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In a frenzied media cycle, Identity/Crisis creates better conversations about the issues facing contemporary Jewish life. Host Yehuda Kurtzer, president of the Shalom Hartman Institute, talks with leading thinkers to unpack current events affecting Jewish communities in North America, Israel, and around the world, revealing the core Jewish values underlying the issues that matter most to you.

A More Perfect Union Transcript

Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.
Yehuda: Hi everyone, welcome to Identity/Crisis, a podcast from the Shalom Hartman Institute creating better conversations about the major issues facing contemporary Jewish life. I’m Yehuda Kurtzer, we’re recording on Wednesday, September 18th, 2024.

So let’s say there’s a big soccer game today. It’s a really important game, a consequential game between two teams that are long-time rivals, teams that have been competing for decades with equally rabid fan bases in both of their home cities. The winner moves on to the playoffs and the loser goes home.

Let’s play this out in the metaverse with two possible scenarios. In scenario one, the game is chippy and violent. The teams foul each other throughout the game, sometimes in ways that are visible to the officials, sometimes when the officials aren’t looking. A number of key players sustain injuries from the foul play. Meanwhile, those same officials make a whole series of questionable calls throughout the game. The fans howling that it almost seems like the game is rigged by the time the dust clears. Team A has won the game decisively.

In scenario two, the game is clean and fair. It’s well-contested throughout. The officials are on top of things. There very few fouls. Nobody gets hurt. Team B squeaks by with a clean victory in a close game. The teams exit the field shaking hands.

Now let’s ask which of those scenarios would we prefer. It depends a lot about who we are in the story. If I’m a casual fan watching the game, I usually do this at home, put on a sports game while folding laundry. I may not care much about the outcome of the game. I’d much rather watch, therefore, the clean and fair game. Sports at its best. And I want to watch good, clean play.

If I’m a middle school soccer coach watching the game with my players. I definitely want them to see that second game too. I want them to learn how to play the game correctly, the way that it’s supposed to look.

But if I’m a superfan of Team A, even if I don’t like that my team commits dirty fouls, even if I feel that sometimes the officials might be biased towards my team, I will choose that victory, dirty, chippy victory every time. And let’s say I’m a player on Team A. Well, I also might have financial incentives to win. My reputation is on the line and I’m really competitive because I’m a professional athlete. In theory, I know it’s not the right way to play the game, but well, remember the last time we played when the other team played dirty? And we all know that winning is winning in sports, in war, in politics, and in other blood sports. Civility is lovely, but winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing.

Now, of course, this isn’t a podcast about soccer. It’s politics. I’m poking a little bit by doing an American elections podcast using the metaphor of soccer, a sport that Americans famously don’t like. But the stakes in a conversation about politics are way higher. Politics, especially here in America right now with our two-party system, oftentimes feels like competitive sports. We as voters see ourselves on teams. We have colors associated with our parties. We’re deeply passionate about our teams and there are winners and losers.

Unlike sports, the consequences are really substantial. On some issues, political elections can have life-and-death implications for real people. On other issues, a lot of people in our society perceive that there are life and death consequences, whether or not that’s actually true. So now which outcome do we prefer? A violent, unfair contest that we win, or a clean and fair contest in which we lose?

I’d venture to say that most people pushed to decide would choose to win. We may all know rationally that winning dirty in the short term is a long-term losing strategy. The game continues to deteriorate. Our team will probably lose worse the next time around. Meanwhile, your best players are getting injured. Meanwhile, our children are watching and learning terrible messages. But what choice do we have? Abortions on the ballot, the question of conditioning military aid to Israel, most of us would do what we need to do in order to win.

Adam Gopnik had a piece in a recent New Yorker about the perils of liberal thinkers and politicians who continue to persist amidst this moment of partisanship and polarization to abide by the rules and the norms of liberal democracy and to advocate for them even at the risk of losing. Think of Joe Biden’s refusal to the howling protests of many on his team, his refusal to stack the court to counteract Mitch McConnell’s shenanigans blocking President Obama’s appointments, which led to the total imbalance in the court today and possibly for decades. Biden’s strategy reflects what Gopnik describes as a liberal preference for good processes as a long-term investment over good outcomes. Good processes beat good outcomes. Maybe in the long run, but it doesn’t feel that way in the short run.

It’s not to say that liberals, who like processes, don’t have a vision for the good on issues and policies, but liberals tend to intertwine that vision for the good with a vision for the overarching framework of the society itself, its structures and its institutions that are meant to sustain or perpetuate that vision for the good.

Another way to describe that point is to say that it would be healthier in a good democracy to have a Supreme Court issuing five-four decisions all the time that tilt in alternating ways politically, rather than it would be to have nine-zero decisions decisively always in one direction. And that should be true even if it’s your side that’s always winning nine-nothing. But if you’re winning each time, what would be your incentive to change the rules?

