What Is Happening With Jewish Students and Antisemitism?

David Bashevkin: 
Hi, friends, and welcome to 18Forty, where each month we explore different topic balancing modern sensibilities with traditional sensitivities to give you new approaches to timeless Jewish ideas. I’m your host, David Bashevkin, and we are continuing our coverage of the war in Israel and the aftermath after the October 7th terrorist attack by Hamas. This podcast is part of a larger exploration of those big juicy Jewish idea, so be sure to check out 18forty.org where you can also find videos, articles, recommended readings, and weekly emails. It feels like in many ways the story that began to unfold in Israel took a very, very sharp turn over the last few days, maybe week or so, where that distance, that geographic distance from the horrors in Israel almost seemed to lessen as so much of the ugliness that we’ve been seeing through the news has begun to emerge throughout Europe, in the United States, on college campuses, in universities.

Really, all throughout society we’ve seen a turn, an upsurge of really ugly antisemitic ideas and it’s like a bizarre time to live in. I’m not even sure. I’m not equipped. 18Forty, it’s not really designed to respond to the breaking news. I’ve always been telling people I like responding to problems that are 2,000 years old. I don’t like responding to breaking news. But in a way, over the last 10 days, it feels like this is a resurgence of a 2000-year-old problem, a 3000-year-old problem of simply a distaste, a disgusted, a hatred for the Jewish people. It’s been rearing its head in all sorts of ugly ways and I wanted to spend today’s episode to highlight some very important voices and ideas that I think give language and perspective to everything that is happening right now.

I was never the kind of person who got very worked up over antisemitism. That’s the honest truth. I need to admit it myself. I think it’s happened a few times. I think once I was in a room with fellow Jewish educators and someone dismissed some of the antisemitic attacks that had been happening in Crown Heights in Brooklyn. I remember where I was and I remember speaking up, but it wasn’t that intense. I was like, “I think you might be a little too dismissive of what is happening right now.” But I’m not bragging. I don’t think this is a good thing. If I was ever the kind of person who got worked up over New York Times coverage, AP coverage. I was like, “Okay, no, no. We’re doing okay. We’re trotting along.” I was never part of the outrage we’re seeing of it’s never been worse, it’s never been this bad. I mean, obviously, that’s not true having the Holocaust just a century ago.

But I never got that feeling, that ominous feeling that we are part of a recurring story and that could even emerge within our lifetime. And a lot of that changed for me on a very personal level in the last week. I have been trying my best to be vocal and constructive in thoughtful ways. It’s not always easy. I really don’t like to respond to unfolding news and especially on social media, like many on Instagram. There was an Instagram influencer who took a poll. I haven’t been sharing my regular softer. I don’t know. She usually posts on fashion content. It’s a very famous influencer, somebody who actually grew up in the same community as me. I know her and her family. And I saw her take a poll and, actually, I don’t know, I thought it was appropriate that she took a poll. Somebody asked her, “When can we get back to regular content?” And she put up a poll, “Do you want it to be regular or do you want it to be about Israel?”

And I wasn’t shocked. I was actually quite heartened. It broke down almost 50/50 and I appreciated that because I feel that internally. There’s a part of me that the intensity of this moment feels like we can’t turn away from it. We need to confront it. We need to embrace it. We need to talk about it. Yet on the other hand, we need a respite. We need to be able to exhale, inhale, be able to take breaths and really reflect on my life. So I hope we’re going to highlight something very important in this episode and something frankly that I find incredibly uplifting. There is an author that has been on my list as 18Forty guests probably since the inception of 18Forty, but not for the reason that we had him on today. His name is Matti Friedman and he is one of my absolutely most favorite authors.

He’s written a couple fantastic books. The book that you may be familiar with, our listeners, is called Spies of No Country, which is the history and the birth of the Mossad, a really fabulous page turner. He recently came out with a book, and we do discuss this because it is so of the moment, called Who By Fire, which is about Leonard Cohen, the musician who we famously know from the song Hallelujah. And that’s not how people pronounce it. That’s how I pronounce it, just because I’ve been brought up, I don’t really say that word because it has the name of God in it. But you can pronounce it the old-fashioned way or you could hum along to it. Who By Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai, both of which are absolutely phenomenal. The reason why I wanted to have him on for so long is he has a book called The Aleppo Codex: A True Story of Obsession, Faith, and the Pursuit of an Ancient Bible.

He published it in 2012. God willing, one day we will have Him on because this book, it’s one of the few books I’ve read more than once in a one-year sitting, I was like, “I need to read this again.” It’s so phenomenal. It’s the story of the Aleppo Codex, which we’re not going to get into now, but it’s the oldest manuscript of the Torah, likely the manuscript that the Rambam Maimonides used to actually copy and correct his own edition of the Sefer Torah, which the Rambam talks about in the Laws of Sefer Torah, I think in the eighth chapter. Just a phenomenal book. That is not why I had him on now. I had him on now because I felt like we are in a moment where the attention that the conflict between Israel, Eretz Yisroel, Acheinu Bnei Yisroel, our brothers and sisters, and the terrorists in Hamas is being refracted through the media and to see people protesting in the thousands.

And I’m not talking just about protests for a ceasefire. I’m not just talking about protests for people who feel a kinship or a familial connection to the people of Gaza. I’m talking about people who are actively saying, educated people who say, “We support the resistance. We support the struggle of Hamas.” Openly educated people, this is a terrorist organization and it is a really hard moment to digest, to see that out in the open. It’s a hard moment for Jews to watch. I think it should be a hard moment for any person of conscience to watch. I usually draw pretty wide lines of what I can countenance, particularly among Jews and even in the world, and there’s just so much that I’ve seen openly, publicly in society, people who carry themselves and look in the mirror and say, “I am an educated, thoughtful person,” and they are really taking a side with a terrorist organization.

It is mind-boggling how unfortunately effective the campaign and the strategy to demonize the land of Israel has become within my lifetime. I don’t think it was like this 20 years ago, honestly, and I could be wrong, but it has been successful in winning over the hearts and minds of many, many young people. And Matti Friedman has written some incredibly important articles about the role of media and how the conflict of Israel is refracted and thought of in the American or the global mindset outside of Israel, outside of the Jewish community. He originally wrote an article for Tablet magazine in 2014 called “An Insider’s Guide to the Most Important Story On Earth.” This article is from 10 years ago and it is probably even more relevant now. He talks about how the Associated Press covers Israel. He got into quite a bit of controversy because he said openly that we self-censor our stories because when Hamas gives us information, we don’t always disclose that and we very often are parroting information that is simply not true.

