosopher, so he's writing about the meaning of Judaism
and community. But he's doing but it's through the eyes
of somebody who just came back from army duty where
(17:49):
he was like literally at the front lines. And it's
a really, really fascinating collection that really is kind of
the snapshot of a moment and where a whole group
of young Jews, who all of whom look for different
ways to fight back against the anty Semitism, and really
(18:11):
we did it in order to kind of plant a
flag in the sand and basically say listen to everybody.
These aren't just isolated students or young people who are
looking for ways to fight back. There's actually kind of
a movement here. And if we look into the thinking
of these young leaders, what we see is a very
new approach to Jewish pride, Jewish identity, Jewish connection to
(18:37):
the land of Israel. What they understand when they use
the word Zionism, it might be very different from what
people from my generation think. And also to send a
signal beyond to older people that hey, there is a
new generation of leaders coming up. And I firmly believe. Look,
(18:57):
I was in the Soviet Jury movement in the eighties.
I was living growing up in Boston. I was marching
in the streets for Sharansky and for Ida new Doll
and for all of these great heroes from the Refusing movement.
And we were marching. And later on the people who
led the movement in America became important, important leaders in
(19:21):
Jewish communal life. And if you think that, and if
that happened where Soviet jeury, for all its worth became
only it took a lot of years before the establishment
kind of embraced it as a cause. But these now,
the trauma that we're going through now and the stepping up,
the people who stepped up at this crucial moment, they're
(19:42):
going to become the future of American jeury. And it's
important to see who they are and to see what
they're thinking, looks like and to and you come away
with a very well, certainly a very powerful optimism about
the future of American and global jeury. But also you learn,
you're constantly learning. Okay, you know, these young people have
(20:04):
their own vocabulary and their own set of priorities, and
we should hear what they have to say.
Speaker 1 (20:11):
Yeah, what do the western kind of intellectuals misunderstand about Zionism?
Speaker 2 (20:18):
What would you say that they're missing?
Speaker 3 (20:20):
Well, this book, no, no, just say the word missing
is so generous. It's not like we missed that. You know.
The Zionism emerged in its current form in the you know,
towards the end of the nineteenth century. The re Zionist
(20:40):
thinkers and Zionist writers who looked at diasper Jewish life
at the time, they called it exile Jews in exile,
and said, okay, centuries and centuries of living in exile
have hurt us. Okay, they've hurt us spiritually and psychological,
they've hurt us politically. They've turned us into people who
(21:04):
are very dependent, who might be too afraid to to
you know, always afraid to fight back. It's what happens
when you are subjugated for generation after generation after generation.
And they looked for ways to rebuild the honor, the dignity,
the strength of Jews coming to is to what was
(21:24):
then called Palestine, coming to the Land of Israel and
building a state was only one piece of their answer.
But their answer began at the spiritual level, and it said,
you have to stand tall, you have to fight back,
you have to know who you are. And so the
political side of it, which which was led by Theodore Herzel,
(21:45):
who not only called on people to come to the
Land of Israel, but also created the core institutions for
what would become the Jewish state eventually, the Zions Congress
and the banks and the investment you know, vehicles and
the paramilitary side of the militias, and all of this
stuff was built in order to create a homeland where
(22:09):
the idea is that it's only through our own homeland,
in our own land, that Jews could really reclaim the
life of dignity and self respect that had been beaten
out of them for so many centuries. In diaspora. What
happened was that a counter movement emerged already in the
(22:31):
nineteen twenties, but really taking full force in the nineteen
sixties on the Arab side that basically was a complete rejectionist,
complete a nihilistic view that said, there can't be any
Jewish presence, any Jewish political presence in the Land of Israel. So,
and this was heavily, heavily backed in the nineteen sixties
(22:52):
by the Soviet Union. Okay, so, the Soviet Union embraces
Palestinianism a core cause in its effort to attack the
West as a whole. And that's where you see all
of these words like colonialism and apartheid and Zionism, is racism,
all of these. I have to give credit to the
(23:15):
scholar Isabella Taborowski, who's really done tremendous, tremendous work on
exposing the connections between what we see today and this
Soviet campaign launched especially after the Sixth Day War nineteen
sixty seven, when the Soviets were so humiliated by the
defeat of their client states were the Arabs, and so
the Soviets start injecting these lies into Western discourse through academia. Okay,
(23:44):
they start publishing books of pseudo scholarship and pamphlets and
translating them into English and French and Spanish and all
these languages, and flooding the campuses with these pamphlets, and
it becomes part of a broader kind of intellectual worldview
(24:06):
that basically says the West is the bad guy, okay,
and Israel is like this prime example of just how
bad the West is. And so if you wonder, like
where does all of this come from that we're seeing
on campuses these professors who are just like line, Yeah,
it's a direct line to the campaigns. I mean, you know,
(24:27):
these are one generation removed from the professors then and
and you know, the students of the seventies are like
the senior professors of the twenty twenties. So you know,
it's if you're asking what are they missing, the answer
is truth. They're there, and it's and it's pretty deliberate.
(24:47):
If you look at what Zionism is, what Zionism was,
what Zionists describe themselves, as you discover that it's all
about our own self rebuild it. To build and be
built is the classic Zionist expression. We come to the
land to build it and to be built by it, right,
(25:09):
And there is no you know, all of these slogans
colonialism and all that stuff. I mean, do you ever
notice how like anytime they want to attack us with
a word, they have to first redefine the word in
order to keep attacking us. So, like you say, no,
I've had these conversations where like apartheid is like South Africa,
(25:29):
I know, because like we were fighting against apartheid in
high school. I also was like there, you know, free
Nelson Mandela. And you ask them, but Israel doesn't look
like that at all, and they'll say no, but apartheid
has evolved moderny, it's legal definition. And I'm like, well,
why did you do that? It didn't just evolve. Okay,
you may just change it. And the same thing with
(25:51):
genocide and the same thing with colonialism, like how can
this be colonialism? The whole point was to overthrow the
powers that control.
