Natalia Mehlman Petrzela
What does it mean to tell Jewish stories in a moment of political polarization and distortion?
On this episode of Identity/Crisis, Yehuda Kurtzer is joined by historian Natalia Mehlman Petrzela to examine the role of the historian in public life: not to offer talking points or easy analogies, but to deepen public understanding in a time of simplification and certainty. Through a conversation about education, Jewish identity, and the place of Jews in American history, they consider why richer storytelling matters—and what it can offer to students, Jews, and the broader public.
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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 Tuesday, February 24th, 2026.
Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute, “there remains no being to improve and no direction to set for possible improvement. And when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Most of us have come to know, just the last line of that piece of writing comes from a 1905 book called The Life of Reason by the Spanish philosopher George Santayana. It’s pulled out often in a framework where it seems as though history is repeating itself, or if you prefer Jonathan Sarna’s formulation: “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.” And the theory behind the quote is that if we can remember the past, we can recognize patterns in the past, in the present, and thus we can prevent the worst ills from our past, from recurring.
In the past several years, the phrase has become vital in American discourse about current events. Think about the journalist M. Gessen and their work on the history of totalitarianism in Russia that informs the present. Or Jason Stanley, author of How Fascism Works, who left America because of his perception that it was following patterns from the past and descending into fascism, or the historian Timothy Snyder, who also moved to Canada at the same time, not under the same pretense, whose work on tyranny was about explaining the playbook of authoritarianism for the past to the present.
In the Jewish community, of course, this argument’s been around for a lot longer. It’s a discipline owned by our constant chronic insistence on preserving the memory of the Shoah, not just because we think it’ll be a crime to forget it, or a betrayal of our own people. It’s because we tend to believe that forgetting will become the pathway for it to happen again.
But there’s two problems with this line of argument. The first is, there is no we that universally agrees upon the pieces of the past that need to be remembered for the present. No universal narrative about the particular warning signs.
A few years ago, the anti-Zionist journalist Peter Beinart argued in a piece of writing that we should use the metaphor of the escape of Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai from Jerusalem at the time of the destruction of the Temple to help us imagine the similar failures of Jewish sovereignty in Israel today. I responded publicly, not just by contesting the politics of the article, but by contesting his very reading of history. Those that seek to remember history are not merely trying to prevent it from recurring. They’re trying to own a version of the past and narrative of the past, sometimes they’re creating a version of the past for their own purposes in the present.
In theory, a real engagement with history and the past could help us think much more richly about the present. Real history is a site of complexity. It’s always a multivalent story that requires deep self-awareness to see ourselves as seekers of something in the past and not just as opportunistic treasure hunters. A real engagement with history would require us to slow down, to be shaped ethically, not just by what we found, but the careful process of what it means to actually look at the past, to be humbled by it. This was my argument on his podcast last summer about the lightning speedway in which so many historians formed a consensus declaring that Israel was committing genocide and Gaza, and they were aided by none of the methodologies that they generally use. So are we actually scared of forgetting the past, or are we just eager to make the past serve the present?
But the second, and I think more severe critique about this ubiquitous phrase is that Santayana’s hypothesis argues that memory will always help us avoid repeating the past. But what happens when those who want to repeat the horrors of the past use history as their template? The obvious case, as usual, is the Nazis. The Nazis were obsessed with history. They saw themselves as inheritors of ancient Rome and the Holy Roman empire and the earlier imperial phase of modern Germany. That’s why they called themselves the Third Reich. They were eager to remember the past precisely so that they could correct the mistakes of the past, in order to relive it, but to fix it.
Closer to our time, Stephen Miller speaks the language of a concern for re-litigating American history as a key instrument of his draconian anti-immigration policies. He has claimed that his opponents reflect a quote, loss of faith in the noble history of America. Many authoritarians think this way, and I think we sell them short. We fight them the wrong way when we argue that they are forgetting the past or that they’re ignorant of it, they often know it better than we do and they’re trying to bring it back.
In other words, we want to believe that the path towards progress involves leveraging the past. The real fight though, is often not with those who are forgetting it, it’s with those who are irresponsibly remembering it.
I’ve been interested in the power of history since deciding as a teenager that I wanted to become a historian of ancient Judaism and then obsessed with it throughout the process of becoming one—you kind of have to be obsessed with this question if you wanna become a history PhD through the slog. Even now, as, I guess, a former historian. I’m still convinced that this enterprise has unique importance and resonance for Jews.
Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, the great Jewish historian, felt that it was a spiritual burden that had fallen to the historian in our secular age to build a bridge between the present and the past. I feel so much of my own work is about the link between history and memory, trying to make us feel whole in the present by creating a rootedness with the past.
I was so excited to find a fellow traveler who I met inadvertently, actually, through a different Hartman program, only to discover that not only does she think in similar ways about some of these questions acts as a unique public historian in the world, but most fascinatingly to discover that we were actually college classmates. That was kind of amazing.
Natalia Mehlman Petrzela is an American historian specializing in the politics and culture of the modern United States. She’s a professor of history at the new school. She’s also, according to her bio, a history communicator who frequently writes pieces about American history and popular media outlets. She’s a co-host of the Past Present Podcast, has created educational videos for the History Channel and for C-SPAN. She’s a podcaster. She has research interests on language, education, and fitness, the Chippendales.
