Adventures in Jewish Studies

The Association for Jewish Studies Podcast

Episode 33: What Makes Someone Jewish?

Transcript

Avishay Artsy: Welcome to Adventures in Jewish Studies, the podcast of the Association for Jewish Studies. In every episode, we take you on an entertaining and intellectual journey about Jewish life, history and culture, with the help of some of the world’s leading Jewish studies scholars. I’m your host for this episode, Avishay Artsy.

“What makes someone Jewish?” Any answer to this question would need to be as complex and varied as the Jewish people. Even that phrase “the Jewish people” is a bit puzzling. Is there one Jewish people, or many? Who is included? Who is not? And who’s to say? Are Jews a “people” at all, or something else?

In recent decades, great strides have been taken in parts of the Jewish community to be more inclusive and diverse. This includes widening the doors to converts, intermarried couples, and Jews of various races, gender identities, and sexual orientations.

I won’t pretend that I have a definitive answer to what makes someone Jewish today, other than “it’s complicated.” But I want to consider the question in this episode through three nodes of inquiry: One, identity - what are the Jews exactly? Two, belief and practice - what do Jews believe, and how central is religion to Jewish identity? And, third, Israel and Zionism - where does the Jewish state fit into Jewish identity?

There are about 15 to 16 million Jews in the world today. Seven million are in Israel, six million in the US, and another two million or so scattered across dozens of other countries.

In this episode, I’ll focus mainly on American Jews. But aspects of the discussion relate to Jews everywhere.

To deepen our understanding of what makes someone Jewish, I spoke with three leading Jewish studies scholars: Shaul Magid, Susannah Heschel, and Noah Feldman.

When asked what makes someone Jewish, the baseline for many is matrilineal descent – if your mother is Jewish, you’re Jewish. Here’s Shaul Magid, a professor of Jewish studies at Dartmouth College and a visiting professor of modern Judaism at Harvard University. 

Shaul Magid: You know, I remember my grandmother, when my cousin was marrying somebody, She said, “oh, he's half Jewish,” and my grandmother said, “on his mother's side or his father's side,” she says, “oh, his father's Jewish.” And my grandmother said, “wrong side.”

Avishay Artsy: Magid says that that traditional position is changing… sort of.

Shaul Magid: The reform movement has kind of shifted that to what they call patrilineal descent, that someone can be Jewish simply by dint of having one Jewish parent. And the reform movement is still, in America, in terms of numbers, the largest denomination. The patrilineal descent paradigm has not really been accepted by most of Jewry. And interestingly, or importantly, it hasn't been accepted by the state of Israel either, in terms of defining if somebody is Jewish.

Avishay Artsy: Measuring Jewishness by birth is tricky, not least because one can choose to become Jewish through conversion, regardless of who your parents are.

Susannah Heschel is professor and chair of Jewish studies at Dartmouth College. She wonders if one could also say that Jewishness is a way of thinking about and experiencing the world.

Susannah Heschel: Other people would say, once you think in legal terms, you know, pilpul, legalistic, then it's Jewish. What makes it Jewish? Is it Jewish because rabbinic thought, which is so central to us, rabbinic legal reasoning, is at the heart of Judaism and therefore anyone who does that kind of reasoning is Jewish? On the other hand, that's been used against us as an anti-Semitic trope. So, it's tricky, isn't it?

Avishay Artsy: Some Jews might define their Jewishness through a certain sense of humor, being part of a Jewish community, eating traditional Jewish foods, or observing Jewish law. Noah Feldman is a professor at Harvard Law School, where he also runs a program on Jewish and Israeli law. He says these are all ways of being Jewish, but what connects them is a shared sense of struggle.

Noah Feldman: What I think all people who self-identify as Jews have in common is a sense that they are linked together in this familial way, in what I call a struggle with the divine. And I actually go a little further and I call it a loving struggle with the divine.