Democracy in America is blood sport. Feels that way. Feels pretty clear to me that at least these days, maybe this has always been true, our political parties are vulnerable much more now to the desperation of winning at all costs than they are to a shared commitment to the rules. I personally think a lot of this can be traced back to Newt Gingrich in the early 1990s. I think Trump and his base are to blame for a lot of it too. And I think personally, I say this as a private individual, my own biases, that bad behavior in contemporary politics is worse on the Republican side than it is on the Democratic side.

But nobody is actually innocent. If you’re being honest, nobody’s innocent. Both parties in every state, depending where they have power, are actively trying to gerrymander congressional districts, creating a massive net loss for cultures of healthy democracy and debate. As is often the case, those that lose unfairly are more likely to try to win unfairly the next time around than to try to correct for the system’s failures. Around and around we go.

So what does it mean in a tense moment like this to try to advance the cause of American democracy itself? In the same week, President Trump stoked anti-democratic fear and hatred towards immigrants in Ohio and was subjected to his second assassination attempt. And both of those conversations are being exploited, oftentimes in bad faith, by members of both parties to expose the flaws and weaknesses of the other.

In a climate like this, where actually it is life and death for Haitian immigrants in Ohio and for the former president of the United States, in a time like this, how do you persuade a general public to spend more time on the rules when they seem less concerned about fair play, much more concerned about winning or losing.

I’m talking today to Aaron Dorfman, a friend and colleague and a longtime conversation partner with me on these very issues. Aaron is the founder and executive director of A More Perfect Union. It’s a great website. It’s jewishdemocracy.org. Don’t know how you got that, Aaron. Aaron’s work, inspiring, and I think you would probably admit sometimes quixotic, is to try to advance the cause of democratic culture, as a priority of the Jewish community, including efforts at trans-partisanship, bipartisanship, civics education, voting rights, all of these institutions and commitments, habits and behaviors that make for democratic culture and norms, especially in a moment like this when most of the Jewish community’s attention seems to be more focused on winning and losing than the rules of the game.

So, Aaron, first of all, thanks for coming on the show. I want to start with a hard question, how bad is it out there? How close are we to that soccer metaphor of bad play and good play? And what do you see as the climate in which those who are advocating for democracy are trying to do this work right now?

Aaron: Thanks, Yehuda. Pleasure to be here. And I appreciate the quixotic reference does sometimes feel like tilting at windmills. Look, I want to pick up on your soccer match reference and say that I think there’s the idea of a game, the idea of thinking about American democracy as a game is a really useful one. James Kars has a great book called Finite and Infinite Games and uses that construct to think about the way we do politics. A finite game is one that you only care about playing once, right? It’s a game where we play this game of chess, we play this soccer match, and we don’t have to think about the long-term implications of the game because the goal of the game is to win.

That works really well with a single soccer match. It works well with a single game of chess. But it doesn’t work well with a league or a season or a professional team that has to play in a league over a period of time. It certainly doesn’t work well in the context of politics. We’re involved in an infinite game, right? We’re still going to be here tomorrow. So are our political interlocutors and opponents. And so the focus on the rules is an essential piece of that puzzle. And the idea, as I think you just pointed out, that our team violating the rules this time might help us win the finite game, but it will erode the potential for fair games going forward.

So I think that’s a really important piece of this. To your question about how bad things are right now, look, we’ve faced really existential threats to our democracy in the 246-odd years we’ve had it. We had a civil war in this country that killed more Americans than any other political conflict we’ve had. We had Jim Crow, had a national flirtation with fascism in the 1930s, we had McCarthyism, we had an explosion of political violence in the 1960s, and we’ve made it through. Like, this is a remarkably resilient country and a remarkably resilient liberal democracy here.

That being said, I think things are pretty bad. We’ve got a very intense problem with toxic polarization, which I want to distinguish from regular polarization, which is a good thing, right? The idea that people disagree about really important problems is a source of health in a democracy, is source of health in a country. But the toxicity of our polarization has become, I think, really, really problematic, ad hominem attacks on political opponents, characterizations of our political opponents as existential threats and enemies of the state. Those things are really unhealthy for us.

The explosion of mis- and disinformation, which again, has often and always been a part of our political dynamics, but has been massively accelerated and turbocharged by social media and the fragmentation of the information ecosystem. The loss of faith in institutions, those things are serious threats for us. And I think your references to the assassination attempts on former President Trump are very concrete examples of an increasing openness to political violence as a form of politics.

There was a piece of research that came out last fall that said that now 25% of Americans agree with the statement that because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country. That’s a terrifying proposition that a quarter of Americans are open to the idea of political violence as a way of solving.

Yehuda: I’ve engaged with a number of exercises with you over the number of years around scenario planning. I know that minimally, there is concern over repeat of 2021 and something like January 6th. Do you feel honestly like we are, and you’ve described a map and a number of examples, some of the things you described are kind of indicators of a problem and some of them are the problem itself, decline in trusted institutions seems like an indicator of a problem, whereas the willingness by people to engage in political violence seems like a commitment to the problem or a perpetuation of the problem, but what’s keeping you up at night about this particular election? Where do you think the real threats actually lie? And then we’ll shift a little bit more to kind of the Jewish community and our place in the story.

