Yehuda: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Identity/Crisis, a show from the Shalom Hartman Institute, creating better conversations about the issues facing contemporary Jewish life. I’m Yehuda Kurtzer. We’re recording on Sunday, May 19th, 2024.

Nathan Kurtzer of Elizabeth, New Jersey, enlisted in the United States military on February 21st, 1942. It was a Saturday. He was 23 at the time, and he was working either as a salesman or in the coal business, or maybe, somehow, as a salesman in the coal business. This detail will become important later on. At some point later that year, he relocated to Spartanburg, South Carolina, I think most likely to Camp Croft, which was a major infantry training center during World War II. In January of 1943, he married his fiancee Sylvia Orgel on the base, or perhaps nearby. By the end of the year, he had been transferred to Camp Blanding, Florida, where his first child, Gale, was born.

We don’t know exactly when he crossed the Atlantic, but we know it was after D-Day, which was June 6th of 1944. We’ll talk about that D-Day crossing a little bit later on. But the next event that we can find chronicled in the spare records that we actually have is that he was injured during the Battle of Metz on September 10th, 1944, shot right near the upper arm in his chest. The injury ended his war. By the beginning of November, he was back stateside after some months in various hospitals, and he was eventually honorably discharged on October 6th, 1945, well after the end of the war, at the rank of corporal.

The reason we have such sparse records is because there was a major fire in 1973 that destroyed an immense number of military records. So decades before the age of digitization, a lot of the stories in color, that would help people like us understand murky but important moments in the history of our recent ancestors, went up in smoke. What’s left now of the paperwork is mostly just a bleak window into military bureaucracy. It’s a lot of pay records, some prescriptions, and medical evaluations, and maybe most importantly, Nathan’s appeals for various benefits to which he was entitled due to his injury, which he argued made him unable to resume his previous employment.

Ultimately, he ended his war highly decorated. He received the Purple Heart, the Good Conduct Medal, the American Campaign Medal, the European African Middle Eastern Campaign Medal with two bronze service stars, the World War II Victory Medal, the Honorable Service Lapel Button of World War II, and a marksman’s badge with a rifle bar.

Nathan Kurtzer was my grandfather. He passed away in 1999, just a few months after Stephanie and I got married. I named our first son after him. He was my papa, an incredibly loving and lovable person who I remember as very big, even though, as the military records indicate, he was five foot seven. Some of his medals now hang in a frame in our house together with a photo of him on that base, looking strong, smiling, handsome in uniform, and a world away from a war that would shatter his shoulder but help bring an end to Nazi tyranny in Europe.

Next week is Memorial Day, when we Americans have the opportunity, and I would say the obligation, to commemorate the servicemen and servicewomen who gave their life in defense of our country. Then shortly after Memorial Day will be the 80th anniversary of D-Day, when America officially committed to fighting in the European theater of the war with our invasion by air and by sea on and over the beaches of France.

I have to say I regret that the dominant conversation about, in connection to military life in many parts of the organized Jewish community in America relates more to the Israel Defense Forces than it does to the United States Armed Forces. Now there are understandable reasons for this. Some of them are personal. I now have a nephew in the IDF, but no close relatives right now in the service here. Meanwhile, Israel is fighting an awful and in many ways, I would say, essential war right now. And the wars that America is fighting or has fought in recent years are very far from home. And I don’t lament that many of us care deeply about the fate of the IDF and the soldiers to whom we are connected, but I fear we have lost the important connective thread between our Jewishness and our very thriving as Jews here in America and the American military history and conditions that make that very thriving possible.

There’s a lot of reasons that’s happened since World War II, which was massively important in the history of American Jews, and we’ll explore some of that today. And there are also real reasons to be concerned about thriving in a country and never quite interrogating who has to sacrifice on our behalf.

But what I really wanted to do today is to get at this story through a personal angle to talk about what it means for one Jewish family to have a legacy of proud service and sacrifice to our country through memories and personal reflections. I think a lot about how my grandfather’s war service influenced our family trajectory and even, sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly, my own choices. I wanted to try to hold that narrative together with how some others might have processed the same data.

