Hello, and welcome back to On the Nose, the Jewish Currents podcast. I’m Arielle Angel, editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents, and I’ll be your host for today. So I know we did an Epstein episode a few weeks ago with Noah Kulwin and Ryan Grimm, where we really got into Drop Site’s reporting about Epstein’s ties to Ehud Barak and his work on behalf of Israel, making diplomatic connections, helping advance defense tech—you should really go and check out that episode and check out Drop Site’s reporting. But, considering the millions of documents that have been made public over the last two weeks and the way that this information—this enormous amount of information—is being metabolized in the public, I thought we needed to revisit this conversation. Not even so much in terms of talking about the specifics of what has happened and what we’ve learned—in many ways, we haven’t learned anything new—but the specifics have been sticking in the discourse in a particular kind of way, and I feel like we may need more of a meta conversation about how this information is being metabolized and what it means, particularly around some of the ways that Jewishness has become part of the conversation (and is, indeed, part of the dynamics of Epstein himself, and his relationships) and some of the things that are in the news right now. So we mentioned in that episode Naomi Klein’s work multiple times, in talking about conspiracy and the shape of conspiracy and how we can think about that in relationship to all of the revelations about how elite power works in this global economy. So today, I thought we would just go straight to Naomi Klein and ask her some of these questions.

Hi, thanks for having me back on.

Thank you for making the time. Naomi Klein really needs no introduction, and I also encourage you to listen to our conversation on this podcast from after October 7th. But she is most recently the author of the book Doppelganger, and she has another book coming out. What’s the title of that book?

End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World, and it’s co-written with Astra Taylor.

Keep your eye out for that book. So, where to start? There’s a lot going on in this new tranche of documents, and there’s a few things that are being homed in on in a lot of the discourse that I’ve been seeing. There’s a lot of conversation about the way that Epstein talked about Jewishness and his own Jewishness, the way that he kind of internalizes certain Jewish stereotypes about cheapness, about money. At one point, he says, “This is the way the Jew make MONEY… selling short the shipping futures’ ‘LET THE GOYIM DEAL IN THE REAL WORLD,” and makes a joke about getting cheaper airfares, saying “Jew is Jew,” things like this. And also, really attuned (almost in a way that I think feels familiar for many Jewish people) to the kind of balance of Jews and non-Jews in a given social arrangement. So like, he’ll be commenting on “this is my goyim dinner party,” with like a list of people that are maybe half-and-half Jewish and goyim, maybe, not just goyim, or like talking about Wall Street bankers as “goyim in abundance” when somebody asks if the dinner party is going to be mostly Jewish.

So first of all, we have just this attunement to who’s Jewish, who’s not, and a way of self-identifying certain kinds of relationships to sociality, relationality, and money in Jewish and non-Jewish terms. We also have this whole other area that is about DNA and eugenics, where he seems to be obsessed with sending people 23andMe kits. He sends one to Noam Chomsky, to Woody Allen and Soon-Yi Previn, to Ariane de Rothschild. He sends a whole bunch of them, like $6,000 worth of tests, to Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, the CEO of a Dubai-based logistics company, so much so that the company is like: Why do you need all these 23andMe testing kits? There is also some weird stuff about people talking to him and him talking about Jewish intelligence in genetic terms—that this is part of an Ashkenazi genetic mutation. Obviously, this has been seized upon as evidence of a kind of Jewish supremacy, and I wanted to start there, in talking about how we understand these familiar and yet insidious expressions of Jewishness.

I guess, just to zoom out a little bit before we start, I think I just want to say that we should always be aware of what we’re not talking about when we talk about Epstein’s Jewishness. First and foremost, we’re not talking about the centrality of sexual violence and misogyny to structures of domination across cultures, and I think there is this really weird way in which there’s so much talk about Epstein, and so much of it is talking around what it means to abuse women at scale, and children, and what is the relationship between that and elite power and impunity. I do think that this really is, big picture, a story about how power corrupts and the dangers of impunity, and I think that within that, there’s also a particular story about injured masculinity and Jewishness.

