133: Mamdani and America’s new left, with Reihan Salam

Haviv Rettig Gur

Foreign. Hi everybody. Welcome to a new episode of Ask Aviv Anything. I'm extremely excited to have on Raihan Salaam. So many of our listeners and viewers have been asking about a whole set of phenomena from Zoran Mamdani's victory in New York, the DSA victories. More recently, the American Muslim community writ large, its politics, all these various ideologies that we've been hearing about and seeing and have been expressing themselves, Third Worldism, whatever the heck that is. And all of these different questions that are arising in Jewish circles, in observers of America, from outside and within American politics. I know that they've been causing a lot of concern. There's a lot of sense of Jewish alienation from progressive spaces. Also quite a few young Jewish voters. For people like Mamdani, what the heck is going on? What does it all mean? Where does it come from? Where is it going? I can't imagine anyone who has helped me make more sense of it then my guest today, Raihan. As president of the Manhattan Institute, Raihan has been one of the best writers, the best observers of these political and policy and cultural debates. He's an author, he's a journalist, he was executive editor of National Review, He's a contributing editor at the Atlantic. He was a fellow at the University of Chicago Institute of Politics. He was born and bred in Brooklyn and is an American Muslim raised by immigrant parents who came from Bangladesh. Very excited to get into it. Before we do, I want to tell you this episode has a sponsor, a return sponsor. We're very proud to be sponsored by them. Israel became the startup nation by turning talent into strength and ideas into industries. For more than a century, the Technion has trained the engineers, scientists and entrepreneurs who transformed Israel into the startup nation and delivered breakthroughs that have changed the world. Now Technion scientists are advancing the next wave of innovation to help power Israel's next chapter. Israel Engineered by the Technion join us visit ats.org rebuild thank you so much to the Technion for that sponsorship and go visit. It's a great cause. A quarter of the Technion student body. This is not in their ad. A quarter of the technical student body are Arab Israelis and there's no affirmative action. It is a crucible of Israeli society. It is the future of the good things that happen in Israel. There's a reason I'm proud to carry their sponsorship on this podcast. I'd also love to invite anybody who has an interest in what we're doing here to join our Patreon community subscribe to our substack. If you want to ask the questions that guide the topics we choose to talk about, you can join us there. That is where those questions are asked. You also get to take part in monthly live streams where I answer your questions live. That's patreon.com askhlavib anything or those links are in the show. Notes Raihan how are you?

Raihan Salam

I'm really happy to be with you. I've learned an enormous amount. I started listening to the podcast in the first few episodes. The historical rounding was hugely valuable to me. So at the risk of flattering you too much, I'm a big fan of

Haviv Rettig Gur

no, no, we can pause on this. I have.

Raihan Salam

No,

Haviv Rettig Gur

no. You know, before we started taping, I said, I have not only learned from you, you know, facts, there's a. I don't know the American Muslim community. I have learned from you deep internal conversations within the American Muslim community. You also talk very clearly about the diversity of the American Muslim community and all of those things and the challenges it faces and how they should face those challenges. And those things, for me, have been a window that has really enriched my understanding of that community. Also placed Mamdani, for example, as a phenomenon in that world. So I have learned a tremendous amount. So now that we've complimented each other, let's get into it. I'm going to start with the simplest question. Why did Zoran Mamdani win? I don't mean literally the electoral tactics, unless you want to talk about that, but this and the surprising run of DSA successes. What is happening here? What is this, you know, socialist, Third Worldist? I don't even know what to call it, what words to use? The democratic establishment is on the run. Hassan Piker is putting out podcast episodes, telling people we're coming. What is this phenomenon of what appears to be a generational takeover that's unbelievably fast. Highly educated young people, white, non white, they seem to be driving it. What is it and how do you understand it?

Raihan Salam

You have asked the question that is most on my mind. The answer has many different aspects to it, of course, but one simple way to think about it is that there is a moral imagination and there is a material imagination as well. When you're thinking about any political movement, there is a temptation to see it narrowly through the lens, as you were, you know, just of political organizing. You have an army of door knockers and canvassers. That certainly matters, and we can get into the tactics that are important. It happens that you have a generation of young Americans on the left who have become very sophisticated about how to leverage a new media environment to build a movement. But, you know, at the core of it is a moral imagination. And this moral idea relates to how younger Americans have been taught the American story, where they see themselves fitting in that story. It relates to the changing cultural self understanding of younger Americans. And then on the material side, it relates to how they've come of age, how they've spent their time, how they've gone about making a living. And it's the kind of collision of these different factors that have come together to create this incredibly ripe opportunity for a movement that is both genuinely radical, but that also derives enormous benefit from being seen as radical and outside a familiar American tradition. Now, that's a lot of words, but, you know, let me put break it down a bit. You remember, you lived in the United States for a long time. You know, your parents were Americans, so you know our country exceptionally well. And what you'll know is that for a long time, you know, Americans on the left really resisted the idea of being characterized as socialist. Even when their views were broadly consonant with those of social democrats in the wider Western world, they resisted that term. You would call yourself a liberal, you might call yourself a progressive, but socialism, that term was anathema. That wasn't always true in American life. If you go back to the early 1900s, the movement of Eugene Debs, you know, there was a very vigorous socialist movement in this country, but basically from the 1930s on, you had the stigmatization of socialism and communism. And I think all of your listeners know why. Then enter the millennial generation. Enter a generation that felt dispossessed, demoralized, really out of love with this romantic American story. You know, imagine that you were someone who, you know, you were a kid when 9, 11 happened. You saw the Iraq war, the war in Afghanistan. You saw these wars essentially end in a kind of failure. Then you saw the 2008 financial crisis. Maybe you were affected by it. You also see a generation that is very disproportionately immigrant and second generation, particularly for some from some parts of the world, that often had an oppositional sensibility with respect to the west, at least in the more educated and elite corners of those populations. So then the fact that socialism was not a familiar part of the American political tradition actually becomes a plus rather than a minus. It's something that is transgressive. It is a tradition that does not own the failures of the previous 20 or 30 years. So if you want to see where all of these novel political forms are coming from that novelty is actually a huge part of its power, that perceived novelty. To be clear as to whether or not these ideas are truly novel, you know, we can get into that. But the idea that you are not bound up, you are not corrupted by the brokenness, the illegitimacy of these institutions that were more familiar to you. I think that that sense of a rupture with the world that came before is a very important part of what's going on. When you're looking at the wider modern world, you're certainly seeing this way in which the past is not seen as an inheritance worth defending, but rather as a domain to be mined for symbols. And the emphasis on the present is incredibly intense. When you think fundamentally about the collapse of fertility, what is the collapse in fertility, but the sense that you are not part of something that aspires to be eternal? You're not part of this grand relay race, to use a more banal, you know, American term. You're not part of this transmission. You know, when I think of articulate radical left ideas, I think of this idea that human nature is a myth, is an ideological myth, and that we are, in fact, infinitely plastic, and that ideas of human nature are ideological projects designed to keep us from paradise or in order to keep the proletariat from winning and what have you. And I know many people, much smarter than I am, who have this belief that human nature is infinitely plastic and that therefore struggle and political struggle overcoming is something that is not just about elections, but is this struggle for the mind to escape from the narrowness of this idea that, you know, humans are embedded, that humans are parts of families and what have you. I'm sounding very weird, but this is something I really, really believe. There is a group of people who are ideologues, idea generators. I don't say that as an insult. There are people who are drawn to abstraction, and that group of people can be smaller or bigger, depending on the kind of society that you find yourself in. I'm always struck by the revolutionaries of the 20s and 30s. You know, if you were Sacco and Vanzetti, you know, you were these anarchists, you know, who were, you know, they could have been people who've said, you know what? I'm going to just, you know, work a job and then send some money back home to Italy and then, you know, build a prosperous life. What was it about them that made them people who had these dreams of paradise and what. What drew them to this kind of radicalism if you think about the, you know, Yiddish speaking, second generation folks on the Lower east side, many of them just went on to become business owners or they became dentists, or they became bookkeepers, and they just kind of made their way in the world. But there was a minority of them who were romantics who had some maybe a different noble understanding of themselves. There's a noble understanding of being someone who loves your family and fights and scraps to provide for them and to live a dignified life and to honor your fathers and forefathers. But there's another nobility that derives from a cosmic outlook on the world. And I do think that right now is a moment where that cosmic outlook for a certain kind of young American is a lot more ennobling and attractive than the meritocratic rat race. I think that that's something that's very true, particularly if you feel as though you've been a loser in the meritocratic rat race, whether that's kind of objectively or otherwise. And that spiritual dimension is something that I don't see as unique in American history. But it is something that we are uniquely vulnerable to now because of the conditions of how we learn, how we relate to media, how we relate to each other. There's something interesting, spiritual and philosophical that's happen. There's a way in which the United States was more resistant to it historically and for a very long time. And our immunity to that has absolutely broken down. I don't think it's gone. And I think that we have unique qualities, institutions that we can draw on as we seek to counter these forces.

