Francyne Davis Jacobs:
Welcome, and thank you for joining us today. The registrants for this event spanned geography and time zones. So I'm going to wish everyone a good morning, a good afternoon, and good evening. My name is Francyne Davis Jacobs. I'm a member of the Brandeis Class of 1995 and president of the Alumni Club of Houston. Professor Mirsky was originally going to travel to Houston this spring to speak at a Faculty in the Field event for our region. And while we were not able to hold that event in person, we were thrilled that he agreed to lead this virtual event and share it with alumni, parents, Brandeis National Committee members and friends literally from all around the world.
Francyne Davis Jacobs:
So to introduce our speaker, Yehudah Mirsky is a professor of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis, and on the faculty of the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies. He teaches courses On Zionism and Israel, Jewish intellectual and religious history and human rights. Professor Mirsky has written widely on politics, theology and culture for a number of publications, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Republic, and The Economist, The Daily Beast and The Guardian. He is also the author of the widely acclaimed volume, Rav Kook: Mystic in a time of Revolution.
Francyne Davis Jacobs:
Professor Mirsky previously worked in Washington as an aide to then senators Bob Kerry and Al Gore, and at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and served in the Clinton Administration as a special advisor in the US State Department's Human Rights Bureau. We are super thrilled and excited for him to join us in this virtual space today. Welcome Professor Mirsky, we look forward hearing what you have to tell us.
Yehudah Mirsky:
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Francyne, and thank you, Sharon, and everyone in Institutional Advancement for making this possible. And welcome, everyone, all of you. You can see me, I'm afraid the technologies of Zoom are such that I can't see you. Thank you all for taking the time. As we talk, there will be a chat open and my colleagues will be taking your questions in. If you say something in the chat that you want to be a question during our Q&A period, please, like they say in Jeopardy, state it in the form of a question. I don't know if the rewards are going to be quite like you get on Jeopardy or the entertainment, but please do state it in the form of a question. And of course, ordinarily professors don't encourage the passing of notes during class, but I'm sure this is an opportunity for you all to say hi to one another and so forth.
Yehudah Mirsky:
And to the extent to which you're sitting here in front of your screens listening to me talk about what might be some very depressing things, is also an occasion for you to meet and be in touch with one another, then please, that would be delightful.
Yehudah Mirsky:
So, our topic today, the topic today, the sort of like Jews today, what I said on the anvil, as I called it, between the universal and the particular. Now, believe it or not, we actually came up with that title several months ago. But as was said, I was planning on making a visit to Houston and talking about this and it seemed like a nice topic. And that, of course, was before everything. We're living through a really remarkable time, for the past several years, actually, I keep telling students, we're living one vast open air seminar in foundations of social and political thought, and they should keep their eyes open on.
Yehudah Mirsky:
I also remind students that so much of what we study, so many of the texts we study were written by people who were living through large and regularly calamitous historical times themselves. Sometimes, say, when I teach and talk to students about things like Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism, it's very clearly on the table. Here's a scholar trying to make sense of what the heck is going on here. How is my civilization falling apart and committed suicide.
Yehudah Mirsky:
But other times, even when, sometimes I'll point that out to students, we could be discussing some medieval text of theology, Jewish theology or Jewish law, on even like nothing relating to persecution or martyrdom, just like commercial law, or it was at the Sabbath. And as it turns out, we know that this text was written during the middle of say sort of the Black Death, which is to say that times like these just I think really heighten the stakes and drive home the importance of the things that we do and our efforts to try to understand. And I'm not just saying that as somebody who teaches, thankfully, for a living, but as all of us who try to think through these times.
Yehudah Mirsky:
Another challenge of these times, if I might make another preparatory comment, but just also give you some sense of teaching at Brandeis these days. As an instructor in a university, not in a theological seminary or someplace like that, I don't see it as my job to indoctrinate students, and I don't see it as befitting to try to indoctrinate students. Not just because of my own political views, not just because of some rule or other of the American Association of University Professors or something like that, because I'm not even sure there is such a rule. But more in terms of what are our moral duties as educators these days, and in general within the framework of the university.
Yehudah Mirsky:
And our moral duty is to try to help students figure out how they can best understand their world and their worlds, and make their choices in those worlds. And indoctrinating them into my own point of view, however correct I may think I am, really runs counter to that moral obligation. And that's an obligation that's a place where morals and so to speak, epistemology, how we know about things and how we act in the world and things we think about doing in the world, that's where they meet. Even though technically, most of my courses aren't technically moral philosophy courses., but that's the thinking that I bring to it.
Yehudah Mirsky:
And there's no such thing, of course, as entirely value free education. All pedagogy has certain assumptions, including assumptions about values and morals. And yes, I'm in many ways an old fashioned humanist, and think that our chief conviction is that human beings can understand one another, even when they disagree, even when they violently disagree. A year and a half ago or so, I was a guest professor in a law school in in New York and I was giving a course on law and state, religion and the law and the state in Israel. And one point I was describing the ultra-orthodox point of view. And one student raised their hand and said, "Wait a second, you sound like an apologist." I said, I'm trying to work like a scholar and I want to understand how they see the world.
Yehudah Mirsky:
That's what humanists try to do. You try to understand people even when we disagree with them. I try to understand the founders of, they were mostly fathers, yes, the founders of the liberal tradition that I inhabit. I also try to understand Nazis as they understood themselves as best I can, bearing in mind that I can't always understand.
Yehudah Mirsky:
And the reason I say this is because this is all very really put to the test these days, in the classroom and otherwise. It's very, very hard to maintain this kind of principle pedagogical neutrality in the classroom. It's very hard. I try to maintain this somewhat neutrality when I'm speaking in fora like these, where I'm not trying to convince you of anything, I'm just trying to lay out how I think we can perhaps understand some things that are complicated these days. But it's very, very hard to do that. And so, invariably, some of my own political views are going to color things that I say here, but I am actually trying to understand and trying to understand those who disagree with me. So thank you for bearing with me during this introduction, but it's important to say for a whole bunch of reasons.
Yehudah Mirsky:
So, this question of Jews between the universal and the particular. This course an age old question, but particularly a huge form in which it's pressed itself home to me and I think to others in recent years, was really during the 2016 presidential election here in the United States. As you guess from the introduction, I've been following American politics not just only personally as a citizen, but professionally for a very long time. And this was the first, 2016 was the first election that I can remember in which the place of Jews in American society was in play in an election campaign.
Yehudah Mirsky:
Now, not that Israel doesn't come up in presidential elections. It does, but also within a relatively narrow bandwidth. I mean, yes, I certainly well recall the arguments over giving Jimmy Carter a second term in office, I'm old enough to remember that. And election cycles before and what people thought about Richard Nixon and what people thought about George Bush the father and Israel. But those arguments by and large were within a fairly, pretty narrow bandwidth.
