[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Rabbi Ami Hirsch of the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York, and you're listening to, in these times.
[SPEAKER_00]: During my time studying law at the London School of Economics, I picked up the daily habit of reading the Guardian.
[SPEAKER_00]: I still look at it almost every day, and while it's coverage of Israel is often highly and relentlessly critical, especially during this war.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it's healthy to expose myself to perspectives I don't always agree with.
[SPEAKER_00]: Jonathan Friedland is one of the guardian's most prominent columnists, and he's an incredible and prolific writer.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's penned nine novels, thrillers, under the name Sam Born.
[SPEAKER_00]: And under his own name, he's written a play in four works of nonfiction.
[SPEAKER_00]: His latest is the Trader Circle.
[SPEAKER_00]: a true story of a secret resistance network in Nazi Germany, and the spy will be trade them.
[SPEAKER_00]: It just came out at the end of October.
[SPEAKER_00]: Jonathan Friedland, welcome to In These Times.
[SPEAKER_00]: Very good to be, Rihanna.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've wanted to spend some time with you for a long time.
[SPEAKER_00]: I follow your career with interest, both with respect to your journalist career and your analyst career as well as your novelist and your you document history as well in just an amazing way.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'm very appreciative that you took the time to share with me and with our audience
[SPEAKER_01]: No, I'm so grateful to be here with you.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I know we have some people in common.
[SPEAKER_01]: And there's much, much ground to cover between us.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, there's, you know, given what we both do, I think there's a lot here for us to talk about.
[SPEAKER_01]: So thank you for having me.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, I must say, you're younger than me.
[SPEAKER_00]: I studied at the London School of Economics back in the early 80s.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I know if we were there together, we would have been fast friends now for the last 40, 45 years.
[SPEAKER_01]: you still you still have some years to catch up on me not much so I was a student in the I started at university in 1986 so you there the L8 is there's not much in it really I'm just I'm just I'm doing I'm hot on your heels there and now I'm going to I called you amy which may be in a hoods but do you say amy or a rabbi hair?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah no call me amy that's that's how the bridge do it that's how all my friends do it good okay let me ask you before we get to the books that you write in particular the latest book called The Trader Circle
[SPEAKER_00]: you're a very well-known prominent journalist in the UK.
[SPEAKER_00]: You write for the Guardian newspaper.
[SPEAKER_00]: I remember even back when I was a student in London that the Guardian always had this quite critical view of Israel.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it's even more so now and I think especially since October 7, 2023.
[SPEAKER_00]: What's it like writing for the, you define yourself as a liberal Zionist, I believe?
[SPEAKER_00]: So what's it like writing for a paper and an outlet like the Guardian?
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, you have a bigger sense of it than a lot of people would have because you go about many decades on this, but the garden has a really long and quite sort of I think surprising history when it comes to Israel and specifically Zionism, so if you go back to the history of Zionism, the newspaper which was the biggest loudest advocate for Zionism was the Manchester garden when
[SPEAKER_01]: had his, you know, fateful and fruitful meetings with Lord Balfour, that produced the Balfour Declaration.
[SPEAKER_01]: He wrote to CP Scott the legendary iconic editor of the Guardian, who was editor for 57 years.
[SPEAKER_01]: and still, you know, everything in the God is named Scott after him.
[SPEAKER_01]: You wrote him to say, you are one of the handful of people without whom the Balfour Declaration would not have happened.
[SPEAKER_01]: I remember being as a report on the paper on display with the Erits, you saw a sublimant of the Guardian published in the 1930s.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Guardian was all in for Zionism.
[SPEAKER_01]: when Zionism had few takers in the rest of the British media landscape in the British press.
[SPEAKER_01]: Then the heartbreak came, as I would describe it, in 1967, where after the war, David became galif in the popular British left progressive imagination
[SPEAKER_01]: And it was a very gradual process, by the way, there was a disinchantment.
[SPEAKER_01]: In fact, there's a book about the whole garden relationship with Israel.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's its title, disinchantment.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so in a very small nutshell, the garden backed is the notion of a Jewish state, it backed Israel up to the point where Israel became an occupier.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, from late to 1967 onwards, and that matches and sort of maps on to a trajectory for the wider British, maybe even European left.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so that's really been the story.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's definitely true that you can point to articles and so on that are been in the garden that we'd make people's hair stand on end.
[SPEAKER_01]: Nevertheless, the other thing that's crucial to know about the garden is it has no proprietor.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's no owner.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's no publisher.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's owned by a charitable trust
[SPEAKER_01]: that has no involvement editorially, and it means if you are in a columnist or a opinion like I am.
[SPEAKER_01]: I've been doing this, I've been right to my column now for since 1997.
[SPEAKER_01]: I have never once been directed to what I can say in that column and never been told that something I have written can't be.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're including places where I have criticised the Guardian.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that is really the exceptional thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: So there is a, to wind up at this far too long answer.
[SPEAKER_01]: There are voices in the garden that, yes, I wouldn't agree with you.
[SPEAKER_01]: You wouldn't agree with, but I'm there, and I'm able to say whatever I like.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that is a kind of journalistic freedom that is so rare and precious that it feels to me a very, very, you know, cherished thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you ever feel like you're kind of an an island on your own
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I looked at the Guardian today.