It is a jaw dropping article. It is a really important article. He actually has an entire follow-up to that article called “Ongoing Controversy Around The Most Important Story on Earth” where he responds to critics of that original essay. Both are worth reading, and I would recommend a third article because this is really the reason why I reached out. And that third article, which he wrote for The Atlantic, which has a very, very vicious paywall, so you’ve got to subscribe if you want to read the whole article, but frankly it’s worth it, it’s called “Israel’s Problems Are Not Like America’s.” And in that article he talks about how the story of Israel and Palestine is almost retold through an American lens as a story of a race war, like what we think about all of the struggles of civil rights, a civil rights war. And he explains why that is patently incorrect.

I’ll just read a paragraph from that article. He writes, “The story of the Jewish minority in Europe and in the Islamic world, which is the story of Israel, has nothing to do with race in America. My grandmother’s parents and siblings were shot outside their village in Poland by people the same color as them. If you stand on a street in the modern state of Israel and look at passersby, you often can’t tell who’s Jewish and who’s Arab. Many Israelis are from Arab countries and for the six million Jews living in the heart of the Arab world, which includes 300 million people, and the broader Islamic world, which is 1.5 billion people, the question of who’s the minority is obviously a tricky one. Most Black people here are Jews with roots in Ethiopia. The occupation of the West Bank is supported by many Israelis mainly because they have rational fears of rockets and suicide bombings, tactics that weren’t quite the ones endorsed by the American Civil Rights Movement.

“All of this is to say that although Israel, like America, is deeply messed up, it’s messed up in completely different ways. Nonetheless,” he says, “the belief in a fundamental similarity has caught on. While following the protests in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014, which to me seemed just unnecessary, I saw a sign that read “From Ferguson to Palestine. This was puzzling,” he writes. “American soldiers still occupied Iraq and Afghanistan and American aid money was flowing to repressive regimes throughout the Middle East and beyond. If activists were seeking foreign inspiration for a domestic movement, they had hundreds of ongoing ethnic conflicts to choose from. But something about Palestine struck Americans as relevant to their own experience.” And what he basically explains, and this is the subtitle of the entire article, “When many Westerners peer out at the world, what they’re really looking for is a mirror.”

He wrote this in 2021, and I just want to say two things about Matti Friedman. Matti Friedman is not afraid to criticize Israel. He was very vocal in his criticisms of Israel during the judiciary reform. Matti Friedman is not a hard line right-winger of the sort. I don’t know where to place him because I’m not really so good at this stuff, especially when it comes to Israeli politics, but he is a extraordinarily thoughtful voice, especially now. And I reached out to him to really try to give some texture to explain what is happening in this moment. Why is this issue galvanizing Americans in universities throughout the country? What are we witnessing? What are we watching? Why is this an issue? While there’s an ongoing war in Ukraine and Russia, you don’t see this type of vitriol around that, but all of a sudden Israel and Palestine are involved and the rhetoric becomes crazy. It goes upside down.

And I reached out to him because I know he’s thoughtful. I wanted somebody who really I think doesn’t have very partisan political views. He’s not afraid to criticize his own, which is why it is my absolute privilege to introduce our conversation with Matti Friedman. Matti, thank you so much for joining today. It really means a great deal to me.

Matti Friedman: 
Thank you so much for the invitation. I appreciate it.

David Bashevkin: 
I want to begin because this is really a moment where diaspora Jewry, worldwide Jewry, Jewry outside of Israel, I feel like Israelis understand this more intimately and American Jewry are seeing an up swelling throughout the world of the attention of what is going on in Israel in ways that are really startling and can be upsetting to people to see there are many other wars happening right now and all of a sudden we see professors around the world issuing statements about contextualizing and understanding and analyzing in ways that I don’t think we’ve seen for other terrorist attacks for other current wars. I’m not talking 30 years ago, wars that are happening right now. The amount of statements and moral verbiage being spilled out right now is unusual and I return in these times to an article that you originally wrote for Tablet magazine. You expanded upon it for Atlantic. That really discusses the undue attention and some of the misunderstanding of the attention that Israel gets, particularly outside of Israel. And I was wondering if you could share with me just your central thesis of what that article was.

Matti Friedman: 
I hope your listeners can bear with us for seven or eight hours while we slowly go through it. The article, which I wrote in 2014, but was really based on my experiences at the AP as a correspondent and editor between 2006 and the very end of 2011, it’s a look at what’s gone wrong with foreign press coverage of Israel. And this is a decade old at this point, but I think that unfortunately what I wrote is even more true now than it was at the time. And there were a few angles to it. One is just the scope of coverage, the amount of coverage. As you were mentioning, the amount of attention paid to this place and to our conflicts is really beyond proportion to any other conflict in the world. And the example that I gave there was that, when I was at the AP, we had a staff of about 40 people covering Israel and the Palestinian Territories.

So print journalists, photographers, TV crews, covering a story that’s about I guess 14 million people, Israelis and Palestinians. And that was dramatically more staffed than we had at the time covering China, which is a country of 1.3 billion people. It’s more staffed than we had at the time covering India, which is also 1.3 billion people and it was more staff than we had at the time in all of the countries of Sub-Saharan Africa combined. That’s 50 something countries. There were more staff in Israel than in all of those countries. Sometimes when I speak to Jews about this, I say, “We covered Israel more than China,” and people look at me like blankly like, of course, it’s Israel. And I think we have to step back and remind ourselves that Israel is 1/100th of 1% of the surface of the world and it’s very important to us.

But if the news claims to be a rational analysis of events on planet earth, and that is what it claims to be, then this makes no sense. It can’t be that a conflict in a country this small and a conflict that is after all quite a small conflict in terms of the loss of life that it draws every English professor at every mediocre college in America who couldn’t find Israel on a map that feels that they need to say something. So, obviously, we’re in an event that isn’t really in the realm of the rational. It’s pressing a very deep button in the West, which it needs to be understood outside the realm of journalism. It’s in the realm of philosophy and history.

David Bashevkin: 
Yes. So tell me, what is the button in your view that it does press that every, as you so artfully called it, every English professor in a mediocre university throughout the world feels like, “I need to step into this.” This is more than news. We have conflicts that are taking place right now, but every higher education is twisting itself right now in statements and statements, returning back to statements. You didn’t see this with Ukraine and Russia. I don’t remember seeing this for the Oklahoma City bombing. I don’t remember seeing this for 9/11, though things happened afterwards. There was discourse, but I don’t remember this level of people tongue-tied weighing in statements. What is the button you think this is pressing in the world discourse?

Matti Friedman: 
I think stories about Jews in the West are one of the deepest ways that western cultures process their own problems. There’s a very good book written about this called Anti-Judaism by a professor from the University of Chicago and he gets into the history of this very strange western thought virus, which he’s very careful not to call antisemitism in part I think because often there are no real Jews involved. So it’s not about hatred of actual Jews necessarily. It’s about using Jews as an illustration of whatever is wrong in the world at a given time. So for early Christians, obviously, the ideology that they’re interested in is Christianity so Christians believe in charity and the Jews believe in greed. Christians believe in the spirit and the Jews are too preoccupied with the body. Christians, of course, believe in Christ and the Jews killed him. So it’s a way of illustrating your own ideology by illustrating what it is not.

