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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.

Our Golden Age 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 essential issues facing contemporary Jewish life. I’m Yehuda Kurtzer recording on Thursday, July 11th, 2024 from Jerusalem.

As many of you have listened to this show before, you know that I have a deep and abiding love for being American. Coming at it honestly, as I’ve told you before, all four of my grandparents were born in the United States of America, we represent a kind of classic Jewish immigrant story, from poor immigrants to successful Americans. I have a debt of gratitude to America that I talked about around Memorial Day because of my grandfather’s service in World War II. And he was one of several of his generation on both my father’s and my mother’s side who committed those acts of service on behalf of the country in which they were born and in which they raised their children.

I spent a number of years trying to think about not just what it means to be American, but in particular, what it means to be an American Jew, what it looks like for us to reflect on a Judaism that we have been actively creating in America, not just an experience of being Jews in America, but all of the conscious and unconscious ways in which American Judaism is a product of the work we have been doing to align what it means to be Jewish and what it means to be American. The funny thing is that for all of my patriotism, which I hold on to in spite of the fact that my country is struggling, which is also what we as Jews do in relationship to the state of Israel, in spite of all of that love and loyalty to the place in which I was born and where I’ve lived most of my life, most of my July fourths have been spent in Jerusalem.

My colleagues here in Israel have been wonderful about throwing barbecues and actually hanging a little bit of red, white, and blue in our courtyard here in Jerusalem to help many of our program participants and staff who are from America feel a little bit of what it means to be at home, although Israeli hot dogs are not the same as American ones. But it has been an odd experience to be here for all of those years and to reflect on what it means to be American.

This year at the Institute, I delivered an address on our golden age, reflecting on the challenges facing America and American Judaism today, and asking both, what have we done over the past hundred, hundred and fifty years to build a serious American Judaism, and what’s it going to take for us to get there to both sustain that Judaism and, in turn, help build back the America that made the creation of that Judaism possible? I had previously delivered a version of this talk as the Robbins Lecture at the University of California in Berkeley, invited there by Professor Ken Bamberger and Rebecca Golbert of the Helen Diller Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies, a lecture I was enormously honored to deliver. And I was excited to refine it and bring it to our lay leaders and rabbis here in Jerusalem. We’ve recorded it, edited it, and cleaned it up for you. I hope you enjoy it.

Thank you for that tribute to Michelle. It’s an honor to deliver tonight’s lecture in her memory. Michelle was a board member here at the Hartman Institute and a long-time learner in this CLP program. And as a learner, she was inquisitive and incisive all the time, but always from a place of kindness. And those are characteristics that we so deeply cherish at this institution in our scholars, in our students, in all of you and all of our friends. On behalf of the Institute, we’re so grateful to her beloved husband, Mark, for his continued support of the Shalom Hartman Institute, and in particular the way he has chosen to memorialize Michelle here in support of all of the learning that we get to do together.

For the American Jews who are here in the crowd, you, like me, might be forgiven a little bit of whiplash at feeling as though you had traveled all this distance here precisely because of all of the turbulence in this society that motivated your need to be here. A kind of turbulence over the past nine months that has felt existential for the future of the state of Israel, and in that for the future of the Jewish people, and then, only to experience, sitting in this courtyard the last few days, that America is experiencing some pretty significant political turmoil, maybe even existential, emerging out of the first presidential debate, and then some extraordinary decisions from the United States Supreme Court that portend a very difficult future ahead. It might be strange to have traveled here to encounter these kinds of challenges, only when you arrive to notice those challenges back home.

When I opened this conference, I talked about crashing, all the ways that October 7th has upended a wide set of assumptions about the meaning of Israel and the meaning of Jewish history. And I asked us at that opening to be more tentative about our convictions as a way of being more open to what it means to shape our future. As an American, I think that the closest we’ve come in recent years to a day with that kind of momentous significance, thinking as Americans, maybe not just as Jews, a day that would tell us Americans a lot about the risks and dangers facing our society, is probably January 6th. I think a lot about the trajectory signified by holding on to both January 6th and October 7th as brackets for American Jews that tells a really complicated story about how we might face our uncertain future.

