Reclaiming the Jewish Story - with Sarah Hurwitz

You are listening to an art media podcast.

You know what Israel is, Dan?

Okay, I'm going to say something shocking and wild.

It's a country.

It's a country.

It was founded like so many other countries in the mid-20th century.

Countries founded in war, partition, in ways that were problematic in many ways.

I'm not saying this is wonderful and great, but I think what struck me is that so often I I think we educate our young people to think that Israel is exceptional.

It's unlike any other nation, but it's actually completely unexceptional in its founding.

And I think we have done a huge disservice to our young people when we have failed to educate them about how Israel is a country and we have failed to normalize Israel for our young people.

We have failed to say like, here's a bunch of really unpleasant facts about how Israel was founded.

And also those same facts apply to these other many, many countries.

Let's go through those as well.

And I think our tendency to exceptionalize Israel, because we want our young people to fall in love with it, it really sets them up for failure once they hit college and they hear their first bad fact and they're like stunned.

It's 4 p.m.

on Sunday, September 7th here in New York City.

It's 11 p.m.

on Sunday, September 7th in Israel as Israelis have begun a new week.

According to reports, today the U.S.

has issued a new ceasefire proposal that would see all 48 hostages released on the first day of the implementation of the deal, alongside the release of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners, followed by talks geared at ending the war that President Trump, according to these reports, would personally mediate.

President Trump announced on social media that Israel has accepted the terms, stating that it is now time for Hamas to take the deal.

This is something we will be monitoring in the days ahead.

Earlier today, a Houthi drone impacted Israel's Ramon airport after failing to trigger sirens.

The drone struck the passenger terminal and caused damage to the building, but fortunately, no severe injuries or casualties.

One man was slightly injured from shrapnel.

Last week, as the war passed its 700-day mark, Hamas released videos of hostages Alon Ohel and Guy Gilboa Dalal.

Alon Ohel was taken captive along with Hirsch Goldberg-Poland, Eliyah Cohen, and Or Levy.

Goldberg-Poland was murdered in captivity while Cohen and Levy have both been released as part of hostage deals.

Alon's family said they have been told by medical experts that based on Hamas's footage, Alon is likely now blind in one eye.

Two days after the videos were released on Saturday night, tens of thousands of Israelis took to the streets demanding an end to the Gaza war and the return of all remaining hostages.

The largest rally took place in Jerusalem near Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's residence where protesters accused the government of abandoning the hostages in order to prolong the war.

This all comes as the IDF has begun to strike Gaza City where the hostages are reportedly being held.

implementing the government's plan to conquer the area.

Meanwhile, according to Israel's Khan public broadcaster, the U.S., Qatar, and Egypt are expected to offer a new proposal for a Gaza ceasefire deal that would see all hostages returned and Hamas replaced by a new administration.

On Saturday, following reports that Netanyahu has been seriously weighing annexing parts of the West Bank, a senior Emirati diplomat said that such a move would be a, quote, red line that would take regional integration off the table.

According to a report by Khan, Saudi Arabia has given the UAE its blessing to reconsider Israeli-Emirati normalization, which was established in the Abraham Accords should Israel proceed with annexation.

As Netanyahu faces mounting pressure from within Israel and the rest of the world, former Mossad chief Yossi Kohn, a close ally, or at least previously a close ally of Netanyahu's, suggested in an interview on Israel's Channel 12 that Netanyahu should step aside after dropping hints about a political career in Cohn's future, although not such subtle hints.

That's it for news updates.

But before today's conversation, a word from our sponsor.

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Its impact is extraordinary.

84% of alumni are raising their children to have a strong Jewish identity, but it can only continue with our support.

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To contribute to a new generation of proud, connected, knowledgeable young Jews, visit birthrightisrael.foundation forward slash call me back and be part of the movement.

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Now on to today's conversation, where we are joined by Sarah Hurwitz, who has a book coming out this week called As a Jew, Reclaiming Our Story from Those Who Blame, Shame, and Try to Erase Us.

It's an urgent exploration of how anti-Semitism has shaped Jewish identity and more importantly, how Jews can reclaim their tradition.

It's a terrific book.

I highly recommend it.

I've had conversations over the last several years with Sarah while she's been working on this book.

And we will link to the book in the show notes so you can order it.

And Sarah and I will be at an event on Wednesday night at the Stryker Center at Temple Emmanuel.

If you want to attend the event, please be sure to register.

That's this Wednesday night.

And it's a terrific panel.

And again, we'll have all the details in the show notes.

Sarah, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you so much, Dan.

It's great to be here.

So, Sarah, I want to start by just jumping to some data that you cite in the book from the 2020 Pew Survey of the the American Jewish community.

And one piece of data you point to here are of those American Jews who do identify as Jewish, but when asked what aspects of their Jewishness are essential, the number one answer, according to this Pew survey, was, quote, remembering the Holocaust.

76% of those Jews who identify as Jewish, Three quarters of them say the most essential part of their Jewishness is remembering the Holocaust, followed by leading an ethical and moral life.