Aaron: I mean, I’ll take a little bit of issue with the one observation. I think the decline in trust in institutions is actually a problem. I think, you know, Yuval Levin, at the American Enterprise Institute is a conservative scholar and one of our strategic advisors at A More Perfect Union like talks consistently and regularly about the fact that declining commitment to and faith in American institutions is, not just American institutions, institutions in general is a sign of social breakdown, it contributes to the loneliness epidemic. It has public health implications. It has implications for the vitality of our democracy, communal infrastructure, all those things. So I think that’s both an indicator of a problem and an intrinsic problem on its own.

But to get to your very specific question about this particular election, I am very nervous. I think we had an attempted coup in this country in 2020 and into 2021. That coup wasn’t just about January 6th. January 6th was the kind of violent, explosive manifestation of a coup that dated back, frankly, then-President Trump’s attempt to delegitimize the election even before it had been held, and then continued with, you know, 61, I think, lawsuits trying to undermine the election, the phone calls to Secretary of State Raffensperger in Georgia, like lots of things that were documented as manifestations of an attempt to undermine the outcome of a free and fair election. That was all part of a coup attempt.

Now, candidate Trump is engaged in exactly the same thing, I’d say, speaking here as a both as a citizen and as a leader of a nonpartisan pro-democracy organization, I can say that candidate former-president candidate Trump’s, one of the features of his, I’d say anti-democratic rhetoric, is that he consistently telegraphs what he’s planning to do. So I think there’s, in the absence of a decisive victory one way or the other by one of the two candidates, there is every reason to believe we will be back in that stew again after the 2024, after November 5th, 2024.

Yehuda: This is a cynical way to think about this, but I’ve actually seen it come from a number of quarters on the American right who will actually argue that the failure ultimately of the attempt to overturn the election and even the although violent and fatal attack on the Capitol at January 6th, the fact that within a couple of weeks we were able to have actually a peaceful transition of power actually tells us a story about the relative resilience of American democracy and being able to withstand that threat.

And I don’t know, that feels to me like it makes my head turn around a little bit, because I’m like, are you looking at the place where there is clearly a problem which could get worse? Or are you saying, well, it didn’t turn into a civil war. So anything that falls short of a civil war is American democracy actually pushing back. And it’s an imperfect analogy, but I think I sent you this article last week. Zaid Jilani wrote a piece in Tablet a few years ago saying, yes, President Trump was early in his administration a real threat to American Muslims, but the actual lesson was, look how well the American Muslim community managed to become organized as a result of the threat, and that was the best thing that could have ever happened to us.

And I don’t know whether that’s life give you lemons, make lemonade, or whether there’s something like actually true in when, of course, there are always going to be threats by extremists and marginal voices, but when the society can actually repudiate them, we should appreciate the capacity of our people and our institutions to resist those threats.

Aaron: For sure. I think that is a great potential analysis. I think it’s worth looking at a couple of historical examples for both affirmation of that and some critique of it. So one, I think, great example of this is February 1981, about five, six years after Franco died in Spain. Franco had been a dictator in Spain for, I think, then by then 50 years when he died, 45 years. And Spanish democracy was just kind of emerging, right? It had been five years since Franco had died. And the Spanish held an election.

And as the election was being kind of certified or whatever in parliament, former ex-Franquistas, like members of Franco’s political party, marched on the parliament. They stormed parliament. They burst into the hall, like the parliamentary hall, with weapons and essentially launched a coup. And what was extraordinary was that other ex-Franquistas who were members of Spanish parliament repudiated it. They stood up and said, this will not stand. This is an assault on democracy. These are people who represent my political positions, my policy priorities, but we will not stand for this.

The king had been, essentially, was quite conservative, himself marched in the streets arm in arm with members of the Spanish Communist Party, with members of the ex-Franquistas party. And together they kind of turned back the coup. And I think the noteworthy feature of that story is that in-group moderates on the Spanish right refused to allow their policy allies, their team, to go back to your analogy, to win based on cheating.

Counter that with February 1934 in France, when again a kind of nationalist right-wing party marched on the French parliament to take over and essentially launch a coup. That coup was turned back by local law enforcement. Police showed up, like the National Guard came in and did its job. But the kind of mainstream conservative party normalized it. They said many of these people were characterized as patriots. They were doing what they did because they believed in France and they were committed to the French. That party undermined the investigation, subsequent kind parliamentary investigation into the coup attempt. And many of those people went on to serve in the Vichy government under the Nazis.

So like, yeah, could go either way. But like, I’d say the Republican Party’s choices following the January 6th coup attempt from undermining the congressional investigation into it, from failing to vote, you know, on the part of many senators and members of House of Representatives for to kind of censure Donald Trump after that event. I think that’s an unnerving indicator of what might be to come.

Yehuda: Yeah. Whereas those who would make the counterargument would basically say, look, Mike Pence tells you the story, turns out to be the kind of civic hero of the story in a very strange way. Whether or not he’s responsible in part for having enabled all of this to have come about, his unwillingness to overturn the election given his statutory responsibilities as vice president is that kind of indicator.

