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- [00:00]
A
Rabbi I'm rabbi ami hirsch of the stephen wise free synagogue in new york. And you're listening to in these times. The American Jewish story has been one of extraordinary success. For generations, Jews flourished in the United States in ways unmatched anywhere else in the Diaspora. We entered every corner of American life. Business, academia, politics, media, science, culture. We became deeply woven into the fabric of the country, and many of us came to assume that this was simply the way things were. Then came October 7th, and the reaction that followed. On college campuses and political movements, across social media and within institutions that many American Jews once considered welcoming homes, they forced difficult questions into the open. How secure is Jewish life in America? Is the hostility we are witnessing temporary, or does it reflect more profound changes? My guest today is Franklin Foer, a staff writer at the Atlantic. He's one of America's leading political and cultural commentators and author of the widely discussed essay the Golden Age of American Jews Is Ending. Franklin Foer, welcome to in these Times.
- [01:26]
B
So delighted to be here.
- [01:28]
A
It's good to see you again. We spent a couple of days together in Aspen last summer talking about all of the urgencies in the Jewish community. So one of the things we spoke about, of course, was your groundbreaking article in the Atlantic. How long has that been now? About 18 months.
- [01:46]
B
Two years.
- [01:47]
A
Yeah, two years called the End of the Golden Age of American Jewelry. I'm paraphrasing. Could you summarize what that article was about, why it was so important, and whether you still stand by it and what is its central thesis after October 7th?
- [02:03]
B
I think that there was this sense that a lot of American Jews had, that an error had come to a close. And some of that had to do with the rise of anti Semitism that we were seeing in the aftermath of October 7th. But a lot of it had to do with the fact that it felt like for a generation, several generations, American Jews had grown up in a country where they were completely and entirely at home, that American Jews had been, in some sense co author of a different iteration of the American dream. And that dream had prevailed for most of the second half of the 20th century. And it allowed for America to prosper and to expand its ideas of freedom and inequality. And American Jewry had prospered in a way that perhaps no other Diaspora community had ever prospered in the entire history of the Jewish people. And my article asserted that Golden Age had begun to draw to a close, even if we weren't fully aware of it as the 21st century started to dawn, that some of this had to do with shifts on both the left and the right and the way in which anti Semitism and conspiracy theories about Jewish power were starting to creep ever closer to the mainstream. Part of it had to do with facts that are independent of anti Semitism, which the American elite was kind of being re engineered and there was less of a place for American Jewry in that new elite. It has to do with external factors. Some of it has to do with internal Jewish factors. But my piece was kind of a dirge for an era that had passed.
- [03:46]
A
I think a lot of people felt that, which is one of the reasons I think it got so much resonance, that something fundamental had shifted.
- [03:53]
B
Yeah, exactly. And I think that shift is only accelerated in the two year sense.
- [03:59]
A
So not only do you stand by the central thesis, the events of the last two years is evidence that you
- [04:06]
B
were on the right track, tragically, sadly.
- [04:09]
A
So, yes, I'm paraphrasing you. If I'm. If I'm mischaracterizing it, mention it. But something along the lines of from the end of World War II to the demarcation, I mean, these social trends are occurring underneath the service and it's not. People aren't necessarily noticing them. But the demarcation line was October 7, 2023. And between those two dates, the end of World War II and October 7, 2023, when some of these underlying trends then burst into the public phase. That world Jewry has never had it so good in any Diaspora community. That's your fundamental thesis.
- [04:50]
B
We can quibble about some of the plot points in the timeline about when the Golden Age began and when it ended, but that's more or less the fundamental thesis.
- [04:58]
A
What has brought it to an end is it just, broadly speaking, in its largest dimension, you know, this is the story of the Jewish people in every Diaspora community. And the good times sooner or later end anyway and you have this ingrained bias towards Jews or, or assumptions toward Jews that just come back to the fore because they're so deep in society and in Western society. Or did something shift that it didn't have to be this way.
