What does it mean to reclaim the Jewish story in an era of shame, assimilation, and contested narratives?

On this episode of Identity/Crisis, host Yehuda Kurtzer speaks with author Sarah Hurwitz about her new book, As a Jew, her journey from superficial Jewish identity to deeper engagement with Jewish tradition, and why knowledge and countercultural courage may be key to Jewish continuity today. 

A transcript of this episode is available below.

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The Unapologetic Jewish Story — with Sarah Hurwitz Transcript

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

Yehuda: Hi everyone, welcome to Identity/Crisis, a show from the Shalom Hartman Institute creating better conversations about the essential issues facing Jewish life. I’m Yehuda Kurtzer, we’re recording on Friday, August 29th, 2025. One of the phrases I hate the most in our contemporary discourse is the accusation, leveled by one person against another person or against a group, that quote, “They will find themselves on the wrong side of history.” This is a way of saying “you’re wrong,” or more accurately, “I disagree with you,” but with panache. When you make this claim, the other person is cosmically wrong in ways that will redound the significance once the truth is fully revealed with the benefit of historical hindsight and collective memory. It’s an accusation also that reveals the accuser’s fundamental powerlessness—“I can’t fully demonstrate to you right now why you are wrong, but over time, my truth will be vindicated and yours will not.” It reminds me a bit of a text from Maimonides in his section on the Laws of Repentance, when he writes, “A person who separates himself from the community, even though he has not transgressed any sins, who separates themselves from the congregation of Israel and doesn’t fulfill obligations together with them, doesn’t take part in their hardships or join in their fasts, but such a person goes on their own individual path, as though he is from another nation and not from the people of Israel—that person does not have a portion in the world to come.” The idea that a person would separate herself from the community in this way, stand apart from their people, is such a deep affront to Maimonides’ understanding of what it means to be Jewish that you can hear the rage in this text, but you also hear the pathos. A person who stands apart can’t really be punished by the community. Their exile is already self-imposed. Instead, Maimonides’ threat is that they will lose their share in the coming world. They will, one day, find themselves on the wrong side of history, condemned to eternal purgatory or worse. You can hear the desperation in the text. He’s saying, don’t worry followers, those who spite us will one day find their comeuppance. You can understand the fear implied of being told that you’re gonna be on the wrong side of history, though it’s actually hard to relate to. The threat that once you are dead, you will be forgotten, or maybe worse, like, maybe you were like the Sadducees of ancient Judaism, who we describe as having lost out to the Pharisees, and then the rabbis, in shaping the Judaism we inherited. Or maybe you’ll be like the Karaites of centuries later. Maybe worse, you, who is wrong right now, will actually be remembered by history for the magnitude of your wrongness, like those handful of congregational rabbis in America who wrote sermons in defense of slavery or those who opposed the civil rights movement. That accusation wants to revere the memory of our descendants so much that we’ll act in ways that make us fear of getting it wrong now. But that phrase is everywhere these days. It was hurled at me when I wrote in the fall of 2023 in defense of Israel’s war, one person on Twitter memorably threatened me that my grandchildren will one day do teshuva for me, they will repent for me. That was actually pretty good. It’s also, I think, the ethos that underlies why so much of the discourse around the war is not actually about the war, but about ancient, medieval, and early modern root causes on both sides. In the midst of a war, to argue about indigeneity, or about the colonialist history of the Levant, or about whether to start the clock on the current fighting in 1929, or ’48, or ’67, or 2001, or 2005, or whenever, that move seems to stem not just from wanting to be right right now. It’s not a justification for one side in the present. It’s a larger attempt to paint a long arc of history in order to situate now in that context, as well as to prepare for that long arc of history to extend well past the present into a future so that later generations will understand this little piece of time as a feature of some sort of coherent, consistent narrative. We all want this. We all want this as Jews. We want to identify ourselves in a continuous line of tradition that traces itself back in myth or reality back to our ancestor Abraham and all the way through the descendants that we’ll never see. We smooth over the ruptures that happened along the way because we see them as the necessary steps in the evolution of our tradition and our people that brought us to today. And we worry then, that we’re making the right moves today that will align with that single timeline of history that we hope our descendants will inherit. There’s another way to make this move, though, not with name-calling, but with trying to rig the story. This was a Maimonidean move, too. In multiple places in his writings, but especially in the introduction to his effort to codify all of Jewish law in one place and situate it all in one coherent superstructure, Maimonides narrates Jewish intellectual history in a way that led to the moment of his arrival. Obviously, this means making choices. It’s not history as much as a way of reversing the accusation of being on the wrong side of history. He tells a story to explain how he and we have found ourselves on the right side. If you can succeed at doing this, if you can curate the story of the past to align with the present, if you can command the authority to make that story canonical, then you can set the stage for what comes next. You will not just have won the past, you’ll get to shape what future generations remember. This is what power in the work of memory making looks like. The stakes feel very high for all of us right now. I can’t tell you how many parents and grandparents approach me very anxiously with some version of a concern that their kids are susceptible to wrong narratives about the Jewish people in Israel, especially as those narratives are contested so dramatically and oftentimes cartoonishly on social media as well as in university classrooms. There’s abundant fear in the field of Jewish education that our kids have to have the correct story, some alchemy of history told a particular way and family narrative and a set of values and commitments, and if they don’t have that history, that story, or because they don’t, they’re going to wind up in a different timeline, akin to those young people out there who discovered that the narrative that they came to learn about Israel and Palestine is so vastly different to the one they heard in their upbringing that they choose to believe the new one, treat the old one as a lie, and they jump ship. Who’s gonna wind up winning the battle for history? I guess the question is also what’s more important: winning our battles today or winning them later? I thought about this as I was reading through Sarah Hurwitz’s new book, As a Jew: Reclaiming Our Story from Those Who Blame, Shame, and Try to Erase Us. The book is out now from HarperOne and I’m excited about it, not just because I’m so fond of Sarah and the journey she’s been undertaking in discovering and rethinking her Jewish story, but also candidly, for the people of the book, we Jews are actually just not putting out enough serious Jewish books for the challenges of the present that are the kinds of books that are also really accessible to the general public. Sarah seems to be taking on this challenge all alone. Her first book, Here All Along, was a story of self-discovery describing her propulsion from something of a lax, lapsed, passive Jew, to realizing the depths of what was going on in this tradition she had made light of for so long. But the second book goes a lot deeper into today’s subject, the Jewish story, history and memory, to make really strong claims about what it means for Jews today to inherit that story more effectively from the past and to be prepared to bequeath it more effectively to the future. Sarah’s been on our show before, most recently with Frank Foer in the live episode we recorded earlier this year and recently re-released about American Judaism. Sarah, thanks for coming back on Identity/Crisis.

