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

Live at JFN: What Ails American Judaism? 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 major issues facing Jewish life. I’m Yehuda Kurzer. We’re recording today live in Nashville, Tennessee at a great venue, the Cannery, hosted at the Jewish Funders Network Conference. I’m really grateful to our sponsors, the Schusterman Family Philanthropies, the Crown Family Philanthropies, and the Jim Joseph Foundation for making this all possible. Really grateful for my guests for being here. I’ll introduce them shortly. And I wanna invite all of you in person, but also on the podcast as well, to stay tuned afterwards for performance and some music from Distant Cousins. Pretty excited to share billing with them in this event tonight.

It’s a really anxious time. It’s hard to tell sometimes what are the things we’re genuinely supposed to be scared of, and where are the times when we might be paranoid. I have a predisposition personally, about the fixation that our Jewish community has with crisis. It’s the kind of joke that’s in the name of the podcast—the two main preoccupations in Jewish life are talking about identity and being anxious about crisis. In fact, that slash in the logo does a lot of work, to illustrate the two as two concerns.

American Jewish philosopher Shiman Rawidowicz, writing in the middle of the 20th century, characterized us as the ever-dying people. He wasn’t describing Jewish life as much as mocking our instinct as a Jewish community to be convinced that we are the last generation of Jews. We are gonna be the last people to turn off the lights. And I’ve always been sympathetic to that kind of critique. Is it really as bad as everybody says? Are we really on the verge of death, disappearance? Or is that simply a hobby, a habit that we’ve carried with Jews for a long time, even if it’s actually hard-earned.

You care about Israel, peoplehood, and vibrant, ethical Jewish communities. We do too.

We’re about two and a half or so weeks out of Passover and in the Passover liturgy, and this is something that Frank cited in his article in the Passover liturgy, we say, “In every generation, they rise up to destroy us and God saves us.” And maybe that’s true. I don’t know whether it’s we save ourselves or God saves us, or maybe we’re not fully threatened to the extent that we feel. But the threats do feel there, and our anxieties, especially today, feel pretty hard earned.

As I said, no one wants to be the last one here, and none of us want to be Jewish leaders who make decisions in a moment like this that make us feel as though we didn’t do enough to stand up against the existential challenges, whether they come from the outside or whether they come from the inside.

A former colleague of mine at Hartman Shaul Magid wrote about a decade ago about intermarriage and about the transformations of Jewish identity in America, which our community spent decades talking about as an existential fear. It’s worth naming that because in retrospect, it was not actually an existential fear for American Jews, but one of the things he said is, in a hundred years American Jews will still be here. It’s just that our Jewish community is gonna look very different than it does today.

And sometimes it’s hard to know whether that’s consolation because when we talk about what we’re scared of, it’s not merely a question of will the Jewish people disappear? It’s—will we be unrecognizable. Fears of continuity are not just about disappearance, it’s about the transformation of our community. It’s something that might be better, but in the end might actually be worse.

I’ve been thinking a lot about metaphors that people sometimes use to describe the condition that we face as Jews, and oftentimes, weirdly, a number of Jewish thinkers go to the terminology of illness. Around the turn of the 20th century, this was pretty common. A Zionist thinker named Max Nordau, who actually was also a physician, so it may not have been so crazy for him to deploy this metaphor, felt that the condition of the Jews was a kind of sickness, an illness, a weakness, a degeneracy in the Jewish condition, and his prescription was that Jews had to become muscular, literally and figuratively. It was a big anchoring idea of his Zionism.

But it wasn’t just the Zionists who felt there was something ill about the Jewish condition, and I’m not talking about like, illness, like the disease that Antisemites say that Jews carry. This is an internal conversation. It wasn’t just the Zionists. Franz Rosenweig, a German Jewish thinker who wanted Jews to be more serious about learning and Jewish identity, the founder of the original Lehrhaus, Rosenweig wanted Jews to invest in their Jewishness, and he too felt there was something sick about the Jewish condition. What he said, amazingly, was “Zionism was a diagnostician of pure genius, but a most mediocre healer. It recognized something ill in the Jewish condition, but didn’t like the prescription that it offered.”