I’m joined today by my father, Daniel Kurtzer, Nathan and Sylvia’s third child. My father retired from a decorated 30-year career in the United States Foreign Service after ambassadorship in Egypt and Israel and now teaches as a professor at Princeton University and, perhaps most importantly, has taken over the title Papa. I’m joined by my older brother David, who spent a brief stint as a Foreign Service Officer in Yemen and now works as a lawyer in Washington, DC. And I’m joined by my brother Jacob, who is now working at the U.S. Embassy in Tanzania as part of an extensive career hovering between government and human rights NGOs across the global south.

Thanks for joining me here today, everybody. We haven’t seen each other for a while. I want to start by filling in the record, whatever else you all know about Papa’s military record and service. And I guess I’ll start with you, Abba. What stories or features of Papa’s war service do you either know because you know them or remember as a kid hearing about when it comes to Papa’s service? And then I’ll ask both David and Jake to see if you can fill in any gaps as well.

Daniel: My father, Papa, actually didn’t talk much about his service, even though, you know, as we now call it, he was part of the greatest generation, the generation that lived through the Depression and then fought to liberate Europe and to defeat Nazism. Whenever he did talk about it, he would normally start with some funny story.

You noted in your introduction that he was shipped overseas in September of 1944, having missed D-Day. And the reason he missed D-Day is that he was married and wanted a weekend pass to visit my mother. But the only way he could get that pass was to enter a boxing match, which his sergeant offered as a means of getting the weekend off.

My father had no experience boxing, had no idea what to do, and got his front teeth knocked out. And therefore ended up in a hospital in late May of 1944 when his unit was shipped overseas to participate in D -Day. So in some ways, he lived with the consequences of having false teeth for the rest of his life. But D-Day was such a dramatic event that it’s probably better that he lost his teeth.

Yehuda: And he didn’t talk about the war when you were a kid?

Daniel: No, no, and we were foolish enough not to have put a microphone in front of him to record what his recollections were. The only thing he talked about often was the efforts he made after he was back in the States, having been repatriated from the battlefield to London at a hospital and then back to the States, his efforts to reach the points total in the army that would get him discharged.

And it took him until October of 45, but he really wanted to go back to civilian life as quickly as possible. And I think that was part of the reason that he just didn’t focus a great deal on his service.

Yehuda: I mean, I think if you had put a microphone in front of him, he just would have sang show tunes. I don’t know that that would have gotten what you needed.

David, what about you? Do you remember anything or any thoughts that you might have had as a kid thinking about Papa’s war service?

David: You know, like Abba just said, one of the things that I regret, not just about Papa, but about other relatives who’ve passed away is not asking enough questions. And I was thinking before we started this podcast, and I really could only think of three, I mean, maybe I’m forgetting some, but I could really only think of three Papa stories about the war, all of which are hilarious, but I don’t know any non-hilarious stories, right? I know the idea that he had a boxing match, got his front teeth knocked out, and therefore missed D-Day, which has a sort of dark comedy to it. I know that anytime, if you asked somebody to pass you food at the table and somebody else at the table intercepted that food, Papa would tell us how in the army, if you did that, the food would be dumped on you because it was considered very rude. And then the third story I know, which I know the other three of you know is that Papa would say that he got shot and there wasn’t anything else to do, so he took a nap. Those are the only three stories that I know about his war experience, and they’re all very funny, but I wish I knew more.

Yehuda: Yeah, that story about lying down and taking a nap is an amazing story because it’s actually one of the bloodiest and most complicated battles of the war. Like I thought he got shot right after he got to Europe, which I thought it was part of the humor. Like he landed in Europe, got shot, took a nap, went home, which kind of would check out.

But no, he must have been actually inland for quite a bit of time because to get to the Battle of Metz means you have to cross the entirety of France. Even though a lot of that had been cleared out, but it still takes a while to get there. And he had a really serious war injury. So the notion he was lying down and taking a nap probably was, he went into shock and was evacuated. But it’s true. He kind of told the story as though it was very obvious.

Jake, how about you? I mean, I remember one of the things about Papa was showing his war wound as part of the, which was always kind of amazing. It just always had this little bandaid on it. Do you remember? Like a little round bandaid. I’m wondering, for you Jake, even if it’s not something you remember about Papa, anything that you thought about as a kid, you know, in knowing that our grandfather had had this war experience.

Jacob: Not to repeat, but like David and Abba mentioned, there’s a certain amount of regret not leaning in more into understanding and capturing family history. But I also, the nap story always resonated with me, partly because I like taking naps, but partly because I also think it illustrated a little bit of the, kind of banality of war. I don’t think that’s what I thought about when I was a kid. I thought it was funny, but I also feel like I have a great sense of pride as a family that doesn’t have any more military service, knowing that we had a connection to, what I think is one of the most important military services in American history.

