What can a small Jewish community in Omaha, Nebraska teach us about power, memory, and belonging? In this special monologue episode of Identity/Crisis recorded on the road in the American heartland, Yehuda Kurtzer reflects, in four acts, on his Midwest travels and what he learned about the quiet strength — and quiet fears — shaping Jewish life today.

Jewish in the Heartland Transcript

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

Yehuda: Hi everyone, welcome to Identity/Crisis, a show from the Shalom Hartman Institute creating better conversations about the essential issues facing contemporary Jewish life. I’m Yehuda Kurtzer, we’re recording on Friday, May 9th, 2025.

The first moment of many when I was fully self-aware of being a New York Jew in Omaha, Nebraska, was when I drove by a gas station which had a hand-drawn sign outside which said, “Dirty Soda.” I said to myself out loud, “Oh! Dirty Soda. I read about that in The New Yorker.” And then I giggled, again out loud, at the absurdity of that comment. How New York to observe a cultural phenomenon and to have only a New Yorker article as a frame of reference.

At one point later in the week, I stopped at the gas station to actually try a dirty soda, which is a fountain soda spiked with creamers, syrups, or fruit purees, thinking, when in the Midwest one should get a dirty soda. I got quickly overwhelmed by the choices and the horror of mixing soda with a non-dairy creamer, and I got back in the car, cradling a plain Diet Coke.

Today’s episode is a travelogue, the story of 10 days spent in the Omaha Jewish community as a visiting scholar. It’s also the story of a small Midwestern Jewish community in all sorts of transition. And maybe it’s also a story of a whole bunch of observations and lessons about Jewish life, about American Jews, about the urgency and challenges of building and sustaining community in our divided era, and about what it means to be an outsider, trying to both teach and learn from insiders somewhere in the heartland.

In this episode, I am your de Tocqueville, or if you prefer, your Benjamin of Tudela, a traveler with the good fortune to witness the experiences of people different from my own in a faraway place and with the challenge to narrate it and make meaning. I’ll tell the story in four acts.

Act 1: On History and Memory. Over the span of 10 days, invited by the Jewish Federation of Omaha to be their annual scholar in their Tapestry program, I spoke across the Omaha Jewish community in dozens of venues for a total of 27 commitments. 26 of these commitments were in the state of Nebraska. One of them required that I drive about 20 minutes crossing the Missouri River to speak at the B’nai Israel Synagogue and Living History Museum in Council Bluffs, Iowa.

Council Bluffs is a great American town. It has three historical claims to fame. It was the point of origin for the Mormon Trail. It was the eastern terminus of the transcontinental railroad, which is the meetup point designated by President Lincoln to unite the American rail systems. And it is the site of where Lewis and Clark met up with the Missouria and Otoes tribes in a conciliar moment that gave the city its name, Council Bluffs.

Like other great American Midwestern towns, it grew and thrived in the period of Western migration and was a seat of manufacturing and industry. Like other such towns, this thriving made it a destination for Jews as well, and especially the several families directed there from the Galveston port in the early 20th century, as they arrived in America and did the great American thing. Going west, seeking fame, fortune, life, and liberty.

Now, Bluffs is basically a suburb of Omaha, linked economically and culturally to the big city. But when you step into the B’nai Israel Synagogue on Minster Street in Council Bluffs, you encounter the legacy of a once small but proud Jewish community that was enmeshed in the bustle of the town in its heyday. And you bear witness to the few and remaining Council Bluffs Jews who refused to let their history be forgotten.

I gave a talk there to a couple of dozen people on the ways in which the ideas of Western migration and the pursuit of a utopian destiny merged American ideals with the Jewish ideals of diasporic restlessness and our seeking of a promised land. We read together from John Winthrop’s City on a Hill and Emma Lazarus’s The New Colossus and talked about why the merger of these stories is so essential in understanding the history of Jews in the heartland.