Most material, perhaps, for our purpose are two things: She’s the lead scholar for a new curriculum in the New York City Department of Education. The curriculum is called Hidden Voices: Jewish Americans in US History, and she has also emerged over the last couple of years as an outspoken voice within the field of history about Israel and Gaza and the responsibility of historians. So there’s a lot to talk about. Natalia, thank you. So much for being here today on this podcast.
Natalia: I’m thrilled to be here. Thanks for having me. And I was just jotting down in your introduction all the great points that I hope we pick up on, so.
Yehuda: Okay, great.
Natalia: Yeah. Glad to be here.
Yehuda: So let’s just start with what it means for you to be a public historian. I mean, the majority of your work is like an academic. You’re writing research that is meant for your field for the review of your field, you teach at university. But you’ve also taken on this second role of being a public historian. I’d love for you to talk a little bit about what that is about for you, what that work looks like, and then we can get into some of the big questions that I was raising earlier about what’s at stake.
Natalia: Absolutely. So the question that led me to become a historian was that I found myself constantly walking around the world asking, how did we get here? How did we get here? And then I realized after a couple years after college of trying some different career paths, that there’s a whole job where you can think about that question all day. And that is, of course, being a historian.
So to me, being a kind of historian-in-public or a history communicator comes from the strong belief that we should all be asking that question all the time. Like I sometimes, and perhaps it sounds a little snobby, I can’t believe how incurious people are about just, everyday life, you know? Oh, when did airports become this way? When did—you know? And not even sort of the big geopolitical questions.
And so my desire is the conventionals for a traditional historian is, of course, to model that sensibility and impart it to my students, very few of whom will become professional historians. But the reason I’m writing for MS NOW, and out there, and on the History Channel is, I wanna kinda show the world that we understand ourselves and each other and the world better when we have that backwards-looking sensibility to understand the processes that brought us here today. So that’s basically it.
Yehuda: Yeah. So tell me, like, what you’ve discovered about your own curiosity in that process. I agree with you. I’m constantly googling random things to understand things like, wait, that’s so weird, or why is that the case? But you start to learn about yourself, certainly when you do it not just by Googling random things, but when you actually take on the project of being a communicator, you start to have some self-awareness of what are the kinds of questions that interest you. What are the areas, what are the problems that you’re kind of trying to solve? So what have you learned about yourself in that process?
Natalia: Well, one thing I’ve really learned about myself and also about the doing of history, that sometimes I think some of the richest inquiries and kind of conversations, both in the classroom and beyond, come from when we ask questions or look at issues that are not immediately kind of sorted into our usual culture wars or political categories.
And so there are kind of two big buckets for my work. One is really like the history of education and American politics, and that’s sort of legible to a lot of scholars. And the other one is like all this like cultural history stuff. I wrote this whole book about fitness culture, made this big podcast about the Chippendales as a lens on American pop culture. A lot of the History Channel stuff is more pop culture. And I’ll say that some people look at that and they’re like, oh, that’s cute or that’s fun. And I say, okay, yeah. All right, fine, I’ll, I’ll, I won’t be offended.
But what I have actually found is that when we use some of those sort of like fun topics to get into an inquiry about the past, the conversations can be actually much richer because people are not so on guard about, well, how am I, I’m supposed to think this or I’m supposed to use that language?
For example, this Chippendales story. Founded—Chippendales, the male strippers listeners. Yeah, I know a little more lowbrow than a lot of your conversations on here, but that. Was a cultural phenomenon in the eighties. It’s founded by an Indian immigrant. He’s really trying to market a very particular version of like, a white American boy next door, and there’s so much to learn from that.
And we are removed from a lot of the traditional kind of commonplace, or, I almost think of them as grooves or trenches, when we talk about gender, when we talk about capitalism, we talk about feminism. People know what they’re supposed to think. Well, when you bring an issue like this, not only is it kind of fun and sexy to like, just think about, but it also interrupts all of those assumptions.
So I would say that one thing I’ve learned about myself is how much I value and don’t feel the need anymore to kind of apologize for doing that kind of cultural work as a lens on the most serious and pressing questions, which should preoccupy all of us.
Yehuda: Yeah, that reminds me a little bit of a interview we did a couple years ago with Rachel Gross, who’s a professor at San Francisco State who wrote a book about Jewish nostalgia as religious practice. It’s a fascinating hypothesis. But a lot of what came across in that discussion was you get to the same depth in questions of identity and meaning and gender and all of the categories that are the big categories through the investigation of the deli as you do if you kind of came at it just from, what are the big questions of identity and politics that are taking place here?
I’m curious what you are hoping from your learners in public context. Maybe we’ll even, I don’t know, use the Chippendales example and then we’ll come to, to more kind of Jewishly relevant topics, but I’m sure there’s a Jewish angle. What is, what are you hoping that the learner does besides feel more informed? Because if it, especially if it does touch issues that are really seismic and significant, what happens in the process of that kind of public learning?
Natalia: This is about a sensibility or a disposition more than kind of content acquisition. And so to me it is about always looking around and one, asking that question, how did we get here? And two, knowing it’s not just the gym or the supermarket or the nightclub, that all of these experiences that we have are conditioned by all of these interesting processes about identity, about power, about all these other things, and nothing is kind of neutral or nothing’s off the table for that kind of inquiry and analysis.
I mean, that’s what I hope, that kind of disposition of curiosity I think is a big one. And that’s much bigger than history, but as a historian, I just see that it’s sort of in my lane to be a champion of that kind of thinking.
