--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today Explained is supported by a movie today. Everybody loves movies. This one's called Viper Club. It's a drama starring Susan Sarandon as a mother struggling to free her captured journalist son. It's also got Matt Bomer and Edie Falco from The Sopranos. Love The Sopranos. Viper Club's now playing in theaters in New York and Los Angeles, and it's Nationwide Friday.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: During Shabbat morning prayers on Saturday, October 27th, a white gunman walked into the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and killed 11 people who were members of Tree of Life Synagogue as well as Dor Hadash and New Light congregations.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The Wednesday prior, and to shamefully less attention and collective mourning among many of our communities, a white gunman tried to enter a black church and then shot and killed two black people in Jefferson Town, Kentucky. We remember all of their names. Joyce Feinberg, 75 years old. Richard Gottfried, 65 years old. Vicki Lee Jones, 67 years old. Rose Mallinger, 97 years old. Jerry Rabinitz, 66 years old. Cecil Rosenthal, 59 years old. David Rosenthal, 54 years old. Bernice Simon, 84 years old. Sylvan Simon, 86 years old. Maurice Dollard, 69 years old. Daniel Stein, 71 years old. Melvin Wax, 88 years old. Irving Younger, 69 years old. May their memories be for a blessing.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I pass a lot of big, important federal buildings on my bike ride into Vox every morning. The Department of Labor, the Capitol, the White House. All the flags outside these buildings were flying half-staff today. That's the reaction we can count on in this country after each and every mass shooting. And now we have another one.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: On Saturday, a man named Robert Bowers opened fire at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. By all accounts, Bowers was a quiet guy out in the world, but he was a raging anti-Semite online. He believed Jews were helping refugees into the country, refugees who were going to commit violence against white people. So he went to Tree of Life and opened fire. 11 died. More were injured. Some are saying it's the deadliest attack targeting Jews in American history.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There were vigils held across the country yesterday. Today explained producer and reporter Noam Hassenfeld attended one right up the street from our office in DuPont Circle here in D.C. Noam, we heard a bit of the vigil at the top of the show. What else did you hear from people out there?
--:-- Noam Hassenfeld: So I talked to a lot of people and the thing that kept coming back to me, the thing that I kept hearing, was just how not surprised everyone was. I was in shock, but honestly, I wasn't that surprised. It's a terrible thing to say, but I feel like it's a long time coming. Like, we're just bracing ourselves for the next act of hate. I'm not surprised that this happened. All these people who say they're surprised, I'm not sure why they're surprised.
--:-- Noam Hassenfeld: A lot of people I spoke to were either from the same Pittsburgh neighborhood where the shooting took place or had close personal connections to Squirrel Hill. Four of my closest friends live in Squirrel Hill, regular attenders of the synagogue, and it all felt very personal as a result. So I am here to be around other people who are also feeling kind of the personal impacts of this.
--:-- Noam Hassenfeld: I met Benjamin Epstein at the side of the gathering just after Mincha. What's that?
--:-- Benjamin Epstein: It's a communal afternoon prayer service.
--:-- Noam Hassenfeld: He was standing with a group of friends on the side of the gathering. He was wearing thin glasses and he had a yarmulke on. Does this make you think differently about going back to synagogue next Saturday?
--:-- Benjamin Epstein: No, it doesn't. It's too important and too big of a part of my life. There's a lot of things that need to change. My going to synagogue is not what needs to change.
--:-- Benjamin Epstein: Is there anything about the fact that this happened in a synagogue that changes it for you?
--:-- Noam Hassenfeld: I wonder if someone had targeted Jews in another location that was not the holiest spot.
--:-- Benjamin Epstein: It does for a couple of reasons. Number one, because the synagogue is a very important place to me personally. I grew up with a family that was very involved in our synagogue life growing up. This felt particularly striking to me as a synagogue, particularly because this happened so early in the service. This was within the first 10 minutes of the service starting. and there aren't usually very many people there.
--:-- Benjamin Epstein: One of the reasons it's important to have some people there is so that people who are saying Kaddish and mourning for people can do that with a community, with a minion, and that those dedicated people who showed up to help those people be able to engage in Jewish communal ritual of mourning were the people who would have been attacked here. It feels particularly painful.
