Toby Hecht: One might ask why the invitation for tonight's invitation read Women's Revolution in the singular. After all, Mahsa Amini's story is not a fight for one, but for all. And it's a good question. One that I'm sure we will hear more of tonight. But before Brett and Roya deliver what is sure to be a thought provoking discussion, let's start at the beginning. Two weeks ago, the Jewish people began a cycle of reading the Five Books of Moses again. In the beginning, God created the world from splitting the heavens and earth to forming and breathing life into mankind. After the sin of the forbidden fruit, Adam and Chava were cast out of Eden, a utopian existence into a tumultuous world where, in the pursuit of knowledge, truth and morality are manifested when human beings choose good over evil. Adam is the first man, and Chava aim mother of all life. In what seems like a hot second, humanity descends into depraved immorality and aside from Noah, his wife, his three sons and daughters in law and the animals, God cleans up shop, destroys the world, and moves on to plan B. For the next 50 weeks of the year, we will be- we will read about rebuilding humanity and its infrastructure, sometimes name by name, all directly descending from the first man and woman.

Toby Hecht: Most importantly, however, we will learn about conscious monotheism through the first monotheist Abraham, which is the purpose of creation and God's will. Everything in the Torah is deliberate. There isn't even one superfluous word. The word Torah means to teach. And indeed it is a manual, the blueprint for the Jewish people to live a meaningful life, a godly life. We don't read it again and again for kicks. We read it to connect, to remember, to learn, and to practice. And as a woman, one can't help but see a very clear trajectory of the power of women from the beginning, illuminated through the distinct qualities gifted to them by God. This is how women, individually and collectively became the foundation of strength and valor. Today, it's easy to join a revolution. Take to the streets with placards. But how about making the revolution? You may think it takes the masses to make a difference. And the Torah tells us, no, not true. It just takes one to get the party started. And it's hard. It takes strength and courage for one to stand against the tide, the fear, the judgment, the naysayers and the doubt. The first Jewish woman Sarah. Sarah. Our mother, Abraham's wife, taught the women of her generation about God, and it was specifically her home that the temple in Jerusalem, God's sanctuary was modeled after.

Toby Hecht: Sarah becomes the archetype of the Jewish woman. God tells Abraham, Kol Asher tomar Eilecha Sara, Shma Bikola, All that Sarah tells you, heed her voice. Abraham is thus strengthened by Sarah's convictions. The second matriarch, Rivka, a prophetess, sees that it is her son Jacob who needs to receive the blessings and not her son Asa, and she quietly does what needs to be done to change the course of history. Through Rachel the third and Leah, the fourth and final matriarch, the selfless and dedicated mothers of the 12 tribes, we see some of the most relevant and timely examples of kinship and support between women, showing that united together through triumph and tragedy, so much is gained instead of lost. Then there is Miriam, my personal favorite, who was inspired by the convictions of her above mentioned great grandmothers. Despite living in a despotic Egypt. Under Pharaoh's rule, ancient Egypt represented the origins of every human rights violation. It is young Miriam who challenges her parents to stay married and have more children instead of giving up. Miriam and her mother, Yocheved, served as midwives, saving boys from the Nile, defying Pharaoh's edict to execute every Jewish male born, thus ensuring a future for the Jewish people. And it is Miriam who takes her newborn baby brother, places him in a tar lined basket, setting it on the Nile to save him from certain death.

Toby Hecht: And yet Miriam alone is not responsible for Moses the Redeemer. For as he lay in the basket floating on the Nile, an Egyptian princess Pharaoh's daughter sees the basket in the reeds, hears his cry as she bathes, she reaches for the basket and draws it near. She knows her father well and what this means for the infant. Without hesitation, she takes the seemingly abandoned baby, calling him Moshe to draw out of the water. With the help of Miriam, Batya   the Egyptian princess saves his life so that Moshe Rabeinu Moshe, our teacher, can become the future leader and redeemer of the Jewish nation in order to liberate them from bondage and servitude, bring them to Sinai and finally the Promised Land. Through the Tanakh, Torah, the Five Books of Moses, Neviim prophets, and Kesuvim, Writings, and onward we see examples of women using their gifted intuition, oftentimes quietly and action here a strong word there: resilience, steadfastness, integrity, and self-sacrifice in the face of tyranny, destruction, and existential threats. Judith, Rachav, Devorah, Naomi, Ruth, Esther Homalka, Queen Esther in ancient Persia, the Jewish heroine who risked her life by asking her husband, the king to spare her people. And on and on.

Toby Hecht: The hundreds, the thousands, the millions of heroic women in our tradition. These women, one by one, have fortified the notion that in order to sustain the truth, we oftentimes alone will have to take a stand about what is right and true. They were not perfect or infallible by any measure. They were very human, just like the rest of us. And through trial and error and absolute persistence, they changed the world for the better. When we think of revolutions happening in places like Teheran, Mashhad, Shiraz, Isfahan, cities we have never been to, we ask ourselves, how can we make a difference here in this apartment right now? And I'll tell you. Think about someone else. Be kind to a stranger in distress. Reach out and make the world a ripe field for goodness and light. You never know what one good deed can do. My family and I were in Park City, Utah last year on a ski trip and were eating Shabbos dinner with the local Chabad rabbi and his family. We met a woman there, originally from Iran. When she heard that her last name was Hecht, she asked if we were related to the Rabbi Hecht, responsible for saving over 1800 kids on the cusp of the Iranian Revolution in 1978. Shmully answered yes. Oops, Almost there Almost there, here we go.

Toby Hecht: Rabbi Sholom Ber Hecht and his father, Rabbi J.J. Hecht, of blessed memory, together with the staunch support of the Lubavitcher Rebbe of blessed memory, were responsible for that rescue mission initiated by Shmully's father, flying to Iran in 1978 to load up airplanes shortly before the Ayatollah Khomeini took over the country. She told us that she was just 11 and her sister's 14 and 16 when they were rescued 44 years ago by the bravery and love of a few people. And then there is Roya, whose name in Persian means dream or vision, whom we met for the first time when she came to speak at our society dinner on Crown Street in New Haven nearly 20 years ago. I believe it was Nelson Mousazadeh who brought you from Davenport. Roya, you easily could have blended into the American dream without a thought of what you left behind, as many do. Instead, you chose to dedicate yourself to truth, to activism, to stand on the floor of Congress, to write books and articles, speak on the networks and argue with the syndicators, advise the State Department to try and save a country from tyranny. Your commitment and resilience, often in the face of indifference and appalling silence, are an inspiration to so many and will go down in history. Thank you for showing the rest of us what it means to carry a banner of truth. And as my grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, told me and my sisters years ago, when you feel weary in your mission and purpose, remember our imahos our mothers, matriarchs, Sarah, Rivka, Rachel, and Leah, for they are always with you standing by your side. Thank you. I'd like to introduce, um, Hal Boyd, who's going to be introducing our speakers. He is a member of Shabtai. Graduated the YLS in 2016. Correct?

Hal Boyd: Let's let's think these two and bring out Rabbi.

Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Um, so I just want to thank, uh. I want to reiterate the thank you's that Toby already gave tonight by thanking God for this wonderful opportunity to see so many beautiful people here together from so many different backgrounds. It's really wonderful to see each and every one of you. And of course, to our host, Gail Victor, who generously gave us her home. Uh, Gail, I should say that this is our second event for Shabtai and your apartment. And in Jewish law, when you do something three times, it has permanence. So after the next event, Toby and I are going to be moving in to the. Uh, we need a place in New York. Um, I should mention John Victor, your nephew, who and, of course, his mom today, Lisa is here, uh, who's responsible for the connection to this organization. We missed John, but he's in Montreal celebrating his grandmother's 96th birthday. And God bless her. So she's lived, uh, live and be well. She has obviously brought up a great generation of proud, um, Jewish Americans, Canadians, Canadian Americans.

Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Uh, my name is Shmully Hecht. I'm one of the founders of Shabtai. Um, I want to just also mention that, uh, through the generosity of Rene Edelman, um, and Shabtai, tonight, we are going to actually give out the books. We're not selling books. We don't do book sales. Um, we're going to give out, uh, two of three to date or more to three, two of three of books, uh, Roya Hakakian books. So they're all sitting over there on the counter. One is assassins of the Turquoise Palace by Roya Hakakian. The other is journey from the Land of No. Um, a girlhood, that's an interesting word, a girlhood caught in Revolutionary Iran by Roya Hakakian. So these are books for each and every one of you to please take home tonight. Um, if you want to get it signed, you're welcome to meet Roya in the lobby at 10:00, because. Oh, they're signed already. Oh, fantastic. Okay, excellent. There we go.

Brett Stophens: Okay, let's sign twice.

Rabbi Shmully Hecht: If you want me to sign it. Um, okay. So that's, uh. Thank you very, very much. Um, I do want to give something a small token to our speakers tonight, um, very briefly, on behalf of the society. So to Hal and to Holly, but to Hal for moderating tonight. Uh, this is an author I recently discovered. Hopefully, we'll have him up on campus. His name is Harry Frankfurt. He teaches at Princeton. I hope he's alive. I believe he's alive. He's got a number of books. The first one was called on BS. I won't, uh, I won't.

Hal Boyd: Great philosophy.

Rabbi Shmully Hecht: He's a great philosopher. And you read this one?

Hal Boyd: I have not read.

Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Oh, you have not read this one? He read the bullshit one. He hasn't read the one on truth. Well, how about I'm giving it to you?

Hal Boyd: The title.

Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Fantastic. Okay, so his first book was called On bullshit. This is the second one. Um, I just gave it to Cory Booker. I'm giving it to people I think, um, are committed to truth and so this is a gift. No, I'm not going to sign it. I don't sign other people's books. Uh, it's On Truth by Harry Frankfurt. It's a great book. I bought it for a dollar on eBay. Is the absolute best all I've ever spent. So, Hal. But I didn't buy one. I bought as many as I could and I've been giving them out. So thank you very, very much for coming. You left the Children for being here tonight and for doing such a fantastic job. To Roya, whose books we're giving out tonight, I did find one book that I thought you may have read. And if you have read it again, it's a book that should be read. And if you have read it and you're not going to read it again, hand it to somebody who needs to read it. It's the story of Hannah Senesh. For those of you who don't know 22 year old girl who, um, who parachuted behind the Hungarian lines during the Holocaust 1942 out of then Palestine and died in captivity. The Gestapo was tortured to death. A woman, a Jewish hero, whose photograph will go on the walls of our mansion up in New Haven because every single person needs to know the story of Hannah Senesh the self-sacrifice of one woman to save the Jewish people during the Holocaust. So that's a gift for you.

Roya Hakakian: Dollar on eBay?

Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Uh, that's a little more than a dollar.

Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Okay. There's.

Hal Boyd: Levels. There's levels.

Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Of course to our hostess. Host. This is a book written by one of the former presidents of the State of Israel. His name is Zalman Shazar. Uh, this gets very pricey. And I'm so in love with this book that I actually had it leather bound, because I think it's a fantastic book. Zalman Shazar was the president of the State of Israel, and, um, he wrote his memoirs and in Hebrew called Kochavei Boker, which translated into English called Morning Stars. It's a brilliant, nostalgic read of going back to a world before a state and then being a leader of a Zionist movement and his kind of break, but reconnection to his traditional roots of Hasidic Jews in Russia. And it's a book that I, I found and I love, and I gave it to my friends. And it really tells the story of, of our people in a very, very, very special way. I will tell you also that as a Lubavitch Hassid, there's only one person that we know that the Lubavitcher Rebbe actually kissed when he saw him. It's on video and it's Zalman Shazar. And I always wondered, of the hundreds of thousands of people over the years of the Rebbe's leadership, why did the Rebbe kiss Zalman Shazar? And I only understood it after I read the book. And so that's my gift to you. Enjoy it.

Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Now with our final speaker, Bret Stephens, who is here tonight. Thanks. Thank you for inviting him to join us. It's very difficult to give a book to, frankly, because, um, anything I've talked to him about, he's read already. So, um, and his book is out of print, which is why we're not giving out, um, your book tonight, but I'm sure there's another one coming up. So I just, um, I want to say something about, um, Iran. I grew up in Forest Hills, Queens. My father is a rabbi of a synagogue that consisted mostly of Iranian Jews. I grew up with Iranian Jews. Man Farsi Baladam. I can speak a little bit of Farsi, probably the most Farsi that any Hasidic rabbi yo are you ever going to meet speaks. And we're actually doing a Farsi night at Yale with all- we're finding all the Iranians, and we're having a gormeh sabzi night. And I'm going to make the gormeh sabzi. And yes, I am making I make the best gourmet sobsi in New Haven down pat. We're having a competition. We'll see. Okay. And so the Cooking Channel can come see who makes better gormeh sabzi, second generation Iranian Jews or Hasidic rabbis from Forest Hills. Okay, but I do remember distinctly waking up in the middle of the night in 1978, when I was three years old. My father returned from Iran. It's the only thing I remember being a three year old.

Rabbi Shmully Hecht: I remember him bringing me back pajamas. It was Iranian pajamas. Pajamas that were made in Iran, and it was his gift. My father was a rabbi. He was a school teacher. He didn't have a lot of money, but he wanted to buy every one of us something. And over the last, uh, 40 years I have met hundreds, as Toby mentioned, of people that are in this country today with first, second and third generation Iranian American Jews today who were saved, um, because my father went to Iran in 1978 and arranged for visas to be given to young to college students to come here. And I spent my summers with them in the Catskill Mountains, because for two years, until their parents were able to come, as you know, um, they had to be housed and fed and taken care of. It's a long story. My father wrote a book about it, and hopefully we'll have you do a talk with my father, which we've spoken about before. A Hasidic rabbi in Brooklyn. The Lubavitcher Rebbe of blessed memory. The Rebbe who inspired my life sends one of his disciples, my father, from Queens to Iran in 1978 to save Iranian Jews. Not Russian Jews, not Ethiopian Jews, not European Jews after the Holocaust, Iranian Jews. It's an interesting story. My father wrote the book. It's inspired me my entire life, so I spend Saturday nights at home.

Rabbi Shmully Hecht: And I get on the phone every Saturday night and I call a rabbi in Detroit, Michigan. His name is Rabbi Levi Shemtov, who is another Chabad rabbi who founded the Friendship Circle, which I'm assuming many of you know, which has over 100 centers around the world, which helps children of under, uh, um, children and adults of special needs. It's a national and international organization. He founded it out of Detroit, and he and his wife have turned it into an international organization. We spend Saturday nights every Saturday night, almost every single Saturday night over the last two years reading correspondence of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, his letters, not his public talks, not his um, uh, interaction on film, but his letters that he wrote. And I wasn't going to say really much tonight. But this Saturday night, the last letter we read- now this is a book. So it's volume eight. We finished volume nine. We're going backwards because he's got other scheduled classes that he does with other people. And this is volume eight of approximately 30 volumes of letters that are published. And then there's probably, you know, tens of more that have not been published. So we opened up a letter and lo and behold, the last letter we read together this week was to his grandfather, my friend Rabbi Levi Shemtov from Detroit. His father was Rabbi Mendel Shemtov, of blessed memory, and his father was Rabbi Ben Zion Shemtov, who was a big chosid in the Chabad movement.

Rabbi Shmully Hecht: And the Rebbe here writes him a letter. And I said, Levi, we're good. It was 11:00 at night already Saturday night. Um, I've got to get to the casino. Let's finish the job. And I said, let's, uh, let's let me finish. Let's finish with this, because this is. This is what I need. I need this for for Monday with Brett and Roya. So it's Baruch Hashem, tes shvat taf shin yud daled and the Rebbe says, Blessed be God. It's the ninth of Shvat 1954. He's writing this letter to Rabbi Ben Zion Shemtov. ,,, All the titles. Rabbi Bentzion. Shalom Ubracha, blessed, bless and peace. ,,, The Rabbe always noted when he received his letter, He was always pretty rapid to get back, getting back to people. And when he did get back to people, he apologized. He says, I'm really glad to have received your letter from the 26th day of Shvat and the fourth of Shvat, two letters ... The Rebbe says, I'm very surprised that you're depressed, that you're down, that you're a little bit, um, morose. You're a little disappointed or you don't have energy. Your spirit is down ... that there are people that are mocking the work of Lubavitch. So this is a Rebbe talking to his chosid about the work of Lubavitch.

Rabbi Shmully Hecht: And the Rebbe's trying to, you know, boost him. The Rebbe's going to boost him. ... So the Rebbe says, why are you down? They've been mocking us, us Jews since the days of Moses. ... Those of us that are committed to fulfill our mission, to bring light to our surroundings Hinei Sof Sof Didan Notzach... ultimately will be victorious. ... As my father-in-law, the Rebbe speaking of his father-in-law, the sixth Rebbe said "Az far dem emes Veren Aleh batel ." In Yiddish, Az faren emes veren aleh batel, that in front of truth. All is null. It dissipates in front of truth, everything disappears. But the Rebbe was very smart. And he says, ... why sometimes does it take longer than we'd like for those who face truth and hold lies to become null. ... the answer is that first of all, we have to thank G-d that slowly the other side is weakening, slowly the other side is weakening. And the halomos vihesterim, the concealment, the hiddenness of that weakening is not always revealed right away, but they're weakening. ... And therefore the battle against what we stand for will ultimately go away. ... and the fact that people speak, otherwise, we're at a battle. Whatever the challenge was, you don't know what he wrote the Rebbe.

Rabbi Shmully Hecht: And why is there still a major opposition ... So the Rebbe says, to them, will come what comes to them. Vianan paala diyimama anan. We are paala diyimama. We are those that are going to toil. Paala dimiama means we are the laborers of the day. We are the laborers of the day. ... And as the great Tzemach Zedek said, Machin lichtig. What is our work? To bring light. ... and therefore there is no time for war, because it is our job to build. So I want to get very personal and very blunt. We're living in very precarious times. And to you, Brett. I know we're on camera, but we're off record. You are walking a very fine, a very tight tightrope right now at the New York Times. I won't get into it. We all know the Times because we all read the Times. You're walking a tightrope, and there are times that you are going to have to ask yourself when you walk out of that office, as some of the people in this room have done and others. What am I doing? Where am I? Where's the paper? What are my views? What do I believe in? And when you walk out to the elevator I can promise you and assure you that the editors are saying the same thing.

Rabbi Shmully Hecht: I've worked with Jim Dao. I've worked with Trish Hall. I've worked with Bari Weiss. I remember you at the Journal. I've been back and forth at the Op-Ed page. I know Ed Rothstein. The list is very long. You're going to walk into the elevator and scratch your head, and you're going to walk into the elevator, and they're going to scratch their head, and it's moments like that. As for me personally, the Rebbe tells us that Anan paala diyimama anan. We have to bring light and truth. So what book can I give you? I can't give you a book. You're the author. You're the voice of truth. So I brought you something else. I asked you what your Hebrew name is, and you told me your Hebrew name is Ariel. Ariel is the lion of God. The first opening verse of the Code of Jewish Law, says Yehuda ben Teima omer ... Rabbi Yehdua ben Teima says that when a Jew wakes up in the morning, he has to be ... as mighty like a leopard. ... and light like an eagle. ... swift like a deer. ...And mighty like a lion. Ariel. Your name is Ariel of the Lion of God. I had a discussion with a zoologist in the School of Environmental Studies three weeks ago, on Friday night at our table at Shabtai, and I said. What's stronger, the tiger or the lion? What's the answer?

