I'm also not a member of the Federalist Society. My parents, who are here in the front row, who probably couldn't afford the local country club, raised us on the Groucho Marx line that I wouldn't want to belong to any club that would have me as a member. And then there's the question of my politics. I hear you guys are conservative, so forgive me then. I'd like to begin by acknowledging that we're standing on the ancestral indigenous land of Leonard Leo. I read in ProPublica that this is his turf.
But then I googled Barbara Olson. I had the privilege of editing some op-eds by Ted back in the day, and I knew that his wife had been murdered by Al-Qaeda in 9-11. But over the past few weeks in my non-spare time, I spent a bunch of it reading about Barbara herself. I read about a Texas girl, the daughter of German immigrants, who was ferociously independent. I read about how she, a Catholic, wound up at Cardozo Law School at Yeshiva University. And I read about how she, as an intern at the Department of Justice, was apparently the only person with sufficient chutzpah to personally serve the papers at the PLO mission to the UN. And I learned that she was on American Airlines Flight 77 because she was headed to LA to be on Bill Maher's show, and because she had changed her flight so she could have a birthday dinner with Ted. And I learned that she had the composure and the clarity and the courage to call him not just once but twice in those horrifying moments before the plane slammed into the Pentagon.
There is a phrase that Jews say when a person dies, and that phrase is, may their memory be for a blessing. And it's an expression of hope. But it is so clear in the case of Barbara Olsen, and the way that the force of her life and her character extends and echoes on, that it is very much a blessing fulfilled. To say that I am honored to give a lecture in the name of such an exceptional woman would be an understatement. So thank you.
It is also, since the massacre of October 7th, a date that will be seared into the memory of civilized people alongside September 11th, profoundly fitting. I don't think it's a coincidence that Israel is the only country outside of America which is home to a 9-11 memorial bearing every single one of the victims names.
And of course, that is what we must talk about tonight, the civilizational war we are in, the war that took the life of Barbara Olson and 3,000 other innocent Americans on that morning of September 2001, and the war that came hideously across the border from Gaza into Israel on that Shabbat morning a month ago, the war that too many foolishly thought had ended.
The physical war currently raging in the Middle East with questions about the right way to defeat Hamas and other members of the jihadi death cult, the kind of operation Israel should be pursuing in Gaza, how America should abandon its fatal appeasement of Iran, and a hundred other strategic questions. Those are subjects for another speech and one for which there are many more qualified people to deliver.
Tonight, I'd like to talk about the war of ideas, of conviction, and of will that faces us as Americans. I want to talk about the stakes of that war and how we must wage it fearlessly and relentlessly if we seek to build a world fit for our children and if we want to save America itself.
By the time Americans woke up on October 7, 2023, it was clear that what had unfolded while we slept was not like previous wars or battles that Israel had fought in its 75-year history. This was a genocidal pogrom. It was a scene out of the places that Jews had fled, a scene out of the history of the Nazi Holocaust or the European pogroms before that, or of the Farhud, the 1941 massacre of Jews in Baghdad, a city that, it's hard to believe now, was 40% Jewish at the beginning of the 20th century. All of these scenes reminding us of Israel's necessity.
The Hamas terrorists came across the border into southern Israel on foot and on motorbike. They came by truck and by car and paraglider and they came with a plan. They came to Israel to maim and to murder and to mutilate anyone that they could find and that is what they did.
These were Cossacks with smartphones. They called their families to brag that they had murdered Jews, dad, dad, I killed 10 Jews, said one. Others filmed the slaughter from their GoPros. Some used cell phones of the victims themselves to upload the footage of their torture and their murder so their families would have to encounter it first on their Facebook pages.
In all of this, the terrorists are laughing, they are euphoric, there is no one who has watched that horrifying, unedited footage who fails to note the hideous glee of the butchers. Some Israelis were literally disappeared on October 7th and I'm not talking about the hostages. I'm talking about people that were burned at such high heat that volunteers are still sifting through the bones and the remnant teeth to identify them. But more than 200 people are currently being held hostage by Hamas and more than 1,400 were murdered in those terrible hours. Among the dead are some 30 American citizens and there are at least 10 Americans among the hostages. All of which is why the immediate analogy the world reached for was to 9-11. As with 9-11, the terrorists caught their victims by surprise on a clear blue morning. As with 9-11, the spectacle and the savagery were the point. As with 9-11, the terrorists notched points on their sadistic scoreboard, taking from us not just precious lives but our sense of safety and security. They changed something within us.
