In a special crossover this week, Yehuda Kurtzer takes the guest seat for a change, as he is interviewed for the podcast Fearless Interventions by Hartman Teen Fellow, Max Alperstein and his co-host Jacob Finkel. Together they tackle a range of issues at the top of their minds, including navigating political polarization, exploring the boundaries of Jewish identity, and pursuing earnest pluralism.

Learn more and apply for the Hartman Teen Fellowship.

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In a frenzied media cycle, Identity/Crisis creates better conversations about the issues facing contemporary Jewish life. Host Yehuda Kurtzer, president of the Shalom Hartman Institute, talks with leading thinkers to unpack current events affecting Jewish communities in North America, Israel, and around the world, revealing the core Jewish values underlying the issues that matter most to you.

Two Teens and Their Fearless Interventions 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 issues facing contemporary Jewish life. I’m Yehuda Kurtzer. We’re recording this introduction on Thursday, April 18th, 2024.

I love what I do for a living. And I love the variety of things that I get to do. I oftentimes pinch myself thinking back to my early days in my career as an aspiring academic, miserable with that path and thinking about what I might be able to do and I can’t believe I get to do it. So I don’t want what I’m going to say next to sound like complaining. The reality is that between my teaching commitments, writing, podcasting, work, travel, fundraising, and the general work of running an organization, one challenge is that my schedule often does not afford a lot of flexibility. But for the skills of my colleague Gabrielle, who manages my schedule and makes it all work, and the smart periodic times when I say no to things, it can be hard to accommodate additional external requests, but I have two very fixed categories of exceptions, requests I will always say yes to and find a way in my schedule to make it work.

The first is when professionals working in the Jewish community reach out for advice or support in navigating their career journeys. I don’t always know that I’m helpful in those situations, but I feel that it’s a responsibility rooted in privilege that those of us in leadership positions support other people working in this field as best we can.

I think I was also heavily influenced by my two years teaching at the Hornstein program at Brandeis, which is a graduate program for folks seeking to work professionally in the Jewish community. That time was also when I shifted from my career path in academia to working for the Jewish people. I really loved my students and the choices that they were making, and I’m still in touch with several of them, and I cherished the responsibility then of helping them see and understand the landscape of Jewish life into which they were entering and the weight of history that sat on their shoulders.

Since then, like I said, I’ve tried to always say yes to any Jewish professional who wants time to sit and talk. The truth is, I’ve learned as much from those conversations as I think I’ve offered, and if this is you, don’t be shy. Email us at [email protected].

The second group I always make time for are young people. I like using the phrase young people because it makes me feel like Wilford Brimley. By young people I mean teens and college students. I could go on a long rant about where we have failed our young people in our systems of Jewish education, but I’d rather frame this positively. When teens and college students reach out to adults they respect for time and guidance or to contribute to their projects, it’s an incredible gift that they’re giving us. Any adult working in Jewish education who doesn’t drop everything to make time for them is missing the whole point of the enterprise.

When I was recently at Berkeley giving a lecture, there was a VIP reception afterwards and there were a lot of VIP people at it, but there were also a ton of Berkeley undergraduates and law students. And I basically hid in the corner with the students to talk to them.

I learned a lot from teachers of mine from when I was a teenager, those that treated me with respect and spoke to me like an adult. I also learned a lot from my Aunt Joyce, of blessed memory, who spoke to me like a peer since I was old enough to speak. I’m not sure whether that was because she didn’t know how to talk to kids, I think that was partially it, or maybe because she was committed to the bit, but it was life-changing for me and I want to pay it forward to others.

Working with teens and college students has become central to our work at Hartman over the past few years. If the budget of an organization is an indicator of our priorities, I can tell you now that over half of the program activity of the Hartman Institute globally is dedicated to educational work with people under the age of 25. That’s a sea change for us as an organization from even five years ago, a sign of what we think is the most important priority for the future of Jewish life. Kind of makes sense. If you care about the future, talk to future people.

So in that spirit, when two teens, Max and Jacob, reached out to me a month or so ago telling me that they were superfans of this podcast and that there are hosts of their own podcasts and would I come on as a guest, I jumped at the opportunity. There’s nothing a podcast host likes more than the chance to be on the other side, and I absolutely loved being Max and Jacob’s guest. They were so well prepared and so thoughtful, but more than that, they were kind and they were generous and they were really respectful.

Older folks tend to rag on the next generation as being individualistic and distracted, and if you’ve ever believed that, I encourage you to listen carefully as Max and Jacob show up in this conversation. Their podcast is called, delightfully, Fearless Interventions. Maybe that tells the story of two teenagers who set big goals on the types of people they want to bring onto their podcast. When it was done recording, I offered the two of them, to their great delight, that we might run it in our feed as well.

Max, by the way, is also a Hartman Teen Fellow. We’re accepting nominations and applications for next year’s program. Information about the program will be in the credits and in the show notes, and it’s worth looking at the website in particular, just to see an amazing photo array of some great smiling Jewish kids in the business of studying Torah, building friendships, and envisioning the future.

