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Tahl Raz
Tahl Raz is Editor of Jewcy, "an online ideas-and-culture magazine born of and for a time when technology has made personal expression far easier and far more democratic. The site attempts to integrate original top-down editorial (hatched, crafted, and made pretty by terrific writers and editors and artists in the traditional production process) with content that users generate with the new tools of participatory media, such as blogs, comment sections, wikis, and forums."
Apart from the online magazine, Jewcy Media Group also organizes theatrical productions other events. Tahl became its editor after writing for various publications, and serving as an Editor at Fortune Small Business (full bio here).
We will discuss issues ranging from the state of Israel's image in the U.S. to the state of young American Jewry. Readers can send questions to rosnersdomain@haaretz.co.il.
Dear Mr. Raz,
I read your comments with interest and with many of them I agree. I do feel, though, that you offer only the analysis, and not the solutions. How do you maintain this sense of "Judaism is important" in this postmodern Jewish world - any ideas?
Thank you.
Mike Bental, NJ
But analysis is so much easier, Mike.
I can relate to the undercurrent of desperation in your question. Adrift in a landscape of institutional fragmentation and moral vertigo, amidst growing calls for God's death, subjected to the schizophrenic behavior of a Jewish establishment fearful of the advancing shadow of its own mortality, present-day Judaism might seem properly personified by the wild-eyed figure shrieking in hopeless
angst in Edvard Munch's painting, The Scream.
I don't buy it, however. Maybe that's because I try to avoid whenever possible all the statistics and talk and writing these days on the questions of who is a Jew, and more provocatively, who is a good Jew, and even more provocatively, how do we make two Jews have sex on a regular basis to produce other Jews. Sometimes it can seem as if all of institutional Judaism today is an industry producing endless provocations leading to nowhere and to nothing.
The adjudication of all this outdated theo-social arcana misses the whole point, namely, that people don't believe in the importance or power of Judaism (or for that matter, God) because of good marketing or successful reproductive strategies ginned up by their elders, but because they are compelled to by their own experience.
We need more great Jewish experiences. Experiences that are fun, edifying, inspirational. The relevance of Judaism is, and has always been, the capacity it offers to change our lives, our communities and indeed our world. We need to be shown how it can do that. We need access to the tools and information it provides. Some of it is going on now on the Internet, in Jewcy and elsewhere.
Revolutionary things are going on driven by spiritually entrepreneurial young people who are using the mediasphere and its technologies to create their own affiliations, start their own organizations, and infuse the community
with innovation, creativity, and change.
I really do believe, and Jewcy is working to exploit, the opportunities for self-growth and community I think this information age offers. I believe these opportunities will be something qualitatively different, better, than the opportunities of the age that it superseded.
How about them overly optimistic apples?
Dear Tahl,
How can you call the objection to intermarriage an "anachronistic tribal obsession". Don't you realize that if Jews will keep marrying out the Jewish people, a small minority in America and the world will eventually disappear? Or maybe you just don't care?
Thank you for you thoughts.
Joel Goldstone, NY
Dear Tahl,
Judaism is already more divided than ever before. Do you think the dispute over the "anachronistic tribal obsession with endogamy" could eventually flower into a full-blown doctrinal schism like the one between Catholic and Orthodox Christianity, creating two Jewish religions with distinct ideas about who is a Jew? Or indeed, has it already happened? And since just about every respectable religion has had such schisms, does it matter?
Best wishes
Gideon, Jerusalem
You know, Joel, I do care. It's an indelible part of who I am and how I was raised. In the dawn of my pubescence, my beloved Israeli mother let me know that if I ever brought home a "shiksa" she'd use a knife to relieve me of my testicles. True story. And I'm not married yet, so there's a part of me that still worries she was being serious.
I do feel the necessity, the urgency, you also so clearly feel about the continuity of our customs and beliefs. And I personally don't find opposition to intermarriage morally distasteful, just hopelessly ineffectual.
In the marketplace of identities, as Eric Liu put it in Slate, I imagine you're a protectionist, Joel. You want to impose restrictive regulations, raise tariffs, and erect as many artificial barriers as needed to keep your little cottage industry of ethnic purity safe and unchanged. But it won't work. It's a bad strategy. In a free and open society, pit against the American assimilationist machine, intermarriage is inevitability.
So what strategy will work? I don't know. What's very clear is that change is hard. But it's reassuring that it can just as easily be an act of creation as it is destruction. Which brings me to Gideon's question.
