The following is a transcript of Episode 61 of the Identity/Crisis podcast. Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.
Yehuda Kurtzer:
Hi, everyone. Welcome to Identity/Crisis, a show about news and ideas from the Shalom Hartman Institute. I’m Yehuda, Kurtzer president of Shalom Hartman Institute of north America. And we’re recording on June 29th, 2021. As a lot of events continue to be in the Jewish news over the last few weeks, we spent a lot of our time talking about Israel, Israel/Palestine, the news out of Israel, and the ramifications of that for the Jewish community. Today, I want to do something a little bit different. It feels like a show that’s a long time coming personally, and in some ways, institutionally. So those of you are familiar, and I hope most of you are, the Shalom Hartman Institute is a scholarly, but not really academic institution. What that means is that we’re really interested in ideas. We actually really value the disciplines around scholarship that create curate, study ideas and put those out into the world.
Yehuda Kurtzer:
But we’re not really an academic institution. We’re certainly not a tenure-granting institution. I’d say that’s an economic benefit for us at least. And we are actually one of, I think the biggest employers, certainly in the American Jewish community of people with PhDs and Jewish studies who are not working in academia. There’s a lot of interesting pieces of that, but it means that a lot of us who are in this work of caring about the Jewish people and caring about Jewish ideas come from a particular academic background and spend our time, however, doing something that’s a little bit different than the work of the academy, not necessarily producing ideas for their own sake. We can unpack the problematics and complexities of those terms, but actually trying to ask questions about who the Jewish people are, what are the needs of contemporary Jewish life and how does academic scholarship as filtered through those questions actually help serve the Jewish community.
Yehuda Kurtzer:
So today’s conversation, which I hope is not too meta, willget into some of the reasons why it actually has some pretty significant political ramifications for Jewish life. But today’s conversation is about what is Jewish studies for? We’ll unpack that a little bit later, but I’m really excited to have two friends and colleagues who are major leaders in the work of Jewish studies in north America here with me to unpack some of this, I’m going to present a little bit about their bios and I’m sure that there are other pieces of their bio that would be worth emphasizing. You can look them up online, but I’m picking out some pieces of their bios that are particularly relevant to the work of being, not just a great scholar of Jewish studies, but a great scholar of Jewish studies who is interested in the work of Jewish studies as it exists in the world, outside the academy seem to be interested in the ways in which to be a leader in this field is also to be a leader in some way in Jewish life.
Yehuda Kurtzer:
And we can unpack the problematics of that. So Pamela Nadell is the Patrick Clendenen Chair in Women’s and Gender History at American University in Washington. She’s the author of “America’s Jewish Women: a History from Colonial Times to Today,” which won a national Jewish book award, which by the way, is one of those that’s not from the academy. It’s one of those things that’s actually created by the Jewish community, but oftentimes rewards academic scholarship. Pam was the former president of the AJS, Association for Jewish Studies. And I’ll pick out one thing that happened, which was in 2017, she testified before the House Judiciary Committee in opposition to the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act, which at the time was an act to codify the State Department’s definition of Anti-semitism.
Yehuda Kurtzer:
Shaul Magid is a senior fellow at Shalom Hartman Institute north America, but I think his main job is a Distinguished Fellow of Jewish studies at Dartmouth College. He is also a rabbi of the Fire Island synagogue. He writes widely for publications, like Tablet, and Tikun. I’ll say those both in the same sentence. I know Shaul takes pride in publishing both Tablet and Tikun. Not a lot of people do that. His most recent book is called “Piety and Rebellion: Essays on Hasidism.” And he has a forthcoming book on Meir Kahane and is a member of the American Academy of Jewish Research. And I’ll just reemphasize what I said at the beginning, which is he’s a senior fellow at Shalom Hartman Institute, which is one of the places where he lives out this question of scholarship, not just for its own sake, but for the Jewish people.
Yehuda Kurtzer:
I’d love to start with both of you, maybe Pam you go first. I’d Love for you to start in a personal place, which is tell us a little bit about whatever personal or communal convictions you think were important to why you went into this field of Jewish studies.
Pamela Nadell:
First of all, thank you, Yehuda for having me. I’m delighted to be here and to be in conversation with you and Shaul, I’m going to reference two books. Obviously that’s what we do in the academy – we read books, we write books. And I want to start by talking about a book that came out more than 20 years ago called “Voices of Women Historians.” And in that book, Gerda Lerner, who was really the pioneering figure in terms of creating the modern study of women’s history in the United States and Gerda Lerner was a woman who came to the United States, got her PhD when she was in her forties and was also a refugee from Nazi-occupied Vienna. And Lerner said that her commitment to women’s history came out of her life, not out of her head. And I think that was such a telling statement that I discovered once that I had used it in the introduction to more than one book that I’ve written.
