Politics
Jeffrey Goldberg
In this episode of Identity/Crisis, Yehuda Kurtzer is joined by The Atlantic’s editor‑in‑chief Jeffrey Goldberg for a conversation about American-Jewish power, flourishing, and fear. Reflecting on the unprecedented success of Jewish life in the United States — and the growing sense that the liberal project that made it possible is under strain — they wrestle with antisemitism before and after October 7, the erosion of pluralism from both the right and the left, and the enduring Jewish tension between pessimism and hope.
This conversation was recorded at an event convened by the Shalom Hartman Institute’s Washington, DC center for Judaism, Israel, and Public Policy, at the Capital Jewish Museum on April 16th.
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Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.
Tessa: Hi, Identity/Crisis listeners. As we approach the 250th birthday of our country, we’re bringing you a special episode to discuss the state and future of the American Jewish experience. This week, on Identity/Crisis, we’re highlighting a conversation between Yehuda Kurtzer and Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, that was convened by the Shalom Hartman Institute’s Washington D.C Center for Judaism, Israel, and Public Policy, at the Capitol Jewish Museum on April 16th, 2026.
Together, the two examine the current moment in American Jewish history, discuss different philosophical angles on peoplehood, and imagine a path forward into the future. Enjoy the episode.
Jeffrey: Yehuda, let’s talk about all the things. Why don’t you tell us the State of American Jewry in the context of the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States and the seismic and quick moving changes in the American Jewish position and the global Jewish position?
I’m gonna go back there and have a snack. You just keep talking, it’s fine. I don’t care.
Yehuda: When I asked Jeff to do this, I said, can you come and ask one question? So, thank you for, thanks for doing it. Do you know the, the old Jewish joke?
Jeffrey: Yes.
Yehuda: Max meets Sam in the park, and says, Sam, it’s been so long. In one word, how are you doing? And he says, in one word? Good. He says, oh, that’s wonderful. I’m so happy to hear it. In two words? Not good.
I think, I think this, there is so much going on for American Jews in this moment, and, and the fact of the framing of being at this place of, at America at 250th, where we as American Jews actually have to simultaneously acknowledge that the conditions under which we have flourished in America are unique and without precedent in any diasporic community in history, I, I feel like it’s like a, that’s the good and not good.
How do I simultaneously say American Jews have experienced more affluence, influence, power and privilege in the most successful assimilated diaspora project in history, unprecedented insiderness, unprecedented accomplishment in terms of institution building and flourishing and social acculturation accommodation, assimilation—all of these things have been just a magnificent story—and it is still the case that America stands out as exceptional diaspora Jewish experience compared to diaspora all over the world, but also diaspora communities in history, how do I talk about that, at the same time that it feels for, for many American Jews, like the sky is falling? That those very conditions that created this moment starting to feel like they were a moment in time, like a blip in the second half of the 20th century compared to most diaspora experiences?
I wanna be able to talk about that, but I also don’t want it to be a self-fulfilling prophecy that now by describing those conditions, I’m gonna disincentivize American Jews from wanting to continue to participate in project of American and American democracy.
I feel like your work at The Atlantic, which, I think coined the idea of “the American idea,” right? Or you made it the centerpiece of the publication. And I remember a piece that Yoni Applebaum wrote a couple years ago. It had a huge impact on me when he kind of tracked the history of the American idea, going back to, I think, Theodore Parker, the abolitionist, who says the American idea is freedom as opposed to the idea of slave holding. And it wasn’t really true, right? You had to kind of convince the American people that that was worth fighting for.
You sit in a publication that is trying to do the same thing for the American people, continuing to describe the aspiration of something, even though it feels as though the conditions around that are beginning to erode.
So it feels hard to divorce the question of how we’re doing as American Jews at the cusp of this moment. than the larger question of how we’re doing in the American project in this moment.
Jeffrey: You know, it’s, it’s funny about the, I’m the 15th editor of The Atlantic since it was founded in 1857. I’m the first Jewish one. And so you all know, I’m on, on the subjects that we’re talking about this evening, I’m the pessimist, and Yehuda is the forced optimist, I think. Is that fair? Forced?
Yehuda: I guess a pessimist can only understand optimism through the framework of force. Like it’s, inconceivably.
Jeffrey: I can’t, I, my, my imagination fails me how he can be actually optimistic. So I think it’s a kind of a performance designed to lift up his flock.
Yehuda: Exactly.
Jeffrey: But, but nevertheless, there’s something unusual about not to make this self-referential, but there is something unusual about the fact that the Atlantic has a Jewish editor, has had one for 10 years now, which is that several of the editors early in the, earlier in the Atlantic’s history, they had Jew on the brain. You know, this age old affliction.
And one of them talked about the generalized fear, once the Jews, and this is in the period 1890s, early 1900s, immigration, once the Jews feel their own power, we are sunk as a country. The latent power of the Jewish brain unleashed upon America is. And I always think that it’s funny that I got his job. So like, there’s a, there are still so many signs of of true Jewish inclusion, Jewish enfranchisement.