I mean, even something like the eugenic stuff: Yes, you can point to those examples that relate specifically to Jews and Jewish supremacies, supremacist ideas—or, in particular, Jeffrey Epstein supremacy ideas. But we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that there’s eugenics talk in lots of conversations that are not about Jews. Like where he’s talking with Joscha Bach, who’s a German computer scientist, and he has lots of disgusting things to say about eugenics, and Epstein funded his research. And then Nick Bostrom as well. I don’t think either of them are Jewish, and their stuff is just kind of straight-up Nazi stuff. At one point, I think Bach says: This is fascism, what I’m saying. I mean, they’re wondering what to do about poor people. And you know, he has these conversations with Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel, for a couple of years, he had this annual gathering called Hereticon, where people were encouraged to share their most heretical ideas, and they had a session called: You Might be a Eugenicist. There’s been a move to normalize this type of thought in Silicon Valley, and so that’s also a part of it. So like, we can cherry-pick just the Jewish stuff and make it seem like he’s only interested in that, but actually, this is a fuckton of rich guys sitting around trying to theorize their own supremacy and rationalize their own obscene power and wealth based on some idea of innateness.

I really, really appreciate that because—I kind of started with all of this because this is kind of the spur, or at least in my feed. This is a lot of the way that people are talking about what’s going on.

And it’s not to say that it isn’t important. I just want to make sure that we’re holding both of those strange things, because then, there’s a particular story that’s being told by some Jewish men.

But I also do think that we need to problematize it. I mean, even as we hold what may be real or insidious in this as a Jewish story, there are millions of documents out there, and we’re reading them without a lot of context. We don’t know what is tongue-in-cheek. We don’t know who’s who. There’s a little bit of chaos in the way that all of this stuff is being interpreted, and the vastness of it in itself makes it, I think, hard to know why certain parts are getting attention and why certain parts are not. And so, I think we also have to be careful in a more broad sense. But because this is the Jewish Currents podcast—

And because people are latching onto those particular parts and giving non-Jews a kind of a pass, right?

Yeah.

So, I mean, I wasn’t shocked by the Jewish jokes.

No, I wasn’t either.

And I’d imagine that it’s ubiquitous in the world of Jewish finance. You know, kind of a self-awareness of like, “we’re fulfilling a trope here,” or something. But it also, I think, probably should be understood a little bit in the context of like: This is a guy who was really good at creating instant intimacy with people, and that’s a shortcut. Like, we’re family here, we can talk like this. It’s an instant kin feeling, and he is a guy who traded on relationships.

No, and we are not the only people who have an inward and an outward, in terms of understanding who is who. Like having a word for people who are not you, that is not unique to Jewishness. But can we totally dismiss it? Because the reason that people are picking up on this is because we’re two years into the genocide—more than two years—and because this doctrine of Jewish supremacy has been laid out for us to see, right? And there is this kind of focus among a lot of people that I would say are on our side, or whatever, on chosenness—on the way that a Jewish self-conception and chauvinism is operative in some way in this. Personally, I would say that that’s overblown, that any of these ideologies and textual bases, they are reached for after the fact. They’re not the motivator, but at the same time, I think that there’s a reason why this stuff is spreading. And do we have to think about the ways that this stuff comes up, particularly in the eugenicist piece of things? I mean, the way in which particularly racial or biological supremacy is expressed.

So I think the concept of chosenness is really, really important in the context of settler colonial violence. It always is. Every settler colonial history has the idea of the settlers being the chosen ones, and that is the rationale for tremendous violence. That’s the rationale for genocide: You’re not the same kind of person. That’s what allows you to do it. And you have a divine mission. You’re building a city on the hill; you’re building a new Jerusalem. Obviously, it’s complicated when Jews become settler colonists, because Jews have a religious narrative around chosenness and draw on biblical narratives. But I just want to say that the Puritans did the same thing in the Americas. They also had biblical narratives to draw on, and so did the Nazis when they did their eastward expansion. We’ve talked about this before, that every genocide is different, but there are these commonalities. And so, when we say when we draw parallels across time and geography, we’re not saying everything is exactly the same.

But, in the book that I just finished about tech fascism, these ideas are so prevalent in Silicon Valley right now, and what he says about what he wants to do with his genes, and I think there’s something about also defunding programs for the poor. So it’s both: I’m going to augment my good genes and spread them throughout the world, for the benefit of all humanity, and I’m going to make sure that those poor people don’t reproduce. Essentially, he’s describing what Elon Musk has actually done: building his quote, unquote “legion.” We don’t know how many kids he has. Fourteen confirmed, but the Wall Street Journal thinks maybe more. And as head of DOGE, he was personally responsible for the biggest cutting of funding to the world’s poor. Was that eugenics? I don’t know. Maybe it was.