- [05:29]
B
Yeah, I don't think it had to be this way, to be honest. And let me just say one thing before I delve into that, which is that Alex Adelman, the comedian, was asked about my piece on the Unholy podcast and he said something like, poor Jews, Jews still exist at Columbia University. They still have a state. They still. And I think that American Jewry still is incredibly prosperous, still is incredibly safe in this country. But when I Talk about the Golden Age. I'm talking about an apex. I'm talking about a zenith in the history of American jewelry where we really didn't have any objective reason to give a moment's thought to our safety or security. And we just existed in this culture and universe, which is, in retrospect, amazing, magical, and a little bit weird. It's kind of incredible that Jews, you know, at best, 4% of the American population, constituted a third of the class at Ivy League universities. When you look at primetime television and how many Jewish characters existed in primetime television, There were some. There was just this aberration where we were able to feel zero sense of alienation in this country. We felt completely at home. I have a friend who's a sports fan who uses this metaphor to translate my piece, which said, for the 20th century, late 20th century, we were playing a home game. And like, in the last couple years, it started to feel like we're playing an away game. And I think that that distinction kind of captures what I'm talking about about the fall, which is not that we're on. You know, the state isn't about to turn on us. We still have incredible prosperity in this country. We're not on trains headed to concentration camps or no pogroms that are kind of headed at us, that are widespread. But still there is a fall, if that makes sense. And, you know, why did this happen? Is the second part of your question. Is this like you were. You were basically saying, is there something about anti Semitism? Just means that it's inevitably going to recur. And I don't believe that to be the case. I think that part of what happened in the late 20th century was that there were a set of political and cultural and institutional arrangements that American Jews played a central role in constructing. I used the small L liberal description to. Just to capture the ethos of that era. And I think what's happened in the 21st century is that style of liberalism has come under assault both from the right and from the left, and its prestige and legitimacy has declined. And as liberalism's legitimacy has declined, Jews have almost invariably lost that golden age position that we held because we were
- [08:22]
A
one of the forces in American society that were most closely associated with that kind of liberalism. I guess what we would call today classical liberalism.
- [08:31]
B
Yeah, it's not even just classical liberalism. It was kind of an American version of it that emphasized, yes, equality, freedom, democracy, pluralism, the importance of having strong institutions that had some sort of emphasis on meritocracy as a value. But there were ways in which American Jews refined that and Americans refined that classical liberalism to fit into an American context, which is different than just kind of Adam Smith or John Stuart Mill. It was a very American version of that ideal.
- [09:06]
A
I've been thinking about this for years. You know, why do Jews do so well in societies that are open and free and liberal? Not in a capital, not capital, you know, not a party necessarily, but a philosophy, a liberal philosophy. And some of the principles that you mentioned, in my view, are so ingrained in Judaism. This idea of reason and evidence and science and openness and intellectual pluralism and debate and the search for truth, respect for establishments, meritocracy is a very big deal in Judaism for thousands of years. The whole rabbinic system is based on that. So I always felt that because these values were so ingrained, so part of what is now Jewish civilization, that when Jews encountered societies that allowed them to express themselves in this way, there was a dramatic overlap between the ethos of Jewish civilization and the ethos, in our case of American society. That itself was at least partially responsible for the enormous success, disproportional success of American Jewry.
- [10:17]
B
And I think that a lot of those principles are anathema to anti Semitism. Because when you have a high degree of trust, when you have a high degree of reason in the public square, it's harder to gravitate towards conspiracy and it's harder to construct a boogeyman out of the other. And when there is a society that generally has an openness, I think that openness tends to extend towards the Jew.
- [10:45]
A
What was it about American society that distinguished it, say from the United Kingdom or Europe, who that are also open, liberal, democratic societies.
- [10:56]
B
It's hard to construct a blood and soil version of Americanism, just given that the elite that came here was an elite that had migration as part of its origin story. I think you have a form of Protestant Christianity that took hold in the United States and that tended to be a little bit more philosemitic than the established churches back in the old world. I think that you had just, you know, had so much mobility within the United States in general after people got here, that there was a bit more, at least in the kind of non racial context, openness to the stranger. We had an economic caste system as related to race. But as far as American Jews were concerned, the economic caste system was actually pretty wide open to them because there weren't. The American aristocracy, such as it existed, was always just knew that there was a greater fluidity here and that there was A greater comfort with new entrants into that system.
- [12:03]
A
And do you think when the dimensions and the horror of the Holocaust became more widely known after World War II, that played a role at all?
- [12:14]
B
For sure it did. That there was a concerted effort among both Jews and Christians to combat anti Semitism as it existed. There's a terrific little Frank Sinatra film that I encourage people to Google. It's on YouTube. And Frank Sinatra confronts a bunch of anti Semitic bullies in about 1945. It's a very young Frank Sinatra. And the bullies take the dimension of the way that anti Semitism existed in places like New York City and Boston in the 1940s. I think we should be. When we think about the Golden Age, I think we have to also recall that in the early 1940s, there was probably more physical violence against American Jews than at any moment in our history. In this country, there was more employment discrimination against Jews than any moment in our history. And the Golden Age itself and this dramatic reversal that we experienced where we went from being excluded to being included, was something that happened in a startlingly short period of time. That's something that we tend to bury in our collective memory because it makes the Golden Age seem more precarious than it was. And as it turns out, that Golden Age was more precarious than we thought it was.