But the difference between 9-11 and 10-7, two massacres of innocent people, symbols to their killers of Western civilization, was the reaction to the horror. The difference between 9-11 and 10-7 was that the catastrophe of 10-7 was followed on October 8th by a different kind of catastrophe, a moral and spiritual catastrophe that was on full display throughout the West before the bodies of those men and women and children had even been identified.
People poured into the streets of our capital cities to celebrate the slaughter. In Sydney, crowds gathered at the Opera House cheering, gas the Jews. People rejoiced on the streets of Berlin and London and Toronto and New York and Paris. Then came BLM Chicago using the paraglider, a symbol of mass death, as a symbol of freedom. Then came posters across our campuses calling for Israel to burn. Then came our own offices at the Free Press in New York City vandalized with F Jews and F Israel.
Then came Harvard's task force to create safe spaces for pro-Hamas students. And then, as thunder follows lightning, more dead Jews. An anti-Israel protester outside of Los Angeles killed a 69-year-old Jewish man this week for the apparent sin of waving an Israeli flag, though NBC's initial headline made it hard to follow. Man dies after hitting head during Israel and Palestinian rallies in California, officials say.
In lockstep, the social justice crowd, the crowd who has tried so hard to convince us that words are violence, insisted that actual violence was a necessity, that rape was resistance, that torture was liberation. University presidents who leapt to issue morally lucid condemnations of George Floyd's killing or Putin's war against Ukraine offered silence or mealy-mouthed pablum about how the situation is complex and how we need to think of both sides as if there's some kind of equivalence between innocent civilians and jihadists. But the most alarming of all were the young people who threw their support not behind the innocent victims of Hamas terror, but behind Hamas and genocide.
At George Washington University just down the road, students projected the words, glory to our martyrs, and free Palestine from the river to the sea in giant letters on a campus building. At Cooper Union in Manhattan, Jewish students had to hide in the library because a mob was pounding on the door. At Columbia, my old professor, Joseph Massad, called the slaughter awesome. At Cornell, Professor Russell Rickford said it was energizing and exhilarating. At Harvard, more than 30 student groups signed a petition that found a way to blame Jewish victims for their own deaths, saying that they, quote, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for the unfolding violence. At Princeton, hundreds of students chanted, globalize the intifada, which can only mean one thing, open season on Jews worldwide. At NYU, students held posters that read, keep the world clean with drawings of Jewish stars in garbage cans.
Hip young people with pronouns in their bios are not just chanting the slogans of a genocidal death cult. They are going around and tearing down the photographs of women and children who are currently being held hostage in tunnels that run under the Gaza Strip, and they do so gleefully. They laugh. They mock the nine-month-old baby who was stolen from his parents. And in doing so, they are tearing down, or at least they are trying to tear down, the essence of our common humanity, or perhaps even the reality that the hostages were taken at all, or maybe it's that they're trying to extinguish their memory, or the people actually had it coming to them. Or maybe, and I say this as the mother of a young child in whose face I see the face of every single child being held captive, they are trying to tear down the divine image that is at the very root of our civilization's conception of the dignity and the equality of every human life.
What could possibly explain this? The easy answer is that the human beings who were slaughtered on October 7th were Jews, and that anti-Semitism is the world's oldest hatred, and that in every generation, someone rises up to destroy us. They tried to wipe us out. They failed. Let's eat. That's the oldest Jewish joke in the world.
But that's not the whole answer, and that's because the proliferation of anti-Semitism, as always, is a symptom. When anti-Semitism moves from the shameful fringe into the public square, it is not about Jews. It is never about Jews. It is about everyone else. It is about the society or the culture or the country where it is being allowed to proliferate. Antisemitism is a warning system. It is a sign that the society itself is breaking down, that it is dying. It is a symptom of a much deeper crisis, one that explains how in the span of a little over 20 years since September 11th, educated people now respond to an act of savagery not with a defense of civilization but with a defense of barbarism.
It was 20 years ago when I was a college student that I began to encounter an ideology that drives the people who tear down the posters. It was 20 years ago that I started writing about this ideology that seemed to contradict everything I had been taught since I was a child.
At first, the things I encountered like post-modernism and post-colonialism and post-nationalism seemed like wordplay or intellectual games, little puzzles to see how you could deconstruct just about anything. But what I came to see over time was that it wasn't going to remain an academic sideshow and that it sought nothing less than the deconstruction of our society from within. This ideology seeks to upend the very ideas of right and wrong. It replaces the basic ideas of good and evil with a new rubric, the powerless, good, and the powerful, bad. It replaces lots of things like that, color blindness with race obsession, ideas with identity, debate with denunciation and deplatforming, persuasion with public shaming, the rule of law with the fury of the mob.
