In this episode of Arc: The Podcast, Mark Oppenheimer sits down with Yehuda Kurtzer to discuss the aesthetics of yarmulkas, the crisis facing clergy-members, and how the war in Israel is changing American Jewry.

A transcript of this episode is available below.

Listen to this episode wherever you get your podcasts. 

You can now sponsor an episode of Identity/Crisis. Click HERE to learn more. 

Yehuda Kurtzer on Arc: The Podcast 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 Hartmann Institute creating better conversations about the essential issues facing Jewish life. I’m Yehuda Kurtzer. We’re recording this introduction on Friday, September 26th, 2025.

I realized something recently, which is, in all of the time I am drawn to the complexity of the questions facing the Jewish people in Judaism, I sometimes forget to be curious about them. Actually, Judaism is interesting. The Jewish people are interesting. Even the hardest things that we’re facing are interesting in and of themselves.

I think the moment that I realized this was when I was interviewed for today’s podcast by Mark Oppenheimer, a journalist, you gotta read his bio on his website, markoppenheimer.com. It’s hilarious and amazing. It tells you a lot about who Mark is. He starts off by saying, “I’m a father, a husband, a dog owner, and a challah baker (not an order of importance), but writing and talking are what I do for work.”

Mark is now a professor of practice at Washington University in St. Louis, an editor of an online publication called Arc: Religion, Politics, Et Cetera, and he interviewed me for the podcast connected to Arc. I was proud to be one of the first 10 interviewees for his podcast. You’ll hear Mark, and maybe some of you’ll recognize him. He was the longtime host of the Unorthodox podcast. You’ll hear in his questions and his approach, this playful curiosity about all things Jewish. For us, it was a pretty wonderful conversation both about deep things like the rabbinic pipeline crisis, which we’ve talked about many times in the show before.

And Mark was able to put in helpful context to larger questions facing clergy in other religions in America, but also in our playful interaction about the size of various kippot, yarmulkes, skullcaps that Jews wear, what it says about our politics, what it says about our commitments, and what it says about our aesthetic choices. I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I enjoyed being on the other side of the microphone for it.

…Things that have aesthetic qualities are sometimes ideological and sometimes they’re just aesthetic. And I, I think about, I struggle with this a lot, as a bald man, there’s a whole adhesive question, which is separate. When I have a kippah that’s a little bit too big, it kind of sticks off my head, in a weird way, ’cause there’s nowhere for hide. You can’t blend in with hair. So I’m very sensitive to like, what’s the exact size?

Mark: You want perfect contour?

Yehuda: Yeah, exactly.

Mark: Hey friends, I’m Mark Oppenheimer and this is Arc with Mark. It is September 15th as I talk to you. And what that means is that the Jewish High Holidays are coming up really, really soon. Rosh Hashanah is next week. It has crept up on me. And I was thinking last year when I was in synagogue for Rosh Hashanah, that it was the first year in about 17 years that I wasn’t primarily concerned with where all of my children were while I was sitting in synagogue.

My eldest is now 18, my youngest is now seven. And so last year when they were, I guess 17 and six, and my youngest was six years old, I really could sort of exhale. I knew that he was probably in the children’s service and he was probably sitting cross-legged and more or less paying attention. And if he had to go to the bathroom, he could take himself to the bathroom. He didn’t need mommy or daddy, and if he needed mommy or daddy, he could come find mommy or daddy in the main sanctuary where the adults were doing their high holiday service.

And I hadn’t had a day like that in synagogue where I wasn’t consumed with juggling the children and thinking about where the children are ever. Or at least not since college. I didn’t go to synagogue growing up. I first went to high holiday services when I was a freshman in college and did that for six or seven years in an academic context. I was affiliated with universities. I would go to university services. Okay. I didn’t have to worry about kids then.

Flash forward a few years to my being married and our having a baby pretty soon after our marriage and my being a member of an adult synagogue community. That is to say, a, a synagogue community that’s not circumscribed or defined by affiliation with a university or a Hillel. Kind of like the real world, as they say.

And from the very first, in the real world, I was thinking about the baby, and my wife was doing probably 72.6% of the baby care, but I was doing 20-something percent, and I had to be mindful and wanted to be mindful of her needs and the baby’s needs. And so it went through the births of all of the rest of our five children.

And in a way, this was totally glorious. I mean, it was, I loved having young children and there’s a part of me that’s really, really sad that, you know, that, that that thing is true, which is that every day that I have with my youngest, with my son, is the last day I’ll have a child who’s that age, because we’re not having any more children. And so, you know, with every passing day, I’m losing the experience of what it’s like to have a child who is seven years, two months and three days old, seven years, two months, and four days old, and so forth and so on. And that’s a little bit heartbreaking.

With regards to synagogue worship, though, there was actually something kind of nice about having to worry about the children because it meant I didn’t have to think about my own spiritual life. I didn’t have to think about my own inability to access the prayers. I didn’t have to think about my own boredom because, let’s face it, a lot of ritualized worship can be boring. I didn’t have to think about showing up as myself in this space in front of the rabbi and my fellow congregants and, and God, however one construes God.

But last year that changed a little bit, and this year I think it’ll be really fundamentally different. I mean, the children really can take care of themselves, and so I have to figure out, how much do I want to be here and why do I wanna be here and am I, am I being here for something other than modeling to my children that someday they should be here?

In other words, am I just playing the continuity game where I’m showing up to synagogue because I want my children to think that showing up to synagogue is what adults do. Is it just about reinforcing a kind of ongoing cultural script, irrespective of any actual truth, value, or any actual meaning? I don’t think that’s true. I don’t think that’s what I’m doing, but to be honest, I have to cogitate on that more.

I have to really reflect on who am I as a Jew now that I’m moving beyond a pretty easy snug fitting role of Jewish dad. Being a Jewish dad is something I’ve gotten really, really comfortable with. I feel like I know how to talk to my kids about Judaism. I feel like I know how to make it fun and make it meaningful and go places with them and sit in synagogue with them and nudge them just enough, but also back off when I’m supposed to back off. And I think that over 18 years I got pretty good at that, and now I have to figure out: Who am I in that space? Who am I these high holidays?

So over at arcmag.org, we’re going to be running a few essays that are relevant to Judaism and Jewish Life at this time of year. And the podcast should reflect that too. And so there’s, there’s no better week to run this interview that I’ve done with hoo to Kurtzer. We talked, I feel like it was about two months ago now. Some of it might feel a little bit dated, but actually the great thing is that when you talk with Yehuda, it never really does feel dated because you immediately go to the really important stuff about God and history and memory, and in this case, why some people wear little, tiny, small yarmulkes on their head and why some wear much bigger yarmulkes on their head and, and that, if nothing else, is why you should listen to this interview.

Dr. Yehuda Kurtzer is president of the Shalom Hartman Institute, and he’s a leading thinker. He’s an author, he’s not a rabbi, but he has a doctorate in this stuff. He’s a major dude, he’s a major Jew. And my friend, my friend Josh Foer, referred to me and Menachem Butler as massive Jews. He found out that we didn’t know each other. We now know each other pretty well, Menachem and I, but he said, but you guys are such massive Jews. You should know each other.

Kurtzer is a massive Jew, whatever that means. And he is, again, he’s head of this think tank called the Hartman Institute. And just a, a, an important thinker. He has a podcast of his own that is honestly one of the best, if you are interested in, not just Jewish life and culture, but American religious life and culture. It’s called Identity/Crisis. It’s identity-slash-crisis. That’s Yehuda’s podcast, but this, that you’re about to hear, is Yehuda on my podcast? Arc: The Podcast. Have a listen.

I’m noticing your yarmulke size. And I always, when I was at Tablet, I always wanted to get someone to do a beautiful spread with photos of like, what the different kippot mean, different sizes. I was recently in community with, having a conversation with a young rabbi who had one of those little tiny mini discs. And you know what I’m talking about, right? Where it’s like, yeah. But those are not the least observant Jews actually. No. Those are actually somewhere up the scale of observance. What’s going on with the disc so small, you wonder how it even stays on?