Avishay Artsy: Whether Jewishness is a way of being biologically or intellectually or behaviorally suggests that being Jewish is more than a religion. So what are Jews? An ethnic group? A nation, a people, or even a race?

This question came to the fore in 2022 when the comedian, actress and talk show host Whoopi Goldberg made some controversial remarks on “The View.” Her comments were made during a segment about schools banning the Holocaust-themed graphic novel “Maus.”

Whoopi Goldberg, co-host, “The View”: The Holocaust isn't about race.

Joy Behar, co-host, “The View”: No?

Whoopi Goldberg: No, it's not about race.

Joy Behar: Well, they considered Jews a different race.

Whoopi Goldberg: But it's not about race. It's not about race.

Joy Behar: What is it about?

Whoopi Goldberg: It’s about man's inhumanity to man. That's what it's about.

Avishay Artsy: Jewish leaders quickly condemned Goldberg’s remarks. The head of the Anti-Defamation League joined “The View” the next day to explain how the Nazis sought to protect Germans from what they considered inferior races, such as Jews. Goldberg apologized.

Whoopi Goldberg: I said that the Holocaust wasn't about race, and it was instead about man's immunity to man. But it is indeed about race, because Hitler and the Nazis considered Jews to be an inferior race.

Avishay Artsy: Goldberg’s comments point to some real confusion over whether Jews should be considered a race, Heschel says. 

Susannah Heschel: Well, if we assume that race is a fiction invented for particularly racist reasons in the 19th century, then to use the term today is, of course, problematic. For Whoopi Goldberg to say Jews are not a race, okay, I understand that. On the other hand, to say that Nazism was not about racism is simply ignorance.

Avishay Artsy: Feldman says Jews were widely considered to be a race, and stopped being so because Jews fought against it.

Noah Feldman: When the whole category of race emerged in the late 18th and in the 19th century, and specifically the pseudoscience of race, most people did consider Jews to be a race, and certainly the Nazis considered the Jews to be a race. And it took hard work by Jews in North America to cease to be seen as a race, not for nothing, because they lived in the United States, where they knew that racial distinctions were not going to be desirable. Jews wanted to be white, like every other immigrant group wanted to be seen as white, whether they were the Irish or the Southern Italians. 

Avishay Artsy: Magid says Jews saw themselves as a unique race, and others viewed them that way too.

Shaul Magid: Until the 1930s, with the Nuremberg Laws, 1935, and the rise of Nazism, Jews were considered by most Europeans as a race, and Jews themselves defined themselves as a race. Martin Buber often talks about the Jewish race. Louis Brandeis talks about the Jewish race in 1915. So defining one's Jewishness racially was normative before the 1930s. Once you have the racialization of the Jew in the Nazi period, the racial description of the Jew starts to fall away, not only among non-Jews but among Jews themselves. And in its place emerges this much looser category called ethnicity. 

Avishay Artsy: All this raises an important question: are Jews white? We won’t spend too much time on this, as there’s a whole episode of Adventures in Jewish Studies devoted to this topic. But in short, Magid says, it’s complicated.

Shaul Magid: Jews in some way want to be white because they want the privilege of whiteness, but they don't want to be white because they don't want to be seen as being part of the problem, part of the oppressors, and so on and so forth… I think that, you know, some people like to say Jews are white enough. Some people say Jews are beneficiaries of white privilege. And I think both of those things are true. 

Avishay Artsy: In a 2021 Pew Research Center survey of American Jews, two-thirds identify as Ashkenazi, meaning their ancestors come from Eastern and Central Europe. About half of the Jews in Israel are Ahkenazi, while the other half are Sephardic or Mizrahi, meaning they come from the Middle East and North Africa. There are also Black Jews, Asian Jews, Hispanic Jews, and many other types of Jews of color. That said, the large percentage of American Jews identify as or are seen as white in society.

Shaul Magid: One could say – and I know a lot of people disagree with me about this – but one could say that while all Jews are not white, Jews are white. As a group they're considered to be white, even though there are Jews that are not white.

