Persuasive Leadership in Divisive Times Today Transcript

Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Yehuda: Hi everyone, welcome to Identity/Crisis, a show from the Shalom Hartman Institute creating better conversations about the essential issues facing Jewish life. I’m Yehuda Kurtzer, we’re recording on Friday, February 21st, 2025.

The real test of leadership in the modern liberal order in these societies that are supposed to be premised on the freedom and dignity of the individual, and in our democracies where the citizen is sovereign, the real test in our time is if you as a leader can lead effectively with persuasion without having to resort to coercion.

Our best leaders are those that recognize that leadership is not a job, not even a fancy one with a big title, but leadership rather is an activity that’s exercised to move people and to achieve change. Anybody can be a leader from whatever position they inhabit.

Our best leaders are those that know that the skills of leadership can be deployed equally well to bad and immoral aims. They also know that sometimes it’s easier to do exactly that because you can appeal to popular sentiment or fear or by manipulating confusion. And the best leaders are the ones who commit nevertheless to be not just great leaders in their habits, but good leaders in their value systems. Our best leaders also never conflate means and ends and also find ways to effectively differentiate between self and role.

Now, even though I said leadership is not a job, there are jobs that involve the responsibility of exercising leadership and they have become very, very hard. In the Jewish community, pressures on professionals in Jewish communal leadership have risen, correlating to both the magnitude of the challenges, just to take the past 10 years, the rise of Trump in 2016, the pandemic, the war in Israel, the reelection of Trump in 2024. But also they’ve become harder because the conditions in which leaders lead, as shaped by technology, the speed of the news cycle, the media climate in general, a culture of scrutiny and public impatience, all of these have created something of a crucible.

One site to witness this is that many professional leaders feel, and I’m not convinced that they’re right, but they feel that one of their key responsibilities is to respond all the time to the events taking place around them. I think a major piece of the problem is that responding to stimuli on one hand and leading on the other are simply not the same activity. And if you devote all of your time to the former, you’re effectively standing still and writhing in the wind rather than moving yourself or others and charting new direction.

The headline earlier this week in eJewish Philanthropy, which is kind of like a trade publication for the Jewish communal field, read as follows, “Returning to a Divided Israel, Conference of Presidents Stresses Unity.” The article was describing this week’s mission by the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, which is an umbrella organization of the professional and lay leaders of some major Jewish organizations, because after all, some major Jewish organizations are excluded from the group, and some of the members of the group are not really major Jewish organizations, but fine.

Anyway, the Conference of Presidents was taking one of its semi-regular missions to Israel for the usual whirlwind of meetings with Israeli leaders and the requisite photo-ops. I read that headline and the article a few times, and I kept coming back to that phrase, “Returning to a Divided Israel, Conference of Presidents Stresses Unity.”

I understand that for the conference itself, whose premise is to present something of a united front of a divided Jewish community, the message of unity is paramount for their own organizational needs. But I actually cringed at the idea that in the face of what some, but I truly cringed at the idea that in the face of some of what the Jewish people face in both North America and Israel, the key moral message of the Jewish community is supposed to be unity.

Unity is kind of a terrible word. It almost always signals some amount of heavy handedness like a hegemonic display of power over people. I understand solidarity. I’ve advocated for it at times, like in the early hours following the Hamas attacks on October 7th. You need to advocate sometimes for people to exercise some amount of solidarity as a choice, because it’s oftentimes in their best interest to do so.

But unity feels like an appeal for some sort of performance and right now, I’m not sure it even makes any sense. America is in real trouble. The Trump administration is systematically dismantling the federal government, Grover Norquist style, cracking down on migrants and on civil liberties, on trans people and other vulnerable populations, while simultaneously throwing Zelensky and the Ukrainians under the bus, basically in social media posts, but also in official meetings, changing the whole power map in Europe and, by the way, casually proposing, like in the spirit of brainstorming, that Palestinians be expelled from Gaza in order to turn the land where they live into a vacation destination.

So what’s actually needed of American Jewish leaders in a moment like right now? The conference seemed to think that even though Prime Minister Netanyahu remains wildly unpopular, even though in his recent visit to Washington, he didn’t even have American Jewish leaders on the agenda, that their only option, or the right option, was to stick with the same itinerary and to pretend that we are united in support. It’s actually kind of strange.

