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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.

Yehuda Kurtzer on Grappling with History and Memory Transcript

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

Tessa: Hello, my name is Tessa Zitter. I’m the producer of the Identity Crisis podcast. We’re bringing you a special episode today from the new podcast, “The Five Books: Jewish authors on the books that shaped them.” On December 12th, Yehuda Kurtzer joined host of The Five Books podcast, Tali Rosenblatt-Cohen, for a wide ranging conversation on the books that are near and dear to him. You can give The Five Books podcast a listen wherever you get your podcasts. Here’s the episode.

Tali: Welcome to The Five Books where each week we talk with a Jewish author about five books that are near and dear to them. My name is Tali Rosenblatt Cohen. Every week I ask Jewish authors about five books in five categories. We’ll hear about two Jewish books that have impacted the author’s Jewish identity. We’ll hear about one book, not necessarily Jewish, that they think everyone should read, a book that changed their worldview. We’ll get a peek into what book the author is reading now, and we’ll get to hear about a book they’ve published and how it came about.

Today we’ve partnered with my friend, Dr. Yehuda Kurtzer and his podcast, Identity/Crisis, to bring you a really special episode. Yehuda is president of the Shalom Hartman Institute. He is a leading thinker on the essential questions facing contemporary Jewish life. He writes and teaches about Jewish history and memory, leadership in American Jewish life, and the relationship between American Jews, Israel, and Zionism. We’ll be discussing the collection of essays and commentaries he co-edited, The New Jewish Canon. He’ll also tell us about some of the books that influenced his life, including As A Driven Leaf by Milton Steinberg.

Yehuda: The book was a way of getting permission to struggle with hard questions, to struggle with really big human questions, really big Jewish questions that our tradition just will never have perfect answers to.

Talia: And, In the Land of Israel, by Amos Oz, published in 1983.

Yehuda: He says, my dream for humanity. Is that none of us would be tied to nation states with flags and anthems and armies. He says that drama ended for me with the story of the Holocaust. And now I insist on playing the game of nations. I think that’s such a deep, hard idea.

Tali: And Yehuda will reframe the current moment to find an opening for optimism.

Yehuda: I’ve been playing a lot lately and trying to write about this line that the historian and philosopher Gershom Scholem has, where he says, there are moments in history that can be best described as plastic moments, where new possibilities are there. And if leaders can exploit that moment, they can change Jewish history.

Tali: That’s all coming up next.

Thank you so much for joining me here on the Five Books. It’s funny for me to be welcoming you because I am sitting in your beautiful new podcast studio in your offices. So thank you for having me and for being here.

Yehuda: Welcome.

Tali: Welcome to both of us. This is a particularly fun interview for me because we have been friends for a few decades. And when I saw the books that you had selected, I just thought to myself like, ah, that tracks.

Yehuda: I’m sorry I didn’t surprise you.

Tali: In the best way of like, oh, I’m so excited to hear more about this. It’s such an illuminating way of talking to someone and getting to understand them better. So I’m really happy we’re doing this.

Part of what I’ve had in mind as I’ve been talking to all these incredible authors and hearing about the books that have influenced them is really just thinking about, what are the books that have shaped our Jewish American story and thinking about that in perhaps terms of a canon? So I thought it would be like a nice echo to talk to you about the New Jewish Canon, which I know you edited along with Claire Sufrin. You were culling I guess the ideas and arguments of What has shaped the Jewish discourse over the last 40 years?

Yehuda: Yeah, it was, it was a kind of a strange book in that it’s, it originated for me—I started the project and then within about a year or two, Claire joined on and what she will say, I think publicly, is she joined so that the book would actually get finished, which was great.

It came from me out of teaching. I was teaching on contemporary Jewish issues and debates and I kept returning to the same source materials over and over again that were modern and contemporary texts that appear on a source sheet when you teach like classical Jewish texts as though they are secondary sources, but increasingly they started to feel like primary sources, like really important essay written two decades ago that has like shaped the zeitgeist.

And I started to feel like, wait, this is actually, there needs to be a textbook. And, and for what it’s worth, there was also a moment, Claire and I shared this at a, in a mini conference when we did a gathering here at Hartman a few years ago about what we called post-Holocaust thought. And there was an observation in the middle of that conference that most of the thinkers who get described as post-Holocaust thinkers, it kind of ends in like 1979, 1980, when in fact, all of us are still in the post-Holocaust era. And there’s been immense production of ideas and debates and literature in the past 40 years, but it takes history too long to start encoding those things as being really important.

So we said, what would it look like to take a really recent snapshot as a means of understanding the Jewish present of the recent Jewish past? And that’s how that book kind of came into existence.

Tali: Yehuda, can you tell me a little bit about the categories that you have, and how the book is structured into those categories?

