← Identity/Crisis
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- [00:06]
A
Hi, everyone. Welcome to Identity Crisis, a show from the Sholom Hartman Institute, creating better conversations about the essential issues facing Jewish life. I'm Yehuda Kurtzer. We're recording this episode on Memorial Day, Monday, May 25, 2026. We're on the verge of celebrating America's 250th, which will be a key focus of Hartman's activity in America over the coming year. Now, if this was 15 years ago, I would have assumed that the celebrations would have been largely unfettered. In my short lifetime to that point, I had benefited from and believed in a trajectory of the American Jewish experience that I understood, based on knowledge of Diaspora Jewish history to be without precedent. One of the ideas I pushed hard on then and actually managed to change the direction of the Institute was the argument that what American Jews had created and experienced here in America was. Was something that could not be neatly described as just another Diaspora, that it represented more rupture than continuity in the Jewish people's wanderings throughout the world in search for home. In fact, I argued, still argue, and largely continue to believe that American Jews have been pioneering something whose only real antecedent was in the ancient Jews of Alexandria. The belief that we could have two places in the world, one that we called homeland, that's Israel, and another here that we genuinely called home. That not only could we sustain both of these commitments without contradiction, we felt these commitments fundamentally reinforced each other. We could hold the kind of dual loyalty that Justice Brandeis had insisted would make our identities not contradictory, but in fact would make us into better Americans, emboldened by the return of our people into stability and normalcy, while enabling us to pursue our destinies in this Goldene Medina that we called home. I grew up experiencing a classic American Jewish story. From immigrant boats at the turn of the century, through the GI experience, through national service, elite universities and social prominence, Very aware that the Jewish question was still not definitively answered here. Not fully content with all the costs that arrival had brought with it, but experimenting with the possibility that something here was possible. Different, imperfect, but possible. This was a countercultural idea for our institute because while our Jerusalem based institution had until then cared deeply for American Jews, I'm not sure it ever took them seriously as anything more than Diaspora Jews. So while we taught on issues of faith, identity, practice, spirituality and Zionism in ways that were comprehensive to American Jews, the context was less specifically about the unusual conditions of the American experience and more the stuff of generic Diaspora trends like intermarriage, assimilation, the passage of time from the birth of Israel. This is natural from a Zionist worldview which conventionally groups diasporic experiences together and mostly looks down on them, either wondering why they haven't gotten the message yet, or simply anticipating that they will fail eventually and and then show up at their doors. I fought long and hard for our Torah at Hartman to take seriously that the American and Canadian versions of Jewish questions needed to take seriously the environments in which they emerged, that our Torah needed to emerge from here in order to be coherent to our learners. But 15 years on and now in 2026, there's a great amount more uncertainty about what it means for American Jews to celebrate this 250th milestone. And I don't just mean because of the menacing return of antisemitism and its adjoining ascendant fraternal twin in the form of violent anti Zionism. Our concerns go deeper as we face now over a decade of the assault on American norms and institutions from the MAGA movement and two Trump administrations, as we witness significant rollbacks in the civil rights and pro immigrant agenda that were hallmarks of Jewish politics for a half century, as we see shifting American Jewish demographics that are creating far more insular Jewish communities than we've had here for a long time. And maybe most surprisingly, with the ascendance of a new and competing narrative of America that exploded in 2020 that calls into question America's core story that it tells about itself. I watched around that time as American Jews were both drawn deeply into this new and critical story of America, as it argued that America was founded on the premise not of liberal ideals but of chattel slavery, and as it insisted that the only future for America involved some amount of its unmaking. I was not surprised that American Jews would be captivated by the moral urgency of this next phase of the civil rights movement. But I worried that the narrative cost for the American Jewish future, which relied on important American mythology, would take too much of a toll. Our futures depend in large part on the stories we choose to tell about the past. An American Jewish ascendancy was already stalling as American Jews appreciated the comfortable position we had attained through the achievements and assimilation of our ancestors. What would happen if this story of optimism and pride would be supplanted by something that demanded shame and contrition instead? But of course, the antisemitism thing is real too. I've always identified as an optimist, not in the sense that I think things will get better, but believing in the possibility of some redemption and reconciliation between Jews and the west. Most of my life and my American ness has been rooted in this experience that makes me continue to believe in this ideal. Now I see around me that that optimism is fading. More and more American Jews settling into a different, familiar comfort, retreating in the knowledge that their experience of antagonism and alienation makes them understand their forebears more, making them suspicious that this American thing will not work. I fear for the politics and the Jewishness, frankly, that emerges as a result. So today marks the launch of the Hartman Institute, marking America at 250. I hope you'll be with us throughout the year as we celebrate, commemorate, study, and consider the integrity of this project, what it has meant for Jews, what it could mean, and what it will demand of us. I'm honored to launch this today with Nicholas Lemon, a decorated journalist and author, the emeritus dean of the Columbia School of Journalism, and the author of just an extraordinary book that has riveted me for the last several days of preparing for this episode. The book recently released is called A Search for Home Across Three Centuries. It's a book that's hard to describe or neatly categorize. It's part memoir and family history, part a deep history of Jews in Germany and America over several centuries, part a spiritual meditation or reflection on what it ultimately means to be Jewish. I'm so grateful he's here to discuss all of that with us today. Nick, thanks for being here.
