The following is a transcript of Episode 166 of the Identity/Crisis Podcast. Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Yehuda: Hi everyone, welcome to Identity/Crisis, a show about news and ideas from the Shalom Hartman Institute. I’m Yehuda Kurtzer, we’re recording on Tuesday, November 28th, 2023. I want to test out a hypothesis with all of you today. I wrote a little bit about it on Facebook a week or two ago and argued with some of you there, and I want to argue it out with our guest today as well. 

So the situation on college campuses is at the same time maddening and scary and also, at times, a little confusing, a little hard to read. A lot of academics that I know insist that the situation on campus is not nearly as bad as media coverage of the college campus wants us to believe and indeed we know that there are a lot of bad actors at political extremes who want the campus to be seen as a site of polarization, that narrative serves their interests. In the meantime, though, it’s hard to deny what we see. 

I work adjacent to Columbia University. Every time I mention that to people, they’re like, well, Columbia is different. Be that as it may, last week was hard to concentrate because of all the police helicopters hovering above the campus. The campus was surrounded by police as a large group of students and faculty members staged a protest around the neighborhood behind a banner that read, quote, “Resistance by any mens necessary.”

There’s a lot that seems quite broken in a system that’s premised on liberalism but increasingly has become aware that it’s actually failing to protect its students. Mostly concerned here today about Jewish students and the rising tide of anti-Semitism, which finds form daily on college campuses, both in these kinds of dangerous slogans as part of widespread campus protests, but also in the regular whole hum stuff, like a painting of swastikas on dorm rooms and at Hillells, which has happened this year at Penn, at Stanford, at Bucknell, at American University, just to name a few, or just in a climate that feels uncomfortable for Jews expressing their Jewishness, feels uncomfortable for Jews, especially who express their relationship to and support for the state of Israel.

So here’s my hypothesis. I think it’s urgently important that we figure out how to differentiate between two very different phenomena. Those that make us unsafe and those that make us uncomfortable. And then within the category of the uncomfortable, those that make us unproductively uncomfortable and those types of incidents that produce productive discomfort.

I’m not trying to advance a technical distinction in order to make light of what’s going on campus, or to weaken our resolve in addressing it by bringing up like technical jargon. It’s the opposite. I think we need these kinds of distinctions in order to figure out how to address each of the different kinds of presenting problems. And I’m concerned that when we don’t draw these kinds of distinctions, we’ll treat three different kinds of problems with the same remedy, we’ll be confused when they don’t get better, and maybe even when they get worse. 

So take three categories. Unsafe, that’s the most straightforward. It’s downright unconscionable for students to be made to feel unsafe on campus. It is wild to me that campuses that have  worked for decades to eradicate an atmosphere that they themselves characterize as rape culture around sexual violence can’t do the same for other forms of environmental toxicities on campus that make students feel vulnerable. This should be a responsibility at every level of the campus, but especially for administrators. In the same way that a government’s primary responsibility is to protect its citizens, university administration has the responsibility to create a safe environment for its students. 

So let’s go to uncomfortable. The term uncomfortable is more suggestive. We do want more productive discomfort, not less. What this might mean for a campus environment even during a war and even on polarizing issues like Israel-Palestine would mean more investing in building a culture of rigorous and serious disagreement on campus, whether in the appropriate classrooms or as extracurricular offerings. 

This should be like a slam dunk thing in universities. They should be places where we all have to confront ideas and commitments that are different from ours, either evolving in our thinking or finding the tools and resilience to hold our own. Some of this is for sure happening on campuses around the country, but it’s going to require serious investment to become the dominant image that we have about what’s happening on campus. 

And it’s also probably going to require some real renovation in the departments and campuses where political homogeneity has already become so deeply rooted and protected by frameworks of academic freedom and tenure, which will not repair themselves. 

And at the same time, there’s that third category. We want less unproductive discomfort, and we have to find ways to combat it that might not be the same means that we use to make our students feel safe. I think most protests on campus live in that category. They’re not directly endangering Jewish students, but they’re not helping either. It’s kind of a slippery category. 

And I suppose I’m trying to articulate and struggling to articulate how Jewish students on campus should not have to feel miserable on campus even if they’re safe, while worrying that what our community might do to make our kids feel comfortable on campus might ultimately make them unsafe. 

So we’ll go back to confusing. How descriptive or predictive is the toxic environment on campus when we’re trying to understand the political mindset and the climate for American Jews more broadly? There definitely seems to be a lot of change underway in the American Jewish political map, the renegotiation of alliances and allegiances, in some circles a kind of great awakening of Jewish politics. And are we talking here about data or anec-data? Those of us that care about liberal values and liberal institutions and see them as essential bulwarks for our safety and security and the functioning of our democracy, how concerned should all of these stories make us right now? 

So I’m talking today to my friend and colleague, Mijal Bitton, who’s a scholar of American Jews, Rosh Kehillah of the Downtown Minyan, a research fellow here at Hartman, a number of other affiliations will have her bio in the show notes. Mijal had a big moment last week as one of the featured speakers at the rally in Washington, which I think probably came about because she went viral the previous week at the rally in the NYU campus, which involved calling the campus to account for its systematic failings in confronting anti-Semitism. So this topic is something Mijal and I have actually been debating on and off for about a decade, and there was no one I wanted to talk to more about this. 