Yehuda: Sure. So we organized the book into four conceptual categories, Jewish politics and the public square, history, memory, and narrative, religion and religiosity and identities and communities. We essentially treated it as kind of two books in one. It was a collection of primary, of what we called primary texts, for between 1980 and 2015. And for each of them, we published an excerpt as well as a short commentary. I think it was like 1500 to 2000 words written by a contemporary peer, scholars, writers, rabbis, thinkers.

In that sense, it was kind of a double canon. There was the stuff of the recent past, and then there was all these really diverse, eclectic writers who were writing about those writers. But we wanted to signal there are big stories that are unfolding in our world as contemporary Jews.

Tali: Right. It also, all of those ideas are echoed in the book selections that you have. So, it’s fun to…

Yehuda: I’m sorry, I’m a little bit on the nose.

Tali: No, so it all comes back and threads around, which is amazing. Book one, a Jewish book from childhood, As a Driven Leaf by Milton Steinberg.

Yehuda: I had a little bit of a weird modern Orthodox upbringing in some ways. Parts of it feel very conventional. Those were the years 1986 to 1994, when we lived in like suburban Maryland and went to a Modern Orthodox school and an Orthodox school. It was just like the previous 10 years where I grew up overseas, in Cairo and in Israel, where my dad was a diplomat. Those were stranger, in the sequence of like, a normal Modern Orthodox upbringing.

But the most kind of, strange dimension of it was that my father’s career was rooted in the peace process between Israelis and Palestinians. And those are the anchoring years of that work. And so Israelis and Palestinians were in our life in a very present way in ways that I only by the time I came to the Hebrew Academy, later realized were odd, right? That, I don’t know, we are just, the politics were different. The conversations at our dinner table were quite different. It was not uncommon for me to pick up the phone in high school and for it to be like Palestinian negotiators checking in, oh, hey, Yehuda, is your dad home? And obviously later I was like, oh yeah, it’s unusual.

So I, I point that out cause it does get to the book a little bit of what does it mean to, to like be in somewhat of an insular life with Jewish identity choices that are rooted in kind of a certain type of insularity, but to also have this portal to the world out there that was really on the edge of some of the normative ideas and politics of the community in which I lived.

Tali: Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so when did you pick up As a Driven Leaf?

Yehuda: So I think I was assigned As a Driven Leaf to read as one of the pre-reading books to go on the Bronfman Youth Fellowships in the summer before 11th grade. Actually, now that I think about it, I think one of the other books was on that list also. So that reading list was very formative and I read it pretty quickly.

Looking back on it, I think there were two ideas that really stood out to me about why that felt so important. One was, it was like the first introduction I had to what became like my first academic love, which was the first century—Judaism in formation in the wake of the destruction of the Temple, the birth of early Christianity, all of this stuff happening at the same time. When I first started to love that period of Jewish history, I didn’t fully realize, and it took me decades to realize, that it was interesting to me because it felt like it was the present, of all of the dynamism of post-Enlightenment emancipation, the world changing, but the cataclysm of the middle of 20th century, it just, it’s basically the same plot 2000 years later.

I gravitated towards that because I was like, wow, this incredibly interesting era in Jewish history. And by the way, the book describes itself as a book about the second century CE, the story of Elisha ben Avuya, the great rabbinic heretic, who’s the student of Rabbi Akiva. And kind of betrays him, goes off and becomes the enlightened, you know, philosophical thinker, leaves tat that community.

Steinberg was not writing about the second century. Steinberg was 100 percent writing about the 20th century. That’s why they have so many echoes.

Tali: In what way?

Yehuda: I think, you can’t really do a narrative history of the second century the way he does. I think he elevates the kinds of philosophical questions that make more sense as modern philosophical questions and situates them as the central problems of the second century.

For instance, there’s a famous rabbinic text that he elevates in the book as being so formative, which is that Elisha ben Avuya. One of the reasons the rabbis offer of why he left, went off the derech, as they say, left the path, is because he had this moment when he was sitting in the valley and watched as a child obeying his father’s wishes climbed a tree to send away the mother bird and take the eggs, which those are the only two commandments in the Torah where it is directly said, you will have a long life for doing that, obeying your parents and sending away the mother and taking the eggs. And the child falls to his death.

And Elisha ben Avuya in the Talmud says, some version of—there is no judge and there’s no judgment. There’s nothing, nothing about this works.

What Steinberg elevates that story to be is essentially a version of when bad things happen to good people, the problem of theodicy, which is in some ways a much more pressing theological problem in the middle of the 20th century after the Holocaust for contemporary Jews than, it It certainly was a big issue in the first and second century following the destruction of the Temple, but I think that’s, it’s really a post-Holocaust story. And I think Steinberg is kind of working it out for himself.

Not to mention the fact that you have this whole vision of the possibility of being fully accepted into Greek society to really be Hellenized, like that was kind of possible in antiquity, but it’s really possible today. So I don’t think I’m foisting too much on Steinberg by saying that to make this parable of the emergence of a Jew from feeling trapped in their parochialism to being a citizen of the world felt to me like a pretty clear parable of what it means to be a contemporary Jew.