- [07:04]
B
Thank you. Thanks for having me. And that was a very eloquent introduction on a lot of other points, too. So we'll have a lot to talk about.
- [07:10]
A
Yeah, we'll hit on some of those. I want to start with the book itself, and there are so many pieces of it, it's literally a three century family accounting. But throughout, you then go really deep on pieces of American history, on Jewish history. You bring up to your spiritual journey over your own lifetime and the ways that it kind of echoes but also contradicts some of the stories of your ancestors. I kind of felt like, oh, this is probably a book you've been writing your whole life. And I'm curious, how did a book like this originate? I experienced it as kind of a departure from a lot of your other work in the New Yorker and the books that you've written before, which were more neatly journalistic in a lot of ways. Where did this book come from? How did it evolve? And am I right that in some ways you've been writing this for a long time?
- [07:56]
B
I guess I've been writing in my head for a long time the way I would Put it is, I grew up in a very exotic seeming from today's standpoint. Very enclosed, little traditional Jewish community in the Deep South. And it was not an ethic of the community for a whole bunch of reasons that we should really talk about ourselves. So when the impulse to be a writer arose in me when I was very young, I kind of thought journalism was a perfect escape from the conflict between wanting to be a writer who was honest and wanting to maintain good relations in my community and my family. So I kind of studiously avoided writing about myself and my community and chose what, in retrospect, were related things to write about that weren't openly the thing itself. Now, the way to express this physically is, and this is what made writing this book possible. I come from what evidently has been a family of pack rats forever. And so my family's story is very, very well documented. There aren't a lot of Americans at all and American Jews who can tell you, here's what we were doing pretty much every day in the 1840s. But I can. So I have a very large extended family. One of my many, many cousins decided to gather a lot of this material together sometime in the late 50s or early 60s and deposit it at Tulane Library. So it's a collection that's really quite extensive and it's available to the public a couple of times. Scholars have used it for various things. So the way I went through life was, I know it's there, so I'm never going to look at it. That was my supposition. And at some point, in just a pure journalistic sense, as I was getting older and as people get older, they get more interested in family history, typically. But I thought in the pure journalistic sense, I'm sitting on a major story and why am I not doing it? I felt like I'd been circling it. I do a lot of work in archives on adjacent subjects and have for decades. And it just seemed kind of perverse not to go look at this material and other material like it. So I decided to do it. And this goes along with things like thinking about my children and what I wanted them to know about our family, thinking about the legacy of my parents generation as it passed from the scene, becoming personally more involved in Jewish life and wanting to explore that. So it was all these pieces kind of came together.
- [10:48]
A
Yeah, I'm glad you said that thing about the pack rat, because I was very struck throughout the book of, like, how much stuff does he have? It's like crazy. I wish my grandfather had written one Diary entry. But you literally had diary entries daily for, like, two centuries.
- [11:03]
B
My great grandfather, in about the late 1850s, started keeping a detailed diary, which he did for about 10 years. And this is through the Civil War in particular, and a lot of travels. He didn't pour out his heart exactly, but I know where he was, what he was doing, and what he was taking in almost every day from the late 1850s to the late 1860s, which is quite rare. And then, of course, there's a ton of business records. This great grandfather, his parents were basically illiterate, but they kept business records. And then there's all these other pathways you can go down. I ended up going back to Germany and being able to find family records going back to the late years of the 18th century there in the village my family comes from. So I was really able to put this all together at a level of detail that's a blessing, you know, that most people can't do.
