Thank you so much for having me on.

Sure. Derek and I started at a very small liberal arts school at the same time. There were about 800 students in the entire school across all 4 years. To some extent, everybody knew everybody, because it was so small. Not only that, Derek lived right downstairs from me in the dormitory, because the dormitory doors actually opened to the outside. I could see his front door every time I opened my door. I should add, at this point, I had absolutely no idea about his background or his ideology or political views. The first time we really connected was not about politics or race or religion or anything like that. It was actually about music. He was and still is a very talented guitar player, and he used to sometimes sit in common area spaces of the dorms and play old country and Western songs on his guitar. I like that kind of music. So sometimes, I would sing along poorly to the songs he would play. That way, we got to know each other a little bit. We weren't close, but we got to know each other. We were in a history class together and shared notes. So we had a few interactions without me ever having any idea about his worldview.

Absolutely. As I mentioned, in the fall semester of our first year at school, not only did I not have any idea, but no one in the school had any idea about his views, because he was intentionally keeping them hidden for reasons you can probably guess. His second semester, he actually studied abroad in Germany. While he was there, another student at the school was researching white nationalism and stumbled upon his picture. Now, Derek, has long red hair that stands out in the crowd, and everyone sort of knew everyone at the school. The student very quickly put two and two together and realized that Derek Black was none other than this guy in the photographs, who was being groomed to be the next leader in the white nationalist movement. That was a complete shock, not only to me but to everyone at the school.

The school was generally a very liberal place and very grounded in ideas of social justice. The notion that someone was a student there and had been a student there without people even realizing it, promoting this kind of an ideology of hatred and separatism came as a total shock and was virtually the only topic of campus gossip for quite a while. Derek, as I mentioned, was studying abroad, and in some sense, couldn't respond when that happened because he was in Europe. There was a very open question of whether he would even come back, because he was trying to keep it secret when he was there, and he had been exposed. He was now something of a pariah at the school. At first, we didn't even know whether he will come back to the school or transfer or do something else. In fact, I knew several people who had been planning to be roommates with him in that coming fall semester. Around the time the semester was about to start, they told me that he was no longer going to be rooming with them. I wasn't sure exactly what was going on. I wasn't sure if it was because he was no longer going to be attending the school, I wasn't sure if he felt unsafe living on campus, because a lot of people were, frankly, very upset with him or what the background of the story was.

I didn't know him well. I wasn't close friends with him, but I did have his phone number because of our prior interactions. So I asked him if he needed a place to stay, didn't want him to be homeless, but he told me he had found a place safely enough off-campus where he felt he could live without being harassed. I started thinking about how our lives are so totally different. My life has been shaped dramatically by my parents. I don't think I would have many of the views that I have today without the influence of my parents; and conversely, if I had had his parents, who are leaders in the white nationalist world. His father ran the Klan at one point founded a website called Stormfront, which is the largest and certainly the first white nationalist website. His mother used to be married to a guy named David Duke, who is probably the most famous racist in America. David Duke was also Derek's godfather. The family is very close. Growing up in that kind of environment, it could very easily see how I would have been shaped. I could imagine how Derek might have been shaped, largely involuntarily because you were surrounded by that all the time by people who you love and care about. They are your family, after all, even if they may express views, ideologies that we find abhorrent.

I was in an interesting position because it was a very small school, I was the only observant Jew there. And I have been hosting dinners every Friday night, pretty much since I arrived at the school for Sabbath. It was open to anyone who wanted to come Jewish, not Jewish, observant, atheist, whoever wanted to come was more than welcome. I built this from originally with just myself, then myself and a close friend and eventually 8, 9 people could be coming on a weekly basis. It did not seem like a lot at the time, but a pretty big accomplishment. I had this thing going, and I thought to myself, this may be the only time that Derek has a chance to actually interact with some of the groups of people that his ideology despises. On a personal level, growing up in that environment with his parents, you probably didn't have a lot of black people coming over to the house or didn't have a lot of Jewish people coming over to the house. Not only that, but once he graduates, he is going to be back enmeshed in that world, because he was taking a very active role in leading that world and promoting those ideas. So he would be back in that environment and would probably never have another opportunity to form personal bonds with these kinds of people, Jews and people of color and so on.