Tali: Did you feel that then when you read it?

Yehuda: No. No idea. Okay. No idea. I just thought it was mesmerizing. I will say the thing that I think mattered to me in terms of my Jewish identity at the time as a teenager was the book was a way of getting permission to struggle with hard questions.

And I, I think about this a lot as a parent of teenagers and as an educator now of teenagers, that it’s neither our job as Jewish educators to like, hold them in place. That feels like a terrible malpractice. Nor is it our job as Jewish educators to like, free them of the, you know, clear the dust over their eyes and expose them to a world and push them out of it. But it is to give them permission to struggle with really big human questions, really big Jewish questions that our tradition just will never have perfect answers to. And in essence, to say, you can struggle with those questions and still be part of our people. I think that’s like a such a big deal for 16 and 17 year olds.

It was a huge deal for me to discover. Wait, there’s a rabbi in the Talmud who is a heretic. Cool. And the rabbis didn’t erase him entirely from history. They only tried a little bit by taking away his name. But then they continue to tell the story. I felt like that was an act of giving permission. And in fact, when I went back years later on the Bronfman program and I was teaching on it, the texts I taught were the Talmudic texts about Elisha ben Avuya, and I saw it—I saw kids identifying with these stories and for the first time feeling like, okay, I’m not I mean, it’s the problem with 16 and 17 year olds. They sometimes come to the conclusion that they are the first people in history to confront major theological and philosophical crises.

There’s something important educationally about saying, you’re not, and we can hold you, right? You can, you can see role models in your community and your family of people who have had these struggles before, and not that they get perfect answers from anybody, but at least you’re not alone.

Tali: Yeah, I think probably I was one of those 16 and 17 year olds and I think what struck me about the book was just, you know, we were learning Talmud in school, you didn’t see them as actual fully fleshed out people and there they were. I wonder…

Yehuda: Yeah. Human characters. When I was in college and I continued to study the rabbinic tradition and in yeshiva, I got very interested in the biography of these characters. And it took kind of getting to graduate school to get disabused of that because no real historian thinks you can do biographical information, especially based on the Talmud. It’s not a history book.

I spent like a year in graduate school on the topic of the historical Jesus, which is an amazing whole category of scholarship, which has like people who are really passionate about being able to make historical claims about who Jesus was. And then the rest of the field that’s like, what are you doing? You could possibly know anything about this individual. And it’s true for the rabbis also.

But yes, some amount of being able to identify them not merely as characters on a page who are debating the kashrut of a chicken, but like human beings living in history. That, that was really eye opening for me with that book.

Tali: Yeah. And I wonder if you can just go back a little bit to your first 10 years abroad. Because I think, you know, Israel certainly has played a huge role in your studies and career and thinking, if you could just tell us a little bit more about what that upbringing was like in balancing your Jewish practice and your father’s role.

Yehuda: Yeah, I, to be honest, like, I don’t, I don’t think I was fully conscious of any of that. Well, in my first 10 years, I can reflect on it now. When we lived, we moved to Cairo when I was about two and a half and we were there for about three, three and a half years. Like, what do you say about an upbringing when you’re that little? It’s like a home. You don’t know that it’s weird that you live in a suburb of Cairo. I went to the American school across the street for preschool and for kindergarten.

I have very faint memories, but important narratives that my parents have told us about the ways that they functioned as kind of a Chabad house in the late seventies, early eighties, anytime there was a visiting Jewish or observant, actually, Jew who was visiting Cairo, they found their way to my parents house. So I keep meeting people who I don’t know and didn’t really know my parents, but they’re like, I had Shabbat dinner in your house in Cairo. They were usually told to bring a chicken because they were oftentimes coming from Israel. So you’d pack a frozen chicken in your, in your suitcase and then you’d show up and eat it.

My dad has crazy stories about one time his suitcase fell apart on the tarmac and a whole bunch of frozen chickens were bouncing around on the runway of the Cairo airport. So there was something very normal about that kind of Jewish upbringing from the inside. In retrospect, fascinating.

And the most interesting story was that my parents went in ’79 right before the Camp David agreements were signed. So my parents were in Egypt when the first Israeli diplomats to get stationed the Arab world, since the creation of the state of Israel showed up in Cairo and they showed up in abject fear. Like they were now told, you’re going to go back to these communities where Jews had mostly left. And you’re going to be the representatives of the State of Israel.

My parents have a, have a, kind of a legendary story in our house where they, my mom dressed us up in costume on Purim and we delivered Mishloach Manot food baskets to the Israeli diplomats and they opened the doors and burst into tears because they were so overwhelmed by this. And my parents have stayed close with some of those people.

