A Caste of Saints: The Jewish Elites Who Turned on Israel, and Why the Line Isn't Hard to See | With Benjamin Kerstein - The Honest Take | Lyssna här

The day after 9/11, Benjamin Kerstein sat in a political science class at Boston University while his professor explained why America deserved what it got. Then the professor wrote ISRAEL in capital letters on the blackboard, pointed at it and said, "The cause." Kerstein argued with him, civilly, and got nowhere: "His answers to me were all, well, I'm just criticizing Israeli policy." He never took another college class in America. He went to study at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheva instead, and he stayed for twenty years.

That isn't where he started. He grew up in Boston in a very liberal Reform home, and by the end of high school he was openly telling people that Israel had no right to exist. The second intifada broke that. He watched Yasser Arafat turn down peace and turn to violence, and he watched everyone around him blame Israel anyway. As he writes in his new book, it was Arafat who made him a Zionist.

Jews of Privilege: Elites, Anti-Zionists, and Our Secret Civil War is half memoir and half argument. The argument is that the Jews running interference for today's antisemitism aren't just a faction of the left. They're a class: the ideological heirs of an old, assimilated Jewish upper class that dismissed Herzl, while Zionism has always been "the movement of the Jewish masses." He names names, from Peter Beinart and Ben Rhodes to Norman Finkelstein and Richard Falk, and he says the line between them and Jews who criticize Israeli policy isn't hard to find: "The tell is the hate." Do they know they're being used? "I think they genuinely believe that they are a caste of saints."

Beersheva taught him what his bubble hadn't. He met Mizrahi Jews he didn't know existed growing up, Russian immigrants who had "gone through unmitigated hell" to get to Israel, leftist professors who wanted to change Israel but never hated it, and a Holocaust survivor in his nineties who told him his life story in a doctor's waiting room: a death march, liberation, and then 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973 in uniform. The Jews of Privilege, he says, talk about ideals. Israelis live with "the horrors of life."

Can anyone who has crossed the line be brought back? "If I can be converted, anybody can." He won't read them out of the Jewish people, but he won't debate anyone who denies Israel's right to exist. For the students in between, he'd open with a question: "Do you realize what you're giving up?" His answer is to teach the next generation what he wasn't taught, from Ahad Ha'am to the poets and philosophers of the Jewish tradition, and to protect the refuge Herzl wore himself out trying to build.

Also in this episode: why his father joined the U.S. Army; Stefan Zweig at Herzl's funeral; the parvenu who adopts the elite's morality to be accepted; how the Red-Green Alliance pulls in Jews who think of themselves as universalists; Benny Morris and the leftist teachers who never hated Israel; whether the Jews of Privilege would convert under an Inquisition; Einat Wilf's Teaching Zionism; and the Z3 Institute's idea of "Zionism 3.0."

CHAPTERS
00:00 Cold open: "A caste of saints"
00:18 Introducing Benjamin Kerstein
03:15 "Israel had no right to exist": a Boston Reform upbringing
05:20 The second intifada and a red line
07:50 No connection to Israel, and a father in the Army
09:26 The Oslo years and Arafat's choice
11:06 Who are the Jews of privilege?
13:25 The Ostjuden and a movement of the masses
14:11 Stefan Zweig at Herzl's funeral
15:36 Herzl's choice and the Dreyfus case
17:26 Where's the line? "The tell is the hate"
21:08 IfNotNow, JVP and young Jews: myopia or malice?
25:04 The Jews who stayed in Europe, and TikTok University
27:03 Ahad Ha'am and what assimilation gives up
28:34 The day after 9/11 at Boston University
31:26 Why Beersheva
33:56 Mizrahim, Russian immigrants and the refuseniks
34:57 A Holocaust survivor in a doctor's waiting room
35:39 Leftist teachers who didn't hate Israel
37:59 Benny Morris and intellectual courage
40:10 "The horrors of life"
42:31 Four wars and a number on his arm
43:39 Soros, Sanders and the ideology of privilege
44:56 The parvenu
46:57 The Red-Green Alliance
50:50 Useful idiots, or a caste of saints?
52:56 Ben M. Freeman and "out of the tent"
55:30 Can they be brought back? "If I can be converted, anybody can"
57:46 Einat Wilf's Teaching Zionism
58:31 Who he will and won't debate
1:00:58 "Do you realize what you're giving up?"
1:02:33 The Inquisition question: would American Jews stay Jewish?
1:05:28 A place to go
1:06:48 What Herzl would grieve
1:07:22 The Z3 Institute and "Zionism 3.0"
1:08:40 Closing thoughts

BENJAMIN KERSTEIN No Delusions, No Despair (Substack): https://benjaminkerstein.substack.com/ Jews of Privilege: Elites, Anti-Zionists, and Our Secret Civil War, foreword by Ben M. Freeman (Wicked Son/Post Hill Press, 2026): https://posthillpress.com/book/jews-of-privilege-elites-anti-zionists-and-our-secret-civil-war The Z3 Institute: https://www.z3project.org/z3-institute

REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE Einat Wilf, Teaching Zionism: Revelations from a Skeptical Classroom: https://www.target.com/p/teaching-zionism-by-einat-wilf-benjamin-kerstein-paperback/-/A-1011686364

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