72%.

So almost three quarters of Jews, essential to being Jewish is an ethical and moral life.

Working for justice and equality in society, 59%.

Being intellectually curious, 56%.

Continuing family traditions, 51%.

And then my favorite one is having a good sense of humor, 34%.

One percentage point higher than those who said being part of the Jewish community, meaning the sense of humor part was more important than being part of a Jewish community.

You cite that data and your response to it was what?

Was, ooh, busted.

You know, that was my Jewish identity for most of my life.

You know, for me, Judaism was three boring holidays and one fun one, Hanukkah.

It was two texts, the prayer book I held in my hand once a year, twice a year, and the thing on the scrolls at the front of the synagogue, a handful of universalistic values, don't lie, cheat, steal, love the poor, and the Holocaust.

The rest of my identity was kind of a series of apologies and caveats.

You know, oh, I'm Jewish, but not that Jewish.

No, no, I'm just a cultural Jew, which beautiful, right?

If you connect to Judaism through Jewish culture, history, language, arts, music, that's wonderful.

I didn't know about any of that.

Or I said, well, I'm just an ethnic Jew, which is a nonsensical statement because Jews are of just about every ethnicity and every race.

Or I said, social justice is my Judaism.

Again, there are Jews who are deeply versed in Jewish social justice and spend their lives enacting that.

And I didn't know anything about Jewish social justice.

So what the heck was I talking about?

What was going on there?

Okay.

So this is your second book on Judaism.

So you've now written two books on Judaism.

Tell us about your journey.

Where were you before you started tackling these projects and why you chose to do it?

Yeah, I was a really half-hearted kind of Jew, maybe showed up a couple of years out of a vague sense of obligation.

But when I was in the White House through a bizarre series of circumstances, I randomly wound up taking an intro to Judaism class in my mid-30s after a painful breakup.

I was just looking to fill some time.

And what I found in that class both stunned me and blew me away.

It was like 4,000 years of wisdom on the human condition about how to lead a truly worthy life, how to be a good person, how to transcend the narrow confines of myself.

And I remember thinking, like, where has this been all my life?

I was so delighted by it.

And I just thought, like, I have to share this with other people.

And so I, you know, I wrote my first book, which was just this love letter to Jewish tradition.

I think what I was stunned by is that, you know, the ethic of the modern secular world is is kind of you do you as long as you don't hurt other people too much.

It's a pretty low bar.

I mean, that's really the ethic of modern American law, which is do whatever you want as long as you don't abuse people physically, steal their property, or infringe on their rights.

Nothing about generosity, compassion, self-sacrifice, self-transcendence, self-discipline.

It's a lot about self-expression, self-love, self-discovery, which are all fine, but I think the balance is a little bit off.

And when I studied Jewish law and ethics, it was a much higher bar.

One example is just just all of the Jewish thinking around how we speak.

I've always heard people say, don't gossip.

And I kind of thought that meant, you know, don't spread salacious stories about others.

But oh no, when you study Jewish law, it contemplates scenarios like the following.

Let's say you and I are colleagues.

We get into a fight one day at work and I am furious at you.

And I go home and I call three of my friends and I say, that guy, Dan, oh man, let me just tell you about him.

And I just trash you.

He's sketchy.

He's dishonest.

He doesn't work.

I mean, I just trash you because I'm angry.

Next morning, we come back to work, we make up.

It was a mistake.

Problem is, I just told three people about you and maybe they told each a few people who told a few people.

A month from now, you apply for a job at a company.

And oh, one of those people who heard what I said about you, they're like, ah, I'm, you know, I've heard something about that guy.

You know, let's just give him a pass.

Okay.

With my venting, with getting something off my chest, I've just seriously affected your livelihood.

And there's actually a Jewish story about this, about a guy who in his little shtetl, he went around trashing the rabbi.

Then he felt bad.

He went to the rabbi and said, look, I've been trashing you.

I apologize.

Will you forgive me?

And the rabbi says, sure, you just need to take this feather pillow, rip it open and scatter the feathers to the winds.

And the guy thinks like, that is weird, but okay.

He does it.

He comes back.

He says, okay, feathers are scattered.

Am I forgiven?

And the rabbi says, absolutely.

But first, you just need to go and gather all those feathers.

That little story, it's like, it's devastating, right?

And there are a million more stories, pieces of wisdom like that that I think push us to be better.

Okay.

You write in the book, and I'm quoting here, cultural Judaism, which you write does not involve any knowledge of or engagement with Jewish culture.

Cultural Judaism isn't all that helpful when your spouse dies or you're wrestling with a difficult ethical decision or you're feeling lonely and like your life is meaningless.

It turns out that Jewish mother jokes are of limited use when encountering the most serious challenges of being human.

In those moments, you could really really use a loving community and thousands of years of wisdom from your ancestors.

Sarah, that paragraph alone, I just feel like I want to like blow up into like a billboard.

And like, it just, that, that's like the single best summary of, I think, what you're trying to say here.