So here are Max and Jacob taking the mic for today’s show. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Max: Welcome back to Fearless Interventions. I am your host, Max Alperstein, here with my co-host, as always, Jacob Finkel. This is the 17th episode of our amazing podcast. And today we have this special opportunity to host the guest, Dr. Yehuda Kurtzer, president of the Shalom Hartman Institute and host of the Identity/Crisis podcast. Yehuda is a leading voice in Jewish discourse with his extensive academic background and dedication to innovation. Yehuda’s insights promise to shed light on the intricate levels of Jewish identity and community.

I had the pleasure of spending some time with Yehuda at the Hartman Teen Fellowship for Shabbaton. Now I have the absolute pleasure of welcoming him onto my podcast, and we will see you in about 12 seconds.

Okay, first of all, thank you so much for coming. How are things going overall? You know, we’d like to start with just an update on life.

Yehuda: Yeah. Thank you. Good to be on your show. How are things going? Uh, it’s been a hard 169 days or so. We could talk about that a little bit later, but right now everything’s okay. We had a nice Purim in our house. Purim is the high holidays in our family. It’s a big deal. So we had a really nice weekend and our family dressed up. We do like a family costume. It’s a big thing. We dressed up as “Jews on the roof.” The two of us were Talmudic characters and one was Fiddler and one was Bathsheba bathing on the roof tempting King David. It was pretty good.

And then we hosted a whole bunch of people yesterday. We, for our Purim feast we do some version of making it feel like you’re eating non-kosher. So this year last year we did real dairy, fake meats. This year and this year we did real meat, fake dairy. Chicken parm sandwiches. It was great.

Max: That’s interesting. Yeah. That sounds good.

Yehuda: You know, Purim is an upside-down day. So, you know, you mix things up.

Max: Yeah, for sure. Yeah. So I guess I wanted to start with, I’ve had the amazing opportunity of hearing you talk plenty of times, both on your podcast and as well as through Hartman and other talks that you’ve given.

But what I’d love to hear is a little bit about your upbringing, as I know your father was the ambassador at times, and just such an interesting upbringing, and how that kind of played a hand in where you are today.

Yehuda: Yeah, thank you. Yeah, a little bit of an unusual upbringing. I was born in the Washington area, but my family went overseas for seven years between when I was about two and a half till I came when I came back when I was 10. We lived overseas in Egypt, you know, from the late 70s to the early 80s. And then in Israel. At the time, my dad wasn’t the ambassador yet. He was a foreign service officer. But he was breaking through what was kind of a known invisible wall, which was he was an Orthodox Jew who was committed to working on the peace process and working in the Middle East. And he was told there was a lot of anti-Semitism in the State Department in the 70s. He was told there’s no way we’re going to let a visible Jew get involved with this work. And he just plugged through it. So that was totally fascinating and very formative.

And I didn’t move to the States until I was 10. So I had to, like, learn how to speak and write English, had to learn how to, you know, understand American culture. And that was unusual. But the biggest part of it was that, you know, I was growing up in an Orthodox community, which, you know, has certain narrownesses around what kind of jobs people do and what our relationship is to non-Jews and certain politics around Israel and Palestine. All of those things were like really, really different in my home.

So I kind of feel like I got this access to both, you know, the nice insular parts of being a modern Orthodox Jew, and also this, I don’t know, portal to the world, which was really unusual for a lot of my peers.

Jacob: Was your first language Hebrew or Arabic?

Yehuda: Well, so at home, you know, my parents spoke English. And when, in, in, when we were moved to Cairo, I was very little, I was, you know, in kindergarten, pre-elementary school. So we spoke English and just went to an American school, but I went to an Israeli public school for first, second, and third grade. So I learned Hebrew really well, was fluent, and at home, my parents said that my brothers and I, you know, would fight in Hebrew. So then by the time we were moving back to the States, we needed some tutors to get back to being more comfortable in English.

Max: I see. So having such like a, an outside kind of upbringing and all over the place, how did that stem in and tie into your Jewish, like, personal life and your non-Jewish narrative, and how do you stay true to that and continue with that through where you are now?

Yehuda: Well, I think the first thing is, I think if you grew up in a family that’s committed to public service, it sticks. You want to be connected to public service one way or another, either professionally or in a serious volunteer way, and almost all of my siblings and their spouses actually have been connected to one form or another of public service and I don’t think that’s a coincidence. And my father still, to this day, he retired in 2005 from the foreign service after he served as an ambassador for two terms, and since then he’s been teaching at Princeton and one of the things he talks about all the time is trying to convince young people to go into careers of public service. So that was very formative.

I think caring deeply about Israel, both as a Jew and as an American, stuck with me in a deep way. You know, my dad was a negotiator in the peace process and lived in Israel as a US official twice. And from the outside, you would say, how can a person who is passionate about Israel as a Jew also be dispassionate about Israel as representing America and being an ally.

