What does it mean to inherit Europe’s Jewish past while living through antisemitism’s unsettling return in the present?
In this episode of Identity/Crisis, Yehuda Kurtzer sits down with historian and author Flora Cassen to explore the differences between European and American Jewish life, the promises and limits of Holocaust memory, and the ways antisemitism resurfaces across political and cultural contexts. The conversation moves between history and memoir, asking how Jews make sense of power, vulnerability, and belonging in a moment when old assumptions no longer feel secure.
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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, recording on Friday, April 17th, 2026. So I wanna admit something at the outset of this episode that I’m sure many of you regular listeners already know, or at least suspect.
As an American Jew, I’ve never really gotten Europe or at least European Jewry in the present. Maybe some of this is just good old, classic ugly Americanness. But I’ve not only grown up here and I’ve steeped myself in American culture and values, but I also argue very regularly about the importance of the exceptional nature of the American Jewish experience.
And in so doing, I tend to see the American Jewish experience as something fundamentally different than the old world Jewish experience. I would go so far as to say that European Jewry echoes to me more as diaspora, in the classic sense, the new versions continuous with those of the past America is the new world. Our experience of it is not quite diaspora, maybe not exactly homeland, but something different, something special.
In contrast, I’ve always found much of Europe to feel kind of haunted. When I was in high school, I traveled throughout Poland on the March of Living. I became mesmerized on our long bus rides by the dark forests, wondering which of them housed lost invisible mass graves of Jews. I am looking out the window at the little towns that now could no longer be called shtetls, but which once bred the Jews and Judaism that I wound up inheriting thousands of miles away.
When I was in college, I spent time in Minsk and thereabouts teaching Judaism to young post-Soviet Jews who had been stripped of access to their cultural heritage. And I felt throughout that experience, like a lost stranger in the very place, literally the exact place from which my great grandparents had come, the difference being that now I was bringing Judaism from the New world to the very place from which so much of it had originated.
Another time in college, I visited my brother who was spending the year in Romania working for The Joint. I traveled with him across Romania, throughout Chanukah, bringing light and celebration to local communities. And let me say, if you ever doubt whether Jews can experience epigenetic trauma, even if they are not themselves, direct genetic heirs to the trauma itself, I recommend taking night trains across Eastern Europe and trying to sleep.
A few years ago, Stephanie and I took our kids to Italy. We were standing in a lovely market in one of Rome’s central squares when one of the kids looked down and noticed that we were standing on top of a marker that was in the paving stones on which it was written, “This is the site where the Talmud was burned in 1553.” Oops. Right beneath our feet.
Much of Europe, Eastern, Central, some of Western Europe feels like a contradiction to me, a place where Judaism’s narrative of continuity was largely forged, a place where the Judaism, many of us know and take for granted, was created, formulated, articulated, and lived. It’s also a set of lands that remain saturated with the blood of our ancestors.
And I say none of this to demean or diminish the vibrancy of contemporary Jewish life in Europe. I’ve been following for years the great excitement of the work of some of the new JCCs, the New Pauline Museum that tells the story of over a thousand years of Jewish life in Poland. I’ve had many friends and colleagues working on building Jewish life and education in Europe. All I’m sharing today is the feeling, a sensibility born of my story as a Jew who came of age and the twin extraordinary stories of American Jewish and Israeli Jewish at-homeness, which felt in stark contrast to and in the shadow of the great betrayal of at-homeness that Europe committed against its Jews.
A few years ago, I was grateful to meet and make a new friend, Flora Cassen. Our guest today reached out to me several years ago for a chat, I actually went back and looked at my email to see when that was, this morning, it was in early November, 2023. At the time, Flora was a history professor at Washington University in St. Louis and struggling, if I can say so out loud. Flora. In the whirlwind aftermath of October 7th, the turmoil that quickly emerged on university campuses. Flora’s personal life and professional expertise sits at the meeting point of the issues of this episode and even my introduction.
She is Belgian and now American scholar of Medieval and early modern Jewish history, and although many good scholars don’t always like to admit it, a person for whom the personal, professional, and political are intertwined. By the way, I think that makes for better scholars and certainly more compelling people.
But what does it mean, really, to be a European Jew who studies both the vibrancy and tragedy of European Jews, and then begins to encounter the way that that history is starting to rhyme again in the present?
Since that first conversation, Flora became affiliated with the Hartman Institute, actually came to us briefly for a year as a stint as full-time faculty member before moving over to a very senior position at Brandeis University. She has a new and beautiful book out now. It’s called Stained Glass: A Reflective History of Antisemitism. I wanna say it’s a hard book to describe. It’s a little bit memoir, some analysis of Europe and America in the moment, a history of European Jews, a history of Flora’s own family. As per the title, it feels like a meditation that offers an opportunity for reflection.
