← Identity/Crisis
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- [00:06]
A
Hi, I'm Michelle Siegel, the producer of Identity Crisis. Today we're bringing you a special episode recorded on Wednesday, July 1, during our community Leadership program in Israel. Every summer, hundreds of leaders and learners gather on our campus in Jerusalem to study with Hartman's lead faculty to explore the power of Jewish ideas and strengthen our understanding of the challenges that impact Jewish life. In this conversation, Yehuda Kurtzer welcomes Barry Feinstone, president and CEO of the Jim Joseph Foundation. Yehuda argues that North American Jewish life should be measured not only by its ability to survive threats or build vibrant institutions, but also by its commitment to moral and communal excellence. Together, they explore how North American Jewish leaders are balancing those interconnected goals of surviving, thriving, and excelling. I'll pass it over to Yehuda.
- [00:58]
B
Hi, everybody. I'm thrilled tonight to change the mode a little bit, as we do throughout this week, plenary learning and small group learning and evening conversations, and to change the mode and to enter conversation with a very close friend. Dear partner to the Sholem Hartman Institute, but also one of the most important leaders and thinkers in the North American Jewish community today, Barry Feinstone, who's the president and CEO of the Jim Joseph foundation, and in some ways the most recognizable philanthropic foundation in the field of Jewish education in North America, and a frequent thought partner with me at least, and for many others, around some of the bigger questions and trends that the North American Jewish community is facing. I want to say a couple of things to preface our conversation, which is there's no such thing as a North American Jewish community. So that itself is a little bit of a myth. Especially when you start talking about larger trends, you oftentimes the first thing that will happen is, well, that's not the way it is here in Detroit. Like, that might be how it is in the Bay Area. It's not quite there in Detroit. I will say, however, as someone who travels around the North American Jewish community, that while the mechanics of Jewish life are very different in a lot of different places, I find that when I go and speak in front of groups, oftentimes the big existential questions are actually identical, even if the raw materials and the data are presenting those questions and resulting in slightly different answers. So some communities feel better equipped to answer a certain set of questions and some less so. Some feel like they're further along on an issue of concern and some further behind. But a lot of the same questions are there. So in our conversation tonight, although we're going to be talking in kind of larger communal trends, it's okay on one hand, to say, is that exactly right where we are? And at the other hand, to try to lean into where we might be able to actually draw some larger conclusions that affect our community. So as a means of framing tonight's conversation, I want to offer a kind of hypothesis, and then I'll use that as a means of introducing Barry. So over the last couple of years, there has been a lecture delivered at the 92nd Street Y, a major kind of Jewish cultural institution in New York City on the east side, in which they have invited speakers in to offer what I think is called the State of World Jewry address. So interestingly, for the past three years, all three speakers are very well known, deservedly for their work that they do, the recognition that they have. And they also operate out of a similar school of thought. It's Dan Sonor, Brett Stevens, and Bari Weiss. And the fascinating thing is, in offering these remarks, they have all wound up hovering around a shared thesis. The shared thesis that they offer is. Is on one hand, a deep analysis of the troubling trends around the rise of antisemitism and anti Zionism. And we can debate whether those are the same thing or not. So I'll just say both of them and you can decide the troubling rise of these phenomenon and their concern about what this means for Jewish life. And then all of them have, in one way or another, offered a dichotomy of sorts, which is we could spend our time, to quote the Tim Robbins character in Shawshank Redemption, get busy living, or we could get busy dying, right? We could spend all of our time focusing on anti Semitism, and instead we should spend our energy engaging with questions of what you might call Jewish thriving. The dichotomy is between surviving and thriving, and surviving is doing the things you need to protect yourself. Thriving is doing the things that you need to produce vibrant Jewish life. Interestingly, some of these converge on similar ideas, like investing in Jewish day schools, which I want to explore together. A Jewish educational setting that's viewed as widely successful for what it does and also only reaches a very small percentage of the American Jewish community. I have found this pairing of ideas, surviving and thriving, in some ways compelling. I like the message personally, that we should invest far less time in. In thinking about our enemies, that they win two ways. They threaten us and they make us obsessed with them. And I certainly don't feel that antisemitism is a problem for Jews to solve because it's not a problem we created. So we have to figure out how to defend ourselves from it. But I'd much rather be engaged in a conversation of how do we build vibrant Jewish life? What's troubled me are two different things. One is they're not opposites. You can protect yourself and build through thriving Jewish life. So there's something strange about positioning these as like in tension with each other. But the other piece that has felt troubling about it is I have surviving and I have thriving. But actually, Jewish tradition invites us to a totally third category, which is called excelling, which is not having Jewish Day schools, but being a great people, holding ourselves accountable to be the best we're supposed to be. Whereas surviving, you never do anything wrong. When you're trying to survive, you're totally morally pristine. And if you're just trying to thrive as a Jew, that can happen in isolation from considerations with others. Excelling is something different. It is a discourse about purpose, who the Jewish people are supposed to be, not just to produce more Judaism or live more Jewishly, but to actually excel. And here the contrast between how Weiss and Sanur and Stevens think about that dichotomy and. And how David Hartman presented this dichotomy in probably his best known essay 40 years ago, called Auschwitz or Sinai, where Hartman said the dichotomy is not between surviving and building Jewish life. It was between surviving and moral excellence. Auschwitz. If