Together with a friend of mine, we decided to invite Derek to join us for one of those Sabbath dinners. The other people who were coming to those dinners were informed ahead of time. We didn't want a bit of a surprise to have white nationalists show up unexpectedly, and many of them were unhappy with that. They felt like I could choose. It was either going to be them or him. And if he was going to come, they would just stay home. But I felt like the opportunity was in many ways too good to pass up, that it was an opportunity to maybe influence someone's life in a very positive direction and maybe not just one person, but a whole movement of people who he is influencing in turn. So, I informed them that they're always welcome to come whenever they want. They are always welcome back, but I am going to do what I think is right and invite Derek to come. Derek started coming. He came not only for one week, but the next week and the following week and he came for about 2 years.

First of all, there was no intention to reform someone's thinking, because I think that that gives me way too much agency. At the end of the day, if a person wants to change, it's up to them. No one can force someone else to think differently or transform in any way. The most I could hope for would be a channel to help Derek to change. But it certainly wasn't a case where I was trying to bamboozle him or trick him or try to get him to abandon his prior ideology by powers of persuasion. In particular, you asked about topics of conversation. Before he came to that first Sabbath dinner, I told all the prospective attendees that there was to be no broaching of the topic of white nationalism. I didn't want people to bring up race, religion, hate, etc., because Derek has set his entire life, up to that point, defending his ideology. None of us have spent our entire lives attacking that ideology. There is no five-second sound bite that would cause Derek to abandon his very firmly held views. I'm sure that you may have many views that everyone may not be shared by everyone, but there is nothing I can say in two sentences or two minutes or even two hours that would cause you to throw that out the window. Not only that, I felt like if people started going down that route, confronting him about his views, that he would put up his armor, become very defensive, and he would walk out of the room and never come back. Then the opportunity to form human connections would be gone and possibly gone forever. And so, for the 2 years that he was coming to these dinners week after week, and the time spent together overtime outside of those dinners as well, we never once broached the topic of white nationalism.

I think there are two parts to that question, and I'll answer them in turn. The first part is about non-attachment. I think that there is a parable that I heard a lot growing up, and it stuck with me, and I thought about it a lot even at that time. The parable goes, there was once a rich prince, and he was born into a palace. The palace had of all sorts of pleasures, anything you could think of. In the front of the palace, there was an enormous boulder. Over time, the prince gets a little older, and as often happens, he slowly starts to find some of these physical pleasures a little less satisfying than he once did, and starts to wonder if there is something more that he should be doing with his life. So he prays, and much to his surprise, God answers him. He asked God what I should be doing with my life. He says, "Your job is to push that boulder". And of course, many people pray, but it's not so often that we have God speaking right back to us. He is so excited. He goes out, and he pushes and pushes, and sweat is dripping from his brow. He's so enthusiastic. But, of course, the boulder is an enormous boulder. He is a normal person. The boulder doesn't move. The next day he gets up, the first thing he does is he runs and pushes as much as he possibly can. He was so excited. But again, the boulder doesn't move. Gradually, over time, his enthusiasm wanes, until eventually, he wakes up in the morning, he puts his pinkie on the boulder and he goes about whatever pleasures he was going to do that day anyway. As things go, Prince eventually gets old and he passes away and he reaches the upper world. And God tells him, you failed. The prince says, "What do you mean, I pushed that boulder so many hours and it didn't budge even an inch?" And God says, "I never told you to move the rock. I told you to push the rock." So I think that got me too attached to whether my actions are the ones that cause some consequence. Maybe my actions don't see a consequence, but because of the effort that I put in someone else, maybe across the world has a transformation. So there is no wasted energy as long as you are really coming from the right place.