Pamela Nadell:
And then just a few years ago, my colleague Jeffrey Gurock wanted to create a kind of similar conversation among historians. And he actually edited a book called “Conversations with Colleagues” and he asked a number of us and you can see the stack of books on the front cover, what each of us had written. And he asked us to write again, sort of like your question, very biographically, how did we come to do Jewish studies? So I titled my essay in that book “Becoming an All-of-a-Kind Jewish Historian.” Now, if you read your children’s books, you will know that it’s a very striking reference to Sydney Taylor’s “All-of-a-kind Jewish Family” series, “All-of-a-Kind Family” series. And I think when I look back, I really see a very powerful intersection in my own biography from growing up in a suburban Jewish community, going to Hebrew school after school, a couple of days a week, spending a year as a college junior studying at Hebrew University and how that ended up coalescing with, for me, what was the feminist project that led to the writing of modern women’s history.
Pamela Nadell:
And then for me, modern Jewish women’s history. So I would say that those concerns set me on my path, not any particular communal concerns.
Yehuda Kurtzer:
Great. Shaul, what about you?
Shaul Magid:
Well, similar to Pamela, I grew up in a suburban Jewish world. I had very, very, very tenuous identity with the Jewish community, almost none in total. When I was 19, I became a Baal Teshuva. And I think there’s a whole long story about how it happened and ended up in Israel and ended up in Yeshiva for six years and then ended up feeling somehow alienated from that world. Or my interests really expanded beyond the parameters of the cultural Orthodox world that I was living in. And I ended up actually finding the Hartman Institute in Jerusalem at that time, which was run by David Hartman and went there really knowing nothing about it per se. And one of the criteria at that time is that if you are a candidate fellow at the Hartman Institute, you have to study at the Hebrew University in the afternoon. That was part of the criteria.
Shaul Magid:
And I ended up doing that for my MA at the Hebrew University, but I really had no idea what academia was. I really had no idea at all growing up. I never knew an academic. I don’t think my parents knew any academic. I was completely really on the outside. So in a certain way, in terms of thinking about Jewish community and academia, I came to academia as a refugee from the Yeshiva world, but somebody who grew up with no Jewish identity whatsoever. And so the connection to the communal, the notion of the collective, which is something that I really learned from David Hartman in my three years, that I was at the Hartman Institute was in a sense coming from the side and never from the front. So I really, in a certain sense, fell into this more than had any kind of direction of like, this is what I wanted to do.
Shaul Magid:
I had a commitment to the Jewish people. It was really like, I love to learn Torah. I knew the languages, I understood. I had a literacy in the material. It was a kind of a natural fit. And it really went from there later on once I went to Brandeis, I left Hebrew U went to Brandeis for my PhD, and then more specifically taught for eight years at the Jewish Theological Seminary then the whole notion of Jewish community became a centerpiece. So it’s really not until I was already inside the academic guild. So to speak that the notion of communal responsibility really became relevant for me.
Yehuda Kurtzer:
It’s interesting, the prepositional language of, from the side, as opposed to the front, something interesting about that. And I think it will keep recurring because I think for many academics, no, I went into this because I was drawn to a particular story, a narrative, an activity, a discipline. I went in search of knowledge. And of course I am in some ways, adjacent to people who use Jewish knowledge in different ways, right. It’s adjacent to. So I’m interested in that whole spacial piece. If I could push both of you though, you know, both of you have really thrived as academics in the traditional ways, in which academics are seen as thriving, tenured faculty at major universities books that are really well-regarded and serious books that are valued. If this is a thing that non-academics never really get about academics, but what you really want is that your books get valued more by your colleagues than by the general public.
Yehuda Kurtzer:
Like who cares about the general public? If my colleagues think it’s good, scholarship it’s really important, but both of you have achieved that in a particular historical context, right? The positions that you both have held wouldn’t have existed certainly 50 years ago in the American academy. And a lot of those positions in some ways are created by a Jewish community that may want something out of Jewish studies than Jewish studies faculty themselves necessarily want for them. It’s not that adjacent. So that could be forces like Jewish philanthropy. For an increasingly secular Jewish community that’s like, well, I don’t want to give it to the shool. Right? I want to give it to the university. There’s something there’s a cachet in that I want my kids to experience Judaism in the classroom and then it’ll might be taken seriously. There’s a whole proliferation of post-Holocaust chairs in Jewish studies.
Yehuda Kurtzer:
I would love for you to unpack a little bit. What are the forces at work in Jewish studies that you experience before we even get to your opinions of them? What are the forces at work from the Jewish community and Jewish interests that you see as actually driving the field in which you’ve been really successful? I don’t want to say beneficiaries. You’ve been leaders, but I’d love to try to map out what are the interests and mechanisms that the Jewish community has actually brought to bear, to make Jewish studies possible in the ways that you see it today.