Let’s talk particularly about American Jews in the story. Beyond the conditional experience of you being an American Jew who cares about American democracy. What’s the argument for a particular exercise of this work as within the American Jewish community? Does it particularize a universal story? Is there a particular reason why you think the American Jewish community needs to be invested in the project of American democracy? What’s at stake, I guess, for American Jews as you see it in this particular line of work that you’re trying to advance?

Aaron: I think I’ll echo some of the arguments that you’ve made in some of your writing and speaking about this. Jews have it better in America than we’ve had it anywhere else in the diaspora in the last 2000 years. I think that’s like an almost inarguable proposition. For centuries, we were interlopers in other people’s countries, subject to the capricious whims of other leaders, and very often those whims tended toward exclusion, ghettoization, restriction, regulation, expulsion, and at worst, extermination.

And when we arrived in this country, we were very quickly co-producers of a multi-faith, multi-ethnic, eventually multi-racial democracy, where we were just as much at the table preparing kind the banquet of what it means to be an American as everyone else. And that fundamental equality was baked into our democratic institutions from the very beginning, Even before you get to the Bill of Rights, like, there’s a clause in Article 6 of the Constitution that says that no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States. This is unheard of kind of radical proposition that religion, religious identity wouldn’t be a litmus test for any kind of role in the government, right, in the leadership of the country.

So I think it’s, I think the first part of the answer to the question is we have been unbelievably successful, protected, and safe in this country. And we’ve got a huge kind of vested self -interest in ensuring that it continues. I think the second part of it is, and this is thinking more at a peoplehood level, Jews have a very long history, 3500 year history. And right now in 2024, we have two big bets. We’ve got two big bets as a Jewish people. We’ve got a big bet in Israel.

And we’ve got a big bet in the United States. There’s two comparably sized populations. One of them is a fundamentally Jewish state in the Middle East. One of them is a liberal democratic, multiracial, multi-faith state in North America. And it’s a smart play for us. This is, thinking like as my mutual fund advisor tells me, have multiple, know, like spread your, diversify your investments. It’s really good for us as a people in the long-term survival and thriving project of Judaism to invest heavily in both of those projects because they’re both pretty wildly successful.

And I think the third is, and we can get into this more deeply because I spend a lot of my time thinking about this, so much of what makes American democracy as vibrant as it is and so much of what makes an American Jewish life as vibrant as it is, is our civil society. Alexis de Tocqueville talks about civil society in this country as American democracy’s superpower. And we as a people have an affinity for civil society, right? We’re taught when we show up in a new town to create a kupah for people who are poor, to build a cemetery, to build a mikvah, to build a synagogue, to build a beit midrash. Like we’re oriented that way. We have an affinity for that kind of work. And we’ve turbocharged that in the context of American democracy. We’ve got like 7,500 civil society institutions in this country, and those are dependent on a healthy and vibrant liberal democracy. the vehicles we’ve created for Jewish thriving here are highly dependent on.

Yehuda: It’s interesting because those are actually all, in one way or another, particularistic answers. This is really important for the Jews. If America fails at what America is supposed to do, it’s gonna… I took all of your sophisticated language, I’m gonna reduce it to, it’s bad for the Jews. Is this good for the Jews, is this bad for the Jews? Yes, X, bad for the Jews. It’s interesting because there’s another way to go out this work, which says, it’s not about being good or bad for the Jews, but I’m Jewish, and that’s my lane. In other words, that’s where I can have influence. And what I care about is America.

But if I was Episcopalian, I’d be running the Episcopalian version of A More Perfect Union. And I’m not really invested in the shared collective enterprise of the Jews themselves. I’m interested in the fact that I have a conditional feature of my identity, which is my Jewishness, but I’m trying to build something out for America to reflect on the difference between those kind of approaches to this work.

Aaron: Yeah, I think it’s a great observation. In some ways, I think it’s a little bit, a distinction without a difference, right? We talk all the time and we say, you know, both self-deprecatingly and I think meaningfully that the Jews are not going to save American democracy. You know, that’s not, our hubris doesn’t extend that far.

That being said, we’ve got to be at the table and we need Asian American Pacific Islanders at the table and we need Evangelicals at the table and we need the Black community at the table and the LGBTQ community at the table and veterans and small business owners and all the people. And yeah, we’ve kind of got to do our part both for our own sake and because we’re kind of deep believers in that, I guess we’re deep believers that what has made American democracy such an extraordinary enabling environment for Jewish life, will do the same for all those other people. And not that we’re exclusively, not those people, right? There are Jewish veterans and there are black Jews and there are LGBTQ Jews and of course.

Yehuda: Of course. But yeah, so it’s interesting. I didn’t think I would go on this off-ramp, but let me take an off-ramp for a brief second on that. It’s interesting because the story that you’re implicitly telling, some places explicitly, sometimes implicitly, is also a kind of story about American success and pragmatism that’s actually been very good for, I would say, the majority of American Jews over the past 200 years, but especially over the past century, the American Jewish century, as some have called it, which describes America as this place that is basically good, basically in pursuit of a certain vision of liberty and prosperity for its stakeholders, never perfect, advancing in that story.