Doctrinal schisms around intermarriage already divide the Jewish world. But such schisms have historically been rather beneficial. Hasidism exploded onto the 18th century Jewish religious scene, and while it caused innumerable headaches for the mainstream (a couple of false messiahs, for instance), it drew in a significantly large and disenfranchised group of Jews who might have otherwise chosen, say, Yoga. Reform and Conservative Judaism, as well as Zionism, were an outgrown of schisms created around how the community should respond to the Enlightenment, emancipation, and increasing anti-Semitism. Discontinuity, as it turns out, can be quite healthy.
Dear Tahl,
Your remark regarding Jewish Peoplehood strikes me as the most controversial. You write that "American life has annihilated Jewish Peoplehood" and if that's so, then why should one expect American Jews (or maybe one shouldn't) to worry about fellow Jews in Israel or, for that matter, Ethiopia?
Best
Rosner
Shmuel,
The death of peoplehood - ethnicity - among American Jews is not an argument about its goodness or badness - it's an observation. Maybe the anodyne Jewish avoidance of hard truths is keeping us from realizing that a central concept in Jewish liturgy and self-image is kaput.
The SATs don't ask young American high school students whether they're Italian, Irish, Polish, or Jewish. They ask whether they're white, black, Hispanic, Asian American, or Native American. Ethnicity is an increasingly irrelevant category in the United States. Ask the country's Census bureau. Jewish leaders are about the only ones left - with the exception of those from marginalized, extremist racialist groups - to publicly advocate for in-group marriage. Research shows that faith has become a fluid category with a growing percentage of Americans changing denominations more than once in their lifetime.
Identity, in America, is not a matter of blood; it's a choice. You can choose to embrace your Jewishness, or you can choose to revoke it. This is the milieu in which the notion of our "chosenness," and the requisite obligations traditionally associated with it, have been vanquished.
In an age of consent (rather than decent), can we make Jewish peoplehood into an idea, a communal unit, appealing enough that we (Jews, non-Jews, and everyone in between) will choose, rather than be chosen, to belong? Absolutely, but with a major caveat: If the revitalization of peoplehood infers dismantling the modern project of securing a universal human rights and returning to a primitive state of tribalism, as it apparently does for Steven Cohen and Jack Wertheimer, than I - and I suspect a large chunk of my generation here and in Israel - will want no part of it.
For Wertheimer and Cohen, whose article in Commentary published last year wailing against our plummeting ethnic identity, the apparent crisis can be summed up by the observation that American Jews seem to have more time for the people of Darfur than their own people. Shocking! In other words, as long as we can convince this wayward new crop of Jews that delivering groceries to a senior center - a Jewish senior center! - is of more moral importance than preventing the mass-rape of eleven year-old girls, everything is going to be just fine.
Far better than I on these matters is Jewcy's in-house philosophical savant and senior editor, Joey Kurtzman, who has reached out to Mr. Wertheimer for the purposes of conducting a dialogue in Jewcy. It's too important an issue not to talk about, even with those who don't necessarily agree. We're eagerly awaiting for Mr. Wertheimer to find some time in his schedule to make it happen.
Dear Tahl,
Let's turn now to your perspective on Jewish America. In your introductory letter to the readers of Jewcy you wrote that "In the thick, messy context of contemporary American life, it's a remarkable moment to be a Jew. There is unparalleled opportunity for people hell-bent on making a meaningful difference with their lives, but also an unprecedented uncertainty about the relevance of old traditions and institutions."
To be honest with you, I wonder if this is not the kind of language that every young generation uses as it evaluates the state of Judaism - there's always an opportunity, there's always uncertainty. So let's try to be more specific and I'll do it by throwing some commonly used words and phrases at you - and ask you to give me your quick assessment of the significance and meaning they have in contemporary Jewish life:
1. Jewish Peoplehood
2. Tikkun Olam
3. Intermarriage
4. Jewish Renaissance
5. Jewish organizations
6. Hebrew
Best
Rosner
First, as for whether what I said in the Jewcy Welcome Letter is true of every generation of young Jews: for the vast majority of Jewish history it hasn't been true at all. There was little freedom to reevaluate old traditions and institutions when, for example, European monarchs empowered rabbis to administer Jewish communities like religious mini-states. But as Jewish communities were emancipated from rabbinic rule, sure, I think yes, young Jews have tended to similar language to describe what they were experiencing, because the progressive dissolution of the Jewish world by the solvent of modernity has presented each generation with similar challenges. But in the United States since World War II, the process has drastically accelerated, and no generation in Jewish history has been as free to define the nature of their Jewishness as are today's young American Jews. We're not just Jews by choice, we're Jews whose every single Jewish decision is a choice.