you are always a Jew escaping Auschwitz, you do no wrong. Victims are constantly in a place of moral pristineness. But if you are a Jew entering the land of Israel, following the covenant of Sinai, you are anxious to do everything right because that makes you deserving of your status of being the Jewish people. Hartman was worried that we were focused so much on victimhood that we weren't talking about excellence. And Weiss and Stevens and Sanur seem to be so worried about victimhood that they're not talking about victims building vibrant Jewish life. So the framework I want to use for tonight is to kind of take the temperature and analyze how we're doing as Jewish life in North America along all three indexes that we commit to hold together, that the agenda of Jewish life has to incorporate surviving and thriving and excelling. Because if I leave any of those out, if all we talked about was thriving and excelling, somebody in the room would be like, but what about the anti Semites? And that's a fair question. And if we only talked about thriving and surviving, then are we actually having a Jewish conversation about Jewish striving? Right. Are we doing what we're supposed to do? But if we only talk about self criticism, we can't really talk about what it means to build vibrant Jewish life. So those are the categories I want to work through. I want to take them kind of one by one, take the temperature of how we're doing. How are we managing each of these agendas in the Jewish community in North America? Barry, for you to bring in your perspective, both as an observer of Jewish life and in many ways, a shaper of the agenda of Jewish life through your influence and through your thought leadership and through the work that you do in philanthropy. Let's assess how we're doing, and then we can use that as a framework to talk about what maybe we should be doing to lead Jewish life in North America. So with that, let's start on the survival agenda. I know you think about this a lot. I know you've become much more passionate in recent years about the necessity of our community to be clearer about its Zionist commitments, to draw lines when it needs to draw them. I know also that as a funder of Jewish institutions, you are probably seeing budgets that are overtaken by security budgets, security lines in totally different ways than before. So I'd love for you to reflect a little bit on how this surviving agenda is shaping our community and how you think we're responding.
- [09:11]
C
Well, first of all, I mean, anybody get any rachmonis? For me to sit with this mind right now, just want to say that totally unfair. Second of all, you know, who the hell has a program during the World Cup? It's crazy. I don't understand it. And third of all, you know, I've got my wife and two of our three kids in the audience, so I got a lot to try and figure out tonight. So there's a lot in that opening frame, and I appreciate the ability to try and unpack them one by one. For those that haven't heard me before, the accent is from Scotland. There are Jews from Scotland. That's another topic. So, look, I agree, and I think I use similar language. You know, antisemitism is not for us to solve. Right. Because it's not our problem. And the first distinction that I think is important to make is I think we have to set aside antisemitism from the issues of safety and security. Safety and security are paramount. It is the survival instincts. It's the bottom rung of Maslow's, you know, ladder. And, you know, we have to be spending as much money as we can to keep our institutions safe. It's tragic. You know, there isn't a synagogue in the country right now that doesn't have its doors locked or some other security out there. And that is just tragic. That is the world that we find ourselves in. And I have no problem with allocating whatever it takes to keep our people safe. And we should be doing that as much as possible. And at the same time, it is tragic in my general reckoning. I have a little thermometer, if you will, that I keep in my office. A I think we're close to a billion dollars in between security and fighting anti Semitism. And if you just think for a minute about where else that money could be going, it's really tragic that we have to do it even in the country that virtually all of us call home. In America, antisemitism is not our problem to solve. And I think the issue that I have, aside from the safety and security, you know, and I'll probably get myself in a little bit of hot water here, you know, I have this theory that every country in the world has an original sin. In Britain for instance, and in France it was kind of like, you know, real colonialism kind of gone mad. If you look at all the hotspots of trouble in the world, Britain and France had their hands in them at some point in history and then just left a mess, including here. You know, in America it's slavery. Of course, every country has that original sin. The world's original sin is anti Semitism. So while I appreciate that there are an incredible amount of well meaning people with literally billions of dollars at their disposal and I do understand the well meaning nature of it, it's a tremendous lack of humility and hubris to think that they could solve it. So I'm a big believer and I've said to many of these people, safety and security, yes, fighting everything that's going on, fighting online hate fighting, what's going on in the political world, I'm not quite sure that it's the best use of our dollar and surviving for us right now does mean safety and security. But I would much rather fund the joy as opposed to the oy.
- [12:37]
B
Yeah. So it's interesting, that approach actually echoes very strongly with something that happened during the war here in Israel. I couldn't wrap my head around it, which was it was clear early on that the state of Israel was going to fight at least six fronts of the war at the same time. You had the northern border, you had the southern border, you had explosion of violence in the west bank, you had Iran and the Houthis, you had a regional conflict which was a set of other fronts of the War. And then you had the last front of the war, which was Western public opinion. And I found it completely astonishing that the state of Israel, it won the rest of the wars. Maybe now it's harder to evaluate, but it not only lost the war for Western opinion, it didn't even fight it. There was a long stretch during the war where Israel had no English language correspondent representing the government. The one that they had, they fired, like, one guy.
- [13:35]
C
Yeah.
- [13:35]
B
And that was it. And it was like those of us who were trying to defend Israel's standing in the world were left holding the bag because the government of Israel decided they want to do it. But in some ways, you're basically saying that's the right strategy for American Jews.