Haviv Rettig Gur

Specifically on the question of do these sort of redemptionist ideas that are totalizing and cosmological, so to speak. Do you think America still has, I mean, you say it has the institutions and, you know, it hasn't taken over, I don't know, this young cohort at the universities. It's just been accepted that the universities have fallen ideologically totally. And it reaches a point where nobody can defend it. I mean, you have Middle Eastern studies departments all over the United States that cannot teach Israel. They can't do it. They can teach settler colonial theory of Israel, but they can't teach the historical experience of millions of people who had a profound effect on the Middle East. The Middle east responded in profound ways. How can you not teach the lived experience of real people? And they can't. And it is so accepted that they can't even be expected to without an ideological lens, that all through the university system in the United States they had to establish little Israel studies institutes outside the Middle Eastern studies departments, so anybody can actually do research and thought and, you know, to study actually this human community. And Israel is the signal. But the universities are all almost a monoculture. Maybe I'm exaggerating. The elite media is. Has it.

Raihan Salam

I want to get a little more grounded because I of course, agree with what you're saying. But also these are institutions that shape a relatively small number of people directly. And what's interesting and powerful is how they shape people indirectly. Right? So if you're looking at the discourse on Israel in the Middle east, this is something that is the product of a deliberate project or enterprise that's unfolded over many decades. And what's interesting is how you take a clique of intellectuals and activists and how you take the fixations and ideas of that clique and how they become a mass phenomenon, which is something I find very interesting. So when we're thinking about, you know, so again, not everyone is a graduate student. Not everyone is in the American university. Not everyone is studying Middle east studies. But in a way, I want to convince your listeners that that world actually does matter. And I want them to get a sense of the vector through which it matters. So I talked about the moral imagination before, and you mentioned Zoram Hamdani. One really interesting thing that is happening in American life right now and on the American left right now is this interesting transition. It might not be permanent, it might just be a fad or a moment. But on the American left, the centrality of the civil rights revolution, the centrality of the black experience, the centrality of the idea of enslavement and the legacy of enslavement being really core to the moral energy of the left has been really, really important. Yet now it almost feels as though in intellectual ideological circles that that experience's centrality is being displaced by what you might call the Gaza cult, Palestinianism, these ideas that have been part of Western political discourse for a while for reasons that I actually think are important, you know, why Zionism and anti Zionism really reflect this deeper divide within Western societies regarding how we orient ourselves to the past. But one element of this and the centrality of the Gaza cult is also the moral authority of the Muslim or the moral authority of that person from the global South. So, you know, when you're looking at Muslim Americans, estimates vary regarding what share of the population they represent. But one estimate is, you know, maybe as high as 1.4% of the population. It is a population that's grown very rapidly, and one Thing your listeners might not be aware of is that this is a really young population. So if you're looking exclusively at adults, 26% of U.S. muslim adults are between the ages of 18 and 24. 26%. So among Jews it's 15%. Among Catholics, 12% Protestants, 5% white evangelicals, 7%. Okay, among people are not affiliated with any religious group, 14%. So 26% are 18 between 18 and 24. Now here's another number that you are going to find very surprising. Of U.S. muslim adults, 47% reported being a current student, I.e. a post secondary student. You're enrolled in a four year degree program, a community college or graduate school. 14% of U.S. muslim adults are in graduate school right now. Now again, they're not mostly getting master's degrees in Middle east studies. You know, a lot of them are getting sense. What?

Haviv Rettig Gur

Why?

Raihan Salam

A lot of them are, you know, maybe you're getting a, you know, you're getting a nursing degree, you're getting a kind of pharmacy or you're training to be a veterinarian. There are many things. But you know, it's funny because people like you and me, people tell us that we're crazy to be so fixated on higher education, you know, and it's true. You know, not everyone's in higher education, you know, not everyone goes to college. You know, that's certainly true. But man, that is really fascinating when you think of our universities in the United States as being sites of organizing. You know, this is something that a lot of people don't really understand. Our universities have become this incredible petri dish and an incredible vector for radicalizing people. Now again, they're, you know, again haviv, most people going to college, they just want to go, they want to get out, they want to get a job. You know, that's certainly true. But there's a non trivial number of people who go there. And you might have some inchoate sense that everything is broken or kind of whatever else, or you might have an inchoate openness to what are transgressive, interesting ideas. And then there are people who are there who are waiting to give you a script and they are there to help you make sense of your general discontent that any young person has. Or if you're a newcomer to this country or you're the parent of newcomers to this country, you know, you both aspire to inclusion and upward mobility. But then what if I were to tell you a story, haviv, where there's actually something ennobling about Being opposed to this machine, this system, this imperial state. And what if you are the bearer of, of something special by being someone not just from the global south, but from, you know, being someone who is of Muslim origin, You know, that actually doesn't just make you someone who belongs to a religious community because by the way, you might not even be that religious. You know, you might not have that religious literacy. Really. What if it actually makes you the bearer of some important meaningful holy truth? And what if the establishment is sack is corrupt, this bipartisan establishment is saturated, you know, by this something that is not just wrong but evil and you. Not only do you see the truth, but actually your identity makes you someone who could be a powerful messenger of this truth from the wider world. You know, it's something kind of amazing to me. So when you look at how many of the important leading intellectual figures in this new far left, Zoram Hamdani himself, said that he came to socialist politics out of his opposition to Israel. Israel is an apartheid state. That's interesting. And he's not alone. Then you look at Darieliza Avila Chevalier, that young woman of Dominican origin, you know, grew up in a, you know, middle class family in Florida. You know, the fact that she comes to Colombia, then she goes to the CUNY Graduate center, she converts to Islam after 10, 7. You know, this is really interesting. And again, I'm someone who sees, you know, I'm not as learned as you haviv, but I see the beauty in the Islamic tradition. You know, this is something that's been important to me, if in a kind of untutored kind of way. But you know, that to me is interesting. You know, there are a lot of reasons to convert, a lot of times to do that, a lot of circumstances under which to do it. But when you do it because you are in an organizer of encampments, you know, you do it because your romantic partner is this person who is, or Ahamdani's kind of his metaphorical older brother, this person who was steeped in radical politics for a very long. It's just interesting for that to be the entry point for you, that to be the conversion experience where a religion is suffused with a kind of radical politics. And again, that's not everyone's experience. I think it's a minority experience, but it's a minority experience that has a lot of momentum and weight and attraction for a certain kind of person.