I don’t know about these metaphors of death, disease, debilitation, or illness. I find them fascinating and a little disturbing, and at the same time, it’s noticeable to me how many thinkers, how many Jewish communal leaders are returning to that almost crippling anxiety, which remember is also a medical condition, that crippling anxiety and fear about what we face, the existential threats that we see against our bodies as Jews, but also the moral threats that many of us experience as corroding our souls.

I thought about this when I read Frank’s influential essay back in the Atlantic in April, 2024, called The Golden Age of American Jews is Ending and especially a line that you wrote near the end: “The case for pessimism is more convincing.” Well, we could talk about that, ’cause pessimism is never falsifiable. Things can in fact always get worse, and I thought about that question of disease and illness and debilitation, even though you don’t use it at all, Sarah, in your influential book Here All Along from 2019, which was a memoir of self-discovery and searching for a version of a Jewishness that you hadn’t found, and which almost characterized American Jewry as not sick, but hopelessly banal, something deeply wrong that didn’t allow you to thrive as a Jew.

Both of you, I think, share some really deep, almost existential fears about the state and the future of American Jewry. And yet the difference between your writings is that Frank, your recent piece characterized the foregoing era of American Jewry as one of thriving a golden age. And Sarah, your longer arc story tells the story of a gradual weakening. And that’s something I want to poke at tonight.

I’m thrilled to be on stage with both of you. Thanks for doing this. Thanks for doing this in this amazing venue. And I wanna start by asking where we are in the American Jewish story. In what ways are we sick and how are we gonna get healthy again? And Sarah, I really wanna start with you. You had a diagnosis of the condition of American Jewry in 2019 when you wrote your book. I think that diagnosis has changed a little bit. The things that trouble you about the state and future of American Jewry are a little bit different than you saw then. Walk us through a little bit—what was wrong then, and what do you think is going wrong now?

Sarah: So, you know, my diagnosis comes very much from my personal experience, which, in turns out, after publishing a book, I realize is the personal experience of probably the majority of American Jews, which is that I grew up with the kind of Judaism that was three holidays. You know, there was Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Passover, and they were the bad holidays. And then there was Hanukkah, which was the good holiday, cause there was a party and that was the Judaism.

You know, the Christians in my town had a church. We had a temple. You know, they had holidays. We had holidays. They worshiped God in their church. We worshiped God in our Jew church. And it was, that was, you know, Judaism was sort of Christianity without the Jesus and with some fun ethnic stuff.

And then when I actually grew up and, you know, in my mid thirties was introduced to Jewish texts and substance, I was so stunned. You know, I thought like, well wait, I didn’t see any of this in those four holidays. That just wasn’t, and by the way, it wasn’t just the fact that I stopped learning when I was. 12 or 13. The adults in my community also were not familiar with any of these texts. I mean, the average American Jew has never heard of the Talmud. I know, I say this to rabbis all the time, and they don’t believe me. I promise you. In fact, I’m gonna go a little further. The average American Jew doesn’t really know what the Torah is. It’s a thing on the scrolls. It’s in Hebrew, it’s old. That’s what I knew about the Torah 10 years ago.

And I started studying and learning, and I wrote this really substantive book with 550 endnotes, cause I wanted to show people the substance I found. You know, like, I didn’t know Judaism had wisdom on death, birth, being a good spouse, parent, friend, being a, you know, conducting your business. I had no idea and I wanted to share this. And then over the last five years I’ve been thinking like, why didn’t I know? Why was this Judaism I grew up with so oddly edited? Not only was the wisdom, anything post-Bible was just kind of disappeared, that was gone. And a lot of the really primal, Earth-based and nature-based traditions weren’t there either.

It was very strange, like, you know, the idea of kri’a, of tearing your shirt, you know, in a moment when you learn that someone you’ve loved has died or at their funeral, that’s a really primal, powerful ritual to horror what we do with the, with the body. This ritual bathing like, these were not part of my community growing up, trust me.

And I wanna say, you know, my second book, which I’ve been thinking about is like, why did that happen? And there’s some history that I think we need to reckon with. You know, I think 200 years ago, onset of modernity, Jews are becoming citizens, we need to figure out how to be citizens in the modern world, and we did our very best. You know, we reformed Judaism and thank God we did because it allowed us to enter modernity. I’m a Jew today because of what those reformers did 200 years ago.