- [13:48]
C
So I think it was either complete stupidity or, like a masterstroke. Right. One of the great privileges that I have in my role is that I often know things that are going on in the Jewish community either before they're about to happen or, you know, that nobody knows about. And one of the terrible things about my job is I often know things that are going on in the Jewish community either before. There was an effort early on in the war to basically saturate Twitter with kind of like pro Israel messaging, or X, I think it was Twitter then and Xnite, whatever it is. And what they discovered is, as they pummeled money into that, the bots multiplied at a rate so that the more money that was spent for pro Israel, pro Jewish messaging, the more hate was spewed exponentially. So if it was like one to 100 before money was put in, it became one to a thousand when money was put in, because 50% of what goes on on that particular platform are not human beings. And so I'd like to think that the Israeli Foreign Ministry and government said, we're not going to fight that. I'm not sure that's the case. I wrote a little piece today that, you know, maybe I'll publish in a few weeks that reversing online hate, you know, I don't want to disappoint anybody. Not possible, in my opinion. And that doesn't mean that it will be here forever. And I do believe in the arc of time and in that long arc and that things will change. And you have to, you know, as Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks of Blessed Memory, you know, says it takes no courage to be an optimist, but it takes real courage to have hope. You have to be hopeful for that. But I think it is wasted dollars, you know, all around. And I've had Many arguments with people. The last thing I would just say is that, you know, here we are, plus or minus about, you know, if you date back to really kind of Charlottesville and the Tiki tortures and Jews will replace us and, you know, we're well over a billion, billion and a half dollars being spent on fighting antisemitism so that we now have eight, nine years of data. Is it better or is it worse? You know, that kind of speaks for itself.
- [16:10]
B
So I want to play devil's advocate because I basically agree we're not in the anti antisemitism business at Hartman, and I even aggravate our development people when I tell them we are not using anti Semitism messaging to fundraise, even though it's quite tempting because capital based on fear is widely available. I do wonder about the fatalism of not believing that our story can be told in a way that people see the difference. I mean, for instance, in Canada, there's wild anti Semitism data in Canada, where there has been a massive cultural shift. A lot of this anti Semitism, according to this data, comes out of the Canadian Muslim community. But in the same studies about Canadian Muslim antisemitism, it drops precipitously when the person being interviewed has a Jewish friend. Like, because all of these things that are ideas that you have about Jews suddenly change when you get the experience of humanizing a Jew, which suggests that actually hearts and minds can be changed. So I don't know whether it's, we should not be investing in this, or somehow what we're investing in feels like the wrong type of investment. Like, is there some value of the Jewish community making a play, and would it require us doing something different than the way that those antisemitism dollars are being spent today?
- [17:34]
C
Yeah, look, it's a fair devil's advocate point. You know, I think a lot of us underestimate. And here I'm going to use, you know, language from Sarah Hurwitz, the author and rabbinical student here at Hartman. You know, there's just a tsunami of hate that our young people are getting every single minute of every single day, you know, and she said it's like bailing out a tsunami with. With a bucket. You know, my wife and I were sitting at the first station last night with a friend of ours, a couple who were in town, and, you know, told us just a story that it's almost like, you knew, it almost like pierces a hole right through that, you know, kid, college freshman, had an amazing experience at a university. Let's not name it. Became best friends with this guy. Completely platonic. Lovely relationship. Amazing relationship, friends, whatever. Sent her a text three days ago. I know that you're in Israel doing volunteer work for Magen David Adam. Our friendship is over. She called him. He said, I don't want to talk. I don't want it all done over text. I think we underestimate the onslaught of what is happening on the other side. And that's not to say because I am not a defeatist on this at all. That's not to say that not necessarily bridge building is important, but human connection is actually the key. The piece of human connection that I worry about the most is actually not the connection and antisemitism between Jews and non Jews. It's the incredibly growing rift that is happening between Israeli Jews and American Jews that to me seems to be both something that is incredibly urgent and actually might be solvable or at least could be attempted in some fashion. And we can talk about that at your leisure at another point in the conversation.
- [19:29]
B
So I want to stay on security for one other question, which is your position, which is, I think, the right position to articulate publicly, which is any amount of money we need to spend on securing Jewish institutions has to be spent. I find this, like, insanely unfair, of course, in a democracy, just unfair. The responsibility to protect religious institutions in a democracy where there is freedom of religion lies on the state. And in some ways I wonder whether our passionate participation in this work is like disincentivizing the state from doing its job. Now, nobody wants to play chicken of like, going to back off to invite you in because bad things will happen when that happens. But I do wonder whether we're using our power in the right way. We're using our power to do this business of self protection. There's a tremendous amount of, like, Jewish gun ownership is rising in America. Like, we will take this matter in our own hands. There are ideological implications for that beyond just, you know, the business of trying to protect ourselves. And what would it look like if the agenda was not, we need to invest our resources to protect our institutions, but we need to invest actually a fraction of those resources to force our public officials to say, this is actually a public safety responsibility and it shouldn't live on the Jewish community.