Mijal, welcome back to Identity/Crisis. And let me start with this. We’ll come back to the hypothesis. I saw you taking some notes on whether you buy it or not and the distinction I’m trying to draw. But let’s start actually with the whole data, anec-data question. I know when you try to figure out where things going on, you collect a lot of information, you collect stories, sometimes systematic research, sometimes simply talking to people. 

What have you kind of seen and observed around the question of young Jews and campus and safety today? What are your kind of observations about how young people on and off campus are feeling politically and what do you sense also living adjacent to a college campus around the atmosphere about the college campus right now?

Mijal: Well, first, Yehuda, thank you so much for having me here and also for giving that framework. I’m thinking about it and the different categories and where people might fall. So in terms of data and what’s happening, I think part of what’s really difficult to parse out is the way you began, but there’s a lot of media narrative and outrage and very loud voices and also very worrying incidents that we have seen. 

And it’s not always easy to tell how normative those are across the board. And it’s not always easy to tell how much the story is from one campus can go to another campus, whether what happens at NYU and Columbia is the same as what might happen at Tulane or Emory or other campuses across the country. So that’s been a little bit hard for me as someone who’s actually been trying to take seriously to understand what’s going on.

And even in one particular campus, I think I’ve been trying to speak to a lot of students, especially in lower Manhattan, different universities, and people have different experiences. Sometimes it depends on what department they’re in. If you’re in the humanities or in social work or something like that, it’s way worse than if you are like doing an MBA, for example, or just taking engineering, even though even there you’re not immune. It’s all a little bit confusing.

At the same time, I think that anyone who’s observing this can see some very significant trends that are happening, which is, and I’m gonna try actually to go back to your categories, Yehuda, which is that in environments where people’s level of comfort have been upheld by the university community as indicating their level of safety, that those expectations have been shattered when it comes to Jewish students and pro-Israel students. 

And that there’s been a unique standard almost being put for Jewish and pro-Israel students to basically be told, even though in most other cases we have insisted on certain ways of being and belonging in our communities, they don’t apply to you. And that often comes with a lack of safety, which just makes everything incredibly blurry and very hard for both, I would say students and outsiders, to fully parse out when is something unsafe and when is something uncomfortable.

Yehuda: What are the kind of examples that you would offer that you hear from students when they describe the feeling of unsafety? And I wanna just, I wanna also just say as a, every time I’ve done anything on campus and we’ve done like five episodes, I always get some feedback of, well, you should have been talking to this Hillel director and not that one, you should have been talking to this university administrator and not that. 

I don’t know that we need to do our full credentials. Mijal and I are both academic-adjacent enough to be in this conversation and we take responsibility that we are observers of this, right, with a kind of inside out side perspective and cannot be kind of cumulative in describing this phenomenon. So when you talk about safety, what are the kinds of examples or incidents that are threatening that sense of safety?

Mijal: Yeah, there’s so many and some of them really reflect each student’s subjective experiences. So let’s just name that right now that what might student one student might find and say if the other one wouldn’t. For some students, it’s about utter silence or indifference when they talk about their friends having been murdered. Some students reflected hearing from other students that their friends deserve to be murdered. Zero empathy from some students is professors who use their class pulpit to make accusations not just about Israel, but about Jews and Jews all being oppressors or being part of oppressor classes. From some students, it’s been actual physical intimidation, students who have to get guards to be able to access Jewish spaces or come out of them. From some students, it’s demonstrations in which people tell them, you should have all been gassed. Some students, it’s swastikas they’ve seen. Some students it’s about posters being put down. 

And for many students, what I’ve also heard in different campuses is seeing the times that school administrators have very different standards and different ways of reacting to hate speech in the case of anti-Jewish speech than when there’s other occasions.

And it’s very hard, Yehuda, even when the speech is arguably one that makes you uncomfortable and not unsafe, I think it’s very hard for many of us to know how to understand that outside of our framework of either depraved indifference to Jewish suffering, or in some cases, is this flirting with anti-Jewish hatred or anti-Semitism, which again, I want to be very careful around those words, but it’s almost like hard to understand, like why is this happening here and not in other places?

Yehuda: Does that mean that you think that distinction doesn’t fully hold? Because I’m not sure it does myself. I know, I can’t quite figure out the difference between unproductively uncomfortable. I know the difference between productive discomfort and unsafety. That feels very clear because one of them is an affirmative value that you actually want to see happen and one of them is a negative experience. 

But I’m not sure I can fully parse the difference. It just feels like we’ve got to figure out what’s, if there’s some usable standard that’s different between, this was an aggressive protest that made me feel uncomfortable, versus, I feel there was a kind of depraved indifference to Jewish lives that made me feel as though I myself am threatened by the culture of what’s taking place here.