Yehuda: Yeah. So curiosity is a different result than some of what I was arguing at the outset of the podcast, which is, a lot of public historians seem far more invested, not in getting people curious, but getting people angry, I would say. Or motivated or activated. And the Santayana quote is rooted in that, like, look, you recognize this pattern. Now, what are you gonna do about it?
And by the way, the historians are themselves, never the people who are going to be on the front lines of this, they are kind of like modern prophets of, listen, I recognize that this is what happens.This is the Reichstag fire now. Now you have to go out to the street and do it. So how do you think about that business in general?
Natalia: Yeah, I, you know, I, it might sound hypocritical because I’m very much out there as we have talked about, writing, et cetera, and opining in public. But I really think that the scholar and the activist are two different roles and I see myself much less as, let me give you all the historical bullet points to arrive at the correct political position that you must now, go take action for.
But I think rather, my point is, let me help you understand how we got here, and I try to do that in a way that I think is sometimes frustrating to my readers because it’s more measured and it’s more nuanced, but that’s our job, right? I get really nervous and sort of, I get the ick, as my kids would say, when people just want like, do you have any talking points? And I’m like, yeah, I could give those to you, but that’s not what we do. To your point at the outset, this sort of selective use of history in order to advance a particular political project, I think is really problematic.
And I wanna kind of—to the same question that you asked—something else that I think is troublesome is that it’s rare that there’s a perfect parallel for what we’re experiencing in any given moment. Right? And I am much more interested in looking at process than I am at parallels. Precedent I like a little bit more, but precedent is a more complex term than a lot of people give it credit for. A lot of people, oh, this is 1933, right? Or “this is exactly that.” It’s rarely exactly that.
And I think that the role of the historian is not to show us that straight line. I’m always saying to students, be skeptical if there’s a straight progress narrative or a straight declension narrative. The role of the historian in public, I think, as well as in scholarship, is to show us those winding path, is to make us aware of contingencies and paths not taken.
I mean, I’ll take an example of a piece that I wrote last week, which is, I don’t know if you saw that, RFK Jr made this public service announcement with Kid Rock about exercise and it was a very viral thing.
Yehuda: Oh, it was so weird.
Natalia: It was so weird and so gross. And so I have this sort of on again, off again column and MS NOW, and they asked me to write about it. And you know, people got kind of angry at me on both sides of that because I both was saying this is kind of grotesque, and this embodies a sort of like alienated version of antisocial masculinity, which is just so depressing. But part of the argument that I made was actually, you know, presidential administrations up until today, not all of them, but many of them, on both sides of the aisle, and in including RFK Jr. at the outset of this MAHA thing represented a kind of idealistic self-actualization through preventative health. That is actually worth, if not believing wholeheartedly, but embracing as a sense of possibility. It is inspiring. All of that inspiration is gone now.
And so you can imagine I got hit from the right for, like, criticizing this wonderful man and anything in this administration. But then people from the left too were like, oh, how dare you say there’s anything good about this vax denier. And, but I think that’s actually the role, not to be annoying and while here and here in both sides, but to give us the full picture of the past as best we can, which is complicated and often defies political lines. And a lot of people don’t like that.
Yehuda: Yeah. I mean, you get the critique, right? There’s an old Onion headline, which is one of my favorites ever, which is like, “Professor sees parallels between things, other things.” And you’re like, yeah, okay. And there’s a little bit of the role of the scholar, the historian of like, well, actually, and that always is like a yes, you’re turning the lens somewhere else, but people are like, but I’m worried about this. But I get what you’re saying.
I think the other piece that feels important to me, anytime a historian is doing the work of whether it’s parallels or precedent, to use your language, what is the business of self-awareness of like, the reason I see these precedents is not just because I’m a historian of this period of time, and once I have that, I’m gonna see it everywhere. But also, what is it that I’m constantly looking for? Right?
Like, and it’s a tricky business to get into people’s identities, so I don’t wanna say that, but like even just the fact like, great, if you spend all of your time studying something from the 14th century, then anytime anything pops up that looks like the 14th century, you’re gonna be like, look, there it is again.
Natalia: Well this is, I don’t even know if you meant it this way, but this is very much a segue towards this question of Jewish American hidden voices. So I’m the first one to say, and we can talk about this later, I am not a scholar of Jewish studies and so I was actually hesitant to take that on.
But setting that project aside for a second, you know, to your point, I came up, really my primary secondary field was very much feminist studies and my own incredible mentor, Estelle Freedman, kind of taught me to always ask like, well, which women? And always to see things through the lens of gender and sexuality, and that has been very, very fruitful for me as a scholar, and I think just as a human being, a mom, et cetera.
I really realized when I was working on this Jewish American Hidden Voices curriculum, which I came to as a social studies educator, and to kind of bring these stories and work with Jewish studies scholars into the scope of US history, how absent that lens was from my own experience as a scholar, as a—I mean, I am Jewish, right? I am really very, I can talk more about that, but I had never, in my sort of standard issue, K through 12 history education, and not in college either, because I didn’t take Jewish studies classes, that lens of how does Judaism, how does Jewish experience shape whatever story I’m trying to tell? Had not been part of my worldview.
Which was humbling and embarrassing, and I actually even looked back. I mean, I teach a lot about education, so I mean, come on, like the labor movement, I, there I am talking about the important role of Jews, but this fitness culture book that I wrote? I mean actually I didn’t talk—
Yehuda: It’s very Jewish.
