The Honest Take

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TRANSCRIPT
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00:00:00.000 — 00:00:14.360 · Alana Newhouse
It's not simply about us not abrogating Zionism. It's about us encouraging everyone else to embrace it, too. Because the reason they're fighting about us is because they're really fighting about everybody else.

00:00:17.720 — 00:00:39.320 · Ben Chertoff
Welcome to the honest. Take the show that goes past the headlines to find out what's actually true about Israel and about the people covering. I'm Ben Chertoff, and my guest today is Alana Newhouse. She's the editor who diagnosed why everything feels broken and then made the case that the cure is a 2000 year old Jewish idea called Zionism.

00:00:42.400 — 00:01:36.010 · Ben Chertoff
She grew up in the five towns in a house she likes to say contained all of American Judaism under one roof, Sephardic and Ashkenazi Orthodox and unaffiliated. In 2009, she founded tablet, a Jewish magazine that turned out to be a magazine about the whole world seen through a Jewish lens. In 2021, she wrote the essay Everything Is Broken that diagnosed flatness before most of us had a word for it, and this year she wrote its sequel.

"Zionism for Everyone," where she makes a claim that lit up Jewish Twitter and made a lot of people very angry that Zionism isn't just for the Jews, that it's a technology for national renewal, one that anyone could use, and that the rage against it isn't really hatred, it's envy. Alana Newhouse, welcome to the honest Take.

00:01:36.050 — 00:01:37.050 · Alana Newhouse
Thanks for having me.

00:01:37.090 — 00:01:57.770 · Ben Chertoff
You. You went to the. You were at the forward right when you left to start tablet. And that was 2009. Right. And you wanted to make a Jewish magazine that was about the world. Like seeing the world through the Jewish lens, if that. Am I? Am I describing that correctly?

00:01:57.770 — 00:04:02.670 · Alana Newhouse
That's what tablet became. Okay. The original idea. If you think back. 18 years. You know, back then we were like, oh, the internet is this great thing. And it's going to create this incredibly diverse and exciting and generative conversation. And it allows you to reach readers all over the world, and it gives you access to them, and they can talk back to you.

And all that stuff felt really positive and exciting at the time. What I the, the original mission of tablet was to be a magazine about Jewish identity and culture. I thought it was going to be for a very small audience, very small audience of people who were interested in reading 5000 word pieces about Jewish history or Jewish identity, and but that the internet was going to allow me to even though that audience was small, I didn't have to find them all in one geographic area because the internet, the internet would allow me to find those people everywhere around the world where they might live over the course of Tablet's history.

One of the things that happened, which I think we weren't, we definitely weren't aware of, at least in the early years, was that journalism around us was decaying and falling apart. And tablets started at first kind of subconsciously and then eventually overtly filling the vacuum, um, reporting on the world from our perspective.

And so all of a sudden, you start seeing pieces in tablet a few years in that don't have the word Jew, Jewish, Israel in them. Um, and then eventually probably around nine, 9 or 10 years in pieces that really could have appeared in any great general interest magazine. They just weren't appearing there. Right.

Um, and so tablet then became this a I think of tablet now as a general interest magazine where we bring a certain perspective to our reporting and our analysis and the way that we observe the world. But there are a lot of people on tablet staff who are not Jewish, and plenty of our readers who aren't either.

00:04:02.710 — 00:04:06.590 · Ben Chertoff
Interesting. Do you know what the breakdown is about? Demographic breakdown.

00:04:06.630 — 00:04:18.670 · Alana Newhouse
It's really hard online. So, you know, if we if you layer Google Analytics on top of reader surveys and stuff, we think that about a quarter of our readers have no connection to Jewish life.

00:04:18.750 — 00:04:36.710 · Ben Chertoff
So after October 7th, tablet became the English language place where a lot of Jews went to process what had happened, you know, myself included. Did did you feel that shift in real time? Did it change what you thought the purpose of the magazine was?

00:04:37.030 — 00:05:01.920 · Alana Newhouse
Um, it did change. I don't know that I would say that it changed the purpose of the magazine. It certainly changed the reality around us. But that just meant that we had to, in the same way that we were covering the world before we were covering the world. Now it's just that the world had changed. It definitely did.

We did feel that that emotional push from readers and we we actually the readership, I would say definitely did change after October 7th. Got a lot younger.

00:05:02.640 — 00:05:37.200 · Ben Chertoff
Along that same line. Um, you have launched a print version last year, which you, you said was Gen Z demand drove it. Um, what does that say about the younger readership, especially younger Jews, that they're going and you know what? It seems to me to use your vocabulary from your everything is Broken essay like this.

This more moving away from a frictionless medium into something that is, you know, has has more of that old school friction to it. It's not it's it's not instant.

00:05:37.240 — 00:05:53.559 · Alana Newhouse
Yeah. I think it's related. And I think that one of the challenges with conversations that attempt to be political is that they don't realize that what they're actually about is technological, and they're about their societal Conversations. And so

00:05:54.760 — 00:08:04.500 · Alana Newhouse
in the post October 7th landscape, as we started to get a rush of younger readers. I have this thing where I have a ton of WhatsApp groups, as everybody does on their phone, right? Um, but one of the things that would happen is, is if I ever gave a speech, people would start WhatsApp groups after my speeches of people who were in the speeches in or of a zoom that I did or of, you know, so I have these all these groups that tend to be demographically different.

And among the groups where there are younger tablet readers in them, I started to feel increasingly their own mistrust with what they were reading online. And I started to probe. And I do these like little focus groups sometimes where I just pick 5 to 10 people and I try to talk to them about something, either a topic or in this case, format change for tablet.