And then we moved to Israel in ’82. And I, this was like a good indicator that our Jewish identity was not fully connected to my dad’s job. My parents were like, well, why would we put you in the American school if we’re in Israel? Why don’t we just put you in the Israeli public school system? So that’s where I went for three years to a religious Zionist public school in Ra’anana, where I got bullied terribly, but I learned Hebrew. And again, that was like a weird bridge that we actually had that that was going to be, our identity was being Jews and speaking Hebrew and the fact that we were also there on this American diplomatic mission was not, I guess, was not that weird to my parents.

And, and more of that has happened in the last 10, 20 years, more American Jewish diplomats spending time in Israel and really blurring the line. Certainly the Shapiros did that, but my parents were real pioneers on that. And to their credit, my parents have managed, always to kind of live this life without constantly naming the tensions. They just do it. And I find that more interesting than getting kind of paralyzed by, Oh, am I an American now? Or am I a Jew now? And I feel connected to this place in Israel, but I’m really just representing the American government. So that fluidity is something I learned a lot from and has stayed with me. And I still try to carry it in the work that I do.

Tali: Book Two, a Jewish book from adulthood, Zachor, by Yosef Chaim Yerushalmi.

Yehuda: So I, I’ve been trying to figure it out. I don’t totally remember where I encountered it, when, when in college or when maybe early in graduate school. I met Professor Yerushalmi as an undergrad at Columbia across the street. Did you take a Yerushalmi class?

Tali: Mmhmm.

Yehuda: That was a hilarious experience. He’s a legendary historian at Columbia. He, there were two amazing things about his classroom. One was he would just come and give these magisterial lectures on the Jews of medieval Spain. But there were two funny things.

One was the first three rows were always filled with what were at the time called lifelong learners. They were like community members who wanted to continue taking classes at Columbia. So all the students were kind of behind them. And it was basically his age peers in the three front rows. And they loved him. And he mercilessly heckled them for most of the lecture for their foolishness and idiocy. And they loved it. It was like this weird enabled relationship.

And the second thing was he had this trick where he would, managed to work his way towards the back of the room over the last five minutes of the lecture so that as soon as the class ended, he would say the last sentence and leave the room so he didn’t have to talk to anybody.

So these were like hallmarks of his great pedagogy. Yerushalmi was just an incredible historian of history, medieval Judaism, early modern Judaism, modern Judaism. And the book is ultimately a meditation on what Jewish history means. And the overall argument that he makes for the first three quarters of the book is that most Jews throughout Jewish history had very little interest in history as we think about it today.

They had interest in a very different discipline, which is remembering the past, narrating it in particular ways, extracting meaning from it, as opposed to The work of history, which he codes really as a modern discipline of actually trying to understand what happens and to faithfully represent it.

The thing that’s so moving about it is in the last chapter, Yerushalmi basically says that business ends because once you become kind of conscious of history and its tools to mythify it, to engage in a mythical version of history rather than a real version of history, That’s like a wrong thing to do. It’s like bad science. It’s alchemy.

So he says instead, now, he argues, the burden of sustaining the Jewish past, which has been so deeply important to us as Jews, falls now on the historians. We are now the inheritors of the Jewish past. We are responsible for building the bridge between the past and the present. He calls history, the faith of fallen Jews. And I think he really thinks it’s the job of historians to maintain that link between past and present and future.

I don’t, again, don’t know when I remember reading it, but I was a student of Jewish history in college and then went to get a PhD in ancient Jewish history. And I felt always very challenged by both ends of this suggestion. On one hand, the recognition that to be a historian is to do something that Jews never really did. And at the same time, then if he’s right, What are the burdens and moral responsibilities of knowing something about the Jewish past for a people that really depends on it? And it ultimately became the catalyst for my first book for Shuva, where I tried to answer Yerushalmi.

Tali: So I was going to ask you to just give a little summary of the Future of the Jewish Past.

Yehuda: Yeah, the subtitle of that book is way better than the title, Future of the Jewish Past, legendary. What I tried to basically argue was that it won’t work. History doesn’t really work. It doesn’t build a bridge between ourselves and the past. It actually oftentimes leads to kind of condescension towards the past, right? The belief that if you believe that you are more enlightened than those who came before you, you ultimately are going to have very little to learn from them. And that the work actually is about reengaging in a postmodern sense with what real commitment to memory could look like, not by pretending that we don’t know the truth of what actually happened, but by being more explicit and self conscious about the business of building that bridge between the past and the present. That’s what I tried to do in the book.

Probably the strongest illustration of it, I think the strongest chapter, was about the Holocaust memory and the assault on Holocaust memory. And I want to say this carefully because I want to be clear that this is not an indictment in any way of Deborah Lipstadt, but I want to use Deborah Lipstadt’s work as an example. One of the reasons Deborah Lipstadt is a hero of Jewish history is because she defends the historical integrity that the Holocaust happened. I mean, it’s one of the scandals of the 20th century is that she has to go to a British courtroom and convince British judge and jury that the Holocaust happened because of the vagaries of British libel laws and because of David Irving, the Holocaust denier.