Sarah: It is a pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for having me, Yehuda.

Yehuda: Of course. First of all, Mazel Tov. Congratulations/

Sarah: Thank you. Thank you.

Yehuda: I can speak as a person who tries to write books and fails. It’s amazing. Let’s start from the beginning of the book, the central claim that you make. You say early on that you discovered something was a “fraud” in terms of your Jewish identity, you were angry. And when you characterize that Jewish identity, you say as follows: “I’d always thought my cultural, ethnic, social justice, ‘be a good person,’ Holocaust-remembrance identity was empowering. A reflection of how I was boldly charting my own freely chosen path as a modern Jew.” I’d love for you to unpack a little bit what you mean by those categories, what that felt like and what that was, and also why you described it as empowering, even though ultimately you’re gonna characterize it as being really problematic.

Sarah: Yeah, you know, for years as a young person, as a young adult, I would go around kind of putting my Judaism into one of these five categories. I would say, “I’m Jewish, but I’m just a cultural Jew.” And by the way, being a Jew who engages deeply with Jewish culture, that’s beautiful. There are Jews who engage deeply with Jewish history, languages, literature, art. Like what a gorgeous way to be a Jew. I knew zero about any of that. I more meant like, I’m kind of anxious, haha. I have an edgy sense of humor, haha. Or I said, I’m an ethnic Jew, which is actually just a nonsensical statement. Jews are of just about every ethnicity. So what was I talking about? There is no one ethnic Jew. Or I said, social justice is my Judaism. And again, there are Jews who engage deeply with Judaism through the lens of social justice. And they know a great deal about what Jewish tradition says, and that is so gorgeous and amazing. I knew nothing about what Judaism says. I more meant like, I think we should help the poor, which is really kind of what everyone says. Or I said, you know, Judaism is about being a good person, which yes, as is every spiritual and religious tradition and every decent secular human being would agree. But I didn’t know what Judaism specifically said about being a good person. In a way, I was just sort of articulating my own opinions about these things and attributing them to Judaism. Or I said, you know, I remember the Holocaust. I want to fight anti-Semitism, which again, fair enough, but being an anti-anti-Semite is a pretty thin version of being a Jew. But you know, I really thought all of this was me being a modern Jew. You know, it’s like, I’m, you know, I’m choosing my own path forward and I’m… I’m not like those other Jews. I’m not too Jewish. That’s essentially what I was saying. I’m not like those really Jewy Jews, but what if I was? Would that be a problem? And I think that constant caveating, apologizing, excusing, diminishing, I was trying to say, look, I’m just like you. You know, I just go to a different church, but I don’t even go to my church! And I know you don’t either. We are both modern, freely choosing, spiritual but not religious people. I’m okay; love me.

Yehuda: Got it. So empowerment is the ability to say, I get to define this on my own terms and that makes me a really autonomous person, even though the latent critique you’re offering is that it wasn’t like you were really choosing something, you were choosing not-something.

Sarah: Correct.

Yehuda: What do you think it’s about that, “I’m just an ethnic Jew.” What do you think that is? Is it a failure of education? Is it something else? It feels like there’s more than just, I’m saying just, it’s more than just a choice, there’s something feels richer in there as to why maybe Jews specifically have a default to, “Don’t worry, I’m not that kind of Jew.”

Sarah: I would argue there’s sort of 200 years of modern history and 2,000 years of history in general that has led to this point. I mean, that’s kind of the argument of the book. I think a lot of it is wanting to not be something that you think is bad. I think the reality is that I, 10 years ago, before I went on this journey of learning, I didn’t know any of this stuff. It was just me saying, I’m not one of those weird, really, really, Jewy Jews who other people think are problematic. I mean, which isn’t—as I’m saying that now, that’s so devastating. I didn’t even know those Jews, right? I didn’t know any really traditional Jews. I hadn’t studied any of the laws that I had dismissed as nitpicky and legalistic and weedy, which again, those words, “nitpicky,” “legalistic,” “weedy,” there’s a historical resonance to those that is very painful and that I dive into in this book.