But I didn't put my finger on the scale. I just started to talk to some of these younger readers about their mistrust of the internet. And there was one particularly smart guy who I had this incredibly generative conversation with who said to me, you know, I'm like, I didn't, I don't know, a world without the internet.

Like, the internet's the wallpaper of my life. But because of that, I also know how easy it is for me to, like, go to GoDaddy and buy a URL that's like the Cleveland Post or something and put up a bunch of completely unsourced garbage. So because of that, I don't know what to trust online. And I realized that unlike his parents or his grandparents, who had an emotional investment in legacy brands, if they see something that has the AP or the New York Times or a brand name that they associate with, even if it's online.

They instinctively trust it, but younger readers don't have that emotional connection with any of those brands. And so all there is is the format at the format had started to become untrustworthy.

00:08:04.700 — 00:08:05.060 · Ben Chertoff
Mhm.

00:08:05.100 — 00:09:42.630 · Alana Newhouse
And he basically said to me I would love a print edition of tablet. So I started to probe that a little bit and ask a bunch of other people what they would, whether that was the same for them, whether they felt the same way. And one of the things that somebody else said to me was, yeah, you know, if I got a print edition, it's not that I would automatically trust everything that I read in it, but someone took the time, yeah, to pay, to put something together and mail it to me.

And I at least feel that investment in it, which I don't have on the internet because it's all free or relatively free, or could be free. And the reason why this was really, really good for me is because tablet always was rooted in esthetics, and we were very, very committed to pieces being not only very well edited and well done and written and edited well, but also with beautiful art.

We were deeply invested in this space of artists and illustrators, and we've always believed that a piece should be shown the respect it deserves by being illustrated properly. And so the idea of actually returning to really the roots of what we were, which were magazines and the great postwar American magazines, felt like kismet.

So then so we launched print a little about a year ago, and it's been a crazy success. We're thrilled with it.

00:09:42.750 — 00:10:30.960 · Ben Chertoff
It's such a such an insight From you, from a Gen Z audience, in somebody who's never really experienced paper like. I cut my teeth as a fact checker. I started as a fact checker in print magazines and so like, and I've seen the change now where we go to the internet and there's, there's such a, like a temporal quality to what gets published on the internet.

If there's a mistake, you fix it, you know, 20 minutes later with print, you know, I remember being, you know, closing the book and you're there in the office till like two in the morning as it goes from like one desk to another desk over and over again. And we're slaving over every single word because you have no second chance.

And that is the beauty of print.

00:10:31.000 — 00:11:07.520 · Alana Newhouse
I mean, not to get I mean, I'm pretty woo but not to get. But but but I really do believe that the energy that gets put into a product is felt by the recipient. And what you're describing is a set of humans putting a certain kind of energy into a story or into a magazine, and that magazine then goes into people's hands and into their homes and in their on their coffee tables.

And I think that that gets transmitted.

00:11:08.520 — 00:11:35.200 · Ben Chertoff
Which kind of moves on to your 2021 essay titled Everything Is Broken and You Talk. You diagnosed this idea of flatness that the demand for a frictionless hierarchy allergic instant everything systems as this disease that's hollowing out medicine, media, education, religion. Can you give me the, you know, the 1 or 2 sentence CliffsNotes for somebody who hasn't read that?

00:11:35.240 — 00:12:40.090 · Alana Newhouse
What I tried to explain in that essay was that many of us were experiencing the effects of a technological revolution. We all kind of thought we were just getting. Email, texting. But actually what was happening was that every part of our life was being reordered. And there's a way to misread that piece as an anti-technology piece, which it's not.

What it is is it's a piece that encourages people to look at the effects of technology on the institutions that they previously used as mediators between them and the world. And it was the institutions that I felt were were getting stressed by that technology and were some of them were responding well, but many of them were not, and many of them by resisting technology or embracing it too much or, um, not understanding the consequences for their relationship with humans of having technology in their space.

We're getting broken.

00:12:40.500 — 00:12:40.820 · Ben Chertoff
Mhm.

00:12:40.860 — 00:15:22.950 · Alana Newhouse
And for example, technology is one of the reasons why we all have this incredibly frustrating experience with the medical system, for example, which is one of the, um, the institutions that I looked at in that piece. But it's also the reason why you sit on endless calls with customer service. It's the reason why you don't know whether or not your MRI was read by a human or a robot.

And again, maybe it's better that it's read by a robot, right? But the point is, is it being read by a robot and you're not having a human to call is a difference in people's lives. And the ability or inability of the systems that control the stuff of our life is being strained. That will cause frustration, which you can decide is about you, or you can decide is about some other enemy, but it's actually about the system that you're that you're trying to flow through is not flowing right now.

So what I tried to diagnose with with that piece was was that sense of brokenness. And part of what I explained was that technology, the specific technology of the internet, is one that puts a primacy on flattening the landscape. And there's a very productive reason for that. Right. So Amazon wants to make it as easy as possible for you to buy your paper towels.

So they need to have one click. You buy things with one click. There isn't there aren't multiple pages for you to go through because at each page, each page adds friction to your experience of buying your paper towels. But what that also means is that these systems have to get designed with this idea that there's no difference between people.

They have to draw down to the lowest common denominator of human behavior and then make that what the system is built on. That can be very functional and it can be very effective. But in society, it can also create a forgetting about what is different about us and what is distinctive and more importantly, can leech our lives of all friction, which is incredibly important to human development.

It's very, very important to our brains. It's very, very important to our the rest of our bodies. Our challenge and friction is vital. And when we take it, when we take that out of all aspects of our lives, we weaken.