The vast majority of American Jews share the sentiment of the vast majority of Israeli Jews about Prime Minister Netanyahu, but you wouldn’t hear it from the headline. The conference fended off criticism for meeting as part of its itinerary a polarizing minister who disparages diaspora Jews on the regular, who opposed the hostage deal.

I wonder—so much of Jewish leadership seems rooted in the need for access, to retain access at all times in Washington and Israel. It’s a big piece of how diaspora Jewish leaders built power and leverage. Does it come at too big of a cost right now?

But I’m most interested not in the Conference of Presidents, I’m most interested in the Venerable American Jewish Committee. AJC is one of the oldest, strongest, best known and I think most important Jewish organizations in America. It exists for over 120 years. It has had a fascinating history as a kind of, I don’t know if this is the right term, a kind of piece of the government of American Jews, certainly stemming from times when American Jews had less actual political power in Washington. And if you had to paint them as a piece of that story, they are probably closest to the State Department or the foreign ministry of the American Jewish community.

Their history has been actually fascinating and spotty in terms of ideological change. Prior to the creation of the State of Israel for a stretch of time, AJC was not a Zionist organization. That’s a way to put it nicely. Following the creation of the State of Israel, in some ways its mission changed and today focuses primarily, although maybe I’ll get fact-checked on this, focuses primarily on threats like anti-Semitism and advocacy for Israel on behalf of American Jews.

I have big questions right now about whether that is or should be the key agenda for the Foreign Ministry of American Jewry. Those questions sit amidst this larger fear and anxiety that I have about what it means to lead the American Jewish community during this period of turmoil.

And I’m really grateful that even with that complicated introduction, Ted Deutch is here, the CEO of the American Jewish community. Prior to coming into AJC, Ted Deutch was Congressman Ted Deutch from 2010 to 2022, representing, I think by the time he left the 22nd congressional district in Florida, but I think at times it was the 19th or maybe the 17th or maybe the 21st, spent 12 years in Florida politics and came into the position of leadership in the Jewish community.

Ted, thanks for coming on the podcast today. Did I get the congressional district right?

Ted: Yeah, you even you might have missed the 19th. We have lots of districts, but the numbers changed, but the constituency stayed fairly consistent. And thanks for having me.

Yehuda: Got it. And the central premise of the job stay the same.

Ted: That’s true.

Yehuda: Of course. Let me start with a question about how you lead. And we’ll get into this in greater detail. I offered a hypothesis that leadership is not about a job. And in our pre-conversation, you alluded to some of the things that I talked about here, about the burden and obligations on leaders to respond to all of these things. I just listed six or seven. And that’s just, I mean, it’s 8:15 in the morning. By 9:30, by the time we finish there are going to be more. I’m curious if you could open up a little bit of a window into sitting in this position of leadership in the Jewish community and reflecting on how you think about your job.

Ted: Sure, Yehuda, thanks. And I know, I know that this is how you like to start your podcast. And I know you get into the conversations and I suppose that’s what people, a lot of people tune in for. I would like to, I would actually like to sit with what you just said for a moment.

Yehuda: Yeah, go for it.

Ted: Because so much of what you said describes the challenges ofJewish leaders of the Jewish community, the communal organizations, but so much more than that, it’s a commentary of where we sit currently as a society. I think that your statement in your opening, and just again, now that leadership is not a job, is vitally important for both sides of, for everyone to think about. It’s true for leaders that this is not my job. The work that I happen to have, the privilege of sitting in this position of this venerable organization that gives me the opportunity to engage around the world with leaders in politics and diplomacy and business and education on behalf of Israel and Jewish people.

But ultimately, leadership is only if I use that opportunity to do something significant on behalf of the Jewish people. And it’s something that everyone possesses. And on the one hand, I absolutely want people to think in, I want people to think in those terms. The people who are involved with us at AJC who come to speak with elected officials and diplomats and try to help them, understand the challenges that Israel faces at the moment to try to help them understand what it means when over half of American Jews, for example, say that they make decisions about their what they do, where they go, what they say out of fear of antisemitism. They need to understand that we can do that. I can do that. Others can do that.

But I really, I just want to drill in on that one point that you made about the public impatience for a response and and in this social media driven world, the need that everyone feels and it’s true, for everyone who fancies themselves a leader, and the good news is I think more and more that’s everyone because everybody can be an influencer on social media. Because of that, there is, as you point out, this constant need to respond in real time to everything, to every statement. The algorithms on social media push people, emotions rile people up and then in the Jewish world and beyond, there is this sense that it requires an immediate response.

