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.

Yehuda: Hi everyone. Welcome to Identity/Crisis, a show from the Shalom Hartman Institute creating better conversations about the essential issues facing Jewish life. I’m Yehuda Kurtzer. We’re recording on Friday, August 8th, 2025. All of us Jews alive today after the Holocaust live under a cloud and not just the one that burdens us with the memory of what we’ve lost and the trauma of our victimhood. We live under a different cloud of multiple fears. Best summarized by the Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer was a speech that he gave to the Bundestag in 1998, and he said famously, “I come from a people who gave the 10 Commandments to the world. Time has come to strengthen them by three additional ones, which we ought to adopt and commit ourselves to: Thou shalt not be a perpetrator, thou shalt not be a victim, and thou shalt never but never be a bystander.” I find Bauer’s framing so powerful in that he juxtaposes these three commandments as moral obligations that are not linear or conditional on one another. They are three simultaneous commitments that our people has to learn from the formative blackness of our recent history. There’s so much moral simplicity out there about the Holocaust, and Bauer asks us to resist it and to notice, especially since the rise of Zionism, that the risk of the Jewish people abusing the power at our disposal is now as equally available, if not more so, than the risk of being victimized again, for our lack of power. I think there are folks around the world who have been waiting, maybe with some glee, for the Jews to finally be able to be accused of being perpetrators, like they got tired of Jewish victimhood and all the guilt it imposed on others, like it’s time for some turnabout. I have no patience for that, of course, but the existence of that narrative does not undermine the moral truth of Bauer’s instructions. The fact that we were a people that suffered requires us to remember that suffering, how it felt to us that we might never experience it again, how it felt to us that others should never experience it by our hand. But to hold to these commitments simultaneously is easier said than done. You see so many people taking the easy exit ramp, becoming fixated on Jewish victimhood as a get out of jail free card for Jews to do whatever they want, and others becoming fixated on Jews as perpetrators or the risk of becoming perpetrators, so much so that they seem to have lost the plot on the complexity of these commitments. and where I have real compassion for our people as we struggle with this impossible moral burden, this burden we bear that we did not seek, a burden that the Nazis imposed on us as like an additional eternal penalty atop our persecution, is that we just have so little to work with in our storied history to use to figure out how to strike the right balance. I think that one of the reasons this particular moment in Jewish history feels so hard, especially for those of us who think about our place in Jewish history a lot, even when we’re living in the present, is that this phase of Israel’s war in Gaza, this recentering of the victim narrative on the Palestinians rather than the Jews, this sense of horror about all that’s happening and who’s doing it and what is preventable, all of this is like a new, bad thing of Jewish history. 22 months ago, during the week of October 7th, I was convinced that I was living in the worst Jewish era of my lifetime, but there was something epigenetically historically familiar about it. Do you remember that moment, when narratives about pogroms were everywhere? Where there was widespread use of the phrase that it was “the worst day of Jewish suffering since the Holocaust”? When many of us sought refuge and respite in traditional liturgies, composed in periods of previous persecution, and looked to texts and practices that evoked the muscle memory of mourning? That was the memory of old bad things in Jewish history. We knew then, we know now, that analogies to the past in those moments were fraught. The Jews attacked by Hamas on October 7th were not the Jews of Kishinev or of Baghdad from the time of the Farhud. We knew that those analogies could be weaponized to become dangerous, to make us so fixated in our victim hood that we would forget our agency. But still, it’s one thing for a Jew to experience a crisis and feel that they have some recourse to the wisdom of the past or some retrievable lesson from the recesses of the past to help us think through it and live through it. It feels like another thing entirely to feel that what we’re experiencing today, which are the consequences and implications of being quite possibly the most powerful Jews in all of Jewish history, that that’s new. Where do we look to understand ourselves now? I’ve cared about this idea of living as a human being in a timeline for a long time. So I went to graduate school 25 years ago to learn how to become a scholar of it, a historian of ancient Judaism and early Christianity. I was riveted by the story of the transformation of Judaism in the first few centuries of the common era, and by the