[SPEAKER_00]: I look at it every day, partially for nostalgic reasons.
[SPEAKER_00]: I still read the British press.
[SPEAKER_00]: And partially, I'm, that's not my world view.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I like to read what other people are thinking about.
[SPEAKER_01]: Sure.
[SPEAKER_00]: And even today, online, of course.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just any article about Israel is relentlessly critical.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you're not here in your capacity as, you know, defender of the Guardian.
[SPEAKER_00]: I just, my question to you is, are you, do you ever feel lonely at the Guardian?
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, you know, I know exactly what you're getting at.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's true that, you know, my particular perspective on it is not the majority of perspective.
[SPEAKER_01]: There are a whole lot of colleagues, actually.
[SPEAKER_01]: That are, in some cases, not all are...
[SPEAKER_01]: you know, behind the scenes, in other words editors and commissioning editors and so on, who are pretty in step with how I see things, but you're right, the overall prevailing view is fiercely hostile, you know, critical and hostile, but then the question, you have to complete the sentence to what?
[SPEAKER_01]: Are they fiercely critical and hostile of Israel as an idea, summer?
[SPEAKER_01]: But are they fiercely critical of this and previous, the whole string of previous Israeli governments?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, they are, but so am I.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, I might do in a very different tone of voice, because I'm within the family.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm sort of at the, you know, I'm at the metaphorical Shabbat table saying, where are we going wrong?
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm not saying where are they going wrong?
[SPEAKER_01]: So the grammar of it is different.
[SPEAKER_01]: The tone of voice is different.
[SPEAKER_01]: But look, I've been, you know, as long as I've been writing a pinion columns, I've been writing one way or another against Petra Benjamin Netanyahu.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, he's been there as long as I have.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was the prime minister.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I said, it's incredible.
[SPEAKER_01]: Because I started writing this column.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was, I'm very, and you know, it was quite unusual.
[SPEAKER_01]: I would be.
[SPEAKER_01]: was asked to write this opinion column when I was age 30.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he'd already been Prime Minister for a year then.
[SPEAKER_01]: And now, you know, I'm the next significant birthday is 60, I'm 58 now.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he's still Prime Minister, you know, it's like the, he and I, these two fixed points in the Jewish universe, and no, what I'm saying is that I've always been a very trench and critic of his.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so there are a lot of stuff that, you know, Jewish readers and others don't like in the garden,
[SPEAKER_01]: Look, if this was in and is really paper, or if I had my name on it, rather than someone else's name on it, would you take it differently?
[SPEAKER_01]: That maybe they would.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I think there's no greater criticism than you hear of successive Israeli governments and from Israelis inside Israel.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is uncomfortable for people reading it in the garden.
[SPEAKER_01]: And by the way, I know you said it's nostalgia and British press.
[SPEAKER_01]: It has become a very different animal now because it truly is a global.
[SPEAKER_01]: phenomenon.
[SPEAKER_01]: The god, the god, it has tens of millions of readers around the world, large numbers in the United States, where you are, it is no longer just simply what it was when you were a student, which was this British brawl sheet newspaper.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think the fourth best selling British brawl sheet newspaper, in other words, it wasn't the number one paper.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now it is one of the forces in English language journalism around the world, but it says things
[SPEAKER_01]: There's always been room there for my voice and I think a lot of the things it says about Israeli governments, though uncomfortable are very often true.
[SPEAKER_00]: Where do we stand with British Jewry?
[SPEAKER_00]: It just strikes us that there is enormous hostility on the streets of the UK towards the Jewish community.
[SPEAKER_00]: And within certain elite power struggle, liberal elite institutions.
[SPEAKER_00]: Is that exaggerated by distance or do you sense that situation is worse now than it used to be?
[SPEAKER_01]: It is worse than it used to be, but it can also give is, et cetera, to by distance.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, you know, Polycos you just, as everyone does by those, not just you, you moved between categories there, about hostility to the Jewish community and then there's anti-Israel stuff.
[SPEAKER_01]: And there are different things, even though sometimes, as we absolutely saw in the most murderous way,
[SPEAKER_01]: that line is more than just blurred.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's crossed and violated in the case of the Manchester synagogue killings.
[SPEAKER_01]: And look, day to day life.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I'm just unpacking this way.
[SPEAKER_01]: First, I think important thing to say is the government and both political parties and that there are several big political parties.
[SPEAKER_01]: They are all, yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, in their public statements, a vowed clear, they are with the Jewish community.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I often make a point in my non-Jewish friends are often surprised when I tell them that there is security outside every Jewish building.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, you know, this of course as well, every Jewish school, if you go to a synagogue, there is airport style security and if anything it's stronger, it's heavier than airport style security, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: People are shocked by that.
[SPEAKER_01]: But then a lot of Jewish community people draw a veil over the fact that the way does the money for this come from.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Some of it is donations in the community, but also a large chunk of it is a very substantial grant that comes from the UK government.
[SPEAKER_01]: And increases every year even when other things have to be cut and that it's been given now under the Labour government and it was under the Conservative government.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is a matter of bipartisan consensus.
[SPEAKER_01]: I read, I say this.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's when people, some of the say, oh my word is 1938 again, it's Europe.