- [20:53]
C
Yeah, look, the downside for all of you in a conversation between Yehuda and me is that we often see things. It's either great minds think alike or fools seldom differ. So, you know, know, discover that at some point. I would go, I don't Know if it's a step further, but I would just. Exclamation point, your point? There are teams of people that are employed by the Jewish community for good reason. It has to be done, sadly, because we can't play chicken. That's their job. Their job is to lobby to get. You know, you'll see. You read E. Jewish philanthropy. The security grants. We just secured $25 million from the state of California. And I'm like, really? Like, that's a hooray. You know, this is America. This is the country where there is no coercion by the state. And as I've said quite often recently, not just in this topic, but in other topics, as somebody who is a proud immigrant to America, who. America gave me opportunity and a life that I really just never dreamed that I would ever have. And therefore. Therefore, by extension, I'm a believer in American exceptionalism. I think we're about to find out. I don't know what that timeframe is. It might be a few years, it might be a few decades. Exactly how exceptional America is. And that's a big thing.
- [22:11]
B
Yeah, that's a big thing. One of the most haunting stories about this that I heard came out of Toronto a couple years ago, where I think it was following October 7th, Holy Blossom, I think the largest congregation in Canada hosted an event in partnership with a neighboring church, a major local institution. And they were talking about these questions of safety. And Rabbi Yel Splansky was talking about how many resources they have to dedicate to protect the institution and said something like, at the time, the number was a million dollars Canadian every year just on security. And so one of the church attendees asks the pastor on stage, what's our security budget? And he looked at him and was like, we don't have a security budget. And that was like a. In Hebrew, you call it a Nephal Hasimon moment, a moment of realization that, like, we pretend that we're equal citizens in this society, but some of us, and it's certainly not just the Jewish community, other vulnerable minorities communities as well, have to shoulder this burden on their own. There's more to talk about here, about also whether, in the end, any of this stuff keeps us safe, it keeps us feeling protected, but whether that agenda should look something very different entirely, including, like, investing in the structures of liberal democracy and the broader fight for civil rights. We can come back to that, because I want to move to the second piece, which is.
- [23:28]
C
Thank goodness we're moving to the second.
- [23:30]
B
Yeah, it's like a downer that first part is a downer.
- [23:33]
C
It's hard.
- [23:34]
B
So let's talk about the second piece of investing in what you call the joy. Right. Which is still not at the place of, like, moral accountability. That's a downer too, but of, like, perpetuating a Jewish life where Jewish kids feel proud to be Jewish, where education informs them, enriches them, inspires them to live lives of purpose and meaning, where people feel tethered to community, where they feel like they live in healthy institutions. So first of all, how are we doing on that front? Because if you would ask many people in the Jewish community, it's always problems. The day school is one funder away from closing. These JCCs are both failing to merge, and that's creating all of these tensions in our community. And meanwhile, the American Jewish community built like the most magnificent institutional infrastructure in Jewish life than any Jasper community ever created. So give us like a report card of how you think the institutions of Jewish thriving in America are actually doing.
- [24:31]
A
Right.
- [24:32]
C
Yeah. You know, first of all, just to go back to the place that you started, what's fascinating about Brett, Barry and Dan, like, on one level, as a Jewish professional, and I tend to agree with your kind of overall hypothesis, to have these three, you know, journalists, authors, to have them get up and say, we got to send more kids to Jewish day school, like, I mean, that's like a dream come true, right? They have audiences and podcasts and Brits in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, and, you know, Barry's star is clearly growing and getting bigger. And call me back, I think is, you know, one of the most listened to podcasts, et cetera. So, you know, I just want to say that having people outside of the business of Jewish Incorporated, the business that employs Yehuda and I and some of other people, that's amazing and is actually quite validating in the, in some fashion to have people from another business, so to speak, just say, yeah, that stuff's important. So, you know, a few things. First of all, the North American Jewish community should be very proud. And, you know, the good news is it has built an astonishingly incredible infrastructure. The bad news is it's probably overbuilt it as anybody has heard me speak before. I often talk about, you know, we love our buildings and I talk about the Jewish community having, you know, an edifice complex. And I'm not suggesting the buildings aren't important. Here we are in this spectacular, beautiful space and you need them. But I think there was a period of time, circa, kind of 1980 to 2010, where we kind of lost sight of what was actually happening inside the buildings. So you walk around North America and you see these beautiful synagogues or these beautiful buildings, but, you know, they've got one rabbi and a part time educator. And I just look at myself and I say, wow, what if they just made that building $10 million less and spent time employing great people to do the work in the building? So that's one. Two is when people ask me what the biggest problem is in the North American Jewish community. And there are many people talk about not having good enough talent. The one problem I know we don't have is money. There is more money than there ever was. And literally every single community pretty much has a money tree that they can go to. Whether that can go to Jewish causes, you know, that's different. But there's incredible, incredible wealth that exists out there. So it's not money. We definitely have enough of that. I think we have a little bit of a lack of vision. I think we have too many organizations overlapping and doing the same thing. If I was in private equity, I'd be rolling a bunch up and creating efficiencies. And I think we've also gotten somehow, for want of a better term, we've succumbed to the numbers game. And I think philanthropy is partly responsible for this. Somebody funds a program. We got 100 people. It was great. I'm going to give you more money to get, get 125. Now, numbers and participation are important, but did we move anybody? Did actually people feel more Jewish? Did they feel more confident? Have their practices changed? I think in some of these places, we've kind of scored a little bit of a C and D. And one of the reasons that we've done a C and D is because we rarely follow the data to understand whether something has actually worked or not worked. We just measure numbers. The numbers are an important ingredient. They are an important ingredient. Sometimes people ask us at the foundation, you've been a longtime supporter of Birthright, and they ask why? And I think they assume, you know, well, because you're getting young kids to Israel. Well, yeah, I mean, definitely the case. Birthright is the most evaluated program in the history of philanthropy.