Natalia: It’s so Jewish. So many—
Yehuda: Isn’t Charles Atlas Jewish?
Natalia: Charles Atlas, Joe Gold, Lucille Robert. It’s like, Gilda Marx, who invented the leotard. It’s a failure of that book, in some ways. I think the book is still pretty good, but I’ve done some work after. But I didn’t use that lens and actually that would’ve taught me and my readers so much about why, in this very immature industry, which was seen as sort of seedy, so many Jews were able to, you know, absolutely make major contributions there. And I think it’s also interesting because it pushes back so much on the stereotype of kind of Jewish physical frailty.
Yehuda: Yeah. Super interesting.
Natalia: Talk about humility and identity and this identity that I occupy with so little a part of my intellectual formation that it created a blind spot. So I’m always trying to get outta my own… More than get outta my own identity, but just think about what I’m missing.
Yehuda: Sure. Actually. If you do write a sequel, I mean there is also a huge story of Zionism was the reclamation of the physical body. The muscular Judaism. Physical fitness.
Natalia: Well—
Yehuda: That would be a whole other side of the story actually.
Natalia: I do have a really interesting guy who you’ve probably heard of, Zishe Breitbart. Do you know who he was?
Yehuda: Yeah.
Natalia: He was one of these early 20th century strongmen, and he would have a big star of David, and apparently this, he was so well known that these Jewish mothers would be like, you should be more like Zishe Breitbart, because he equated this kind of muscular Zionism with being Jewish. And then there were these other strongmen who hid the fact that they were Jewish because they thought that was sort of… That’s a little bit more predictable. But yeah, so you never know what comes next for that, but—
Yehuda: Totally amazing.
Natalia: That was my failure, you know, as a failure, I would say, of my education. One of the things that we’re trying to remedy right now, but also of myself.
Yehuda: So tell me more about the curriculum. It’s an interesting effort, and it feels a particularly sensitive and time-sensitive concern in New York City to engage in building out a new kind of curriculum on Jews and Jewish New Yorkers. Where did it come from and what are they trying to do with it?
Natalia: Right. So briefly, 2018, there was a new kind of curricular initiative founded in New York City called Hidden Voices, and the idea was to create social studies, supplementary materials that social studies and history teachers could integrate into their existing courses and that emphasized minority groups who had been hidden. And then within that, not just being a sort of most famous who’s who, but people who you might not expect as well, but who shed light on American history in some way and on this group.
And so the way Hidden Voices works as a format is, look, I have the Muslim American ones right here, the Jewish one is in my office. But basically there are these books and inside there are profiles of individuals and then with them come primary sources, guiding questions. There’s all kinds of different activities for elementary, middle, and high school students. So that’s what Hidden Voices is.
So 2018, several of them come out. There is a African diaspora one, there’s a New Yorkers one, there’s a disability one, Asian American Pacific Islander. However, despite New York City being a rather important metropolis for Jews around the world, no Jewish one. Okay. So the Jewish one was prompted by—
Yehuda: Can I just pause you and ask you why? Oversight?
Natalia: My sense is at least two things. One, that by 2018 Jews are considered by a lot of people, sort of a special flavor of white people. And so why would you have a separate book about this group of white people? And then also the Jews are considered to be very successful minority group, although so are Asian and American, AAPI people. So my sense is that.
I also think, I don’t know, but my sense from studying this kind of thing in a lot of different districts is I don’t think there was a Jewish parent pressure group who was pushing for this either at that time.
Yehuda: Oh, that’s super interesting.
Natalia: That’s something that I think, and that’s a pattern I see, you know, history of curriculum as part of my thing. But you know, there are a lot of, I think, maybe liberal Jews who think, well, we don’t need this. There are other groups who are more oppressed and need to be focused on.
And also we have this robust Jewish education world of both Hebrew schools, supplementary education, and Jewish day schools. So my sense, and this is not proven anywhere, but my sense in studying a lot of these is that a lot of Jewish parents are like, well, there’s another place for doing this kind of work. So—
Yehuda: I would imagine there’s also theory three, which is, a lot of the transformation of education around these kinds of issues around the country has come from a kind of ethnic studies orientation, which is, either intentionally doesn’t include Jews or is a blind spot for Jews. So I’m sure that that’s part of the story.
Natalia: Absolutely. And I think part of that ethnic studies orientation, or even people who wouldn’t align themselves with that movement is very much a sense that any identity-based curriculum is only for that group, right? That, like, oh, the Jewish kids need to see themselves in the curriculum.
I think that is valuable, but because Jews are such a tiny minority, including in the New York City schools, by the way, that argument sort of vanishes, right? Like if it’s only for the Jewish kids, you’re not actually serving a very big population. So I think that’s kind of part of that as well.
2023 after 10/7, you know, there’s this upsurge in antisemitism, especially in educational environments. And then the specific thing which precipitates this. Is that there was essentially what I would call a pogrom at Hillcrest High School in Queens, which I’m sure some of your listeners know about, where this teacher, Karen Marder, some students found a social media picture of her at a Bring Them Home rally and basically like took over the school. Like they were like ripping water fountains out of the walls, trapped her in a classroom, and it was a really horrifying incident.
That is something that came up at the congressional antisemitism hearings, and one of the things that Chancellor Banks said is, oh, well, we have this Hidden Voices curriculum that we’re gonna do for Jews. It was already in the works by then, but I think that really accelerated things. So that’s kind of the background. Do you want me to pause for a moment?