Without equalizing or equating the two days, January 6th and October 7th, I think many of us American Jews feel ourselves caught between, on one hand, the chaos unleashed by the anti-democratic forces that came to the surface on January 6th, those that would contest the legitimacy of free and fair elections, those that would contest the peaceful transition of power which has been an essential hallmark of American democracy, those who are motivated to do so by autocratic power, and a politics that preys so deeply on reactionary beliefs about America, about immigrants, and about race.

And on the other hand, we as American Jews have been witnessing the growth in recent months of an equal anti-Americanness that threatens the basic social position of American Jews, those of us who believe in the basic legitimacy of the state of Israel and seeing that emerge inside some of those key institutions that have been so key to American Jewish belonging in universities, in government, in public positions, and in the public square itself. January 6th signaled one rise of a threat to American Jewish stability, and October 7th has invited in America the rise of this second threat.

Some years ago at Hartman I taught about the difference between two ways to envision the future. The difference between what I call Judeo-optimism, those of us that would believe, since the Enlightenment, that the conditions of liberal democracy could actually one day make possible the thriving of Jews in liberal societies, those that would insist that we just haven’t built the right liberal democratic systems yet. And on the other hand, Judeo-pessimism, like some of those early Zionist thinkers, and like many Israelis today, who think that the whole promise of liberalism and emancipation is a lie, and the only option that we have to envision how we will be safe and secure in our future is if we put that responsibility in our own hands.

Now the point of this conference was not to talk about trauma or fear in order to dwell in those commitments. A lot of this conference acknowledged, gave voice to the trauma and fear of this past year, but the point of this conference educationally was not to talk about those commitments in order that we dwell in them. The point was to describe those conditions honestly and seriously, to give voice to the trauma and fear precisely so that it could help us prepare to lead our way out of it.

In that vein, one conclusion many American Jews are reaching right now about the American Jewish project is to say, as was famously on the cover of The Atlantic a few months ago, that the golden age of American Judaism is over. In this moment, those who would come to that conclusion are responding to the anxiety and the trauma and fear that we are witnessing emerging in America, and deciding to do something that it is not a threat to the American Jewish experience, that it is a empirical demonstration that that project is basically over.

In Hartman language, we call that an embrace by former Judeo-optimists of a Judeo-pessimism about America itself, a belief that I don’t know what’s supposed to happen. Leave? Go somewhere else? Give up on that project?

But if it is the case that we are indeed the heirs of a golden age of American Judaism, and I’m going to argue tonight that I think we are, I think that piece in The Atlantic by Franklin Foer is descriptively true of the past, even if I don’t yet subscribe to its dire prediction of the future. If we are in fact the heirs of a golden age of American Jewry, I want to argue tonight that it’s our responsibility to sustain it. American Jews, over the past century, built a Jewish community that experiences, that benefits from, more affluence, influence, power, and privilege than any other Jewish community in history, with the possible exception of today’s Jews in the State of Israel.

Think about how extraordinary it is to notice that the two most successful Jewish communal projects in history are contemporaneous to one another. We, American Jews, building this magnificent, thriving, and successful Jewish community so significant enough that when many American Jews read Franklin Foer in the Atlantic, which says the golden age for American Jewry is over, they took for granted that there was, in fact, a golden age of American Jewry. That part didn’t need to be explained. We know it to be the case.

And in building that community, we did not merely establish institutions, though we as American Jews like to mock how many institutions we have. And though the conversation in American Jewish life is oftentimes about those institutions, the ones that are thriving and the ones that are failing. We didn’t just do that. What we really did over the past century was we built an ideology, an actual American Judaism, an amazing story and an amazing accomplishment. In so doing, the American Jewish community is, I feel like I should knock on metal in saying this, the Jewish community on Earth with actually the strongest narrative of continuity of all Jewish communities on the globe.

This is ironic, of course. The Jewish community has been in a continuity panic for the last two generations. There are reasons to fear why the next generation of Jews won’t be Jewish like their parents’ generation, or maybe not as Jewish as their parents’ generation, as though Jewishness is quantifiable like that.

But that’s not what continuity really means. What continuity really means is our grandchildren growing up in the same relatively good and stable conditions as their grandparents. Most Jewish communities on Earth can demonstrate from the beginning of the 20th century to the end that the story of their community had to be radically relocated from one place on Earth to another. The State of Israel is a beneficiary of that story. American Jewry represents a story of radical continuity. And in that process of continuity, I want to argue tonight that we have been involved as American Jews, not always consciously, but we have been involved as American Jews in the creation of an extraordinary Judaism.