So Flora, thanks for coming on the show today. Thanks for this book. Thanks for being on Identity/Crisis. If you’re a listener to this show, you already know that some of the most important conversations in Jewish life happen at the intersections, where ideas meet lived experience, where history meets the present, and where identity gets negotiated in real time.
So I shared my story of feeling haunted by Europe. That certainly can’t be your story, and without having to summarize the whole thing, I’m both curious if you can respond to that, to what it feels like for an American to say that European Jew is haunted [00:07:00] as someone who is a European Jew, and to what extent you feel like that is just Well, you Americans see everything through the prism of America.
And to what extent does it actually maybe capture some truth about European Jewish life that may have never fully reckoned with all of its ghosts?
Flora: I think it captures more than a little bit of truth. And, and, and I think I say that in the book. One of the things that surprised me very quickly after I moved to America and you know, I came to go to grad school, I wanted to study Jewish history and I didn’t expect that one of the things I would discover is a completely different Judaism than the one I knew. You know, I grew up in a very close knit, warm Jewish community in Antwerp. But it always felt, and, and I only realized that in comparison, right? Sometimes you have to leave to, to understand the difference from where you are.
Yehuda: Sure.
Flora: And I remember I was at NYU, first High holidays, I get that email and there’s like a menu of different services I can go to. And I’m thinking, you know, this is amazing. And then I could try one, and I could try the other. And I find that in American Judaism, there’s an aliveness and, and there’s a creativity and, and a dynamism that I didn’t know growing up that, that felt in some ways maybe stunted, right? Because of, of, of the Holocaust and what happened. And you, you, you need a certain confidence. I think you need maybe a critical mass of people there, a society that is also receptive maybe to that kind of experimentation.
And frankly that I’m still impressed with, you know, you, I know that right now many American Jews are worried and I understand why. And at the same time, I’m looking at the variety of responses, the creativity, the creation of new institutions, and I’m amazed. You know?
Yehuda: Yeah. So we’ll come back to our fears later on and what’s shifting and what’s changing. But let’s stay a little bit on this kind of dialogue between America and Europe and through the prism of your own experience. Your stories at the beginning of the book are enchanting and funny about the things that one, as a European wouldn’t know, like, you know, “go out of the campus, five minutes and it’s right there,” and you’re not realizing, obviously that means drive five minutes.
You know, in your last comment you said the difference between Jewish life in Europe has to do a lot with the kind of background of the Holocaust. In your comments, you’re also saying, like, the openness for different kinds of religious expression, different kinds of religious diversity is available to American Jewry, and that can’t simply be about the Holocaust itself.
What do you think are the different drivers for the ways that American Jews seem to behave around religion and culture about being American versus how European Jews behave around those same set of questions. What do you think are the main differences that now, as a person who grew up in Europe, but having lived in America for, I think close to 20 years, what are kind of your big observations beyond the memory of the Holocaust, about what animates European and American Jewry to behave so differently?
Flora: You know, I think American society probably in general is one where you have much greater religious pluralism, whether it’s, you know, within Christian communities or within Jewish communities.
And so I think maybe part of it is, you know, when you live in that context and that background, it makes it easier. It also seems to me that structurally Europe has that kind of maybe greater separation between religion and public life. And that maybe constraints those kinds of experimentation a little bit too.
But I, you know, looking back in retrospect, I also think that, and you know, that’s going back to the Holocaust a little bit, but there’s a sense of comfort and trust in a society that allows you to, to experiment and, and, and do new things and, and that in many ways, maybe, or certainly in Belgium, I don’t wanna necessarily speak about all of Europe. I think France has more of that, but that in many ways it’s just not there, right? There’s a sense that we’re not quite sure what that society might do or we know what it’s done. And, you know, redrew lessons from that.
And you know, it’s funny because early on when I started to work on this book, I thought that I wanted the title to be something like, Why Not There? You know, why is it that what I saw here in America is sort of, you know, flowering and creativity of Jewish life, I didn’t see in Europe sort of, you know, what can we learn from Americans? How is it that, you know, in the continent that’s had Jewish life since the Roman Republic or even earlier? You don’t have that today. You know, it’s so sad. And here you’ve got, you know, 200 years of Jewish life, but it’s, it’s incredible.