Yehuda: It was hard to read the opening anecdote of the book of going to a Shabbat dinner, walking out and never coming back. And it kind of feels like the nightmare that many Jewish organizations, institutions, Hillels, Chabads struggle with. It puts an immense amount of pressure on them to like, do something a lot better to catch people and trap them. But it doesn’t feel like that’s the real argument of your book. Like, here’s what the Jewish community needs to do to make its offerings more compelling to the consumer. You’re actually taking a flip side argument. I want you to unpack it a little bit.

Sarah: No. I am. You know, a variant of this argument is: “Hebrew school is the problem.” Hebrew school is not the problem. You cannot make a child Jewish in two hours a week as a Jewish educator, no matter how talented and brilliant you are. And we have plenty of talented, brilliant Jewish educators. Parents make children Jewish. And why that is so hard is because so many parents never became adult Jews. Like me, 10 years ago, I had not yet become an adult Jew. I had never gone beyond my childhood Hebrew school education. So I was stuck back in, you know, sixth grade to be generous, I’d say more like probably second or third grade Jewishly. And if I had had children, I would have thought like, I can’t make these kids Jewish. I better outsource this to a Hebrew school teacher and then I’ll yell at them if they don’t really know enough. And so the Jewish community is being asked to play catch up, to do things that just are really the job of parents. And so many parents don’t have the tools. Right? It’s not their fault either. I’m not blaming or shaming anyone here. This is a much bigger, more systemic problem. And I think that so often we are kind of yelling at people about the symptoms of the problem without dealing with the actual problem.

Yehuda: I wanna skip ahead to something of a punchline question, although we’re gonna go back into deeper parts of the book, but Donniel Hartman has this story from, he says earlier in his career when he was speaking to a group of college students, and one of the students said something to the effect of, “Rabbi Hartman, why should I be Jewish?” In a kind of combative, confrontational tone. And Donniel’s answer, which I very much identify with, but might be a losing argument, is “I can’t tell you why you should be Jewish. But if you decide that this is something that you want to know more about, I can tell you beautiful things about Judaism that could help you build a serious and meaningful Jewish life.” That’s my version of his story. And I kind of feel the same way. And I wonder whether it’s, in some ways, a losing argument, right? Because you also like, you’re not really blaming the people who came before you. They were also making independent and autonomous choices. And they were making great choices for the opportunities of assimilation that were available to them as American Jews. And because actually saying that Judaism should make you a good person is actually kind of a beautiful idea. But you’re also saying that it’s fundamentally impoverished. So I guess I want to know what’s the sell here. Is it on individuals or is it on someone else who’s supposed to make this happen for Jewish life?

Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, I do think this is losing argument because I think if you grew up like I did, where Judaism is three boring holidays and one fun one; two texts—the prayer book you hold in your hand and the Torah on the scrolls, neither of which you comprehend or know anything about; and a set of very generic universalistic values, why would you be asking questions of Donniel? Why would you be saying, “I want to learn more?” You’ve had precisely no exposure to what the tradition is. And I don’t blame anyone today for that. I really think that the beating heart of my book is looking back at the history. It is looking back at 2,000 years of Christian anti-Judaism and persecution of Jews that led to a moment in modern Europe in the 1800s where Jews finally getting citizenship in the countries they were in and finally getting to take advantage of the opportunities of the modern world, universities, jobs, education, they have this moment where it’s like, well, wait a second—how are we going to be Jewish now? You know, to be a Jew pre-modernity was to live in an insulated Jewish world, to live by Jewish law, to eat Jewish food, it was an entire way of life. Suddenly you can actually be part of this secular, this broader secular world. How do you do that? And you know, our ancestors made an extraordinary decision. They said, no, we want to still be Jewish. Instead of saying, well, hey, all these opportunities are great. Let’s go to the baptismal font. Let’s just be nothing. This is so amazing. I want to go be a lawyer. Forget this Judaism thing. They said, no, we want to be Jews. But ultimately, the kind of Judaism that they created… It does in some way feel like a Protestant cookie cutter was jammed into it. It does in some way feel like they very much diminish many of our post-biblical texts, or really all of our post-biblical texts, which I would argue are kind of the beating heart of Jewish tradition, where so much of our laws, ethics, traditions, rituals take root. And, again, we’ve tried to restore this, we’ve tried to reclaim this, we’re kind of trying to return to some of the traditions, but I think the result is the kind of Judaism I grew up with. It’s a very highly edited form of Judaism. And I understand why many Jews wouldn’t bother asking a Jewish educator to learn about Judaism, because what they’ve seen, it doesn’t really tell them that there’s something there to ask about or look for.

