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On TEXTing: IRL – Ideas for Real Life, Elana Stein Hain brings the big dilemmas facing North American Jews into conversation with classic and modern Torah texts.

Good for America, Good for the Jews? Transcript

Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Elana: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to TEXTing IRL: Ideas for Real Life, where we grapple with the dilemmas of the Jewish people through the lens of classical and modern tour texts. I’m your host, Elana Stein Hain, and we’re recording on September 8th, 2025. Thanks to Micah Philanthropies and the Walder Charitable Fund for generously sponsoring our show. You can find any of the texts we reference in the show notes.

So we’ve been thinking about Jews in the world because here come the Yamim Nora’im, the high holidays, that aren’t just about particularism. But also are about the entire world, whether through the Book of Jonah, the importance of caring about all of humanity, or even Hayom Harat Olam, Rosh Hashanah as the day the world was conceived, when all of humanity goes before God.

In our last episode, we talked about the issues of Jews in the world pertaining to humanitarianism. How are humanitarians grappling—Jewish, Israeli humanitarians—grappling with some of the tensions between their Jewish particularism and their humanitarian universalism, and that was with Dyonna Ginsburg.

Today we’re gonna focus on another aspect of Jews in the world, and that is the Jews and democracy. Ever since George Washington wrote his letter in 1790 to the congregation at Newport telling the Jews that toleration is not a matter of kindness, it’s a matter of rights. And to quote, literally, “America will give bigotry no sanction, to persecution, no assistance.” Jews realized, oh my goodness, we are in a different place. Democracy will protect the Jews. And for the next 230 years, Jews went about not only benefiting from democracy, but helping to shape it.

Just think about Emma Lazarus’s poem: “Give me your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free.” The embrace of freedom. Just think about in our recent century, Heschel and King marching together. Think about Louis Brandeis and RBG, famed Jewish Justices, who were considered American heroes. And yet at this moment in time, when it comes to the question of Jews in democracy, so many Jews are feeling challenged by democracy.

One prominent example, the incredible, capacious freedom of speech of the United States has led to a situation on campus that is uncomfortable, alienating, and even antisemitic, and Jews are experiencing it. The media. Part of freedom of the press. Obsessed with Israel! Trusting, not always verifying.

Thinking about the way that democracy is challenging the Jews right now, I wanted to talk about it, and I wanted to talk about it in as nuanced a way as we can. And so I invited the person who I think is really just expert in this arena, and that’s just not my own perspective. That is the world’s perspective. And so I wanna welcome Dahlia Lithwick to this podcast. Thank you so much, Dahlia, for coming.

Dahlia: Oh my goodness. It’s just such a treat to be with you.

Elana: So those in the crowd who don’t know you, let me just tell people a little bit about you. Dahlia is an expert on the US Supreme Court, which is obviously an important vehicle and symbol of American democracy. You’re an award-winning journalist, author, senior editor at Slate, and you’ve written Supreme Court dispatches and Jurisprudence columns since 1999.
You host Amicus, Slate’s Award-winning weekly podcast about the law and the Supreme Court.

Your recent book, Lady Justice: Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America became an instant New York Times bestseller. And I have to say, my good fortune is that you spent a little time at Hartman as a fellow, and so I got to become your friend. I’m so, so, so happy to be able to have this conversation.

And maybe before we even get to the text, can you say a word from your vantage point about how democracy has become challenging or maybe is even failing the Jews, in this moment, in the United States?

Dahlia: Yeah, and I, I probably would even just start by saying how democracy is failing, period. Because I think you either sort of stipulate to that or you don’t. And I think one of the challenges is to figure out how much failed democracy we, as Jews, can tolerate. Right?

And so I think there’s no question at all, you know, particularly in the last seven months or so that you can say, and you know, we’re watching democracy in the United States and in Israel, by the way, being downgraded by the kinds of entities that rank how democratic is your democracy. And you know, whether you sort of comfortable with that or not in some sense is at the heart of your question.

But if you really do take seriously, and I do, Professor Kim Lane Scheppele at Princeton and her sort of thinking about what’s called autocratic legalism, which is that you use the law instead of tanks to sort of slowly subvert democracy, and this is the Orbán playbook in Hungary.

It’s fairly clear that both the United States right now, and Israel in very different ways, but with some of the same plays, and in fact, some of the same players are doing things like attacking their courts, right? This is not done by tanks. This is not done by the ways we think about autocracy overmastering democracy, but it’s done by way of going after the courts, going after free speech, as you mentioned, going after protests, right? Going after the military itself, happening both in the US and in Israel. And I think it’s fair to say that the places that think about democracy would say that democracy, both in the US and Israel, are pretty fragile right now.