Speaker 2 (25:59):
Them indigenous the word indigenous.
Speaker 3 (26:03):
Yeah, we ended up like literally fighting you know, against
the British in order to have our state and they're like, no, no,
you're you're colonialists. I'm like, what are you talking? No,
but we read if you So they redefine everything. Now
this has two two big effects. The most obvious one
from a Jewish standpoint is that that they're just making
(26:24):
up all sorts of crazy stuff to attack us. That
what might be even worse is that any time that
word used to mean something important, it doesn't mean that anymore.
So you can't fight against genocide in the world anymore
because now it doesn't doesn't mean anything anymore. And you
can't fight against again against racism. And you know, all
(26:46):
of these things that they're redefining to attack us with
become completely defanged when it comes to the whole rest
of the world. And so the people who suffer most
are the Palestinians, and people who suffer most people are
victims the actual genocide in Africa. They're the ones who
all of a sudden, the West has lost its moral bearings.
Speaker 2 (27:06):
And language to use to describe any of it.
Speaker 3 (27:09):
Yeah, because any time they have they had a word,
somebody came and hijacked and said, no, no, it's about
the Palestinian.
Speaker 1 (27:14):
We're going to take a quick break and be right
back on the Carol Marcowitch Show.
Speaker 2 (27:21):
What do you worry about?
Speaker 3 (27:22):
I worry about that everything's going to be going to
feel like things have calmed down and the world is
over and the anti Semites are on their back foot,
and that we're all going to kind of slide back
to old habits. I want to expand on this just
a little bit. I've recently started working with an organization
(27:47):
called the Z three Project. It's based in Palo Alto,
out of the pale Alta JCC and the Ousman Family
JCC of Pale Alto. It started out as a whole
series of conferences which I thought were really fascinating about Zionism,
and they approached me after Jewish priorities came out and said,
(28:07):
you know, we'd like you to help start a think tank,
which we'll call the Z three Institute. And the core
of it is that after October seventh, we have this
huge feeling that the rug has been pulled out from
under us. And on the one hand, it's a horrible
tragedy and a horrible trauma, but on the other hand,
(28:27):
it's also an opportunity because when everything's fine, you let
things go and you don't want to rock the boat,
and you don't want to change things. But the truth
of the matter is that diaspora institutions, and especially American
Jewish institutions, they dropped the ball. Oh yeah, okay, And
you know, whereas in Israel, everybody knows that it's institutions
(28:50):
and leaders in military that everybody dropped the ball, and
their endless calls for a national commission of inquiry, and
a lot of people have resigned in the military and
security services and intelligence. All of these leaders have either
resigned or announced they're going to be resigning. And in diaspora,
you know, despite the fact that for a hundred years
they have these institutions they call them defense organizations that
(29:12):
were built to watch out for any Semitism, to fight it,
to prevent it, the Holocaust education, hundreds and hundreds of
millions of dollars per year were spent on these things.
Speaker 2 (29:23):
They were completely unprepared.
Speaker 3 (29:25):
And they were completely unprepared. And the kids know it, okay,
the young people. They write about it in this book
in the youngxiety's voices, they're they're they're angry, right, and
they're frustrated about the failure of the institutions to prepare
prevent to their jobs. But have any has anybody resigned yet?
Speaker 2 (29:43):
Of course not. Now they're doubling down on it. In
a lot of cases, I think that the institutions are
not improving.
Speaker 3 (29:50):
Yeah, so we identify right now an opportunity because the
institutions aren't budgeting. But if you talk to Jewish professionals,
so if you talk to ordinary Jewish participants in communities
and congregations, everybody feels like things have to change, like
something went deeply wrong in core understandings of our communal strategies,
(30:15):
our alliances, our education. Everything needs to be rethought. And
who's going to do that. So the purpose of the
Z three Institute is to identify scholars, writers, people who
are actually coming in with fresh thinking and who can
build alternative frameworks for everything from Jewish education to communal strategy,
(30:40):
to Holocaust, to Zionism and Israel diaspora and all of
these big pieces philanthropy, all these big chunks where all
the underlying assumptions that have been built over real literally
centuries now need to be challenged and rethought with alternative
frameworks to kind of come in and perhaps become the
(31:03):
beginning of a very new path towards a much more educated, thriving,
proud Jewish community in the diaspora. I love that.
Speaker 2 (31:11):
I hope it works because we need it.
Speaker 1 (31:13):
What advice would you give your sixteen year old self,
you have to do this all over again?
Speaker 2 (31:19):
What does he need to know?
Speaker 3 (31:21):
Number One is that you're Jewish. What's the word they
use now? Journey? Your Jewish journey right as the kids say,
As the kids say, your self understanding is first of all,
your own responsibility. Okay, you can't blame anybody if you
(31:41):
don't know stuff. Okay, it's got to be a fire
that comes from within to go and learn, Go and study,
Go and deepen your own understanding. Read you know, read
the Bible, read the Talmud. Study. We have three thousand
years of history that you that's yours. You can go
and grab it. And when you do that, then you
(32:05):
become the arbiter. You become the master. You don't you know,
you'll you'll automatically have defenses against an endless sea of
crazy people trying to tell you that you're the bad gun.
That's number one above everything else. I had a student
just last week. I was in Austin, Texas for the
Z three Austin conference, and Gil Troy and I were
(32:28):
doing this wonderful session with a group of Jewish professionals,
including some young people, and one of them asks me, look,
you know, I really want to know more about Israel,
but I keep getting sucked into this all this husbarra
stuff and it's all about cherry tomatoes and what to
say against other people and and and you know, I'm
not looking for what to say. I'm trying to learn.