And I argued in the book, this is a losing proposition for Jews to make it as though our relationship with the significance of the Shoah, of the Holocaust, depends on whether other people believe our story. I said, over time, it’s going to be harder and harder to do. The evidence is going to thin out.

And so one project has been like, make sure you get all of the evidence. I worked for a summer at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and this was the project in the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, was—chronicle all of the information in these long encyclopedias and camps and ghettos. And until you’re there, you don’t realize that in order to do that work of preserving the Holocaust, the primary evidence you rely on is perpetrator evidence. Nazis kept all the best records.

So in order for us to remember the Holocaust, we have to depend on the perpetrator evidence and the literature at the museum that at the, when I got there as a graduate student, and I guess it was 2002, 2003, I went to look for a project, and I found this whole section of the library untouched. The section was called the Yizkor Bechar, which are these books written by Jews and Jewish communities after the Shoah, where they try to chronicle everything they can remember about their shtetl or their town from beforehand.

From a genre perspective, they’re a mess. They don’t follow a pattern because they were not professional archivists or historians. They only have a few things in common. They have beautiful introductions where somebody writes a kind of lament. They wind up having a list of names at the back. And then besides that, you know, one of them will have a hastily drawn map of what somebody remembers and historians can’t use them for anything, because they’re wrong—because they’ll tell a story of the town being liquidated on a Tuesday, but we know from the Nazis actually took place on a Thursday. And then you’re like, well, I guess I can’t use this. It’s unreliable testimony.

And the thing that I noticed was that the introductions are also unreliable because they’re unreadable to historians, but they’re readable if you know something about Jewish history, because they are quoting from the book of Lamentations and they are quoting without telling you that they’re quoting from Crusader testimonials, they’re actually, there’s a beautiful continuity of Jewish literature and Jewish memory taking place there.

And our job is to actually find a way to reclaim the business of memory rather than thinking that history is going to save us. So that’s what I was trying to push back with that book. Like, I agree, we have to figure out how as a modern Jews to hold on to the past. It’s been vital to us. We actually don’t know how to do the future without a version of the past. We do this all the time, but we’re going to have to do so in ways that reclaim Jewish memory as opposed to declaring it as something that has ended some piece of the past.

Tali: Book three, a book that changed your worldview In the Land of Israel by Amos Oz.

Yehuda: The book was first published in Hebrew, Poh V’Sham B’Eretz Yisrael. It’s a beautiful book that—Israel books don’t often hold up well, you know, new cycle. So Amos Oz writes this book in, I think it was 1982 and it’s an unusual book because what it basically consists of is him wandering around Israel and talking to people and kind of getting a sense of the moment.

You see, this is a theme for me. I like books that reflect a moment. And then he essentially reports these conversations. In some cases it’s, I went to go speak to this group of people and here’s the speech that I gave. In some cases, it’s a whole chapter with a right winger where he just, the whole chapter is the right winger talking and his story for the future of Israel.

And so the book has two powerful, kind of, enduring elements for me. One is there are just sections of it, which are magnificent. When Oz himself is speaking, he has a whole section on why he has come to terms uncomfortably with nationalism, where he says, nationalism is the curse of mankind. He says, I wish the Jewish people, he said, my dream for humanity is that None of us would be tied to nation states with flags and anthems and armies. He said, I think it’s bad for all of us. He says, I wish we’d lived in a world with cross pollinating civilizations that were able to pursue their destiny in the world peacefully in relationship with others.

But he says, the problem is that the Jewish people have already staged a long running one man show of that sort. Occasionally, the international community applauded and joined in, and occasionally they slaughtered the actor. And he says, and since he says that drama ended for me with the story of the Holocaust, and now I insist on playing the game of nations, quoting George Steiner, as though I am an old man in a kindergarten, he says, I don’t embrace the tools of war. I don’t like the mechanism of state, but I accept it as basically the rules of the game.

I think that’s a deep, hard idea. It runs against the idealism on both ends, either the anti Zionist idealism of de-territorializing Jews, or even the Zionist, over-valorization of the state and the army and the anthem. And it’s an uncomfortable comment. And I feel it’s kind of evergreen and it’s studyable. No coincidence that excerpt is in the New Jewish Canon. The right wing section, totally enduring. Everything in the right wing section came to pass. I mean, it’s horrific, actually genocidal in some ways.

Tali: There’s that part about I will do this now so that in the future, you know, you can disavow what happened in the past.

Yehuda: Correct. He says, you know, we’ll do what we need to do to the Palestinians and we’ll do it now. And later you will get to be welcomed into the family of nations by beating your chest and saying how terrible that we did this in our past. There are chunks of the content that are so powerful, but I’ll just also love the method of the way you learn a society or a civilization is not by standing on the side. It’s actually by talking to the people.