But before the talk, I got a quick tour of the museum that has been constructed on the primary level of the synagogue as a tribute to not only the Council Bluffs community, but to Jewish life more broadly in the Midwest. My tour guide was the seemingly indefatigable Mary Beth Muskin, an educator who has taken on herself to build the museum, writing every description, collecting each item, including pieces of Council Bluffs history that she has found on street corners and in construction sites, and who is lovingly telling the story of a once thriving Jewish community in what may seem to many of us now as an unlikely place.

I love history and memory, as you know, and I loved the personal touches and passion that characterized these exhibits which were assembled by someone who was not professionally trained as a curator or archivist, but who sure as hell knew how to tell a story and bring it to life. At every corner she mentioned a connection between an exhibit and a current Jew living in Omaha, who was a descendant of the person being profiled. It became clear that having their family’s histories preserved in the museum felt vital to a lot of these locals, even though the synagogue is now rarely used, and the vast majority of those connected to the synagogue now live across the river in Omaha.

One particularly memorable sign about an important Jewish leader in Omaha in the middle of the 20th century read, and I quote, “She is remembered by her nephews Larry, Mark, and Jerry Goldstrom, as a sweet, intelligent woman who always wore a black dress, sensible shoes, and her hair in a bun.”

In small towns in America, Jewish history is both alive and dead. There’s a lot of sadness and nostalgia in a place like Council Bluffs. You can feel a sense of the loss of something once great, standing in a sanctuary built in 1931 that can seat nearly 200 people and has never been renovated and is now virtually never used.

And maybe you feel a little bit of longing from the few remaining Jews who remember its heyday and hope that one day those demographic tides will turn back and those pews will be filled again with noisy Jews. But that sadness is balanced, at least in this place. And in recognition of the end of that era, there’s a new era for the Jewish past found not in longing for the future, but in properly cataloging and preserving that past.

I found it audacious that the Jews of Council Bluffs chose that instead of selling off the building, probably for a pittance, they preserved it instead. They got it listed on the National Registry of Historic Buildings and they built a museum that could expand the imagination of today’s Jews in understanding what we once had.

You’ll be driving across the heartland, as I hope you will. You’ll go, maybe as I did, to the Lewis and Clark monument, marking the site of the council that gives council bluffs its name, overlooking the plains and the Missouri River below. And when you do, maybe you’ll have some Don Everly of Iowa or Dar Williams who sang about Iowa playing in the background. Stop by the B’nai Israel synagogue. A window into the Jewish past opens windows into the hearts of the living Jews who continue to tell its story.

Act 2: Our hidden ambivalences. On one of the two Shabbats that I spent in Omaha, I offered the sermon on Shabbat morning in one of the four thriving synagogues. I really like doing the sermon slot on scholar residence weekends. It’s such an easy gift to give the rabbi to be able to take the week off.

I hadn’t been in Omaha very long and I was cautious not to speak about polarizing topics. After all, I anticipated in a community of only 6,000 Jews, roughly one sixth of the number of Jews in my neighborhood in Riverdale, New York, people were going to come to see me more than once during the week and I didn’t want to scare them away. But each of the institutions at which I spoke had made requests for topics and this synagogue had asked me to speak about the ethics of Jewish power and about the state of Israel.

I have a lot of feelings and opinions and I was happy to oblige. This is a hard topic to talk about, especially since October 7th. The acuteness of the human rights catastrophe in Gaza intensifies. Israel’s government is doubling down on trying to pursue a military victory it may never win. And the question of how we watch, absorb, integrate into our Jewishness, how Israel uses power, is even more contested every day.

Omaha is a broadly pro-Israel community, as far as I could tell. Maybe some of this is that some of the same big city trends of radical politics have not taken root here in the same way. Maybe smaller communities are a little bit more dispositionally conservative for reasons of self-preservation. Maybe it has something to do with being in a predominantly red state. I’m not sure.