Haviv Rettig Gur

Well, this is the question, is it the future in one way or another? She, by the way, is for the dsa, a radical right. But is this. I grew up, I was raised on the rabbinic tradition. What you teach your kids is what the future is. And the idea that universities can be treated as this place that can totally just radicalize into nonsensical bigotries, that's a bigotry. If there's a field of human experience you can't teach because it's inappropriate, it goes against your moral sense of the word, that's a bigotry. And that's okay, because universities are nuts. Universities are silly. Obviously not stem, but, you know, humanities and social sciences. And then you grow up and you get a job and you have to. And that just lackadaisical attitude toward the university, I think has produced more than the Mamdanis. The Mamdani is the most prominent Muslim in American politics, and he's exactly the product of this. And he's leading a kind of charge on democratic institutions that the entire democratic establishment is terrified by. I don't think that, for example, when Rahm Emanuel came to Israel just now to give a speech of critique to the Israelis from a place of love. But you guys are really screwing up, right? I don't think he was speaking to Israelis. No Israelis heard him, okay? It was not like front page news in Israel. He was speaking to the Democrats. And I don't think he's running for president. I think he's running for vice president in a ticket led by an aoc, at minimum, and maybe someone more radical than her, potentially. It depends how the convention goes and depends what all the young people want. And I look at the Yale youth polls that talk about this massive radicalization under 25 or under 30. Is this the future?

Raihan Salam

I don't believe the future is determined. I don't believe it's already been written. I believe that future can change. As of right now. What I see is a movement with immense conviction who are running up against not even a movement, a coalition that has lost its moral appetite for a battle, that has lost its confidence. And that is something that is certainly, certainly an indication that, look, this could be the future. I would be foolish to suggest otherwise. But what I see is an immense reservoir of potential energy that could counter this. I'm not seeing that right now. And what I want to underscore is that radical movements, they tend to burn themselves out. They tend to burn themselves out because of ferocious infighting. They tend to capitalize on some moment of discontent, and then when there's a shaking at the kaleidoscope, the issues change. Then oftentimes these movements run out of steam. This movement, if we want to tell the story that it really is formidable, something really is different. And I think that there is a plausible case for that. Then it comes from what you were talking about before. It comes from the fact that you have a large number of young people who feel bereft. They feel bereft of tradition. They feel bereft of some thick identity that is reinforced through real community. They don't have the obligations of marriage and child rearing. And when you don't have that, you have a very big absence that can be filled. And when that's being filled by people who are able to leverage images, just a level of media savvy that is really unusual and really impressive. You know, you can certainly tell a story about that. Then I can tell you the story tactically about incompetence. I can tell you the story about how people with this radical orientation can sometimes be so blustery that it's repellent to other people. You know what I mean? They can actually be so dogmatic that, you know, eventually you grow exhausted of it. So I. So I actually don't believe that all hope is lost at all. But you're certainly right that right now you have a militant movement that is pushing on an open door. Now, my belief is that you can only beat a story with a story. You know, when you have a story that is a moral story, that is doing something for people psychologically, and that's an important component of what we're talking about here. I always like to ground. You need another story that is a story that draws you back into the world of sanity. And I see that as a big part of your project. Khaviv I think there are a lot of people, there are a lot of Americans or a lot of American Jews where they're finding themselves. They feel themselves to be victims of a kind of gaslighting. They're like, what is going on? I know this to be false, but here I am someone who's just been living my life, and I need the words, I need the vocabulary to fight against opponents who are oftentimes extremely articulate because they know exactly what their story is. So I think, you know, a big part of what you're doing, a big part of what we try to do as well, is to actually step in to do that. But again, I just really am. I keep being drawn to grounding this in psychology. I think about. I remember reading this article. You know, there was a reporter who was talking To a man in his 60s, a Muslim taxi driver, longtime taxi driver, who was talking about how he felt unhappy, just about how unaffordable his life was, but he felt, you know, I'm living in a studio apartment. It's incredibly expensive. You know, I just kind of feel like. And I thought to myself, if you were that exact person and you had a daughter and your daughter went to college and your daughter now has a life, you know, maybe your daughter is a nurse practitioner or a doctor or something else, and she owns a home and she has a place, you would be incredibly happy and satisfied and you would feel blessed if your daughter went to college and then she became a community organizer or maybe she went to work for the city council, or maybe she joined the United Auto Workers when she was a graduate student at CUNY or Columbia or wherever else. And she has been taught that the indignities that she suffered as someone who maybe felt different or looked different. She's now surrounded by many other people whose lives are defined not around us sense of gratitude for what their parents sacrificed for them, but a sense their parents are also victims. And then you talk to your parent as. Because you're the articulate one. You're the one who has that vocabulary. You're the one who kind of really understands the world. Haviv you see through the propaganda, you know, the hasbara, you kind of know all of that. You actually know the truth. And then your nobility, your superiority, some could say, derives from your superior clarity of understanding. And you take that clarity of understanding, that is your resource. Your resource is not having built a life in the classic sense, not passing on the baton in that way. I always joke that Mark Zuckerberg is not the real hero. Dr. Zuckerberg the dentist and Dobbs Ferry is the real hero. But, you know, but you know, but people don't believe that, you know, because everyone wants to be the TikTok influencer. You don't want to be the dentist at Dobbs Ferry. And I think that to me, sanity stems from being wanting to be the dentist and wanting to kind of get your kid to be that dentist. And actually the great glory of your life being producing grandchildren and being someone who, you know, you might, you may well achieve recognition, but you're grounded in something. And then I think that if that's not even on the table as a possibility and not even because of, oh, the affordability, there is an affordability crisis. And I can talk to you about the affordability crisis all day long, but it's actually what is Your moral imagination about what a life ought to look like. What are the models that you've seen that psychology is something that matters not just for immigrants and second generation people. But I think that that's been an important dislocating experience that is a missing part of this bigger story that you and I are talking about.

Haviv Rettig Gur

Look, I have like eight questions here about the American Muslim community, about Mamdani, about things you've written about Ma. But I can't avoid the opportunity to drill down here because I realize, is it talking? I don't know what it. I have four kids. I live on a street where I'm average and my wife is the oldest of eight. I mean, I can imagine having a tremendously happy life being a deeply creative, world traveling person. And you don't want kids. I can imagine that. But we've seen a drop. I forget what the numbers were. The Financial Times had this entire big deep dive into this question that went viral and I read it and it was. It's a drop from 80% of women having kids to 60% of women having kids. You're telling me that hundreds of millions of women suddenly didn't want to have kids and that's a drop from the 80s? It's not a drop from, you know, or a drop from the 90s. These are not women living in Victorian England. Right. The expectations of them. It wasn't a question of feminism. It was something having to do with screens, I think was their main argument. But what do you think has happened at the scale that it has happened? And that takes us to all kinds of other arenas, about intimacy and the ubiquity of porn, about the differences between men radicalizing to the right, women radicalizing to the left. All of these different phenomena, I guess. Give us the bottom line. How do you interpret the kind of social changes that you just said are in some way the. In the Venn diagram overlap, the political changes that we're talking about?

Raihan Salam

You and I are both products of a genuinely different world. You and I are around the same age or a little bit younger than I am. And my parents, they came from a world that was itself dislocated and disrupted in profound ways. You know, my father was born in 39, my mother was born in 47. And they were very modern people in a way. They were very literate, curious, worldly in their interests, but they were ferociously loyal to each other. And they had a really difficult life. So much more difficult than anything I can imagine. But there was. Raising children was just life. And I Just, it was life. And they were people who experienced being people who were of pretty high status in their native country to being people of much lower status in a new country. But it didn't matter. They didn't experience that as an injury or an indignity because they had their project, which was survival and flourishing for their children. And I just think about that now. You think about any modern person. I don't know, it's just they were connected to a different world that had different rhythms. They were connected to a world that again, itself had been dislocated a lot over the 19th and 20th centuries. But there was a way they could see into the past. They knew who their ancestors were in a way that I don't. That is, they passed on many beautiful and wonderful things to me, but that transmission was incomplete. And I look at my children. My children are third generation Americans. Uh, my wife had 120 first cousins. My children have three first cousins. Beats me. Fine, sir. My, you know, they have three first cousins. So I did not beat you, Hafiv, because.

Haviv Rettig Gur

Okay, no, they did. So.

