Jim Ver Steeg: You’re listening to Quadcast, the official podcast of the University of Rochester. If you pay attention to the news, it’s easy to get the sense that acts of violence, particularly violence inspired by bigotry and hate, are on the rise. Unfortunately, the numbers seem to back that up. Just this week the FBI released its report that showed crime incidents targeting Jewish people and Jewish institutions in the US spiked about 37 percent between 2016 and 2017. Unfortunately, colleges and university campuses are not immune.
In a message to the university community President Richard Feldman mentioned that we had had our own recent experiences with intolerance and disrespect, including a swastika written on a sign at one of our schools. In his message President Feldman wrote, “The recent acts of bigotry and violence in Pittsburgh and Louisville, the national threat created by pipe bombs sent in the mail and many other recent incidents have been deeply disturbing and unsettling. As a university that celebrates academic freedom and civil discourse, these acts and a national conversation that too often displays hate and divisiveness are distressing and frightening. The recent acts of bigotry and violence in Pittsburgh and Louisville, the national threat created by pipe bombs sent in the mail and many other recent incidents have been deeply disturbing and unsettling.”
So, I’d like to begin there in our conversation that I think will shed some light on bigotry and hate from an academic perspective. Joining me in the studio today, I’m honored to have Nora Rubel, who is the Jane and Allen Batkin Professor of Jewish Studies and Chair of the Department of Religion and Classics. Nora’s scholarship frequently centers around religion, food, and intersecting identities among faith, culture, and race. She is author of the book Doubting the Devout: The Ultra-orthodox in the Jewish American Imagination, and is currently working on her second book, Recipes for the Melting Pot: The Lives of the Settlement Cookbook. Nora, thank you for joining us.
Nora Rubel: Thank you for having me.
Jim Ver Steeg: We’re also joined by Laura Elenbaas. She is an Assistant Professor of Psychology. Her research exam is developing conceptions of fairness, perceptions of social groups, and peer relations, including children’s perceptions of inequality, their development of stereotypes, and how they learn to reason through complex moral issues such as justice and discrimination. Laura, thank you for joining us.
Laura Elenbaas: Thanks for inviting me.
Jim Ver Steeg: And we’re also joined by Thomas Fleischman. He is an Assistant Professor of History. His research fields include modern European history, German history, environmental history, and state socialism. He is currently finishing the manuscript for his book, Three Little Pigs: East Germany’s Green Revolution 1945-2000. Tom, thanks for joining us.
Thomas Fleischman: Happy to be here.
Jim Ver Steeg: So, not an easy subject but I’m so grateful to the three of you for joining us. And Nora, I want to start with you, particularly as we think of acts of bigotry and hate, particularly around anti-Semitism. How is it that you’re understanding what we’re seeing in the world today? What is your perspective on some of these things?
Nora Rubel: There has been a response to the FBI report that shows that hate crimes have spiked against Jews in the last two years. However, anti-Jewish discrimination is the highest reported anti-religious discrimination, but Jews historically in America have had better relations with law enforcement and are more likely to report. However, anti-Semitic crimes tend to be more graffiti, vandalism, et cetera, much like the fliers that were found on campus recently that were faxed to several departments that had anti-Semitic writings.
There’s a couple of reasons for this. Jews look a lot like everybody else. Most Jews in America are White. So, if you wanted to actually commit and anti-Jewish crime, it’s much easier to go to a place where Jews congregate. So, acts of drawing swastikas on walls or sending out anti-Semitic fliers is a lot easier than kind of figuring out who’s a Jew in a crowd.
Jim Ver Steeg: One thing I wanted to talk to you about, Nora, is I know that you teach and study a lot about White supremacy and the Christian identity movement, and I think that that played into the events in Pittsburgh.
Nora Rubel: Yeah, well, one of the things that came out after the shooting in Pittsburgh was sort of the underlying roots of this sort of anti-Semitism that we see. And I think probably Tom will talk a little bit more about European anti-Semitism, but within the United States, starting in the 1980s, really, we saw a kind of blossoming of the Christian identity movement. It goes back – it’s – much further back, but this is sort of an idea of Jews as being the children of Satan and responsible for kind of all of the ills that befall White people.