--:-- Benjamin Epstein: I just didn't even, I didn't put two and two together. Those are the, like, and that's why it's all the old people, too, because they're the ones that make the minion. Who show up at, you know, 9.45, you know, at kickoff. No one shows up at kickoff. You know, you ask me who the first 11 people in shul are, who there after 10 minutes starting I can tell you who they are in my synagogue growing up You know it a specific group of people and it was really painful
--:-- Benjamin Epstein: Do you think this is going to close off the Jewish community?
--:-- Noam Hassenfeld: In reality, it will in part close off parts of the Jewish community in fear and worry. I think it's going to be a pretty big task to push back against that and remain an open and welcoming place, particularly in the context of Jews who come from less mainstream or traditional backgrounds. And I think we're going to have to work really, really, really hard to make sure that the things that people decide to do in order to keep their places safe don't end up closing off and shutting people out of the community and shutting us off from the broader world around us.
--:-- Noam Hassenfeld: I wonder, so to that end, as Benjamin's saying, to remaining open, did you see people from other religious communities out there in DuPont Circle, from other cultures?
--:-- Noam Hassenfeld: Yeah, actually, the vigil itself was put on by a whole bunch of organizations, Jewish organizations, not Jewish organizations, including the March for Racial Justice. There were a ton of people, white Jews, Jews of color, Muslims, black people, Latinos. I even ran into Linda Sarsour, who's a well-known Muslim activist. She's actually one of the people that helped organize the Women's March.
--:-- Linda Sarsour: What was your reaction when you heard the news?
--:-- Noam Hassenfeld: It was that punch in the gut, that nauseous. I felt shattered. I felt heartbroken. But I also reminded myself that anti-Semitism is not new in this country. Racism is not new. But what's different now is that we have an elected leadership that is not taking responsibility nor trying to bring people together. And it just scares me that those in power who have power to bring people together are actually dividing us.
--:-- Linda Sarsour: Do you draw a connection between a lot of the rhetoric that we've been hearing and these violent attacks?
--:-- Noam Hassenfeld: Absolutely. I mean, if you look at from the person that sent the pipe bombs to the different kind of democratic leaders to this person who engaged in this act of domestic terrorism against these Jewish Americans at the synagogue, the rhetoric is clearly connected to this emboldened racism, anti-Semitism and white nationalism.
--:-- Linda Sarsour: We have a president who actually admitted on national television that he himself was a nationalist. And we know that the foundation of white nationalism is anti-Semitism. So when you hear that one day and a few days later, 11 innocent people are killed, there's no way around it. You have to make that connection. We have to hold our leadership accountable.
--:-- Linda Sarsour: In this week alone, we've had three terrorist attacks against leftists, black people and Jews. How do you build a coalition that allows everyone to work together to see everyone else's problems as their own? White nationalism uses divide and conquer as a tactic. And what we need to do is resist with unrelenting solidarity and love, which is why I'm here today.
--:-- Linda Sarsour: An attack on a Jewish synagogue is an attack on a mosque, is an attack on a temple or church, on a community center. And, you know, when we need to be able to come out because they don't want to see us together. Jews will not be safe if Muslims are not safe, if black people are not safe, if Sikhs in America are not safe.
--:-- Noam Hassenfeld: Were people responsive to Linda's message, that argument that people need to come together and fight white nationalism right now?
--:-- Noam Hassenfeld: Yeah, a lot of people I talked to were really emphatic about the need to work together. I heard it in the speeches. I heard it from people I talked to. Michelle Zavis told me that when she heard about the attack at Tree of Life, she started thinking about other types of hate and violence in America.