But the synagogue is a bulwark of pro-Israel activity. And like many Jewish institutions in Omaha, is doing a lot more than you would anticipate from its size. Just in the previous year, Matti Friedman, Shlomo Brody, Amir Tibon, and a whole bunch of others had made visits to this

synagogue community to speak about the war in Israel from a decidedly pro-Israel perspective. My talk, my sermon that morning, was measured but rooted in a lot of concern. How does the state of Israel answer the great apologetic question that Yehuda Halevi asked in the Middle Ages, whether the fact that we are morally pristine may simply be because we have never had to rule over others?

You see, lingering in the back of modern Jewish imagination is the possibility that our orientation to thinking of ourselves as aspiring to moral exceptionalism is only because we’ve never really tasted normalcy. And now, how are we doing? I’m genuinely concerned right now. I don’t think we can look at over 50,000 dead Palestinians and continue to just congratulate ourselves on our moral pristineness, especially as the government continues to pursue this war. I shared some of this ambivalence, and then I sat down.

It was moving to see how many people came over to me during Kiddush to murmur their own ambivalence. And those who were not so ambivalent, who still came to acknowledge how they felt it was important to have this conversation out loud.

You know, Jewish community discord is out loud all the time, but sometimes I feel that we keep too tight of a lid on our ambivalences, the questions that we are nervous about, not the things that we have conviction about, but the things that make us anxious.

On a different evening, I had the pleasure of talking to a bunch of teens from the different synagogue religious schools who had come together for an evening of quesadillas and this buttoned up Jewish scholar from New York. Fortunately, I’ve gotten a lot more experience in last few years talking to teens, so I engaged them in an exercise on what we think keep Jews safe, which has been the subject of Jewish debate more than any other topic since the late 19th century.

I gave them a bunch of images that gave them options to think about. Is it going to be more security and guns? Is it that we need to invest in the infrastructure of liberal democracy? What about alliances with those in power? Or allyship with other vulnerable communities? Or is the answer God, which is what a great number of pre-modern Jews might have said?

I was a little stunned when not a single one of the teens chose liberal democracy. I guess it’s loser talk these days. There was a robust debate between the group of kids that believed in more security and more guns, happened to be all boys, and the group that believed in allyship, happened to be all girls, and the mixed group, which was talking about building strong political alliances.

One kid sat with a clergy member in the God group. Now, is this evidence of anything that nobody chose liberal democracy, even though I think many lay leaders, older Jews, would definitely be in that group? I don’t know.

Maybe it’s not enough data to say. Are Omaha teens significantly different than other teens in this respect? When I ran this workshop with our teen fellows a few years ago, the groups divided more evenly. Then again, there’s no Jewish high school in Omaha. I think the combination of the social media onslaught that all young people feel around anti-Israel and anti-Semitic sentiment and the culture of fear around the rise of anti-Semitism, they’re definitely creating a bunch of foment, ambivalence and the narratives of safety for young Jews.

On a separate occasion, I was with a different group of teens and their parents in Omaha. There was a little bit of overlap, and we talked a lot about antisemitism. Several of the teens and a bunch of their parents were morbidly curious about the college scene in the Northeast and the images they had seen, but others seemed to think that the antisemitism was possibly worse where they were, where there were far fewer Jews than the East Coast, where at least we had numbers. The one thing that was clear to me was that anti-Semitism was on their minds.

This is all a way of saying that one of my lessons in Omaha is that once you scratch just below the surface, the very same fears and ambivalences that big-city Jews have are alive and well for small-community Jews. I’m not sure if this is surprising or banal. In some ways, I found it oddly reassuring, not only because it meant that my talks that I had chosen would be relevant, but mostly because it helped me feel a sense of kinship with these folks.

Find me the people who are sitting up awake at night with the same fears and concerns as me, and I feel that those might be my people in whatever part of Nebraska they may be.