And the answer is, you can, it’s just, it’s more sophisticated. It’s not simplistic. And I’ve, I love that. I embrace that and I’ve carried that with me.

And I also, I guess would say in my job at Hartman, I get to work with an Israeli organization and live here in America. And I think the experience of bouncing around a little bit as a kid stuck in a good way, I like living in one place, but feeling like I can bounce back and forth between America and Israel. That meant a lot to me.

Jacob: Your father was the ambassador and you went into not exactly an ambassador, but a similar field where you work with Judaism and try to connect the two in a way. I’m not too knowledgeable about like what ambassador is. Cause like, I’m kind of still learning that. So I think starting with that would actually be pretty helpful. But like, I know that coming from the Middle East to America had to have been like a crazy, like, culture shift, especially because you’re so used to the cultural norms in Israel. And you had to switch really quickly and then start your middle school and then go into high school and on to college. So how was that kind of switch?

Yehuda: Yeah, I mean, I’ll come back to talk about what an ambassador does in a minute. But yeah, that was a very weird experience from fourth grade to fifth grade. I remember, like, my parents kind of teaching us a little bit about football because we were moving back to the Washington area and in Washington, this was before there was even a Washington Nationals baseball team. You have a terrible basketball team. You have a terrible hockey team. Football is, is king. So they taught us like what football is and how to be able to not sound like an idiot among the other fifth-grade boys.

And, I don’t know there were a lot of things that took a couple of years actually to readjust from living overseas. We got there. I think we’re young enough. I think if we’ve been a lot older, that kind of cultural stuff is harder to connect to.

What an ambassador does, basically, is. ambassador is part of the State Department and the part of the foreign service and you are essentially the lead representative of your home country and to another country and you engage in diplomatic work.

There’s, the United States has huge interests in Israel and Egypt, where my dad was the ambassador. Economic, political, certainly, you know, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and you are the lead representative of the U. S. government in that place. So, yeah, my dad and I, our work is very different, but I think what we hold in common is that our Judaism, our Jewish values are really critical to what we do. We’re, we have deep attachments to the United States of America. And we also are both committed to a life in public service, and in some ways also a life in public, for better or worse.

Max: So, speaking of core values and commitment to both Judaism in America and Israel and all other places, I was just wondering how you perceive and how you see the future of the ever-evolving relationship between American Jews and Israeli Jews and just Israelis as a whole, and how we can continue to balance and protect that.

Yehuda: Yeah, wonderful. It’s a wonderful question. And I’m glad that you included the last part or the question of how do we, I think you said balance and protect, which I think is a beautiful way to express it.

You know, this is the thing that I think about professionally more than anything else. You know, one of the big questions that the Hartman Institute exists to help ensure is that the Jewish people don’t walk away from each other. And the interesting thing about the time in which we live, and this is the time you’ve grown up into, so it’s the only one, you know, is that there’s something weirdly fragile right now about American Jews and Israel and pulling apart from one another, et cetera, which has only been created because of the success of both the American Jewish experience and Israeli experience.

If Israel was really, really vulnerable today, like on the verge of being destroyed, there would be no question. We would feel worried and nervous and protective, and the same would go for if our position was really, really precarious here as American Jews, we would also feel like, you know, bonded and tethered to each other in an unusual way.

It’s only because we’ve gotten to this place where we’re relatively safe and comfortable that we can start saying, well, why do I need you? You don’t have my values. You don’t speak my language. I don’t like your government, you know, in the last couple of days, you know, in particular, it’s been a very dicey moment because it feels as though America and Israel are still powerful allies, but it’s hard to sustain that relationship, even a really powerful one, throughout a war.

So I would say I continue to be worried. I think there are some positive signs since the war started about the American Jewish community and its resilience in its relationship with Israel, especially watching young people who are like, oh, this is what like my people’s fears were about these, you know, what happened to Hamas did on October 7th, so I feel attached to this. But it will require of us to be a, you know, more generations of people who feel that the responsibility for holding the Jewish people together sits on our shoulders to take them seriously.

Max: Just a quick follow-up to that, earlier today, I had the pleasure of listening to your Music in a Time of War episode on Identity/Crisis. And you talked about how music in Israel kind of took a divided-politically nation at the time and helped unify a country that was so divided and it became almost a unification under, uh, understanding of the pain, I’ll say, and the pain and the suffering that had happened over October 7th.

So, I have not finished it, but maybe just because I’m wondering, do you think that also translated into a relationship between American Jews and Israelis and that music, that Israeli music, or just the Jewish music in general has kind of been like a no words bridge to bridge the gap between us two and kind of bring us together more?

Yehuda: You know, it’s a good question. I would say it could be. But we’d have to invest in it. I think right now, do both of you speak Hebrew a little bit? Well, put like this, if you have a little bit, you’re already vastly ahead of most American Jews, and it could be, meaning culture could be one of the great bridges between different parts of the Jewish people, because if we share the same music and art and film, we actually could disagree politically but we would still feel like we were part of the same conversation. We would see ourselves as belonging to the same kind of people.