Roya Hakakian: The lion, obviously.

Rabbi Shmully Hecht: What's the answer? Who's bigger, the tiger or the lion? Well, your phones are off. You can Google it when you get down to the lobby at 10:00. The answer is that there are actually a number of tigers that are larger and more powerful than the lion. Hence the question that bothered me. Why does Rabbi Yehuda Ben Teima say that a Jew should wake up in the morning and be mighty like the lion? There was a rabbi who lived in the 1600s in Lvov. We're reading about Lvov, Lemberg, the city of Lions. That's what it's translated as. And he's the first commentator on the code of Jewish law. And in the first commentary of the first verse of the Code of Jewish Law, quoting this Mishnah from the second century of being mighty like a lion. The Taz who lived in the city of Lions says. He doesn't talk about the tiger. He doesn't even ask the question that I'm asking, but he answers it. He says, ... because the lion is not afraid of any other creature. Even if the lion confronts the tiger, that's heavier and stronger and more powerful. The lion is the king of the animal kingdom because strength, strength is here. And on that note, I want to give you a gift. And you may have a pair of Tefilin. Do you have a pair of Tefilin?  I'm going to give you another pair of tefilin because this is my gift to you, a pair of tefilin. And it says in Hebrew, Ariel Stephens. Why Teflin?

Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Tefilin is what has has kept the Jewish male and I know we are speaking about women tonight. It is the power of the Jewish man. The Torah tells us it's Deuteronomy. I found it actually on a Christian website today. I was looking for the verse and they come up. They seem to come up first. But I checked in the Chumash. I think it's Deuteronomy 28. Deuteronomy says , the Torah says ,,,  that all the nations of the world. ... All the nations of the world will see that the name of God is upon you. Moses tells the Jewish people before they come to the. And then the verse says Viyaru Mimecha and they will fear you. When the world knows and sees that we carry truth. And we carry courage. And we're fearless. They will fear us. And the Talmud comments on this verse. That the verse that says that the world will see God upon us and fear us ... what is our ammunition. Our Tefilin.

Rabbi Shmully Hecht: And what do we do with our tefilin?. Every day we put them on our hand and we put them on our head because our hand is next to our heart and our head is on top of our brain. We're all skeptics. All of us put a piece of leather with parchment that talks about the oneness of God on my hand and on my head every day, and say a prayer? It's primitive. It's what you say, 12th century. It's 2000 BC. Yes, because at those moments. When we have to face the courage to the world, we must connect with something that is greater than ourselves. That is the magic of the Jewish people. ,,, that the nations of the world will see that God is upon you. Viyaru mimecha, and they will fear you. ... This is the Tefilin Shebirosh that we put on every day. Whether we understand it, whether we perceive it, conceive it, even even have a relationship or feel any spirituality about it, because we commit our heart and our mind to something greater than ourselves. And then Brett, we'll conquer truth at levels that even you and your agents and your publishers and your biggest fans cannot even imagine, because it will come from a higher place.

Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Roya has shown us the way. Roya will continue to show us the way. Roya will fight until the people of Iran are liberated. God willing, one day my children will say that we in this room did something tonight and will continue to do something. Maybe we're not getting on a plane and flying there because we can't, but we're going to do something when we leave here. We're going to call a Senator or Congressman or the CEO of the company we work for or the people around us, and we're going to do something. We're going to connect with truth. We're going to connect with powers that are greater than ourselves. And we're going to bring liberation to the people of Iran, to all people, to all nations, because Viyaru Mimecha because we fear something that is greater than ourselves. So I just want to say thank you very, very, very much to everybody. Thank you, God, for giving us this wonderful opportunity. This is in place of a book. It's a thing. It's another pair of tefilin and it has your name on it. Ariel, Stephens, the lion of the Jewish people. Thank you. The University of Chicago group is coming in at ten, so we like that.

Brett Stophens: Everyone leaves. The fun goes to die.

Toby Hecht: Good evening. I'm going to start by asking everybody, please, to turn off your cell phones off. We are recording tonight. Just so you know. Okay.

Toby Hecht: Good evening. My name is Toby Hecht and I am the director of Shabtai. I would like to first thank God for bringing us together for this important event. Thank you Gail. Gail, how are you? Thank you, Gail, who has for generously opening up your home once again to Shabtai New York City. Thank you, Ariel Steinberg, Rene Edelman and Stanislav Atanasov for your support tonight. Thank you, Roya and Brett, for graciously accepting our invitation to speak for us on Iran and the Women's Revolution, and thank all of you for taking time out of your busy lives to be here. We have an extra seat right here. Does anybody want to take it? Don't be shy.

Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Tal. It's yours. I just look at it a little more. Thank you. No, I'm not over.

Toby Hecht: Oh, actually. I'm sorry. It's taken.

Toby Hecht: Sorry. Never mind. You're good. That's for you. No, no, it's not mine. Okay. One might ask why the invitation for tonight's invitation read Women's Revolution in the singular. After all, Mahsa Amini's story is not a fight for one, but for all. And it's a good question. One that I'm sure we will hear more of tonight. But before Brett and Roya deliver what is sure to be a thought provoking discussion, let's start at the beginning. Two weeks ago, the Jewish people began a cycle of reading the Five Books of Moses again. In the beginning, God created the world from splitting the heavens and earth to forming and breathing life into mankind. After the sin of the forbidden fruit, Adam and Chava were cast out of Eden, a utopian existence into a tumultuous world where, in the pursuit of knowledge, truth and morality are manifested when human beings choose good over evil. Adam is the first man, and Chava aim mother of all life. In what seems like a hot second, humanity descends into depraved immorality and aside from Noah, his wife, his three sons and daughters in law and the animals, God cleans up shop, destroys the world, and moves on to plan B. For the next 50 weeks of the year, we will be- we will read about rebuilding humanity and its infrastructure, sometimes name by name, all directly descending from the first man and woman.

Toby Hecht: Most importantly, however, we will learn about conscious monotheism through the first monotheist Abraham, which is the purpose of creation and God's will. Everything in the Torah is deliberate. There isn't even one superfluous word. The word Torah means to teach. And indeed it is a manual, the blueprint for the Jewish people to live a meaningful life, a godly life. We don't read it again and again for kicks. We read it to connect, to remember, to learn, and to practice. And as a woman, one can't help but see a very clear trajectory of the power of women from the beginning, illuminated through the distinct qualities gifted to them by God. This is how women, individually and collectively became the foundation of strength and valor. Today, it's easy to join a revolution. Take to the streets with placards. But how about making the revolution? You may think it takes the masses to make a difference. And the Torah tells us, no, not true. It just takes one to get the party started. And it's hard. It takes strength and courage for one to stand against the tide, the fear, the judgment, the naysayers and the doubt. The first Jewish woman Sarah. Sarah. Our mother, Abraham's wife, taught the women of her generation about God, and it was specifically her home that the temple in Jerusalem, God's sanctuary was modeled after.

Toby Hecht: Sarah becomes the archetype of the Jewish woman. God tells Abraham, Kol Asher tomar Eilecha Sara, Shma Bikola, All that Sarah tells you, heed her voice. Abraham is thus strengthened by Sarah's convictions. The second matriarch, Rivka, a prophetess, sees that it is her son Jacob who needs to receive the blessings and not her son Asa, and she quietly does what needs to be done to change the course of history. Through Rachel the third and Leah, the fourth and final matriarch, the selfless and dedicated mothers of the 12 tribes, we see some of the most relevant and timely examples of kinship and support between women, showing that united together through triumph and tragedy, so much is gained instead of lost. Then there is Miriam, my personal favorite, who was inspired by the convictions of her above mentioned great grandmothers. Despite living in a despotic Egypt. Under Pharaoh's rule, ancient Egypt represented the origins of every human rights violation. It is young Miriam who challenges her parents to stay married and have more children instead of giving up. Miriam and her mother, Yocheved, served as midwives, saving boys from the Nile, defying Pharaoh's edict to execute every Jewish male born, thus ensuring a future for the Jewish people. And it is Miriam who takes her newborn baby brother, places him in a tar lined basket, setting it on the Nile to save him from certain death.

Toby Hecht: And yet Miriam alone is not responsible for Moses the Redeemer. For as he lay in the basket floating on the Nile, an Egyptian princess Pharaoh's daughter sees the basket in the reeds, hears his cry as she bathes, she reaches for the basket and draws it near. She knows her father well and what this means for the infant. Without hesitation, she takes the seemingly abandoned baby, calling him Moshe to draw out of the water. With the help of Miriam, Batya   the Egyptian princess saves his life so that Moshe Rabeinu Moshe, our teacher, can become the future leader and redeemer of the Jewish nation in order to liberate them from bondage and servitude, bring them to Sinai and finally the Promised Land. Through the Tanakh, Torah, the Five Books of Moses, Neviim prophets, and Kesuvim, Writings, and onward we see examples of women using their gifted intuition, oftentimes quietly and action here a strong word there: resilience, steadfastness, integrity, and self-sacrifice in the face of tyranny, destruction, and existential threats. Judith, Rachav, Devorah, Naomi, Ruth, Esther Homalka, Queen Esther in ancient Persia, the Jewish heroine who risked her life by asking her husband, the king to spare her people. And on and on.

Toby Hecht: The hundreds, the thousands, the millions of heroic women in our tradition. These women, one by one, have fortified the notion that in order to sustain the truth, we oftentimes alone will have to take a stand about what is right and true. They were not perfect or infallible by any measure. They were very human, just like the rest of us. And through trial and error and absolute persistence, they changed the world for the better. When we think of revolutions happening in places like Teheran, Mashhad, Shiraz, Isfahan, cities we have never been to, we ask ourselves, how can we make a difference here in this apartment right now? And I'll tell you. Think about someone else. Be kind to a stranger in distress. Reach out and make the world a ripe field for goodness and light. You never know what one good deed can do. My family and I were in Park City, Utah last year on a ski trip and were eating Shabbos dinner with the local Chabad rabbi and his family. We met a woman there, originally from Iran. When she heard that her last name was Hecht, she asked if we were related to the Rabbi Hecht, responsible for saving over 1800 kids on the cusp of the Iranian Revolution in 1978. Shmully answered yes. Oops, Almost there Almost there, here we go.

Toby Hecht: Rabbi Sholom Ber Hecht and his father, Rabbi J.J. Hecht, of blessed memory, together with the staunch support of the Lubavitcher Rebbe of blessed memory, were responsible for that rescue mission initiated by Shmully's father, flying to Iran in 1978 to load up airplanes shortly before the Ayatollah Khomeini took over the country. She told us that she was just 11 and her sister's 14 and 16 when they were rescued 44 years ago by the bravery and love of a few people. And then there is Roya, whose name in Persian means dream or vision, whom we met for the first time when she came to speak at our society dinner on Crown Street in New Haven nearly 20 years ago. I believe it was Nelson Mousazadeh who brought you from Davenport. Roya, you easily could have blended into the American dream without a thought of what you left behind, as many do. Instead, you chose to dedicate yourself to truth, to activism, to stand on the floor of Congress, to write books and articles, speak on the networks and argue with the syndicators, advise the State Department to try and save a country from tyranny. Your commitment and resilience, often in the face of indifference and appalling silence, are an inspiration to so many and will go down in history. Thank you for showing the rest of us what it means to carry a banner of truth. And as my grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, told me and my sisters years ago, when you feel weary in your mission and purpose, remember our imahos our mothers, matriarchs, Sarah, Rivka, Rachel, and Leah, for they are always with you standing by your side. Thank you. I'd like to introduce, um, Hal Boyd, who's going to be introducing our speakers. He is a member of Shabtai. Graduated the YLS in 2016. Correct?

Hal Boyd: That's correct.

Toby Hecht: Yes. And is here tonight with his wife, Holly from Utah. And he is where he is the executive editor of the Deseret Magazine.

Hal Boyd: So yes.

Toby Hecht: Thank you. To Am I missing something?

Rabbi Shmully Hecht: (Inaudible).

Toby Hecht: I did. I did, I did, yep. Got it all. All right.

Hal Boyd: Perfect. Thank you.

Hal Boyd: That was a wonderful, wonderful introduction. Thank you. Thank you, uh, Gail, for hosting for all those who have made this night possible. Toby, that was a great introduction for what we're going to talk about tonight. I'll just put in a quick plug for Shabtai as a member. Um, you know, my tradition, the Latter Day Saint tradition. The Mormon tradition, uh, we have this strong belief that the children of Abraham will bless all people, will bless all people. And I was certainly blessed through my association with Shabtai at Yale Law School. The intellectual dialogue, the free debate, the ability to seek Lux et Veritas, uh, Urim and Thummim, lights and truths. The Yale motto to seek it from all facets was embodied within Shabtai and what has been built here. And so I just want to commend, uh, those who continue to make it possible, those who sponsor it and thank all of them for making this night possible. So, uh, there couldn't be a better bridge than what uh, Toby already said with regard to the power of women to enact change. And thank you. Um, and in 2015, as I was preparing for to moderate this discussion, uh, rereading some of the articles that, uh, in 2015, there was a curious article in The Economist that talked about Iran as a, uh, a modernizing country, as a country that was maturing and that this trend would continue, uh, if there were to be a nuclear deal.

Hal Boyd: Um, now, that has been the prevailing wisdom of center left politics. And I think just, uh, just, uh, sort of a foreign policy dogma ever since then, um, that if the US had a deal, we had a deal. That deal was, uh, was taken away by a Republican administration, and now that deal needs to come back. But suddenly, within the past six weeks, that prevailing dogma has been thrown into turmoil. Something truly magical, something stunning, something tension filled, tumultuous is taking place. Uh, there is real change that is in the air, uh, in Iran. And we see it through the videos. We see it through the news reports of what can come out of the country. And so this has changed the dynamic. This has changed the paradigm of Westerners such as myself, of understanding what is happening, what what what is happening in Iran, what is happening in the hearts of the Iranian people. And so, uh, to help us understand this inspiring wave, this daring wave of protest, um, to unpack what is what is occurring and what the implications are not only for Iran but for the United States and, of course, the Middle East, we have with us two esteemed guests: uh, Roya Hakakian, who is Iranian born American poet and a noted author whose writing has graced the pages of The Atlantic as of late in recent weeks, and as well as the chyrons of the CNN and other media outlets helping unpack the significance of these events.

Hal Boyd: In particular piece The Bonfire of the Headscarves, quite a title, and her recent testimony on Capitol Hill have helped to, uh, have helped Westerners, Americans such as myself, better understand the dynamics that are taking place. Of course, we also have Bret Stephens with us, uh, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, the former editor of The Jerusalem Post, and a distinguished columnist at The New York Times. And I would note that through his work at the Times, he has carved out a very influential voice, uh, critiquing the Iran nuclear deal and, um, and the various sundry attempts to revive it. And so I'm sure we will have some of that illuminated today in our discussion. This is certainly a sobering topic. Uh, it's a time of tumult and tension, but it's also a time of hope. It's a time of the possibilities of what could come. It's a time, even perhaps, of revolutionary sentiment, the likes of which have not been seen for more than half a century. And so with that, let's go ahead and begin. And rather than start at the beginning of that revolutionary period of those late 1970s, which Toby touched on so well, let's start six weeks ago and Roya, help tell us the story of Mahasa Amini her life, her significance, her death, and the events that follow.

Roya Hakakian: Good evening. Um, I'm mic'd up, so I hope everybody can hear me well. Um, since everybody was thanking everybody else, I want to thank Brett. Um, because, um, I texted him to say if he would do this with me, and within about a few seconds he said yes. So I'm touched both as a friend but also as a fellow writer and thinker, because I felt that he understood the gravity of the issue. And thank you. Um, so I came up all of a sudden with a metaphor, or at least a parallel for Mahsa Amini, who was a Kurdish, 22 year old Kurdish woman who had come to Tehran to visit with relatives, um, for just a few days and then go back to Kurdistan. And I thought that her story of of eventually what happened to her is the perfect parallel in some ways with this story of Emmett Till. Um, you know, Emmett left Chicago, came to, uh, Mississippi. Um, you know, he was not a political person. He was a 14 year old. He had no intention of being politically provocative and then just the most innocent thing that he could possibly do, uh, got him killed and, and in some ways, obviously changed history. And I think Mahsa Amini's death, uh, a visitor in Tehran with no political intentions.

Roya Hakakian: No, no. You know, unlike so many other women in Iran or especially in Tehran, no intention to be provocative. Um, she had a few buttons at, of her uniform, the Islamic uniform that you have to put on as women in Iran, open. Um, it's actually been misreported by everyone. Uh, her hair wasn't showing. She had her scarf on, but the buttons were open. And the morality police always wants to make a lesson of somebody. And so they picked on her. And the rest is history. Um, and I think because she was everyone, because she was so perfectly innocent, because she had no intention of being provocative, it is that, you know, the nation has taken to the streets because everyone can feel that in her death they can find the death of their own relatives, you know, female relatives. And I think that, um, you know, someone told me when you were at the State Department speaking to, uh, the, you know, secretary of state and others, somebody quoted that the hashtag Mahsa Amini has circulated in social media over 100 million times. Um, and so, you know, I think she has somehow swept up everyone. Not just in Iran, but also the imagination of so many others along the way.

Hal Boyd: So you talked about it as certainly capturing the hearts of the Iranian people, but it's uniquely a women's movement. Is there, explain, do you think that's true? And in what ways how have women become sort of a political force within Iran suddenly? Or maybe they've always been one. What do you?

Roya Hakakian: They have always been a political force in Iran. They were the first opposition to the regime, and they had every reason to be. So if we go back a little in Ayatollah Khomeini, who is the founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, uh, returned from exile to Iran in February of 1979. And, um, and and you would think that after a such a major revolution, he would have such, such great agenda. He would want to, you know, pursue so many other, uh, goals. But the very first, um, uh, issue that he focused on was to institute the hijab for women within, within the first few days that he had taken power. And so everybody was shocked but at the time he was the most beloved and the most feared person in the country. So the overwhelming majority of people in Iran tried, kept silent about the idea of introducing hijab to a country that had freedom of choice for women. And and so what happened was at the time that no one, absolutely no one, would dare to challenge Khomeini. On March 8th of 1979, women took to the streets of Tehran. And- and when no one else was criticizing Ayatollah Khomeini, women said that we didn't make a revolution to go back. So I think the foundation of an opposition, of a political opposition was, uh, was laid down right there and then on March 8th of 1979. And I think they became a political opposition. And I think the irony is that the rest of the nation, including secular intellectuals, leftist intellectuals who weren't, you know, who weren't religious, they had no reason to support the idea of the hijab.

Roya Hakakian: They weren't conservatives. They also believed that if women would sacrifice for the cause of the revolution, would make their own, you know, preferences secondary to and make the, you know, the cause, the success of the revolution a priority, then, you know, they would be helping the revolutionary cause and that's what a good revolutionary at that hour in the country needed to do. So there was a sense that that the women were being selfish by wishing to have the freedom of choice to dress as they wished. And that collusion between the left and the right, between secular women even, who were intellectuals and the rest of the country over this one issue is probably one of the darkest moments in in the contemporary history of Iran. And so people call it a women's revolution, not because the only people who are out there on the streets now are women, but because everybody else recognized the error from 1979. Everybody else recognized that to forego of that one right, to sacrifice women at the altar of the revolution was the wrongest thing to do. And so it is a women's revolution, because everybody has come to recognize that they need to go back to the beginning, and they need to all realize that it was a misogynist effort on the part of the Ayatollah, and it was a misogynist collusion at the beginning of the revolution that has allowed the ayatollahs to go on for 43 years. So you need to undo that by by allowing women to lead. But certainly women are not the only ones.