- [13:30]
A
You're a keen observer of American politics. It's an important year in American politics. We're approaching the midterms. Where do you think American politics stands now? It seems to people that if it's not unprecedentedly polarized in our recent memory, people don't remember this kind of tension and anxiety in society. Is that right? Or is that just kind of the natural reaction of anybody living through any period?
- [13:59]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think we could probably reach back and find some antecedents if we wanted to, but that shouldn't really matter. I mean, I think the fact is, is that what we're seeing is our breakdowns in the fabric of the culture of American democracy that seem to me that are very hard to repair. I mean, I take one of them, which is the just excessive gerrymandering. And to have this race to the bottom where the rules of democracy are being broken because you have both parties making these extravagantly drawn maps in order to get the voters that they want to have. There's something just so broken about a system that allows a politician to basically reconstruct the system so that they are inherently not having to compete in an election. And the fact that our elections have become so uncompetitive is a pretty shocking breakdown of the system. The other thing that I look at, and I'm just experiencing this in Washington D.C. where I live, is we used to have the Washington Post, which had an incredible metro section. And after Jeff Bezos gutted the paper, this is the first mayoral election that we have where there is no Washington Post endorsement of the mayoral candidate and there is not extensive coverage of the election. And so I get pieces of mail pushed through my slot that have very serious charges that the candidates for mayor are leveling against one another. And I encounter very smart people on the street and they believe what is being presented to them in these mailers. And that's just, I don't understand how we can make good democratic decisions if we don't have good information. And so at the very local level, I mean, in these congressional races which are going to shape the contours of our nation going forward, you know, we people are making decisions based almost wholly on partisanship. They're doing it with zero literacy about the candidates or kind of the issues at stake. And they're being swayed by the, the most manipulated forms of information possible. I mean, social media looks like it's the gold standard compared to a lot of the dreck that gets pushed through mail slots or the campaign ads that people use to make decisions.
- [16:25]
A
And why is that happening? Do you have, have you studied that? Is it technology or.
- [16:30]
B
Yeah, it's technology. In a nutshell. Gokul news was premised on monopolies that existed because local newspapers had classified ads and because there just weren't other competing sources of information. And then news media made kind of a ridiculous short sighted decision in order to give their content away for free on the Internet. Just as Craigslist was emerging and crushing their classified ads business and big tech was allowed to kind of come in and, and displace like a lot of very important American media institutions. And social media is just an inherently manipulated environment. The whole algorithm exists in order to manipulate people's attentions. I have a hard time disentangling our democratic decline from the poor quality of information that citizens get and the fact that we're moving into a, a post literacy world where, you know, it's, it's imagery, it's podcast, it. I'm apologies Rabbi, but it's like podcasts can obviously have depth and it's possible to find deep things on YouTube, but most of what people are exposed to is done, you know, in less than 30 seconds. And it's as I said, it exists in this manipulated environment. So it's impossible to have for the average citizen to make decisions based on any kind of depth.
- [18:00]
A
So you mentioned democratic decline, if you can explain that a little bit more, but in this context, because technology is only going to get more powerful, the algorithms are going to get more powerful. We haven't even spoken about AI, which I'd like you to relate to as well. And this is in a context where the way you characterize it is we are having democratic decline. What's. What's the next 10 years going to look like?