Under your question, I think is this other question, which is, A, how does democracy feel about the Jews and B,

Elana: Even when it’s working well.

Dahlia: Even when it’s working well, right? And B, how do Jews feel about democracy, particularly in the United States right now, when it feels like it’s not showing up for us?

And I think it’s a really complicated question because in some sense, democracy, as you said about George Washington, right, democracy’s supposed to be great for the Jews. And at least a huge part of the American 200 plus year experiment with democracy was, you know, the Jews were all in, as you said, at least some quadrants of the American-Jewish public-intellectual world was absolutely convinced that democracy was going to make them for the first time in history not as vulnerable as they were in other settings.

And that’s the part I think that you’re describing that’s feeling like we kind of know, we’re still on democracy’s team and we’re a little ambivalent about whether democracy is on our team. And that I think is the question you’re asking is what has happened, really in the United States, when you get to the place where you feel like you’ve been the architects of democracy, you’ve been building the hospitals, you’ve been building the universities, right? That rising tide of freedom and liberty and dignity lifts all boats, seems to have not been there for the boat, particularly after 10/7, as you say, on campuses. I’ve been working on the rapes, sexual violence of 10/7, feels like democracy doesn’t always show up.

And so then I think you have this problem that we’re trying to pick our way through, I know it’s the topic of our conversation today, which is, particularly if you were, you know, I would say Reform, Conservative, but even Modern Orthodox as a Jew, you really believed that American democracy had kind of perfected Jewish freedom and equality, and real questions.

Elana: Well, in the introduction, I didn’t even say how many religious liberty cases have been brought by Jews, over the course of this time, where actually, your religion is protected. And that is also a win for democracy. Even if you don’t think of it as “democracy is our savior,” it’s, “if I want the right to have kosher food in such and such place, I want the right to be able to wear my religious garb in such and such place,” I can actually take that to the courts and win that on grounds of religious liberty.

So maybe let’s start with, in terms of our texts, let’s think about that spectrum of the way that American Jews have expressed what democracy means to them. And I wanna start with, you know, Rav Moshe Feinstein, who was really widely regarded as one of the greatest halachic decisors in America when he lived. You know, he was asked in 1984 by the JCRC to write a letter urging his constituency to vote.

And you know, fun Stein Hain fact, my grandfather got his semikha, got his rabbinic ordination from Rav Moshe Feinstein. Rav Moshe Feinstein was at my father’s Bar Mitzvah. He means a lot to our family personally. And I want us to just think about how he describes Jewish connection to democracy.

Here’s an excerpt from the letter:

“On reaching the shores of the United States, Jews found a safe haven. The rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights have allowed us the freedom to practice our religion without interference and to live in this republic in safety. A fundamental principle of Judaism is hakaras hatov,” otherwise pronounced as hakarat hatov, “recognizing benefits afforded us and giving expression to our appreciation, which safeguards the freedoms we enjoy. The most fundamental responsibility incumbent on each individual is to register and to vote.”

And then kind of part three: “Therefore, I urge all members of the Jewish community to fulfill their obligations by registering as soon as possible, and by voting, by this, we can express our appreciation and contribute to the continued security of our community.”

This third piece to me says, “I wanna protect Jewish particularism this way.” So when he looked at this, democracy is a gift given to the Jews. We are appreciative, I’m gonna say appreciative guests, because just knowing Rav Moshe’s general way of thinking, he does not think about us as hosts, and we should participate ’cause this is actually gonna protect us. So I’m curious when you hear this, you know, this is not, it’s all in a different way.

Dahlia: Look, I think we forget sometimes, you’re gonna cite your, you know, sort of intellectual load stars. Like one of mine is the great Harold Bloom, literary professor, who I studied with, and he always reminded us how belated we are. Right? We come to this so late. That we think that it was ever thus. And belatedness, I think, is something you can really affix to this conversation about Judaism and democracy because we are so belated, particularly in the United States where we think it has ever been thus right, because George Washington penned that letter, Jews have always had, you know, utmost freedom under American democracy.

And I think we forget just as the world is very late to come to democracy, so too are the Jews, right, and that for almost all of history throughout the Jewish experience, you were there wherever there was at the sufferance of the king. Right? At the sufferance of whoever was in charge. And that is what you’re describing, right?