David Bashevkin: 
It’s negation.

Matti Friedman: 
It’s a negation. Who are we? We are not Jews. And this gets carried through medieval times when people get interested in commerce and Jews are then presented as the embodiment of greed and the embodiment of the ugliness of money and markets. And then a guy like Karl Marx is trying to explain his new ideology and he writes an essay called “On The Jewish Question,” and he explains that Jews are the embodiment of capitalism, that the god of the Jews is money and that mankind must free itself not from capitalism, which is what you’d expect Karl Marx to say, but from Judaism. You can actually find this essay online. So he’s trying to explain that his enemy, the enemy of his ideology is Jewish. But of course, at the same time, the people who hate communism think the communists are Jews.

So it’s Jewish Bolsheviks if you’re a capitalist, but if you’re a communist, then it’s Jewish bankers. And if you’re a French nationalist in the late 1800s, then the Jews are cosmopolitans who subvert the body of the nation. And this really explodes in the Dreyfus case, which really is a debate about France but has almost nothing to do with actual Jews. It’s a way that French people are fighting with each other about what it means to be French. And the same thing happens, of course, in Germany. And there are many, many examples of this. And I think the Israel story is that. For people who would describe themselves as having liberal values, Israel has become an embodiment of everything they hate, so it’s colonialism, racism, militarism, nationalism. This is a story that allows them to channel all their negative energy toward one target who happens to be a very familiar target.

At the same time, by the way, there are similar stories on the right. If you’re on the hard right in America, you don’t like globalization, and Jews in that narrative are globalists. They’re people who are erasing national boundaries, who are importing immigrants into the United States. So there are parallel narratives on the right. Basically, these narratives, these anti-Semitic stories are a way of understanding the world for stupid people and they’re very, very powerful and we’re seeing an explosion of it right now.

David Bashevkin: 
Tell me, when you look at the landscape now in universities, in higher education, you’re somebody who’s educated yourself, I never want to be on the other side of education. It is very hard. But what do you think they are missing? There was a statement that was issued just recently, professors from an Ivy League school, talking about how important it’s to contextualize what happened and to realize the clock didn’t start on October 7th. It started much earlier. This is part of a larger story. Why do you think the instinctive reflex to contextualize with this tragedy misses or hurts the actual analysis? Meaning maybe they’re right. Meaning, why do you think when we superimpose these larger stories of racism and colonialism onto Middle Eastern analysis of what is happening, what gets lost in translation when we do that?

Matti Friedman: 
I think what the context here is supposed to do is to try to explain away this event in a way that allows people to keep their preconceived notions about who the victim is. The event is a real disrupting factor, because if you look at it, then you see that women were raped, that babies were murdered, that families were burned, that children were kidnapped from their parents and are being kept in tunnels, and 1,200 civilians were murdered in cold blood. So this is very upsetting. It’s confusing if you have this idea about who the victim is in this story and if you’ve really imbibed this idea that these Israelis are stormtroopers from Star Wars and the Palestinians are basically organic olive farmers who are out to create some peaceful commune and the Israeli militarists won’t let them.

The context here that’s being suggested is a way of explaining away this story. Yes, it’s true there was some unfortunate violence on the border, but you really have to understand who the real oppressors are here instead of understanding that what you’ve just seen is something very important for anyone trying to understand the Israeli psyche. I mean, why is there a military occupation in the West Bank? Well, one of the main reasons there’s a military occupation in the West Bank is because there’s a real sympathy for this kind of violence on the Palestinian side. The Israelis saw it in the 90s and that’s why they decided that the peace process wasn’t a very good idea. So you can use the context to understand the way Israelis think and to get a grasp of a very complicated conflict, but that’s not really what’s going on.

What’s going on is a way of maintaining this incredibly simplistic division of the world into oppressors and oppressed, which seems to be the guiding principle of a lot of higher education these days, which is unfortunate. So that I think is what the context is here. There was no similar attempt to offer context for 9/11 and there was no similar attempt to offer context for the terror attacks in Barcelona or in London. That was very clearly condemned as terrorism and it was clearly accepted that there is no acceptable justification for the murder of innocent people. And in this case, people seem to think it’s very important to explain why there is in fact a justification for it, and it’s quite unique.

David Bashevkin: 
Your article, to say the least, it didn’t sit in obscurity. It was passed around that I see it bubble up over and over again. I’m curious, in the reception to the article, in the dialogues you had afterwards with others, did you get any insight for how Israel or people who are sympathetic, I’m not just talking about the Jewish community mobilizing, but I’m talking about how the larger world can and should be making the case for Israel. From the almost reception of your article, did you have any conversations and learning how do you really change someone’s mind on this if immediately everything is filtered through this very old and overly simplistic lens?

Matti Friedman: 
It’s very difficult and sometimes you can just realize that someone is not going to have their mind changed. In such cases, I think it’s a waste of time to expend too much effort on it. But there are people who are just not knowledgeable and they’ve been given some very simple ideas and are amenable to having a more complex view of it. What I often try to do is ask people what they know about their own military and their own complicity in the actions of their own military. You’ll never meet an American who has any idea how many civilians have been killed by the American military in the last year. Sometimes I ask Americans. I have yet to meet anyone, how many civilians died in the campaign against ISIS in Mosul? No one knows. It’s just not an issue that’s of interest to Americans, including the Americans that are extremely passionate about Israel in a negative way.

And sometimes I find that, that conversation can be useful. It just gets people to consider why they’re so interested in this when they’re not interested in almost anything else in the same way. Why is there a boycott campaign against Israel when there is no boycott campaign against China? Isn’t that strange? I mean, it is strange. And if you’re speaking to an intelligent person, they might agree that it’s strange and it might lead them to examine the simple beliefs that they have. I try never to play defense. I don’t think it’s a good idea to start explaining about 1948 and the Holocaust and the settlements and rockets or whatever the details are that we try to use. It’s a very deep story. I don’t think Israel or Jews need to accept that we’re defendants. I don’t think we need to sit in the chair of the defendant.

Maybe somewhere there’s a country that has the right to judge Israel, but I haven’t encountered it yet. And it’s certainly not the United States. So I think we can be more, I guess, macro in our critique of the story, not to come in with a small explanation of why any given event is happening, but to attack the narrative as a very unique story that people have been told. Why were a 100,000 people out in the streets of London last Shabbat when no such thing ever happened when the Syrian Civil War was happening?

David Bashevkin: 
Correct.

Matti Friedman: 
So that is the kind of discussion that can sometimes be useful, because I think any intelligent observer understands that something very unique is happening here, and the explanations for it, again, are deep and are not in the realm of current events.