- [11:59]
A
It's amazing. And then it overlaps with a lot of other historical records, including the correspondence between your grandfather and Felix Frankfurter, as becomes a major plot point in the book. But before we go too far into that, I want to go back to something you said right at the beginning. I'm going to ask you about where this book comes from, where you described a kind of writer's or journalist's anxiety about stepping aside and not fully interrogating the self out of a fear that that kind of discredits you as a journalist. I've heard it also from historians, but I can't help but feel that Jews may have a disproportionate fear of that, which is a little bit of the theme of the book. The book is about Jews as both insiders and outsiders, and toggling between that relationship all along. I felt, when I was a undergrad at Harvard, like, I would watch as the building next door to where the Jewish studies building was housed in Near Eastern languages, civilizations next door was East Asian languages and civilizations. And there was a kind of camaraderie between professors and students who were studying disciplines that were obviously connected to the countries they had came from, with a kind of cultural pride that that's what you did. You studied it and you bonded. Whereas when I would go speak to my Jewish studies professors, this was as a graduate student, rather, and even as an undergrad at Columbia, when I would speak to my professors, there was always this, like, desire to create an arm's length between them and lived Jewish life. And it felt to me like a kind of Very Jewish thing as they had ascended through the ranks of academia or UN journalism, that that arm's length thing was like really critical for them to be accepted by others as real scholars. So without going too deep in your psychological orientation, how much do you think that affected your own thinking about whether this story was a story worth telling?
- [13:41]
B
I understand what you're saying, and it's a bit of a yes and no. The way I grew up is based on your introduction, pretty different from the way you grew up in a whole bunch of ways, including. We were not like out of the closet Jews, you know, we were deeply, deeply socialized as German Jews who had been in this country a long time in a minimally Jewish and not very pro Jewish community to just keep it quiet about being Jewish. Maybe we'd talk about it among ourselves, but don't go out in the world and say I'm Jewish and expect to be accepted. So there was always this sense of your own Jewishness is not a big appropriate topic for discussion in the outside world. So, you know, that was one the so called golden age that people talk about being over now. I was never in the golden age. You know, as growing up, we were very, very aware of that being Jewish was a kind of provisional status. So that's one. And then the other is just the old novelist's dilemma of if I write things that feel real and true to me, it's going to strain relations with my family and close circle. And that's maybe particularly true in New Orleans, which isn't. Or at least when I was growing up wasn't. You know, I live on the Upper west side now. So there's this kind of baseline, like if something's happening that's emotionally important. Let's talk about it.
- [15:14]
A
Right.
- [15:15]
B
When I was growing up, that was not how we rolled. You know, it was something emotionally important is going on. Let's not talk about it. So, you know, surfacing all these things would have been considered, if you will, trafe in the world I grew up in.
- [15:31]
A
Yeah. And not to mention that there's probably more Jews living on west end Avenue between 98th and 105th than there is in much of New Orleans. Right. I mean, so it's also saturated with Jews in ways that make it comfortable for Jews to talk about Jewishness all the time without the kind of fear of, well, we're a minority community, let's not talk about all of these things and make ourselves vulnerable to outsiders.
- [15:53]
B
Yeah, exactly. I mean, that neighborhood is one of the few places in the World probably outside of Israel, where if there's a major Jewish holiday, you know that it is just by walking outside on the street. And that was definitely not true in the world I grew up in.
- [16:09]
A
Yeah. I sometimes think LaGuardia and Kennedy and Newark may be the airports in the world where TSA is most familiar with Alulav, besides Tel Aviv, of course.
- [16:19]
B
Yeah.
- [16:20]
A
So one of the deepest parts of the book, for really the first third, is sometimes just a kind of narrative description of the fact that your ancestors in New Orleans or at the time in Donaldsville were slaveholders. And some real reckoning with trying to get inside their own moral calculuses. Did this make them bad people? Did they have some sort of cognitive dissonance? Were they simply business people who were operating within the context of the Southern economy? I'm sure that is the kind of thing that writing this aloud would have been a challenge both for you kind of confessionally, as well as maybe for your relatives. And even broader than that, in a context where American Jews are feeling increasingly vulnerable. Thought of as a fifth column in a whole bunch of ways. Also kind of puts on the record in the most significant way. I think I've seen that this is actually a feature of some of the American Jewish experience. Can you talk through some of what you worked through in kind of telling that story?