Avishay Artsy: As Magid suggests, this is a controversial position. The white supremacists that marched in Charlottesville in 2017 chanting “Jews will not replace us” clearly do not think of Jews as white. But they didn’t think of Jews as Black or another race. They saw Jews as something racially other. 

Is there a biological answer to the question of what it means to be Jewish? If not whiteness, is there something else? There is a certain stereotype of what it means to “look” Jewish, Magid says.

Shaul Magid: When you look at antisemitic comics, for example, in Europe during the Nazi period, they're comics of semites. They look like semites. Curly hair, big nose, you know, certain kinds of features. I mean these are semitic features. They look like they could be from Morocco or Iraq or Yemen and be Muslim. But yet in the European white Christian mindset, those Semites, those others, happen to be primarily Jews. And that kind of becomes the kind of normative thing about “looking Jewish” or “not looking Jewish.” And of course, black Jews, Asian Jews, they don't fit that stereotype at all.

Avishay Artsy: Antisemitism in Europe went beyond just defining certain physical characteristics as Jewish. It also includes the idea of a deeper Jewishness that lives in the blood.

Shaul Magid: You have this notion of limpieza de sangre in medieval Spain, of pure blood; that the new Christians, the Jews who converted to Christianity, were not really Christians because they didn't have pure blood. So you already have the beginnings of a blood racial-biological definition back even in the 15th century. It's not necessarily racial the way we think of it today, but it's certainly making hierarchical distinctions according to biology.

Avishay Artsy: Heschel has studied a lot of antisemitic material from the late 19th century through the Nazi period. That work became the foundation of her book “The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany.” She found that European antisemites focused on biological aspects of Jewishness that couldn’t be seen with the naked eye. 

Susannah Heschel: It's something more subtle. What they’re really concerned about is the moral and spiritual degeneracy that is conveyed, they claim, by Jews. It's a degeneracy that spoils the whole society. It's an immorality that denigrates European society. Now where is that immorality to be found? It's found in the body. That is, the body is the vehicle that carries this Jewish immorality, so that racism becomes what I claim is a kind of hermeneutics. To learn racial theory means to learn how to think beneath the surface, so to speak. To know that when you see a Jewish body, you're not just looking at a body. You're looking at a body that contains a dangerous immorality that can affect you, that can lead to the disintegration of European society. That's the problem.

Avishay Artsy: So if Jews have moved away from thinking of themselves as a race, what should they be thought of as? Feldman raises another possibility: a nation.

Noah Feldman: In 19th century and 20th century nationalism, a nation is a group of people who share a common language, a common culture, often a common biological ancestry, and who therefore deserve to have a country of their own. And so it was crucial to Zionism to insist that the Jews were a nation. But today, if you look at it, Israel is clearly a nation because it has its own language, its own culture, its own citizenship. And that took a lot of effort to create Israel as a nation. But Jews who are not Israelis aren't members of the Israeli nation. So that makes it a lot harder to say that today there is a nation of Jews that includes non-Israeli Jews. Ironically, it's the success of Israel, the greatest undertaking of Jewish nationalism, that put paid to the idea that the Jews are a single nation.

Avishay Artsy: None of these labels quite fits a group that includes religious and secular, conservative and liberal, Ashkenazi and Sephardic, Jews by birth and converts. Heschel says the old categories no longer work. 

Susannah Heschel: Liberalism can't cope with Jews. Socialism, communism, all the different political movements all stumble when it comes to Jews because we don't fit the categories in this exact, precise way. But that becomes a category problem. It's what Mary Daly, the feminist philosopher, called methodolatry. The method becomes the idol, the category becomes the idol. Are Jews a religion? Are Jews a race? The categories don't work. We need new categories. That's the point.

Avishay Artsy: Magid says Jewishness has always had permeable boundaries, with people going in and out. Any attempts to create strict delineations – to draw an eruv [AY-roov], a boundary, if you will – around Jewishness is misguided.