Mijal: Yeah, so I actually agree with you that there’s an important difference there. But at the same time, that actually brings up a question for us. What does it mean for young American Jews to feel at home in institutions where the culture of those institutions don’t make that distinction for anything else, except the way they’re feeling it when it comes to Jewish lives? You got what I’m saying? 

Like, it’s almost like a question like, are we asking, I actually prefer what you’re saying. I think that we need to be able to make a distinction between speech that really harms, like you know, and then speech that makes one uncomfortable. And I think that all of us, myself included, need to have a thick skin, and we need to be able to stand up and push back. 

But then I don’t know how at home I can feel in institutions, where it’s only Jewish suffering that is asked to live up to these standards. So then there’s different options that we can have here. One option is that we all become kind of like warriors to in general make all of our more progressive institutions give up on this culture of safetyism in which words are violence and the term safe has lost all meaning. And then we are going to have to push back against a lot of the assumptions in the culture wars around how language is used.

The other option is that we just continue to use these institutions, but we don’t feel at home in them. And we learned for ourselves how to have a thick skin and how to operate within them, but we lost that sense of belonging in which we see, you know, and students see themselves as belonging in the same way that other students belong.

Yehuda: You left out a third possible option, which is we embrace the safetyism that is associated with all other interest groups, ethnicities, etc., and we insist that the universities apply the same standards to Jews. So what you’re saying is like, the frustrating part is that these rules seem to apply to everybody else, but they don’t apply to Jews. And then your two options were either exit the system or insist that it changes the rules. And I’m wondering whether is there space for a major advocacy effort that would agree with the safetyism hypothesis and insist that Jews shouldn’t be a carved-out exception.

Mijal: Yes, the reason I didn’t mention that is that I thought that option would collapse your distinction. That I think if we go to that option, then we are operating in institutions that have given up many times on the distinction between being comfortable and being safe. 

One thing that I often wonder about is I imagine what if I was a very prominent pro-life advocate as a student at a university, right? At a costal kind of like liberal elite prestigious university. What would that feel like? What if I was a gender-critical feminist at one of these universities? What if I was a heterodox intellectual who didn’t believe in anti-racism? 

So I think many of these kind of like countercultural voices and movements have encountered these questions and have had to figure out the distinction between safetyism and comfort, but their environment, right? The university culture that we know right now, especially in more prestigious elite institutions, right now, I don’t think the culture allows for that distinction, except when it comes to the case of Jewish students in which we hear a lot of talk about free speech and all that, which I support, I just wish there was more consistency in how it’s applied.

Yehuda: One of the things that’s been confusing to me about that argument, which is that universities are not heterodox spaces on a whole bunch of issues, is that every couple of years you get an open letter. There was the Harper’s letter and then there was the version 2.0 of the Harper’s letter. It tends to be signed by a whole bunch of tenured professors who are at universities who, what they are effectively pleading is this place has become so oppressively homogenous politically that I’m made to feel uncomfortable.

But it hasn’t resulted in them losing their tenure or losing their status. And that’s what I wonder whether that’s the, like that might be the fate essentially of Jews on campus who support Israel. It is a unpopular position, not held by the vast majority of the faculty and maybe the activist wing of the student body, but it doesn’t actually jeopardize the position of Jews on campus. Do you think that’s naive?

Mijal: Yeah, Yehuda, because there’s a big distinction between a tenured professor and between most academics who don’t have tenure and between most students who don’t have that kind of protection and who are beginning careers and who are thinking a lot about their social capital. 

And it’s not that many people who’ve signed those letters and they’ve received a tremendous amount of pushback in terms of their, I’m not talking about losing their tenure, but their ability to kind of be bona fide members of certain intellectual groups. So I do think that it’s complicated. 

The only thing I would say, the other consideration is that Jews will form new coalitions and that we will form coalitions with a bunch of groups of thinkers and activists who are similarly perturbed about the extremism. And I would add here the moral bankruptcy that we are seeing in so many campuses.

And I don’t know, I don’t know how much some of these institutions can be redeemed, which doesn’t mean, by the way, that I think we should all abandon them. They’re still important institutions in terms of negotiating power and influence in American life. But we’re going to have to figure out different strategies. Some strategies are going to have to be to fight for the souls of these institutions, even though I think many of us have become cynical about that.

And other strategies are going to have to be to kind of immune ourselves or protect ourselves as we go through these institutions. And there it might be interesting to look at case studies. And I know it’s going to be a shock for a lot of liberal just to do this, but to look at case studies of like conservative students and how they have gone through some of these institutions and what they had to do in order to get through them.

Yehuda: Yeah. One of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot actually is how in an earlier era of Jewish history when American Jews perceived universities to be anti-Semitic and closed to them and to their norms and values, American Jews, by and large, went to city colleges, but those who wanted to break their way into the Ivy League did so, and they basically just insisted, essentially pushed their way and stood their ground, became major philanthropic supporters in certain places of those institutions, and within a span of a 30 to 40 year period, changed it. 