- [28:27]
B
And Judaism.
- [28:28]
C
Yeah, and Judaism. Right. Jewish and non Jewish, by the way. Right. That's why we fund it, because it works. Does Birthright have room for improvement? Like everything? For sure. We don't follow a data. You know, we count attendance, we count experiences. They're all worthwhile. But again, I want to go back to We've kind of not really counted. Are people more knowledgeable? Are people more confident? Are they more connected? Are they more responsible? We'll get to that a little bit later. And then the last thing I want to say is that again, I've written about this a little bit bit before, is that the Jewish world was built and kind of stood still, you know, about 20 years ago. And everything in this world has changed so quickly and so dramatically. One of the things I love about the Hartman Institute, and I love about Yehuda's leadership, not to embarrass him, is that something happens in the Jewish world, and if necessary, and if it can be done, and they are the right people to do it, Hartman has the ability to respond to it quickly. They don't have tenured faculty. They can move budgets around. They have a wonderful board, but not a board that doesn't give them the authority and the autonomy to be able to move in different directions. And if you think about the way that we work in the Jewish world, we work at a very, very slow, methodical pace when everything around us is moving so quick, quickly. And I've told this a few times, the US Army Department of Education in the late 80s coined a term. It's a think tank. And the term that they coined was called Vuca. Volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. And they said that at some point in the future, this will hit the world where everything will just, you know, go at an accelerated rate. Pace that happened in 2007, where two cataclysmic events combined at the same time. The beginning of the global financial meltdown and the birth of these things. So you could see everything happening in real time, okay? And so the world is moving at such a pace that the Jewish community life and institutions can't respond to it quick enough. And we've always been a step behind in our Jewish community work. Yet in business, science, academics, we Jews have always been steps ahead. When we were writing letters, the world was on email. When we were on email, the world was on Facebook. When we got to Facebook, everybody had moved to Twitter. When we got to Twitter, everybody and so on. So I can't diagnose why we are so brilliant and so far ahead of so many other things. But in our Jewish institutional life, where there's incredible work going on and incredible people, professional or lay, we play a tremendous amount of defense and very little offense.
- [31:22]
B
I mean, there are theories for this. One is that our conceptual paradigms of understanding the change in Jewish history have not caught up right on all Three indexes of identity, ideology and infrastructure. The American Jewish community is telling a story of evolution from the early to the mid to the late 20th century without recognizing that on all three fronts revolutionary change already happened. It's no longer the case that the story is true from the early part of the 20th century that like there was an empirical difference between a Jew and a gentile, and Jews knew it and gentiles knew it, intermarriage changed that story completely. So Jewish identity changed, normative ideologies changed. There's no such thing as common dual Judaism anymore. That there was in the 1950s, where what Jews held in common was not faith, but broad commitment to support the state of Israel and fight anti Semitism wherever it was located. And now those are partisan issues. And our infrastructure, as you said, was built for a particular moment in history the way all institutions are. And then all institutions suffer from the tragedy of an institution which is it is born to solve a fundamental anthropological, human need, community, mission, purpose, whatever. And the minute that institution is created overnight, its mission changes, which is to sustain the institution. It's almost impossible to get out of that trap. And once you're there, the good institutions keep remembering that their job is service of that. And that means they have to become different institutions. But it's very, very hard for institutions to do that. So that's like one diagnosis of how we've gotten to a place where it always feels that we're behind, but the other, and this is a very self interested comment, we are a fast growing institution that benefits from visionary philanthropy. However, the total budget devoted to ideas in the American Jewish community is minuscule. It doesn't make any sense. I will guarantee you it is nowhere near the biggest billion dollars that gets invested in fighting anti Semitism or securing our institutions. And even if you incorporated the full education budget, it's not at an order of magnitude that would reflect that it is our primary commitment. But you want to separate those two because ideas are not the same as education. Ideas are at the vanguard of what a community is supposed to be about. So we're making choices. And I agree with you what you said earlier, which is, I'll put it in my terms, we got 99 problems, but money ain't 1 in the American Jewish community. Right? That's not the issue that we have. In fact, like the transformation in Jewish philanthropy would be that if you made a 1% turn in the total money held by American Jews in their donor advised fund, so money they have already committed to philanthropy, if they made a 1% shift of how much of that money moves from non Jewish causes to Jewish causes, you would be awash with more money than the Jewish community could spend. That's not the issue. The question is, what are we investing in as a Jewish community and what are those places supposed to be?