- [18:31]
B
It's. Our institutions have been gutted. If you look at the relationship between the national legislature and the national executive, right now, the Senate and the House have ceded so much of their powers to the executive. If you look at the state of the bureaucracy in Washington, D.C. it's been so degraded and run down over the course of the last couple years that those institutions in Washington, D.C. actually played a role in the dissemination of objective knowledge that became the basis for good policy deliberations that were independent of the political will of the executive. And I think that that is. That's an enormous tragedy. So, you know, when I think about what we need to do moving forward, there's a need for the restoration and the reformation of institutions across American society. And I'll just give you an example, kind of adjacent to democratic decline, which is our universities, which I think for a long time people understood that there were fundamental problems in our universities, that our universities had slipped away from a lot of the small l liberalism that we talked about earlier in the show, and yet there was this reluctance to actually go through the process of trying to reform and restore universities so that they'd adhere to a lot of their core values. And what happened was that those universities ended up losing a lot of their popular legitimacy. And rather than being kind of venerated in a bipartisan way because they were an enormous strength of the American system, they became a political punching bag just as they were becoming overly politicized themselves. And only now, after they've suffered this huge fall, have universities begun to go through this kind of long, hard task of reforming themselves. And to their credit, a lot of these universities have taken very important steps to correcting. My colleague David Brooks wrote an excellent piece about how there's a lot of good news to be seen in the American university. I think you could say the same thing about media, that media is needed to undergo some of that sort of same reform process. And it's certainly true of our bureaucracy and of our political system. And it's always striking to me how there isn't really a political reform movement that has a broad base that makes an argument for restoring American institutions. Instead, we end up with populism, which is anti institutionalist by almost its very definition.
- [21:15]
A
On both sides.
- [21:16]
B
On both sides in both parties. Yeah.
- [21:18]
A
So this is, this leads me to my question, to you. You know, liberals tend to look at the last 10 years and the weakening of the Democratic guard rails and the decline of institutions, and they tend to put all of the blame or much of the blame on Donald Trump. How do you see it?
- [21:42]
B
Donald Trump has walloped institutions and democracy in a way that there are no equals. There are no equals to kind of the damage that he's inflicted on the system. But I think part of his ability to inflict that kind of damage had to do with fundamental weaknesses in the system to begin with. And I think that merits, on the part of liberals, a degree of introspection about how the system became as weak invulnerable as it did become, and that there were deep flaws and faults that Trump was able to exploit. But I think the headline story really does become the way in which under the Trump administration, norms and institutions have been gutted in such a way that it's very hard to imagine a restoration to some sort of pre Trump status quo. For those of us who care about institutions, who care about governance, who care about civil society, it's going to require a great deal of creativity to reimagine what comes next.
- [22:59]
A
Even if the Democrats win the midterms, whether that means taking back the House or possibly even the Senate and the presidency in 28. It's not as if there's going to be a Democratic president and even a Democratic Congress and everything will go back to what it was pre Trump.
- [23:18]
B
Yeah, well, that's part of what happens when you have a fragile ecosystem that you think is much stronger than it actually is, is that once that ecosystem, once central nodes in that ecosystem are destroyed, it becomes hard to restore it. And also I think the problem of norms is that when norms are gone, it's very hard to restore them. Because once Trump has begun to go after political enemies, there's this temptation to replicate that on the other side. Or once Trump installs cronies in certain positions, there's going to be a temptation to, to be retributive. And, you know, we'll, we'll see. I'm very pessimistic that we'll be able to somehow escape a cycle of retributions that we're going to return to some sort of American Eden of Democratic hygiene. I think that Pandora's box has been opened and I have no faith that we're going to land in a great place.
- [24:21]
A
Well, we have the midterms in, I guess, less than. What is that, four or five months. Do you have any, if not predictions? You know, the. There's a statement in Judaism that prophecy is the domain of fools. So, not that I'm asking, please, please,
- [24:39]
B
Frank, be a fool for us, like I'd like you to.
- [24:42]
A
So if you're not prepared to venture a educated guess on what the outcome is going to be, how do you see all of this unfolding over the next few months?
- [24:51]
B
Right now, Democrats have about an 8 to 9 point advantage in the generic ballot. And that I think if that were, if that were to hold today and if gerrymandering were to kind of take basically the shape that it's assumed at this moment, that would give the Democrats back the House of Representatives. And it's strange to believe that maybe the Senate is in a stronger position for the Democrats in the House. I'm not sure that's exactly the case, but they don't have to overcome exactly the same headwinds that they have to overcome in the House. But look, Trump is profoundly unpopular right now, and he's unpopular on issues that are his core issues. And I think what we're seeing in the aftermath of the Iran war is that, first of all, the Iranians aren't especially keen to bail out Trump. And so right now, it doesn't seem as if they're rushing to cut a deal with Donald Trump, that they have some sort of upper hand in the negotiation with him. And then secondly, it's the effects, the rolling effects of this war are such that a lot of the shortages, a lot of the supply chain issues that we're having experiencing as a result of the Strait of Hormuz being shut down are just starting to kind of roll through the system.
- [26:17]
A
Now, your argument is it'll intensify, exacerbate and get worse in the coming months.