David Bashevkin: 
Aside from your articles, which are fantastic, I do email them out because I do think that it allows somebody to be pulled out of a very American lens for something that is far more complex, this is not riots or protests after racial violence, this is not George Floyd, this is something very, very different, aside from your own articles, are there specific thinkers or writers who you turn to? You mentioned the book Anti-Judaism. Are there other specific thinkers or writers who you think have done a strong job at presenting just the depth of what we are witnessing?

Matti Friedman: 
Do you mean in the last couple of weeks or in general?

David Bashevkin: 
In general, something more macro of what is happening.

Matti Friedman: 
Right. I mean, if we’re looking at the current events now, there was just a really good essay published, a similar critique published by a really good British historian named Simon Sebag Montefiore. It came out in The Atlantic, and it’s a look at how the narrative was created in this very strange idea that decolonization is the narrative framework for a terror attack that saw more than 1,000 civilians killed in cold blood. That’s worth reading. For my understanding of Israel, I often find myself turning to people like Yossi Klein Halevi, who’s written some excellent books on Israeli history, and other Israeli historians like Tom Segev and people who have an in-depth view of the story. I try not to waste too much time fighting the narrative war, so I don’t read a lot of media critiques having written one.

That’s not really what I’m interested in. I’m very interested in Israel and the country and the people in the history and Jewish civilization. All of that is very worthwhile. So I often encourage people who when I think they’re getting too sucked into the narrative war to read, I don’t think you need to hear this, but have you read The Tanakh recently? Have you read a great book about archeology in Jerusalem? There’s so much that’s great here that I wouldn’t want to let our enemies define the way we talk about ourselves or think about ourselves.

David Bashevkin: 
I appreciate that very much. Which leads me to the other topic I really wanted to talk about, because it seems like we are in a moment that in some ways really parallels a very niche story that you wrote an entire book about, and that is the book, I believe, it’s called Who By Fire. It’s a fantastic book about the singer Leonard Cohen, who our listeners may know from his famous song, Hallelujah. People sing it in a lot of synagogues to Lecha Dodi. There’s a beautiful rendition. But something very unusual happened during the Yom Kippur War where he was sitting off on some far off little island in Greece, I believe, and he hears a war taking place, the Yom Kipper War, we’re at an anniversary now for the Yom Kippur War, and he picks up, not speaking really all that much or maybe not any Hebrew, and decides to go to Israel to play music for the troops, for the Israeli army.

And there’s something about that story that really resonates in this particular moment where there isn’t a pull for a lot of diaspora Jews, Jews around the world who want to contribute and be together on the front lines. I’m wondering if you could tell me a little bit about what pulled Leonard Cohen to Israel during a time of war, during the Yom Kipper War, to play music, and what did he learn about himself and his art from that experience?

Matti Friedman: 
So there are a few things going on in that story. It’s October 1973, and on Yom Kippur, 2:00 p.m., Israel is attacked by the Egyptian army and by the Syrian army and that triggers this event that we now call the Yom Kippur War. And at the time, Leonard Cohen, as you said, he’s living on this Greek island. He’d grown up with a pretty significant Jewish education. He grew up in a community called Shaar Hashomayim in Montreal, which is to this day a great Canadian Jewish institution.

David Bashevkin: 
Sure.

Matti Friedman: 
His grandfather had been the president of the synagogue and his great-grandfather was also the president and if you go to the shul today, you’ll see oil paintings of Leonard Cohen’s ancestors on the wall of Shaar Hashomayim in Montreal. His other grandfather, his mother’s father, was a talmid chacham, Rav Shlomo Klinitsky-Klein, who came from Kovno in Lithuania. And he was an expert on Hebrew grammar. So he grew up steeped in Jewish tradition and in Jewish texts, but he traveled very far away from it by that point and although he never quite left, as we know, but he was leading a very different life. And then this war breaks out and he hears it on the radio and he’s having a personal crisis, which is unconnected to the Yom Kippur War. He believes that his music career is…

Matti Friedman: 
… which is unconnected to the Yom Kippur War. He believes that his music career is over. He’s in an unhappy relationship with the woman he’s living with. They have a child, his first child, Adam, who’s 1-year-old. He’s 39 years old, which is a prime age for a male crisis. And all of these things are… So I’ve heard. All these things converge on October 6th, when the Jewish people experience this as this crisis. And the crisis of the Jewish people in some ways suggests a way for Leonard Cohen to escape his own crisis. And he has this deep affinity for Am Yisroel and he realizes that this is a moment of great danger. And I think he surprises everyone, including himself. He leaves this little fisherman’s cottage where he is living on this island called Hydra, and he goes down to the port, gets a ferry to Athens, gets a flight to Tel Aviv and inserts himself into this war.

And he initially doesn’t know what he’s going to do. He doesn’t bring a guitar, he doesn’t come with an entourage. He just shows up in Israel and then happens to meet a few musicians in a cafe in Tel Aviv. And they recognize him. He’s a pretty major star. He’s had major hits, and no one can believe that he’s in Tel Aviv in the middle of the Yom Kippur War. And they convinced him to come down with them to play for troops in Sinai.And what ensues is one of the greatest, weirdest moments in the history of rock and roll, which is also an incredible Jewish moment. It’s this meeting between maybe the great diaspora voice of the 20th century, Leonard Cohen, I guess I could get some argument on that point, but definitely one of them, and Israeli Jews at this very Israeli moment, which is a war.

And we have an incredible photograph of Leonard Cohen standing next to General Ariel Sharon in the desert, the two archetypes, the two Jewish archetypes of the 20th century, this poet, this universal artist from the village and the whole folk scene of the ’60s and this general, the man of war, who represents Zionism and the rebirth of the Jewish people in this very tough part of the world.and they’re standing next to each other in a concert in 1973. So it’s really an incredible rock moment, and it’s an incredible Jewish moment that does end up changing Leonard Cohen. I mean, it definitely restores his faith in his art. He releases an album immediately after the war that has some of his greatest songs on it, including a song called “Who By Fire,” which is basically a Leonard Cohen riff on Unetanneh Tokef, which is, of course, maybe the peak of the Yom Kippur service, so it’s a moment with a lot going on, and I tried to cram it all into a very short book of about 200 pages.

David Bashevkin: 
It is absolutely incredible. And in some ways it feels like that crisis, there is a pull, there is kind of this almost like a boredom that can set in. And he was really pulled into the Mikveh Yisroel, the larger body of the Jewish people. When he emerged from that, was there a way that he clearly articulated what the impact was on his Judaism, or did he only kind of transmit the transformation through the art itself?

Matti Friedman: 
He’s a very cagey character, Leonard Cohen, so he’s never going to come out and say exactly what happens. He wants his poems and his music to be judged on their own. And he doesn’t like to make life easy for lowly journalists like me who are trying to place him in history and say, “Leonard Cohen was at this place on this date, and this is what happens.” He doesn’t like it.