- [17:23]
B
Yes. So, I mean, first of all, in the world I grew up in, in New Orleans, virtually everybody, not just Jewish, had some direct connection to slavery. And the local, you know, elite were heavily descended from antebellum plantation owners. So I grew up in a world where, you know, it was a long time ago and far away, where if you had a family plantation that had been in the family since it was slavery times, that was considered a badge of pride. You know, very different from the world we're in now. In my family, there was a mythology that, you know, this was our story, a very weird Jewish story. The quick way to say it is we were Jewish plantation owners, although, as one of my friends said, oh, Shimon Legree. So our family acquired plantations after emancipation because they had roots in this sugar planting town in rural Louisiana and saw a business opportunity. So the family preferred mythology was we only became involved in plantation owning after emancipation. Now, that itself is somewhat problematic because, you know, this is an overwhelming white supremacy atmosphere. But we weren't literally plantation slaveholders. So I went to the parish. You know, we have parishes instead of counties in Louisiana. The parish courthouse, and there's a guy there who knows everything and is the master of this very Elaborate set of records going way, way back, many of which are handwritten, many of which are written in French. And I told him I wanted to see all the trouble transactions my family had been involved in from the very beginning. It was very helpful. And you know, as soon as I got there, he said, no, here's a folder I made for you that you need to look at. And it's a folder involving the buying and selling of human beings. I should say. This isn't like they were not slave traders for a living. They were not slave owners for a living. They didn't have slaves living in their house, according to the census. But they did not have any compunction about buying parcels of land that they were later going to sell or something like that, where several human beings conveyed with the parcel of land. So they owned them for a time and then sold them. There's about a dozen instances of this back in the 1840s and into the 1850s. And I really felt grappling with the past in an honest way. I needed to say this in the book and deal with it now. A lot of my Jewish friends who had more normal Jewish upbringings originating in Eastern Europe and coming later have basically said to me, this is inconceivable because no Jew could ever have anything to do with slavery by definition, because our central narrative is emancipation from the enslavement by Pharaoh in Egypt. So how could a Jew do this? And my family did it. And basically there was a smallish but distinct Jewish migration from Germany and Alsace to the deep south before the Civil War. The most well known rendition is this play called the Lehman Trilogy, which you may know. And these people made a decision to move to an area where they saw economic opportunity. And one of the reasons it had economic opportunity was slavery existed there. So I have zero evidence that my great, great grandfather who moved to Louisiana wrestled with this in any way. He just went. I can sense that in the next generation it started to be wrestled with my grandfather. The third generation was actually more than I had known when I started the book. Very, very involved with civil rights struggles for a native born Southerner. And that's a point of pride for me. This is one of the ways in which I find reading Torah enriching. It is not a collection of good people, including the patriarchs and matriarchs or even including God. You know, arguably reading the texts forces you to engage with a moral world that has some points of intersection with yours and some points of wild disagreement with yours. And, you know, being a Jew, you're not allowed to say, oh, well, screw that. I'm just taking out the good parts like the Ten Commandments and ignoring the rest. I mean, you have to really work to understand that your tradition is not properly characterized as a procession of inspiring good deeds, full stop. It's much more complicated than that. And of course, as you know, there's many references to slavery in the Torah, although there's a whole argument that, well, that's different because, you know, and concubinage and animal sacrifice and all sorts of things. So I use that as a way to make myself think about it without excusing it, but without saying I blame people I came from for being evil and morally corrupt. I'm completely devoid of such tendencies myself. I think being Jewish and studying texts and learning about your family history should help you leave a world of thinking that you're good. Life is simple, being Jewish is simple, et cetera. At least that's how I've used it. I felt called to own up to this in the book.
- [23:11]
A
Yeah, I mean, the framing of how could this possibly be true? We are dispositionally opposed to slavery is just classic cognitive dissonance stuff. And it's rooted in kind of a appeal to exceptionalism, which I think is very hard for many Jews to let go of. I noticed almost in introducing this whole section of the book, you have a little meditation. It reminded me sometimes of, like, these meditations that the service leader, the hazan, leads on the holidays before they enter into a deep prayer, where they say some sort of, like, I hope I get this right. Don't blame me if I don't. Right. I'm an unworthy representative. Where you said something along the lines of, I'm aware that future generations may look on me as their ancestor and call into question some of the things I did, but I really hope they don't judge me. So I sense that you were trying to get to that place of, I'm trying to understand this. I'm not going to try to defend it where it's indefensible, but I'm trying to also not use the moral truths that I'm more deeply aware of now than then to cast judgment on these people. And I think the way that I felt that you did this was by reinforcing over and over again the almost precarious economic position that your great, great grandfather Jacob was in, largely because of how Jews had to make money as middlemen and brokers and merchants and money lenders like that created an archetype that put him into an environment where the only way he was going to be able to do that was by transacting with chattel slavery. And I couldn't figure out whether I was comfortable with that, as I don't think it was an apologetic. I think it's a genuine explanation for the position that he found himself in, because. But it felt like that was the place where you were trying to hold that balance between, how do I judge them but also figure out a way not to judge them. Is that fair?