- [26:22]
B
Yeah, or it's not gonna. It's not like Americans are going to suddenly start to feel better about their economic situation between now and November.
- [26:37]
A
Talk a little bit more about the Iran war. What is the impact of that for the American Jewish community and American Israel bilateral relations
- [26:47]
B
headed into the Iran war? I would have said Israel sitting in a very strong regional position, that the Sunni Israeli alliance was kind of a game changer for Israel. It had been motion for many years. And the fact that Israel and the Gulf countries were kind of stitched into an air defense system, regional alliance against Iran, I would have said, kind of suited Israel incredibly well. I thought Iran's proxies were relatively weak. Iran, it seemed to me, was relatively weak. And in the course of this war, what's been exposed is that Iran was proved to be weak in many regards and has been weakened in other regards. But the fact that the Revolutionary Guards in Iran are able to claim victory because they survived what was essentially kind of an all out air assault on their country, and that the United States proved that it was basically unwilling to send ground troops into Iran, means that they have greater faith in their ability to survive a war, which means that I think ultimately in the wartime conditions there have allowed them to punish, brutally punish their, their opposition, which they had been brutally punishing even before the war began. But I think more troublingly for Israel over the long run is that there's something to be dangerous about the narrative that Netanyahu dragged the United States into war, because I don't believe that is the case. I think that Donald Trump is an adult who makes his own decisions and that there is something borderline dangerous about the narrative that the kind of the malign deceiver Bibi Netanyahu dragged Donald Trump into war. That said, the war is inherently popular on both the Democratic side and among younger Republicans. And I think that among younger Republicans and among Democrats, there's this sense that the war is associated with Israel and that Israel is associated with Donald Trump and foreign adventures. And that is just not good for Israel. Part of my hope has always been that after Trump, the Netanyahu and Trump are so connected, and that for Democrats and in this kind of partisan environment, once you get past Netanyahu and you get past Trump, that there'd be a way in which a lot of the political heat here and a lot of the intense partisan feelings wouldn't be projected onto Israel in quite this sort of way. But I'm not so confident about that headed forward. To be honest, for you and I, it's kind of astonishing to watch how Israel went from being kind of the ultimate bipartisan issue to being an issue where it's kind of. It's ultimately hard to see where its kind of core political allies exist beyond older evangelicals. And that really is a huge turnabout. And I think there should be an inquest about this kind of within Israel because it demands explanation and demands some
- [30:05]
A
sort of strategic pivot in the blink of an eye. Historically, it just, yeah, basically happened overnight. Yeah. Just to follow up on what you said a few minutes ago, do you think that Israel has lost the Democratic Party and do you think the Democratic Party is moving away from American Jewry?
- [30:26]
B
Yeah, I do, but I also think, I think Republican Party is too. So for Jews, the Democratic Party has felt like home. This is kind of part of the American Jewish story, so that feels more intimate. I look at the way in which a lot of the debate is being conducted right now, and there's so many legitimate and important reasons to criticize kind of the Israeli government. And yet a lot of the policy discussion isn't being conducted as a policy discussion. It's being conducted using tropes. I mean, I think that the litmus test around aipac, to me, like AIPAC is, is, has never proved itself to be more ineffectual than it has been in recent months. It's really, it's failed in its attempts to intervene in Democratic primaries. It's squandered kind of its bipartisanship over the course of the last couple decades. To describe it as kind of this juggernaut of a political force is just
- [31:26]
A
not accurate, if it ever was, by the way. Yeah.
- [31:30]
B
And so to have that be the litmus test within a lot of these primary elections, it ends up becoming this debate about whether a Jewish cabal of money men is shaping American politics and whether you, you're on the side of the people against the Jewish cabal or not. And I don't think that most of the people who subscribe to that are consciously anti Semitic, but they've, they're falling into anti Semitic tropes.
- [32:02]
A
So you mentioned since the end of World War II, Jews have supported the Democratic Party in every way by say, 2/3 to 3/4 who vote for Democratic candidates and offer all kinds of other financial and other forms of support disproportionate to the size of the Jewish community. How do you think that will unfold in years to come? Do you think the rising antagonism to Israel in the Democratic Party will change electoral habits in elections to come?
- [32:44]
B
Yeah, I do. At the very least, I think it means that American Jews are going to be less partisan than they were. I don't believe that at the presidential level there's going to be a massive shift in the near term. I mean, and some of that depends on, I, I, I, I don't even know if I believe that prediction. But I, I mean, I think it depends so much on who gets nominated.