But I also asked Frank Foer to write that cover story, wrote, whatever it is, more than a year ago now, about the end of the golden age of Jewry, ’cause I thought, oh, this is really a thing. So maybe just talk about that, ’cause we’ve talked about that, and I know you’ve talked to Frank a lot about that. Did October 7th leash forces that have led to the end of the Golden Age?
Yehuda: Uh…
Jeffrey: You could just say pass.
Yehuda: No, I, look what I, what I wanna say is there’s no way to not periodize things. That’s what you do in Jewish history. You identify, kind of, key moments and you say that’s the key inflection point. I don’t think this one works as well, so this is as close as I can go. There’s no question that you have to look for those periodized moments.
We also know that so many of the things that are getting unleashed in this country about Jews and about Jews worldwide long proceed October 7th. So it is a, it is a kind of permission. October 7th and its aftermath have become the kind of obvious permission structure for certain types of antisemitism. I don’t wanna get into the debate of anti-Zionism versus anti-Semitism. It kind of leads to the same place, so it doesn’t really matter, definitionally.
There’s a question that a lot of that stuff has catalyzed and unleashed in a very different way than, than it was before. And it would be more responsible for us to say what have been the processes over the past 20 or 30 years that have begun to alter the dynamic of who American Jews are as authors of our own story, as it’s been unfolding.
My only descent with Frank’s piece on the end of the Golden Age is that what I felt was not fully represented in that story was a kind of appreciation of what American Jews had done, rather than an appreciation of the social or cultural position to which American Jews had had arrived, which Frank kind of diagnosed, look, we’ve gotten to a place of this kind of comfort, and lo and behold, that comfort is going away.
And the different way to look at it is what, what did American Jews do from the first half of the 20th century to the second half that led to that period of flourishing? And what then becomes our responsibility to do, as American Jews, to notice these erosions and ask what can be reversed?
Jeffrey: Well, what do they do?
Yehuda: Well, I’ll give you a good example, right? So we know about like structural antisemitism that existed in the Ivy Leagues until they broke, that was Mark Oppenheimer’s very good podcast on this, through Tablet, about, I think it was called Gate Crashers? About how Jews kind of made their way into the Ivy Leagues.
So you had structural antisemitism at the Ivy Leagues in the first half of the 20th century, and instead of Jews being like, I guess they don’t want us anymore, let’s do what, you know, several people have been writing, let’s just send our kids to Vanderbilt and to Mississippi State. They were like, what do we need to do to find our way into those systems? There was a lot of chutzpah in the American Jewish project to insist, counter to the, what you described about the editors of the Atlantic, that we are going to fight our way to this position on the inside.
But the second thing, equally important, is that American Jews played an outstanding, exceptional role in doing the work of defining the version of America that America would need to be able to accommodate Jews as insiders. That’s not a coincidence. It’s not a coincidence that American Jews like Horace Kallen is the author of the idea of cultural pluralism for America itself. It’s not a coincidence that Emma Lazarus becomes, like, the poet and the prophet identified with telling a story about America that’s about accommodating immigrants.
Jeffrey: And obviously Jews wrote this literal soundtrack to American patriotism.
Yehuda: And Jews write, Jews write the soundtrack. Yes. Thank you. Jews write the soundtrack.
Jeffrey: Can you just say everything that you just said?
Yehuda: Yeah, exactly. Jews write the, the, the soundtrack to American patriotism. We engage in that project. The thing that I think the American Jewish community has let go of is that we became comfortable. Just as saying like, well, we’re now insiders to that project. We no longer need to be active creators of the American story for America. We just get to kind of sit on our laurels and take part in it. And we kind of should be able to do that. Like, other Americans don’t feel like they have to get up from different cultural and minority communities and say, we need to write the story of America to make ourselves included in it. But it is, it is the way that American Jews turned America into an exceptional diaspora as opposed to other diaspora.
Jeffrey: So in, in your view, I don’t wanna be overly reductionist here, but in your view, isthe illiberalism that a lot of people sense in American life, and see it every day, is the—I don’t wanna say marginalization, but the troubles that Jews are feeling, is that just a byproduct of the larger illiberal project?
Yehuda I do think that—
Jeffrey: But what, but, but then what do you say to the people, on a very, on a very potent Jewish right, who say that it’s actually the liberals who are turning against us? You think of the Ivy League as a bastion of left, even leftism, not liberalism. And those are the places that people have anxiety about, not for not, not for nothing.
Yehuda: Liberalism and pluralism are uncomfortable. They’re choir building societies that make possible living together with difference and creating systems where sometimes you win in those systems and sometimes you lose, and everybody respects the rules of the game. That’s what a liberal society is supposed to do, and it works so long as everybody believes in it.
What I think we are facing right now, and this is true in America, in many societies around the world, is that the attack on liberalism is taking place on both ends. The anti-liberal of effectively the populist right is sabotaging the belief that you need to respect norms, institutions, the rule of law, and you win at all costs. And you do that partly by also sabotaging your opponents on the other side. The illiberalism of the left is also skeptical of the liberal pluralistic project, right?