Act 3: Taking Up Space. There used to be a country club right in the middle of Jewish Omaha, which is on the west side of town. I didn’t get the full download, but I’m guessing from what I heard that it was a Jewish country club, in the sense that a lot of those kinds of country clubs sprouted up in the middle of the 20th century when Jews were excluded from the regular country clubs. Legend has it that in Omaha, in order to be a member of good standing of that club, you had to be a synagogue member and a federation donor.

I don’t know when the country club went out of business, but Omaha Jews, like other American Jews, are assimilated and intermarried and part and parcel of Omaha life. In a community of that size, it’s hard to imagine being able to sustain an autonomous country club.

Instead, the beautiful and sprawling property now houses a campus called Tri-Faith, where three religious institutions, a mosque, a church, and a Reform temple, have now co-located their beautiful new buildings. The fourth building on the campus is for Tri-Faith itself, an organization both responsible for the property, but also for cultivating interfaith learning, activity, research, and programming.

Tri-Faith is magnificent. It’s just off a main road, but the campus feels silent and meditative. The three buildings, which all look different, but also share something of an aesthetic, they’re unified by a bridge over the ironically named Hell’s Creek that runs through the property. The bridge is called Abraham’s Bridge, and it’s decorated with art, with faith themes, for a length of its way between the three institutions.

I wandered down towards the bridge before my lecture, which was titled “Interfaith Allyship in Contentious Times,” and I dreamed hazily about scaling the model of what they were doing in Tri-Faith elsewhere in America. I concluded that it was probably impossible in most places. It was an especially amusing thought if you even tried to just house three different synagogues on one campus, much less three different faith communities. The event, though, was laced with uncertainty. At a previous program a few days earlier at the Federation, I stumbled into a conversation about the community’s controversial issues, and it became pretty clear that Tri-Faith itself was a topic of concern and disagreement.

It was clear that some Omaha Jews opposed the interfaith agenda more generally. Others maybe just dissented from the effort to persist in this work during the war. Others maybe just had specific concerns about some of its partners or programs. I noticed the tension in that session and I quickly changed the subject.

=[-p=lThere was also some rumbling about a protest at my event, at my lecture at Tri-Faith, a rumor that Nebraskans for Peace or another pro-Palestinian group was going to show up and protest, and a whole bunch of scurrying of activity and preparation which included getting more security for the event and some contingency planning in the event of disruption.

I was impressed, first and foremost, that the protesters would have figured out to protest me. We at Hartman are, after all, a pro-normalization organization. And my goal in the lecture was to advance the idea of normalization, to talk about how you do interfaith allyship between Jews and Muslims and Christians. But you kind of have to work to figure that out. It was impressive that the protesters figured out it was worthy of protest.

And I have to say, I was devilishly excited for the possibility of some noisy nonviolent protest. It would have been great educational fodder for the evening. And can you imagine the Instagram engagement numbers? But in the end, it turned out to be nothing. There was no protest. There was a really civil discussion in the evening with the 50 or so people who were there, with a little bit of heat from some of the respondents following my lecture in response to what I had said and directed towards each other, a Jew, a Muslim, and a Christian.

After October 7th, the likelihood that an American Zionist Jew and a pro-Palestinian Muslim American can simply engage without some heat is naive, and maybe it should be naive. But still, even so, it was a lovely and quiet evening.

Nevertheless, I’m a little obsessed, still, with the Tri-Faith idea. The fact that it incurs controversy locally is a good thing. Interfaith, when it’s done right, is a destabilizing idea. It means that people who hold sincere commitments nevertheless commit to a project of pluralism which requires some amount of epistemological humility and is therefore a little risky.

Little acts of community inside Jewish life, like the ones I witnessed all week in my programs in different institutions, or at the community-wide lunch at the end of the week where I summarized my ideas and my findings, or on the college campuses with faculty and students confronting tensions of liberalism through open discourse, and there at Tri-Faith with people of such different backgrounds—all these little acts and activities of dialogue across difference are the vital activities of building social fiber. Those who want to insist on dividing us know that those are risky moments when we actually build bridges.