And so, when we named our first son after Papa as well, getting that Purple Heart and the picture into Nathan’s room was something of a priority for me, to make sure that he had it and had that image that he could look to from a very young age. And we could answer questions about who Papa was and why we had that picture of him specifically, and not a smiling picture of him as a grandfather.

So I think, again, not knowing much of the service, I always felt like I took a certain amount of pride in knowing that our family had a connection and a real one of military service, particularly given how, as you mentioned, in our community, it’s fairly uncommon these days.

Yehuda: Yeah, you know, both of you mentioned the kind of disappointment of not having recorded it. I’ll tell you one story, which is we basically had, all of us have essentially one Holocaust-surviving relative, and that was my grandmother, Sylvia’s cousin, Baruch, who survived the Holocaust, actually survived a Russian prison camp as well, and somehow managed to get from Eastern Europe to Palestine in 1947, by 1947, 1948. And that was really our one Holocaust-surviving relative. All of his, the rest of his family was killed.

And I had an opportunity when I was living in Israel at one point, I finally convinced his wife, Yael, that it would be okay for him to tell his story for an hour or so into a tape recorder. And he would get very agitated. So it was a hard thing for him to do, but he agreed to do it. And I sat with him for an hour, recorded the whole thing, got back to my apartment and the tape recorder never worked. It never worked and I lost it. So, yeah, I think a lot of these stories are just lost to the extent of our memories.

Jake, I want to pick up where you left off, which is not just hanging the picture in Nathan’s room so that he has an image of the story, but you’ve made a whole bunch of life choices and career choices about your own commitment to public service. You’ve been adjacent to war in a few places, not as a soldier in war, but dealing with the kind of human rights catastrophes and humanitarian consequences of war.

I’m wondering if you’ve put together for yourself whether that was, am I sharing this with you for the first time or is there something rational about growing up in a family that’s committed to public service where war service is actually one of the origin stories?

Jacob: Yeah, I mean, I think people have asked me over the course of the years if I could draw a direct connection between Abba’s service and my own career choices in particular. And I certainly think, you know, I probably would require a therapist to unpack it, you know, most cleanly, but I certainly think that we all look admirably at our father’s choice of public service. And I think that probably draws some direct line from Papa’s choice of public service.

But there are two things that you said in your introduction that made me think about my own time in the humanitarian sector and connected to Papa’s story. I mean, I think the fact that he didn’t talk about it was important in a way, because I do think we live in a period where there is a lot of, I would say, a sort of glorification of military service. And I think military service is essential. You think about like the Big Lebowski and the pacifist comment, you know, like there’s, there is a time and a place for military service. And I think Papa’s decision and Papa’s experience was essential, as you described it.

But I don’t, you know, the fact that he never sat us all around and regaled us with war stories suggested to me that he didn’t think of it as something that required a lot of rah-rah, but it was just something that you did because the circumstances necessitated it. And as you described, I’ve been in and around situations of armed conflict, working for humanitarian organizations for many years. And, you know, I think there’s an essentialness to that work, but there’s not an attempt to glorify it because the work exists because the circumstances demand it. And it’s troublesome.

And if I may, there’s one other point that I wanted to touch on from your introduction. And that’s the work for Papa to deal with the paperwork and the work for us to deal with the paperwork. One of the things that, when I worked for the International Committee of the Red Cross, you see from people in armed conflict is their loss of their history and their loss of their ability to maintain images, paperwork, family records.

And so a lot of people think humanitarian work is about food and medical care and shelter. But a lot of humanitarian work is also about helping people who have been victims or otherwise affected by armed conflict piece together not just their contemporary life, but also try to pull together the pieces of their previous life to maintain that family history and that family record and the legacies that are so important for generations, now and into the future.

Yehuda: Yeah, it’s a great insight because that, we have Jewish language for that, it’s called continuity. And actually, part of what’s interesting about our particular family story is, I’ve tried to make this point often, American Jewish community often is very worried about continuity. Will we have a future? Will we have Jewish grandchildren? But it’s masking the fact that the American Jewish story is actually one of immense continuity over several hundred years in this country. And our family is a kind of a good witness to that. And I think you’re testifying to, you know, you say we don’t really have a lot of records. We have 67 pages worth of these medical records. And this, clearly in most international conflicts and wars, the records are part of what gets destroyed by conquerors over the conquered.