Yehuda: Look, the truth is, this used to be a more coherent pattern. Like these kind of Jews wear this kippah, these kind of Jews don’t, I actually found in the past decade it became total chaos.

Mark: It’s all falling apart. It’s all falling apart. But like, because there’s all this like performative ultra-Orthodoxy, with certain type of kippot, because people kind of like the aesthetic, but it’s not actually their values or their community. And, and Religious Zionist Jews in Israel still kind of stick with the knit kippah, but sometimes they kind of also wear a velvet kippah, or they wear like the Rabbi Nachman ones.

Anyway, so, it’s not, it’s hard to kind of use a kippah to like map on a person’s ideology. And, and by the way, there’s that guy in Congress now. There’s a Republican in congressman, I think from Tennessee maybe, who’s walking around wearing a kippah as solidarity with the Jews.

Mark: Who’s not Jewish?

Yehuda: First person to wear a kippah in Congress. He’s not Jewish.

Mark: One of my favorite pieces, it sank like a stone, I don’t think anyone else read it. But one of my favorite pieces I ever wrote was making the point that for all of Joe Lieberman’s, you know, professed orthodoxy and I, I don’t doubt his own sincere religious journey, that in fact, we’ve never elected a Jew who visibly presents Jewish to a national office. We’ve never elected a woman who dresses in, you know, frum clothing. We’ve never elected a man who on, on, who not on the Sabbath, wears a yarmulke to Congress. Whereas we have elected lots of Christians who probably wear crosses or perform their Christianity in a public way. We’ve, we’ve never done that with the Jew. The Jews always present as Gentile in Congress.

Yehuda: Wow.

Mark: And you know, like in fact if you go online, you’ll find more photographs of B Barack Obama in a kippah than of Joe Lieberman. And I think that we, you know, that’s an interesting milestone that we haven’t met yet, that somebody who looks Jewish, who would walking down the street, draw the ire of antisemites, could go to Congress. We’re not there yet.

Yehuda: So I, I wanna contest the premise on two fronts. One is if, if wearing crosses is an indicator, I. I would bet that there are members of Congress now, women members of Congress now who are Jews who wear Star of David necklaces or hostage dog tags, especially post-October 7th. I would be shocked if Kathy Manning had no Jewish jewelry. That seems that might that that one I, that requires some investigation.

Mark: Fair enough. But I, the historical question I would ask is, American Jews did not wear kippot in public really until the sixties. And that was, the emergence of kippahs had to do with combination of kind of the identity politics turn and the Six Day War and a few other things. So it’s little bit funny to say we haven’t elected somebody with that because it’s, it’s such a, it’s so counter-cultural to how kind of, even observant American Jews have behaved for a long time.

Mark: Fair enough. So to, for our, for our majority gentile listenership. Right. Even, pre, say, sixties, even modern Orthodox, what we would now call modern Orthodox Jews tended to be, you know, not, not wear yarmulkes. And if they were in the workplace, they’d take their hat off and they’d have nothing on. They, they would, they’d look like me. That, I don’t think that was true of like the aggudah, to the extent we had Hasidic or Haredi Jews in America, Ultra Orthodox Jews. I think they probably were wearing Yamahas, but they were a pretty tiny minority before World War II.

Yehuda: Yeah. And, and not politically significant. And if you really wanted to play this out, you would say that maybe the real test is when would you elect a Jew with a beard, a male Jew, with a beard? Because that’s also a, that’s also like a signal, in some ways, of kind of traditional Jewishness, is not just a man with a kippah, but with a man with a beard.

Mark: You’re right. All your sort of Joe Leibermans and Jerrold Nadlers and whoever elses are clean shaven. Of course, almost everyone in Congress is, I mean, the beards are coming back now, but yeah, we haven’t had a bearded president for, for a century or so.

Yehuda: Yeah, that’s right. For, for the, for Lubavitcher Rabbi, by the way, for Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the head of Chabad, the beard was the thing. I mean, he was very, very adamant that when you were to become Chabad, and it is, there’s a lot, like a lot of holiness embedded in those beards. So it’s like part of the look is, that’s how a Jew, that’s how a Jew represents, or male Jew represents themselves in public is without a clean face.

Mark: And, and, and the reason that there are very Orthodox Jews with clean shaven faces… I mean, Torah says what? You don’t shave below the cheekbone? What, what is, what is the, what is the commandment?

Yehuda: It says the equivalent. “You can’t round the skull.” So it’s hard to know exactly what that means. It’s probably some, some version of an ancient idolatrous haircut that involved rounding. I mean, it has come to mean basically cutting the sideburns.

Mark: But so when I see very observant Jews who have the sideburns, but otherwise are clean shaven, are they using razors or are they using depilatory? Isn’t there an anti razor thing about it? Or am I completely inventing that?

Yehuda: Yeah, there’s an anti-razor bias that, in, in traditional communities, the, the custom is to use something that resembles clippers more than a razor. So most electric shavers are, are okay ’cause they’re basically codified as scissors as opposed to being a razor.

Mark: But for the Lubavitcher Rebbe, it was a cultural thing. It was like, it was like mesorah, it was tradition, right? You just, you have to have the beard. That’s so interesting.

Okay, so this was a fun tangent, but before we leave this tangent, ’cause I, I like talking about this stuff. Before it all went to hell, say in the past 10 or 12 years with people signifying different ways, it was like, non-Hasidic, ultra-Orthodox tend to have a black felt, like yeshivish people had a black felt yarmulke. Religious nationalists, who we would map onto kind of Modern Orthodoxy, had a woven yarmulke. What else was there? There’s the Rebbe Nachman kind of like, it comes down, it’s like a, a fez almost, right?

Yehuda: Uh…

Mark: Or no, that’s something different.

Yehuda: I don’t know what the term is. Skull cap. Like something that was pulled down, knit, but woven and pulled down, like close around the ears, right.

Mark: Was a Breslover.

Yehuda: You have like centrist, Orthodox Jews would wear suede kippahs. Those are pretty common also, cause they kind of just blend in.

Mark: To me, the suede is like the indefensible one, ’cause you’re murdering an animal. There’s no reason you need leather on your head. They look, they look hot. If you’re in the sun, they’ll be the least comfortable. There’s no grip underneath. So it, it’s, I would imagine their har it’s harder for them to stay on your head. They just reek to me of sort of somebody’s bar mitzvah kippah. The party favor of the bar mitzvah.

Yehuda: Yeah, that’s probably right. The Bar mitzvah Kippah of choice has now shifted entirely to a different material, kind of a cloth material. Easy to produce, cheaper than suede, suede are expensive. But anyway, the adhesive issue has nothing to do with suede. I mean, you got a bobby pin, you got a clip, or now you have like something attached on the inside of a kippah to keep it on your head.

Mark: Well, only in that, the woven ones, I think kind of interact with the hair a bit more and may give you a little more grip, but…

Yehuda: They feel better.

Mark: I would think they feel better.

Yehuda: Okay. But getting back to my original question, and then we’ll talk about things like Jewish continuity and the rabbi shortage, the, the important stuff, the little disc, the one that’s so small that it’s, you can’t even see it if the person’s, unless they’re leaning way over. What is that?

Yehuda: So, I know I understand it a little bit better in Israel, what it kind of signals in Israel is I grew up in a, a religious community, a religious Zionist community, usually, usually modern Orthodox. And I am loosely connected to it since I probably was in the Army. And I, and when I go back to my parents’ home, I gotta stick something on and this one fits kind of neatly in the pocket.

Mark: Interesting.

Yehuda: It’s kind of like on the border of in and out a little bit. I haven’t seen a lot of them here. But it’s inobtrusive. It’s a way of saying

Mark: Right. When I’ve seen them here, I, I’ve honestly, you know, I see them. I live in a college town. I see undergrads. I’ve seen them on maybe three or four guys over the years, and in every case, and I have no idea what this connotes, but in every case it was a really good looking, sort of jacked, bro-ey kind of guy, who was into his body, the buzz cut. It was never sitting on top of like a big fro. It was always like sitting on top of like a buzz cut. He was the guy who wanted to look like he was, you know, special forces or, you know, a model or something, you know, he was, a guy was into his look. It was a really kind of a style conscious guy, wanted to rock this little disc.