Anti-Semitism tends to be different than a lot of other types of bigotry in that anti-Black, anti-Hispanic, anti-Muslim sentiment tends to have sort of pejorative ideas about people as being less than, lazy, stupid, inferior. Anti-Semitism in this kind of conspiracy theory tends to look at Jews as crafty and smart and pulling the strings behind the scenes. So, for example, the Pittsburgh shooter was particularly upset about this congregation’s involvement with HIAS – the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society – and he was very hyped up about this idea of this caravan of brown people coming across the border. But this has a history that goes back quite a bit, this idea that Jews are responsible for bringing in brown people to supplant the White race.
Jim Ver Steeg: That’s an interesting point and something I want to touch on a bit. Though we’re primarily focusing on acts of violence against Jewish people and Jewish institutions, I want to get your thoughts on how some of these things are intersecting, how it’s not just necessarily anti-Semitism but there – so many other things are attached to these acts, if it’s misogyny, if it’s racism. So, can you talk a little bit about how those things intersect in these events?
Nora Rubel: Yeah, a lot of scholars on these issues say that anti-Semitism tends to be the canary in the coal mine, because if you’re seeing a spike in anti-Semitism or public anti-Semitism, that usually goes along with other forms of racism, misogyny, religious discrimination. There’s been a lot of anti-Muslim aggravated assault. We can see that many of these shooting events tended to have to do with anger about women and that seems to be very much mixed up in this.
Jim Ver Steeg: Tom, I want to turn to you. I think getting a little bit of a historical perspective would be helpful, but I – to Nora’s point, I think it would be interesting to hear a bit of a comparison, or at least your thoughts around a European or German experience of some of these things as compared to how we’re seeing them manifest themselves in the States these days.
Thomas Fleischman: Right. Well, I always start my class on Nazi Germany with this cliché that history repeats itself, and I sort of admonish my students not to view Nazi Germany in that way but actually to use sort of Mark Twain’s famous expression that “History doesn’t repeat itself but it certainly rhymes.” And in this way we can think about the ways in which history can instruct or inform what’s going on in the present.
And from my perspective what I think is absolutely real and what is totally going on is the revival of fascism as a viable political ideology in and around the world today. Now, it’s sort of tricky to talk about what fascism is because it’s an ideology that’s hard to pin down, largely because its outward appearance, its symbols are different based on the country in which it’s happening. But what do all forms of fascism have in common? Well, Robert Paxton wrote this very famous book about what fascism is and he defined it more or less in this way: It’s an ideology that depends on the primacy of a particular group. The primacy of that group is also at the same time subverted by that group’s victimization. The group then also has a natural faith or desire to follow a leader. And fourth, there’s a glorification of violence embedded in that ideology. And I think if you were to go through that checklist, you would find all those factors present here in the US right now.
Now, it looks different in every country because it depends on the national myths that those countries have told themselves. So, in Mussolini’s Italy it was about recovering the glories of ancient Rome, connecting 1920s fascism to Caesar. Hitler wanted to – the Third Reich was supposed to be the third thousand-year Reich after the first – the Holy Roman Empire, then the Kaiser Reich, or the German Empire, that was founded in 1871, and then Nazi Germany, which was supposed to be the third incarnation of that.
In the United States what you’re going to see more are appeals to American exceptionalism, Manifest Destiny, and then of course the primacy of White people, which is embedded in our histories of slavery, but more recently segregation in the US South.
Jim Ver Steeg: Do you think about the effects of what happens when the biggest voices in the room sort of embody and embrace this type of doctrine? What does that do to a culture? Or how does that inspire or how does that – what does that – what is the effect of that?
Thomas Fleischman: I mean, I think we’re seeing it right now, is that it gives permission for people to act in violent and discriminatory ways. It allows people to do things that they wouldn’t have done before, primarily because the most powerful person in the country is telling them it’s okay.
Jim Ver Steeg: We had a conversation earlier about technology. And it seems – the internet used to be thought of as this – it was going to be a terrific tool for the democratization of all things. It was going to be the great liberator. It was going to provide information and make us a better society. But we clearly have seen how the internet has been used to do quite the opposite. And I think before we get to Laura I would just like to get both Nora and Tom’s thoughts on how we consider some of the information that’s out there and some of the ways in which technology is being used to promote some of these more hateful events and maybe some of the more hateful rhetoric.