And it’s really interesting that I have yet to see the kind of version of that plan that worked in the 1920s and 1930s emerge in the Jewish community today. You’ve seen a bit of philanthropic threatening. We’re going to withdraw our capital from these universities if they don’t adhere to our positions. You know what? You’re not what you should be. The way we’re going to change that is we are going to basically show up, insist that we are who we are, and we’re going to make a major investment in elite universities. And I don’t quite know why that hasn’t happened yet.

Mijal: Yeah, I’m not sure either, but I wonder historically. I feel like there’s a difference between fighting to make your way in and to belong into an American story, where every generation you’re fighting a little bit more, and between feeling a betrayal of like, oh, I thought I was part of this, you know? And then there’s like an earthquake. 

And I think that sense of betrayal and destabilization, I think that psychologically, to me at least, feels more difficult than feeling like you’re slowly every single year trying to inch in and to fight for your version of the American dream.

Yehuda: I’m curious in particular about your discipline because you come out of a sociology background, the social sciences have been the atmosphere that has been most ripe for the capture under these kind of ideological systems that are so deeply inhospitable to Zionism, sociology, anthropology, to some political science to the extent that they do post-colonial work.

I’m curious what your experience was as a sociologist training at NYU, whether it was, I know that your work ultimately wasn’t really about Israel and maybe that was useful, but what are the conditions in a particular university department or in a discipline more broadly that make it susceptible to this? 

And I ask that, I’m being, I’m asking it naively because there’s, the system is supposed to be designed, tenure is supposed to be a mechanism, academic freedom is supposed to be a mechanism where people say whatever they want and somewhat radical things and yet ironically in some of these disciplines they’ve become profoundly homogenous environments that actually protective only of particular political orthodoxies. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about work within the field of social science.

Mijal: Yeah, well, I guess I’ll start by saying, Yehuda, that I had a couple of options to consider, like a straight up academic career in my field. And way before October 7th, I decided to not pursue them. You know, there’s a bunch of reasons why people might choose to not go into academia, but one of them is that it was clear to me a while ago that I would not be able to have real critical thinking, you know, as someone junior without tenure in my field, and put Zionism and Israel aside.

If you want to have questions about agency, about choices that people make, about groups that are complicated beyond just like an ethnic identity label, it was pretty clear to me early on that there were a lot of echo chambers. And just like the group thing is just so thick in terms of thinking about groups and categories. So that was clear to me. 

And I would say my own journey was not the typical one. I took a lot of courses in Jewish studies, a lot of courses in school of education. So I was a little bit insulated, I would say, from some of the worst aspects of this, even though I have been reading enough in the field to kind of follow the trends and decide pretty early on that I was uncomfortable where things were going and that I myself didn’t want to be at the heart of that if it would mean that I couldn’t do the kind of critical thinking I wanted to.

Yehuda: But why? Why does that happen? I mean, I remember as a graduate student in New Testament that periodically you would encounter a piece of theory. And it was like a really interesting way of poking at the work that we were doing. 

Okay, so our seminar on Paul for a semester, a whole semester, one of the weeks was like, let me read Paul through the lens of post-colonial theory. And you’re like, wow, this is so interesting. It opens up really interesting lines of thinking about literature and power and all of these things. And then, you know, if you have a good, intelligent professor, the next week you do something that’s not post-colonial theory. You do something else. And you wind up having learned over the course of time not only different ways to think, but how to think. 

But it does feel that there’s been a real closure of what are the methods and lenses that we are supposed to be using to analyze the world in which we live? I’m just curious if you have observations about why you think that happens.

Mijal: Yeah, I mean, I think that for me, my favorite thinker on this is someone like Yascha Mounk, who writes clearly about the intellectual history of how we’ve prioritized thinking about people or even ideas, in terms of identities. So it matters a little bit less what we might intellectually think about something and critical thinking and much more trying to put groups and people into categories of good and bad, oppressors and oppressed. So definitely just recommend following that to understand this better. 

I will tell you, Yehuda, the following. I grew up and I was raised in a socially conservative background in a pretty traditional milieu. And it was like in my early 20s, I would say that I discovered, you know, classical liberalism, discovered left-wing intellectual arguments. And I found it exhilarating. And this idea that you could argue and you should be able to be in relationship and understand things from different perspectives. That’s all I wanted. It was amazing. It was breathtaking. 

And I think for me, what’s been hard, it’s that it’s almost like these centers of knowledge production that were supposed to represent this kind of critical thinking, that they betrayed their own missions. And they became and have become really rigid and monolithic. And there’s huge questions about the human experience that we need and must continue to ask. But even asking the questions has become kind of like forbidden in many spaces. 

And Yehuda for me, coming from an Orthodox background, and I’m not saying this as a way to critique orthodoxy, but it’s almost like I feel like many of this academic and intellectual spaces have become orthodox. Like for me, it’s like, oh, I know what this is like. This is the, the person who has certain credentials or certain identities, you cannot question what they say. Or you’re supposed to just follow certain precepts without asking questions. So I think it’s been really hard to see. And there’s been a lot of incentives and reasons as to why this has happened, as to why this kind of post-colonial theory has risen. 