00:15:23.350 — 00:15:47.920 · Ben Chertoff
Let's move on to the the the meat of this the your essay recently, "Zionism for Everyone." Um, can you lay out lay it out plainly. Your claim is that Zionism has become, in your words, a technology for national renewal that could conceivably be used by anyone. What do you actually mean by that? I mean, can you.

Can anybody actually use it? Yes.

00:15:48.200 — 00:16:50.970 · Alana Newhouse
Um, so if you if you squint, you will see the direct line from everything is broken into Zionism for everyone, in part because they're both driven by my analysis of how technology works societally and the flatness of that I tried to define in that first piece ends up appearing, um, at broad national and international scale.

In the second essay, in which I tried to explain that the one of the things that happened in the postwar decades, particularly in Europe, but eventually globally, is driven by Europe's reaction to the Holocaust and then followed by globalization even before technology. There was an effort made to imagine that nationalism or national difference was the poison,

00:16:52.210 — 00:18:07.330 · Alana Newhouse
and that what needed to happen was we needed to begin to strip away national identity. Strip away national boundaries. Strip away culture. And that was happening for decades before technology comes and basically puts that whole thing on crack and and technology. Then turbo charges that flattening what that then creates.

Again, I don't know, I think many people were not conscious of it, maybe still aren't conscious of it. Is it meant that many nations in the West, many people are living living in nations in the West began to feel that the right to have a sovereign, distinct nation was no longer something that they a privilege that they enjoyed or were allowed to enjoy.

Once you start to have an argument around about Israel, where we start to throw around this term Zionism and Jews defensively say Zionism isn't a threat. It's just the right of the Jewish people to their sovereign nation in the land of Israel.

00:18:07.770 — 00:18:08.250 · Ben Chertoff
Mhm.

00:18:08.290 — 00:18:21.210 · Alana Newhouse
When you put that claim into a landscape where everyone else has abrogated their own sovereignty, all of a sudden it looks like Israel gets to have something that nobody else does.

00:18:21.530 — 00:18:21.970 · Ben Chertoff
Hmm.

00:18:22.050 — 00:18:40.340 · Alana Newhouse
But the Jews and many Israelis did not know that. Like they're not conscious that everybody else seems to have lost that privilege along the way. So they think they're just arguing to have what everyone else has. Everyone else feels that they're arguing for special treatment.

00:18:40.820 — 00:18:41.220 · Ben Chertoff
Mhm.

00:18:41.220 — 00:19:16.180 · Alana Newhouse
And therein lies, I think, a huge part of the controversy around Israel and Zionism. And so now to answer your question, one of the things that I started to feel as I looked at this space and I looked at the conversation around Israel, was that actually what people, people were not there were many people, good faith actors who did not necessarily want the Jews to not have something.

They just wanted it for themselves, too.

00:19:16.900 — 00:19:17.340 · Ben Chertoff
Hmm.

00:19:17.660 — 00:19:39.470 · Alana Newhouse
And so the question then became, how can they get it back? And I started to look at how Israel got it. It's a very young country, and as a result, it's worth studying as a template. And when I started to look into it, it felt to me like there was a pretty simple technology there,

00:19:40.710 — 00:19:57.630 · Alana Newhouse
one of which is an understanding of your people as distinct. And we can talk about that a little bit and what that means to have a distinct culture. But once you have a distinct people with a distinct culture, you then add two things to it. One, a vision for the for the future.

00:19:58.830 — 00:20:08.510 · Alana Newhouse
What do you want your future to look like? And two ruthless pragmatism to achieve that vision. Anyone in the world can do that.

00:20:09.190 — 00:20:16.229 · Ben Chertoff
Do you think, though? I mean, my personal thought on this is that

00:20:17.270 — 00:20:38.160 · Ben Chertoff
Israel succeeds in many ways because it has to, because it's an existential threat for Israel to not succeed. We are such a small people. Um, doesn't that crucible have something to do with the success of of the Jewish state in particular?

00:20:38.200 — 00:20:53.040 · Alana Newhouse
Maybe. And maybe that's part of the culture there. But plenty of nations thrive and succeed with different culture, so you do not need to have an existential threat to have a country, right?

00:20:53.080 — 00:20:53.400 · Ben Chertoff
Yeah, of.

00:20:53.400 — 00:21:17.360 · Alana Newhouse
Course there are plenty of countries that do so. I don't know that I know that that you can identify that as central to the Israeli culture. I might argue that I might argue for a different way of articulating it, but you can do that. But just because Israel has that does not mean that everybody else has to.

I think that everyone can have their own culture.

00:21:17.720 — 00:22:10.160 · Ben Chertoff
So the line that really lit up Jewish Twitter was that expressions of disgust are often evidence of envy. And you touched on this briefly, um, Saying that anti-Zionism is driven more by envy than by anti-Semitism. That's, you know, that's a big swing. Um, is is that really what you mean, that that this is that this is envy?

Yes. So much of what is lobbied lobbed against Israel are, are, are claims that are a thousand years old. You know, that, um, the the blood libels of the claims of killing children, of dual loyalty. Um, you know, that stuff predates the State of Israel by a thousand years. So it seems like there has to be some degree of anti-Semitism there.

I mean, is this just a new alibi for it?

00:22:10.720 — 00:23:34.620 · Alana Newhouse
Um, well, first of all, you're imagining that anti-Semitism historically was never about envy, which, I don't know was the case, but but more importantly, I think that there's a difference between how things get expressed and what the fundamental feeling is, right? We all know this. Anybody who's in a marriage or in a relationship knows that sometimes what you say isn't actually what you feel.

And the internet creates these memes that then allow you to have a container for your feeling that somebody else made. And let me put it this way. anti-Semitism is not a cause. It is a symptom. Historically, it's a symptom of societies and stress, right? And I think that that is what we're looking at now.