Yehuda: Yeah, I found this a recurring theme throughout the book, maybe even the central motif is, I’ll use three different words here, which is a kind of embrace for Jews of a certain comfort with difference, with otherness, and with counterculturalism, right? Those are not the same thing, right? The resistance that you offer against Christian hegemony is that like, we’ve kind of embraced some of the worst stories that are told about us, so that even though we claim that we don’t really believe in them, we’re actually stained with a kind of shame that’s been given to them. You make the argument that we have to be, even as assimilated people, comfortable with that not everything totally works through a framework of assimilation. And then the most programmatic piece is to embrace some kind of counterculturalism. And I wonder what that looks like for you, and I wonder whether you think it can work. I mean, America has made it possible for Jews to just not have to do that. We don’t have to. And except with enclave Jews, it doesn’t really work. So what does that actually look like? Including personally, what does that look like for your Judaism? Sarah; Yeah, so I think, just to unpack a little bit the Christian hegemony, because I think it’s key to understanding the answer I’m about to give. You know, I trained as a hospital chaplain during COVID, just as a volunteer activity. And I was just stunned by how many Christian terms and ideas were deemed universal in that context. You know, chaplaincy is multi-faith. People of all traditions do it. But, you know, almost all my classmates and all of my instructors were Christian. We spoke about our ministry, our theology. I was told that prayer is: “God, please heal this person right in front of me who can hear me saying this prayer that I’m just making up out loud.” I was told no, that’s universal prayer. Everyone prays that way. I was like, well, Jews generally don’t pray that way. No problem if you want to. I wouldn’t say that’s a common form of Jewish prayer. And I began to realize how much I thought in Christian language, images, values, ideas. Spirituality was—body: bad, degraded, carnal; spirit: incorporeal, good. This is not a central Jewish idea, right? This mind-body dualism. And so, you know, I think that for me, know, so often when you say, how do we maintain this difference? People say, well, halakha, ritual halakha. We keep kosher, we do Shabbos, we have these enclaves. And I think that’s a beautiful way to maintain difference. I love that. However, I think as you rightly point out, that doesn’t work for the vast majority of American Jews. And I actually think for me personally, I maintain difference through understanding Jewish thought, through realizing, like, actually to be is to think very differently about concepts like spirituality. I think about all of our thinking around visiting the sick, caring for mourners. You know, we have a secular world which tells us death, dying, grief, aging, illness. You run as far away from that as humanly possible. It’s disgusting. Inject some botox into it. Send a text or some flowers. Creepy, gross. And Judaism says, no, no, no, you physically run right up to that. You get your body as close to the ill, the dying, the mourner, the bereaved, the dead body. You actually are right there in those liminal, thin spaces where the bountiful boundaries between life and death, heaven and earth have thinned out, you go right there. And that’s disconcerting and it’s disorienting. But Judaism demands that we be there because we declare those holy spaces. I mean, wow, what a countercultural idea. And I can give you a million more examples along those lines. But for me, it’s a realization that to be a Jew is to think differently than both modern secular culture and modern quasi-Christian American culture. Is that sustainable? You know, like, can I scale that? As a Jewish funder might ask. I don’t know, but I think it’s a little more scalable than we think. I get this pushback that I find both condescending and just really infuriating. It’s like, Jews don’t study. no, they, no. I’m like, really, that’s interesting, cause I go into any Jewish household and it’s filled with books. Not necessarily about Judaism. Jews are reading books all the time. Jews are studying and learning all the time. So I just, I find that, I find that idea frustrating. And it’s like, we haven’t really tried this yet. So to me to be a Jew is to think differently, and it is to some extent to live differently. I do, you know, in my life live differently in some ways, but not in a kind of very rigorous, halakhic, enclave kind of way.

Yehuda: Yeah, yeah, you say near the end of the book, it’s a great phrase that your aspiration is that we become “uncool, knowing Jews.” Now, I identify with that a lot as someone who works in a space where the primary offering that we do at the Hartman Institute is we don’t force Jews to aggregate together in shared practice. We invite Jews to aggregate together in shared study. And then they get to kind of go do what they do on the other end. At the same time, and I want to push on this kind of study-practice dichotomy. Like with my kids, from a young age, we instructed them that they have to get comfortable being uncomfortable at Shiva houses. You have to go. And obviously, nobody wants to go. It’s awful. And especially when you do it in very traditional contexts where the mourners, you know, sometimes there are loose Shiva houses where like, you know, everybody’s kind of standing around with a drink and it’s like a little bit more of a wake, right? But in some very traditional Shiva houses, the mourner is really responsible for kind of guiding the conversation, but isn’t allowed to say hello. There’s like a real obstacles, and it’s structurally uncomfortable. And they were like, we don’t want to go; it’s really uncomfortable. And we’re like, no, this is uncool, but it’s being uncool practicing Jews. And those are the kind of ways in which counterculture seems to show up the most. You do wear something that marks you as different. You eat this, not that. You celebrate the holidays that nobody understands, like with the lemon and the stick. Like you do those things. So can you talk a little bit about how you think about that? Is… whether knowledge and study gets us fully there and how much of this notion of practice also has to be part of this equation?