And I, I saw this happen, just personally when I first started at Hartman. This is now 15, 16 years ago. The critics that I got all the time were on the right. They didn’t like that the stuff that I talked about, like liberal Zionism and pluralism, that was like, that sounded like lefty-talk. For the past six, seven years, the only hostility I get is from the left. And I didn’t stop talking about the same topics. I didn’t change my commitments. But suddenly pluralism, for instance, for progressives, has become loser talk. Why do you continue to believe in things like “the rule of law” and “the systems” if the other side doesn’t agree with it either?
So actually, and that’s certainly the case on the college campus. Progressivism has played a major role in shutting down the pluralistic discourse that a university campus is supposed to inhabit.
So now we’re stuck. As an American Jewish community that forged its identity on the hybrid between American liberalism and a construct of Judaism that we wrote to have affinity with that American liberalism, now we’re stuck between, an illiberal argument on the right, which is currently in power and an illiberalism of the left. And as, and the minute you get to a place where the whole society doesn’t believe in the premise of liberalism, it becomes harder and harder to sustain that position.
So what do we do as American Jews? Do we throw out that commitment, and I think that that’s, the pessimists are asking us to do that—stop believing in the possibility of this being a liberal project. But I say back to the pessimists, that means you now have to choose a side. You have to choose, I want to be part of the illiberal right? Or I want to be part of the illiberal left?
And now you’re back in a story of Jewish history and diasporas that never worked for Jews, which was, we’ll choose a team until, and it’ll be great while our side like the king is like on our team. And then lo and behold, when you get out of the halls of power, you will be identified as the exemplar of that political attitude that can now be destroyed.
I don’t think we have a choice as American Jews but to fight for the very liberal framework that resists the authoritarianism on the right and resists the authoritarianism of the left and insists that this is the only way that we make it work for ourselves as American Jews.
Jeffrey: I haven’t really thought of this before you, you mentioned this, but there’s something interesting about Netanyahu’s approach, that you are describing Netanyahu’s approach to the king. Think about it. Israeli prime ministers, up until today, have valued the idea that Israel’s relationship with American politics is bipartisan.
In my view, and obviously people disagree with this, he has consciously discarded that. He has found the king.
Yehuda: Yes, that’s right.
Jeffrey: And he’s got his, and that king did a thing that, you know, he wanted to do. That king also wanted to do it, to be sure. But it’s a very diasporic, kind of response to, to the world. I mean, and this is because maybe, again, I’m interpreting him based on my knowledge and experience with him, because he doesn’t believe in liberal ideals. And it’s interesting that that’s dragged a lot of American Jewish community with him into this problem.
I mean, we, I, I don’t want to become too abstract in this conversation because we’re sitting here in the city where 40 Democrats in the Senate just did something that you never have imagined three years ago, right? Three years ago, not 10, 20, 30, 3 years ago. And that has people feeling destabilized. And how do you put place, what just happened on the Hill, in the context of what we’re talking about?
Yehuda: Yeah. So I would say you’re right about Netanyahu. I think Netanyahu represents, like, I think there have been two stories for Jews starting in the late 19th century leading to now that coexisted pretty well.
One was the dominant story of Zionism, which we’ll call Judeo-pessimistic, which said, stop believing that the West will ever really make room for Jews unless Jews basically take power into our own hand and build our own state.
And then you have the Judeo-optimistic story of American Jews who said, actually, we can find redemption in the West as long as we find a society with genuine commitment to liberal democracy.
And for most of us, I would say American Jews, leading up to relatively recently, we were able to support both projects at the same time without too much cognitive dissonance, ’cause I could say I, I support a kind of less liberal version of Israel than I support the, my liberal values in America, because I think the Jewish people need it. In some sense, I, we kind of need it. And if the cost is a little less liberalism over there, in order for me to be able to pursue my own identity as a liberal over here, unbalance is good for the Jewish people.
Jeffrey: You’re not finding any attraction at all, intellectual attraction, in Judeo pessimism? Over the last three years?
Yehuda: I will say, look, it’s a one way street. Once you go down that road, that’s where you are, you, because pessimism remembers—
Jeffrey: Why is that true?
Yehuda: It’s never falsifiable. Things can always get worse. The pessimists are always, it is, it is never falsifiable. It’s optimists who have the much harder job. I understand the appeal of the Judeo pessimism is like, yeah, things look really bad. Let me stick with team “things are getting worse,” right? So I, I just, I feel like, what, what’s the end?
Jeffrey: But what if things are getting worse?
Yehuda: The work gets harder. That’s what an optimist says. Not that things will get better.
Jeffrey: I’m gonna berate you until you fold. No, I’m not.