--:-- Michelle Zavis: I think it's incredibly important for those of us who are white to recognize what is happening in this country and be just as horrified by what happened in Charleston, what happened at the Kroger, what happened at the Pulse nightclub, what happens on the border. We've already separated children from parents. It's just that it's been people who are brown.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Up next, we try to understand modern anti-Semitism in America.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Another note about the movie Viper Club. It's a new drama from the producers of All is Lost and Margin Call. As I said up top Viper Club Stars Academy Award winner Susan Sarandon as a mother struggling to free her captured journalist son After hitting walls with the FBI and various state agencies she discovers a clandestine community of journalists advocates and philanthropists who might be able to help Again, the movie also stars Matt Bomer and Edie Falco from The Sopranos. Viper Club was an official selection at the 2018 Toronto International Film Festival. It's out in theaters in New York and Los Angeles, and it's going to be nationwide Friday. You can check out the trailer if you just type in Viper Club trailer. I just did it. You can do it too.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: My name is Eric Ward, and I am executive director of Western State Center, a national civil and human rights organization based in the Pacific Northwest and Mountain States. And where are you right now, Eric?
--:-- Eric Ward: I am actually in New York, where I've been speaking actually on anti-Semitism.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Can I ask you a personal question? Are you Jewish?
--:-- Eric Ward: I am not, actually. But you speak about anti-Semitism.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: When I was younger, I lived in Oregon. I moved to Oregon from Southern California at the same time that an organization called the Aryan Nations was attempting to turn the Pacific Northwest into an Aryan homeland. And I worked with community organizations around the region to build a response. And that response really drove us to understand the importance of anti-Semitism as a fuel of the white nationalist movement.
--:-- Eric Ward: So what did you encounter when you moved to Oregon?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: 30 years ago, this November, a young Ethiopian man by the name of Molligata Saraw, who was a student in Portland, Oregon, was attacked and beaten to death by a group of neo-Nazi skinheads with baseball bats. And as we were trying to understand these organizations and its propaganda, whether the propaganda was anti-black, whether it was anti-immigrant, whether it was homophobic, what we began noticing is that in the propaganda and speeches, that Jews were always centered as the ultimate evil that was secretly trying to dispossess whites of the United States of America.
--:-- Eric Ward: And what we noticed is that, yes, racism existed, homophobia existed, xenophobia existed. But at the core, anti-Semitism seemed to always be the driving narrative for this movement. And the movement is what?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The movement is called white nationalism. It has its roots, ironically, in the victory of the civil rights movement. If you looked at the period of the 1960s, largely racists believed in segregation. They believed in a concept called white supremacy, which was based off of white superiority. Jim Crow was natural. Separate but equal was natural. And then all of a sudden, they face a huge political defeat called the Civil Rights Movement. that crushes Jim Crow. Now imagine you believe in white superiority. You believe black people are inferior. How do you explain all of a sudden that you've lost to people you saw as inferior?
--:-- Eric Ward: Ultimately, those who wanted to cling to Jim Crow in the days of old began to develop an answer for their political defeat. And that answer became white nationalism. the idea that there was a Jewish conspiracy that formulated the civil rights victory, that in fact blacks could not have done this on their own. And it is how anti-Semitism becomes the driving force of this new social movement.
--:-- Eric Ward: Anti-Semitism allows those whites who believe in white superiority to cling to it by saying that people of color and immigrants or women or Muslims have no real agency, that their demands for equality in this society are nothing more than the strings being pulled by a puppet master. It's not new. It is the mainstreaming of anti-Semitic tropes like globalist, globalists like financiers that have signaled to this extremist movement that it is okay and acceptable to act out on their fantasy of a racial revolution.
--:-- Eric Ward: Where are you seeing all this happen?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think the average American doesn't encounter a lot of anti-Semitism in his or her day to day. It certainly has been very prevalent over the last few weeks, including statements made by the president of the United States, who in a recent speech a few days ago talked about globalists. They're called globalists. They like the globe. I like the globe, too. I like the globe, too, but we have to take care of our people. We have to. Globalists. The crowd there supporting him started chanting Soros, Soros, Soros.
--:-- Eric Ward: You know, there are ads being run that echo this. Prima Donna athletes protesting our anthem. Left wing mobs paid to riot in the streets. Billionaire George Soros bankrolls the resistance. NRCC is responsible for the content of this advertising.