Sarah: Knowledge and study absolutely does not get us fully there. And I sometimes am misinterpreted where people think because I’m making such a strong, vehement argument for knowledge and study, they’re like, oh, you want Jews just to sit alone in their homes reading. That’s not Judaism. Come on. Obviously not. But my theory of the case is that study, is that actually knowing the profound, brilliant, challenging, humane wisdom behind all of these rituals and traditions will make you want to do them. It’s certainly been the case for me. Once I actually studied the thinking behind this, I just thought like, wow, this is brilliant. You know this is part of why I wanted to do chaplaincy. I studied the Jewish thinking around bikkur cholim, and I thought like this yeah, this is sacred, this is holy, I do want to be in this space. So you know, of course you can’t just study and sit alone in your house. I don’t even know what that is. But my theory is that you know so often we try to bring in Jews by saying, “Go to the Shabbat service. You’ll love it. It’ll be beautiful.” And they’re sitting there like, what is going on, and it’s embarrassing. Or “come to the Shabbat dinner, that’ll convince you to love Judaism!” And they’re like, I don’t know these prayers, why are people washing their hands without soap? So I just I would actually argue that an on-ramp that perhaps could be explored more is the study, because it’s—Jews do this, right? We all go to high school. Many of us go to college. So I think we often get it a little bit backwards where Jews like you who grew up with this stuff, you’re like, “No, no, Shabbat dinner is amazing. Come on. I love it!” I know you do. But it’s not weird to you. It’s not uncomfortable to you. It has been for me. So I want to offer this path. I think it’s actually a pretty appealing path for many, Jews. And I think it leads to the community, to the practice.

Yehuda: I remember an experience about maybe close to 15 years ago where I was teaching a class. Edgar Bronfman used to host a study session in his office. It was a beautiful thing. It was once a week. And he invited in teachers all the time to come in and to basically teach him and some of the staff around him and some kind of VIPs. And it was very formative for me actually in my role that he invited me a bunch of times to do it. And I remember one time I went and I was like, I’m going to teach about Sukkot. It was right before Sukkot, it’s like so predictable to do the high holidays, but I was like, I’m gonna teach about Sukkot, which I argue is the most important political holiday of ancient Judaism by far. And I taught about it, and I remember my friend, Abbie Pogrebin, who you know well, has been on the show. Abbie basically was side-eyeing me the whole time throughout that class of like, are you kidding? And we talked about it afterwards, you know? Who has the time for Sukkot? You devote all of this energy to the high holidays, you’re knocked out. For me, by the way, that’s like one of the greatest things about it. You’re exhausted from the high holidays, you just go sit outside and have picnics with your people. And it was the first time I think that it made an argument of like, yeah, this is a weird thing for me, but okay, maybe there’s something there. I guess what’s your favorite weird things, in your study? What are your favorite weird things that you’re like, yeah, not that I have to do it, but that like, that’s really interesting and I would not have seen that as part of a serious Judaism.

Sarah: I mean, Tahara, the practice of washing and preparing the dead for burial. I think that is one of the most extraordinarily moving practices. This idea that you say a prayer asking the person for forgiveness because you’re about to clean them, do things that are a little bit, a violation of their privacy, that you don’t pass any tool over their body. You actually walk around. I mean, just the idea that someone you love, as they were kind of birthed into life in love, they’re being birthed into death in love. Like there is just something so profound. And it’s your community members doing this. You know, ideally it’s members of your community doing this and you’re kind of all doing this for each other. I just find that to be so incredibly beautiful and, you know, in a society where we like to just pump people full of chemicals and have professionals do that, maybe that seems weird but I think it is profound.

Yehuda: Yeah. So I guess the flip side of that question is, you know, I’m skeptical of people who fall so in love with Judaism that they love all of it, right? Because then you’re just an apologist.

Sarah: Yeah. Oh, don’t worry.

Yehuda: I think part of being authentically Jewish is that you hate parts of the tradition, that you fight against them, that you think are bad and immoral ideas. This book doesn’t do that, because what you’re doing is giving people kind of an entryway and an on-ramp into seeing a more continuous narrative, but there have got to be things along the way that you’ve been like, no, I wish that wasn’t there. Any of that stand up for you?

Sarah: Yeah. For sure. I mean… You know, the reality is that I think in Judaism, much of the unit of engagement is the family. It’s sort of like the immediate family. And I think if you’re someone like me who is not married, doesn’t have kids, a lot of it doesn’t quite work. Right? Like I think for me to be a Jew in an enclave kind of Judaism, I would be the outlier. Like it would be a little strange and it doesn’t quite fit. And I’m not going to say I hate that. I kind of resist the argument that goes like, I am not the norm, thus the norm is bad. I think this norm is fine, right? I love families, I love kids, this is great, but it does kind of make it challenging and I think it’s a challenge on a much broader level because so many people in the Jewish world are not like me, and it’s like, okay, what do we do with them? How do we engage? I will also say, you know, long hours in shul?

Yehuda: Not your favorite, yeah.

Sarah: Not my most favorite part of, nope, nope, it’s not my most favorite, not gonna lie. Respect it, I respect it, respect the siddur, respect the practice, but I wouldn’t say that that’s where I, you know.

Yehuda: Well, I should tell you, Sarah, that your book is perfectly sized for high holiday reading. So for those who don’t like sitting in shul for a long time, I’m a long advocate of high holiday Shul reading. The book is very political in nature. And I’m curious, you even acknowledge this in one of the middle chapters where you’re talking about your Judaism, especially from the first book from here all along and getting a push back from an audience member who says, where’s your chapter on Israel? And you gave, in your own description, a kind of mealy-mouthed answer—that doesn’t have to be the anchor of Jewish identity in the same way that Holocaust shouldn’t be an anchor of Jewish identity. And then your discovery that maybe that wasn’t the right answer. I’m curious a little bit about how much of this book feels like a response, in your own narrative to the first book, and then I want to ask you how much of your own thinking first, and then how much of the book shifted for you post October 7th.