What I've tried to explore in that essay is what is the stress that society is put under. So what are you really feeling when you say you believe that the Jews are killing babies? What's underneath it? And if what's underneath it is a feeling that the Jews have something that you don't have. Then what's underneath it is envy.

If what's underneath it is a suspicion that the Jews secretly control the levers of power, thereby disempowering you. Right? And what's underneath it is envy.

00:23:34.780 — 00:23:35.420 · Ben Chertoff
Right.

00:23:35.460 — 00:24:02.660 · Alana Newhouse
So I'm not diagnosing or describing what we're seeing on the surface. We all know what we're seeing on the surface. What I'm trying to do is go a few levels deeper and say, what are people actually feeling, even if they don't know that it's what they're feeling? And I think that in good psychoanalytic framework, the fact that that line is the line that infuriated everyone.

It strikes me as like evidence that I was right.

00:24:03.140 — 00:24:28.949 · Ben Chertoff
Okay. To talk about the specific word Zionism. Um, you know, people like Sam Harris have recently said on like, figures show that like that we shouldn't even be using the word Zionism anymore. That that it's an own goal that like Zionism is done. The state of Israel exists, and you're you're smiling like you have a

00:24:30.150 — 00:24:33.750 · Ben Chertoff
an answer to this. What do you think about that? I mean.

00:24:34.870 — 00:24:59.030 · Alana Newhouse
Um, so, uh, that idea could not be more misguided in my view. It's not something that we picked up at Walmart 20 years ago and is now irrelevant to our lives. Zionism was an idea that's thousands of years old, and we don't simply discard things from our legacy. That's the first thing is it's right.

00:24:59.070 — 00:24:59.470 · Ben Chertoff
Right.

00:24:59.510 — 00:25:53.590 · Alana Newhouse
It doesn't seem like good hygiene culturally to do that. But more importantly, I think that the the impulse to abrogate this jewel that helped us get what nobody else has now is a weak, it's defensive. and it's also the key to us making everybody else vulnerable. The Jews and Zionism are not the target. The target here is the West.

We are just in the way. And if we give up on that idea, that's part of the reason. The conversation around Sam's essay was another indication to me that there was something right here. It's not simply about us not abrogating Zionism. It's about us encouraging everyone else to embrace it, too,

00:25:54.870 — 00:26:23.319 · Alana Newhouse
because the reason they're fighting about us is because they're really fighting about everybody else. Right. The question here is, can the can that can the West have distinct civilizations? And we if the West would like to fight for their own privilege to have distinct civilizations, it's going to need.

It definitely will not be able to do that. If

00:26:24.320 — 00:26:30.880 · Alana Newhouse
the price for being in that conversation is the Jews giving it up where the first line of defense.

00:26:31.080 — 00:26:56.280 · Ben Chertoff
I mean, it seems like it's it is both the, the, you know, the the classic anti-Semitism and, you know, transmuted into anti-Zionism and that, like, you know, everyone gets mad at Jews for controlling all the money. But that was the only thing we were allowed to do. Um, so, yeah. Um, what what would that look like for for a country in the West to embrace Zionism?

00:26:56.280 — 00:27:52.890 · Alana Newhouse
Well, that's part of what I was hoping. And it's it's still happening in my inbox, but part of what I wanted was to generate those conversations. I am not I'm not German. Right. So I can't generate a conversation about what's German ness right now because I don't live there and it's not my culture. But I would love to field ideas from people who want to write pieces about what that would mean for them.

What does it mean? What is Norwegian ness? Write. I'd love to know. Right? Then there are some countries or political leaders, and I talk about some of them in the piece, who I think have been making an effort to manifest a vision for what their country's culture is and how to fight for it. But it's a conversation that I would love to have to to have my ear in, because I think it would be.

I think it's fascinating and I think it's the way forward.

00:27:52.930 — 00:28:11.770 · Ben Chertoff
I mean, it also seems like Jews were uniquely, you know, we're uniquely suited for this because we've been a people in unto ourselves without our own nation, but a cohesive identity. And I don't know, is, is that something that exists elsewhere? Yes.

00:28:11.970 — 00:28:32.300 · Alana Newhouse
I think there is such a thing as France. I think there is such a thing as Japan. I think there is such a thing as America, and I refuse to believe that we're all just one big trackless mass. It's not my experience of life. I know when I'm in a system that's been designed by an Italian.

00:28:33.100 — 00:28:33.900 · Ben Chertoff
This is right.

00:28:33.980 — 00:28:59.420 · Alana Newhouse
And so that means there's something different about that. I know when I am in a space that a Scandinavian has decorated, that's not fake. It's real and it's culture and it's important. And it's where people's it's how humans develop their ideas about how to organize their lives.

00:28:59.660 — 00:29:02.300 · Ben Chertoff
Mhm. Do you think if we,

00:29:03.460 — 00:29:17.700 · Ben Chertoff
you know, if the Italians became more Italian and the French really embraced, you know, a national identity, that that would actually end the animus towards the only Jewish state.

00:29:17.740 — 00:31:40.160 · Alana Newhouse
Yeah, I do. I think it would be a long road, because I think that we've gotten ourselves into, um, a state of confusion, again, largely technologically driven, where we have replaced national identity and national identity markers and social cultural bonds with politics and in particularly technologically driven politics, so that people now feel like that's their identity.

Um, and so it will take I think it, it it will take a while, although I don't know how long the internet makes everything move faster, but it will take a while for people to realize that their identity and their lives are not based on who they follow on TikTok. Right. But I don't know how long that takes. And it inevitably will be a patchwork where there's some success and some failure, and some people succeed at different rates or at different rhythms.