And the entirety of Jewish community organizations through most of history, you have in some sense a micro-democracy, right? Because you’re always electing a leader. It’s not necessarily the rabbi, but you appoint somebody! You have no rights. You appoint somebody who is special pleading to whoever the sovereign is.

And really, post-, I would say emancipation, post-enlightenment. You finally get Jews looking around and saying, wait a minute, we could be a part of this thing. We’re not here, you know, at the mercy of, or the sufferance of the sovereign, we have skin in the game. But that’s a very, very late historical development. And I think what you’re describing a little bit is the sort of classic sense of, okay, we’re here. We don’t know how long, but as long as we’re here, we’ll like make it better.

Elana: There’s a theological aspect to it too, right? Because he’s looking at the Jews as being in exile, which means eventually they’re going to return regardless of whether they have, they’re treated well or they’re not treated well. So there’s also that piece in the background.

But what you’re making me realize is, you know, Rav Moshe, he talks about America as a malchut shel chesed, literally, a monarchy of kindness, even though we translate it as a government of kindness. But this is exactly what Washington was saying, is, this is not kindness, this is rights. This is enshrined in law.

But I do have to say that even if we’re coming to things belatedly and like, you know, we’re late to the party, we came to this party and Black people were being held as slaves during that democratic, it was a democracy then too. Right? So you already have these, sort of shades of, are we talking about democracy just needs to be its best and then it will protect everyone? Or is democracy always liable to the possibility of autocratic legalism?

So let’s move like, very far along the spectrum in terms of thinking about democracy and Jewishness and Jewish identity, ’cause so clearly Rav Moshe is protecting Jewish particularism here.

Now, Rabbi Lauren Holtzblatt gave a beautiful eulogy for the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in—it was a private ceremony back in 2020 and she’s the co-rabbi of Adas Israel congregation in Washington, DC and I wanna read an excerpt says:

“Today we stand in mourning of an American hero, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The Torah is relentless in reminding, in instructing, in commanding, that we never forget those who live in the shadows, those whose freedom and opportunity are not guaranteed. 36 times we are taught that we may never forget the stranger. 12 times we are told to care for the widow and the orphan. This is one of the most important commandments of the Torah. It is the Torah’s call to action.”

And this is where she makes the segue:

“And it is also the promise written into our constitution. As Justice Ginsburg said, and I quote, ‘Think back to 1787, who were ‘We the People?’ They certainly weren’t women. They certainly weren’t people held in human bondage. The genius of our constitution is that now over more than 200, sometimes turbulent years that we has expanded has expanded.’”

Imean, I’m gonna give you first dibs on this one. Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Dahlia: Right, I mean, look, this is, I would say it was not an accident for a chunk of my career that the three liberal justices were Kagan, and Ginsburg, and Breyer, right? Like I think that it’s not an accident that historically Jews have tended to be all in on that theory. I mean, that’s a pretty sort of a crisp analysis of it, but I think Justice Breyer feels the same way. I think Justice Kagan feels the same way, that absolutely woven into the promise of the Constitution—and by the way, the promise of the 14th Amendment.

Let’s be clear, not a lot of Jews were framers, right? I mean. Framework were overwhelmingly white Protestant men, but the belief that somehow this kind of universalist ethos of, you know, what are rights? Rights are, you know, at bottom a lot of the manifestation of Torah commandments, about equality, about dignity, about how we treat—you know, this kind of Tikkun Olam version of progressive Judaism that has gotten banged up a little bit, on your watch and mine, but this idea that the widow in the orphan are the load star, right?

Elana: Well, this is amazing, because she calls her an American hero, basically because she’s a Jewish hero, meaning in upholding these Jewish values, that makes her an American hero, and vice versa. Judaism democracy, equal sign between them. Right? And I also wonder if there’s a theology behind that too. Right?

Rav Moshe would never say to you his definition of Judaism is Tikun Olam. Ethics are in there, but it wouldn’t be his primary definition. Right. But for many liberal Jews, that is a primary definition, and therefore democracy and Judaism, hand in glove, and that makes this much more difficult, because I’m gonna go back to this question. Is democracy simply, “it just needs to be its best self and then everything will be fine,” or is even democracy as its best self not enough to protect the Jews, as it wasn’t enough to protect people of color?

Dahlia: And in that sense, I think what you are really probing, Elana, is this seam between, you know, Jews as white and privileged, right? And Jews at, you know, the very beating heart of policy and democracy and the media and you know, every Jewish power center in the United States, right? It’s not an accident. Unbelievably and disproportionately powerful and influential.