And I don’t think it’s that he’s hiding his Judaism, that’s not my sense. It’s that it’s sleeker. It’s the same way he has a tight t-shirt, he has a tight little kippah, not one of those loosey goosey.

Yehuda: Right. So I, I, I guess what you’re saying is. And I think we know this, like things that have aesthetic qualities are sometimes ideological and sometimes they’re just aesthetic.
And I, I think about, I struggle with this a lot. I, as a bald man, there’s a whole adhesive question, which is separate, but, but I, when I have a kippah that’s a little bit too big, it kind of sticks off my head, in a weird way, ’cause there’s nowhere for, you can’t blend in with a hair. So I’m very sensitive to like, what’s the exact size you want?

Mark: You want perfect contouring. You want perfect…

Yehuda: Yeah, exactly.

Mark: Okay. Lemme, and lemme ask you, now that you’ve raised it, what is the adhesive situation with a man with no hair like you?

Yehuda: So, Naftali Bennett, former Prime Minister of Israel, used double-sided tape. And I know some men who used like toupée tape also, it sticks on the head. I don’t, I don’t, I, this is a great story actually. I was standing in line, I was standing in line at O’Hare.

Mark: So to speak.

Yehuda: Well, thank you. And a guy behind me goes, hey, how does that thing stay in your head? And I turned around and I said, Congressman Paul Ryan.

Mark: Was it really?

Yehuda: It was. And I regret not saying Speaker Ryan, obviously, I totally, you know. And he said yes. And I said,] oh, I said, my usual answer to this is sweat, gravity, and faith in God, which he loved. It was a great answer. Which all works fine when you’re indoors, right? Doesn’t really work in the wind.

Mark: I like him so much more now that you’ve told me that story. I don’t have a particular beef with Paul Ryan, but I don’t think well of him. And now I think what a, what a what a dude. Like what a, what a cool dude that he, that he just kind of did that.

So, speaking of speaker Paul Ryan, you have been erroneously been referred to as, you know, Rabbi Kurtzer, and you’re, you’re not a rabbi. You’ve written about this by way of getting into a piece that I love of yours about, how we need, I think the headline is “We Need More Great Rabbis,” but you actually could have just said, “We Need More Rabbis.”

Because even though the numbers of, you know, synagogue, attending Jews are, you know, static, maybe inching up, inching down. They’re not burgeoning relative to 30 or 40 years ago. And yet we don’t have enough rabbis for the Jews who want one. We actually have a, a shortage. There are pulpits unfilled. There are people not going to the rabbinate.

I have been very interested for 20 years now as a journalist in the clergy shortage because, I mean, if you think there’s a rabbi shortage, surely, you know, the priest shortage is, you know, is even more worrisome. The Catholic priest shortage. And I think in a lot of communities there just aren’t enough clergy. So let, I mean, let’s start there. Why not? Why are, why are people who would’ve done this 50 or 75 years ago not doing this?

Yehuda: There’s a wide array of hypotheses. The thing I’m most cynical about in this conversation is people who come up with a single hypothesis, which usually is an inverse of some program that they wanna start, or a kind of reflection of their, of, of their biases about religion or about community.

Mark: It’s like the decline, the decline in morning consumption of dry cereal around the American table has led to a dearth of rabbis. Therefore, Kellogg, you should sponsor my cereal-Institute for Rabbinic.

Yehuda: Exactly. It’s not Captain Crunch. It’s Rabbi Crunch. So yeah, there’s a lot of different hypotheses you could look at the fact that there’s a general decline, as you said, in clergy service and kind of say, this is not really about Jews. And look at the drivers around the extent to which we’re in a little bit of a recession on, on certainly organized and institutional religion in America and Jews. Largely imitate those trends. We don’t behave differently than other people like that. You could look at the fact that careers in public service are viewed differently than they were a generation ago.

You could identify the fact that, I don’t know, which is the cause and which the effect, to the decline in public service. But consumer culture around religion has made it very difficult for professionals who work in those contexts. So rabbis report now, especially in synagogue context, that what is expected of them from their congregants in terms of a wide variety of competencies that they’re supposed to be great at, with much less professional support than rabbis of a different generation would’ve had. And with far less tenure job security than rabbis of different generation, makes these jobs very hard to do. Burnout is very high, right? So you can kind of blame it on the consumer, the congregants. They want great rabbis, but they’re driving them out.

There are interesting gendered ways to view this problem. The same phenomenon that basically happened to the, the, the respect afforded to pediatricians and school teachers, which shifted considerably when they became, and I know this is a very contentious way to describe it, when they became thought of as, as “women’s professions.”

Mark: The feminization of any profession leads to the decline of men who wanna do it. I mean, that’s, this is sociologically well-established, at this point.

Yehuda: That’s right. And it drives down salaries, drives down respect according to the field. I think there are some, so there, those are all kind of environmental and social drivers of this, of this issue. And there’s been so much disruption in how we think about the, how we think about the map of Jewish institutional and communal life that you’re in this weird place, where I think Jewishness, Judaism is actually a hot commodity. People want Judaism, they just don’t tend to want it through the institutional infrastructure built in the 1950s. And so there’s a weird economy of what does it mean to go into this profession where some of the most exciting stuff is actually entrepreneurial as opposed to built in. What does that do to the job pool and to the types of people who are willing to go into this.

Mark: I wanna say, and the people looking for something entrepreneurial in their rabbi, the people looking for the interesting startup that meets in the coffee shop, they don’t want to pay for it as much as, or they aren’t as willing to pay for it as the people who just wanted to kind of pay their annual dues to a synagogue.

Yehuda: Especially when, like, when Americans were churched, Jews were also churched and therefore these synagogues had huge membership numbers and therefore secure, you know, revenue lines.

So there are specific issues though, I think in the Jewish community and kind of the evolution of Judaism in America, which is, something really happened in the sixties and seventies, I think, connected to the civil rights movement where rabbinic leadership started to become encoded much more with what you might call prophetic leadership. I think this has to do with the history of the reform movement, as I said, the civil rights movement, I think a little bit is kind of Christianization of liberal Judaism, and when that happened, a lot of rabbinic education, in my view, actually has been catering towards it. And as a result, folks who are going into the rabbinate are… tend to be going in thinking that these jobs are about pursuing justice, which is very different than jobs that are about providing care, pastoral service, spiritual wisdom, etc.

And those folks—by the way, when that becomes the main objective of people going into the field, other people who might have gone into this role for other traditional reasons look at it and they’re like, no, I don’t really wanna be an activist, therefore I’m not gonna become a rabbi. So it also kind of fuels the shifting of the pipeline.

And that’s not about like the broader ecosystem necessarily of religion in America. It’s about kind of internal stuff happening in how we think about what a rabbi is supposed to be, which I think has been bad for the pipeline.

Mark: You’re being very, very nice to the current rabbis. I mean, one of, one of my observations over just, you know, with just so having interviewed a lot of them is that, and this is true in the liberal branches of Judaism than in I, I think there are different stereo—I would stereotype the problems in Orthodox Jewish clergy differently. I would’ve different stereotypes for them, no less flattering, but the stereotype that has a grain of truth in it, when you’re talking about Reform and to some extent Conservative rabbis, I always say is, a lot of them seemed like they were, they went into this because they were just the best goddamn counselor at Jewish summer camp, or the most active person at College Hillel. And somebody said to them, you’d be a great rabbi, but they were neither sufficiently interested in texts and Jewish learning, nor in necessarily the hospital visits.

And the, because, you know, being, being a song leader, being a ruach leader, a spirit leader, is not the same thing as doing marital counseling, visiting people in the hospital, visiting people who’ve just lost a child, et cetera.

And so you end up with people who have a, their mode is that they want, they wanna lead really fun services or they want to get people psyched. They don’t necessarily think of it in terms of relational wisdom, pastoral care, and so forth. And that, that also seems to me in, in a weird way, maybe a side effect of the fact that there were in the 1670s, a lot of great song leaders, a lot of great, you know, fellowship leaders. And so that too became a model, which is like the, the turbocharged camp counselor.