But let’s talk about continuity a little bit, Abba, I’m going to come back to you. You also grew up with an American war. You, like all of us, registered for selective service. You were not drafted in the Vietnam War. I’m curious if you could talk a little bit about, was there any part of you as an 18-year-old who would have said, well, my father served in World War II, it’s now my generation’s responsibility?

And I guess I’m partly asking because the more famous story I know about you is that when you were 18, you picked up right after the Six-Day War in Israel and went to clean up the Hebrew University campus at Mount Scopus. So you also had a kind of formative experience in and around a war, but it wasn’t the war in Vietnam. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Daniel: Well, actually, Papa and I talked about it a great deal because even though he had done his service, he was very opposed to the Vietnam War. Papa was well-read. He wasn’t college-educated, but he had a very significant interest in history. And he just felt that Vietnam was a terrible mistake on the part of the United States, something which many of us agreed with. And we talked a great deal, I wouldn’t say every Shabbat, but we had about a mile walk to shul on Shabbat, and this would be part of our regular conversation. He made clear that he did not want me to serve in Vietnam. And I made clear that if I was drafted, I was going to go. I wasn’t going to run to Canada.

So we had this back and forth for a couple of years until, it was 1969 when they introduced the lottery system. Before that, the draft was kind of haphazard. But the lottery system, you were assigned a lottery number based on your birthday. And I happened to have, my birthday happened to fall out to like 278 or 287, I can’t remember, which meant that I was not going to be drafted. So I actually gave up my student deferment and passed through that year without being drafted and therefore was not eligible to be drafted unless there was a true national emergency.

So the issue never moves to a point of decision, but it was interesting that a man who had spent three years in the U.S. military doing what he knew had to be done thought that the Vietnam War was such a mistake that he really did not want his son to go over there.

Yehuda: Yeah, I remember at your swearing in, I guess it was the, I think it must have been the first swearing in, the ambassadorship to Egypt, Papa was there. I think that was, who did the first swearing in?

Daniel: Tom Pickering.

Yehuda: Tom Pickering did the first, Ambassador Tom Pickering did the first swearing-in to Egypt, and I remember Papa being there, and it being an incredibly emotional experience for him to see where you had risen in government.

Can you connect the dots a little bit? If it wasn’t military service for you, to what extent you felt that a career in public service on the diplomatic side, if not on the military side, represented any sort of continuity with Papa’s military sacrifice?

Daniel: Papa was extraordinarily proud of what I was doing, but had no understanding of what diplomacy was. So we would talk about it. And even when I was appointed as ambassador, he was bursting with pride, but then when we talked, he would say, what exactly will you do? And what’s exactly the role?

So it was, I don’t know if you can draw a straight line. My own decision really emanated from not going straight into academia. I had gone to graduate school straight after college and halfway through realized I didn’t want to do that. So I took the Foreign Service exam without thinking about it a great deal. It was kind of funny, the pride that he had, but he did not want me to go into a very successful business that he had started with his brother. It’s a delivery service that went through all the boroughs of New York, including Nassau County. And he did not want me to go into that business.

Yehuda: The story I remember actually was, I don’t know if you remember this, but the morning of the swearing-in, among the meals of the day, I think for Papa breakfast was the top three. Very important, he was sitting at breakfast at our kitchen table, I think probably eating a grapefruit. And I don’t remember who asked him something about the day, he was very excited about the day, he was already kind of dressed for it, almost had his suit on, and said something about like the invitation, how important the invitation was, at which point he disclosed that the invitation was in his shirt. It was between his undershirt and his shirt, so that was well, it was close to his heart.

Daniel: And he didn’t want to lose it.

Yehuda: Yeah, he didn’t want to lose it. But I think it was more than that, at least for him. I have to imagine that to go to the State Department and to see senior officers, there was something just, I think, very patriotic about the whole thing. It wasn’t just, I’m proud of you because you’ve achieved this accomplishment. I think it’s a real, I would have to imagine a real understanding that the patriotic act of going to Europe to fight Nazis was now being echoed by this patriotic experience of watching your son being elevated to this kind of high position, having to swear an oath to the United States Constitution as part of that commitment.