[SPEAKER_01]: No, there was a really big difference.
[SPEAKER_01]: that the governments in that era were against the Jews, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: And now the governments and the people in charge are very much with the Jewish community.
[SPEAKER_01]: And there are examples I could give you even just this week of that.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's a really big difference because you were talking about elite institutions.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's true some universities and liberal media organizations and other things.
[SPEAKER_01]: They give Israel a very rough ride.
[SPEAKER_01]: Does that, is that the same as they're hostile to the British Jewish community or to the Jewish community?
[SPEAKER_01]: Look, certainly some individuals post things and tweet things that are horrible and I call them out, other people call them out definitely.
[SPEAKER_01]: But it's not, it'd be wrong to say there is this overall climate of hostility.
[SPEAKER_01]: And you know, I'm not somebody who wears a kip out and about the street, but lots of my friends do and they are
[SPEAKER_01]: they report that they forget, it remarkably, you know, little trouble for it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I live in the sort of hurriedie neighborhood here in North London, and I see, you know, most of the time, my neighbors carry on their lives un-bothed by other people.
[SPEAKER_01]: There isn't that climate hostility.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, there are weekly marches about,
[SPEAKER_01]: you know, chanting free, free Palestine.
[SPEAKER_01]: That is, I think you just have to sort of put that into a category that is not about hostility to Jewish life and Britain, even if there are placards and slogans that sometimes shade into that and need to be rooted out and cooled out.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's not, it's not just, it's not quite as a, we believe that most breads make a distinction between their
[SPEAKER_00]: along the lines of accusing Israel of genocide, which is about the harshest accusation you can make now against a country.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: So they can make a distinction, and they do, in fact, most people.
[SPEAKER_00]: Make a distinction between that and anti-Jewish sentiment.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think most do, and I am reading this polling, it suggests that.
[SPEAKER_01]: But once in what the challenge I put to a lot of them, when I'm writing in the Guardian, and I'm addressing that audience,
[SPEAKER_01]: is to say, look, you may think this is a very hard and fast distinction, and you walk around very content with your own conscience that you are only critical of Israel, and you have no problem at all with Jews, but you have to realize that how a Jewish person here is a slogan like from the river to the sea, for example.
[SPEAKER_01]: that they hear that differently from how you, the garden reader, might mean it, but the other point I did make, after the manch to killings on young kippur, the immediate point I made there was even if you think the line is very clear, you have to now grapple with the fact that there are people around in this country who do not police that distinction, who do not observe that distinction,
[SPEAKER_01]: on the country, their anger and hostility about Israel, they decide to express that by literally killing Jews in Britain.
[SPEAKER_01]: So you yourself, I say to the Israel critical garden reader, you now have to be quite vigilant about this.
[SPEAKER_01]: Are you when you're going on that march?
[SPEAKER_01]: Really sure, you're not
[SPEAKER_01]: pumping into the air, a kind of hostility, the other people less vigilant than you.
[SPEAKER_01]: Let's be give the, you know, there are interlocutor, the benefit that out.
[SPEAKER_01]: People less vigilant than you might take that and blur that distinction.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the other point I do often make is that
[SPEAKER_01]: It's very neat for the Antisanist to say, oh, no, I have no problem with Jews.
[SPEAKER_01]: I just have a big problem with Israel.
[SPEAKER_01]: I often write everything in this in the garden several times to say, you know, I get the intellectual distinction, but in the actual day-to-day reality, A is role is the biggest Jewish community in the world.
[SPEAKER_01]: B, most Jews around the world, identify with, are bound up with a family who live in Israel.
[SPEAKER_01]: And third, there are plenty of people around you who just think one is the same as the other.
[SPEAKER_01]: For all those reasons, it requires a kind of detachment to think that these things are neatly separate and not neatly separate.
[SPEAKER_01]: And therefore, if you are every single day, railing against Israel and hurling at it, the most extreme criticism,
[SPEAKER_01]: I say to, you know, the people who are reading my stuff, you know, think very, very carefully because these things are not quite as separate as you might need them to be in like them to be.
[SPEAKER_00]: My last question about contemporary events, so the Stammer government recently recognized Palestine.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not sure that even they know what that fully means, but was it well received in the United Kingdom?
[SPEAKER_01]: It was quite well received, I think, by the general public, but very badly received by the Jewish community.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Jewish community was really angry with it, and immediately echoed the line you heard from the Israeli government that this was a reward for terror.
[SPEAKER_01]: I am, and I don't want to mislead your listeners and viewers at all by pretending that the opinion I'm about to voice is anything other than a minority opinion in Britain.
[SPEAKER_01]: is, and I've based this on my own reporting and having spoken to diplomats and others, I thought first I had no problem with it because I think if you believe in a two-state solution, which is so many people are saying is dead and buried and over.
[SPEAKER_01]: what you need to do to do something to revive it and guess what, it's now back on the agenda and even though it's not in that language, it's what underpins phase two of the Trump plan, because that's implied there.
[SPEAKER_01]: But the second thing, this is the point about based on the conversations I've had, it seems clear to me that the deal, which everyone in Israel, including the liquid benches in the Kinesa, are celebrating, which brought the hostages back home.