I guess I’m being kind of remarkable about it methodologically. And I, one dream I always had is to write a sequel, like walk around and talk to Israelis or talk to American Jews and figure out like, what’s the story here? And it’s not the same as like the precise social science version of sociology. It’s not about demographic studies or how many people believe this. It’s actually, can I, can I? extract powerful currents and ideas that are in a particular place. I think the lousy version of it is the like, I was in Israel and a taxi driver said this, which is an unfortunately common habit in some newspaper columnists, but also on social media. I got the zeitgeist through this one random conversation with my cousin, but in the hands of a master author, it’s actually a pretty remarkable exercise.

Tali: Do you remember where you were or how old you were when you read it?

Yehuda: That same dumb Bronfman summer.

Tali: Pretty formative summer.

Yehuda: I know. I actually can’t believe I also did the homework.

Tali: And have you read it or gone back to it?

Yehuda: Oh yeah, I read it regularly. It really does not get old. That’s the crazy thing. He’s on top there. The demographics have changed. The settler movement went from being small to being big. Haredim, ultra Orthodox Jews are a different population now than they were then. Nobody really believed even to the 80s that they were going to become such a significant population force. The great hubris of Israeli secularity was that eventually they were going to kind of cave in and be like everybody else.

So it’s not like all the pieces of the demography hold up, but the core ideas have been there for a long time. And I think it continues to be a kind of studyable textbook on Israel for today.

Tali: Book four, the book you’re reading now, The Safe Keep by Yael van der Wouden.

Yehuda: First of all, it checked all my boxes. It was like a book on memory. It was like a kind of a mystery of the past and a really, it was like a slow building anxiety book. I was frustrated. No spoilers. But yeah, in all of the ways that it hits on those themes of how do we remember the past? Who are we as responsible for what happened in the past? All of that stuff that we even talked about today was all over that book. And, you know, that was my last book.

Tali: Book five. The author’s latest book: The New Jewish Canon, edited by Yehuda Kurtzer and Claire E. Sufrin.

Yehuda: Let me just start by saying the project of trying to corral 70 authors to write something and then edit them is a total nightmare and I don’t wish it on my worst enemy. That’s why it took, it took about five years to put together the book. And that was also just, start and stop, I’m not a full time author. So there was just a lot of kind of coming and going.

I don’t totally remember where that came from, but I think if I go back to the fact that I envisioned it primarily as a textbook and a teaching tool, it felt to me important to not just pull these excerpts out of context, but to make a case as to why each of these excerpts mattered. In some cases, it’s not totally obvious.

You know, one of the stranger pieces that we included in the book was the Artscroll siddur, which came out at some point in the 80s, which actually, it’s not the text of the Siddur, the prayer book’s been around a long time, they didn’t make major changes, but the whole layout of the siddur, the whole attitude towards commentary, detailed instructions, like take three steps back, then three steps forward, say this. Some congregations say this, which means don’t say it. Most congregations say this, which means do say it. All of that was actually new in the Siddur publishing industry, and it has changed how prayer books are created. So it was actually about the book itself as opposed to its contents.

And that needed a commentary so that people could say, Oh, otherwise, if you just had like a photocopy page of the siddur for the excerpt, you’d be like, well, prayer wasn’t invented this year. So there were clearly places that needed that commentary.

Or when we had a section that Mijal Bitton wrote a commentary on, on Jewish population studies. Any individual Jewish population study is not that interesting. They happen all the time. It’s a big industry. The obsession with Jewish population studies between 1980 and 2015 is the story. So the commentaries were a big part of it. And that also added a layer of complexity because different authors. We’re going to offer their own spin and lens. And we had to kind of streamline that all of them were making something of a neutral claim of the importance of the document.

So it wasn’t like, I like this book, I don’t like this book. And you need a little bit of like suggestive language of provocative arguments that the authors are making about its significance, but mostly you need them to just say, this was important because, and that’s actually why I think the book works is because those pieces are, many of them are just excellent. They’re very readable and exciting short essays. And the sum total of the book is that it helps you explain a lot about contemporary Judaism.

Tali: Absolutely. I’m, I’m wondering now, as you look back at it, you know, it makes sense why you boundaried 1980 to 2015. Do you feel like 2023, October 7th, is sort of a new boundary? Do you feel like we’re at the start of sort of a new epoch or not necessarily?

Yehuda: I’ve been playing a lot lately and trying to write about this line that the historian and philosopher Gershom Scholem has, where he says, there are moments in history that can be best described as “plastic moments,” where new possibilities are there, and if leaders can exploit that moment, they can change Jewish history.

And Scholem used it to describe the kind of early moments following the Six Day War, which he feels were wasted. And I have felt that very, very acutely over the past year of—there’s huge opening. All of the ruptures in Jewish institutional life for the past couple of decades have already happened. The institutions that are declining have declined.

And certainly what we’ve seen about the tectonic shifts in politics in the Jewish community and, and around Israel, yes, there’s something very big going on. I don’t know yet that the books have been written, right? I don’t know that the books have been written or the, but it’s all there.