emergence of the literature that would come to shape the Judaism that we have inherited. I was fascinated by the politics of ancient Judaism, slowly becoming self-aware that this was, in part because I saw so many parallels between then and now, or maybe because I was so interested in now that I imagined some parallels with that formative period in our people’s history. I already loved Jewish texts by the time I got to graduate school, and I wanted to know and understand them better. I wanted the disposition of a scholar, the critical faculties, the respected, engendered, maybe eventually the career path and the tweed jacket. I loved the past and I wanted more time with it. The experience of graduate school itself was humbling, and it was very hard. It was not what I expected. I naively assumed that I would feel a basic sense of continuity between my undergraduate and graduate seminars, just that I wouldn’t have to also waste my time taking math classes. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Like many graduate students, I questioned throughout whether I would make it through. This started on literally my first day of graduate school when I had what I later understood to be a panic attack in one of my professor’s offices, as I felt that the walls which were lined floor to ceiling with books were closing in on me. It turns out that being a student of a discipline has almost no relationship to being a scholar in the discipline, much like enjoying a piece of music tells you nothing about what it takes to become expert enough to perform the piece, much less to write it. You learn quickly as a graduate student how little you know, much less than you think, even though you had met the qualifications to get accepted into the program to begin with, you start to understand that the more intimacy you start to feel with the material that you hope to master, the vast that corpus becomes. You set out day after day, often alone in a library, to read a few important articles or to fight your way through a densely written academic book. You realize that there’s important data in a footnote which directs you to a different important article or five. By the end of the day, you still haven’t finished that original article, but the list of things to read has grown longer. Most of all, you learn the discipline involved in trying to say something real and new in the face of this mountain of knowledge. And following a history of scholarship, you’ll never be able to fully cover a novice trying to become a professional alongside your teachers. And therefore, you recognize that that sense of humility and overwhelm is not meant to disincentivize you from trying. It’s meant to inculcate in you the heavy responsibility of trying to get it right. I want you to consider all the following methodological considerations that a good historian will use in approaching the evidence of the past and trying to draw clear conclusions. We wanna try to understand events and people in texts in their own context, bracketing our own assumptions. As modern scholars with the benefit of new critical methodologies, we wanna go further naming and questioning our own biases and assumptions to interrogate how they influence the way we understand what we see. This means we both want to basically trust what we encounter in historical sources, reading the materials of the past in good faith, that they’re not trying to deceive us. But we also wanna practice what Paul Ricoeur called a “hermeneutic of suspicion,” which assumes that there are underlying meanings or counterfactuals that contradict their surface appearance. We try to enter into the minds and experiences of people from the past to study history from the inside out, but we also want to pay attention to the ways that what has survived from history can only represent a single strand of a complex narrative, that the truth of the past, if that can ever even be discovered, requires imagining beyond what we have and what we know, elevating voices that have been suppressed, listening for tensions and contradictions in the periods that we study. We find ourselves both asserting and hedging on our assertions all the time. All of this is supposed to make you humble in the presence of the evidence before you. And it works. Graduate students often have to overcome major psychological obstacles in this process so that they can emerge as peers to their advisors who have been in the work for far longer, who have accumulated the expertise in striking the right balance between caution and certainty to be able to speak in more positivist terms about their material. Ultimately, one of the greatest compliments you can give a historian is to describe them as careful. It’s a paradox of success in this line of work. The better you are at reading the evidence, the more careful you will be about describing what you are seeing. I really struggled with this. I was far more interested in theorizing what I was seeing, in developing new ideas, offering new ways of thinking about the material than I was in the slow work of dotting every I and crossing every T, verifying every assumption, cross-checking every manuscript variant. My advisor, a