[SPEAKER_01]: That deal, a part of why that was possible, was that the Arab states came on board, a plan that says Hamasat must be out of the picture and must disarm, and that condemns October 7, partly because of a sequence of moves which include recognition of a Palestinian state, that so-called New York Declaration, Emmanuel Macron and the Saudis, brought together the
[SPEAKER_01]: others, Portugal, recognizing a Palestinian state, what hardly ever got noticed was it was also signed on to by the huge number of Arab states, big Muslim states, Indonesia and others, what got them on board, was that European recognition and sort of G7 level, recognition of a Palestinian state.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's one reason why you have not heard major condemnation of it from Donald Trump.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's been very mild his condemnation of it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that is because, my understanding is because it was one of the, in the choreography that led to that deal, the Europeans quietly were doing their bit.
[SPEAKER_01]: got the Arab states on board.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I don't I have I myself and not one of those who denounce the UK government for recognizing Palestinian state, but I don't mind that I don't want to mislead anyone, most British Jewish sort of community activists would take a different view from me.
[SPEAKER_00]: but popular British opinion is behind this supportive of the deal.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so I think it is, I think there's a question about some people say how effective or difference will it make.
[SPEAKER_01]: But no, it is pretty supportive.
[SPEAKER_01]: I should look up numbers to put some data on that, because I don't have those in my fingers.
[SPEAKER_01]: But broadly, yes, because people, including people who are very sympathetic to Israel,
[SPEAKER_01]: were just appalled by the site at this very long wall.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I have to tell you, the thing that really broke, a lot of people's support for Israel, was not bombing and the artillery and the firefights.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was the cutting off of humanitarian aid.
[SPEAKER_01]: There are defenders of Israel who just could not defend that.
[SPEAKER_01]: and that is what broke.
[SPEAKER_01]: I know of individuals but I also know from folks groups and other things that I've been privy to, it's extraordinary how much public opinion was ready to support Israel when it was just a military fight, but could not bear.
[SPEAKER_01]: the idea of civilians, including children, being deprived of food or water or medicine, people found it unconscionable.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I have to say, on the podcast I do on Holy, which I, you know, co-host with Johnny Levy, I've channeled 12 news.
[SPEAKER_01]: I was making that point within weeks of October 7th, you will lose global sympathy, because people get fighting hummus.
[SPEAKER_01]: No one can get their head round.
[SPEAKER_01]: uh, making Palestinian civilians suffer for what Hamas did on October 2 and that is what cutting off aid was always going to do.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that's what broke the support here and that's why when the gesture of Palestinian stay had people thought, look if you know, whatever it takes by that point.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, no, that's really very interesting and I think that's very true.
[SPEAKER_00]: So Israel's reputation and standing is taking a very big hit in the West and in the UK.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're going to be elections in Israel in 2026, they're now thinking about sometime in June of 2026.
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you think that Israel's reputation is salvageable at least in part and does that require a new government?
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh yeah, it definitely requires a new come-to-requires, a new wave of political leadership.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let me get to your books.
[SPEAKER_00]: You've written, I think, nine novels, is that right?
[SPEAKER_01]: No, I wrote nine novels under the name Sam Born.
[SPEAKER_01]: Most of them were under the name Sam Born, and then I've written four books of nonfiction.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so I wanted to ask you, why do you write your fiction under a pseudonym?
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, that goes back a long time ago when I first started that, which is actually 20 years ago, which is I had this idea for a thriller, which was based on an el...
[SPEAKER_01]: So I don't know, I still even now don't want to give a spoiler because people might read it.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was called The Righteous Men.
[SPEAKER_01]: It turns on a notion which will be utterly familiar to you and most
[SPEAKER_01]: There is an idea that's deep in Jewish mysticism about what enables and perhaps particularly who enables the world to continue and the clue is in the title of the righteous man, but I don't want to say any more than that.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I did think of an idea of thriller and this was after the Da Vinci code had come out and people that I'd had the idea for years by the way, but Da Vinci code came out and I said to my very old friend of my agent,
[SPEAKER_01]: And look, that idea we'd always talked about.
[SPEAKER_01]: People are obviously interested in kind of religious thrillers.
[SPEAKER_01]: What do you think?
[SPEAKER_01]: And he'd thought about it and he said, yeah, there's definitely something here that we're gonna have to do something about your name.
[SPEAKER_01]: I said, what would we might say?
[SPEAKER_01]: And he said, your name sounds like his words.
[SPEAKER_01]: A pointy headed columnist for a pointy headed newspaper.
[SPEAKER_01]: It doesn't sound like a thriller writer's name.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not a kind of muscular name.
[SPEAKER_01]: He said, you've got to come up with pseudonym, and I thought about it, and I'd already written a nonfiction book about members of my own family that was called Jacob's Gift, which was prompted by the birth of my first son, Jacob.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it was there was no contest, obviously, the pseudonym had to include the name of my second child, also a son, Sam.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then we went back and forth and about trying to work out our last name, but the, you know, what was the year that I thought of this idea for a thriller, it turns out to be the year in which my son Sam was born and so Sam born.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so, so we went on if we did that, you know, if I did that for age books, we did one of them under my own name, but really the rest of the moral thrillers under the same symbol.