- [34:27]
C
There's one other thing I want to say about the institutional piece, which is it's incredible that an American today, just an American, can live. It might not be a full life, but can live a life not leaving their house. You can order their food, they can get access to their podcast. They can, you know, all of that, their job, their job, everything, everything can be done. You could literally not leave your house. You could get everything. You get your pharmacy delivered. You could have a telehealth with your doctor, you know, the whole nine yards. You could listen to a great podcast by Yehuda and you could get your foot, you could do it all from your house. Point being is that America likes to outsource. It's kind of like part of the ethos. It's capitalism and whatever. And I do think that while institutions have been amazing at building community and have done so much for American Jewry, we've outsourced it to the point where we've forgotten where the most important part of Jewish life, which is the home. And that, I think, is an arena that is probably a little bit ripe for some serious thought and investment and experimentation. You know, the greatest classroom in the world will be the kitchen table. The greatest sanctuary will be the living room. The greatest teachers will be parents and siblings. And we've somehow basically pushed out and said, and I saw that Shai David, of all people, wrote an article today that came out in the Times of Israel, you know, about it, and I've been thinking about this for quite some time, that we've outsourced it to the point. And, you know, parents cannot outsource their children's education. I sent my kid on Birthright and they're an anti Zionist. What happened? You know, like 10 days is somehow magically going to, you know, whatever. And I do wonder over the course of the next, you know, 10, 20, 30 years. You're young. Long after I'm not doing this anymore, I wonder if that shift will actually become centered in a little bit. The world needs more home, not just Judaism. The world needs more family dinners. Easy to say when a lot of people don't have the luxury of one spouse that doesn't work or, you know, the busyness of life. It needs less youth, sports schedules. It needs Less running around. It needs sitting home, talking and building that fabric again. And I think that might be the next kind of vanguard that we as an American Jewish community need to be going after. People ask me all the time about the modern Orthodox community and why, you know, know they've had some success. I think it's Shabbat, I think it's holy time, I think it's family dinners. It's the celebration of the holidays. Again, not necessarily from a religious and observance standpoint, but from a, can we take a breath and can we just be together instead of, okay, you pick them up from school, I'll take this one to basketball, you'll take this one to ballet, you pick that one up. A meal on the way home, I'll pick this one out. And that family of three, three, four, five or six never actually sits down together. I think that's the next road of Jewish education we have to be thinking about.
- [37:46]
B
There's a whole trapdoor here, actually, because the modern Orthodox community is encountering its own moral crisis around materialism. It's hard to differentiate between the kind of vision for Judaism as somehow that should be untethered from this massive capitalist philanthropic enterprise, that the money isn't actually going to solve our problems. Our commitments to ourselves will solve them in certain ways. And there's some unpublished data about this coming out of the uk, which is, you know, they did a massive study about like, what works, which of these things, school, you know, youth group, camp Israel trip, et cetera. And the two highest scoring things on what works are actually youth group participation and home, parents and home. And like, ironically, those are kind of the cheapest, right? So you're right, there's something like, American Jews are kind of at odds with each other. Maybe part of the problem is that we can't escape that. The cultural norm of being American is rooted in growth and building and driving money towards things. And that's the only way to actually demonstrate value. But here also, I want to push back on something. It's true. I see this all the time. I go to a congregation that has a 2,000 seat sanctuary, but nobody's in it, right? But there's vibrant things happening in other parts of the building. And I'll be like, well, obviously I'm talking to Rabbi. Obviously you come in for the high holidays for this 2,000 seat sanctuary, and they're like, no, no, the H vac is way too expensive. So it literally inhabits no function. And you're like, of course you should downsize that. However, American Jewish institutions that downsize from infrastructure are encoded as losing. Yeah, right. Two rabbinical schools in the past couple of years sold their flagship campuses, they brought in a ton of money using it towards programs, and both of those stories were like, oh, look, that institution's in collapse. So how do you get that story to shift that it's not just. Just through dollars and growth that we're creating thriving, but actually through mission achievement and purpose that we're actually able to prove something in Jewish life?
- [39:59]
C
Well, part of it would be that one way to do it would be for some Jewish organizations to say, you know, what we did, what we were supposed to do at a certain period of time and we no longer need to be around. And that is also very un American. Right. Because that's failure. Start a company. You know, even in Silicon Valley, you know, I live in the Bay Area. That's kind of like the ethos. Yeah. You know, failure, failure, failure. You know, if you fail at a startup, you know, it's frowned upon. Right. It's a hard one to get around,
- [40:28]
B
but there's no buyout.
- [40:29]
C
No. No leverage. No leverage.
- [40:31]
B
There's no leverage. So why would an organization go out of business? Because then you feel like you're the last one who closed the doors and you betrayed the mission.
- [40:38]
C
Look, I mean, I'll just say it, right? Things are proven. You youth group is proven. Getting kids to Israel is proven. Summer camps are proven. Day schools are proven. In my opinion, some of them are more scalable than others. Okay. They just are. Okay. I have my own thoughts about which ones are and which ones aren't, but some of them are fundamentally more scalable than others. But the reality is, in a world full of antisemitism, the thriving becomes critical, because I don't want my children or, please, God, one day grandchildren. You hear that? Kids that are in the room. No, I'm joking. I want my grandchildren to feel that they're Jewish on the basis that other people hate Jews. And at the same time, you know, Judaism has so much to say and so much to give to the world, which maybe we'll get onto in the third part of the conversation. So thriving is important. Surviving to me is critical, but only if it allows my ability to thrive. Surviving just to survive seems to me to be like a benchmark that is kind of like so low and so weak that I just can't. You know, it just doesn't animate me.
- [41:49]
B
I don't know if I've ever told you the story, but when my oldest kid was 3, and I went to pick him up from daycare. He's sitting in the back of the car in his car seat, and he goes, abba, who are the Jewish people?
- [42:03]
C
I was like, definitely your son.
