Yehuda Kurtzer (3:09)

Things that have aesthetic qualities are sometimes ideological and sometimes they're just aesthetic. And I think about. I struggle with this a lot as a bald man. There's a whole adhesive question, separate. When I have a keeper that's a little bit too big, it kind of sticks off my head in a weird way because there's nowhere for hide. It can't blend in with a hair. So I'm very sensitive to, like, what's the exact size you want?

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (3:30)

Perfect contour. You want perfect.

Podcast Host/Announcer (3:32)

Exactly.

Mark Oppenheimer (3:40)

Hey, friends, I'm Mark Oppenheimer and this is Arc with mark. It is September 15th as I talk to you. And what that means is that the Jewish high holidays are coming up really, really soon. Rosh Hashanah is next week. It has crept up on me, and I was thinking last year when I was in synagogue for Rosh Hashanah, that it was the first year in about 17 years that I wasn't primarily concerned with where all of my children were while I was sitting in synagogue. My eldest is now 18, my youngest is now 6, 7. And so last year when they were, I guess 17 and 6 and my youngest was 6 years old, I really could sort of exhale. I knew that he was probably in the children's service and he was probably sitting cross legged and more or less paying attention. And if he had to go to the bathroom, he could take himself to the bathroom. He didn't need mommy or daddy. And if he needed mommy or daddy, he could come find mommy or daddy in the main sanctuary where the adults were doing their high holiday service. And I hadn't had a day like that in synagogue where I wasn't consumed with juggling the children and thinking about where the children are ever or at least not since college. I didn't go to synagogue growing up. I first went to high holiday services when I was a freshman in college and did that for six or seven years. In an academic context, I was affiliated with universities. I would go to university services. Okay, I didn't have to worry about kids then. Flash forward a few years to my being married and are having a baby pretty soon after our marriage and my being a member of an adult Synagogue community. That is to say, a synagogue community that's not circumscribed or defined by affiliation with a university or a Hillel. So kind of like the real world, as they say. And from the very first, in the real world, I was thinking about the baby, and my wife was doing probably 72.6% of the baby care, but I was doing 20 something percent. And I had to be mindful and wanted to be mindful of her needs and the baby's needs. And so it went through the births of all of the rest of our five children. And in a way, this was totally glorious. I mean, it was. I loved having young children. And there's a part of me that's really, really sad that, you know, that. That that thing is true, which is that every day that I have with my youngest, with my son, is the last day I'll have a child who's that age, because we're not having any more children. And so, you know, with every passing day, I'm losing the experience of what it's like to have a child who is seven years, two months and three days old, seven years, two months and four days old, and so forth and so on. And that's a little bit heartbreaking. With regards to synagogue worship, though, there was actually something kind of nice about having to worry about the children because it meant I didn't have to think about my own spiritual life. I didn't have to think about my own inability to access the prayers. I didn't have to think about my own boredom, because, let's face it, a lot of ritualized worship can be boring. I didn't have to think about showing up as myself in this space in front of the rabbi and my fellow congregants and God, however one construes God. But last year that changed a little bit. And this year I think it'll be really fundamentally different. I mean, the children really can take care of themselves. And so I have to figure out, how much do I want to be here and why do I want to be here? And I'm. Am I being here for something other than modeling to my children that someday they should be here? In other words, am I just playing the continuity game where I'm showing up to synagogue because I want my children to think that showing up to synagogue is what adults do? Is it just about reinforcing a kind of ongoing cultural script irrespective of any actual truth value or any actual meaning? I don't think that's true. I don't think that's what I'm doing. But to be honest, I have to cogitate on that more. I have to really reflect on who am I as a Jew now that I'm moving beyond a pretty easy, snug fitting role of Jewish dad. Being a Jewish dad is something I've gotten really, really comfortable with. I feel like I know how to talk to my kids about Judaism. I feel like I know how to make it fun and make it meaningful and go places with them and sit in synagogue with them and nudge them just enough, but also back off when I'm supposed to back off. And I think that over 18 years, I got pretty good at that. And now I have to figure out, who am I in that space? Who am I these high holidays? So, over at Arc Mag Dawg, we're going to be running a few essays that are relevant to Judaism and Jewish life at this time of year, and the podcast to reflect that, too. And so there's. There's no better week to run this interview that I've done with Yehuda Kurtzer. We talked. I feel like it was about two months ago. Now, some of it might feel a little bit dated, but actually the great thing is that when you talk with Yehuda, it never really does feel dated because you immediately go to the really important stuff about God and history and memory, and in this case, why some people wear little, tiny, small yarmulkes on their head and why some wear much bigger yarmulkes on their head. And that, if nothing else, is why you should listen to this interview. Dr. Yehuda Kurtzer is president of the Shalom Hartman Institute, and he's a leading thinker. He's an author. He's not a rabbi, but he has a doctorate in this stuff.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (9:00)

He's a major dude.

Mark Oppenheimer (9:01)

He's a major Jew. And my friend, my friend Jo Foer once referred to me and Menachem Butler as massive Jews. He found out that we didn't know each other. We now know each other pretty well, Menachem and I. But he said, but you guys are such massive Jews, you should know each other. Yehuda Kurtzer is a massive Jew, whatever that means. And he is, again, he's head of this think tank called the Hartman Institute, and just an important thinker. He has a podcast of his own that is honestly one of the best, if you are interested in not just Jewish life and culture, but American religious life and culture. It's called Identity Crisis. It's identity slash crisis. That's Yehuda's podcast. But this that you' about to hear is Yehuda on my podcast, Arc the podcast. Have a listen.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (9:52)

I'm noticing your yarmulke size. And I always, when I was a tablet, I always wanted to get someone to do a beautiful spread with photos of like, what the different kipot mean, different sizes. I was recently in community with having a conversation with a young rabbi who had one of those little tiny mini discs. And you know what I'm talking about, right? Where it's like, but those are not the least observant Jews. Actually, like, those are actually somewhere up the scale of observance. What's going on with the disc so small? You wonder how it even stays on.

Yehuda Kurtzer (10:24)

Look, the truth is this used to be a more coherent pattern. Like these kind of Jews wear this khipa. These kind of Jews don't. I actually found in the past decade, it became totally different.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (10:34)

It's all falling apart. It's gone down.

Yehuda Kurtzer (10:35)

It's all falling apart. Yeah, that, like, because there's all this, like, performative ultra Orthodoxy with certain type of kippot, because people kind of like the aesthetic, but it's not actually their values or their community. And. And religious Zionist Jews in Israel still kind of stick with the nikkeepas, but sometimes they kind of also wear velvet kippas or they wear like the Rabbi Nachman once.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (10:55)

Right.

Yehuda Kurtzer (10:55)

Anyway, so it's not. It's hard to kind of use a kippah to, like, map on a person's ideology. And by the way, there's that guy in Congress now there's a Republican congressman, I think, from Tennessee maybe, who's walking around wearing a kippah as solidarity with.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (11:09)

The Jews, who's not Jewish.

Yehuda Kurtzer (11:11)

First person to wear a kippah in Congress, he's not Jewish.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (11:14)

One of my favorite pieces, it sank like a stone. I don't think anyone else read it. But one of my favorite pieces I ever wrote was making the point that for all of Joe Lieberman's professed orthodoxy, and I don't doubt his own sincere religious journey, that in fact, we've never elected a Jew who visibly presents Jewish to a national office. We've never elected a woman who dresses in, you know, from clothing. We've never elected a man who not on the Sabbath wears a yarmulke to Congress. And whereas we've elected lots of Christians who probably wear crosses or perform their Christianity in a public way, we've never done that with a Jew. The Jews always present as gentile in Congress. And, you know, like in fact, if you go online, you'll find more photographs of Barack Obama in a Keeper than of Joe Lieberman. And I think that we, you know, that's an interesting milestone that we haven't met yet that somebody who looks Jewish, who would walking down the street draw the ire of anti Semites, could go to Congress. We're not there yet.