For me, it’s not just about Jews and Zionism. It’s very much about the West and a critique of America. I spent some time a couple of years ago reading up on critical race theory. It was really helpful and important for me to try to understand some of the critiques that have a reason. And I think we have like a real civilizational struggle right now trying to figure out what are our key tenants that we’re going to stand for.

Yehuda: You know, I think the thing that is very difficult to watch is that I tend to agree with you that there is a kind of monolithic orthodoxy of the left that’s taken root in a number of university disciplines. It’s not, it’s interesting, last, just today actually, an open letter came out at Columbia basically saying, we can have different opinions about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but we should be able to stand against Hamas. 

And it had 500 faculty signatures, which was terrific. Most of them not in the humanities. Medical school, the law school, a bunch of other places. So there’s a certain kind of orthodoxy in the humanities, which is, as you’ve indicated, a kind of paradox of what liberal humanities was supposed to engender. That’s one kind of camp. 

There also is another camp that I see from folks who are really trying hard to be the balanced thinkers around Israel-Palestine, from Jewish studies, from the humanities, etc., is a kind of, option two is a kind of withdrawn posture, closer to what I might call playing a role around productive discomfort on campus. Right? Yes, I can condemn and also I can contextualize, let’s convene this panel of scholars to talk about this, to do a teach-in on campus. All things that I think are generally good.

What tends to be missing though is the third piece of that element, which is what does it mean to be nakedly pro-Israel and operate out of this discipline? So what the result is that it’s so deeply imbalanced, because it would be one thing if you had like an essential existential fight taking place among the anthropologists between like the squarely pro-Israel team and the squarely anti-Israel team, you would say actually that’s political diversity. And at wartime they’re going to be polarized.

But it almost feels like there’s a really strong left. There’s a pretty robust, what I wanna call for lack of a better word, center. And there’s really no right. And I think that has the effect of discrediting that anybody who really is just kind of red meat pro-Israel can operate within the framework of these academic disciplines.

Mijal: Yeah, and Yehuda, I don’t even know if I would call it like a right. You know, I mean, what you have absent here is like the voices we’re seeing from the Israeli left and many Israeli academics who are very critical of Israeli policies and who have really strong bona fides as lefties and impeccable academic credentials. But to them, supporting terror, which, let’s be clear, that’s what we’re seeing in so many places, would just be so ludicrous and so anti-humanist.

And you know what’s hard is, I mean, the example that we have 500 faculty members saying, which is, it’s great saying, we can disagree, but let’s, let’s call out Hamas. The fact that that’s like a bright spot right now. It’s just, if we were talking to ourselves, like half a year ago, we would be so depressed by thinking, oh, we have 500 faculty members. Again, thank you. Please, please keep writing those open letters. We need more of those. But the fact that that’s like our new low bar, call out Hamas as a terrorist group, and the fact that we can’t always assume that, like sometimes I’ve been in conversations where I actually started by saying, I wanna be honest that it’s really hard for me to be here because I don’t know how many people here think that what Hamas did in October 7th is justified resistance. 

And the fact that that’s now kind of become part of acceptable discourse, that the goal posts have shifted so, so much, that the center are those who say Hamas is a terrorist group that wants to murder Jews and is despicable. That’s just really, really depressing about the state of academia and the state of the left.

Yehuda: Yeah, and maybe part of the problem here, Mijal, is like, liberalism in general has a problem of evil. I’ve been reading a lot about it the last couple of weeks. Doesn’t know what to do with it. Goes back to Kant, didn’t really know what to do with it. And as a result, it really doesn’t know how to punish it when it shows up, because it’s trying institutions, ostensibly liberal institutions, are trying so hard to make possible that ideas can stay within their parameters that forget about whether they’re genuinely heterodox, they somehow can’t pull the trigger on saying this is intolerable in our institution because they’re scared that the minute they do that they are anti-free speech, they’re anti-academic freedom. 

So if a Yale professor goes on Twitter and embraces the Hamas attacks on October 7th, what every sane employer in the world would do is say you can’t work here anymore. What any sane university would do is say, we don’t trust you with the minds of our students, but universities, for some reason, can’t pull the trigger. So what almost you would need to see happen in a moment like this for universities to repair the culture of liberalism is to just become a little bit illiberal in order to restore the balance of what’s legitimate to take place within its midst.

Mijal: I don’t know if I agree with that. And I haven’t done the reading they’ve done about liberalism and evil. But I think that if you, if we look at a place like the University of Chicago, for example, who has become one of the few kind of like elite institutions that has argued for classical liberal values and free speech in a way that goes across the board, they don’t have as much of an issue because they’ve made certain principled, kind of like statements about free speech, and they are trying to apply it consistently. 

To me, what fills the problem here is not so much a problem of liberalism, is that many institutions already became illiberal by deciding to limit free speech and free expressions in many areas. And then they’re like, it’s almost like the problem is to be inconsistently liberal, you know, when it comes to Jews as victims. And when you only allow, I’m exaggerating right now to make a point. But when you only allow uphold and applaud free speech when it comes to pro-Hamas supporters, that’s when there’s a terrible problem. I don’t think the problem is with liberalism there. I think it’s with a perverted and manipulative and deeply, deeply cynical, inconsistent use of liberalism.