- [42:04]
B
I was like, what a dream. I get to. I get to. I can't believe this moment has come. I was like, why, Noah? We are the Jewish people. He burst into tears and he said, I don't want Pharaoh to come get me. I'm a firstborn kid now. I had seen some feedback for the daycare center about which parts of the Passover story should be emphasized to the three year olds. Right? Like, that seemed not great, but there was a part of me, you said, I don't want their identity to be defined by this. But I've comforted them down. I was like, don't worry. It's a long time ago humans wrote that I'm going to do that whole story. Part of me felt, I'm glad. Like, good.
- [42:56]
C
Yeah, yeah.
- [42:57]
B
You should be terrified. You're in this story. Like, you're, you are part. This, this is part of the covenant of fate and not just the covenant of destiny. You belong to this in some way.
- [43:07]
C
It is and that lasts.
- [43:08]
B
But that's a dead end if it's the only thing, right?
- [43:10]
C
That's what I'm saying. It is part of it. And of course it's part of our story. And it should always be continued to be part of a story. And, you know, Seder, I mean, it's the most celebrated. Although, you know, I am forced to say, when you just mentioned Seder, that we hosted second night, and, you know, somebody said afterwards, you know, it was. And this isn't because, you know, we ran such a wonderful Seder. My wife ran such a wonderful Seder, which she did, but it was like what they loved was it was just fully fixated on us as Jews. Right? Like, can we just have one night, right? Or two nights where it's just us? You know, And I do sometimes worry in America that, you know, as somebody who constantly loves moving between universalism and particularism, I don't want to, you know, sit in my sukkah and talk about other people that have outdoor things I don't want to talk about. Yes, I know there's terrible injustice in the world and there's slavery going on everywhere. But this is my story, my people's story of my night, of these two nights a year. And I want to tell it just for us. And I think that's an important thing that we also have to own sometimes that maybe for a few nights a year we can be fully focused on us.
- [44:25]
B
Yeah. So I'll ask you one more question which is on this excelling piece, the mechanism by which the American Jewish community doesn't simply engage in the business of defending ourselves, doesn't merely engage in. In the business of building up the Jewish educational, industrial economy to produce more Jews, but also sees itself as a community that can hold itself accountable to excellence. So the angle I want to take with you is over the last 20 years, the Jewish philanthropic system is taking up more and more space in actually shaping the agenda of Jewish life. I have mixed feelings about this. If in an ideal world there's a balance of power that's generated between the side that has capital and the side that has expertise, and they are co dependent on each other. But because of the growth of very significant capital located within prominent family foundations, disproportionate wealth, it's become in the interest of organizations to pursue very large giving from those institutions as opposed to their local market, which makes our institutions less democratic. And it invests more and more power on the philanthropic side of the ledger compared to the organizations themselves. This is leading to some philanthropic institutions actually now operating their own businesses in Jewish life, which sidelines that world of expertise. So I'm wondering, number one, what we do about that, where you sit, how's that supposed to operate? But second, I think more importantly, what responsibilities now sit on the philanthropic side of the ledger to not just build Jewish life idiosyncratically or even based on data, but to actually be the mechanism by which the Jewish community can hold itself accountable to its values.
- [46:13]
C
Yeah. So I mean, look, there's a practical answer which is it is what it is. Toothpaste out the tube. And I think that philanthropic foundations that operate their own thing, and by the way, we got into that business in a small kind of side segment of something about five years ago. Whether it's right or wrong, and I'll come back to that in a second, it's not going to go away. So I think that's just a reality. And if anything, if it's not going to go away, I think it's actually going to become more. Because I think as philanthropists, as business owners become remarkably successful and set up their own philanthropy, I understand the motivation of, well, look, I was able to build and do that really, really well. So therefore, why shouldn't I try and build and do that really, really well? I've actually kind of come a little full circle on this, and it's not just because we're in the game, because we do operate something, but I think it's a little different. We do it differently than other people do. Where it frustrates me is if the dollars, if it's not of both end. In other words, if a foundation has making it up just for the argument's sake, $100 million to give away every year, and they were giving away $100 million into institutions and Jewish life, and they decide next year, you know what, enough of that, we're going to give $80 million to Jewish Life and we're going to do our own thing for $20 million. That's problematic to me. If that number is 120, if the pie grows, then, you know, I don't want to suggest that just grantees and others on the other side of the table are the ownerships of all the great thoughts and ideas. And I don't think that you're suggesting that. I think what is happening, though, is, I think the former is happening. I think you're seeing a shrinking, you know, a little bit, which does give me pause. You know, I've often said that if you're in philanthropy, let's imagine Philanthropy is a 20 story building. You can decide as a philanthropist where you want to sit in that building. You can be on the ground floor operating something and making the sausage or making the sausage with a grantee, or you could be on the 20th floor, General on the Hill, just kind of surveying the scene. I actually think the best place for philanthropy is probably on the first or second floor. And I'd like to think the relationship that we have with you guys is that we're close enough to each other where we're a little higher up and we can maybe see some things, but we're also close enough to you where you can see some things. And so you're calling up and we're coming down. But I think if the trend continues, I think I share the same fear that the pot of money going into institutional life will shrink. And the other fear that I have, which I think is, you know, I talked about some of the issues of turf and territory. The next biggest fear is leadership is attracting quality people at all levels in the Jewish community. And I think an awful lot of quality people are going to say to themselves, I'm not going to come into this business. And I've heard that, you know, talk about the October 8th Jew, which is a phrase I hate. You were a Jew on October 7th, and you'll be A Jew forever. And that's just the way it is. You can't shed your Jewishness. It just is. But I understand the wording and all these people coming into the Jewish community. Well, there's little bits of data now beginning to show nearly three years on that. Some of them came and some of them are leaving and they're leaving not because of remuneration, they're leaving because, you know, I had this idea, I went to my board and they set up a subcommittee, you know, and they got this person involved and then a donor came in and said they didn't like it. And you know, nine months later nothing's happening. And you know, I'm just going to go back and I'm, you know, so there's ecosystem stuff that is tough on that.