Yehuda Kurtzer (12:17)

So I want to contest the premise on two fronts. One is if wearing crosses is an indicator, I would bet that there are members of Congress now, women members of Congress now who are Jews who wear Star of David necklaces or hostage dog tags. Especially post October 7th. I would be shocked if Kathy Manning had no Jewish jewelry. That seems that might, that requires some investigation. But the historical question I would ask is American Jews did not wear kipot in public really until the 60s. And that was the emergence of kipas. Had to do with combination of kind of the identity politics turn and the Six Day War and a few other things. So it's a little bit funny to say we haven't elected somebody with that because it's, it's such a, it's so countercultural to how kind of even observant American Jews have behaved for a long time.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (13:12)

So to, for our, for our majority gentile listenership, right. Pre say 60s, even modern orthodox, what we would now call modern Orthodox Jews tended to be, you know, not, not where yarmulke is. And if they were in the workplace, they'd take their hat off and they'd have nothing on. They, they would, they'd look like me. That I don't think that was true of like the Aguda. To the extent we had Hasidic or Haredi Jews in America, ultra Orthodox Jews, I think they probably were wearing yarmulkes, but they were a pretty tiny minority before World War II.

Yehuda Kurtzer (13:39)

Yeah. And not politically significant. If you really wanted to play this out, you would say that maybe the real test is when would you elect a Jew with a beard, a male Jew with a beard? Because that's also like a signal in some ways of kind of traditional Jewishness is not just a man with a kippah, but with a man with a beard.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (13:57)

You're right. And all your sort of Jo Lie Rubens and Gerald Nadlers and whoever else is, are clean shaven. Of course, almost everyone in Congress is. I mean the beards are coming back now. But we haven't had a bearded president president for, for a century or so.

Yehuda Kurtzer (14:10)

Yeah, that's right. For Lubavitcher Rebbe, by the way, for Rabbi Menachem Nendosh nearby. They had a chabad. The beard was the thing. I mean, he was very, very adamant that when you were to become chabad and is, there's like a lot of holiness embedded in those beards. So it's like part of the look is that's how a Jew. That's how a Jew represents, or male Jew represents themselves as public is without a clean shave of face.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (14:35)

And the reason that there are very Orthodox Jews with clean shaven faces, I mean, Torah says what? You don't shave below the cheekbone. What is the commandment?

Yehuda Kurtzer (14:50)

It says the equivalent. You can't round the skull. Okay. So it's hard to know exactly what that means. It's probably some version of an ancient idolatrous haircut that involved rounding. It has come to mean basically cutting the sideburns.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (15:05)

But so when I see very observant Jews who have the sideburns but otherwise are clean shaven, are they using razors or are they using depilator? Isn't there an anti razor thing about it or am I completely inventing it?

Yehuda Kurtzer (15:15)

Yeah, there's an anti razor bias that in traditional communities the custom is to use something that resembles clippers more than a razor. So most electric shavers are okay because they're basically codified as scissors as opposed to being a razor.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (15:32)

But for the Lubavitcher Rebbe, it was a cultural thing. It was like mazora. It was tradition. Right. You have to have the beard. That's so interesting. Okay, so this was a fun tangent. But before we leave this tangent, because I like talking about this stuff before it all went to hell, say in the past 10 or 12 years with people signifying in different ways, it was like non Hasidic, ultra Orthodox tended to have a black felt. Like Yeshivish people had a black felt yarmulke. Religious nationalists who we would map onto kind of modern Orthodoxy had a woven yarmulke. What else was there? There's the Reb Nachman kind of like it comes down. It's like a spez almost, right? Or no, that's something different.

Yehuda Kurtzer (16:13)

I don't know what the term is. Skull cap, like something that was pulled down, knit, but woven and pulled down. Like close around the ears was a breast sliver. You have like centrist Orthodox Jews would wear suede kippas. Those are pretty common also because they kind of just blend in.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (16:28)

And to me, the suede is like the indefensible one because you're murdering an animal. There's no reason you need leather on your head. They look. They look hot. If you're in the sun, they'll be the least comfortable. There's no grip underneath, so I would imagine they're hard. It's harder for them to stay on your head. They just reek to me of sort of somebody's bar mitzvah. Keep up. The party favorite, the bar mitzvah.

Yehuda Kurtzer (16:49)

Yeah, that's probably right. The bar mitzvah keepa of choice has now shifted entirely to a different material. Kind of a cloth material. Easy to produce, cheaper than suede. Suede are expensive. But anyway, the adhesive issue has nothing to do with suede. I mean, you got a bobby pin, you got a clip, or now you have like something attached on the inside of a keepa to keep it on your head.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (17:09)

Well, only in that the woven ones, I think, kind of interact with the hair a bit more and may give you a little more grip, but they feel better. And they would think they feel better. Okay, but getting back to my original question, and then we'll talk about things like Jewish continuity and the rabbi shortage. The important stuff, the little disc, the one that's so small that you can't even see it if the person's. Unless they're leaning way over. What is that?

Yehuda Kurtzer (17:29)

So I know I understand it a little bit better in Israel. What it kind of signals in Israel is I grew up in a religious community, a religious Zionist community, usually modern Orthodox.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (17:38)

Yeah.

Yehuda Kurtzer (17:38)

And I'm loosely connected to its since I probably was in the army. Okay. And when I go back to my parents home, I gotta stick something on. And this one fits kind of neatly in the pocket.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (17:51)

Interesting.

Yehuda Kurtzer (17:51)

It's kind of like on the border of in and out a little bit. I haven't seen a lot of them here, but it's inobtrusive. It's a way of saying it right.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (18:01)

When I've seen them here, I've honestly, you know, I see them, I live in a college town, I see undergrads. I've seen them on maybe three or four guys over the years. And in every case, and I have no idea what this connotes, but in every case, it was a really good looking, sort of jacked bro y kind of guy who was into his body. Probably the buzz cut. It was never sitting on top of like a big fro. It was always like sitting on top of like a buzz cut. He was a guy who wanted to look like he was, you know, Special Forces or, you know, a model or something. You know, he was a guy who was into his look. It was a really, kind of a style conscious guy wanted to rock this little disc. And I don't think it's that he's hiding his Judaism. That's not my sense. It's that it's sleeker. Right. It's the same way he has a tight T shirt. He has a tight little kippah, not one of those loosey goosey.

Yehuda Kurtzer (18:49)

Right. So I guess what you're saying is, and I think we know this, like things that have aesthetic qualities are sometimes ideological and sometimes they're just aesthetic. And I think about. I struggle with this a lot as a bald man. There's a whole adhesive question which is separate. But, but I. When I have a keeper that's a little bit too big, it kind of sticks off my head in a weird way because there's nowhere for hide. It can't blend in with a hair. So I'm very sensitive to like, what's the exact size you want?

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (19:16)

Perfect contouring. You want perfect.

Yehuda Kurtzer (19:17)

Exactly.

Mark Oppenheimer (19:18)

Okay, let me, and let me ask.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (19:19)

You, now that you've raised it, what is the adhesive situation with a man with no hair like you?

Yehuda Kurtzer (19:23)

So Naftali Bennett, former prime minister of Israel, used double sided tape. And I know some men who use like toupee tape also. It sticks on the head. I don't, I don't. I. Here's a great story, actually. I was standing in line. I was standing in line at o' Hare and so to speak. Well, thank you. And a guy behind me goes, hey, how does that thing stay in your head? And I turned around and I said, congressman Paul Ryan.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (19:51)

Was it really?

Yehuda Kurtzer (19:52)

It was. And I regret not saying Speaker Ryan, obviously. I totally, you know, and he said, yes. And I said, oh. I said my usual answer to this is sweat, gravity and faith in God, which you love. Which all works fine when you're indoors, right? Doesn't really work in the wind.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (20:10)

I like him so much more now that you've told me that story. I don't have a particular beef with Paul Ryan, but I don't think well of him. And now I think what a.