Raihan Salam

Yeah. So that is something I think about all the time. And, you know, though I have a spiritual longing and curiosity, I don't have the kind of religious, spiritual life that they did as children. And so in a way, I think of it as our generation. You and me, we grew up in the shadow of something that we still could see and we could still recognize, you know, because it was still there, but it was attenuating. And then you think about the people a generation behind us, or even 10 or 15 years behind us, that process of attenuation was even further along. So, of course, smartphones, all these things kind of are accelerants. But I think the big thing is when you disown your inheritance, and I hate to think of myself, I don't believe I've disowned my inheritance. I don't believe that. I don't want to believe that. But that is the great weapon of a certain kind of this politics that you and I are talking about, this kind of, call it third worldist politics, you know, this vision. Because what it takes is that absence and that sense of injury or something missing that you have. But it says that. But. Aha. But you don't have to be disloyal, because to be loyal is to be an anti imperialist. So imagine haviv that I was taking this fact this. I'm incredibly fortunate and happy, and I love my life and I love my family. But if you were to Put a gun to my head and say, do you feel like there's something lost? You know, do I miss my father every single day? And do I miss the world that he left behind, that he had to leave behind? Yes. And there is a sense of I'm an American, I am a very, for my sins, I'm an American, I'm a very assimilated, some would say deracinated American. I speak my parents native language, I love it, I cherish it, but I'm an American. And so there can be this feeling, you know, Norman Padhoretz called assimilation a brutal bargain. There's something I've gained and there's something I've given up. What if I could tell you, Haviv, that there's a way to be loyal to that? And the way to be loyal is to embrace ideas that are hostile to American imperialism, that are or really just have it be Gaza. Gaza is a stand in. You know, there's this narcissism. I want to be charitable, I struggle with this sometimes. But you know, there was a wonderful piece that Mati Friedman wrote on gazology, you know, for the Free Press some months ago and I thought it was just so brilliant because he was talking about these books that are ostensibly about Gaza and ostensibly about the supposed genocide in Gaza that are actually just navel gazing by an award winning Egyptian Canadian writer, just looking at him, looking at his phone, scrolling through, but also some person committing a microaggression against him or asking him where he's from or something like that, and the kind of deep anger and hatred. So in a way this projection, this kind of obsession with the war that you cannot even begin to understand then becomes this kind of substitute for who am I? You know, no, I'm not disowning the past, even though I have only a very tenuous connection to it. I am filling that absence with this ready made cult, this ready made ideology that actually gives me a. There's this term from the study of the sociology of violence, of writing forward panic. Forward panic. Someone's already on the ground and other people are kicking them, then you just rush in and you kick them too. You kick that person on the ground. And the sense of joy and effervescence that you derive from that, you know, the ways in which Brad Lander, a gentleman who is a Democratic nominee for Congress, someone who described himself as a liberal Zionist, a progressive Zionist, you know, said that, you know, he used to say that Israel's war of survival was not a genocide. Now he says it's a genocide. Why? Well, because his daughter, a recent graduate at the University of Chicago, had read Raphael Lemkin and explained to him, now it happens that the explanation happened at exactly the right time for him to kind of be buoyed by this new political movement that he's seeking to gain the favor of. But I thought it was so interesting,

Haviv Rettig Gur

sometimes the timing works out. What are you going to do?

Raihan Salam

Forward panic. Forward panic, you know, then everyone is moving in this direction and then I can litigate this and I can say, well, I believe that Israel is a death machine warrior, you know, kind of. But it's not a genocide. Well, forward panic then. For these people I'm describing, first of all, they have a story about me. Their story about me is very obvious. Aviv. Their story about me is that, you know, I get deracinated or also I'm seeking the favor of white America or the Jews or you name it. And it's a very powerful story. And, you know, it's one of these, these other things where, you know, the story is that I am damaged in various ways and that I cannot see the truth. I cannot see what's. So we all tell the story. I'm going to tell the story about how they're psychologically damaged. They'll tell the story about how I'm psychologically damaged. But what I will tell you is that I believe that there's something very precious and special about this country, my country, America. And from my. I have been around the Israel debate pretty much my entire adult life. I remember being an undergraduate student in college and seeing this extremely articulate young man wearing a kippah, arguing with it. Less articulate woman. And the woman was taking the pro Israel side, the young man was taking the anti Israel side. And I remember thinking, I just thought, I'm going to step into this argument. You know, I just, I think there's something that made me feel as though, I don't know, it's some. It's reading of history or something like that. But I think that for many decades at this point, I've seen this unfold, I've seen this happen. And it's funny to me when I see people project onto me their view of kind of why it is I have the convictions that I do. But, you know, it's partly because I understand the power of that feeling of absence and I understand how susceptible one is to having that filled with a story that feels ennobling, but that I can actually do profound damage to these institutions that I love this country, that I Love. And so anyway, I mean, we all are. Have our experiences, you know what I mean?

Haviv Rettig Gur

It's astonishing to me how much authenticity is part of this American political moment. Many years ago I read a movie critic, it might have been Roger Ebert, who wrote a piece about the Matrix trilogy. And he noted, among other things, he noted that all of the dancers, the humans dancing in the city of Zion are brown or black. There are no white people in Zion, except for of course, the white savior. Neo. Right. But there are no white people in Zion. And people are going to write to me that that's technically incorrect for some reason. But the point is that is Hollywood code, cultural code for authenticity. I agree with you. I feel it, I see it. These kids wearing keffiyehs. Why would a keffiyeh be a symbol? Do you even know like how that. Right. But it was turned into this kind of signal of belonging and authenticity that there's so much more to say about this. I want to get back on topic and focus us in. You mentioned that there's the phenomenon of second generation Muslim immigrants. And I want to use that as sort of an opening both to understand the Mudani phenomenon, because he is partly in part of that, he himself is an immigrant.

Raihan Salam

Yes, but.

Haviv Rettig Gur

But he's in a sense, but part

Raihan Salam

of this world of highly assimilated. Exactly, exactly. They call it the 1.5 generation. Yeah, right.

Haviv Rettig Gur

And who are religiously secular and politically deeply Muslim in their political identity, which is an interesting combination because Muslim is coded in their worldview as exactly the way you described as this political entity. Can you explain who are these people? What is this group? What is their role in these politics? How big is this phenomenon? How much do you attribute that to them? So many of them seem to belong to this world. Abdullah Said from Michigan, what is this phenomenon? How can you describe it for us?

Raihan Salam

I want to be very careful because this is a phenomenon where we do not have quantitative data. Exactly. We have some, as I was suggesting to you before, you have some quantitative data about the sheer youth of this population, how many of them are in post secondary education right now? So, you know, you can look at those larger demographic characteristics to tell the story, but I still think of it. Think of this as just one man's experience from. From being a part of this world, traveling through this world. So the Muslim population is the most racially and ethnic diverse religious population in the country. It has many different pieces to it. There is a multi generational black population, converts to Islam. Then of course, you have African immigrants and their descendants and you have South Asian immigrants and their descendants. You of course, have Arabs, you know, people from the Middle east itself. And it's interesting because there is a kind of hierarchy. You know, when you look at isis, the Islamic State, the European Muslims and Arabs were higher on the hierarchy. The Bengali Muslims who came were the cannon fodder. But, you know, that's a separate issue. Then if you look at this kind of political world, it's not that crude, but there's a way in which to be a Nakaba survivor, you know, to be a Palestinian, you know, Palestinian origin itself does have this incredible moral authority. So there's a way in which there's a hierarchy there in which you're at the top. Then, you know, this kind of like broader, you know, Muslim group. Then there's a broader universe of, you know, brown people, you know, just, you know, people who could kind of plausibly have some connection. Do you have some narrative of being a survival of imperialist aggression? I'm being a little cute and simplistic here, but I do think that there's something there. Now, if you're looking at the South Asian population, you know, and again, this is a very variegated population, there is an affluent Muslim population, but there's also a very poor working class Muslim population. The community that I come from, the Bangladeshi origin population, this is a pretty working class, lower middle class population. There's also a kind of, you know, more affluent professional segment, but relative to Indian Americans, it is a less affluent population. Indian Americans are the most affluent nationality group. It is a triple selected group. You know, it is a group that when you're, you know, long story here, but you know, if you look at this population has really been Transformed by the H1B visa and through selective migration. Now, most of those people are non Muslims, but Indian Americans have become a really fascinatingly important group politically, intellectually, ideologically. Because this group is so disproportionately represented in the young American elite. I'm not talking about the people, you know, who are, you know, over 60. I'm talking about the American elite of people call it under 40. If you're on an Ivy League campus, if you're at Yale Law School, certainly if you're in the kind of banks and tech firms, but also really in this kind of academic, ideological world. It's a group that is really disproportionately influential. And again, there's a Venn diagram. Some of those people are of Muslim origin, some of them are not. But the larger turn of this Indian American population. The ways in which they've contributed to replenished energize the left with their intellectual capital is in some ways akin to the Jewish role in shaping the American left, which you're intimately familiar with. It's different. The analogy breaks down in all sorts of ways.