Yehudah Mirsky:
You never had a major American presidential candidate saying that, in since the 1960s, saying that America should fundamentally rethink, George Hall, that sort of people here and there. American needs fundamentally to rethink it's support for Israel, nor since the 1960s, if you had an American president saying, Israel can do whatever the heck it wants, whenever the heck it wants. And if Israel wants to unilaterally declare a state and just impose whatever it wants on anyone, yeah, they should go right ahead. And some people interpret the green light that America gives Israel for all kinds of things in those ways. But that's never been an American policy, certainly that's never been the way it's been discussed in presidential campaigns.
Yehudah Mirsky:
And then in 2016, you have a president who seems to be saying that, but more crucially, American Jewry is placed in American society something on the table. It's somehow an issue. And to make it even crazier, over the years, I mentioned there were disagreements, or there were opinions about whether this or that American president was "good for Israel or bad for Israel." But whatever the prevailing consensus was, it tended to be shared between the Israeli government at the time, whatever it was, and American Jewry. There was not a whole lot of daylight. It's sort of at the margins, but by and large, not a whole lot of daylight between Jews in the United States and Jews in the State of Israel over whether or not a candidate was fundamentally good or for Israel or was predisposed towards Israel.
Yehudah Mirsky:
And here you have that. You have a candidate president who was many in ways, until recently was wildly popular in Israel. Now, last few weeks, his luster has faded somehow. You have candidate who is wildly popular, and who American Jews not only disagreed with but were terrified of in very large numbers, while other American Jews just thought this was great. And you have, and sort of governments, I'm giving you like a political discussion, so like the political service before I start doing a deeper dive in history philosophy and all that kind of stuff. You have government, historically, one thing that, you never had governments in the United States actively seeking to foment severe disagreement among American Jews.
Yehudah Mirsky:
The story I love to tell is, this organization, Conference of Presidents and Major American Jewish organizations, many of you are probably familiar. And how did it come about? Because in the 1950s, John Foster Dulles, then Secretary of State was tired of taking, on any given issue relating to Israel, the Jews had to take phone calls from a dozen different Jewish organization. And he called Nahum Goldman of the World Jewish Congress and Chaim Weizmann's longtime aide, and said, I'm tired of this, okay, just get me one Jewish leader, one phone call, that's all I want to do. And hence the Conference of Presidents which we know to the present day.
Yehudah Mirsky:
And now we have an American government that revels in arguments between American Jews and Israel and enjoys American Jews tearing each other apart and so on. And this happens, this becomes, this became an issue in 2016, not just episodically about how were people going to vote in well-known centers of Jewish population like New York or Florida or something. But it seemed to be resonating with larger themes of the campaign and American politics, and not only American politics, and this sort of brings us to the, so the nutshell of what I want to talk about is that I think the reason why Jews and Israel have become such electrifying and electrified topics in recent years, part of how we see antisemitism as an issue in American politics and people harboring genuine doubts as to whether or not the President United States actually thinks antisemitism is a bad thing.
Yehudah Mirsky:
It's really like the mind bending feature of this, and additionally mind bending feature of this question is that President of the United States has a son-in-law, who is a self-described Orthodox Jews, whose daughter converted to Orthodox Judaism. How does all this happen? So the point that I want to make is that, one of the fundamental issues roiling the world in our time is attention, a dichotomy, a duality, reciprocal relationship.
Yehudah Mirsky:
And I'm using all these different terms because this functions in all these different ways between, it's called the universal and the particular. Between people as seeing themselves as part of a specific group with ethnic features of a certain religious community, certain place, certain language, certain history, a certain culture, on the one hand. And their values, their core values, reflecting that kind of belonging. And the universal. People seeing their values as coming from some sort of more universal ideal, there's lots of different kinds of kinds of universalism when you talk about that. And that their affiliations are less tightly connected to things like ethnicity and place, and sort of the forms of religious life that sort of are very tied to those kinds of notions of ethnicity and place and language and so on. But are broadly shared across the globe to those who happen to share their views.
Yehudah Mirsky:
Now, so much of what we argue about in our world in recent years is very much over that. Is there one truth? Is there one truth for everyone? Ordinarily, one would say, well, empirical science. But one of the things we see in the Corona crisis and we're seeing it in recent years in debates over climate change, global warming, that even questions of science, which we thought were well settled that there's such thing as empirical truth about that, turn out to be very tied to issues of politics and culture and ideology. And people's economic interests are defined also in terms their politics and culture and ideology.
Yehudah Mirsky:
And the thing with the Jews is that this question, this tension, this complex relationship between universal and the particular is with the Jewish people from the beginning. And Jews are both potent symbols of this divide as well as actors and players in how this divide works out, especially in the last couple of centuries. And that's the idea in a nutshell and I'm going to sort of unpack all of that.
Yehudah Mirsky:
So, if we start with the Hebrew Bible, we start with the Hebrew Bible, and the Hebrew Bible, the book of Genesis, the entire book of Genesis, if you take a look, one in the same time, it's a story of a universal God, who creates the world, and the universe and everything, and operates by certain universal moral principles. And who then develops a particular relationship with one particular group of people, one particular family, which becomes sort of a clan and a tribe.
Yehudah Mirsky:
Let mu just backtrack for a second. In some ways, what we're talking about here are questions of identity, and what do we mean by identity? Identity is meaningful collective belonging. What are the groups of other human beings that I belong to in ways that give me meaning in my life? Now, ordinarily, we don't worry much about identity. I don't know about you, but I first learned about the term identity in high school geometry and there I learned and identity is like, all things that have three sides are triangles. They add up to 180 degrees. These three sides of the 180 degrees are triangle, and no matter how they're shaped, it's a triangle, it's a triangle, it's a triangle. Triangles don't spend a whole lot of time worrying about their identity. Sort of the preoccupation with identity is itself a sign that something's amiss.
Yehudah Mirsky:
Triangles don't spend a lot of time worrying gee, what kind of triangle am I? Did I choose to be a triangle? What kind of triangle do I choose to be? Am I the triangle that my grandparents were? Is that okay? Would my grandparents have been proud of me and would they have thought the way I'm being a triangle is the way they were different from how their grandparents were being triangles? Triangles don't worry about those things. The term identity as we used it also has a history, my colleague in NEJS in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies, Jonathan Krasner, has done marvelous research on the history of the idea, this term identity, especially as it's used in American Jewish life. It has a history.