Sarah: Yeah, it’s funny, have two main regrets about my first book. Number one is Israel, that I didn’t really go into it, and number two is peoplehood. And that wasn’t some strategic decision. It was just where I was at the time, where I’d sort of, fell so in love with ritual, tradition, spirituality, and I was like, guys, I gotta tell you about this. And I just wasn’t, that wasn’t how I was engaged. But I think those are two pretty serious holes in my first book. And in a way, this is kind of a rectification of that. And I will tell you though, October 7th changed absolutely nothing about my argument. I started writing this book probably a year and a half before October 7th. I actually sold it many months before October 7th. October 7th was just kind of more evidence of my argument. The argument of the book did not change as a result of October 7th. Certainly the content did. October 7th was very much illustrating many of the points that I was making. And I think the reason I’ve been so afraid to touch Israel in my first book was because, you know, on the one hand, I was scared of the blowback. It was so controversial. I was scared people would be mad at me. Doesn’t speak very well of me. But honestly, something deeper and frankly more sinister—I was really afraid that there was some kind of like, original sin at the heart of Israel’s founding that if I actually did the research I would discover and be unable to defend. Now where had I gotten that idea? I think, again, going back through history and seeing this virus of Jews being understood as diabolically powerful, deeply depraved, and in a conspiracy to harm us that I think was injected into the Western world’s mind 2,000 years ago in many ways by Christianity and has sort of morphed and changed but more less stayed the same, I do think that kind of infected the way I thought about Israel. And then when I actually did take a dive into the history, I realized, okay this is gonna be a shocking thing to say, I hope it’s okay to say this, but I realized that Israel is a country. I know, blew my mind. Country. Founded like many other countries in the mid-20th century. Much better founding story than our own country, United States of America, I would argue. And I just thought like, wow, that’s interesting. It’s a country. And you know, you can blame Israel education for implying that it’s exceptional, that it’s something other than a country, that it is something magical. Which by the way it is, Israel to me is a miracle. And it is a country. And I think that that discovery was both affirming and a little bit infuriating that I had sort of thought this way. It was disturbing to me.

Yehuda: Yeah, I mean, it gets at a theme that runs throughout what we alluded to before, but we can go a little bit more deeply. In one of your chapters, you describe being in a chaplaincy moment where somebody asks about circumcision, and you gave a kind of apologetic and defensive answer. And then afterwards you were like, why was I, this person was not angry at me, they weren’t angry at the practice. And you felt ashamed by it. And it feels like it echoes a little bit with that, “I’m worried to look into Israel’s history because I’m going to be ashamed,” and it particularly resonates right now with so many people who are, I wouldn’t say angry at Israel’s actions, but feel increasingly ashamed by it. And I wonder if you could unpack a little bit—you obviously don’t think that that shame is deserved. You describe it as in many ways coming out of Christian hegemony, but some of it is okay, right? It’s okay sometimes, because sometimes it’s a marker of peoplehood. I wonder if you have a sense of where that line lives between a healthy amount of shame that Jews have for what other Jews do and the kind that’s actually toxic for us.

Sarah: So yeah, I think there is a kind of embarrassment and disapproval that is healthy and appropriate. For example, personally, I am pretty embarrassed and appalled by the ideology and the policies of the current Israeli governing coalition, and of the current prime minister’s insistence on continuing this war in Gaza. The problem comes when instead of expressing shame or disappointment at a policy or an ideology, it sort of bleeds into the idea of shame at Israel’s very existence. This idea that somehow Israel is the world’s original sin that has to be expiated or abolished. And I think that this is really relying on these old tropes of Jews as diabolically powerful, perversely depraved, and in a conspiracy to harm others. And I think there’s a real problem when Jews and Israel are held to different standards than other countries and other peoples. And Jews ourselves sometimes do this, and this sometimes takes on this form that I find so unnerving, where someone says, well, as a Jew, I hold Jews to higher standards. And I just find that a little bit chilling because it’s like, is that Jewish supremacy? Is that chauvinism? And just to take that a little further, is the implication that I hold others to a lower standard? Really? I mean that’s a bit condescending. Oh, I’m sorry. I’m just sort of taken aback by that. As a Jew I hold Jews and others to high standards, right? So I sort of see that in some parts of the Jewish world, and it just makes me a little bit nervous. Dara Horn writes brilliantly about this in her book People Love Dead Jews. And she talks about this kind of anti-Semitism that isn’t the typical eliminationist kind that we’re used to— Jews are bad, we kill them, nothing you can do to be good. It’s the kind of conversionist kind that says Jews are bad, but you know what? There is something you can do to be good, which is you can reject whatever aspect of Jewish civilization that we the majority find disgusting. And she says this is a form of weaponized shame, right? Like back in the day, reject your Judaism, your Jewish religion, become a Christian. You are saved, maybe, for a little bit. My parents’ generation, reject your name, your nose, your… you know, Jewiness, and be a WASP and you’re saved, maybe. Today, it’s—reject your Zionism, reject your connection to your ancestral homeland because that is disgusting, because it is a colonial, horrific, racist endeavor, and then you’ll be saved and okay. That is a form of weaponized shame. It is trying to make Jews feel ashamed of their nation.