Haviv Rettig Gur

Lay out this analogy. You've written, by the way, making this analogy. I read in your. You wrote an essay in Sapiri essay.

Raihan Salam

Yes, yes.

Haviv Rettig Gur

That was mind blowing for me. Make the analogy because you also draw conclusions from it. In other words, take the radicalism with a grain of salt. This happened to the Jews show up in America and you know, most of the Jews go off to work, but some of the Jews become the communist agitators of America. But it's okay.

Raihan Salam

They're all.

Haviv Rettig Gur

Their kids are all middle class doctors and lawyers or whatever. I'm obviously, you know, as you said, being cute about it. But can you make the analogy so people really understand both the Muslim current phenomenon and the.

Raihan Salam

I will disagree. But what I want to. But I also want to say this. There's a tendency that you and I, both because of what we care about so deeply that we're going to catastrophize. And I can do that all day long. You know what I mean? Because I will tell you to be alarmed. And actually, to some degree, the people that I work with are some of the most brilliant, tenacious people in the world. And they're alar. We're al alarm together. So sometimes I want to take a breath and I want to just kind of. Because being too alarmed can be enervating, can be demobilizing, can be demotivating to some degree. I actually believe that the, the radicals we are facing, they want to demoralize their opponents, that is us. So we have to be mindful. We both want people to be awake and aware, but we don't want to demoralize them. So to the analogy, you know, honestly, listen to earlier episodes of Ask if anything. But I mean, if you look at the history of American Jewry, that this kind of unique diaspora population, a big part of that is that, you know, you've had, you know, Jews for centuries in this country, but then you had this massive wave of people fleeing pogroms and experiencing deep poverty. And then in the next generation, some upward mobility, but also some openness. This was a cosmopolitan population at a time when ideas were going back and forth across the Atlantic. And, you know, you have a sense these are people who do have a religious and spiritual tradition that teaches them to do something larger than yourself. And if you're not becoming a rabbi, looking at the grave injustices of segregation or looking at kind of this world unfolding around you, looking at labor strife, you know, there's a way in which some of that Jewish intellectual energy was channeled toward fighting this injustice right in front of your face. There were, of course, the other people we don't hear about, who are the people who are like, hey, actually, rather this than, you know, be in the pale of settlement right now. Rather this than being in Odessa right now. And actually there's something we can work with and do. And there's an intersection between those two worlds. There are the people who are the people who were humbly building a business, but then supporting causes that mattered and doing things that were beautiful and noble. And then there are people at the edge of that, and they're the people who became utopians, and they're the people who were not necessarily revering the founding generation of this country, but rather seeing them as yet another corrupt structure seeking to indoctrinate, you know, kind of in. In defense of the interests of capital. So then you have this kind of crazy, crazy intersection. You have the Holocaust. You have the Second World War. That was a kind of inoculation against a certain kind of anti Semitism. Of course, there was casual anti Semitism, but a certain kind of anti Semitism as a politics, as a vigorous majority politics. The country was to some degree inoculated against that in the Cold War era. At the same time, the country ferociously turned against communism and radicalism. Now, you know what I'm driving at. There's a different world in which you could have had a ferocious anti communism that was also anti Judaism, anti Semitism, anti Zionism. It could have been that. So actually, when we think about the golden age of American Jewry, when we think about the. The what America achieved after the Second World War, it was such an accident. It was such an accident that it happened. And you think about the central role that American Jewry played in that renewal and that process of becoming more inclusive and becoming. Realizing so many of our ideals. So some of that utopian energy, you could say, was sublimated, or it changed and it became utopian. It was less utopian. It was a kind of less romantic, but no less energetic phenomenon that became a beautiful foundation for what this country became. And when I look at this moment right now, so one story that, you know, my smart. I have a very smart friend who tells me, well, Raihan, you know, you're exaggerating. With that, you know, yes, the South Asians, yeah, they're all becoming radicals, but also everything is faster now. So that the process of them becoming banal bourgeois, you know, people will just happen faster. And, you know, kind of you're being unduly alarmist. And maybe that's true. But, you know, I think that the world that we're in today, the world that we're approaching, it does feel different from the 50s. The demographic context, as you've observed, is really different. You know, that process of what are you assimilating to? Assimilation is happening, but what are you assimilating to? What are those ideas as you deracinate, as you deculturate, what is filling that vacuum right now? So, you know, what I see is with this population I'm describing to you a population that has become affluent much faster. It's kind of like you immediately move to a suburb. You're not in the Lower east side as a peddler. You're not pushing a cart. You know what I mean? You're not living seven to a room on Orchard Street. You're kind of there in that world. And then you're taught that whatever feeling of alienation you have or marginality that you have, you're implicitly taught that this is a resource to be mined. If you were a Jewish garment worker, you know, kind of, you know, that was not necessarily leverage for you to get into Harvard. Harvard didn't want you there, you know, kind of. So, you know, in a way, that experience of upper mobility was an experience of mutual aid and building your own thing. And then if you were left, it was survival. Today, that's not exactly the case. Today. You can penetrate. You're not penetrating, you're kind of welcome. You know, these elite institutions want you there, and they want you to bring your grievance and victimhood as a story and as a resource. Imagine if you were coming from Odessa and you arrive in the Lower east side and then suddenly there's a group of, you know, wasps. Oh, my. Tell us more about what happened there. Oh, gosh. We're going to give you a fellowship. We're going to give you a grant to describe your Jewish victimhood. Yeah, it's a different kind of world. Again, I'm being cute and I know there's so much more to it. And by the way, there are people. There are absolutely American Muslims growing up in poverty. And. But then again, what is your path to upward mobility? If you're a Bengali Muslim growing up in a working class, lower middle class Family in Queensland, but then you kind of go to college, your upward mobility, maybe it's going to Baruch, and maybe it's kind of getting an accounting degree and kind of doing all of that. But there's another path right now, which is this political path, which, by the way, can be a lot more fun because it's something where, again, you know, you're not the rabbi. You're not celebrated for, you know, kind of your, you know, deep learning and. But you're celebrated. You're on the front lines. You're part of something that is filling that vacuum. So I think that that intersection between what is high status, what is prestigious, what do you chase? There's so many functioning communities, you and I know, where it's kind of like, yeah, you want the rabbi to come to your house for dinner. You kind of want to kind of be there. You want to be someone who's a builder and a sustainer. Think about the people that you and I love. You know what I mean? Just kind of like, who are builders and sustainers? People who've achieved great things, but they don't want to be famous, but they do support. What if you could short circuit that? What if you could fast forward to get to that esteem faster? I think that that's part of what's going on.

Haviv Rettig Gur

It's an amazing matrix of interests and incentives. And you see it, you know, once you see it, you can't unsee it. I mean, so many of these, you know, Brown quote unquote candidates, who, their identity is front and center in their campaigns, then you dig in and you find out, as you said about. I forget her name because it's complex and that's not fair.

Raihan Salam

I was Dariel Avila, okay, who is

Haviv Rettig Gur

a who, you know, middle class and grew up in America. She's not the story that she is representative of to highly educated white voters who, who are, you know, a big part of, of the voter base.