Yehuda: It’s interesting. One of the cute little anecdotes you have around this issue is you said you’re sitting in a library, I think it was at NYU as a graduate student, and you heard three students casually talking about, like one says how annoying it is to go home for Christmas and another one talking about like being home for the Jewish holidays and being kind of totally taken aback that a Jewish student just casually is talking about their Jewishness, but also even kind of semi disparagingly without fear of embarrassment.
I wonder whether some of what’s going on there is that, you know, Europe was for so long a fundamentally religious place, so much so that European religious identity is like, needs the Jew as the inverse identity to be able to self articulate and has been trying so hard since modernity and especially over the last 100, 150 years to suppress that feature of religious identity, that religion becomes a kind of uncomfortable thing to talk about in public and maybe the American story doesn’t have that is just self-consciously religious, and that’s okay.
I wonder if that helps to understand why you’re able to see like, why—weird! American Jews can just talk about being Jewish in public in ways that, ironically, European Jews who have had Judaism there for thousands of years are unable to do.
Flora: I think that’s definitely part of it, and I think more broadly, America I think has constructed itself as a, you know, a collection of different groups and identities and minorities and people from here, and people from there, and everybody can, in one way or another, try and combine their story with the American story. And I think that doesn’t work as well in Europe. And so I certainly think that’s a part of it.
But another part of it, going off of what you were saying on that, you know, centuries long history of right defining the Jews as the ultimate religious other. The title of the book, Stained Glass also refers to the Cathedral of Brussels that has, you know, that’s entirely dedicated, in fact, to a host desecration accusation. So Jews were accused of stealing the, you know, eucharistic wafers that they’re giving out at mass and, and torturing them. And literally all the windows, all the paintings, you know, the tapestries. And you can even go downstairs in the treasury and still see the wafers that supposedly were, you know, tortured 700 years ago.
And, and so I think there are also layers and, and ways in which that history is visible, even if people think differently, times have changed. And I think that’s a feature of the book that, that’s sort of toggling back and forth because I had never given so much thought to that.
You know, you, you, you grew up in a place, things are how they are. Right. It’s normal. Until I arrived at the University of North Carolina and people were arguing all the time about the confederate statue at the entrance on campus. And, and one of the arguments was that, you know, having that on campus sends a signal that not everyone is welcome, right, that Black students and Black faculty are not as welcome as everyone else.
And it made me wonder, right, the fact that you still have that imagery, in Brussels, it’s, it’s really central in some ways. But, but in many places in Europe, right? What does that mean? And it’s interesting to me that there’s, it’s a conversation that Americans are having. It’s not a conversation that’s happening in Europe, and it’s not even one you can hope to start. Right? And, and that’s, that’s also part of it.
Yehuda: Yeah. You don’t touch on this in the book fully, but the analogy to the lingering legacy of the transatlantic slave trade and slavery in America and as a kind of feature of the American experience versus antisemitism is just a landscape feature of Europe is a really interesting one. I heard your colleague at Brandeis, Alex Kaye, say something to this effect of, part of the fundamental reason why the position of Jews in America is so different than in Europe is that in Europe they are the alternate identity around which European identity is constructed, and they show up in America, and they’re not the alternate identity around which American identity constructed. That’s Black Americans. And that puts American Jews in a fundamentally different place.
But I do think you’re right to notice that like America also can’t quite figure out how to make sense of this horrific stain on its identity. And one of the ways that America responds to it is by trying to not talk about it. The difference though, and this is a really key part of the book, I found it some of the most provocative pieces of the book, is that Europe has tried to make an effort to heavily memorialize the events of the Holocaust.
You argue in the book that it may have backfired. Can you go deeper into that? You talk about like, the costs of making people remember the Holocaust as something that has not actually worked to prevent the continuous rerise of antisemitism. So what do you mean by that? What does it mean that maybe it was too costly, maybe it was the wrong way to do this kind of memorialization, and why? Even in spite of the fact that Holocaust totally wrecked Europe, morally and otherwise, the memorialization culture has not had the effect.
Flora: You know, I think it was always probably more superficial than what it seemed, right? I think when people looked at it from here, from the United States looking at Europe and thinking, oh, Europe, 40, 50 years later, they’re really reckoning with their past and, and I think in a way it was something that maybe, you know, politicians and academics and cultural elites had agreed what was very important. And you know, that is not so different, right? And here that once you start opening those dark pasts, you know, you force people to reckon with, right? An image of their country, their past, their history that they don’t necessarily want to reckon with, right?