Daniel: It was also an extraordinary moment if you looked around the room because we had a large contingent from the State Department and a large contingent from our community in Kemp Mill, all of the men wearing kippot, and feeling very comfortable with one of their friends, one of the members of their synagogue, being sworn in to be ambassador to Egypt, which is, you know, today we take it for granted that American Jews can serve all over the place, but when I entered the Foreign Service in the late 1970s, it was almost a foregone conclusion that I could not serve in the Middle East because I was Jewish. And here, you know, 15, 16 years later, I was going off as ambassador. And I think that also, it affected all of us, but I think that also affected my father who saw this as a kind of defining moment for his parenthood.

Yehuda: Yeah, I think about the fact that zooming out from our family, for many Americans, but especially for many white Americans and certainly for many Jewish Americans, the experience of World War II became an incredibly important stepping stone towards what then became a period of major socioeconomic mobility for American Jews, a combination of the integration of American Jews into the military who experienced, there was anti -Semitism in the American military, but nothing quite like other minority groups experienced. The kind of legitimated American Jews as real participants in the American story. GI Bill and other efforts enabled military veterans to come back and then proceed on this story.

And our family kind of is a great example of it. Papa comes back, starts his own business with his brothers. The next generation starts getting higher education degrees and by the third generation, we’re all in a very different kind of work environment. High education, high specialization, very much removed from kind of blue-collar work.

David, I’d love for you to reflect on this a little bit because you also live in Washington. You’re very active as a volunteer in Jewish life. You’ve had a portion of your career in public service. Your daughter is now highly engaged in the political process. So you’re adjacent to very different ways in which American Jews, partly because of the success story that we’ve had over the last couple of generations, are in one way removed from what our ancestors had to do to acquire Americaness, but are also trying to contribute and participate in serious ways to American life.

I wonder if you’ve reflected on what that kind of looks like and feels like today, in some ways, a continuation of this legacy of political participation, but in other ways, like with cleaner hands than what our grandparents’ generation had to deal with.

David: Is the question asked sort of in relation to Papa’s military service? Is that the idea?

Yehuda: No, I’m curious about your own kind of your own view at this point about like, if one generation of American Jews had to do X in order to participate as Americans, what happens three generations later when none of us are encouraging our children to enlist in the American military, but we are trying to encourage our children to find ways of and doing it ourselves through their professional work and volunteer work to figure out ways to be adjacent to the kind of civic project of America.

David: Yeah, well, I guess I would say, I mean, I think the past six months, like for everybody, have caused me and I think a lot of people around me to really reflect on what it means to be a Jew in America because, I mean, this is perhaps banal and maybe sort of subversive to the premise of your question, but like, it’s not even something I really thought about.

I think until the last few months, participating fully in American Jewish life, American civic life, not as a Jew, American political life, every part of American life just seems so profoundly ordinary. I mean, I have a spouse who has spent most of her life in the United States, but who grew up in England. And I’m not talking specifically about her experience, but when we visit her family and family friends in the United Kingdom, the way they relate as Jews in Britain to the country around them, I think is just fundamentally different than the way I ever have felt as a Jew in America, meaning, it’s just like not an issue. It’s just not something that I thought about until recently. And I think that that has caused recent events and, particularly, the rise of anti-Semitism and sort of figuring out how it all fits together has caused me to reflect on it a lot more in terms of, where do Jews fit in in this country? Is it more of a question mark than I’d ever really thought about?

Yehuda: Yeah, it’s an important insight. When the Charlottesville Nazi thing happened, I think I was supposed to have the reaction as a Jew of being scared because, you know, Nazis are back again, but I think I had more of a reaction as an American of being frustrated they were marching on our shores. Like, that’s what, we went overseas in order to repudiate the Nazi threat, that it wasn’t merely an anti-Jewish threat, it was an anti -American threat.

And I’ve stitched together, at least personally, over the last, you know, six, seven years, you had the Nazi march, you had January 6th, and then I feel like October 7th is part of that continuity. And I don’t know, I think what I’m trying to work out, and I’d love any of your thoughts on this, is one instinct that American Jews have when things get bad for Jews, whether it’s anti-Semitism here, or whether it’s fighting Hamas in Israel, is to start thinking about packing, you know, getting on the move. Another instinct that I know many American Jews have, I see it actually in my kids’ school, is like, I’m gonna go fight in the Israeli army.