Pamela Nadell:
I’m going to take us back, historically. Some of the listeners will know this, but I think many will not. In the 1920s, there was at Columbia University, a donor came to the president of the university. Her name was Linda Miller. She was active at Temple Emmanuel, the big reform congregation in New York. And she decided that she wanted to endow a chair in Jewish history. And then I haven’t read the correspondence, but other scholars have, there’s a tug of war between Miller and the president, president Nicholas Murray Butler, because she wants a majority vote on who occupies that chair. And Butler and she go back and forth and back and forth. She can make suggestions. Ultimately she does not get a chance to have a veto or a majority vote, but from the get-go. And after all this becomes the Miller chair that is held by Salo Baron. He gets the chair in 1930, after a bunch of other people have either been offered it and turned it down or been rejected by the committee.
Pamela Nadell:
And Baron is the preeminent Jewish historian of the middle decades until the latter decades of the 20th century, the towering giant figure. But he also held the only chair in Jewish history in the world for many decades. And so we see from the get-go this tension between the philanthropists who are creating Jewish studies, even before we get to the real explosion that begins in the seventies and eighties, it’s already laid out there. And the other thing that happens is that Baron’s chair is put in the department of history and not in a Jewish studies program or Semitics department. And that’s actually for me, maybe for Shaul as well, that is actually extremely significant because it says Jewish history is going to be part of world history. It’s not just going to be shunted aside in its own little particular area,
Yehuda Kurtzer:
Just to play devil’s advocate on that for a second, Pam. And then I’ll turn to Shaul for the original question. One might argue that it long proceeds, even that controversy. The idea that the university would be the place for the proliferation of Jewish knowledge is simply a reallocating of the center of gravity to something that Jews have paid for and commodified for a long time, which is the production of Jewish knowledge for its own sake. So maybe it’s not going to be the Yeshiva anymore. Maybe it’ll now be the university, because if we’re part of the class of people who might actually be clients at the university, of course, that’s the place where we should be setting these things up. But that means that it’s not just Jewish philanthropy coming into the academy. It’s actually, in some ways a relocation of almost a sacred activity that is considered to be important to actually live in the university.
Pamela Nadell:
Right. And I would point to, as you well know that this reallocation actually goes back to Wissenschaft des Judentums, this movement for the scientific study of Judaism, that’s a response actually to rising Anti-semitism in the beginning of the 19th century and response to the entrance of Jews into the modern world,
Yehuda Kurtzer:
Shaul, how do you see that story?
Shaul Magid:
It was a great historical preamble, because I think that in a certain sense, it really sets up the problem and the tension that exists in, I think this was the occasion for Rafe and Gilah’s essays in Religion Dispatches about Jewish studies. We can maybe get to that. But before that, I think that many of us who are employed in secular universities really feel in some way that we’re serving two masters. On the one hand, there is an implicit understanding that in some sense, the money is coming to us and our chairs are being endowed and our programs are being sponsored by people who really think that they’re getting the best bang for their buck by giving money to universities so that when their kids go there, they can take Jewish studies courses and they can enhance their Jewish identity. And that maybe says something about the nature, or maybe the moribund state of the American synagogue that is said, Yehuda, a lot of these donors feel like their money is better spent, their Jewish money is better spent by giving universities rather than giving to synagogues.
Shaul Magid:
That’s a separate point. But then on the other hand, many of us also feel very attached, and in a sense, devoted to the academic discipline in the humanities, many of us who were teaching in religious studies departments or history departments, and we don’t necessarily feel that our primary responsibility is to educating Jews about Judaism. Our primary responsibility is to produce knowledge about Judaica and to teach students, Jews, and non Jews about our subject matter. And I think that there’s very often a real tension between those two things. I mean, I’ve gotten calls and I’m sure Pam has too, in many of us have gotten calls from parents of Jewish students who were upset about something that was said in their Jewish studies course, because it didn’t really cohere with what they understood they were giving their money to send their kids to university in order to learn.
Shaul Magid:
And you know, our answer is, or my answer is that that my job is not to save your daughter’s soul. My job is to work in the academy and to produce knowledge. Simply my colleagues do and various other religious traditions or other kinds of disciplines. And I think that that tension really in a certain sense at various times in history reaches a kind of breaking point. And I think that in some way in the last six months or so, given those two essays and my contribution, it really is an inflection point where we really have to rethink what our relationship is and responsibility is to the Jewish people or to American Jewry, as opposed to what our responsibility is as academics in the academy.
Yehuda Kurtzer:
Good. So Shaul, for those who are listening is referencing a few articles. He’s mentioned the Religious Dispatchers by Rafe Neis and Gilah Kletenik, we’ll put those in the show notes for people who want to find them. Shaul wrote a response as well. And it’s part of the theoretical literature around this conversation. I would say some of those pieces are directed a little bit more towards the academic community themselves and the way that they’re written in the idiom in which they’re written. And we’re trying to figure out how to bridge this conversation to a broader Jewish community. But you’ve hit the nail on the head, Shaul, which is many academics themselves see themselves as engaged in the enterprise that may be dependent or may at one point have been dependent on Jewish communal resources, but in which the language of barter was not implicit or was not understood on the same terms by those who are driving Jewish studies in the academy, and those who may have made it possible.