Yehudah Mirsky:
And if you take a look, if you compare, and identity generally has three parts. One very helpful way of capturing what we mean by identity. It was offered by the late great Israeli sociologist, Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt, who said, he used to talk about, he said, there are three kinds of identity. What he called primordial, civic, and transcendent. Primordial, sort of the people, the community into which you're born, people with whom you have ties of blood, place of origin, that sort of thing. Civic, the people with whom you don't have those kinds of ties of blood but with whom you share your society and your social space. And transcendent, the values that stand over and above you, the values that stand in judgment on your life, the values, the ought that you try to get to from your kids of your life.
Yehudah Mirsky:
In a way, what what Eisenstadt is doing there is recapitulating what Aristotle does in the beginning of his politics. Remember in the beginning of his politics, Aristotle talks about how society evolved. Well, we start with families, and then a bunch of families and clans get together and they create a village. So we start with the primordial ties, then the civic ties of the village. And then from there, eventually we get the city, the metropolis. And we know that ideas of transcendence as we know them in the Western world in Greek philosophy in the Hebrew Bible, in Chinese civilization, in India, in Persia, a whole bunch of places, very much related to the evolution of these large metropolises and large empires that you get these much larger all encompassing moral and spiritual ideals. And they all sort of, in Aristotle's scheme, they all sort of emerge very serenely out of one another to kind of process the teleology.
Yehudah Mirsky:
And for Eisenstadt, a modern sociologist, no, these three elements are in a reasonably well-integrated human being or society, they're hopefully working together. And when they don't work together, that's when problems happen. And these three elements of primordial identity, civic and transcendent, are also very present throughout history, and also very much in Jewish history. So getting back to the Hebrew Bible. A wonderful little illustration of this issue is the fabled story in the book of Genesis when God decides to destroy the city of Sodom. And he says, well, Abraham is my guy. Abraham is the person I've designated to teach my universal message of truth and justice. And so, I really need to share this with him. And God shares with Abraham his intention to destroy the city of Sodom for its wickedness.
Yehudah Mirsky:
And Abraham famously argues with God, and says in Hebrew [Hebrew 00:23:23], the judge of all the world will not do justice? And they sort of, they bargain back and forth on this. And Abraham sort of bargains God down to, well, if there's 10 righteous people in Sodom, which is to say there's a genuine community of righteousness, because 10 is sort of in the biblical world the smallest unit of meaningful community. If you have 10 righteous people in Sodom, I won't destroy it. Okay, is that good for you? Fine, now go, and the rest is history, biblical history.
Yehudah Mirsky:
Now, the thing is, that Abraham argues with God On the basis of universal moral principles. He doesn't say, God, it says in your Torah or God, it doesn't say in this Jewish law book. No, he says, God, you are the judge of all of the earth and you must do justice. Abraham is saying, God, there's a moral law. It binds me and it binds you, as you are the guarantor of that. So there's the universal piece, the universal ethical, moral piece. But on the other hand, why are Abraham and God even having this conversation? Because God is in this special relationship with Abraham. Relationship creates the intimacy between Abraham and God where Abraham can argue with God.
Yehudah Mirsky:
And so, this fundamental duality starting in Hebrew Scriptures and works all the way through. The Jews in Judaism are committed to teachings and ideas that on the one hand, are fundamentally saying that there is a universal God, and the moral principles of their religion are fundamentally universal, applicable to all people, all times and all places. And indeed, the rabbi's of the Talmud as some of you know, elaborate, so they have what they call the seven laws of the sons of Noah, which is sort of like a fundamental moral code of binding all of you. And at the same time, people have a covenantal relationship with God and a specific relationship with God in their own way of dealing with God.
Yehudah Mirsky:
And then in the course of history, they're developed in western civilization, they're developed to other versions of biblical religion, that trace this differently in Christianity and Islam. Christianity, in a sense, maintains this notion of Israel of being in a covenant with God. But it's no longer quite, and again, there's a long history about how this happens and exactly when it happens, but it's no longer quite tied to the ethnos, the ethnic character of Israel, nor is it tied to the laws of Israel. St. Paul says, there's neither Jew nor Greek nor male nor female, nor bondsman, or slave, all are one in Christ Jesus, which as scholars have pointed out, on the one hand is a wonderful universalist message. On the other hand, it's sort of says that if you insist on maintaining your particularity after the proclamation of Jesus, then you've got a problem.
Yehudah Mirsky:
The Hebrew Bible has a rather differentiated set of ways of looking at nations. It's not Israel here and everyone else over there, for some purposes, yeah, but for many purposes, no. You look through the Hebrew Bible, all sorts of nations have different sorts of moral characters, different kinds of relationships. Paul kind of reframes it, and then later Islam also reframes it, as there, Islam doesn't see itself as Israel, sees itself as Umma, sort of a nation or a people, but the collected people of God. And Islam as we know sort of has a place within it for distinctive places of Jews and Christians as each one is [Arabic 00:27:17]. You're like a people of the book, which is to say people who have been given revealed scripture by God.
Yehudah Mirsky:
Now, through Jewish history, I'm going to stick with the Jews, it's what I know to talk about and it's sort of the center of our conversation here. Through Jewish history, of course, there's all kinds of ways in which the universal and particular get mixed and matched. In Jewish thought, in Jewish ideas. This also plays out with how Jews relate to secular culture. The rabbis incorporate, the rabbis of the Talmud were trying to recreate Judaism after the destruction of the temple, incorporate a lot of ideas from the Greco-Roman world.
Yehudah Mirsky:
So the idea of a universal oral moral law, which the rabbi sees reflecting how they interpret the Torah as well as reflecting the oral traditions that they've received about how to interpret the Torah. Obviously, in the Middle Ages, the great project of Maimonides to integrate biblical religion with Aristotelian philosophy, Aristotle and a bit of Plato, for Maimonides. Again, okay, it's a great example of Jewish integration of the universal and particular. Maimonides at the end of his code, at the end of his magisterial law code of the 12th century, the Mishneh Torah, portrays the Messianic age and who is the Messiah, he's Plato's philosopher king. Sort of the Messiah is a, and also in my mind, he's got it perplexed.
Yehudah Mirsky:
Who is the Messiah? There is a Messiah, the Messiah that's talked about in the Bible. The Messiah is somebody who restores Jerusalem, the temple and all of that, and is a philosopher, and is a philosopher who has used reason to discipline his passions and to live his moral life and sort of in the Messianic kingdom, there's nothing miraculous or supernatural about it. The Messiah is a well-ordered, rational, ethical person. And the Messianic Kingdom is a well-ordered, rational, ethical society, that one at the same time reflects a rational moral person, a rational moral ethos and order, and creates a society where people are able to develop themselves into the kind of people who can maintain a rational moral order. And that's what the Bible was talking about. It's this remarkable synthesis of universals and the particular, and we see it in all kinds of ways in Jewish history. Then we get to modern times. Moderns times, again, it's different.