(32:51):
And I said, look, you're one hundred percent right. Husburah
or the fight as we call it, is a machine,
and it's a desperately needed machine, right, because we are
in a battle. But that doesn't mean that you can't
limit that and bracket that out and learn, because at
(33:12):
the end of the day, learning is is kind of
the opposite of messaging, right, Messaging is I know the answers,
they are boom boom boom, boom boom, and and that's
how battles of communication really are conducted and have to
be conducted. And it's entirely legitimate that it exists. But
if you don't go and deepen your own knowledge, at
your own under your own energy and go to Israel
(33:34):
or learn Hebrew or or you know, engage with Israeli
culture and through your own drive. Then all you're going
to be left with is the easy stuff, the machine,
the sort of the places where people want you to go.
And so so we have to build a generation of
what they call it self starters. That's the work. I
(33:58):
love it. It's right, you know, self starting journeys. But
but there's something to that. You really need to build
a whole generation of people who are who drive themselves,
who push themselves, who want to deepen their own knowledge
(34:19):
and understanding. And there's so many paths to it. You know,
when when I was a kid, there was no internet,
right right, If you wanted to learn about Israel, you
need to read history books or go to the library,
or you know, maybe see a TV show that was
heavily biased in one direction or another, or watch you know,
an old movie, or go to Israel, which itself was this,
(34:40):
you know, was this huge investment and you'd have to like,
you know, communicate with your parents through aerograms. And today
you can learn anything you want, Like it's an amazing moment.
But that means that you but it doesn't chain take
away the responsibility and it's being on you to care
(35:02):
and to want to learn, and to drive yourself to
to uh to seek to go find it. And I
think that that there's a cultural there's a risk of
a cultural laziness in which we have everything so I
don't have to work to learn anything. And it's the
exact opposite of the truth. You're flooded with information, but
(35:23):
becoming a knowledgeable, deep person requires that you be the
one to arbitrary, to arbitrate what's important, what's not important,
what's reliable, what's not reliable? Who can I learn from?
You know? The the ancient rabbi has had this expression,
make for yourself a rabbi, like get yourself a rabbi. Yeah, okay,
(35:44):
which is which is really fascinating. We think about it
because you think of religion as it's kind of top down.
You know, your rabbi is kind of a given right.
You're the clergy, like, tell you and that's what God wants.
And the rabbis were like, no, it's the exact opposite.
It's got to come from inside. You've got to go
out and find the right teacher for you, and you've
got to go in and study. And it's it's all
(36:06):
on you the individual, and I you know, really really
want would love to see that part of Judaism be
imbued into young people because it's the core of everything,
because once you get that engine going, then that everything
else follows from.
Speaker 2 (36:25):
I love that.
Speaker 3 (36:26):
Well.
Speaker 1 (36:27):
The last question I ask all of my guests, and
I would love to hear what you have to say
is a tip that you would offer my listeners for
better living, how.
Speaker 2 (36:37):
To have a better life.
Speaker 3 (36:38):
We Jews have inherited a really strange combination of like
an intellectual thing combined with a spiritual thing. Okay, and
when we we call it that, that combination we call
it love. But for us, love means something else that
(37:00):
it means for a lot of other people. There's no
contradiction between research, study, argumentation, getting to the truth on
the one hand, and the spiritual impulse to embrace those
our families and our communities and our people that that
need to extend ourselves and you know, and take care
(37:22):
of our world. These don't contradict. They're actually the same thing,
because you can't really take care of people unless you
know what they're going through. What are the methodologies, what
are the technical aspects of what you know what does
take care of people. We have all these you know,
political arguments about no, we should you know this or that,
and it's all like do outcomes matter? Well, yeah, outcomes
(37:44):
are the only thing that matters, right so so, but
to no outcomes means you have to understand how things work.
And you can't really take care of your child unless
you know what children need and consult with doctors and
love your child and give them all the core self
confidence in the world. And it's the same thing with
(38:06):
uh with so my tip for a better life is
be loving, be inquisitive, be critical, be aggressive, be all
of these things all together, because that's the Jewish one.
Speaker 2 (38:18):
I love that he is David Hazoni.
Speaker 1 (38:21):
Check out his latest anthology, Young Zionist Voices and New
Generation Speaks Out.
Speaker 2 (38:26):
Thank you so much for coming on, David.
Speaker 3 (38:28):
Thank you, Carol, thanks.
Speaker 1 (38:30):
So much for joining us on the Carol Marco wid Show.
Speaker 2 (38:32):
Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Hi, Welcome back to the Carol Marcowitz Show on iHeartRadio.
It's actually my one hundred and fiftieth episode today, and
I just want to say thank you to all of
my listeners. I really wasn't sure if this kind of
show would work. People love their news of the day,
and The Carol Marcowitz Show is very much not about that.
I record a lot of these episodes several weeks out.
(00:26):
I tried to get to the bottom of people's personalities
and their stories and not what they think about you know,
what did Trump say today? So it was a gamble
and I love that it's working out, and so many
of you are listening. We've been clearing a million downloads
every quarter with only two episodes a week, and I
just feel so fortunate for you all. Thanks so much
(00:49):
for tuning in. So last weekend, I was laying by
a resort pool Lazy River when a mom and her
approximately four year old by me, and the child was
like kind of playing and he said to his mom,
you're stupid. The mom responded, Hey, buddy, if you want
(01:09):
to talk to me like that, we're going to get
out of the water. I of course tweeted about it
and it's the sort of thing that went, you know,
semi viral, four thousand plus likes, lots of responses and retweets.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
Most agreed with me. But somewhere in the.
Speaker 1 (01:24):
Vein of what's your problem, this was handled perfectly. The
mom gave the kid a warning, what more do you want?