Hal Boyd: Okay. And so what? Speaking of who has taken to the streets, what are the demographics of those who've taken to the streets? And do they have widespread support?

Roya Hakakian: You know, it's interesting because you asked me that this afternoon and I thought, hmm, you know, did the American Revolution have widespread support? You know, how can we prove that other revolutions throughout history have had widespread support? In my view, revolutions are events that take a nation towards a better future. And, you know, sometimes the rest of the nation needs to follow, you know, kicking and screaming. Um, so, no, I mean, I don't think anybody can tell how wide the support is, but I can tell you one thing, and this is interesting because I was at the State Department, Anthony Blinken asked me, you know, so you're telling me that secular Iranians are with this revolution. What about the conservatives? And I said, well, the conservatives are moral people, too. You know, the conservatives recognize that if this regime continues, Islam is going to lose every ounce of attraction, allure, legitimacy that it has in the eyes of the people. There are, you know, for those of you who are on social media, you might have seen that it's become sort of a public prank for teenagers and other people on the street to knock off the turban from the head of the imams and, you know, other clerics who walk by. But that's an expression of the amount of hatred that people are feeling towards the clergy in Iran right now. So I think, you know, looking at the fact, the mere fact that it hasn't gone away, that it's, it's in its sixth week, and it keeps on growing in places that no one had ever expected, including Qom, which is the Vatican of Iran, which is the place where all the Shiite seminaries are located. You've had demonstrations in Qom. It's unthinkable. And so I would say it is widespread. It is a popular movement. And I think some of the conservatives who are joining are joining because they want to save Islam from further deteriorating in the country.

Hal Boyd: Let's turn to you, Brett. Um, retrace for us a little bit the politics of the nuclear deal. With some brevity. I'm sure we could dedicate an entire evening to that. And how is the past six weeks complicated the administration, the current administration's hopes to strike a deal?

Brett Stophens: Um.

Hal Boyd: Take it from there.

Brett Stophens: Uh, well, let me make a couple prefatory comments. And just also build on a few things that Roya said when she asked me to, uh, if I would join her this evening. The reason I answered immediately is, of course, it's an honor to share a stage with you. And for the last ten minutes, I think all of you have understood why it's an honor to share a stage with you. Um, and it's also delightful to see some old friends. Thane, Ed, Greg, a number of other people that I've known over the years in different walks of, uh, different walks of life. I just wanted to say one more thing in connection to what you said. You know, for revolutions to succeed, they often they don't just need exemplary heroes. They need exemplary victims. In 1978, the apartheid regime in South Africa, um, beat a man named Steve Biko half to death and left him chained in the trunk of a car. Um, and Steve Biko in some ways is, in the manner of his death, was a demonstration of why it was the regime that killed him that had to go. When Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in Tunisia in, at the end of 2010. That was the exemplary victim, the everyman, which who showed why all of these Arab autocracies had to go. Something similar happened in Poland with a priest whose name escapes me right now during the solidarity movement. But that's in effect, it seems to me, what what Iran has had not the perfect champion. And I think the success of this revolution in some ways will depend on whether it finds a champion. But it is certainly found its exemplary victim, which is why it has been so galvanizing.

Brett Stophens: A second observation in connection to what you said, um, women had a unique power in Iran that men didn't have, which is that in being forced to wear hijab, every woman in Iran had the instrument of revolution literally sitting on her head. Um, and all it took was the courage, often found in numbers, to take that hijab off, to spark a revolution. And that's a real problem that dictatorships like Iran's have, which is that in trying to impose their dictatorship into the most intimate parts of people's lives, they leave themselves exposed. The best dictatorships, I mean, the best from the standpoint of dictatorship, is a Goldilocks dictatorship, which is not so repressive, right, that it creates opportunities like this and at the same time not so liberal that it makes it makes them easy to overthrow. So this is, I think, the way to understand what's happening in Iran can't simply be in the context of what's happening in Iran itself. You have to look at it in the context of other revolutionary moments and see how how it compares. And now it seems to have almost all of the features required for a successful revolution, except for one, which is some concept of leadership and I suspect we're going to see whether that emerges. With respect to the nuclear deal, to me, the nuclear deal was always essentially a form of capitulation. It was the capitulation which argued that there is nothing more that we can do to stop Iran from acquiring the instruments for weapons of mass destruction than to bargain with them and to offer them things that we think they might like in exchange for restraints.

Brett Stophens: And of course, it might have worked if the negotiation was being taken with South Korea or Belgium, you know. I mean, it's very easy to disarm people who are willing to be disarmed. But disarmament doesn't work with dictatorial regimes because they cheat. And there's an extensive history of this, whether it was during the 1920s and 1930s, the way the fascist powers violated strictures connected to remilitarization, naval tonnage and so on. The Soviet Union was notorious for cheating on nuclear arms control deals in from the 50s, uh, onward. And the Islamic Republic is the past master of cheating. Of course, it's very easy to cheat if you have a huge country with lots of mountains and lots of places where you can secret, uh, secret stuff away. The other miscalculation involved this false dichotomy that became entrenched in the thinking of Western foreign policy elites, which was the idea that there was a meaningful distinction between Iranian hardliners and moderates. Now, to some extent within the ambit of fairly narrow ambit of Iranian politics, that distinction might have meant something. Although if you actually study the history of Iran's nuclearization, the first great wave of its nuclear efforts happened under Mr. Khatami, who was hailed as the great reformer of the late 1990s and early, early part of this century.

Brett Stophens: So there was this idea like, well, you know, if we strike a nuclear deal and particularly if we strike a nuclear deal with moderates, and in the last administration, we had Rouhani, who was supposedly a moderate, then that will encourage moderate forces and create a kind of a movement for change within, within the regime itself. Now, this was just totally false. A, because it misunderstood that the regime was not Rouhani's to run. It was the supreme leader's to run always and particularly on nuclear issues. But it was also a mistake because the moderates were no less interested in a sincere denuclearization deal as, as the hardliners are. In fact, my experience in a different context, when I used to report from Israel and Palestinian Authority, is that it was better to speak to Hamas than it was to the Palestinian Authority because Hamas more or less told you what they intended, right? Whereas the Palestinian Authority lied. I mean, they intended the same thing, but one was dishonest and the other the other was not. So I think from the moment it was signed in 2015, I thought it was a disastrous deal. I supported and I didn't often support him. Trump's decision to walk away from the deal. And now to your last question. Um, the deal I think was dead on arrival before this revolution began. It's very difficult to imagine this or any other administration reaching a concordat with the people who are busy murdering men and women in the streets of Tehran and elsewhere. Right.

Roya Hakakian: So I just want to say something to the point you made about Hamas being a better negotiation partner. Um, I was at a dinner with Condoleezza Rice 15, 14, 15 years ago, and she said that Kazem Soleimani, the head of the Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps, had called her up to say, if you really want to have a successful negotiation, why are you reaching out to the to the foreign minister, to Javad Zarif? You should know that the person who can actually make a deal is me. So yeah. So yeah, exactly. You know.

Hal Boyd: So speaking of negotiations, that was a good transition. You've been on the Hill. You've been talking to the Secretary of State. What are what are some of the- first of all what can the US do? What is it doing? What could it potentially do in your judgment, uh, better perhaps to support this fomenting, uh, protests, possibly, um, attempts for regime change, if you could, if I could be so bold to say, what could the US do? What could the Western world do? And what are you hearing from politicians? What are you hearing from diplomats with regard to the US's role?

Roya Hakakian: Mm. Um, Washington or at least the Washington I met mostly Democratic senators and the top brass at the State Department is intellectually delayed as far as the events in Iran are concerned. They are um, and it was obvious from the questions that they were asking. The first one was, um, it's a women's revolution, so who else is on the streets? Um, so, you know, we had to explain that yes, the women sparked this movement, but everybody else has joined in and the women have led it because they had a, you know, they had a reason and they had a tool with which they could spark the revolution. But everybody else has come along. Um, and then, you know, they they are so wedded to the nuclear deal that everything else has to orient itself around, you know. So what do we do with the nuclear deal? How can we help the demonstrators and carry on with the nuclear deal? And it seemed to me like, you know, it was like Churchill being asked to sit down with the Nazis and come up with a peace agreement, you know, during World War II. And, and he found it incredibly impossible to do both at the same time. So I was trying, without referring to Churchill, to say to the State Department, you can't be sitting down with the people who- with the very leaders who are killing the people on the streets, um, and, and negotiate a deal with them and think that you can also support those people at the same time that that these two are entirely, uh, paradoxical.

Roya Hakakian: They they can't happen both at the same time. Um, and, and I think part of the reason is because the intention of the State Department has been, ever since Biden came to power to bring back the nuclear agreement, that this has been the central effort that they have been trying to make. So I think part of what the US can do is to undo some of the thinking that they have been so wedded to. Um, part of it is the nuclear deal. The other is the idea that there is this, you know, there is this good and evil force in Iran, hardliners and reformists, and that if they just do the right thing and at the State Department or, you know, if they could just help the reformists, somebody would emerge to save the day. Um, and this is, as Brett said, has been false from the start. In fact, I think it's the the greatest political good cop, bad cop that any government has ever played. Um, and it's part of what unfortunately, so many of liberal intellectuals in America have bought and it goes on, you know, the discussion about, you know, reformists.

Roya Hakakian: Is there something we can do to help them gain power? Um, so I think part of what, what needs to happen is somehow for the administration to see this, you know, uh, kind of detach itself from these two beliefs. And then the third thing that keeps coming up is, and I had that conversation with one senator who said, but we can't intervene because we never understood that region. And I was thinking to myself to say, in the politest way, I could you don't have to understand the region. I mean, it's not it's not a very big issue. It's, it's a, it's a people who are saying the most fundamentally, Washingtonian wishes that what one could ever hear. They're saying, we want to hold hands on the street without being afraid. We want to have a future. We want clean air. We want to dance on the streets, and we want to be able to sing. I mean, it could very well be lines from, you know, the letter that George Washington said or the speech he gave to a Jewish congregation in Rhode Island where he said, we're building a republic where everyone can sit under his own vine and fig tree. Right. And that's precisely what Iranians on the streets are, are articulating at the moment. So to think that we have to think about Afghanistan and what went wrong in Iraq, and then and then conclude that we ought not to ever do anything again is the possibly the the worst un-American conclusion that we could ever draw? And I also think it's to miss a historical, an important historical moment, which is something happened in Ukraine.

Roya Hakakian: And that is in my belief, in my view, what has changed the Iranians perspectives on what they can or cannot do? Because if you had asked me when, when, uh, the US left Afghanistan, whether a revolution could happen in Iran, I would say no way, because it was it created such bleak circumstances. Um, and Afghanistan being next door to Iran, I thought, you know, they have every reason to fear that these forces, these Islamist forces in the region have become so powerful that they are impossible to overcome. And I think Ukraine changed all of that. Ukraine made it look like, uh, a nation that is incredibly dedicated about the cause of independence and democracy can be the David that stands up to Goliath. And, and, you know, and I think that made was a turning point for Iran as well. So what I was trying to tell to people I was meeting in Washington was that it's true that Iran is where it is geographically, but in terms of democratic readiness and maturity, Iran is ought to be bundled with Ukraine.

Roya Hakakian: And that's what they're not thinking about. But if they do and if they really catch up and if they somehow shed the fear of, um, you know, regime change because these have become, uh, buzzwords that, you know, send shudder to, to anybody at the State Department because, you know, whatever errors we made, uh, as Americans, you know, in Latin America or in Vietnam and other parts of the world somehow is catching up with them now. And so, uh, the idea of not doing anything, it's as if that inaction justifies or rectifies what it was that they did or didn't do, you know, 50, 60 years ago. And but and I had to say to, to Blinken, you don't have to change the regime. The people want to change the regime. You just have to make sure that A, you don't help the people they want to overthrow by by sitting at a negotiating table with them. And B, they're not asking for you to intervene militarily, but give them every other support that you can. At the moment that support is, uh, primarily internet and digital capacity. Um, the the demonstrators, the protesters are behind the regime turns off internet like a water faucet. It's incredibly scary. And then, you know, there's a whole host of other things that we could possibly do.

Hal Boyd: It's fascinating. So a couple of threads, uh, to sort of follow up on that. One is and I'd be interested in your thoughts, Brett. Um, so love the quote from, from George Washington in terms of, you know, uh, aspiring to everyone having their own vine and fig tree. Of course, we know Hamilton and the city made that line, uh, famous. Uh, you know, it it was, of course, in another book, uh, you know, in another famous setting before was in Hamilton, uh, but, uh, and this audience knows that better than anyone. But Washington also warned against foreign entanglements, and I imagine the tensions and, of course, some of the failures in the Middle East have caused conservatives in particular, but I'm sure across the political spectrum to become pretty gun shy in terms of entering into or getting involved in, um, uh, some of these, uh, more sticky and thorny foreign policy issues. So I would love to hear your thoughts of has the right- has conservativism broadly defined today in America retreated too much? Uh, has it properly recalibrated? Should it had never recalibrated? Uh, what are your thoughts about that? And then I have additional threads that I want to follow up from, from what you said.

Brett Stophens: Um. Look, the United States has screwed up around the world, and we have also done great good around the world. And we should endeavor to learn from our failures, but not forget the fact that were it not for us, Europe would be under either a Nazi or a Soviet dictatorship. Japan would be a very different country. South Korea would not be the thriving democracy that it is. Self-loathing and self-flagellation and we can never get anything right is a poor recipe in life. And it's a poor recipe in foreign policy as well. And it's particularly a poor recipe when we are not being asked to intervene. We are being asked to simply make it possible for other people to use instruments that we provide in order for them to realize their liberation. So it's a good thing that we are helping Ukrainians with arms. We're not intervening. We are allowing the Ukrainians to fight a battle that is vital for our interests without American soldiers being involved. It will be a very good thing, a very good thing for the United States, for the state of Israel, for anyone who cares about a future in that region that is led by moderates and modernizers if the Islamic Republic of Iran is overthrown because it stands at the center of an effort to turn the entire region into a series of appalling tyrannies, appalling tyrannies, tyrannies of a kind, by the way, that make the tyranny that's in Saudi Arabia seem relatively mild in in comparison.

Brett Stophens: So look at what is happening in Iran, Syria under Bashar Assad, Lebanon under Hezbollah, Yemen with with the Houthis. All of this has has Iran, uh, uh, Iran at its at its center. So, look, the right conservative approach ought to be prudential, ought to be sensible. There are options between sending the third Infantry and do nothing. And and this is one of these sort of false dichotomies that crops up, usually in kind of demagogic voices like the American Conservative or other publications like, well, you're just for another, you know, another Iraq or another another Vietnam. Well, no. Why don't we help the Iranians? Roya mentioned that we can help them with tools of communication. We can simply withdraw from from a negotiation which promises to give them tens of billions of dollars in sanctions relief. We can ask ourselves, why not get our oil from Alberta Canada? And leaving global, global, the global warming will happen whether it's in Alberta or Iran. But why are we seeking oil relief from oil sanctions for the Iranians instead of the Canadians? Bad as I think Canada is on many fronts. Uh, I'll take the Canadians over the Iranians. We can ask our European partners in a show of solidarity with women to expel, uh, to to expel ambassadors from European countries because every Iranian embassy is essentially it's an espionage and a hub of assassination, which which Roya can tell you. And to withdraw their ambassadors from, uh, from Tehran, we can go after Iranian assets throughout the region, in Iraq, in Syria, in Yemen.

Brett Stophens: We might even ask ourselves, why is it that we tolerate Iran having factories to produce drones, which are which are being used for genocidal purposes, genocidal purposes in, in Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities? And to Roya's point, which I think is extraordinarily important, these struggles are connected. What happens in Ukraine, uh, will determine the outcome in many ways of what happens in Iran. And by the way, what happens in Ukraine will also determine the outcome of what may happen in the Taiwan Straits and in Taiwan in the very near future. So helping Ukraine achieve a swift and decisive victory over Putin will have ripple effects, not just in terms of strategy, but in terms of offering moral succor and an example of moral courage to people who are risking their necks in Tehran, Isfahan and elsewhere in Iran. The idea that we can do nothing, the idea that, you know, the this idea, everything we do is going to be a mistake is it's not only it's not only a false idea, but it's it's a pernicious idea because at its root is actually not so much a statement about our own failure, but a wish for the for the tyrants to win abroad, a belief that the United States should not be the last, best hope of Earth. And I think that is, in a profound sense, an un-American point of view.

Hal Boyd: Excellent.

Roya Hakakian: And can I add something because, you know, he gets me excited so I have to say something. Yes, yes. So I mean to to Brett's last point, uh, you know, historians and policy makers and politicians have been discussing, you know, how can the US lead in the world? You know, we are not the greatest economy or we are just about not to be the greatest economy. You know, so many other countries have caught up with us. So what's left for the US to by which to call itself a superpower? And I think what's left is moral leadership, because Russia is not going to do it. China is not going to do it. India certainly has its own problems. And I think- and by moral, I, you know, everybody is going to probably is thinking without telling me that, you know, the US has never done that. It's not about to do it. It's not you know, politics is not moral. But I think actually moral leadership is what is the most pragmatic thing to do at the moment, especially with respect to Iran. I have never met an educated American who knew the history of Iran and the Middle East, who didn't say to me, if we only hadn't overthrown the, you know, government of Prime Minister Mossadegh in 1953, the Iranians wouldn't hate us.

Roya Hakakian: We wouldn't have 1979. We wouldn't be where where we are. Right? That happened 70 plus years ago. Since then or or. No, actually before that we, we also, you know, bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Japanese have forgiven us. They have been our best allies or one of our best allies for the past several decades. But the one thing, the one immoral thing we did in Iran and I, I would argue that we didn't even do it. You know, we had some hand in it, but, you know, we wanted to take the credit. The one that one immoral thing that we did has been haunting us for longer than, you know, the nuclear bomb has been haunting the Japanese. So I would argue that doing the moral thing with respect to Iran completely changes the view, the perspective, of everyone in the Middle East about what the US is and what it can do, and it establishes a footprint for America that it so badly needs going forward from now.

Brett Stophens: Can I just make one more point to that? I remember in 2009, during the Green Revolution, as it was then called, the protests after the stolen election. Iranians were holding up signs in English. Uh. This was for our benefit, right? Yeah. There's a reason they were holding up signs in English. They were asking for help. And so our alliance with the real moderates of Iran is our alliance with its people. It's not all of its people, but it seems to be the overwhelming majority of its people, people who can actually muster the courage. And you have to ask yourself, think of the courage it takes to remove your hijab, to go out in the streets night after night, to risk getting beaten up, to have your house marked with paint because someone in the IRGC or in the Basij militia has noticed that you're involved in protest activity. Those are our people. And every Western government should say every single day we stand with them and we will find ways to stand with them, in part by undermining the 500,000 or so willful Iranians who are part of the regime, who aim to put their foot on the necks of the other 80 million. Right.

Tal Keinan: So I think we're at the time where we're going to open this up a little bit for discussion. But let me ask one more question. Um, we've talked about this in terms of how hopeful this could this could be. How this could result in a possible regime change. What is the best case scenario? I mean, could Iran get to a point if there's a regime change, could you see Iran in the next five years joining, say, the Abraham Accords, or is that ever possible in your mind? And then what is the worst case scenario? Because of course, we've already talked about, you know, some of these interventions which have not gone particularly well. And what do you think is actually what do you what do you actually think will be the outcome? And I'll direct that both of you.