Yehuda: Well, I have a lot of questions about why this is an answer to that problem.
Natalia: Oh, yeah.
Yehuda: I mean, that’s the big one,
Natalia: Right. Why is this an answer to that problem? Well, I am the first one to say it is not the only answer or nor will it solve this. One of the reasons I agreed to do it is that there is an unfortunate reality that the only time that many kids in secular schools will encounter Jews is either in a lesson about the Holocaust, very important of course, or in some kind of antisemitism, anti-bias training after an incident happens. Also very important. Or, these days in some ill-informed conversation about the Israel Hamas war. And those to me are completely insufficient to kind of understand the importance of Jewish stories in US history.
So I do think that the way this curriculum works is it goes back before the colonial founding and it features Jews throughout American history who contribute to all matters of things, whether it’s, you know, the labor movement, the finance industry, fashion, I mean, arts, sports, like everything.
But we did, and this is important and this is made of up of the work of serious historians. None of this is hero worship. And that was really, really important to me. I mean, I think on balance, every profile should sort of leave you with like there’s some sort of positive contribution here, but because it’s a curriculum that nobody is gonna be using wholesale. We have to be really careful about the fact that someone might just encounter one of these profiles, right, in the course of their education.
So the example I often use is Judah Benjamin, Vice President of the Confederacy, not in Hidden Voices, because to me, like, yeah, it’s, he’s an interesting story. But for this, if you’re just gonna encounter that one, I don’t really think that’s the best.
Yehuda: You can run around with any of these if it was like, you know, somebody who’s connected to the finance industry. Great. So that’s the Jew. And Dr. Ruth, who I love, who is a member of our synagogue, oh, well, look, Jews are obsessed with sex. I mean, that is a trap in any of these kind of plug and play pieces of a curriculum.
Natalia: Totally. It’s a trap, but I’m hoping that the plug and play dimension of it allows the flexibility that more people will actually use this. I mean, I think it would be dead on arrival if it was like, you have to get district approval to adopt this year-long course. And then, of course, then people would just self-select in the same way. I never took a Jewish studies class, even at Columbia as a history major. I want this stuff to be integrated into the main of social studies and history education, and this is, I think, the only way you can really do that.
Yehuda: I have a quote that you gave about this actually, I think. Maybe it was about the curriculum, maybe it was more general from a different podcast where you said “Jewish stories are something that can save us, invigorate us, and inspire us as a people and make us less hated.” Although you say it’s not really up to Jews to solve the antisemitism problem.
I, I want to dig into that a little bit further. That’s a big claim that it can, these stories can save us, invigorate us, and inspire us. If this does work, this is a much larger play than kind of patching a hole in the curriculum. It is a big argument that when we tell these stories, something happens in the world vis-a-vis ourselves and vis-a-vis others. Can you unpack that further?
Natalia: Absolutely. Well, it was a grand claim. I was certainly in the exuberance of an interview and saying that, yeah,
Yehuda: That’s great. That’s great.
Natalia: But I will say that I wouldn’t have spent all of this time and energy on this if I didn’t have really big ambitions for it. And in some ways I think that the possibility of these Jewish stories, having that big impact, comes from the fact that the bar is so low right now.
I mean this, to put in the most simplistic terms, I talked to pretty educated college students, high school students, they think of Jews as rich white colonialists who run the music and the finance and the media industry, and you know, are doing horrible things in the Middle East. And that’s sort of the full picture of who they are. No understanding of this concept of whiteness being a very recent, you know, application to Jews in the United States and not even being totalizing at this point. And so I really think that these stories, any one of these profiles that any teacher deems to use in good faith will interrupt those assumptions, which are so prevalent today. And that in itself, I think is something.
And I should say, I’ve found, I mean this is a K through 12 curriculum. I teach college, but I have found that even in the courses that I teach, which again are not centrally about Jewish history, I have made a much bigger point of integrating things sort of like these different Jewish figures and kind of showing the complexity of their experience. And people are surprised. And they don’t know this. And I think that that’s the beginning. It’s not gonna solve our problems. Trust me. And it’s not only our job as Jews to do that, but I do think that is the beginning of a sort of, I don’t know, epistemic opening, right, to kind of think differently about a group, which sadly is very simplistically maligned. It’s so simplistic.
Yehuda: Yeah. And in theory it operates on both ends. It’s both for Jewish kids to be able to say, actually I’m not that, I’m Lender’s Bagels. Right, that’s one of your, you know, one of your examples, a bagel I have not eaten in decades.
Natalia: Thank God. Good.
Yehuda: We lived outside the New York area. What else are we gonna eat?
Natalia: Yes.
Yehuda: It’s for Jewish kids, but in theory it’s also for non-Jewish kids to say, okay, so these people are actually just a people. And that’s ultimately what the conclusion is. Part of this is also rooted in a critique, which you’ve said publicly, but I think is also implicit, which is, this is not two things. It’s not Holocaust education and it’s not anti-Semitism education. And there is kind of really good data out these days about how not only is Holocaust education not working to prevent antisemitism. In some cases it actually accelerates it, right, because it starts getting people to ask the question of—why did people hate the Jews? And then coming up with legitimate answers for why they might have.
So I’m curious for your thoughts on that, of how that fits into this agenda for you as an educator.