And it took a while, frankly, for Europe to really start, right. It’s not probably, I mean in, I think Germany was earlier ’cause you have a generation of Germans who are looking back, right, what did our parents do? And so they’re debating that earlier. But talking about Western Europe, it’s probably not until the 1990s that it’s really starting. It partly starts because of American pressure. You know, first on Swiss Bank and then the Claims Conference. It’s not something that, you know, spontaneously, suddenly people wanted to pay reparations. And it happens in a society that I think as a whole was occupied, right?
I mean, take Belgium, the war didn’t only happen to Jews, the whole country was occupied. A lot of people have stories of hunger and imprisonment and deprivations and, and the loss of freedom and dignity and so on. Of course, for Jews, it was a death sentence. And for everyone else it was a very, very difficult time.
But I think that at some point there has been that focus on the Holocaust and it became that kinda thing that you almost, right, countries really had to reckon with their past to become, you know, bonafide members of the European Union, right. And I think on some level people resented that, that, that, that’s what I’ve come to, to realize and feel. Why do we focus on their suffering so much? Why? Why should we pay? I mean, our grandparents made a mistake. We didn’t do anything. Right? Why should we pay for that?
And so I think something that became, you know, you looked at it from the United States and it looked like Europe was really reckoning. And I think from the inside it felt different. There were a lot of questions and they were pushed under.
And you know what’s interesting to me that I realized in retrospect, there’s also things happening in the Middle East in those years, right? There’s the Second Intifada and so on and antisemitism started to rise in Europe and everything has been attributed to what’s happening in the Middle East. And, and I think what I’m asking in the book is, could it be that it was that, also, right? That, that, that sort of feeling of, you know, why is their suffering more important? Why do we have to care about them? That, that created an underlying tension.
Yehuda: It kind of feels like there are three interlocking forces for why this memorialization culture of the Holocaust hasn’t worked. And you alluded to all of them. One of them is like a kind of denial story. We were also victims. It wasn’t us, it was our grandparents. That’s clearly the case of what’s going on in Poland with all this legislation where the Polands want to portray themselves as being victims of the Holocaust as opposed to perpetrators. You have some measure of guilt, the more you keep talking to people about their responsibility, the more you’re gonna invite a backlash.
But I think that the most evocative is kind of where we started, which is that if you have a town that simultaneously has a Holocaust memorial and still has the much more auspicious, you know, 14th century church that is dedicated to the Jews desecrating, the host, one of those has a more enduring legacy in the cultural imagination of the people than the other. You know, it’s like if you’re not willing to really interrogate the roots of how deeply baked in Christian antisemitism is into European society, then you’ll enable the possibility of this cognitive dissonance that, that sits in the center of the town. And yes, it’s too bad that the Holocaust happened, but you’re not really carrying through the full thread of the ramifications of one to the other.
Flora: Right. And I think that’s one of the points in the book, right? That there’s maybe a depth to it and look, you know, it’s difficult to reckon with history and sometimes I wonder if there was maybe a better way to do it, you know? And, and also we, we’ve taken for granted, you know, those who remember the past won’t repeat it. But I don’t know who, who, you know, ever said that this was proven to be true. We’ve sort of accepted it dramatically and, and of course I’m a historian, so I believe it’s really important to remember the past. I believe it’s important to know it. I’m not sure that it protects against repeating things or against atrocities happening.
You know, if anything, it hasn’t, right. It hasn’t proven to be true. And so I think we’ve also created the kinda moral narrative. If you don’t do that, you know you’re on the wrong side of history. You’re not sort of, you know, a moral person who cares about, right, not repeating atrocities. And maybe it’s enough to know and remember, because we have to know history and not repeating atrocities, not being antisemitic, not being racist. You know what? Whatever you’re thinking about, that requires something else, right? And we, I think, put everything on that.
Yehuda: Yeah, I think the scarier possibility is sometimes when you insist on narrating history that people come along and want to imitate it actually, or replicate it or repeat it. You know, we assume, oh, everybody learns the lessons of history, but oftentimes people actually wanna imitate it.
I am curious about the decision to become a historian. You allude to this earlier, like my parents were completely unsure about this, because part of what the book is also about is exploring even the discipline and the dynamic of history, and in particular, at one point you refer to Salo Baron’s famous thesis about the lachrymose theory of Jewish history. Baron famously argued that it’s a mistake for us to focus entirely on, like, the terrible things that happened to Jews as opposed to all of the vibrancy.
I wonder how you’re feeling about that these days. Because as history goes in cycles and as we start to feel the kind of return of the ambience of antisemitism, what we gain and what we lose from trying to resist big narratives and big theories out of history and out of Jewish history in particular.