Yehuda: Yeah. I mean, it was hard not to read quite a bit of this anger into the chapter around what you’re encountering on campus, especially after October 7th. And maybe a lot of it is shame among college students. I wrote about this in Jewish Review Books last year. I think a little bit of it is this in constant appeal that Jews have had throughout Jewish history towards the kind of Pauline conversion narrative, right? The seeing of the truth, like, there’s some way of like, you know, literally scales will fall from my eyes and I’ll encounter what’s really true. How much of what you think is going on on campus is really about in anti-Semitism, the imposed kind, and the internalized, kind of self-loathing kind? How much of it is just the opposite of your project, which is an attempt to write a totally different narrative of Jewish history that leads to a very different telos? You even use the quote from your book where you say, “The story of Zionism has been stolen and rewritten by others.” And if that’s the case, it’s like kind of a fair fight, right? You and I want the story to run a particular way. Other people want a particular way. It’s not anti-Semitism. It’s not folly. It’s like, it’s the fight.

Sarah: Yeah, I mean, there’s this pushback I get to my speaking and writing about campus which is like, “The kids are just doing criticism! How dare you! And many of these kids are Jewish!” Okay, I hear that, but here is what criticism is: “I find absolutely abhorrent, appalling, and disgusting this particular policy for these particular reasons.” That would be criticism. Use even stronger language if you want. Curse. I don’t care. But “Jews are Nazis,” you know… is that criticism? Because if that’s criticism, then I guess “Palestinians are terrorists” is criticism, right, if that’s what we’re doing? You know, I would hope that if a Jewish student ever said “Palestinians are terrorists,” we would say, “that is disgusting and racist. Don’t ever say that again.” Or if a Jewish student said “from water to water, Israel shall be Jewish.” Are you kidding me? Right, you and I would both be so sickened by that. We wouldn’t say, well, that’s legitimate criticism. No, it’s not. So let’s just be very clear about what’s going on campus. Very little of this, I think, is actual criticism. And I agree with you, you’re right, it is an attempt to rewrite the Zionist story. And I find so tedious—is it antisemitism? Is it anti-Zionism? I find this so tedious. You know what? Sure. Whatever you want to call it. I’m just gonna concede the argument because I find it so boring. But what I think is important is that I would just notice that this narrative has the same themes that we’ve seen for 2,000 years—that this small group of diabolically powerful, disgustingly depraved Jews is in a conspiracy to do the worst thing. I mean this is like, you know, this kind of anti-Semitism, it’s not the personal prejudice. It is the idea that we the majority are engaged in a grand moral project to save the world and the only thing stopping us are the Jews. “We’re Christianizing the Roman Empire! Ugh, these Jews, they’re stopping us.” “We’re bringing about the great brotherhood of man as communists! Who’s stopping us? The capitalist Jews.” “We’re creating the great, racially pure, Aryan fatherland here in Germany! Who’s stopping us? These race-polluting Jews.” And today you see it on the right. We white American Christians are bringing back white Christian civilization! Who is stopping us? These Jews importing immigrants of color, right? This racist, anti-Semitic, right, replacement theory. And on the left you have, “We are doing anti-racism, anti-colonialism! The only thing stopping us? These Zionists,” which is the polite word for Jews. So, I mean, call it what you want, but I will say it’s the same story over and over again. So you’re right. They are trying to rewrite that narrative. It’s a fight that’s happening. We can go around whining that it’s unfair. But I think just that constant, like, this is not fair. I hate to say this because it’s sort of depressing. But I think we’ve forgotten that we’re Jews, you know? When I was in Israel soon after October 7th, I was talking with this lovely guy who had lost his brother on a kibbutz. It was just heartbreaking. And as he walked away, I thought like, oh… he thought, you know, for many years he thought he was an Israeli and I thought like I was an American of the Jewish faith, but I think we’re still both Jews. Like I think we’ve forgotten that. And yeah, it’s unfair. Sorry. So like, I mean, is it a fair fight? I don’t know. 16 million versus billions? I don’t know if that’s a fair fight. It’s tough on social media, which is a global kind of medium. I do think it’s actually very smart to look at it that way, actually, rather than whining about how it’s unfair to say, okay, this is the fight we are fighting. What are we going to do? What I would lovingly suggest with that fight is something I just thought about very recently when I was talking to a young person who explained to me that “no, no, Zionism means you’re pro-Bibi and pro-occupation,” and I was getting very huffy, like, how dare you? That is not true. That’s a perversion, la, la, la. But then I just stepped back and had a moment of honesty. It’s like, where did they get this idea? Is it possible that maybe they got this idea from a Jewish community that is afraid to show any daylight between the excesses of the current Israeli government? And I understand that fear and I share it to some extent because once you’re criticizing, you can bring the tsunami of anti-Semitism, I get the fear, I really do. And I think for many years that was the right call. I am increasingly worried that maybe that’s the wrong call because if the choice people are presented is Bibi, Smotrich, Ben-Gvir, or anti-Zionism in the traditional actual meaning of the word, like no Jewish state—I don’t think we’re gonna like where they go.