Yehuda Kurtzer (20:17)

What a.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (20:18)

What a dude. Like what a, what a cool dude that he. That he just kind of did that. So speaking of Speaker Paul Ryan, you have erroneously been referred to as, you know, Rabbi Kurtzer, and you're not a rabbi. You've written about this by way of getting into a piece that I love of yours about how we need. I think the headline is, we need more great rabbis. But you actually could have just said we need more rabbis. Because even though the numbers of, you know, synagogue attending Jews are static, maybe inching up, inching down, they're not burgeoning relative to 30 or 40 years ago. And yet we don't have enough rabbis for the Jews who want one. We actually have a shortage. There are pulpits unfilled. There are people not going to the rabbinate. I have been very interested for 20 years now as a journalist in the clergy shortage. Because, I mean, if you think there's a rabbi shortage, surely, you know, the priest shortage is, you know, is even more worrisome, the Catholic priest shortage. And I think in a lot of communities, there just aren't enough clergy. So, I mean, let's start there. Why not? Why. Why are people who would have done this 50 or 75 years ago not doing this?

Yehuda Kurtzer (21:23)

There's a wide array of hypotheses. The thing I'm most cynical about in this conversation is people who come up with a single hypothesis, which usually is an inverse of some program that they want to start or a kind of reflection of their. Of. Of their biases about religion or about community.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (21:42)

It's like the decline. The decline in morning consumption of dry cereal around the American table has led to a dearth of rabbis. Therefore, Kellogg, you should sponsor my serial institute for Rabbinics.

Yehuda Kurtzer (21:52)

Right, exactly. It's not Captain Crunch, it's Rabbi Crunch. So, yeah, there's a lot of different hypotheses. You can look at the fact that there's a general decline, as you said, in clergy service and kind of say, this is not really about Jews. And look at the drivers around the extent to which we're in a little bit of a recession on certainly organized and institutional religion in America, and Jews largely imitate those trends. We don't behave differently than other people like that. You could look at the fact that careers in public service are viewed differently than they were a generation ago. You could identify the fact that I don't know which is the cause and which is the effect to the decline in public service. But consumer culture around religion has made it very difficult for professionals who work in those contexts. So rabbis report now, especially in synagogue context, that what is expected of them from their congregants in terms of a wide variety of competencies that they're supposed to be great at, with much less professional support than rabbis of a different generation would have had, and with far less tenure, job security than rabbis of different generation makes these jobs very hard to do. Burnout is very high. So you can kind of blame it on the consumer, the congregants. They want great rabbis, but they're driving them out. There are interesting gendered ways to view this problem. The same phenomenon that basically happened to the respect afforded to pediatricians and schoolteachers, which shifted considerably when they became, and this is a very contentious way to describe it, when they became thought of as women's professions.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (23:33)

The feminization of any profession leads to the decline of men who want to do it. I mean, this is sociologically well established at this point.

Yehuda Kurtzer (23:39)

That's right. And it drives down salaries, drives down respect, according to the field. I think there are some. So those are all kind of environmental and social drivers of this, of this issue. And there's been so much disruption in how we think about the. How we think about the map of Jewish institutional and communal life that you're in this weird place where I think Jewishness Judaism is actually a hot commodity. People want Judaism, they just don't tend to want it through the institutional infrastructure built in the 1950s. And so there's a weird economy of what does it mean to go into this profession where some of the most exciting stuff is actually entrepreneurial as opposed to built in. What does that do to the job pool and to the types of people who are willing to go into this?

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (24:28)

And the people looking for something entrepreneurial in their rabbi, the people looking for the interesting startup that meets in the coffee shop, they don't want to pay for it as much as. Or they aren't as willing to pay for it as the people who just wanted to kind of pay their annual dues to a synagogue.

Yehuda Kurtzer (24:42)

Especially when, like, when Americans were churched, Jews were also churched. And therefore these synagogues had huge membership numbers and therefore secure, you know, revenue lines. So there are specific issues, though, I think, in the Jewish community and kind of the evolution of Judaism in America, which is something really happened in the 60s and 70s, I think, connected to the civil rights movement, where rabbinic leadership started to become encoded much more with what you might call prophetic leadership. I think this has to do with the history of the Reform movement. As I said, the civil rights movement, I think a little bit is kind of Christianization of liberal Judaism. And when that happened, a lot of rabbinic education, in my view, actually has been catering towards it. And as a result, folks who are going into the rabbinate tend to be going in thinking that these jobs are about pursuing justice, which is very different than jobs that are about providing care, pastoral service, spiritual wisdom, et cetera. And. And those folks by the way, when. When that becomes the main objective of people going into the field, other people who might have gone into this role for other traditional reasons look at it and they're like, no, I don't really want to be an activist, therefore I'm not going to become a rabbi. So it also kind of fuels the shifting of the pipeline. And that's not about, like, the broader ecosystem necessarily of religion in America. It's about kind of internal stuff happening in how we think about what a rabbi is supposed to be, which I think has been bad for the pipeline.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (26:15)

You're being very, very nice to the current rabbis. I mean, one of my observations over just, you know, with just having interviewed a lot of them is that. And this is truer in the liberal branches of Judaism than in. I think they're different. I would stereotype the problems in Orthodox Jewish clergy differently. I would have different stereotypes for them. No less flattering, but the stereotype that has a grain of truth in it when you're talking about Reform and to some extent Conservative rabbis, I always say, is a lot of them seem like they went into this because they were just the best goddamn counselor at Jewish summer camp or the most active person at college Hillel. And somebody said to them, you'd be a great rabbi. But they were neither sufficiently interested in texts and Jewish learning nor in necessarily the hospital visits and the. Because, you know, being. Being a song leader, being a ruach leader, a spirit leader, is not the same thing as doing marital counseling, visiting people in the hospital, visiting people who've just lost a child, et cetera. And so you end up with people who have a. Their mode is that they want. They want to lead really fun services or they want to get people psychedelic. They don't necessarily think a bit in terms of relational wisdom, pastoral care, and so forth. And that also seems to me, in a weird way, maybe a side effect of the fact that there were in the 60s and 70s, a lot of great song leaders, a lot of great, you know, fellowship leaders. And so that too, became a model, which is like the turbocharged camp counselor.

Yehuda Kurtzer (27:48)

Yeah. Look, I am charitable towards rabbis, partly because I know a lot of really good ones, but also because in general, I believe, like, more honey will attract rabbis than more than vinegar. Like, it's better for us to set up a template of the good rabbis and try to recruit more people like them. I think you're onto something important, which is that it's true the most common way in which future rabbis are tapped by older people, by mentors, which, by the way, is a really essential way to build the pipeline, tends to be not, you would be a great rabbi, but you seem to love Judaism. And therefore. And the job that a person does who loves Judaism is this, which is not true. To love Judaism can make you a great congregant, right? To love Judaism can make you a great educator or Jewish professional, etc. But it becomes like, you love Judaism, you must be a rabbi. As opposed to us saying, taking an approach as the Jewish community of saying, who are actually our best and brightest, which was for many centuries, the people who became sages were the best and the brightest. In fact, it was considered incredible thing. Like, I have this really bright kid. I want to set them off to become the literate, the learned, right? And it's not necessarily what we tend to commodify in liberal communities is that the best, brightest, most learned people should be our rabbis. And by the way, it might necessarily mean that they're great at hospital visits. So it would also require a little bit of a shift of what kind of. What's the exemplar of rabbinic leadership that we would need?

