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Hi Identity Crisis listeners. This is Yehuda. I'd love to study with you in Jerusalem this summer. Every summer our campus hosts the Community Leadership Program, transforming Jerusalem into a gathering place for learners and leaders committed to wrestling with the big questions facing Jewish life today. This summer, you can be part of this experience, learning with me and my wonderful colleagues, joining a community rooted in hope, curiosity and possibility. Join us in Jerusalem from July 1 through 7 for the community Leadership Program. Space is very limited. Visit shalomhartman.org CLP to reserve your spot. Hope to see you there. Hi everyone. Welcome to Identity Crisis, a show from the Sholem Hartman Institute, creating better conversations about the essential issues facing Jewish life today. I'm Yehuda Kurtzer. We're recording this introduction on Friday, February 20, 2026. It's inevitable in a weekly podcast that some episodes land much more powerfully than others. We see often that when we're really pegged to the news cycle amidst a horrific war or a domestic crisis, that our shows do better. I think this is just because the urgency of the issues creates a different relationship to the listener, who may be coming in need of something more than entertainment. I've heard from enough people over the years that at times this podcast, or for heaven's sake, can serve a pastoral role. It can be calming or agitating in ways that feel more interactive than a one way medium normally should. This knowledge has helped me reconcile myself to this medium because I never went into this line of work to become a media personality and I thought I had left behind my radio DJing days when I graduated from college. This work, these kinds of podcasts, make me feel like an educator. Our podcasts from two weeks ago, America Betrays the Stranger, was one of those episodes that landed differently. We have some scientific ways of measuring this, but I can usually tell from the text messages, the reposts, and from what I'm told by friends and colleagues. It felt differently recording it. I was in Jerusalem at the time and I was sleep deprived. I wrote it from a place of anger and sadness and desperation, and it was much more direct and candid than I usually am. It was an effort to speak a language of moral truth, which is a departure for a podcast that tries to give airtime to complicated ideas, to let them breathe and to create conversations about them. Moral truth. This is a hard idea in pluralistic society. I really believe in moral conviction, in trying to speak and lead from a place of well thought out and serious commitments. And sometimes I believe in moral clarity, which is the willingness to believe that you've come really close to fully clear, clearly articulating an ethical position. But to speak in the language of moral truth is to go one step further. It's to claim to speak a language of certainty, even on issues that are so clearly publicly contested. I generally fear such claims, one of the reasons I prefer the rabbi to the prophet. I identify with thinkers like Isaiah Berlin, who asks us to build bridges rather than to stand on ledges, and Yitz Greenberg, who argued that one of the lessons of the Holocaust is that we may make no absolute truth claims anymore about anything, because the Nazis represented absolutism and they showed us how absolutism can lead to destruction and dehumanization. But this episode pushed us into moral truth territory. It was complicated to write, and it may have been different for some of you, may be difficult to hear. You know you're living in perilous times when you find yourself speaking differently than you ever anticipated. Another good indicator that this podcast landed differently for people was in the mail. I didn't hear a lot of disagreements to my core claim that it was a morally clear obligation for us as Jewish Americans to stand up against what's been happening not only in Minnesota but all over the country in these often illegal, violent, unconstitutional immigration crackdowns. Maybe some people dissented quietly. Maybe some people I managed to persuade. But I do want to respond to two pieces of mail that came in that largely agreed with what I wrote, but felt that I missed something. One came from Judy and from Susan in New York, in which they took issue with my characterization that major Jewish institutional leaders were too silent in response to this crisis. They cited to me the work of HIAs, major rabbis, many synagogues, and many local activists. I appreciate the correction. And of course that's right. In fact, in the podcast itself on social media about this podcast, I expressed admiration for those who had taken to the streets in Minnesota and and of course, hias, whose work we've talked about in this podcast last summer, and JCPA and other organizations. Those folks have indeed been out front. I still think, though, that my point stands as relates to the organizations who claim to represent the American Jewish community more generally to the public, to public officials, some of whom constitute what's called the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations. I think their silence is, frankly embarrassing. In the same week that we released the podcast, I read a quote from the executive director of the conference, who said that mainstream Jewish leaders are nearly all in agreement on most of the core issues, such as the centrality of Israel in Jewish life, Jerusalem as the eternal capital of the Jewish people, and a basic understanding of Israel's roles and rights in a hostile region. Those are the core issues, as he articulated, and not some basic elements of American democracy. Those are left out. I truly think this is shocking and helps to explain why only some of our organizations in America, and not all of them, have the courage to speak out right now. But thank you, Judy and Susan, for the opportunity to correct and clarify the record. I also heard from Rabbi Barry Block, who nudged a bit on what criteria I was using to endorse the kind of prophetic protest voice in a moment like this and not in others. It's a fair question at times. Our organization, the Hartman Institute, has embraced and endorsed participating in protests, even though our idea of the Beit Midrash as a place for healthy, combative ideas predominates in what we do. And even as we know that moving out of that lane to the protest lane always comes with consequences to that core mission. The Institute, for instance, marched officially in the Pride March in Jerusalem in 2016 because Shira Banki had been murdered the previous year, and we felt that religious institutions in Jerusalem had to show up to make the case for a Judaism that cared about human rights. Both Daniil Hartman and I spoke at various rallies during the Judicial Reform protests in Israel in 2023 because we felt we were standing with the majority of Israeli society in defense of democracy. And similarly, we have stood up against Itamar Bengvir and Bizala Smotrich through public letters and other forms of Protestants. And of course, we went as an organization en masse to the solidarity rally in November 2023 in D.C. just weeks after the attacks of October 7th, to do what I felt was the bare minimum of being with our people in that moment of crisis. So the criteria on when to speak up are not an exact science, but we're usually motivated to do so, that is to say, to make clear statements rather than to educate through our conventional means, when we can do pretty much all of the following when something feels like an unusual moral imperative, and when our voice can give cover to other leaders, to exhibit moral courage, and when we can contribute our ideas and wisdom to the cause that enables us to step out of our lane once in a while, while maintaining a commitment to the integrity of our work, of building an expansive Jewish people, a culture of pluralism, an embrace of the Jewish people's commitment to striving for greatness, to, again, once in a while, step out of the classroom and participate in other ways of Creating the plausibility structure to make those ideas come alive. Once in a while, you shed your fears about nuance and insist on some clarity. Once in a while, with the blood of our neighbor in the streets, we dare to speak the language of moral truth about what has gone wrong all around us to lead us to this catastrophe. On February 11, there was a Jews Against Ice rally in Washington that was led and overwhelmingly attended by the Shalom Hartman Institute's favorite people, a bunch of rabbis. I couldn't go, but a few of my colleagues could. I'm thrilled to hand over the mic today to our producer, Tessa Zitter, who is behind the scenes doing the great work of making this podcast great every week, and who this week walks us through what it meant to actualize this momentary shift from the classroom to the street.