I would also even point out that even if you're someone who's really focused on fighting anti-Semitism, even if that's your jam as a Jew, you can't do that either if you don't know anything about Jewish history or Jewish tradition.

If someone says to you, you know, Judaism is a a religion of law with an angry, vengeful God, and it's nitpicky and weedy, and Israel is a colonial, genocidal state.

If you know nothing about Jewish law, if you know nothing about Jewish history, what are you going to say back?

I love Kogel.

I think Seinfeld is funny.

Ha ha.

Right.

That thin, you know, Judaism as an ethnic joke kind of identity, not only does it diminish the life you lead, it leaves you defenseless against so much of the Jew hatred we're seeing today.

So you wrote the first book, Here All Along, and then you wrote this this book, As a Jew.

Why the second one after you hit many of these themes that you're talking about right now in your first book?

Right.

So this book was prompted by several things.

Number one, I trained to be a volunteer hospital chaplain.

And I just want to pause on the word chaplain, right?

When I told people that, they were like, but aren't you?

Jewish?

Don't you have to be Christian?

No, it's interfaith, but it's America.

So many things that are ostensibly interfaith are actually kind of Christian.

And I found that in the training, it was like, we talked about our ministry, our theology.

I was told that prayer is, God, please heal so-and-so who can hear me praying out loud for them right in front of them spontaneously.

I was told everyone prays that way.

And when I kept trying to say, you know, that's not a common form of Jewish prayer, I was told, no, no, it's universal.

So that was interesting.

And I began to think about the ways in which Jews actually think, speak, and understand the world and Judaism through Christian terms, values, and ideas.

Even the way we define spirituality.

I guarantee you, the vast majority of Jews think spirituality is we have these carnal, kind of materialistic bodies, and the goal of spirituality is to transcend them for this heavenly spirit realm.

You know, body, bad, degraded, soul, beautiful, incorporeal.

That's a fine idea.

It is not a central Jewish idea.

That's actually more of a Christian idea.

And that really affects how we look at our traditions.

I also say another thing that happened is I visited a college campus many months before October 7th, and I had previously been pretty little dismissive about the whole campus anti-Semitism thing.

Like, come on, what if a few kooky professors?

But one of the students at the Hillel asked me, you know, how did you deal with anti-Semitism when you were in college?

And I literally didn't understand the question.

Like, she had to repeat it.

And I was like, I didn't, not once, never, a single time in the 1990s or early 2000s in college or law school.

And the kids looked so stunned.

Like, I think they didn't believe me.

So that was pretty sobering.

And again, this is many, many months before October 7th.

And I actually, that question that I asked with such delight, like, where has this been all my life?

I began to ask it more seriously.

Like, why was the Judaism I had grown up with so deeply edited?

What was that that I grew up with?

And why hadn't I seen the vast majority of our tradition?

And I took a deep dive into history and discovered that none of that was an accident, that actually the Judaism that I grew up with, and I think many people did, was really in many ways the heartbreaking outcome of 2,000 years of anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism and about 200 years of a very understandable and in some ways courageous effort by Jews to escape that persecution, to take advantage of the opportunities of the modern world by erasing aspects of ourselves and our traditions.

You talk about this experience of becoming a chaplain, which was in and around COVID.

Was it right after COVID?

No, it was right in the midst of COVID.

Which means that a lot of the work on this book happened before October 7th.

Correct.

Where were you with the book project on October 7th?

You know, by October 7th, I had essentially been working on this book for about a year and a half.

And when October 7th happened, a lot of my friends were like, oh no, does this change your book?

And I said, not a bit.

It certainly changed some of the tone and sensibility of the book, but the key ideas, there was no change.

So after I did that initial Hillel visit, which again was many months before October 7th, I reached out to Hillel and said, okay, something's going on here.

Would you mind planning like a campus tour for me?

And they agreed.

So after October 7th, I visited 27 college campuses.

And, you know, just to be very clear, to say campus is X is nonsensical, right?

Campuses are incredibly diverse.

You can have basically every kind of experience as a Jew on a college campus.

But a lot of the campuses I visited were ones where anti-Semitism was particularly bad.

And I think what really stunned me about these visits was how the moral atmosphere on campus had become so extreme.

On some of these campuses, Israel had been put into the same bucket as the KKK and the Nazi Party.

So if I said to you, Dan, I'm a Nazi, but I'm a liberal Nazi.

Come on.

Or look, I'm in the KKK, but I'm not racist.

I just, you know, white pride.

Come on, right?

These are entities that one should have no contact with, no affiliation with whatsoever.

They are vile, period.

So that, you know, these poor Jewish students were saying, wait a second, I am against Bibi and this government.

I am even against the war.

I am against the occupation.

I have so many disagreements, but I still care about Israel.

Oh, no.

It cuts off all conversation.

And, you know, I find it frustrating that I still get a lot of pushback and almost gaslighting from people who say, come on, Sarah, it's not as bad as you say it is.

You know, this is just criticism.