Raihan Salam

One thing I want to say on

Haviv Rettig Gur

the other side, too. Graham Platner being the poor oyster, the working class oyster farmer, and then turning out not to be so working class and not to be an oyster farmer. And even, even J.D. vance, right, in a slightly different context, J.D. vance didn't grow up a hillbilly. So there's so much cachet across the political aisle from, from needing that leg up, from having that moral authority. It's an astonishing, astonishing reality of America right now.

Raihan Salam

Well, so, you know, I'm just struck by this and again, because I, I experienced this because of, you know, when I grew up. So, you know, in the case of jd, what I will say is that he did grow up in a middle class family, but that was chaotic. You know, there was, there really was chaos there. And if you look at Chevalier, I don't know everything about her family, her upbringing, but it's striking when you look at the things she was writing when she was a woman in her mid, late twenties. It's just fascinating. So when she was running in this primary, at the very end of the primary, Mayor Mondani went out and was focusing on one issue, the claim that there were racist attacks against Chevalier from people in the Dominican community who are calling her Haitian. This is really, it's an interesting story. This sounds like a minor thing, but I want to explain why this matters. So basically when she was a young woman, she had said things about how I want to, you know, wouldn't it be amazing if Haiti and the Dominican Republic, there was instead a socialist black indigenous republic called Kiskia that was kind of ruling that island. Now there are many Dominicans who are including naturalized citizens of the United States, but people with Dominican origin who are very patriotic, very devoted, and the Dominican Republican Haiti have a fraught relationship. The Dominican Republic is very heavily, um, you know, it's mixed race, but there is absolutely very heavily dark skinned black component, you know, the African descended component to that population. And even for that population there's a resistance of Haiti and the sense of Haitian interlopers and what have you. It's an ugly politics. The way that politics can be ugly all over the world, including here in the United States. But it was fascinating to me because there were many things being said. There are also many scary things being said about her opponent that I would claim her anti Semitic or racist or really alarming. But it was amazing that at the end of the campaign it wasn't, well, she has the better stance on the issues or what have you. Or like, no, she's the one who has the intelligence and wisdom to be in this role. The pitch for her was that she was a victim of racism and bigotry and chauvinism. Even Espayat was actually like, he didn't, he never said these things, but he was apologizing. You're like, no, there are people that are over. He wasn't saying it. There were some other people saying it. And that was a resource to be mined. It's kind of like you're, you're, you're digging for gold, you know what I mean? You're mining that. Where can I find it's kind of like this idea that if there's not a big enough supply of racism to meet the demand for racism, you gotta find new racism. Then Zionism has to be racism or kind of, you know what, it just kind of. It has to spread. It has to become microaggressions.

Haviv Rettig Gur

You have.

Raihan Salam

And then the genius of this political vision is that it means you can always ante up if haviv you and I are polite people. But actually, what I've learned and the reason why I came to my job and why I love Manhattan students, I love the people that I work with, is that I realized at a certain point that actually there are times when you need to say enough is enough, and you need to be able to do that. And that requires having some backbone. And again, for me, as a conciliatory person, sometimes you are really easily rolled. You're really easily manipulated by anyone who says that they're offended, by anyone who leverages that authenticity, that moral authority that we're talking about. It becomes this incredibly powerful weapon that you can use. So it's kind of like you have an arsenal. Sometimes you're just aggressive and you harass and intimidate, but then sometimes you're the victim. You know, every single time I mention anti Semitism, I have to mention Islamophobia. Anti Palestinian racism is the new term that's being used. And then basically, you make anti Palestinian racism so capacious a category that it includes trying to give an honest accounting of the history of the Middle east from 1948 on or from, you know, the 1890s on. Giving some attempt to give an honest accounting then gets redefined as racism. It's actually quite fascinating and incredibly effective because again, the kind of whole the audience for this is people who are. There's an absence. They're kind of able to be persuaded by it. And so, you know, I think that victim narrative you're describing, it's not. It's. It's a political tactic, but it's so much more. It's a way of bending how we see the world and make sense of the world. And the only way to counter it is to know history. And that's obviously a tall order.

Haviv Rettig Gur

I want to get back to the Muslim community in the United States and understanding a little bit better the political phenomenon as it's rooted in that Muslim community. In that Sapir article, which I highly recommend people read, it is a fantastic jumping off point. Looking at some of these issues, you distinguish between two dangers within the Muslim community. That the Muslim community itself, in polling of the Muslim community sees inside itself and talks about. One of them at least is the rise of radical Islamic, you know, Islamism as we call it, radical Islamic ideologies coming into the Muslim community. And you suggest that, you know, some solutions need to be found for this, a little bit better vetting and immigration, some questions of law enforcement, education, et cetera. And then you say the larger long term threat is what you describe as Third Worldism. And we've used the term, I've used it, you've used it, and we've covered a lot of this ground. But give us what is that? What are those two things? The more academic sounding one is the more dangerous than the threat of violent radicalism. What is that? Third Worldism and how widespread is it in the Muslim community?

Raihan Salam

First, I definitely don't want to discount the threat of Jihadi violence of Islamism. I think it's real. However, I also felt that that was not where I could make a unique contribution. And I also genuinely believe that that is more of a minority phenomenon fundamentally in the American Muslim community. And it's something that is to some is necessarily limited to Muslims. Third Worldism is a phenomenon that like communism, socialism, anarchism is potentially something that can draw in anyone, but where there's a group of highly assimilated American Muslims who've been a powerful vector of this phenomenon. So, you know, I'm using the term really inspired by Zeineb Reboy, a scholar at Hudson Institute who's brilliant, wonderful, and she was drawing on this older intellectual tradition that you and I are both familiar with, if you study the plo, but also if you study the new left movements, you know, this romanticization of the anti colonial liberation struggles of that era, it was a new mode for a kind of left wing politics where it was not classic Marxism, but it was taking this racialized struggle between the global south and the global north and making it this central morality play for understanding the world. And what's interesting about it, Haviv, is that it's not something that is just attractive and magnetic for American Muslims. It's attractive and magnetic for young American Jews. You know, the kind of, I, you know, some of my friends and I joke that what we see is a civil war among American Jews between Jews who like their parents and Jews who hate their parents. But you know, I think that this third worldist ideology is something that is very magnetic to a wide array of people. And then there are some people, including you know, our friends at Tablet, who said that, no Third Worldism, it's not. That's, it's communism. You know, there are other people who say it's this and it's that. You know, but I think I find the word Third Worldism useful because it's that idea of baptismal revolutionary violence. You know, settler colonialism. Adam Kirsch wrote a beautiful short book on settler colonialism. And, you know, these ideas began in Australia and then traveled to Canada, made their into the United States in the American academy about, you know, indigenous people and the fundamental injustice of the disposition of these lands and the idea that, you know, these states are not legitimate. They are settler colonial entities that are fundamentally predatory. And this is a way to understand these societies. Then Israel became the locus of this. But the thing about Israel is that Israel, one can imagine it actually being destroyed and actually there is real everyday violence that's happening that then you can fetishize and celebrate and identify with. So Third Worldism, you know, there, you know, one related term is the idea of campism. You know, why do, why would leftists, you know, be for Iran? And why would the Dariel is Chevalier was arguing that Russia was bullied into invading Ukraine. Why would they be pro Putin? And then, you know, China, China engages in more labor repression than any other state in the world. You know, they, they oppose building welfare. I mean, China is communist, but they're not terribly, they're not Danish social democrats. Exactly right. So why are these the regimes that they celebrate? Well, because part of the Third worldist ethic, it's campism. America is the leader of the imperialist camp. Israel is its junior partner, or maybe it's its senior partner. Who knows, Depending on which brand of this ideology you believe they need to be opposed or destroyed or subverted from within or kind of what have you. And so any opponent of American imperialism is then the good guy. And by the way, you know, there is this element of Third worldist ideas. What is the nexus between them and foreign actors? There's a transnational character to this. Of course there is, because again, it's, it's a worldview that's not really about we honor our founding fathers. You know, this kind of thing. It's like, oh, like we are going to look in an American, you know, I mean, Zora Mandani gave a speech in the fourth of July. But you know, if you look at his inaugural address, you look at this tradition they come from. These are not people who romanticize America. And that's not a crime, by the way. It's a Free country. But their worldview is transnational in character. And that Third Worldist idea, for all the reasons you and I have been talking about, is very magnetically attractive to a certain kind of young intellectually inclined person who has something missing and it's something that really can grow.