brilliant, and it turns out, surprisingly patient historian, kept coaching me that the key work in a dissertation is below the line in the footnotes, far more than what is supposed to be the economical pros of the text itself. Showing your work in a sandbox is a better testimonial for an emerging scholar than the paltry sandcastle that they wind up building. It’s funny, if I told you what I wrote about in my dissertation, where I made a subtle argument about the emergence of rabbinic culture over several centuries in the Roman Empire, and not just in the rabbinic centers in the land of Israel and Babylonia, you might be amused to hear this described as too ambitious, too unprovable, a thesis for a doctorate in ancient Judaism. It’s pretty subtle, but I knew throughout that I couldn’t or didn’t want to do the kind of work that I so admired and appreciated in my advisor scholarship. So I got my doctorate. I think what I did was good enough and I guess my committee agreed. And within a few years, I began my move away from formal historical scholarship and into this different discipline where I live now, of public-facing scholarship and thought leadership. I wanna go back to the central paradox in this line of work. The better you are at the actual careful work of historical scholarship, the more cautious and tentative your conclusions are supposed to be. This echoes with an argument that Barry Wimpfheimer, a Talmud professor at Northwestern made in the pages of our Sources Journal last year. The more conversant you are in critical academic theory for him, Foucault and Derrida, the more inclined you should be to resist any reductive thinking about the past or the present, the more inclined you should be towards seeing complexity and operating with epistemological humility. He writes of his peers: “Many academics in the humanities who do very subtle and nuanced work in their own research areas issue complexity when it comes to Israel.” I recommend reading the whole essay. Now, here’s a more powerful wrinkle. All of this hesitation and caution and care that we ancient historians use before making definitive pronouncements about the past are practices of a discipline in which all the available evidence is laid out before us. Except for the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls, a discovery that rightly changed a lot of what we knew about the past, and once in a while, a periodic archeological finding, by and large historians of ancient Judaism or Jewish intellectual history have at their disposal everything that is available from the past. The field moves and changes. Knowledge of the past changes because we move and change. We develop new methodologies, new self-awareness, new competencies. We look at old texts with new eyes. We look to parallel sources of knowledge. We learn languages of adjacent civilizations, and then we go back to that same source material and we try to tentatively draw new conclusions. And not only is all the material available, for my doctorate, virtually every piece of data, whether it was a wall inscription from Ancient Rome, or a funeral inscription, or a letter, or an archeological discovery or a text, virtually every piece of it was digitized already, but it was also meant to be available equally to everyone. There was this period, actually, after the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered when they were unfairly apportioned out to only a few certain scholars who had exclusive control over the material and the privilege of publishing their findings first before anyone else had a chance to look at it, no credible scholar, though, would uncritically accept those findings until they too had a chance to examine the materials themselves. Scholarship and critical inquiry cannot work otherwise unless there is equal access to the evidence. Scholarship, in other words, is a business of access, caution, and the wise economy of language. We work hard for our conclusions to be rock solid subject to the scrutiny of others and expressed in constant reference to the evidence itself. We apply rigorous disciplinary methodologies to become conscious of our own biases and we risk our reputations whenever we put our ideas out into the world. And all of this grants scholarship its power. All of this builds the bridge between scholarship and the knowledge that is meant to shape the world’s understanding of itself, and then in turn builds the bridge to wisdom itself. This is not an episode about my time in graduate school. This episode is a work of criticism that I want to offer about the discourse, talking about talking as relates to the current humanitarian crisis in Gaza and this tragic, unending war. I will share more as we go on as to why sometimes talking about talking is not an avoidance strategy, the way that it gets mocked sometimes. It’s part and parcel of shaping our moral present and our moral future, especially when we get very clear, each of us, what our role is in the world, what we’re meant to contribute, what’s in our control to change and what is not. I offer this meditation with trepidation as Gaza burns, as many of its people, Israeli hostages among them, are