Shaul Magid: We don't really have formal rituals and acts of conversion to Judaism until probably around the second century CE. Shaya Cohen's book “The Beginning of Jewishness” is a great primer in looking at the history of defining Jewishness in the ancient world. Before that time period, if a Jew married a Greek, or a Jew married somebody from outside of the Jewish world, that person just became a Jew by dint of coming into that family. It was almost like an automatic, you know, being grandfathered in, so to speak, into being a Jew and defining themselves as a Jew. And then at a certain point, the rabbinical authorities said, no, we actually need to have some kind of ritualization of becoming a Jew. 

Avishay Artsy: If one can become a Jew through conversion, can one also cease to be a Jew? An orthodox Jew might consider a secular Jew to be a “non-practicing Jew” but wouldn’t deny that they are still Jewish. Is Judaism indeed the Hotel California of religions, as some have joked - where you can check out, but you can never leave? Magid says this has been an issue of contention in Israel, where the chief rabbinate has power over deciding which denominations are considered authentically Jewish. 

Shaul Magid: For example, the famous “who is a Jew?” case in the Israeli Supreme Court in 1961 with Brother Daniel, Oswald Rufeisen, who was a Jew who converted to Catholicism and then became a monk and wanted to enter Israel on the Law of Return, meaning that he wanted to make the claim that he was still a Jew, even though he converted to Christianity. And the decision of the secular court, secular Supreme Court in Israel, was that he is not considered to be a Jew if he converted to another religion, in particular Christianity. And the Israeli rabbinate, interestingly enough, opposed that decision and said that conversion cannot erase one's Jewishness. Actually, nothing can erase one's Jewishness. Somebody can be a bad Jew, somebody could be an apostate, but they can't become un-Jewed, in a sense.

Avishay Artsy: While that case was more about citizenship than strictly about identity, it points to an interesting paradox – being an atheist has no impact on one's Jewishness. Now, adopting another religion COULD make you less Jewish, or not Jewish at all, but it depends on which religion you convert to.

Shaul Magid: Interestingly, Buddhism is not considered to be something that would take one out of one's Jewishness, which is why you have today a whole community of people who identify as JewBus, that is, Jewish Buddhists. So the Buddhism becomes the religion and the Jewishness becomes the ethnicity… There are JewBus. There's another community called the HinJews, Hindu Jews. I think what ended up happening in terms of the Israeli Supreme Court decision, it wasn't so much converting to another religion. It was really about converting to another religion that had persecuted Jews, that is, entering into Christianity, which had a very, very complicated history with Judaism, whereas Buddhism or Hinduism or Jainism or Zoroastrianism or whatever have you, doesn't have that same kind of history.

Avishay Artsy: There’s disagreement over whether one's Jewishness cannot be erased, as the Israeli rabbinate argued. That’s partly why Feldman titled his latest book, “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People.” The phrase “to be a Jew,” he says, implies the possibility of not to be.

Noah Feldman: So I'm not attracted to the idea that Jewishness is a state into which we are thrown in some Heidegerrian way that we cannot get out of. It might feel that way on certain days, or sitting at the Seder at a certain hour of the night, but it's not actually the case. We could get up and leave. 

Avishay Artsy: Feldman prefers to describe Jews not as a race, ethnicity, tribe, people or nation. He likes to think of Jews as a family.

Noah Feldman: I'm not at all the first person to think of the Jews as a family. In fact, I think that's a biblical idea. But what's distinctive, I think, about my definition, is that I'm using a meaning of the word family that is a contemporary meaning of family. That is, it's not based solely or even primarily on genetic relationships, but rather on the full panoply of human interactions that go under the name of family: chosen family, adoptive family, porous family, family where the lines of boundary are not clear at all; a family in which our imagination is actually central to constructing the nature of what family is, and who's inside and who's outside of it. And that's the kind of family that I think of the Jews as being.

Avishay Artsy: And like a more traditional conception of family, Feldman sees the Jewish family as being in some respects very loving, and in other respects highly dysfunctional.