People were to be given authority in this new order, I learned, not in recognition of their gifts, their hard work, their talents, their accomplishments, or their contributions to society, but in inverse proportion to the disadvantage their group had suffered as defined by radical ideologues.And so as an undergraduate, I watched in horror sounding alarms as loudly as I could back then. I was told by most adults, including Jewish communal leaders, that yeah, it wasn't great, but don't be so hysterical. Campus were always hotbeds of political radicalism, they said, and this ideology they promised me would surely dissipate as young people made their way into the world.
They were wrong. It did not do that. Over the past two decades, I saw this inverted, morally perverse worldview swallow all of the sense-making institutions of American life. It started in the universities. Then it moved beyond the quad to cultural institutions, including some that my wife and I know well, like the New York Times, as well as to every major museum, philanthropy, and media company. It has taken root in the HR departments of every major corporation. It is inside our high schools and even our elementary schools. And of course, as everyone in this room knows, it has come to the law itself.
When you see a federal judge shouted down at Stanford, you are seeing this ideology at work. When you see people screaming outside of the homes of certain Supreme Court justices, causing them to need round-the-clock security, you are seeing its logic. The takeover of core American institutions by this ideology is so comprehensive that it's hard sometimes for people to even notice it, because it's everywhere.
Now, for Jews, there are obvious and glaring dangers in a worldview that measures fairness by equality of outcome rather than by equality of opportunity. If underrepresentation is the inevitable outcome of systemic bias, then overrepresentation, and Jews are 2% of the American population, suggests not talent or hard work, but unearned privilege. This conspiratorial conclusion is not actually that far removed from the hateful portrait of a small group of Jews divvying up the ill-gotten spoils of an exploited world. And it's not only Jews who suffer from the suggestion that merit and excellence are dirty words. It is every single American. It is strivers of every race, ethnicity, and class. That is why Asian immigrant success, for example, is seen as so suspicious. The percentages are off. The scores are too high. The starting point, as poor immigrants, is too low. From whom did they steal all of that success?
The week since October 7th has been a mark-to-market moment. In other words, everyone can now see how very deep these ideas run, and we see clearly that they are not just metaphors. Decolonization isn't just a clever turn of phrase or a new way to read novels. It is a sincerely held political view that serves as a predicate to violence. If you want to understand how it could be that the editor of the Harvard Law Review was caught on camera a few weeks ago physically intimidating a Jewish student, or how a public defender in Manhattan recently spent her evening tearing down posters of kidnapped Israeli children, it is because they believe this and they believe it is just. And their moral calculus is as crude as you can imagine. Israelis and Jews, powerful, successful, colonizers, so they're bad. Hamas is weak. They're considered people of color, so they're good. And no, it doesn't matter that the majority of Israelis are also people of color. That baby, he's a colonizer first and a baby second. That woman, gang-raped by terrorists, shame it had to come to that, but she's a white oppressor.
This is the ideology of vandalism in the true sense of the word, the vandal-sacked Rome. It is the ideology of nihilism. It knows nothing about how to build. It only knows how to tear down and destroy. And it has already torn down so very much. The civilization that feels as natural to us as oxygen, that takes thousands of years, thousands of nudges of progress, thousands of forgotten sacrifices and risks to build up to. But vandals can make very quick work of that. Reagan used to say that freedom is never more than one generation from extinction. And the same can be said of our civilization.
If anything good can come out of the nightmare that began on October 7th, it is this. We have been shaken awake. We know the gravity of the stakes, and the stakes are not theoretical. They are real.
So what can we do?
First, we need to look. We must recover our ability to look and discern accordingly. We must look past the sloganeering and the propaganda and take a hard look at what is in front of our eyes. Look first, of course, at what just happened, at the barbarism that Hamas carried out. Then look at the reaction to it. Take stock of how profoundly the lies and the rot have traveled, how badly the forces of civilization and of good are faring in this battle, how it is that the most educated, the most pedigreed have become the most morally confused.
The suspect in the killing of Paul Kessler is a college professor. To see the world as it is, we have to prize the distinctions that so many have forgotten, the distinctions between good and bad, better and worse, pain and not pain, safety and danger, just and unjust, friends and enemies. I do not need context to know that tying children to their parents and burning them alive is evil, just as I don't need a history lesson in the Arab-Israeli conflict to know that the Arab-Israelis who saved scores of Jewish Israelis that day are righteous.