Yehuda: Yeah. Look, I, I am charitable towards rabbis, partly because I know a lot of really good ones, but also, ’cause in general, I believe like, more honey will attract rabbis than more than vinegar. Like it’s better for us to set up a template of the good rabbis and try to recruit more people like them.

I think you’re, you’re onto something important, which is that it’s true, the most common way in which future rabbis are tapped by older, by older people, by mentors, which by the way is a really essential way to build a pipeline tends to be not “you would be a great rabbi,” but “you seem to love Judaism,” and therefore the job that a person does who loves Judaism is this, which is not true, right? To love Judaism can make you a great congregant, right, to love Judaism can make you a great educator or Jewish professional, et cetera.

But it becomes like you love Judaism, you must be a rabbi, as opposed to us saying, taking an approach as the Jewish community of saying, who are actually our best and brightest, which was for many, for many centuries, the people who became sages were the best and the brightest. In fact, it was considered incredible thing, like, I have this really bright kid, I wanna set them off to become the literate, the learned, right? And, and it’s not necessarily what we tend to commodify in liberal communities is that the best, brightest, most learned people should be our rabbis.

By the way, it might not necessarily mean that they’re great at hospital visits. So it would also require a little bit of a shift of what kind of, what’s the exemplar of rabbinic leadership that we would need?

Mark: Well, so that’s, I mean, that’s a great question, right? Because right, so you take your average Reform temple, or most Conservative synagogues as well, and first of all, the congregants, the type they want isn’t necessarily the sage. They’d like that person to be able to play at sagacity, to perform sage. But in hiring, they have a lot of other things they want, they want warmth, they want conviviality, they want the hospital visits.

They want, I mean, I remember someone saying to me where he was so sad that his old rabbi left because that rabbi could talk Philadelphia flyers with his kids, like NHL hockey knowledge in a hockey city. And this person meant this in all seriousness. And this person was a serious Jew. I mean, serious, was not a frivolous human being, this person, but, but that had mattered in terms of the old rabbi’s relationality to, to the congregation.

So let’s take that average Reform temple. They don’t want the old model of the be of just the best and the brightest as the qualification, but I think it tends to fail when the model they get is just somebody who’s like overflowing with love for Judaism, but doesn’t necessarily have another skillset. If you could engineer the right person for that job, who, who is it, what, what, what is there? And assuming that he or she’s not a superhero, but an actual human being, what, what does the basket of skills look like?

Yehuda: I think the model doesn’t fail when they get somebody weak. The model fails when they have a certain vision of the kind of rabbi that they want, and the person isn’t that exact kind of rabbi or when they don’t know what kind of rabbi they want, or they have expectations that their rabbis are supposed to be great at everything, right?

Because yes, let’s acknowledge that there are gonna be great rabbis who are great pastors. There are gonna be great rabbis who are great educators. We have great rabbis who are great sages and sermon givers and great rabbis who are community organizers. So you could have a great rabbi for every community in the country as long as it knew, that’s what we want. We wanna get like, an awesome educator and we’re gonna compensate around those things that the rabbi isn’t great at, either through lay leadership or other professional staff, or just knowing we’re, we’re accepting something and we’re, and there’s a trade off on the other end.

And right now part of the problem is, well, we, we actually kind of want all these things. We’re unwilling to prioritize them. And by the way, it’s very, very rare. There are some, you’re gonna find a rabbi who’s just a plus at all of these things, and it doesn’t mean they’re a bad rabbi, it’s just like they… they’re—let’s figure out how to align those things and, and that from that standpoint, like the ecosystem has to be thinking about how many rabbis do we need, who are in each of these columns to be able ensure that.

Mark: How do you compensate for, and I’m thinking of a few clergy actually. One’s not a rabbi, one’s a Protestant minister, I think. A few clergy were excellent, who were good sages, very bright people, good sermons, good managerial, like good at all the sort of bookish and ledger stuff, but just hated pastoral visits and were bad at them. Hospital visits, let’s say. Assuming you don’t have the money for more for a second clergy person, how do you compensate around that? If someone can’t sit with someone who’s dying in an empathic and kind of steady way,

Yehuda: Look, you might, that might be, it might be that you say, okay, listen, that’s the sine qua non, right. It might be, that might be the case. I think many rabbis would say, yeah, yeah, that’s probably the most important thing you need do, if you’re a rabbi of a congregation.

You might say to that person, listen, if you really don’t wanna do that kind of work, there are other rabbinic jobs that are available to you, right? In education and other sectors. It might not be that running a congregation requires of you to be a pastor, which requires that kind of bedside manner that those relational skills there too. It’s an ecosystem question. There’s no such thing anymore as like, creating rabbis for the obvious professional pathway that they’re supposed to go.

Where we have a real problem right now is that we, to the extent that we’re training rabbis, most of them don’t wanna go to pulpits. So they know that there are a wide variety of options available to them, but the place that’s most starving for talent are kind of traditional synagogue pulpits. And, and it might be that in that type of environment, that’s the skillset that needs to be most important.

Whereas to, to work, to be a rabbi at a Hillel on, on a campus, to be a rabbi who works in a Jewish day school, to be a rabbi who’s a kind of the startup innovator who’s meeting people in coffee shops and giving them spiritual direction doesn’t need that kind of same skillset. So it, it’s never gonna be a one size fits all.

And by the way, even in the heyday where we had a lot of rabbis, it certainly wasn’t, I mean, that was like, you know, you get this from a, you get this pretty well from a serious man. The, the great rabbi of the congregation was not visiting people when they were sick.

Mark: Right, right, right. And a lot of rabbis held pulpits for decades who were pretty mediocre in all of it. I mean, and, and almost held their congregants captive in a sense, because congregations didn’t feel they could fire the elder statements. They were statesmen, they were sometimes in awe of the rabbi or, or a few wealthy members of the board loved the rabbi, and so everyone else kind of had no choice, basically. So, no, it was, it was far from perfect.

How is it that, given the fabulous wealth that some Jews have, not me and you and, and not most Jews, but given that there is a lot of philanthropic wealth in the community because of, you know, several hundreds of, of very generous and rich people that we haven’t made rabbinic education free, this has always struck me as.

If there’s a single bullet to getting more people into the rabbinate, it would be saying to them, as we say to doctoral students, you’ll go for free and we’ll give you a stipend. And you know, I’ve often thought, you know, what would it take to get a hundred more rabbis out of the pipeline? Well, you know, if it was a hundred thousand dollars a year for each of them, that’s not a sum that the Jews couldn’t come up with. We could come up with that. Why is nobody working on that?

Yehuda: So there are people working on it, and we’re running our own pilot of a new rabbinic ordination program at Hartman. We’re in the middle of first, first core, recruiting second. And one of the things that’s the basic criteria for us, our willingness to do this program is that it’s fully subsidized. The program, the cost is subsidized, plus the stipend. It happens to be a mid-career program. So we’ve accounted for a lot of different variables.

Mark: So what’s the stipend?

Yehuda: The stipend we provide is $20,000, which basically covers the cost of, you know, the housing and relocation for the various components of the program.

Mark: They can’t quit their job.

Yehuda: We don’t need them to quit their job. We run it, we built it in a way that doesn’t require them to do so. What you’re describing, I agree with you, Mark, is a scandal. It’s a scandal of the Jewish community that does not say, we have a very, very essential role for the spiritual health of our community, but we’re actually not willing to pay for people to be able to do this in ways that are different from any other graduate job. We’re not willing to signal at the outset of their career that their training is so important to us because they are important to us, that we know that they’re making financial sacrifices to be in this line of work, and it’s a priority to us.

It’s a, there’s a, this is a big difference between the liberal movements and the Orthodox movements. Not—liberal movements have different financial structures. Many of the schools now actually do find ways to waive tuition or to provide some sort of fellowship, but nowhere near at scale what happens in Orthodoxy. So much so that, if I’m not mistaken, the majority of rabbinical students at Yeshiva University don’t actually become professional rabbis, but they feel that they have the flexibility earlier in their career to get a rabbinic education, and then they go off and be an accountant or whatever it is. But what that gives to a community is knowledge. It puts people in the pews who have rabbinic knowledge and that changes the whole texture of the community.