Noah Feldman: And there, too, I would say that the precedent for that is flatly biblical. You know, I think immediately of the Book of Genesis and of the ways in which family is depicted as originary to Israelite identity and the ways in which the family relationships are profoundly broken and splintered, and in which anger and struggle are just as powerful as love is. And that, I think, again, still characterizes the nature of Jewishness as a kind of family membership. I also think that it's possible for families to end. Sometimes it's appropriate for them to end. And I think that it's also possible to leave a family. 

Avishay Artsy: That 2021 Pew survey of American Jews found that three-quarters of respondents said that “being Jewish” is either very important or somewhat important to them. About two-thirds of American Jews identify with religious movements, mostly with the big three – reform, conservative, and Orthodox – and just four percent identify with smaller branches, such as Reconstructionist or Humanistic Judaism. A full third of Jews don’t identify with any particular Jewish denomination.

In “To Be a Jew Today,” Feldman introduces a typology of Jews that’s based more on belief structure than on institutional belonging. These categories include traditionalist, evolutionist, progressive, and godless Jews.

Noah Feldman: The first group I describe is traditionalist, defined as those who believe that God communicated the Torah to Moses at Sinai, and that in that communication was an assignment of authority to future people, specifically the rabbis, to continue the Mosaic authority under divine command, and that that chain of rabbis is unbroken, that those rabbis can be identified today, and that one has a fundamental duty stemming from God's existence and the covenant to follow the law as it is interpreted bindingly by those rabbis. 

Avishay Artsy: This first category would include nearly all Haredi Jews, the branch of Orthodox Judaism that holds fast to a strict interpretation of Jewish law and its traditions. Jews who do accept more modern ideas and practices are part of a category that Feldman calls evolutionist Jews.

Noah Feldman: Those are Jews who, in my typology, accept the idea that the covenant is binding and that the law is divinely authorized, but believe that it’s a fact of the world that the law has evolved through human interpretation, and furthermore believe that it's morally appropriate for us to consciously guide our interpretation of the law according to what we think is right by our own best lights.

Avishay Artsy: This second category would include Jews who identify as modern Orthodox or liberal Orthodox, along with many classical Conservative Jews. The third category would be progressive Jews...

Noah Feldman: …defined as those who believe that the content of Judaism is the divine command to seek justice, interpreted broadly to mean that what God wants us to do – God, however understood – is to update our moral beliefs based on our best efforts as humans to figure out what's morally right, and that our Jewishness consists of following that moral set of principles in the realm of social justice primarily, but also perhaps in the realm of the spiritual, and that if we find in the tradition components of the tradition that contradict our considered opinion of what's morally right, it is appropriate for us to jettison those components because they were simply other humans in the past also doing what we're doing, namely doing their best to understand what was the morally right way to do things.

Avishay Artsy: Here you would find mainstream Reform Jews, many Reconstructionist Jews, along with many who consider themselves part of the Conservative movement. Feldman’s fourth category is godless Jews. 

Noah Feldman: And for me, that's anyone who starts the conversation by saying, look, whatever it is that I think about being Jewish, I want you to know clearly that it's not God. I don't believe in God. And I think for Jews like that, there are a wide range of different ways of expressing Jewishness. Some are cultural, some are expressly nationalistic. That's the one that's become most predominant, I think, in our era. Some wear it lightly and think of being Jewish as kind of rooting for a sports team that you care a lot about. You want it to do well, you care about it, you want your kids to root for the same team, but if they don't, it's not the absolute end of the world. And I really bent over backwards in the book to make it clear that I am happy to embrace and endorse any of these, up to and including the very light forms of cultural Judaism. I actually have a section called “In Praise of the Bagels and Lox Jew” because I think there's something profoundly rich and interesting and meaningful about that way of being Jewish as well.

Avishay Artsy: This group of so-called “godless Jews” is growing in America. Heschel says she’s saddened by this trend.