--:-- Eric Ward: Anti-Semitism functions as a narrative of ultimate evil. And this means when anti-Semitism becomes weaponized, it typically leads to violence such as we saw two days ago.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Where does someone like Robert Bowers who shot up the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh get his ideology Where are his ideas being allowed to sort of flourish
--:-- Eric Ward: He became very active on social media We know that he had individuals who were following him, who liked what he was saying or found him interesting.
--:-- Eric Ward: What we know most about Bowers is what he says before he commits his act of mass murder. He blames a Jewish organization, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, for asylum seekers who are moving through Central America and Mexico.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: My next guest just returned from Guatemala, where he spent four days on the ground witnessing the caravan just north of the Honduran border. Joining us tonight, Chris Farrell, director of investigations for Judicial Watch. Tell us what you can.
--:-- Chris Farrell: Sure. Look, this is a criminal involvement on the part of these leftist groups. It's highly organized, very elaborate, sophisticated operation. A lot of these folks also have affiliates who are getting money from the Soros-occupied State Department, and that is a very great concern.
--:-- Eric Ward: People can frame this as some partisan left or right issue, but again, I want to point to the fact that when Bauer walked into that synagogue, he did not stop to see who was from the left or who was from the right. Bauer didn't care. The only thing he cared about was that they were Jewish. And what that meant to him was that they were the enemy.
--:-- Eric Ward: And if we think anti-Semitism only impacts the Jewish community, communities of color, American Muslims, gays and lesbians, poor people in America are going to find out that we are likely more in danger because of the potential of anti-Semitism to undermine democracy than the Jewish community itself.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: People in Pittsburgh right now are calling on the president to denounce white nationalism. Do you think President Trump denouncing white nationalism, if he felt compelled to do so, could have any effect on this community that you know well?
--:-- Eric Ward: I think it would be responsible for Donald Trump to unequivocally denounce white nationalism. If Donald Trump refuses to do so, I believe that the Senate and House need to step up, condemn anti-Semitism publicly and the environment that has created it. And I believe that they should center the president for his role in helping to curate this environment that led to this mass killing two days ago.
--:-- Eric Ward: Eric, you've spent time with white nationalists as a black man and I'm a brown man and I'm sitting across from a Jewish man. I wonder, you know, what would you say to people who are fearful, who are fearful that the president won't condemn white nationalists and that there are going to be more attacks like this?
--:-- Eric Ward: I mean, I saw some AP report that said the shooter took advantage of unlocked doors, which seemed like an insane way of couching what happened on Saturday. And there are a lot of unlocked doors in this country. The normalizing of bigoted violence and the rationalization of bigoted violence is very disturbing at this time.
--:-- Eric Ward: So this is what I would tell individuals. We're in a very volatile time, and it's a very frightening time. We have to respond to this by resisting the inward pull that this type of intimidation causes. This type of terror seeks to make us feel isolated, and we have to know that we are not. We are the majority, and it means closing ranks with one another.
--:-- Eric Ward: It means understanding that this is not just an assault on the Jewish community. This is an assault on democracy. This is an assault on America. We have to build bridges with one another. We cannot wait until these events happen to do so. These are our communities. We are not always going to agree on everything, but we do agree that violence and bullying tactics are not the way.
--:-- Eric Ward: We have democratic practices that are supposed to be people-centered and inclusive, and we have to stand up for those things, and we have to stand up now.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The End with the world, but here's one about what we can do right. It's called Future Perfect. It's from Vox's Dylan Matthews. It's all about effective altruism, using all the resources we have to help others the most. The latest episode asks how our drinking water could help prevent suicide, which might seem crazy because no one's talking about it, but Dylan is. Lithium is a potent drug used to treat bipolar disorder, but it's also the third element in the periodic table. It's also a Great Nirvana song, and you can find tiny amounts of lithium in most drinking water. Scientists have discovered something remarkable. In areas where the tap water has more lithium, fewer people seem to die by suicide. And that raises a big question. Should we put small amounts of lithium in the drinking water? Listen to the latest episode of Future Perfect to find out. You can find Future Perfect wherever you find your podcasts.