Yehuda: I am drawn, as a Zionist, to understanding why that story became so significant for the rise of Zionism. You see it like in Pinsker, who, like, precedes Herzl. Pinsker, by the way, has one of the best things ever. He has like an epigram at the beginning of his most famous book, Auto-Emancipation. Literally, the Jewish people are gonna emancipate ourselves. And you know, he quotes from Hillel’s famous dictum, which says, if I am only for myself, who—
Jeffrey: We know it. We know it. You don’t have to do all three.
Yehuda: He takes out, he, he quotes the whole thing, except for the phrase, “if I am only for myself, who am I?” He’s like, I don’t need that anymore. He just says, if I’m not for myself, who will be for me? And if not now, when? And he leaves out the other part.
Jeffrey: Oh, he drops it.
Yehuda: He drops it. I actually understand reading that in 1890s Europe, and I certainly understand it in 1945, of the Jewish people being like, I will, I gonna try to make this project a project that is good for all of its citizens and good for the world, but it is ultimately gonna be about the Jewish people taking responsibility of our own political destiny.
And I do think in very weird ways, we liberal American Jews, needed some measure of that Judeo-pessimism as part of our Zionism to help make coherent our liberal optimistic project. I think it worked in kind of weird ways. Has October 7th done a job on me also about my own pessimism? Of course it has. I hear terrible stories all the time.
Now it happens to be that like, for whatever reason, I’m gonna jinx myself here, I don’t experience all that much of what I know a lot of other people are experiencing. I walk around with a kippah all the time, again, just like, you’re not supposed to say these things out loud, but it just, I, I, I don’t see it in the same way, but I know how afflicted students are on campuses. I know how afflicted people who work in various industries. I’ve met with professors who are flocking to the Hartman Institute for help right now, because they were like, I went into this business thinking this was a liberal enterprise and now I’m being excised out of that enterprise.
I see all of the appeal, but the appeal to pessimism doesn’t give you the tools to address the long-term solutions for the society. What it leads you to do is to do all sorts of things that have become more prominent in our agenda as a Jewish community, like secure our institutions. But as we were talking about before, there’s something humiliating about that, that we have to do this and others don’t. It’s humiliating, right? That leads us to that being the agenda, but it doesn’t incentivize us as a Jewish community to say what is actually required of us in a moment like this, not just to pursue our own safety, but to be at the front lines of helping the society confront its challenges.
Jeffrey: I want, I want to come back to this ’cause among other reasons. I’m very interested in this Bundist Zionist discourse, and the Bundist obviously are the optimists, and you know how that ended about it. The Zionist for pessimists, and that story still unfolding.
But let’s step back through the more general issue. And I, what I hear you saying, and we’ve talked about this in the past, I think we both believe that Jews only flourish in societies. Civilizations where there’s rule of law, where there’s a rationality, where there’s tolerance as a, as a moral value, where logic is applied. The whole range, of sober minded, democratics—multi—behaviors that allow for thought as opposed to the formation of mobs. We don’t do very well at times when it’s easy to form a mob. Obviously we live in the age of the digital mob, the universal digital mob, so that’s, that’s a problem.
My question to you as an American is, are we heading as a society, irrevocably down some path? Give us your diagnosis of where American society is on those markers.
Yehuda: All of the things you said are where your own diagnosis, right? Do you think this is irrevocable?
Jeffrey: I don’t think anything’s a replicable. I don’t think that—politics waxes and wanes. Leaders rise, leaders fall. I think we can’t have any conversation without understanding the growth. Technology on cognition, technology on personality formation, technology on human interaction.
I mean, a hundred years from now, somebody might write the history that said, “And then a man named Zuckerberg, came and believed that it was a good idea to have everybody communicate with everybody else all the time.”
Yehuda: All the time. Yeah.
Jeffrey: And that was the beginning of the end of the end. I mean, and I, I would read that book, it’s plausible.
Yehuda: That’s totally plausible.
Jeffrey: And again, I don’t know, not to go down a rabbit hole, but I don’t know if he believed that or if that was a useful marketing tool to advance the cause of his company. But I have reason to believe that a lot of people like Mark Zuckerberg actually believe that constant communication, unfiltered, instantaneous—you know, I always think about Zuckerberg in relation to James Madison’s understanding of human behavior.
Madison believed that America was not going to survive the rise of the daily newspaper because the daily transmission of new information was too much cognitively, he didn’t use the word cognitively, but too much cognitively for human beings to bear. There would be too much emotion, too much anger, no time to settle. He thought that the greatest gift America had, the, the, the greatest attribute of America in terms of the primacy of logic was that it was so big that it would take information, a long time to travel.
Anyway, we’re in a situation right now where too much information is coming over too many transoms all at once. Yeah. So nothing’s irreversible, except that we don’t even know, fully, what the effect of AI is gonna be on the next election, much less the ‘28 election. So like, all bets are off now in terms of irreplicability.