My week in Omaha was called Tapestry, and by the end of the week, I got why. It’s true for Jewish community for interfaith work for American democracy more generally. When we sit together, as risky as that sometimes feels, we weave the fibers together into something beautiful.

Act 4: Generations. My host in Omaha was a fantastic Jewish professional named Naomi. I had been invited originally by Bob Goldberg, warm and visionary Federation director leading this community which in his words punched above its weight. By the end of the week I understood what he meant and I agreed. For a town with just one kosher restaurant, a beloved bagel place, there was an immense amount of Jewish attachment, Jewish activity, Jewish philanthropy, and Jewish creativity.

But Naomi made the whole week possible. This was true both in serving as a liaison to me, ensuring I always had what I needed, briefing me for each program, trying relentlessly to feed me, moving me last minute from the Airbnb when I thought there might be carbon monoxide leaking from the stove, and much more. But she also worked relentlessly on the other side of the program, working closely with each of the institutions in the community to ensure that the programming met their needs and addressed questions that were important to them. Did I mention that there were 27 programs?

By the way, if you speak 27 times in a community of 6,000 people, you really can’t repeat yourself too often. It’s a good thing I know a lot of synonyms for words.

Great Jewish professionals are everywhere. So I wasn’t surprised that I found one in Omaha. But there was a very moving thread that I also found at Omaha and it routed through Naomi as well. At one of the teen programs, I met Naomi’s stepdaughter, a passionate and curious high school senior with insights about the Jewish community she was going to encounter when she left town and insights about the one she had grown up in.

I met Naomi’s husband at a different program with his questions about how the community might stretch to reach more outsiders. On a different day, I met Naomi’s mom, who also worked on the Federation campus for a different Jewish communal agency. And I then saw her name on the plaque in one of the hallways listing her as the Jewish professional of the year.

We went over to the Rose Blumkin Jewish Home, a skilled nursing facility, so I could speak to the residents about my Jewish journey. And there were Naomi’s grandparents in the front row, smiling at me the whole time, and I went once to visit one of the beloved rabbis in the community who was in a nursing home, a rabbi who had been to Hartman several times and who was grateful for a few minutes of my time as I was to spend it with him. Naomi sat by his side at times holding his arm. He had been her rabbi growing up and was still her rabbi now.

All Jewish communities are ultimately interwoven networks of people and families, but you see some of the power of these networks much more acutely in a small Jewish town like Omaha. This was enormously compelling. I know that plenty of people, not in Omaha, live in multigenerational communities, but I sense that city life knocks this out of people, and America in general invites us to leave home and go far away.

I found when I was in Omaha that I too wished I was surrounded by multiple generations of my family all pursuing our Jewish lives and identities in the same community. And I think that is more common and more compelling in a small Jewish community where everyone also knows your name. Naomi described some days when she’d bring dinner, her mom would come out of the Federation building, her kids would come out of the Friedel Day School on the same campus, they’d all walk over together to the Blumkin home, still on the same campus. And I imagined and felt so deeply what a story that told of generations over time, the kind of thing that puts the heart in the heartland.

Omahaans are worried that their kids will move out and not come back. And I think they have good reason to be worried. These communities in some places are shrinking. But maybe they’ll also come back when they realize they have a good thing going. Maybe some of us Easterners will see the beauty in the pace, the simplicity, the serenity of what’s possible in Midwestern Jewish life. I know that I did. So folks, listeners, get out there in search of Jewish in America. Everywhere you go, you’ll find sincerity. You’ll see stories. You’ll learn something about others as you’ll learn something about yourself. And if you pay close enough attention, listen to those stories and share your own, you just might also find your people.

This episode is dedicated to the memory of Annette Fetman. May her memory be a blessing.