- [33:07]
A
Yeah, I mean, like if, if Marco Rubio were running against aoc, for example, that would shift the American Jewish vote in all likelihood, right?
- [33:17]
B
Yeah. I mean, I. I don't know how extreme that shift would be, but there would be some shift. And if Josh Shapiro were running against JD Vance, I think that that would shift the vote in the other direction. And so I think what we're describing is more. I think that there'll be a larger homeless tribe of American Jews. Maybe they defy polarization in this country and they become something closer to swing voters. But I. I do think that there's going to be a Jewish right that will grow and will be consolidated. And then I think the Jewish left is moving even further left. And so to some extent, we're seeing the same sort of polarization that everybody else is witnessing in the country writ large within our own community.
- [34:06]
A
I live in New York and I was fairly active in the lead up to the mayoral campaign. I thought that 30% number of new York Jews who voted for Mamdani was rather high. I saw a recent poll by the Jewish majority of 26%. That sounds more right to me. And then if you look at the percentage of New York Jewish voters who voted for Mamdani who are active in American Jewish life, right. They're members of synagogues or Jewish establishment, the percentage is even much lower. I'm sure, I'm sure 26%. Where you would have expected, you know, exactly the opposite. Even if you take the 30% number, you would have expected 70% of New York Jews voting for the Democratic candidate, whoever that was, it was complicated because he ran against a very flawed candidate in Cuomo. There were three people running. All that being said, all that being
- [35:05]
B
said, it's a one party city.
- [35:08]
A
So my question to you. Do you think Mamdani represents something long term that affects not only the Democratic Party, but the way the political system in America relates to the American Jewish community?
- [35:23]
B
If I look at the way that the left has decried Israel as kind of this global pariah that is kind of evil beyond other evils in the global scene, and it becomes a litmus test issue, I do think that that is the future of the left. I mean, you've seen this in the way that Rahm Emanuel has started to reposition himself on the question of military aid to Israel. And you see in the way that kind of preemptively Netanyahu is positioning Israel relative to this question. I do think that even in the Next is the 2028 election. I think military aid to Israel is going to be one of those rhythmist test questions for Democratic candidates. And that, I think, is kind of on the same trajectory as Mamdani's rise.
- [36:21]
A
And do you think that wing of the party will be increasingly influential in years to come?
- [36:27]
B
Yes, I do. I think if you look at kind of at the local municipal level, the Democratic Socialist candidates are surging almost everywhere in the nation. DSA has tapped into something within some deeper resentments, anxieties, anger, sense of hope that exists within younger people. And it's kind of a failure of conventional Democrats to kind of figure out how to navigate some of those underlying issues, just as it was a failure of conventional Republicans to understand and navigate a lot of the populism that Donald Trump was channeling. And so I think back to Franklin Roosevelt, who said, I'm that kind of radical because I'm that kind of conservative. And that he understood that in order to have kind of conventional liberalism kind of make its pivot into an era where there was so much economic anxiety and frustration, he needed to reform the Democratic Party and liberalism in order to respond to that sense of aggravation and sense of despair that people felt in a way that. That was ultimately hopeful. And I keep waiting for kind of, you know, some sort of talented candidate to be able to come in and to bridge those issues. And the Israel question overlaid on that is insanely complicated, just given the way in which Israel's reputation in this country has just plummeted.
- [38:13]
A
Tell me about the American Jewish community. What's your sense? How are we doing? What are we doing well, and what do we need to work on?
- [38:21]
B
There's no more philanthropic community in the history of the world, in the American Jewish community. And so that there is all this money flowing in all sorts of directions, so some of it insanely inefficient, insanely silly. But there is a lot of innovation that's happening beneath the surface in American Judaism, that there are a lot of people who are applying their creativity and talents to do creative things. And, like, liturgically, I think that there are, within Conservative and Reformed Judaism, there's a lot of. A lot of interesting things happening. A lot of spiritualism that exists that's. That's kind of being tapped into. I think that the October 8 Jews are a fascinating phenomenon, and it's interesting to watch the organized Jewish community figure out how to bottle some of that energy and enthusiasm that's emerged in the aftermath of October 7th. But writ large, I would say, given that we're entering into this era of post liberalism that I don't think there's a lot of strategic, good strategic thinking about where the community needs to head. I don't think that there is a good response that the community has generated to Israel's plummeting reputation and the way in which that is going to be a millstone for American Judaism unless we find some sort of way to navigate that.