I’m not going to talk tonight about Reform Judaism, or Conservative Judaism, or Orthodox Judaism, or Judaisms that lack a name. I want to talk about the creation of an American Judaism that crosses the trajectory of all of these particular denominational expressions. And what has been so elegant about this Judaism that American Jews have been unconsciously creating is that we have been forging a Judaism that works for America at the same time as we have been part of building an America in which that Judaism could thrive. We’re building a perfect Judaism for the context of America, and we’re shaping that context to be hospitable to that Judaism. I think that’s a masterful, interpretive process. And it’s something that I think will be remembered one day, hopefully, long in the future, when Jews and historians will ask, will take stock, what did American Jews contribute to the history of Judaism?

So before we can figure out where we’re going as a community, and take on the challenges that the current dynamics in America are presenting to American Judaism, I want to take stock of what is this Judaism that we have created. I want to argue tonight that American Judaism consists of four principles, all rooted in a belief. The first great principle that American Jews have given to Judaism, designed and created in the American context, is that we redefined classical Jewish sacred geography, which used to divide the world between two places, homeland and diaspora. This is an amazing thing that Jews do, by the way. I have two places I could live in the world, a tiny strip of land in the Middle East, That’s the homeland, and everywhere else. Right? That’s how the world neatly divides into two. That’s how Jews have classically thought about sacred geography. Homeland and diaspora.

But instead, we American Jews have argued, embraced the possibility, that actually, we have two homes. One which I call home, and the other, which I call homeland. We have done this in spite of the fact that virtually at no other time in Jewish history did Jews make this kind of audacious claim. Actually, throughout Jewish history, when Jews argued that there was such a thing as homeland and another thing that was called diaspora, we weren’t really talking about geography at all. We were talking about time. I live here, and one day I’ll be able to go there.

What did American Jews do in turn in the past three generations? By and large, since 1948, American Jews redefined all of the terms of sacred geography, looked at the creation of the State of Israel, and decided, nevertheless, to stay in America. But what’s extraordinary about that is American Jews did not, by and large, do that by disparaging the State of Israel. American Jews did that instead by saying, I choose to treat America as home. I choose to reject the categories of the place I am and the place that I am supposed to be. And in turn, we created a Judaism that was hospitable to both notions of home, a place I actually call home and a place where I understand that the story of the Jewish homeland is taking place.

This is a one-of-a-kind modern Jewish identity, one that could imagine belonging in diaspora while supporting Zionism in the state of Israel without conflict or contradiction. Some of the key players who helped American Judaism do this were folks like Louis Brandeis, who argued that to be a Zionist did not actually create a dual loyalty problem, And do you know why? Because Brandeis said dual loyalties are only problematic if they compete with each other. But what if they don’t compete? Brandeis argued compellingly that for Jews to be Zionists in America made us better American Jews. Because it gave thickness to our Jewish identity. It made us people who belonged to a larger people and that like other ethnic minorities in America, that could actually shore up our Americanness as opposed to undermining it.

Mordechai Kaplan took that idea, invented a term, a term called Jewish peoplehood. It’s a strange word. We have terms in our tradition like Am Yisrael, the people of Israel, but Kaplan said no, no, there’s actually an ideology here. To be a Jew is to belong to something collective. He called it peoplehood, by the way, because calling it nationalism by American Jews in the 1930s and 1940s would have sounded bad. Kind of lightened the term by calling it Jewish peoplehood. It’s amazing to watch Israelis try to understand Jewish peoplehood by coming up with a Hebrew word to translate what American Jews invented. Inventing a very weird, ugly Hebrew word called amiut. Doesn’t appear anywhere in our history because they’re trying to understand and relate to something native in the American Jewish story. And by doing this, we, American Jews, have managed to attach ourselves to this majestic story of belonging to a collective that’s bigger than ourselves without undermining our ability to be great citizens of America and great and loyal citizens of the Jewish people.

This is kind of an amazing thing on its own. Think about all of the richness that so many of us as American Jews appreciate and embrace as part of our Jewishness. Those of us that travel here love being here. Feel a deep sense of home and at homeness, whether in Jerusalem or in Tel Aviv, and then you turn back and go home, and you’re home. How incredible is that?