Roya Hakakian: Okay.

Brett Stophens: So I go first.

Roya Hakakian: Yes.

Brett Stophens: You know, the best possible outcome is a gay pride parade in Tehran in 2025. And if that happens, all your other problems are solved. Abraham. It's all good, right? Um, look, what is the worst case scenario? I wrote about this in my book 12 years ago. Well, the worst, the worst case scenario is the regime wins. That is the worst. Uh, which is to say, the IRGC comes out. There are massacres in one city after another. Women are imprisoned and systematically raped in a way that has happened before in this, in this regime's history. And at the end of that process, within a year, the West comes begging and offers a nuclear deal which ensures that this regime has not only consolidated its power inside, but has essentially been given a green light to effectively acquire all the tools it needs to rapidly assemble a nuclear weapon, if not acquire a nuclear weapon itself. What's the second worst outcome? The second worst outcome is a kind of a Syria outcome in which this becomes I mean, people forget Iran has many ethnicities, uh, within it. It has the potential to be ethnically fractious between Kurds, Baluchis, Azeris, Arabs, not just, uh, not just Persians, and that a civil war that takes a half million or a million lives and creates even more a greater numbers of refugees. That could happen. Those are real things. Um, and you have to be thoughtless not to take them into account. You also have to be heartless to say that because bad things can happen, you shouldn't aim at optimal outcomes.

Hal Boyd: Excellent.

Roya Hakakian: Um, so I'll- whatever he said and I'll take it a step further, which is that Iran, Iranians need our support, but we need their victory just as much. And I'll tell you why. So yesterday, anybody who who had a New York Times at home saw that there was a huge two page ad that was a letter that Hillary Clinton, Oprah Winfrey, a whole bunch of leading women from around the world had signed inviting everybody to, um, it was a call to the UN to say that the UN should suspend Iran from the Women's Commission because Iran sits on the UN's Women's Commission. Uh, and my reaction was, when was the last time all of these women got together to issue a single statement? I don't know. There are historians in this room, you can remind me, but in my view, never. Right. So. And I'll talk about one other instance, which is, you know, the on on March 8th, 1979, when women in Iran took to the streets, there were French feminists marching alongside with them. Kate Millett, the famous American feminist, was there alongside the Iranian women marching, because at the time, the idea of feminism was that it's a global sisterhood, that if feminism was broken or the cause of women was broken in one country, it was broken everywhere else too, and we all had to come together for the cause, no matter where it took place.

Roya Hakakian: That idea has not been around for the last 40 plus years, and it has been the movement of women in Iran that has revived it. It's been the movement of women in Iran that has sparked so much excitement within the ranks of feminists. We also need Iranians to win because we need we need democracy to win in order for us to stay a healthy democracy here, the the, the more these thugs, the more these undemocratic, authoritarian systems win, the weaker we become. Now you can ask me, how can you draw a direct correlation? We can discuss that. But I think it's a the idea is that if if democracy keeps failing in other parts of the world, it, it will ultimately fail at home too. So I think we, you know, they need us to help them win, but we need them to succeed just as much in order to, you know, keep some of our own institutions and great ideas healthy. What Brett said about ethnic division in Iran, uh, is true, but I would have agreed with him far more seven weeks ago prior to this movement, than I would now. This movement has had a magical effect on bringing ethnicities that have never had a solidarity together in the last 20 plus years that the regime has had has made a concerted effort to divide ethnicities to, you know, pit them against each other.

Roya Hakakian: And in the past six weeks, the Kurds, uh, issue slogans in support of the Baluchis and the Baluchis, issue slogans in support of the Azeris and so on and so forth. So one of the reasons I feel like this is a revolution is the way in which it has galvanized and brought together the entire nation of all these disparate ethnicities that we thought would be fighting each other at any moment. Um, so I think these are all excellent signs, but they need support so that rather than keep experiencing failure, they can have some victories in order to gather momentum and move forward. And let's also remember that in the first seven, eight weeks that, uh, Russia invaded Ukraine, everybody that I know, with the exception of a few, was predicting that the Ukrainians would lose. And and with the proper help from, you know, the US and and the international community, they're winning. Um, it can happen in Iran too. And and who will come to power? I don't know, but, you know, we can't keep the movement of a nation forward just because we don't know what's going to come next.

Hal Boyd: Thank you, thank you.es here

Hal Boyd: Thank you, thank you. Now let's open the floor. We've got some questions already. Speak loudly. We have, uh, booms on boom mics that can pick you up if you speak loudly near the camera. So go ahead.

Brett Stophens: Speak softly, but carry a large boom.

Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Please introduce yourself.

Tal Keinan: My name is Tal Keinan. Roya, you ended with we don't know what will come next. Brett, you started with by framing leadership as the missing ingredient to a revolution. Can you collectively nominate 2 or 3 candidates for leader of that revolution now? Second part, assuming that that leadership needs to be cultivated in exile like it was in the last revolution, is there a role for U.S. policy here?

Brett Stophens: I don't think it's a question of who. I think it's a question of what? Um. Oh. I'm sorry. Should I repeat that?

Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Yes.

Brett Stophens: It's not a question. I don't think it's a question of who. I think it's a question of what? I mean, people can speculate whether it's, uh, some someone, you know, the Pahlavi family or someone we haven't heard of, uh, or a kind of an Iranian eminence living, uh, a Persian eminence living abroad. I don't think that's really for us to I mean, the United States. One of the mistakes the United States had in Iraq was to sort of say, oh, it's going to be Chalabi. Right. And so there was this kind of Chalabi buzz. And so it involved us in questions I think that were beyond our Ken and beyond our proper prerogatives. What we want is a government that Iranians agree is a legitimate and, and hopefully representative, uh, government. You know, I would also say this, you know, one of the problems with Iraq is that we try to impose a 21st century government on a 12th century society, not a great idea  in Iran, I would say right now you have a 12th century government on maybe not a 21st century society, but a 20th century society. Right? So let's at least bring the let's create a government that, whether it's in the 21st century, the 20th century roughly reflects-

Roya Hakakian: Its own people.

Brett Stophens: Its own people.

Roya Hakakian: Um, I have some- there are some characters who have been very effective.

Brett Stophens: How about this one, by the way?

Roya Hakakian: No, no, no, no, he's joking. Um, really joking. There are some characters who've been very effective in, in creating the sense of fearlessness that, that, you know, people have gained, which has been really important because, you know, there is amazing footage. I mean, I know that the streaming services on Netflix are very attractive, but so is the footage that's coming out of Iran on social media. Um, and, and you see that there are people empty handed, empty handed, and they walk right up to somebody with, with a gun and,  and full riot gear. It's incredible. It's stuff that I have never seen. So there have been figures who have been very influential in, in creating that sense of fearlessness. You know, one of them is Masih Alinejad. She, you know, she did a lot of campaigns to get women to dare to take off their headscarves. That has been very important. But I'm but I don't see those figures who can take it from here and move it forward. I think they've been important in, in creating, you know, what what we see now. But I think from this point forward we need a different or different sorts of figures. And and I was very pleasantly surprised by a recent statement that that the son of the former Shah gave saying that I only wish to be a transitional figure.

Roya Hakakian: I don't want to return and become a monarch. I don't even want to become a president or anything. But I wish to be a transitional figure and open it up, open for a referendum and and allow for an election for people to choose. I have a couple of favorites who, unfortunately, were plucked from their homes on the second or third day of the movement, the start of the movement, and are now languishing in prison. One of them is Hossein Ronaghi, who used to actually submit op eds to the Wall Street Journal. So the journal was publishing op eds by Ronaghi with his name for for about 2 or 3 years. And he is one of the first people that they picked up. So there are people there are, you know, some of them are in prison. And I think, you know, there the son of the former Shah, as a transitional figure is a wonderful thing. Um, so I wouldn't worry about leadership. I think there are enough characters there that once you know, this atmosphere of fear kind of breaks. And there is, you know, this movement has experiences a little bit more success. We will hear from them.

Toby Hecht: Please.

Max Gitter: Um, I is there a mic?

Roya Hakakian: I can give him this mic?

Brett Stophens: Why don't you take that mic?

Toby Hecht: Um, please introduce yourself.

Max Gitter: My name is Max Gitter. Um. I have a question for both of you. Uh, it seems to me that the absurdity of the American position has not been brought out in its fullest. Uh, Roya, you made the point that it would be very difficult for the United States to sit down with the Iranians while people are being killed on the streets. Well, that's a gross understatement because we are not sitting down with the Iranians. We are allowing the of all people in the world, the Russians, to sit down for us on behalf of the United States with the Iranians. Why isn't the absurdity, the utter absurdity of the American position not gaining more traction?

Roya Hakakian: Why?

Brett Stophens: Well, well, it's the point I made in the New York Times column back in March before, uh, before this revolution. Um, but, uh, maybe because Blinken is a journal reader. Uh. Look, I think there are two aspects. Um, one is the idea there was a kind of brain deadness in terms of the administration's position on Iran, which is that our entire policy is about getting a nuclear deal back. There wasn't any kind of.

Roya Hakakian: Yes.

Brett Stophens: Uh, plan B at, uh, at any point. Um, and so that's poor, poor planning by whoever's in charge of, of policy planning at, at the State Department. I don't even know who who, who.

Roya Hakakian: Malley.

Brett Stophens: Yeah, well, there you go, Bob Malley. Um, uh, the other aspect, and maybe I want to make this point sort of to the younger people here is that, um, American self-loathing has become a kind of bipartisan foreign policy impulse. And it comes to the question that you asked, I think very astutely, uh, earlier and that I get all the time, which is, you know, well, we were just the people who, uh, screw it up. Well, compared to who? I mean, compared to whom, are we screwing it up? We provided the Ukrainians with 18 of these Himars rocket systems, and they were able to turn the war around. Imagine if we provided another 18, for example, um, or UAVs. Um, we are at any given moment this, this country, for all of its manifest failures and all of our defects and all of the errors and sins of our past are doing more good around the world at any given moment than any other country on earth, period. You know, the one thing you never hear about George W Bush, say what you will about him, is he probably saved 25 million Africans from HIV AIDS. Don't even talk about that. I mean, any other country would be a century achievement, right? They would, you know, if, if if France had pulled that off, they'd be speaking about it for ages. But they don't do this.

Brett Stophens: And so we have to find our way back from the idea that everything we are doing is destined for failure. There are creative resources, even at the State Department, that can be deployed with leadership, imagination, um, and listening to people like Roya.

Roya Hakakian: So, so interestingly enough, I brought this up, some version of the point you just made, with Anthony Blinken because, you know, under George W Bush, uh, the State Department started an initiative by giving funding to the cause of cultivating democracy in Iran. And it started in 2004 and an organization that I helped co-found got the first grant, which was $1 million. And it was so much more than what we had ever wanted that we just didn't know what to do with $1 million. But anyway-.

Brett Stophens: Give it to me.

Roya Hakakian: But anyway, that was almost 20 years ago. And the funding came the- I'm no longer affiliated with it, but it keeps on going. Um, so I sat across from, from everybody at the State Department, and I said, you gave funding to the cause of promotion of democracy in Iran. Are you ready for good news? It worked. You know, people are on the streets. They want democracy. When you were giving this money out, did you have a second step for your plan because obviously, if you were giving the money and not thought in advance that it could actually succeed, then you would have a next step to follow through with at this moment. But they didn't because I think they always plan for failure. Um, and so I said, you know, there's good news. You didn't have to go into Iran. You thought for the longest time that it was a country that you were going to go to war with, it was going to be another Iraq and whatever. And it didn't turn into one of those things. You gave a few million dollars over the years to the cause of democracy promotion. It has worked. So, you know, let's make that investment pay by supporting them, by making sure that they succeed. And so that was our conversation, and I don't think they were ready for good news.

Hal Boyd: Yes. Go ahead and then we'll go.

Jody Hotchkiss: My name is Jody Hotchkiss. Um, could you talk a bit about the difference between 2009 and now? 2009 was crushed.

Roya Hakakian: Mhm.

Jody Hotchkiss: Um, you mentioned social media as being important. You mentioned um, like I think oil sanctions might have something to do with it, but why is there more hope today than there was then?

Roya Hakakian: So that's an excellent question, because I think even if the US had provided support in 2009, it wouldn't have been a successful movement. And the reason is that the people who were out on the streets were asking, where is my vote? They were in conversation with the government that they still believed in some legitimacy within the system that could deliver a just election to them. And it ultimately didn't. But nobody was calling the supreme leader a dictator. Nobody was, uh, obviously, calling the founder of the Islamic revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini, a dictator. But all of that and and all of that would get in the way of building a democracy. If you still think that within the the frame of a constitution that places a supreme leader above the law, you can have a democracy, then you really can't. You're not ready for democracy. This new generation understands that the Supreme leader is not supreme and he's a dictator and he's got to go. And thanks to social media, they also recognize that the guy, the supreme leader whom they thought was the pope is really Tony Soprano. Because it's been through the power of social media that they have they all the all the material, all the documents, all the video, all the photographs of so many of these leaders going to Europe and, you know, having lovers of on their arm without, by the way, unveiled in, you know, in Thailand and other parts of the world. The people, especially the conservatives, recognize that they don't want to be represented by this class of people. And I think if this if social media has had a major effect, it's been to to provide this evidence of the regime's corruption.

Brett Stophens: You know, there's there's another aspect to that, which is that, you know, it's not an accident that the Soviet Union collapsed a little more than 40 years after the end of World War II. And that's because the victory in the Second World War was the sustaining myth and that provided a kind of foundational legitimacy for Soviet power in post-war Europe. So all of the leaders, not just Stalin and Malenkov, but then obviously Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko. For them, their idea of Soviet power was linked to this astounding moment in history when the Red banner flew over the Reichstag in May of 1945. Right. Um, Gorbachev, no accident comrade, was the first leader for whom World War II was not the formative memory. Here you have a kind of an aging out of the regime, because for a diminishing number of Iranian leaders, was the revolution of 1979 their formative political experience? And for many of them, the formative political experiences were the brutality and corruption and self-dealing that typified the regime after 1979. So it's been de-linked from that moment, which is why dictatorships tend to suddenly sort of collapse at certain moments, usually when the founding generation, or at least the children of the founding generation, have to hand the baton just because they're dying out to another generation. And that's the difference between 2009 and 2022. These 13 years are significant. The fact that the Supreme Leader is now gravely ill is another reason why there is more hope now than there was in '09.

Hal Boyd: Okay, we've got time for one more.

Jody Hotchkiss: I just want to finish the. Isn't it a bit also of a perfect storm, meaning the economy being as dire as it is being part of this? Or no?

Roya Hakakian: Um, we have had economic uprisings and protests, but as far as I followed, nothing about the economy has reflected itself within the slogans and the protests. It's all death to the dictator. And by the way, things much worse than death to the dictator that I can't repeat because there is so much obscenity at the moment that there, you know, I think they're they're just trying to break the sanctity of the office of the Supreme Leader by uttering these obscenities. But yes, I mean, the there is nothing other than death to the dictator, woman, life, liberty and other slogans that really have been uniting the entire country. Obviously, obviously, the economic reasons are there, but it isn't what the protesters are actually articulating. Whereas we have had economic protests, the water shortages and, you know, subsidies got slashed and people came to the streets to protest, but not this time. And that's why I think this is, in every way, this is reflecting a true democratic shift in a subterranean way within the Iranian population that I have never seen.

Brett Stophens: Yeah. I mean, one of the wisest statements attributed to Khomeini was we didn't have a revolution to cut the price of watermelons. Um, which is a really astute comment. Revolutions don't happen because people are poor. Actually, typically they rarely happen. Revolutions happen on account of a moment of moral indignation that crystallizes why people might be willing to risk their lives to overthrow a regime that humiliates them.

Roya Hakakian: Right. Exactly, yes.

Hal Boyd: Let's go with you for the last question.

Valerie Pavilonis: Sounds good. Hi, I'm Valerie Pavilonis. Um, so I heard earlier, Roya said that the US government tends to be intellectually delayed when it comes to Iran and the region. And I was wondering, so we'll talk mostly about the government, but I was curious to know, um, is there anything that the Western media gets wrong about, like these protests in particular?

Roya Hakakian: You're tricky because you know what I think about this? Okay, well, yeah, they get everything wrong. I mean, with the exception of Brett, but the important point to be made is this. And I hate to be an alarmist, I never am. I'm the biggest optimist there is. I mean, I go to Washington to meet with people believing that they're going to do everything that I'm asking them. Um, and so but here's the alarmist, uh, idea that the reason we as Americans keep repeating certain ideas about what the Iranian regime is made of and all that. It, you know, like they're divided between hardliners and reformists and, you know, the, uh, if we only lift the sanctions, the nation will be happy and there will be no problems, that it's only the American sanctions that has made people brought people to the streets, not the regime. Uh, these are narratives that Tehran has successfully peddled within the American public sphere. And they made their way to the American media and then, you know, through CNN and everyone else, to the rest of us. So we are at a disadvantage because we as Americans have 1001 other things that we are thinking about.

Roya Hakakian: We are thinking about, you know, the environment, we're thinking about education, we're thinking about, you know, culture. We're thinking about so many things. The Iranian regime has only thought about one thing from from day one, survival. And so we are at a disadvantage because they have been planning for survival in ways that we could never think of. And therefore they have created a footprint that, you know, most people are- nearly no one that I know is aware of. For instance, here's something- I know we've run out of time, but this is this is important. Um, here's something incredibly absurd that some of you are too young to remember. But the students who took over the American embassy in Tehran in 1979 had a spokesperson. It was a woman named Mary. And Mary later on, Mary, who was a staunch anti-American, you know, but spoke excellent English because she had gone to school in Pennsylvania, was the face of anti-Americanism. Um, and then she became a vice president. She rose to power. She still is in power in Iran. Guess where her son lives.

Brett Stophens: Maryland.

Roya Hakakian: Beverly Hills. And she has a- he has a mansion. So I don't have a problem with people who turn away from the regime coming and living among us. You know, it's not his fault that his mother was, you know, crawled, you know, scaled the walls of the American embassy. But it's the fact that they're not repentant and they're here. It's the fact that you know, nothing about their fundamental belief about the United States has changed and that they are here. And so what I'm trying to say is that I think part of what I you know, Brett said, Roya can be a leader. I go to every place that I go, making sure that everyone hears me say first that I'm here as an American, as a concerned American, that I'm speaking to you because I am worried about what will happen if this regime stays in power because they have created a footprint in America. They are here. They have been controlling, uh, not controlling, but they have been peddling their own narrative within our media. And we have bought them wholesale. And I think we should do everything in our power to help the demonstrators, in part because this footprint ought not to exist because it's dangerous.

Brett Stophens: Just very briefly, uh, if I can speak for parts of the American media. Americans have a problem in that we mirror image societies that are very unlike our own. So we assume that if we care about economic issues, that everywhere in the world people must care about economic issues, and people must aspire to ever higher levels of prosperity or greater GDP growth. One of the advantages of I'm saying this quite happily, that of going to the University of Chicago as opposed to Yale. One advantage is an actual education. But had to get there.

Audience: Here here.