The kids on campus are criticizing Israel.

And I just, respectfully, you know, when you're hearing things like from water to water, Palestine should be Arab or Israelis are Nazis.

I'm not totally sure how that is different from water to water, Israel should be Jewish or Palestinians are terrorists.

Those are vile, racist, eliminationist, disgusting things to say.

God forbid a Jewish student should ever say such things.

But we somehow just have decided that that's legitimate criticism.

And there's a big difference between slurs and unsupported accusations and actual criticism.

So you talk in the book, there's a historical precedent for one phenomenon we've been seeing over the last couple of years, which is the number of times I hear from critics of Israel, oh, it's not just us who are anti-Zionist, they will say, referring to themselves.

There are Jews who are now anti-Zionist.

I'm friendly with this one student at Harvard who said that the year after October 7th, whenever there were campus protests, the protests of the Students for Justice in Palestine or whatever it was, they would always be sure for the first speaker to be a Jewish student.

There is historical precedent for what I'm describing here in that trying to get Jews comfortable with rejecting Israel and rejecting Zionism.

And what you argue in the book, it's never going to end just with that.

It's not like they're accepting you as a Jew.

So can you talk a little bit about that?

Yeah, I think many of the students I encountered on campus, and frankly, many of the adults I've encountered, their core anti-Semitism education is Holocaust education, which takes the form of, you know, you're told that anti-Semitism is the Jews are bad and we're going to kill them and there's nothing they can do to be good, right?

That is the Holocaust and pogroms.

However, there is another form of anti-Semitism, and Dara Horn writes about this brilliantly in People Love Dead Jews, which is more of a conversionist kind of anti-Semitism, which says, oh yeah, the Jews are indeed bad.

But there actually is something they can do to be good.

There is something they can do to be saved.

And that something is that they can reject whatever aspect of Jewish civilization that we, the majority, deem disgusting.

So centuries ago, if you rejected Jewish religion, if you converted, you'd be saved.

Maybe.

We'll see for time.

You know, in my parents' and grandparents' generation, it was reject your name, reject your nose, reject your Jewy mannerisms, be more classy, civilized, waspy, and then maybe, maybe you can work at my law firm, join my country club.

The problem today is not the Jews' religion, God forbid.

We would never be bigoted against religion.

The problem is not our names or our noses, God forbid.

That's so discriminatory.

The problem today is our nation.

And the conversion demand today is convert to being an anti-Zionist.

Reject your ancestral homeland.

So I just make sure this is very clear.

It's the message that these Jewish students or Jewish progressive activists are hearing is, we'll let you be Jewish.

We won't discriminate against you for being Jewish.

You just have to reject Israel.

Correct.

Just carve that out of your Judaism.

Correct.

And then you're fine.

And it often, you know, I sometimes heard these Jewish students doing this heartbreaking conversion narrative, which had such historical resonance, which was, you know, growing up, my rabbi and my parents told me Israel was great.

I got to campus and I heard it's actually this Nazi racist state.

And I had an epiphany.

I saw the light and I took anti-racism and anti-colonialism into my heart.

And now I'm saved.

Now I'm an anti-Zionist.

And it's like, yes, now you are saved.

I would say this to the kids.

If a black student said to you, my campus is great for black students, but I can't wear my Black Lives Matter t-shirt because that guy, I'd be just harassed and ostracized.

So the majority is deciding how black students should be black.

Really?

You'd be okay with that?

Well, no, okay, I wouldn't.

You know, it's confusing because anti-Semitism gets upgrades.

You know, the medieval Christian clergyman did not think he was a bigot.

He had centuries worth of very sophisticated theology telling him Jews killed Jesus.

The enlightened European gentleman in the 1800s did not think himself a bigot and he wasn't some superstitious Christian.

He had enlightened racial science that said that Jews were racially superior.

And today, no one thinks Jews killed Jesus.

No one thinks they're racially inferior.

The issue is Jews' nation, right?

That's the problem today.

And when you're in the upgrade, you often can't see it clearly.

You really are so impacted by the thoughts of those around you that you kind of think like, oh, God, maybe our religion was the problem back in the day.

Maybe our race was the problem back in the day.

And today it's like, oh, maybe our nation is the problem.

When you're in the upgrade, it's very hard to see it clearly.

I want to take a short break to hear a word from our sponsor, and then I want to pick back up on some of these historical precedents that you cite in the book.

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Okay, Sarah.

So just picking up where we were just before that short break, the Yevsexia in the former Soviet Union in the, I guess it was the first half of the 20th century.

Can you talk a little bit about what that was and how relevant it is to what you're describing right now?

Yeah, so Dara Horn, she writes about, I think the essay is entitled The Cool Kids.

And, you know, this is like the communist revolution is coming.

And, you know, that means getting rid of Jewishness, which is considered counterrevolutionary and so what they did is they actually recruited jews to help stamp out jewish tradition to go and to you know get rid of synagogues jewish cultural institutions jewish schools and these jews they believed in the revolution this was cool and they were you know i think there is she calls this the weaponization of shame you're made to feel deeply ashamed about your disgustingness the disgustingness that the majority around you wants to reject.