Yehuda Kurtzer:
Let me put my own bio into this conversation too. Because I asked you both this question. I’ll share my own answer. When I was deciding, after college, which path to pick, it was either go to rabbinical school or go get a PhD. I felt that going to get a PhD was, you know, Christianity refers to the priesthood as white martyrdom. I felt like getting a PhD was like a white rabbinate. I didn’t have to make a particular denominational choice. I never really wanted to like be in a synagogue. And in some ways rabbinical schools are designed it as a kind of gilded industry to put people into those jobs. I wanted to be in the world of teaching of scholarship and ideas, but I really didn’t care much for the life and work of the academy. I never really liked the footnotes. If you don’t like the footnotes, what are you doing there?
Yehuda Kurtzer:
Right? I wanted to do work kind of like this. Now for me then, as opposed to the way you constructed your stories, I wanted to serve Jewish life. I wonder actually, how many PhD students go into this work precisely because they do. They actually are motivated by Jewish questions, personal ones, communal ones. They see the creation and production of knowledge as one of the principle commodities by which Jews have been led. And they want to be part of that. They get to be on the inside. So it’s not just Jewish money fuels Jewish studies. It’s actually a lot of people really care about Jewish life. And you can see it because scholars signed petitions about Israel, Palestine, even though they have no relationship to it in their academic work, they take positions on Jewish communal issues. So it’s gotta be a little bit more than just they out there want us to be doing something we don’t want to do. It’s gotta be a little bit deeper, right? Shaul. You’d have to say that this is much more personal for a lot of people in Jewish studies than I think sometimes they let on.
Shaul Magid:
I think that’s definitely true. I think it’s definitely true with me and for other people, not for everybody, people go into things for all kinds of reasons. And I think that creates a tension that’s internal to ourselves because we also have to be able to regulate and modify our own sense of allegiance and affiliations when we’re sitting in a faculty meeting in a history department or a religion department, right? None of those people you see sitting around the table could care less about what I think about the Jews or what I think about Jewish questions. And if I would be open about those particular kinds of commitments and feelings of responsibility in that context, in the context of a departmental meeting or some forum, it would actually be somewhat uncomfortable. And in a certain sense, inappropriate, I’m sure some of those other people have similar kinds of affiliations and responsibilities.
Shaul Magid:
And it’s not just the Jews speaking in a religious studies department where people are studying Islam and Buddhism and Hinduism, right. Everybody’s coming in – in religious studies, I think more than in a history department, everybody has a personal story that’s brought to the table. And I can’t speak to history departments cause I’ve never had a part of one. But I know within the study of religion, the people that are coming in that are Buddha-logists, particularly those that are American baby boomers, right? The interest in Buddhism is not simply an academic interest for all of them. They might not consider themselves Buddhist, but they certainly have a story that goes along with their own academic choices. So I think that there is the external tension between the academy and the community. And then there’s the internal tension between our responsibility as academics and also the personal story that actually brought us there. And there are, you know, academic adjacent institutions like the Hartman Institute and like other institutes, which really an incredible space in order to be able to cultivate those other kinds of senses of responsibility and affiliations and allegiances in a more open forum.
Yehuda Kurtzer:
Let me sharpen this to your Pam, which is, is it fair to basically say back to the Jewish community, we know that you’ve been philanthropically essential to the creation of Jewish studies and we know that you want something out of this, that our people aren’t really trained to do it in some ways you might say they are actually, and there is a constant static, right? Between a kind of expectation for not just the production of knowledge, but the proliferation of our people’s content and Torah and history. Is it fair right to say that, sorry, you’ve got to create these chairs, but we’re not accountable to you.
Pamela Nadell:
First of all, it’s a great question. And it’s a question that’s really about audience. That’s really what you’re getting at. And I thought about your comment about the kind of rabbi that an academic is without being formally trained as a rabbi years ago. I’m pretty sure that Paula Hyman once said that “our students see us as secular rabbis, even though that’s not what we set out to be.” So when I think about the audience, audiences can make lots of different demands and they take lots of different things away from any conversation they come in and they hear what they want to hear. What we type on our keyboards, what we write in our books, when those words leave those spaces, the reception is going to differ tremendously depending on whether it’s one of our colleagues who’s listening to it, or whether it’s our students or some of the parents that Shaul was talking about, by the way, I’ve never gotten a call like that from a parent.
Pamela Nadell:
So I’m really curious about what you’re saying and what I’m not saying, but I’m really of this older generation. I really think it’s a real problem when the philanthropists or the various different communal stakeholders try to intervene into what goes on in the academy. What strikes me is that in the conversations that have been happening around this in some of these academic forums that Shaul’s written about and others that you’ve quoted is that nobody seems to be aware that this is an issue that hits the university really widely. It’s not just going on in Jewish studies. So to give an example from my own university, we have a very generous philanthropist who endowed a center for the study of Russian culture. And every time that I try to say, well, you know, you have book talks, why don’t we bring in Gal Beckerman to talk about “When They Come For Us, We Will Be Gone” his fabulous history of the Soviet Jewry movement, the answer that I get from the director who’s a faculty member is Susan, the founder of the center, is not interested in this. So what you’re getting at is a wider issue within the realm of the university. You’re just reading it only through the prism of Jewish studies.