Flora: You know, one of the things I’m asking in the book is if, right, the historical professional, or at least maybe historians of the Jews sometimes went too far in saying we really should only focus on right, the vibrancy and lives of Jews and, and I agree we should focus on that, but I wondered if we maybe focused too much on that and, and that made it harder for us to understand antisemitism and its recurrence.
You know, I remember at some point in 2014, 15, there were a series of shootings, you know, the Jewish Museum in Brussels, you know, kosher grocery store in Paris. And, and I looked at it and I thought, I’m a historian, right? How did I not see this coming? I, I was totally surprised. But I also think that, you know, what is interesting about Baron, and I didn’t understand that early on until I reread him much later, is that he’s also arguing, and that’s actually quite provocative and we don’t talk about that maybe enough, he’s saying, you know, modernity and democracy has not been that amazing thing for Jews that we think it is.
And to imagine that, you know, the past when Jewish communities, you know, were kind of, right, core Jews, maybe of the Lord or, or had to make agreements in every city in which they live, but they had to kind of right communal autonomy and freedom and, and that gets lost. He’s kinda saying, you know, we have to have a more balanced view, that both systems, in a way, have positives and negatives, and that with the transition to modernity, what Jews lost is having someone who, for whatever reason, oftentimes that person didn’t even write like them, but decided to protect them.
And in a society where there’s a lot of hostility, that can help. And with the transition to modernity where you have democracy, and democracy is a numbers game, right? Sometimes your candidate wins and sometimes your candidate doesn’t. But Jews as a community are a small number of people typically, and so it’s much harder to you. You have to live in a society that in, in a way, wants to right, protect and enable minorities to live freely. Like everyone else. And that doesn’t always happen, right.
And I think that contrast there is also very interesting that he didn’t say, you know, it wasn’t all bad in the past. He also said, but the present is also not all perfect, right? What we imagined is gonna be that era of, you know, freedom and liberal democracy and everything’s gonna be amazing didn’t necessarily materialize. And I think that’s another very interesting point that he makes.
Yehuda: Yeah, there’s another piece that you engage in in response to, like, how history is supposed to work, which is you talk about how historians tend to resist the kind of theological narrative of antisemitism, it’s eternal and it can’t go away. And of course historians are always gonna say it’s contextual and I couldn’t help but feel the tug though, the emotional tug in your book about the, like a more responsible way of talking about the inescapable of antisemitism.
Can you talk about that a little bit? Like it’s not eternal, it doesn’t have to be theological, but it’s foolish for us to pretend as though it’s always contextual because if you say it’s always contextual, then you can always say things like, well, there wouldn’t be antisemitism if it wasn’t for the state of Israel, or it wouldn’t be antisemitism, but for the fact that Jews control the economy. Can you talk a little bit more about that dynamic, both as a historian and as someone who’s experiencing this story viscerally?
Flora: It’s very difficult, right? Because it is one of these ideas in the historical profession that people. And I think rightly so, feel very strongly about, right, it’s not eternal, and I agree, but sometimes stating that so strongly prevents us from understanding why it is recurring and why it’s happening again. And I wish we could do that more, right. We found maybe a better language to talk about these episodes of recurrences, to talk about how patterns, maybe, you know, the language changes the, the context is different, but we see stereotypes, we see patterns, we see things happening again.
And so I wish that there were maybe a better and more nuanced way to understand that, and I try to highlight that in the book. I don’t think I fully found the way to do that. But how do you, right, understand and explain that without falling into that simplistic narrative, right, that lachrymose narrative that Baron criticized, that said all of Jewish history is a history of tears and it’s a history of, right, persecution and suffering.
It’s, it’s not true. There’s a lot of times where Jews live very well and had, right, beautiful and creative lives, and yet there is a thread of exclusion and violence against Jews that runs through that history. And how do we explain that without adopting a more sort of simplistic narrative? And, and, and that’s what I try to do. And I, and I think it’s important because that’s what we need to understand.
Yehuda: So the way that that shows up near the end of the book is, in search for language to help explain the anti-Semitic turn, you have two terms that you wanna put into the discourse, “replacist-antisemitism” and “eliminationist antisemitism,” one of which operates on the right and one of them operates more on the left. Do you wanna unpack those terms on what you’re trying to do by giving them that terminology?
Flora: You know, I was trying to, instead of worrying about what is, you know, the right definition. And the definition to an extent is always somewhat abstract. I was trying to say, let’s listen to what people say and be more descriptive in what is happening. And so when I tried to do that and I started reading about what people say on the left, what people say on the right, it’s struck me that broadly I could find these two descriptors. And of course it doesn’t capture everything, but that would broadly capture it.