And I’m thinking about it a lot, both on the intellectual side, but also on the institution building side. What could happen right now that couldn’t have happened before? And the failure to respond to it now won’t mean that we won’t take advantage of it. It just means that the people who have other designs on the future will have taken better advantage of this moment.

You see it in the Israeli right right now. They know. They are trying to sail through this window and create facts on the ground in Israel that are going to irreparably damage the future of the state of Israel. It’s happening daily. So if liberal Jews don’t make the same concerted effort on the idea side and the institution building side, that plastic moment notion means we could lose for a long time.

Tali: It’s a lot of pressure on you.

Yehuda: Uh, not me. I’m just, I’m just an ideas guy. I don’t know.

Tali: I don’t agree. In that context, I was going to ask you which of the, I don’t know what you call them, they’re not quite chapters, but which of them feel the most resonant to you right now?

Yehuda: Yeah, I guess it’s like day by day.

I wrote about the, you know, going back to 1982, which is when the Amos Oz book was from, I wrote a short commentary about the Kahan Commission’s report after the Sabra and Shatila massacre, which took place in 1982. So I guess the Kahan Commission, I think, came out in ’83. Kahan Commission was primarily written by, at the time, a new judge on the Israeli Supreme Court, Aharon Barak, who later became the president and chief justice.

And it was, it was a really profound moment in Israeli jurisprudence because it was a government commission to investigate this terrible episode when the Israeli military, under the leadership of Ariel Sharon, had essentially evacuated the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp in southern Lebanon during the occupation there, and by evacuating it and kind of winking to the Christian phalangist group, those folks came in and massacred Palestinian refugees living there, men, women, and children. Terrible incident.

And so Israel investigated it internally, and the document that they produced, the conclusion of the report was Israel can be exonerated and can be as a good, as a key line, it can be exonerated based on the literal reading of international law because they didn’t actually perpetrate the massacre. But the Kahan commission uses the Bible and the Talmud to say, but we as Jews don’t want to think about how the State of Israel should act that way. We actually want to hold ourselves to a different standard.

And what that means is that we accept upon ourselves a sin of committing a crime through indirect responsibility, a sin of failing to take responsibility for everything that happens under our sovereignty. And they go on to say, and we in Jewish history suffered terribly when the countries in which we lived turned a blind eye to ravaging bands of marauders who killed us by saying, well, we didn’t do it. It was just those people.

So you have all three arguments in two paragraphs, and it is very haunting to read it today because number one, the Israeli government will not, and is not permitting a commission of inquiry to take place about the events of October 7th. They’re not doing it, obviously, because they are responsible for massive intelligence failures and the failure to respond quickly. So there’s no moral courage like there was.

Even if there was a commission of inquiry, it seems incredibly unlikely that any commission of inquiry will happen about the war in Gaza, where you don’t have to be an anti-Zionist or a hater of Israel to admit that there have been war crimes over the past 14 months. That’s inevitable under any war. But the way that you don’t become guilty in a larger sense is you fess up to them and you put instructors of accountability and you remove senior officers in their position when you need to. And that’s not happening.

And most painfully, the idea that Jewish tradition could be marshaled to make that kind of moral argument about who we are trying to be aspirationally has been replaced almost entirely in Israeli public discourse by Jewish arguments that, that, that advance the vision of our own supremacy.

So it is a haunting text because it was, it felt like a high watermark. In fact, it was at the, at the time, the French of all people were like, this breaks new ground for how a country investigates itself and holds itself accountable. And now it’s just not there. So to read it is to not just look at a historical moment, but it’s also to feel a little bit indicted by a historical moment by what the state of Israel canon should be.

Tali: Yep.

Yehuda: Look, I want to, there’s something else about the book that I want to acknowledge because it was such a big part. Unfortunately, it was a big part of the release. You know, the book came out in the summer of 2020. That sucked. We were supposed to have a big celebratory event at Hartman that summer. It got canceled. Instead, we had a big book launch on Zoom, which was wonderful, but it’s not the same.

But the other thing that happened was we were right in the throes of the racial justice protests in America, both because of that kind of moral climate that had taken place and also since we were immediately post me to the book came under a lot of criticism for our decision to include authors in the book of quote, unquote, primary texts who had committed or had been credibly accused of committing some version of sexual harassment, sexual assault.

It was a very confusing stretch of time for both Claire and for me, partly because. We had included a whole bunch of genuinely terrible people in the book who nobody was upset that we included, you know, we had Meir Kahane and we had this guy who wrote a book called Torat Hamelech, which is a rabbinic Israeli justification for mass murder, which has had growing influence inspired by Goldstein to commit his mass murder of Palestinians and the two of the patriarchs that have run. So it was confusing to us that like, cool. If the argument was, you should not include bad people, I mean, half the book couldn’t have been written.

