Eitan Hersh: Can the Jewish Left Talk With the Jewish Right?

Transcripts are lightly edited—please excuse any imperfections.

David Bashevkin: Hi friends and welcome to 18Forty where each month we explore a different topic balancing modern sensibilities with traditional sensitivities to give you new approaches to timeless Jewish ideas. I’m your host, David Bashevkin, and this month we are continuing our exploration with a bonus episode about Jewish outreach. This podcast is part of an exploration of those big juicy Jewish ideas, so be sure to check out 18Forty.org, that’s 1-8-F-O-R-T-Y.org where you can also find videos, articles, recommended readings, and weekly emails. As I was preparing our series on Jewish outreach at the end of January, an article dropped in The Wall Street Journal that really caught my attention.

It actually reminded me of something I had read earlier. It’s an article entitled, “Where the Left Studies the Right:At Tufts, an elite Boston-area university, Eitan Hersh teaches a class in 20th century conservatism.” This is an article that was written by someone named Barton Swaim.

Right away it caught my attention. I don’t know what it is, but Eitan Hersh, that sounds like a very, like, I mean, obviously Jewish, but like, it sounds like somebody, like, everyone knows an Eitan Hersh. I was like, I need to know more about this. So I read the article and it was absolutely fascinating.

The article begins with a question of who do you think knows one another better? Do you think politically liberal people know conservatives better or do you think conservatives know liberal people better? And it’s a fascinating question. It’s about how we argue, how we debate, how each side sees each other. It always catches my attention when people think this way because so much of what I have the opportunity to see in the window that 18Forty provides is being able to kind of look out and listen to hear other sides that you don’t agree with, that you don’t see eye to eye with. And I read this article and I just want to read a little piece of it because I think it’s so fascinating.

This is what it says:The upshot, a great many liberal VIPs in America simply don’t know much about their adversaries. The belief that conservative views are an outcome of either stupidity or perfidy, ignorance or greed or both is consequentially very common among the country’s cultural elite. Plainly universities by transforming themselves into compounds of conformity and homogeneity bear some responsibility for this state of affairs.

I think what has happened on campuses like ours, says Eitan Hersh, a professor of politics at Tufts University, is that the communities here have convinced themselves that they are all on the same page, that you walk into a classroom and you can expect that everyone present is pro-choice, pro-LGBT rights, and everyone is fighting the good fight for social justice. Many schools’ mission statements convey a similar kind of message. We’re all on the side of goodness and light, not like those people. Everything seems fine until, Mr. Hersh points out, there’s something people on campus disagree about, as there was after Hamas invaded Israel in 2023.

When that happens, students don’t know how to deal with the situation at all. They don’t know how to argue and debate, how to learn from other people about their views. It’s just a total mess. And I read this article and first and foremost I was reminded because he was also featured nearly a year ago and I remembered and shared this article in Boston magazine entitled, “A Conservative Thought Experiment on a Liberal College Campus.”

Last semester, Professor Eitan Hersh and a class of undergrads embarked on a mission to understand conservative thought. Here’s what’s happened. This was written by Rachel Slade and published in March of 2024. And in that article it actually talks about how he presents his own religious affiliation to his students.

It is so fascinating. This is what the article says. Here’s how that game can play out in real life. What are your parents’ hopes and dreams for you? Hersh asks the class.

Just to be happy, a student says. Follow your passions. They want me to be whoever I want to be. Some say their parents want them to be successful at whatever job they choose.

I would never say any of those things about my children, Hersh responds. He wants his children to serve their family and community. I want them to follow the precepts of religion. Hersh attends an Orthodox synagogue and in his spare time, which is minimal since he commutes to Medford from Newton and splits childcare duties with his wife, enjoys listening to a podcast of conservative rabbis around the globe debating current events and esoterica through halacha or Jewish law.

It was a dagger in my heart when I spoke to him. I’m not going to give it away now, but he was not referring to 18Forty, though he is a listener. I won’t hold it against him or the Boston Globe that we were not the podcast being referred to in this article. While he admits he may be a flawed father, that mentality is going to make them happy because it’s giving them that sense of purpose and efficacy.

When you have a God-given purpose of what I’m supposed to do and what my parents expect from me, he adds, you’ll be happier. So this is someone who obviously understands both the Jewish world and the political world. And when I was reading this article, I said, this is somebody who I want to include and discuss this notion of Jewish outreach that we’ve been discussing over the past month. The idea of how we could articulate a vision of Judaism that can reach beyond any one community, because the problems that he addresses in that classroom are so similar in so many ways of the very points of contention and division that divide the Jewish people.

And I’m not saying I have the answers, but I do think a commonality of the problem is that we have forgotten how to talk to one another, how to share ideas, how to discuss contentious, ideologically significant issues that shape our lives and commitments and passions and ideas of morality and ethics and how we should lead our life. This isn’t just a political conversation. It’s a conversation in many ways that I believe the Jewish people need to find a way to have right now. It’s that notion that I’ve been repeating over and over again.

And I re ally look at this as a mission-driven community and the mission that I want to really put at the center of 18Forty is this idea of developing a beit midrash for the study of the Jewish people to be a platform and a window for us to truly understand each other. And I think what differentiates us in so many ways is that it’s not always going to be inspirational. It’s not always going to be what you agree with. It’s not always going to be people from within your community, but we are learning, hopefully collectively, with how to talk to one another and engage with these ideas.

And that’s the very idea of what I believe is at the heart of what Jewish outreach is, to learn how to reach beyond ourselves, to talk to one another about the things that are most significant. And because they’re most significant, they’re sometimes the hardest things to really have conversations about. But to know that there is a place where people can gather and think about the very future and the bonds that tie the Jewish people together is an absolute privilege. And that is why I was so excited to invite Eitan Hersh and really compare notes with the work he does in the classroom and maybe dream for a little bit about what we could potentially do with the Jewish people.

It is my absolute privilege and pleasure to introduce Professor Eitan Hersh, who teaches at Tufts University and whose work has recently been featured in not only Boston magazine, but more recently The Wall Street Journal. We’re going to hear all about his incredible work and the relevance to everything that we talk about in 18Forty. Thank you so much, Eitan, for joining us today. 

Eitan Hersh: It’s my pleasure.

I have to say right off the bat that I’ve listened to your voice so many times, but only at 1.5 speed. So this is my first time hearing you at 1.0. 

David Bashevkin: I will try to talk as quickly as possible. And I get that a lot now.

So when I meet people in person, I have to start speeding up the way that I talk. So I very much appreciate that. And I’m curious if it even surprised you that I reached out and felt that your work is so in concert with everything that we really try to do on 18Forty. But before we get to kind of your reactions, can you describe and explain what is unique about the course you are teaching in political science?

Eitan Hersh: Sure.

So, you know, I teach other classes. I’ve always taught like I teach a big class on elections, you know, and we learn about all the topics, gerrymandering and Citizens United. And I try to do what I think like every teacher should do, at least politics teacher, you know, understand what each conflict is. Why do people disagree? Is there an ethical dispute? Is there a legal dispute? Is there a dispute about the facts? And, you know, that seems to be the job, although I’m increasingly realizing like that’s not what every faculty member does when they approach a subject.