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (29:19)

Well, so that's. I mean, that's a great question, right? Because. Right. So you take your average Reformed temple or most Conservative synagogues as well. And first of all, the congregants, the type they want isn't necessarily the sage. They'd like that person to be able to play at sagacity, to perform sageness. But. But in hiring, they have a lot of other things they want. They want warmth, they want conviviality, they want the hospital visits they want. I mean, I remember someone saying to me, he was so sad that his old rabbi left because that rabbi could talk Philadelphia Flyers with his kids like NHL hockey knowledge in a hockey city. And this person meant this in all seriousness. And this person was a serious Jew. I mean, serious was not a frivolous human being, this person. But that had mattered in terms of the old rabbi's relationality to. To the congregation. So let's take that average Reformed Temple. They don't want the old model of the best, of just the best and the brightest as the qualification. But I think it tends to fail when the model they get is just somebody who's like, overflowing with love for Judaism, but doesn't necessarily have another skill set. If you could engineer the right person for that job, who is it? What is there? And assuming that he or she's not a superhero, but an actual human being, what does the basket of skills look.

Yehuda Kurtzer (30:36)

Like, I think the model doesn't fail when they get somebody weak. The model fails when they have a certain vision of the kind of rabbi that they want and the person isn't that exact kind of rabbi, or when they don't know what kind of rabbi they want or they have expectations that their rabbis are supposed to be great at everything.

Podcast Host/Announcer (30:52)

Right?

Yehuda Kurtzer (30:52)

Because yes, let's acknowledge that there are going to be great rabbis who are great pastors, there are going to be great rabbis who are great educators. We have great rabbis who are great sages and sermon givers and great rabbis who are community organizers. So you could have a great rabbi for every community in the country as long as it knew that's what we want. We want to get like an awesome educator. And we're going to compensate around those things that the rabbi isn't great at, either through lay leadership or other professional staff, or just knowing we're accepting something and there's a trade off on the other end. And right now part of the problem is, well, we actually kind of want all these things. We're unwilling to prioritize them. And by the way, it's very, very rare there are some that you're going to find a rabbi who's just a plus at all of these things. And it doesn't mean they're a bad rabbi. It's just like they. Let's figure out how to align those things. And from that standpoint, like the ecosystem has to be thinking about how many rabbis do we need who are in each of these columns to be able to ensure that.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (31:59)

How do you compensate for. And I'm thinking of a few clergy, actually. One's not a rabbi, one's a Protestant minister. I think a few clergy were excellent who were good sages, very bright people, good sermonizers, good managerial, like, good at all the sort of bookish and ledger stuff, but just hated pastoral visits and were bad at them. Hospital visits, let's say, assuming you don't have the money for more for a second clergy person, how do you compensate around that? If someone can't sit with someone who's dying in an empathic and kind of.

Yehuda Kurtzer (32:27)

Steady way, look, it might be that you say, okay, listen, that's the sine qua non. Right? That might be the case. I think many rabbis would say, yeah, yeah, that's probably the most important thing you need to do. If you're a rabbi of a congregation, you might say to that person, listen, if you really don't want to do that kind of work, there are other Rabbinic jobs that are available to you in education and other sectors. It might not be that running a congregation requires of you to be a pastor, which requires that kind of bedside manner, those relational skills there too. It's an ecosystem question. There's no such thing anymore as, like, creating rabbis for the obvious professional pathway that they're supposed to go. Where we have a real problem right now is that to the extent that we're training rabbis, most of them don't want to go to pulpit. So they know that there are a wide variety of options available to them. But the place that's most starving for talent are kind of traditional synagogue pulpits. And it might be that in that type of environment, that's the skill set that needs to be most important. Whereas to work, to be a rabbi at a hillel on a campus, to be a rabbi who works in a Jewish day school, to be a rabbi who's kind of the startup innovator, who's meeting people in coffee shops and giving them spiritual direction, doesn't need that kind of same skill set. So it's never going to be a one size fits all. And by the way, even in the heyday where we had a lot of rabbis, it certainly wasn't. I mean, that was like, you know, you get this pretty well from a serious man. The great rabbi of the congregation was not visiting people when they were sick.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (34:00)

Right, right, right. And a lot of rabbis held pulpits for decades who were pretty mediocre in all of it, I mean, and almost held their congregants captive in a sense, because congregations didn't feel they could fire the elder statements. They were statesmen. They were sometimes in awe of the rabbi, or a few wealthy members of the board loved the rabbi, and so everyone else kind of had no choice, basically. So, no, it was far from perfect. How is it that given the fabulous wealth that some Jews have, not me and you, and not most Jews, but given that there is a lot of philanthropic wealth in the community because of, you know, several hundreds of very generous and rich people, that we haven't made rabbinic education free. This has always struck me as the. If there's a single bullet to getting more people into the rabbinate, it would be saying to them, as we say to doctoral students, you'll go for free and we'll give you a stipend. And, you know, I've often thought, you know, what would it take to get 100 more rabbis out of the pipeline? Well, you know, if it was $100,000 a year for each of them. That's not a sum that the Jews couldn't come up with. We could come up with that. Why is nobody working on that?

Yehuda Kurtzer (35:10)

So there are people working on it. And we were running our own pilot of a new rabbinic ordination program at Hartman. We in the middle of the first court, recruiting the second. And one of the things that's the basic criteria for us, our willingness to do this program is that it's fully subsidized. The program, the cost is subsidized, plus the stipend. It happens to be a mid career program. So we've accounted for a lot of different variables.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (35:31)

The stipend.

Yehuda Kurtzer (35:32)

The stipend we provide is $20,000 which basically covers the cost of, you know, the housing and relocation for the various components of the program.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (35:41)

They can't quit their job.

Yehuda Kurtzer (35:42)

We don't need them to quit their job. We're, we're run it, we built it in a way that doesn't require them to do so. What you're describing, I agree with you Mark, is a scandal. It's a scandal of a Jewish community that does not say we have a very, very essential role for the spiritual health of our community. But we're actually not willing to pay for people to be able to do this in ways that are different from any other graduate job. We're not willing to signal at the outset of their career that their training is so important to us because they are important to us that we know that they're making financial sacrifices to be in this line of work. And it's a priority to us. This is a big difference between the liberal movements and the Orthodox movements. Not liberal movements have different financial structures. Many of the schools now actually do find ways to waive tuition or to provide some sort of fellowship, but nowhere near at scale what happens in Orthodoxy. So much so that if I'm not mistaken, the majority of rabbinical students at Yeshiva University don't actually become professional rabbis, but they feel that they have the flexibility earlier in their career to get a rabbinic education and then they go off and be an accountant or whatever it is. But they're. What that gives to a community is knowledge. It puts people in the pews who have rabbinic knowledge and that changes the whole texture of a community. It's a scandal. And what it really tells us, we know the answer to this. Communities put their dollars where they consider their priorities. And in our community, philanthropic dollars unfortunately go primarily towards defensive and protective philanthropic agendas related to the state of Israel, to fighting anti Semitism and They don't go towards, you know, overwhelmingly, they don't go towards the basic spiritual needs and health of our community.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (37:28)

And they go towards. And again, I'm not trying to be. I'm trying, I don't want to be the vinegar rather than the honey, to use your metaphor, but they go towards jccs, they go towards squash courts, they go toward, I mean, they go toward a lot of things that aren't learning. And some of them are valuable things. I'm glad I have the pool to swim in at my jcc. But. But I think most of the people whose names are on the plaques at the JCC would not give the same amount of money to a Jewish day school. Some of them would, but a lot of them wouldn't. You know, a lot of them wouldn't. That strikes me as a problem.

Yehuda Kurtzer (37:53)

That's right. And a lot of philanthropic dollars are local. So, you know, I had a great story actually from one I heard secondhand from a Syrian community in Brooklyn that thinks in very interesting ways about rabbis as particular people who are meant to serve communities. And the story was described to me as like, this particular community is spending an untold amount of money to basically train the next rabbi for that community. In other words, they're not waiting for the field to produce a set of interview candidates, but they identified a young person.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (38:32)

It's like the Dalai Lama. It's like, don't they find a 7 year old? You're the next Dalai Lama, whether you like it or not, kid.