And so the replacement theory is the idea that white people are being replaced, whether it’s in, right, the United States or in Europe by immigrants. And how do you explain that? Because, right, people who have that theory believe that white people are, right, the better, and, and then smarter race. And so how do you explain that it is even possible that they would be replaced over time by people coming from different places, from different minority groups.
And the answer they come up with is that it’s some kind of Jewish plot, right? In a way it echoes, right, the older anti-Jewish conspiracy from the 19th century, from the Nazi era. That’s one trend that I think is very prominent on, on the right and that we hear in, in a variety of different contexts today.
Yehuda: I’m gonna interrupt you for a second to say, it feels to me like both of these will ultimately converge on Israel too, surprisingly, because I think some of what we’re seeing from the right, actually of like, why is America giving away our healthcare dollars to the state of Israel has “replacist” qualities to it. It’s like, why are you trying to take away from us and giving to the Jews, right? Something that belongs to us.
Flora: Right. And, and I think that’s become very prominent in the past year. Right? I mean, my, my book was already gone to the publisher. I think I mentioned this very briefly, that they, they both converge, but yeah, the incorporation of the anti-Israel narrative into that right wing replacement theory has exploded in some ways in the past year.
Yehuda: Yeah. And on the Eliminationist side.
Flora: And on the eliminationist side, I was trying to. You know, find a way around that debate about right critique of Israel and antisemitism and it seemed to me that, you know, critiquing Israel is not antisemitic. Any state can and should be criticized. But the more I, I was reading and listening to people and listening to what they were saying, it seemed to me that there were maybe two points at which that kind of critique veered into a more antisemitic narrative.
And you know, one is when, instead of critiquing, you know, people start echoing older antisemitic stereotypes and narratives, right? If instead of talking about Israeli military actions, suddenly everybody’s talking about, you know, all Israelis are killing babies, or something like that, right? And that echoes those older accusations.
But the other one seemed to me that when, you know, it’s not a critique anymore of, you know. They should do this better or they should do that better, but it’s, the country is so inherently right, flawed, and evil, it should be eliminated, right? There should not be a Jewish state. And, and that’s where I think it veers again.
And it seemed to me important to articulate that because we keep going back and forth and you know, there are people who are saying, who are basically saying that all critics of Israel are antisemitic and that’s not right. And then there are those who are saying that it’s, it never is. And I think that’s not right either.
And so I try to find, at least for me, those two points where I think, you know, I’m comfortable saying that. Because once you talk about eliminating a whole country, nobody’s innocent in this country. Nobody. You, you know what I mean? I, I think there, it’s a different level.
Yehuda: You know, I know you well enough to know the nuanced views you have on Israel, and one of the things I actually liked about the way you do this book compared to things like the IHRA definition or the Jerusalem definition, is that I know what those definitions are trying to do. They’re trying to grasp on clear articulations of the very tension that you’re describing. Mostly because they’re trying to help people, like in law enforcement and in other places figure out what’s actual hate speech. So I, I understand the need for like, let me reduce this complicated issue into rules.
But I think what your book does is it’s like, it’s not always that neat and clear cut. We have to know when things cross a threshold. But intelligent, sentient people should be able to know how to cross the threshold. And in some ways, the anecdotes do more than even the rules. Like you give an example early on of a colleague in North Carolina who said something to the effect, to you, to the effect of like, you can’t reasonably expect, you know, much sympathy for Jewish suffering given what the state of Israel is doing to Palestinians, which is so morally incoherent.
But hearing it narratively does something more and more powerful than just saying, you can criticize Israel, but not like this. You know what I mean? Like it has, that’s what story helps to illustrate of, like, no, that’s just not how morality and power and vulnerability operates that we need to create, I don’t know, narrative space to help sort out these distinctions as opposed to simply kind of legal and probative space.
Flora: And that’s really what I try to do in the book. So I thank you for highlighting that and it took me a long time to, you know, get to that place where I figured out the way to most, maybe helpfully do this and, and, and present that argument is to layer, you know, all these different stories in small chapters.
And then in a way, and which was difficult for me as a scholar to try to take a step back and not tell people what they have to think, you know? But to, to let them, in a way, draw their conclusions. Right? As scholars, we often, you know, start with the argument and end with the argument, and, and I cannot try not to do that. I thought, there’s a story to tell and I can provide all these different layers, and I hope when people read it, they can, you know, people are smart and they can figure out their own opinion and, and partly also.