But in some ways, and please don’t yell at me when I say this, I’ve gotten some real pushback on this, but in some ways we did kind of take a Protestant cookie cutter and jam it into Judaism and get rid of a lot of things that didn’t fit. And I know why we did that. And we did it because we were just bathed in hatred and bathed in Christianity, and we were doing the best we could, but it came at a cost. We lost a lot. And Orthodoxy was a reaction to that. And there was a rigidity to that and a reactiveness to that. And that came at a cost.

So, you know, these denominations that have served us beautifully for so long, they came at a great cost. And I think now we have the ability to go back and reclaim what we lost. And so many Jews are doing that today.

Yehuda: Yeah. They’re not gonna yell at you because we told them to be quiet for a podcast recording. So they might be seething, but they’re not gonna yell at you. We’ll come back to some of the pieces that you said. You said a lot there about the history of what we’ve inherited in this moment.

Frank, I want to turn to you ’cause your diagnosis of what’s gone wrong is a little bit different. You tell a story of a golden age, actually of American Judaism and, and I guess I wanna start with what was the moment at which you felt that something was off in this story that you feel that we’ve inherited, that it’s been by and large, a positive story.

Frank: I think that there was a moment where I started to, I mean obviously after Squirrel Hill and after Charlottesville, there was this moment where it felt like antisemitism had been this thing that was totally alien to late 20th century Jewish American existence.

I think one of the thrills of living through the late 20th century as a Jew was just this sense that we weren’t living in a world of alienation. We were totally at home in American culture and in American politics, where it was, in fact, a culture and a political culture to some extent that had actually been shaped by Jewish dreams and, a lesser extent, Jewish anxieties about the potential for this nation.

It was actually, there was a moment I was talking to my brother Josh, who’s a friend of yours, and in, I think 2018, and I said, you know, I see these events and they’re terrible, but I don’t experience antisemitism in my own life. And my brother is, he’s slightly more observant than I am. And he told me a couple stories, in Boston, there had been a couple things that had happened. He’d walked down the street one day, after shul, and some guy came up behind him, muttering Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump in a very menacing sort of way. His in-law’s shtiebel in Westchester, had been shot up with the BB gun. His son’s best friend is the son of a Chabad rabbi and his house had been burnt down in arson.

And I thought, this is, I’m not connecting with this story, but there was something out here that I needed to understand. And then October 7th happened and there was this explosion. I had kind of identified before October 7th, much more strongly with the idea that there was a threat coming from the political right and from the far right against Jews, which I think is still a very salient feature of American politics, and then there was this other threat that was emerging, which I had kind of bracketed a little bit and maybe wished away. And so I guess, you know, the scales fell from my eyes and that cliche after October 7th.

But there was something that you said at the very beginning that you were talking about anxiety and fear as Jewish emotions, and I guess also their political emotions that are very common and it’s hard not to experience them. There’s so much about the way in which we’ve been conditioned as Jews in order to filter what we see through our canonical texts, through the experiences of our grandparents. And that’s real. And I think that we can’t shunt that to the side.

But on the other hand, we also know that fear and anxiety are overwhelming emotions and they occlude our ability to think strategically, and so in the Jewish brain, in order to navigate the world in which we live, we need to both be able to process that, that anxiety and that fear, and not, and not shunt it aside. Like that is real. That is genuine. That’s authentic. It’s based in reality.

But in order to navigate this world, I think we also need to be able to think strategically.

We need to think about making political choices, and those choices can’t be done from a position of abject fear because, uh, if they are made from that position, then I think we’ll make bad decisions.

Yehuda: Yeah, I definitely wanna come back to that because there’s a logical reason to say fear is a useful survival mechanism. It gives you preparedness to be able to handle existential threats. You’ve seen it before, you might have a playbook, but whether actually in real time it helps you do that, I’m not totally sure or kind of gets in the way.

I think what I see both of you share in common is a characterization of a lot of Jewish life in the 20th century as kind of what I’ll call a warm bath of liberalism, for better or worse, right? The warm bath of liberalism creates the kind of conditions of assimilation. That you see as having weakened our resolve to maintain our own particularism, to actually mine the stuff out of Jewish tradition that Jews perceive that they didn’t really need. Like, why do I need particularly Jewish mourning rituals if what I’m borrowing from my neighbors is perfectly fine?