And she says, you know, this kind of anti-Semitism, it often looks like the Jews themselves choosing to reject their traditions.

It does not fit the typical rubric for what we think of as bigotry or prejudice.

And that's why it's just tremendously, tremendously confusing.

And so basically they said, reject your Zionism, you can be a Jew.

And then, but the idea was, well, it's not just reject your Zionism, but just reject every reference to the land of Israel, to which when you start saying we're going to reject that, you're basically scrubbing thousands of years of Jewish texts.

I mean, this is, you know, we are very much a land-based religion, which I think we lost in the transition to modernity.

On Sukkot, we shake a lulav and a citrum, which are a fruit and a plant that are native to Israel, to the land of Israel.

You know, we blow on major holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we blow a ram's horn known as the shofar, which again, that's from a native species in Israel.

And I could kind of go on and on.

You know, so much of our tradition connects back through that land spiritually, emotionally.

And I think to say that somehow it's just the modern state of Israel and that's it, it just, it reflects, I think, some ignorance of history and of Jewish tradition.

You have this line where you write in the book, I worry that Israel has become, quote, the short skirt and drinks for many Jews today.

Can you talk about what you mean by that line?

There is this incredibly ugly, disgusting, and misogynistic idea that women who were sexually assaulted were asking for it.

You know, they wore a short skirt.

They had too many drinks.

What did they think?

What did they expect was going to happen to them?

Which just, I find it repulsive, that lie.

And I think today we're seeing something kind of similar where it's like, well, look, like this is the short skirt and drinks for Jewish students.

It's like, look, you want to have contact with this evil state?

What do you think is going to happen to you?

You know, there is this sense.

And what that short skirt and drinks thing does is it makes the woman feel ashamed.

It makes the woman feel like there is something kind of wrong with her, where that's really not the case.

And I think that many Jews today are being made to feel shame, not just about the Israeli government's actions or policies.

That's a totally separate matter.

It's shame about the very existence of Israel itself.

It's this sense that Israel is somehow just the original sin of the world's existence that really needs to be expiated.

We need to get rid of that in order to redeem the world.

And you quote in the book, Achadam, who had this, you know, about something along the lines of, well, what if the whole world is right?

Like we're sitting here saying it's so obvious that Israel's not wrong here.

It's not to say Israel doesn't make mistakes, but we're not wrong here.

And at some point, given the persistence of anti-Semitism, you know, century after century, millennia after millennia, that like maybe they're all onto something and we're missing the narrative.

That's exactly it.

I mean, there is, you know, this is the problem of general agreement, I believe he calls it, where it's like when a vast majority of people around you are all agreeing on something.

It's kind of easy to gaslight yourself and say, I must be wrong.

But he actually cites the blood libel as what enabled us to fight back against that because the blood libel, which is the smear from the, from medieval times that claimed that Jews were drinking Christian babies' blood for ritual purposes.

I mean, disgusting anti-Semitic lie.

You know, Jews heard that and said, wait a second, our laws prohibit the consumption of blood.

That is so patently not true that it was a moment of like, wait a second, the majority can be wrong.

You know, that realization, and what I saw on campuses that really gave me hope was I think a lot of Jewish students today were beginning to realize like, oh, wait a second.

Maybe the majority can be wrong.

You know, maybe the mob isn't always right.

You know, a lot of Jewish students I met with at Hillel were coming to that realization.

And look, you know, Jewish students on campuses, they can't just throw a tantrum and have their feelings be heard, right?

They're sort of told, you know, you Jewish oppressor, we don't want to hear your Jewish tears.

So they really learned to cite facts, to think critically, to cite arguments.

You know, it is a very painful way to get an education, but they are getting it.

And I have a lot of admiration for these young people.

Staying on that, you have this chapter in the book called My Search for Israel's Original Sin.

So can you talk a little bit about what is Israel's original sin and your, and your, and why you wanted to search for it?

So, you know, my first book, I was talking to a Jewish communal leader, telling her about my first book and about, you know, the chapters on ethics and God and Shabbat, on and on.

And she looked at me and she said, uh-huh.

And the chapter on Israel?

And I had this long thing about when, no, no, no, and, you know, it's distracting, la, la, la.

And she looked at me and she goes, well, that's a cop out.

And the truth is, it was.

I felt a lot of anxiety about Israel.

It seemed so complicated.

And I hate to say this now, but I think on some deep level, I had a feeling that there was something fundamentally problematic about Israel's founding and existence that if I did enough research, I would discover and I would not be able to defend.

That you would be part of the general agreement.

Exactly.

Like I was actually, which is just, I'm so embarrassed by this now.

It is such a painful thing to admit.

Sarah, this is what we're dealing with.

I hear this all the time.

So you're just saying it out loud from people who otherwise just say it quietly or in small groups.

And you know, as I did the research, I was like, you know what Israel is, Dan?