So my broader diagnosis, in which I think we should be understanding this, is: I see the Epstein files as the after-after-after-party of Davos and that this really is a story about what happens when a relatively small group of people are allowed to grow richer than God. They have to have stories that rationalize why they have as much as they have in a world where so many people do not have enough to eat. And the only story they can possibly come up with is that they must be that much innately better. So, it stands to reason that you should gift the world with your seed, right? So we’re deep into the story, and I think it’s interrelated with why people who claimed to care about climate change 10 years ago are now absolutely fine with massively accelerating the climate crisis by building data centers powered by fossil fuels and so on.

But I do think there is a Jewish story within this broader story, which is also about power, but injured power, where I think that there’s a particular kind of way in which some very rich and powerful men metabolized the Holocaust. And whether or not they had family there directly, I think every Jew had their brains rearranged by that, in the same way that every Palestinian is having their brains rearranged. You understand that it could be you, and it was experienced in a particular way by elite Jews. I think there’s something around kind of injured masculinity that is also not unique to Jews. Like Pankaj Mishra writes about Hindu nationalism in the context of injured masculinity under colonialism. And so, there is a way in which certain men metabolize that sort of group injury by taking it out on women and children. And that, I think, is really entangled with Zionism and really entangled with other minority groups. So, I think there are some particular things going on with Jewish men within this broader impunity.

Yeah, I mean, look, there’s a lot of echoes with the Madoff moment and also the early #MeToo moment, like with Weinstein and the way that story was also being metabolized.

I want to say again: I think this is about power. I think this is about impunity. This is about men who see themselves as masters of the universe, and I think that was absolutely true of Weinstein as well. What I’m trying to put my finger on is: Is it the ultimate expression of power as a Jewish man running an empire, that you get to fulfill the tropes? Like, proving one’s own untouchability? Like, if you can fulfill the stereotypes brazenly, sort of daring the world, and you believe you’re untouchable because you’re that rich and you’re that well-connected, and you have friends in the Israeli government, and they have the nukes? I mean, I think it’s really, really tied in with Zionist psychology as well of just becoming untouchable.

Yeah. I mean, what proves your power for any of these guys more than being able to participate in a global sex trafficking ring with children? But there’s something I really recognize in something that came out in these recent documents, where Epstein is writing this email that feels very proud, in a way, where he is sitting down with the Chinese, and he takes with him these white women who happen to be fluent in Mandarin, and he says that they say: Be careful of the Jewish dog. And there’s this pride in, first of all, having outsmarted them—like, he knows what they’re saying. He’s experiencing their antisemitism, and also, he’s going to pull one over on them in some form.

And he enjoys being a dog.

And he enjoys being a dog. Like, there’s the shame of it, the thrill of it. It’s almost more fun for him that that happened than if it had not. You really get the sense of that, and I recognized it, on some level. I feel like there’s something about, also, the criminality, about being on the outside, being able to hold that role. That’s part of his whole self-mythology, right? Of being a guy who came out of nowhere—in Bannon’s words, just some schmuck from Coney Island or whatever. Like, what it actually means to be inside and outside at the same time and to flex power, quote, unquote, “from the outside,” even when you’re in. Even when you have all the trappings of power, when you have all the money, all the impunity, and yet, you still retain some kind of chip on your shoulder, on some level, about being an outsider while you’re doing it.

It’s interesting. I listened to that interview that Bannon did with him. Bannon goes to these extraordinary lengths to build him up as literally the smartest guy in the world, and he’s trying to establish that even the smartest guy in the world did not understand the way the financial system worked ahead of the 2008 crash (which is a formative event for Bannon in his fake populism). But I think part of the outsiderness, at least the way Bannon spins it, is proof of one’s intelligence: Unlike those WASPs who are in these rooms because of their connections, we’re here just because of our smarts. So that’s proof of your inherent superiority. It’s not so much that they really want to be outsiders, it’s that they think it makes them look good.