But what happened, I don’t know, four years ago, five years ago, I started seeing that our students who are graduating in political science, I think like didn’t have a big understanding of how conservatives think about politics, that they’re in a bubble. It’s not their fault. I think their parents and frankly, a lot of people you and I probably know are in bubbles too.

David Bashevkin: Sure.

Eitan Hersh: And it’s hard for people to access the other side of disputes on a campus. I think that’s especially true with controversial, sensitive issues.

David Bashevkin: Maybe you could give me some examples of like, what were the tells that your students were in a bubble? Do you remember, you know, thinking five years ago, listening to the way your students would speak and say, wow, they’re kind of in a bubble.

Eitan Hersh: One thing, as you probably know, because it’s been a big news story about higher ed in general, you know, I think there are whole topics like immigration, say, or LGBT rights, where if one side of the topic is perceived as sort of like threatening to someone’s identity, it kind of is off the table.

And, you know, you can take a topic like I do mostly contemporary public policy topics. So take a topic like affirmative action. That’s a controversial topic. It’s in the courts.

It’s been sort of dismantled in terms of education. It’s still around for employment. And there’s like interesting debates about it. What are the two sides think? What are the ethical disputes? What are the moral, the legal disputes? What facts are on each side? And I thought that just students, when you just had conversations with them about any of these topics, they just came with the assumption that we are all on the same page fighting the good fight and that there was like nothing to learn here.

So even though I hadn’t previously taught many of those topics, you know, I teach about now gun rights and all these topics, divorce, so many subjects that they weren’t having access to and they weren’t able to talk about and have good conversations about. You know, I remember early on the Tufts Republicans, which is like a beleaguered group of five or six students or something like that. They wanted to have an evening session and they asked me to participate about family values. OK, and now I don’t usually do evening stuff on campus.

I’m home with my own kids, but I thought I would do this. And it was a big event, actually. A lot of people came and we talked about marriage and family and things like that. It wasn’t particularly political.

And there were a number of students in the room who didn’t say anything the whole time. And then afterwards, I went up to them. I said, you know, is there anything you want to add to the discussion? And they said, we’re actually not part of this group. We’ve just never really been able to have a conversation about these issues.

And so we came here. And so we didn’t want to like kind of interfere. And that made me just realize, like, whoa, there’s just a lot of important topics that our students, either because they feel uncomfortable talking about them or they don’t have the material to talk about them. They never get a chance to learn about.

And, you know, unlike elections, which is my main thing I teach, a lot of the stuff that we talk about in this class on conservatism is really much more personal and about what kind of life you want to live and all that. And so it’s a very special class for that reason.

David Bashevkin: Were you surprised by the amount of attention that this class was getting? Meaning, how did you make sense of the fact that you’re teaching this course? I also teach a public policy course. I teach in Yeshiva University.

I do something somewhat similar, but I would be baffled if the work that I’m doing in a classroom suddenly is getting the attention of The Wall Street Journal. How did you make sense when they first approached you and they want to highlight your work? Did you realize how unique the work you were doing actually was?

Eitan Hersh: That’s a good question. You know, I think I understand the world. There’s a home base for people who are interested in sort of viewpoint diversity in the curriculum.

And it’s people who tend to study like political philosophy, political theory. And there’s not much about this on the contemporary public policy world. And that was sort of what I was introducing that’s somewhat new. That is like I went around to like find every online syllabus I could find before I started teaching this class.

And most of it is really like in the theory world. My sense was that students wanted contemporary stuff. I also got a sense that they were put off by like anything that felt like handholding, like kumbaya, let’s hear how both sides think, let’s have a debate class or a discussion class. There was something about a class that’s called American Conservatism that feels illicit at our campus.

Like it feels like we’re talking about stuff that you shouldn’t be talking about. And some students said this, that they, you know, they showed up for the class because they wanted to see some kind of—

David Bashevkin: Fireworks, like something’s going to go down.

Eitan Hersh: Yeah. What was the guy who had the, like the Jerry Springer show?

David Bashevkin: Yeah, exactly. 

Eitan Hersh: But it turns out like, it’s not like that at all. Of course, it’s not like that. We’re just learning.

We’re learning these things. And of course there is disagreement, but I think there’s something that feels special about being in the room when you’re introducing subjects to students for the first time. I guess we all do this in all of our teaching, but more than another, my classes, I think I feel like I’m opening my students eyes to something they’ve never thought about before. That’s like, oh, I can see why someone who’s a reasonable, smart person who is a upstanding person can reach a different conclusion.

And I, before this thought they were crazy. And now I think I might still disagree with them, but I understand that. And that feels amazing. 

David Bashevkin: We’ve been talking kind of about it and I want to discuss it.

You know, my father had a teacher named Rabbi Besdin who used to teach in Yeshiva University in JSS. And he would have a famous statement that he’d always tell his students. I don’t want to talk about Torah. I want to study it.

I don’t want to talk about it. I want it. So I don’t want to just talk about your class. I kind of want to understand your class.

Like what is it? So can you take me through one topic and a topic that you specifically saw that aha moment that your students are receiving the other side, they’re clicking with a worldview that even though they don’t hold it, you now see they clearly understand it where you really see that shift very clearly. How do you present it? Take me through a class and an issue that avoids you must have parameters or maybe it’s a general introduction that avoid just the classic escalations that everybody associates with college campus where students are like surrounding you, like the original Jordan Peterson video that I’m sure we’ve all watched and just being shouted at and he’s going back and forth. Your class clearly doesn’t devolve into that. So take me through a class if you can, or at least your introduction, the parameters of how you avoid discussing sensitive issues without it collapsing.

Eitan Hersh: Yeah. I mean, first of all, it’s probably obvious, but the class is big. It fills an auditorium, but it’s self-selecting, right? So the students who come in are the ones who are smart and mature and want to engage with this stuff. Some of them feel like deeply connected to some subjects, right? We’ll talk about why do people oppose trans rights and there’s going to be non-binary identifying kids in the class.

And that’s tricky. I think the weeks that touch on racial issues about crime and punishment about affirmative action, people are in those classes who feel like they have very high stake in the issue. And so I just generally set the agenda. We’re going to talk about these hard issues.

We’re going to talk about stuff you probably disagree with. The point is that we’re learning. Everyone’s going to try their best to articulate things in respectful ways. And then we’re off to the races.

I’ll give you an example of a topic. If we talk about family policy, I’ll start by saying basic, we may be providing, there’s an amazing literature review from medical research that basically suggests that marriage is really good for people. Like it’s good for your health. It’s good for your physical health.

It’s good for your mental health. It’s a hard thing to study because it might be a selection effect where the people who are healthiest become married. But the evidence is pretty compelling that marriage is good for your health. And it’s really good for your children.