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to get to your latest book, the Trader Circle.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mentioned to you, I know.
[SPEAKER_00]: this is a particularly intense time for me and for rabbis and your book is I guess it's 400 pages here close to 400 pages with notes it's more than that and I you know what I originally wanted to do was kind of skim through it and get enough of it to be able to have a
[SPEAKER_00]: a decent conversation with you, but honestly, Jonathan, I just couldn't put it down.
[SPEAKER_00]: I credit you or blame you for sucking up a lot of more hours in your last week and the week before.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it is an amazing writer.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I highly recommend this book to
[SPEAKER_00]: Anybody who's interested in writing, let alone the story itself.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, no, it's completely true.
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to ask you about the Escape Artist, too, because I followed Rudy Verba quite closely as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: And when you were writing that book, I was writing a long, high-holiday sermon about him as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I had heard that there's this British author who's doing research on Rudy Verba.
[SPEAKER_00]: Eventually his wife came in to see me she had watched the sermon I gave and some really very curious you've written two books now in the last three four years On holocaust and the
[SPEAKER_00]: The second book, the Trader Circle, is not particularly about the Jewish experience.
[SPEAKER_00]: Nonetheless, it overlaps with the just the enormity of the fascism and nonsense in the and the cataclysmic changes that World War II brought in.
[SPEAKER_00]: what brought you to the traders circle it's a story tell us a little bit about what is it about it's kind of complicated a lot of characters in there and why did you why did you dwell on this story yeah no dwell is a really good way to use so
[SPEAKER_01]: In a nutshell, this is the story of a small group of elite aristocratic high society Germans who had in common their own resistance or defiance of the Nazi regime.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're anti-nazi, but they're from the very top drawer of German society.
[SPEAKER_01]: They gathered for a tea party.
[SPEAKER_01]: The story is entirely true.
[SPEAKER_01]: The 10th of September 1943, they gathered for an afternoon tea party.
[SPEAKER_01]: Partly to just be in the company of other anti-Nazi rebels to be with Kindred Spirits.
[SPEAKER_01]: What they don't know is that sitting around the table with them is someone who is about to betray all the rest to the Gestapo.
[SPEAKER_01]: We won't tell you that is, because I want people to read the book, no spoilers.
[SPEAKER_01]: But the idea of the book, and I think I'm very, very flattered by you saying it was unputdownable.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I've tried to write it in the style and where the who done it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Everything in it is true, it's documented.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's
[SPEAKER_01]: 50 pages of footnotes that the structure of it is like who done it as you'd guess who of this group of people would betray all the others and the reason I was drawn to it or that I dwell on it to use your very good word is because I think in writing and I don't think I understood this
[SPEAKER_01]: immersed in the story of Auschwitz and Auschwitz, Birkenau in the really graphic detail of that, and really staring at the very worst of humanity.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think there was some pull in me to a story that was the very opposite, a kind of antidote to that, because these people who did not need to resist, who could have very easily kept their heads down and their lives would have been fine.
[SPEAKER_01]: never the less risked everything with in many cases terrible consequences to do the right thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: So this was the best of humanity and I think on some level I needed that after having been in this very dark world.
[SPEAKER_01]: for so long.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so, you know, there's a who done it kind of mystery in this book, but there's a deep mystery, one in which is more of your line of work than mine.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, it is the almost spiritual mystery about why do some people do great acts of goodness?
[SPEAKER_01]: which I know a lot of people, a lot of writers are fascinated by evil and horror and serial killers.
[SPEAKER_01]: To me, it's a deep, unfathomable mystery why some people at great personal cost do a good thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that is what powers this story.
[SPEAKER_01]: These people were all involved as individuals we can get into what they did, acts of defiance and resistance, but not one of them stood to benefit from doing that.
[SPEAKER_01]: And to me, that's fascinating.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you must have some insight into this.
[SPEAKER_00]: You spent the last three, four years thinking about this from two separate angles.
[SPEAKER_00]: What do you think?
[SPEAKER_00]: I, of course, think about it all the time too.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is a deeply religious question, not only a religious question, but also a religious question, the nature of good and evil and heroism and betrayal.
[SPEAKER_00]: What would prompt, the way they come across is kind of a group of well-meaning aristocrats.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: They were all up across.
[SPEAKER_01]: Some are literally aristocratic.
[SPEAKER_01]: They've got titles and country-estates.
[SPEAKER_01]: Others are just really elite people or diplomats or at the top level of the civil service.
[SPEAKER_01]: So they're either got blue blood in their veins or they've got very top jobs or did have before Hitler.
[SPEAKER_01]: So they're from, yes, absolutely the upper cross.
[SPEAKER_00]: So what what what what what would drive somebody like that, did you ask the question and I've been pondering that as well, you know, what what drives courage, what drives what drives you know patriotism, Rudy Verba,
[SPEAKER_00]: When I was doing my research on him, I haven't had a chance to read your book yet, but I will.
[SPEAKER_00]: He talked about how in Auschwitz ideology only played a limited role.
[SPEAKER_00]: When he looked at the guards, the SS people, the soldiers who were actually involved in this monumental evil, he felt that it was more human nature.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was just pedestrian kind of...
[SPEAKER_00]: circumstances, they wanted to get ahead.