Yehudah Mirsky:
Now, something that we crucially don't remember well enough is that through up to modernity, up to and for our purposes, modernity here is kind of starting in the, early modernity is sort of starting with the Spanish expulsion of 1492. And then, of course, modernity has fully arrived to the bang by the time we get to the French Revolution of 1789. Up to then, Jewish communities had a lot of autonomy. They had a lot of legal authority over themselves. And they weren't alone. Pre-modern society, the modern nation state as we know it is a modern thing.
Yehudah Mirsky:
Now, often you hear in the academy, oh nationalism, it's all this modern invention, imagined communities. A while ago in one of my courses, I asked students to define nationalism. And an doctoral student who's an excellent doctoral student, and clearly learned her lessons well in her other courses, said, "Yes, nationalism is an imagined community concocted by modern publicists and propagandists in order to foster hegemonic power relations," and etc. Now, there's a little bit of truth to that, but I'll get back to that in a second.
Yehudah Mirsky:
Throughout history, we see people thinking of themselves as peoples. What's interesting is that so much some of the most trenchant criticisms of this modern notion, this very contemporary notion of nationalism is this entirely constructed entirely imaginary thing. Some of the most powerful criticisms interestingly come from people who are students of ancient history, or classical history. People who do the history of the Roman Empire, people who do the history of the Persian Empire, people who do the history of African and Asian empires.
Yehudah Mirsky:
They say, look, of course not, all through human history, if nationalism is this entirely invented thing, why all through history are people rebelling to cast off foreign domination? Why are all these people chafing against imperial rule all the years. And not always talking about it in terms of religion because also in many ways religions we know it doesn't quite exist in those years, in those times and places.
Yehudah Mirsky:
So it is the idea that there's something like a people, that you belong to a large group of people to whom someway you're ethnically connected and geographically connected, what we can call culturally connected, and connected to religion. And that also can have political meanings, that's been with us throughout human history.
Yehudah Mirsky:
What's distinctively new in modernity is this idea of the nation state, that this nation, that this kind of people that has formulated as an idea of a nation, and it's very connected to the idea of a state. That the nation is intimately connected to the state and that the state is, that a state consists of one sovereign with one set of laws in a well-defined geographic area. And one monopoly on the use of coercive force.
Yehudah Mirsky:
How does this relate to the Jews? Because in pre-modern society, there were all kinds of overlapping kinds of belongings and jurisdictions and laws. Jews were just one part of it. Within one principality, you have laws for Jews, and you have laws for the church, and you have laws for this guild and that guild. And then you have different prerogatives that are reserved for nobles in terms of how they handle their estates and so on and so forth. And Jews are part of this, and within that, Jews have a lot self-rule. And so, both Jewish community is very well defined, on the one hand. In sort of the political, geographic cultural areas around them are somewhat ill defined.
Yehudah Mirsky:
France as we know it, there's this thing called France, and there's only one place on the map called France, doesn't exist until the modern period. Germany doesn't exist in that sort of way. We have Germanic lands where people are speaking German and doing Germanic kinds of things. But Germany is this unitary state. So modernity sees the emergence of the nation state, and with that the emergence of the nation. And that's how the Jews become a problem because what do you do with them? What do you do with them?
Yehudah Mirsky:
You're only supposed to have one set of laws in a new nation state. So you can't really have these independent Jewish communities with their own laws. But do you make them full fledged citizens? Well, kind of. But, a, many of these countries still have some sort of Christian character, and of course, there's huge differences here between Protestant and Catholic countries and in eastern Western Europe. And so I'm speaking in broad brush generalizations.
Yehudah Mirsky:
But what exactly is the place of the Jews? You have the famous formulation at the time of the French Revolution. To the Jews as individuals, everything, and as members of the people, nothing. The modern nation state tries to reconcile the relationship between Jews as a people and also Jews as a people who have ties across borders, whose religion is very similar to Christianity and yet different in crucial ways. Whose ties across borders are not only of ethnicity, but also of religion. And the idea of a modern nation state with citizenship as a universal category.
Yehudah Mirsky:
So Jewish life becomes problematized in that way, and the idea of the universal and the particular becomes problematized in that kind of way, as the universal in particular becomes a tension of the modern state. We have nationalism arising as a political force in the modern world for many reasons. One of them is a reaction against the enlightenment idea that there's such a thing as a universal human being.
Yehudah Mirsky:
So the enlightenment has this, certain forms of enlightenment have, some of the kind of radical enlightenment we associate with Voltaire, that there's certain kinds of British enlightenment. There is one universal human reason and that sort of creates a model of what a human being is. There is one version of reason, there is a rational person, there is one way to run a good society, there is one way of human development. And that happens to be the way of reason and progress and all of that. And then romanticism pushes back on and says, no, there's passions, and there's also passions connected to places and ethnicity and belonging and all these kinds of things.
Yehudah Mirsky:
Jewish existence in that way becomes a question or a problem. By the end of the 19th century, people are talking in Europe about the Jewish problem. Most famously, Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, who offers Zionism, the Zionist Movement as an answer to the Jewish problem. I'm going to sort of both, to the end of the 19th century and then sort of double back for a second.
Yehudah Mirsky:
One of the most important essays I think ever written in this whole story in Jewish history is written by a very important Zionist thinker writer whose pen name was Ahad Ha'am, Asher Ginsberg, who was the leader of sort of, he was Theodor Herzl's most powerful critic from within the Zionist Movement, very important Eastern European Jewish writer and intellectual. A Zionist in many ways but very critical of Theodor Herzl's idea of political Zionism. In response to the first Zionist Congress in 1897, Ahad Ha'am writes his essay, calls Zionism the Jewish problem. And he basically says, when people say the Jewish problem, the Jewish problem, all Europe is preoccupied with the Jewish problem. There's really two problems. There's the problem of the Jews and the problem with Judaism.
Yehudah Mirsky:
The problem of the Jews is what I've just been talking about. Jews don't have an obvious place in this new configuration of the nation state, hence you get antisemitism. It's not that people didn't dislike Jews before, as we know, they very much did. And throughout history, and since everything we're talking about today is just yet one more instance of how Jews became this thing that's good to think with. You can work out a lot of your issues about otherness, about identity, what do you think about law. How come William Shakespeare writes a play called The Merchant of Venice and there hasn't been a Jew in England in several hundred years. It's because Jews are good to think with, he wants to explore issues of law and grace and being an insider and being an outsider. The Jewish merchant with a beautiful daughter. Wow. Jewish moneylender with a beautiful daughter. What a great dramatic device with which I can dramatize these other questions.