Susannah Heschel: I find it very sad if Jews think that religion is not a component of their Jewishness. I find it sad that they haven't either experienced or understood what religious Judaism can bring to their lives. And of course, that was the whole point of everything my father wrote was to address that. And so I would like them to read his books.

Avishay Artsy: Her father, Abraham Joshua Heschel, was one of the leading Jewish theologians and philosophers of the 20th century. He participated in the civil rights movement, marching alongside his close friend and spiritual ally Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma. He descended from preeminent Hasidic rabbis on both sides of his family and Susannah grew up around such rabbis.

The move away from religious observance has been a cause of great concern for generations of Jewish thinkers, who see it as an existential threat to the survival of Judaism, Magid says.

Shaul Magid: And this is something that someone like Will Herberg back in 1955 when he published this book “Protestant-Catholic-Jew,” he basically said, religion is not going to be able to sustain Jewishness. Because of secularization and immigration, most American Jews had abandoned religion. And he felt that once that happens – because he wasn't particularly a Zionist – once that happens, there's nothing to prevent the disappearance of the American Jew. Through intermarriage, through assimilation, through acculturation, over the course of a couple of generations, Jews in America will disappear unless they're able to reattach themselves in some way to religion.

Avishay Artsy: Zionism became a way to give secular Jews a sense of identity and pride in their Jewishness that is about national affiliation and not about practice or belief. 

Shaul Magid: For most of American Jewish history, at least since the 1970s, and I'm just speaking postwar, there was a very, very concerted effort at what I've called this Zionization of American Jewry. That is, making Israel and the support of Israel and Zionism the very centerpiece of Jewish identity. Not that people were going to move to Israel. It was not about moving to Israel. It was not about aliyah. It was about creating some kind of a secular attachment to Jewishness that would sustain from one generation to the next.

Avishay Artsy: Interestingly, it is now religious Jews who feel a far stronger connection to Israel than secular Jews. In that 2021 Pew study, about half of religious Jews say that caring about Israel is essential, while only a quarter of secular Jews would say that caring about Israel is essential. Magid writes in his latest book “The Necessity of Exile: Essays from a Distance” that many younger Jews connect to their Judaism through values of social justice, rather than through religion or Zionism.

Shaul Magid: I think what we're seeing now is a slow process of, to some degree, de-Zionization, where younger Jews are basically saying, “well, Zionism doesn't work for me anymore because the state of Israel doesn't embody my values, so I want to now reconstruct a new form of Jewishness through Judaism that will contribute to my participation in, you know, progressive or liberal American values.” So that, there's a very interesting transition that Arthur Waskow in his book, “The Bush Is Burning” in 1971, who was a kind of refugee from the New Left after ‘67, basically said there's a movement from Jewish radical to radical Jew. And I think that's kind of what we're seeing now, in another iteration, of people who are saying, “I'm going to reconstruct my Judaism to reflect my progressive values.” And if someone would say to them, “well, you're just inventing Judaism that doesn't exist.” I think, you know, the intelligent among them would say, “yes, that's exactly what I'm doing.”  I mean, own that.

Avishay Artsy: In fact, Heschel argues that a focus on social justice has deep roots in Jewish tradition.

Susannah Heschel: It's clear that's in the prophetic tradition, to speak up for justice and to speak against exploitation. In addition, I would say it's an effort to soften hardened hearts. There are a lot of hard-hearted people in our world. And I worry about that. I meet people like that and I think this is not the way. This is not how to be a Jew. 

Avishay Artsy: Feldman argues that even young, college-educated Jews who are giving up any commitment to the state of Israel are still doing so in a very Jewish way.

Noah Feldman: For that generation of young Jews with those political views, they still feel that as Jews they have to self-identify in relation to Israel. That's what the “not in our name” slogan means. If we were talking about a country to which they genuinely felt no connection, they wouldn't have to disclaim the idea that what is being done is in their name. So in that sense, the idea that anti-Zionism would be a manifestation of Jewishness for some young progressive Jews reflects a continuity, not a discontinuity. The continuity is that to be a Jew, you have to be thinking about Israel one way or another.