But something very deep clearly happens to him. And it’s interesting to hear a speech that he gave about a decade before the war in Montreal. This was 1964. You can actually find it on YouTube. In my opinion, it’s one of the great Jewish texts. He’s invited by the community in Montreal to speak to them because he’s beginning to find fame as a poet in Canada, and they want to hear what he thinks. And they’re very proud of him. You know, he’s the local boy made good, so they invite him back to Montreal. And he’s speaking to the community, and he explains everything that’s wrong with Judaism, in his opinion. And it’s an incredible speech, and I’ll ruin it if I paraphrase it, but I’ll just say that he tells them that, “We’ve forgotten what it means to be Jews.”

He thinks Judaism is basically the Judaism of Nevi’im, of the Prophets, that our job is to receive divine transmission and translate it into the language of humans. That’s our job.He says, “Once, we had a genius for the vertical,” by which he means we used to look up toward God. “Once,” he said, “we all stood together and we had a vertical seizure.” And he’s talking about Har Sinai. He’s talking about the Jewish people standing at Mount Sinai-

David Bashevkin: 
“A vertical seizure.”

Matti Friedman: 
“A vertical seizure,” what an incredible Leonard Cohen term. And now, he says, we’re all horizontal. We’ve forgotten the vertical. We’re just interested in what we’re driving, and what we’re wearing to shul on the holidays. And he says, we’re knocking on our own doors and we’re surprised that no one answers. And he says, we have to cancel all of the religious services in this community until someone reports a vision or breaks his mind on the Infinite and then he leaves and that’s it. That’s how it ends.

And he kind of drifts away from the community and he ends up on this Greek island and then this war breaks out. And one of the incredible things about this story is that he ends up in Sinai and part of what’s going on is that he’s looking for something that will shake him out of his rut. He’s looking for the vertical seizure. That’s what he wants to happen. And even more incredible in my opinion, is the fact that he seems to have found it somehow in this war, which really shakes him up and really kind of rattles him. Something happens. He begins to sing again. Music is a matter of life and death at these concerts in the desert. And he’s kind of sucked into this incredible crisis of the Jewish people. And he experiences the vertical seizure. And where does it happen? It happens in Sinai.

David Bashevkin: 
At Sinai.

Matti Friedman: 
It happens in Sinai, and he never makes that explicit. But that’s what happens. And it’s one of the incredible layers of this story.

David Bashevkin: 
Matti Friedman, I cannot thank you enough for taking the time out. It really feels like we are in a moment where whether or not we have or can experience that vertical seizure. I definitely feel that even in our horizontal knocking from door to door, there has been some really powerful moments of connecting and kind of seeing that vertical vision through our support, our unity and our purposefulness in this moment. And just your scholarship in your writing is just a beacon of light for everyone. I urge everyone just to read all the articles. We’ll have links of course to everything. And God willing, the next time we speak, I really hope it is about your book, about the Aleppo Codex. It plays like a movie. And I hope my bracha, which is not the primary. My bracha is for peace, shalom, and that somebody somewhere should option that book for a movie because it’s that good.

Matti Friedman: 
In that order. Let’s hope for the first part first, but then the second part would also be okay with me. But thanks so much for having me and thanks for all the great work that you’re doing.

David Bashevkin: 
I think what fascinated me most about the conversation with Matti Friedman was not just his commentary on why this has grabbed hold of America so strongly, but I found the story of Leonard Cohen and his trip to the Sinai to be so incredibly moving, particularly at this moment where Leonard Cohen is searching for that vertical seizure. He’s searching for the voice of God, his Judaism, his Yiddishkeit, his identity feels kind of rudderless, almost purposeless. And you have to check out the YouTube video that he mentions of Leonard Cohen speaking to a synagogue in Montreal. It really is an astounding moment. This is before he went to Sinai almost 10 years before as he mentioned. And he’s searching for that vertical seizure, for that voice from God within that will give him some purpose, kind of peek through the veil of this chaotic universe and provide him some meaning.

And the only thing where I would diverge is I believe that in this moment, that horizontal meaning, the horizontal meaning of Jews comforting Jews, of coming together as a people, even without that prophetic voice that reverberates perhaps quietly within us and through us, but that horizontal connection I think is the doorway in this moment to that vertical connection where connecting to Amcha Yisroel, connecting to the Jewish people, connecting to one another has been an incredible vehicle for Jews to rediscover God speaking through us through history and almost glimpse and hear the quiet whisper of that vertical seizure that continues to echo and reverberate from that revelation on Sinai that he re-experienced in the Sinai desert. And I think Jews around the world are really starting to feel that.

And who by brave ascent, who by accident, who in solitude, who in this mirror, and he concludes that song and who shall I say is calling because I think that we are all getting a call. We are all hearing a voice bubble up within us. It can feel frightening. It can seem frightening. It feels like we are not witnessing history but participating in the shift of history and there is a voice on the other end. And I believe that it echoes to that original revelation that gave purpose to this world, that voice from Sinai, that voice that Leonard Cohen traveled to Sinai to rediscover and rehear.

And our collective hope is that we have the answer to that question and who shall I say is calling? And part of what I reached out to discover is to talk to other people on campuses to really understand what is happening. There was a listener who reached out for separate reasons, very heartening reasons, but not ones that are relevant to this episode. A student who is in Harvard who reached out really very organically and we spoke a little bit and I asked him for a few minutes of his time to kind of describe through the lens of your average student. This is not speaking on behalf of any organization, any student organization, but just through his eyes what is happening in Harvard, what is happening in our universities. Here is briefly our conversation. What is happening on the Harvard campus right now?

Nati Stern: 
Sure. I think it’s appropriate to give the background for how this came up. You had posted a link to an article written in The New Yorker.

David Bashevkin: 
Yes.

Nati Stern: 
And the article had given the background information behind the scenes look of how that letter or statements signed by over 30 clubs in the university condemning Israel for all the violence that had happened. And that letter had gone viral and the article in The New Yorkerbasically gave the background of how that letter came to be and from the perspective of the Palestinian students who put together that letter and the reaction in the fallout from that letter. There were a few quotes in the article that I found very interesting, namely that the Palestinian students on the undergrad campus, which I believe these students were felt unsafe and they felt abandoned by the administration and so on and so forth. And I reached out to you and I said, this is a really interesting article because on the law school campus, which is where I am, it seems to be the exact opposite, or at least from my perspective. Whatever I’m going to say on this podcast is just from my point of view. I’m not speaking-

David Bashevkin: 
On behalf of any or university or organization. You’re a student in Harvard currently and sharing your perspective, which is exactly what we were looking for.