Yeah. I mean, it does seem that, in Epstein’s case, he is kind of from nowhere. It’s not like he came up with the silver spoon, was born into this milieu. It’s like there is a pride in having mastered it, on some level, and also a kind of positionality that makes him a convenient avatar for its darkest aspects, its criminal element.

I mean, it’s interesting when he’s talking to Bannon, because he says repeatedly that actually, the Wall Street guys try to make it sound more complicated than it is—and here they’re talking about derivatives and subprime mortgages and the financial collapse—but he was saying the reason they make it sound so much more complicated than it is is because they don’t want people to know how easy their work is, because they get so rich off of it, and that if people only knew how easy it was— I actually have rarely heard people admit that.

Well, I want to talk about the conspiracy stuff. I know what we were talking about on our last podcast when we referenced you is how the conspiracy is capitalism. I wanted to have you talk a little bit about that and how that’s showing up in the Epstein files. I do also just want to say that I maintain—and I feel that way even more so now—that there’s one way of reading the Epstein files, where there’s this connection of Jewish elites, and there’s another way of reading it where it’s like: These are Jewish guys, who are also connected to other Jewish guys, who are also elites. I mean, if you look at my phone book, there’s also a lot of Jews in my phone book. So I’m trying to bring down the level of conspiracism on just the Jewish connections, and yet, there is still this other, quote, unquote, “conspiracy.”

Yeah. And there’s connections with the Israeli government, clearly. Some questions about Israeli intelligence. Definitely connections with Ehud Barak, but the main role being to basically help him be a successful disaster capitalist and introduce him to Peter Thiel and this whole world of people who are betting on collapse. I mean, this is where there’s this interesting exchange with Peter Thiel, where Epstein is excited about Brexit, and says this is the beginning of the collapse, and it’s way, way easier to make money on the way down. And so, this is an area of research for me. And there are Jews involved, there are Christians, there are Hindus—it’s a veritable United Nations of assholes who are doing this. There is this uncomfortable thing: Are Jews overrepresented? Which is what you’re getting at, and I think that the truth of it is that Jews are overrepresented in finance, and finance is overrepresented in capitalist depravity. And that’s a very old story relating to monarchs having Jews be the lenders to protect them, and the fact that, as we know, Jews were blocked from being landowners and certain professions, and they were able to go into the money business. So there’s some history to this. It’s also true that that was only a small portion of the Jewish community, and that there used to be a much broader and wider conversation about class within Judaism—that there were people who had a lot of money, and most people did not, and they didn’t have the same interests.

So, I think part of what we’re seeing is the way in which any discussion of class has been erased from Jewish discourse. And that was absolutely not the case. I mean, our friend Molly Crabapple has an amazing book coming out about the Jewish Labor Bund, and this is one of the things that strikes me most, reading that history—this acute awareness. These were thousands and thousands of Jews who were organizing against their landlords, against their bosses at factories, who very often were other Jews, and the idea that they would all have the same interests just because they happen to be Jewish would have been patently absurd. But then, along comes fascism—and this is where conspiracies are always useful: to protect capitalism, and to protect rage from going up and looking at systems. When a multi-ethnic, multiracial working class alliance is forming, one of the most effective ways you can blow it apart is with an antisemitic conspiracy theory. That was done by the Russian tsar. It was also done by the Nazis. I mean, at a time when there was a great deal of fear of the Russian revolution spreading to other countries in Europe, when communism and socialism were very powerful, and what Nazism did is replace a horizontal class solidarity with a vertical race solidarity. And what’s really scary is you realize that Zionism did that for us.

Yeah, I mean, I’d say I’m coming to this conversation with just a fair bit of anxiety. I mean, Candace Owens is essentially saying we’re ruled by satanic pedophiles who work for Israel or whatever. You know, when they call us goyim, they’re talking about how we’re cattle, and they’re talking about herding us and ruling over us.