Avishay Artsy: Heschel acknowledges some political and religious forces in Israel that are very destructive and disturbing. Nevertheless, she sees support of Israel’s existence as a core component of what it means to be Jewish today.

Susannah Heschel: Whether you can exist as a Jew and not recognize the importance of the state of Israel, no, I think that would not be possible. Especially in this very moment, when there are so many people who are calling for, who want, the abolition of the state of Israel. And to try to think about Jewish survival without a State of Israel, it's not possible for me.

Avishay Artsy: Even as a younger generation of Jews moves away from religion and Zionism, and despite a rise in antisemitism, Magid is optimistic about the future of Jewishness in America.

Shaul Magid: I think that we are experiencing a Jewish renaissance in America. I think Jewishness and Judaism are being reconceived, reconstructed. I think you're seeing a kind of interfaith interchange. I think you're seeing synchronicity between one religion and another. I think that in a sense, we are really on the cusp of something potentially very, very constructive and very productive. Now, more traditional Jews will say, well, that's the end of Jewishness and that's the end of Judaism. And, you know, from their perspective, they're right. On their criteria, they're right. I think more and more, very strident pro-Israel American Jews will move to Israel. I think that there will be an uptick in aliya of pro-Israel Jews to Israel. And I think there's going to be a continued separation of American Jewry from Israeli Jewry, which, on one reading, is actually healthy for both societies. Right. That's not to say that there's going to be a severance of ties, but these are two aspects of a civilization that are moving in very, very different directions. And I don't necessarily see that as a bad thing.

Avishay Artsy: So even as some bemoan the end of America Jewry’s golden age, Magid is unconvinced.

Shaul Magid: It reminded me of Simon Rawidowicz’s famous essay “Israel, the Ever-dying People.” People have been talking about that for millennia. And Jews just don't seem to disappear and they don't seem to go away. And they seem to have a very, very, very wily way of re-inventing themselves wherever they are. And there's no reason to think that's not going to continue.

Avishay Artsy: Heschel says there are two ways of looking at the changing nature of what it means to be Jewish.

Susannah Heschel: One way to look at it is to say we're reaching a point of no return, in the sense that we may have a kind of reformation that leads to a major split in how we define being Jewish. There'll be those who follow Orthodox principles and Orthodox rabbis and those who reject Orthodoxy, and who will be much more flexible in terms of Jewish law and also emphasize principles of social justice rather than, let's say, strict adherence to shulchan aruch, to code of Jewish law. So that could happen. We could have a major split that would really be devastating and tragic.

Avishay Artsy: Heschel warns, though, against rejecting Orthodox Jewry altogether. There’s much that other Jews can learn from them about how to live in community and support each other.

Susannah Heschel: There's a real sense of community that the Orthodox preserve that the rest of the Jews haven't. I can tell you that having gone to conservative synagogues, nobody invited me to their home, never once. Whereas I go to an Orthodox synagogue and immediately, come to my home for shabbos lunch at my house. There's a big difference. And that's something, for example, that has led to the great success of the Chabad movement. I may disagree with its politics and with its views of gender and so forth, but it gives us a lesson. And I guess the issue for us today is, can we emulate what even those we don't agree with are doing in a way that's helpful to us as well? There are always going to be some Jews who are not going to want to live as a reform Jew and some who want to live as an Orthodox Jew. All right. But still, there are ways of being in this world, ways of behaving, ways of compassion, of being loving people, of engaging with others, of caring for one another through social justice that we all should follow. That's really the issue and that's how it is to be a Jew. And so, I return to what my father says. It's about rachmanes, it's about compassion. 

Avishay Artsy: Adventures in Jewish Studies is made possible with generous support from The Salo W. and Jeannette M. Baron Foundation and the Diane and Guilford Glazer Foundation. The executive producer of the podcast is Warren Hoffman. I’m the lead producer for this episode.

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