- [25:06]
B
Yeah. I mean, I ask my students often, what do we take for granted that people in 100 years, now, 50 years ago, will be shocked that we didn't notice as morally wrong? And I'm very mindful. You know, I teach at Columbia University, where basically all the leading lights of the faculty 100 years ago were ardent eugenicists and they thought that was a liberal cause. But this question tends to stump my students, as it does me. They say, well, we weren't attentive enough to climate change. And I say, well, that doesn't count because you know that you are aware of climate change as a problem now. I mean, something you're not aware of that will seem in defense of and almost by definition you don't know, because standards change in ways that you don't imagine they will. So you're saying it exactly the way I feel it. It feels facile. And this is another issue with just family memoirs in general, which usually go back one generation and tend to be pretty judgmental about. Here's what my parents did wrong, not in a slavery sense, but in an emotional sense. And even there, when I first became a parent, I and most of my friends, we had a very detailed and iterated critique of our own parents parenting. And we were never going to make any mistakes like that ourselves because we were so aware of it. And of course, now my children have very detailed and iterated critique of the kind of parent that I was. So I just think in family histories, memoirs, et cetera, the good guys and bad guys frame. I don't like, and I don't like being easy in the judgment that they got it wrong. I disown them, even though I come from them. And I will never stand up as somebody who got anything wrong.
- [27:03]
A
Yeah, let's talk a little bit about some of the broad conclusions around Jews and Jewish history that this book suggests. Right near the middle of the book, you know, two kind of memorable framings that I want to unpack with you. One is you talk about a familiar tug to opposite directions that Jews experience in America one towards social acceptance, the feeling that something is possible. What I described a little bit in my introduction, as well as the tug back to maybe the security and insecurity of belonging to Jewish life. And then you describe this kind of more politically by saying that whatever period of time you were talking about, these Jews experienced inclusion briefly followed by exclusion. Now, those are two different ways of capturing the same piece. One puts them as a simultaneous experience of insider, outsider. The other describes it as a sequential experience of sometimes you're included and you're excluded. Can you unpack how both of those work and how you understand the kind of American Jewish story beyond your own families?
- [28:10]
B
I would say first, if you think about the long sweep of Jewish history, the idea that it would be possible for a Jew to live a full, rich Jewish life and be a fully accepted, fully participating member of the non Jewish society around that's a very new idea in Jewish history. Not a lot of Jews have even thought they could live that way, and most Jews today probably don't. So we need to sort of locate it as a kind of experiment, whether you want to call it Jewish emancipation or Jewish enlightenment or that kind of thing. And optimism comes naturally to Americans or has historically maybe fading. So it requires an optimism about both sides of the equation that you can kind of hang on to a rich Jewish identity while modifying it enough to be able to live in the wider world and that you will be accepted fully as a Jew in the wider world without having to engage in a kind of what feels like a self denial or a hiding exercise. So the overlap is pretty elusive in the entire history of Jewish life. And I mentioned that. I'm sure this is on your mind too, because it feels like we're returning to a period now where it becomes clearer to most American Jews, especially liberal Jews, that it wasn't as big an overlap as we had all thought it was. So the kind of provisionality that I grew up with about Jewish identity is being felt much more widely among friends of mine who grew up in the sort of American urban, suburban, big city, Jewish mainstream of the late 20th century. To their surprise and pain, it felt
- [30:08]
A
a little bit like you were gravitating, certainly by the end of the book towards what I characterized at the opening as more of a pessimism, a recognition that the American experience may have been exceptional for a period of time, but it is trending towards the mean of diaspora experience. There was an obvious German Jewish intellectual who you don't mention in the book, which is Hannah, arendt Arendt is kind of the ultimate pessimist in this regard and her popularization of Lazarre's pariah parvenu distinction, right, the one who's completely left out versus the one who's, as she says, rowing upstream, desperately rowing upstream, trying to fit in, trying to compete. She resolves ultimately with the kind of advocacy for just embracing the status of the conscious pariah. At least you get some dignity back in just knowing who you are. And I couldn't quite tell if you're fully there.