Yehuda: Yeah, I mean, I suppose I could agree that if, like in general, forget about universities for a second, a lot of other institutions, the New York Public Library, whatever it is, got themselves into trouble with the culture of statements, even before you get to liberalism, not liberalism, they got themselves into a culture of statements. And that really took off around Me Too for important reasons, where they did have to say things because in some ways they were complicit in really terrible behaviors that they housed. And then George Floyd, and then Ukraine, and then they got stuck at Israel-Palestine, and treated it as a, well, that’s a complicated political issue as opposed to the moral clarity that was on display at October 7th. 

One option is just rewind the clock. You say we’re going to all become University of Chicago, or what I thought the Northwestern president’s statement was pretty good too. On a personal level, I think it’s abhorrent. On a university level, I don’t think we should make statements. I was kind of okay with that.

Mijal: If they continue with that and, Yehuda, if Northwestern continues to hold itself up to that and makes no more statements, then I would like everybody to uphold what the University of Chicago is doing. But again, and you know, let me ask you a question, Yehuda. What are the, because I know that you’re great at coming up with really sophisticated conceptual categories. When we see this kind of inconsistency, right, it’s like just so obvious, the masks are off, a lot of people just code it immediately as anti-Semitism. 

And I get it, even as I’m nervous about it. And I’m wondering what you think are the different ways that we can understand this deep inconsistency in spaces where we have one set of rules for seemingly—again, I’m exaggerating a bit—but seemingly everybody, and then like one unique set of rules when it comes to Jews and their safety.

Yehuda: Yeah, I don’t have a problem with characterizing a lot of what’s become clear over the past month as anti-Semitic. I find that describing things as anti-Semitism is oftentimes internally validating, but actually incredibly ineffective in getting people to stop what they’re doing. Because when you call an anti-Semite an anti-Semite or you describe their behavior as anti-Semitic, their motivations will be to explain to you why they’re not anti-Semitic. 

Like, rare is the anti-Semite who, when you say you’re acting like an anti-Semite, says, thank you for seeing me for who I am. So if all it does is it invites that resistance, I’m going to recategorize what I’m doing as anti-Israel activity, then the term kind of loses its meaning probatively in that context, except for the purpose of our internal community.

And that’s why, I guess the reason why I was going towards these categories of unsafe versus unproductively uncomfortable is because I’m trying to get at a more accurate descriptor of what it actually feels like as opposed to trying to paint it with a particular lens. 

But your critique, I don’t disagree with your critique that there’s something that liberal institutions really don’t know what to do with. And I’m really struggling, as I think you are, with the choices that we enumerated before. I have never believed in the, kind of the Tablet position of exit the Ivy Leagues, exit the liberal institutions. I don’t think that feels right to me. I guess my constructive impulse is to say, how do we restore the dignity of liberalism back to what liberalism was supposed to be? 

And I am always gonna, by the virtual fact I’m a liberal, I’m an optimist. So you’re always gonna feel like that’s the goal, right? I just, maybe I’m a little bit more optimistic about that possibility than you are right now.

Mijal: Yeah, I’ll take a different position than the two you outlined. I think that we need to just learn how to operate and succeed in systems even while we are indifferent to how those systems see us and to a sense of belonging. And I think that’s like a huge, that would have to be a real transformation in liberal American Jews. 

Some of it feels to me familiar in terms of my more immigrant and Orthodox communities, which I think have done this for a while. But I think that that’s one of the options we need to consider.

Yehuda: You know, one of the places, one of the areas where we traveled over this terrain together a number of years ago was around the question of allyship and the Women’s March. I feel like that in retrospect was like the, that was like the shot across the bow for progressives back then. And I’m not sure if I’ve changed my view on it, but I did write at the time that it felt to me okay that Jews would line up in particular places with, together with people who are clearly anti-Zionists, maybe even in some cases anti-Semites, if what they were doing was negotiating those positions to be subordinate to the purpose for which they were gathering. Right? 

And the theory of Margalit’s compromise and rotten compromise, the minute it becomes elevated that what you’re really doing is partnering with someone to advance their own anti-Zionism, then you’ve got to get the hell out of there.

But you can provisionally negotiate a place. And that’s kind of what happened in the Women’s March in 2017, right, where liberal Zionists stood on stage together with anti-Zionists because they shared a different issue, a different conception. It kind of feels as though that, those days are kind of over, for two reasons. 

One is I’m not sure liberal Zionists are going to want to put themselves in those kind of positions anymore. I think that the earth has changed in six weeks. And I also suspect that those who identify as anti-Zionists are unwilling to subordinate those commitments anymore. Do you feel like that story, have you experienced that story of allyship among liberals changing at all?