Nati Stern: 
Right. None of what I’m going to say should be taken as a statement of any club or university or so on and so forth. So it seems like it’s been the exact opposite for the Jewish students on campus. In the days following the attack, we had set up a table during the club hour right in the main hallway or thoroughfare of the school with an Israeli flag on it and links to donate to the various major organizations like the Friends of the IDF and Magen David Adom, as well as a link to sign a statement because at that point, the university as well as the dean of the law school had not come out the statement yet. And the tabling went pretty well, without too many incidents. But there were a few incidents that students I believe, from various, either the Palestinian clubs on campus or the Muslims clubs on campus came over to us and wanted to talk, but their tone of voice came clear that they were questioning what had happened already.

In one just example that I can remember, off the bat, they were questioning whether or not babies were beheaded or whether or not women were in fact raped or not. And I had commented to a friend after and I said, “We’re arguing in one nekudah of a much larger machloches here and that’s not going to make a difference.” Since then, there have been certain incidences that have certainly raised concerns for the Jewish students on campus. Namely, and probably most prominently last week, more than a hundred students or individuals marched through the law school campus inside the buildings around the campus during school hours, chanting free Palestine and stop the genocide. I was in class at that time and I heard the rumblings and I was receiving texts from my wife who saw this because she just happened to be around at that time.

And there are videos of it. Students were scared. Whether that fear is justified or not, I think reasonable people can disagree about that. But a good friend of mine, she’s a dorm counselor in the undergrad, not particularly from, but she has a mezuzah up on her door and she told me that she took it down because she doesn’t feel safe, and it’s been very difficult and a lot of this takes away from what’s actually going on in Israel. I like to say that we’re fighting like a statement war, and that’s how it’s felt over the last two, two and a half weeks where someone issues a statement and then another club organization has to issue a rebuttal statement and then there’s a rebuttal to the rebuttal statement. You just go on and on and on.

David Bashevkin: 
It’s interesting you say that. I just want to kind of jump in because initially I kind of felt the same way that the main story is, and it continues to be obviously a terrorist attack that happened in the land of Israel, but I don’t think that what is happening in the United States, I wouldn’t call it a distraction because I think it is a very important story in the way that we see reasonable people, educated people, bright people. I think there is a spectrum of opinion in the same way that you acknowledged that I think dignified people can countenance, but I have been seeing educated…

The cream of the crop of our society, American society say things that are deeply troubling and I think borderline dangerous. I don’t look at it as a distraction. It is a parallel story to what is unfolding. And in all of the analogies, we both, I assume live through September 11th, I certainly remember it clearly, and the moral clarity that people had after the attack, which I know led to a lot of ambiguity afterwards, but there was a moment of moral clarity and I feel like a lot of our society skipped that step.

I just want to ask you a question. When you came to Harvard’s campus, did you come in as someone who was active in Israeli issues or has this kind of unlocked something personally for yourself that somebody needs to speak up here? The position that I normally would’ve taken, and I’m seeing this with myself, I did a series on Zionism within the last 12 months where I was not the… Well, whatever. I’ve always been a Zionist, I guess in that sense, but not in the classic sense that we talk about it in our community. I’m curious how this has changed kind of you in a way, if at all.

Nati Stern: 
Sure. I’ll start with saying that I came to law school and I wear a kippah wherever I go. And I say that because invariably what’s going on right now, people are going to link the kippah-wearing with Zionism or Israel. I have noticed in maybe this is my own neurosis or feeling self-conscious, I have noticed that people are looking at me differently right now over the last two weeks where they haven’t had those same looks in the last two years since coming. Within the broader Israel discourse on campus over the last two years, I’ve certainly been identifiably Jewish. My peers know that I’m Jewish, that I’m an Orthodox Jew, that I care deeply about Judaism, and just in passing, the Israel conversation hasn’t come up all that frequently in my experience. There is a club called Alliance for Israel, which has events during the semester last year, most notably, they had former mayor of New York, Bill de Blassio come and talk about Israel and Palestinian relations and two-state solution.

And that drew a big crowd, but there really hasn’t been all that much tension on this wide of a scale, I think during my time. And again, other people might have different opinions on that. People are having all sorts of conversations, but within the people that I’ve spoken to, the Israel thing had not really come up. Maybe in passing once or twice, in a normal course of discourse over the last two years. And now this has certainly awoken something in myself where I think I can relate to what you said, where certainly a Zionist but was never the person organizing rallies on a one-off Sunday in January when nothing apparently is going on, right?

David Bashevkin: 
Correct.

Nati Stern: 
Now this is much more, I’m seeing it. It’s about Israel, but it’s a lot-

David Bashevkin: 
More even.

Nati Stern: 
They’re just entangled with Judaism and kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh, I see it right now. So not irrespective of Israel, I see this as much more as an attack on our people. So defending Israel means defending Judaism and vice versa, I think.

David Bashevkin: 
I also was in graduate school. I was in a very politically left wing graduate school. I was in the new school. It doesn’t really get more left wing than that, certainly with economic policy. Political policy. My closest friend when I was in the new school, and we are still in touch though, we actually haven’t been in touch since this happened, was a Muslim woman. She was an Egyptian Muslim. Her father fought against Israel in the Yom Kipper war, and we were able to have really reason and kind of a very real friendship and talked to each other. We studied, share notes, et cetera, et cetera. And I’m curious if there were any bright spots in conversation. Has anybody come over to you? Have there been any people who may be at the surface would not be the kind of person that you would think would be able to have a even reasoned conversation with? Have you been able to have any discourse? Have there been any bright spots?

Nati Stern: 
As of now, I think things are still very raw and it’s still in the front page of the New York Times. And I think on the social media side too, students are still posting all sorts of things on both sides of the spectrum. For an average law student that maybe doesn’t know much about what is going on or the vast history between the Palestinians and Jews, if you are being fed information on Instagram or on Twitter, you are likely going to think that that is the only view. And just yesterday I met with a friend of mine, a non-Jewish girl who told me that she had posted something about Israel on Instagram the day or two after the attack had happened and immediately was canceled by multiple girls in our class section, which is really disheartening for myself.

There’s a Muslim girl who I’m in class with her, and I think there’s this understanding that right now we kind of just can’t talk to each other almost. This same girl is friends with another friend of mine, and they passed each other in the hallway and just gave each other a hug and just kept walking just because there’s this underlying tension, whether other people are going to view it as one is sympathizing with the other or we just can’t talk right now because it’s too difficult to have any reasoned conversation. And I had alluded to earlier when we were tabling and people had come over to us and they wanted to have a conversation, one of the other members sitting at the table had basically said just this of, “It’s too soon for us to have any talks between our groups. Let us just grieve right now and mourn and try to assess what is going on, and maybe later, we can talk.”

David Bashevkin: 
I kind of appreciate that. I understand. I think it might not be the reaction that the Jewish community is trying to center and service right now, but given all of the horrific reactions we’ve seen that cause these statement wars. Somebody who tells me, “Look, I am a student and everything is upside down and I’m not issuing public statements, but I’m also just kind of trying to make sense of the world right now.” Given all of the options. I’ll take that one in a heartbeat.