- [31:02]
B
I didn't mention Arendt in the book just because she's been so written about. And I thought it'd be more interesting to surface names that are less familiar who have wrestled with versions of this. But there's a lot of wonderful writing about her. Let me try to say it in a more optimistic way, or maybe realistic way in another portion of my life. I've spent a lot of time in recent years hanging around with social scientists and they have this phrase denominator problem. Compare 14 to 1/100th. The numerator is the same, but the meaning is completely different because the denominator is so different, right? So what we see now we can all kind of agree on, although we don't all agree on them. But the real question is how do you compare what is happening now to what should be expected? And if what should be expected is this idea of complete consistency between a strong Jewish identity and a uncomplicated accepted American identity, I think that's unrealistic and probably was always unrealistic and was less my assumption than a lot of my friends. A book that had a profound influence on me that very few people have heard of these days that I encountered in Middle Age is called the Process of Government by Arthur Bentley, published in 1908. And basically its point is the world is a pluralist place. Everybody belongs to a group. People can belong to multiple groups. But there's no such thing as a universalist identity. And there's no such thing as the public or the people. And life is properly understood as a sort of kaleidoscope like series of struggles and rearrangements among interest groups. And that is the way the world works. I really believe that. I have come to believe that I am a recovering universalist and the old fashioned German Jews who founded the Reform movement were universalists. So I would say being Jewish is a rich, wonderful, fulfilling identity that I think one can have in American society and will probably, you know, at least for the years remaining. To me, I'll be able to continue to have. But to think that there are no friction points between that and mainstream American life, particularly mainstream, sort of liberal, universalist American life, is an illusion that's not true, may never have been true, is not going to be true in the coming years. It's not so simple as an either or. You have to decide which world you want to inhabit and leave the other world. But I do think for me, what works is to say my primary identity is being Jewish, and then I'll sort of explore what parts of the non Jewish world I'm comfortable with and which parts I'm not. But I don't feel that I should expect it to be or that it is a 100% comfortable place. And I see a lot of Jews struggling to redefine what it means to be Jewish in a way where all the tensions and inconsistencies disappear. And I think that's kind of a fool's errand.
- [34:26]
A
It reminds me of a Leo Strauss line where he says, the Jew represents the unique case of an individual who leaves their home in search of the universal family or the universal community, and upon arrival discovers he's the only one there. And he says the act of returning to his people is what makes him a baal. Teshuva, which is a traditional word, usually means someone who is repenting based on their misdeeds. But he turns it into almost a political act of rejoining his people. And you talked just now about universalism and you had a phrase in there that I loved, which is starting to experience the luxury of particularism. Right. The feeling of being tribal. Again, share with our listeners a little bit about what you mean by that luxury of particularism in this context. You mentioned that you. Your primary identity as a Jew, and I definitely get that. I identify with that. But your story reflects almost like a discovery that being in the inside of Jewish life and closing off a little bit from the externals, it's not just a political act. You're exulting in something, finding something where there was a richness that you thought was barren. Can you talk a little bit about that?
- [35:36]
B
You know, I was raised as a Pittsburgh platform Reform Jew. Now, the Reform movement basically renounced the Pittsburgh platform in phases, as you know. And it was a dead letter by the time I was born. But my family and a lot of people around us still clung to the idea. So that's a totally universalist vision of what it could mean to be Jewish. And long story short, the German Jews, the world I grew up in, it doesn't exist anymore. And the basic reason it doesn't exist is it's not like the Nazis came along and wiped us out. It's. I mean, if you will, I'm saying it a little too harshly. We wiped ourselves out by denaturing and watering down the meaning of being Jewish to the point when it just couldn't hold people, especially through generations. So all of those, you know, Pittsburgh platform, Reformed temples are now way, way, way, way more Jewish than they were.
- [36:33]
A
And Zionist, by the way, that was also a piece of the turn.
- [36:36]
B
Right.
- [36:36]
A
It wasn't just denatured. Yeah, yeah.