It’s pretty unambiguous that a kid raised by two parents does really well relative to other circumstances. Okay. So we start off there and then I might put in a little snide remark about, well, okay, let’s follow the science. If we believe in science, how do we get everyone married? And we talk about why do people get married and where does the government come in? Does the government ever help people get married or does it ever prevent people from getting married? And there’s a lot of circumstances in which it might, right? We talk about periods of warfare where a country went to war and a huge number of young men died and then there’s a problem.

And what do we learn about the circumstances for women in those historic moments? Or there’s the China one child policy, which led to a big asymmetry of how many men and women there were. There is the issue of incarceration in th e United States where a huge number of young men in some demographic groups are basically taken out of marriage market. And then we talk about the changes over time, right? So how did we get to a situation where basically college educated people are in nice marriages and raising kids who are having great outcomes. And over the last 50 years, the non-college population took a really different path where all of a sudden marriage is very uncommon.

Most of my students of course, come from like fairly well-to-do families and they went to private schools. They have two parents who took care of them and most of them are liberal, right? And then they look at the data of like what exactly happened here where this life is not accessible to the majority of non-college educated families. And what is the role of culture in producing that outcome? What’s the role of economics and what’s the role of government policy? So we’re pulling in stuff from other countries. We’re talking about history, we’re talking about data, and we’re trying to answer the question of if marriage is really good for kids and if it’s good for people, should government have a role in encouraging it? Should we avoid ways government action that discourages it? And so now we’re having a public policy discussion where everyone’s on the same terms, right? Where basically like you can think marriage is a disaster, but like if you thought it was useful, like on average good for society, how would you craft a society that makes it easier for people to be married?

David Bashevkin: It’s such a fascinating example and the way that you talk it through, like you have to set the terms first of like, it’s almost like a court case where both sides have to kind of agree on what is the evidence that we’re going to bring to bear on a matter like this.

Have you ever had a topic where you see is a much deeper pressure point? You have to give it a special introduction every single time or you see it will go off the rails.

Eitan Hersh: That’s a good question. I mean, I think that I’m sensitive to the issues around LGBT policy, race policy. I do talk about Israel for about 30 minutes in one class on foreign policy.

Like these are issues that I understand there to be disagreement with in the room and people are sensitive to them, but I kind of teach them all in the same way. It’s very helpful like just in any class to bring texts into this. So it’s not me talking. I get to assign the text and then we’re reading it.

So for example, there’s a conservative gay writer named Andrew Sullivan.

David Bashevkin: Sure. I read him a lot on Substack. Yeah.

Eitan Hersh: Okay. So I assign a piece about why Andrew Sullivan doesn’t like the queer agenda, but it’s coming from a guy who was at the forefront of the gay marriage fight in favor of gay marriage. This guy’s been living with HIV for years.

David Bashevkin: Sure.

Eitan Hersh: So he is the voice that I’ve asked the students to hear about what he thinks from a conservative perspective is wrong with essentially trans rights as they’re construed in public discourse. What am I doing there? First of all, of course, in no part of the class am I really articulating my views, but I’m showcasing perspectives that they might not have heard before that comes from a position of some either personal or scholarly authority.

David Bashevkin: What do you find is the reaction of students emerging from your class and what is the reaction you want? And I kind of want to lay out a few possibilities. 

One is that students change their mind. Some students, they walk past it. I get the conservative agenda better. The other is they react in the opposite end.

They come out, they’re crazy. This is wild. The other is they could deeply, deeply disagree, but now they maybe change the rationality of why they are disagreeing because now they’ve seen a new side. How are students reacting? And just explain to me what you want their reaction to be.

Eitan Hersh: That’s a good question. I haven’t heard them being sort of reactionary.

David Bashevkin: Digging their heels in even further.

Eitan Hersh: Yeah.

No, no. I think the standard answer is that they’ve gotten smarter and they know why they disagree with people better. It’s interesting on some subject, like on gay marriage, they’re just sticking with it because it’s a controversial one and it comes up. There’s interesting evidence about whether gay couples, when they adopt children, they seem to get divorced at much higher rates than straight Sure.

Okay. And there’s increasing evidence on this. And for some students, for many, maybe most students, the divorce rate among gay couples has absolutely no bearing on their commitment to gay marriage. Their commitment to gay marriage is entirely about either the morality of it or what they think is the legal argument.

It’s not, it doesn’t matter, but it’s useful for them to know, to like reflect on that. 

David Bashevkin: My position is deliberately not accounting for the actual health of the marriages that I think this right produces. They’re kind of forced to hone in on their position a little bit.

Eitan Hersh: Right.

I think in a lot of situations there is, what I hope is that there’s movement towards mutual understanding and people making better decisions. I don’t like the framing that like, you know, I’m helping like the left be smarter and fighting the right. That’s not how I think of it. I think about like, in order to make good decisions, we need to hear from multiple perspectives and I’m hoping to do that.

But I do think there are a lot of students in the class who are, again, they’re raised by two parents. They’re probably going to go off to work at some, I don’t know, consulting firm or something like that and going to live in the suburbs. And, you know, they’re not going to live a world of uncomplicated progressive politics. They’re at a weird moment now where they might be in that, in that world, but they see what’s coming.

They’re going to realize there’s a lot of complexity with the role of government in people’s lives and, you know, what their preferences are. And I think some of them grow up in the class, basically. Somehow in the bubble of the university, they’re not expected to be adults. They’re expected to be like ideologues and purists.

And here I’m basically inviting them into adulthood. And I think they really appreciate that. Some do like feel l like they have a moment of crisis of transformation where they didn’t realize that they had thought something they knew. I think a place where you and I have a shared goal.

And again, I just want to take the chance to say like, I’m such a fan of your podcast.

David Bashevkin: Oh, that means so much to me. Truly. When I reached out, I was like worried.

You’re like big celebrity now getting featured in The Wall Street Journal. And it was a beautiful feature. You were so gracious. I was very excited to speak with you.

Eitan Hersh: Well, this is probably outside the point, but I was very excited to speak to you. I told my kids this morning how excited I was. I’ll tell you, my podcasting is like, I listened to you and I listened to Dovid Lichtenstein and I listened to Efrem Goldberg. And my children are just like, please just put on something, some music.

But they were less excited. Okay. There’s something very special that happens in the class with a lot of students, which is that they might themselves identify as progressive, but they have a family member. They have a friend who they’ve never been able to connect with because they see them as so oppositional.

I mean, we have kids who maybe they grew up in an evangelical family and they came to Tufts to escape their family. There’s all sorts of circumstances that you see over the years like that, that are really truly difficult family circumstances and get tools to understand their own people. And of course, I want them to understand politics. That’s the job.

But there is something very personal about them understanding their own family or friends in a new way.

David Bashevkin: That’s very much what I had in mind because so much of my conception of what we’re even trying to do on 18Forty is exactly that. I’ve been using the terminology of creating a beis medrash, a house of study for the Jewish people, for us, for our views, and just serving as a window for people to look at communities and ideologies that they may not hold, but be able to just listen to somebody else explain their worldview and what they’re struggling with, which is particularly hard in the Jewish community, which I really want to get to in a second. Before I get there, I do have just one or two other questions about the actual course before we then kind of add in the Jewish element.