Mijal: Well, I actually wrote against attending the Women’s March back then. I was one of the critics of that kind of allyship. I felt strongly then that kind of illusion or naivete, that was wrong. And part of the reason I felt this is that I had conversations with some people who were supporting this allyship with the Women’s March organizers. And when I would ask them, well, what’s your red line? Is there something that they would say or do that you will then say, I will not compromise my community safety or my own values? And they couldn’t really respond in a convincing way. 

So I think that there were, I just, you know, I think that I’m not saying it as a way to say I was right, but maybe I was right. I think that we could just make a critique that even then it was wrong to do this and to be, I don’t know if I think there was a lot of naivete and like illusions, like, you know, like they would never go this far or like we are friends and we do Shabbat together, so of course, you know, you can do this. 

But we have a huge question right now in terms of alliances. And I have been incredibly heartbroken by some individuals that I have worked with in the past and the things they have said and not said. And I’m not saying that I expect from non-Jews or just other folks to be pro-Israel, but I think that there’s a certain amount of cavalier indifference to Jewish or Israeli lives that has just been beyond anything that we’ve imagined. And I think we have to stop compromising when it comes to just value of Jewish and Israeli lives. 

You can be pro-Palestinian, you can be anti-Israel, you can be all of those things. And those who are trying to make this as though we’re asking for everybody to be Zionists, it’s just ridiculous and gaslighting. But if people cannot express, right, if they cannot express empathy for Jewish victims, if they cannot condemn terrorists, then to me, we do not have a way to talk anymore. 

And the hard work that we have to do is to not lose hope and to try to figure out, okay, how do we insist on the one hand, I’m going to say personally, how do I insist on the one hand that I won’t work with certain people, but then double down the work with everybody else, no matter what positions they have that I might really disagree with. And that’s where maybe the safety and comfort distinction might actually come into play for our activism now.

Yehuda: Yeah, I mean, it is okay to take a victory lap and say I was right about the Women’s March then. As I wrote on Twitter, Matti Friedman is taking the world’s greatest victory lap right now about the AP and about the international press. And he responded on Twitter, yes, I’m taking a victory lap in my sealed room. Thanks very much. I think that’s okay. 

I think the bigger cognitive dissonance actually awaits, because the number of Jews, liberal Jews right now, who are gonna basically kind of take the red pill strategy. I was wrong about everything. I was wrong about all my liberal commitments. I’m basically now shifting over to a conservative. I think it’s ultimately gonna be quite small. 

I think American Jews passions for racial justice and economic justice and the rights of LGBTQ folks and being pro-choice are pretty strong commitments that are native to our Judaism in ways that are not about, I didn’t care about those because my allies cared about them. But how do I actually be lonely and not be able to necessarily be in coalition with people who care about that actually creates a much deeper cognitive dissonance that just means that Jews are going to be maybe politically uncomfortable. And I don’t know if that’s good news or bad news.

Mijal: Yeah, no, I agree with you. And I think it’s not just Jews. We’re going to have to find new alliances with many groups that are feeling politically uncomfortable and that might agree with a whole bucket of values, but become dissidents or heretics when it comes to particular things. And there, the question that you raised is that it’s not only up to us and how much we want to lean in, right, into certain liberal environments.

But a lot of it is going to be determined by how much certain liberal or progressive environments allow Jews who are either Zionist or who are condemning Hamas to be part of their coalitions. And that’s we’re going to see what happens.

Yehuda: Mijal, I know you also have an hypothesis about the question of representation in terms of young Jews. Long-standing questions about what it means for the organized Jewish community to be thought of as a representative. And a lot of people who are like, those people don’t speak for me. And that the same thing seems to be happening also on the left end, maybe skewed by social media. You want to walk us through a little bit about that hypothesis?

Mijal: Sure. So I’ve been thinking about this for some years already, and I’d be grateful for feedback from you and from our audience, just if anybody has any more data to support this, because I’m not sure we have kind of like the kind of polling data that could either support or falsify this. 

But for many years already, we’ve had certain, I would call them like loud, young Jewish leaders, especially on the left, kind of call out the organized Jewish community and say, you are not representative of our views, our positions, and if you really want to lead us into the Jewish future, then you need to center our voices. 

Very often this has come with very strong critics of Israel or anti-Zionism. Maybe the most prominent people around this are groups like If Not Now, who’ve said, we represent a new generation and your views supporting Israel are totally out of the mainstream.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot. I think when I speak with leadership in the Jewish community, they tend, like in the establishment, they tend to assume that outside the Orthodox community, these are often the prominent, like Gen Z voices, and that a lot of this is what characterizes the new generation of American Jews. 

Now, what I’ve been seeing anecdotally and also speaking to some colleagues in different fields who have seen similar things is that there is another gap of representation that we have to pay attention to here. So this is my hypothesis. My hypothesis is that very often young Jews who go into the Jewish professional ecosystem and who are the louder voices speaking about their generation, that for many reasons, they tend to be much more ideological in general and much more to the left than let’s just say like the mainstream, young, Gen Z, American Jew, who’s participating in different institutions. 