Yehuda Kurtzer (38:38)

That's right. He's working at a great job. They said to him, we think you should leave your job and become a rabbi. We're willing to pay you your salary for the next five years to train, and then we're willing to guarantee your salary for the next 30 years, 40 years in our community. So even if Jewish philanthropy is local, the JCC or even the synagogue, you would have to change the model where someone would say, we are going to invest in building our rabbi for the future. We're not going to wait to see who JTS or HUC sends us when it comes to the search process. We're going to actually do it ourselves. Now it's a little bit dangerous because then you're going to wind up with a situation where the wealthy congregations can guarantee their own continuity, which is, by the way, already the case. Top congregations in America are always picking up the top of the pool. You don't really want that type of scenario to happen, but you do need a little bit of a groundswell that says this is a collective challenge for the future spiritual health of our country, community and the current maintenance of our spiritual health. We're willing to invest that 100, 200 liberal young superstars every year are getting recruited on campus, told to make their lives for the Jewish people, and guaranteed.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (39:45)

Or not on campus or not on campus, but in their 20s, like, they're showing up at events in New York or Chicago, or they're on staff at Camp Vermont 24, doing something. They're found. Yeah. Somewhere relatively early. I don't think it has to be.

Yehuda Kurtzer (39:59)

On campus, maybe, but I think the Jewish community should be doing more on campus recruiting in general. That's a whole separate thing. But I would say try the thought experiment the other way, which is. I use this example a lot. I think I learned it from Rabbi David Steinhardt in Boca. The NBA knows if you're a great basketball player at age 11 or 12, they know who. They know who you are. And I think if we worked at.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (40:23)

It, 11 or 12, they do.

Yehuda Kurtzer (40:26)

You got.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (40:26)

No, but I'm saying, would you go. If we worked at it, was that going to. We could find kids.

Yehuda Kurtzer (40:30)

No.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (40:30)

Bar mitzvah age.

Yehuda Kurtzer (40:31)

Bar mitzvah ages. Bar mitzvah age is a crucible.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (40:34)

Well, look, I mean, I. Look, I have some kids in my house who I think would be splendid rabbis.

Yehuda Kurtzer (40:40)

Do you tell them that?

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (40:42)

I do, I do. There's. There is some. And they have tremendous reverence for our Rabbi Eric Woodward, who's a great rabbi. And I think at this point in life, I think more than anything, they wouldn't want to be at the beck and call of so many people. I think they see exactly what it is in terms of the consumerist demands. But who knows with time? I mean, look, as you're a dad, right? I mean, if you want your kids to do something, don't tell them to do it. The last thing they need is their. I mean, yes, I hear what you're saying that a parent should tell. We should look at our children and say what we're proud of them for and what they're good at. And also, if I wanted one of my children to follow me into journalism, I don't particularly, but if I did, I wouldn't spend a lot of time saying, you should be a journalist. And I'd hope they'd see it, see the gift that they have on their own and get there. Is that right? Do you take a different point of view vis a vis your own kids?

Yehuda Kurtzer (41:35)

I think for the system, we have to do some work in the system to make sure that our kids see that these are noble professions, they are respected professions. Which is different from telling kids at a point in their life when they want to reject everything. You're saying that they should do this. But I will say we had a funny story a couple years ago. My boys are 19 and 17 and they staged an intervention with Stephanie and with Mimi. I think it was maybe a year ago. And they were like, we feel pressure from you guys to do meaningful things with our careers. My wife is ahead of a day school. We laughed, we were like, hell yeah, you should feel that pressure now. If they decide to rebel, we want.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (42:17)

To go on their professional surf tour. And Right. If they decide be a TikTok influencer respectively, won't you love us no matter where?

Yehuda Kurtzer (42:26)

Right. My feeling is like, if you want to go into finance and be still a great Jewish and a great lay leader and bring Jewish values into your home, that is not a rebellion against us. But do I feel bad that I implicitly signaled that lives built of professional meaning in service to the Jewish people are like, I'm supposed to feel bad about that?

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (42:49)

Like, no, no, no, I don't think you should feel bad. I don't think you should feel bad about that. I'm a trillion percent with you there. But that actually gets around to the money thing a little bit, which is that, I mean, maybe your kids weren't saying, we want to go into finance. And some of my favorite people are in finance because they pick up the check. But we do have a materialism problem. I mean, I think all American communities do. I don't think this is unique to us at all. I don't think Jews are more or less materialistic. But when I talk to undergrads and they say, well, I couldn't become a rabbi, it's not even I couldn't become a rabbi. I couldn't become a rabbi, a teacher, a social worker. This is, by the way, in contradistinction to when, not only when I got out of college, but when my dad got out of college. If you got out of college in the late 60s, it was almost de rigueur that you spent a few years finding yourself. Like it was really uncool to go straight into lucrative work if that was your path. When I got out in the 90s, coming out of an elite college, it was still one of the privileges we knew we had was, look, my Yale degree is good four years from now. If I want to screw around for fears, if I want to go learn another Language or travel or try something out. That might not be my forever career. That's okay. Like, the career will be there for me. Today's kids are so petrified. It's not even that they feel I have to be rich. It's that they don't think there's any life to be had outside of fields that would make them rich.

Yehuda Kurtzer (44:06)

Yeah.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (44:07)

And I hear this even in Orthodoxy, again, I'm not Orthodox, but I've talked to like some Yeshiva university boys who said, well, it's good to do Kolel and maybe, you know, get ordination, get. But of course you want a degree in. In accounting.

Yehuda Kurtzer (44:20)

Yeah.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (44:20)

I'm like, well, do you fucking enjoy accounting? Nobody even, like, I'm not even sure. I think my accountant does like accounting, to be fair. But most people, what would. What could be drearier? And they look at you like, well, I don't ever thought about it. I just know, like, you have to. I thought, well, then, like, what did the Rav. What did the Rav live for? If the YU kids are saying you have to do accounting?

Yehuda Kurtzer (44:39)

You said even in Orthodoxy. And I would say it's especially in Orthodoxy because the cost of living associated with being a modern Orthodox Jew in America is stratospheric. You have to live in certain neighborhoods. You pay more for your food. It is obligated that you send your kids to day school, plus a year in Israel, summer camp, all of these things. So the minute I've decided to be part of that community, what I basically am saying is the meaning that I derive is by being a good Jew in this community. But the way that I do that is by guaranteeing a kind of AGI of $300,000 and above. And it does drive down the perception that there is noble. There are noble professions outside of those that are going to guarantee you that income. And it drives down creative impulses.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (45:26)

I mean, so this is stuff I know. And. But I'm glad we're getting a chance to talk about it, right. That if you want to live in Teaneck or wherever, Scarsdale, in the modern Orthodox community, it's super expensive, by the way. If you're having four or five or six kids, even the 300,000 for all the day schools isn't going to be nearly enough right now. A lot of them have, you know, two kids now. But. But, you know, the. The money is astronomical. Right. How the hell did we get to this point? And why is nobody trying to figure.

Yehuda Kurtzer (45:51)

Out, oh, a lot of people are.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (45:53)

I mean, we weren't there it wasn't that expensive to be Orthodox 75 years ago. Now there, there wasn't the same expectation. Your kids went to day school. They actually went to public school and then did hater after school 75 years ago. And so there's this new day school expectation. But even so, like there were poor neighborhoods, middle class, it's filled with modern Orthodox kids. Like, what? What the hell happened? I mean, is part of it that they feel that culturally they feel. But we need a fancy house and we need fancy cars and we need like, is some of this that, like these are both spiritual but also materialistic communities.