Yehuda Kurtzer:
Do you think that Jews, I mean, Jews like everybody else, but more so. So do you think that there’s any uniquely Jewish pieces of this? I’ll just tell anecdotally I felt as a graduate student at Harvard where Jewish studies was at near Eastern languages and civilizations, and many of my professors, not all of them, many of my professors erected this boundary that’s very common in Jewish studies, which is, I will talk to you about Jewish things, but with the door closed. It doesn’t come into my classroom. This isn’t a Hillel building more often than not. If a kid comes after a class and says, wow, I was really affected by what happened in this class. Go talk to the Hillel. Very, very common in that context. And I would look next door at the East Asian languages and civilizations building and it was Hillel. But for students who were studying these things, it just felt less problematized. So I agree. I hear what you’re saying, Pam, which is forces outside the university, trying to shape the agenda of the university is a really big issue in part, because people think this is where identity is created, produced, right? This is the index of our civilization. But I wonder whether we are more, I don’t know, uptight or anxious about enabling people to feel a holistic sense if I’m studying the civilization because it’s mine.
Pamela Nadell:
But the reason is because how Jewish studies evolved in the American academy. So what you have to remember is that until we get to the first Jewish studies programs really taking off in the sixties and the seventies, that Jewish studies on college campuses, the courses were taught by rabbis, mostly Hillel rabbis. And I’ll give you a personal example. When I was hired in my position at American University, where I spent my entire career, the director of my program for about the first decade was actually the former executive director of Bnei Brith. And he’d been director of the Bnei Brith Hillel. And when I got hired, I remember a colleague at another university saying to me, how can you work under him? And I thought, oh my gosh, I got a tenure track job. What do you mean, how could I work under him? But the point was that there was a very deliberate bifurcation from the get-go because Jewish studies, when it made its way into the university was the religion course that the Hillel rabbi came and taught.
Pamela Nadell:
And so there was an effort, the academically trained PhD granting programs we needed to differentiate ourselves. The other thing I would say is that when I think of some of my greatest teachers, when I was an undergraduate and a graduate, most of those men had rabbinical degrees because they couldn’t get the PhD training that they needed in their history department. So they were trained as rabbis, but had also gotten PhDs in history, in particular, in other departments where they ended up writing on a Jewish studies topic. So I think they were also deliberately trying to make some kind of line between the two.
Yehuda Kurtzer:
So then I’ll just push and say, okay, that was true. Then it’s not really true now,
Pamela Nadell:
But it is because when I meet with what we call “prospies” prospective students and their parents, I tell them as they’re looking for where they want to send their kids to college, that there are about 5,300 colleges and universities in the United States, the Hillel guide lists about 900 of them. And probably the overwhelming majority of the Jewish kids are on 50 to 60 campuses. And so when you’re looking for where to send your son or daughter, what do you want to look for? You want to look for multiple Jewish addresses. You want Hillel, you want Jewish sororities and fraternities if they have them on the campus. You want various denominational organizations. You want to have the various different expressions of Israel life on campus, but that you should also look for Jewish studies, but you need to know the Jewish studies is the academic arm. It is not the place that is instilling identity. That said, when I have a student come to me and because he’s thinking of converting to Judaism because of his girlfriend, who am I to say, don’t take my class, right?
Yehuda Kurtzer:
I mean, I guess it might even be more than that, which is if a lot of people in the world do imagine you as in some ways a secular rabbi, and since a lot of people in Jewish studies go into this line of work, because they are answering certain questions about themselves, their history, their background, something they want to know, or they’re seeking authority in a community that privileges knowledge. Maybe there’s some aspect of, yeah my class is a place for you to encounter a Judaism that might be a gateway to your own conversion. And I know we want to be avoidant of that. I’m just pushing. Shaul, you also have been on the side of like policing this boundary and saying, no, the client of Jewish studies is Jewish studies. The client of Jewish studies is not Jews.
Shaul Magid:
I was at Indiana university for 14 years and I don’t think that anyone in my department knew I was a rabbi. I never told anybody. I never tell the students. I mean, now with the web, everybody knows everything. But in those early days, it was not something that I wanted to project onto my identity as a professor of religious studies. I mean, I was not a professor of Jewish studies. I was a professor of religious studies, you know, as Jacob Neusner said, right, the data that I study is Judaism, but my field is not Jewish studies, but the study of religion, I think, you know, back to your point, it’s a good question. And I think that Islamic studies and African-American studies are two other examples where they are, in their own sub-field, struggling with very similar types of questions, especially in African-American studies, whether they see themselves as scholars of African-American religion or history, or whether they see themselves as resources for African-American identity.