Yehuda: I’ll say just a couple of things. One is, as I see it, you know, I’ve watched as my, my kids’ Jewish day schools—or one of my kids’ Jewish day schools. Obviously you don’t send your kids to the same Jewish day schools. That’d be crazy. You gotta, you have to maximize the number of dropoffs, right? Went down very fast down the pathway of embracing technology in the classroom in ways that were so obviously dumb, right? Like just iPads in every classroom at all ages from a young age. And it was so obviously dumb. Everybody knew what was happening. And finally now you see the reversal starting to take place. Jonathan Haidt has played a big role in this, of being like, what are you doing? Why are we doing this to our children?
So what I think, I think what’s happening is that we have a pretty deep consciousness collectively that we are, we think that we are the scientists in this lab experiment of how technology can improve our lives. We’re actually the lab rats in this experiment, and it just takes time at each phase of this technology to stop assuming optimistically that all these technologies will improve our lives, and in fact, put in much more consciousness and much more guardrails.
I think the particular question for the Jewish people is, you know, it’s not like the Jewish people actually, when it comes to Judaism, the books of Judaism, today’s Jewish people are far more literate, Jewishly, than any era in Jewish history. More Jews study Torah today, for instance, than at any other period of Jewish history. And that’s been made possible because of the technological revolution.
Jeffrey: Wait, excluding a massive draft-exempt Haredi population in Israel.
Yehuda: Including…
Jeffrey: Including. Okay.
Yehuda: But even if you excluded that the number of non-Orthodox Jews who do some kind of Torah study in their life, who listen to Daf Yomi podcasts, who access Sefaria, this is like a very big part of Jewish life in ways that were never true throughout Jewish history, where learning was the province of an elite.
So we actually have this myth about ourselves as the people of the book, but actually it was only a relatively small number of people at every phase of Jewish history who preserved that kind of elite knowledge for others to come. And everyone else was kind of like semi-pious, semi-traditional, relying on those people. So in some ways this has actually been a period of Jewish intellectual flourishing as more Jewish stuff is out there in the water.
I’m very worried about the Jewish institutional landscape and its priorities right now, but I want to note that like, yes, the fastest growing industries in the Jewish community are in “fighting antisemitism,” whatever that means—no incentive to win, because you keep growing the business. Fighting antisemitism is very big, right? But we are the fastest growing Jewish educational organization. And we are like, trying to do, basically, graduate school for beginners. And people are drawn to this. In our community there’s a tremendous hunger for more Jewish sophistication around ideas.
So whenever you come to a technology question, you could say yes, I’m not expert to say, at which year in the next 30, is it gonna be the robot apocalypse? I don’t know. Probably one of them. I’m not expert to say that, but I do wanna say, what does it look like for us once again to say, how do we exploit this moment, make better choices as a community and figure out in what ways can all of this stuff be useful to our flourishing as human beings and as Jews?
Jeffrey: To come back to the question of diagnosing American society. We just saw a study released the other day, found that more young men participate online gambling on a weekly basis than have read a book in the last year. It’s over, well over 50%. The first one, under 50%. A book. A book.
Yehuda: A book.
So I come back to this question, ’cause this does relate to Jewish flourishing. We, we, again, I mean, correct me if I’m wrong, and obviously there have been pogroms in educated countries. But it seems fairly obvious that superstitious, conspiratorially-minded, illiterate, uncivilized people are more apt to form mobs and hurt Jews and historically that is true.
So the question is, speaking as an American, looking at the landscape, are we heading in the wrong direction in terms of our cognitive abilities, our attention span, our, our, our ability and willingness and even understanding that problems are complicated?
Yehuda: Yeah, I am worried about it. I see my own attention span changed over the last number of years. And I’m, I’m actually now actively practicing it, right? So, you know, like now I have a book club with my 13-year-old daughter. We’re reading horror books. It’s great. It’s a practice of like, slowing down and reading paper books. And she likes reading horror, so I’m reading horror with her. I do think it’s like one of these things that is happening to us and we’re, and we’re not fully aware of it.
What worries me a little bit more in this context are the people who know better who are opening the gates to these, to this mechanism. I shared this with you, but I wrote a piece this week. I was really, really upset by Ezra Klein’s, I felt, unconscionable defense of Hasan Piker in the New York Times. It’s funny to even say like, what is, who is Hasan Piker? He is a Twitch streamer. It is like a phrase that doesn’t, I don’t even, it’s like a, like, is that a job?
Jeffrey: Like, no, no. Maybe the robot apocalypse is already here.
Yehuda: And what I found striking about his defense of Hasan Piker, which was framed as like, we have to talk to people we disagree with, but ultimately was, we actually have to partner with demagogues in order to win elections.
Jeffrey: To fight a demagogue,
Yehuda: To fight a demagogue. I was like, no, no, you fight demagogues. It’s like, here’s a really arcane historical analogy. In like the year 63 BCE, the brothers Hyrcanus and Aristobulus were fighting over the Temple in Jerusalem, right? They were the, the last heirs of the Hasmonean dynasty.