Natalia: Yeah. I mean, we absolutely don’t shy away from the Holocaust. I mean, Dr. Ruth is actually one of our profiles. So where there are plenty of people in here who are Holocaust survivors, and of course the Holocaust so much shaped the experience of American Jews that it is here. But to us that is one traumatic, terrible event in the broader history of American Jewry.
And I think that part of that unintended and awful consequence of Holocaust education actually accelerating antisemitism is sort of the fact that it’s always sort of set apart as this unique and standalone thing that like we all have to be sort of like reverent about and quiet about and it’s kind of almost disconnected from the rest of history.
And so kids who are, I hope, sort of contrarian and wanna ask questions and push boundaries are pushing back on some of that, which can lead to, well, why did they hate the Jews anyway? Hidden Voices, I think really, as you said, it comes from this different perspective. Jews are a people like any other, you know, with our own stories and our own unique experiences of course, but who are a people who are part of this complex American tapestry and we should understand our stories in that way as well. And I really do think that is both important for Jewish kids, but actually almost, it’s even more important for kids who might never know a Jewish person.
And actually I’ve been shocked. There have been some anecdotal stories about like, people who live in New York City who are in the public schools and have never met a Jewish person. Or think they haven’t.
Yehuda: Or think they haven’t.
Natalia: ‘Cause we have very segregated, of course, neighborhoods and schools.
Yehuda: I’m wondering if you’ve had any interface with any of the newly activated parents in the New York public school system. I’ve had a little bit of exchange with them. I’ve met with parent groups in New York and in San Francisco and other places who have woken up basically to the epistemic antisemitism and certainly anti-Israel sentiment in the school system and are trying to figure out—do they stay? Do they leave? How do they organize? How do they support their kids around their dignity? Or simply advocating for their kids?
And I’m curious what the receptivity is to curricular efforts, which are less sexy than we’re gonna organize and we’re gonna mobilize, we’re gonna get this person fired. Right? But may have a longer kind of shelf life and staying power, right? So I’m curious what your interface has been with those folks.
Natalia: Oh yeah, a lot of interface. I mean, full disclosure, I am one of those parents too. I mean, I’m the one who went to curriculum day and my sixth grader then shows me the map of the Middle East and there’s no Israel on the map, just the occupied Palestinian Territories.
Yehuda: Oh my god.
Natalia: Right. So I am one of those parents who’s horrified at what I’ve been seeing in schools. I have interfaced with a lot of parent groups that I’m directly part of and not part of, and I found a range of reactions. I think for the most part, people are really happy that these efforts are being taken. They’re a little surprised some of the people that the DoEd is doing this because it doesn’t have the best track record in recent history on addressing questions of antisemitism or Jewishness.
I’ll say that people who I would consider… Probably to my right, there’s a little bit of like, oh, this is just like DEI ideology, and we don’t want a part of this. But if they actually take the time to look at it, which many of them have, and I’ve had wonderful, wonderful, productive conversations with people who I don’t share the same politics, necessarily, with on these issues and they say, oh, actually this is really, really helpful. Like it’s not the perfect silver bullet which will solve everything, right? But making Jewish histories and stories just a default part of the curriculum, this is actually something we should be fighting for. And so that’s been really, really heartening.
Of course there’s some people who, on, actually, both sides, left and right, who have really come at me for this, but, you know, you can’t satisfy everybody.
Yehuda: Yeah. Seriously. I wanna shift the lens a little personally, if I can.
Natalia: Sure.
Yehuda: Another thing that you recorded as saying on a different podcast was, “It’s not until October 7th that I felt my Jewish identity is one of the most salient things in my life.” And then you added, “It’s been a privilege not to feel that.” Can you talk a little bit about that? About that shift and both what happened to you on October 7th and even unpacking that privilege language?
Natalia: Absolutely. So I grew up in Newton, Massachusetts, very Jewish suburb. Both my parents are Ashkenazi Jews. Went to Hebrew school, had a bat mitzvah. North
Yehuda: North or south?
Natalia: South. Newton South. Most of my friends were Jewish. Went to Columbia, with you. Then I worked one year in finance, one year in education, okay, and as new, as a DoEd teacher, I kind of would joke that, like, I never had to join any Jewish organizations because my whole life was a Jewish affinity group, but so unremarked.
If anything sort of marked me identity-wise, my whole life, it was one, my mom is from Argentina, and so very thick accent, very educated, but very thick accent. We spoke Spanish at home. My grandmother lived with us. Didn’t speak any English. That, being Latin American was absolutely like my number one sort of identity marker.
I am so Jewish in many ways, but I have to say, people have always told me, oh, you don’t look Jewish or “full?” when they see me. So I’ve always—
Yehuda: “Full”?
Natalia: Yeah, “full.” That was at Columbia, by the way. So that is something I never had to think about that much, even though the shadow of the Holocaust, I think for our parents’ generation, this is something we were talking about all the time at home, but I have to say I’m a little bit embarrassed about it. It never felt like that could happen here. I was always like, oh, come on. You know, being Jewish is going to bat mitzvahs and complaining about Hebrews school, et cetera. And that was sort of how I grew up.
When I went off to graduate school at Stanford on the West Coast, I remember that I was tutoring kids to make money. There was this Jewish family who I tutored and they said, “Oh my gosh, you’re Jewish? Do you wanna come over for the high holidays?” And it was the first time that they weren’t strangers, but like someone I wasn’t really friends with had like opened their home to me in this way that assumed, rightly in that case, that I might not have somewhere to go, as someone who was far away from home.