But the problem is that most American Jews don’t speak or understand the language with which, now, the majority of Jewish culture is being produced. The majority of Jewish culture is being produced in Hebrew and in Israel, and I wish it was the case, I think if more American Jews listened to and understood Israeli rap and for instance, the amount of protest language in the Israeli rap scene about democracy and violence and occupation, and be like, oh, I get it culturally and I identify with what this movement’s trying to do, but without access to that translation, we’re farther and farther apart.

Jacob: What are some other insights you’ve gotten from your podcast?

Yehuda: The podcast has been an amazing project. I suspect you’re having the same kind of experience. It’s a fascinating thing to do, right? You meet really interesting people. You have to do homework to coax out the conversation. What I try to do with my podcast is, there’s so much noise and there’s a lot of the culture of debate and you know a lot of media figures, it’s like a kind of a gotcha thing and my feeling is, my guest is my guest and my job is to create the best version of a conversation on the issues that the guest is coming to talk about. It’s a lot, it’s a lot of work, but I’ve loved it.

I will also say, we launched the podcast the week of the lockdown in March of 2020, by accident. I mean, we were just planning for it for a while. We were like, that’s when we’re going to start it. And it turned out to be a great project to start during a pandemic. Cause you know, I have a whole bunch of equipment now here at home and I was able to build up an audience base throughout that time and it’s totally, it’s, everyone’s home, right? And I used to travel all the time. Instead, I was able to do reach more people with better educational content without having to get on a plane. So it’s been an amazing kind of adventure.

Jacob: So I do track and my coach, I get frustrated about a lot of things. Cause like tracks, one of those sports, you can’t really control much. And he always says, focus on what you can control. So how can we focus as a group, and also like within the Hartman Institute in New York and Boston, everywhere, how can we control like, to like heal that divide between the two sides?

Yehuda: Yeah I mean, I think it sounds like you’re talking about things like polarization, the things that they’re tearing our society apart where there’s deep differences. So I think you already alluded to one of the things that we can do, which is, you find your own particular lane. Where does polarization exist in your networks, in your community? In other words, you probably can’t solve for the divisions in the US Congress tomorrow. You can solve for issues in your own public school or private school. You can listen for, you know, can your synagogue, for instance, be a more healthy place for discourse? Can a youth group be a place that you get to model civics and democracy education? You know, you just find your particular lane.

I can tell you professionally, as the Institute grew, and I felt like as my own work grew, I got bigger and bigger platforms in the world, you become tempted to solve for bigger and bigger problems. So that’s just a little bit of a mistake. And you know, what you really should do is say, okay, you have greater agency to work on the issues you’ve been working on all along and actually may be able to make a difference on them.

And for me, that’s been a reminder, otherwise you can get, you know, ego can take you away from yourself. You’re like, I could go to bigger thing instead of like, it’s going to be hard enough to deal with what you can deal with in your own neighborhood.

And I’ll give you an example of this. There’s a great essay called, I quote it all the time called “The Reductive Seduction of Other People’s Problems,” which says from far away, other people’s problems look solvable. I’ll just come in and fix it. When you get close, you realize that like the same person, much more complicated, like the same person who wants to solve a water problem in South Saharan Africa with like a patent will not volunteer for the school board in their own public school district. Cause they’re like, Oh my God, that’s going to be impossible to solve. And it turns out like the really hard work is to say, where am I in the world? What’s the version of the challenges I am uniquely capable of addressing and then spend your whole life on them.

Max: So let’s say that you do see these challenges. What do you recommend for, you know, for a young teenager going in high school? How do we get out there? How do we use our voice and share our beliefs? And we’re not just yelling, we’re not just seeing who has the loudest voice, but who can really push out there and make a change?

Yehuda: I’ll tell you something that, I’m gonna sound old, but I heard from a Hillel director a few years ago that he can tell three minutes into a conversation whether a kid who’s just come to Hillel for the first time has Shabbat dinner with their family every week, because kids who have Shabbat dinner every week can conduct a conversation for three minutes without looking at their phone. I found that to be like an alarming, astonishing comment, right? A little depressing, right?

Now, the reason I’m mentioning it is like, here, you guys have this project. I think it’s a great thing, this podcast. It could mean two things. It could mean it’s a technology project, which I think is fine. Or it could be a human relationship platform, which I think is basically what the world needs a lot more of, right? What does it mean to become an empathetic listener, an attentive listener? What does it mean to reach out as you both did be like, Hey, we know you’re a busy person. Can you come on our podcasts?

I think that’s really important. You learn immense skills after that, take risks on things like that. You know, you can use a platform like this to invite on guests who you know, you’re really going to disagree with on hard issues and invite them to, challenge yourself to say, I’m here to have you as a guest and you’re going to say things I don’t like, but my job is not to argue with you, fight with you and defeat you and crush you. It’s to name something and then be able to disagree respectfully.