One question I have is you mentioned they don’t know what your personal political views are. I am looking at you now. You are wearing a fairly large yarmulke with clips, which I’m not even sure why that is necessary with a yarmulke of the size that I see. But I’m wondering, number one, do they really not know your political view? Do you address how your religious affiliation, how being a public Orthodox Jew may or may not affect somebody’s policies or politics? And secondly, I’m so curious, why don’t you disclose your personal views? Meaning isn’t so much of what you are trying to teach is allowing them to listen to somebody’s personal views and be able to create space to actually allow them to hear your personal political views without feeling that pressure, like teaching them how listening to somebody’s personal views is not a pressurized thing that I’m telling you to agree with me.

Eitan Hersh: Okay, so first of all, I don’t wear a kippah at school, at work. Actually, my whole life, I’ve basically been putting on and taking off and putting on my kippah. It’s funny, this is the environment that’s sort of like in between my personal life and my-

David Bashevkin: The third location.

Eitan Hersh: Well, I’m not sure exactly what to do, but I decided a while ago not to wear a kippah.

David Bashevkin: Because all the articlesidentify you as an Orthodox Jew. 

Eitan Hersh: Right. When I’ve been asked about my Judaism, I say I attend a Modern Orthodox synagogue. As I’m sure you appreciate, the labels are difficult for me.

But yes, I attend an Orthodox shul. I don’t wear my kippah in professional settings because even though I’m not hiding my Jewish identity, even though my politics don’t come up, I bring up Jewish examples all the time in class. But there is something to me that’s a struggle that I don’t have the final answer to. I’ve never been fully comfortable with it, is the certain judgment that comes with it in the settings that I work.

I just, I can’t do it. I don’t know. 

David Bashevkin: It’s too much for you. No, no, no.

You can be honest. I’m sorry if I assumed, but that’s a real thing, meaning you don’t want to get into Orthodoxy with your professional colleagues.

Eitan Hersh: I don’t. I always had to struggle.

In high school, I was a Senate page. I went down to Washington. I lived in Washington, DC, and I worked in the United States Senate. You could see me in old videos on C-SPAN with my kippah on.

I always remember these moments of Jesse Helms, who was a famous Republican senator from, I think, North Carolina. He came right up to me on the first day and said something like, we Baptists are friends of the Jews and friends of Israel. I just thought—

David Bashevkin: I get it. I get it.

You want, especially in our line of work, you want to be seen on your own terms. Now, you’re going to elicit those automatic response. I totally get it. But answer the latter question.

Leaving out the rthodox Jewish identity with your students, why don’t you disclose your personal views?

Eitan Hersh: First of all, especially in office hours, the way I do office hours is anyone can come in and if they want a private meeting, we’ll do that separately. But office hours are a time for discussion. We get deep into issues, and I do want to push them as a teacher to take the other side. Usually, that means I’m taking the conservative side.

But if I need to, I’ll take the opposite side too. I just want to be able to have that flexibility as a teacher. I want them to just be able to kick the tires from all directions, and I want to do that too. But it’s hard to hide your own identity and your own view so much.

In the last year, I’ve done a lot of research on campus antisemitism. I’ve written a ton on that. I write op-eds. If they wanted to, they could probably find out what I think about some things.

But I guess I don’t like every class discussion devolving into as a Jew this or as a Christian that. I just want to understand the issues in a more objective kind of way. But the way I introduce Judaism into the class, let me give you an example of where it comes up. 

David Bashevkin: Yeah 

Eitan Hersh: The way I introduce the topic of Christian nationalism is I dress in a dress shirt and pants and a jacket to class.

So I said, if you came to my neighborhood in Newton dressed like I’m wearing right now on a Saturday morning, random people might say Shabbat Shalom to you, might wish you a good Sabbath. And I ask the students, what do you think their motivation is for doing that? They say, oh, it’s to wish people well, whatever. I say, okay, so do you intuit an agenda that everyone needs to be Jewish? No. Okay, so now let’s do the Merry Christmas version of it.

What do we think about Merry Christmas? Okay. I’m saying Merry Christmas to everyone and you walk by. And so I sort of started that. I said, that is what we call light Christian nationalism.

And then we’re going to draw the spectrum from light to heavy. And tell me where you think it gets uncomfortable. Where do you think there’s a real trade-off? 

David Bashevkin: What’s the step after Merry Christmas? Because I love that. I always have a joke every year that I wish “Merry Christmas according to some Rishonim.”

That’s my joke, which is a very deeply rabbinic joke because there are some medieval commentaries. They marginalize Christianity less, especially for non-Jews, as not being a form of idolatry and that it’s fine that non-Jews can be Christian. So I say Merry Christmas according to some Rishonim. But what’s the next step that you take them on that spectrum? I’m so curious.

Eitan Hersh: Okay. Well, an important policy when we talk about in class, as I’m sure you know, about a dozen states have just in the last five years adopted universal vouchers for private schools, including religious. We can be jealous of the listeners down in Florida who get whatever, the $8,000 check per year.

Okay. So if the Jewish community, I wouldn’t say it exactly this way in class, but if the Jewish community really values a certain insularity, so we can sort of have our own education system, which requires a lot, and we want to keep out some elements of a secular culture. And as we all know, it’s really expensive to do that. How do you do that if you are a poor evangelical family in Alabama? How do you do that? How do you do that where you’re avoiding materials in the library or in the public school system? How do you build a community around religion? And do we want public dollars to be able to use so that families can make some of those choices by themselves or don’t we? And that’s a point in which the students will disagree strongly with one another about what to do. There’s a book, I’m trying to remember exactly the name of it, by Rod Dreher.

He basically says that Christians should do what Orthodox Jews do, which is like for a long time, the Christian right had tried to take control of government by winning elections and change the culture of the country through that. But it’s kind of too hard. Republicans can win elections, conservatives can win elections, and it’s hard to deal with some of the cultural problems, the divorce, bad habits, bad behaviors. Dreher suggests that Christians basically follow Orthodox Jews and create more close-knit communities.

David Bashevkin: That’s so fascinating. I just want to jump in because the name of the book I looked up is called The Benedict Option, a Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation by Rod Dreher. I’ve never heard of this book, but that’s fascinating. He explicitly draws upon the Orthodox Jewish community.

Eitan Hersh: Yeah. Now, as you know, and as I know now from a lot of the research I’ve done around the Jewish community, the correlation between income and being able to have an observant Jewish life is shocking.

David Bashevkin: Agreed.

Eitan Hersh: Like a real point of, I think, embarrassment.

David Bashevkin: It is cruel. It is cruel that we have become dangerously close to transforming Orthodoxy into a socioeconomic group, which is, it’s heartbreaking to me. 

Eitan Hersh: It’s heartbreaking, but it’s also therefore quite easy to empathize with a poor Christian American family that for very similar reasons wants to create some separation between themselves and secular culture. And then the question is, well, like, how can you do that? And what does that mean for everyone else?

