For millennia, the threat of antisemitic persecution has made an acute sense of vulnerability one of the defining features of the Jewish experience. More recently, the stability and belonging – the “at homeness” – that the American Jewish community enjoys has largely supplanted this crisis narrative.

Today, rising antisemitism in the United States has North American Jews increasingly defining their existence through a lens of crisis. Donniel Hartman, Yossi Klein Halevi, and Elana Stein Hain discuss the impetus and ramifications of this perceptual shift on Jewish identity and Zionism in North America.

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About

For Heaven’s Sake is a podcast from the the Shalom Hartman Institute’s iEngage Project that revives the lost art of Jewish debate for the sake of illuminating a topic, not sowing division. The podcast draws its name from the concept of Machloket l’shem shemayim, “Disagreeing for the sake of heaven.”