The thing that I think is really important though, which if you haven't read the piece, you might not know, is that I distinctly talk about the my thinking being kind of in between two wrongheaded ideologies or ways of thinking right now. One is is broadly identified with the left, which embraces this flattening, embraces boundary looseness, embraces this idea of the individual as the functional unit.

And there is no, you know, our tribes and our communities and our our states and nations are, if not irrelevant, then they are. There's something bad about them. And then on the other side of me are these blood and soil kind of jingoistic thinkers and politicians who and others who are broadly associated with the right.

And they too, I think, are missing this opportunity to articulate a healthy way forward and a and a a progressive way forward and a funny, effective use that term by being very backwards looking. All of those people tend to be driven by a desire to reanimate some lost glory of the past. And I think that that takes people into very dark places.

00:31:40.480 — 00:31:53.280 · Ben Chertoff
Yeah. You talked about the four pillars of, uh, of Zionism that you have demographic continuity, collective responsibility, preserved identity, and a cohesive, forward looking people. That was part of the technology of Zionism.

00:31:53.320 — 00:32:34.010 · Alana Newhouse
Got it? Yes. So, so basically what I the way that I described these is I described them as your survival tests. Right. So pretty simple questions to ask yourself. But when you think about them, they're actually four questions that only Israel right now in the West, um, Answers in the affirmative. The first one is, can you maintain your demographics?

Do you have babies? Right. Israelis are having kids above the replacement level, which makes them completely unique among Western nations. The second question is, is can you defend yourself? It is a truism, whether we like it or not, that people who can't defend themselves tend to not survive.

00:32:34.530 — 00:32:35.050 · Ben Chertoff
Mhm.

00:32:35.290 — 00:33:15.370 · Alana Newhouse
It's just one of the things about life. Right. So you have to be able to be not be, be both able and willing to defend your people, the people that you see yourself as a part of. Um, the third one is, is are you happy? And by happy, you know, happiness is a kind of funny term, but I use it because it's used sociologically.

There are all these there are various studies and markers of sort of happiness in countries, and Israel is reliably among the happiest nations on Earth. Even though they are frequently in violent wars.

00:33:15.730 — 00:33:18.610 · Ben Chertoff
It's astounding. I mean, you feel at the moment you land, right?

00:33:18.650 — 00:33:33.610 · Alana Newhouse
And that is where you see the forward looking. The effect of having a forward looking vision there. And then the final test is basically how you engage with the challenge, the technological challenge of your moment.

00:33:33.930 — 00:33:34.450 · Ben Chertoff
Mhm.

00:33:35.010 — 00:34:33.020 · Alana Newhouse
This isn't to say that other other countries that are bigger or different can't meet the challenge. It's just that Israel is meeting the challenge of an AI moment and of a technological moment in a very particular way. Technology that we're looking at and that are covering our lives tend to be ones where there's a primacy put on being able to deploy small and cohesive teams.

And if I told you that you had two choices, you could be president of one of two countries. Right now. You could be the president of a large country with very high obesity problems and education. A lot of different, diverse people who don't share anything in common. Or you could be president of a country of 10 million people, half of whom serve in the military together, and a large portion of whom sit around together in small groups and learn an obscure legal document.

00:34:33.100 — 00:34:33.659 · Ben Chertoff
Mhm.

00:34:33.980 — 00:34:44.820 · Alana Newhouse
There's one that, simply by analysis, is going to be primed to be better, um, at meeting this technological moment.

00:34:44.860 — 00:34:56.980 · Ben Chertoff
Do you think that October 7th kind of kicked a bunch of us out of the flatness trap and kind of embraced nuance some more? I might be, you know, reading into my own experience here.

00:34:57.020 — 00:35:13.750 · Alana Newhouse
No, I think that that's exactly what it did. Um, and I think that that was it was absolutely a consequence of the public discourse. I think that the way that I'll give you an example that's that is that draws from the thinking behind the piece.

00:35:14.110 — 00:35:14.550 · Ben Chertoff
Mhm.

00:35:14.590 — 00:35:45.710 · Alana Newhouse
When we think about distinction in cultures or distinction in people, I use this metaphor of music. Right. That what you need to be doing as a people is making music that is distinct, so that it's recognizable both to your own people as yours and also to others as distinctly yours. What that means is that we all develop cultures using different instruments at different levels, and you can kind of think about culture as a big mixing board.

00:35:45.950 — 00:35:46.310 · Ben Chertoff
Mhm.

00:35:46.350 — 00:35:53.910 · Alana Newhouse
So Japan in Japan race is a loud instrument.

00:35:54.190 — 00:35:54.790 · Ben Chertoff
Mhm.

00:35:55.190 — 00:37:12.730 · Alana Newhouse
If you are not Japanese and you move to Japan, even if you speak Japanese fluently, even if you speak Japanese with no accent, you will still be seen as distinct from Japanese culture, because race is actually. It is a strong sound in their music. Race is completely not even in the Israeli music at all, right?

It is. Israel has other tethers that keep them together and that create the foundation of their culture, but race is not one of them. What that meant. So? So there's natural difference in cultures, but our inability to understand this difference and understand how cultures distinguish themselves from one another, then created this mass confusion in public discourse about Israel, where we applied an American racial discourse to Israel and then kept getting our circuits jammed because they don't fit into it.

Right. And the left kind of can't figure it out. And then the right keeps saying, see, it's a racially diverse thing, and the whole conversation becomes people talking over each other because it's just nobody is rooted inside of this fundamental idea, which is that cultures are different.

00:37:12.770 — 00:38:04.290 · Ben Chertoff
In the diaspora. There's this, especially on the diasporic Jewish left, um, there is this revival of the idea of Bundism. There's a neo-Bundism, the idea of doikayt or here ness, and that Jewish life should be built about, you know, right where we are now. You know, many people have said that that is a misreading of, of the original, original Bundism.