Yehuda: Yeah, so this gets me to something that I’ve been trying to figure out, but now I finally understand what I want to ask about, which is, you just hinted at something which is very suggestive. On one hand, you’re telling our story, right? And I identified with a lot of your story. Listen, it’s hard when you’re trained as a historian to read the popular version of it. And we went back and forth in some of your drafts, about some of those questions. Well, does it say this? But actually, does it mean that? Fine. But you are trying to tell something of what you might call, like, a canonical story. This is our story. And I wonder what room we have for plural stories. I’ll give you my example to this, was, when I interviewed Josh Leifer, I guess that was earlier this year about his book about American Judaism, one of the things that I didn’t fully get at the time that was part of my resistance to his book was that he appealed to his own family’s American Jewish story, which was rooted in a kind of radical politics. And then he’s observing how American Jewish politics have become really bourgeois, and that’s a kind of betrayal of our story. And I didn’t realize until later on, even when I was interviewing, I was like, oh, it’s not that we just disagree about politics—I don’t have his story. My story wasn’t radical Jews on the Lower East Side. You know, it was like up and comers who were just trying to do their thing, you know? And I guess I have a little bit of a fear that you’re right that there are a lot of different ways to engage with Holocaust memory, with the legacy of the creation of the state of Israel. How do we both tell a coherent story that we can embrace and one that allows for multiple authentic Jewish politics and multiple expressions of understandings to the story that doesn’t homogenize our story beyond what actually can hold?

Sarah: Yeah, I’m very conscious that this is just my story. This is why I didn’t present this book as an academic, you know, like, here is the history. No. It was like, okay, I am wrestling with this history from my own vantage point. I’m very aware of that. I mean, keep in mind the history I just talked about is in Europe, right? Many Jews do not have roots in Europe, so it’s a really narrow kind of history, I think it’s almost the wrong question of like, how do we come up with the one story? As Rav Kook, who’s, you know, extraordinary Jewish thinker, I think this is him and I could be wrong. I could be misattributing this, but he conceives of the Jewish people as a body. And to say, well, the heart’s more important than the liver—it’s just nonsense, right? You need a strong heart, a strong liver, strong lungs. And each part of the Jewish body, Haredi, Reform, this and that, they’re each a vital organ, they’re a vital component. The idea that the heart is more important or the liver is more important, it just doesn’t make sense to me. What I think you’re going to have is a bunch of stories. And hopefully there will be something in that Venn diagram that overlaps. I’m familiar with Josh’s story and argument and some of it resonates with me, some of it doesn’t. It’s not like they’re two separate stories. There’s overlap in that Venn diagram. So I think, and look, there are lots of fringe stories that are kind of the little circles far out there and not many people can relate. So hopefully there’s some overlap in the Venn diagram that lets us say like, okay, I think this is what’s going on, how do we move forward? And recognizing actually, not everyone relates to that story and how do we include those people too?

Yehuda: Yeah. Let me ask you one last question, which is one of the literary techniques in your book is this experience in chaplaincy. And a place where you interrogated, as we talked about, your own shame, and you discovered the ways in which Christian language is dominant in how religion is constructed in America and in pastoral spaces and trying to carve out, looking for like, is this really what Jews do? Is this how Jews talk about the sick, to the sick, with the dead, et cetera? The next big thing, and we’re very excited about this, and very proud, that you’ll be joining the second cohort of the Hartman Beit Midrash for rabbis. You’re going to move from being this chaplain space and a writer and a discoverer about Judaism into a very different role. I wonder if you could share a little bit about what becoming a rabbi means to you, and what you think will be different when you move from just discovering Judaism to the responsibility of being a much more explicit curator of Judaism for others.

Sarah: So it’s funny, actually Yehuda, when you first came to me about this program, I think you’ll remember, I actually said like, no, I’m good, I’m a Jew just like everyone else. I’m just a Jew who learns, that’s my shtick. I don’t wanna lose that relatability. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized I really hit my ceiling with the level of knowledge I have and with the ability to learn on my own. Doing this auto-diadact, catch-as-catch-can, take a class here, do a study group. It’s just not a great way to have a really deep understanding of this tradition. And I realized that I’ve kind of run my course in this pretending to just be like, I’m just like you. I also just have this kind of, sort of hypothetical question of like, what if we could go back 250 years and just as we enter modernity, what if we could like almost undo that, but not be soaked in Christian anti-Judaism? Not be surrounded by people who hate us and think we’re disgusting? What if we were able to kind of look at our tradition through just really curious, openhearted, loving eyes? Like what would that, like what would the Judaism we create look like? And I think that’s actually the project that so many Jews and Jewish organizations are engaged in today. And I think for me to actually engage in that project, I need to know the tradition in a deep way. And I think, Hartman, it is the kind of learning that you guys do, the engagement, the fact that this cohort is such a serious and accomplished group of people. I’ve just been blown away by the people I’ve met already. The depths of the conversations, the extremely high caliber of the teachers. To have teachers like this, to have classmates like this, it is so critical. And I think you really persuaded me with this argument that, you know, if you want to be a voice, if you want to be weighing on Jewish tradition, you should actually have a deeper grounding, right? And maybe actually have that title that leads people to listen to you. And I think that was just a very compelling argument to me. I’m just, I’m so, it’s kind of moved me that you all knew what I needed before I did. It really speaks, you know, I’m very grateful to you for that and I just, I could not be more excited to do this program.

Yehuda: Well, as one of the original uncool, knowing Jews, I’m really excited to be on this journey together with you, Sarah. Thanks for coming on the show today.

Sarah: Thank you so much, Yehuda.