But you’ve also described is, like, the warm bath of liberalism made Jews basically feel safe. And I share in common with you that like, when I was in graduate school, yeah, people said weird things to me all the time around Harvard. People would say things all the time about wearing a kippah. Professors. I had a professor in the classroom who parenthetically had served in the Wehrmacht. That should have, that should have been a red flag, who said really anti-Semitic things to me, but it didn’t feel threatening to me. I just thought it was weird. And I argued with him about my grade, which he gave me a bad grade on cause he said I was, I was reading Paul wrong. Whatever, that’s a whole other podcast. But those, but it didn’t scare me. And now something flips in terms of that sense of being scared.

And I guess I wanna take both angles of that warm bath of liberalism. Frank, I’ll start with you and then I’ll come back to you, Sarah. What do you think were the central features? What made it possible for you to feel that we were basically fine? Like, and not just what did it feel like, but what were the characteristics of this society that Jews built in America or enabled America to build that enabled us to feel that sense of security?

Frank: So American Jews are incredible dream casters and imagineers. It’s really one of the geniuses of our community. We happen to be good at creating communal organizations and philanthropy and all these other things. But really one of our gifts was to imagine what American Jewish life would be like by casting these glossy images about what American life could look like.

And you know, it goes back to Emma Lazarus. It goes back to people like, there was a Harvard philosopher named Horace Kallen, an idea about America as being a tolerant society where to participate. You didn’t need to engage in this European bargain where you needed to renounce your particularism, your Jewish identity in order to become a citizen. And the United States citizenship was about authentically showing up. And it was the, the hyphen in the middle of Jewish American was not something to hoo. It was something to embrace. And so that is one vision.

And then the second vision is this vision of, I mean, the corollary to that is this idea that America is a place where there is no blood and soil nationalism, which is kind of a fiction, but it’s a wonderful aspiration about what America could look like. So it’s a celebration of immigration. It was this idea that in order for Jews to thrive, we needed there to be broad protections for all religious and ethnic and political minorities. It meant that we could participate in the culture as truly ourselves. We didn’t need to change our names anymore. You didn’t need to be George Burns or Edward Robinson in order to participate in American Life. You could participate as Jerry Seinfeld. You could participate as Adam Sandler singing the Hanukkah song, and that felt that kind of cultural ubiquity, that acceptance from the mainstream, the way in which it was possible to see yourself reflected in the mainstream.

It was bizarre in retrospect, because we’re only, what, 2 or 3% of the population, at best. But if you turned on the television set and you watch the nightly news, or you watch Prime Time, it felt like we were, we were looming over the culture. It was an incredible privilege for an ethnic minority to have that kind of salience and to feel seen and accepted and embraced in that sort of way.

Yehuda: Yeah. So, and I actually, my favorite example in that, maybe the turning point in the whole story is Lenny Bruce doing comedy routines in comedy clubs describing Jewish and Goyish. And naming that there’s something different between the Jewish and the Goyish in a way that says, yeah, Jews are a little weird, but not dangerously weird. Not like weird in a way that should be scary. It’s just that… their rye bread and we’re white bread.

Like that distinction, and that marks that like you’re not trying to hide your Jewishness in order to participate in something. You’re gonna participate fully as a Jew and be part of the kind of cultural thriving.

Sarah: But are you?

Yehuda: Yeah, go ahead.

Sarah: I mean, but are you? I just, you know, it’s like this, this idea that Adam Sandler, that this is like the full Jew, like this is like, I, I don’t know. I, I hear what you’re saying and I do, I’m not in any way saying that. That wasn’t wonderful. It was wonderful. I mean, whatever the vacation from history that we had in America was wonderful. But I just, and, but I just, you know, I’m just questioning a little bit like these very public Jews, like, were they really public as Jews or as sort of like, ha ha, I’m a cultural Jew. Ha ha, my mother’s anxious. Ha ha, I like bagels. Ha ha, I’m rye bread, not white bread, but we’re both bread, you know, I just go to a different church like.

What was the kind of, as a Jew that was presenting and that’s a fine way to be a Jew. I’m not, I’m not criticizing that, but I just wonder like, you know, Joe Lieberman was so notable. It was like, oh my God, like, whoa, this guy, he’s an Orthodox Jew. Like that. That was the exception. That was not the rule.