And to me, I don't see the parenting in this exchange,
and I say the words my kids aren't perfect a
lot because they're not. Obviously, no one is perfect, but
they're pretty close. If a kid can call his mom
(01:46):
stupid and get to continue about his day, I think
back to when my kids were a handful, and believe me,
they've been a handful each of them, and we'd have
to leave a restaurant or something. They were not calling
us stupid or anything close. They were maybe acting up,
being loud in a restaurant, or like turning around and
staring at people. We really did cut down on all
(02:09):
kinds of antisocial behavior very early, because we thought, we
want to have these kids out in public with us.
We want to travel, we want to go out to eat,
and we don't want them to be monsters. One other
thing I tweeted about it is parents use this singsongy
voice that they learned on the internet, and this fake
gentle thing that kids know how to dismantle when they
(02:31):
should be lowering their voice to a growl and saying,
talk to me like that again, and you'll wish you hadn't.
I just hate that whole trend. It's supposed to be
gentle parenting, but it just sounds like acting to me buddy.
Calling your kid buddy rubs me the wrong way too.
It's not that I think you can never call your
kid buddy or people say, oh, you know, you shouldn't
(02:53):
be buddy with your kid. That's actually not it for me.
I don't mind that so much, but when they just
called you stupid. I also tweeted that I had a
friend once ask my husband and I which one of
us spanks the kids to get their good behavior. The
truth is we don't spank.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
We don't have to.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
I like to say I murder them with my eyes
if they misbehave. I'm not bragging here exactly. It started young,
and my kids know what.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
Is expected of them.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
They know what behavior we won't tolerate. Spanking also is
very after the fact.
Speaker 3 (03:32):
To me.
Speaker 1 (03:33):
It's the kid has done something and now you spank
them to not have them do it again in the future,
and they're going to have to remember that for next time.
For me, it's more like in the moment, it's my
eyes that will make them shape up. And my last
point on X was I feel like a lot of
parents think their kids will become a different person when
they get older. Maybe, but in my experience, if you
(03:54):
don't lay down the law when they're four, you'll have
a much harder time at fourteen. They need to respect you,
and that starts young. And that last point is really everything.
There are lots of ways to parent. Maybe mine is wrong,
maybe it won't work for you. I can't say, but
I can tell you that people don't change all that
(04:16):
much unless you make them change. And the way your
kid is to you today is largely how they'll be
in the future. If they don't respect you now, they're
not going to respect you as time goes on. A
lot of people seem to think you can just not
fix bad behavior at four years old because they'll grow
out of it. I haven't seen.
Speaker 2 (04:35):
Evidence of that, to be honest.
Speaker 1 (04:37):
If you excuse something today, you will likely excuse it tomorrow.
I always love hearing from listeners, but would particularly love
to hear from you on this What do you think?
Am I right or wrong? Thanks for listening. Coming up
next an interview with David Hazzoni. Join us after the
break and welcome back to the Carol Markowitz shaw On iHeart.
(05:00):
My guest today is David Hazoni. David is an award
winning editor, translator, and author, and director and Steinhardt Senior Fellow.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
At the Z three Institute.
Speaker 1 (05:10):
His newest work, Young Zionist Voices, A New Generation Speaks Out,
brings together the next generation of impassioned Jewish leaders.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
Hi, David, so nice to have you on.
Speaker 3 (05:21):
Hi, Carol, thank you so much.
Speaker 1 (05:23):
I feel like I've known you a long time on
the old internets, but I would love to know how you.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
Got into this world. Where did you get your start?
Speaker 3 (05:31):
Wow? So you're always a young Zionist, that's right. So
I was born into an Israeli family in the United
States at a time when there weren't a lot of
Israelis in America. It wasn't like today where you have
sort of these big, you know, movements and organizations and
(05:55):
whole communities that are of Israeli Americans. The concept Israeli
Americans didn't exist as a label. And in fact, when
I was a kid, my non Jewish friends didn't know
what Israeli was. This is the nineteen seventies. Israel's only
been around for thirty years, and so like, you know,
a fourth grader is like, Hazoni, what is that? And
I said, it's Israeli, Like there's no such thing. It's Italian.
Speaker 2 (06:18):
That's kind of Italian.
Speaker 3 (06:19):
Actually, yeah, I mean, I guess my grandfather's original name
was Hasanovic and all my grands that's real Italian. Yeah,
And all my grandparents moved to the Land of Israel
in the nineteen twenties nineteen thirties, and it was very common,
especially going through the nineteen fifties, it was very common
(06:42):
for people to Hebraisize their last names as part of
this sort of new resurgent Jewish homeland. Hasanovich became Hazoni
and that's what I got.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
Where did you grow up?
Speaker 3 (06:57):
So? I was born in Princeton, New Jersey, and I
was there to well ninth grade, and then my father
was a professor there and then he moved to Boston University.
So I moved to Brookline, Massachusetts, where I went to
high school, and then I started college in at Columbia
University in New York became I spent a year in
(07:18):
Israel studying in Yeshiva, kind of got religion, as they say.
Then finished my degrees at Yeshiva University, and then after
I moved to Israel in ninety four, I got a
PhD at Hebrew University in Jewish philosophy.
Speaker 2 (07:35):
And I was committed to this whole Jewish thing.
Speaker 3 (07:38):
I'm yeah, I'm on board, and you know, I look,
I'm actually from the tribe of Levi. I'm not even
strictly you know, the word Jew comes from Judea, from
the tribe of Judah, and I always like to say, well,
I'm kind of Jewish, but I'm really a Levi and
that confuses everybody, and.
Speaker 2 (08:01):
Kids in Princeton don't know what to do with that.
Speaker 3 (08:04):
No, no, they're just like, now you're Italian. So I
actually got started while I was doing my graduate degree
in Israel. I got started in the think tank world.
I was one of the original people at the Shalem
Center in Jerusalem, and I ended up editing its journal,
(08:25):
and I spent a lot of time, a lot of
years kind of watching how books and the ideas in books,
and you know what we call public intellectuals, how they
really helped shape the debate how a single book can come.