So what does this mean? It means that the problems that we might, for example, I’m calling them problems, right? But that we might, for example, see with like rabbinical students and their views around Israel or around, you know, a certain type of Jewish collectivity, that might not actually reflect the views of the young Jews that they are going to end up serving.

So, and those young Jews, I’m not saying they are perfectly represented by like the older establishment. So, my hypothesis is that there’s actually a vacuum because we have the future leadership or like the rising, emerging, and I’m generalizing a lot right now, but the emerging young leadership of American Jews that is itself much more ideological than their peers, who I would characterize as normies. 

Normies is like language for people whose brains are not on Twitter all day long and who don’t think about politics and activism all day long, and who might have a much more kind of like natural affinity to certain types of Jewish collectivity and Jewish solidarity and even to Israel. So that’s been my hypothesis, and I’ve been trying to figure out both how to think about this and also what to do about this.

Yehuda: Yeah, if you are right, one possibility is that gap is going to create problems between the Jewish community and the people that it seeks to represent. That’s one possibility. The other possibility is that it will course correct a little bit, as oftentimes happens when rabbinical students are far left of their people that they serve, and they realize when they actually go to serve them that they have to serve them, and that they can hold on to their own political views, but they wind up moderating and modulating, not unlike the way the college students who have radical ideas oftentimes are not spending much of their time in the same kind of political organizing once they’re out into the world.

Mijal: Yeah, another possibility, and it’s not something that I’m saying like with triumphalism, but would be like a certain, you know, move and shift towards Orthodoxy. I’ve already been speaking to a lot of young people who are really, you know, diverse in many ways and who are feeling religiously homeless because they are going to very progressive communities where they have felt just really challenged by the way that people have reacted to October 7th. And some of them end up going to Orthodox spaces, which is good for Orthodox spaces.

But I do think there’s like a real, real challenge here for the liberal American Jewish institutional ecosystem to figure out how to course correct and how to serve those young American Jews who have an affinity to Israel and to collectivity and to Jewish solidarity.

Yehuda: Let me ask you one last question, which is, as a devout liberal, I kind of wanna fight the fight against illiberalism only with a careful use of illiberalism, right? Like, maybe draw some lines. I’ve supported, for instance, the handful of university presidents who have used mostly technical and administrative reasons to block Students for Justice in Palestine from their campus because I think that they’re fighting fire with fire. I think they perceive those organizations as having crossed the boundaries of legitimate discourse and they’re going to do what they need to do to protect their students even if that activity is a little bit illiberal. 

But there are a whole bunch of other folks who are kind of piling on. A lot of external organizations around campus, most prominent examples is this doxing phenomenon of identifying students who have been publicly identified with protests on campus and then broadcasting their names, usually outside of campus, on public property, rather than university property. 

It feels on one hand fair, like you showed up to a public protest, like it’s fair game, you’re in public, but it does kind of feel really icky and illiberal, and I think if Jews were put in that position, we would find it to be unconscionable. And I’m curious if as we kind of probe this fighting liberalism with illiberalism or liberalism, how you’re feeling about it.

Mijal: Yeah, I mean, Jews are already being put in this position. I know a lot of examples in campuses where pro-Israel students are being kind of like broadcast to all of their other fellow students as kind of like representing evil and people being asked to kind of, you know, ex-communicate them socially in many ways. 

Listen, I think I agree with you there’s something icky about some of this. And I think we need to be above all strategic. I’m going to kind of move away from the morality or ethics of things. I’m being a bit of a pragmatist right now. This is a long battle, not just for the sustainability of a flourishing American Judaism where we feel like we belong, but it’s also a long battle for those of us who care about classical liberal values and who believe, and I’ll put myself here in like certain American values, as being sacrosanct and really worth fighting for.

So if this is going to be a long fight, then we cannot be so reactive and we cannot allow our very well deserved and well intentioned outrage to drive our actions. We need to be as, you know, as strategic as an army that is literally thinking about battles and about the war and about having to have different strategies there. 

So that to me is really the most important thing we have to do. We cannot assume each campus is the same as another. We have to pay careful attention to what students are saying and to how they wanna be supported. We have to do our due diligence and learn what each university’s bylaws are and how they’re approaching different issues. And we have to also have a thick skin, I think. 

And on the one hand, I’m working with so many young people who are embattled for good reasons. And I also think about my cousins, their same age, who are walking into Gaza and who have to figure out how to, you know, deal with war. And there’s something there about this moment demanding and inviting us to stand up and to become new people, to have a thick skin, to take on risks and take on challenge and be, it requires certain courage that I think many of us never had to, we never had to exercise that muscle at this level. So it’s not easy, but I think it’s really incumbent upon all of us to step up and to support the students who are fighting.

Yehuda: Thank you all for listening to our show this week and special thanks to our guest this week, Mijal Bitton. Identity/Crisis is produced by M. Louis Gordon, our executive producer is Maital Friedman with assistance from Sam Balough, Sarina Shohet, and Tessa Zitter. This episode was edited by Gareth Hobbs at Bear Cave Audio, and our music is provided by So Called.

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