- [50:02]
B
So in that my last question I'll ask and then we'll open up is just, it's kind of a self interested question, but it's also an opportunity for some transparency. You're sharing the campus right now here, here in this NCLP together with a bunch of other groups. One is a group of senior rabbis who come as part of a three year program mid career to learn here at Hartman. Some of you may be here at the same time as your rabbis. They're going to be very polite with you in the courtyard and then they're going to retreat back to being with other rabbis. But we also have two cohorts here of Rabbanut North America, our rabbinic program, which is ordaining a new generation of spiritual religious communities, communal leaders for the Jewish people in America with a rabbinic ordination. This was a move that we made to move from training people in once they were rabbis to also being part of this business of rabbinic formation. And what was unusual for us and unusual for you is that we did this together. This wasn't a program that we designed and then we went to the Jim Joseph foundation and asked for funding. It was a program you and I talked about mostly by text message for a couple of years over or maybe even less, and then began to form it together. So I would love for you to just share briefly what your vision for that is, what it means to do this in partnership between a philanthropic foundation and organization and why you think this is kind of a project that's worth the kind of investment that it's taken.
- [51:19]
C
Yeah, thanks for this opportunity because it's something we're just so excited about. So, you know, as Yehuda said, you know, the problem didn't require, require much diagnosis, right the amount of rabbis that were coming out of the non Orthodox seminaries were not big enough. And the quality of the people was also not strong enough. And we looked at it and we talked about it. We created this program and we created it together. When we diagnosed the problem, what the Jim Joseph foundation said was, you know, I went to our board about seven or eight years ago and said, look, the hypothesis here is there is no position in the North American Jewish community that has greater influence over a lifetime than that of a great rabbi. That was the hypothesis that we put out there. The board agreed with it. By the way, I really, truly do mean that. Not a great head of a federation and there are many of them, and not a great day school person, a rabbi has that ability to just for over decades and decades and decades, Decades. So what do we do? We said, well, is there somebody that is already in our system that we can work with? Right? And by that point in time, we were already general operating supporters of the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America. And if you're going to take anything away from this call, if there are philanthropists in the room, the words general operating support should be like your Shema Yisra'. El. I'm serious. I knew that line would get a laugh. I truly mean it. Don't fund programs, fund organizations. And if you are going to fund a program, give all the overhead to run it. Because Yehuda and all the wonderful people that work for this great institute, I see Sam in the back and plenty of others around and Tammy over there and all these people, people that are in the room, you know what they are the raw material. So we were already a step up the curve because we'd already worked with them for quite some time and we already knew that they could do this. The second reason that we wanted to work with them was they were non denominational, so we didn't have to pick a denomination to work with. That made our lives, you know, an awful lot easier. But the third reason is something that I alluded to earlier on. And that third reason is that they can move quickly. So from the text messages to can we do something? To money coming, you know, this all happened during COVID and please God, in six months we'll be in New York ordaining 13 new rabbis and there's a cohort two's already started and there are hundreds of other people that are lining up to come into Cohort 3 if we keep going with this program, which I think we all want to, but it only worked because we were already in deep partnership and relationship. Okay. And I was sitting with a group of people last night who are on the other side of the table, said sometimes the best thing to do when you're on the other side of the table is to say no to money. Right? And because we had this long standing relationship over a period of years, it allowed that program to and it really is a joint program. But let me be clear about the jointness of that program. We're now in the situation where we write checks and Rabbi Jesse Paikin who leads the program and Yehuda and others and all the faculty, they're doing all the hard work. So Shama Yisrael General Operating Support
- [54:49]
B
thank you Barry. Really appreciate it.
- [55:05]
A
Here are some other things that are happening at the Shlom Hartman Institute. Hartman has an exciting new offering for educators working with young people. It's called Siyach, which means conversation in Hebrew. Siach is a curriculum with flexible discussion guides that use curated texts, framing questions, and facilitate our support to spark meaningful conversations about the big questions facing Jewish life today. It's helping learners connect timeless Jewish ideas to contemporary realities. To learn more about siach, go to shalomhartman.org siach thanks for listening to our show and special thanks to our guest, Barry Feinstone. Identity Crisis is produced by me, Michelle Siegel. Our Executive producer is Maytal Friedman. This episode was researched by Gabrielle Feinstone and edited by Josh Allen with music provided by so called transcripts of our shows are now available on our website. Typically a week after an episode airs, we're always looking for ideas for what we should cover on future episodes. So if you have a topic you'd like to hear about, or if you have comments about this episode, please write to us@identitycrisisalomhartman.org for more ideas from the Shalom Hartman Institute about what's unfolding right now. Sign up for our newsletter in the show notes and subscribe to this podcast everywhere. Podcasts are available. Thanks for listening.