I wonder, in addition to fighting the toxic polarization that’s taking place in our country, it seems that in that narrative, you’re also fighting an ascendant competing narrative that is being told by more and more Americans, which is, it wasn’t what you think it was.

I think the time where I most felt this was I was giving a talk once about this story, what has America meant to the Jews? And I was describing this story about, which in some ways is rooted in the Jewish value of hakarat hatov, like paying back the good that this country has done for us. I remember an African American colleague of mine sitting in the front row. And as I finished my talk, wrapped it up nicely, he just raised his hand and he says, I don’t actually know what you’re talking about. What America are you talking about? It never was and it never will be.

What’s the, there feels to me like there’s a bigger ideological argument that you’re not just making about what you want America to be in the future, but it also hinges on a particular ideological narrative of what America has meant in the past and whether you think that your work is actually fighting against that ascending critique of America.

Aaron: So I want to thread the needle a little differently than that, which is to say, I think that there are two narratives. I’m going to make a little bit of a straw person out of each of them to say that we’re competing against both. My wife talks often about this problem that people have of loving things that are broken. It’s hard to love something that’s broken. And my generalization about the left, which I think picks up on the ascendant narrative that you’re talking about is that America is broken and that means I can’t love it. And I think there’s a competing narrative on the right, which stems from the same tension, which is, I love America, therefore it can’t be broken. Like I can’t recognize its flaws because that will put me into a state of cognitive dissonance that I cannot bear.

And I think we’re fighting against both of those things based on the idea that we love things that are broken all the time. I mean, every person I know, every person I love is like flawed and trying hard. Families are broken. I think in this way, in some really important and powerful ways, America and Judaism share a deep affinity. Both are flawed, both are broken, and both are in a beautiful and kind of profound way, permanently aspirational.

Every year at the end of the Seder, we say next year in Jerusalem, even when we’re in Jerusalem, right? Like it’s like that amazing Basho haiku, right? Even in Kyoto, when the cuckoo cries, I long for Kyoto, right? We’re permanently aspirational. We are always striving, never arriving. And it’s true. America has not been, is like far from perfect. We have fomented foreign wars. We were not really a democracy until 1965. We had Jim Crow, we have anti-Semitism. You know, women were not allowed to vote until 1919. Like, it’s a flawed project, but it is an aspirational project that is trying to get better. And I think we love it in its brokenness and think that’s a project worth engaging in.

In a way, very similar to Israel, right? Also a broken project trying really hard to be its best self.

Yehuda: The problem it feels to me that’s happened in the Jewish community is, you know how Jews are just like everybody else, but more so? That line? So Americans have become hyper-partisan, Jews as a result of the success of the assimilation project, are Americans, and so we’re just doing the same thing as everybody else, but sometimes amped up.

And it goes back to the winning problem, which is that passionate Jews on the right side of the political aisle have now curated their Jewish values in a way to a very particular story about America and particular policies that are meant to address that. And the same has happened on the Jewish left. And therefore there’s less of a conversation that our values are transcendent, in some ways, about our politics, our love for America is not about our political expression. The dominant Jewish values politics conversation are, let me show you how my Judaism aligns to this particular political position. Right. On the tax code, on abortion, on gun rights, on support for Israel.

And that feels like, I don’t know if it’s a political problem or an educational problem, but it does feel increasingly irreconcilable because that means that now Republican and Democrat are basically Jewish denominations in America with ideological positions. How do you confront that? How do you move people beyond that story, especially because it now feels good? I’m voting for this person because they are the Jewish candidate. They speak all of my language and my values.

Aaron: So one of the choices that we made early in launching A More Perfect Union was to avoid framing our work in terms of Jewish values. We don’t have pesukim on our website. We don’t invoke Talmud texts. That’s not our jam. Largely because we think people arrive at their political values informed by a set of, often informed by a set of religious values that are quite different. Bend the Arc and the Tikvah Fund both consider themselves deeply pro-democracy institutions and both them ground that position in very different understandings of Judaism and Jewish values and Jewish texts. So in some ways we kind of avoid that issue.

I’d say though, and I’ll put on my quixotic hat for a minute. I think we’re trying to lean into a position that Yair Zivan just wrote about in his book, The Centre Must Hold, that’s really powerful, which is that, and I think this probably transcends, I mean, obviously it transcends America because he’s talking about it in the Israeli context, but certainly in America, we’ve over-indexed on one version of the political spectrum, which is the left-right political spectrum. And we spend a lot of time like identifying as a person on the left or identifying as a person on the right and fighting those things out on those grounds.

And there’s another political spectrum that I would argue is more important right now, which is the centrist-extremist political spectrum. And the threat that we face, one of the critical drivers of the threat that we face, is too many people indexing on the extremist end of the spectrum. And we need more people to pull back towards centrism, which is about in part being in favor of fair and equitable use of the rules in the soccer match you described at the beginning. It’s about being more interested in getting more of the people who are stakeholders in something to embrace it, even if it’s not everything that I want.