So I just wanna, you know, this is Meir Soloveitchik. I think this is sort of his argument, which is almost a counter argument to your piece, which was, yeah, it was a golden age for a certain type of Jew for a certain type of assimilated cultural Jew that was acceptable, right? That was kind of like, oh, I’m just like you, but with a fun ethnic church. Like, you don’t go to your church. Ha ha, I don’t go to my Jew church either. We’re both kind of modern and, you know, we’re, you know, spiritual but not religious. And so I, I don’t know, I just want to push a little bit on like that. What, what was the nature of that acceptance?

Frank: I think that it sells American Jewry a little bit short, not to note all of the incredible theology and theological innovation that emerged on American soil. So your critique of Jerry Seinfeld is probably fair, right? Like that’s a pretty empty reason to celebrate American Jewish life. But in a constellation of, kind of the whole edifice you have, Meir Soloveitchik’s father wrote an incredible book and founded an incredible strain of Judaism that was about the tension of living in American life and navigating American life.

Even all of the Jeremiahs decrying assimilation represent an incredible canon of Jewish thought, going back to the stuff that Abraham Joshua Heschel started writing as soon as he got to the shores. The American offshoot of Chabad is an incredible theological innovation. Conservative Judaism is an incredible offshoot. Reconstructionist strains of Judaism is an incredible offshoot.

America is a place where religions tend to innovate because there is this blank canvas to work with, and that’s been true for Jews as well. And so we’re experiencing things in the same sort of way that Jews all over the world experiencing things in this interaction with modernity, there is assimilation that tug is there and we do lose some of the richness in the course of it, but then there are all these other things that spring up in that same space.

Yehuda: Yeah, I guess I feel Sarah, that that represents my growing up story, where I felt as the childhood of American public servant, perfectly assimilated into the possibilities of what it meant to become an American, ultimately representing America overseas as a Jew, but also with a richness of Modern Orthodox upbringing and Jewish education that felt like it was only possible. Because of America. But that experience left you hollow.

Sarah: No, and here’s, first of all, I’m certainly, I mean like the ability of Jews to thrive in America is unparalleled. And there’s no question that the, you know, the Conservative movement, which is now 18% of American Jews has thrived, the Reconstructionist movement, which is now I think 1.4% of American Jews has thrived. I mean. There are these pockets and I’m not, I’m in no way denying that.

And that is the beauty of that vacation from history we had that, you know, you guys were free. You were free to grow up with this deep, rich Jewish identity that didn’t impede your Americanness. That was the beauty of that vacation. But you know, the legacy of the history that led to that vacation that led us to be safe enough in this country to be kinda accepted is that I grew up and the majority of American Jews grew up with something that wasn’t that rich Jewish identity, and that is a cost.

And I think, you know, I sometimes see in the organized Jewish world, you know, this idea that kind of every Jew knows what the Talmud is like every, there’s almost, it’s hard for a lot of people who didn’t grow up like I did, to realize just how little most American Jews know about the tradition. I think it’s just hard to even imagine. And they don’t believe me. And so there are, you know, there are certainly wonderful, I think minority pockets of Jews doing deep rich Jewishness.

And then there’s like a vast number of Jews out there who don’t have access, who don’t even know that exists. Like, I’d never heard of the Federation 10 years ago. Never heard of it. You know, I just, I, I didn’t, I didn’t know I, I wasn’t connected and, you know, looking at the Pew survey data, I wasn’t alone. There’s a lot of Jews like me.

Yehuda: I guess one of the things that I’m steering towards is that this is old chestnut of like, America was good for Jews, but bad for Judaism. Which is to say the assimilation that was made possible for American Jews in America was very good for Jews as individuals. All of the attainments that we were able to achieve in every piece of industry, socioeconomic, political mobility, the fluidity of boundaries, the breakdown of the kind of structural antisemitism that exists in other places that Jews lived, but there’s an open question that we could continue to debate about whether it was ultimately good for Judaism itself, for the flourishing of Judaism.

And the, the flip side of that is. Okay, well there are only two ways to kind of continue to preserve Jewish particularistic thriving. One is to bring back just enough antisemitism that it’s not dangerous, but where Jews are reminded of what it means to be Jewish. That’s choice one. I would say that is what we might call a slippery slope. Yeah, just enough antisemitism.

The second option is to bring back unjust enough Jewish weirdness. Like, are Jews willing to be counter-cultural and weird in readopting Jewish religious and cultural habits and practices that are not the Protestant versions of Jewishness? Because it’s only by doing that that we will be able to kind of really create Jewish continuity.