starving, as the situation feels hopeless and as many of us feel helpless, hopeless in the face of this catastrophe, with nothing but our voices to raise in cries of anguish, anger, sadness, and despair, hopeless and helpless. And I’ll share with you where I stand right now about all of this, my opinions of Gaza and this conflict, so that I am not misunderstood. I believe based on what I can see and verify, which is limited, and based on what I understand about this conflict and about Israel and Hamas and Gaza, some of which is obscured, that the situation in Gaza is extremely bad, a humanitarian catastrophe. I believe that the food crisis is largely manmade, as are nearly all global food shortages. I’m not an apologist for Hamas, which began this awful war, which is starving the hostages and which controls the economy of Gaza and bears responsibility for a lot of what we see. But I believe Israel is at least partially and possibly primarily responsible for causing this current phase of the crisis, and as the gatekeeper for provisions, primarily responsible for alleviating it, I’m persuaded both by those who argue that feeding the Gazans is a moral obligation, as well as those who see it as in the strategic interest of Israel in paradoxically putting pressure on Hamas, who benefits every day, both from the suffering of the Palestinian people themselves, as well as the mounting assault that emerges as a result against Israel’s legitimacy around the world. I believe that the outset of this iteration of the conflict on October 7th, 2023, that this was a just war against Hamas. I still believe that that framing was correct, but it has become harder and harder to sustain that argument over time as more military officials and security officials in Israel make the case that Israel achieved its achievable military goals as early as May, 2024. And as the once marginal, now mainstream drumbeat in Israeli society and even among top government officials, makes the case for permanent occupation and possibly even Jewish settlement in Gaza. The absence of achievable military goals that can be held in balance with the expected loss of civilian life, the emergence of non-military goals, all of these threaten the “just war” claim, and I think we may have already passed that threshold. I am angry about the dehumanizing language that some Israeli officials use about the Palestinians. I’m angry about the toleration for violence against Palestinians in the West Bank and about the daily threats to the civil rights of Palestinian civilians of Israel. All of that threatens what I believe is an essential claim that helps justify Israel’s war against Hamas, which is that it is not directed at the Palestinian people. And I am haunted by the images of the few remaining living hostages, with a deep awareness that returning them alive has never been the priority of this Israeli government. But I believe now that to do so, to do whatever needs to be done to bring them home would be the last salvageable good that could come from this awful war as part of a comprehensive effort to end it, to bring them home, to feed the Gazans and begin the complicated work of the day after. This is where I am now, and I’ve tried to say all of this without resorting to cheap sloganizing. I argued in an essay near the beginning of this war that we needed a moral map to make sense of the overwhelm that we were facing with this multi-front war. That map included attention to the questions of solidarity as Israel confronted immense danger and uncertainty, a concern for the civil rights of Palestinians in Israel for the lives and rights of Palestinians in the West Bank, a concern for Palestinians and Gaza caught in the crossfire, but deserving of protection and a responsibility to stay attuned to sustaining democratic norms in the middle of the war. I wrote then, and I’m sorry for insufferably, quoting myself: “A moral map is a case for slower and more serious deliberation because it is a heuristic for moral thinking. It does not offer reflexive responses for all situations. Such partisanship, the mapping of moral language directly onto clear policy positions is not credible in this moment.” “All of us are experiencing this crisis in real time,” I said back then. “We cannot be certain whether what we’re seeing from media or from Israeli government and from Hamas channels is accurate. We cannot be certain about the deliberations behind Israel’s impossible choices and actions. Rather, we diaspora Jews are going to have to approach all of this tentatively. One moral frame is not enough for a war like this. The gift of a complex multivocal tradition and of minds and hearts capable of halting multiple commitments at the same time, is rewarded in the promise of some coherence, perhaps a community of fellow interpreters as we muddle through the impossible.” And now, as I zoom us back to the present, our job is to continue to watch, to scan what is visible to us, to learn what is happening. Our responsibility is to formulate the best understandings of what we see, knowing the limitations of what we possibly can, and then to take on moral commitments, knowing and respecting that those