Brett Stophens: But the second advantage is at least a serious background in political philosophy, which allows you to understand that there are possibilities for the way in which people conceive of the good, which are radically unlike our own. And I actually think that, uh, studying Plato, Aristotle, the Greeks, opens your horizons to the possibility of a regime like Iran that Iran's that, by its own conception, is dedicated to a set of principles and a concept of virtue that is so different from ours. And so we're constantly projecting onto Iranian leaders and the Iranian people sets of desires, which are not necessarily similar to ours. The other problem that the media has is that we look for evil in almost every corner, except where it stares us in the face. And so it has been with this Iranian regime. All of a sudden, all these reports like, oh, this regime is terrible, you know, no kidding. Right. Uh, you know, I had a there was a person in Iran in 2009 who was busy writing these articles like, oh, Iran is this wonderful modernizing place. And then, of course, the election was stolen and Neda was killed in the streets. And he was like, oh, how could this be happening?

Roya Hakakian: I know who that is, but we'll leave it out.

Brett Stophens: Modernizing a country. Same with Putin. I'm very proud that my first anti-Putin editorial was December 30th, 1999. I have an unbroken record of saying that this guy was terrible, but we refuse to look at it. We refuse to look at it because maybe we thought it would be clever to look elsewhere. Actually, the clever thing is to to look at these regimes and understand what they are and to judge them accordingly and say so in clarion, ringing tones.

Roya Hakakian: But the Iranian anti-imperialism also hasn't helped. All the liberal media who want to embrace the anti-imperialism of, you know, the third world countries so.

Gabriel Diamond: Please join me in welcoming Jodi Rudoren.

Jodi Rudoren: Well, I got to shorten up that bio.

Mrs. Toby Hecht: It's fantastic. But why? So, um, I'm just going to, you know, ask you a few questions just to get us really comfortable because I think, I think that it's really amazing that we have this opportunity to have Jodi here. And I know that there are aspiring journalists in the room or journalists already. We got several here from the YDN, and so I figured we'd just get comfortable and then we'd open up to Q&A. Maybe, um, we'll see how we go.

Jodi Rudoren: Great.

Mrs. Toby Hecht: Sound good?

Jodi Rudoren: Sounds good.

Mrs. Toby Hecht: So, um. Your your career is expansive. It's every journalist's dream, probably every writer's dream. I mean, can you tell us a little bit how you got started? I mean, being managing editor of the YDN to where you are today? I mean, that's a huge spread and amazing. Like, I had a million questions. I was I don't even didn't even know where to start. So we're just going to we're going to go and see how it goes. But I think that that would be great for sure.

Jodi Rudoren: I was going to when we were talking about correspondence, I was going to say, so my father died a year ago, and we've just moved my mom into like an independent living community. And so we've been cleaning out their house, and it's been amazing to find correspondence from our past and from our ancestors past. And one of the things I found was my college recommendation by my high school journalism teacher. Um. Who thought I was really, really awesome.

Mrs. Toby Hecht: Wow, you never saw the letter? You didn't.

Jodi Rudoren: No I did see it. No. Yeah, I had it in my house, but I hadn't seen it in 30 years.

Mrs. Toby Hecht: Okay.

Jodi Rudoren: Um, anyway, so I started doing journalism. The point is, when I was 13 years old, um, I'm the youngest of three sisters. My second sister had taken the journalism class when she was a junior, so it was the best class at the high school. You could take it any time you want. So I took it as a freshman, I was hooked, I was editor of my high school newspaper, and I really loved it, but I, I did not think that was what I wanted to do with my life, in fact, or even in college. Um, I thought I wanted to be a lawyer and a senator. That was my very like, it's very Yale, right? To be like, yeah, I want to be a senator. Um, although it's funny, my roommate from Yale just was confirmed as a federal judge, so, you know, it happens. Um, but it was funny. I remember very clearly my interview, actually, for Columbia. I said I wanted to be a lawyer and a senator, and the person was like, you know, maybe you should go into journalism. Like, we have a lot of lawyers. We really need good journalists. And I was like, no, no, no. And then I remember very clearly when I was a freshman here, I went to the first meeting of the Yale Daily News.

Jodi Rudoren: And those of you who worked at the Yale Daily News. So, you know, it was up in the boardroom which looked even stuffier then. It now has a lot of like lighter pictures, but it was very like imposing this big wooden table anyway. And there are like 60 people there. And the editor, Chris Sheridan, we all went around the room and of course, everybody had been editor in chief of their high school newspaper. I was like, not very impressive. And also Chris, who I adored, kept saying how you didn't need any experience at all. No experience necessary. And I'm like, I have all this experience. So I was not excited by this moment of at the Yale Daily News. I did I took a story as I left this. Actually, I remember very clearly the story was, um, it was a feature story about older students, like people who were grown ups. And the lead that I wrote was about a guy who had fought in World War II, who was taking a class about World War II. Um, anyway, I got really hooked. I came back those those who were at the Elderly News will understand this and those who aren't, I'm sorry, but, um, I ended up turning the story in, like, in October, in the week before elections. And so it was this thing where all the people who were running to be editor in chief were, like, hanging around extra, like nobody.

Jodi Rudoren: Everybody wanted to impress their friends and colleagues about how committed they were. So there were all these really cool, funny, funny, sarcastic. And as it happened, very good looking men who all were running for editor in chief and they were just all hanging around, copy edit room. And, um, I was like, I like this place. This seems really cool. Um, but I still didn't, um, know I wanted to do this. I also got really involved in the Yale Political Union. Um, yeah. Um, the Liberal Party, um, although super random, I think it was like, just because of who my friends were, and I just, I had this kind of I had a couple of different sort of transformational moments. Um, one was I was walking across old campus and I lived in Wright Hall and somebody I was my friend of mine asked me some question about Wright Hall, and I was like, I don't know, but I can find out. And I just, um, remembered like that, like feeling so turned on by that idea of being able to find shit out and knowing how to find stuff out, knowing how to ask the right person the right question, and and the idea that I now have I mean, I've basically now spent the last 30 years being paid to find out answers to questions, which is pretty incredible.

Jodi Rudoren: Um, so that was a light going on. And then also, I had all these friends who were really active both in the political union and in also just as activists and doing various causes. And I was sort of covering a protest and my friends were like speaking at the protest. And I just sort of increasingly understood that where I was most comfortable standing in the world was observing and listening and not talking about my own, um, how, you know right I was about everything. Um, and I mentioned this just because my philosophy about journalism is people sometimes ask, like, when did you decide you wanted to be a journalist or, you know, and it's like, I, it's not a thing I do. It's a thing I am. It's very much about where you stand in the world, observer and not actor person, a person who finds stuff out. And I think as journalism itself has been so transformed by technology, um, it's become even more important to remember that, that that the core of it is actually still the same. It's like about seeking truth. It's about storytelling. It's about holding power to account. It's about bearing witness. And it doesn't matter if you do that on TikTok or in a, you know, 800 word, uh, column.

Mrs. Toby Hecht: What would you say? I mean, you you went from from Yale straight to the L.A. times, is that right?

Jodi Rudoren: Yeah. I had an internship at the LA Times, and then they hired me.

Mrs. Toby Hecht: And then how long were you there? You were there for?

Jodi Rudoren: I was there for, um. I was five years in LA. I went I went literally like a week after I graduated here. I drove cross country in a 1981 Buick Skylark, um, and started this internship. And then I, and I thought I was going for the summer, and then I got hired, and I was weird because I was like, suddenly in Los Angeles, where I very much do not belong. Um, nice place, but not they don't really get my jokes. Um, anyway, um, sorry if you're from Los Angeles.

Jodi Rudoren: I actually just had a very nice vacation there. Um, but, um, so I spent I spent two years in Orange County, which is the suburbs of the south. It was at the time there was a 200 person newsroom in Orange County, and there was a newspaper war there with the Orange County Register. It was a different time. Sad. LA Times just cut 20% of its newsroom yesterday. Yeah. Um, anyway, and then I went and covered City Hall, um, in Los Angeles after I covered actually, my big break was I covered this, the largest municipal bankruptcy in history happened in Orange County in 1994. And it was like really a big break for me. Um, and then I went and covered City Hall, and then I went to the Washington bureau of the LA Times. I thought, well, I'm going to stay here. It's going to have to be not in LA. Right. Um, and then I ended up in The New York Times. I see I was only at the LA times for one more year. So six years altogether and then 21 at the New York Times.

Mrs. Toby Hecht: All right. So the LA Times, then The New York Times, and which you were for years in Jerusalem. Right. And some time in Chicago.

Jodi Rudoren: Yeah.

Mrs. Toby Hecht: Covering elections, um, starting incredible things. You won, I guess, newyorktimes.com the first Emmy for One in 8 Million, which is incredible.

Jodi Rudoren: My kids were just giving me crap about my Emmy is not very polished or something like I let it tarnish.

Mrs. Toby Hecht: Oh, gosh. It's it's it's like a martini.

Jodi Rudoren: I have an Emmy. Shut up.

Mrs. Toby Hecht: Exactly. For those of you who haven't seen One in 8 Million, it's about the kind of everyday life of, like, the New York region, I guess 8 million.

Jodi Rudoren: It was. It was these- it was three minutes. It was really. It was really. It's funny because it's so it was so innovative and-.

Mrs. Toby Hecht: For the time.

Jodi Rudoren: So not anymore. It was the first digital first project of the New York Times had done like it was. We had to downstream it into print. We and it was, um, this thing, these things called audio slideshows. Does anybody remember the audio slideshow? Not really. Right. It had a moment and then it was gone. But this was like, you know, now you have like the cascading article video, whatever. This was just so they were um, they were three minute audio monologues, highly edited and gorgeous, gorgeous black and white photos and by this Pulitzer Prize winning photographer, um. And they were presented in what again, at the time in 2009 was like this very like ambitious and creative. Um, um. Interactive. It was like this. The photos cast. We did it. We did 50. We did it for a year. So it was over 50. There were 50 of them, or 55 of them, I think. And um, they would like cascade by and then stop on the one. And anyway, they were and the point was that they were about regular people. So we had we had three rules. What was very interesting about this project was there were these new people coming to the Times who had different backgrounds and different skills, and there were these two young women who had these background in audio and but they and they but they didn't really know how to like, do the Times, you know.

Jodi Rudoren: So I was the sort of traditionalist who was- I was the executive producer. They knew I didn't know anything about audio. I did, I did, I did one myself to be part of it, but I was just the one who was supposed to make sure that, like, the stories sort of held up to Time standards. But anyway, we had three criteria for picking the people. Um, they had to live in the five boroughs of New York. Um, I'm going to forget the third one. Oh, they had to be a good talker. You had to sound good on audio. Doesn't matter if you have a good story, if you can't talk. Um, and they had to have never had their name appear in The New York Times before or really in any paper. So. And that was, like surprisingly hard. But the idea was to get out of the, um, of that familiar, the people who we always cover. And so they were really everyday people. And the idea was obviously everybody has a story. Um, yeah. I also invented I, some people I don't know if you guys are like Times obsessives, but people are always very excited when I say that I invented the Sunday Routine, the column in the in the metropolitan section of what people do on Sundays. Anyway.

Mrs. Toby Hecht: So that was great. I was reading a story of a man, Mr. Cotton, who was a grandfather in the Bronx. This is, I mean, if you had a chance to check out this, this project, you should.

Jodi Rudoren: I'm impressed that you were able to, because for a while it was not online anymore, I don't know.

Mrs. Toby Hecht: So I was able to pick up a few, but.

Jodi Rudoren: Oh okay.

Mrs. Toby Hecht: One of them actually, that I did, I actually didn't see it, I read it, I read his story, and I loved it, and it kind of reminded me a little bit or touched on your article that you wrote about your great grandfather, um, while you were cleaning your your parents home. Sorry. In Newton. Um, uh, but this Mr. Cotton who has, or he's watching- he watches his four grandchildren. Actually, I don't know what year when this was. I don't know if you're familiar with this. If you remember,

Jodi Rudoren: I don't remember.

Mrs. Toby Hecht: Just fabulous. He was describing about how he doesn't, um watching his grandchildren, he doesn't teach them anything. He just wants to them perhaps to um, I'm paraphrasing here, obviously, um, you know, if they glean kind of any insight just from being around him and from the things he shows him, and, you know, one day they'll remember that their grandfather showed them this and it kind of illuminates or gives them insight, you know, that to him was how he wanted to present himself as like, kind of like a a role model to them. And I love that because, you know, that's how I felt about my grandparents. And I still feel like, you know, I they showed us how to live versus telling us how to live. Um,

Jodi Rudoren: I'm so moved by how many of the people at this table are in some kind of correspondence with a person much older than them?

Mrs. Toby Hecht: Yes, I love that.

Jodi Rudoren: And like, it's really interesting to think about, um, and I think it's really hard to do so.

Mrs. Toby Hecht: Also, not a lot of people are interested necessarily in communicating with people with, you know, I guess, you know, who who have, I guess, longer perspectives of life. You know, it's people are very much today about living in the present. And what I loved about your piece, um, so Jodi wrote a piece in the, in the Forward recently about cleaning your family's.

Jodi Rudoren: Yeah.

Mrs. Toby Hecht: And kind of like the emotion about being able to go through things which, you know, today, you know, in during a war and in the aftermath of destruction, people not having anything to homes to go home to. And I love that I totally understood that. And I think at the same time, it's so important to be able to connect to your to have that nostalgia. It's a it's a real gift. And I loved what you said about finding your grandfather, your great grandfather's wealth. And I love the fact also that your named after your great grandfather, right? Yeah. Yitzchok Yahoshua.

Jodi Rudoren: Yeah.

Mrs. Toby Hecht: Um, and Zaydy Shea, by the way, Shmully has a great grandfather who was a Zaydi Shia as well, a third generation. He was Shmully's sixth generation American. But. And I loved his his description. I just loved the way you wrote it. It was so poignant and so important. And, uh, you know, you describe that, you know, he he taught your father how to be a Jew, and thereby you. And I just wanted to know if you could talk a little bit about what that—  that was really a strong statement. I want to.

Jodi Rudoren: Sure.

Jodi Rudoren: I mean, so there were a couple of things about the column. First of all, so his will, this is a person who is very big in my father's life, um, and who, you know, I never knew and didn't know that much about, honestly. And I'd never seen this will, although, um, someone who wrote to me, they had they, they had like 20 years ago had the same experience of finding this will. They're they're a cousin. His brother is their grandfather and their, I guess, father had said, like, look at this. So it was this was one page typed will, and it's it's just super simple. It's like, um, you know, forgive me and don't carry me into the synagogue. It's just like very specific instructions, which my father also had very specific instructions about his funeral. Um, so that was interesting. And then it's like it literally said like it's like, here's an A gate. He gave $25 to each of these few places, five places, the synagogue, the Hebrew school, the cemetery. And he died in 66. So like, it's only like $250 now. Like it's not like he just didn't have any. You know, we I'm not from a family of of means, but there was something just incredible about this simplicity. So that was one thing that was very moving about it. And it's just, um, so this cousin has this long lost cousin has reached out to me.

Jodi Rudoren: He's got, like, our whole family tree on some website called Jenny Something, and he's going to now do a zoom with a bunch of cousins to show us all how to. And, like, I don't know, today, he seems to. Yesterday he sent us something about how we might be related to Elvis Presley. But I. It's possible he's like Looney Tunes, this guy, but we'll find out. Um, and, um. But yeah, the other thing was it's just interesting. It's also interesting, again, thinking about the correspondence and that some of it is from WhatsApp. And my son was saying the other day that, like, he's a photographer and his hard drive is screwed up, and I'm like, "Why do you even need a hard drive? How about the cloud?" But it's just interesting. Like this paper, like we have so much paper and the going through and the culling and you know, we're lucky I live my parents had this big basement. They didn't live in a big house, but they had this very, um, a lot of storage. And I actually do live in kind of a big house, so we have plenty of room to keep stuff. So then you keep these things, but, like, who wants them? I mean, like, I have, like, every note I passed that someone passed to me, like, in high school, which my parents had somehow kept. And now they're in my house and I do not want them at all.

Jodi Rudoren: But so we had an interesting time going through stuff and actually really picking things out very carefully. And then, you know, you come home and you want to show them to your kids and they're totally uninterested. I mean, they're kind of or they have a I don't know, it's just interesting to think about what we save. The longer you save something, the more the harder it is to throw it out. But which things you say? But but it was funny because a lot of the things that I found in my, first in my father's things, and then in this longer family archive last, right after he died, my mom gave us each this envelope of stuff that was in his desk that he had saved for us. And my envelope had a bunch of things that I would have expected, stuff from my wedding, stuff that I clips of mine. But it also had these two emails he had printed out, um, from when I was in Israel. And, um, there was this. And so one of them was about I had decided after the 2014 war in Gaza, which was a very, very intense I mean, it seems silly now to say, but it was intense at the time. Um, anyway, I decided that we really needed a vacation and we went to, uh, Crete, I think, for over Sukkot.

Jodi Rudoren: And my dad was very disappointed that we were going to, like, blow off Sukkot. And he told me it like on like every Yom Kippur when we were, like, apologizing to each other or something. And I was really mad. I was like, this is not good parenting like you. I understand, like, it's fine to be just me, but like, it's too late. Like you're telling me it too late for me to make a change. Like, either tell me earlier or tell me after it's over that you were disappointed, but, like, you're not. This wasn't helpful. I mean, that was one. And I wrote him this very hard, harsh email that was more articulate than what I just said. And it was. And he had printed it out and saved it for, you know, all these years. And the other one was even more interesting. Um, he, uh. There was really one. My my father was a leader in this Orthodox synagogue. Um, got a lot of crap about my coverage of the Israeli Palestinian conflict from people in his universe. This one guy I remember, actually, he didn't say it to my parents, said it to one of their good friends. He said, what happened to her? She was raised in this community. Like what happened to her? Anyway, my dad was- did not, um, give me much feedback on my coverage, but this one time he did. It was, um, it's a really rambling answer, but I think it's going to get to things that you might be interested in.

Jodi Rudoren: Um, it was, uh, I was covering something about a conflict on the Temple Mount, um, where there had been one of these very, very intense clashes. And actually Jordan had withdrawn its ambassador. It was really a crisis again, like, things have gotten so much worse that but it was unprecedented at the time. And, um, my dad was one of several people who had said to me that the articles we wrote about it, he was like, there was you didn't have enough context because it didn't say so. For those who don't know, the Temple Mount is also the Al-Aqsa mosque. Um, and it's controlled by Jordan. It has been since 67. Israel basically captured this area as part of the old city in 67, but immediately handed it over to Jordan to control, um for concern about this, you know, this holy, holiest place, third holiest place in Islam, holiest place in Judaism. This is going to be really problematic place. Um, and Jews are not allowed to pray there. Um, and so my dad and some other, like, pro-Israel types criticized me at the time for not including in these articles that, um, that that before 1967, Jordan had not allowed Jews to go to the Western Wall.

Jodi Rudoren: Jordan had controlled the whole old city, and Jews were not allowed access to the Western Wall, because now this was about access to the Temple Mount. At the same time, I was getting some criticism from the left for not mentioning in my article that people who lived in Gaza at the time were not allowed to go to the Temple Mount, because they aren't allowed to. They it was difficult to get a permit to leave Gaza at all. Um, and both of these were under the rubric of you don't have enough context in your article. Both of these things also seem to me to be not at all like essential to an article about, like, Jordan withdrawing its ambassador over this clash. Um, and this question of how much context to put in any individual article in the New York Times about these early Palestinian conflict is a perennial question. So I'd really gotten into it with my dad. I'd written him this very harsh email back, and again, he printed this out and saved it. And I thought it was quite a thing that he had saved these emails where I was like, you know, being kind of mean to him, um, but also being kind of forceful. So I don't know.