And they were trying to defeat each other, and one of them was like, I know how I can win. I can partner with the Roman Empire. And that led to the sack of Jerusalem. And I feel like that’s this, like, oh, you have demagogic power? I can find my own demagogue. And we just have to be the people who know better. And, and that’s actually gonna require a tremendous amount of resistance, of like, how do I, how do we refuse? How do we teach our children? How do we create our society that becomes a little bit more immune to the demagogues who are on our sides?
And I don’t know how we do that when, as, as we know, you know, podcasters are shaping elections. And I don’t know how we get our politicians to resist that.
Jeffrey: Let, let me loop back to something very specific you said before. You, you were obviously deriding the effort to fight antisemitism. Would you, if you were in charge of the Jews, spend the amount of money that the Jews are spending to fight antisemitism, or would you just take that money and put it into education and let the antisemites do in their own juices?
Yehuda: I would not spend what the Jewish community is spending to fight antisemitism, not even close.
Jeffrey: What is wrong with the way they’re doing it?
Yehuda: I did the math. I did the math. It’s, I think it’s probably, I don’t mean security, but I mean, the fighting antisemitism industry, I think is probably in the neighborhood of four to $500 million, which by the way sounds like a big number, but in the ecosystem of Jewish life is not a huge number.
In other words, the amount of money we actually spend on Jewish education vastly exceeds that, that amount of money. So it is a lot of money, but it’s not like, oh my God, that’s the money that if you took that would radically transform Jewish education.
I think the problem is—
Jeffrey: You’re making the argument on the principles of the idea itself, not just on the basis of money.
Yehuda: The principles, the idea itself. My bigger concern is, I don’t just don’t think we’re fighting antisemitism intelligently. I think most of the money that is being spent around antisemitism operates on the premise of kind of name and shame. That doesn’t work. People don’t like being shamed. Once they realize that there is no social liability to it, they start to embrace it even more, right? That’s happened with a number of, kind of, key celebrities. I don’t think billboards, nasty, weird, billboards help anybody? No, I, I’m, it’s like, it’s like a, it’s unbelievable. Those don’t, those don’t help us as a community.
I think if antisemitism was about civil rights, alliances across difference, right? Quiet advocacy with key stakeholders in other communities. If most of the antisemitism industry was invisible, I think it would be a far more effective strategy. And if it’s not gonna be that, then yes, I’ll take that $500 million and put it in Jewish education.
But it doesn’t have to be zero sum. I don’t think we understand antisemitism in this country if, if reflected by the way we’re fighting it. In fact, I think that performative approach towards antisemitism assumes we’re living in a different era, that Americans, by and large repudiate antisemitism, so all you need to do is elevate the moments when it takes place, remind Americans that this is against the angels of their better nature, and then, of course, it will become unpopular again. But the cat’s out of the bag, in such powerful ways, that that actually is, I find it totally counterproductive.
But if I was the king of the Jews, I have opinions about that, but I am not running. And if elected, I will not serve.
Jeffrey: If you were the King of American Jews, how would—
Yehuda: I don’t like this line of question.
Jeffrey: How, would you—nobody could be the King of American Jews. There are a thousand Kings.
Yehuda: Yeah, that’s right.
Jeffrey: How would you organize the psychoemotional, spiritual, financial, political relationship with Israel as it is today?
Yehuda: Yikes.
You know, I was, I was sitting with a group last night and, and talking about this a little bit, some folks working in think tanks, and talking about how it feels to me like there is a twin project for folks who sit with my worldview about Israel. I self-identify as a, as a liberal Zionist. I know that a lot of people feel we should stop using these terms. We can talk about that.
To me, there’s two simultaneous projects that have to operate. One is, American Jews are gonna have to find a way to articulate the thickness of our relationship to Israel and the Jewish people that is not perpetually under the test of what the Israeli government does today and tomorrow. And have to simultaneously build the kinds of relationships in Israel that can advocate for a more liberal worldview in ways that can be politically plausible and not just because if Israel was more liberal, we would sleep better at night. Right.
But actually, because it’s the articulation of what the state of Israel is supposed to be, and we care that Israel be a liberal democratic state that is both good for the Jewish people and a state for all of its citizens, that to me is the dual project. It’s not a surprise that those feel like projects that are seen as at odds with each other, right? The more that Jews talk about what needs to change about Israel, the less they are inclined to talk about what attachment to Israel is supposed to look like and attachment to the Jewish people as well. And the folks who are primarily invested in the project of creating attachment to Israel tend to encode conversation about what needs to change about Israel as disloyalty, right? And that to me is where the brokenness is. And I just think those have to travel together.
You heard what I said. It’s not simply about announcing that here are things we don’t like about Israel. Actually, I think most of the time that American Jews do that announcing the things we don’t like about Israel, it has not only zero effect on changing Israeli society, it actually has a net negative effect on those efforts in Israeli society, because Israelis, for their own psychoemotional reasons, feel completely isolated. They feel judged and criticized all the time, and they don’t feel that there’s real partnership by those who have these viewpoints except those minority people in Israel who are fighting desperately and hopefully not giving up on correcting the pathways and the path that Israel is on.