All of those are like world-changing activities. And it’s precisely because of the environments and the technological environments that we’re in, that we have fewer and fewer incentives to do that kind of work. So that feels to me like something that would feel like really countercultural for young people in this country to be doing.

Max: Got it. And that sounds amazing. Now, I’m sorry, I don’t want to cut you off, Jacob because I know it’s your turn, but I do have a follow-up question to that, sorry.

In terms of those types of disagreements and those almost, I don’t say arguments, but those conversations are very difficult. For me personally, sometimes when I have on people who, not necessarily a podcast, but talk in general, people who inherently disagree with me, and one of the core things that comes up from the really religious standpoint is whether or not I truly count as a Jew, being that I’m adopted and that I was born in Guatemala, adopted and very young, I converted like as, I’m as Jewish as I’m going to get. And I guess my question to you is both, like, how does one combat those kinds of, like, inherent fundamental values that are at odds with my place in the Jewish community or Israel, and as well as, like, from your standpoint, which I may be setting you up with one answer, but what makes a Jew? Is it the religious beliefs, the cultural affiliation, or lineage?

Yehuda: I mean, the answer is obviously some or all of the above. And in fact, I sit on the research seminar that talks about this very issue, we work on it every week, on Jewish identity. And what we’ve been discussing and arguing is that Jewish identity has always been a moving target. Throughout our history, you of course are Jewish through some form of ethnic lineage, which would suggest that it’s like a blood faith.

But at the same time, we’ve always had the door open for converts, which means it’s not really about blood faith. It’s also about commitment, the desire to be part of the people. And we’ve always been fighting over questions of, well, what if a person does all of these things? Does that make them Jewish? Or what if a person decides they no longer want to be Jewish?

First of all, no one should question your Jewishness, right? We, our tradition is very clear about the fact that number one, you never are supposed to question anybody’s Jewishness, even if you have reason to. And the second is certainly converts stand at Mount Sinai. And our tradition has so much wonderful Torah about how In the place where convert stands, born Jews can’t really stand because we never crossed the Rubicon, you know, it’s just have an accident of birth So I’m sorry that that’s happened to you.

I think the thing that we have to do, well, I’ll quote this right from a teacher of mine, Rabbi David Ellenson, who actually passed away earlier this year, who was as major leader in the Reform movement. David taught that there’s a difference between identity and status. Identity is what I feel about myself and status is conferred by a community.

So the reality is we don’t have a Pope. So that means that there’s nobody who’s deciding on status for everybody. And it means that you are going to have to go through life with people who think you are less of a Jew or not a Jew. And that’s awful and painful. And on the other hand, you’re going to find as many communities as you will, and you will find many of them, who don’t have that baggage and that, or that hangups. And that’s just a feature of what it means to be a modern Jew. And I think we prefer that than the Pope model, where one group of people or one tradition was totally responsible for policing Jewish identity. I think that would ultimately be worse for us.

I think our job, though, is to still educate one another, to remember that like Jewish identity has always been complicated, and that we’re better off as a people, I think this is the punchline. We’re better off as a people worrying less about what infractions we have in people’s, like, backgrounds or lineage and what we’re doing. And instead saying like, how do we celebrate the 15 million of us who we have and all of the biodiversity that comes with the Jewish people. I think that’s the complicated place that we’re in, you know, as people and as a community right now.

Jacob: I just want to change it to a little bit of a sadder topic, but what you said was kind of inspiring. You said 169 days since October 7th, it was 169, I’m not Crazy, right?

Yehuda: I think that’s right. I, one of my kids wears the masking tape, which has the countdown of the days, but I haven’t seen him yet today, but,

Max: 170.

Yehuda: 170 now.

Jacob: So I have been like trying to follow the situation and everything. And I remember seeing at one point that there’s this group of Jewish people that were Jewish, but they didn’t support the state of Israel. And also there’s a bunch of young people who are, I feel like getting the full education and then making a decision instead of jumping to a conclusion, who are joining that group, or they’re just skipping the fact that they’re Jewish and they just don’t want the state of Israel to exist in order for Palestine to exist.

How can we like, not only educate, but also understand each other’s differences without getting violent over such a touchy topic, that’s been very touchy throughout the course of history?

Yehuda: Yeah. Um, hmm… Where do I even start? This has been a hard thing for me. You know, one of the things that I’m committed to most personally and institutionally is an idea called pluralism. And pluralism is a term that gets kind of tossed around, but what, it can mean just the stuff that we do to get along with others in an open society, but it can also mean something loftier, which is, none of us have a monopoly on truth. And therefore we should build societies that are skeptical of people who insist that they’re the only right ones.

And what that means is that you should be careful not to become dogmatic and fundamentalist about our politics. The problem is sometimes you come up with something like a war. And during a war, you only really have two options. Do I support the red team or do I support the blue team? Right? It’s like, imagine being at camp and they declare a color war and you’re like, oh, I don’t, I choose not to identify with either of these positions. It’d be like absurd.