Mrs. Toby Hecht: That's really interesting. And he left them to you.

Jodi Rudoren: They were just in his. No, they were he had just kept them.

Mrs. Toby Hecht: He kept them. He printed them and kept them.

Jodi Rudoren: He printed them. They were in his Jodi file of whatever. I don't know why he printed that kept them. Maybe he read them over and over to himself about.

Mrs. Toby Hecht: He's trying to figure it out.

Jodi Rudoren: Yeah, maybe, I don't know.

Mrs. Toby Hecht: Um, speaking of personal and stories and anecdotes, we spoke on the phone and you mentioned that you like to be- you are personal. You share a lot of personal things in your articles. I don't know if you always have something new, but that's sometimes you get pushback because of it. And I'm wondering, as somebody in the profession of writing and. Um, how do you balance? Is there a balance between what's this? How do we balance professional professionalism and personal within writing and journalism and is do we have to? I mean, today, you know, it's interesting because I meet young people who, when they're in their job and they're in their office, they have a whole different persona than they are when they're not. And their voice changes, their mannerism changes. They're they're different people. I literally can get on the phone with somebody and her voice is different. And once she secludes herself in her office by herself, her whole body and her mannerism on the on the phone changes and I'm wondering, um. You like to blur the lines a little, but there you're getting some pushback. I personally love it. I think it's really great that you can be your whole self all the time. Have you always been that? Was that something new?

Jodi Rudoren: That's a great question. I mean, I do really believe in the idea of bringing your whole self to work, and I am really I'm really unpretentious and believe in sort of transparency, part of a kind of radical honesty philosophy that is very rooted in journalism, I think. Um, and my, my husband says that I have no orange cones in my head, like the normal things that stop people from saying things that they shouldn't say I don't have. Um, but so it's interesting. I mean, you know, I had a pretty traditional career in terms of reporting. And, you know, in the 90s when I worked at these major newspapers, you know, we didn't write in the first person. And we, um, there was this, like objectivity or whatever. I did always have a little bit of I did always write, um, kind of on the side, like, not my actual job, but I would occasionally write these different personal essays. I wrote about my grandmother, my great grandfather's daughter - excuse me - who, um, she was getting married for the fourth time, and I wrote about her. I wrote about I wrote about her weddings and about how, like, I was afraid. And I was 29, that she had, like, or younger than 29, I guess. But she had used up all of her weddings and started in on mine or whatever. Um, and the headline was when Harry met Goldie and it, um, it put all of her wedding pictures.

Jodi Rudoren: And that also led me to this really interesting correspondence. Somebody who, someone in LA who saw this photo was like, we must be related because your grandmother's wedding photo was in my house, like, who are you? And this was like before all those genealogy websites started. Um, I also wrote um. Uh, I at some point did I, I, I did the Atkins diet in like, I don't know when and I wrote this essay about like how the lead of it was about like all the eggs that I'd eaten. And anyway, I wrote this essay and it was very funny because it was very like out there, I was talking about losing weight and blah, blah, blah. And my boss and real mentor at the time was Ethan Bronner. And I, as soon as the essay ran, I got this call from like, I don't remember, I think it was NBC news. They, like, wanted me to be on the nightly news to talk about my essay. And Ethan, I think very smartly, was, I was like 30 years old, and I think he very smartly was like, I don't think you really want to be on the national news talking about losing weight, like you're a very serious journalist. Like, why don't you wait to get on the national news about, like what your actual work and that was not a bad piece of advice. But when I started writing this column for the Forward, a couple interesting things happened.

Jodi Rudoren: I mean, when I came to the Forward, people wanted me to write like editorials, and I'd never really written opinion before. I'd done a decent amount of these first persons, and we had started to bring the first person into reported pieces and serious pieces. But I didn't write opinion. I was a news reporter and editor and, um, and I didn't know what to do. People were like, you have to write these opinion pieces. People need to know what the editor of the Forward says about this and such, and I didn't have it in me to write like, here's what you should think about X political thing about intermarriage. My predecessor had written like, she's really opposed to intermarriage, and she was like constantly writing editorials about why intermarriage was bad. And I was like, I just don't think that way. I don't really want to tell people what to do. So I was trying to figure out what what does my value add, what could I what could I do in this column and what I- Ethan, actually, I forgot this. Um, Ethan said to me about a year into writing the column- he said, "you've perfected the genre of the news and me" which, of course, was not a genre or is not a genre, but but that's what I basically do, is I try to connect, like whatever's happening or whatever I decide to write about with.

Jodi Rudoren: Like my experience as a journalist like this profile I did last week about the Gaza woman, like her sister, is a stringer I worked with in Gaza. So I know her. And I wrote a column earlier in the war about Al-Shifa hospital when when the IDF took the hospital, because I've been to Al-Shifa a lot, so it connected to my own experience there. And sometimes that's about my kids. I also think that, um. I also think that a lot of the world's problems are best understood at the kitchen table. You know, I think that when you talk, I'm one of the I might write a book in this franchise. But my- during the 2021 conflict in Gaza, my daughter said to me, she's like you. She said you have to do a column answering people's questions, kids questions about Gaza, because all of my friends have all these questions and like, they don't have anyone to answer them. Like you're answering to me at our at our breakfast table, so I did. She went out and collected a bunch of her friends questions, and I did a column like that. And I've now done, I think, three kids questions about Israel and Gaza. Um, and it's super interesting. But anyway, I just think that like, um, I think people I don't know this like a false detachment between what's happening in the world and what's happening in your, in your life and your experience.

Jodi Rudoren: And I think connecting it makes it more relatable, makes it more memorable. Um, I also wrote, I mean, you know, people thought I wrote, um, I think in the fall of 2021, I wrote a story about, um, my fertility journey. I have twins, as I said, um, I always used to tell the joke, I've been pregnant twice. I've had two abortions. How many kids do I have? Um, because I had a traumatic pregnancy that, um, uh, I was advised to terminate. And then, um, after I did, I then did IVF and was pregnant with triplets. And the numbers on triplets are very bad for the babies and for the mom. And so I was encouraged to do a procedure called selective reduction, which is also an abortion. Anyway. So I wrote this piece about that. I thought it was important to write a piece, you know. Nobody talks about those abortions. Really. Um, and, uh, you know, 1 in 4 women have had an abortion in America, and many of them are really, you know, kind of routine and very, um, normal people. I mean, not not like some tragic circumstance. And so, anyway, I wrote this long piece that everyone thought was super brave and but it was just it was also very matter of fact. I think, um, I think the headline was something like My Abortion Story because it's true and real and people shouldn't be afraid to talk about it. Right.

Mrs. Toby Hecht: Was it hard for you?

Jodi Rudoren: You know, it was I think I was it hard to write it? I mean, it, you know, I write my columns really on. I almost never write a word of them before Friday mornings. I do it in this very compact. And that week I did do it earlier. I wanted to make sure it got edited. Um, I think one of the things that was hard about that my kids was, you know, we've always been pretty honest with my kids. They were old enough to now hear the whole story. But knowing that this was going to be written like and that this would be the record they would refer to back about it, I think I was worried about that a little bit. Um. I don't know. I thought it was important, but it was definitely new for me to do that. Um, and again, it's important for me, it wasn't a story about, like, abortion should be legal or Roe v Wade is great. It was just a story about here's what's true. Yeah.

Mrs. Toby Hecht: That's a nuanced very.

Jodi Rudoren: Um, I hope so.

Mrs. Toby Hecht: Yeah. Um. So I guess, um, before we open it up a little bit to questions, I wanted to just, um, dive into- I was going to ask you about your your highs and lows in the, in the industry, but. And get to that too, um, but you know, being that we are, you know, October 7th, we spoke, you know, the other day when we were talking and you said, that's essentially a lot of what, you know, you're doing, what you're reporting on and you're writing for, and your editor in chief of a of a Jewish journal now, um, is that is is this a lot different covering this for many reasons. Um, but since, you know, leaving the Times and now. You know, you know, being the voice of a Jewish paper and to the Jewish world, but also as a Jewish paper to the world in a very critical time and something that even our generation, our parents generation, we have been witnessed. Um. And how I mean, how has that been for you personally? How do you navigate that for yourself as somebody in the industry, but also as somebody who's covered beforehand for different type of paper? How is it different now? And um, as editor in chief, is there a certain, um, not control, but is there a certain narrative that you'd like to kind of present? Um, being that the response to October 7th has been nothing we could have ever dreamed as far as, um, I mean, we're we're on campus here.

Mrs. Toby Hecht: Yale's been interesting. We've had other campuses that, you know, um. We don't I don't have to elaborate on that. But, you know, we are dealing with things that that we have never had to deal with, not in our generation. And and the reality is, is that I'm not sure I don't know if any of us know exactly how to navigate, um, the rising anti-Semitism and anti-Israel sentiment that we're seeing in ways that we never thought, in ages that we've never seen. Um, just to give you, you know, to speak with. For me, I think the most concerning, um, and I don't know if you're hearing about this, you know, as you think about students in medicine, you know, in the medical school. Um, and you think about these are future. These are future doctors and nurses who have unbelievable responses to women who were, you know, such violence against women who five minutes ago, literally, we were marching in the street for to end violence against women. And something about the story about women and children, and it's just not something I don't think anyone has encountered in this degree of, of the inability to really call it for these many organizations and institutions who who have been standing up for women and have suddenly gone silent. And how are you navigating this, Jodi? I really I really want to know.

Jodi Rudoren: I mean, it's funny because you know, it was a pretty intense fall and a lot of people would be like, you know, how are you holding up? And I was very aware that as as challenging and intense, um, as my current job is, it was a lot, um, simpler than my prior job and my, than Patrick Kingsley's job as the Jerusalem bureau chief of the New York Times. It is a very, very I mean, it's just, first of all, just an enormous amount of work. And the scrutiny is relentless and mostly not in good faith. And so it is a really difficult- that is an even more difficult job. But it's been- I want to talk first about the Forward, and then we can talk about the New York Times if you want. But I mean it's been a really interesting. So the Forward is a it's founded as a socialist paper, but it's really a non-ideological paper. Now I like to say it's not a paper, it's a digital outlet. But anyway, I like to say that the only ideology is that of inquiry. And it really is the only Jewish outlet that is, um, independent, um, with, with the exception of maybe the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, which is like our wire service. Um, and it's really committed to being broad minded and to having particularly in the opinion section, having kind of all of American Jewish diversity really represented: religious diversity, um, racial diversity, political diversity, geographic, generational, all those things.

Jodi Rudoren: And so what that means is that, you know, you're definitely not going to agree with everything in the report. You're going to see yourself hopefully reflected in what we publish and also really challenged by it. And so, you know, we had a day last fall where we published on the same day, big, thoughtful, smart, respectful, well-argued opinion pieces by Yehuda Kurtzer, who's the head of the Shalom Hartman Institute, and also by Yonah Lieberman, who's one of the founders of If Not Now. And those those two guys, you know, don't don't sit in the same room. And I thought that was really- I think that's really important. Um, look, I think what's been really interesting for me, um. I don't think I understood this about Jewish journalism until October 7th, and I'm not even sure this has really happened before, but one of the American Jewish responses to October 7th was really a drawing closer to people's Jewish engagement, Jewish identity. People drew closer to their Jewish identity. People, some, some people drew closer to Israel. Obviously, there's also a lot, and I know you see it on campus of the opposite. And a lot of those people and like, these are like my friends, my my kids' friends' parents from synagogue in Montclair, New Jersey. A lot of those people, it was very unclear kind of where they could be open about their experience and their feelings because they- one of the experiences after October 7th was being very surprised to discover what your neighbor or your coworker or your dorm mate or your, you know, fellow classmate, whatever, actually thought about Israel and about Jews.

Jodi Rudoren: And I think a lot of American Jews found that they needed, they wanted, um, the true story. They didn't want like, I mean, a lot of people do want propaganda, but some people didn't, and they also wanted it to be Jewish. They wanted to be in like a Jewish space. So what's interesting, it's always very interesting when when our story, our niche story is the main story, which has been now for the last few months. And we know that our readers also are reading The New York Times or The Washington Post or CNN or I mean, also obviously TikTok, but also like Times of Israel, Haaretz and Jerusalem Post. So what's what are we? What value are we adding to that diet? And I think, um, I think the two things really were we've really tried to provide some clarity amid all the chaos that is online around this war, um, including a lot of just really bad faith disinformation. And but we've done that in a Jewish way. So we're going to tell you, like, what the Talmud has to say about X or Y. We're going to talk about, um. You know, when we talk about the things around genocide, like we're doing this from this perspective of our history. Um, and for myself, I mean, you know, I feel, um, it feels like a bit of a bashert thing that I was in this chair when the story happened.

Jodi Rudoren: I have, you know, I'm very kind of ready to to lead coverage of this story. Um, and so it's been a real like it's felt like a real responsibility and also a real opportunity. I'll say, you know, a lot of my friends and maybe some of you felt the same thing, like in the first weeks after October and I suppose still now. Um, it was like, um, they didn't know what to do. They wanted to do something, and they didn't know what it was to do. And one of the things I love about being a journalist is that that never happens to me. Like when, you know, on Election Day, I'm doing elections. When there's a war, I'm doing the war. So I was I wasn't a I didn't have to I didn't spend a lot of time stopping to think about what did I think and what was I going to do. It was just like, there's a lot to do so, and people really needed us. And the response from readers has been incredible. I mean, just growth and people are giving us money. But more importantly, the feedback they send is so on point to this idea of we need clarity, we need truth, we need independence, and we need a Jewish lens.

Mrs. Toby Hecht: That's really great. Um, yeah.

Rabbi Shmully Hecht: I'm just. Are we open here?

Mrs. Toby Hecht: I think we should. I mean, yeah, let's let's. Yeah, let's definitely start. Let's let's open to Q&A.

Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Shmully again. I'm just. Can you just answer Toby's- oh the mic. Just on that last. Thank you. That was fantastic. But I don't think you answered Toby's question. Toby's question was it was kind of broad, but she got very specific about why you think the groups that did so much for women have been so silent about the rape of Jewish women in Israel?

Jodi Rudoren: Yeah, I mean, I sorry, I did skip over that because I also think the moment of that story has really passed. Like, I don't I mean, I think.

Mrs. Toby Hecht: Maybe. I mean I still feel it so it's still on my mind.

Jodi Rudoren: I still think it. I think it's like. No, I mean, it's not like.

Mrs. Toby Hecht: And women around me, I.

Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Mean, the hypocrisy. We're talking about the hypocrisy.

Jodi Rudoren: Yeah. No, I get it. Except I also think I totally get it, but I don't know. I also think that most reasonable people totally know there was rape. Um, and have acknowledged it. And I mean, you're right, the mainstream women's groups took a long time, and that was really upsetting. And UN women in particular. And then there was this big campaign against them, and now they've all kind of acknowledged it, I think. I also think there's something else going on, though, that I think. I think that, um. There's a thing that's happening with Israeli Jews in particular, maybe with some Jews here. It's like people want to feel better about. So I think that like, I think there's been. I don't know. I don't think there was ever a moment where any reasonable person didn't understand that there was a horrible terrorist attack that was barbaric and brutal and inhumane on October 7th. People were, I mean, there were there was, um, besides the rape, there was the grandmother who was killed and put on her Facebook. There was beheadings, there was babies. There was. And I think that the fuss over exactly how many of this kind of brutality or that was, is a little bit like, what? What's the point? Like I there was a really brutal terrorist attack. There has also been a response that has been devastating with a very high death toll.

Jodi Rudoren: Um, there still are these 100, more than 100 hostages still in captivity. Israel does not have a plan for the day after that. Is that all reasonable? Like all of those things are true and the right thing to do, the Jewish thing to do, I think, is to look at all of those things and to try to grapple with all of that complexity and difficulty. And I think some of the people, not you, I'm sure, who want to focus on why X or Y celebrity or X or Y group isn't talking enough about the rape of the women on October 7th is like a little bit of a deflection. Like, um, and also, I mean, you know, The New York Times did this really amazing story led by a friend of mine, Jeffrey Gettleman, about the rape. And it included a bunch of stuff about why the evidence was destroyed exactly or ignored. And one of the reasons why there was. I mean, you know, President Biden talked about rape on October 10th, on Tuesday in his very first speech. Actually, when he talked about it, there was- the IDF had not confirmed that there was any rape. So he was like he and Netanyahu were ahead of the evidence, which was never to say when we wrote a story saying that which we got some crap for.

Jodi Rudoren: Um, and I never occurred to me that there hadn't been rape, but it was also- it was interesting as to why how it got ahead of of its own, of the evidence. But I think, like, I don't know, I feel like this is a little bit of a side show and I feel like some of it is about

Rabbi Shmully Hecht: you  think it was a side show ?

Jodi Rudoren: No, I think the obsession about which women and which women's groups had, which kind of response is a bit of like, it's like to make us feel better about how victimized we were. And I think, like, I don't think I don't think again, I don't think there is any, um, politician in America. Um, I don't think there's any serious person who does not understand that there were rapes on October 7th, um, and that it was brutal. And I'm not disagreeing with you that in November there wasn't enough attention to it, but I feel like it's like I'm kind of over that. I've moved on from that moment. I feel like there wasn't enough attention and then there was more attention. And we all know there was rape. And why are we still talking about it?

Mrs. Toby Hecht: Um, yeah. Let's open it up.

Yosef Malka: Awesome. Thank you so much.

Mrs. Toby Hecht: Oh, yeah yeah, please.

Yosef Malka: Thank you. Um. Thank you. That was fascinating. My question is about, uh, the Jewish and Jewish newspaper and sort of how you think about your audience because, you know, 100 years ago. Yeah. The Ford was a socialist newspaper. It was taking very particular stances. And they were controversies, legal controversies. Um, and I just wonder about, you know, what what it means to, to write for the American Jewish community. And when you make decisions and write your editorials, um, who do you. This is really a question about how you see the American Jewish community. It's a great question how it's how it's changed, what it how it's constituted today. Um, and yeah, and how you see the, the newspaper sort of in dialogue with it.

Jodi Rudoren: So just first of all, a very brief history of the Forward, founded in 1897 by immigrant socialists. And it was wildly successful. For 50 years it was published in Yiddish. It was a broadsheet in 19- in the 1920s. It has had more readers than The New York Times. It had editions and bureaus in every major Jewish city in America and in Europe, um.

Mrs. Toby Hecht: And in Yiddish, right.