And I remember thinking, oh, that’s so nice and that’s so friendly and that’s so warm. And that’s so much the attitude of a kind of minority group of people who need to find each other. And so that was early two thousands, but that was kind of early in my thinking about this.
And then the next sort of big thing that happened to me is I was invited to this retreat of the Reboot organization. Do you know Reboot? To kind of, you know, big tent Jewish creative organization. And my friend, the writer, Adam Mansbach, also went to high school with me and went to Columbia as well, who invited me. My first comment was, this was 2021 or 2022. I said, well, I don’t think I’m like Jewy enough for a Jewish group. And he’s like, no, no, no, you’re perfect.
I went to this weekend and it sort of threw open this whole new sense of possibility of what it could mean to be Jewish. I left there, Adam and I started doing Daf Yomi. We read Talmud together every day for like a year and a half. And I really just sort of had this different lens.
Meanwhile, I know this is a little long-winded, but my daughter who went off to a kind of Jew-ish camp, again, a sort of default Jewish space, started doing Shabbat and wanted to do it at home. And then, you know, said, I wanna study for a bat mitzvah, and why don’t I go to Hebrew school? So that kind of shifted too.
So I was already like, in this spiritual rediscovery.
Yehuda: You were in the zone.
Natalia: Yeah. And then 10/7 happened. And I hate to be so naive to say I was shocked, because I’ve been very aware of, certainly, the anti-Israel animus in academia for years. But I could not believe what was going on on campus. I could not believe how these smart, kind of humane universalist people were so hateful, were so quick to have a sort of Jewish exception to their identity politics. And I was hurt first, and then disgusted, and then angry, and then I realized, you know, I have tenure. Like if, if, if not me, who? Like I should be the one who was trying to kind of take a stand to push back on this.
And it’s part of why I said yes to Hidden Voices, because I think that’s in some ways a part of that work. But it’s also why I’ve really been taking a lot of time on these issues in the last couple of years, and I don’t regret it at all.
Yehuda: Yeah, no, I’m, I’m grateful for it. I’m curious, I know about the case with the American Historical Association where you were one of the outspoken opponents of the resolution that the AHA passed condemning Israel post 10/7. And I know you got heat from that. You were one of the most visible voices on it. I think you were quoted in the Times.
Natalia: Twice. Yeah.
Yehuda: So I’m curious both about the fallout for you, with your peers in that system. And to describe a little bit of the inside of that, I think will be really interesting to our listeners. But I’m curious about other spaces where you’ve been able to say, listen, I have tenure. Here’s where I’m gonna be able to try to push on behalf of Jews, in some way.
Natalia: Yeah, no, absolutely. So, okay. Before the AHA thing, the first thing that sort of put me on the map in this way a little bit is, as I mentioned, I was writing for, then, MSNBC, and I wrote a piece really early—it was November, 2023—of, where are all the feminists? When we know about these Hamas—or we have very credible evidence about these Hamas rapes. No, you know, American feminist organizations were saying anything.
And when I wrote that piece, I got some heat for it online and I heard a lot of, kind of grumbling through the grapevine at work of like, oh, she’s a Zionist? Like, you know, what’s going on? Like, I, you know. And I, my answer to that is yes, and also like, come say it to my face, basically. So that was sort of the first thing that kind of put me on the map in that way.
With the American Historical Association. So this is the biggest organization of historians in the world. I dunno. Are you still a member or no?
Yehuda: Oh, no,
Natalia: We need you at the business meeting to vote down these resolutions. I, like, recruit people hand by hand, but anyway. Over the years there’s been a kind of radical group called HPAD, Historians for Peace and Democracy who bring these anti-Israel resolutions or BDS resolutions, sometimes, to the business meeting to be voted on and adopted by the whole organization.
Over the years, I’ve always kind of shown up at the business meeting ’cause it’s only the in-person vote to vote against them. I’d never spoken out about them, in part ’cause I was junior, but also I wasn’t so activated on these issues. After 10/7, I guess this was the January, 2025 meeting. They were bringing a resolution to condemn what they called “Scholasticide in Gaza.” And they’re really good online. They mobilize a lot of people. The meeting was gonna be in New York.
And at that point I was approached, I had tenure, I was a full professor. I was approached by some of the folks who have been active in this movement for years and said, you know, I know it’s a big ask. ’cause it’s gonna be ugly, but will you speak against the resolution at the business meeting? And I said, sure. And I don’t regret it, but I didn’t really know what I was signing up for, I will say that as well.
And so basically what happened is—I do think the details might be interesting to your listeners. They published the program for the event, and this was gonna happen on like, it was January 5th. It was a Sunday, like the first Sunday of the year. And it says “Business Meeting Agenda: Speakers in favor, speakers against this genocide resolution.” So I actually hadn’t even seen it published, but I start getting all these notifications on social media of like, oh, pro-Scholasticide, pro-Genocide Scholar, Natalia Petrzela is gonna defend genocide before the biggest organization of historians.” I’m seeing all this. I’m like, what is going on?
Meanwhile, hadn’t even, I knew what I was gonna say, but I hadn’t written my remarks. The content of my argument was not published anywhere because it didn’t exist yet. Like what’s going on? So the people who were doing this were some of your typical online bullies, but they included colleagues who I know, people who I work with directly on various things. And then, and this became a huge issue.