And how do I think about my job? Well, it’s really important to remember that social media isn’t the real world and that most people aren’t spending all their time thinking about the need to respond immediately and that in fact we’re going to be much better off if we can if we can take a breath, acknowledge the challenges that may come up on a daily basis, so many already by 8:20 this Friday morning, and then think about what is in the best interest of the community and how we address them.

And then finally, that analysis, I think, has to recognize that we don’t just always pick a side in this and in responding, you’re either with the president or you’re against them. You’re either with this particular Jewish group or you’re against it. Our part of the Jewish community feels this way. The other part doesn’t. I think what the conference was talking about, there’s not unity of thought within the Jewish community, but the idea of trying to at least get the Jewish community to recognize that whatever their differences of opinion may be, and that happens certainly within our people, that there is this much, much bigger outside world that does view us as one community and often views us that way in terms that are not favorable. And if we’re all at least thinking about how to work toward a common approach with our different opinions, we might be better off.

I hope that helps a little, I very much appreciate what you said.

Yehuda: Yeah, thank you. I’ll come back to the unity piece, but apropos your comments, so your own frustration about the necessity of responding in real time and social media and so forth. I’m going to push you a little bit. You when we were doing research for this, we just, said to my research assistant, like, pull together some key statements. And her response was, what do mean? There’s a statement every day? You know, and on February, I have a list of statements from February 5th. So why play the game?

Ted: The answer to how do we respond to this pressure to constantly comment is not to say, this is a really important point I appreciate you asking, it’s not to say, well, we’re going to just sit back and see how things play out. There are things that are said, all of the comments that AJC makes on social media, there could be a hundred more a day.

I’ll give you an example. I think this is what you’re getting at, Yehuda. When the president just this week, when the president accused Zelensky of being a dictator and that suggested that, not suggested, stated that it was Ukraine who started this war. There are, for an organization like ours that really does engage at the highest levels around the world, I just, I’m just back from the Munich Security Conference with an AJC group we met with, prime ministers and defense ministers and foreign ministers. This is the work that we do on behalf of Israel and the Jewish people and so many of them from Europe. And knowing from them and from our offices across Europe how those comments were received, it was important to say something in real time.

However, the question is, where does it lead? We pointed out what seems obvious to people who have studied the recent history, past three years, actually going back to Russia’s occupation of Crimea and then what we’ve seen since Russia invaded and the brutal onslaught against Ukraine and their ongoing efforts to wreak havoc on the territorial integrity of Ukraine, the people of Ukraine. It was important to point out that that’s what happened and that Zelensky is not a dictator.

But the comments, because everything happened so fast, this isn’t a one and done, right? We shouldn’t think for a second that the president made those comments and we have to immediately figure out how to respond because we’re gonna move on to the next issue. This is a great example. There are ongoing conversations about what a peace agreement would look like.

So as for us, our organization that worries about the Jewish communities in those countries, that worries about the transatlantic relationship, frankly, worries about how they interact with Israel, the response is to acknowledge the moment, understanding that there is a chance and we’ve used this opportunity to think long and hard about what the next steps will be if there are additional statements. there’s an ongoing effort to undermine Zelensky or to lift up Putin, you need to be prepared for that.

But it doesn’t mean coming out with everything you’re thinking on every statement immediately when it happens.

Yehuda: Yeah, I’m sympathetic to the argument because what I’m hearing in the argument is, look, there’s the public diplomacy piece of this work and there’s the private diplomacy piece of this work. And where I think our community is struggling is in, it’s not just in the assumption of that, it’s not just in the frustration and the challenge of the public diplomacy work, the statement work, it’s also recognizing that the bulk of the work is invisible.

And I think this is true for organizations all over the place. People get evaluated by, what did you say in this moment right now, as opposed to what is the 90% of the work that nobody actually sees that you’re doing? And I think that that’s what I hear a little bit about this. I come at this honestly as a kid of a diplomat. Like, I know the overwhelming majority of diplomatic work does not hit the papers. And then you hopefully get the version in the papers that actually is advancing what you’re trying to do in private.

Nevertheless, it’s not surprising that you’re going to wind up with a kind of public referendum on the attitudes and ideas of where an organization sits based on what you actually share with the press and the public.