So, Candace Owens—I understand fascism as a capitalism protection racket—that it emerges in these times of crisis when powerful people feel injured, and people with relative power also feel injured. Like after a war. So you have soldiers who lost, you have industrialists who are having a bad time for various reasons, and then, you just have working-class people who are being screwed by economic crisis and the cost of living. And so, there’s a potential vertical alliance of people who’ve lost status. It’s a disease of injured strength. And so, I don’t find it mystifying that people would believe an anti-Jewish conspiracy theory. I think people are reaching for explanations to explain why life is so hard, why nothing is working, and conspiracy offers that. And the reason why it was first disseminated by the Russian tsar after there was a near-successful revolution in 1905 was because he was afraid that the anger was coming for him. And so, I think part of what we need to understand is that Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson—they’re protecting the system. Even though they’re seeming to be the radicals and they are incredibly good at (especially Candace Owens) seeming like they’re just so incredibly daring, I think we really need to understand that they’re using their huge platforms to prevent the anger from going to the system itself that is immiserating life for majorities.

I hear that. The problem is that it’s not confined to the right. You know, I’m seeing this everywhere, and I guess what I just want to put a flag down for in this conversation is the fact that our job on the left, on the Jewish left, for the last couple years, has basically been to turn the volume down on the antisemitism discourse. To basically say: The things that you think are antisemitism are not antisemitism. Jews are relatively safe. Being pro-Palestine is not antisemitic, being anti-Zionist is not antisemitic, blah, blah, blah. And now, we are in this totally new reality where there is just an explosion of anti-Jewish sentiment, such that I have never seen in my lifetime, coming from all over, that is connecting to things that I don’t think are being interpreted correctly, but they also have some basis in reality.

Yeah, no, I think you’re right. And this is where I think we are in kind of uncharted territory, because we are caught in this pincer of the same old trick that capitalism always does, and the ways in which a segment of our own community has responded to that past history by concentrating power militarily and economically, to such a degree that they’re finding their ugly freedom by fulfilling all of those tropes. Right? And so, that’s an extremely dangerous pincer to be caught in. It sucks, and we have to do two things at once, in taking on the people who are doing that and breaking this sense of alignment that we’re all part of the same thing.

I want to go back to the question of conspiracy and the question of Mossad. There’s all of these accusations around whether or not Epstein was Mossad. There is a document that has been widely cited that people are talking about, where the FBI says he’s been trained as a spy under Barak. But as with so many of these documents, you don’t know what they mean. There is not ample context, and there’s other stuff that seems to disprove that. When we had Noah and Ryan Grimm on, they were like: Well, it’s not so much that he’s a spy. We have to broaden our conception of the way that the elite basically functions. I know that you have thoughts about that, and I wanted to hear from you how you understand the way he was operating, not just in relationship to Israel but in international affairs more broadly.

Right. I mean, I don’t know, and if it turns out he was doing some work for Mossad, I don’t think that was his only client. Clearly, we’re seeing a whole network of relationships, and if it turns out that he was working for Mossad, that still won’t make this an international Jewish conspiracy. It’ll mean that the Israeli government is involved, and the Israeli government is involved in a ton of shady things around the world, as we know. That’s why the Mossad exists. I mean, this is the thing. He’s really involved in all kinds of international interference, intrigue. I mean, the whole reason why he and Bannon are in such close communication is because Bannon is trying to get him to fund this whole outreach that he’s doing, particularly with the European far right, but it’s actually an international project. Bannon calls it the “nationalist international.” But in this phase that they’re corresponding—this is when Bannon’s been kicked out of Trump’s first administration—and now, he is off making alliances with Fratelli d’Italia, with Marine Le Pen, with basically the European right, which is now much more networked than it was before Bannon started doing that. So, they are helping fascism spread around the world, and this is where I think it’s really important not to lose the big picture.

And then, there’s this whole other thing around all these guys freaking out about #MeToo. This, once again, really underlines the point around impunity and how much impunity these guys had gotten used to, and Epstein was, I think, the ultimate expression of that. They do not believe that the rules should apply to them because they’re just too rich for that. He was the guy who knew how to get all of it—the drugs, the girls—and he was the way to express their sense of impunity. One of the really interesting things is watching how they’re all dealing with this shocking development: that non-famous women are using the platforms that some of them created to out them as sexual predators. And they’re trading these emails: Who’s next? Who’s next? The story of why they did what they did is simply because they think that that’s what power is for. And that’s the moment that we’re in, where this backlash against so-called “woke capitalism” or whatever, like all these tech companies that performed a certain kind of politics for a while—acted like they cared about diversity, and climate change, and creating a non-hostile workplace—are now just going: Actually, we can do whatever we want. That’s the whole point of being worth almost a trillion dollars. That is being expressed through Donald Trump. It is being expressed through Elon Musk, who, when journalists asked him a question, for a while, he would send a poop emoji. Now, he sends an auto response that says “mainstream media lies.” But the point is, they don’t think they should have to answer questions. They don’t think rules apply to them. And I think there’s a bigger story here about panicked elites choosing fascism over accountability. Like: I would rather have fascism than have to be answerable for my predation.