It’s a scandal. And what it really tells us, we know the answer to this, communities put their dollars where they consider their priorities. And in our community, philanthropic dollars unfortunately go primarily towards defensive and protective philanthropic agendas, related to the state of Israel to fighting antisemitism. And they don’t go towards, you know, overwhelmingly, they don’t go towards the basic spiritual needs and health of our community.

Mark: And they go towards, and I’m, again, I’m not trying to be, I’m try, I, I don’t wanna be the vinegar rather than the honey to use your metaphor, but they go towards JCCs, they go towards squash courts, they go toward, I mean, they go toward a lot of things that aren’t learning. And some of them are valuable things. I’m glad I have the pool to swim in at my JCC, but I think most of the people whose names are on the plaques, that the JCC would not give the same amount of money to a Jewish day school. Some of them would, but a lot of them wouldn’t. You know, a lot of them wouldn’t. That strikes me as a problem.

Yehuda: Yeah, that’s right. And a lot of philanthropic dollars are local. So, you know. I heard a great story actually from one—I heard secondhand from a Syrian community in Brooklyn that thinks in very interesting ways about rabbis as particular people who are meant to serve communities. And the story was described to me as like this particular community is spending an untold amount of money to basically train the next rabbi for that community. In other words, they’re not waiting for the field to produce a set of interview candidates. But they identified a young person.

Mark: It’s like the Dalai Lama. It’s like, don’t they find a 7-year-old and say, you’re the next Dalai Lama, whether you like it or not, kid.

Yehuda: That’s right. He’s working in a great job. They said to him, we think you should leave your job and become a rabbi. We’re willing to pay you your salary for the next five years to train, and then we’re willing to guarantee your salary for the next 30 years, 40 years in our, in our community. So even if Jewish philanthropy is local, the JCC or even the synagogue, you would have to change the model where someone would say, we are gonna invest in building our rabbi for the future. We’re not gonna wait to see who JTS or HUC sends us when it comes to the search process. We’re gonna actually do it ourselves.

Now, it’s a little bit dangerous because then you’re gonna wind up with a situation where the wealthy congregations can guarantee their own continuity, which is, by the way, already the case. Top congregations in America are always picking up the top of the pool. So you don’t really want that type of scenario to happen, but you do need a little bit of a groundswell that says, this is the collective challenge for the future spiritual health of our community and the current maintenance of our spiritual health. We’re willing to invest that a 100, 200 liberal young superstars every year are getting recruited on campus, told to make their lives for the Jewish people or, and guaranteed—

Mark: Or not on campus. Or not on campus, but in their twenties, like they’re showing up at events in New York or Chicago or at, you know, they’re on staff at Camp Ramah at 24 doing something like they, they—they’re found yeah, somewhere relatively early. I don’t think it has to be on campus.

Yehuda: Maybe, but I, I, I think that, I think the Jewish community should be doing more on campus recruiting in general. That’s a whole separate thing. But I would say, try the, try the thought experiment the other way, which is, I use this example a lot. I think I learned it from Rabbi David Steinhardt in Boca. The NBA knows if you’re a great basketball player at age 11 or 12. They know who they know who you’re, and I think if we worked at it—

Mark: 11 or 12?

Yehuda: They do. They got—

Mark: No, but I’m saying, would you go, if we worked at it, was that going to… we could find kids, bar mitzvah age?

Yehuda: Bar mitzvah age. Bar mitzvah age is a crucible.

Mark: Well, look, I mean, I, I look, I have some kids in my house who I think would be splendid rabbis.

Yehuda: Do you, do you tell them that?

Mark: I do. I do. There’s, there is some, and, and they have tremendous rabbi reverence for our, our rabbi, Eric Woodward, who’s a great rabbi, and you know, I think at this point in life they, I think more than anything, they wouldn’t wanna be at the beck and call of so many people. I think they see exactly what it is, in terms of the consumer’s demands.

But, but who knows with time, I mean, look, you’re a dad, right? Like, I mean, if you want your kids to do something, don’t tell them to do it. Like the last thing they need is their, I mean, yes, I hear what you’re saying, that, that a parent should tell, we should look at our children and say what we’re proud of them for and what they’re good at.

And also, if I wanted one of my children to follow me into journalism, I don’t particularly, but if I did, it would, I wouldn’t spend a lot of time saying that you should be a journalist. I’d hope they’d see it, see their, the gift that they have on their own and get there. I don’t know, is that right? Or I mean, am I, do you take a different point of view vis a vis your own kids in this?
Yehuda: Yeah, well, I think for the system—we have to do some work in the system to make sure that our kids see that these are noble professions, they’re respected professions, which is different from telling kids at a point in their life when they wanna reject everything you’re saying that they should do this.

But I’ll say, you know, we had a funny story a couple years ago. My boys are 19 and 17 and, like, they staged an intervention with Stephanie and, and with me, I think it was maybe a year ago. And they were like, we feel pressure from you guys to do meaningful things with our careers. My wife is the head of a day school. And we, we laughed. We were like, hell yeah you should feel that pressure. Now if they decide to rebel by being—

Mark: We wanna go on a professional surf tour and, if they decide be, be, be a TikTok influencer respectively, won’t you love us no matter what?

Yehuda: Right. My feeling is like, if you wanna, if you wanna go into finance, and be still a great Jew and a great lay leader and bring Jewish values into your home, that is not a rebellion against us. But do I feel bad that I implicitly signal that lives built of professional meaning and service of the Jewish people are like, I’m supposed to feel bad about that?

Mark: No, no, no. I don’t think you should feel bad. I, I don’t think you should feel bad about that. I’m, I’m, I’m a trillion percent with you there, but that actually gets around to the money thing a little bit. Which is that, I mean, maybe your kids weren’t saying, we want to go into finance and, you know, some of my favorite people are in finance—because they pick up the check.

But we do have a materialism problem. I mean, I think all American communities do, I don’t think this is unique to us at all. I don’t think Jews are more or less materialistic, but when I talk to undergrads and they say, well, I couldn’t become a rabbi, it’s not even, I couldn’t become a rabbi—I couldn’t become a rabbi, a teacher, a social worker. This is, by the way, in in contradiction to when, not only when I got out of college, but when my dad got out of college. If you got out of college in the late sixties, it was almost de rigueur that you spent a few years finding yourself. Like it was really uncool to go straight into lucrative work, if that was your path.

When I got out in the nineties, coming out of an elite college, it was still one of the privileges we knew we had was, look, my Yale degree is good four years from now. If I wanna screw around for fears, if I want to go learn another language or travel or try something out, that might not be my forever career. That’s okay. Like the career will be there for me.

Today’s kids are so petrified. It’s not even that they feel “I have to be rich,” it’s that they don’t think there’s any life to be had outside of fields that would make them rich. And I hear this even in Orthodoxy. Again, I’m not Orthodox, but I’ve talked to like, some Yeshiva University boys who said, well, it’s good to do Kollel and maybe, you know, get ordination, get semicha. But of course you want a degree in accounting. I’m like, well, do you fucking enjoy accounting? Nobody even like, I’m not even from, I think my accountant does like accounting, to be fair. But most people what would, what could be drearier? And they look at you like, well, I don’t know. I never thought about it. I just know, like, you have to. I, I thought, well then like, what did the Rav, what did the Rav live for if the YU kids are saying you have to do accounting?

Yehuda: You said even in orthodoxy, and I would say it’s especially in orthodoxy because the cost, cost of living associated with being a modern Orthodox Jew in America is stratospheric. You have to live in certain neighborhoods. You pay more for your food. You, it is obligated that you send your kids to day school, plus a year in Israel, summer camp, all of these things. So if—the minute I’ve decided to be part of that community, what I basically am saying is the meaning that I derive is by being a good Jew in this community, but the way that I do that is by guaranteeing a kind of AGI of, you know, $300,000 and above. And it does drive down the perception that there is noble, there are noble professions outside of those that are gonna guarantee you that income. And it drives down creative impulses.