Zivan talks about, you know, if a political party controls 61 seats in the Knesset, should it try to get 100% of its policy package passed with those 61 votes, or should it try to get 75% of its policy package passed with 85 votes? And his argument, which I think is very compelling, is you should obviously go for the 85 votes, both because the policy package then ends up being more enduring because the number of people who oppose it is pretty small and because it makes the outcome of the election less existentially threatening.

The other side doesn’t have to worry it’s going to lose 100%. It has to worry it’s going to lose 25% because, you know, its opponents got 75% of what they want, but 20, like I can live with losing 25% every turn of the election crank. But when I feel like the election is going to determine 100% losses or 100% victories because both sides are being maximalist in their policy aspirations, that’s really scary. It makes elections feel existential. It gives license to the idea that political violence is an appropriate response. I think leaning harder into centrism is a critical move for us.

Yehuda: Yeah, it reminds me of something very wise that was said to me by a friend right after the Trump election in 2016, where she said something to the effect of, liberals who oppose Donald Trump have to figure out which are the issues that we take to the streets to and which are the ones that we lose honorably on. Which sometimes you lose honorably. I think to your first argument, this is the problem right now with the whole governing by executive order strategy.

Because it avoids entirely the question of consensus-based governing, enduring governing. Because even the things that are most outrageous about the executive orders are sometimes only policies that last for three and a half years until the next president comes in. So they don’t even achieve any sort of sustainable change. They just kind of inflame our political divisions against each other.

Aaron: Yeah, and I think that that contributes to the sense both of the existential stakes of each election and also to a sense frankly that government is dysfunctional, which increases cynicism, reduces faith in institutions, right? All of these things that are tied up in mutually reinforcing doom loops.

Yehuda: How do you do this in a genuinely nonpartisan way when, if it’s the case in the soccer match, that one team is fouling more than the other? And you even talked about it earlier on about the attempted coup under former President Trump and the failure to repudiate it. Okay, so you’re as a referee, you’re calling out one side of this, but that has consequences for whether you can be viewed as trying to actually build democracy or trying to tilt the scale towards the other team. How do you do that work?

Aaron: It’s really hard. Right. So we as an institution have tried to do it in a few different ways. One is that when we launched, like I’d say the third thing we did was to recruit a group of strategic advisors. We are honored that you are one of them who run the ideological spectrum from, you know, quite conservative, quite far to the ideological right to quite far to the ideological left. I’d say both as a form of imprimatur of our work and also as way of seriously holding us accountable to that question. Like, are we in fact living into nonpartisan stances on issues?

The second is that we programmatically have identified strategic priorities in areas in which we work and that we take on that we describe as unimpeachably nonpartisan, right? We don’t in fact do voter registration and GoTV work, even though that work can legally be done in nonpartisan ways, because very often you’re choosing a community to do voter registration with, you’re choosing a particular community whose political valence you know to do get out the vote work with.

We focus on things like supporting the administration of fair elections by building relationships with local election officials and recruiting poll workers and countering mis- and disinformation, things that are, again, unimpeachably nonpartisan. So that’s, I’d say, the second piece of the work. And the third is, and we say this very often, and I’ll put in a plug for a manifestation of the way that we’re doing this right now, the fact that a particular candidate or party or political leader attacks a democratic norm or institution doesn’t make defending it partisan, right?

Like we would as Jews, of course, have no problem calling out anti-Semitism on the part of a political leader or candidate. We wouldn’t say, I don’t want to I don’t want to say that that anti-Semitic act, I’m not going to call it out because if I do, then I’ll appear partisan. I’ll appear like I’m supporting the other candidate. Like, of course we would do that.

Yehuda: No, we don’t!

Aaron: We should. I think we often do, right? Like, we don’t always. We don’t always, but we should.

Yehuda: No, we don’t. That’s actually, that’s the essential flaw right now in the anti-Semitism conversation, which is that it’s been hijacked by partisanship. Jews who vote for the Democratic Party only get exercised by anti-Semitism on the right, and in fact, build definitions that define anti-Semitism to be encoded much more coherently as a right-wing position.

And the same goes on the right. If you are on the right, the anti-Semitism you’re most exercised about is not the one on your side. And I hear this from right-wing friends all the time. Yeah, of course, there’s some neo-Nazis who vote for the Republican Party who live in their grandmother’s basement, but they’re harmless. The real anti-Semites are the anti-Israel members of Congress and activists on college campuses. Those are the dangerous ones. So we’re doing this all the time.

Aaron: We do this all the time, but this is exactly the thing that we need to fight against, that we need to transcend. We know from both the post-Franco Spain example, but in fact from myriad examples of democracies facing precarity over the last hundred years, the most influential voices are the in-group moderates in the party that’s going off the rails. So we need Republicans with integrity to call out authoritarian excesses on the far right. We need Democrats who are members of the Democratic Party who are committed, know, pro-democracy Democrats to call out anti-Semitic and illiberal excesses on the left. We absolutely need that.