Haviv Rettig Gur

What fascinates me, that I draw from your writings analytically, is the extent to which political Muslim, just to tie some of the strands together, religiously secular, politically Muslim, what politically Muslim means, and all of these layers of authenticity and all of these questions of identity, and all of this hunger and yearning in a young population that for all these different reasons is less likely to marry, less likely to settle down, less likely to have access to a home and a great career. And you've written about what many scholars have written about, all of this problem of elite overproduction. There are too many people with too much education. What are they going to do with that education? What is the education? If it's massively costly in terms of debt, but doesn't actually provide you the life that it claimed to provide you, what do you do now? You kind of become a radical that wants to overturn the system. You're more likely, slightly more likely to become. What fascinates me is the way in which religiously secular, politically Muslim identity of the Zoram Hamdani type has come to. Almost this is with a question mark, almost identify, almost be identical to be coterminous with this Third Worldist Muslim identity as a symbol of oppression, as a symbol of resistance to Westernness or whiteness. It's all coded racially. It borrows from that debate in America. That, to me, is a fascinating thing. Am I getting that right? Is that, is, is that your analysis or is that something I'm concluding fundamentally,

Raihan Salam

this is work that requires ethnography, that requires a real textured understanding. So, yes, that is what I see. And I want to be very clear what you and I are both talking about. You're talking about minorities of people who have disproportionate weight and influence in our culture. You know, we know how this works. Do I believe. But yes, if I'm just going to be blunt about it, yes, that is what I see. And the reason, one reason I see this is that, you know, think about European Muslims now. Since 911 and even before that, there has been this idea, we need to find the moderate Muslims. Where do we find the moderate Muslims? And part of the challenge is that what, you know, in America, you know, at a different time and place, you saw the rise of The Reform movement in Judaism, you know, it was an idea that you're going to have the continuity, you're going to have peoplehood. But we are going to create Judaism that is almost like a Protestant denomination, but drawing on the Jewish tradition. We're in a different world that's a much more secular world. And, you know, you think about the timelines and you think about the demography. There's no one who created Reform Islam, you know, that doesn't really exist. What you see is a global world where you have WhatsApp and you had. You have these kind of currents that travel from one place to another. You have some immigrant Muslims who have mosques that are immigrant mosques that are that world and that maybe survives the second generation, but probably not, or is sustained by replenishment and what have you. And, you know, maybe in the second generation it's there and, you know, you see this. So. So you do have observance. But that thing that we mentioned as the, the Reform Judaism of Islam isn't really there. If it's there, it is going to be a more austere religious practice that is that kind of Arabized vision of what Islam is that spread throughout the Muslim world, you know, in the kind of post 70s world when that oil money was put, you know, in service to Allah. And then that kind of indirectly affects these various diaspora, immigrant diaspora populations. Then the other thing you had in Europe and the United States is people who just fall away from religion entirely. About a quarter of Americans who are raised in Muslim households now do not identify as Muslims at all. They don't appear in a lot of surveys. Then you have people who identify as Muslims but are not necessarily grounded in a community. By the way, I'm one of them myself. You know, I identify as a Muslim. I'm a believer. I don't have the deep religious command that my parents did, and I don't have the deep religious community that they did. I'm married to someone who's not a Muslim. You know, she actually knows a lot about it. But so think about, you know, the mosque, the immigrant mosque in Brooklyn where I grew up versus the NYU Islamic Center. I mean, you know, you know, just think, these are different. My wife, you know, went to a selective American university where there are a lot of foreign students, and she actually got to know a lot of the Muslim foreign students very, very well. That's an interesting different world. That's an interesting crucible. That's a world where you have people who are the foreign students coming, let's say, from the Arab world or elsewhere. Then you have the Americans who grew up in Muslim households, not very literate, and you kind of get drawn into this orbit. Then you have a few girlfriends and boyfriends who get drawn in, you know, kind of a few of those people. And then how does that world of the student Islamic center, Remember I said 47% of US Muslim adults are in post secondary education. How does that intersect with Gaza then? How is Gaza drawing in? You know, at Barnard, I remember reading there were second generation dictators. There's a, there's a. Excuse me, not second, there's a Korean immigrant who is arrested. You know, kind of. I just say her parents, you know, her immigrant parents. How do they feel about this? How do they make sense of this? How did this happen? She wasn't necessarily converting to Islam, but actually that is almost. It's like the way you climb the levels. That's almost the higher level of enlightenment that you achieve if you're really in it. Darieliza Ville Chevalier. She achieved the higher level of enlightenment, right? She unlocked. She became more of an insider. So this is an interesting world.

Haviv Rettig Gur

We should think. Forgive me for the interruption.

Raihan Salam

No, no, no, no, please.

Haviv Rettig Gur

I'm getting excited, I'm interrupting out of excitement. We should think of reform Islam, so to speak. And Islam that tries to retool itself to a deep integration into this American culture and moment turns third world is because that's the America it's integrating into. And in that America specifically, it can claim levels of moral authority. Well, that would drive a conversion after nine, after, after October 7th.

Raihan Salam

This is brilliant. This is brilliant. First of all, that is so perfect because it is credibility. Well, no, but, no, but I think that you've articulated it. You know, it is. What is, you know, Christianity was the universalization of Judaism. You know, what is the thing where the barrier to entry is lower? What is the thing where we create something with prestige and status? You think about, you know, yes, that Jewish assimilation, you know, had. Took many different forms. One form of this was how could we be dignified and accepted and proud? So part of it is how do our religious forms come to resemble those kind of religious forms that are high status in this new country? And how do we kind of adapt? And you don't necessarily think of it that baldly, but you're adapting. But then you think about, you know, the ethical culture movement, you know, you think about, you know, reconstructionism and kind of what came out of that. You know, this is reconstructionist Islam and it is reconstruct. It's not the kind of like these guys with the beards and the hats and the kind of, you know, they're kind of doing this and they. And the accents, you know, it's not that. It is something that is much more tasteful and high status. It is something that is magnetic, that is, that is sexy and transgressive. This is something where the greatest, hippest, coolest musicians in the world are, you know, kind of singing from your hymnal. So if you're someone who, I mean, yes. And again, it takes a different form than it would in the 1950s in Scarsdale. You know what I mean? It's just, you know, it's just, it's different. But I think that you've. Yes, I think you've totally hit the nail on the head.