Thomas Fleischman: Well, in Nazi Germany it’s famously tied to propaganda campaigns masterminded by Goebbels. But I think more recently what’s been going on is the use of technology to allow these relatively isolated groups to communicate more often with each other. There was a book published earlier by Kathleen Belew at the University of Chicago called Bring the War Home, and it’s about the rise of White supremacy in the United States since Vietnam. And one of the more striking things that she talks about in the book is how beginning in the 1980s these movements began to use computers and computer networks to communicate and trade information about assassination lists, how to build bombs, how to cause mayhem, and all the other assorted forms of racist propaganda.
What appears to be happening now is that social media is amplifying and extending the reach of those networks in ways that we hadn’t really considered before, that White supremacy has organized online for a long time but the rise of Twitter and Facebook, particularly their inability or perhaps unwillingness to regulate such behavior and actions and communications have allowed them to spread in ways they never could have dreamed.
Nora Rubel: I agree with Tom. I think that technology has always been used as an outreach method. You had propaganda on the radio going back to the dawn of radio, and some of that was a way of reaching people in isolation and having them feel like they were part of a conversation. You then had White supremacists also using ham radio technology, reaching out to each other that way. In the past, though, to really find out about these White power organizations people had to send away for pamphlets, attend meetings. They don’t have to do that anymore. They can Google a conspiracy theory – you know, “Jews…” – and then you can just see what pops up.
So, I do think that in some ways this connects people in a pretty dark way. We also saw with the Gamergate scandal that was really kind of the beginning of our understanding that people could be doxed, where their personal information could be released to the public. So, you could show up at somebody’s home that would normally be a private citizen. And I think that that’s one of the dangers of the internet as well.
Jim Ver Steeg: And Laura, I – with this information that’s out there, especially when it’s consumed by young people, I’m assuming it has to have some sort of formative effect. But I want to get your thoughts on how do stereotypes happen? How does bigotry happen? How does prejudice get instilled in young people? Can you share some thoughts on what some of those processes are?
Laura Elenbaas: Yeah. So, I can definitely speak to the development of stereotypes and prejudice more broadly. And the fact is that from an early age kids and teenagers, they’re sifting through a lot of potential messages about how they should feel, what they should think about people who are a different background from themselves. So, in developmental psychology there is a long line of research on children’s racial attitudes, racial or ethnic attitudes, but also some important work on perceptions of people of different religious backgrounds, different nationalities, different socioeconomic statuses from oneself.
And so, kids are bombarded from a very early age from lots of different messages coming from adults – like, parents and teachers are crucial setters of norms for how we behave within our family, within our classroom. But also from the media, of course, and there’s been this ramping up of really intense rhetoric around immigration, around religion in the US lately. But also from other kids. Kids’ peers are a strong source of information for them about how we treat different groups within our school peers who are a different ethnicity or different nationality from us. So, they’re going to adapt the attitudes, the perspectives that make sense for them in their lives. There’s a lot of contextual or environmental variability in the extent to which kids then buy into biased beliefs or issues of prejudice.
But one thing I want to highlight from – coming from the developmental perspective here is that kids often lack positive opportunities to interact with, to come into contact with, to talk with and even become friends with peers who are a different background from themselves. So, again, most of this comes out of work on race or ethnicity, but it applies in the case of religion too, in the case of socioeconomic status and nationality. Positive social interactions between peers of different backgrounds are crucial for reducing and limiting the development of stereotypes and biases in childhood and adolescence. In fact, friendships – stable, quality friendships between peers of different backgrounds is the number one way of reducing stereotypes and biases because it could – it puts a face on the other group, a name on the other group, a personality on the other group. An individual who can disprove those potential stereotypes that you’ve heard from other sources.
And unfortunately, though, despite how good it is and how friendship alone is a source of support, a source of well-being for children, unfortunately, the way that many communities are structured, the way that neighborhoods are structured, the ways that schools are structured, a lot of times kids don’t get those chances early on. That is one way to – that is one source of bias and that is one way of addressing bias. Kids who have friendships with peers of a different background are much less anxious about interacting with other kids of that background. They’re much more empathetic across group lines. And you can see a direct link in terms of the inclusivity or respect shown in their behavior.