Jodi Rudoren: In Yiddish. And so in those days, yes, it was socialist. And what I mean, so it was socialist, but I think that's actually the least interesting thing about it in terms of how it's different from today in some ways. One is it was an immigrant newspaper in the immigrant language. So it was- it was not writing only Jewish stories. Um, it was the main it was people's main newspaper. And it also was, um, this community institution, it had this landmark building on the Lower East Side. People would go there to watch election results. Also, people like Got Mail there. There's this we did this piece earlier last year. This we the Forward ran for many years a column called Seeking Relatives in which before World War II, during World War II and after World War TII, people would send these like classified ads that were like, I'm looking for an Uncle Shmully. He's a butcher in Brooklyn. They were like refugees trying to connect with some relative. And there are these stories of, um, in the Holocaust, people were like, given the address of their relative to like, pin to their. Um, anyway, we ran this column for many decades and really, you know, saved and reunited thousands of families. And so last year, one of my reporters, um, unearthed an archive of the original letters, and we wrote kind of the history of this thing, so that so that's what it was. And, um, for the first 50 years, it also ran the first advice column called the Bintel Brief, long before Ann Landers and Dear Abby. And it was very much teaching that community how to be American, um, teaching these Eastern European immigrants. There was literally like, should I let my kid play baseball? And a ballot of how to vote and all this kind of stuff. The Forward has lost money every year since 1946, which is kind of amazing we're still in business. Um, and it did not publish in English until- guess when we started publishing in English.

Jodi Rudoren: Anyone?

Jodi Rudoren: 1990, even 74 would have been pretty late. 1990 was really late. So now I'm forgetting your question. Oh well, how do we think? Yeah. So so so what- the role we played in people's lives in like the 20s and 30s is like radically, radically different from the role we play in our audience's lives today. So, um, it's funny, I'm happy to answer this question, and I it's just it's funny. I've been giving so many talks since October 7th, and it's like, I haven't talked about this. I've been talking only about the war. So it's really interesting to to get back to this broader view. Anyway, um, in the most recent Pew Research study about American Jews, it's long. It has like a gazillion, you know, little data points. But the upshot of it really, I think, can be distilled in like two sentences, which is there's a lot of people who are pretty into being Jewish and the Jewish, and this is actually a little bit of an example of one right at this table, the traditional, um, Jewish organizations, institutional Judaism, whether it be synagogue structure or like the ADL and the AJC and this alphabet is not working for people. They're they're like, it's not accessible to them. They don't they don't want to do Jewish in that way. And there's like huge interest in Yiddish. There's huge interest in Jewish food. There's huge interest in Jewish music. There's like a lot of different ways to be or do Jewish. Um, and I mean, I mentioned this because I think, like Shabtai is like not Hillel. Right. Like it's different. Um, and it responds to that thing of people are like, interested in their Jewish identity, but not in maybe traditional organizational Judaism.

Jodi Rudoren: So the Forward, to me that's the Forwards like opportunity and purpose, right, is we are a place where wherever you are, whatever kind of Jewish community you live in, whatever you think about your Jewish identity or Jewish engagement, we have, like on ramps for you to connect with that thing. Maybe it's Israel, maybe it's religion, maybe it's history, maybe it's Yiddish, you know, and we've got a little bit of all that stuff, and you can kind of wallow in it as much or as little as you want. Um, and it's not the same as belonging to a synagogue or whatever. Um, and maybe people, maybe we're a gateway for that kind of thing and maybe not. Maybe all someone's going to do, maybe their whole Jewish identity is going to be reading the Forward. Um, so that's how I think of how we sort of serve the American Jewish community. I think Tobi mentioned something ran over something earlier that is really important. We are by for about the American Jewish community, but we are also, and historically, have even been more of this, um, the voice of that community to the broader body politic. So in that heyday, um, New York politicians in particular, but American politicians generally like, look to the Forward to tell them what this community, um, thought about things or how they saw things. Um, we would like to restore that to have, I think we're not quite there yet, but we would like to be a sort of barometer of the diversity of American Jewish thought for. And it is interesting we do, you know, um, have these sort of really we do have some non-Jewish readers that are pretty committed. And it's very funny. It's interesting always to hear from them and who they are and why they read the Forward. Um, does that answer your question?

Yosef Malka: It's very interesting. You sort of said that it started selling or packaging or introducing Jews to America, and now it's sort of.

Jodi Rudoren: Yeah, I mean, now I think it's like about, yeah, it's about teaching America. I mean, it's complicated to be an American Jew today and to figure out what that means. Um, and there's a lot of different ways to do it. And most there aren't that many pluralistic spaces. So we are very pluralistic space.

Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Thank you. Break down of the institutional, traditional institutional.

Jodi Rudoren: Yeah. And now finally we also took down the paywall. So no barrier to entry. Just like come read share whatever.

Mrs. Toby Hecht: That's great. Not a lot of.

Danielle Frankel: Yeah. Thank you.

Mrs. Toby Hecht: Oh, yes.

Danielle Frankel: Thank you so much for being here. I'm from Brookline. So when you say inaudible. Yeah. Um,

Jodi Rudoren: Did you go to Brookline High?

Danielle Frankel: No, I went to Nobles in Dedham. Um, I so I was wondering about something related to The New York Times. So I have, um, family and friends who have been, like, very upset by the coverage, um, post October 7th of the from The New York Times. Um, especially with the hospital, the false coverage of the hospital. And I know people who have canceled their subscriptions to The New York Times. And I'm just wondering, like, what do you think about the trajectory of The New York Times and what's been what have been your feelings with that?

Jodi Rudoren: Yeah. Um, I did an event two Fridays ago, um, and I the next morning I was like, I should have answered this question differently. So I'm going to give you my Saturday morning answer. No, I want to say first that like you're asking me to talk about my family and about how my family handled the hardest thing that ever happened to them. So like, I'm going to I'm not sure how. I mean, I know a lot about The New York Times coverage of the Israeli Palestinian conflict, and I am like, you know, one of the top experts on this subject. Um, but I also know a lot about how hard it is. And there are people who I admire and respect and love and that are making these decisions. So maybe I'm not so objective about it. Um. I think, I mean, I think I think the coverage has been basically extraordinary. And I also think that there has been more, um, showcasing of the Israeli narrative in this conflict than in the ones that I covered in this war than the ones I covered. Um, I got an email just I answered an email this morning about Patrick Kingsley, my successor as bureau chief. And just like, you know, his biggest project in the fall was this reconstruction of what happened at Beeri. Jeffrey Gettleman did this massive thing about the rape.

Jodi Rudoren: Yeah. There was um, and I think this and I think this hospital thing is I mean, you know, it was a it was a it was a fuck up. It was a mistake, by the way. Everybody made the mistake. And The New York Times and one other place are the only ones who apologize. Explained the mistake.

Rabbi Shmully Hecht: For those who dont know what you are talkiing about...

Jodi Rudoren: Sorry. Sorry. So yeah. Yeah, yeah. Like in, like the third week of the war, there was an explosion at a hospital in Gaza, a small hospital. And the Hamas immediately put out a announcement that it was a strike by an Israeli airstrike and that 500 people were killed. And, um, numerous publications had a headline like that, including The New York Times, The New York Times. It was like the banner headline on the live blog. Um, it said it said 500 killed in an Israeli blast, Palestinians say, or something like that. Um, uh, that was on a Wednesday. And on the following Monday they issued a long editor's note saying that it had been a mistake. The the headline was changed within an hour or so. It was when Biden was on his way to the Middle East for his first trip. The Arab street erupted in protests, and he ended up changing his itinerary and didn't go to Jordan. And I forget where else that he was supposed to go. Um.

Speaker28: Ramallah.

Jodi Rudoren: In addition to the, um, in addition to the editor's note, the editor of The Times, Joe Khan, also did a 20 minute, like audio interview explaining what happened. And then later on, Vanity Fair published an article that they got leaked the like internal slack messages of how the decision was made around this headline, and it revealed that there had been a substantial debate around what the headline should say and how big it should be, and that but that the debate had been, um at a pretty low level. And one of the things that Joe said was like, when this debate is happening, like, I need to know this is happening. And so anyway, I mean, one of the things that I think is really specious that people have said about this incident is that the protests on the Arab street were about the were caused by The New York Times screwed up headline. Like that is just like patently not true. They were caused by the Hamas messages on telegram. And one of the reasons, you know, it's patently not true is because it didn't change when the headline changed or when there was a lot of traffic on Twitter being like, yeah, they've changed the headline. It's not this. It was it turned out only like a dozen people were killed also, and they were in the parking lot and not in the hospital.

Jodi Rudoren: Um, the people on the social platforms that were like going out and protesting in the streets were denying the things that were said on social once it was corrected. So I don't think that The New York Times is responsible for those protests. Um, you know, I guess part of the question is, um, what people think The New York Times is for and what the readers bring to the experience of reading The New York Times. And a lot of American Jews think this is a Jewish paper that is like for them. And it is not. Um, you know, you, um, you, uh, I think I think, I mean, one of the things I always used to say, I think this is, again, I think that this question is less potent around this war than other times. I think that The Times' coverage has been more tilted towards the Palestinians in prior wars, because the asymmetry was even more, um, profound. Um, but in any case, I think that, um, this is- look, this is a conflict that is a conflict of narratives, and the narratives are rooted in our identities. And so it is very, very difficult when you are trying to understand something or read about something that feels like it's about who you are, to be neutral about it. And so you, you or your family or whoever is canceling their subscription is bringing to the experience of reading to The New York Times a lot more than they bring when they read about other things, about other story lines, about, I don't know, the presidential election or, um, Africa or the water crisis or insects or whatever.

Jodi Rudoren: Um, you know, and I think, um, I, you know, I don't buy the I, I try not to say like, well, you know, the other side thinks, I mean, I was, every day, accused of being a self-hating Jew and an IDF hasbaras propagandist for the IDF by different people. I do not buy the idea that if everybody thinks if everybody is mad at you, you must be doing something right. I think that's simplistic, but I do think that this tells you something about it is in the eye of the beholder a little bit. And I mean, I just would encourage you to remember to judge The New York Times based on what it is setting out to do and not some other thing that that you've put on it. Um, I don't really mean you, obviously. I think also just remember, like The New York Times coverage of the Israeli Palestinian conflict is not for people. It's not primarily for people who are on 17 listservs about Israel from all the groups that they, you know, already know what they think and their part.

Jodi Rudoren: It's for people who otherwise wouldn't know anything about what's happening in the Middle East. Um, in that way, that's the biggest difference from the Forward. Like I used to say, that, you know, my job when I was the Jerusalem bureau chief for The New York Times was to tell people a 360 degree view. People in, like Nepal or Nebraska who otherwise wouldn't ever go there, wouldn't know what was going on, whatever it was to give them the most nuanced and complicated and 360 degree view of the whole situation. My job now is not that. It's, you know, to to help American Jews think about the sort of Jewish questions related to the war or anything else. So anyway, I mean, I think I know people aren't very satisfied with that answer, but I think that, um. It's just, uh, yeah, I think I mean, first of all, I think the coverage has been- it's not perfect. It's really, really hard to cover a. I mean, the biggest problem with the coverage, honestly, this is probably not the, the problem that people are resigning their subscriptions over. And by the way, a large percentage of the people who cancel sign up again. Um, they like to cancel and make a big deal and tweet about their cancellation, and then they sign up again, which is fine. Totally fine.

Jodi Rudoren: Um, I think the biggest problem in coverage of this war is that there's no international journalists inside Gaza. Um, and there are two big problems with that. I mean, one is that all we're getting out of Gaza are like from, you know, Palestinians in Gaza who are basically stringers or photographers. They're not, you know, very experienced, sophisticated international journalists. And the even bigger problem from than that is that the coverage is really bifurcated. Um, the there's like The New York Times has like a little like Gaza coverage Bureau of Arabic speakers who are all day long whatsapping and phoning and dealing and looking on social media of the Gazan social media. And separately, there's a group of people who are doing stuff on Israel. And in the 2014 war, we were doing a mix of things, you know, and I was in Israel and then in Gaza, and people were and it's just it's. I mean, now there have been and then, you know, the people who are going into Gaza are only going under like IDF control and you can only look in certain places. So that's the biggest problem, is that there's not a really a 360 view of Gaza. Um, I think that's the thing that's missing. For questions. I'm going to try to have shorter answers, I apologize.

Rabbi Shmully Hecht: You know, by the way, it is 9:40. If anybody wants to step out.

Jodi Rudoren: Wow. How did it get to be 940? Geez.

Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Very quietly.

Mrs. Toby Hecht: Because we're going to continue.

Rabbi Shmully Hecht: We'll make our next stop at 10:00. Yeah.

Jodi Rudoren: Okay. Sorry.

Mrs. Toby Hecht: No, no. Keep going, keep going.

Mrs. Toby Hecht: Ely.

Ely Altman: Thank you for being here. Um, I'm not a journalist, but I've enjoyed hearing about your experience. It sounds like it's been difficult and fulfilling. And we, although not The New York Times, have had our fair share of drama with Israel, Palestine and news coverage at the university here.

Jodi Rudoren: I have heard.

Ely Altman: I know, and I thought that you might have and I and I wanted to get your opinion on it, which is that there was a big controversy about, um, you know, some articles had descriptions of rape that were then removed and it went crazy on conservative Twitter and Twitter and, and the alumni. And I'm just curious, from your perspective, someone who's a professional in the field, um. What were your thoughts watching that? Do you think that it was overplayed, underplayed? Appropriately played? Um, what words of advice would you give to students who are not in journalism when they're looking at student journalism to student journalists themselves? Um, any reflections that you have on the situation would be very interesting to me.

Jodi Rudoren: I mean, I, I have not reported this out, but I did hear I mean, I think there were also like really serious death threats against the editor. Right? And like somebody like then they papered her house or something like that. Right? With some kind of.

Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Is that true? We have death threats.

Danielle Frankel: I think so, yeah.

Ely Altman: No, no, I have heard that there were some threats against the editor and there was.

Jodi Rudoren: And some real harassment in any case. Right? So, I mean, that I would just start there to just say like, uh, that is just freaking crazy. And, I mean, I feel like all there's so many really terrible things that have happened, obviously, October 7th itself, a lot of the war, but also like the things that have happened on American campuses are like mind boggling. And I would say that the doxing and harassment is like maybe the worst, you know. I mean, I think that, um, there's just at some point, particularly in the academy, but really in the public discourse in general, the idea of terrorizing people based on what they say, I mean, even even more so for journalists who are trying to, like, make sense of what's happening on campus. But even for activists, I just think that it is just like, not okay to make expressing a view or practicing journalism or practicing activism a thing that is dangerous. And I mean, that is just like really un-American and un-Jewish and all of those things. So that I think is probably the most troubling. Um, I think what happened here and there have been a few other campuses where this has happened. And, you know, I there was a story a few years ago at Northwestern, not about the war, obviously.

Jodi Rudoren: Um, but, um, there was some kind of protest on campus, and the paper covered the protest, and they took some photos of some kids at the protest. And I think the kids were. Maybe like climbing over a wall or like some kind of, like maybe trespass. They were doing something not cool. Maybe it was at the president's house, I can't remember. Anyway, they ran a photo of this and got, um, criticized for it. And then they took it down, um, which was not the right choice. Um, and they got the editor of Northwestern. The person has turned out to do fine, but got really like the world, the professional journalism world kind of ran down on his head. Um, and I guess I feel like that sounds like a little bit of what happened here, too, is like, there's. It can be. Look, it's very hard to do this work under, like, intense activist pressure. And particularly when they're not good faith actors, when people are not interested in journalism, not interested in truth, not interested in diverse opinions, they're just interested in I want everybody to hear my side. And I think that it sounds to me like the decision to take it out was a mistake. Um, but just probably under great duress. And.

Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Do you mean to take out the story of rape, because there's duress?

Jodi Rudoren: I mean, I don't I mean, I'm not sure that I'm the expert on what happened here, but I think there was some.

Rabbi Shmully Hecht: If an editor chooses to not talk about the rape, what.

Jodi Rudoren: But that's not what happened. There was a column that was published with a mention of rape, and then there was like pressure put on the editors and they took it out.

Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Right.

Mrs. Toby Hecht: Right. And then they put it back in.

Rabbi Shmully Hecht: what sort of duress do you have to be under to take out the fact that somebody is talking about rape. I mean, what what are you saying?

Jodi Rudoren: I'm saying that people were like, I think the- I don't know what kind of exactly. I mean, does anyone here from the YDN know what the pressure was? I don't know.

Michael Ndubisi: Yeah, so the issue was it was an attribution, a question of attribution. So there was a link that was under the keyword, uh, there was a link there that linked to an Atlantic article that there was some debate question about whether or not that actually did properly, you know, sort of support the claim that rape occurred and things like that. So it was it was going back to like the questions about, you know, what things can be said as statements of fact. And you know, how it is that you, Link them .

Jodi Rudoren: And what I mean by.

Rabbi Shmully Hecht: That is they couldn't establish it as a fact that the crime and therefore no.

Jodi Rudoren: Sorry that's not- my understanding and I could be wrong is like so, you know, you're going through your process of editing the story and weighing this question of, what a proper attribution is, what you want to link to, whatever. But my understanding was that there was public pressure from campus around after it was published to take it out, and that there was like it became the focus of an activist campaign that was, I think, probably not about what the truth was, but was about this. I mean, one of the things that is incredibly frustrating is the way that people want to turn this conflict into like a basketball game where it's like my team, your team, and it's all about scorekeeping. This came up in this thing with my dad and the Temple Mount. It's like if you put in the bat, if you put in one more thing, that was the bad thing. And the other team did against my team, then this is a good article. If you put in fewer things that are bad for me and more things that are bad for the other person, that's bad. That's not a good article. And I think this kind of scorekeeping is reductionist.

Jodi Rudoren: It totally misses the complexity of this conflict. And when one of the things that has happened long before this war is that a lot of activists in this conflict have taken undermining journalism as a weapon in the conflict. So the idea of a letter writing campaign, or maybe it was a protest outside the building, I don't know what it was in this case, but when the editing of an article and the choices about what the right attribution is, or whatever becomes a kind of pawn in a political activist campaign, good journalism does not result. So I think that my my sense was that, you know, I mean, it's like also going back and forth and changing your mind is like generally, you know, you want to try to have as much discussion and scrutiny before publication, um, and then be able to stand by it. Um, you know, we make mistakes and we change things. We update things all the time. And that's part of especially in digital, um, if we do it transparently and fairly, like I think that's fine. Um, am I answering your question?

Ely Altman: No. Yeah. That was about 70%. The remaining parts was just what advice would you have for student journalists and for people reading the point?

Jodi Rudoren: Yeah. I mean, I think look, I think that like, the biggest advice for the consumers of journalism is, again, to sort of, um. I mean, a few a few pieces of advice. I mean, first of all, I think, like media literacy is more important than ever in your generation because we have so many sources. You're basically your own curators. You know, in my day, the editors of The New York Times told you what was important, and you looked on the front page, and that was what was important today. And that's not how you guys consume news. You, first of all, the home pages of even the mainstream papers are much bigger. They're algorithmically, um, curated for you. But also, of course, you're consuming, you know, from many, many sources and really picking your own media diet. And so knowing what a legitimate source is and not and knowing how to- part of it is knowing about the source, the publication, part of it is also knowing how to read something and be like, is this well attributed or not? The other day my daughter came down from her room and she's like telling me that her friend was going to text me because this guy who was posting all of this stuff on Instagram was saying that the IDF was harvesting organs from dead Palestinians. And so I'm like, what? You know, like, what are you talking about? So we googled it and, you know, it was like, okay, this comes back to this thing called Euro-med monitor, which is like an activist leftist organization that has really no credibility. But even if you look at the report that it was citing, it was completely it was air.