David Bashevkin: So let me ask you, there’s been some discussion in this election, I’m just curious what you saw when Trump got elected that the outrage and the sense of moral indignation and the rallies and all this, we haven’t seen it in the same way.

And I’m wondering if you noticed the same thing among your class and what your explanation is, is there a real conservative shift left among college students? Are they changing? Are people thinking about, or are they just exhausted? Like we don’t have any energy left. What do you see in your classroom? Because you’re teaching now on this election. I’m so curious what you’ve noticed.

Eitan Hersh: Yeah.

I mean, it’s a question that people talk about a lot, whether students are demoralized or what. I do think that A, this wasn’t the same kind of surprise that it was to the public in 2016. And B, yeah, I think there is a bit of a backlash that manifests in students kind of thinking they know some of their friends probably voted for Trump, which is sort of unimaginable four and eight years ago, that like, maybe this whole frat over there, they probably voted for Trump. Because, you know, I think on a lot of issues unrelated to like war in Israel, like I think issues around race and gender and immigration, there’s a perception of maybe overreach on the democratic side.

And so I think more students can get why people voted for Trump this time than could get it four or eight years ago. But I don’t have like data on that. That’s just my sense. In that Wall Street Journal article, they mentioned this story, which is true.

We were talking about university reforms after the conflict last year. And one of the students said they endorsed the position of the Republican Party, which is that students who celebrate a terrorist organization, and if they’re foreign nationals, they should be kicked out of the country. And a number of students in the class, in the open class in front of 100 of their peers said, yes, I agree with that, basically. That is unimaginable in previous years.

David Bashevkin: Unimaginable.

Eitan Hersh: Unimaginable that student would publicly take a position like that and not feel they’re going to be canceled and whatever. That’s new. 

David Bashevkin: So here is my real question that I really want to get to.

I know we’ve been talking for a while, but if you can indulge me and if you have to go, you’ll let me know. We’ll find another time because I’m not going to let you off. This is the deep dive question that I really want.

Eitan Hersh: So, you know, you send me a calendar invite for 30 minutes, but I listened to your podcast, so I scheduled an hour and a half for myself.

David Bashevkin: You knew better. You knew better. So here is my question. I think of 18Forty in a lot of ways, like this beit midrash, it is a house of study to understand the Jewish people, to be able to peer through a window and listen to people who you may disagree with, you may vehemently disagree with, but at least give you an understanding of either issues, opportunities, struggles that other people have in their Jewish lives.

Not all, but a lot of our listeners are Orthodox or Orthodox adjacent, right? They’re interacting. And I think that we need a course for the Jewish community. And I think we need two different courses. We need one course for the non-Orthodox community to better understand the Orthodox community.

And we need a separate course that teaches the Orthodox community how to better understand the non-Orthodox community, especially after October 7th, when we are coming together much more and we are thinking, I think people are considering what are these familial ties that bind the Jewish people together. My dream is to go into Lakewood and teach the parallel of your course, but how more liberal Jews think, and to go into the heart of a really liberal Jewish community, a non-Orthodox community, and teach this course about the Orthodox Jews. My first question is, have you ever even thought about this, of what it would mean to adapt your course for the Jewish community? 

Eitan Hersh: Like, not in great detail, but I agree it’s a good idea. And it’s a good idea in two different ways.

Let me just say one way that you didn’t bring up exactly, but I just, I think about all the time, which is that the Jewish community needs more on-ramps. And what I see among students and young people who are like wearing Magen David necklaces out of nowhere, like I worry a lot that they have an entry point maybe at a Hillel or a Chabad. There’s no way they have an entry point into a synagogue, and they really don’t have a shomer Shabbat community. Students ask me about Shabbat observance.

And when I describe what Shabbat is like for me and my family, which is like the best, I mean, the kids are running around the neighborhood. There’s no work in technology. Like I’m letting them in on something that they think is amazing and totally inaccessible, even if they would want it. Correct.

If you grew up in a place where there’s not a lot of shomer Shabbat families, it is a little lonely.

David Bashevkin: Didyou grow up in such a community?

Eitan Hersh: I grew up in Providence. Providence had this great advantage where like, even the families that were not keeping Shabbat all live within a few blocks of each other. Gotcha.

So we always had like, you know, football, but in high school, I went to a public high school and on those long Shabboses, like Shabbos afternoon is not like the most fun thing. That’s for sure. 

David Bashevkin: Correct. And I think that understanding and providing that window to just understand what are the ingredients that allow a community to preserve or have a communal Shabbat experience would be so fascinating, not through a kiruv lens, meaning that’s the difference.

Like I’m not making an argument and saying this is what you need to do, but something much more descriptive. These are the ingredients. This is the thinking process. I’m very moved by saying we need more on-ramps.

The language that we’ve used in the past is, you know, in every room there are always neon exit signs. And what we need in the Jewish community are neon entrance signs. But dream with me for one second. When you think about bringing your course, what do you think are going to be the difficulties and the pitfalls that you would have to navigate by bringing a course, you know, you teach in the political science realm and bring it to the explicit socio-religious realm?

Eitan Hersh: I’m just thinking out loud here.

I think of something that’s really been quite moving to me is how your podcast and others can really give people an invitation into a room where they’re not invited. I think about like maybe like a Halacha Headlines podcast on a debate about some controversial subject. And it’s amazing. It is so humanizing to watch a Rav in Lakewood and a Rav in Yerushalayim disagree strongly about something.

And wow, what if everyone listened to it? The problem is it’s in yeshivish and you can, you know. 

David Bashevkin: Yeah, Headlines and Dovid Lichtenstein, just to be clear, is a dear friend of mine, very, very close. And I happen to have been one of the editors of the original Headlines book. I’ve always said I’m like the Modern Orthodox Headlines in a way.

I’m very different as a host than Dovid. He’s got a, I think he drinks more caffeine than me. He’s a little bit more combative than I am at times. But continue.

I want you to dream out loud about this. 

Eitan Hersh: No, what’s special is I think like watching people in a community who have mutual respect disagreeing, which I think that program does feature because they’re talking on the same terms with the same basic structure of Halachic authority. Their disagreements can be very strong, but very respectful. And I think that doing that in a way that’s open to more people and in more directions, not just about halacha, of course, but about the project of the Jewish people and the Jewish community and what we’re doing differently.

You know, part of me like thinks that I don’t know how much of the disagreements or differences across the Jewish spectrum come from just like how central is this to your life? Like how much of your life revolves around this? Or how much is it about actual tenets of faith? It’s hard to know.

David Bashevkin: It’s similar to how you introduce your course. Like you first, you know, unpack the legal issues, the moral issues, the ethical issues. And I think in a similar way, and I’m also thinking out loud, if we were to develop a course like yours within the Jewish community, one of the things you would have to first unpack is like, what are the motivators? How do we understand this issue? Is this a theological issue? Is this a societal issue? Just an emotional issue? Is it just how deeply you care about it? What actually animates our differences? Like how do we even get here? What are we even fighting about at this point? But I’m curious in your own experience, you must have conversations like anybody on the kind of the sensitive topics in the Jewish world.