Yeah, I mean the thing that really scares me about this is the feeling that it produces to recognize that all of this is happening; that there’s an unaccountable elite that is impossibly wealthy, that just doesn’t care about us, and the fact that there’s nothing that we can do about it. I mean, there’s a righteous rage that comes from that. I guess I have two questions. The first one is just like: How do we redirect this narrative on the left, or how do we take control of this narrative on the left? But the second one is the more particularist question, about: How do we understand the meaning of Jewishness at this point after the genocide, and after the Epstein files, and how do we relate to that collective narrative? We can’t just disavow it.

No, I mean, I think we have to be very clear that part of the way some Jews—particularly Jews with access to state power and massive financial power—have responded to the lessons of Jewish history, is by latching onto a vision of freedom that means the power to do whatever you want to whomever you want and facing no accountability. So, two-and-a-half years into the genocide, we know exactly what that looks like. Part of what it looks like is detonating the institutions that might hold you accountable. The war that we’re seeing on the UN—the secretary general says they may need to close UN headquarters and lay off thousands of people because the US is not paying its dues. Why is it not paying its dues? Because Donald Trump wants his own UN. He wants the Board of Peace, which is like a family-business UN, and the fact that Francesca Albanese was targeted with sanctions the day after she publishes a report on the economy of genocide that names some of the people in these files. So I think that the more you break the laws, the more you commit crimes in broad daylight, the more you get found out, you either get held accountable, or you detonate the structures that might hold you accountable. So, I think that we’re in the detonating-the-structures phase. And so, in terms of how we respond to this, I think we tend to think we’re more powerless than we are. To be honest with you, I was a little bit surprised by how freaked out they were by #MeToo, you know? So I think we should look at what they were afraid of and take our hints from that.

Yeah, but wasn’t that just the proof that it’s all temporary? I mean, it’s hard to look at it as a model because what it proved is that you can survive it.

But part of what I’m coming to understand is that part of this fascist revival that we are in right now, it is very much a response to the fact that they were genuinely rattled by things that the left were doing, that maybe I didn’t fully understand how powerful they were. The reason why I keep bringing it back to impunity is that I think the real core of it is that people should not be allowed to be this rich. I think there’s a pathology to this concentration of wealth and power that is expressing itself in all these ways. You know, we’re very deep into this process of allowing wealth to explode to completely untenable levels. Mostly, we argue that that’s a problem because there are poor people who need the money, but I think we also have to really focus on the fact that it’s a problem because these people are out of their minds, that their wealth has deranged them and made them think that they don’t have to live on the same planet as us. I mean, Elon Musk is now—he’s written off Mars, but he’s now quite serious about building a new colony on the moon. I just think we really have to stop them, and we need a politic that can really focus on this.

I’m reading The Origins of Totalitarianism right before we were talking, for something else, and something interesting that Arendt is talking about, she writes that: “If a patent forgery like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is believed by so many people that it can become the text of a whole political movement, the task of the historian is no longer to discover a forgery. Certainly, it is not to invent explanations which dismiss the chief political and historical fact of the matter that the forgery is being believed. This fact is more important than the historically speaking secondary circumstance that it is a forgery.” I’m trying to make sense of this little passage, about what it means to both understand the forgery here—like this kind of socialism of fools around the Epstein files that replaces Jews with capital, on some level—but also to understand the conditions that allow the forgery to take hold and to take some communal responsibility for some of those conditions. I hear, in what you’re saying, both the ways in which rediscovering class solidarity within the Jewish community is important, like actually starting to differentiate and to form collectives—we can’t do this on an individual level. We can’t just say: I’m not a Zionist, I’m not a supremacist. I think we have to concede that power has made Jewishness mean something in this moment, and we have to collectively find ways of taking back that meaning. But the question of the timescale in which that’s happening versus the timescale in which the other path is unfolding becomes very scary, I would say, in terms of how long it will take us to form the collectives and the alternate vision that would change the meaning. It’s like, we don’t even have that time.