What does it look like to a Jewishness that can actually notice that we are enriched by the gifts given to us by two societies? And noticing the ways that actually, sometimes, the things that we’ve learned as Jews in America feel like the antidote to the problems of this society, and the things that we appreciate here feel like the antidote to the problems facing American Jewry. Those of us who sit with the home and homeland story get to be the beneficiaries of two laboratories of Jewishness in which we get to be stakeholders. American Jews, like Americans, are plagued by an epidemic of loneliness. Israelis are not. They have existential loneliness, that’s something different. But the bonds of family and community here are so powerful that I oftentimes feel as an American Jew, how could I bottle some of that and bring it back to strengthen American Jewry?

We, in turn, at least until recent times, had a lot to say about the power of American democracy as maybe something that we could use a little bit more of here. That’s an extraordinary gift that we’ve curated as part of our Judaism in America. More than that, Jewish peoplehood helped us as Jews in America make Jewishness something bigger than what was local. This enables us to take pride in a bigger story of the Jewish people. Most of us, especially if you’re here, do not merely identify as a Chicago Jew or as a Miami Jew or even, in much more limited terms, a person who belongs to a shtetl in a particular neighborhood. That was the limitation imposed by most of the history of Jewish diaspora. But we created a Judaism where we said, No, no, I am a member of the Jewish people. And I am also a member of this particular community, and it makes us feel bigger and more transcendent.

And the most powerful idea that comes with how Jews navigated this question of home and homeland is that by connecting to this big story of Jewish peoplehood, we modeled for others Jewish peoplehood itself, which is rooted in this crazy paradox that we are both one people and a people made up of sub-tribes.

Now sometimes you feel a little bit more connected to the whole people, and sometimes you feel a little bit more connected to just your own tribe. But that very model of collectivity, where I don’t try to erase differences together with other people who are part of my people, is part of how American Jews gift to America a belief in pluralism. It is no coincidence that so many American thinkers who wrote about pluralism in the first and second halves of the 20th century came from Jewish backgrounds. It was precisely because of this extraordinary curation of a story of Jewish homeness in Israel and here that modeled something that made for an American Jewish thickness and in turn contributed something to America itself.

The second big Jewish idea of American Judaism is that in embracing America as a land of individual striving and opportunity, as the country on earth that most prides itself on the story of self-actualization, a country that describes the fundamental ambition of an American, which is to leave home and go west, that’s what you’re supposed to do, in order to make that Jewish, we Jews elevated some core liberal ideas in our tradition of radical human equality. It’s no coincidence that one of the most important American Jewish texts is the idea that all individuals are created in the image of God. It’s also no coincidence that that’s in the Declaration of Independence. We took the central idea in our tradition and noticed that it both dignified and empowered the human spirit as a feature of American Judaism and worked perfectly for an American context that wanted to elevate those ideas.

And look at the incredible accomplishments that the belief in liberty, in liberalism as an essential Jewish commitment, gave to the Jewish people. American Jews gave to the rest of the Jewish world gender egalitarianism as a Jewish norm. We made that a basic norm of American Judaism. It is the vastly held commitment of American Jews, and it has permeated from there to other parts of Jewish civilization.

Even bigger than that, we paved the way for a Judaism that seeks to erase any fundamental ontological difference between Jews and Gentiles. American Jews have spent a lot of the past half-century worrying about intermarriage without noticing the fact that we were achieving something ideologically and politically that our ancestors would have only dreamed about. That instead of living as an other within a society that wouldn’t have us as members, we were being embraced and loved by our neighbors. That has become a normative commitment of American Jewry in life practice, in habits, and increasingly as part of our ideology. Home and homeland, liberalism and individualism.

Third, because America is big, we argued that Judaism should be big and should aim big. If there’s one American Jewish value, that if you kind of stop an American Jew on the street and say, what’s the most important Jewish value, they will probably say Tikkun Olam. I love this. It’s not, I don’t know, visit the sick. It’s not prayer in isolated community. It’s not individually oriented commitments. What’s the Jewish value that more American Jews describe as the essential Jewish value? Taking responsibility to fix the whole world. It’s an unbelievably chutzpahdik, audacious Jewish commitment. Who are you to make this claim?