Nati Stern: 
And I think just Jews trying to be together right now. I know the Jewish Law Students Association has been amazing in providing food and just a space for Jews to be just all come together, whether it be for dinner or during the lunch hour and just there’s no event. Just come and be together.

David Bashevkin: 
Are you seeing Jews participate in that who wouldn’t normally have participated?

Nati Stern: 
Yeah, I think so. As it has awoken in me something, I think it has awoken something in other students as well. There’s a friend of mine who doesn’t normally wear a kippah on campus. He comes to Chabad on Friday night, but the day after the attack, I see him wearing a kippah for the first time on campus ever. And I didn’t say anything to him, but we made eye contact. And I think we both knew in that moment that something much bigger is going on here, that it’s kind of like an all hands on deck and you can’t be silent about this and you can’t just ignore what is going on because this is a defining moment.

David Bashevkin: 
Absolutely. I really cannot thank you enough for taking a few moments. It’s busy, there’s a lot of chaos, but kind of sharing the experience, and I think the way you’re talking about it, a defining moment of how we reflect on our own Jewish identity, our own ties to Israel, which we all grew up with, but I think are kind of naturalized and kind of integrated. It doesn’t feel that urgency and there is a great deal of urgency right now. Thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate it.

Nati Stern: 
Of course. Thank you so much for having me on. Appreciate it.

David Bashevkin: 
There has been an incredible amount of attention in these moments given to what is happening on the university campus, and that is well warranted and important attention and really credit to the work of Rabbi Ari Berman, the president of Yeshiva University, and all the attention that he has done in having a joint statement. You can check it out online, signed by presence of other universities, a commitment to prevent antisemitism. There are schools now Yeshivas that are banding together and not allowing universities in that don’t have a clear plan to protect Jewish students. But there is a population that I have heard much less about, and frankly, it worries me. It worries me a great deal. And it’s a population that we often do not think about because we are rightfully so, oftentimes distracted with our own children’s education. There has been a huge push, as we’ve spoken about in the last half a century, to provide children with a Jewish education and to send them to Jewish schools.

But there is no question that the largest Jewish population in schools is not in the biggest Yeshivas. It is not in Lakewood. It is not in the five towns. The largest Jewish population in schools is in the United States public school system. And Jews within the public school system, I believe, have been totally overlooked about what they are feeling right now because this is an incredible moment. And I’m not looking to compete with any other attention because the attention that’s being given to higher education is crucial. The attention that is happening in Eretz Yisroel, in Israel is crucial. I’m not looking to compete. I just want to highlight this as such an important issue because I really have not seen a lot of it attention being given to Jews in the public school system. This is a cause that is near and dear to my heart because I had a son in the public school system for a few years.

We switched him. He’s no longer in the public school system, but he was in the public school system. And thank God it was the time of relative peace and quiet. And overall, we had an incredible experience in the services and the needs and really responding to him. We also had some jaw dropping issues in applying and things that I’ve spoken really to local politicians about and getting involved in school board where there are still residual issues, but overall it was fantastic. There really didn’t feel like there were any major issues to deal with. Right now, we’re in Halloween time. I remember, I think the biggest issue was my wife dealing with… There was a WhatsApp group with other Jewish parents who were sending kids to public school, and the biggest question was, “Should we send our kids in costumes for Halloween?” They don’t call it Halloween in the public school system.

Because that is kind of like a religious holiday, I guess. But they have dress up day that always comes out at the end of October. And there was a question among the parents, “Should we send our kids dressed up?” I’ll give you a moment to guess. Do you think I sent my kid dressed up to public school? I don’t know if you’ll remember this, but the answer is a resounding absolutely, I did. What did he dress up as? I was so proud of our solution to this, and I love the costume. I hope he one day reuses it for Purim. My son dressed up as, drum roll, Hershel from our favorite Hanukkah book, Hershel and the Hanukkah Goblins by Eric Kimmel, a lovely individual who I’ve reached out to personally. I shared it with him, the author Eric Kimmel. If you haven’t read it already, let me just say Hanukkah’s coming up.

Shame on you. This is a book for children. It is a book for grownups. This is absolutely a Hanukkah classic that I still hope finds a retelling. It should be an animated movie. It’s that good. But my son dressed up as Herschel. That was really our biggest issue. But over the last few weeks, what I have been thinking about a great deal is what is going on with all of the Jewish students in the American public school system. On the university campus, as terrible as it may be, there are resources. We have Hillel, we have JLIC, and there’s Chabad. And I was just thinking, who is looking after all of the Jewish children in the American public school system and what they have to face? And there is an answer to this question. The answer to this question happens to be… And you can dismiss it, you could say I’m biased, but I think it’s that important.

I want to highlight this right now, is there is a program called JSU, the Jewish Student Union. It is run by NCSY, and it is a network of educators that run Jewish culture clubs in public schools throughout the entire country, servicing nearly 20,000 Jewish-American teenagers in the public school system, running, I think there are over 200 public schools with clubs. And for a host of reasons, it’s not something that is all that high on anybody’s radar. But I thought, “Wow, this is really, really important, especially in this moment, to highlight the fact that there is, so to speak, a Hillel for American public schools to make sure that the needs and that there are resources for all of the Jewish students in the public school system.”

It’s important to note, this is specifically in high school. They do not have clubs on the elementary school level. I don’t know that I’m sure there may be other barriers or issues with that. But in the high schools, there is a network called the Jewish Student Union, and I spoke briefly to the head of NCSY, the International Director of NCSY, Rabbi Micah Greenland a little bit about the importance of JSU in this moment. Here is our conversation with Rabbi Greenland. Rabbi Greenland, thank you so much for joining me today.

Micah Greenland: 
Pleasure, Rabbi Bashevkin. Great to be with you.

David Bashevkin: 
What are the resources, what are the ways that NCSY is thinking about how do we support the largest network of Jewish teens in the schooling system are in public school? How do we service them properly, all those teens in the United States of America in our public school system?

Micah Greenland: 
Yeah, so we’re really looking at this as pre-October 7th and then post-OC October 7th because there really has been a sea change to how the world of a Jewish public high school student looks since the Hamas attacks on October 7th. Prior to October 7th, we had a network of about 300 clubs in public high schools, about 18,000 Jewish teens coming to those clubs. And primarily, it was about Jewish identity building, creating a sense of community, a sense of a safe space, a place to explore and learn a little bit about what each individual teen’s Judaism meant to them. And the curriculum on a club by club basis was really driven by the teens where if they’re interested in learning about Israel, that’s what we learn about. If they’re interested in learning about Jewish holidays, that’s what we talk about.