[SPEAKER_00]: This was good for their careers.
[SPEAKER_00]: So is it that or is there something deep at the core of the human soul that can even overcome the self-interest and the day-to-day circumstances that drive people to act the way they do?
[SPEAKER_01]: you know, it's fascinating hearing you wrestle with this question because I, you know, even as you formulate it, because I wrestle with it all the time and have been for this book.
[SPEAKER_01]: So you're right, you know, even the escape artist, I hope has quite a few insights into why people do act, so I'm going to evil them.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's huge amounts of work and psychologists are involved and you know, Christopher Browning and his book on all, you know, ordinary men, the notion of compliance and you know, peer group pressure and camaraderie is all kinds of things about that.
[SPEAKER_01]: This question, to me, is equally mysterious why people do good.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's a question, and this is what partly really maybe grab hold of it, that all of us ask at some point rather.
[SPEAKER_01]: So anybody who has looked at the story of the Holocaust, all the Second World War, has asked ourselves a version of this question, what would I have done?
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think most people, I've been doing speaking to audiences all around Britain and I'm coming soon to the United States and I say to audiences when I'm talking about this book, and I think most of us would like to think that we would have resisted and everyone nods, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Because when you thought about that question, what would I have done, you very quickly supply the answer, I would have hidden Anne Frank.
[SPEAKER_01]: I would have been the one person in the crowd who didn't do the Hitler salute.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's what we tell ourselves.
[SPEAKER_01]: the statistics, and I use this figure in the book, suggest that hardly any of us would have done that.
[SPEAKER_01]: There is one ally investigator in American who went with the liberating allies into early in our 1945.
[SPEAKER_01]: He estimated that some three million Germans had been detained or arrested or jailed.
[SPEAKER_01]: for crimes of dissent, sometimes no more than a critical remark.
[SPEAKER_01]: On one level, if you believed as I, you know, my upbringing with, you know, was told that there were no good Germans, every last German was involved, that 3 million figure is very surprisingly high.
[SPEAKER_01]: but on the other hand, what it actually amounts to when you look at the size of the German population of the time, it's about 5%.
[SPEAKER_01]: It means 95% complied.
[SPEAKER_01]: So what I often say is it requires a great deal of self-confidence, if not arrogance, to say, yeah, I would have been one of the 5%.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's most of us would not, that's what we've got to face.
[SPEAKER_01]: So who of these 5% and my nine or 10 people in my story are from that group?
[SPEAKER_01]: what is it that they had?
[SPEAKER_01]: I came to this sort of tentative conclusion.
[SPEAKER_01]: What they all seem to have in common, the characters in my story, is that they had some kind of belief in an authority higher than the Nazis and at all Hitler.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now for some of them, it was their own aristocratic upbringing that they believed these Nazis were sort of vulgarians who would come and go, my family has been here for a thousand years.
[SPEAKER_01]: This castle has stood for hundreds and hundreds of years.
[SPEAKER_01]: I will outlive you the Gestapo man knocking on the door.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a kind of aristocratic self belief that really did enable some
[SPEAKER_01]: the Nazis on the street corners, you know, because they believed they were from an older, deeper true Germany.
[SPEAKER_01]: But the other, the others in that group, what was fascinating to me is the higher authority they believed in.
[SPEAKER_01]: was God, it was religion.
[SPEAKER_01]: They were several very committed Christians in this group.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so when Adolf Hitler essentially takes over the church and makes himself the head of the church, these people are affronted because their view is the head of the church is Jesus, it's not you.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that enables them to stand up to the Gestapo Man to arrest them because they believe I will be judged by an authority higher than you.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that equips a person with a kind of inner steel.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's funny that we're talking, we began.
[SPEAKER_01]: this exchange talking about religion.
[SPEAKER_01]: Religion, I think played a very, it's not the only part, but that confidence that there is an authority higher than the government of the day, it's crucial and I think it doesn't, it's not just confined to the Nazi German period, I think as lessons for us even now.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, it's a blifting that you mentioned that because, you know, in fashion to accuse religion of all of kinds of evils in the world, and that's true as well, that it does drive a lot of evil.
[SPEAKER_00]: but it also accounts for tremendous good that allows people to rise above, even what they assume they're capable of themselves.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I appreciate you saying that.
[SPEAKER_00]: This group of some of them were aristocrats
[SPEAKER_00]: others were well-meaning people none of the efforts to overthrow the Nazis in Hitler actually succeeded.
[SPEAKER_00]: The closest was I guess Stelfenberg, who almost succeeded in killing Hitler, and it has an impact on the people that you write about as well when that failed.
[SPEAKER_00]: So there were efforts to overthrow Hitler and kill Hitler in the government that were perhaps a little more successful or less successful, but nobody really succeeded what brought the Nazis down where they allies.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this group especially did they do anything where they just a bunch of people who they want to get together and comfort each other or did they actually make a difference?
[SPEAKER_01]: No, I think they really did make a difference.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think that's, you know, in the Jewish world, we've come to expand our definition of resistance, haven't we?
[SPEAKER_01]: Initially, the only thing that Plastovative Resistance was the sort of Warsaw ghetto uprising.
[SPEAKER_01]: But we came to expand our definitions so that the person who remembered that in the camps that tonight is the first matter of Hanukkah and Litter candle.