- [36:38]
B
It would be as hard for an anti Zionist to be invited to speak at Temple Emanuel today as it would have been 100 years ago for a Zionist to be invited to speak. That's just been a huge shift. And it's Zionism about Israel, but it's Zionism is a sense of we're a people first and then, you know, let's have a conversation about what else. So in the world I grew up in, you know, there's this familiar phrase that you may have heard once or twice. Is it good for the Jews? Yeah, you would never say that in the world I grew up in, because you weren't supposed to say, I'm a Jew. And I think first about what's good for my people. You were supposed to say, everything I'm for is good for everybody. It's a universal principle. And empirically that's almost never true in life. But it also leads you to keep editing the meaning of being Jewish and living a Jewish life. Simple example of many. So the Pittsburgh platform, as you know, abolished all the kosher laws. Right. So there's something you never have to think about. I am anything but glad kosher. But if I go to a restaurant and I look at the menu, I think about, you know, I'm a Jew looking at the menu. So, you know, you could say, well, that's horrible. That's so tragic and so restricting. Or you could say, it's okay to be reminded of where you are. And unlike many Jews, I'm the kind of Jew who will eat in a restaurant and not ask, where have those plates been? Exactly between, you know, me and the next person you serve. So it's imperfect, but I don't mind that. It's pops into my head every day, this sort of difference between the two worlds. And once you stop trying to resist the tension between them, you can open up a lot of richness in your life that comes from being in the community. So I Feel there's been much more joy than sorrow to me. That's why I'm rejecting your notion of I'm fundamentally pessimistic.
- [38:47]
A
Yeah, well, no one likes to be called a pessimist. You know, actually, your story on Kashrut reminds me of the. I think the first time I spent real time in New Orleans, actually, it was my brother's bachelor party and they went out for dinner one night and I was like, well, listen, I keep kosher, but I'm sure I'll be able to find something that I can make my way through. And I literally look at the menu, I was like, there is nothing here I can eat. And of course, I was a little irritated that that was the restaurant of choice. But part of me also was like, I'm making my choices and I'm okay with those choices, even if it means I can't have the turtle soup.
- [39:20]
B
Right, right.
- [39:21]
A
Which was the specialty item. You talk briefly in the book, and I'm sure this was cautious about the eruption of anti Israel, not only protest, but violence on the Columbia campus, including ways that it hit home for your family. And I would say the place in the book where I felt you had the most almost open hostility was to Elmer Berger and the rise of the American Council for Judaism. The kind of anti Israel position that was very prominent among, I guess, German Jews in the middle of the 20th century. How much do you connect the dots between this broader overall story of this dance between inclusion and exclusion to the specific case of Zionism these days? Is it just another representation of this saga of Jewish history?
- [40:09]
B
Well, it's an iteration of a long running story. So the acj, you know, is now in certain circles having a bit of a revival. I've seen a couple of articles popping up that present Elmer Berger as a kind of hero. And it's because so many Jews, particularly on the left, have come to the view that Zionism, which one can define in various ways, is simply unacceptable. They want to be. It's kind of like back to the Future. I want to be a Jew, but I want to be a Jew in a way that does not include Zionism or any reference to Israel, because those things are just so completely unacceptable now in progressive circles. So then you go looking for a usable past. And one of the places you might land, one of the places as, you know, people land as the Bundest. And another place is the American Council for Judaism. I find it a little hard to go there, particularly if you grew up inside that world, as I did, partly because there's something kind of clueless about starting an organization to oppose the creation of a Jewish state in 1942, which is when it was founded. It's a lack of realism about what options most Jews had. The official position of the ACJ was always some variant of, oh, they can just come to America, but of course they couldn't come to America. That was clear.
- [41:38]
A
No, it's closed.
- [41:39]
B
And it was also a sense of, you know, non solidarity. These are not our people. These are Russian Jews, essentially. And I was in rooms where people had those conversations. If you weren't, it's possible to think, oh, well, you know, this is a lot more innocent and beautiful than it actually was. But it contained an element of real distaste for the less fortunate brothers and sisters that is hard to countenance even in retrospect. The mega question is, can you truly invent a sustainable version of Judaism that takes out Israel and Zionism entirely? And the historical record is no. I mean, probably the most successful example of sustainable Jewish non Zionism is the Satmars. But they have a very, very thick Jewish identity, to say the least, and have zero interaction with the outside world or as little as they can. So you sort of get why it survives. But the people like my people who thought that that could be made as a sustainable Jewish world, that just didn't work.
- [42:55]
A
Yeah. And I couldn't help but feeling, having read your book, that it helped me clarify the ways in which I feel a lot of the anti Zionism that's emerging today, including the rehabilitation of things like the acj, are rooted in a kind of, maybe even unconscious effort to just mold Jewishness into a liberal Western vocabulary that will just make Judaism salvageable. Right. In the long run.