Jodi Rudoren: There was nothing there. And then and finally you'd go like three sources down to there was something in the 1990s where there was an admission that nobody was killed to harvest their organs, but there was like somebody who was taking corneas from dead bodies to study the corneas or something. It was like such a it was so distorted, but it was very easy to see how distorted it was. You just if you just pay attention, like if you just look at the. So I think, you know, it is incumbent on you to um, to be smart consumers of media and, but also not to put on to the source an agenda of your own. And you should understand what the agenda of the sources are. And, and the agenda of The New York Times is, you know, to tell a 360 view of the conflict. I think also, you know, it's been interesting to me to watch over the years many, many smart, sophisticated, intellectually rigorous people who seem to want a very simple, um, take on this conflict in particular. Everything else they want to get into the nuances. But here it's like very black and white, very like my team or the other team, very basketball game. And I, again, I think it comes back to what happens when you're talking about a narrative that is core to your identity. Um, but I think it's not simple. It's really, really complicated. And I would encourage you to wrestle with the complexity.

Mrs. Toby Hecht: Okay, I'll take another 1 or 2 questions.

Zachary Suri : Um, I just wanted to ask you, you mentioned earlier the role of the Forward in sort of like projecting to non-Jews, sort of the voice of the Jewish community as sort of like a secondary role. I'm curious what your thoughts would be on how we can get non-Jews to understand, but also Jews to understand the sort of complexity of Jewish history, but in particular the complexity of the state of Israel and this conflict. One of the things that's been frustrating to me is the way in which, as you said, people reduce the conflict and also reduce the sort of complicated layers of history that are involved in any discussion of the conflict.

Jodi Rudoren: Yeah. I mean. Now by doing it, you know. But I think one thing is language. There was a really deep piece, um, in The New York Times, I think on Monday or Sunday about like the origin and history of the term settler colonial colonialism. And it was really smart and detailed and took you through the whole. And I think that so so on the one hand, I think it's to be really careful in your day to day language, but also to then go deep into things. Um, but but I think I'm ignoring your question. So. Right. So how do we get non-Jews to engage critically with the full story of Israel? I don't know, I mean, just by, um, telling the full story of Israel. I mean, there's a lot of people doing a lot of things, you know, um, non-Jewish politicians. There's tons of trips for non-Jewish politicians to go over to Israel. Um.  I think.

Jodi Rudoren: I don't know. I guess what I would say is that I would encourage you not to respond to over simplistic oversimplification with more oversimplification. I think that a sort of, you know, from the river to the sea. Like responding to from the river to the sea thing with a Israel right or wrong thing is not going to. I don't think it's going to help. So.

Mrs. Toby Hecht: Abe. A final question. Unless we.

Abe Baker-Butler: A lot of pressure.

Rabbi Shmully Hecht: What time is it?

Abe Baker-Butler: Mine's very quick.

Mrs. Toby Hecht: You are doing good.

Abe Baker-Butler: Um, I don't think you mentioned why you left the Forward for The Times.

Jodi Rudoren: Why I left The Times for the Forward.

Abe Baker-Butler: Oh, sorry. Yes. Um, why did you leave The Times for the Forward?

Jodi Rudoren: Yeah. Um, Gabe asked me this before, and I said temporary insanity. I mean, right, why did you leave the most successful news organization with the biggest platform in the world to run a scrappy, deficit laden nonprofit that has a tiny audience? Yeah, I don't know, for less money with a big 30% pay cut. Why did you do that? Good question. I was having a midlife crisis. Um, I it was a.

Mrs. Toby Hecht: Yeah,

Jodi Rudoren: It was a few-

Mrs. Toby Hecht: And any regrets.

Jodi Rudoren: It was a few reasons.

Jodi Rudoren: I, um, it was a few reasons. I, um

Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Should we turn the camera off?

Jodi Rudoren: No I've answered this question many times.

Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Come on Jodi.

Jodi Rudoren: But I don't think I've, I it's not succinct enough. I need to be succinct. Um, so there are a few things. One was I was involved in a lot of really important conversations at the times and contributing meaningfully to them. And if I wasn't there, it would have been fine, you know what I mean? Like, The Times is, like, wildly successful and.

Mrs. Toby Hecht: You don't feel like you were adding.

Jodi Rudoren: It's just like there wasn't I. So I thought that I could have more impact somewhere else. And I was in this role where I was seeing that while The Times had really figured out the digital subscription strategy and was beginning this, this growth to where it is now, um, all around The Times where these crisis, the industry was in crisis, the local news deserts were growing, and there was this very exciting kind of nonprofit journalism industry growing up. Um, and I just thought, like, maybe I could have more impact over there. And when this thing happened at the Forward where, uh, they decided to go all digital, and they fired their editor in chief, and they were looking for a new person to run it. I mean, I actually, I know I knew the CEO publisher, and she just asked me to go to lunch to give her some names of potential people. And I did that. And then I sort of dictated myself into the I was just very compelled by her vision. And so I was like, well, maybe I could do this. Um, I also, you know, I, I kind of miss the Yale Daily News. I was at this big place. People were praising me for knowing how to get ideas through the bureaucracy, which was not what I had gone into this for being, like, good at navigating the place felt sort of empty. Um, and I thought it would be fun to try to run something small again. Um, and it has been really fun.

Jodi Rudoren: And now it has been. It has. I mean, this last few months has felt enormously meaningful and important, and I've felt like I was in the right place and at the right time. Um. But it's also, you know, lonely and, uh, I mean, and I miss the, you know, at The New York Times, you, you had it was very difficult to get new ideas approved. But when you did, you had this incredible team of people with all different skills to maximize the idea. At the Forward, I can do whatever I want, but we have to do it by ourselves. Like, you know, it's like, uh, go find an app that can do that. I mean, this is like all very scrappy. And so there are pros, you know there are benefits and drawbacks of every job. I think that, I also I think like was trying to be um. I don't know, I, I wanted to not care as much about the brand name, the, you know, like, I mean, a lot of people ask me why. I mean, you know, I it took me a while to realize it, but I realized after a couple of years that maybe people thought that I had had something bad had happened to me at the Times. That was not the case. They tried very hard to keep me. They said, you know, my career was very bright. They have tried to bring me back multiple times. Um, and I may yet go back.

Mrs. Toby Hecht: That's nice.

Jodi Rudoren: Um, I left there in great stead. And I love the place. It's filled with flaws. It is a flawed, messy, complicated place, but it is a amazing miracle every day. Also, um, so I miss it, but I like what I'm doing, too. And, you know, life is long. I believe in life. I'm not saying all the same things I said to you, Gabe, did I? But you know, chapters, right? Like we have chapters in our lives. So this is what I'm doing now.

Rabbi Shmully Hecht: There are two more.

Mrs. Toby Hecht: Okay.

Jodi Rudoren: Yeah.

You did it. You did it.

Jack Madden: I can ask it. I have the answer. I don't think that.

Rabbi Shmully Hecht: Somebody did anything with it. So we'll do two more. Yeah.

Jack Madden: So we already talked a bit about both like fragmentation of audience, audience bringing their identity and the importance of language, how both is somebody who's trying to read or like somebody that's trying to write a piece. Do we write something that that tries to communicate an idea when there isn't really a shared language, when like, for instance, like my parents can't agree on, like what an idea means, like how do we try to sort of even talk to each other or even try to communicate back and forth when I think I'm saying something and the person listening thinks I'm saying something very different, even though we're using the same set of words.

Jodi Rudoren: I'm not sure I understand, but I'm going to try. Um, I mean, I think. I one of the things I'm hearing in your question. I think one of the questions is like, who? It's always like, who's your audience? Who are you? Who are you trying to communicate with? Who are you writing for? And people can do whatever they want. But what I really believe in is writing for a broad audience. And particularly I'm not quite sure what the point is of writing something to sort of impress people who think like you do, or who have the same experience as you do, like, um, or to rally those people around, like, I mean, there is obviously a point, but it's not like a real journalistic point. I think, you know, I my goals are to I always say that like, I think the goal after you read an opinion piece should be to have the reader say, I never thought of it that way. You know, not like I don't think it's realistic. I don't think it's that interesting to be like, yes, you know, to have that reaction of like, yeah, I mean, sometimes it is really lovely to read someone who's managed to articulate what's in your heart and you hadn't you hadn't found the words or the way to say it. So that is a good reaction as well. But I think that like the sort of sometimes like on MSNBC, it feels like it's just preaching to the choir kind of cheerleading. That's not very interesting to me, nor do I think it's realistic to think like you're going to write something that's going to make someone who really, fundamentally disagrees with you be like, man, I've been wrong all along.

Jodi Rudoren: Like, sign me up for the other party. Or like, that's not going to happen. So it's all about like, enlightening or making. I mean, I think it's not even it's just about making connections for people, for people to be like, huh, I never thought of it that way. I didn't know that thing. I never really saw the humanity and that person who's so different from me. And now I understand that this woman from Gaza has this thing in common with this Holocaust survivor. Like, how interesting is that? And I guess it's just like, um, I think if you, for me, the point of journalism is shining a light. Bringing out a story that otherwise wouldn't be told. Making connections on things that people don't understand are connected, helping. I mean, it's really simple helping people understand a complicated world. The world is totally complicated and fucked up. And I think we want journalists to, like, go talk to people in different places and synthesize it for us to tell us, like, here's why this weird thing is happening. Here's who's, here's who's responsible, here's who's, you know, getting screwed, here's where the money is, like those basic things. And I think, like the sort of when it really gets ideological, it's so much less interesting to me. That's my take.

Sadie Bograd: Yeah. This is if we have time for one.

Rabbi Shmully Hecht: More, we're going to make that.

Sadie Bograd: Yeah. This is sort of a follow up to what you were just saying. And also on this point of the Forward serving kind of a broad, pluralistic Jewish community. I'm curious how October 7th and the Israel-Palestine conflict has impacted the rest of your the Forward's reporting, both are there stories that have sort of fallen by the wayside and that you wish you had time to cover? Um, but that have sort of been displaced by just this massive global conflict and then has I'm curious whether and how what's happening in Israel-Palestine has changed the way that you feel about the other stories that you're editing and just the way that those stories get covered?

Jodi Rudoren: Great question. And it's a great time to ask in the fall, because I'm really trying to figure out now, like, what's the new normal? You know, for the first six weeks, it was just we mostly, I mean, there were a few other things, but really we were just doing the war and to some extent and then maybe it was I mean, I think we probably have been 90% on the war since October 7th, um, until the end of the year. And, um, you know, it's a much. And that includes everything on campus. I mean, it includes all the kind of aftermath and repercussions. And, you know, we made we made some commitments. We hired someone to be based in Israel. We had myself and two other people went to Israel to do reporting in the fall. So, you know, we were like restructuring and reallocating the budget to cover this. Um, but that's changing. I mean, I don't know what percentage it is now, but like today we had, you know, we're doing much more, not more stuff now.

Jodi Rudoren: And I think it's. I guess what I would say, I feel like this is a little bit of a zaggy answer to your question, but one thing that I'm really focused on right now is how I think we were at our best in October and November, because news is good for news organizations. I mean, it's good because people need us and they come and they read us, and but it's also good because we like, we know exactly what we should do. And, um, and we're very we were like, on a war footing. We were like, sharp. We made sharp decisions. We were discerning. We only did I during my days, like, only did meetings that were essential. I was all about the essential. And because I only had I mean, I was already like working endlessly. So it was like I didn't have time for any bullshit. And I'm just trying to hold on to that. Um, because I think like one of the luxuries of the Forward, but it's also a total Achilles heel is we can do whatever we, you know, there's no clear coverage map normally, and we want to have this broad like all these on ramps for people. But so it can also be like, yeah, what should we what's urgent today. What are people talking about today? And I just I really am working hard to, for myself and for my team to hold on to urgency and clarity of this is worth doing and this is not worth doing. So I have my answer is less about like. Um. The content, the subject matter, and more like the sort of standard, like we just should only do things that we can really add to the debate, where we can either turn, do a quick, sharp take on the news and what people are talking about right now, or a kind of holy shit conversation making story that will really like, grab people's attention.

Jodi Rudoren: I want to cut out the mediocre middle, the sort of like dutiful, boring stories that nobody really wants to read. Um, and I'm just trying to stay sharp on on that. I think that the war and the conflict, the broader conflict and the exposure of the sort of deep anti-Zionism and antisemitism that exists here is going to be the driving storyline for a while. But it's not the only thing, you know, we all we always think about Counterprogramming, too. So, um, I don't know, it's sort of a, you know, when you see it kind of situation. Um, but I think, I mean, I think there's, there's like always some fatigue around a news story like this. And I guess this goes back a little bit to when we were talking about the rape question. I think that it's clear to me that this is a driving, defining storyline still, but we need to keep pushing it forward. You know, what's the next thing, what's the next thing, what's the next thing? And you know, we're going to see this. The phases of the war are changing. There's going to be elections. There's you know, there's a lot that's going to.

Mrs. Toby Hecht: Jodi. I'm not saying I think you're right. And there needs to be brought a perspective. I think the reason a lot of people are stuck specifically on this is because it hasn't been dealt with. And even The New York Times coming out two months later, which I understand this deep dive, investigative journalism takes time to get all the facts. And that's what I was responding to, people who were outraged about the delay. It takes time to gather facts and to put together the type of article that they did put together The New York Times, which was fantastic and fantastic. I don't use that word, but very important. Um, I think a lot of the reason why we're still stuck and haven't kind of emerged into the larger narrative is because it hasn't it wasn't dealt with in the onset. I think there's just still so much shock surrounding it and knowing that there's still women, you know, being held hostage, and it's unclear what's happening to them. So I think that it's not something that we can move on from, because I think in order to like, it's not like it's resolved.

Mrs. Toby Hecht: It's like, it's very.

Jodi Rudoren: I'm not saying you should move on. I'm just saying that I think a lot of. No, no.

Jodi Rudoren: But I'm not I don't think that like the activists need to. I'm not telling you as a reader, thinker, activist, what you should do. I'm just saying we need to. The story is constantly changing. So all I'm saying is that when we think about what is the right percentage of our coverage map that should be taken up with the conflict, it is going to get less, but it's also going to change in its dynamic. I think.

Mrs. Toby Hecht: Maybe.

Rabbi Shmully Hecht: I'm going to close. So I want to just again, thank everybody for coming out and staying a little bit past our usual time. Jodi, thank you for coming. It was fantastic to have this conversation. I think it's a conversation that should continue. And frankly, I think the YDN should probably have you back as a YDN event or maybe a Masters tea. Or Manuscript, you said you were in Manuscript  And maybe a master's tea, a manuscript. You said your manuscript. So I don't know who's in manuscript, but you should be on campus more often. I think this is a the beginning of a much larger conversation with young people. Um, but I, uh, and I, and I want to say one thing in closing, um, based on what you both spoke about at the end. So this is not a critique of The New York Times or the Forward or of anything either of you said tonight. Um, but I have a different perspective, and I just want to share it with everybody here tonight, which is this is actually much, much more simple than we think. There's nothing complicated about it. All the complexities have actually fallen to the wayside. October 7th is evidence that, um, you know, 3000 people were sent in to annihilate the Jewish people to rape, pillage, behead, burn to death Jews for being Jews. And the leaders of the movement that that initiated the war said multiple times publicly that they would do it over and over and over again. There's nothing more simple than that. Now, going back to the historical question of Jewish independence, the Jewish homeland, there's a much longer conversation. Judging which side is wrong or which side is right is something that every person can can judge for themselves.

Rabbi Shmully Hecht: What we can't judge, um, subjectively, is facts. The Hamas sent 3000 people to to annihilate and murder Jews, women, children at a at a at a at a music rave. They raped them. They burned them to death. They put them in ovens. They went into rooms and threw grenades into children. They slaughtered kids. They took women on motorcycles back and raped them and continue to do so and have these people in their basements. The population of Gaza is not demonstrating against Hamas. The Islamic world hasn't stood up against Hamas. The Muslim leaders in this country mostly have not come out to condemn Hamas. The leaders of the Arab world have not come out to condemn Hamas. Thank God America is a sane country. Some European countries are still sane. Um. That is the fact. It's very simple, very, very difficult for all of us normal people to accept. And the frustration of why the women's groups who claim to be for women and the the maybe Black Lives Matters groups that claim to be for certain minority groups or certain blacks haven't made the statement. The frustration I think that a lot of us are having is the hypocrisy, the hypocrisy, the terrible hypocrisy that in this instance, these groups that claim to fight for these underdogs, for these for the minorities, for people of one year old baby, 25 year old woman, Holocaust survivors have been silent. So how much more simple. Let me let me finish, please, if you don't mind.

Jodi Rudoren: Because it's just. No.

Evan Gorelick: If you don't mind, can I finish? I promise I'll let you speak. Um, so it's not. It's just the the the where I'm disagreeing with you, respectfully is to call this complex. I think most people in this room are very intelligent. It's not complex. It's very simple. Now, if you want to go back to justifying it or how did it come about or what could possibly justify something like that to happen? That's a that's the big narrative of Israel and the Palestinian population that lives in Israel. And the two state solution, all those questions. But what happened on October 7th, thank God, unfortunately, but thank God has shown the world the true color of what the people in Israel are dealing with. And unfortunately, it's spilled over to the world of what the Jewish people are dealing with. And hopefully the more simple we can actually narrow in and focus in on it and understand what it is, the faster we're going to solve the problem. That's my opinion.

Jodi Rudoren: So all I would say is, you know, I don't disagree with your characterization of the straightforward horror that happened on October 7th, but it is beneath you to suggest or argue or present that that is that slice of the story is the whole story. There's a lot of things that happened before October 7th, and there's 109 days or whatever, 110 days since October 7th. And so to say that it's simple, because this horrible thing happened on October 7th is, is really reductionist. So it's not about justifying what happened on October 7th at all. It's just about seeing the whole picture. So there's a big picture with a lot of parties and history and ideology, and I don't think that you have to I mean, I think it's. It's very twisted, I think, to suggest that in order to see the whole thing that's about justifying what happened. There's no justification for terrorism and for brutality and barbarism. But that doesn't mean that the lack of justification for what happened on October 7th means that there's no Palestinian humanity or Palestinian, uh, nationalism, or that you can't understand those things, or that the level of death and destruction in Gaza is simple. So it's just it's I mean, it's like to say like this one thing is simple, and therefore the whole thing is simple, I think is oversimplified. So.

Speaker4: Continued.

Jodi Rudoren: Thank you all.

Isha Brahmbhatt: Are you hiring?

Jodi Rudoren: Uh. We are. We're hiring an opinion editor. I just put out the posting two days ago, and we are always hiring interns and fellows. We have a internship program, a paid internship program, um, $15 an hour, 29 hours a week.

Rabbi Shmully Hecht: What about submissions like for students?

Jodi Rudoren: We are always thrilled to have students write for our opinion pages to pitch us freelance reported stories. All that. You can email me at rudoren@forward.com. My my last name Rudoren. Um, I'm happy to either look at something you're pitching or send it on to the right person. Um, we do have a one year fellowship that we also are hiring. We'll be hiring for this summer. Um, so. Yeah.

Mrs. Toby Hecht: No, I just wanted to thank you so much for coming. Thank you. It's really amazing. I think you have so much to offer. As far as journalism, I don't think I've met somebody with that much experience. In all the years that we've met. We've met a lot of had a lot of journalists come up.

Jodi Rudoren: Yep.

Mrs. Toby Hecht: There's so much more I could have asked you about for another time.

Jodi Rudoren: The next time. Next time.

Mrs. Toby Hecht: Part two. Part two.

Jodi Rudoren: Sure. Next time. Now I have to go to the bathroom.

Danielle Frankel: Thank you so much.

Jodi Rudoren: You're welcome.