Ted: Right, but that’s actually the point. Everything should not be a referendum on where we sit at the moment. It should be a conversation about what we’re trying to achieve. And on case, at this moment with this administration, as was the case, frankly, with the Biden administration, there’s a good part of our community that insists that you can either be all in or, a hundred percent against, the statements, the positions, the actions that are taken by the administration.

At AJC, I deeply believe, and I was in politics for a long time. I now have the privilege of running a nonpartisan organization. There is good and bad in every administration. And we worked closely with the Biden administration on a number of efforts and we were critical when that was appropriate. And with the first Trump administration, we were very supportive, obviously, of moving the embassy and the Abraham Accords and some executive orders.

And since the new Trump administration has taken office, we have, on the one hand, expressed concern about the Gaza, taking over Gaza and owning Gaza. And we expressed concern over the Ukraine statement and USAID, slashing USAID. And for some people, they hear that and think, okay, well, they’re obviously out. They hate this administration. It’s not true. This is where it gets, it shouldn’t be complicated, but in this environment, it becomes complicated. They don’t understand that at the same time that we’re just being honest and true to our values as an organization.

And I think our work on behalf of the Jewish people, at the same time, we’ve been very supportive of the president’s efforts to bring the hostages home and maximum pressure on Iran and the work that the Department of Education is doing.

This is nuanced and it’s hard for people in this social media driven age to pause and actually consider nuance. If you want to be impactful, you have to be engaged in the process.

I spent all these years in Congress. I work with people, I work with colleagues that from the outside people would look at and say, why are you having, why do you even talk to this person? I can’t stand their politics! Well, that’s not an option for us. And it wasn’t when I was in, I don’t think for any member of Congress, it’s definitely not an option at AJC. We’re going to work with people who are in power, who have the ability to do important things on behalf of the Jewish people and who have displayed a commitment to doing that.

And in this case, Trump administration and the people we work with in the Trump administration, even in these early days, we see as partners when, certainly when we can, to strengthen the Jewish people, fight anti-Semitism, and defend Israel’s place in the world.

Yehuda: So the piece about retaining access feels critical to me, to part of this, right? As long as you can maintain relationships with people in power and they are sympathetic to your agenda, you stay in relationship with them. That makes total sense, especially if you’re trying to kind of achieve a set of outcomes that they have the power to do so.

It is particularly complicated when it comes to President Trump because any perceived slight or alienation, if you speak in a particular way, doesn’t matter who you are, where you are, you have the possibility of very significant retribution. I don’t want to go deep into that, but I actually think it’s a real danger to the whole mindset of retaining relationship to power when actually a piece of it is not just about effectiveness, but it’s also about fear.

Ted: Right. Can I push back a little on that? I hear that and I don’t. We have a month now, we have a data set, it actually goes back more than a month because the Trump team before the administration took office was deeply engaged in the negotiations over the hostage deal.

And the prevailing sentiment, as you just described, is, sure, you’re either in or out with this administration. And so the only way to be engaged meaningfully is to avoid saying anything that is in any way critical of decisions that are made. But if you look at the administration and the way that it’s operating, there are plenty of examples already where the president puts something out there that a lot of people criticize. The senior officials in his administration have come back and said, well, this is a statement the president made about Gaza, for example, we’re looking, as the national security advisor pointed out after that press conference, we want this to be a moment that stakes things up and that brings other proposals. If the region doesn’t approve of what the president said, then come with something else. And in fact, some of that, a lot of that is happening already.

The point is, that’s a very specific example where on the one hand, sure, there are people who think the president said something, you cannot even express any concern about it for fear of retribution. But the administration, if you acknowledge that the goal here as expressed by others in the administration is to get to a point, then we’re going to comment as we did, express our concerns, even as we continue to work with administration officials who are trying to find a way forward in this horrific moment for Israel and the aftermath of Gaza and Hamas doing what it did just this week. It’s not just in or out.

I think, in politics, I saw this, especially true in diplomacy, and your, Ambassador Kurtzer definitely knew this, that there is a respect that others will have for you if you’re consistent and respectful in the way that you approach the statements that are being made, the policies that are being advanced, everyone doesn’t agree all the time. That’s okay. And some people want to criticize us because we’ve either said encouraging things about the Trump administration, or we worked with the Biden administration, or the opposite as well.