commitments sometimes pull against each other. That, I think, is a way of living in the world where there are clear and visible injustices, which include the plight of the reigning hostages and the starving and dispossession of nearly 2 million people within this larger climate of the fog of war. That approach that I’m suggesting is not widespread. I am astonished that instead of measured morality and epistemic humility, a growing cascade of scholars, and I am particularly scandalized that it is scholars and especially historians who have decided to categorize what is taking place in Gaza as a genocide, a definitive conversation-ending classification about this one episode in a generations-long conflict. I am surprised by it. I wanna say I’m angry by it, and I fear its long-term implications for the credibility of scholarship itself, which we desperately need in our increasingly truth averse world. I want you to pause for a second to ask the methodological question, how, facing a crisis like this, should a scholar evaluate what they’re seeing? What would they need to know to come to such a definitive conclusion? Well, first they would need a preexisting agreed upon definition of the term genocide, and more importantly, they would need a seeable, knowable, and verified body of evidence. In the case of Gaza, this would include all the following: Death counts, precisely; the differentiation among the dead between civilians and combatants; the military calculations that are actually going into the choices to attack targets that also result in the killing of civilians, so that you could determine whether those choices were being done responsibly or not. You would need to understand the obstacles to the distribution of aid on both the Israeli side, on the Gaza side, and on the Egyptian side. You would need a fuller accounting of the war’s aims that goes well beyond the most inflammatory statements that are made in public by Israel’s worst political actors. You would need, for all of these, objective information, or at least enough information from multiple sources to be able to scrutinize the biases in your source material. And hold conflicting data sources against each other to make sense of the differences and draw reasonable conclusions you would need, as good scholars need, time. None of these conditions are in place right now, and as a result, none of the commitments to the work of scholarship as it is supposed to be done, are visible in this conversation either. We all know this, but it has not seemed to temper the boldest and most definitive claims about what is taking place in Gaza. There are no foreign journalists in Gaza, and you can blame Israel if you want. I pushed David Horovitz on this podcast about that, but the absence of evidence does not grant permission for the free use of bad data or no data to draw conclusions. What does come out from Gaza is under the thumb and control of Hamas. Now, we know from previous conflicts that Israel does not generally contest the overall casualty numbers that Hamas reports, but at the same time, no one can agree on the numbers and the differentiation between civilians and combatants, which means—and here are two totally plausible ways to interpret the data—that Israel could be seen as either killing people disproportionately and indiscriminately at potentially historically significant rates, or the same data could suggest that Israel is breaking new ground in limiting civilian death in modern urban warfare. Or maybe somewhere in the middle. We certainly know that Hamas engages in a propaganda and disinformation campaign. We also know, as John Spencer has argued, that Hamas has actually pioneered a new and unprecedented approach in exploiting the death and endangerment of civilians on its own side of the conflict as an asset in its nihilistic information war. We know that there are serious problems in the objectivity of the human rights organization that have been operated in Gaza since Hamas took over, and who has been controlling all the information coming out of Gaza since 2005. All of these are variables clouding the possibility of getting a clear story of what is taking place beyond our collective impression that what is taking place, to use very technical terminology, is extremely bad. And then there’s the issue of intent, which is often understood as the most important variable in assessing whether something is a genocide or not. Those who believe it is a genocide point to inflammatory statements by some Israeli leaders about what they hope to do in Gaza to the Palestinians. They point to the dangerous rhetoric alive in parts of Israeli society. Those who argue against the claim of genocide point to parts of the genocide statute, which insists that it can only be a genocide if there’s no plausible military claim justifying what is taking place. After October 7th, and with a constant flurry over the past two years of tactical decisions, you can agree with them or not, can anyone say with certainty, “Aha! I now understand this whole campaign to have been a lie?” Or perhaps does the choice to emphasize this politician’s statement over that one, this action that Israel