I would say it's very central to Kabbalistic thought than Jewish thought. Yeah, I think so. I'm sure that everyone is entitled to their own opinions. But I grew up in the Kabbalah Center, and was grounded in those teachings. That was something that I felt very strongly then. It's something I continue to feel strongly now. I would say that I would feel strongly about that, even if this story had a different ending. Even if the story didn't end with Derek leaving the white nationalist movement, I wouldn't regret what I did.

You had an amazing topic, which is the commonalities between human beings. It sometimes shocks people that Derek and I were able to have conversations about topics outside of white nationalism. I will admit that the first time he came over, it was probably a little awkward because neither of us knew for sure what to expect, now that the cat was out of the bag, about his views. Even though I didn't tell him or talk about his views with him, he definitely knew that I knew because everyone knew at that point. We actually found that we had an enormous amount in common. We had an enormous shared interest in music, history and religion. We were both very family-oriented. In many ways, we had a lot in common. Of course, we had one very big difference. But it was enough in common to form human connections as opposed to just being casual acquaintances in perpetuity.

I think that it's critical to my thinking that everyone is entitled to human dignity. Even someone endorsing and supporting horrible ideologies, and I don't want to mince any words and leave some doubt about where I stand. No, I think white nationalism is a very destructive ideology. But the people supporting that ideology are human beings just like us. One challenge that we often have in schools is to teach students about periods in history that feature horrible behavior by human beings. The Nazi regime, for example. The students leave with the message too often that the reason that Nazis did that was because they were horrible people, they were almost monsters. And we're not surprised that monsters do horrible things. If you watched Lord of the Rings, you're not surprised that the Orcs aren't such nice people. They have no control over it. They're just born that way. But human beings who did these horrible acts in the 1930s and 1940s, many of them loved their families, were active in their communities, were active in their churches. Nevertheless, they went down a road that led to them performing some of the worst atrocities in human history. So we have to look at ourselves and ask, "Are we really similar to them?" It turns out we are very simple in many ways, and we have to be very careful then because if they were so different from us, we could be assured. Of course, we would never do such things. But if they're similar to us, we can't feel that comfortable. We have to be constantly thinking about where we might be going astray.

Before I answer that, just want to say that I don't want to oversell myself in say it was complete non-attachment. I was certainly not expecting any great change after one dinner. But to be frank, after months and years went by, it became very frustrating, and it became very difficult to continue. There were people who were going to those dinners that were very supportive at the beginning and who, by the end, were nowhere to be found for that very reason. It was very challenging to keep going even when it seemed like nothing was changing at all or maybe even changing in the wrong direction. It takes a certain perseverance in these kind of situations that goes beyond logic sometimes. As far as the story, I think that there are really three key components to the eventual transformation.

One, we've talked about it at some length, forming human connections with myself especially, and to some extent also other people of color or Jewish people or other people who are not part of that white protestant ethos that white nationalism supports and sort of denigrates everything else. But that wasn't the only part either. You mentioned Allison Gornick, who is both in the Goldman Sachs video and one of the photographs earlier. She played an instrumental role. She was one of my roommates. I had a four-bedroom apartment on the campus, and she was one of my roommates. She had been coming to these dinners for the year and a half. And then, as soon as Derrick started coming, she wanted nothing to do with it. It was in her living room. She would stay in her room. She didn't want anything to do with it.

But, over time, without going into all of the nitty-gritty, you can read the book, it has the story there, but she started coming out and got to know Derek. She was a student in psychology. She is actually doing her residency now at Kennedy Krieger and Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. She took a tremendous amount of effort and labor in understanding why he believed the things he believed.

Derek was always a very smart guy. It wasn't that he thought white nationalism was true only because his parents told him it was so. He said, oh, I have these studies A, B and C that shows whatever he thought they showed about, let's say, genetic differences in IQ scores or things of that nature. He also wanted to be the best white nationalist possible. So if she came to him and said this methodology is a problem for these reasons, he was eager to learn because he thought there was such an abundance of evidence to support his ideology that he didn't want to diminish his credibility by using bad evidence. They became closer over time and continued having these discussions.