And I have been outspoken about how I think it’s the responsibility of the American Jewish community to support Israel during this war, because I think it’s a just war by war theory. And I’ve been outspoken that I think the folks who have been calling for a ceasefire immediately actually were taking a position that I considered to be dangerous for the state of Israel in the world and one that needed to be criticized.

And the hardest criticism I got back was, what happened to your pluralism? And that’s the dance that I feel that we’re in right now. Can you hold strongly to a belief and be willing to say something about it and then know that you have to still hold on to the sense that you might be a little bit wrong.

And the truth is, in this case, I know I might be a little bit wrong. There are a lot of things that are happening during this war that I’m not proud of, that the state of Israel is doing. I don’t support this Israeli government, and that’s an impossible thing place to be. And I mostly would rather be in a place of, as I was responding to Max before about Jewish identity, I would rather be educating people about why support for Israel is important than policing why I think their opinions about Israel are bad. But I think that’s the pressure that a lot of us have been brought under in this time.

And you know, I’m hoping, please God, the war is gonna end soon, for a lot of reasons, the hostages will come home, and you know, we can see real change, and then we can go back to the real work, which is, during peace time, you can educate people differently about how complicated the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is and why Israel is not committing genocide and it is not a colonial apartheid state. But during this time, you can see why people are drawn to really polarized narratives of the world.

Jacob: I have a quick little thought, but is it peace right after the war? When does the war end? Because even when the war ends, Israel is still going to have an internal conflict that they need to pick up on, that happened before. So is it going to be kind of like one of those wars in history that the battle ended, but the war didn’t end until like four or five years later.

Yehuda: Yeah. The real war that we’re talking about here is that Israel has been at war on and off for 76 years of its existence. And the unresolved issue is not even a war issue. It’s a conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians, and that’s not going away. The fates of Israelis and Palestinians are, we like to say, inextricably intertwined. The safety of one is reliant on the safety of the other. So that’s what we mean by genuinely solving, for the problem. It’s not ending the hostilities today. It’s actually ending the conflict

Max: A question of, more of like the conflict side and the side of internal arguments with both pro-Palestinians who are here at home in America for me, and Jews who might not have the same exact opinion for me, and what it really means to have an open-minded conversation.

But at home, I think that, for better or for worse being, as I mentioned before, and like having a little bit of a cultural hand outside of the Jewish circle, and as much as I believe that I truly am part of the Jewish circle, I have a hand outside, being that I’m from Guatemala, and I think a lot of times people who are non-Jewish will often, both at, my communals at home who are not Jewish, friends who are not Jewish, and things like that, will come to me and kind of be like, look, you’re our spokesperson for pro-Palestinian, and for the Jews, you’re our spokesperson for pro-Israel, go work your magic, be, you know, proud of either side.

And I think that, for me personally, I stand very much to pro-Israel, I’m very, very much a believer in that, but, I think a lot of things that I struggle with is being able to have a productive conversation that is not undermined with the idea that I need to change someone’s mind, and I need to prove them wrong, and I need to show them that Israel’s right, Israel’s this, Israel’s that.

And I think, like you said before, I would much rather spend time showing why I support Israel  and less time explaining why they their belief is wrong. And my question to you is, when you find an inherent disagreement and you find this belief that is so fundamentally impossible to change and so hard to overcome, like, if they, inside of their mind, believe that Israel is committing genocide in whatever strange way they managed to get to that assumption and that belief, I can’t, at a fundamental level, I can’t compromise with them. I can’t find a commonality. And how do you safely and productively continue said conversation without endangering either yourself or others?

Yehuda: Oh, um, so first of all, there’s a couple of different issues that are stitched together here. One of which is there’s the question of our relationships with others on the basis of the things that we care about the most. Therefore, can I stay in relationship with someone who believes that the thing that I care about the most is fundamentally immoral? That’s one question. There’s another question which relates to the fact that we’re here and not there, which is a political question, which says, how do I make sure that Israelis and Palestinians are killing each other, but those of us who are pro-Israel and pro-Palestine don’t have to kill each other here?

This is a difference, and they connect in that we have to decide, as moral people, how much do we want to weaponize our own passions. So, on one hand, I’m sympathetic, Max, to the idea that if you’re telling me that my people are committing genocide, I’ve got nothing to say to you. I feel that that’s a slander against the Jewish people, and I’m going to push really hard against it.

On the other hand, I’m really worried that in the process of becoming really loyal to our people, we’re actually, like, we’re damaging a whole bunch of relationships with people of other faiths and other communities that we don’t have to damage. Because ultimately, I’m not picking up weapons here, and neither are they.

And on most issues here in America, us and our interfaith and intergroup allies might actually have much more to work on that will be damaged by the fact that we’re kind of guilty by association to the groups that we adhere to. So I guess I would say, our job is to work as hard as we can to prevent those relationships to getting to the point where they’re accusing you of genocide and you’re accusing them of slander.