But, you know, writers are arguing that diaspora ism should replace Israel as the center of Jewish identity. It's like, it seems to me that that is like the ultimate flattening of of the concept of Judaism. It is like the, the least, uh, you know, the, the frictionless version. I mean, where do you Why is that here?

That's the wrong answer.

00:38:05.490 — 00:39:09.540 · Alana Newhouse
Well, first of all, I just want to say history doesn't repeat itself. And we don't just go, and I don't try to. I don't think there's any use in trying to reanimate something that existed in the past. That said, you can look to the past for inspiration and for modeling of something that felt useful for one reason that you think is still applicable.

For me, um, what's interesting about the argument is that I do believe in the diaspora. I live in the diaspora, and I'm firmly committed to my diaspora country. I'm an American, and so I don't I meet them in their commitment to their diaspora context. The problem is that it's not really Bundism, right?

It's communism. And they just want to be communists. And they're looking for a Jewish costume for their communism. Which is fine. If you want to be a communist, just go be a communist like I doesn't.

00:39:09.580 — 00:39:09.900 · Ben Chertoff
Right.

00:39:09.940 — 00:39:36.460 · Alana Newhouse
And and to be perfectly honest, if you want to find your Jewish costuming for it, that's fine too. It's just simply. That's what it is. It's your Jewish excuse. It's the Jewish door into the ideology that you, in fact, want to embrace. And so then let's talk about that ideology instead, is how it feels to me, rather than the door into it for you, which doesn't feel that interesting.

00:39:37.180 — 00:39:51.980 · Ben Chertoff
Right. I mean, it strikes me more as the socialists who thought that socialism would end anti-Semitism in the, you know, early 19th century. Whereas like the Bundists, you know, they had like rifles in Yiddish schools. It was a very rooted and cohesive thing.

00:39:52.020 — 00:40:42.590 · Alana Newhouse
And also and, and and the important thing is, is to me and again, there are so much smarter people who can talk about this. but the idea of imagining Yiddish outside of lived life and outside of a Yiddish speaking peoples and culture is impossible. There's no again, it's just it's a performance and it's a play that you're putting on, which can be fun and that's great, but you're not going to the supermarket and talking to the supermarket lady in Yiddish.

You're not you're not going. You're not, you're not working that way. And I, I just think that there's something intellectually. It's like Swiss cheese. It just doesn't. It's not really a real argument.

00:40:42.750 — 00:40:46.870 · Ben Chertoff
Right? I mean, well, it's just like taking one piece and not not the rest of it.

00:40:46.870 — 00:41:15.110 · Alana Newhouse
And I get I get it. It feels comfortable to you because it feels like it's your way of being accepted on the left without feeling like you have to abrogate everything about who you are. But I would encourage you then to ask yourself why you feel you have to abrogate who you are in those spaces, right? What is it about those spaces that's asking that of you and I?

I, I just think that the answer might not be what people think it is.

00:41:16.470 — 00:41:35.950 · Ben Chertoff
You've said what really interests you is the emotional palette of Jews, emotion and esthetics over power, the instrumental politics of coverage. You know, what are we feeling right now that the institutions aren't aren't naming the legacy institutions?

00:41:35.950 — 00:41:59.480 · Alana Newhouse
I'm so hopeful about, about Jews. I'm hopeful about American Jews. I'm hopeful about choosing in other countries. And I'm very hopeful about Israel. I feel that there is a there's an embrace of increasingly there's an embrace that being a minority and a minority is actually our natural place.

00:41:59.760 — 00:42:00.280 · Ben Chertoff
Mhm.

00:42:00.640 — 00:42:46.240 · Alana Newhouse
I don't need all every single person who responds to a poll and says they're Jewish, to agree with me on all of the issues that they get asked about. I do need a small cohort of Jews to feel kindred with me, and I have that. And increasingly that cohort is much bigger than I ever would have thought it would be in this moment.

In fact, in the wake of October 7th, I was afraid that that cohort of Jews who would want to raise the flag for their Jewishness would be vanishingly small. And it's absolutely not. And even if it's the minority, which I suspect it might be, I don't think it's that small a minority.

00:42:46.520 — 00:42:50.480 · Ben Chertoff
The minority among Jews or among Jews. I mean, obviously we are the minority.

00:42:50.520 — 00:43:12.370 · Alana Newhouse
The minority among Jews. Right. So if you told me that actually only 40% or 50% of American 40. Let's call it a minority. 45% of American Jews actually were, um, committed to being distinctly Jewish and Zionist. I'd be like, let's go.

00:43:12.450 — 00:43:13.010 · Ben Chertoff
But still.

00:43:13.010 — 00:43:15.090 · Alana Newhouse
A lot. It's a lot, and it's enough.

00:43:16.130 — 00:43:41.850 · Ben Chertoff
Legacy media. Let's go move on to that. Legacy media is collapsing, independence or rising. You've argued that real institutions with editors, standards, hierarchy will matter more as the old ones die. I happen to agree with that. Um, can you make the case for hierarchy to an audience who's been told that the gatekeepers are the enemy?

00:43:41.890 — 00:43:43.570 · Alana Newhouse
Yeah, I feel it's like saying.

00:43:43.610 — 00:43:45.010 · Alana Newhouse
Like, men are the enemy.

00:43:45.050 — 00:43:47.570 · Alana Newhouse
Like we it's.