So for just for example, we had an unknown historian
by the name of Michael Orn came to us in
(08:47):
nineteen ninety seven and said, I want to do a
book on Israel's War of Independence nineteen forty eight. And
the think tankers were like, you know, that's the wrong book.
It's thirty years after the Sixth Day War. The archives
are all opening up. The bad guys are out there already,
the new historians they call them, saying that that Israel
(09:10):
deliberately started the war in order to capture territory. What
we really need is a definitive history of the Sixth
Day War. And he agreed to do that, and the
book became Oxford University Press's first ever bestseller. They didn't
know what to do with it, and he became a
very famous person. And I've kind of seen over and
over again, how you know, two thousand and eight, whenever
(09:33):
it was a book comes out called Startup Nation, right
by Dancy Noor and sault Singer. Before that, people would
talk about Israel, like you know, it's the only democracy
in the Middle East, and it's David against Goliath and
all of these sort of conflict related concepts. Excuse me.
(09:54):
It along comes this one book and it creates this
whole other lens through which we can understand the country.
And now everybody knows the expression startup nation, what percentages?
I do. I like to do this. I'd just like
to ask people in a room, how many of you
actually read the book.
Speaker 1 (10:10):
I read it.
Speaker 3 (10:11):
It was very okay, but I read.
Speaker 1 (10:13):
It, but I read it only like in the last
five years, and so it's kind of an It's not
not that it's outdated, but there is.
Speaker 2 (10:19):
A newer, you know, version of it out now. But yeah,
it was. It was great and it was eye opening
even reading it so late.
Speaker 3 (10:29):
Yeah. So, so I've just been very aware and sensitive
to the mechanics the craft, how you know, an idea,
how a book can kind of either capture a moment.
Take for example, Darrel Horn's People of Dead Jews. Okay,
that was a book that just sprung up out of nowhere,
very well written, very well researched. But the most important
(10:51):
thing was the title, because the title just grabbed what
so many people were already feeling. And you see, you know,
and it's not just in our world, it's also in
the world in general. All these expressions that people use,
tipping point and clash of civilizations and long tail, all
of them go back to books. So in twenty nineteen
(11:15):
I spent four years in Washington, I moved to Israel
ninety four. I spent four years in Washington during what
people in DC call Obama two, meaning twenty thirteen to
twenty sixteen, and then I came back to Israel. And
in twenty nineteen I connected with my old friend Adam Bellow,
who had just come off of a thirty year stellar
(11:37):
career as a commercial book publisher, and he was starting
a new publishing house called Wicked Sun Books, which had
a sort of Jewish facing market. And then he said
to me, you know, anthologies are actually really important. And
I said, what do you mean important, Like do they sell?
(11:58):
And he said, well, well, yeah, you know. And I said,
but who goes into a bookstore and says, show me
your anthologies. He goes, no, no, no, no no. If
you pick the right niche then you can kind of
capture a moment. And then everybody has to have the
book on their bookshelves. And he said, what's your niche?
And I said, well, you know, I've been Orthodox and secular,
and I've been left and right politically, I've been Israelian American,
(12:20):
and I've been young and old. So how about like
the whole Jewish people? And he laughed and I laughed,
and we ended up producing how.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
About we leave out the old people, just a young
Xiet voice.
Speaker 3 (12:31):
So so we started thinking, how could you like do
like a Talmud for today, like capturing kind of the
entire people in a single volume, And we got to
work on something that ended up being called Jewish Priorities
sixty five Proposals for the Future of Our People, which
contains within it essays where the audience is us as
(12:53):
a as a collective, the totality of the Jewish people,
but each person is coming from a very different perspectivity
of ultra Warthodox to secular. And you have left and right,
and you have young influencers and veteran writers, and you know,
people from the entertainment industry, people from business, people from journalism,
literary just sort of and of course rabbis and scholars,
(13:15):
and it just came together as it's really kind of amazing,
beautiful collection that was scheduled to publish on October twenty third,
twenty twenty three, so long come yeah, so October seven.
So we had this whole huge launch planned out. It
(13:36):
was very festive. It was like imagine having the whole
Jewish people over for dinner. And then all of a sudden,
October seventh hits and every single one of the events
that we had planned reached out to us and said,
we want to do it anyway. We're going to pivot
on the vibe, on the marketing, but right now, in
(13:56):
the thick of this horrific trauma, the thing we need
is for the Jewish people to come together and for
anything you can kind of represent that. So I came
to America to We did a full day festival in
Philadelphia at the Whites Museum, We did a nine speaker
event of the Striker Center, New York, and we did
something at the Z three conference out in Palo Alto.
And it was my first exposure to how American Jews
(14:21):
were experiencing October seventh because it was different, meaning there
was obviously a lot of overlap. A lot of people
have a lot of connections back in Israel. But while
we were, you know, going through a really collective trauma
coupled with a collective mobilization and going off to war,
and really it was the most together moment that Israel
(14:43):
had experienced in my lifetime. But American Jews, we're going
through something very different. You know, you walk out, you
wake up in the morning, you walk out into the street,
and my personal world has collapsed. But everybody else life
is going on. How did the buses keep running? And
where people having fun in bars? And it's just it
became a much more private and it was much more
(15:05):
scary because of that.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
So, I mean the riots and the protests and yeah,
insanity on the streets certainly didn't help that feeling.