The New School, which is where I teach, Faculty for Justice in Palestine, Students for Justice in Palestine, a few other Palestine groups made this Instagram post, like a permanent post, it was a picture of the agenda and it said “The New School must denounce Natalia Petrzela, prominent defender of genocide, who is going to argue for genocide at this big organizational thing.”
Okay, this—you can imagine the onslaught that I got. I’m used to getting hate for being out there, but this kind of hurt too, because this is the call is coming from inside the house, right? These are my colleagues.
So I go to give the speech, right? Two minutes. My argument was effectively that, you know, this is a really bad idea for the AHA to adopt any resolution like this because we know we’re really divided on it, plus this whole scholasticide charge ignores the fact that Hamas uses civilian you know, sites for military sites. It didn’t mention the hostages, who were not at all home at that point. Didn’t mention 10/7 at all. And I said also, why would we want to tether ourselves as an organization to this particular deeply divisive cause at a moment when there’s a massive target on the back of all kinds of academic and professional associations. We should be coming together to fight for something I think we all believe in, which is the kind of dispassionate study of history. That should unite us.
Oh my God. So I said this, this was in a conference room at the Hilton in Midtown Manhattan. There were like 600 people there. When I tell you I was hissed at, I was booed. When I mentioned antisemitism people did this performative eye roll. People I knew wouldn’t even talk to me or make eye contact with me, like, at the conference. It was crazy. They had to actually hire security for my panel on podcasting, which had nothing to do with that, because the online threats were so intense. So that happened, it was really ugly.
And then with the Instagram posts, I’ll just say this because I complained to The New Schools’ powers that be about this, and no one would do anything. Oh, it’s free speech. Oh, you know, this is protected speech. It’s not our Instagram account. It’s not an official—and the thing that I said, which is a bit provocative, but what I think is true, and there was a little bit of thoughts and prayers, but I said, are you joking? Like if there was a New School branded account that targeted a Muslim professor with no basis, saying she’s about to defend terrorism in front of some scholarly organization, you would let that stay up there? Absolutely not. And so months and months later it came down. But it was really, really, really disturbing, really disappointing.
And, you know, we soldier on, but I am really disappointed at the behavior of some of my academic colleagues in this moment, and inspired by others. New communities have formed throughout this, but this was really gutting and really demoralizing. And there are a million other little small versions of this that happened on campus.
Yehuda: Sure. Sure. I mean, there’s so many pieces of that that are problematic, but even going back to what we were talking about earlier, you know, certainly we can unpack the eye roll about antisemitism and the lack of permission that’s granted to Jews to narrate their own experience. I mean, that’s part of what’s going on here. You actually are not seeking to be an activist. You’re very clear about that. And in fact, the very position of, “we should not be weighing in on this” is a kind of anti-activist position.
Natalia: Totally.
Yehuda: But the encoding that’s been used in these circles has been, you’re making a pro-genocide activist argument, and that’s been one of the weirdest things that screws up your own head of like, I actually think I’m trying to do my job. And because I’m not being activist the way that the activists are operating, I’m now being treated as a counter activist.
Natalia: Right.
Yehuda: And that’s like a really screwed up thing.
Natalia: Well, it’s a little bit the like, “silence is violence” kind of thing, right? And I’m not being silent, of course. But yeah, I do think that’s incredibly screwed up. And I also think there’s this sort of groupthink, of course, which is at work as well. And one of the things that I have really, really tried to do, whether it’s in this curriculum or any statement I’m making on these things, is to really stay in the lane of my expertise.
I actually don’t get up there and say, this is genocide. This isn’t genocide. I am not a scholar of genocide. I am trying to read all these things. My argument for the AHA was, I am a scholar of educational politics and polarization, and let me tell you, I know how this will go down. So I think that, and essentially, I think I was right in that regard.
I think it’s really important that yes, we speak up or we are silent or we explain our rationale, but also that we’re doing it within the scope of our expertise. Otherwise, the whole idea of expertise is completely undermined and that’s happening all over the place right now.
Yehuda: So you’ve been really generous through time and this has been super interesting. I guess I have one last question, which is somewhere between a question and a request. Which is, what’s your next big Jewish project?
Natalia: Ooh, that’s a good question.
Yehuda: I mean, all of it is like steering towards this, right? You had like this big kind of life-changing awakening and a searching, and then you’re doing this project, but it’s all, it’s like what’s the next big thing and is it gonna be for the Jews?
Natalia: It’s all for the Jews, right?
Yehuda: Yeah. Yeah.
Natalia: You know, that’s interesting. I’m working on two books right now, and neither of them have Jewish frames, but they both have big Jewish stories in them. So I don’t know if that counts, but… And one of them, just briefly, one of them is kind of a brief history of the school culture wars in the United States since the 19th century. And I’ve been writing about—
Yehuda: Very Jewish.
Natalia: Yeah, very Jewish. Very Jewish. So that one counts. And the other one, which I’m co-authoring with a historian of religion and politics, Neil J. Young, is a history of the Hamptons from, kind of the 1600s to today. Also very Jewish. I’m learning all about the different congregations out there. And there’s a specific kind of whiteness story which happens, I think, in this world, which is super, super interesting. So Jewish stories will never be absent from any of my work, whether they’re the direct frame of it.
Yehuda: Amazing. Well, thanks for doing this today. I’m excited for the Jewish community that listens to this, to know your voice better and to pay attention to what you’re doing. Thanks for being on our show.
Natalia: Thank you. It’s such a pleasure. I’m glad to be here.