Shaul Magid:
And I think there’s a split among scholars of African-American studies, the way there is among Jewish studies. And I think in the study of Islam, that’s the question, they have their own heritage students. We call heritage students. And in a certain sense on the one hand universities like the heritage students, because it fills the classrooms. And on the other hand, I think Jewish study suffers because of those heritage students, because scholars in other disciplines don’t take us as seriously because they see us as somehow the academic arm of Jewish summer camp or Hillels or something else. So they don’t really take us seriously in terms of what we’re providing the university. So, I mean, I hear what you’re saying. And, you know, I grew up at Hebrew University and Brandeis and taught at JTS where those weren’t even questions, right. That was just basically assumed, but in a secular university like American University or Dartmouth or Indiana University, or Cal Berkeley or UCLA, I think it’s a much more complicated story. And I think for us too, I mean, I don’t know if what you’re suggesting is why don’t we just be honest with what we’re doing and that is, we’re also actually teaching Jewish identity. I think that if we did that, it would be to the diminishment of our stature within the university structure.
Yehuda Kurtzer:
So, I think that is right. That that is exactly what people are concerned about. And I think it stems from a very authentic anxiety in the seventies and eighties, that Jewish studies was being pushed forward as an agenda. When the Anti-semitism within the university system had far from diminished, when Jewish studies itself couldn’t fully articulate it. It’s a weird discipline Jewish studies. It’s not history, it’s not language, it’s not culture. It’s spans thousands of years. It’s a weird discipline. So there’s something strange about this whole argument and that has created a kind of -don’t let anybody else see that this is still complicated for us. And at a certain point, I show up at the AJS gathering with thousands of people there. Jewish studies has nothing to be scared of, right? Jewish studies faculty have nothing to be scared of. Their chairs aren’t going away. And that’s what I’m pushing on is whether we have to continue –
Yehuda Kurtzer:
I understand why certain generation of scholars felt that they had to work really hard if there’s a whole parallel first, second, and third wave feminism here of like we had to work really hard to show that our hard earned gains showed everybody else that we were serious scholars and whatever discipline we had to come in through the door of. I’m not sure that that captures the kind of way in which the next generation of Jewish studies scholars who are much more transparent about their ideological commitments from the get-go. I don’t know why that continues to have to persist as being the model here.
Shaul Magid:
I think the danger is the political polarization can easily result in a diminishing of money because a lot of the people that are giving the money have a particular political inclination, a lot of the professors and academics have a different political inclination. And if that should become much more apparent in terms of these letters on Israel, Palestine, and critical race theory, all these other kinds of things, if they decide, no, I’m not going to give $2 million to have my daughter study critical race theory, the question is, will the university then fund those Jewish studies positions? And I think the answer is no, that they won’t. So in a certain sense, there is a danger of a diminishing of those chairs of those programs. It’s going to be harder and harder to raise money in such a politically polarized environment. If we’re considered to be the progressives and the people who are giving the are not of that persuasion. So I think there is a danger and maybe that’s not actually so bad. Maybe if there were fewer programs or fewer positions, it might not necessarily be a terrible thing. Less is not necessarily worse. But I do think that there’s a price that could be paid.
Pamela Nadell:
But there’s also – Yehuda you seem to be making an assumption that the current generation of junior scholars and the PhD students that I know want this different kind of connection to the Jewish community. And I’m not seeing that Shaul. Are you saying that from the junior scholars that you know?
Shaul Magid:
This is something that we haven’t talked about, but what does it mean for a person to say, I want to get a PhD in Jewish studies and they come to you and they ask your advice. I mean, what are you supposed to tell them when the chances are very, very high, that they will not get a job? I mean, 10% of PhDs in Jewish studies will end up getting tenure track positions. So at some point you would think that those younger people will say, hell, I’m not doing that. I’ll go to rabbinical school. I certainly, will be to get a job as a rabbi, or I’ll go do some Jewish communal work or I’ll do something else. So I think that, that I’m sure Pamela feels the same way that we’re torn when a prospective graduate students comes and says, I want to get a PhD in Jewish studies. What are you supposed to tell them? I mean, you have to tell them, you know, I think it’s a great thing, but the chances are, you’re not going to get a tenure track job. I mean, you have to be honest and tell them,.
Pamela Nadell:
I mean, I only take graduate students who are open to working in public history. So maybe it’s a little bit different for me again, because I’m sitting in a history program. My most recent PhD student actually did a fabulous dissertation on Mormon women and their voting rights. And I will only take students who are open to alternative career paths. Now some of that could be within the Jewish community, but in the case of, you know, many of my students is not going to be, it’s going to be in historical organizations, some kinds of settings like that. So I haven’t personally seen the kind of connection Yehuda that you’re talking about. The students who come to me, they want to study history. They want to get a PhD in history. They happen to be particularly interested in Jewish history for a variety of different reasons. But I don’t see that as having an expression towards identification with the wider Jewish community in any way.