Speaker 3 (15:16):
Well, it created a sense of paralysis for a lot
of people, a sense of I mean when I say people,
I was in New York. I was talking to very
big philanthropists and they were saying to me, we don't
know what to do. And so some of the mobilization
did happen for Israel, right, but it was almost like
(15:37):
a deflection. It was like they didn't want to see
the crisis that was coming to America. For their perspective,
if they could do something, it would be to help Israel,
which is great. But so I wrote an essay right
afterwards called the War against the Jews that came out
on November seventh that basically said, the war's coming to America,
(16:00):
and resources and especially kind of thinking needs to be
switched into a kind of global diaspora war footing, and
here's what that would look like. This essay got a
lot of traction, especially in philanthropic circles. I got a
lot of people reached out to me, and at the
(16:21):
same time, we started to notice that there was another
kind of mobilization, there was another kind of pushback, and
it was happening almost entirely among young people. So you'd
see on campuses as diverse as like from Harvard to
UCLA to Tulane University, pen you'd see students fighting back,
Jewish students recognizing this as anti Semitism and not just
(16:45):
criticism of Israeli policy, and looking for ways to fight back.
And we decided at that moment that the next book
we would do would try to bring together some of
these voices into a single volume. It's called Young Zionist Voices.
It just came out in November, has thirty one essays.
(17:05):
All of them are written by people under the age
of thirty, a lot of them from campuses like Chabas Kestenbaum,
de La Kocha of people at Columbia University, people at
George Washington, Stanford University, Julie Steinberg, but also a lot
of young professionals, young rabbis. We have about ten who
live in Israel. Half of them are kind of Israeli Israelis,
(17:27):
including one Osbinon, who was a fighter in the ego's
Special Forces unit that my son also serves in and
fought during October seventh. And he's also kind of like
a philosopher, so he's writing about the meaning of Judaism
and community. But he's doing but it's through the eyes
of somebody who just came back from army duty where
(17:49):
he was like literally at the front lines. And it's
a really, really fascinating collection that really is kind of
the snapshot of a moment and where a whole group
of young Jews, who all of whom look for different
ways to fight back against the anty Semitism, and really
(18:11):
we did it in order to kind of plant a
flag in the sand and basically say listen to everybody.
These aren't just isolated students or young people who are
looking for ways to fight back. There's actually kind of
a movement here. And if we look into the thinking
of these young leaders, what we see is a very
new approach to Jewish pride, Jewish identity, Jewish connection to
(18:37):
the land of Israel. What they understand when they use
the word Zionism, it might be very different from what
people from my generation think. And also to send a
signal beyond to older people that hey, there is a
new generation of leaders coming up. And I firmly believe. Look,
(18:57):
I was in the Soviet Jury movement in the eighties.
I was living growing up in Boston. I was marching
in the streets for Sharansky and for Ida new Doll
and for all of these great heroes from the Refusing movement.
And we were marching. And later on the people who
led the movement in America became important, important leaders in
(19:21):
Jewish communal life. And if you think that, and if
that happened where Soviet jeury, for all its worth became
only it took a lot of years before the establishment
kind of embraced it as a cause. But these now,
the trauma that we're going through now and the stepping up,
the people who stepped up at this crucial moment, they're
(19:42):
going to become the future of American jeury. And it's
important to see who they are and to see what
they're thinking, looks like and to and you come away
with a very well, certainly a very powerful optimism about
the future of American and global jeury. But also you learn,
you're constantly learning. Okay, you know, these young people have
(20:04):
their own vocabulary and their own set of priorities, and
we should hear what they have to say.
Speaker 1 (20:11):
Yeah, what do the western kind of intellectuals misunderstand about Zionism?
Speaker 2 (20:18):
What would you say that they're missing?
Speaker 3 (20:20):
Well, this book, no, no, just say the word missing
is so generous. It's not like we missed that. You know.
The Zionism emerged in its current form in the you know,
towards the end of the nineteenth century. The re Zionist
(20:40):
thinkers and Zionist writers who looked at diasper Jewish life
at the time, they called it exile Jews in exile,
and said, okay, centuries and centuries of living in exile
have hurt us. Okay, they've hurt us spiritually and psychological,
they've hurt us politically. They've turned us into people who
(21:04):
are very dependent, who might be too afraid to to
you know, always afraid to fight back. It's what happens
when you are subjugated for generation after generation after generation.
And they looked for ways to rebuild the honor, the dignity,
the strength of Jews coming to is to what was
(21:24):
then called Palestine, coming to the Land of Israel and
building a state was only one piece of their answer.
But their answer began at the spiritual level, and it said,
you have to stand tall, you have to fight back,
you have to know who you are. And so the
political side of it, which which was led by Theodore Herzel,
(21:45):
who not only called on people to come to the
Land of Israel, but also created the core institutions for
what would become the Jewish state eventually, the Zions Congress
and the banks and the investment you know, vehicles and
the paramilitary side of the militias, and all of this
stuff was built in order to create a homeland where
(22:09):
the idea is that it's only through our own homeland,
in our own land, that Jews could really reclaim the
life of dignity and self respect that had been beaten
out of them for so many centuries. In diaspora. What
happened was that a counter movement emerged already in the
(22:31):
nineteen twenties, but really taking full force in the nineteen
sixties on the Arab side that basically was a complete rejectionist,
complete a nihilistic view that said, there can't be any
Jewish presence, any Jewish political presence in the Land of Israel. So,
and this was heavily, heavily backed in the nineteen sixties
(22:52):
by the Soviet Union. Okay, so, the Soviet Union embraces
Palestinianism a core cause in its effort to attack the
West as a whole. And that's where you see all
of these words like colonialism and apartheid and Zionism, is racism,
all of these. I have to give credit to the
(23:15):
scholar Isabella Taborowski, who's really done tremendous, tremendous work on
exposing the connections between what we see today and this
Soviet campaign launched especially after the Sixth Day War nineteen
sixty seven, when the Soviets were so humiliated by the
defeat of their client states were the Arabs, and so
the Soviets start injecting these lies into Western discourse through academia. Okay,
(23:44):
they start publishing books of pseudo scholarship and pamphlets and
translating them into English and French and Spanish and all
these languages, and flooding the campuses with these pamphlets, and
it becomes part of a broader kind of intellectual worldview
(24:06):
that basically says the West is the bad guy, okay,
and Israel is like this prime example of just how
bad the West is. And so if you wonder, like
where does all of this come from that we're seeing
on campuses these professors who are just like line, Yeah,
it's a direct line to the campaigns. I mean, you know,
(24:27):
these are one generation removed from the professors then and
and you know, the students of the seventies are like
the senior professors of the twenty twenties. So you know,
it's if you're asking what are they missing, the answer
is truth. They're there, and it's and it's pretty deliberate.