So, I mean, I’ll go to this plug. We just launched a project with our partners at Protect Democracy called the Democracy Principles. We were inspired to do this because the American Bar Association, kind of reflecting back on the way that lawyers participated in efforts to undermine the 2020 election, launched a set of principles, there were, the set of principles was actually drafted by the Society for the Rule of Law, which is a group of conservative legal activists to say, you know, lawyers, gotta stand up for the rule of law. Here’s the set of principles that define what standing up for the rule of law looks like. Sign your name here so you don’t get co-opted into undermining the rule of law by supporting a coup in 2024.

So we worked with Protect Democracy this summer to develop a set of democracy principles for civil society leaders. We’re launching it. We just launched it yesterday, actually. It’s at democracyprinciples.org. And it’s a place where civil society leaders can embrace a set of pro-democracy principles that are, again, unimpeachably nonpartisan. Things like we support freedom of speech. We support free and fair elections. We support the peaceful transfer of power. We are absolutely and fundamentally committed to non-violence. And we’re trying to get Jewish institutions as a kind of laboratory pilot to sign onto it as a way of declaring clearly and upfront where people stand. And to be honest, it’ll only work if all of us do it.

Yehuda: If all of us do it.

Aaron: It’ll only work if all of us do it.

Yehuda: How do you feel about rabbinic endorsements?

Aaron: Rabbinic endorsements of candidates, political candidates? That’s a good question. I haven’t, I honestly haven’t given it a great deal of thought. I think it’s, I think it’s, I think probab – I don’t know. I don’t have a great answer.

Yehuda: Yeah. Yeah, I don’t either. It just feels like it’s actually the opposite activity of the one that you’re describing, which is a willingness to build trust in the system and in the behaviors that are supposed to characterize the system as opposed to leveraging one’s kind of spiritual leadership on behalf of particular candidate. But I have a hard time pushing really hard on that because I also feel it’s legitimate for somebody to say, my religious tradition situates me squarely on the side of this set of issues that I need this political candidate to be able to advance in the world. I don’t know.

Aaron: Yeah, I think maybe I’d feel more, mean, maybe, and I’m gonna float this and, you know, may want to take it back later. You can have me back on another episode. I think as long as it’s accompanied by a, you know, full-throated defense of the system and an unequivocal endorsement of free and fair elections and acceptance of the victory of whichever candidate and, you know, a fierce commitment to call out attempts to subvert the election post facto, that would make me more comfortable with it. But again, I don’t have a strong position on this.

Yehuda: So I wanna talk a little bit about strategy. We did a thought exercise a bunch of years ago at Hartman with a bunch of scholars and we sat around and said, if you identified the Jewish values arguments that directly implicate policy decisions in America on the right and on the left, I don’t know if you were in that meeting, this session, but we may have talked to you about it. Does anything sit in the middle of a Venn diagram?

Would you say, Jewish values of a conservative, inclining them towards a very particular political position? Do they wind up aligning on any issues? And we found two, right away we found two, where Jewish conservatives and Jewish progressives or liberals would both be on the same side as related to disability inclusion. Actually, the Orthodox community in America has been way ahead of other denominations on disability inclusion and now codes conservative politically. And the second was prison reform for nonviolent offenders, where liberals and conservatives can come, can use Jewish values to come to the same place.

Aaron: Amazing.

Yehuda: If we did that exercise again, there’s actually a few more. Actually, I think some version of a moderate abortion policy would actually be welcomed by certainly the Orthodox community where abortion is not only permitted by Jewish law, oftentimes actually required. So even if you are a social conservative, if you are an Orthodox Jew, you depart with your party’s orthodoxy on abortion. So there probably are a few more.

I’m wondering what you think about the exercise, whether it’s actually, because ultimately it’s not going to change how people vote. You ultimately have to choose between am I going to vote for the Republican candidate or Democrat candidate, but what about it as an exercise that helps, you know, elevate our perspective as Jews thinking politically from my politics, my values are captive to my party versus some consensus related work, is it?

Does it do anything for us?

Aaron: I think it’s an interesting academic exercise. I’m a little, like I’d have to think about it some more, but I’m a little worried that it, you know, it sort of overplays into the, you know, into the right left stichotomy and suggests that like the solutions are in finding the things that are sufficiently, pareve-ly in the middle of that, as opposed to trying to challenge the extremist-centrist binary and encourage people to be willing to lose on the things where they disagree because they have confidence that their political opponents and interlocutors are not going to be policy maximalists when they come to power, are not going to try to subvert the system. That feels like a more salient, frankly harder project.

Yehuda: Yeah, I just wonder what the educational work here is because our colleague Rivka Schwartz, associate principal at SAR High School has argued that Jewish day schools, especially Orthodox day schools, may be one of our community’s last set of bipartisan spaces. And it’s really interesting to watch how students vote in mock elections. It will be in a few weeks. And I’m really wondering about how civics and political education can operate in those environments. I see those kind of exercises helping us break down that my party loyalty only gets me to a certain place, but that my values as a Jew, as an American, that I party is in some ways a failure.

I think that’s part of the solution to this. To get us to be a little bit less doctrinally connected to party and to elevate that values conversation in different place, which opens up the possibility of relationships with others that can provide a stronger sense of kinship than just those who I vote with.