- [40:00]
A
So you think Israel is going to continue to play a central role on the American Jewish agenda?
- [40:07]
B
It's too central to the way that kind of mainstream Judaism thinks about itself for it not to be. It's also too central to the way in which antisemitism rears its head in this country. And so I don't see any way around that, do you? I'm just curious.
- [40:26]
A
I think there are very, very substantial challenges within the American Jewish community. I'm of course, very concerned about the decline in the standing in the west in general, but especially in the United States for Israel over the last two and a half years. I still can't get my hands around it all because as I said earlier, I think when things happen so quickly in society, it was all bubbling up under the surface and people weren't just noticing it. And it took something to release this energy. And I still can't get my hands around why it was October 7th, the worst massacre of Jews, that released this energy of hostility to Jews and to Israel. And again, that's without regard to, to legitimate criticisms of any Israeli policy or so on and so forth. By the way, any Israeli prime minister, at least in the first year of the campaign in Gaza, would have responded in the same way or they would have been gone in, in a matter of weeks.
- [41:33]
B
Yeah, I agree with that. And I also think that I can, I could, I was going to call it a normal Israeli government, but like a more centrist Israeli government wouldn't have had the likes of Smotrick and Ben GVIR saying the most indefensible things. I think that the struggle for kind of the soul of Israeli society is a real one. And that just as we are experiencing democratic decline in this, this fight to kind of restore our own, institute and preserve and protect our own institutions, something similar is happening within Israel. And I actually think it's kind of incumbent upon American Jewry to rush towards that and to kind of care about that and participate in that actively, not just because it's important for Israel, but I think it's important for us in our own souls and the own case that we make to kind of the American people about our relationship to Israel, that the fact that there is press suppression and settler violence and the failure to protect minority rights within the country is something that I find deplorable, shocking and worthy of our moral fervor.
- [42:54]
A
In addition to all the moral arguments and you know, the ties of history and destiny that Jews have with each other around the world and the miraculousness of the re establishment of Jewish sovereignty after 2000 years. In addition to all of that, I think what you're saying is American Jews have a direct self interest in the standing of Israel because Israel, as you said a few minutes ago, will continue to play such a central role in the American Jewish ethos.
- [43:26]
B
Exactly. There's sometimes a desire to either bury one's head in the sand about this or to kind of react in a way that can falls back into some of the tropes of American identity politics, which is just kind of to spring to a sense of incredible defensiveness that precludes the possibility of persuasion and dialogue. And if I had one message for the leaders of the American Jewish community, it would be don't give up on the possibilities of persuasion. I think this is one thing that Israel has done terribly, which is that Israel prices in global anti Semitism, which is real. Like it's, it exists and like they just kind of, once you assume that the entire world is arrayed against you, you cease to go through the effort of presenting your best case to the world and trying to persuade. And I think that once you wall yourself off from the possibilities of persuasion, it skews one's moral calculus because you're no longer considering how a global audience would respond. And it also just, it's just strategic stupidity. It's like, you know, the more isolated Israel becomes, the harder its existence becomes over the long haul. And Israel is miraculous. Israeli capitalism is miraculous. Israel, Israeli innovation is miraculous. But I think it's a mistake to believe that you can exist in, in an island. They don't exist in an island.
- [45:01]
A
Yeah. No person, no society, no country is an island entirely unto themselves. Even the United States, as we're seeing now, with the difficulties of concluding this war with Iran. Right. Well.
- [45:12]
B
And I think that the bet that Netanyahu made on Trump and on the Republican Party over the long run is going to prove to be an incredibly self defeating one for the state of Israel. Because what it means is, is that it shifted all of its eggs into one basket and it didn't begin to consider the possibility that one basket could end up rejecting the those eggs.
- [45:39]
A
My last question to you is What, Frank, what are you working on now? Are you working on a book or are you working on a big article?
- [45:46]
B
I'm working on a book about American Jewry, about the golden age of American Jewry. It's a cultural, political, intellectual history of the story about how our people kind of went from being on the margins to kind of doing so much to reshape the American dream, which was kind of also an American Jewish dream, and. And to explain so much of the world. When I went out and I talked about that article was just kind of, if you grew up in the 21st century, the kind of the miraculous Jewish existence in the 20th century was something that was almost a foreign country to a lot of younger people. And so I wanted to both recapture what had gone down and then to explain in greater detail kind of why it dissipated. But it's a very joyous thing to work on because I'm going back and I'm writing about a history that was so exuberant and where there was so much excitement, so much creative fervor that was generated out of American Jewry.