Once you’ve reached that point, you’re right, there may not be a way to get back. You may have crossed over a bridge that you can’t get back to. It’s what a philosopher named Avishai Margalit calls, he says, we should always be committed to compromise. As human beings, we should always be trying to reach common ground. And we should know when we’ve hit the place called rotten compromise. Once you’ve made a rotten compromise, you feel bad about yourself. You’ve like made a deal with the devil, but that shouldn’t disincentivize you from the next time around. Now I’m going to be really cautious and I’m not going to try to be a compromising person.

I think we want to try as hard as we can to stay in relationship with people who we disagree with, even on things that are really important. And maybe those relationships will help prevent the people who we care about from being able to come to casual and callous conclusions that we’re going to find totally morally untenable.

You see what I’m trying to say? Like, I know that once you’ve hit that point, there’s, that’s a point of no return, but I’m asking what could we do before you get to that point to maybe prevent that from being the inevitable consequence in our relationships with others.

Max: And I think for what we can do, from just, from my own perspective, I believe that before we go into an argument and before we lay our hearts out onto a table, is it the better approach, I guess now more of a question than a statement, but is it the better approach to kind of put my fundamental values out on the table and say, look, this is what it is, if you don’t can’t get by that, like, we can’t go anywhere. Or, do I solely work in my beliefs and hope and pray that, you know, maybe, maybe we won’t hit that barrier? Maybe we won’t hit that wall? And is it worth going into a conversation bound for failure?

Yehuda: The more that you stipulate, here are my red lines of how I can be in relationship with other people, by definition, you’re going to narrow the political communities you can belong to. You’re going to, right from day one, indicate who you can’t be friends with. Imagine if you do that on a college campus, you show up the first day and you declare, these are my red lines. Anyone who doesn’t believe in the following three commitments, I can’t interact with you. You might find a couple of friends, but it’ll be really, really hard. And everyone will know who you are right away. And it’s just not a great social strategy.

Now, that said, you want to avoid the other situation, which is, hey, you’re in with all your buddies, and then it turns out that they all think that Israel is a racist, apartheid, genocide-committing state, and you’re sitting there, the only person in the room, and you feel like you’ve hidden your politics, and now you’re complicit, because you’re part of this group. So there’s no easy answer to that. You’re talking about I will show up as a complicated human. That’s no, it’s no easy answer to that.

Jacob: I feel like kids nowadays, like I see it a lot at like my, so I go to North, it’s a huge public school. I feel like kids nowadays, like they really established that like pretty early on, like I know kids I used to be friends with, but like they post a lot about the pro-Palestinian, like media and whatnot. So like how, you talked about a rotten compromise, but I feel like this is a unique situation where everyone’s stemming from the same, like, place. Like I know some kids that are Jewish and they chose the pro-Palestinian side. Is there a way to get out of the rotten compromise? Even though like they’re so far apart?

Yehuda: In the war, it’s hard to do. I will tell you candidly, I have relationships with folks who have very, very different politics than me on Israel and Palestine. And we kind of taken a break during the war. As painful as that is to say. Maybe after the war we’ll be able to debrief and do something different. But you also you indicated maybe a little bit of the solution to the problem in your question, which is, it’s become like a habit for young people to be so performative with our political views and with statements about identities and opinions. And I just don’t know why, why do people do that to themselves?

You lock yourself into the narratives that other people are going to want to tell about you. There’s a, it’s so strange. I feel very fortunate that social media didn’t come around until I was a young adult in my 20s. And I feel like it saved me from well, if I had written this when I was 19, would I’ve ever gotten this kind of job? Or like, those kinds of things, they stay with you.

And I know that it’s a very common part of our culture that people like to narrate their identities. I am this, and I’m not that, and I’m this, and I believe in this, and I believe in that. And it’s part of what we think makes us unique. It’s actually not. It’s actually a means of describing ourselves with reference to other things. And I think there’s a real loss in it. And I would say one of the most powerful, again, counter-cultural things you can do as a young person, is to not play that game.

Max: So given that you’ve spent a lot of time speaking, as you said, your job is to talk, your job is to share, your job is to teach, and I guess my question is, when you are choosing your articles, your essays, your podcasts, how do you choose that? How do you make sure you’re choosing the right people and the people who you know that are gonna be productive and have the right mindset coming in?

Yehuda: With the podcast, I have a great team and we meet every week and we plan out a few weeks ahead, at least. Sometimes you have guests where you need to do a lot more planning and I have person on my team who does research about guests, including like sometimes personal, they put out a book, so she’ll read the book beforehand. Give me some notes. Here’s what to focus on. So it is a bit of a team effort.

We do a lot of thinking as our, when we brainstorm about storytelling and balance, if we’ve been leaning so far on one type of conversation, how do we kind of mix it up? How do we make sure we’re getting a diversity of voices, diversity of representation, diversity of opinions, and then, I do a lot of prep in advance of like, what story do I want the episode to tell? So there’s a little bit of that.