Aaron: Yeah, I think that that’s totally valid. And certainly, at the DNA level of A More Perfect Union’s experiment is a hypothesis we have that shared Jewish identity, even as divisive as it is, and even given all the things that we fight with each other about, is sufficiently sticky, and shared Jewish investment in the success of the liberal democratic experiment here because it has made Jewish life here the way it is possible. Like those two things will be enough to counter the partisan affiliation, kind of vituperation, is that a word? The kind of viciousness of our toxic political polarization. The jury’s out.

I feel very proud is not the right word, gratified that we’ve recruited 180 Jewish institutional partners from 30 states, Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist, non-denominational, Jewish family and children services, synagogues, day schools, summer camps, JCCs, all of whom have signed onto this effort, who are doing meaningful pro-democracy work that matters in their communities are beginning to build relationships with each other across sectoral lines and denominational ideological lines. So I think that there’s room for real hope about those things, but it’s hard. It’s an uphill.

Yehuda: We’re going to have to, we have to run experiments. I mean, Jill Lepore argued this in the New Yorker a few years ago, you might’ve even sent this to me, of like experiments in bringing Americans together in the thirties and forties to withstand the partisan moment at the time. And I like to believe that the social sector can help repair the fabric of America. It helped that we wound up fighting a war to bring Americans together. And then we had the Russians to be on the other side, right?

Aaron: Yeah, having an external threat is a really good motivator for political comity. But no, think Lepore’s article, which was brilliant in this January 2020, The Last Time American Democracy Almost Failed, I think it was called. And her argument was like, we had a you we had Lindbergh talking about America first and Father Coughlin on the radio and, you know, Hitler apologists all over the US and what saved democracy was little book groups coming together and reading the Federalist Papers and reading Frederick Douglass’s What to a Slave is the Fourth of July and the Gettysburg Address and talking about what it meant to be part of a democracy. I think it’s a compelling, optimistic, hopeful vision for what we need, what sources of hope we need.

Yehuda: Let ask you one last question, which is when I was growing up, my dad was a Foreign Service officer for 30 years and really believed, and still does, in the ways that certain forms of public office are really supposed to be separate from the partisan political order. A lot of that has been eroded in the civil service and foreign service bureaucracy of the last decade. But what that translated into was that my dad would never refuse to tell us who he voted for. We were like, well, but you’re supposed to help us figure out who to vote for. And he was like the really adamant, know, this is a secret ballot. When you’re old enough, you’re going to get an opportunity to vote and you’re to have to figure it out for yourselves, which I think at the time was annoying in retrospect, like a lot of things, I’m like, that was great parenting, actually, because he and it was civic education, right, what the responsibilities are.

I’m curious how you talk about your political commitments at home with your kids and your civic commitments and what you would recommend to parents and households as we’re looking at the next very fraught six weeks when actually our ecosystem tends to be dominated more by, let me put a lawn sign on that tells everybody what I believe in and don’t believe in, where we’re actually perpetuating a lot of outrage among younger people. What would you recommend that we do beyond the systemic change but even in the domestic arena to help the next generation of Americans and American Jews grow up with a different sensibility?

Aaron: Yeah, I think this is gonna, I my answer to this question picks up on, I think, a lot of the themes that we’ve talked about throughout this conversation. We have and have had very clear policy preferences, my wife and I, in our household forever. I’ve been active in American political life since, you know, I cast my first vote in the 1992 presidential election. And, you know, we have been out canvassing in 2012, 2016, 2020, we’re gonna go canvassing again in 2024. And our kids are very much involved in that. And do their own, we support them to do their own political advocacy.

And at the same time, we’re really committed to having our home and our conversations about these issues have like two really important qualities. One is that we’re an outrage free zone. Like we don’t do outrage because outrage is a intellectually paralyzing, unsophisticated, like dangerous frankly stance to hold. And the second is it’s like we lean hard into complexity. We try to portray really sympathetic understandings of why other people hold the political positions that they hold. We bring a hermeneutic of generosity to thatץ

When our kids bring us questions about political issues, they do so with a little bit of fear, because usually the answer to a political question will involve going back 40 or 50 years to lay the seeds of the political dynamics that led to this thing, that led to that thing, and why these people supported it, and where.

Yehuda: I’m empathizing with your children being like, I didn’t ask you about Franco.

Aaron: Yes, yeah, but I think that’s part of modeling a willingness to engage in complexity that frankly comes very naturally to us as Jews, right? The Talmud doesn’t give simple answers. It doesn’t give unitary answers. It presents conclusions because you have to make a decision, but it shares all of its thinking and it seeds the possibility for reconsideration. And I think that’s incumbent on us as citizens of this democracy to be always willing to do that. I think back to the, and I’m going to forget the exact justice who wrote it, but in the Plessy-Ferguson case, there was a lone dissenter, eight-one, eight-one choice in favor of, I can’t even remember what the case was, but maintaining some awful part of Jim Crow. And that was the dissent that got cited in 1964 and 1965 in the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act. We’ve got to plant the seeds of our future reconsideration. It’s part of what makes for healthy democracy.