[SPEAKER_01]: We now say that's a form of resistance.
[SPEAKER_01]: it was, you know, we call it spiritual resistance.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so I think we should have a similarly expanded notion here.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think we've walked around often, I include myself in this, with this notion that the only resistance that counts is either a plot to kill Hitler, or, you know, the French resistance romantic image of planting bombs on railway lines and so on, planting and blowing up bridges.
[SPEAKER_01]: What did this group do?
[SPEAKER_01]: So there's several of them,
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, that was the highest risk enterprise you could imagine.
[SPEAKER_01]: There is a there are not just there's not just one countess in this story.
[SPEAKER_01]: There are two and both of them at different points.
[SPEAKER_01]: He Jews in their homes one of them in the most spectacular fashion including.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I'm going to reveal that too.
[SPEAKER_00]: We were always that was a great great discovery that you made.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, it's not unbelievable.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that we weren't for that story, but she was hiding large numbers of Jews.
[SPEAKER_01]: There were others who were using their diplomatic contacts to get visas for people to leave the country, to even secure jobs for them abroad.
[SPEAKER_01]: And there were people who were even getting hold of forged papers.
[SPEAKER_01]: They were helping giving them across the border to switch and spiriting them out of the country.
[SPEAKER_01]: There were
[SPEAKER_01]: a whole range of, and even, you know, you mentioned the failed plot of July 20, 1944, there were other plots earlier, and one of the characters in this story is on the edges of, but, you know, involved in one of those schemes.
[SPEAKER_01]: So they're with this group of people on that, they're not just talking over tea, you know, even though that was the proof to be the fateful day for them.
[SPEAKER_01]: They are involved in real things, but here's one moment, which I found out very early in my research for this,
[SPEAKER_01]: First of all, that this story I thought would work, but the second countess, I mentioned there are two, she made it her habit to walk around Berlin holding two heavy bags of shopping.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, why does she do that?
[SPEAKER_01]: She did it so that if someone were to approach her in the street and give her the Hitler salute, she would have no free hand to reciprocate.
[SPEAKER_01]: She had to look at them apologetically, oh I'm so sorry, I'm carrying two bags of shop.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's what she did.
[SPEAKER_01]: To me that is an amazing thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a small, literal gesture of defiance.
[SPEAKER_01]: But if everybody did that,
[SPEAKER_01]: what a difference it would have made.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's in a way, I'm going back to the religious notion, you know, we always say to save one life as is if you've saved the whole world.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you are one of those people who hid one Jew, you got forged papers for one Jew to get out of the country.
[SPEAKER_01]: You just made your own little gesture of defiance, you refused to give the Hitler salute.
[SPEAKER_01]: That counts.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's not nothing.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that's, I feel as if that's part of my own Jewish upbringing, you know, it's why sort of, you know, recycle plastic bottles, somebody say, oh, what difference is it made?
[SPEAKER_01]: The whole ocean is filling with plastic.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, but each one of us does our own individual thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's what these people did at great risk and great personal cost.
[SPEAKER_01]: I can't feel anything bad for that.
[SPEAKER_00]: and just to look at that period in perspective.
[SPEAKER_00]: So three million Germans
[SPEAKER_00]: were arrested for some kind of suspicion, what didn't even mean that they actually were resisting, but they were suspected of resisting.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: What are the lessons for us today?
[SPEAKER_00]: There are a lot of challenges facing the West and civilization and the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I ask you, I know you have to run this will be kind of like to summarize what you've learned and the message that you want to leave the audience that's listening and watching.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, first of all, I would defend the idea that there are lessons, because I do think there are lessons.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think people again, a lot of Jewish people are nervous about that, because we think if you're saying there are lessons from this period, you're saying that now is the same as then.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm absolutely not saying that, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: It would be, you know, if somebody says Donald Trump is the new Hitler, no, that's fast-style, it's offensive to the victims of Adolf Hitler.
[SPEAKER_01]: but is there a trend towards authoritarianism in many Western countries right now?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_01]: Is power being concentrated in the center with potential checks and restraints on power?
[SPEAKER_01]: Being one by one attacked undermined or removed?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, and you can see that.
[SPEAKER_01]: in Victor Orban's Hungary, you can see it in Maduro's and as well as you can see it in the Erdogan's Turkey and you can see it in Donald Trump's USA where the targeting of those civil society institutions that might have kept a check on power whether it's the media or the universities or the courts, the independent bits of the government bureaucracy.
[SPEAKER_01]: Those things have a sort of echo.
[SPEAKER_01]: and what they then do is they impose a dilemma or a predicament on the citizens who live with those changes and with that trend and the one thing I would say that does come out of this story.
[SPEAKER_01]: Individual actions matter, they do, they have value, they have worth but also you don't have much time.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you believe that there is a trend aware, democracy, remember the Germany before 1930 was a democracy.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you believe that democracy is slipping away or is under attack, it happens very, very fast.
[SPEAKER_01]: There isn't really time to say, let's see how this plays out.
[SPEAKER_01]: Or give it to, I don't believe all this hyperbole.
[SPEAKER_01]: I just let the dust settle a bit.
[SPEAKER_01]: There isn't time for that.