So that’s the, to me, that’s the agenda of where I would love our community to focus its resources. These are twin exercises that actually feel, they need to be mutually reinforced.
Jeffrey: How do you talk to, especially younger Jews, about this very issue? Ben Gvir, I mean, we were talking about this, Ben Gvir is the—I mean, I’m speaking personally here—is the nightmare.
Yehuda: Yeah. Right.
Jeffrey: And I, I told you this before. I’ll mention it. You know, I was at the Jerusalem Post in 1990 when Kahane was assassinated in Manhattan. The funeral went past the Jerusalem Post office in Romema, you know, right behind the old central bus station. And a huge angry crowd, break off groups, were chasing Arabs who were working in that neighborhood, you know, through the streets. We hid some Arab workers, people from nearby restaurants, and I realized when he rose to power, is that Ben Gvir was 16 at the time, a Kach activist, pretty good chance that he was in that group and now he’s in charge of the police.
So you say that, you explain to someone who has thin relationship with Israel 17 years old, and they’re inundated on social media, the very, very worst interpretations of what Israel is. But they also know that, oh, Ben Gvir is real, Smotrich is real, the people who are burning olive groves in the West Bank are real.
How do, how do you communicate what you are trying to get them to understand about not just their relationship, but the Jewish relationship with the land and the people?
Yehuda: I, I think the, I think the only pathway is through honesty. I don’t want to be in—
Jeffrey: This is Washington though. You’re in the wrong… Take that to New York.
Yehuda: No, it’s the only way. The only way forward is honesty because the most persuasive argument is to say, I, as a Zionist hate that guy, and I’m embarrassed by him, and I view him as the apotheosis of the very thing that I think is the opposite of what the Jewish national project is supposed to be about. And I’m gonna fight tooth and nail, and I’m gonna lead an institution with a campus in Jerusalem, whose very mission in the world is to construct the Zionism that is supposed to defeat the Ben Gvirs.
And, and I don’t think our community leaders speak with that. They’re constrained by doing that, because they’re oftentimes worried that in doing that, I mean, Ben Gvir is easy. Most Jewish community leaders speak pretty openly and critically of Ben Gvir. It gets more subtle when it’s not Ben Gvir.
I mean, it was wall to pretty much wall to wall that the Jewish community didn’t, didn’t meet with Smotrich when he came. And I thought that was really admirable. It’s like, no, we just, that’s not our guy. We don’t believe in that. It gets more complicated, the, the closer you get into the center of the Israeli government where it’s much more complicated to say, you won’t meet with the Prime Minister of Israel, even though he’s built a coalition and handed over the reins of the police to Ben Gvir.
We have to be comfortable simply saying, not the no true Scotsman argument, that’s not Zionism. Of course it’s an expression of Zionism! Of course it is. It’s the evil inclination of Zionism. But our job is to create alternatives educationally and morally that say we are as invested in the future of the Jewish people and the state of Israel as the Ben Gvirs are.
And now here’s the interpretive work that is gonna show that Zionism does not have to lead to the inevitability of that conclusion. Here’s the political pathways that we are trying to put in place to help Israelis get past their sense of such deep fear and isolation that is gravitating them towards these kinds of fundamentalists. You need that kind of courageous voice to signal it.
And I don’t know whether young people writ large will feel that’s enough. I think what you’ve mentioned before about the assault on Israel’s legitimacy in public is a big part of the story. I think there’s an immense amount of shame that travels for American Jews and especially for young people about association and affiliation with Israel in a moment like this. And it’s very hard to get past that shame with even rational arguments.
But I also know, and it’s under-reported, for reasons, you know, we’ve talked about the ways in which the story of Jews leaving Israel, leaving their support for Israel, over-indexes in mainstream media, but I’ll tell you what under-indexes is how many young people over since October 7th feel a greater sense of attachment to the Jewish community and Jewish life, and even the state of Israel since October 7th.
Jeffrey: And that’s not simply manifesting as seeking out more education about Judaism, but it’s a connection to Israel itself?
Yehuda: I don’t know how rational it is, but I don’t, I I, I’m struggling to understand why there has been a spike in conversion to the Jewish people by people who are on the margins since October 7th, and why there was a surge after October 7th of students on college campuses and in synagogues being like, it’s not really about Israel, but I wanna be part of the Jewish people.
There’s no way to detach that these stories are connected. I don’t know what the there there is. But there is something there. And I don’t, I definitely don’t want to be so distracted by the fear of the conclusions that young people are drawing, that we either become apologetic for Israel and its actual issues, or we ignore that there’s also a story, and here an opportunity, to model a different alternative about that attachment that could do something powerful.
Jeffrey: Would you talk just a minute about, let’s call it, advisably, the platonic ideal of, of a Hartman philosophy imbalance as an American Jew, not in an Israeli context. And by that I mean, we talk about this regularly, you know, the, the centrality of Israel, psychically and politically, and the centrality of the Holocaust, not to open up a, a completely new can.