undertook over that one, do those choices betray an interpretive decision, one that takes greater caution with the benefit of wisdom and time than is currently being employed by the daily onslaught of blogs, by academics offering us their definitive conclusions? I think back to what I was talking about earlier about how tentative we are with our conclusions as historians when we all have access to the same data and information preserved from the past, and in contrast, how wildly confident these scholars seem to be in the face of literally no agreed upon information. And for the life of me, I do not know what’s going on. Actually, I have a few theories. My most generous theory is that what motivates this kind of irresponsible scholarship is well-intentioned desperation. We are laden, we are burdened, all of us, since the Holocaust, with the recognition that our societies have never and will never do enough or act quickly enough in the face of man’s inhumanity to man. We have terminologies like genocide laden with so much power that they force us to act. No serious moral person can say, “Yes, I agree, it’s a genocide, but…” Genocide is a conversation ender. It’s the ultimate intolerable deviance, to use Donniel Hartman’s language. The appeal to the language of certainty intends to stop any argument, to put any defender of the status quo on the defensive. And not only are people desperate, they feel helpless and they wanna do something. When you give a definition to something, it’s a way of doing something, at least for scholars. It changes the facts of the present and it establishes precedent for the future. It’s like putting a stake in the ground in this case, either in order to invite more opprobrium against Israel, or maybe even just a signal for future scholars how to interpret the evidence of this awful reality in which we are living. Look at the time we named it for what we thought it was. All of this, as well as the memification of this complexity, all of it makes sense as strategies for activists. I don’t begrudge activists their rhetorical tools that they need to move and mobilize people. Now, I personally have limited appetite for such activism. I can’t really abide the reduction of complex moral realities, which most moral realities are into the blacks and whites that get people’s attention onto the street. I pick very few spots when I go to the street myself. The ultimate expression of this is a campaigner, at least the non-populist one, who may start out outlandish and simplistic policy positions that kept people’s attention; as momentum builds, they’re a little bit less “Defund the Police,” and more—“Let’s work to rethink the relationship between the police and the community.” That’s where the language of activism meets the necessities of reality. But the fact that that kind of performative or sometimes morally explicit activism, the fact that it’s not my cup of tea, doesn’t mean that I don’t respect the necessity of those kinds of activism for moving societies, for raising the temperature, for signaling the stakes of contentious issues, for changing hearts and minds. There is a place for some amount of polarization in a healthy democracy, and activists often give us helpful goal posts on either end that make movement possible in the center. But activism, my friends, is not responsible scholarship. It’s just not. You have to decide at a certain point as a scholar to be that person standing on the side saying, well, actually, even if doing so makes you a little bit insufferable and sometimes it makes you a little bit irrelevant. To do so keeps you careful, and it keeps you honest. Some years ago, I was sitting with a friend and colleague who had gone to graduate school after years of being an activist. He conceded that after his extensive years of study had come to embrace the truth that even on the issues that he was most passionate about from his new scholar’s vantage point, those issues were far more complicated than his activist’s placard had insisted. I thought this was great. He didn’t. I nodded approvingly, but he sputtered back at me, “I’ve done less on this issue in the last six years as a graduate student than I did in two weeks when I was on the job.” Not surprising, he went back to that line of work, and I felt sad about it for two reasons, both because I think he has embraced narratives that he knows are imperfect and maybe even wrong because they stir the passions more effectively, but also because he has concluded—and here I think the activists just take too much for themselves—that the work of nuance and complexity, the realm of the scholar, has nothing to give this world even in the face of injustice. How tragic. How tragic that conclusion is for the business of wisdom that has helped evolve our species for so long. By the way, I also don’t begrudge Palestinians themselves in Gaza or elsewhere, as they grab for terminology like genocide. That helps them hold together a narrative of their continuous displacement of the violence against them, and that which is done in their name, and especially as new possibilities are on the horizon for their further permanent displacement in the face of so much