When it comes to writing articles and also it goes to social media posts. I think about this a lot because, the evil inclination around this stuff, around ego is very severe. I did a podcast a few weeks ago about listening, and I talked about this quite personally, actually, in the podcast about how there are times when like something happens, and I’ll be like, I should write something about that. And I have to notice very carefully the difference between, do I need to write something about this because I have something unique to contribute and a take that’s important and is it going to generate light and not heat? Those are the things that I care about. Or am I responding to this because I want to hear the sound of my own voice? Am I responding to this because I want my name to be in the news cycle also?

And anytime I’m sensitive, I’m not perfect at this. Anytime though, I’m sensitive to that, that’s what’s going on. I’m like, don’t do it, Yehuda, that’s not worth it, because I could, you could do it all day. It really could. I’ve made, I made some bad calls, like I shouldn’t have written that, you know, I shouldn’t have given that statement to the press. And usually it’s a failure to adhere to that.

I’ll say also, the last thing is, one of the things we care about a lot at Hartman is, you know, when people are studying, we have people study in pairs, in chavruta study, it’s the name of our gap year program. It’s a whole habit of being, is actually to be in conversation with others.

The things that I know that I’m writing that are going to be more controversial or more problematic, I always have multiple other people read them beforehand. The times when I’m like, I’m on my own, maverick-y. Not good. Not good. You know, you’re gonna make terrible mistakes.

So I like that you are doing this podcast together. You’re holding each other accountable, right? You’re probably preparing together. You’re taking turns. And that means like probably sometimes, you, Jacob, you’re like, I wish we had done it this way. And then you’re like, you know, I would love the style to be like this. But I guarantee that collaboration on these things makes them a lot stronger.

Max: I guess two follow-ups. I will say that from all the episodes that I have listened to, and although I’ve not listened to all of them, I’ve listened to my fair share.

Yehuda: I haven’t listened to all of them either, believe me.

Max: So far, my favorite was the music and with implementing that and playing that back. I liked the, and then as well as the one with, uh, Berkeley in the office. Fascinating stories. Anyway, my question, for a friend, of course, not for me, but how does one find a way onto Yehuda Kurtzer’s podcast?

Yehuda: There’s no, I gotta tell you, there’s no science to it. But listen, maybe if you guys send me the audio of this, we’ll see whether we can run it as a show on Identity/Crisis, that will get you a whole bunch of boosts for your listeners.

Jacob: Done deal.

Max: Done deal. Yes. So I guess right before we finish up this incredible episode, first of all, I want to say thank you so, so much for coming. It’s been an absolute pleasure. By far one of my favorites, but right before we leave for anyone listening, anyone who made it this far, is there anything that you want them to take away, that like, one message that you hold strong to yourself and you say, look, anything you take away from this podcast, if anything you take away, what will that be and how can you use that to move forward?

Yehuda: You know, one of the things that I say a lot is that we don’t get to, I say this as a Jewish leader, we don’t get to pick the era of Jewish history into which we’re born. All you do is you get to choose what kind of Jew you want to be in that era.

And relatively speaking, this is a pretty good one. And at the same time, the challenges that we have feel very, very heavy. I don’t know. I guess I would want people to spend less time thinking about the causes of the problems that they face and a little bit more time on like, where can I spend the limited time that I have and whatever gifts I have, trying to do something positive and productive about it. Where are the relationships that I can cultivate?

One of the things that I’m having the most fun with in our work is this teen program. And it’s precisely because of conversations like this. There’s just immense curiosity and talent among Jewish young people and a lot of anxiety about who Jewish young people aren’t. And instead, like, we bring them built a platform to basically talk to Jewish young people. And it’s amazing and it makes us more optimistic.

So those types of moves, those types of interventions I think are critical. And wherever anybody is in their trajectory of Jewish leadership, they could find the little steps that are within their competencies to just bring a little bit more light.

Jacob: Yehuda, it’s been a pleasure to have you on the Fearless Interventions Podcast. Thank you for watching the Fearless Interventions Podcast and making it this far through. Tell someone you love them, subscribe, follow, share with a friend. Have a good one and I’ll see you in the next one.

Tessa: Thanks for listening to our show and special thanks to our guest hosts this week, Max Alperstein and Jacob Finkel. Identity/Crisis is produced by me, Tessa Zitter, and our executive producer is Maital Friedman. This episode was produced with assistance from Sarina Shohet and edited by Gareth Hobbs at Silver Sound NYC, with music provided by Socalled.

Max Alperstein is a Hartman Teen Fellow in the 2023-2024 cohort. Applications are now open for next year’s cohort. If you are or know a motivated and curious teen, you can learn more and apply at shalomhartman.org forward/teenfellowship. You can continue to follow Max and Jacob’s podcast, Fearless Interventions, at the link in the episode description.

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

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