I’m wondering if any of you, especially David and Jake, because you’re gonna have kids within range of making these choices, is it even like part of a radar of like, no, I’m gonna really encourage my kids to fight on behalf of our country? Like, is that a plausible way that we as American Jews might say, okay, there’s a major challenge to the ideas of our country and what’s our responsibility as Americans to confront this challenge?

Jacob: Part of the reason that I have that picture of Papa up on the wall is because I agree with your assessment of, the first generation pushes pedals on the street and the second generation joins the military, and the third generation becomes ambassador. And I want to, I’ve thought about this often. If Nathan said to me when he’s 18, I want to go be a Marine, like I actually, insomuch as I would be very concerned and I don’t put military service on a pedestal, I think I would be proud of that.

I also think that I agree with your assessment on the Charlottesville situation of, my reaction was not discontent or concerned as a Jewish person. It was concerned as an American. And what is happening to the project? And even to this day, I have a different view about the rise of antisemitism in the United States. I remain more concerned about it as an American than I do as a Jewish person.

Now, bear in mind as well, when it’s explicitly antisemitic, I’m certainly comfortable with the idea of running. We’ve got a long history of that.

Yehuda: I’ve seen you run.

Jacob: I’m faster than I look. I remember when I was with the ICRC, I took a position in Myanmar in a town called Sittwe, which was the capital of Rakhine State, which is the part of Myanmar that had, at the time, a very large presence of an ethnic minority called the Rohingya who were being ethnically cleansed by the Burmese military called the Tatmadaw. One of my colleagues was Serbian and he had been an ICRC beneficiary during that war. He received support from the ICRC humanitarian support. He then went on to work for them and then he was a coordinator. He was the head of a unit operating in one of the most contentious contexts at the time.

And we had a very interesting conversation where he said, you know, basically him having lived through conflict, he said if it happened again, he would pick up a weapon and fight to defend his territory from an outside force. And I said to him that like, I don’t feel that particularly strongly about Arlington, Virginia, that I would pick up arms to defend it against an external adversary. And he thought that was crazy. And I thought, you know, I thought like this idea of like necessarily fighting over land, you know, it was just a very interesting conversation and it was born of very different experiences.

But I do think, thinking about the next generation, I think, service to the United States, even if it was military service, I think I’d be very proud of. And I think if it was service to defend against enemies from within, I think I’d be even more proud of, because I do think that that’s, the challenge that the United States faces now, I think is much more internal than it is external.

One last point that I would want to make about the concept of patriotism. I started as a federal government employee twice, really. The first time in Congress where, you know, for what it’s worth, I don’t remember swearing an oath, but I probably did, working as a staffer. And then more recently, I’m currently employed in an embassy and I did swear an oath.

The times that I have felt the most patriotic in my life are when I was overseas working for the ICRC. When I was the only American in a humanitarian organization working in a context so far removed from American life, that’s when my pride of being an American was the greatest because I felt like the concept of service and the concept of patriotism has been narrowed in American public life in the last 20 or 30 years to be like, you’re either a soldier or you’re a cop, and then you’re patriotic and you’re serving the country.

But if you’re a teacher or a nurse, you don’t seem to get that same level of valor even though the service that you’re providing for the citizens and for the next generations are equally as important. And I think doing foreign, working for an NGO, if it’s in your neighborhood or if it’s across the world, is a form of service both to people but also to country. When I’m an American working for a humanitarian organization, it tells all my coworkers and it tells all the people that we’re working about that there are people in the United States that care about them and they care about that project. And I think that’s a very important part of the modern American story.

Yehuda: Yeah, so David, I’ll ask you a different version of that question, which is, what do you think, what do you feel, as we are all fourth-generation Americans, the product of an American success story, what do you feel are our responsibilities in this generation confronting an anti-Semitism threat, confronting a kind of erosion of American democracy? What would you like to see us, where do you think we, as the inheritors of this particular American Jewish story, should invest our time and resources as part of this fight?

David: Well, I don’t think I’m going to offer any sort of prescriptive view as to what anyone else should do, but living in Washington, D.C., our family is tremendously politically aware and politically engaged, maybe more than I think is good for teenagers. I think it would be my preference if my kids spent less time thinking about current events than they do. I think that would be better for kind of everybody’s sort of mental health. But the reality is that they are incredibly engaged on these issues.