And I can handle, this gets back to the question of leadership, I guess, I can handle that criticism if I’m confident that, and we’re confident that what we’re doing is helping to advance our goals of securing a thriving future for the Jewish people in Israel.

Yehuda: So, that I think comes to meet the crux of the issue, which is, there is a hypothesis that would say, let’s take the case of anti-Semitism, domestic anti-Semitism. We can come back to Israel in a moment. When it comes to the anti-Semitism crisis, and you have new research on anti-Semitism right now, the statistics are incredibly alarming about, I would characterize them as less about the manifestations of anti-Semitism and more about fear of anti-Semitism, which is at like record high for American Jews over the past couple of decades.

One hypothesis about how you fight antisemitism is what I see as the kind of mainstream organized Jewish community response, which is some hybrid of education, some amount of political advocacy in Washington, advocating for particular types of legislation, right?

I think there’s a totally different hypothesis, which says antisemitism does not get dealt with as though it is almost like an economic problem. It is the result of the active dismantling of the infrastructure of liberal democracy. That’s my hypothesis about anti-Semitism. In which case things like, and I don’t really don’t think this is a crazy thing, things like firing one quarter of public health officials in America, eroding trust in public institutions and in universities, threatening the capacity of free and fair elections, all of those create a ripe environment for hate speech, conspiracy thinking, and ultimately anti-Semitism to thrive.

That means that there is a choice for Jewish organizational leaders, whether to fight the symptoms of anti-Semitism, advocacy, education, legislation, or whether to actually be willing to confront the larger underlying anti-democratic conditions that are actually bringing this about. In other words, it’s not, that feels to me like a very, very significant divide. And I’m curious why you and the AJC are at the place that you are in terms of this kind of strategy to fight antisemitism.

Ted: A couple of thoughts in response, and I would add actually one more way to respond to a symptom that you didn’t touch on. I would respectfully suggest that your analysis, Yuda, is very much of the moment. And in part, I completely agree. And the data backs this up, and we’ve seen this throughout history that when antisemitism grows in a society, it doesn’t reflect only that society’s attitudes towards the Jewish community. It reflects a much deeper problem with democracy, institutions, polarization. There’s a rotting at the core of society when the kinds of, when anti-Semitism continues to increase, when, one just recent example, when somebody who clearly at least once was a cultural icon, Kanye West uses his Super Bowl ad to advertise these these swastika t-shirts, and in some ways is, doesn’t seem that serious, but it was horrendous and there was virtually no outcry or maybe a couple people over a day pointed it out, it’s just become one more thing that people do and it’s the society we live in.

So I agree that it suggests that there’s something much deeper. And by the way, this is true if you look at antisemitism around the world, it arises in countries, whether there’s a large Jewish community or virtually none at all, because it does get back to the state of society. So I agree with that.

But it is not as if the antisemitism that we have witnessed is somehow something that has arisen over the past month. We’ve seen this rise in antisemitism over years now, it comes from lots of different places. The question is, how do we address it? But it comes from lots of different places, all across the political spectrum, our data shows that the Jewish community understands it’s the far right and the far left and Christian nationalists and radical Islamists and all of that contributes to this really nasty stew of antisemitism. And we have to deal with it wherever it comes from.

But it’s also that if you go back to just a few years to COVID and you saw the spike in conspiracy theories. Well, again, we know history tells us whenever the world is looking for a scapegoat, here we are. And that’s part of it. And we also know that when extremes rise and they’re each looking for their own problem to identify, it’s often the Jews. And so in a more polarized time that we’ve seen, again, going back now for a number of years. That’s a problem we have to confront.

All of this is to say, yes, polarization in our society and in the world is an enormous challenge and we have to address that in a serious way. If we’re going to confront antisemitism, our survey shows that Jewish community is absolutely concerned about polarization and the rise of extremism. And it was true in the last administration in the Biden administration. And it’s true as we come into the Trump administration and whoever is in the White House, these challenges are the challenges that we need to confront together.

Yehuda: Whoever is in the White House? I agree with you. I guess I’m not making a claim that this goes back a month. I wrote a piece back, I think in 2018, describing that the existential issue for American Jews is the partisan divide. And that was already 10 years too late into that. When you study the Pew material on partisanship, they identify the kind of shift around partisanship in America begins around 1992, 1994, the Gingrich Revolution. And it kind of makes sense. Like you get the post-World War II 40-year stretch of the bipartisan era because of the Cold War. And now it erodes and globalization and terror, all of these things feed into the story.