00:43:47.570 — 00:45:45.820 · Alana Newhouse
Like. Which one? I mean, what are you talking about? That's crazy. I don't want to speak for anyone. who works for me. And. And I'm sure whoever listens to this can reach them and see if they agree with me. But I think that plenty of people a tablet are happy that they don't have my job. They don't want to keep the lights on there.

They don't want to be responsible for talking to lawyers. That's not what they want to do. They want to be free to go out and report on the world, to make a great piece of art, to create social media posts. That's what they want to do. They do not want to be doing my job. And I think that hierarchy is about everyone having a different job.

So if I do my job correctly, I create the space for you to have your own distinct job I am. You know, many years ago somebody asked me a question. They said, you know, what do you do all day? Like what's your job? And I said, I brought up this episode of The Dog Whisperer. And I saw where Cesar Millan. Yeah, is talking to this woman who has this big, beautiful Samoyed.

So the gorgeous big dog. And she explains to him that she got the dog when the dog was a puppy and she was working from home. And now the dog is grown up and is very big, and she also has to go back to the office, and the dog is now peeing on her rug and ripping up her furniture. And she explains to Cesar Millan, you know, I know that the dog wants me to feel guilty, and that's what the dog is trying to express.

And Cesar Millan is like, okay, guilt is not a dog emotion, right? And he was like, you are the alpha dog. And when you leave, this dog does not know what it's supposed to do all day. And you, by giving it the run of the house, are actually creating anxiety for the dog.

00:45:45.860 — 00:45:46.380 · Ben Chertoff
Mhm.

00:45:46.420 — 00:46:16.790 · Alana Newhouse
Now you have a challenge because this dog is a big beautiful Samoyed, so you can't pin it in tightly, because then you're going to crush its spirit and who it is. But you also can't give it the full run of the house with no boundaries, because it's spinning off into anxiety. So your task as the owner of this dog is to figure out exactly the right shape and size pen for this big, beautiful thing that you have.

I make pens,

00:46:17.830 — 00:46:36.630 · Alana Newhouse
okay? For creative people. That's what I do. I make pens so that people, writers, editors, artists can make things that they want to make. They have enough creative freedom to to maneuver and to move, but not so much that they spin off into the atmosphere and I lose them.

00:46:36.830 — 00:46:38.350 · Ben Chertoff
Right, right, right.

00:46:38.630 — 00:46:55.520 · Alana Newhouse
That's a particular job. And you want somebody who actually does that for you. If you are that creative type, you don't want to have to do everything. And so the question about gatekeepers isn't about whether or not gatekeeping is bad. It's about who does it.

00:46:55.840 — 00:46:56.320 · Ben Chertoff
Right.

00:46:56.360 — 00:47:05.280 · Alana Newhouse
Which is, by the way, the question we're getting in so much of life, the question about life isn't whether art is bad, it's about who does it and who gets lauded for it and why.

00:47:05.760 — 00:47:06.320 · Ben Chertoff
Right.

00:47:06.360 — 00:47:29.040 · Alana Newhouse
The question about politics isn't politics isn't bad necessarily. The question is, is who's doing it? And how do they do it? So I think that you're setting yourself on a weird path when you decide that the category is the problem and not how it's being manifested right now, and by whom?

00:47:30.600 — 00:47:53.050 · Ben Chertoff
Speaking of by whom, you graduated Columbia J school. What has changed in the ideological water in Columbia? J school in J schools in general? I mean, like, are you seeing this to the the in a much more ideological bent among younger writers coming out of these institutions.

00:47:53.410 — 00:48:42.810 · Alana Newhouse
Yes. But again, I believe that the conversation around politics is actually a conversation around format. So, um, even when I was at J school, there wasn't really a journalistic industry with jobs on offer. Even back then, it was just more than 20 years ago. Right? There definitely isn't now. So like with journalistic outlets, what these institutions have done is they've replaced the promise of a job that actually might be able to sustain you, and maybe even a family with a sense of righteousness.

That's what that's how you get paid. That's your paycheck. Your paycheck is your sense that you're fighting for some righteous cause because you're not getting another paycheck. That's actually cash money.

00:48:43.170 — 00:48:44.010 · Ben Chertoff
Right, right.

00:48:44.050 — 00:48:55.780 · Alana Newhouse
So I think that the that the space of the journalism schools directly relates to the space of the industry that they're looking to hire into, which itself is going through this period of real challenge.

00:48:56.060 — 00:49:06.980 · Ben Chertoff
Where do you see this going? I mean, you said you were optimistic about Jews, but like in terms of the media landscape five years out, are you optimistic about are you optimistic about it?

00:49:07.020 — 00:51:24.549 · Alana Newhouse
I am, I am, I am optimistic about it. I think that I mean, here's my take on what happened. There was an ecosystem of legacy media outlets. Those legacy outlets did not see the challenges, both to their business and to the culture of the ecosystem. And as a result, they were caught flat footed and they stopped really responding and they stopped doing their jobs.

And as a result, particularly starting in Covid and after Covid, a kind of alternative media space Developed Substack, social media, various independent sites that that started that independent media space, then in many ways hurtled into a space of conspiracy theories and nutcases. And so they ended up.

They had a the independent media landscape had the opportunity to replace the legacy media landscape. They were primed to take their place in the media diets of vast numbers of Americans. But instead they went and they had their they they started to commit their own sins. So what's now happening is that I see is that there's an increasing blending of the normative elements of both landscapes into one landscape, and it's going to take time.

Um, I don't know that we're going to be looking at a cohesive American media landscape for another ten years. Maybe, but I see it forming already, I think that. I mean, I've said this in other spaces, but I think that there's a and again, I could be wrong about this, but my read, for example, of the CBS acquisition of the Free Press is not that the Free Press was now swallowed up by CBS, but that CBS was looking to infuse itself with the spirit and the journalistic principles of the free press.