I mean, I think we never have the time, but I actually think that we’re in a better position than at any point in my life to have those conversations, in terms of having institutions of our own and ways of speaking. I think one example of the re-emergence of a class discussion within Judaism was during the New York City mayoral election, where you had the hedge fund class trying to speak on behalf of all Jews and turning it into a referendum on their definition of antisemitism. And a whole lot of Jews, particularly younger Jews, just going: No, my class solidarity is more important. I want to lower the rent. That’s big, and I think that it’s indicative of more potential. I think we need a language, because I think that there’s this weird way that we don’t know how to talk about class because there isn’t the large working-class Jewish population that there was when the Bund was organizing. But that doesn’t mean that upper-middle-class people have the same interests as these unhinged billionaires, and I think it would be helpful if we figured out how to talk about it. I do think that there is something that I keep trying to get at, around how the shame of persecution gets weaponized, and I want to say this is not only a story of Jews. I think that this happens in other ethnic and religious minorities, where there’s the shame of having been part of an oppressed group, and you’re proving your freedom with this overperformance of whiteness or something.

Totally. I mean, I think what people are seeing in Epstein is taking the white supremacist, antisemitic idea of racial superiority and basically just self-applying it. You know: You’re correct that these racial distinctions exist, but we are the apex of it.

Yeah. And the eugenics is just a kind of mirroring. Like: Now we’re the ones who are doing eugenics.

I was shocked, actually, at the conversation that they were having with Ehud Barak, where he was talking about how they were gonna bring in a million Russians. And he was basically like: Well, we can be very selective now by bringing in these Russians, whereas we used to have to bring in the Arab Jews. And I was like: I can’t believe he just said that. It’s not shocking that they’re talking about demographics. It’s more just shocking because there has been, on some level, a discussion about Mizrahim in mainstream Israeli culture. Like, it’s the piece of things that they can reckon with even a little bit. I was surprised that they were still essentially asserting, over a Jewish solidarity, a racial solidarity, essentially.

Summers was part of that conversation, too, and we know Summers has opinions on women. These are guys who are really interested in genetics as a rationale for their dominance and power. I think there’s a lot to be very frightened of in terms of what we’re seeing, but I would just say we should understand this more as a class project that’s happening now. Don’t forget the Peter Thiel connection.Peter Thiel, who people remember when he gave an interview to the New York Times, was asked whether he thinks humanity should survive. There was a long pause, and then he went and started talking about transhumanism. So this thesis of the book that Astra and I are in the first draft of is really that we are in a time of global cataclysm. And of course, they understand that the planet is heaving under the stresses that we are putting it under, and there’s a decision not to address any of these crises at source: not to lower emissions, not to battle poverty, but allow it to get much, much worse. And that is going to lead our elites—Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Muslim, and none of the above—to go fascist on us. It already is. Because you need theories that rationalize mass death, and that’s what we’re catching a little glimpse of. There’s evidence of it all over the place, not just in the Epstein files. But I think there’s something about it being leaked that is making people feel like they’re discovering something that they can’t see in lots of other places. I mean, there’s some people who say some very unguarded things because they’re in private. But yeah, just think about that Peter Thiel interview. Look at what Elon Musk did when he was head of DOGE. That tells you a lot about the way they see the future and non-rich people. I think that a lot of what we’re seeing in the world right now is an expression of this, including the entire Trump administration and what’s happening with tech. So, we need to build a movement that is really targeting the drivers of that impunity.

Well, if we don’t, it’s going to be us. And I mean us broadly, I don’t mean just Jews. But I’m just saying, if we do not figure out how to create accountability, someone else is going to pay. That anger will be released in another kind of way.

No, the anger is going somewhere, and we should be part of multiracial movements that are directing the anger where it belongs. There are a lot of people who don’t want for all that energy to just go into hating Jews, you know? But yeah, it’s really scary.

Yeah, it is scary

If you take one thing away: Our elites are depraved (not only the Jewish ones).

Yeah. I think that’s a good place to stop. Naomi, thank you so much for joining us. This has been another episode of On the Nose. Thank you to our editor, Jesse Brenneman. If you like this episode, share it and subscribe to Jewish Currents, JewishCurrents.org. See you next time.