My Interview with Judge Altman on Anti-Semitism, Israel, and Judging

Over the past three years, the rise of anti-semitism has come as a surprise to many. It shouldn’t have. The groundwork for this resurgence of the oldest hatred has been laid by elite institutions for generations. October 7, 2023, was merely the spark that rekindled the conflagration.

We all owe a debt of gratitude to Judge Roy K. Altman (SDTX) who has made it his mission to teach the world, and the legal profession in particular, about the scourge of antisemitism.

Judge Altman was kind enough to answer some of my questions, which are now published in Civitas Outlook.

Here is an exchange about the false dichotomy between anti-semitism and anti-zionism.

JB: There is a common argument: the protestors are not anti-Semitic, they are anti-Zionist. How would you explain the distinction between these concepts?

RA: There is no distinction. In the 1800s, there was Jew hatred that was all over Europe. It was very prevalent, and it was uncomfortable for much of the ruling class. They said, “The Jews are bad but we don’t want violence in our society. We’ve moved past that, we’re much more sophisticated than that.”

Wilhelm Marr came up with the idea of giving Jew hatred a different name, so that it would seem more anodyne, less violent, and less hateful than it was. He came up with this idea of anti-Semitism. It was more sophisticated, it was intellectually based, and it wasn’t inappropriate, because it wasn’t Jew hatred. Anti-semitism wasn’t violence based on race; it was based on intellectual and philosophical disputes about a people and the people’s role in the broader society.

Well, we’re just doing the same thing over again now. Anti-Semitism over time became untenable because the Holocaust showed that, as anodyne as you wanted to make it, and as intellectual as you wanted to make antisemitism seem, ultimately antisemitism was just a word that came to represent the Jew hatred that had always existed and percolated in society. The Holocaust brought to the fore just how violent that Jew hatred, whether it’s called antisemitism or something else, can really be.

Now we’ve come up with a new word. We’re not really talking about Jew hatred; we’re not really talking about antisemitism. Let’s give it a new intellectual name, anti-Zionism. It’s just hatred of Zionists, not Jews. In fifty years, once it becomes clear that anti-Zionism, like anti-Semitism, led to the rape and murder of hundreds or thousands or millions of Jews, then we’re going to come up with a different word, right? Because we’re going to say, okay, yeah, we realize anti-Zionism also brought the violence of Jew hatred to the fore; let’s call it something else, maybe we’ll call it anti-Abrahamism, or whatever, but again, it’s just the same thing. You’re putting lipstick on a pig. You’re calling it a word that’s new, that to your mind is an anodyne word, an innocuous word to label something that we all know is an ancient hatred.

The fact of the matter is that over fifty percent of the world’s Jews live in Israel, and about ninety percent of the world’s Jews view Zionism and the existence of the state of Israel as an integral part of their Jewish identity. So, as a practical matter, the two things are co-extensive. The Jews who are not Zionists, who are anti-Zionist, are a tiny fraction of the population, even though they have an outsized voice in our academic institutions. As a practical matter, to hate Zionists is to hate Jews. As a matter of law, we don’t allow you to say in a jury selection process, “I’m going to exclude all the people with dreadlocks and who like a certain kind of music.” We’re not going to allow you to do that, because we know that’s a proxy for black people, and we’re not going to allow you to exclude black people on the ground that you used a different proxy, a different word.

Well, here we’re doing the same thing; we’re saying we’re going to exclude from our civic organizations, from our literary clubs, we’re going to block from our campus protests, our rallies, and our classrooms people who are ninety percent of whom we know are Jewish. That doesn’t work. It doesn’t work with black people, it doesn’t work with any other group of people, and it cannot work with Jewish people.

And here is an explanation of why he chose to write his new book, Israel on Trial.

RA: I wrote the book not as a judge, but as an American who loves this country. I honestly believe that the country is built on our ability to tell truth from fiction. Alexis de Tocqueville came in the 1830s, and he looked around. He said it’s not just that they have these institutions; it’s that they’ve built a virtuous populace. By being virtuous, they can be free. The essence of being virtuous and free was this ability to make the right choices. The government wasn’t going to tell us which choices to make, but it trusted us to make choices that were beneficial to the whole. We had all kinds of training grounds for practicing how to be a good, free, and virtuous people. One of those, of course, was the jury system.

People say to me all the time, “Oh, juries don’t know what they’re talking about; they don’t know antitrust law; they don’t know patent law. How are they going to make these important decisions for our society?” First, I think they’re wrong. I think juries get it right much more often than you would think. Second, that also misses part of the point of why the jury system is important. The jury system isn’t just an algorithm for getting to what is “the right answer.” The jury system was a real-life practice ground, a training ground for us to become a free people. It taught us how to make important and momentous decisions for ourselves in some of the most important cases and disputes in our society.

What happened after October 7 in our sacred institutions, at our universities, in our Western media outlets, in our international NGOs and nonprofits, is that we completely forgot the ways that we had learned to tell truth from fiction. We had begun to buy lies that were being pushed on us by our geostrategic adversaries, not just Hamas, obviously, but the Muslim Brotherhood through Al Jazeera, the Chinese Communist Party through TikTok, and other channels.

I took it upon myself to travel around the country to figure out how this is happening to us. In the course of those travels, I had thousands of conversations, many of them with people who see the world, frankly, differently than I do, but I came to recognize that their entire debate about Israel, and really the entire debate about America and its relationship with Israel, was driven by six main claims that people believe about the Jewish state. I have two pieces of good news: one, they’re all false, and two, they’re all, at their core, legal claims.

Read the whole interview and buy the book.