Look carefully, look at your enemies and your allies, and I say that to myself more than to you. Many of you have no doubt understood this for far longer than I have, but for many people, especially many people in my cohort, friends and enemies are not who they thought they were before October 7th. Accepting this might be hard for some of you, as it has been for me. It might mean giving up on nice things, giving up on Harvard, giving up on the club, or your New York Times subscription. Sorry, wrong crowd. LAUGHTER
But you get my point. The point is that things, prestige, they are not the point of our lives. Harvard and Yale don't give us value. We give us value. Something beyond ourselves gives us value. The something that is visible in the faces of so many people before me right now. And in recognizing allies, I'll be an example right now. I'm a gay woman who is moderately pro-choice. I know that there are some people in this room who don't believe that my marriage should have been legal. And that's okay, because we're all Americans who want lower taxes. LAUGHTER
But I am here because I know that in the fight for the West, who my allies really are. And they are not the people who are looking at facile external markers of my identity that I might imagine them to be.
My allies, true allies, are people who believe that America is good. My allies are people who believe that the West is good. And that human beings are created equal. And that saying so is essential to knowing what we are fighting for. America and our values, those are things worth fighting for. And that, and not any number of nonsensical or at least tertiary culture war issues, that is the priority of the day.
The other thing to look for right now is for the good. To look for the good in these moments of darkness and to not lose sight of it. There's a New York coffee shop owner named Aaron DeHaan. He had all of his baristas quit the other day because he put an Israeli flag in the window and began fundraising for Magen David Adom, which is the Israeli Red Cross. So they all quit. But his cafe didn't close. It was quite the opposite. Suppliers sent him free shipments of beans and cups. Community members picked up shifts for him for free. There were lines around the block on the Upper East Side just to buy a cup of coffee. His cafe made $25,000 in a single day. Just this week, American cowboys, I hope you guys have seen these guys on social media, American cowboys from the Great Plains and the Rockies traveled to Israel to tend the fields and animals of Israeli farmers who have been killed in the past month
This is the opposite of the cheap solidarity of standing with Hamas that we see across our campuses and in our city centers. This is the essence of the West. This is the essence of the idea that free people and free societies must stick together.
It's not just, as James Woolsey once put it, that we're all Jews now. The reverse is also true. Israel is a mirror for the West and for the United States, whose founders saw a version of themselves in the biblical nation that also inspired the modern Zionists, whose descendants are now looking toward America with gratitude, but also with alarm, sensing a shared struggle ahead. So the first thing we must do is look.
The second thing that we, really you, must do is enforce the law. The wave of the so-called progressive prosecutors that have been elected across many of our cities has proven to be an immensely bad thing for law and order in cities across America. It turns out that choosing not to enforce the law doesn't actually reduce crime, it promotes it. And it is no coincidence that many of the same activists who have pushed to defund the police are now the people physically harassing Jews in our streets. Everyone in America deserves equal protection, not only of the law, but from the forces of chaos and violence.
In Brooklyn, there have been an unconscionable number of violent attacks against Orthodox Jews over the past decade, and they've been correctly identified as hate crimes. But they're also simply crimes that if the law were upheld would be far less likely to happen, whatever their motivation.
Masking at protests is illegal in many states, so that it doesn't become an attempt at mass intimidation a la the KKK. Now maybe that's a good idea, maybe it's a bad one, but in nearby Virginia, it happens to be the law. And yet, as David Bernstein recently pointed out in Eugene Volokh's blog, at George Mason University's Fairfax campus, nearly all of the protesters at a recent Student for Justice in Palestine rally were masked, completely covered. Were they punished for breaking the law? I suspect if they had, we would have read about it. The rallies that we're seeing right now would likely be less susceptible to erupting in violence if the attendants weren't covering their faces. So don't allow selective enforcement of this law or any others. If neo-Nazis and white supremacists can't do it, then neither can Hamas sympathizers.
APPLAUSE
The third thing, no more double standards on speech. Public universities are constitutionally forbidden from imposing content-based restrictions on free speech, and yet that's precisely what they have been doing. Ask any conservative, and I know a few now, who's tried to speak at a public university and had a security fee imposed on them or had their speech quietly moved to an off-campus venue. Private universities can legally restrict speech, but their restrictions can't be enforced discriminatorily, and yet they are. I'm just going to give you one quite amazing example from Yale Law School. In 2021, in an example I'm sure all of you will know, law student Trent Colbert invited classmates to his trap house in his announcement of a Constitution Day bash hosted by FedSoc and the Native American Law Students Association. It took 12 hours for administrators to process discrimination complaints, haul Colbert in for a meeting, and suggest his career was on the line if he didn't sign an apology that they wrote on his behalf.