Yehuda: What about the Holocaust?
Jeffrey: What about, let me just say this about the Holocaust. There are a lot of people who are asking questions about the half billion dollars spent on the traditional defense agencies, the antisemitism watchdog groups. I have a lot of questions about all the money that’s gone into Holocaust education. We’re told that Holocaust education has instrumental purpose, it makes people less anti-Semitic. Okay. Sure. It doesn’t seem that way.
But take that, take the anti-Semitism piece, take the Israel support piece and, and, and, and run it through this sort of the Hartman understanding of a Jewish diaspora community in balance, spiritual and intellectual balance.
Yehuda: We run a program for teenagers. It’s become one of pretty much the best thing we do. And the topic that our teens want to talk about more than any other is power and vulnerability. That’s the conversation that they want to be in. It’s all over their lives. It’s, it shows up for them in a whole bunch of ways.
I would say the key Hartman philosophy around this question actually dates back to an essay. I think the best thing David Hartman wrote, an essay that Hartman wrote in 1982, around the time of the Lebanon war, in which he argued that there were two paradigms for the Jewish people in the return to Israel that could animate our relationship to power, survival, and responsibilities.
The essay was called “Auschwitz or Sinai.” And he says, the Auschwitz paradigm interprets the return to Jewish power as an antidote to victimhood. And it becomes, it is both morally important on its own, but it becomes a huge obstacle for any sort of conversation about moral responsibility. Because if you, everything you do is about Auschwitz in the rearview mirror, you kind of can do whatever you want. That’s the permission structure that’s granted by the notion of vulnerability.
And he says, in contrast, the original story of the Jewish people’s arrival in Israel was on the heels of having stood below the mountain at Sinai and accepted covenantal responsibility where the return to land, the acquisition of sovereignty and the building up of a powerful society was tethered to a set of moral and political obligations that made that return to history conditional.
And for Hartman, who is watching the Lebanon war take place, he’s like, that Auschwitz consciousness just can’t, we can’t get away from it. We have to figure out how we shift towards a conversation about Jewish power that is rooted in responsibility.
Now, I would say Hartman, by the end of his life, recognized that… He was so eager to push from Auschwitz to Sinai that he didn’t take as seriously the commanding force of Auschwitz itself. You know, it’s, you don’t leave it behind completely. You don’t forget, you remain vigilant, that actually, people are trying to kill you, that that has a huge feature on our consciousness as well.
But our philosophy in the moment has to be that power for the Jewish people grants us a dignity that has been stripped from us in the past. We don’t believe as the Jewish people that power is fundamentally corrupting. It’s actually, theologically, one of the gifts that God gives human beings, is to be able to enter the world and to rule it, to conquer it. That’s supposed to be something powerful. But it is also conditional to larger covenantal and moral responsibilities that we carry in the world.
That’s a story that I think can sing both as we look at what the state of Israel is and where it’s failing and where it needs to go, but also to back to where we started: It is it is a story that sings for American Jews after a hundred years of extraordinary accomplishment as American Jews with power. In this story where I, I see why people want to gravitate towards back the Auschwitz narrative, to go back to what that gives us—let’s focus on it. Let’s respond to it. Let’s be fixated with it. But as you said, it doesn’t actually free us. It doesn’t challenge us. It doesn’t elevate us.
Jeffrey: I know we’re gonna go to questions, but let me just ask you one final question, and this is what I believed much of my life. I think you believe this. That somehow the United States is a sui generis diaspora experience. You still believe that it’s the sui generis diaspora experience?
Yehuda: I do. I mean, this is all for me, it’s partly personal. You know, I, my, all four of my grandparents were born in this country. I feel like, my family’s story, it feels like the movie version, right? Like the generation that came between 1895 and 1905, and they were the immigrant generation, and then the next generation built their own businesses, fought as GIs in World War II, the next generation achieved incredible accomplishments in the professional class, and then the next generation gets to go get PhDs. Like, that’s the story.
So that story, it, for me, it carries a lot of like the, that kind of fulfillment narrative. But I do think there is also just something different, not just about the conditions that America made, but what the interpretive process that Jews did for America. We built a Judaism that’s been so webbed together with American ideals. That’s what’s so unusual, right?
And you know, tikkun olam is like the biggest example. Like we found a ready-made, arcane concept from the 13th century, and we made, we were like, we decided that’s the most important Jewish value. And why? Because it was like a perfect Judaism to align itself with American exceptionalism. We’re responsible for the world’s problems and we feel we have the arrogance that we can actually solve them.
I think, I think that’s like so incredible. It’s admirable. It means that we’ve been doing an interpretive process here and whether or not ultimately this place is sui generis, it’s just been extraordinary, and I really hope that at, at like this pivotal turning point, we’re able to say, look what we did as American Jews in this moment. Look what we benefited from American Jews in this moment. And to recommit ourselves to saying that’s actually the project of what the next 250 years is supposed to look like.
Thank you, Jeff.
Jeffrey: Thank you.