Okay, I'm going to say something shocking and wild.

Brace yourself.

It's a country.

It's a country.

It was founded like so many other countries in the mid-20th century.

Countries founded in war, partition, bloodshed.

I'm sorry, it's not pretty.

I really wish it had come about in unicorns and moonbeams.

That would have been beautiful.

I mean, look, this is how a lot of nation creation came about in the mid-20th century, in the wake of World Wars I and II.

You know, countries were partitioned, divided up, and in ways that were, I think, problematic in many ways.

I'm not saying this is wonderful and great, but I think what struck me is that so often I think we educate our young people to think that Israel is exceptional.

It's unlike any other nation, but it's actually completely unexceptional in its founding.

And I think we have done a huge disservice to our young people when we have failed to educate them about how Israel is a country and we have failed to normalize.

Israel for our young people.

We have failed to say like, here's a bunch of really unpleasant facts about how Israel was founded.

And also those same facts apply to these other many, many countries.

Let's go through those as well.

You know, I wish every young person could understand that, yeah, there's some really tough, hard, awful stuff in Israel's founding, as there was in the founding of many other countries at the time.

And I think our tendency to exceptionalize Israel, because we want our young people to fall in love with it.

It really sets them up for failure once they hit college and they hear their first bad fact and they're like stunned.

They can't get over it.

And they kind of freak out and throw out the whole thing because they're immature.

That's what 18 year olds do.

They just kind of flip out and there's plenty of support for that on campus.

So I think we kind of own some of this.

At my kids' Jewish day school, there's a class taught in the high school called Dual Narratives,

which they look at historical events in the Israeli-Palestinian-Israeli-Arab conflict and they study perspectives from the Israeli and from the Palestinian perspective.

But there's something, and I'm not getting the wording exactly right, but it basically says, to be clear, the goal of this course is not to reach some kind of middle ground on all these issues, right?

You know, implicitly, some of these issues are just not bridgeable.

Some of these perspectives are not bridgeable.

But it's just important to understand the way we see a certain event and where the other side sees a certain event.

And that in and of itself, to your point, going onto a college campus would be an important thing for Jewish students to know.

Even if we say, look, we're not going to sort this out.

It's not reconcilable.

Like, it is not reconcilable.

So, and we're not going to try to accomplish that.

We just want you to know where they're coming from.

Exactly.

And by the way, how Jewish, right?

To hold conflicting perspectives and understand them.

I think that is such a profound kind of Jewish education.

All right.

You also say in the book, in the same chapter about searching for Israel's original Jewish sin, quote, if Jews had been colonialists, they would have given up and returned to their home empire long ago.

Explained.

Yeah, this is the problem with this, you know, Jews as colonialist narrative.

Whatever word you want to use, that's fine.

But the idea of a colony is that it is a colony.

It's in the actual word itself.

It's a colony of an empire or a home state, right?

People from that home state, empire are coming.

They are forming a colony in this other land to which they have no actual right or entitlement.

And they're stealing it.

The problem is, A, Jews bought the land actually when they originally came.

Oops, small factual issue there.

But more importantly, they had nowhere to return to.

And so when they're conceived as colonialists, it's just, it's a category error.

It's actually a mistake.

Because if the idea is, well, look, previously in history, we have fought colonizers with relentless violence and terrorism and they leave because it's just not worth it to keep a colony when you got a home state or empire.

Problem is, Jews have no home state or empire except for Israel.

They can't leave, actually.

It's actually going to be worse for them in the places where they came from.

And I think that is just a terrible category error that has been made and has resulted in a lot of totally needless violence and bloodshed.

Speaking of my kids' Jewish day school, just the other day I was at a ceremony.

What they do is the head of the school gave a delivered remarks in which she made reference, although, you know, delicately, about Israel, about 700 days of war and of hostages.

And I was just thinking to myself as she was speaking, when my son, who's a senior, so he was in this assembly, started in kindergarten.

The Israel he knew of and would learn about in the subsequent years is so dramatically different than the Israel that these kindergartners now will experience in the next number of years on so many levels and in so many ways.

It was actually so upsetting to me as I sat there looking at these little kids thinking like, there's so much shattering and devastation and darkness.

So what is your message to those?

I mean, I know you're not speaking to kindergartners, but just imagine these these kids now coming of age now over the next number of years.

Like, what do you say to them?

So, look, you know, this is something that I've really been struggling with as someone who, you know, I am a Zionist.

And by that, I keep having to define this.

It's like so frustrating.

And I got to be honest.

Even the fact that I have to say I'm a Zionist, like Zionism succeeded.

We founded a state.

Why am I re-arguing this battle?

I almost worry that I'm undermining my own cause.

But I say to them, like, I'm a Zionist, which means that I think Jews have a right to safety and security in a state in their ancestral homeland.

They have a right to national independence, just like Japanese people have in Japan, just like Latvians have in Latvia, just like I think Palestinians should have in a state of their own at some point.

And, you know, the reason why I think we need that is because I know history.