Mark: So this is stuff I know and I’m, but I’m glad we’re getting a chance to talk about it, right, that if you wanna live in Teaneck or wherever, Scarsdale, in the modern Orthodox community, it’s super expensive. By the way, if you’re having four or five or six kids, even the $300,000 for all the day schools isn’t gonna be nearly enough, right? Now, a lot of them have, you know, two kids now. But, but you know, the, the, the money is astronomical, right? How the hell did we get to this point? And why is nobody trying to figure out…

Yehuda: Oh, a lot of people are.

Mark: I mean, we weren’t there—it wasn’t that expensive to be Orthodox 75 years ago. Now there, there wasn’t the same expectation that your kids went to day school. They actually went to public school and then did cheder after school 75 years ago. And so there’s this new day school expectation, but even so, like there were poor neighborhoods filled, middle class, it was filled with Modern Orthodox kids. Like, what, what the hell happened? I mean, is part of it that they feel that culturally they feel, “but we need a fancy house,” and “we need fancy cars,” and we need a, like, is some of this that like, these are both spiritual but also materialistic communities?

Yehuda: Right. So there’s a blurring of two different things. One is like changing economic circumstances in America, changing certain expectations of what it means to be a good Modern Orthodox Jew. And then there’s a second, which is this way in which American Modern Orthodox Jews, like everyone else, are assimilated into an American materialistic culture. And therefore, it’s not just what I need, but what I want or I perceive as being necessary to succeeding at the American story.

The way my colleague Rivka Schwartz says, this is a principle at SAR High school, is she says the challenge around the financing of day schools is that parents want both affordable Jewish education and excellent Jewish education.

Mark: And they want lacrosse fields.

Yehuda: Correct. That’s right.

Mark: They don’t just want, it’s not that—they could have affordable and excellent if they just wanted blackboards and books. But they don’t, they want it to look like Horace Mann.

Yehuda: That’s right. That’s right. And it does.

Mark: And it does.

Yehuda: And it does. It does. Right. And so by the beneficence of philanthropy, you wind up being able to build useful cost reduction programs, especially for families. Large children, more and more day schools have, like, you’re not gonna pay more than X amount because they don’t wanna disincentivize people from having children.

But still out of the gate, you know, I say our tuition is at least $30,000. And, and, and I, and once you, once you pay that amount of money, you’re like, yeah, I need Model UN, and I want this soccer team, and I wanna be able to do this and all that because I ultimately want my kids to be able to get into a non-Jewish college so they can continue this loop of being able to build their own social, economic, and political mobility here in the country.

Mark: So I’m reading this book by Paul Kingsnorth. I don’t know if you know him. He’s a, he has a substack called Abbey of Misrule, but he is a, he’s a British, he’s now Eastern Orthodox. He used to be a radical environmentalist. Then he found Jesus, then he found Jesus through Orthodoxy and he now lives on a farm in Western Ireland, and he’s really off the grid. He’s like taken his old eco-agrarianism and turned it into a kind of Christian primitivism.

And the book’s come out in October, called Against the Machine. It’s really good in certain ways, really infuriating in others, but one of his basic theses is, insofar as we’re trapped in the consumerist Skinner box, right? On the, the hamster wheel. There’s no answer. Like you can’t mediate you, you can’t, and I say this, by the way, my, my sister-in-law’s the librarian at SAR, so I say this with like deep knowledge of the community. My kids too. My kids are in day school. Like I’m in this consumerist world and I’m not, I’m not throwing shade on the people who are in it with me. We’re all trapped.

But his take is you can’t futz around the edges. Like you actually have to get out of it. You have to go live somewhere that’s affordable. You have to understand your children may not have mobility, but they’ll have love. You have to throw out the devices. You have, like, you have to not care if they go to Harvard or even Binghamton or Stonybrook or Maryland or one of the other places with a lot of Jewish students, he’s of course talking to Christians.

He’s saying like, if you, if what you care about is God and living in a godly way, you actually have to stop caring about that other stuff. You can’t. The consumerism will always win. You won’t have the strength of character if you, if you situate yourself in these communities to be the person with like, really good values, you have to kind of get out of them and find a counterculture somehow. And I’m not at the end of the book where he tells us how, except moving to Western Ireland.

But I mean, do you ever feel that way? What do you, what do you think about that kind of radical despair about the consumerist trap?

Yehuda: I, I feel I’m, I feel it’s halfway right. And the halfway part is, I think fundamentally it’s true that those who care about larger values, community, spirituality, et cetera, they’re not, you’re just not gonna find it through the consumer orientation which characterizes this country. So the market capitalist orientation—Synagogues are thriving when they can be market capitalists. And I think that’s like a short-term win and a long-term loss.

Where I resisted a little bit is that it sounds more Christian than Jewish, because Jewishness has no… I don’t think Jewishness, Judaism rather, has the same kind of intrinsic opposition to wealth that pious Christianity developed. By the way, it’s not like they were consistent on this. The church is pretty wealthy.

Mark: But I mean, he’s, he hates, he hates most of his fellow Christians and Christian institutions. To be clear, right?

Yehuda: I mean, feasting is a piece of Jewish tradition and, and being comfortable, those are things that we have actually really interesting Jewish texts around. So I, I don’t want it to be doctrinal, like Jews have, are supposed to be kind of anti consumption, but we are supposed to be anti-materialistic and certainly are not, we’re not built for allowing Judaism to have been remade as basically something that’s supposed to, that’s supposed to operate as, you know, shaped by material capital culture.

And I, I see this really eroding traditional communities in America. You see it with the growing cruise, like, you know, wow—

Mark: The Passover trips?

Yehuda: Passover trips, yeah, Cancun and, and the, the cruises where just wildly expensive and no, there’s nothing that’s spared, where it’s like every, every imaginable cuisine is rendered as, as Kosher and, and it’s just like, yeah, I know you can do that. You can pull it off. But like, is the, is, is it, is it such a significant, is, is the value of keeping kosher so significant that it kind of erases all of the other countercultural behaviors that keeping Kosher was supposed to kind of signify?

Mark: Right, it’s supposed to set you apart. So if you can, if you can have a cruise with kosher sushi, kosher Wagyu beef, kosher, whatever. Yeah, then you’re just, you’re an imitation of the goyim, in a sense.
I remember—so I didn’t know that there were these Passover trips. And for those who don’t know what we’re talking about, for the week of Passover, there’s all these foods you’re not supposed to eat and dishes you’re not supposed to use. And so traditionally, one way you would answer this in your own house is you would get, you would set aside all your normal food and have to restock with kosher for Passover food and take out separate dishes. If you have money, you can now go to a resort where the resort kitchen has been restocked for kosher for Passover food so you can do your whole Passover in Cancun or on a cruise ship or whatever. And there’s often guest speakers and there might be bands and there might be like, there’s entertainment for the week and your kids have the week off from school ’cause they’re at Jewish Day School.

When I learned about this, I said to one friend of mine who was more, who was modern Orthodox and has some money, I said, is this what your family does? And she said, well, it’s what everyone does. And I said, so have you done it all your life? And she said, well, it started when I was 11 or 12. She was maybe 27 or 28 at the time. Young mother. And I said, so is this what you do with your kids? And she said, well, of course, my parents pay for it. They want all the cousins together, so we always take a cruise somewhere different for Passover.

And I said, so that means that like the Passover of our nostalgic lore, which is like at Bubby’s table, eating the Matza ball soup and you know, the brisket and whatever, but like having traditions at Grandma’s house, doesn’t exist for thousands and thousands of American Orthodox families. Like they actually don’t gather at somebody’s house and run around and play games in the basement. They’re always off on a different decadent trip. And she hadn’t thought of it that way, but she said, yeah, yeah, that’s right. And I like, I wanted to stab my eyeballs out. Like, how is, how does the community not know that’s fucked up? I said it, you didn’t. But how do they not know we’re broken? We’re broken if that’s what we’re doing.

Yehuda: So look, I don’t wanna be too sanctimonious about this because I’ve, I’ve, I’ve gone once or twice. Mostly because we, I was able to get a gig.