(24:47):
If you look at what Zionism is, what Zionism was,
what Zionists describe themselves, as you discover that it's all
about our own self rebuild it. To build and be
built is the classic Zionist expression. We come to the
land to build it and to be built by it, right,
(25:09):
And there is no you know, all of these slogans
colonialism and all that stuff. I mean, do you ever
notice how like anytime they want to attack us with
a word, they have to first redefine the word in
order to keep attacking us. So, like you say, no,
I've had these conversations where like apartheid is like South Africa,
(25:29):
I know, because like we were fighting against apartheid in
high school. I also was like there, you know, free
Nelson Mandela. And you ask them, but Israel doesn't look
like that at all, and they'll say no, but apartheid
has evolved moderny, it's legal definition. And I'm like, well,
why did you do that? It didn't just evolve. Okay,
you may just change it. And the same thing with
(25:51):
genocide and the same thing with colonialism, like how can
this be colonialism? The whole point was to overthrow the
powers that control.
Speaker 2 (25:59):
Them indigenous the word indigenous.
Speaker 3 (26:03):
Yeah, we ended up like literally fighting you know, against
the British in order to have our state and they're like, no, no,
you're you're colonialists. I'm like, what are you talking? No,
but we read if you So they redefine everything. Now
this has two two big effects. The most obvious one
from a Jewish standpoint is that that they're just making
(26:24):
up all sorts of crazy stuff to attack us. That
what might be even worse is that any time that
word used to mean something important, it doesn't mean that anymore.
So you can't fight against genocide in the world anymore
because now it doesn't doesn't mean anything anymore. And you
can't fight against again against racism. And you know, all
(26:46):
of these things that they're redefining to attack us with
become completely defanged when it comes to the whole rest
of the world. And so the people who suffer most
are the Palestinians, and people who suffer most people are
victims the actual genocide in Africa. They're the ones who
all of a sudden, the West has lost its moral bearings.
Speaker 2 (27:06):
And language to use to describe any of it.
Speaker 3 (27:09):
Yeah, because any time they have they had a word,
somebody came and hijacked and said, no, no, it's about
the Palestinian.
Speaker 1 (27:14):
We're going to take a quick break and be right
back on the Carol Marcowitch Show.
Speaker 2 (27:21):
What do you worry about?
Speaker 3 (27:22):
I worry about that everything's going to be going to
feel like things have calmed down and the world is
over and the anti Semites are on their back foot,
and that we're all going to kind of slide back
to old habits. I want to expand on this just
a little bit. I've recently started working with an organization
(27:47):
called the Z three Project. It's based in Palo Alto,
out of the pale Alta JCC and the Ousman Family
JCC of Pale Alto. It started out as a whole
series of conferences which I thought were really fascinating about Zionism,
and they approached me after Jewish priorities came out and said,
(28:07):
you know, we'd like you to help start a think tank,
which we'll call the Z three Institute. And the core
of it is that after October seventh, we have this
huge feeling that the rug has been pulled out from
under us. And on the one hand, it's a horrible
tragedy and a horrible trauma, but on the other hand,
(28:27):
it's also an opportunity because when everything's fine, you let
things go and you don't want to rock the boat,
and you don't want to change things. But the truth
of the matter is that diaspora institutions, and especially American
Jewish institutions, they dropped the ball. Oh yeah, okay, And
you know, whereas in Israel, everybody knows that it's institutions
(28:50):
and leaders in military that everybody dropped the ball, and
their endless calls for a national commission of inquiry, and
a lot of people have resigned in the military and
security services and intelligence. All of these leaders have either
resigned or announced they're going to be resigning. And in diaspora,
you know, despite the fact that for a hundred years
they have these institutions they call them defense organizations that
(29:12):
were built to watch out for any Semitism, to fight it,
to prevent it, the Holocaust education, hundreds and hundreds of
millions of dollars per year were spent on these things.
Speaker 2 (29:23):
They were completely unprepared.
Speaker 3 (29:25):
And they were completely unprepared. And the kids know it, okay,
the young people. They write about it in this book
in the youngxiety's voices, they're they're they're angry, right, and
they're frustrated about the failure of the institutions to prepare
prevent to their jobs. But have any has anybody resigned yet?
Speaker 2 (29:43):
Of course not. Now they're doubling down on it. In
a lot of cases, I think that the institutions are
not improving.
Speaker 3 (29:50):
Yeah, so we identify right now an opportunity because the
institutions aren't budgeting. But if you talk to Jewish professionals,
so if you talk to ordinary Jewish participants in communities
and congregations, everybody feels like things have to change, like
something went deeply wrong in core understandings of our communal strategies,
(30:15):
our alliances, our education. Everything needs to be rethought. And
who's going to do that. So the purpose of the
Z three Institute is to identify scholars, writers, people who
are actually coming in with fresh thinking and who can
build alternative frameworks for everything from Jewish education to communal strategy,
(30:40):
to Holocaust, to Zionism and Israel diaspora and all of
these big pieces philanthropy, all these big chunks where all
the underlying assumptions that have been built over real literally
centuries now need to be challenged and rethought with alternative
frameworks to kind of come in and perhaps become the
(31:03):
beginning of a very new path towards a much more educated, thriving,
proud Jewish community in the diaspora. I love that.