You know, if it’s bad enough that we Jews divide the world between a strip of land in the Middle East and the rest of the world, we’re like, our responsibility, the 14 million of us on earth, take on as a mission to fix everything for everybody else. It’s an extraordinary process. There’s a whole bunch of great literature on this of how American Jews elevated what was really an arcane, mystical idea at the beginning of the 20th century and made it, no, no, what’s the Jew? A Jew is a person who repairs the whole world.

In American context, it makes total sense. This is American exceptionalism in Jewish language. America, especially following the Second World War, imagined itself as doing the same thing. Now, of course, it’s a little bit different to be a country of 300 million people with nuclear weapons who sees its responsibility to fix the whole world, but it’s not a coincidence that the Jewish minority within an American context takes that kind of American commitment, domesticates it to our Judaism, and then sanctifies it with this kind of importance. This is something that is so majestic and so absurd as a Jewish aspiration for the world, that it can only be imagined within the framework of the American empire.

And by the way, it’s no coincidence on the same terms that American Jews also built gigantic buildings. Sometimes people are ashamed of that. I’m not really. One day, I hope that the cascade of incredible American Jewish architecture, where we just decided to show up big in public spaces, even though our numbers were pretty small. One day I hope that’s understood as a belief in presence and in pride, the good kind of pride. We found this canvas, a huge canvas called America, in which we could project our aspirations and in which we could truly belong in order to send out the message about what it meant for us to sanctify God’s presence in public. Given the opportunity to be big, we went big.

And the fourth American Jewish idea that I think characterizes what we have been building and creating is that we understood America to be something different, as a country, than any other diasporic Jewish civilization in history understood their countries to be. Both Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, and Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, the leading Orthodox halakhic decisor in America in the 20th century, had a term for America that does not precede and does not show up in any other context. They referred to America as a “malchut shel chesed,” a kingdom of kindness.

It’s a powerful term for rabbis to use because it’s antecedent, the thing it’s referring to, is that most times in Jewish history, these were referred to as “malchut harasha’,” the evil empire. Greece and Rome and Assyria and Babylonia, all of these countries and civilizations in which Jews lived in were understood to be basically bad. And sometimes we could curry favor to be able to build positive relationships. And sometimes that depended on the vicissitudes of whoever happened to be in charge at a particular time or our political capacities to do the work in that context. But both Schneerson and Feinstein, and I would argue most of us, have believed that that’s not what America is basically about. That America is in some fundamental way good to the Jews, hospitable to the Jews in a nontemporary way, and therefore deserving of our gratitude.

Civic responsibilities in America by American Jews are often understood as mitzvot, as religious obligations. Rabbi Moshe Feinstein argued that they were. Feinstein argued that for Jews to go to the ballot box and vote was a repaying of the kindness that America gave to the Jewish people by doing for America what is good for America. It wasn’t go to the ballot box and vote so that our candidates can win. It was go to the ballot box and vote because that’s what a good American does and Jews owe it to America to be good Americans.

Many times in Jewish history, Jews prayed for the government. But oftentimes, that was rooted in fear, most famously expressed in Fiddler on the Roof. The prayer for the Czar. What is the prayer for the Czar? That he stays far away from us, right? I’m still praying for the Czar. But I’m praying out of a sense of fear and anxiety. American Jews offer a prayer for America, oftentimes deeply rooted in sincerity. We have participated in its political culture as insiders rather than outsiders.

Beyond what we did because it was our Jewish commitment, we American Jews also helped America think of itself in that way. It’s not a coincidence that one of our American Jewish tradition’s greatest poets, Emma Lazarus, is the author of the poem that shows up on the base of the Statue of Liberty, who envisions America as a place for the fulfillment of biblical ethics. When she says, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” It’s not hard to hear that as the American equivalent of the Bible’s 36 times that it mentions your responsibility to the widow, the orphan, and the stranger. We gave that to America. We saw it as part of what it meant to be Jewish in America, and we bequeathed it to America itself.

Four essential Jewish ideas that characterize a Judaism only possible to have emerged in America. The first, a story of peoplehood where we could be both at home, believing in a homeland. A second, that human beings are created in the image of God, and that that liberal principle should shape how we are Jews, and how we relate to others. A third, a belief that we could actually repair the world. That Judaism should think big. And fourth, that America was a kingdom of kindness, to which we owed our gratitude.