I guess what I’m struggling with is like, and our whole business at Hartman is nuanced. I’m with you on a nuance.

Ted: I know, I know it is.

Yehuda: I’m just grasping at when are the moments when we don’t, we don’t actually need nuance. We actually need to fight. I think that that fighting, I’m just going to, I’m going to read you a quote. I’m going to tell you, you’re going tell me who said it. The quote is, “The president’s budget is morally bankrupt, cruelly demonizes the needy and is premised on phony economic theories and farcical math. If a president’s budget is meant to convey his values and priorities, then president Trump is making quite clear his contempt for working families and the most vulnerable Americans. In the president’s ideal America, the extremely rich receive more from the government and everyone else receives dramatically less.”

Ted: That is a beautifully crafted quote, Yehuda.

Yehuda: Isn’t it great? Isn’t it great? So that’s Congressman Ted Deutch in, I think, 2018.

Now, I know your job is different when you’re the running the AJC versus, and I know that you’re in a, but there was, but I think you were right in 2018.

Ted: But my, our job now, my job now, I think an analysis of the president’s budget, and I think, I this is fairly clear, an analysis of the president’s budget is not what, it’s not the work that AJC does. And you may agree with that statement from then and you may study the ongoing conversations about the budget and how DOGE is operating and where that’s going and draw your own conclusions about this moment.

Again, this is not a question of being in or out. And there are, yes, absolutely, there are issues where you’ve got to join the fight. I completely agree. But what are we fighting for? And what are we trying to achieve? That’s the, that that’s what we think about all the time. And there are within, again, this is I’m not, I’m not urging unity within around these issues and how people feel about politics. I, there are people who in the Jewish community who are deeply involved, who were deeply involved with the Trump campaign. And I’m glad they were. And there are people in the Jewish community who were deeply involved in the Harris campaign, right? And I’m glad they were.

That’s not, and there was a time when politics, I thought that politics was, for me, it was the best way to try to move the country forward. Now, in this work that I’m privileged to do, trying to help the world understand what the Jewish community faces and trying to work with those in power to help ensure that we’re tackling the challenges of the Jewish community, I’m gonna leave budget conversations that don’t impact those issues to others.

I’m not saying they’re not important and people have different opinions, and I’m not trying to suggest that the Jewish community should be of one mind on every political issue. But when it comes to working with Congress and the administration in tackling the challenge of antisemitism and normalizing Israel’s place in the world and standing up for Israel’s defense and touting Israel’s democracy and understanding the nuance even within Israel, that’s the work that we do. And it’s frankly, it’s more, I think, more important than ever because there is this push that people have to go one way or the other.

So you should, Yehuda, I’m encouraging you, should be as all in on the politics of the moment, as you care to be and feel that you need to be. For me, I’m going to wind up, my goal in this work is to ensure that those who may completely agree or disagree with one party or the other know that that in working with AJC, they can actually be with the overwhelming majority of Jews in America who want to move forward together to tackle the issues that our community faces.

Yehuda: Yeah. Listen, I have my own organizational institutional constraints around partisanship too. I run a nonpartisan organization and it’s not easy. And maybe I might even get in trouble from my endorsing of your 2018 remarks about the budget, but be that as it may.

I think one of the pieces that feels genuinely tricky right now is, when we come to the Israel piece of what it means to do Israel advocacy right now, is that to do Israel advocacy right now in the Jewish community to kind of stand with the government of Israel is to effectively stand against the citizens of Israel. I’m curious how that plays into the considerations of what it means to be a pro-Israel organization right now. I tried a couple years ago to coin a term, failed completely, to say I’m not pro-Israel, I’m gonna try again. I was like, I don’t want to be pro-Israel, I want to be pro-Israeli. Just to say like, I want to identify with the people. The people are out in the streets, furious at their own government about the failure to advocate for the hostages.

There’s pretty good evidence at this point that the deal that Israel was able to extract was a deal that was on the table months and months and months ago, might have resulted in more hostages being alive today. There’s also some argument, some of this is coming from former government officials, that it is a far worse deal today for Israel than it was when it was available to them months ago.