Of course, as with many belief systems, if you take out one leg from a table with a thousand legs, the table is just as sturdy as it ever was. But eventually, you take enough legs away, and the whole edifice collapses. That was an integral part of the thing, transforming on an intellectual level why he thought the things that he was supporting were correct. Then there was a third piece, which was also very important, which sometimes gets overlooked. Now, during that first semester at the school when he was there but no one knew about his background, so he had been able to have more normal interactions with the other students. He got to respect many of them. And suddenly, when he comes back on the campus, these people who had grown to respect, who he thought were extremely intelligent people were outspoken in saying that his ideology was not only intellectually wrong, but it was harming people in the community itself, that there are people in that community whose lives were made worse by his behavior, whose lives in some cases, maybe threatened by the people who he was riling up with his talks and ideology.

That was very different from just the anonymous hate mail that he'd gotten in his youth, because these were people who he knew, and in many cases, people he liked who were saying these things. That forced him in many ways to be more introspective than he would ordinarily have been. When you put those three components together, you have a pretty powerful combination. Again, it wasn't instantaneous. This was in the fall of 2011. Derek didn't renounce white nationalism until the spring of 2013. So there was an extended period of time, but I think that if you took any one of those three pieces away, the story would have had a very different ending.

Sometimes people say to me, "I think your story is so great. But I don't know any white nationalists. I don't have any dinner parties. I don't really see how I can take anything from the story in a practical way." But I think that that misses the point. It's not about doing one particular action. There's no blueprint for these kinds of things. But if we see opportunities in our lives to do things that will make a difference in the world, we have to seize it. We can't let it pass us by and hope someone else will take up the charge. We have a personal responsibility.

I was having people over as I mentioned. I was the only observant Jew. There were some other Jewish people. There were also non-Jewish people of both religious persuasion and atheists. I would pray only by myself before dinner. At the beginning of the dinner, I would do a prayer called the Kiddush, which is a blessing over wine and then a blessing called HaMotzi over bread. So there were a couple of prayers that were part of the dinner, but it was less the group participation. But everyone was very respectful during those services. It's easier to be respectful during a brief service.

If you look at our body and you say to the liver, you're so much less important than the heart or the brains, the whole body will shut down, the whole thing will stop working. There is tremendous diversity within every single human body, and some parts may think that it's less important or more important, but the whole thing is a cohesive whole. Just because someone thinks differently than me or looks different than me or is from a different place than me or what have you, it doesn't mean that they are not just as valuable.

A central part of my thinking is that everyone is created in the image and the same God that our souls are sparks of that creator. As a result, we have to treat everyone with dignity. To not do that is insulting God. Because, I'm insulting the creation. Unfortunately, religious persuasion, spiritual persuasion is no surefire recipe for being a better person. There are plenty of people who become religious and are worse off for it. And there are plenty of people who become religious and use it to become amazing spiritual sharing people. Nothing is a magic bullet. Things need work. If we just go into a situation and think, whoever I am, whether I come from a background as a religious Jew or I come from a background as an atheist, from some other place or wherever, I cannot expect that I will be my ultimate self or as good as I possibly can be, without really working at it and sometimes going to uncomfortable places outside of my comfort zone to do so.

I think that we often define ourselves by what we're opposed to, what we dislike, and what we hate. There was a joke that a Jewish person was stranded on a desert island. There were no people on the island, but there were trees and food. He realized over some time that he is not going to be rescued. He builds the whole village for himself. Ten years later, a ship was going by and they see a fire. It's amazing. This guy has built a whole village for himself. And they asked him, "Sir, what is this building here?" He said, "That's my house. That's where I sleep." And they said, "What's this building here?" He said, "That's my synagogue. That's where I pray every Saturday." They said "What's that building there?" He said, "That's the synagogue I would never go to."