Yehuda Kurtzer (46:28)

Right. So there's a blurring of two different things. One is like changing economic circumstances in America, changing certain expectations of what it means to be a good modern Orthodox Jewish. And then there's a second which is this way in which American modern Orthodox Jews, like everyone else, are assimilated into an American materialistic culture. And therefore it's not just what I need, but what I want or I perceive as being necessary to succeeding at the American story. The way my colleague Rifka Schwartz says this is a principal at SAR High School is she says that the challenge around the financing of day schools is that parents want both affordable Jewish education and excellent Jewish education.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (47:06)

And they want lacrosse.

Yehuda Kurtzer (47:07)

Correct.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (47:07)

They don't just want. It's not that they could have affordable and excellent if they just wanted blackboards and books.

Yehuda Kurtzer (47:12)

That's right.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (47:12)

But they don't. They want it to look like Horace Mann.

Yehuda Kurtzer (47:14)

That's right. And it. And it does.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (47:16)

An exit. And it does.

Yehuda Kurtzer (47:17)

And it does. And it does. Right. And so by the beneficence of philanthropy, you wind up being able to build useful cost reduction programs, especially for families, large children. More and more day schools have like, you're not going to pay more than X amount because they don't want to disincentivize people from having children. But still out of the gate, I say our tuition is at least $30,000. Once you pay that amount of money, you're like, yeah, I need Model UN and I want this soccer team and I want to be able to do this and all that because I ultimately want my kids to be able to get into a non Jewish college so that they can continue this loop of being able to build their own social, economic and political mobility here country.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (47:57)

So I'm reading this book by Paul Kingsnorth. I don't know if you know him, he's. He has a substack called Abbey of Misrule, but he's a he's a British, he's now Eastern Orthodox. He used to be a radical environmentalist. Then he found Jesus, then he found Jesus through Orthodoxy. And he now lives on a farm in Western Ireland. And he's really off the grid. He's like taken his old eco agrarianism and turned it into a kind of Christian primitivism. And the book's coming out in October, called Against the Machine. It's really good in certain ways, really infuriating in others. But one of his basic theses is, insofar as we're trapped in the consumerist Skinner box right on the hamster wheel, there's no answer. Like you can't mediate, you can't. And I say this, by the way, my sister in law is the librarian at sar, so I say this with deep knowledge of the community. My kids too. My kids are in day school. I'm in this consumerist world and I'm not throwing shade on the people who are in it with me. We're all trapped. But his take is you can't futz around the edges. Like you actually have to get out of it. You have to go live somewhere that's affordable. You have to understand your children may not have mobility, but they'll have love. You have to throw out the devices. You have to not care if they go to Harvard or even Binghamton or Stony Brook or Maryland or one of the other places with a lot of Jewish students. He's of course talking about Christians. He's saying if what you care about is God and living in a godly way, you actually have to stop caring about that other stuff. You can't. The consumerism will always win. You won't have the strength of character if you situate yourself in these communities to be the person with really good values. You have to kind of get out of them and find a counterculture somehow. And I'm not at the end of the book where he tells us how, except moving to Western Ireland. But I mean, do you ever feel that way? What do you think about that kind of radical despair about the consumerist trap?

Yehuda Kurtzer (49:43)

I feel it's halfway, right? And the halfway part is I think fundamentally it's true that those who care about larger values, community, spirituality, et cetera, you're just not going to find it through the consumer orientation which characterizes this country. So the market capitalist orientation, synagogues are thriving when they can be market capitalists. And I think that's like a short term win and a long term loss. Where I resist it a little bit is that it Sounds more Christian than Jewish because Jewishness has. No, I don't think Jewishness. Judaism rather has the same kind of intrinsic opposition to wealth that pious Christianity developed, by the way. It's not like they were consistent on this church, but like, I mean, he's.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (50:37)

He hates, he hates most of his fellow Christians and Christian institutions, to be clear.

Yehuda Kurtzer (50:40)

I mean, feasting is a piece of Jewish tradition and, and being comfortable. Those are things that we have actually really interesting Jewish texts around. So I don't want it to be doctrinal. Like Jews have, are supposed to be kind of anti consumption, but we are supposed to be anti materialistic. And certainly we're not built for allowing Judaism to have been remade as basically something that's supposed to, that's supposed to operate as, you know, shaped by material capital, culture. And I see this really eroding traditional communities in America. You see it with the growing cruise, like, you know, wow, here, the Passover trip, Passover trips, Cancun. And, and the, the cruises were just wildly expensive. And no, there's nothing that's spared where it's like every, every imaginable cuisine is rendered as, as kosher. And it's just like, yeah, I know you can do that. You can pull it off. But like, is it such a significant. Is the value of keeping kosher so significant that it kind of erases all of the other countercultural behaviors that keeping kosher was supposed to kind of signify? Right.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (52:04)

It's supposed to set you apart. So if you can have a cruise with kosher sushi, kosher wagyu, beef, kosher, whatever. Yeah, then you're just, you're, you're an imitation of the goyim in a sense. I, I remember. So I didn't know that there were these Passover trips. And for those who don't know what we're talking about for the week of Passover, there's all these foods you're not supposed to eat and dishes you're not supposed to use. And so traditionally, one way you would answer this in your own house is you would get. You would set aside all your normal food and have to restock with kosher for Passover food and take out separate dishes. If you have money, you can now go to a resort where the, the resort kitchen has been restocked for kosher for Passover food. So you can do your whole Passover in Cancun or on a cruise ship or whatever. And there's often guest speakers and there might be bands and there might be like, there's entertainment for the week. And your kids have the week off from school because they're at Jewish day school. When I learned about this, I said to one friend of mine who was more. Who is modern Orthodox and has some money, I said, is this what your family does? And she said, well, it's what everyone does. And I said, so have you done it all your life? And she said, well, it started when I was 11 or 12. She was maybe 20 or 28 at the time. Young mother. And I said, so is this what you do with your kids? And she said, well, of course my parents pay for it. They want all the cousins together. So we always take a cruise somewhere different for Passover. I said, so that means that the Passover of our nostalgic lore, which is at Bubby's table eating the matzo ball soup and the brisket and whatever, but having traditions at Grandma's house doesn't exist for thousands and thousands of American Orthodox families. Like, they actually don't gather at somebody's house and run around and play games in the basement. They're always off on a different decadent trip. And she hadn't thought of it that way, but she said, yeah, that's right. And I, Like, I wanted to stab my eyeballs out. Like, how is. How does the community not know that's fucked up? I said it. You didn't. But how did they not know we're broken. We're broken if that's what we're doing.

Yehuda Kurtzer (53:56)

So, look, I don't want to be too sanctimonious about this, because I've gone once or twice, mostly because it was able to get a gig.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (54:03)

Well, I was gonna say if they paid me to teach, apparently one person said to me, we go wherever Rabbi Sacks is teaching that year. So, like, whatever cruise ship he's on. And by the way, I did. I did one of these at. It was at Camp Ramah in California. So, like, it was not a cruise ship. It was, you know, a cabin. But whatever. Whatever.

Yehuda Kurtzer (54:18)

Yeah. And we went a couple years ago actually to Camp Rama de Rome in Atlanta. It was amazing experience. It was like. Yeah, yeah. Anyway. And there is something. You do feel a sense of freedom when you don't have to actually get down on your hands and knees and scrub your house and do all these types of things. So it's not that I don't think that you can. You can't experience some dimension of that story of freedom when you. You do these kind of things, but I do. I do feel that it has gone to A place that's just deeply and profoundly unhealthy. And you see it, especially when it is a cult, when it is an expectation, when somebody who's, like, barely making ends meet has to kind of keep up with, I don't know, the equivalent of the Joneses in an Orthodox community. You have to keep up with your neighbors by, okay, this is an additional expectation of the cost of living. And you're like, no, it's not. That's not a cost of living. That is a choice to live in very particular and extravagant ways that have nothing to do with your religion. They have to do with the cultural trappings that you've tried to invest around your religion, but it's nothing to do with religion itself. And that's where I think it really goes off the rails. And I'm not, and I'm not sure that folks who do this on the regular, who can afford doing it, are fully conscious of the optics that they're creating for others about what the expectation of the holiday of Passover is supposed to be.