I guess I’ll, I’ll start with you, Frank. Where are you on that?

Frank: I’ll take door number two, Bob. No, I think that, oh, well, first of all, antisemitism has emerged. And it, it, it…

Yehuda: Good news, bad news, right?

Frank: No, it has emerged. And I think we can’t deny that it is a looming presence in American life, that it is something that hit us across the face in a way that I think will have profound implications for our community. Those implications will be both good and bad. I think that there’s incredible sense of identification that didn’t exist before October 7th, that is real, and that could be harnessed and incredibly productive sorts of ways.

I think that I, I don’t dismiss that one of the sublime things about being a Jew is that you exist within the context of this extremely contingent sense of existence, where your peoplehood is a very fragile thing and the fact that it manages to persist despite history is actually something that is sublime and overpowering and to be reminded of that contingency, I don’t think is necessarily a bad source of identification.

And it’s ultimately gonna be connected to the second thing that you’re describing is that sense of contingency, I think actually does steer people in, make people feel counter-cultural. Right? That I think that that actually opens up spaces for the type of counter-cultural weirdness, your term, not mine, is something that I think could actually take root in this sort of environment.

Sarah: I mean, I, definitely option two, obviously, but I think, I think, you know, being honest, I think the only way to get to option two is for some of option one. I think we have to kind of be forced into it.

And I’ll tell you, I’m seeing this a lot on college campuses. You know, having spoken at like 25 campus Hillels since October 7th, what I am seeing is Jewish students being Jews, like they actually, they’re the only students on campus who really have to think. No one cares about their feelings, so they can’t just throw a tantrum. They actually have to, you know, muster up some facts. Their stories are always decentered. They’re told like, you’re an oppressor, we’re gonna decenter you. So they spend a lot of time listening to other people’s stories.

And they’re really, you know, they’re learning the Jewish lesson, that the mob, the majority, and particularly the mob, is often wrong. It’s an important lesson. Ahad Ha’am, famous Zionist, you know, the whole idea of like the blood libel taught Jews that sometimes the majority is wrong, that everyone can be wrong and the Jews can be right.

And you know, seeing this on campus when these kids are getting kicked out of every progressive campus club because they have a no-Zionists-allowed policy. You know, what I tell them is I’m like, start your own climate change club and make it open to everyone of every background, every belief, you make it radically welcoming, radically inclusive, and then build the best climate club you can. You know, and this is what we’ve done in this country. Right. This is what we did with law firms and hospitals back in my parents’ day.

And I, I do wonder if that little bit of option one that is happening now, it is leading to this weirdness and what I want is I want Jews to know the awesome weirdness that we have. Like most Jews do not know that there is Jewish wisdom about any of the issues that we’re thinking about today. They have no idea because again, if your Judaism is three bad holidays and one good one, what are you going to, how would you know? How would you know?

Yehuda: Yeah, it’s the problem that we have though is that the off-ramps are so powerful and the off-ramps are either I’m being pushed out, I’m therefore gonna adapt my politics to accommodate themselves to the mob. That’s one choice.

And the other is not, I’m going to try to retain my commitment to my liberal values that have carried me until now, but I’m gonna reject those liberal values entirely. I mean, that’s where I want us to land, is in a recommitment to the very principles of a liberal Judaism that was rooted in, in the value of human dignity and autonomy and freedom that we built a whole Judaism around in this country. And by the same token that we wanna advocate for in Israel, a liberal Zionist position that has no plausibility structure currently in Israeli politics, but still might be the best version of a current Zionism out there.

How do we go about cultivating that sensibility when the off-ramps are so powerful?

Frank: Well, I think we also need to consider the context that we are stepping into a Postliberal America, that it was easy for Jews to celebrate liberalism when liberalism was the political norm and maybe the weirdness now and the countercultural thing is actually to promote liberal values.

I think about where we’re going in this spiral that we’re in. And one of the dangers in this spiral is that Jews look for protection from the strongman, from the person who stands up and says, I am your protector, I will, I will fend off these people. And it, and it’s such an attractive option to feel like you have that on your side.