And we felt like, well, no, the point of the book is to capture a moment of what were considered important ideas. And some of those important ideas were advanced by people who did bad things.

As a result, it took us a while to kind of figure out what the nature of the criticism was, how to engage it, made some adjustments and changes to the book. At the same time, I still feel to this day that some of the chapters that people were most upset about, like. There were two places where the work of the prominent sociologist Steven M. Cohen were included. And again, you can have whatever opinions you have about Steven M. Cohen, and I have strong opinions about the things that he was accused of—You cannot ignore his contribution, incredibly significant contribution to the economy and policies of Jewish life in America around the Jewish community’s approach to intermarriage around numbers, population decline, population growth, around the very activity of population studies. He did the majority of them. And I admire actually a lot of the work that he did, even at times I disagree with his conclusions. We work closely at various times. I certainly disagree with his actions.

I actually, in weird ways, if there was a coda chapter, even that whole sequence. Would have been an interesting chapter because…

Tali: And it’s interesting, because you did embed in there talking about how in some ways his attitudes towards women were part of his work.

Yehuda: This was, a series of scholars actually wrote that essay who said you can only understand his scholarship in relationship to his behavior towards women. I think the bigger meta piece is this old question of how do I study pieces of my own past that I’m ashamed about?

Look, if we were gonna do the book again, we made a lot of sins of omission. Even till the last day with the publisher, I was like, can we get another thing in here? I think we missed it. And then they were just like, no, you’re done, right? It’s too long already. I just think that whole story tells something about this era that we’re in it, by the way, we’re seeing it again now, post-October 7th of like the whole controversy around Israeli writers, Israeli authors, or Jewish authors who express Zionist views who are now suddenly considered illegitimate. We’re living in a weird era of ideological authoritarianism. And I, I think that that like we were in that story.

Tali: Yeah. I mean, that’s, that’s part of the impetus for this podcast altogether is just more books, more stories, more books, more

Yehuda: more books, more stories, that’s right.

Tali: More voices. Just to add to it all. So I just want to ask you, what do you think is the most important conversation for Jews to be having right now?

Yehuda: I think that the Jewish conversation right now is so dominated by the present and it’s exhausting. What happened today? And it’s exhausting in America about American Judaism because it is turning into versions of, oh my God, America doesn’t seem to be as good today as it was for Jews 10 years ago. And there’s scarcely any conversation about—what will it take to build a version of the Jewish community that we want?

And the same is true, by the way, in Zionist circles, there’s so much fear and anxiety. And all of that fear drives you to a kind of protective mode where all you can do is talk about the present. And there’s no real conversation in Israel about the future. There’s still no conversation about the day after in Gaza. There’s no conversation about the Israel of tomorrow.

And it takes a lot of risk to talk about the future when you feel anxious in the present, but it’s a self fulfilling prophecy. You wind up then just perpetuating the anxiety of the present into the future. You don’t, you actually wind up implicitly having a vision for the future. You just haven’t been able to articulate it, and it winds up being the worst version.

That’s what I want to talk about, and we, with our teen programs, our college student programs, I want to talk to them, not about how do I understand the present? I want to talk to them about like, okay, you’re going to be in charge of Judaism. Which version do you want? How do we help you figure out what we take from the Jewish past to make that work? I’m desperate for more Jewish organizations in America to be talking like on the antisemitism. Don’t tell me, don’t just keep telling me what happened today, right? I want to hear from Jewish organizations to fight antisemitism more on like, how are we rebuilding faith in liberal democracy? Because that was the strongest instrument that protected Jews in America for the last hundred years. Nothing. We’re fighting crickets. Tumbleweeds, because I think there’s just a fixation on now on the urgency of now, and I don’t actually think the urgent questions conversation is now the conversation we should be having should be about tomorrow.

Tali: That is such a helpful framing. Thank you so much.

Yehuda: I hope it works.

Tali: No, it, it is. And it’s, it, it gives you an opening toward optimism. Yeah. Like what to build towards. So that’s great.

Yehuda: Awesome. Thanks, Tali.

Tali: Thank you so much for joining us for The Five Books. Our guest today was Yehuda Kurtzer. Today, he discussed the thought provoking collection he co-edited, The New Jewish Canon. You can find a link to the book and all the others discussed today in our show notes.

If you’re not already a listener to Identity/Crisis, I hope this podcast gives you a sense of the deep and nuanced thinking that Yehuda brings to all conversations. You can find a link to that show in our show notes as well.

I’m Tali Rosenblatt Cohen. Our producer is Odelia Rubin. We recorded this episode at the Shalom Hartman Institute and are grateful for all the help from Yehuda Kertzer, Maital Friedman, Tessa Zitter, Gabrielle Finestone, M. Louis Gordon, and Daniel Goodman. Music by Dove Rosenblatt and Blue Dot Sessions. Art by Dina Friedman. Thank you especially to Odelia Rubin.