And we ran that experiment of Jewish statelessness for 2,000 years.

It went poorly.

And I think what a lot of Jews don't understand is, you know, they know the Holocaust, two-thirds of European Jews wiped out.

And they think, well, okay, that was terrible, but it it was kind of a one-off.

They don't know 850,000 Jews living in Arab lands in the mid-20th century, all who fled persecution because they were unsafe in these lands.

The majority went to Israel.

They don't know 2 million Russian Jews persecuted in Russia, a million to Israel.

They don't know tens of thousands of Ethiopian Jews persecuted in Ethiopia, went to Israel.

I can go on and on.

So, and they just can't somehow comprehend that, the real horror of Jewish statelessness.

And I also, I worry that there, you know, there was a category error that we made in the transition to modernity, which was we began to think of Judaism as a religion in order to fit in.

And, you know, if you think of people in Israel as your co-religionists, you might look at them and say, well, wait a second, those people aren't practicing my religion of social justice and of tikkun alam.

Like they don't, I have nothing in common with those people.

But that's a category error.

They're not your co-religionists.

They're your siblings.

You know, they're not a religion.

They're your mom.

And I think that category error is what is maybe confusing a number of us.

So I want them, that's the argument I make.

And I make very clear that I'm appalled by the current Israeli government.

I'm just, I'm appalled.

I disagree with many of the policies.

I disagree with the extreme ideology that we see in it.

I'm passionately critical.

But I'm also an American who is a proud, patriotic American who loves my country so deeply.

And I'm horrified by my current president.

It's not hard, right?

You can love a country, be connected to it, think it is a worthwhile project, and be appalled by its current leadership.

And I think we again and again need to emphasize that.

I also think, and I say this gently and with respect, a young person recently said to me, Zionism means being pro-Bibi, Bengavir, Smotrich, and the occupation.

That's Zionism.

And I got so huffy and I started lecturing her and how dare you, and that's not true.

But then, Dan, I stopped for a minute.

And I thought, if this young woman doesn't really see a lot of the Jewish world having any daylight, between these things, not, you know, if the policy is like, we don't criticize, which I get, I get, I think criticism, man, you you give them an inch, they take 100 miles.

So I get the danger of that.

But is it so unreasonable that she's gotten that impression that that's what Zionism is?

And if it's that or anti-Zionism, if those are the two only two choices, I almost think we have some responsibility in her going to anti-Zionism.

If there is not a kind of Zionism that I want to present to people, I worry, I worry that we are losing young people and it's maybe not 100%.

We're not 100% blameless in that.

Although I'll say, I was listening just this morning to a podcast, and

there's this professor, Danny Orbach from Hebrew University, who just came out with this big study looking at the claims, the charges of genocide against Israel.

It's like a big 300-page report.

It's very serious.

He systematically knocks down really with extraordinary data, just really takes it apart.

And the host of the podcast says something along the lines of, you know, it's great that Danny Orbach did this, but, you know, he's a professor from Hebrew University.

So it's an Israeli university.

It would have been better if it were a university in France or a a university in the UK.

This almost comes back to your earlier point, like about liberal, you know, are you a progressive Nazi?

Like we're trapped, regardless of who's to blame for it, we are trapped by this idea that if you are an Israeli or a Jew, you are somehow inherently corrupted.

Yes.

You know, I often say to college students on campus, if your Chinese American classmate walked around with a t-shirt that said China, I think that even if your classmates knew China wasn't turning a million Muslims in camps, I think they would still say, oh, clearly she doesn't agree with that.

Like she, you know, she's probably has family or heritage there.

Maybe she's studying Chinese.

And again, that courtesy is not afforded to Jewish students.

Sarah, we've talked a lot about anti-Semitism as it has exploded on college campuses, which is largely an anti-Semitism of the left.

But you don't only write about anti-Semitism coming from the left in your book.

Yeah.

And it's, that's very important to me because one thing I find so distasteful is the, oh, it's on the other side.

No, it's not.

If you think there are sides here, you are very confused.

There aren't sides.

There's kind of one thing.

And what I see on the right that really quite worries me is this idea that there is a small group of powerful, highly depraved and perverse elites who are controlling things, who are manipulating things and harming your family.

That is the very structure of anti-Semitism.

Small group of powerful, depraved Jews are harming you in a conspiracy.

So the leap between elites and Jews, it's like roughly a millimeter and it's being being made.

You are seeing this being made on the right.

Tucker Carlson has made the leap.

A lot of people are following him.

So I think it's incredibly important to understand that.

And I also think that anti-Semitism is the idea that the Jews are the one thing that stand in the way of the redemption of the world.

You know, we are doing this grand moral project.

The only thing stopping us is the Jews.

And yeah, you see that on the left, which is we're doing this grand moral project of anti-colonialism, anti-racism.

Who's stopping us?

These colonialist, racist Zionists, meaning Jews.

You see it on the right too, which is we upstanding white Christian Americans are bringing back white Christian civilization to America.