But I think the danger is, is that in the history of the world, that type of liberalism is actually the only thing that has demonstrably allowed for Jewish thriving and you know, the golden age was the golden age because there was this political context. And so if Jews in a, a generation ago were able to look at America and say, this is what it means to be an exceptional nation, I feel like it’s kind of incumbent upon Jews to reengage in that project at this moment where liberalism feels like it’s slipping away on both sides. I think it’s incumbent to say this is America’s best self and it grows from something that we know from our own history and from our own canonical text that this is a way forward.

Sarah: You know, I, what worries me about, as I see as I see rising illiberalism in our politics, I see the appeal for a lot of people of an illiberal kind of Judaism, the very like, angry, everyone’s out to get us. We are just gonna take what we can get and who cares about everyone else? It’s just about us. You know? So I see that and that option, I get the appeal of it. It’s strong. It has a very strong, clear message.

And if on the other side the option is kind of a watery, like social justice is good, with no particular substance. I worry that, you know, that illiberal Jewish message is quite powerful. So I think my answer is, we need a liberal Judaism that actually has substance, that has radical countercultural, powerful wisdom for how we live today, that will make people think like, actually, there’s something worth, there’s something worth engaging here.

Yehuda: Yeah. Which also, by the way, requires a continued focus also on what it means to be a critic of our own people. At the same time, the external threats are easy to notice. And it requires also us to push back against the internal issues as well.

What were you gonna say, Frank?

Frank: Oh, I feel like we’re almost 75% of the way there. When you listen to the way that Jews tend to position themselves in, in American political discourse, there are a couple things that we fall back on as expressions of our core beliefs. We wanna believe in free speech. Because we, I think we know from the 20th century, going back to the post Cold War era, is that the protection of minority rights and dissonant rights is something that is actually, it’s good for us as well as it’s good for the nation.

I think certain ideas about meritocracy we want to believe in as expressions of a type of liberalism. The challenge, I think, is not to engage in that type of. Liberalism selectively because it’s, it’s so hard to be, I find this in myself. You land on places where you sound so fervent about your values, and then there are instances of hypocrisy that creep up on you, and I’m afraid that the rest of the world can see those moments of hypocrisy and it’s not attractive.

Yehuda: Yeah. I mean, listen, the best way for liberal Judaism and liberal Zionism to win is for it to be as passionate about its commitments as the illiberal causes that are rising on both ends.

Lemme ask you the final question, which is a very American question, which is, we started with diagnoses of things that aren’t working, both the longer arc history of Jews in America, the more recent episodes. Both of you have focused a lot of your attention on campus as a site of some of your concerns.

But give me one thing that makes you optimistic about the possibility that we as American Jews are gonna be able to get past this. Point, it can be a vision, an image, a story, something that makes you feel optimistic.

Frank: Well, I definitely, I mean, I, I’m just, I will just stay pause for a moment on campus where, I went to Columbia, I’ve written a lot about Columbia, and I do feel like as I’ve gone to campus and I’ve met with Columbia students and students who have been on the front lines of things that I would describe as objectively anti-Semitic, I have seen that they become more accustomed to engaging in this type of open, courageous argumentation that I think a lot of us would benefit from that it feels like.

One of the tendencies that we’ll have in a moment where we feel under threat is to hunker down. It’s to which again, can be a very productive tendency in a lot of ways, but this retreat from the world to retreat from the political arena and to see kids get trained in the actual work of politics, which is sitting in a room with people who may not like you, and you may not like them, and actually having a passionate argument with them where you don’t walk away.

Sarah: You know, I have this fantasy where we could go back to Europe in the early 1800s and with our modern sensibilities, I mean, with the sensibility of Jewish pride and joy and curiosity, we could actually kind of reinvent Judaism from there. We could kind of bring Judaism into modernity without the Protestant cookie cutter, without the real, like profound hatred of most of our fellow citizens. And I kind of wonder what kind of Judaism would arise.

And I actually, I feel optimistic because I see a lot of people today doing that project. I see them at Hartman, at Hadar, at Svara, really mining the depths of our tradition to take our wisdom and bring it to the Jewish public. And I think that that makes me very, very optimistic.

Yehuda: We can do that project without a time machine. Exactly. So I wanna thank, thank you to Frank Foer, to Sarah Hurwitz.

Thank you for being here tonight, and please enjoy the amazing sounds here in Nashville of Distant Cousins. Thanks everybody.