And at the same time, the vulnerability that comes with being, for pure democracy’s sake, a tiny, tiny fraction of the population. Right. And I think, I mean, you sort of flicked at it, but it’s worth noting that the kind of classic story told about Jews and freedom and First Amendment protection is the Jewish lawyer who defended the right of the Nazis to march at Skokie, right, to march in a Nazi rally that was in a Jewish, you know, Holocaust survivor neighborhood.

And there was this sense that, and by the way, like splinters the ACLU, right? I mean, this is a huge problem. And Jews always sitting on that seam of, we believe that if we do enough repair—not an accident, that Heschel’s marching with Dr. King, right?—If we do enough constitutional repair, the day will come that democracy… That’s the payoff, right? It’s the slot machine. Three cherries; we’re all free, and that was the bargain.

Elana: Including us. The Jews. Meaning the point is what you’re saying, and tell me if I’m getting this right, is Jews assume a position of enlightened self-interest, meaning I do for others, it redounds well for me as well in the future.

And what happens when we don’t find that to be the case either because. Changing wins, meaning people change their perspective on things, right? Ideology about Israel is changing in America. There’s no question about it. So the Democratic Party is definitely perhaps more vulnerable to this, but wins are changing.

So you might have fought for somebody’s right to X. That doesn’t mean they’re gonna fight for your right because they don’t agree with what it is that you’re looking for, and in a pure democracy, they have that right.

Dahlia: I think a couple of responses. One is, I would query whether America’s a pure democracy, right? And I think you, you started with this, but let’s be perfectly clear and I just wanna commend to viewers and listeners, Jill Lepore’s gorgeous new, forthcoming book about what this constitutional experiment could have been like if we took seriously rights for everybody as opposed to for tiny filaments of people and had a constitution that was amendable.

But I think it’s really important to locate this conversation in American constitutional democracy, despite our best efforts, has never been perfected, has never been close to perfected, right? Malapportioned Senate, Electoral College, I mean, we could go on and on; gerrymandering, right? There’s no scenario in which this is a natural experiment in how Jews fare in a perfected democracy, both in Israel and in the United States.

But I think that this other model—I think it’s never an accident when there’s an uptick in the language of Queen Esther, the language of having somebody who can go importune, right, whoever the person empowers. We’re very into Esther right now in American discourse. Not just Jews by the way.

Elana: But who else?

Dahlia: Well, this whole project, Esther, this whole, you know, sort of very, very zealous Christian view is rooted in this idea that Esther is the quintessential heroine, not because she’s a heroine of democracy, as you and I are constructing it, but she’s a heroine of special pleading.

Elana: and I remember when Madeline Albright became Secretary of State—maybe this is because I’m from a religious community—people talked about her as Queen Ester. That is that literally they, because they said, oh, now we have a Jew who’s in a position. That is a powerful position and that is helpful. It doesn’t mean people don’t care about democracy, it doesn’t mean people don’t value democracy, but it does mean that there is a recognition that when you are this teeny minority you actually do need to have people who can do some special pleading or are in a particular environment.

And I’m wondering, do you sign onto that as who you are? Meaning you have spent your life fighting for democracy. Democracy. Democracy. So what is this carve out? We’re not looking for court Jew, but it sounds like democracy alone for a small minority is… might not be able to do it.

Dahlia: I mean, you’ve now just scraped on the pain point of my current life because I really have been sort of all in on the church of RBG, and—I say that, the church of RBG.

Elana: I think people get it. By the way, never before has “Moshe Feinstein” and “the church of RBG” in the same… But that is the capaciousness of what we’re trying to do here, right? Is actually engage the full range of the way people are thinking, right?

Dahlia: And that’s the dialectic, and that’s the question, and I think that for an awful lot of Jews, first of all, I think it’s very fair to say for many, many, many categories of Jews, there was never an all in on democracy. That’s why they had to be implored to vote, both in the United States and in Israel, right? That, vote, because this is how we express ourselves.

Elana: Or use it transactionally.

Dahlia: Yeah. And not because democracy is the end in itself, but because you know

Elana: No, you’re because what you want is the end in itself.

Dahlia: Exactly. So I think that, and that’s a whole separate question about what happens, and particularly in Israel, I think when this may be a fully realized democracy in some sense, but it’s not protecting democratic institutions, not the attorney General, not the Supreme Court at the moment, not the Army, certainly not a free press in Israel.