Yehudah Mirsky:
Now, part of what Theodor Herzl realized, and he wasn't the first, it was realized around 20 years before him, by insufficiently famous thinker named Leon Pinsker, in a book called Auto-Emancipation, that this new form of Jew hatred that we saw, I mean, what was so striking to people about modern antisemitism was that people were used to the sorts of, I just mentioned Shakespeare, really important early modern author, talks about Jews and uses all these anti-Jewish themes and ideas in ways that are still very tied to Christian ideas of law and grace and people rejecting Christ and all that sort of thing. Not to belittle the concerns of people who really see a problem with Jewish interaction with Christ.
Yehudah Mirsky:
Modern antisemitism is different because all that is supposedly done with. And it's not being stated in those terms. The officially self-described antisemitic party in Vienna led by the y or Karl Luegar, isn't arguing about the sacraments, meaning of the New Testament. It's talking about Jews as a bad influence on modern society. Jews are responsible for all sorts of terrible things. Jews are the symbol and bearers of everything that's disturbing them.
Yehudah Mirsky:
In many ways, antisemitism, and by the way, just think about this term, antisemitism, a ism, ism means an ideology, it's a modern ideology. What do we mean by ideology? Ideology is distinctively modern notion that human society and politics are an artifact that can be made and remade it will. Even the most far reaching biblical visions of transformation, in the Hebrew prophets, the lion shall lay down with the lamb, that kind of thing, there's still a king. There's still a society, there's still classes. It's great that all the classes will get along with one another.
Yehudah Mirsky:
Jesus Christ is the Prince of Peace. We're not doing away with the idea of princes, we're just redefining what a prince should be. And not that there still won't be Jews or bondsman for St. Paul, slaves or bondsman, there will, but it kind of won't matter. In modernity, we have this idea of policy, we have this idea of movements, we have this idea that society can be made and unmade aw will, hence ism, liberalism, socialism, nationalism.
Yehudah Mirsky:
Now, antisemitism, what's Semitism? As historian, Deborah Lipstatd has pointed out, there is no such thing as Semitism. The Semite is this category that comes from linguistics of trying to look at like a certain branch of languages in Mesopotamia, or a certain sort of collection of ethnic groups. It's a term that sort of like, it's like you're struggling to talk about Jews in a way that doesn't sound the way you used to talk about them in Middle Ages because your argument with them is different.
Yehudah Mirsky:
A lot of what's distinctive and modern, and you have all kinds of Jew hatred in pre-modern periods, and of course, with the rise of Corona, as so many people pointed out, Jews were blamed for the Black Death in the Middle Ages. But what you don't have in the pre-modern world is this idea that Jews are everywhere and nowhere in pulling the strings behind fortunes and empires and media empires and shaping public opinion in ways that nobody notices, nobody talks about.
Yehudah Mirsky:
At first, it seems that antisemitism is ridiculous on its face, these antisemitic ideas are ridiculous on their face because the idea is that Jews are simultaneously evil bankers and socialist revolutionaries. Jews are these thin blooded cosmopolitans wants to leech everybody from forms of belonging and meaningful forms of belonging, and at the same time, they are these religious obscurantists who stick to their fanatical laws and all of that. I always say, it's one of the reasons why people love to beat up on George Soros because he's like three for one. He's like, you get bang for your buck. He's European, he's Jewish, he's socialist, he's capitalist. I mean, it's everything.
Yehudah Mirsky:
So, on the one hand, this seems crazy, but the thing is that it was also all true because there were Jews who were bankers, international bankers, Rothschilds being the most famous example. And there were Jews who were socialist revolutionaries. And there were Jews who were radical cosmopolitans, think of the people who invented Esperanto, the universal language. And there were Jews who were sticking very vehemently to their specific religious traditions, orthodoxy is a self-conscious ideology. And that's because modernity really scrambled the conditions of Jewish life, as well as giving Jews new possibilities. New possibilities for amassing power, political and economic. New opportunities for advancement. New kinds of professions, like lawyers taking on the, being the profession of the law taking on different form. Professional education, university education, the world of journalism, which Theodor Herzl, was both, he was a journalist, very exemplary figure.
Yehudah Mirsky:
And so Jews are in the middle of all. And Jews are in the middle ... And it's so funny, horrible, Stalin calls Jews rootless cosmopolitans. And he himself is preaching this new kind of revolutionary universalism where everybody has to be part of this classless society that is extensively utterly cut off from pre-modern tradition, religion and all of that, even though you're just Russian and then sort of act like the way people did in the Russian Empire, only even more terrified... Russian empire and so on.
Yehudah Mirsky:
By the way, the other piece of Ahad Ha'am critique of Theodor Herzl is that Jews, that the problem is not, the crisis facing modern Jewry is not just the problem of the Jews, which is Jewish economic, social, political disabilities, but the problem with Judaism. The attacks and sort of the way the bottom falls out of Jewish tradition because of modern science, modern philosophy, and as Ahad Ha'am puts it very arrestingly and speaking from his own personal experience, the problem the Jews doesn't really happen until there's a certain kind of society undergoing certain kinds of changes and certain kinds of political social developments. The problem of Judaism happens every time a yeshiva student can get his hands on a copy of Spinoza. Ahad Ha'am argued that Theodor Herzl had perhaps some sort of answer for the problem the Jews but none at all for the problem of Judaism. A little unfair to Herzl but that's for another time.
Yehudah Mirsky:
And this issue of the particular and the universal became a major axis of debate also in modern Jewish thought, people arguing about the problem of Judaism. How does Judaism see itself as one at the same time, university of religion, the dispensation, set of ideas and philosophy, teaching universal moral principles, while also caring deeply about wanting to...
Yehudah Mirsky:
And in a sense, what's so interesting, a book I highly recommend to everyone is by my colleague at the University of Virginia, James Loeffler, L-O-E-F-F-L-E-R, called Rooted Cosmopolitans, punning on that line of Stalin tones. The subtitle is, Jews and Human Rights in the 20th Century. Just using it as an example of the way in which this is a much more complicated question.
Yehudah Mirsky:
If you take a look, okay, just give a quick snapshot in time, just three days in December 1948, you have the passage of United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. You have the passage of the Genocide Convention, and you have the passage of the UN Resolution 194 that ends the Arab Israeli war in of 1948/1949, and recognizes the existence of the State of Israel and its pre 1967 war.