The law school dean also authorized a message condemning his language. Why all of this hullabaloo? Because trap house was a term that some claimed had racist associations with crack houses. But when Jewish students wrote that dean two weeks after the Hamas attacks, detailing the anti-Semitic vitriol they had received, they got a formulaic reply from the deputy directing them to student support services. For certain students, kid gloves. For others, the maw of whatever hate their classmates and professors can dream up. The universities are playing favorites based on the speech they prefer and the racial group hierarchies that they have established. It is a nasty game and they need to be called out for it.
APPLAUSE
Fourth, and this is my last, accept that you are the last line of defense and fight, fight, fight. If you study history and if you look at where Jews stand for better and generally for worse, you will understand with almost 100% certainty where a culture, where a country, or where a civilization stands. Whether it's on the way up or on the way down. Whether it's expanding in its freedoms or whether it's contracting them. Where liberty thrives, Jews thrive. Where difference is celebrated, genuine difference, Jews are celebrated. And where freedom of thought and of faith and of speech are protected, Jews tend to be too. And when such virtues are regarded as threats or thrown to the side, Jews will be too. As goes Ohio, so goes the nation is the famous political phrase. The Jews, please don't quote me on this, we're Ohio.
And nothing is guaranteed, nothing. The right ideas don't win on their own. They need a voice, they need prosecutors. It's time to defend our values, the values that have made this country the freest, most tolerant society in the history of the world. and to do that without hesitation or apology. The leftist intellectual Sidney Hook, who broke with the communists and called his memoir out of step for that reason, used to implore those around him to always answer an accusation or a charge, to never let a falsehood stand unchallenged. We as a culture are leaders. We have let too much go unchallenged. Too many lies have spread in the face of inaction, inaction that's come as the result of fear or wanting to be polite.
No more.
You are the last line of defense. Every person is the last line of defense, and we have to think about it that way. Don't bite your tongue. Don't tremble. Don't go along with the little lies. Be the skunk at the garden party. Speak up, break the wall of lies, and let nothing go unchallenged. Our enemy's failure is not assured, and there is no cavalry coming. We are the cavalry, and our civilization depends on us
Now I'm gonna close with maybe something unusual for a Federalist Society lecture, but it's a very, very rare thing for me to not be sitting at a Shabbat dinner table on a Friday night as the sun sets. So I hope you'll let me close with a little bit of Torah
Tomorrow, in every synagogue around the world, we'll read the portion of the Torah where Abraham, Avraham's wife, Sarah, dies at the ripe old age of 127. We read in the Bible that she died in Kiryat Arba, now Hebron, or Hevron, in the land of Canaan. And we read that when she does, as the Bible says, Abraham proceeded to mourn for Sarah and to bewail her. And the very next verse goes like this. Then Abraham rose from beside his dead and spoke to the Hittites, saying, I am a resident alien among you. Sell me a burial site among you so that I may remove my dead for burial. So that's the first thing he does. He buys a plot of land to bury Sarah. And the second thing he does is that he goes to find a wife for his son, Isaac. The late, great, holy man, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, who I was blessed to know, tells us this about the sequence of events. Abraham heard the future calling to him. Sarah had died. Isaac was unmarried. Abraham had neither land nor grandchildren. He did not cry out in anger or anguish to God. Instead, he heard the still, small voice saying, the next step depends on you. You must create a future that I will fill with my spirit. That is how Abraham survived the shock and the grief, writes Rabbi Sacks. This is how generations of Jews before me have survived. This is how every civilization survives.
I am so honored, as I said before, to be here speaking in this place in honor of someone who stood up courageously for all the things that mattered most and who was murdered by the enemies that we are fighting still today. Her memory is a blessing for me. There is another phrase, though, that traditional Jews invoke when speaking of someone who has been murdered, and that is, Hashem yikom dama. May God avenge her death. Amen. We, human beings, leave vengeance in the hands of God, but fighting, fighting is for all of us, especially when there is something so precious worth fighting for.
Ted once said of Barbara that Barbara was Barbara because America, unlike any place in the world,gave her the space, freedom, oxygen, encouragement, and inspiration to be whatever she wanted to be. There is no place like this country. There is no second America for us to run to if this one fails. So get up, get up and fight for our future. This is the fight of and for our lives.