Ah, but the only thing stopping us are these Jews who are importing black and brown immigrants to take the place of white people.

That is the great replacement conspiracy theory.

It is a hateful racist anti-Semitic lie.

But, you know, this stuff is happening on both the right and left.

And I really worry that we are getting to the point where the horseshoe, the ends are meeting and it is taking the shape of a noose.

And I think we need to be really thoughtful about that.

And I have zero patience for the it's on the other side people.

I think that is patently nonsense.

Okay, I want to wrap up here and just basically ask you, because we've talked a lot about Israel and the experience on campuses and this wild period we're living through, but you also argue in the book, and we touched at this at the beginning, that the sort of countercultural wisdom that Jewish tradition offers as a cure for many of our societal ills.

So it's less about, not about anti-Semitism, it's not about Israel.

It's about what's happening in American Western societies today that you feel like Judaism is like the perfect antidote for.

Yeah.

There are so many ways in which Judaism is so wildly countercultural and in exactly the way that I think we need right now.

And I'm going to give two examples.

The first one is there is this old anti-Semitic lie that says that Christianity is a religion of love and grace and Judaism is a religion of law, legalistic, nitpicky, weedy.

And that's actually not really true.

If you actually look at Jewish law, what you find out is that in those nitpicky, weedy details is a high bar for love.

Now, I'll give two quick examples.

Jewish law says, if you're in a store and you have no intention of buying anything, do not ask the shopkeeper the price of an item because that wastes their time.

and it gets their hopes up unfairly.

We're also told if you've loaned money to someone in need and you happen to see them coming down the street towards you a few weeks later and you know they're still financially struggling, you should actually walk a different direction.

You should try to avoid them.

Now you could say, come on, you can't just say help the poor.

You can't just say be kind to workers.

Why do you need these hyper-specific situations?

And that is what you see in Jewish law again and again.

But what if this happens?

And what if the person has this need?

And what if this?

But what you don't understand is that weediness, it is designed to inculcate within you an exquisite sensitivity to the needs and dignity and humanity of every single person who crosses your path.

You know, each specific little situation is like when you go to the eye doctor and they click that little vision machine to make your vision sharper.

That's what's happening.

Judaism is making your moral vision sharper and sharper to narrow down on this particular individual, to see them in all of their humanity, their vulnerability, their dignity.

And this is the exact opposite of the modern secular ethic that says, no, no, no, no.

You divide people up into two crude, dehumanizing categories, powerful, powerless, oppressor, oppressed, and we love or hate them accordingly.

End of story, which is like clicking the vision machine backwards and making your vision so blurry that all you can see are two big blobs.

So that is the kind of wisdom that we need, a kind of moral vision.

The second thing I'll say is that our modern society is so repulsed and disgusted by death, dying, grief, illness, aging.

We're just disgusted by it.

Hospitals freak us out.

Dead bodies give us the creeps.

It's like, just inject some chemicals into that, give it some Botox, send some flowers or a text, just like run.

We spend billions of dollars running like hell from these aspects of life.

And what Judaism says is, no, no, no, no.

You run right up close to that aspect of life.

You get your butt to that hospital bedside and you sit with that sick person.

You get your butt to that funeral, to that Shiva, which is where Jews mourn as a community.

You prepare that dead body for burial.

Community members do this.

And, you know, what Jewish tradition is saying is that there are these thin spaces in our lives where the boundaries between life and death, heaven and earth, thin out, and they are disorienting spaces.

When you are in that space, you are on the edges of of life and

you're just really lost.

And Jewish tradition is saying you need to be accompanied.

You need a loving community.

And it is our job to get right up with you in those thin places.

And that is just so counter to modern life, which just says, no, that's all disgusting.

We want nothing to do with it.

All right, Sarah, we will leave it there.

That is beautiful.

And again, I highly recommend the book.

So we'll have a link in the show notes to your book as a Jew.

And as I mentioned in the intro, Sarah and Dara Horn and I will be on a panel at the Stryker Center on Wednesday night at 6:30 p.m.

If you want to register for the event, we'll have a link to that in the show notes too.

I think it'll be a very spirited conversation.

And registering for the event, also, if you can also register in a way that gets you a free copy or not a free copy, but gets you a copy of the book.

And general admission is free.

It's Wednesday, September 10th at the Stryker Center at Temple Emmanuel in New York City.

So, Sarah, I guess I'll see you in a couple days.

And until then, thanks for doing this.

Thanks so much, Dan.

That's our show for today.

If you value the Call Me Back podcast and you want to support our mission, please subscribe to our weekly members-only show, Inside Call Me Back.

Inside Call Me Back is where Nadavyal, Amit, Segel, and I respond to challenging questions from listeners and have the conversations that typically occur after the cameras stop rolling.

Inside Call Me Back will come out every week as an extension of the Thursday episode.

To subscribe, please follow the link in the show notes or you can go to arcmedia.org.

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Call Me Back is produced and edited by Elon Benatar.

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Research by Gabe Silverstein.

Our music was composed by Yuval Semo.

Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.

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