Yehuda Kurtzer:
Yeah. I mean, maybe this is anecdotal. So I, you know, it would be great to have somebody who could actually research this. It’d be great. But I see in our work, since our organization has grown the amount of doctoral students turning to the Hartman Institute and saying, can I find a place there? Now it’s skewed by the fact that nobody has money. So if you’re offering to pay people, people want money. They want fellowships. They want to collect these things. I appreciate that, that skews this a little bit, but we’re very explicit about not being an academic institution and being adjacent to the academy at best. And that we have a whole bunch of ideological objectives that we’re inside the Jewish community in the deep way. And we’re getting 40, 50 applications for five fellowships that require advanced doctoral work. And to read the essays that say, this is why I went into this in some ways they are deeply confessional because they know that they have to be confessional to say, you know, of course they want to get a tenure track job. That’s the dream, right? That would be great. And then I could do this other stuff on the side, in the ways that in the Jewish community, you can pick up a scholar-in-residence gig at a local synagogue. You can do things for the general public, but I hear a lot more of that stuff of, no, I want to feel holistic. I want to feel integrated.
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Yehuda Kurtzer:
Let me ask one last question to you both which kind of gets at one of the most politically sensitive or politically charged piece of this work. We alluded to Israel Palestine before, but a couple of years ago in the wake of the Me Too allegations against Stephen M. Cohen. There was an essay by Lila Berman, Kate Rosenblatt and Ronit Stahl arguing that basically what we’re talking about today, which is the intertwining of the Jewish communal agenda and Jewish social science scholarship was essentially not only distorting the image of who the American Jewish community was as relates to the continuity agenda, but was, was essentially corrupting that agenda made it basically that a continuity agenda in and of itself was misogynistic was in and of itself was regressive. And that what we needed to do is create a new conversation around the whole dynamic of what Jewish continuity is ultimately about.
Yehuda Kurtzer:
It’s a flawed enterprise. I’m struck by this piece of scholarship and the ways that it was not exclusively in the academy, right? They wrote about it in the Forward. It was written in other places because it was actually not just an argument about scholarship was also argument about the Jewish community’s expectations of scholars. But if what that had resulted in was what we really need to do is what we were talking about before – just erect a boundary. What scholars do should be for scholarship and the Jewish community should do, should be for the Jewish community’s agenda. Fine. But what is oftentimes accompanied with is actually equally vociferous arguments about Jewish communal policy that are different. So that’s where it gets tricky to me. If it’s merely, we don’t like this policy for Jewish communal life, and our scholarship says it should be different. Then everybody agrees that scholarship is the currency through which big Jewish questions and communal life are being litigated. But if it’s, I want to create a boundary between these two things, that results in a really different conversation. So I’d love for you to unpack that moment for us and help us think about like, what do you think is taking place in that story? And I mean, first you can say, did I get the story right?
Pamela Nadell:
So first of all, I assume, you know, that after they published that in the forward, that then they published a much longer version of the piece in the Journal of American Jewish History and they had a symposium discussing it. And the way that I read the argument, I understand what you’re getting at is they’re raising questions about the scholarship that are ultimately really questions about the communal agenda of the Jewish community. And in a sense, it almost takes us back to where you started us because you asked us to speak personally at the very beginning. And the way I read their argument is that the scholarly production is personal. And in the case of scholarly production, that was funded by men and produced by men who were both patriarchal and the misogynistic that therefore we needed to question that very scholarship and then everything that ensued from that scholarship.
Pamela Nadell:
So you’re right, they’re not setting up a boundary, but the reason they’re not setting up a boundary is because that boundary had already been crossed the linkages between the social scientists and the activists. What’s interesting, Yehuda, I’m thinking about the “New Jewish Canon” that you edited with Claire Sufrin, and you faced some of these same kinds of questions because you included scholarship by some of these figures who are now deemed anathema or whose ideas, not just that we’re canceling them out of their present positions, but that their ideas should also be entirely canceled out. So where I stand in this is in opposition to boycotts and blacklists, which as you may know, there was a letter from past presidents of the Association for Jewish Studies where we raised this issue that while I understand the scholarship production has a powerful personal element, the question is at what point does that personal element becomes so determinative of the scholarship, that if that person is flawed, and frankly who is not flawed, if that person is flawed, then we simply have to cancel all of that out. And I’m not on the side where we have to cancel it all out, but that is the culture that we’re in at the moment and the voices that call for canceling that scholarship, it’s really a generational divide. And so a lot of them are very active on social media and they’re very loud and frankly, I’m too busy to spend a lot of my time there.
Yehuda Kurtzer:
I mean, it’s interesting, you’re right to cite that example of Claire and my edited volume, and really interesting because given my position in the Jewish community, I was making an argument rooted in academia back to this critique, which was a book preserving recent history. So of course, you’re going to read the ideas that matter. And the irony is that the argument is basically a communal argument, right? That’s cloaked in an academic claim, it’s inherently legitimate, but it’s actually driven by a communalagenda. So in some ways, what was so interesting is that the script is flipped. I’m making an argument from outside the university using university language. And the arguments that was coming from the academy was actually using Jewish communal language. Shaul, well, what about you? How do see the story.