Jim Ver Steeg: Nora?
Nora Rubel: So, you mentioned that children who have these friends, they can be more empathetic. It seems to me that empathy seems to be the kind of key to understanding that people are different but they’re worthy of respect. Can you talk a little bit about developing empathy in children?
Laura Elenbaas: Yeah. Yeah, so the empathy emerges very early in development, actually: the capacity to put yourself in somebody else’s shoes, try to understand what somebody else is going through, and if necessary respond accordingly. So, even very young children, even toddlers will respond to another person’s distress by trying to address it. So, someone is sad and a little toddler can come over and pat them on the back: “It’s okay.” Someone is hungry: “Okay, maybe you can have a little piece of my graham cracker.” “You’re trying to get something that’s out of reach and I can help you? All right, I can take care of that. I can look out for your welfare in these ways.”
But also, recognition of differences and similarities between oneself and others is also really emerging. So, what quality friendships across group lines does is extend that expression of empathy under a broader umbrella. So, kids have eyes; kids have ears. They’re going to notice who has a different skin color from them, who speaks a different language from them, who practices a different religion from them. But whether or not that makes a difference in terms of whether they’re going to express empathy, whether they’re going to hang out with that kid or be friends with that kid, be in the club after school with that kid, invite them to their birthday party, has a lot to do with the conditions of their social environment. So, conditions of where adults are condoning hostility towards stigmatized groups or towards out group, so to speak, where there is an environment of threat of competition are not going to promote empathy, are not going to promote friendships across group lines.
Jim Ver Steeg: So, I want to turn our attention to difficult conversations that the three of you might be having, either with students in your classrooms, maybe your own children, just young people in general, or anyone who really comes to you for insight, academic insight on how we can understand hate and bigotry. Obviously, in higher education we espouse the great charge of education and making society better, and an informed society is always of course a more empowered and healthier society. And at the University of Rochester we have our own vision and values statements, which include the umbrella of Meliora, which is striving to be ever better, but we also celebrate equity, leadership, integrity, openness, respect, and accountability. Those are all really wonderful things but sometimes they fly in the face of some of the events and some of the actions that we’re talking about today.
So, I’m curious to hear from each of you as how you talk about these things, both in the context of education but also how you can share the fact that these are all good things, but we still can’t – we can’t lose sight of the fact that there are bad actors out there. So, whoever would like to go first.
Nora Rubel: Well, we saw a spike in hate crime directly after the 2016 election and a rise in biased incidents here at the university. So, I brought that up in my classes, which unfortunately at the time – unfortunately or fortunately I was teaching a class called “Sex and Power” and I was also teaching a class called “Religion and the Race for the White House.” So, both classes were really relevant to what was going on at the time, and many of my students were just shocked by what was coming out. But I will say that my students of color were not surprised at all and definitely shared that with their colleagues, that these are things that happen all the time and they’re just not always reported and people don’t care about it as much and now we’re seeing maybe a little more public expression of things that people had been keeping in private.
So, as Tom had said earlier, suddenly there’s permission. Right? And you just had the feeling that suddenly there were all these people that were thinking these things and saying these things in private and they were delighted with the opportunity to say it out loud because you have public elected officials saying that it’s okay. I think the most recent midterm election where you had Andrew Gillum running against DeSantis in Florida, I said it’s not that necessarily DeSantis is a racist, but the racists think he’s a racist. And that allows for people to feel free to say these things that they might have already been thinking.
Thomas Fleischman: So, it might help if I talk about my course, “Hitler’s Germany.” One of the things I try to do in the class is sort of reframe how students think about what the phenomenon of Hitler and the rise of Nazism actually means. And it requires that I do two things. One is that I push back against this notion of the Holocaust and Nazi Germany as an exceptional event in history – it’s exceptional in its violence, it’s exceptional in its racism, it’s exceptional in its genocide – and to put it right back into the 20th century. And the reason I do that is twofold. The first is that when students see it as exceptional they also tend to be thinking explicitly – or maybe implicitly – about Auschwitz as representation for what Nazism was. But there doesn’t have to be an Auschwitz for there to be a fascist movement. There doesn’t have to be genocide and concentration camps for there to be all the other things that Hitler brought into the world. And so, I try to help them see how fascism emerged over the course of a 20-year period between 1918, the end of the First World War, and 1939, the beginning of the Second World War.