That's very interesting. Right now, you're seeing a kind of blend of the of of the

00:51:25.550 — 00:52:15.600 · Alana Newhouse
normative aspects of the independence space with the normative aspects of the legacy space into what I think is going to emerge to be a new media landscape. And I think that media landscape, I hope that media landscape ends up being much more diverse, truly diverse in its in the worldviews it offers than either one of the landscapes that it is replacing.

And because now both of them offer these weird kind of monolithic views of the world. And I think that readers and viewers at this point, given the internet, they want real diversity of opinion, they want true difference of perspective. And I think that the media outlets that can do that and can give that to them, are the ones that are going to succeed going forward, whether they're from the independent space or from the legacy space.

00:52:16.080 — 00:52:28.520 · Ben Chertoff
What do you tell a 25 year old journalist, Jewish journalist who's starting out today? Do you do they go into a legacy institution and work on that from the inside or to an independent?

00:52:29.040 — 00:52:31.160 · Alana Newhouse
Well, are they talented.

00:52:32.160 — 00:52:33.000 · Ben Chertoff
I guess, yeah.

00:52:33.040 — 00:52:52.399 · Alana Newhouse
If they're talented, I tell them to come work for me. And but no, the in seriousness, what I tell everyone. Not just journalists, but I tell everyone about everything right now. Is that you? Can I when I look at an institution or at an industry or at an idea, actually, frankly, at this point I

00:52:53.720 — 00:53:18.520 · Alana Newhouse
you can put them in one of four buckets. The first bucket is this thing works well enough. It basically does what I want it to do, in which case the energy and the resources that I put into it is preserving energy or conserving energy. Right? So I'm working at that thing to keep it as it's as what it is.

00:53:18.880 — 00:53:19.440 · Ben Chertoff
Mhm.

00:53:20.120 — 00:54:54.340 · Alana Newhouse
Then there's the institution that seems to have lost its way, but where there's gold in it somehow. And so you say, okay, I am going to work at this institution and I'm going to invest in it. My time, my resources, maybe my money. But it's reforming energy. I am investing in it to make it better, and to change it with the understanding that it's not functioning well.

Right now, a third impulse is those institutions are done for, and I need to build something completely new and work at something that does not currently exist in the world, because that's the best use of my time and my life. And then there's a fourth one, which isn't necessarily a natural impulse of my own, but I understand it on other people's parts, which is there is an institution that's become so poisoned that it is dangerous.

And in fact, it is worth my time to actively work to dismantle it. That is, those are the burn it all down people. And I do know people who are in those spaces around particular institutions and they make good cases. It's not my impulse, but it's definitely an impulse that's alive today. And so when I look at a 25 year old, I say to them, what is the institution or industry or idea that you're captivated by?

And which one of these buckets does it fit into? And then approach it that way so that that's that's how I would advise somebody younger today.

00:54:54.780 — 00:55:09.260 · Ben Chertoff
For the general person now who's, who's trying to get friction over the frictionless, this is going back to the everything is broken idea. Um, what's one thing somebody listening could do to start that move?

00:55:09.460 — 00:55:43.150 · Alana Newhouse
So when I say Zionism is for everyone, what I mean is it's not only for nations and peoples, I actually mean it's for individuals too. So the whole point of the technology, that of thinking about Zionism as a technology, is that it allows you to think of it as three different things. There's the understanding of what's unique or different about you, and then there's adding on to a vision for the future and adding on to it work.

That is a methodology that you can use as an individual.

00:55:43.470 — 00:55:43.910 · Ben Chertoff
Hmm.

00:55:44.150 — 00:56:35.709 · Alana Newhouse
Who are you? What is different about you? What do you think is distinct? Not. I'm not asking you how you would sell yourself to someone else. I'm asking you, what do you really believe? You have to contribute. That is special. It doesn't have to be better than other people. It doesn't have to. This is not a superiority contest, but it's just.

Where do you imagine that you have something to offer in this life? And I don't care if it's if the if you wake up and you say, I really believe I can work with kids with special needs, or I really believe that I'm a painter, whatever it is. What is that? What is it about you then have a vision for where and how you want to do that work, and then just wake up every single day and jam on it.

That's the whole

00:56:37.270 — 00:56:38.150 · Alana Newhouse
method.

00:56:39.070 — 00:56:42.670 · Ben Chertoff
I love it. Alana Newhouse, thank you so much for joining us.

00:56:42.710 — 00:56:43.910 · Alana Newhouse
Thank you for having me.

00:56:50.030 — 00:58:25.760 · Ben Chertoff
Most of this fight is about what we're against, what we have to refute and what we have to defend, what we have to survive. Alana Newhouse spends almost none of her time there. She started by diagnosing a disease. Flatness, everything fast, frictionless, everything the same in the essay that we spent today talking about.

Turns out to be the prescription. Because here's the part that sneaks up on you when she says Zionism is for everyone. She doesn't only mean nations, she means you know what's distinct about you have a vision for where you're taking it, and then wake up every single day and jam on it. That's her whole method.

And it's how a tiny, ancient people built the happiest country in a tough neighborhood. And it's the same move she's asking each of us to make. Refuse to go flat. Decide what makes you different is worth keeping. And then do the work to keep it. Alana Newhouse is the founder and editor in chief of Tablet Magazine, and the author of Everything Is Broken and Zionism for everyone.

Links are in the description. If you're not already, subscribe and hit the notification bell so you never miss an episode. And if this one gave you something to think about. Do me a favor and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's the single biggest thing you can do to help more people find the show and follow honest reporting on Instagram x, TikTok and Facebook.

I'm Ben Chertoff. This is the honest take and we'll see you next time.