Yehudah Mirsky:
What's so interesting that these three days in December, one after another, December 9, 10, 11, 1948, is that you have the UN, the post-war world coming out of World War II affirming, on the one hand, universal human rights, and on the other hand, the Jewish right to a nation state. And the people involved are all the same people. The people involved in getting the human rights work through the UN are also Zionists. And they didn't see any contradiction. Why? Because after the Holocaust, they come to the conclusion that in order to secure Jewish well being, before the Holocaust, Jews tried to secure, it's a whole long story, but Jews tried to secure a lot of the rights as national minorities within states that really didn't work. And so Jews realized they simultaneously need to embrace a regime of universal human rights that every human being by virtue of being born has a basket of rights that no state can take away from them. And Jews need a nation state of their own.
Yehudah Mirsky:
So you see this dynamic playing itself out again and again. And we come to the two great Jewish communities of the present day. I've gone on a bit. I've done this long winded historical, philosophical introduction because I think it gives perspective that one often doesn't see elsewhere, and will provide a background for a conversation perhaps on more contemporary issues. We have today the two great centers of Jewish life are United States of America and the state of Israel. And while indulging in broad brush generalizations, and forgive me once again for that, American Jews, by and large, have embraced the universalist dimension of Jewish life. Their outlook is, so to speak, horizontal.
Yehudah Mirsky:
The challenge of American Jewish life is maintaining one's Jewishness within a broadly liberal society, in which all sorts of ethnic and religious identities matter but are not meant to matter legally and politically. And so, Jews have done in many ways a very good job of sort of reframing their Jewishness. In terms of universal moral ideas, that can speak to people across boundaries of all sorts. And Israeli Jews have developed a Jewish nation state. Their attitude towards Jewish tradition has been sort of to go very deep into it. And if one reads, sort of if you compare works of theology written by American Jews, written by Israeli Jews, you can sort of sense that American Jews are engaged in this broader conversation with all sorts of groups and seeing themselves that way. And Israeli thinkers are very much plumbing the depths of the meaning of their existence in this place, in this state, in this land, with these people, etc, etc.
Yehudah Mirsky:
Now, this issue of the particular and the universal has very much played out in recent years because it also relates to the tensions around, finally I mention it, globalization. Around globalization. Globalization seems to deface these national boundaries. This plays out in questions of trade. This plays out in questions of, so much of COVID-19 it's a function of globalization, people moving freely all over the globe. Barack Obama, part of his appeal to so much of the American electorate was precisely you seem to be this very universal person. He was from Kenya and he was from Hawaii, and he was from Cambridge, and he was from the north side of Chicago and the South Side of Chicago, and he was from all of them and he was from none of them at the same time, and to many people, this is very healing.
Yehudah Mirsky:
And sort of since the end of the Cold War, the turn of the 21st century, we've seen institutions that have sort of tried to create this sort of a globalized sense, through networks of communication and commerce and trade and all the rest. And there's a reaction to it. People feel that that other dimension of being human is very much left behind. And that is why I think Jews have become so, as I said, electrified and electrifying in good ways and bad, and electrocuting a topic in our politics, including in American politics in this day and age, where does this leave us? I would like to leave time for questions and discussion.
Yehudah Mirsky:
These two features, what I've been calling the universal and the particular are features of the human condition. They just are. Jewish life is such that Jews are made, everyone feels this tension in different ways, and Jews have been made to feel this very keenly or deal with it. And they happen to have this dynamic tension running through them very, very keenly.
Yehudah Mirsky:
I think that the only way to navigate these kinds of problems is one at the same time, so to speak, the problem with ideologies is that they go deeper than surface but not deep enough. What do I mean? At any given moment, we always need to ask, on any given political or social question, in very practical concrete terms, what will this do? Empirically, what will this hurt and what will this help? What are the likely consequences of something by our moral lights? While at the same time, being aware, all the while, that we are making all sorts of deep assumptions about what people want universally and what the people want particularly.
Yehudah Mirsky:
I think the only way to deal with this tension is to put it on the table and say that the universal party, universalism is not the ultimate good and particularism is not the ultimate good. Both are features of the human condition, and there is a variety of ways of trying to work this tension out. The moral principles that I try to proceed from in terms of how to think about this is what, bearing in mind that this is a tension that will never be resolved as long as human beings are around. What do we do to avoid avoidable manmade, human made cruelty in the near short and long term? And there's no obvious answer to that, but I think there's comfort to be had from the recognition that this is an eternal problem, an eternal future of being a human being with all its sorrows and joys.
Yehudah Mirsky:
Thank you for listening to now. And we have time for questions. We're close to 12 but I'm happy to stay a bit longer than that. Thank you for your patience.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Wonderful. Thank you very much, Professor Mirsky. We appreciate hearing your insights and your thoughts. Anyone who has a question, please type into the Q&A box, and we will get to as many of them as we can. So, just to, for our first question, in terms of Jewish Israeli and Jewish American theology today, do you think they have in common a presupposition of atheism?
Yehudah Mirsky:
Okay, let me put it like this. What I take your question to mean or the way I would interpret that is that modern Jewish thought has to deal with atheism, which is different from secularism, I'll get to that in a second, has to contend with atheism as a live option. Not only as a live option philosophically, because that was around in the Middle Ages and before, but as a live option socially and politically. That they are people and groups in society and social policies fashioned in the life of something like an atheistic idea. And that is a fundamental reality.
Yehudah Mirsky:
But I think what's more in the foreground, is less the idea of atheism than the idea of secularism. And what do I mean by that? We tend to use the term secularism and secularization as interchangeably and they're different views, as most famously pointed out by the great philosopher, Charles Taylor. Secularism as it sounds like is an ism. It's an ideology, it's an idea. Secularization is a process like mechanization, industrialization, that sort of thing.
Yehudah Mirsky:
Secularization is the process whereby the institutions that sort of carry, and so to speak, manage and organize human beings relationship with God, with transcendence, are not dominant in society and are fundamentally alongside, or even more like, ultimately under the authority of other kinds of institutions, for whom religious concerns might be one, but not necessarily central or any concern at all. That's secularization, and that sort of happens everywhere, most everywhere. But that's what that is.
Yehudah Mirsky:
Secularism is the idea that taking ideas of God, religion, out of the public square and perhaps out of one's own life is affirmatively a good thing. And you can be for one and not be for the other. Forget about the Jews for a second, Roger Williams. Roger Williams of the founders, founders of the colonies in 17th century, the one who articulated most powerfully what we've come in America to regard as doctrines of church and state, was a profoundly religious man. He argued for a kind of secularization in order to safeguard the purity of religion. So that religion not become some sort of partisan political football, it needs to be kept out of politics. And you have Jewish thinkers who say the same kind of thing.