I said at the beginning, there are going to be four ideas, and one big belief. And the belief on which this all sits, all of these commitments is that we American Jews have believed for a long time that America is a site of a covenantal relationship, that the best way to be American was to believe in the possibility of America and then work really hard to actualize that belief.

I call it covenantal because like any covenant, especially the one between the Jewish people and God that is given to us at Mount Sinai, saying that I have a goal and I have a mission is no indicator of whether I’m actually going to succeed or fail at that mission. It’s just going to be, success or failure, my responsibility has to be always to pursue what I’m supposed to be doing.

When God makes a covenant with the Jewish people, God must know that we are an ornery, stubborn people, and we will never actually fulfill those obligations. God knows that. But by making it a covenant, the lesson, religiously, is stay committed to the process.

I have a short handout, which is going to come around right now. And lest you think that it is only Tamara Elad Applebaum who can make you sing at a Hartman program, we are going to sing this text together as an exemplifying of what it means for Americans and American Jews to hold on to a covenantal belief. Everybody ready? And if you are Canadian, or Brazilian, or anything else, hum along.

“O beautiful for spacious skies, For amber waves of grain, For purple mountain majesties Above the fruited plain! America! America! God shed His grace on thee And crown thy good with brotherhood From sea to shining sea! O beautiful…”

You know, I have to imagine if this song was written today, it would be written by a red state country singer. But it was actually written by Katharine Lee Bates. She was a major social reformer and an activist, in addition to being a professor, on behalf especially of gender equality. And she wrote this poem for exactly the reasons that I’m talking about today, which is one way to think about what it means to belong covenantally to a society is to argue for what I described here at the Institute a couple of years ago of “the idea of the idea,” that societies are motivated or can be driven by essential commitments, big moral dreams, and that our choices always are to decide when our societies inevitably fall short. That either that dream is a lie, or that we have to work harder to be part of the process of actualizing it.

The philosopher Martha Nussbaum talks about the ways in which liberals have stopped believing in poetry as an essential dimension of what it means to advance the liberal order. She writes about Whitman and King as the two quintessential American liberal thinkers who understood that you need big ideas, and then you need powerful language to express those ideas, to remind people of the core commitments of a society, and then demand of the society to bridge the gap between what it is and what it is supposed to be.

We American Jews today, in contrast, are tragically participating in a process because we have so many fears about the future and because we are inadvertently empowering the forces that are bringing down our country that’s leading to the unmaking of all of this. One way this is happening is that America is polarizing itself into terrible partisan divides in ways that are a deep existential threat to to American Jewry, and we are just going along with it because it’s good for the political parties for whom we vote.

We are mirroring in our communities some deep cynicism about the very legitimacy of the American project, whether it’s argued from the right, as though America is a failure, or whether it’s argued from the left, that America has always been a lie. And when we participate actively, In questioning the fundamental, covenantal belief that America is a place for the actualization of our dreams, even if it isn’t quite there yet, even if it has let down quite a few people in the language that it has used around freedom and equality in ways that have oftentimes benefited us more than others. But when we participate in that process of undermining the belief, we are undermining the America on which we have built this powerful, incredible palace of ideas and commitments that have driven the success of the American Jewish golden age until now.

Now it’s true that the golden age of American Jewry was not just about our beliefs or our ideas. A lot of those ideas emerged for American Jews in great greenhouse conditions of post-World War II liberalism and optimism. It was different to be a patriot between 1950 and 1990 when you were on the team of the U.S. against the evil forces of fascism and communism. We can’t control all of the ways in which those greenhouse conditions are eroding, which are some of the reasons why cynicism and pessimism about the American future are rising.

I understand especially why young people, who are growing up with deep economic disparities that are not gonna be fixed in their lifetime, we’re watching the first generation of Americans who is gonna have less wealth than their parents. In the history of America, this is the first generation that we are hitting. We’re witnessing immense climate pessimism about the future of our globe. Political polarization is not uniquely an American problem. It is no surprise that given the change in the global conditions in which Americans are living and operating, that some of that pessimism and cynicism about the American project and the ideas that flourished on the basis of that project are giving way to a different kind of cynicism and pessimism. And we see the kind of politics that emerge from pessimism. The radicalism of the left and the reactionary politics of the right.