Speaker 2 (31:11):
I hope it works because we need it.
Speaker 1 (31:13):
What advice would you give your sixteen year old self,
you have to do this all over again?
Speaker 2 (31:19):
What does he need to know?
Speaker 3 (31:21):
Number One is that you're Jewish. What's the word they
use now? Journey? Your Jewish journey right as the kids say,
As the kids say, your self understanding is first of all,
your own responsibility. Okay, you can't blame anybody if you
(31:41):
don't know stuff. Okay, it's got to be a fire
that comes from within to go and learn, Go and study,
Go and deepen your own understanding. Read you know, read
the Bible, read the Talmud. Study. We have three thousand
years of history that you that's yours. You can go
and grab it. And when you do that, then you
(32:05):
become the arbiter. You become the master. You don't you know,
you'll you'll automatically have defenses against an endless sea of
crazy people trying to tell you that you're the bad gun.
That's number one above everything else. I had a student
just last week. I was in Austin, Texas for the
Z three Austin conference, and Gil Troy and I were
(32:28):
doing this wonderful session with a group of Jewish professionals,
including some young people, and one of them asks me, look,
you know, I really want to know more about Israel,
but I keep getting sucked into this all this husbarra
stuff and it's all about cherry tomatoes and what to
say against other people and and and you know, I'm
not looking for what to say. I'm trying to learn.
(32:51):
And I said, look, you're one hundred percent right. Husburah
or the fight as we call it, is a machine,
and it's a desperately needed machine, right, because we are
in a battle. But that doesn't mean that you can't
limit that and bracket that out and learn, because at
(33:12):
the end of the day, learning is is kind of
the opposite of messaging, right, Messaging is I know the answers,
they are boom boom boom, boom boom, and and that's
how battles of communication really are conducted and have to
be conducted. And it's entirely legitimate that it exists. But
if you don't go and deepen your own knowledge, at
your own under your own energy and go to Israel
(33:34):
or learn Hebrew or or you know, engage with Israeli
culture and through your own drive. Then all you're going
to be left with is the easy stuff, the machine,
the sort of the places where people want you to go.
And so so we have to build a generation of
what they call it self starters. That's the work. I
(33:58):
love it. It's right, you know, self starting journeys. But
but there's something to that. You really need to build
a whole generation of people who are who drive themselves,
who push themselves, who want to deepen their own knowledge
(34:19):
and understanding. And there's so many paths to it. You know,
when when I was a kid, there was no internet,
right right, If you wanted to learn about Israel, you
need to read history books or go to the library,
or you know, maybe see a TV show that was
heavily biased in one direction or another, or watch you know,
an old movie, or go to Israel, which itself was this,
(34:40):
you know, was this huge investment and you'd have to like,
you know, communicate with your parents through aerograms. And today
you can learn anything you want, Like it's an amazing moment.
But that means that you but it doesn't chain take
away the responsibility and it's being on you to care
(35:02):
and to want to learn, and to drive yourself to
to uh to seek to go find it. And I
think that that there's a cultural there's a risk of
a cultural laziness in which we have everything so I
don't have to work to learn anything. And it's the
exact opposite of the truth. You're flooded with information, but
(35:23):
becoming a knowledgeable, deep person requires that you be the
one to arbitrary, to arbitrate what's important, what's not important,
what's reliable, what's not reliable? Who can I learn from?
You know? The the ancient rabbi has had this expression,
make for yourself a rabbi, like get yourself a rabbi. Yeah, okay,
(35:44):
which is which is really fascinating. We think about it
because you think of religion as it's kind of top down.
You know, your rabbi is kind of a given right.
You're the clergy, like, tell you and that's what God wants.
And the rabbis were like, no, it's the exact opposite.
It's got to come from inside. You've got to go
out and find the right teacher for you, and you've
got to go in and study. And it's it's all
(36:06):
on you the individual, and I you know, really really
want would love to see that part of Judaism be
imbued into young people because it's the core of everything,
because once you get that engine going, then that everything
else follows from.
Speaker 2 (36:25):
I love that.
Speaker 3 (36:26):
Well.
Speaker 1 (36:27):
The last question I ask all of my guests, and
I would love to hear what you have to say
is a tip that you would offer my listeners for
better living, how.
Speaker 2 (36:37):
To have a better life.
Speaker 3 (36:38):
We Jews have inherited a really strange combination of like
an intellectual thing combined with a spiritual thing. Okay, and
when we we call it that, that combination we call
it love. But for us, love means something else that
(37:00):
it means for a lot of other people. There's no
contradiction between research, study, argumentation, getting to the truth on
the one hand, and the spiritual impulse to embrace those
our families and our communities and our people that that
need to extend ourselves and you know, and take care
(37:22):
of our world. These don't contradict. They're actually the same thing,
because you can't really take care of people unless you
know what they're going through. What are the methodologies, what
are the technical aspects of what you know what does
take care of people. We have all these you know,
political arguments about no, we should you know this or that,
and it's all like do outcomes matter? Well, yeah, outcomes
(37:44):
are the only thing that matters, right so so, but
to no outcomes means you have to understand how things work.
And you can't really take care of your child unless
you know what children need and consult with doctors and
love your child and give them all the core self
confidence in the world. And it's the same thing with
(38:06):
uh with so my tip for a better life is
be loving, be inquisitive, be critical, be aggressive, be all
of these things all together, because that's the Jewish one.
Speaker 2 (38:18):
I love that he is David Hazoni.
Speaker 1 (38:21):
Check out his latest anthology, Young Zionist Voices and New
Generation Speaks Out.
Speaker 2 (38:26):
Thank you so much for coming on, David.
Speaker 3 (38:28):
Thank you, Carol, thanks.
Speaker 1 (38:30):
So much for joining us on the Carol Marco wid Show.
Speaker 2 (38:32):
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