Yehudah Mirsky:
I think though that a major difference between American Jewish and Israeli thinkers and theologians are sort of the theological challenges posed by the societies in which they're living, and the societies in which they're living shape their theological questions. What do I mean? For American Jews, the question is, how do I deal with, well, at least until recently, was a fundamentally liberal society? A fundamentally liberal society which basically sees people as individuals, which celebrates individual conscience and autonomy, in which there is a free market, not only a free market for economic life, but also a free market for ideas and for spirituality and for religion from the get go.
Yehudah Mirsky:
One of the things that's distinctive about American society is that the church is present to the outside, we're a multiplicity of churches, on the one hand. And Israeli thinkers need to deal with, here I am in a state. There's a state for which I as a Jew have to take responsibility as a state. And the state very much defines itself in terms of, sort of things like people's forms of belonging, religious and ethnic and cultural are woven into the fabric of the law. What does it mean to take responsibility for a state like that, and a society like that?
Yehudah Mirsky:
And also bearing in mind, this is a society that's heterogeneous. This is a society that has many Jews who don't feel like living by traditional Jewish life, who mix and match their relationship to tradition with great freedom. And also citizens who are not Jewish, and for whom the state defines them as non-Jewish for all kinds of purposes. That definition of their being non Jewish is meaningful to the Israeli state for all kinds of purposes. But as a Jewish thinkers, Jewish theologian, you have to somehow account for that.
Yehudah Mirsky:
I think that's a better way of capturing the differences between these two communities, the thinkers.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Thank you. We have another question here. What is the answer to the current polarization of Americans? And can I also just ask you to speak up, just to scooch.
Yehudah Mirsky:
Okay, sure. What is the answer the current polarization of Americans?
Sharon Rosenberg:
Yes.
Yehudah Mirsky:
That's a hard one. Okay, at this point, I'm going to sort of make my own political views, which won't come as a great surprise, open. I think step one, of course, is to get Donald Trump the heck out of office. We have an office, this is now Yehudah Mirsky talking. I'm speaking here only for myself. This is my own political view, I hope I don't offend people by saying this.
Yehudah Mirsky:
The current occupant of the White House, remember, I'm from New York, I grew up watching Donald Trump's antics. The current occupant of the White House is fundamentally a mob boss, a mob boss of white collar crime, sort of like a John Gotti figure of white collar crime, who is a genius for publicity, a genius for attracting attention and compliment. As a great fan of Donald Trump's, used to work with him and television and now works for him, though he gets paid by him under the table, I've known for some years, once said to me, "Look, if Donald Trump by," this is just quote, "By any standard of intelligence, you and I recognize him as an idiot, but he's a genius with a reptile brain." And this fellow went on to sell me eventually further exchanges, "People like you were just too stupid to understand what a genius he is and how his policy is a work of art."
Yehudah Mirsky:
And he thrives on conflict, he thrives on this kind of thing. And because it's good for business, it's good for money. Nothing can ever feed the void in his soul. And he's a mobster down to, a good mobster knows to take care of the clergy, refurbish the church, send the poor people turkeys at Christmas, make sure that his family's in charge of everything, make sure that everything is personal.
Yehudah Mirsky:
And a number of groups in American society who are not all bad people, have decided that he suits their interests, whether it's evangelical Christian, who have concluded that they can't win the culture wars without him and his brutality. Whether it's judicial conservatives who think that only he can ram through the judicial appointments that they like. Whether it's medium-sized business owners, the business owners who are large enough to be regulated but not large enough to able to afford the lawyers who can help them handle all their regulations.
Yehudah Mirsky:
White working class people who've suffered from the industrialization and are neglected. I'm talking about the kinds of counties in Ohio that voted for Obama and then voted for Donald Trump. Of course out and out racists who support him and love him. And people enjoy making money from him. There's this marvelous article by Evan Osnos in the New Yorker a couple of weeks ago about Greenwich, Connecticut, of all places, how Greenwich, Connecticut eventually went for Donald Trump because he's good for business.
Yehudah Mirsky:
How does one undo that polarization? So again, step one is getting this man out of office. During the impeachment hearings, would President Michael Pence be that bad? He wouldn't necessarily be to my liking, but compared to this. I think it's very, very, very hard to sort of figure out who are the people that you can talk to who you can talk to, and who are the people with whom there really is not talking? Who are the people who will be with Mr. Trump no matter what? Also, you have to think about how helpful is it to tell people, you've been wrong all the time and now you're wrong all the time, and you should realize how wrong you were all the time. You should tell me now that you know you were wrong all the time. Anybody who's ever actually tried to convince anybody of anything knows that that's entirely not the way.
Yehudah Mirsky:
I think if we try to both be very clear about the clear and present danger that Donald Trump poses to America and the world, and I don't say that lightly. I really don't say that lightly. Do we want to live in a world that's run by China? Do we want to live in a world where Vladimir Putin essentially gets whatever he wants out of the American president? I think it's important to realize that Trump and his folks have at times raised issues that liberal elites like me were not paying attention to. I wasn't paying enough attention to the people who were losing from trade and globalization. I wasn't paying enough attention to genuine problems with China. Just take two examples. And one of the problems with Trump is that like he and his people, they sometimes will actually raise genuine questions, but then instead of crafting a policy, they just pick up a meat cleaver and start hacking away.
Yehudah Mirsky:
And at the same time, I think about trying to convey a positive message of what a better America actually practically could look like, not some sort of Kumbaya, we'll join hands together. No. We have real problems, there are concrete ways of dealing with problems. We have dealt with these problems before in a better way. And one thing that's so important, so important, and it's such a temptation these days is to not give in to anger. And it's so hard, especially because so much of the internet's business model is predicated on anger. Anger drives clicks. It's the devil's own business model. And somehow not giving into the anger that all kinds of people are trying to stoke for fun, power and profit all the time, seems to me to be the most important stuff in trying to turn things around.
Yehudah Mirsky:
I hope that's something helpful. And one last thing. I don't mean not to have righteous indignation, but there's this thing nowadays that people enjoy being angry for anger's sake. And that happens on the left as well as on the right.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Thank you. So we're about 1:05 here on the East Coast. So, we're just going to close with one more question for you. And also, just to let everyone know who's joined us today, we will be sending out a video recording of this afterwards. Oh, actually one other question, we got two more questions in here. So I'm actually gonna go with two more if we have time to squeeze those in. And we will be sending out a video of this afterwards. It usually takes about a week and we'll get everything online and send you that information in an email.
Sharon Rosenberg:
So, this question is, how is the current rise of antisemitism in the United States connected with a rising belief in America has connected the winners of globalization, I.e, the tech entrepreneurs and Wall Street, prominent Jews, and that the losers of globalization, blue collar industrial and service workers, where Jews are not well represented?