People often define themselves in these ways. How am I better than other people, how I oppose other things? But if everything starts from the same seed, the same creator, even though we all are different and have our own beliefs and views on personalities, we have a common route. Not only that, but there are things that are harmful in the world.

Let's use the example of white nationalism because it's prudent to the story. Not Certainly, everyone's views are equal and equally valid. White nationalism causes tremendous pain for many people in this country and around the world. But to see beyond someone's ideology and see who they are as a human being, I think, is the first step to being able actually to affect any kind of transformation. Because if I just come and want to show how right I am and how wrong the other person is, then I can shout very loudly, and maybe I will feel good about myself because I think I'm such a tough guy and a defender of what's right in the world. But if I care about the actual outcome, maybe I've done exactly the opposite. Maybe what I have really done is push the other person further and further into their existing views, which is the exact opposite of what the goal was. I have to take my ego out of the equation and instead of asking what can I do to make myself look good for the people on my side, how I can I actually try to make this world a better place where more people treat each other with human dignity.

We say personality. I'm certainly not suggesting that we should become automatons, clones of each other. We all have our unique skills and our unique attributes and our unique opportunities. We have to be open, though, taking to the universe to see where we can best apply the skills that we have and the opportunities that we have to make the world a better place.

Harkening back to what I said earlier, I would draw a huge distinction between embracing people and embracing ideologies. I think that we can look at people as human beings, even if they have ideologies that maybe we oppose, and not only oppose, but find abhorrent maybe. It's not saying that white nationalism is okay. In fact, quite the opposite. I think it is an incredibly destructive force, and we shouldn't be promoting it. But when we look at white nationalists, the people who support white nationalism actively and even more so, people who agree with some parts of white nationalism implicitly, but who are not activists, but they are part of many people who share many common beliefs, by attacking them as human beings and denying their human dignity, not only are we pushing them further and further away from the rest of us and probably further into the ideology we are opposing, but we, in some sense, give way and become more like the thing that we're trying to oppose.

If the thing that we dislike about white nationalism is how it dehumanizes people who are not white and often not male and not of a very particular mindset, it turns out it's a pretty narrow list of people that they are fond of. Not only opposing it often causes a structural change to make it very painful and difficult for them to advance in society and live their lives, sometimes even with violence. We have to look at our actions. In some ways, we become similar and start thinking about other people as less than human—even our ideological opponents. Now, there's another side of it, though, which I think is worth bringing up in this context. Which is, I believe, very pertinent to the conversations we're having across the United States and in many cases across the world right now, are about race in the way that racism has, unfortunately, over centuries, seeped into many people's natural way of thinking. Everybody's naturally thinking is that the sun should rise in the east.

There is an amazing study that was done many years ago called the Asch Conformity Experiment. It's really remarkable. What the experimenter did was, he takes one subject and several other people, but unbeknownst to the subject, they're all in cahoots with the experimenter. And he shows them all three lines and one line. The three lines are of different lengths, one of which matches the standalone line, and the other two are much different, one is much longer, one is much shorter. He goes around he asks, which of these lines matches the other line? The person who was really the subject is arranged to go last. What do the first people do? They give the wrong answer. By the time it comes to the subject, everyone has given the wrong answer. But the subject with his own two eyes, could very easily see the correct answer. And amazingly, he almost always picks the wrong answer because he wants to conform with everybody else before him. But there's also an amazing permutation of this experiment, which is if you have exactly the same setup, but one of those prior answers gives the right answer and someone breaks from the pattern of conformity, suddenly the whole power of that conformity is gone and the subject will give the right answer.

I think it's often possible when we're having casual interactions with people. As you said, sometimes there are sides of us that we don't want to bring up that we're embarrassed about, or we may be averse to confrontation, and we'll let things go. If it seem as though the consensus is really something that many of us disagree with, I think we have to take it upon ourselves to be willing to be the ones who break that pattern of conformity. And in some cases, say exactly what we think, even when it may not be perceived as being popular. I think that as soon as you do that, you enable a whole host of other people to do the same thing, and you can see that so many times when movements start with just one person or one small action catalyzes an entire region and entire continent. I think that's a power which is, again, in many ways beyond logic.