[SPEAKER_01]: That is the lesson I think that comes out of this book.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it recurs down the generations.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you see that trend, it's better to move very, very fast.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then afterwards, go, oh, maybe we are overreacted.
[SPEAKER_01]: Better that.
[SPEAKER_01]: and to leave it too long, and suddenly find rights which you were obvious, and you took for granted, have gone.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's worth remembering Germany.
[SPEAKER_01]: Why do regardless of the most civilized country in Europe, if not the world, at the time, the Jewish community, they are thought they were the most comfortable, settled, secure Jewish community in Jewish history.
[SPEAKER_01]: things can change very, very fast.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that is, I think it's, it's one of the things that comes through this story in the traitor circle.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the book is the traitor circle just a cliffhanger and it's not
[SPEAKER_00]: When it comes out, I'll do a pre-order on your next book.
[SPEAKER_00]: Whatever, as it doesn't matter to me, and I got to go back and read all the books that I missed over your illustrious career.
[SPEAKER_00]: So thank you very much, Good Luck, and you'll be coming to America soon to speak, and also promote the book.
[SPEAKER_00]: So Good Luck on the Book Tour, and we wish you all the best.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you so much, I'm really grateful.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_00]: that while most of us would like to believe that if confronted with similar circumstances, we too would resist evil doors, that we too would hide the hunted and ferry people across borders to safety, even at great risk to ourselves and our families.
[SPEAKER_00]: Deep down, we know, or have enough doubts about ourselves to suspect, that we would not rise to the moral challenge.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the really interesting question, the central moral dilemma is what motivates those select few to do the right thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was struck by Jonathan's observations that religion motivated many in the circle of resistance.
[SPEAKER_00]: And for the rest, if it wasn't God, it was a fierce loyalty to a higher cause and higher values that compelled them to resist.
[SPEAKER_00]: Much of it is well-deserved.
[SPEAKER_00]: C.S.
[SPEAKER_00]: Lewis wrote of all bad men, religious bad men, or the worst.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're the worst because when they commit transgressions, they validate immorality in the eyes of others.
[SPEAKER_00]: Instead of cleansing our impurities, they wipe wash them.
[SPEAKER_00]: An act of violence becomes a righteous crusade.
[SPEAKER_00]: A murder becomes a noble g-hud.
[SPEAKER_00]: The world is turned upside down through an unholy inversion of values.
[SPEAKER_00]: Cruel is kind, killing is compassion, and sin is salvation.
[SPEAKER_00]: The horrible becomes honorable.
[SPEAKER_00]: Our highest aspirations are manipulated to excuse our basic symbols.
[SPEAKER_00]: But there is the other side as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: At its best, religion is a source of inspiration, not intimidation.
[SPEAKER_00]: Religion is sublime when it animates us, awakening the better angels of our nature.
[SPEAKER_00]: We seek to instill a sense of right, goodness, and deacency.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is so overwhelming that any inconsistent thought or deed is rendered reprehensible in our eyes.
[SPEAKER_00]: Those who resisted the Nazis were so motivated, they refused to surrender their self-respect and their commitment to righteousness.
[SPEAKER_00]: They understood in the deepest, most inner recesses of their being.
[SPEAKER_00]: That religion is for life.
[SPEAKER_00]: The key inside of religion is the insistence upon the distinctiveness of the human creature.
[SPEAKER_00]: All were created by God.
[SPEAKER_00]: We alone were created in the image of God.
[SPEAKER_00]: Every religious principle flows from this axiom.
[SPEAKER_00]: If both you and I were created in God's image,
[SPEAKER_00]: We have equal sanctity, equal worth, and equal dignity.
[SPEAKER_00]: Reference for life is religion's primary preoccupation and central principle.
[SPEAKER_00]: Every life is precious.
[SPEAKER_00]: Every life is sacred.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Talmud states that to save a person's life is akin to saving the world and tire.
[SPEAKER_00]: And to destroy a life is akin to destroying the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: Religion yearns for peace and emphasizes the power of the Spirit more than the power of the sword.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not by might nor by power but by my spirits are the Lord of hosts.
[SPEAKER_00]: Religion seeks to convince not coerce.
[SPEAKER_00]: Spiritual understanding comes through reflection not rage.
[SPEAKER_00]: Religion seeks gentleness.
[SPEAKER_00]: Its ways are ways of pleasantness and all its paths are peace.
[SPEAKER_00]: Religion seeks mercy and forgiveness.
[SPEAKER_00]: Mercy and truth are met together, wrote the Psalmist, righteousness and peace, kiss.
[SPEAKER_00]: I love the final words of George Eliot's masterpiece, Middle-March.
[SPEAKER_00]: The growing good of the world is partly dependent on historic acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been.
[SPEAKER_00]: Is half-oing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs?
[SPEAKER_00]: We owe our lives to those who lived faithfully, and now sleep in the dust.
[SPEAKER_00]: Many of them are unknown to us, but the growing good of the world depends on these people.
[SPEAKER_00]: The world does not yet all that bad.
[SPEAKER_00]: As long as there are people like those courageous and righteous souls in the circle of German resistors, that Jonathan Friedland memorializes.
[SPEAKER_00]: Until next time, this is in these times.