And for somebody in your space, maybe not as much as a podcaster, surely you are sometimes in rooms talking with other Jews who you’re the one liberal Jew in the room or you’re the one conservative Jew in the room. You know, somebody like myself, I’ve had experiences with both almost on a daily basis. There are some rooms that I’m the progressive liberal rabbi, you know, in the Orthodox world. And there are some rooms where I am like the very from me, I’m Reb Elchonon Wasserman in some people’s eyes, you know, usually people who don’t know who Reb Elchonon Wasserman is.

I’m curious for you, what do you think are the most contentious issues in our community that in your opinion, would merit, you know, being one of the you teach a 13 week course, what do you think those most important issues are in those first, you know, four or five weeks?

Eitan Hersh: So it’s like whether we are in a common project. One thing that is I’m sure you remember like the study from Pew from I don’t know what year where, you know, like … Orthodox Jews and not just do not think they are, you know, like Orthodox, you say they more in common with basically religious Christians than with Reform Jews. So I think it’s like trying to understand what is the project that we have going on together? What in what sense do we have anything in common with folks across the Jewish identifying spectrum is really hard, because not everyone will agree that we are on the same page or on different pages.

David Bashevkin: Or how different our pages, some may say we’re in the same book, different chapters, some would say totally different volumes, some would say they’re not even in the book.

Eitan Hersh: Right, and sometimes when you like just change the setting, you can like do something amazing. So for example, I have to plug my brother who runs a Ramah camp … 

That camp is a day camp. It has like hundreds of staff, including 80 Israelis, it pulls in some families from the Modern Orthodox world. It is like any camp just like the best place in the world …

There’s all sorts of people at a Conservative camp.

David Bashevkin: Sure. We love camp Ramah. I’ve long said and I got this from my mentor.

I heard this once from Moish Bein, who said that you could make the argument that the greatest kiruv organization of all time was camp Ramah. It revolutionized the whole generation of Jews.

Eitan Hersh: Right. My brother, like when he brings in the Mishlachat, and they are like the diversity of Israel now is in Nyack, you know, religious and secular and Sephardi and Ashkenazi, everyone’s there.

And you go for a Shabbos, you’ll hear someone like read Torah with a Temani tune, and like everything is is a mix, but they have it’s a delight because it’s camp. Yeah, common project is an amazing camp. And then if you can be adjacent to that project, and just meet a lot of other people from different walks of life, like that’s just gold. But it’s not a discussion.

Camp is not a discussion. It’s the focus is not solving the problems of the Jewish people. But it does solve the problems of the Jewish people. You know what I mean? Like, there’s something about it.

David Bashevkin: Being ina different location taking I totally agree with you.

In some ways, it’s like the phenomenon. If you meet somebody from your own community in a third location, you’re on vacation in I don’t know, in Italy, and you bump into somebody from your community, all of a sudden, you feel much, much closer, so long as they’re not asking you to be the 10th of the minyan in the middle of the afternoon on vacation. But like, all of a sudden, you feel like, oh, my gosh, we have a kinship when you bring Jews to that third location. But I think that is the kind of the founding question is what do we do with our familial ties that still bind us? Do they still even bind us? Do we have a vision of a common project that addresses the totality of the current Jewish People?

Eitan Hersh: Here’s something I learned from the class that I teach that might be helpful, right, which is that the left and the right, for example, in politics, they just care about different things sometimes, like this is a class on public policy, and like three or four weeks is on family and religion.

That’s a lot because if you’re putting together a class on public policy that’s driven by the agenda of the conservative side, you’re going to focus on totally different things than if it’s a public policy class focused on the issues of concern to the left. In the Jewish world, we have basically a similar thing where communities will talk past each other, because the way that they think about Judaism is different. You know, there are some communities for whom gender equality issues are just the number one thing. Like, that’s it.

That’s it. That’s it. And that’s what they want to talk about. Because that’s really what is the divisive thing from their perspective of Jewish communities coming together and other communities.

It’s not it’s not the main thing at all. And maybe Israel’s the main thing. And the idea that you might have anti-Zionist like or the far right, like that is like the thing that really creates tension. And so like understanding not just what another side thinks, but the terms in which they understand the debate.

Like if you were imagining this course, that’s who I want to focus on.

David Bashevkin: No, I’m literally imagining what would it be like to go into a non-Orthodox setting? You know, I don’t know, like Limmudis non-denominational and trying to explain why would a community actually feel strongly about the importance of separating men and women and vice versa to go into Lakewood not to advocate for anything, but to try to understand what is the worldview of somebody? Why would even somebody make gender equality their top issue? What would draw somebody to that issue? Just thinking about it now, give me advice because I don’t know if this course is going to happen. I don’t know if we’re going to be actually co-teaching it together. Don’t get nervous.

You haven’t signed anything. But to me, one of the hardest issues to talk about, and I actually plan on doing a series on this on 18Forty fairly soon, is who is a Jew? How we define our very Jewish identity. And this is an issue that is so painful because it’s to the core of somebody’s identity. And it is a question whether or not, you know, am I seen as a full Jew, you know, just having a Jewish identity in everybody’s eyes? And the answer is no.

We are still fighting over the very definition of a Jew, patrilineal descent, matrilineal descent, conversion standards. How would you teach a course about who is a Jew in Orthodox and non-Orthodox circles?

Eitan Hersh: Yeah, I mean, so number one, like the big advantage of education, formal education, is that we have a way to do it. Like we know the algorithm for teaching, which is basically we’re going to read something together and then we’re going to discuss that stuff. And we’re not trying to actually necessarily articulate our own view.

We’re trying to understand the view of the authors that we read. Again, like for me, half that time, it’s like understanding data analysis, but half the time it’s understanding someone’s actual position. And people know how to behave in that setting. Actually, that’s what I find that actually in the university world, one of the most points of contention is in this in-between space, the guest speaker who’s kind of a teacher, but kind of an advocate.

And there’s sort of a Q&A positioning, but like, you don’t know, like that often is disaster for two reasons. That person is usually not a teacher. And that setting is not a classroom.

David Bashevkin: I’m nodding vigorously because that point of knowing how to behave in certain settings, Agnes Callard made this point in a speech she gave in the University of Chicago recently.

We don’t know how to behave online, on social media. Like part of what makes formal education so magical is because from a very young age, first, second, third grade, we kind of imbibe the terms of the room. When there’s a teacher in front, when you’re in front of the room, nobody gets up and is like, actually, I want to stand in front. We kind of know the terms of the room.

It’s very hierarchical, and it’s very clear what everybody’s role is. So it is sometimes much easier to discuss things more formally. And where it gets more difficult is where we haven’t been given the terms yet. You’re talking about a guest speaker, you know, in Talmudic terms, I would say, kal vachomer ben beno shel kal vachomer, all the more so when it comes to social media, when you see people discussing these issues online, that’s when things like blow up, because we don’t have any norms or rules of discourse, really.