Shaul Magid:
Yeah. I’m not really in favor of those kinds of boundaries. It’s a kind of Jacob Neusnarian distinction between scholarship and Jewish life. I think it’s really more about how open the community, the academic community and the larger Jewish community is to the notion of critique. So in a way to say, okay, we can make an argument about the relationship between a person’s personal life and their scholarship. That particular connection is open to analysis and critique, and that should be open. In other words, we should be able to investigate what it actually means. What pro-natalist Judaism actually means in relationship to personal life. And it can go in a lot of different ways. I think in a certain sense by drawing the boundaries, you’re closing off the possibility of that critique. I mean, I just wrote a book about a Jewish racist, fascist, horrible person, right?
Shaul Magid:
But nobody said, oh, you can’t write a book about Meir Kahane because he should be canceled. Like that’s okay. But in the case of other people who may have acted badly towards the women, somehow that person has to be canceled. So all the people I write about are pretty insane in many, many ways. So I think it’s really about the nature of critique. And I think that’s what academia can bring to the conversation is not making a question of canceling or affirming, but just basically saying we as a community should be open to carefully reading and analyzing and critiquing what people say. And yes, what they do comes into the equation as to what they say. And I think in a certain sense, the pushback against what Lila and those others were doing was to say that, well, we’re not going to really even investigate that. What people say and how people live are two separate things.
Shaul Magid:
And therefore one should be able to study what people say, even if the way they live their lives might be pernicious. So it works both ways in a certain sense. So I applaud them for raising the issue. And this goes to Rafe and Gila’s pieces also, they’re not saying, oh, there should be no relationship. They’re saying the opposite. There should be a deeply integral relationship between what scholarship does and the world that the scholars live in. And so they want to kind of critique cis-heteronormativity. Okay. So let’s do it. Let’s have the debate. Let’s basically talk about it. Let’s kind of dig in, instead of basically saying, you know, as some of my academic friends said, oh, I’m not even going to read that piece. I don’t know what the words mean. I mean, it was just kind of an anti-intellectual response. Like, no, I don’t even want to go there.
Shaul Magid:
And I think the idea of facing those demons, cause it really is facing those demons. Either personal or historical or communal demons is something that scholarship has to offer. It’s very often messy and it doesn’t look very good and it’s very contentious and it’s very acrimonious. But at the end of the day, I mean, you know, Yehuda and I have sat in a room and argued for hours, but at the end of the day kind of something gets done. Right. And it may not be pretty. But I think that’s the process of not only producing knowledge, but also creating models of continuity.
Yehuda Kurtzer:
There’s much more for us to unpack here. I think what I was trying to push towards is not just the question of the legitimacy of that critique. But the question of if what you’re trying to do is evaluate what happens when scholars have particular agendas for the Jewish community. And to say that gets in the way of doing really serious work you’ve created your own obstacle to the kinds of -nobody’s objective, – but the kinds of objectivity and critical analysis that you’re supposed to do. I want to make sure that that lens is turned on everybody. I want to probe what happens then, I mentioned this before, what happens when scholars sign a letter on Israel/Palestine, what questions am I now allowed to ask about their scholarship, right? And I’m not saying that to impeach anybody’s scholarship. I’m saying if we’re going to be in this business of the real analysis, in some ways the dismantling of our critical agendas, because of our consciousness of our political positions, the things that we hold with, things we care about, it becomes really complicated and maybe Shaul your optimism as well-placed then.
Yehuda Kurtzer:
And with this, we can close, which is what should happen is that this world of scholars who I love and I feel adjacent to and committed to and happy to employ many of them, if what they can help bring to bear to a Jewish community is critical reading skills and critical thinking skills to help interrogate our commitments. That is great, right? And maybe that might be sufficient more than the scholarship has to serve a very particular communal agenda or the other way around. So I’m really grateful to both of you for this conversation and for your leadership, thank you to Pamela Nadell and Shaul Magid. And thanks to all of you for listening to our show, Identity/Crisis is a product of the Shalom Hartman Institute. It was produced this week by David Zvi Kalman and edited by Alex Dillon with assistance from Miri Miller and Sam Hainback and music provided by so-called. Recently, we’ve received a lot of requests for transcripts of the podcasts.
Yehuda Kurtzer:
We’re making them available on our website, usually about a week after the episode airs. To find them and to learn more about Shalom Hartman Institute, you can visit us online shalomhartman.org. We always want to know what you think about the show you can rate and review the show on iTunes to help more people find it. And you can write to us at [email protected]. We really do read your emails and we sometimes even respond to them. You can subscribe to our show in the apple podcast app, Spotify, SoundCloud, audible, and everywhere else podcasts are available. We’ll see you next week. And thanks for listening.