But I think that one of the things to really think about is to the extent, and I—kind of throw your question back to you—but to the extent that we think about the sort of side hustle, which is, but we always have a Jared Kushner, right? We always have a Witkoff. We always have someone in our pocket who presumably can make sure that if this democracy thing doesn’t work, at least this other thing, you know, will redound to our benefit.

And I think that’s the sort of beating heart of the stress right now. It is certainly, I think that fault line on which, you know, there are an enormous amount of Jews, both in Israel and in the diaspora, who are like, okay, so they send a couple hundred guys to seek out prison without due process, right? Okay. So they’re sending the National Guard into Chicago in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act. It’s okay, you know, because we’ve still got what we think of as the architecture of democracy working for us, right? And we also, if that fails us, we have a Jew who’s there to do special pleading.

And I think that in some sense, when you think about where the right and the left convergent antisemitism, it’s, the objection is to, you know, the power of AIPAC, the power of the ADL, the power of Jewish money in the media, whatever it is. It’s an objection, not to Jewish commandeering democracy qua democracy, but Jewish commandeering.

Elana: Do you think it’s a fair objection if maybe for any small minority that would be necessary?

Dahlia: Look, it’s always going to be, it’s the complaint about white Christian men, right? Yeah. That they have outside privilege and power. So I think it is a longstanding question in any democracy is, you know, how is it that you’re a tiny proportion and you still hold power?

But I think maybe more pointedly, from my view, again, because I’m all in on this, Elana, is the idea that I don’t think we’ve ever really tried democracy qua democracy, that I would like to see the Jewish community think about voting, thinking about election reform, thinking about things like Supreme court reform, the kinds of things that I think would perfect democracy. We’ve not actually tried and we’ve not been committed to, because democracy is the water we swim in. We’re belated.

And so what I would like to see is with an understanding that we will, I think, hopefully always have, you know, the power of the media and everything else that we have access to. But I think that the idea that democracy has failed, the Jews and the Jews haven’t really, really, I think necessarily done much more than take democracy for granted in some ways, both in Israel and I think in the United States. I think we need to think very seriously about democracy as an hourly, minutely daily muscle that we work on perfecting before we say it didn’t show up for us.

Elana: What does that look like practically?

Dahlia: I mean, I think it’s hard right now, but it’s some of the stuff you talk about on the show a lot, which is coalition building, which is listening very hard, which is not giving up the story I think I need to tell now, is, you know, story of Justice Scalia used to always say, and here I am, I’m at the church of Scalia, which is across the street from the church of RBG, right?

But Justice Scalia used to always tell the story of, you know, constitutional democracy doesn’t have to be the best. It just has to outrun the next good thing. And Anita Hill, who I interviewed for my book, when I said to her, my God, you’re a woman of color who has been utterly shredded up by the instrumentalities of democracy, be it the law or politics, how are you still fighting for democracy? And what she said to me, which I love, I quote all the time, is “because the alternative is chaos.”

And I think what we have to think very seriously about, for those of us who are like, eh, maybe we’ll align with the special pleaders. You know, maybe we align with, we’ll give up on a little bit of democracy because whoever the autocrat is, is gonna help us out is that, that has never, ever, ever, ever worked for vulnerable minorities, Elana. It’s not worked, right, for Mussolini. It’s not worked for people who cozied up to…

Elana: But Jews did okay in Europe with that kind of special—

Dahlia: Until they didn’t.

Elana: Until they didn’t.

Dahlia: Until they didn’t. And my grandfather in Iraq did great until he didn’t. So keep trying to perfectdemocracy and special pleaders, not necessary or are special pleaders still necessary?

Dahlia: I think that I am all for the idea that Jews have to be vigilant and careful about knowing that they are seen and heard out of proportion to, you know, what Stalin would call just statistics. We’re not just statistics.

Elana: Got it. Got it.

Dahlia: But I also think that the idea that we give up on the instrumentalities of democracy, we give up on the courts, we give up on the law, we give up on the academy, we give up on freedom.

Elana: Okay, so we promised, we promised people nuance, and we delivered. Because you’re not giving people… either you can be a court Jew or you can go for pure democracy. You’re basically saying to people, Democracy, push for it, work for it, and ensure that your voice is heard in important halls of power, because we are a small minority. And even pure democracy is not going to be enough to protect any small minority that is not heard.

Now, we could go on and I could ask you about Title Six, but I actually think we’ve given people some sort of middle position, or some hybrid position, that’s very realistic.

Dahlia, thank you so much for joining me for this conversation. You always have insight. Thank you.

Dahlia: I always learn so much from you. Thank you so much.

Elana: Thanks to everyone who’s watching with us. See you next time.