You know, both of those can have their own Judaisms. Jews who hold to radical politics would say, No, Jewish values are not the ones you’ve talked about that are cloaked in liberalism, but they’re about tearing down the villainy of our society and replacing it with something else. They have their sources. Politically right-wing Jews certainly have their own set of Jewish sources as well. The American Judaism of the Golden Age worked because it aligned really well with a larger American moment. As America is evolving, we are evolving with it. That is the thing that is risking the loss of this particular Golden Age.

What we need to start doing as a Jewish community, and again reminding you, our job here at the Institute is not to depress you by talking about the difficulties. It is to understand the difficulties so that we feel learned and empowered enough to build something out. Tamar’s mind-blowing Torah on recognizing that the fundamental Jewish condition is to be born into the abyss and that your job is to build a ladder. That’s what we must start doing as American Jews.

Number one, we need to start insisting that this is an actual Judaism, that these commitments, they’re not small. Jewish communities in Jewish history contributed incredible and essential ideas to Judaism. And we have to, these are not a set of scattered values, but a set of commitments in which we as American Jews should be taking pride as something that is worth investing in and something that will be remembered.

Second, we have to insist on this as an American Judaism, even as it becomes countercultural. The fact that it worked as a Judaism because it was so aligned with a particular moment of American liberalism means that we had the conditions in which to create it. To speak this language now in the American Jewish community is to sound a little bit counter-cultural. To resist the forces of partisanship and polarization, to acknowledge the serious ways in which the behavior of the far-right and the far-left are deeply anti-American and a threat to our commitments, to be willing to notice that these kind of liberal Jewish commitments are serious and worth investing in is a counter-cultural commitment.

We have to stop talking and thinking that our Judaism in America is mere assimilation and disappearance. The more American Jews talk about disappearance, the more they ensure the fulfillment of that prophecy. Instead of talking about assimilation, why don’t we talk about this as a Judaism that is remarkable, and strange, and worth investing in and saving?

If you are here today, you are here because other American Jews created the conditions that made your Judaism viable and possible. It is not because your ancestors assimilated. If they assimilated, you wouldn’t be here. We have to start owning that we are in the midst of a constructive and creative project, naming it and owning it. And we have to start leaning in to still, at least for the time being, being the majority of American Jews.

It’s amazing how often people use demographic threats as a means of describing why they’re losing. That doesn’t make any sense. You can say, the birth rates in that community are much higher than those in my own community, so in 30 or 40 years, there are going to be more of them. I don’t love using that language anyway, it kind of sounds anti-semitic, like Pharaoh describing the Israelites flourishing like he describes them as language of insects. I don’t love talking about other Jews as a demographic threat. But even if you’re worried that ideas are emerging, that are counter to our dominant ideas.

Part of the reason that feels scary is because whatever you want to describe this, the moderate mainstream middle, the historic anchor of American Judaism, it is still the majority position. It just does not take itself seriously, and it doesn’t advocate for itself. The essential project for American Jewry is ideological.

We spend so much time talking about the rise and fall of this institution or that, when we should be talking about this: What is the Judaism our parents and grandparents created in America? How do we sustain it and bequeath it to our children? And the institutions will fall into place. The good news is, the hard work was already done. This is a Judaism that I am merely tonight interpreting for you. Not inventing. This was done by successive generations of American Jews who translated and created a powerful Judaism that works in America. Our job is to make it thrive.

And I’ll conclude with this. We Jews simply do not, ever, control what era of Jewish history into which we are born. We simply decide what kinds of Jews we want to be in that era. What’s it gonna take from all of us to stop believing the prophecies of doom that people use to describe a condition that could be alleviated by hard work? What is it gonna take of us to sustain this magnificent era of Jewish history in the face of what others would call a decline? Thank you very much.

Thanks for listening to our show. Identity/Crisis is produced by me, Tessa Zitter, and our executive producer is Maital Friedman. This episode was produced with assistance from Annie Beyer Chafets and edited by Gareth Hobbs at Silver Sound NYC, with music provided by Socalled.

Transcripts of our show are now available on our website, typically a week after an episode airs. We’re always looking for ideas for what we should cover in future episodes, so if you have a topic you’d like to hear about or if you have comments about this episode, send them in. Please write to us at [email protected]. For more ideas from the Shalom Hartman Institute about what’s unfolding right now, sign up for our newsletter in the show notes and subscribe to this podcast everywhere podcasts are available. See you next week and thanks for listening.