death. I do not begrudge the desperation they must hold to capture the world’s attention to their plight. I am fundamentally sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinian people. Nothing in my Zionism requires of me to deny its legitimacy or its pathos. I feel desperate to see a world in which Zionism, with its dreams and its tragedies, can coexist with Palestinian nationalism, in which we take seriously the inextricability of these stories and our peoples in which we stop thinking of Palestine and Israel in zero sum terms. I fear that the use of the terminology of genocide will not work to solve the conflict. Jews experience it as the seizure of a piece of Jewish historical experience that’s now being flipped on the Jews, a recasting of the Jew from victim to perpetrator. I think that this terminological tug of war does not bring us together, but rather sustains the very conflict itself beyond repair. Still, I don’t begrudge when activists use inflammatory language like this or when Palestinians do the same, but something is wrong when it happens with scholars. So for scholars, maybe the reason they’re doing it is because of desperation, helplessness. Maybe because they are themselves trying to be activists. Maybe it’s something else entirely. You see the origin story for the accusation that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza was a short opinion piece published by an expat Israeli scholar named Raz Segal called “a textbook case of genocide.” It was published on October 13th, 2023. I want you to pause and consider that date for a second. This meant it was written almost immediately after the genocidal rampage by Hamas in Southern Israel. It was written the same week. The IDF had just completed re-securing the kibbutzim and the army bases, and the villages that had overrun. They had just begun air assaults into Gaza. It was a dangerous time. Tempers were running high, and the rhetoric was out of control. On October 13th—on October 13th—Segel declared that Israel was committing genocide and by doing so, publishing so in a Jewish publication, he created the permission structure for other scholars to make the same argument. To make such a claim on October 13th requires us to understand that this argument lives within a school of thought that believes counter to most of the norms about how we define genocide itself. That Israel has been committing a slow moving, a slow burn genocide against the Palestinian people for decades beforehand, going back to the nakba and continuing to the present. It is a narrative of history. Therefore, that was looking to assemble further data to prove a preexisting belief. It was incoherent to make the claim of genocide back in October of 23, if the claim was specifically about Israel’s actions in Gaza. It was only coherent if it stemmed from an existing worldview that was seeking affirmation. It is a textbook example of what we call confirmation bias. Virtually every article since that alleges a genocide in Gaza now quotes Segel’s article, directly or indirectly. Much of this infrastructure of this scholarly campaign, which is what it is, a scholarly campaign, is built on one of the worst transgressions a scholar can commit. Confirmation bias represents the unwillingness to examine new data on its face, to ask hard questions, to interrogate your assumptions. It instead assimilates information as a means of reinforcing an existing belief, and then not surprisingly, it becomes unfalsifiable. Was it possible? Does it remain possible that such a scholar will eventually confront the confusing mountain of evidence that will one day replace our current vacuum of any evidence and say, whoops, I was wrong? No, more likely scholars who have already come to this conclusion will simply continue to assemble their proof of the crime based on their theory. Jewish historians from my field look back at Yigael Yadin excavating Masada while holding Josephus’ book in hand, “finding the truth of the narrative here and there,” to confirm the accuracy of an account that did not deserve to be treated as fact or scripture. They’re not supposed to do that in this business. And the appeal by some of these scholars to say now, well, I said it was genocide, but what I was really doing was issuing warnings. Well, they use a language of certainty about unfolding realities that they now say have come to pass. That doesn’t mitigate our suspicions about the legitimacy of doing this kind of work and doing it this way. Once you start working this way for scholars, there’s no way out. And not surprisingly, as with any activist campaign, it’s becoming harder and harder for scholars in the same field to contest this orthodoxy. Orthodoxy on any non empirical argument in social science fields usually is an indicator of a problem. Everyone still has the same body of evidence. Obviously, people should come to different conclusions reading that evidence because it is not definitive and it’s not empirical. But then there’s peer pressure and political pressure and a sense of urgency and a desire to not be, as the saying goes, on the wrong side of history. There’s an indicator of a problem. Now, you might ask