Mark Oppenheimer (55:51)

I hope you're enjoying this interview with Yehuda Kurtzer. If you're bored, now's as good a time as any to navigate over to arcmag.org that's a R C M a g dot org where we have posted a couple pieces recently that I think are just like they're simply fab. Alicia Kelman wrote a piece for us called the Mind of Maga. It's a profile of Yoram Hazoni, who is the Israeli American political theorist most identified with what's called national conservatism or the nat cons. And these are people who have a lot of influence in the Trump administration. And Yoram Hazoni is their guy. He's the guy who sort of made it all happen. And we have, I think, the definitive profile of Yoram Hazoni, the Mind of Maga, over@arcmag.org and also, if you want to think about anything but politics, you should read Seeing Through Fog by Robert Scaramuccio, which is his beautiful essay about walking the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage in Portugal and Spain, which he did after losing the second of his two parents and becoming an orphan. And it's just a beautifully written piece with some gorgeous photographs, and I would encourage you to check it out. There's a lot more over there@arcmag.org please go check it out and share it and subscribe to our newsletter, arcmag.org and now back to my interview with Yehuda Kurtzer.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (57:13)

What are you guys working on at the Hartman Institute? What's the, what's the important stuff going on right now?

Yehuda Kurtzer (57:17)

So I would say, you know, for the last two years, since October 7th, we've, we have been obviously, you know, for all imaginable reasons, focused a lot on Israel, on the challenges, the crises in Israel, the crisis that has created around liberal Zionism for American Jews in a variety of different ways. Both the challenges of liberalism here, you know, within here, the second Trump administration, but also questions of the relationship between American Jews and Israel. Those have been bread and butter issues for a long time, but partly because we're divided between an Israeli and a North American staff, they're just also so deeply in the lives of all of our people. And we see our responsibility as both the think tank and educational center for the Jewish people to bring, to bring a different kind of wisdom into, into our community about these issues. There's no shortage of punditry and news that people can get about Israel. But the larger spiritual and moral questions about what it means to be a Zionist right now, what it means to care about human rights, what it, what it means to think about our liberal Jewish commitments in relationship to each other, there's a real hunger for that. And it's been a lot of what we've been doing through our podcasts are publishing and so forth. I mentioned the Rabbinic Pilot as a major new experiment in our work. And, you know, another new piece that's coming down the horizon for us is that this fall we're opening a new center in Washington on Judaism and public policy where we're trying to bring a different kind of Jewish conversation into Washington that doesn't reduce the conversation of who American Jews are, what do we care about and what are our concerns. It tries to resist the partisanization of Judaism in America and to try to re. Articulate like to be in A Jew in America has been an incredibly interesting and noble project that American Jews have been trying to build. And we're kind of letting it go because we're acting like other dumb Americans in trading our serious ideological commitments for the stuff of, of partisanship and trying to win elections. So those are some of the kind of both ideas and projects that we're trying to build out in the next couple years.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (59:28)

You've given a couple speeches about the golden age of Jewry in America, of Judaism in America, and you've contested the idea that it's entirely in the past, the way Franklin Foer argued in the Atlantic magazine. But we're not still in it, are we? I mean, what's your take on that? You say we're letting it go, we haven't let it go. You're saying, what about our current age is golden?

Yehuda Kurtzer (59:52)

Well, yeah, nothing's great right now. I would still say if you lined up, even in the current steady state of what it means to be a Jew in America right now, if you line that up against every other diasporic Jewish experience in history, you would say by virtually every metric, we're doing better now. When you're in something good, people tend to have a lot of fear of its disappearance. So the projection of the golden age of American Jewry is over. Is rooted in like, oh my God, it's getting away from us. The sky is falling. Right. I just feel that's a terrible way to try to sustain this wild new experiment that Jews have made at the intersection of liberalism and Jewishness and the American project that has been really great for us and by the way, really good for America. Like we played a role in shaping the kind of covenant of those values for the American people. And it feels like a big mistake to embrace a kind of self fulfilling prophecy that it's gotten away from us instead of saying, how do you get back to work now? I'm frustrated by the fact that there are, I think a whole bunch of Jewish organizations who are complicit in the kind of taking down of the American Jewish Project.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (61:09)

Like who?

Yehuda Kurtzer (61:10)

I think by and large the industry that claims to be fighting anti Semitism in America, that does so by embracing anti democratic measures in this country, by letting abandoning our allies, by particularizing the experience of antisemitism and not allowing it to share anything in common with other forms of hatred. I think that is just a total abandonment of the Jewish project. And what I want us to do is say what were the raw materials ideologically that constituted what we as Jews built in America over this period of time and reinvested those. I don't care about the cultural expressions in the same way of the American Jewish Golden Age. Fine. We're actually doing fine on that front anyway. I'm talking about.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (61:58)

We used to have more people choose in writers rooms of Hollywood comedies, right?

Yehuda Kurtzer (62:02)

Yeah, whatever. What I want to talk about is like we were committed to the notion of cultural pluralism. Are we still doing that? We were committed to the idea that fighting antisemitism was akin to fighting all sorts of other forms of hatred. We led the way on that in America. We talked about America as something vastly different than other diaspora experiences. And now I watch a whole bunch of Jewish leaders who are like, oh, look, you know, we're back in the old, you know, the king and the nobles. I just. It's like crazy to embrace those stories when we still have the ability to do something remarkable here. That. That was unprecedented in our history. I don't know why we would stop.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (62:44)

Did you get the email I got this morning that one of the major Jewish philanthropies is starting a new project to rate colleges as healthy for Jewish. Like, so. So the ADL already has a report card, and now the Tikvah foundation is gonna have their own report card. And I mean, maybe it'll be a better report card, but it strikes me these are the worst ideas is sort of giving out report cards to universities on. Right. Like, there's something about. There's something so defensive about that as opposed to.

Yehuda Kurtzer (63:14)

Yeah. When I had you on the podcast to talk about Jews in the Ivy League and the work that you had done with that podcast series, which was so great, when Jews first experienced antisemitism in these institutions, what did we do? We're like, we're going to beat it. You can't keep us out. And that meant investing in those institutions despite their anti Semitism. And instead our community is saying, like, oh, you're inhospitable to us. We're going to fight you. We're going to participate in federal efforts to dismantle the university. They have nothing to do with anti Semitism. They're about a conservative plan that's been around for a decade to dismantle higher education because they perceived that they couldn't win the battle of ideas through those contexts. It's just nuts. Our job right now is to say, if these are part of the vital infrastructure of building American society, we got to stay in it and fight for it.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (64:03)

Well, no one ever said Jews were smart.

Mark Oppenheimer (64:12)

It's time for religious holidays and celebrity birthdays. As I've said, Rosh Hashanah is upon us. It begins sundown, September 22, and then lasts for two days, even in the state of Israel. I made a mistake on the last episode and I said it was one day in Israel. Rosh Hashanah is actually the holiday that is two days both in Israel and in the Diaspora. It's followed up by Tsom Gedalia, the Feast of Gedalia, and Yom Kippur and Sukkot and Simchat Torah and Shemini Yatseret. Like, this is the season when little Jewish kids at Little Jewish Day Schools are never in school. So many days off, so much parental complaining. The Hindu holiday of Navaratri is on September 22 to October 1. We've already talked about how the solstice is coming up for pagans and Wiccans. That's September 22nd as well. Really coincides with Rosh Hashanah this year. And the Prophet Muhammad's birthday is celebrated in Islam actually today and tomorrow. So you'll missed it a little bit by the time you hear this podcast. But be mindful of that and maybe say something to your Muslim friends. Celebrity birthdays. We've got some good ones. Nick Jonas birthday on September 16, September 25 Will Smith, Donald Glover and Catherine Zeta Jones. Newly relevant because she plays Morticia Addams in Wednesday on Netflix Wednesday. The story of little Wednesday Addams as played by Jenna Ortega has become the show of choice for me and my 12 year old daughter Anna. We plow through it at about 15, 20 minutes a night after dinner and I think Jenna Ortega is simply fabulous. I think she's a star for the ages and a it's a great joy to be getting reacquainted with the Addams family. Catherine Zeta Jones having a birthday September 25th. And we'll just round that off by saying that T. Pain, the rapper T. Pain, star of the great Lonely island comedy video. I'm on a boat you should go check out. That's with the Lonely island guys of Samberg and Akita Shaffer and Norman Taccone. T. Pain has a birthday September 30th. And now back to my interview.