What I find sometimes very difficult in this debate is that I think name calling or a kind of, you know, a moral designation has replaced thoughtfulness or analytic carefulness. You know what I mean? And sometimes you try to navigate very complicated problems and people want you to say one thing or the other thing. And, you know, if you don’t, then you know you’re complicit. You’re a bad person. You’re, and so I was trying to really navigate, navigate that in the book. And, and so that’s how I tried to do that.
But by, by telling the story, and hopefully people will make up their minds and I don’t expect everybody to agree or to think the same thing, and you know, I hope there would be interesting conversations.
Yehuda: Yeah. I wanna make sure not to miss the piece of the book that I found most staggering, actually, and courageous, which was a series of chapters in the middle of the book where, in talking about your own family history as part of this story, you describe the history of, I believe it’s your grandparents, your essentially discovery that part of the way in which they survive the Shoah is through a stretch of time that they spend as Belgians in the Congo. Seeing them in colonial garb and the struggle, the dissonance that creates for you in both recognizing that they were doing whatever they needed to do to survive, but in doing so, they landed amidst a story as the kind of antagonist in effectively a, a global colonial criminal enterprise in Congo.
And I, first of all, I think, I think it was just courageous to tell that story and also to invite readers to say, stop turning all of these histories, both of vulnerability and the perpetration of vulnerability on others as like the simple stories. And can you still listen to this story of a Jew navigating questions of antisemitism? Even if for a brief period of time your ancestors kind of traveled into that story. I wonder if you could just say a word on, like, the decision to include that in the story and what you’re hoping your readers get from reckoning with that piece of your family history.
Flora: You know, that was the most difficult, I, I think, part to write, because, you know, it’s my grandparents. And I know them. They’re wonderful people. They wouldn’t hurt a fly, and yet at some point I realized that for three years they lived in the Belgium Congo, and you know, they were in Belgium until the summer of 1942, so they escaped just before the deportations out of Belgium started, and, and it took them, right, almost a year, traveling, hiding through France, to make it out there, to arrive in Spain and then to the Belgium Congo.
And in their attempt to cross the Pyrenees by foot, actually, because they had no other way to get out of there, they were arrested and somehow my grandfather was able to get in touch with the Belgium Consul in Madrid, and, and he’s a man who didn’t, you know, he didn’t save any Jews, but when he heard that my grandfather had fought in the Belgian army during the Nazi invasion in 1940, he said, actually, they’ve asked me to send soldiers to fight in Africa. If you agree to do that, you know, I will give you the papers and I will help you out of there. And so they said yes, and that was the agreement, right? As soon as they arrived in the Congo, my grandfather had to join the Belgian military there. And they made him commander of a big company of Black Congolese soldiers.
And you know, I have that photo album from my grandmother where, you know, I see him in his, you know, white colonial uniform. He sometimes had to discipline his soldiers and, you know, in the Congo that meant, you know, sometimes whipping them or having someone else, but, but he would order it.
My grandmother set up a household, you know, where she had I think, six or seven, right, Black servants and they called them boys at the time. And I see that in her writings and her letters and it’s extremely pejorative. And to suddenly, right, reckon with that in, in the middle of a Holocaust story, and knowing my grandparents, I, I really struggled with that, with how do, how do I tell it in a way that tells the truth, says what happened, but at the same time maybe honors the circumstances and who they were.
And you know, I think we sometimes think that, you know, learning history is maybe about, right, judging people, and figure out who was right and who was wrong. And what I discovered there is that it’s very hard for me to, you know, say who was right and who was wrong, right?
I, I, I mean, obviously what they did when they were in the Congo, to some extent, it was wrong and they became participants in that colonial regime. And we know the Belgian Congo was maybe the worst European colonial regime in Africa, and I have no illusions about that. And yet, at the same time, they never wanted to be there. They never would’ve gone if not for the war. While there, you know, they felt excluded by the rest of the Belgian Colonial elite. So it’s a very complicated story and I try to tell it that way.
Yehuda: But what it really does, Flora, is it shows the ways in which real conversations for Jews today in 2026 about power and vulnerability are so much less simplistic than the ways that the worst forces in our community tell that story, and more importantly, that our enemies tell that story.
And we should be better capable of conducting that conversation internally, not just for our own moral integrity, but also so that we can be better and more effective narrators to others when we want them to understand us, right?
I mean, it’s not surprising to me that like when young people now come to Hartman programs, the conversation they most want to have is around power and vulnerability, because that’s what everybody’s talking about when it comes to Jews, right? The Jews have too much power and then they look at their own community, and Jews are obsessed with power because we feel like we don’t have enough to keep ourselves alive, and they’re looking for something different.