maybe the most important question, a question that’s lingering for me too, as I wonder about what it means to talk about this piece of the drama right now. The talking about the talking and not about the issue itself. And does this matter? In the presence of this level of human suffering, why focus on this issue? Is it semantic? Is it pedantic? Does it suggest, which I’m not trying to do, that the bigger issue is the words that we use about a crisis rather than the crisis itself? And I say no. My principal grief these days is for the human suffering itself, for the culture of failed leadership, for my general sense of powerlessness in the face of this world that will not heal itself. I feel helpless and hopeless too. And I say that knowing that I have more agency in my land of work as it relates to Israel from my desk in New York than most North American Jews do. And I feel hopeless and helpless from here, imprisoned, as well, by the feeling as I alluded to earlier, that there’s very little, that Jewish history and tradition has by way of precedent to genuinely help us work through this. But I am also watching what I perceive to be a long term tragedy here that sits along the short term crisis, and I’m a scholar, and maybe more importantly, I’m an educator and my work is for the long term more than it is for the short term. Many of you listeners are educators too, and rabbis, and parents, and you have responsibility as well for the stories that we tell, and a great more agency and power to do something when it comes to storytelling than you may have when it comes to intervening in Israel or Hamas’ actions in Gaza. What I’m asking of us is very hard. It is to confront a horror and to feel it deeply and maybe even be willing to believe that what we’re seeing is fully true, despite the problems with being able to prove that it is. And yet, and still, to stop short of giving that horror a name. One of the deepest Talmudic texts I know is the story of the four rabbis who enter the orchard. It’s a parable of all that can go wrong with mystical speculation by the untrained and the unready. Four rabbis go in; only one, the teacher, emerges intact. At a key moment in the story, the teacher and guide, Rabbi Akiva, instructs his disciples that when they reach the pure marble stones, they should not say “water, water,” for if they do, they will be as liars about God in God’s presence. There’s so much to say about this text. It’s an incredibly obscure line. I understand it to mean that the human impulse to name things, which is a way for us to create order in the unknown, to make sense of things that are hard to see, that that same strategy of reducing the complex into the intelligible can actually be damaging to what it is that you’re seeing. You become a liar in service of your own protective self-interest. Instead, what does it feel like to just see and bear witness and refuse even against our own biological instincts to name that terrible thing as something that it might not be? To do so represents a willingness to try to both respect those gnawing emotions within us, to acknowledge the power of what’s in front of us, but also to take seriously our commitment to truth. We have voices and how we use those voices matters. Sometimes, some of us need to be activists raising our voice about what we think the Israeli government should do. Raising our voices for the hostages, lest they be forgotten, signing one, but maybe not all of the open letters and petitions that are going around. Sometimes we need to just be humans and Jews, whether raising our voices in prayer and lament, or using our hushed voices to whisper comfort to our children as they see a world we wish they wouldn’t see. We’re speaking to our loved ones in Israel to express our love and care for them from afar. But sometimes—and that includes now—we also have to use our voices to educate about the present using language that will not permanently and inaccurately discredit the work of history and scholarship, so that it does not continue to lose the public trust and to preserve its impossible responsibilities to caution and humility, so that it can properly inhabit its place in the world as the anchor of knowledge and the font of wisdom. We too bear responsibility, not just for trying to fix the present, but also to set pathways forward in the future, pathways that need to be paved with truth as well as justice, with wisdom more than with certainty. To make trade-offs now, to listen to our helplessness and satiated with the empty calories of rhetorical performance is a disservice to the business of knowledge that we will always desperately need. Let’s try, then, all of us, especially those who are farthest away, let’s try to be the kinds of people who can use our voices in all of these ways, to weep with sadness for the innocent, to advocate for just outcomes, to scream when necessary, and still throughout, to insist on the necessity of truth and the responsibility of scholarship to remain accountable to it, let’s be the people who kept our heads intact, even as our hearts were torn from our chests. This is how we live in the present. This is how we fight for the future.