So there’s a lot of righteous Israeli Zionist anger against its own government, and it’s very, I understand how tricky it is for American Jewish officials to play in that territory in terms of their criticism of the Israeli government. But it does create this weird dynamic where standing with the government of Israel is not the only imaginable Zionist option right now. Could you talk a little bit about those calculations?

Ted: Yeah, although I would note the two different characterizations that you just laid out, is being pro-Israel or pro-Israeli people, that the government and the people are different. And then the way you just characterized it, which is there are different opinions. And I mean, there are other podcasts I could do before Shabbat today where this conversation would be very different. And they would characterize your assessment also differently, and that’s the world that I operate in. I’m not going to say that only one of them is correct. I’m going to acknowledge, this is, and I just don’t…

Yehuda: But one second, surely you agree this podcast is better than the other podcasts, correct?

Ted: I think this is a, I will surely agree that this is one of the best conversations I’ve had in a long time.

Yehuda: Fantastic.

Ted: I would just, I would say, because I think about this too, like if I asked you, given our last exchange and acknowledging that you like me run a nonpartisan organization, can you draw the distinction between being pro-America and pro-American? And doesn’t it get a little risky when you start to characterize the views of the entirety of the population in a democracy? There are very strong opinions.

And I’ll use the example of the hostage families, because I think this in some ways gets to your point. Since October 7th, we’ve done everything we possibly can to lift up the voices of hostage families. We’ve now scheduled more than 500 meetings with members of Congress and senators and leaders around the world and all across the U.S. because it shouldn’t be necessary. The fact that, that it’s now over 500 days that hostages have been in these horrific conditions. Hamas just this week showing us again, the utter depravity of, of who they are and, and their approach to the world, that everybody should be talking about it.

But we think it’s important, because it’s not the case for a whole variety of reasons, that at least leaders hear from them so that those voices are in their heads, so that they’ll share it and they’ll push to try to bring all the hostages home. Great. Well, the hostage families, as you know, like Israeli society, they don’t all have the same opinion of the Netanyahu government. But I’m not going to pick and choose and say, we’re only going to hear from families who have consistently been, if not supportive of the government, they’re not going to be too critical because I don’t really want to rock the boat. In this case, these families all need to be heard.

And sometimes at AJC, we’ve put ourselves in positions where families have used our podium to launch some pretty tough attacks against the government, and sometimes that’s uncomfortable, but there is such a strong disagreement in Israel, which I acknowledge.

But again, Yehuda, in the outside world, I don’t have the liberty, I don’t. I don’t have the liberty of deciding that one view absolutely represents the views of all Israelis, because there isn’t one, as you acknowledge. We’re going to be true to our values. And when a minister in the government says something or someone else in the government says something that we think requires a response, we’re going to say it.

But in the outside world, for government leaders elsewhere and for officials in the United States and for the non-Jewish world, I want them to understand that in Israel, there is this incredibly vibrant democracy. And it’s not a question of whether I take sides, it’s a question of whether I’m listening and engaging with everyone because they’re all a part of the Jewish world.

I sometimes think that it’s harder for people in Israel to understand that. And some of the frustration comes, especially for my friends in Israel, it’s so intense and so personal every day there. And for us, it’s intensely personal as well. But we’re also trying to get the rest of the world to understand why there is not a divide that they can try to play into to divide support within their own within their own society for israel

Yehuda: The hostage family example is very compelling to me because I agree with you. The idea that you would say, I’m only going to listen to those hostage families who are anti-Netanyahu as opposed to engage with the rest of the hostage families because they happen to like the prime minister is incredibly demeaning and it turns them into an instrument or like an object of our own politics as opposed to be human beings who are suffering. I’m totally with you on that.

I think where the rubber meets the road is, if you perceive that the government of Israel is doing things that it’s not just, well, their Israelis disagree, but that you perceive that the kinds of things that they’re doing are actually endangering the condition of the Jewish people, then it becomes, well, my job is it. You can’t simply say my job is to, you know, maintain a relationship with them and maintain both sides. There’s something bigger at stake here.

And even like a left field example is like, the relationship between the Israeli government and the government of Hungary, for instance, or other far-right governments in Europe, actually has really damaging implications for those Jewish communities. So we are left with a choice of like, of trying to sustain and manage our relationship with the Israeli government position while at the same time advocate for Hungarian or now German Jews, where those international partnerships between their government and the government of state of Israel is part of what seems to be endangering them. That’s where it feels very, very risky.