Yehuda Kurtzer (66:03)

Do.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (66:15)

I have a few questions for you. These are my, my traditional podcast ending questions and they have nothing to do with anything else. You ready?

Yehuda Kurtzer (66:20)

Yeah.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (66:21)

Okay. Do you believe in God? And if so, what does that mean?

Yehuda Kurtzer (66:24)

Okay, I, huh, I don't know that I conventionally believe in God. Like it's certainly not like the flying Spaghetti Monster version.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (66:41)

Right.

Yehuda Kurtzer (66:42)

I definitely don't relate to God as a force that will that I want to do my bidding. I find that to be like a narcissistic, almost idolatrous way of being in the world. God cares about me. It doesn't make sense to me. I take very seriously the God of our tradition and I identify most with the rabbis who tried to build a Jewish world that was rooted in taking responsibility for it and giving back God. God's autonomy. That's my evasion of your question. No, I like that. I like that.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (67:22)

Giving back God, God's autonomy. If you could have done any other job within reason like something that maybe you could have done if you'd made different choices, what would it be?

Yehuda Kurtzer (67:30)

I mean, the easy answer is I would have stayed in academia. I think I would have hated it, to be honest. I didn't probably.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (67:36)

You would have.

Yehuda Kurtzer (67:37)

I think I would have, but I think I probably could have done that. Yeah. Honestly, I started doing this so young that I didn't, I never really poked down like another pathway. I could have, probably could have run for office also would have hated that too.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (67:51)

Yeah, I see that.

Yehuda Kurtzer (67:52)

Yeah.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (67:52)

You probably found the one thing you, you wouldn't, you wouldn't have hated. What's a, what's advice you give to younger people, not your own kids, but let's say a college student comes up to you and says like, give me.

Yehuda Kurtzer (68:02)

A piece of advice, any piece of advice on anything.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (68:04)

Yeah, yeah.

Yehuda Kurtzer (68:08)

I mean, I got, I heard somebody say this a few years ago, which I thought was great. Your career is more of a jungle gym than a ladder. Right. Sometimes you move laterally, sometimes you move down, you move around. You look at it differently. The goal isn't, it's not, you know, and I think your pathway in life is not linear. I also remember early on I had a friend who, who told me, I think we were 19 or 20, about his 10 year plan for his life. And I must have looked at him like he was crazy. Like he was crazy and he was like, well, what's your ten year plan? I was like, I think I'll figure it out as I go along. And then 10 years from now that will retroactively have been the 10 year plan. And I, I, that has, that has worked for me. I'm not, I'm not a huge believer in, in that kind of long term planning. And by the way, I'm not a huge believer in it for organizations either.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (69:03)

You know, what became of that dude? How did his 10 year plan go?

Yehuda Kurtzer (69:07)

I think it worked for him.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (69:09)

He made partner.

Yehuda Kurtzer (69:11)

Yeah, maybe I found it boring.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (69:14)

No, I mean to me there's almost an existential despair at thinking that I would know where I'm going to be in 10 years. It would almost make me not want to keep going if it was all laid out before me in a predictable way.

Yehuda Kurtzer (69:25)

I'd also say don't burn bridges. That's a big one. Don't burn bridges. And I think for young people that has a lot to do with social media. Don't paint a picture of yourself in the world that you're not going to be able to erase later on. Don't Paint yourself into a corner because of the ideological convictions of your youth. Right. And it's certainly true with relationships as well.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (69:45)

Yeah. Or just don't be on social media. That'll take care of a lot of it. Is there a song that makes you nostalgic for a particular moment?

Yehuda Kurtzer (69:53)

Oh, there's so many. I sang my wife down the aisle at our wedding. I know that's the cheesiest thing imaginable. I sang a song called Tapuach Sahav. They're called An Orange or a Golden Apple by Eric Einstein, Israeli singer. So I can't hear that song without thinking about that awesome moment when all of my wife's mother's friends fell in love with me.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (70:24)

In all candor, you're a pretty good singer.

Yehuda Kurtzer (70:26)

I'm assuming you're passable.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (70:28)

Yeah, right. I wouldn't do that. That wouldn't be fair of me to do to anyone. But, you know. All right, Passable. I'm gonna figure that means better than passable. And you're being modest. And finally, can you give us something to watch and something to read?

Yehuda Kurtzer (70:41)

I'm in the middle of watching Yellowstone, which I love. I don't know how and what.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (70:46)

I haven't seen it. You always read about it as, like, the show that Red said. America loves that. That liberals like me have never heard of. And in my case, that's kind of true. I've never seen it.

Yehuda Kurtzer (70:54)

So I actually. I found it to be kind of a combination of, like, succession, but in a non corporate environment. It's the same kind of story, you know, patriarchal figure, semi dysfunctional children trying to think about the future, continuity of the business, all of these things. It has all of these aspects of kind of Western culture that I never thought I'd find interesting. And it's also kind of a telenovela, so I kind of love that. What did I just read? I just finished reading Fleischman is in Trouble.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (71:25)

Oh, yeah, Good book.

Yehuda Kurtzer (71:27)

Which I, at the beginning was like, oh, okay, I think I know what this is. And by the end, I was crying and I was like, oh, this is a really, actually deep book about relationships. And I'm really. I'm trying desperately to interview the author because her two books have a lot to say about Jews. And I'm.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (71:45)

You've read Long Island.

Yehuda Kurtzer (71:46)

I read Long Island Compromise.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (71:47)

First, this is Taffy Brodess or Actner, who's great. That's interesting. You read it first. Yeah. They're both great. They're different, but they're great. And they do have they're very Jewy. I mean, they're super Jewish.

Yehuda Kurtzer (71:56)

They're very Jewy. And sometimes, you know, sometimes fiction writers, they don't want to, like, go deep on that. But I want, I kind of want to have that conversation with her.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (72:04)

Well, and she's, she's, you know, she's a fellow Rama mom. I mean, she'll, you know, and she's, you know, her mother and sisters are Orthodox, and, and so, you know, she'll go deep.

Yehuda Kurtzer (72:14)

Yeah.

Interviewer/Co-host (possibly David Sugarman) (72:15)

So. Yehuda Kurtzer, CEO, Rosh Yeshiva Headmaster, President, just president of Hartman North America. Thank you for joining me.

Yehuda Kurtzer (72:23)

Thanks for having me.

Mark Oppenheimer (72:35)

ARC is a production of ArcMag.org, the magazine ARC Religion, Politics, etc. Which is itself a production of the John C. Danforth center on Religion and politics at WashU in St Louis. We are so thrilled to have colleagues like Deborah Kennard, Abrab Van Engen, Mark Valeri and all the rest at the Danforth Center. This podcast is produced by David Sugarman with assistance from Robert Scaramuccia. Our interns at ARC are Caroline Kaufman and Ben Esther, and we encourage you to subscribe on whatever platform makes you feel happy. Happy holidays to all those who celebrate, and we'll see you next time on ark, the podcast.