I think that part of what you’re signaling with this story is like, I can handle it. Right, and you even say at one point, why am I putting on my own complicated feelings about my family’s legacy on my grandparents who are literally trying in that moment to survive? I think that that’s like a really important distinction between, what is this legacy that I bear and what are my responsibilities and circumstances in the present, and they can’t be completely saddled on one to another. Do you know what I’m saying?
Flora: Right. No, you’re, you’re totally right. And, and I think what matters is what we do with that history in the present, right?
Yehuda: That’s right.
Flora: It’s less about judging the past, but saying like, you know, we are the sort of custodians of our history.
Yehuda: That’s right.
Flora: And what do we do with it? That’s what matters. And the question of power and vulnerability is interesting, right? Because many people think Jews are powerful. Many Jews feel very vulnerable right now, and how do we navigate that?
Yehuda: There’s much more to talk about, a lot to talk about with academia, but I’ll ask you one last question, which is, you know, going back to my opening about what I always understood Europe to be and what I always understood America to be until less than a decade ago, I always understood, Europe is the place where they have to have armed guard stationed outside of Jewish institutions. And that is changing. I was like, that’s so weird, and it’s so awful, and it’s so embarrassing for them. And look, in America, we don’t have that. And now it’s become very obvious that major Jewish institutions have to have security stationed outside the door.
And I wonder about the psychological impulse of that. But you know, you said initially that one of the things that you wanted out of this book was to help European Jews build a Judaism that’s a little bit more like American. But I would say the reverse question: What do we need to do here in America to prevent that story of what European Jews are dealing with from overtaking us? And I mean, not just what do we have to do to protect ourselves, but what resources do we need to have internally to continue to believe that the path that American Jewry is going doesn’t have to be a path of inevitable decline and inevitable experience of vulnerability.
Flora: That’s the hardest question, right?
Yehuda: Yeah, that’s why I did it last.
Flora: You know, I often hear people say, you know, why did we build all this Holocaust museum? Why did we invest in Holocaust education? It hasn’t worked. Antisemitism is coming back. But I think maybe the more correct way to frame it is, it has worked, right? If you look at the second half of the 20th century, and you talked about that, right? That’s the American Jewish community that you grew up with, that figured out, right, how to make a space for itself in that society and how to show up and how to, you know, be safe.
And, and I think, you know, in, you know, the, the first two decades of the 21st century, things changed and we have to find new ways, maybe, of protecting ourselves, be safe, be part of that society. What I find, you know, impressive is the way that people still continue to show up, right? Even though synagogues have to be right, they have to have protection now, and that, and that’s more like Europe.
But what I’ve often seen in, in Europe is, you know, Jews retreat or leave. And that’s also part of the book. And I don’t see that here. I see American Jews saying, no, we have a place here and we’re gonna show you and we’re going to contribute and we’re going to try to explain our story differently. And you know, I think the Hartman Institute is a great participant in that. And we don’t know what exactly is gonna work and, and when, what isn’t gonna work. But I do see that creativity at work and, you know, even around the debate about, you know, Zionism versus anti-Zionism.
You know, I find it interesting that, for example, people are creating, you know, anti-Zionist tools and congregations. You know, I, I may not agree politically with, with everything they do, but I find it fascinating that they’re saying, you know, there are different ways of being Jewish, and in fact, there should be, right? I think American Judaism doesn’t wanna be pigeonholed in just one form or one version. It’s always been a kind of plurality and to continue to work on that and build that and, you know.
In a way, what worries me more are maybe the internal conflicts that come out of that. I would like people to find better ways to, to talk about all those things. You know, I would like for it to be possible for people to say, you know, I’m Zionist, you’re anti-Zionist. Okay. We have, you know, big differences in worldview, but we can still, right, sit at the same table, talk about our Judaism and our views.
And think about other ways of doing it in the future. And so from where I sit, I realize it, it feels like a time of crisis, and it is. And at the same time, I do see that creativity at work, and so that gives me hope. I think that structurally the situation in America is different than in Europe, right? You don’t have those centuries of exclusion and violence, and you have a society that structurally and maybe constitutionally has been better able at making, you know, space for a plurality of people. And I think frankly, that’s under attack too. And so, you know, in, in some ways that worries me, but I think if people managed to maintain that, I, I’m hopeful in a way,
Yehuda: The book is called Stained Glass from Flora Cassen from the New Jewish Press. Thanks so much, Flora, for being on the show today.
Flora: Thank you.