Haviv Rettig Gur

The difference is potentially very, very important because the, the Jewish integration process, Americanized in the sense of committed Jews to what America itself, the traditional sense of liberal democracy of America, whereas Third Worldism, which is extremely sexy in the elites, is a path to validating all kinds of radicalisms. This will be the last question. You wrote a piece in the Free Press in March. There was an attempted Islamist, I think they were affiliated with isis attempt to bomb an anti Islam protest at Gracie Mansion at the mayor's official residence in New York. And they were trying to attack the protesters, the anti Islam protesters and the NYPD officers. And their bomb didn't go off properly. And that was the event. And Mamdani had issued, Mayor Mamdani had issued a very, very clear cut denunciation of the anti Muslim protesters and then at first issued a very just anemic and almost empty denunciation of the attack, then followed up with a denunciation of the terrorist act. He used the word terrorist, but he never addressed the actual ideology like he did speak of the white supremacy, as he put it, of the anti Islam protesters. There was no ideology to the terrorists who tried to murder NYPD officers and the protesters. And you wrote. I'm just going to quote you for one second, as New York City's first Muslim mayor Zoran Mandani is the most prominent observant Muslim in American life. He's made his religious identity a central part of his political identity. He has vowed not to bite his tongue in the face of Islamophobia. That gives him unique credibility and authority to speak out. And this is where you make enemies against the chauvinism, extremism, misogyny and racism that exist within Muslim communities. And that has translated into violence again and again. Those trains represent as much of a threat to Muslim American flourishing as any external forces. And right now, Muslim Americans are desperate for leadership that addresses their internal communal challenges. Polling is spotty, but we know. Forgive me for continuing to read. I want to position the entirety of your argument and we're three quarters of the way there. Polling is spotty, but we know that Muslim Americans are concerned about extremism in their midst. In the last major survey on the topic in 2017, 82% of American Muslims reported concern about extremism in the name of Islam. 66%. 66 points of that being very concerned. And in that survey, only 39% said that leading Muslim interest groups are doing a good job representing their interests. And then you write the punchline, mamdani could be the leader Muslim Americans actually want, who sees Muslims not as perpetual victims of white supremacy, but as a vibrant pluralistic community that has the strength to face its internal challenges. And you just go on there to say he could be the leader. He could do enormous good for Muslim Americans in their relations to their non Muslim neighbors by being a leader in the truest sense, the reform Islam that is a political third Worldism, a secular, religious, but politically Islamic can't be that leader. Can't turn inward and fix and self critique. There's a tremendous amount of self critique in the Jewish community and there isn't in the Muslim community because. Because that version of Islam, that political Islam creates a moral hierarchy of authority and authenticity in which the Muslim is the good guy, definitionally. So how could you have serious problems of anti Semitism in the Muslim community, of misogyny in the Muslim community, of things that actually need to be seriously discussed and put on the table because that's the only disinfectant. Right Is Mamdani, the most prominent Muslim political leader in America is not going to go the way the Jews went. Because this ideology doesn't allow for that kind of introspection. Or doesn't. It allows for it. It doesn't. It doesn't drive it. It doesn't make it easy. It doesn't make it obvious.

Raihan Salam

You know that when you're writing a piece like this, there is an element where you're trying to make sense of a phenomenon. But then there's also an element where you're trying to be aspirational. Even if you believe that the argument you're advancing is unlikely to bear FR fruit. This is a case. Where do I believe that Zora Momdani was likely to take my advice? No, I did not believe that. Then I don't believe it now, and I can explain to you why. But I also believe that my posture, our posture, should be to create some exit opportunity to articulate what it might look like to take a different path. If that doesn't apply to Mayor Mamdani, it might apply to someone else just to kind of lay out what that that might look like. Now the challenge here is that, you know, one of my colleagues recently observed that the American left is over institutionalized and the American right is under institutionalized. And I think you could say something similar about different faith traditions, different religious communities. You know, the American Jewish community, for a variety of reasons, and I think this is something that's very much in a larger historical tradition, has a very rich, dynamic civil society. You know, there it's, it's thick with institutions. You know, some of those institutions are fragile, but you know, some of them are very vibrant, vigorous and healthy. The American Muslim community is under institutionalized. You know, you do have a few advocacy groups and what have you, not all of which I consider very savory. That's a whole other story. But then in general, you know, you have a heavily immigrant community or second generation community. The affluent parts of it are very kind of suburbanized and still their religious tradition is ethnic. Then you have this whole universe of younger assimilated people that you and I have been talking about. They are under institutionalized. And when you go Back to that 47% number, how many US Muslim adults are in higher education, In a way I'm sounding cute, but in a way these universities are the madrasas. You know, I mean, these universities are actually the institutional core, the institutional center. So your reform analogy is just so good and powerful. The Middle east studies department departments are actually. You're not going to Al Azhar University to kind of like call the plays. You know, you're going to the Columbia Middle East Studies department to call the plays. You're going to, you know, the people, you know, the Khalidis and then kind of like the. The various devotees of said and kind of what have you. You know, you have this kind of whole line of people and they have one on every campus, right? And you know, so it is quite fascinating. So I think, think you're. I hope that I'm wrong. I hope that I'm wrong. But when it comes to a figure like Mayor Mamdani, for him to say anything beyond the bare minimum would be seen as weak, inauthentic. It would be. It would be something that would be an. Experienced as an indignity and also Remember, you have multiple audiences. You have the audience in the broad mouth. Okay, well, he said something. He said, terrorism is bad. Okay, okay, I'll take it. Then you have this small audience that is really paying very careful attention to what he says and wants to make sure that he is not bending. See what I mean? They want to make sure that he is not actually conceding. He is not doing that. So they're very carefully parsing their words. You know, there was an article in a Politico newsletter shortly after Mehrma's inauguration saying, well, what is he spending time doing? He said, well, he's really deferring to heads of his agencies to let them do their job. But he's spending hours working on press releases. I don't know if that's changed. He's been at the job longer now. But I thought, yeah, that tracks. That tracks. And I don't mean that to, you know, insult the guy or diminish him. He understands the power of these words. And he's someone who is, you know, unlike someone like a Bill de Blasio. Bill de Blasio wants what's good for Bill de Blasio. You know, Bill de Blasio wants to be famous. He wants to be. Saramandani is not arrogant in that way. Zoramandani is a movement builder. Zoram Hamdani wants these ideals. You and I have been calling them the third worldist, but he wants them to conquer the center left in this country. He wants to have a red strategy as well as a blue strategy. There are many different components to it. And so he's not perfect. He's not a political sage in every respect, but he has pretty good instincts. He understands how attention works. He understands how you've got to keep that hardcore minority happy as well as be an acceptable face to a wider universe of people. He understands momentum. And this is why I don't know if he's going to fade from the scene in five years. Maybe he will. But he is laying down a model that is being studied and will be followed. And he is surfacing many truths about this country, about our immigrant communities that are real. But I just want to say to you, Haviv, as a. I don't speak for anyone. You know, I'm a conservative. I'm a weirdo. I'm a kind of, you know, all sorts of things about me that are kind of different. But I will tell you that there are. I don't want this to become American Muslims versus American Jews or American. It's I do believe that we can change this dynamic. And I also believe that there are many people. Remember I told you about the articulate and the inarticulate. You know what I mean? They're the people who don't have the vocabulary. They don't have the vocabulary, but they have the heart and they have the gratitude. And there's people who are out there. And in a way, I have failed because I'm not a person who's out in the world. But we need our person who is out there to make that case, to kind of make. Build a different. There are small people in little communities who are trying to do that, but we need that path to advance the things that you and I care about and that tens of millions of other people care about too.

Haviv Rettig Gur

We need to find the plain words. And in the end, real, ordinary people are going to be the redemption of the world from all the subtle, sophisticated ideas of the intellectuals that claim to know it all. This is why I never got a serious formal education, so I could help shepherd along that you and me both. Raihan Salam. You went to Harvard, right?

Raihan Salam

I have an undergraduate degree, my friend. You know, in the Salam family, that is, I'm the least educated member of my family, our moral authority.

Haviv Rettig Gur

Raihan Salaam. This has been a. You've taken an ignorant tourist on a tour of an absolutely fascinating and important world and humanized it for me. And you come and you are extremely clear about where you come from, how much you represent, how much you don't, how much you're trying to analyze this world. But getting a sense of the ideas that animate them is a lot better than just tracking all the ways in which they're anti Semitic by claiming the NYPD learned to be racist to minorities from the Israel Police Exchange Program. That to me is just Mamdani. That's it. Like anti Semite. But actually there's a deep, rich, fascinating, profound cultural shift happening that has to do with immigration and has to do with Islam. It has to do with things that have nothing to do with immigrants and Islamic, but that they're all overlapping in these people. And to understand some of that richness, to have that window open a crack and look in is extremely rewarding for me and I hope people have learned from it. So thank you very much for all that you do and thank you for joining me. This was absolutely, absolutely fascinating.

Raihan Salam

Thank you, my friend.