Eitan Hersh: Right. And I think like what these sensitive issues have in common is that the stakes are sometimes misaligned, where on some issue, someone can have a very high stakes interest in an issue, and the person on the other side does it. And so that generally leads to conflict, because the person for whom it’s low stakes doesn’t care that much, basically. And in a classroom, that all goes away.

I mean, a classroom with grades and some, you know, stick is helpful. But even without that, I mean, I find that adults, children, if you’re in a classroom setting, you know how to behave. And when we’re trying to understand a shared text or a set of texts, we can do this a lot better.

David Bashevkin: Imagine for a moment bringing a group, I keep on mentioning Lakewood, it could be Williamsburg, it could honestly be the five towns, it could be just like a very strong Orthodox community.

And the way I’m imagining it is one would be kind of what is the worldview of the non-orthodox world to the Orthodox community? And what is the Orthodox view to a non-Orthodox world? Do you think it would be smarter to bifurcate that these are two different groups or put them all in the same room? Do you think your course, part of the magic is, is that your students are actually somewhat homogeneous or would you have to do a totally different course if it was heterogeneous?

Eitan Hersh: That’s a great question. I do have probably 10% of the class is probably more conservative, but yeah, I think I would maybe choose different topics or organize it slightly differently if I was teaching in a more heterogeneous group. I do think there is value in doing something within separate communities first anyway, before you bring people together because they can ask questions and engage in the material differently than if they’re in one big room together. I think the thing to avoid in these situations is too much of a kumbaya attitude.

It’s funny, I have a colleague who’s a Muslim colleague and we’re doing some writing together on basically statistical analysis of Israel-Palestine conflict. And he said something that really resonates with me. He said something like at his mosque, they sometimes have dialogues. And he thought, oh, I don’t really want to have a dialogue with these people.

I want to have it with their uncles. And so in order to create the space to have the deep conversation, you need to have a series of steps. And one step is just giving people the ability to have a more frank conversation on their own terms, to learn about the other terms.

David Bashevkin: I love what you said because I have a friend, Elie Schulman, he’s actually a former guest on 18Forty.

And we spoke with him about the value of group therapy. And I’ve spoke with him at length about what is the magic? Why is it that group therapy? And it’s not just in the therapeutic world. There’s something called T-groups that they launched in Stanford. These kind of like groups where people are discussing issues.

And he said his teacher, his name is Lou Ormond, would always say, go to the sound of the canon. What makes discussions great is when we actually lean into the friction, when we find that place, otherwise you’re not able to have momentum. You know, in 18Forty, sometimes the way that we talk about it is turning into the crisis. When a car starts losing control, you usually take the wheel and you turn away from the conflict.

But actually turning into the conflict is the way you get a hold of the car. But this is actually particularly difficult in the Jewish community because in the Jewish community, I think we instinctively know that we’re not kumbaya, but we love talking about achdut or Jewish unity and the importance of Jewish unity. But we never talk about the importance and the need for being uncomfortable, for being challenged, meaning it’s very easy for us post-October 7th for all Jews to emphasize, it’s so important to emphasize Jewish Peoplehood or beyachad nenatzeach, together we will win, or the importance of unity. And we have these kind of kumbaya slogans that every community for however brief a period, all champions, but no one’s willing to actually do the difficult work of talking to each other and fighting and just learning about one another.

Eitan Hersh: It’s curious because I think two things are going on. One thing that’s going on is that I think you have a special constituency here, a special community that loves complexity. And I do too. That’s my audience too.

And it’s not that big of an audience, I think. I wish it was. 

David Bashevkin: I’m actually surprised, I’ll be honest with you, when I first started 18Forty, I thought this would be a very, very niche community, very niche. We’re not massive, we’re not the biggest, but I have been surprised by the appetite for complexity that is laser focused on our religious emotional lives rather than politics, rather than economics, or even halacha.

We’re not fighting out the complexity of some minute halachic detail like you would see on a Headlines podcast, but complexity about community, about our lives, about relationships. But it’s not a massive community.

Eitan Hersh: I shouldnot have said that. I’ll speak for myself.

In the higher ed world, one thing that I struggle with a lot is that even though, yes, I teach this popular class and it’s featured in The Wall Street Journal and all that, I do worry that I’m only impacting a small number of students that maybe most faculty don’t agree with my project or think it’s not valid. I don’t know. I guess I don’t have a strong enough sense of how big the market is. I think that even at like a Shabbat table, if you’re on a Shabbat table of fairly homogenous view people, and you bring up the complexity, sometimes you ruin that Shabbat table.

David Bashevkin: And there went the meal. 

Eitan Hersh: So that’s one thing. The second thing is as a political scientist, I like to think about coalitions a lot. And the Jewish community, all Jewish communities, or nearly all, want a shared coalition around Israel.

That can bring people together for that reason. Of course, there is some disagreement and there’s been conflict over that disagreement internal to our community. But for the most part, the reaction to October 7th and what came next is a lot of communities have a shared goal and they know they need as expansive of a coalition as they can to serve that goal. At the community level, there are sometimes things like that.

More than one community wants a kosher market or a mikveh or something, not all want day schools. There’s a whole bunch of things that we’re not in a coalition on. I think some of the stuff that you’ve highlighted so well, I’m just picturing myself driving to work in tears, listening to an 18Forty episode about family dynamics, where people are not on the same page with someone they love about Jewish practice.

And that’swhere you have a need for a coalition, because you have someone who, you know, their kid or their parent is on a different page and they need to figure it out.

And so there are these places where you need a coalition. You need to reach out. Israel is a good example. Those family dynamics are a good example.

Sometimes community utilities like the kosher market are examples. Antisemitism is an example. But you know, when it comes down to it, probably gender issues are not something that in and of itself needs to be resolved in a community. The question is, where is the common project and what do you need to do to build a coalition? Again, sometimes that’s like a micro thing and sometimes it’s a macro thing, but it’s not discussion for its own sake.

It is somewhat strategic in why we are having the discussion, what we’re trying to get out of it, and why might we do that better together.

David Bashevkin: It’s a really brilliant point you’re making. And it’s one that I never really articulated the way you did, but there are sometimes issues and efforts, particularly in the Orthodox world, to kind of get everyone on the same page. Like there’ll sometimes be white papers, there’ve been white papers out about gender issues.

You want certain policies around LGBT issues or whatever it is. And I actually kind of agree with you that it’s only important to get on the same page when there’s a need for that coalition. But I think sometimes there are some issues within the Orthodox community, within certain bounds, that actually disagreement or having different shades makes us much, much stronger and we would be much better off as a community if we did not get on the same page and we had a little bit of variety. I don’t want to get too in-depth on certain issues, but sometimes maybe it’s a rabbinic dream to have real conformity of practice within the Orthodox community.

And I sometimes think that our strength is highlighted even more when we’re not on the same page, because you don’t always need a coalition that’s actually part of our strength in our community, that we shouldn’t needlessly insist on coalitions when one isn’t necessary. Sometimes you actually like competing restaurants. 