1. Jewish Peoplehood:
No significance, and too muddled a term to say that it has any concrete meaning. When the Jews of pre-WWI Poland didn't speak the language of their own country, occupied a distinctive economic and social niche, and had virtually no social interaction with non-Jews, it made sense to talk of them as a people. But American life has annihilated Jewish Peoplehood.
2. Tikkun Olam:
Essential. If Judaism can't inform Jews as to how to navigate the universal ethical dilemmas of modern life, then the religion isn't worth keeping. We're better off all converting to Quakerism. Tikkun olam will have to be a vastly more significant and better elaborated component of Judaism than it has historically been.
3. Intermarriage:
Significant in that it's crucial that we figure out how to overcome this anachronistic tribal obsession with endogamy. If Judaism and Jewishness are of value in the modern world, they will survive. If not, they won't. Intermarriage will ultimately have little to do with it. In any case, it's a natural feature of modern life, just as endogamy was a natural feature of shtetl life. People who think otherwise are tilting at windmills.
4. Jewish Renaissance:
The optimism is admirable - I'm not so sure we're seeing a 'Jewish Renaissance' right now. We're certainly seeing all sorts of exciting behavior, but we don't yet know whether this is the rebirth of Jewish culture or the eccentric senescence of a patient with Alzheimers.
The journalist in me says check back in a hundred years. The meddling sophist in me says I'm going to take a crack at arguing, yes, you're damn right it's a renaissance.
The seminal Jewish experience marking the past two centuries has been a flight from particularity. Being Jewish got us pogroms, the Holocaust, an alienating sense of otherness and so we converted, outmarried, or wherever possible, attempted to assimilate to the point of religionlessness. The way different Jewish denominations have approached this flight have produced the biggest schisms.
Until recently, the discussion of these schisms were dominated by an either/or proposition. The religious-minded and racialists called for a return to particularity and invested their time and money in strengthening the establishment and trying to eliminate things like intermarriage. They turned a lot of us off: We were Americans, part of the melting pot, and we had no intention of returning to the shtetl. The secularists and humanists, on the other hand, argued that Judaic particularity was outmoded and railed against what they considered a destructive nostalgia for ethnic purity. For these people, Jewish was cultural thing, not a God thing, so give us our bagel and Thomas Friedman and an Oprah-infused vision of the spiritual life, and leave us alone with your rules and demands. They also turned a lot of us off: it smacked of the hippie-yippie culture of narcissism, with its extremes of individualism and secularism, allowing Boomers to free themselves from the restrictive confines of family, religious, social, and political obligation so as to spend ever greater amounts of time on self-care and self-improvement.
Part of what might be called a Jewish Renaissance is an attempt at reconciliation. We're throwing the either/or out the window. A generation of Jews is emerging that has a less damaged, less complicated sense of Jewish identity. We want to be both particularly Jewish and particularly American and particularly of the world at large. The establishment wasn't built to handle that sort of nuance, and so we have a trend away from centralization toward denominationalism. If you're institutions can't contain our multitudes, we're screaming, we'll build our own. And so you have this explosion of neighborhood minyans and innovative organizations and ad hoc digital communities that have no need for the strict divisions between 'in' and 'out.'
Whatever the outcome, it's not bad jokes and dance music on one side and Torah, Avodah, and Gemilut Hasidim on the other. It's not either hip and cool or sacred and pious. It won't work. The real progress of any potential movement or renaissance will be it's resistance to primitive polarities; it's detestation of closed milieus and empty edicts.
There's really nothing new here. As my friend Rabbi Andy Bachman likes to say, "If Judaism is anything, it's countercultural."
5. Jewish Organizations:
There was report on Jewish identity issued last year that said essentially, 'Traditionally, young Jews rebelled against mainstream Jewish organizations; today, they no longer rebel, because they don't even know the organizations exist.' That's about the score.
6. Hebrew:
All of what I've said is perfectly compatible with the fact that I'm deeply pro-Israel, and to make an uncomfortable admission publicly, I grit my teeth whenever I hear Jewish liturgy done in English. Intellectually the rationales are compelling for such alternative services; emotionally I can't help but feel they're lacking.
Anyone who wants access to the primary language of Jewish worship needs to learn Hebrew, and so does anyone who wants to understand Israeli society.
Tahl Raz
Dear Tahl,
Let me start with something you wrote in a recent article: "The fact is debate about Israel is not being silenced on college campuses or anywhere else. On the contrary, there is no country more openly criticized, supported, or argued about than Israel."
Since I agree with you, let me ask you this:
1. Why is the "silencing" argument so common, mostly among people of the liberal-left both in the Jewish community and generally (Carter)
2. What's bothering you about it - the tone of constant whining or the possibility that it is an excuse for lack of convincing arguments?