Mark: Well, I was gonna say, if they paid me to teach, apparently one person said to me, we go wherever Rabbi Sacks is teaching that year, so like whatever cruise ship he’s on. And by the way, I did, I did one of these at, it was at Camp Ramah in California. So like, it was not a cruise ship, it was, you know, a cabin, but whatever, whatever.

Yehuda: Yeah. And we went to a couple years ago, actually, to Ramah, Camp Ramah Darom in Atlanta. It was an amazing experience. It was like, yeah. Anyway. And there is something, you do feel a sense of freedom when you don’t have to actually get down on your hands and knees and scrub your house and do all these types of things. So I I, it’s not that I don’t think that you can, you can’t experience some dimension of that story of freedom when you, you do these kind of things, but I do, I do feel that it has gone to a place that’s just deeply and profoundly unhealthy.

And you see it, especially when it’s a, when it’s an expectation when somebody who’s like barely making ends meet has to kind of keep up with, I don’t know, the equivalent of the Joneses in an Orthodox community. You have to keep up with your neighbors by, okay, this is an, this is an additional expectation of the cost of living. And you’re like, no, it’s not. That’s not a cost of living. That’s, that’s a, that is a, that is a choice to live in very particular and extravagant ways that have nothing to do with your religion. They have to do with the cultural trappings that you’ve tried to invest around your religion, but it’s nothing to do with the religion itself.

And that’s where I think it, it, it, it really goes off the rails. And I’m not, and I’m not sure that folks who do this on the regular, who can afford doing it are fully conscious of the optics that they’re creating for others about what the expectation of, of the holiday of Passover is supposed to be.

Mark: I hope you’re enjoying this interview with Yehuda Kurtzer. If you’re bored, now’s as good a time as any to navigate over to arcmag.org, that’s A-R-C-M-A-G.org, where we have posted a couple pieces recently that I think are just like they’re simply fab. Elisha Kelman wrote a piece for us called The Mind of MAGA. It’s a profile of Yoram Hazony, who is the Israeli American political theorist, most identified with what’s called National Conservatism or the NatCons. And these are people who have a lot of influence in the Trump administration. And Yoram Hazony is their guy. He’s the guy who sort of made it all happen. And we have, I think the definitive profile of Yoram Hazony, The Mind of MAGA over at arcmag.org.

And also, if you want to think about anything but politics, you should read Seeing Through Fog by Robert Scaramuccia, which is his beautiful essay about walking the Camino de Santiago, the pilgrimage in Portugal and Spain, which he did after losing the second of his two parents and becoming an orphan. And it’s just a, a beautifully written piece with some gorgeous photographs, and I would encourage you to check it out. There’s a lot more over there at arcmag.org. Please go check it out and share it and subscribe to our newsletter, A-R-C-M-A-G.org. And now back to my interview with Yehuda Kurtzer.

What are you guys working on at the Hartman Institute? What’s the, what’s the important stuff going on right now?

Yehuda: So I would say, you know, for the last two years, since October 7th, we’ve, we have been obviously, you know, for all imaginable reasons, focused a lot on Israel, on the challenges, the crisis in Israel, the crisis that is created around liberal Zionism for American Jews in, in a variety of different ways, both the challenges of liberalism here, you know, within, in, in here, the second Trump administration, but also questions of the relationship between American Jews and Israel.

Those have been bread and butter issues for a long time, but partly because we’re divided between an Israeli and a North American staff, they’re just also so deeply in the lives of all of our people. And we see our responsibility as both a think tank and educational center for the Jewish people to bring, to bring a different kind of wisdom into our community about these issues.

There’s no shortage of punditry and news that people can get about Israel, but the larger spiritual and moral questions about what it means to be a Zionist right now, what it means to care about human rights, what it, what it means to think about our liberal Jewish commitments in relationship to each other—There’s a real hunger for that. And, and it’s been a lot of what we’ve been doing through our podcasts, our publishing and so forth.

I mentioned the Rabbinic pilot as a, as a major new experiment in our work. And, you know, another, another new piece that’s coming down the horizon for us is that this fall we’re opening a new center in Washington on Judaism and public policy where we’re trying to bring a different kind of Jewish conversation into Washington that doesn’t reduce the conversation of who American Jews are, what do we care about and what are our concerns. It tries to resist the partisan-ization of Judaism in America. And to try to re-articulate like—to be in a Jew in America has been an incredibly interesting and noble project that American Jews have been trying to build. And we’re, we’re kind of letting it go because we’re acting like other dumb Americans in, in trading our serious ideological commitments for the stuff of, of partisanship and trying to win elections. So those are some of the kind of both ideas and projects that we’re, we’re trying to build out in the next couple years.

Mark: You’ve given a couple speeches about the golden age of Jewry in America, of Judaism in America. And, you know, you’ve, you’ve contested the idea that it’s entirely in the past, the way Franklin Foer argued in the Atlantic Magazine. But it’s not, we’re not still in it, are we? I mean, what, what’s your take on that? You think, you say, we’re letting it go. Are we… we haven’t let it go? You’re saying—what is, what about our current age is golden?

Yehuda: Well, yeah, nothing’s great right now. I would still say if you lined up, even in the current steady state of what it means to be a Jew in America right now, if you line that up against every other diasporic Jewish experience in history, you would say by virtually every metric, we’re doing better.

Now, when you’re in something good, people tend to have a lot of fear of its disappearance. So the projection of “the golden age of American Jewry is over” is, is rooted in like, oh my God, it’s getting away from us. The sky is falling. I just feel that’s a terrible way to try to sustain this wild new experiment that Jews have made at the intersection of liberalism and Jewishness and the American project, that has been really great for us, and by the way, really good for America. Like we played a role in shaping the kind of covenant of those values for the American people. And it feels like a big mistake to embrace a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy that, that it’s gotten away from us instead of saying, how do you get back to work?

Now, I’m frustrated by the fact that there are, I think, a whole bunch of Jewish organizations who are complicit in the kind of taking down of the American Jewish project.

Mark: Like who?

Yehuda: I think, by and large, the industry that claims to be fighting antisemitism in America, that does so by embracing anti-democratic measures in this country, by letting abandoning our allies, by particularizing the experience of antisemitism and not allowing it to share anything in common with other forms of hatred, I think that is just a total abandonment of the Jewish project.

And I, what I want us to do is say, what were the raw materials ideologically that constituted what we as Jews built in America over this period of time, and reinvest in those. I don’t care about like the cultural expressions in the same way of like, the American Jewish golden age. Like fine, we’re, we’re actually doing fine on that front anyway. I’m talking about like, pluralism.

Mark: We used to have more Jews in writers’ rooms of Hollywood comedies, right?

Yehuda: Yeah. Whatever. I, what I wanna talk about is like we were committed to the notion of cultural pluralism. Are we still doing that? We were committed to the idea that like, fighting antisemitism was akin to fighting all sorts of other forms of hatred. We led the way on that in America. We, we talked about America as something vastly different than other diaspora experiences. And now I watch a whole bunch of Jewish leaders who are like, oh look. We’re back in the old, you know, the king and the nobles.

I just, it’s like crazy to embrace those stories when we still have the ability to do something remarkable here, that was unprecedented in our history. I don’t know why we would stop.

Mark: Did you get the email I got this morning, that one of the major Jewish philanthropies is starting a new project to rate colleges as I did healthy for Jewish? Like, so, so the ADL already has a report card, and now the Tikvah Foundation is gonna have their own report card. And I mean, maybe it’ll be a better report card, but it strikes me—these, these are the worst ideas, is sort of giving out report cards to universities on… Right? There’s something about, there’s something so defensive about that as opposed to…

Yehuda: Yeah. When I had you on the podcast to talk about Jews in the Ivy League, and, and the work that you had done with that podcast series, which was so great. When Jews first experienced antisemitism in these institutions, what did we do? We’re like, we’re gonna beat it. You can’t keep us out. And that, that meant investing in those institutions despite their antisemitism.