- [43:20]
B
Yeah. And that's an older story. I mean, that's the story of the earliest Reformed Jews back in Germany in the early 19th century. I think where it's most poignant and pertinent for me today is friends of mine who grew up again in this sort of more normal mainstream Jewish world, my age, or maybe a little younger, who really believed that all these problems had been solved, you know, that there were no more barriers. Jews were totally accepted. Jewish culture had become accepted as mainstream culture. Israel was a loved and admired liberal triumph. Very light duty, observance and knowledge was fine. That package, it's a very powerful package psychologically. And people who grew up with it are seeing it go away. And it's very disturbing. And I feel like I'm in this kind of especially I've been out promoting the book. I'm in this never ending group therapy session or something. You know, people write me letters and say, I need to talk to you. And they'll either say I need Israel to have a labor government again to be a Jew, or I need to have a way to be Jewish that doesn't involve going to shul ever. It's just this kind of longing for it all to fit together in a way that it doesn't and hardly ever has.
- [44:44]
A
Yeah, I think it's a good way to put it.
- [44:47]
B
And again, it's like a reverse engineering thing. Let me reinvent Jewishness. I don't want to be like an anti Semite or a self hater or any of those kinds of terms. So let me reinvent a version of Judaism that is truly universal. You know, and for my friends like this, I'm sure you know, people like this, I mean, there's a kind of cluelessness that is very much in human nature. You know, like, they never told me that the establishment of the state was called the Nakba. They never told me that the wonderful triumph in the 67 war is properly understood as an occupation. Well, who's the they who never told you this was secret information?
- [45:31]
A
Yeah.
- [45:31]
B
The better thing in retrospect would be just process that these were not all winner, no loser developments.
- [45:40]
A
Yeah, I think there's a self infantilization going on with that of you lied to me, my education system failed me. Okay. But read a book and then do the work. Last question. You've been very generous with your time. I started on America at 250. Any closing wish that you have for American Jews in marking this anniversary, in thinking about what it means for us, what should this conversation look like over the coming year?
- [46:06]
B
Well, yeah, I mean, I think please drop the illusion of a universalist or universalizable version of Jewish identity because you're not going to find it, especially now. Step one, find a Jewish identity that is strong, meaningful, joyous to you and feels like a solid ground to be on. And then step two, explore your relations with the outside world. You don't have to withdraw entirely, but just it comes from step one. And I think that's a much more useful way to be in the world as a Jew in America, especially in the coming years, than to say, I'm starting as a universalist and then trying to find a form of Jewishness that fits with that.
- [46:57]
A
Amazing. Nick, thanks for being on the show today. Congratulations on the book.
- [47:00]
B
Okay, thank you very much for having me.
- [47:02]
A
Thank you for being here.
- [47:16]
C
Here are some other things that are happening at the Shalom Park Hartman Institute as the United states marks its 250th anniversary, the Hartman Bate Midrash for America at 250 offers a space for serious Jewish thinking about democracy, belonging and responsibility in American life. Throughout the year, the Hartman Institute will share essays and podcast episodes, convene learning and conversation, and publish a special edition of Sources to explore how the remarkable story of Jewish life in America can help us confront the challenges of the present and imagine possibilities for the future. Join us in the Hartman Beit Midrash for America at 250 all year long to fortify the American Jewish project through the power of ideas. Learn more at the link in the show Notes at the recent closing Shabbaton of the Hartman teen Fellowship, over 250 fellows from across the United States and Canada spent a weekend building pluralistic community while studying ethics and our relationship to the other with Hartman Scholars. One one fellow shared I was able to talk to many people I never would have otherwise talked to. I was able to strengthen my own beliefs while gaining an appreciation for the fact that things can be understood differently. Mzaltov on a productive year There is still time to join us at Hartman in Jerusalem this summer. Join fellow leaders, philanthropists and learners at our Community Leadership Program. Bring renewed energy to your Rabbinic work by attending our Rabbinic Torah Seminar. Reflect on your education. Work with your peers at the Wellspring Summit for Education. Click on the link in the show notes to learn more and register.
- [48:42]
D
Thanks for listening to our show and special thanks to our guest Nicholas Lemon. This episode of Identity Crisis is produced by Daniel Goodman and our executive producer is Maital Friedman. This episode was researched by Gabrielle Feinstone and edited by Josh Allen with music provided by so called Transcripts of our show are now available on our website. 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. See you next time and thanks for listening.
- [49:26]
A
SA.