Yehudah Mirsky:
I think that that does play a role. I'll tell you a story. I have a friend who's a Republican who's very anti-Trump Republican, but has spent many years, this is what he does for a living, as an opposition researcher. He's one of these people who digs up dirt on people, very skillfully. I can tell you, those of you who are regular readers of The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Financial Times, have seen the fruits of my friend's research in all kinds of...
Yehudah Mirsky:
A few years ago, he told me that he was friendly with Steve Bannon. And I said to him, "I'd like to meet him because I think smart antisemites are interesting people to me." And my friend said to me, "Oh, Bannon is not an antisemite." My friend, by the way, is an Orthodox Jew, who's this anti-Trump Republican opposition researcher. He said to me, "Bannon is not an antisemite. You got to see it the way he looks. He loves Israel. He loves Israelis. Israelis are patriots. Israelis go to the army. Israelis are tech geniuses. Israelis are dedicated to their countries. Israelis kick the daylights out of Arabs and Muslims. And Israelis tell liberals where to get off. They're great."
Yehudah Mirsky:
"American Jews, he despises. Wall Street. Bannon said to me," my friend said, "I went to Harvard and I worked in Wall Street and I worked in Hollywood and I served in the Navy. The only place I never saw Jews was in the Navy." The armed forces are one of the only places where Jews are actually represented in exact proportion to their percentage of the American population.
Yehudah Mirsky:
We know that globalist is a code word for Jew, right? Warren Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway invests in all kinds of international companies. And when Donald Trump is railing against globalists, he's not talking about Warren Buffet. There's a reason why they always go to George Soros. There's a reason why they always talk about New York. Now, the thing is, again, what's so interesting is that some of the critiques of globalization are quite real, and the honest truth that I, and I say this in terms of, internal for and the Jewish community, I think Jews, including Orthodox Jews like me, to give reckoning about the roles that we played in globalization.
Yehudah Mirsky:
I can tell you a good friend of mine, who's a tech investor, good liberal, an Orthodox Jew, very prominent tech investor. After the rise of Trump, we had a heart to heart. And he said, "Yehudah, I got to tell you, I got to tell you, the honest truth is yeah, I wasn't paying enough attention to the people that I was putting out of work by shifting my investments from certain kinds of industries to other kinds of industries and overseas." I think it's okay to raise those questions, I think it's okay for us to ask themselves those questions. When people argue that this is part of some kind of Jewish conspiracy to take over American life and that its maligned and that it seems athwart with people's interest, so I think yes, obviously, for some people, it's very on the table.
Yehudah Mirsky:
And in many ways, the fact that sort of these, the more international minded Jews tend to take more left wing or leftish dovish positions on Israel, comports very nicely with this. Sort of the enemy, there's the enemy without and the enemy within. And the enemy within are these liberal Jews who are trying to undermine Israel. That's how you can support Israel and despise so many American Jews.
Yehudah Mirsky:
You even see these splits inside the administration. In recent weeks as everybody's talking about annexation, good reporting, analysts that I really know well, and trust, have said, there's sort of a split inside the administration on whether or not Israel should be, it's a good idea for Israel to be talking about annexing the territories and how Friedman, the ambassador who's a true believer in, even though he's like this New York lawyer, a true believer in Israeli right wing politics in a very strong ideological way. Yeah, really thinks Israel should annex territories, it's a great idea.
Yehudah Mirsky:
Jared Kushner, on the other hand, is saying, well, Israel should sort of dangle annexation as a way of getting the Palestinians to the table, and it's no accident that of the two of them, Jared is the one who's more connected to these global elites. Just last night, Tucker Carlson, literally last night, Tucker Carlson was blaming Jared, the Jewish son-in-law banker from New York for Trump's seeming failures to get on top of the riots of recent days.
Yehudah Mirsky:
So you see these elements playing out sometimes very explicitly and sometimes implicitly. And also part of the trick as with so many things these days, part of the trick is somehow be able to take a step back and analyze things and sift out and, what parts of these criticisms make sense and what parts don't? What are genuine occasions for thinking and what is just, because also remember, all of the ambivalences and questions these days are being weaponized by people through the internet in really complicated ways.
Yehudah Mirsky:
By the way, if I have you all here, there's a podcast I highly recommend put out by the Center for Humane Technology called Your Undivided Attention. And it's people who were ethicists at Google and Facebook and are not anti-tech, but are brilliant explicating the ways in which so many things on the net these days are designed precisely to inflame rather than enabling us to work constructively.
Yehudah Mirsky:
And I think we have one more question, Sharon?
Sharon Rosenberg:
Yes, one more quick question for you, just curious as to what's your current research and what are you currently working on and looking to work on next?
Yehudah Mirsky:
Oh, thank you, that's very kind. So I have two books I'm trying to finish over the summer. One, as was mentioned, I did a book on Rav Kook, Abraham Isaac, very important figure in Jewish Israeli and Zionist history and thought. I did a brief book on him a few years ago, and I'm publishing a slightly revised edition in Hebrew, with a large Israeli trade publisher. And just this morning, or just this morning, I was working on both the projects I'm about to mention now, so that hopefully will be out in a few months.
Yehudah Mirsky:
Also, I'm publishing a very large ponderous scholarly tome on Rav Kook's early decades. And I have to say that given the politics of recent weeks and months, being able to dive into capitalistic discussions in late 19th century, Lithuanian rabbinic culture has actually been a very welcome relief. So that's that. And there'll also be a lot in there about the early history of Zionism and so on.
Yehudah Mirsky:
The next projects, I very much want to write on political thought and on human rights. I'm really interested in the very deep relationships between human rights and theology because both of those are very bad ideas of the sacred for human rights, the individual human being is sacred. Theology is very much about one's relationship with the sacred with God. Much of the history of human rights, many ideas of human rights originated as religious ideas.
Yehudah Mirsky:
And I'm trying to figure out how best to conceptualize that and might be some sort of, an intellectual history of the aspects of the early post-war years, the immediate aftermath of World War II, when a number of pieces of our world as we know it, sort of post-colonial nation states, human rights, free trade, ideas of civil rights and desegregation and so forth, and apartheid as well, all sort of came together. So that's kind of what I've been thinking about. We'll have to see, some more literary/theological projects as well. But that's very kind of you to ask.
Sharon Rosenberg:
Great. Thank you very much. Thank you for giving your time to us today.
Yehudah Mirsky:
Oh, my pleasure. My pleasure. Thank you all, and for listening so patiently.
Sharon Rosenberg:
And thank you again, and thank you always for joining us. As I mentioned, we'll be in touch to share a link to the recording when it's available. And we hope to see you in other virtual events coming up. You have a full calendar and more events continue to be added. So please keep checking your email and looking on our website, looking on our social media, and more information will be shared for all that. And thank you again and enjoy the rest of your day and stay safe and healthy.