And instead our community is saying like, oh, you’re inhospitable to us. We’re gonna fight you. We’re gonna participate in federal efforts to dismantle the university that have nothing to do with antisemitism that are about a conservative plan for… that’s been around for a decade to dismantle higher education because they perceived that they couldn’t win the battle of ideas through those contexts. It’s just nuts. Our job right now is to say, if these are part of the vital infrastructure of building American society, we gotta stay in it and fight for it.

Mark: Well, no one ever said Jews were smart.

It is time for religious holidays and celebrity birthdays. As I’ve said, Rosh Hashanah is upon us. It begins sundown, September 22nd and then lasts for two days, even in the state of Israel—I made a mistake on the last episode and I said it was one day in Israel. Rosh Hashanah is actually the holiday that is two days, both in Israel and in the diaspora. It’s followed up by Tzom Gedalia, the Fast of Gedalia, and Yom Kippur and Sukkot and Simchat Torah and like this is the season when little Jewish kids at little Jewish day schools are never in school so many days off. So much parental complaining.

The Hindu holiday of Navaratri is on September 22nd to October 1st. We’ve already talked about how the Solstice is coming up for Pagans and Wiccans. That’s September 22nd as well. Really coincides with Rosh Hashanah this year. And the Prophet Mohammad’s birthday is celebrated in, in Islam actually today and tomorrow. So you’ll miss it a little bit by the time you hear this podcast, but be mindful of that, and maybe say something to your Muslim friends.

Celebrity birthdays. We’ve got some good ones. Nick Jonas birthday on September 16th. September 25th, Will Smith, Donald Glover, and Catherine Zeta Jones, newly relevant because she plays Morticia Adams in Wednesday on Netflix. Wednesday, the story of Little Wednesday Adams as played by Jenna Ortega has become the show of choice for me and my 12-year-old daughter, Anna. We plow through it at about 15, 20 minutes a night after dinner and I think Jenna Ortega is simply fabulous. I think she’s a star for the ages, and it’s, it’s a great joy to be getting reacquainted with the Adams family. Catherine Zeta Jones, having a birthday September 25th. And we’ll just round that off by saying that T-Pain, the Rapper, T-Pain, star of the Great Lonely Island comedy video, “I’m on a boat,” you should go check out. That’s with the Lonely Island guys of Samberg, Akiva Schaffer, Jorma Taccone. T-Pain has a birthday September 30th. Now back to my interview with Yehuda.

Mark: I have a few questions for you. These are my, my traditional podcast ending questions and they have nothing to do with anything else. You ready?

Yehuda: Yep.

Mark: Okay. Do you believe in God and if so, what does that mean?

Yehuda: Oy vey. Huh. I don’t know that I conventionally believe in God. Like it’s certainly not like the flying spaghetti monster version. I definitely don’t relate to God as a force that will, that I want to do my bidding. I find that to be like a narcissistic, almost idolatrous way of being in the world. God cares about me. I don’t make… it doesn’t make sense to me. I take very seriously the God of our tradition and I identify most with the rabbis who tried to build a Jewish world that was rooted in taking responsibility for it and giving back God God’s autonomy. That’s my evasion of your question.

Mark: Oh, I like that. I like that. Giving back God God’s autonomy.

If you could have done any other job within reason, like something that maybe you could have done, if you’d made different choices, what would it be?

Yehuda: I mean, the easy answer is I would’ve stayed in academia. I think I would’ve hated it, to be honest. I didn’t…

Mark: Probably you would’ve.

Yehuda: I think I would’ve, but I think I probably could have done that. Honestly, I started doing this so young that I didn’t, I never really poked down like another pathway. I could’ve, probably could’ve run for office. I also would’ve hated that.

Mark: Yeah, I see that You probably, you found the one thing you wouldn’t, you wouldn’t have hated.

Yehuda: Correct.

Mark: What’s a, what’s advice you give to younger people, not your own kids, but let’s say a college student comes up to you and says, like, give me a piece of advice.

Yehuda: Any piece of advice on anything?

Mark: Yeah. Yeah.

Yehuda: I mean, I got, I heard somebody say this a few years ago, which I thought was great. Your career is more of a jungle gym than a ladder. Sometimes you move laterally, sometimes you move down, you move around, you look at it differently. The goal isn’t, it’s not, you know, and, and I think your pathway in life is not linear.

I also remember early on, I had a friend who, who told me, I think we were 19 or 20 about his 10 year plan for his life. And I, I must’ve looked at him like he was crazy, like he was crazy. And he was like, well, what’s your 10 year plan? I was like, I think I’ll figure it out as I go along. And then 10 years from now, that will retroactively have been the 10 year plan. And I, I, that has, that has worked for me. I, I’m not, I’m not a huge believer in, in that kind of long-term planning. And by the way, I’m not a huge believer in it for organizations either, you know?

Mark: What became of that dude? How does ten year plan go? I think it worked for him.

Yehuda: He made partner?

Yehuda: Yeah. Maybe. I found it boring.

Mark: No, I mean, to me there’s almost an existential despair at thinking that I would know where I’m gonna be in 10 years. It would almost make me not wanna keep going if it was all laid out before me, in a predictable, in a predictable way.

Yehuda: Oh, I’d also say don’t burn bridges. That’s a big one. Yeah. Don’t burn bridges. And I think for young people, that has a lot to do with social media. Don’t paint a picture of yourself in the world that you’re not gonna be able to erase later on. Don’t paint yourself into a corner because of the ideological convictions of your youth. And it’s certainly true with relationships as well.

Mark: Yeah. Or just don’t be on social media. That’ll, that’ll take care of a lot. That’ll take care of a lot of it.

Is there a song that makes you nostalgic for a particular moment?

Yehuda: Oh, there’s so many. I sang my wife down the aisle at our wedding. I know that’s the cheesiest thing imaginable. I sang a song called Tapuach Zahav, an orange or a golden apple by Arik Einstein Israeli, Israeli singer. So I, I don’t, I can’t hear that song without thinking about that awesome moment when all of my wife’s mother’s friends fell in love with me.

Mark: You know, in all candor. Are you, you’re a pretty good singer, I’m assuming?

Yehuda: Passable. Yeah.

Mark: Like, I wouldn’t do that, that wouldn’t be fair of me to do to anyone. But, you know, pass, alright, passable. I mean, I’m gonna figure that means better than passable and you’re being modest.

And finally, can you give us something to watch and something to read?

Yehuda: I’m in the middle of watching Yellowstone, which I love. I don’t know how and what—

Mark: I haven’t seen it. You always read about it as like the show that Red State America loves, that liberals like me have never heard of. And in my case that’s kind of true. I’ve never seen it.

Yehuda: But, so I actually found it to be kind of a combination of like Succession, but in a non-corporate environment, it’s the same kind of story, you know? Patriarchal figure, semi-dysfunctional children, trying to think about the future, continuity of the business, all of these things. It has all of these aspects of kind of Western culture that I never thought I’d find interesting. And it’s also kind of a telenovela, so I kind of love that.

What did I just read? I just finished reading Fleischman is In Trouble.

Mark: Oh yeah. Good book.

Yehuda: Which I, at the beginning was like, oh, okay, I think I know what this is. And by the end, I, I was crying and I was like, oh, this is a really actually deep book about relationships and, and I’m really, I’m trying desperately to interview the author, because her two books have a lot to say about Jews.

Mark: You’ve read Long Island Compromise?

Yehuda: I read Long Island Compromise first.

Mark: This is Taffy Brodesser-Akner, who’s great. That’s interesting you read it first. Yeah, they’re both great. They’re different, but they’re great. And they do have, they’re very Jewy. I mean, they’re super Jewy.

Yehuda: They’re very Jewy. And sometimes, you know, sometimes fiction writers, they don’t wanna like go deep on that, but I want, I kind of wanna have that conversation with her.

Mark: Well, and she’s, she’s, you know, she’s a fellow Ramah mom. I mean, she, she’ll, you know, and she’s, you know, her mother and sisters are Orthodox and, and so, you know, she’ll go deep.

So, Yehuda Kurtzer, CEO, Rosh Yeshiva, head macher.

Yehuda: Just, just president.

Mark: Just president of Hartman North America. Thank you for joining us.

Yehuda: Thanks for having me, Mark.