3. Is there a convincing argument on the part of those complaining about the suppressed debate?
Thank you
Rosner
When it comes to Israel, people across the political continuum have their sacred tropes - the left cries about censorship, the right about anti-semitism and self-hatred. This is propagandistic masturbation masquerading as moral fervor. Both sides have learned that righteous indignation is easy, and feels great; both ignore the very coherent internal logic of opposing arguments.
Claims of censorship, or the 'silencing argument,' are particularly curious, though. It's easy to spot endemic anti-semitism because no one is sure what the term means, exactly. It's easy to find evidence for a phenomenon that you can define more or less as you wish. But there's no such ambiguity about the left's claims of 'silence' on Israel. Israel/Palestine very clearly generates more coverage per square foot than any story in the history of the world, and there is nothing you can state publicly about the conflict that won't be vigorously and loudly contested. And that contestation - seen, in just one example, in the endless public flogging Dershowitz and Finkelstein deliver to each other with such crypto-sexual ravenous delight at every opportunity, in every forum, through every medium - has become a reliably entertaining spectacle for editors and TV producers. It's as silent as a circus.
And I do think there is a danger in this self-glorifying myth of a silence? punctured only by the lonely, prophetic voice of the countless and voluble opponents of Israel. The willful tuning out of every nuance, every substantive argument that would make anti-Israel activism just a little less orgasmic, is what allows for the fairly popular image of Israel as the pristine embodiment of hubristic, amoral, colonialist evil. These people are not spiritually crippled anti-Semites, and they're not going to be responsible for the destruction of Israel. But they demonize one party to a conflict that involves two sets of legitimate claims, and in so doing they may complicate or delay the concerted-but-delicate international intervention that will ultimately be required to resolve the conflict.
Israel is like those puppets that family therapists use to get troubled children to express their feelings. Our parents' generation (the Baby Boomer Jews, more or less) often seems like a confused rich kid in the throes of a very uncomfortable puberty, using Israel to work out their identities at a comfortable remove. So although the Jews in pro-Israel organizations can't silence debate, they do often respond bitterly to reasoned criticism from Jews, and hysterically when it comes from non-Jews. There are too many Abe Foxmans reflexively branding every perceived dissenter as a 'self-hater', and too many Michael Lerners lost in fantasies of their own prophethood.
But younger American Jews aren't nearly so damaged by Jewish history. We want freewheeling debate. We're not frightened by tough, smart, incisive criticism, we're eager for it. That's why we created Jewcy - not because we'd been 'silenced,' but because in the age of the decentralized web, in a country with a first amendment, no one need stay silent, or whine about how others conduct the debate. Create your own space, and make all the noise you want, how you want.
Tahl Raz
Dear Mr. Raz,
I read your comments with interest and with many of them I agree. I do feel, though, that you offer only the analysis, and not the solutions. How do you maintain this sense of "Judaism is important" in this postmodern Jewish world - any ideas?
Thank you.
Mike Bental, NJ
But analysis is so much easier, Mike.
I can relate to the undercurrent of desperation in your question. Adrift in a landscape of institutional fragmentation and moral vertigo, amidst growing calls for God's death, subjected to the schizophrenic behavior of a Jewish establishment fearful of the advancing shadow of its own mortality, present-day Judaism might seem properly personified by the wild-eyed figure shrieking in hopeless angst in Edvard Munch's painting, The Scream.
I don't buy it, however. Maybe that's because I try to avoid whenever possible all the statistics and talk and writing these days on the questions of who is a Jew, and more provocatively, who is a good Jew, and even more provocatively, how do we make two Jews have sex on a regular basis to produce other Jews. Sometimes it can seem as if all of institutional Judaism today is an industry producing endless provocations leading to no where and to nothing.
The adjudication of all this outdated theo-social arcana misses the whole point, namely, that people don't believe in the importance or power of Judaism (or for that matter, God) because of good marketing or successful reproductive strategies ginned up by their elders, but because they are compelled to by their own experience.
We need more great Jewish experiences. Experiences that are fun, edifying, inspirational. The relevance of Judaism is, and has always been, the capacity it offers to change our lives, our communities and indeed our world. We need to be shown how it can do that. We need access to the tools and information it provides. Some of it is going on now on the Internet, in Jewcy and elsewhere. Revolutionary things are going on driven by spiritually entrepreneurial young people who are using the mediasphere and its technologies to create their own affiliations, start their own organizations, and infuse the community with innovation, creativity, and change.
I really do believe, and Jewcy is working to exploit, the opportunities for self-growth and community I think this information age offers. I believe these opportunities will be something qualitatively different, better, than the opportunities of the age that it superseded.
How about them overly optimistic apples?
Tahl Raz
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