Ted: And that’s very challenging. And for us, working as we do with both the Jewish communities and governments across Europe, where the polarization that we talked about earlier has driven people to say, one quote, it just sticks in my head. I was in Paris meeting with the Jewish community and someone said, well, we know that that Le Pen’s father was a Nazi, she’s really, she’s with us and she’s been so strong. For those of us who aren’t in it, in Paris, that requires a little bit of unpacking and how to think about that.

And in Amsterdam, again, those who stood up for the Jewish community after that pogrom that took place are, are some especially from parties that the community more broadly might not traditionally have been so comfortable with. And this is, this is actually really hard, but there has to be a way that this is exactly the work that we do across Europe, there’s got to be a way to figure out how to maneuver that in ways that both safeguard Israel and help the Jewish communities in those countries.

And in our case, at AJC, we’re not just looking at this and lobbying statements about it. We’re engaged deeply with the Jewish community to figure out how to actually engage on these issues.

Just going back to France for the other side of that, the far left in France at this point has instrumentalized anti-Semitism as a part of their political worldview. We see that in too many places as well. So it’s really challenging, but the moment that we say you can or can’t talk to this kind of leader or not, not only is it, I think, not going to be helpful and it obviously won’t be helpful in the work that we do with those governments, but more than that, it’s not always being respectful enough of the struggles that the Jewish communities in some of these countries have, as they’re trying to sort out the best way to think about their future.

Yehuda: Yeah, we had a conversation a few weeks ago with Jonathan Sarna about American politics, and we talked a lot about this notion of a royal alliance and retaining relationships with structures of power as a kind of diaspora Jewish flex over the generations. And these stories are not, this is not a new story of what Jews have to deal with when you’re oftentimes caught in this double bind between both ends.

Let me ask you one last question, which is if you didn’t have to respond in real time to everything, if you had a month of quiet, relative quiet. What does the agenda look like for you and for the AJC of what you would want to pursue? Where would you want to move the American Jewish community? And it didn’t have to be in responsive mode. It could actually be in the kind of leadership mode that all of us want to be in.

Ted: Well, I would certainly use some part of that month to formulate that. Look, so much of what we’ve discussed here, this is the range of issues that we don’t spend enough time really struggling through. So if I had the good fortune of being able to stop and work, really work our way through this, how best at AJC and AJC working on behalf of the Jewish community, the Jewish world, with other leaders from the Jewish world.

How do we work together to stand against the polarization that undermines the extremism that undermines not just democracy, but really undermines the way that we approach these issues? We all are affected by the algorithms that drive the content that fills our inboxes. And having a little bit of time to step back and think about what that’s done and what it’s done to our community and what it may have caused us to forget about our history and why we just can’t allow that to guide us going forward. That would be number one.

And then the other thing that I would think about figuring out how to do more of is the positive response to this moment. Geopolitically, Israel is in a dramatically different place and there are huge opportunities. That we understand and we’re working on it, and our office in Abu Dhabi is constantly looking at ways to build out the Abraham Accords. And I think Saudi normalization could be a game changer. That we’re doing already.

But the positive piece of this is October 7th happened. The Jewish community felt incredibly vulnerable, and I would suggest for the first time there were a lot of people who understood what it means to say that our future and Israel’s future are are inextricably linked and and because we all felt so vulnerable and and people as a result wanted to be involved and they’ve gotten involved in the Jewish world and it’s not just these conversations and organizations, but they just want to be proud, proud Jews.

So if we can remind, and this is true across the political spectrum, if we can remind the Jewish world and find ways for what is often a divided Jewish world politically and denominationally and in so many other ways that over thousands of years, the contributions that we’ve made to the world as this small people that was a blip thousands of years ago that has, unlike every other ancient people, has endured and survived the most harrowing experiences that any people could ever imagine and built this modern state of Israel that yes, there are political challenges, but it’s a remarkable feat and has contributed in every country in which we have lived in significant ways.

If I had a month to think about the best way to drive a conversation about that as a unifying force that will make us stronger as a people, I would love to have that opportunity.

Yehuda: Well, I bless you with that. Thanks for coming so much on the show this morning. Thanks for engaging with me in this complicated conversation. And I’m really I’m grateful for your leadership as well.

Ted: I appreciate that. Likewise, Yehuda, I really enjoyed the conversation. Thanks very much. Thanks for your good work.