When I think about myself as a teenager, you know, I was vaguely aware of who the president of the United States was, but I just didn’t like, I didn’t have any political activism or engagement. And, you know, you mentioned before that one of my children is particularly engaged in political campaigning and organizing, but all three of my kids have been to rallies and protests and made signs and they’ve all done phone banking and they’ve all done door knocking and I take a lot of pride in all of them feeling like they have an investment in the issues that they believe in. I think we’re very lucky that they’re able to do that and feel so comfortable with that.

Yehuda: Yeah, it’s a story essentially of being on the inside as opposed to being on the outside. I will tell you two funny stories. I was invited to the White House Hanukkah party years ago and I brought my two boys with me who were, at the time, very little. I think they were like eight and six. And we had a great time. Mostly they enjoyed getting Pepsi. That was like awesome for them. But the best part was right when we left the White House, I think Noah said, I think he was eight, he said, Abba, how will I ever get back to the White House if I don’t work for a Jewish organization? I was like, that’s amazing.

And then the second version of that story was a number of years later, I think it was last year, where I was also at the White House Hanukkah party and somebody came over to me and said, hey, are you, and for my whole life that has been, are you Dan Kurtzer’s kid? And I’m very proud, whenever that happens, but this time, actually, the person said, hey, are you Gabriella Kurtzer-Ellenbogen’s uncle, because of Gabby’s political work in Pennsylvania and I was like, yes, yes I am.

Abba, last one is to you, which is kind of a version of the same question. After an extensive career, may it continue, in public service and in teaching and in diplomacy, what’s your hope for how American Jews might think of our future responsibility, not just in combating anti-Semitism as a threat that is manifest to ourselves, but in kind of advocating and fighting for America? What do you want to see happen?

Daniel: Well, this is such an extraordinary country. You know, when, when anti-Semitism has now spiked, who’s taking the lead against it? Well, it’s the federal government and state governments and local governments. In other words, there are going to be anti-Semites all over the place, but they’re not going to find the same kind of support structures that we’ve seen in other societies, you know, most notably in Nazi Germany, but also in other societies where governments have stood aside.

So the fact that all of you and your spouses and your kids are engaged publicly, whether in politics or in volunteering, in Jewish organizations, overseas in the embassies, is a source of incredible pride to Imma and me.

And I would just add that the, and I’ve mentioned this often when I go out to speak, I have had occasions almost all the time where I’m introduced as one, as the father of one of you. Oh, you’re Yehuda’s father, oh, you’re David’s father, oh, you’re Jake’s father. And I can only tell you that gives me much more pride and satisfaction than, you know, simply saying, you know, well, you served and you did your thing. Because what it suggests to me and to Imma is that maybe we contributed to doing something right and instilled the kinds of values where you’re all good, you’re tremendously good fathers and your families are wonderful families, but you’re also giving something back to your respective communities.

Yehuda: I think you’ve said this actually a lot in your speeches, post-October 7th in particular telling students about careers in public service. Is that right?

Daniel: Yeah, I had an experience at one college where I was told in advance that there was going to be a demonstration against me. It was really a quite nasty one. But I happened to walk into the room where the demonstrators had gathered and I asked them if they wanted to chat and they didn’t respond. So then I said to them, have any of you considered a career in public service? And one of them said, we would never work for this government. And I said to them, you know, that’s really silly because you’re demonstrating to have an impact on policy. If you came into the government, you’d actually be at the table where policy is being made.

So, yeah, I’m a big believer, even if a college graduate goes in for a year or two, a little stint on the Hill or an NGO or something, where you give back to the society that’s been so good to all of us.

Yehuda: Well, thanks to all of you for listening to our show this week and special thanks to my very special and beloved guests, my father, Daniel Kurtzer, my brothers, David Kurtzer-Ellenbogen, and Jacob Kurtzer.

I want to encourage everyone, whether or not you’re related to a military veteran and certainly not whether or not you’re related to someone who gave their life for our country, to take a moment this Memorial Day to think about those who gave their life for our country.

Identity/Crisis is produced by Tessa Zitter. Our executive producer is Maital Friedman. This episode is produced with assistance from Sarina Shohet and edited by Ben Azevedo at Bear Cave Audio with music provided by Socalled.

Transcripts of our show are now available on our website, typically a week after an episode airs. We’re always looking for ideas of what to cover in future episodes. If you have a topic you’d like to hear about or if you have comments about this one, please write to us at [email protected].

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