Eitan Hersh: Right. I mean, another way to put that, if you were going to take a political science class, you would call it a long coalition, which is essentially what a political party is.

It’s not about any individual issue. It’s about that you’re playing a long game and the community’s playing a long game. And in order to play that long game, you need to know who’s in your group and you need to know what they think. Sometimes you have to give them stuff that you don’t care about.

You know, sometimes maybe in some community, the Orthodox community needs to ask the Reform community to help support an Eruv, even if it’s not important to the Reform community. And why should that Reform community want to do that? Because they’re, we can call it achdut or we call it the long coalition. We have shared values and shared interests and need to understand the other parts of our community enough that we can hold it together when we need to.

David Bashevkin: The long coalition.

I love that terminology. My last question before we do our rapid fire questions, and you were clearly prescient in elongating the calendar invite from a half hour to an hour and a half. Well done, Eitan. I very much appreciate that.

But I’m curious, you are a religious Jew. You’re also a political scientist. How do you see the difference in the way people hold political views versus hold religious views, the way that they identify with those respective issues or those are respective identities? What are the differences, if any, between holding a political view and holding a religious view?

Eitan Hersh: It’s a really good question. So, you know, historically what’s happened over time is something quite dramatic.

It used to be that different religious groups had different political affiliations. So, for example, like the religious Catholics were Democrats and the religious Protestants were Republicans. And then over the last generation or two, there’s been a different kind of polarization that’s happened, which is essentially religious people of all denominations and sects and faiths have become Republican and secular people of all those same faiths are strongly Democrat. So there’s a lot of religious, non-religious polarization.

For the most part, we think that the religious values are the core values and the politics are to be downstream from that. But sometimes, and there’s some evidence for this, it’s actually the opposite, too, that you, for whatever reason, identify as, say, more conservative, could be your personality, your sense of morality, whatever it is. And that leads you to a religious practice that comes downstream from politics. Yeah, but for the most part, that’s not the way we think about it.

And I probably not the way we should think about it. In other words, religious values are core and the politics are downstream. And so I think a lot of the Jewish community now is in a point of thinking what politics is downstream from their religious values. And one of the great things that we can all debate together and you and I put together some curriculum for the Jewish community is to help people work that out.

Because I actually think it’s something we talk about, but don’t actually talk about in an organized way, organized meaning in our own brains. Like, what are our religious values? And to what extent is different political beliefs or practices or votes downstream from that religious value?

David Bashevkin: I cannot thank you enough. Really, really thought-provoking and just continued success in your work. I hope the day comes where we are teaching in the same beit midrash house of study and really kind of adapting your approach and your methodology to the Jewish world, because I think there is such a desperate need for it.

And I’m just very moved by everything that you’ve been doing and speaking about. I always end my interviews with more rapid fire questions. My first question is, you have any books that you would recommend that have taught you or open your eyes for how to present issues and topics to the other side? How do you frame ideas to cultivate healthy dialogue and debate? What are the books that helped you understand that or gave you a window for how it’s best done?

Eitan Hersh: That’s a good question. Oh, my goodness.

I think there are books that are good for learning about the other side because the terms that they’re on are totally different from yourself. Sure. So like there’s a new book by Coleman Hughes about racial politics. That’s about the kind of anti-racism type topics that many of my students are interested in, but it’s a critique of them.

And so understanding that worldview is really important. Some people are more data oriented. There’s a book on the syllabus that I teach called The Two-Parent Privilege by an economist, and she basically walks through the evidence of what’s happened to marriage and families, and what do we know about the answer of why it’s happened? So again, I don’t think there’s one right way to approach this. It’s sort of like opening your eyes to different books that talk about topics you care about and maybe in ways that you haven’t thought about.

David Bashevkin: I love that. My next question, if somebody gave you a great deal of money and allowed you to take a sabbatical with no responsibilities whatsoever to get a second PhD, what do you think the subject and title of your dissertation would be? And if you could be so kind while you answer, could you tell me what your actual PhD is in?

Eitan Hersh: My first PhD is in political science. That’s what I studied, but I was a philosophy major as an undergraduate. And sometimes I hang out with my now dear friend and neighbor, Yonatan Brafman, who teaches Jewish philosophy at Tufts.

He’s my colleague and he gets to think about what is the nature of obligation? And that stuff is endlessly appealing. And so maybe I’d go back and do Jewish philosophy and hang out with Yoni more.

David Bashevkin: Your PhD in political philosophy studied what in specific? I’m so curious.

Eitan Hersh: It was about the role of public records and micro-targeting databases in how political parties and campaigns interact with voters.

I wrote a book called Hacking the Electorate. That was my first book. And that was about sort of like how campaign targeting is influenced by government records.

David Bashevkin: Absolutely fascinating.

My final question, I’m always curious about people’s schedules. What time do you go to sleep at night and what time do you wake up in the morning?

Eitan Hersh: 11 to 6.

David Bashevkin: 11 to 6. Fairly consistent.

And thank you for not hemming and hawing. A lot of our guests fight that last question. I appreciate being so forthcoming and more than anything, thank you so much for your time. Professor Eitan Hersh, thank you so much for joining us today.

It’s an honor to be with you. Speaking to him had my wheels really, really turning to imagine what would a course like this mean for th e contemporary Jewish world? Because the question that we began with, and that was the question that Barton Swaim introduces his article, is do conservatives know more about liberals or do liberals know more about conservatives? And it’s a question I ask not in a political sense. It is a question I oftentimes ask in a religious sense. Because one of the great gifts of 18Forty, which also can cause a lot of strife, is that we have listeners on the very far right and on the very far left religiously, whatever you want to call that.

In the Haredi community, in the American yeshiva world, we also have listeners who are on the very far left who feel extraordinarily comfortable. In the non-Orthodox world, we’re in the very progressive Modern Orthodox world, and of course we have many listeners who are someplace in the middle. And it really opens your eyes to the way what triggers different communities. Where are the pressure points where we don’t understand each other? Where are the places, what are the topics that make conversations so difficult? Because if we’re ever going to achieve in a real sense a semblance of Jewish unity, we have to be willing to walk through the forest of Jewish disagreement.

It is that ability and capacity to have very serious disagreements, but be able to find some construct, some conceptual underpinning that still ties us together, is I think the hallmark of what the Jewish People represent, and the very characteristic that has preserved us and made us so resilient through the exile. As we stand on the precipice of redemption, just imagine for a moment, and I invite you to reach out, send emails, what would this look like? What would it really look like? Let’s think practically for just a moment. What would it mean to really learn about one another? What would it mean to really take one step towards understanding one another? How could we do this? Yes, the political world needs it, but the Jewish world desperately needs it. And it’s people like Professor Eitan Hersh and this community that gives me that hope at first sight that one day we’ll achieve it.

So thank you so much for listening. This episode, like so many of our episodes, was edited by our dearest friend, my colleague, Denah Emerson. If you enjoyed this episode or any of our episodes, please subscribe, rate, review, tell your friends about it. You can also donate at 18forty.org/donate.

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