I think that you touched on something, which I think is very critical. Many people living in the south have very strong views about the Confederate flag, statues and so on. One thing that's remarkable to me is how, partially through the very prevalent de facto segregation that exists in American society, it's hard to understand the other side's perspectives. Not only that, it doesn't seem like there is a tremendous effort to do so, especially coming from the other side. In other words, I think that there are many people supporting the flying of the Confederate flag and so on, who make no effort to understand what it means to other people. Because as you said, maybe there is an understanding of how they come to their conclusions about the flag. But conversely, of course, imagine if your ancestors were enslaved, put in bondage, brought across ocean in unfathomably inhuman conditions and how a perpetual reminder and almost the glorification of that might make you feel? I'm not saying which side is right or wrong. I think that there's a message that goes beyond this particular case, which may be more universal and generalizable. When we associate with people just like ourselves, we become enmeshed in echo chambers, and unfortunately, I think social media has aggravated that problem, because not only I am usually friends with people who think and feel the same way that I do, but I can even block you. I can ignore certain ones. And so we end up seeing the same thing again and again. We watched TV channels which tell us the same thing again and again. And we get riled up in a way that makes it seem like anyone who thinks differently from us, it's not just different, but they have negative motives.

You can see politicians and people talking about politics so often, unfortunately. They talk about how the other party is trying to destroy America or destroy the world. I think there are many legitimate differences of opinion in, which course of action is correct in all sorts of situations, political situations, etc. But when you start to dehumanize other people, it opens the door to all sorts of horrible things, going back to what I said before about what can enable ordinary human beings to behave like monsters. One of the most unifying themes is dehumanization. The Nazis, way before they started putting Jews into gas chambers, started promoting the idea that Jews were not human beings. They were vermin. They were trying to suck the life out of human beings. And you saw in the south and many places outside of the south in America. Racial minorities, especially black people, were treated barely better than dogs. I should add, not from a position of hate in the way that you or I might think that you hate your ex-wife, but it is just natural that the order of society is like that. There is a caste system in some sense.

When we start doing that, we can explain why all sorts of horrible actions towards the other person. Because, just like I'm not upset when I kill a fly, and I'd be horrified to think that I just hurt, much less kill another human being. It's an enormous gulf to the extent that we are doing things that dehumanize other people, we open the door to unbelievable tragedies. Look at what's going on in Western China right now. You have a million Uyghurs in concentration camps.

Sure. Thank you. It's been a very great privilege to be on and I appreciate that. As a former student, I am appreciative of everything you've done for me in the past as well. I think we've covered a lot of stuff on this talk. I think the recurring theme, and I'll repeat it because it's so essential to have it ingrained in all of our minds, is that even if we think that the idea of loving other people as we love ourselves is beyond us, we have no excuse not to treat other people with human dignity. If there is ever a point in our lives where we feel, or we find ourselves trying to convince ourselves that we have such an excuse that this person is an exceptional person, because what they're doing puts them outside of the pale of humanity, it is something we have to reflect deeply upon. The other point I'd like to make is that I mentioned my religious upbringing being very influential on me. The other thing that was very influential was my mother. My mother was an alcoholic. She became sober when I was maybe seven or eight. I used to go with her to open meetings in AA. Open meetings are meetings you can attend even if you are not an alcoholic.

I used to go with her when I was in elementary school, middle school. I met people there who had been in incredibly dark places in their lives. I knew one man who had run over his son in the driveway while drunk, killing him. Incredibly dark experiences that are almost impossible to fathom. And yet, so many of these people had transformed their lives, had gone from being destructive tornadoes to becoming beacons of light, making sure that other people don't have to experience the same chaos and suffering that they have experienced, becoming sponsors to others and so on. Despite having been in those dark places, no one is beyond the point of redemption.

Thank you very much.