And then, the second thing I do in the class to push back against this sort of sui generis notion of Nazi Germany is to connect it to trends in world history. And in particular, under fascism and for Hitler himself the United States was a very powerful influence on his thinking: on his racial ideology, on his economic ideology, and on his notion of imperialism. On the eve of the invasion of Eastern Europe in 1941 he made a speech in which he said that the Volga River would be Germany’s Mississippi, and implying in that notion that just as the United States had wiped out all the native peoples that existed between the coast and the Mississippi, Germany would do the same to the people that existed between Germany and the Volga.
And so, the point here is to say – is to really get students to think about, one, the ways in which Nazi Germany didn’t just happen in an exceptional way, but, two, to get them to really understand that it could happen anywhere. There’s nothing special about being German and anti-Semitism. There’s nothing special about religious or ethnic hatred and a particular national history.
Nora Rubel: We see this conversation now about limiting immigration from certain countries and this is something that has happened time and again in the United States. There’s never been a consensus on “What does it mean to be an American?” And in the late 19th century we saw in response to great numbers of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, which were seen as the undesirable parts of Europe, a radical limiting of immigrants, essentially cutting immigrants off in 1924, specifically for the purpose of maintaining a primarily White, Nordic stock in America. So, this is a conversation we continue to have in the United States.
Thomas Fleischman: And I would just say that the 1924 Immigration Act doesn’t also happen in isolation. This is known as the era of the second Ku Klux Klan, when it reaches its apogee, the greatest national membership it’s ever had. This is at the height of mob violence and lynching against Blacks in the United States. This is also a moment in Eastern Europe when we have – after two decades of pogroms and violence against Jews. And it’s also going on in the context of sort of massive global disruptions caused by capitalism and trade and unfortunately war.
Jim Ver Steeg: If you’re talking to young people about this, this type of hatred or this type of bigotry, how do you talk to them in ways that are beneficial to their development and maybe contrary to these messages? But also, if you’re working and speaking with students on campus, how are we talking about this in the – from a developmental perspective?
Laura Elenbaas: I actually do talk about the development of prejudice and the development of discrimination in my undergrad courses. I teach “Social and Emotional Development” – it’s our intro developmental course in Psychology – and also a small seminar in peer relationships. And in both of those I talk about the development of biases. So, I keep it data-based. I talk about “What does discrimination look like in the child’s world?” And it looks like repeatedly bullying someone for biased-related reasons. It looks like excluding them from friendships or just from social groups. It’s often name-calling, taunting, other forms of harassment. So, I talk about what it looks like when a child shows bias and what it does to be on the receiving end of that. Being on the receiving end of that sort of harassment in childhood is associated with depression, with anxiety, with academic disengagement.
But I also – and I think that many students appreciate the fact that from a developmental perspective you have a chance to intervene early on. And really, this is what the developmental data shows. If you want to have a chance of changing attitudes for the better, of promoting inclusion, of promoting respect, you need to start in childhood when those attitudes are still malleable and still forming.
So, I hope one thing that my students come away with over the course of this discussion – I think that they do – is that they are going to make choices in life about where they live, about where they send their kids, about who their kids hang out with, and about the things that they directly say to children, whether it’s as a parent or a teacher or a doctor or a social worker or a clinician. We all have interactions with kids and adolescents. We need to think about our words and we need to think about an example that we’re setting.
Jim Ver Steeg: Well, I’d like to thank Nora Rubel, Laura Elenbaas, and Tom Fleischman for joining us on this episode of the Quadcast. I got a lot out of it and I really appreciate your insight on understanding and hate and what’s happening in our world. Thank you for coming.
Thomas Fleischman: Thank you.
Laura Elenbaas: Thanks.
Nora Rubel: Thank you.
Jim Ver Steeg: For the University of Rochester’s Quadcast, this is Jim Ver Steeg. Thanks for listening.
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