- [46:53]
A
When is the book going to be published? When do you.
- [46:56]
B
You know better than to ask an author that question.
- [47:00]
A
You still got a ways to go.
- [47:02]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [47:03]
A
All right, well, listen, first of all, I will be. We, the Jewish community, will be eagerly awaiting the completion of your work, and we'll gobble up the book as quickly as we can.
- [47:17]
B
Thank you for having me on. Thank you for engaging with the issues that you engage with in your podcast in such depth. And it's, you know, I think the idea of, as you said, is like the idea of conversation, arguments, discussion. Like, this is. These are Jewish values. This is part of our contribution to American democracy. And it's so healthy for our own people to just be able to engage in an introspective way.
- [47:46]
A
I agree. I agree with that. And, you know, I missed the classes in rabbinical school about podcasting. I never
- [47:54]
B
studied it.
- [47:55]
A
So to hear some complimentary things from you about my podcasting skills, that makes me really feel good.
- [48:02]
B
Okay, good.
- [48:04]
A
Keep up the good word, Frank.
- [48:06]
B
Thank you.
- [48:15]
A
In this, the 250th anniversary year of the birth of the United States, Franklin, for his groundbreaking essay in the Atlantic, which he is now expanding into a book, gives us an opportunity to look back at what Frank and we mean by the golden age of American Jews. From the beginning, America offered a bargain to the fulfill the obligations of citizenship and receive the government's blessings and support. As the first president, George Washington wrote in a Famous letter to the synagogue in Newport, Rhode. Happily, the government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions, their effectual support. By and large, America has lived up to its promise to the Jews. It has not been perfect. There were periods of pervasive antisemitism, but never like European antisemitism. We do not live here with daily reminders of wholesale Jewish destruction or government discrimination, as do our counterparts in every significant Western European Jewish community and every significant Muslim country. Our ancestors were drawn to America like a bee to a flower because they knew deep down at the core of their being that this country was different. Jewish songwriter Irving Berlin, a cantor's son, captured this feeling of our immigrant forebears when he wrote God bless America, Land that I love, Stand beside her and guide her through the night with a light from above. Irving Berlin is a good example of how enmeshed Jews are in American society. The anthem of American Christians during Noel is White Christmas, written by Irving Berlin, the Jew. The son of a cantor. Christian Americans didn't mind that a Jew wrote it. In fact, if they even know, they thought it was rather cool. America embraced the Jews. Americans held us in high regard. They sing our songs and we write their songs. We are good spouses, good breadwinners, good parents and good citizens, contributing mightily and disproportionately to the well being of the country. When we say the golden age of American Jews, we mean in the last decade of the 20th century and the beginning of the new century. Jews, who were less than 2% of the population made up 40% of American Nobel Prize winners in science and economics, 20% of professors at the leading universities, 21% of senior civil servants, 40% of the partners in the leading law firms in New York and Washington, 26% of reporters, editors and executives of the major print and broadcast media, and 59% of the directors, writers and producers of the top grossing motion pictures. Looking back, we might say that the golden age of American Jews reached its symbolic and political peak when 26 years ago, one of the two major American political parties, the Democrats, nominated as their vice presidential candidate an observant, self proclaimed Orthodox Jew, no less, Senator Joe Lieberman, to be a heartbeat away from the presidency of the United States. The Gore Lieberman ticket actually won the popular election by 700,000 votes. Lieberman's religious observance did not apparently impede him at all. Even his inability to drive to his own inauguration because it fell on Shabbat that year was counted, to his credit, emphasizing the strength of his faith, a political asset in this country. I remember so well watching an interview that Senator Lieberman gave during the final stages of the 2000 elections on Meet the Press, where he was asked how, if he could not drive, would he participated in his own inauguration. Lieberman gave the classic Jewish response that resonated with Americans. He said, if my mother were here, she would say, sweetheart, you should only have such problems. On this, the 250th anniversary year, the first thing we should do is celebrate American exceptionalism. Life has been better for Jews in this country than any other Diaspora community in the entire history of our people. And then, after we have celebrated, we should get down to serious work. We've lost a lot of ground, and these losses are intensifying. History has bequeathed to us the central how a country treats its Jewish population is a barometer, the ultimate test of the health and moral vigor of that country. And therefore, after celebrating America, we should try our best to recapture what was lost, not only for the good of the Jews, but for the good of the country we love. Until next time. This is in these times.