In effect, it’s a place, especially in schools where Jews are in only a small minority within, there’s only a dozen or a few dozen Jewish students in a high school, having a club that supports them in terms of their Jewish identity has been of valuable importance to them. But since October 7th, it’s taken an entirely new definition. It’s not just of valued importance, but it’s really meeting a need that I would call a crisis where teens in public high schools are feeling under siege, threatened, their minority status is definitely felt. And in many cases, there are physical threats to their safety, threats to their moral compass of the genocide that they’re perpetrating against innocent civilians in Gaza. And it’s really terrifying to see the rhetoric increasing. So for us, it’s much more than just community and safe space, but it’s about providing teens-

Micah Greenland: 
… Than just community and safe space, but it’s about providing teens the mental health support that they need, providing teens the educational support that they need to respond back, providing them a playbook to the rest of the Jewish community, resources and partnerships of, what do you do when it’s a faculty member who’s threatening you? It’s really terrifying, and we’re doing everything we can to step up to meet the need during this challenging time for our teens.

David Bashevkin: 
Just tell me a little bit where you’re dreaming right now. I don’t know if you’re comfortable sharing actual figures. I can imagine, you’re running a school with close to 20,000 teens that needs a formidable budget to service 20,000 teens, and now in a time of crisis. What was it before October 7th, and what are you looking to achieve now in terms of providing the resources and services to this larger-than life population in the United States of Jewish teens in American public schools?

Micah Greenland: 
I appreciate the question. Our JSU budget was about $12 million prior to October 7th. We’re seeing an influx of teens in terms of the quantity of teens. A club that would typically have 25 or 30 people showing up on a typical day, will now have over 100 in many schools across the country. We’re anticipating that a network of roughly 18,000 Jewish teens is going to have to ramp up to 36,000 or more.

That means increasing staffing, increasing the frequency of club meetings, in many cases, so that’s doubling quantitatively. There’s also the increase of qualitative support that we need to provide: ramping up educational resources, mental health resources, the networks of our partnerships and connections. We’re seeing this as a doubling quantitatively and a doubling qualitatively, and estimating that it’s likely going to be upwards of 25 million that our budget has to grow to, just to meet that need that is so dramatically felt.

We don’t see that going away anytime soon. We don’t see that as being something, “Well, we’ll step up our resources for the next month, and then we can go back to normal.” I don’t think anybody’s feeling that way. The threats that Jewish students are hearing in their public high schools are making very clear to them that they are not safe emotionally, psychologically, or in some cases, even physically. For their physical safety, we’re working with school administrators and law enforcement.

When it comes to their emotional safety, their psychological safety, their Jewish identity, and their association with the community of good versus the community of evil, that’s not going away if their classmates or their peers hate them. The degree of support that we need to be providing is not temporary. We’re seeing, roughly speaking, that our budget is going to have to double or more than double. We’re preparing to launch a serious campaign to support our students the way they need to be supported.

David Bashevkin: 
I am not typically an alarmist, but just watching all of the videos that are being shared online, it’s incredibly disheartening and almost feels surreal to have these conversations, talking about Jews in the United States. You are seeing it in our educational institutions. There’s been a lot of attention to higher education, and frankly, in my opinion, not enough attention to those Jewish Americans within our public school system throughout the country.

It is incredibly heartening to know that there are people and leaders like yourself and the JSU network that is able to support and uplift Acheinu Bnei Yisroel who are in, this is their most very vulnerable, at a very vulnerable time in their life, teenagers in America. Really, thank you so much for your leadership, so much for your work, and wishing you an incredible amount of success in providing the services, support, and needs for the largest Jewish teen population in America, which is within our public school system.

Micah Greenland: 
Thank you, David. Amein. It’s a privilege and a responsibility to be in this position, especially during this time, and appreciate all the support from colleagues like yourself, and all the supporters out in your listenership, as well as the rest of Klal Yisroel. Thank you very much.

David Bashevkin: 
I want to highlight a little bit on a personal level for people, because I was one of the people who was somewhat dismissive of what happens in JSU clubs. I am the director of education for NCSY, and I have very often felt that my background, my experiences, my expertise, does not lend itself well to public school clubs. Public school clubs are very experiential. They’ll build sukkahs before Sukkot made out of chocolate.

They’ll run the chocolate seder, they’ll do all these team building exercises, and it’s not the meatier education that I think gets me all that excited. Very often, I’ve really stood at the sidelines and focused on other areas within NCSY to direct my educational services. There was one conference which really shifted my thinking on this. It was really one of the most remarkable exchanges I have ever seen, and it was a halachic exchange.

It was a question of Jewish law that was posed to Rabbi Zvi Sobolofsky, who is the posek, who is the decider of Jewish law for all questions that emerge in JSU and NCSY. I’m not sharing this with you because of the halakhah conclusion, but really the values that underlie it. I asked permission from Rabbi Sobolofsky, to share it, and he just asked me to emphasize it. I’m not sharing a bottom line Jewish law to our listeners, but really a sentiment that I found so incredibly moving about the importance of this network.

We were at a conference and there were a bunch of JSU educators there. There was a question that came up, and they said, “Can we run public school clubs? Can we run Jewish culture clubs on Sukkot? We have a question. We have to run these clubs inside of the schools. In our clubs, we invariably have to give out pizza, bagels, donuts. The snacks have to be A+, so it’s got to be pizzas. It’s what gets the kids in there. Can we run that on Sukkot time? There is a problem.”

“We do not have a sukkah. Most public schools do not have a sukkah in the backyard. What are we supposed to do? Where are the kids supposed to eat? Is it okay to come in with a pie of pizza on Sukkot, and serve it to the Jewish teens who are coming to Jewish culture clubs in our schools?” Rabbi Sobolofsky’s answer absolutely astounded me.

He thought for a moment and he said, “You know what? There is an exception for when you do and do not have to eat in the sukkah. That is when you are visiting your Rebbe.” In the second parach of Tractate Sukkah, there is a mishnah, I believe it’s a straight mishnah, it’s for short quote in the Gemara, that when you are going to visit your teacher, your rebbe, there is an exemption that you do not have to eat in the sukkah.

Rabbi Sobolofsky said, “For these students, for these Jewish teens in the public school system, you coming in with the pie of pizza may likely qualify that they are going to hear words from their rebbe, because you serve as their link to our tradition, to Yiddishkeit, to our mesorah, to the great unfolding narrative of Jewish thought, of Torah thought, and Jewish ideas. You are their link. You are their Rebbe.”

Aside from a very novel and creative read of Jewish law, it really moved me. What exactly are we doing in these clubs? We’re not just building sukkahs out of marshmallows and chocolate. We’re not just having a mock Passover seder where we have a, I think they do it, again, chocolate. I think there’s a running theme in a lot of the programming involving food. It’s much more than that. You are serving as a chain, as a link in the mesorah of the tradition of what Yiddishkeit is, of what Judaism is for these teens.

It is so much more than coming in. You’re not a pizza delivery service. You are the entryway into Yiddishkeit, for these people who otherwise do not have the infrastructure to have a formal Jewish education. That allows you, bring them that pizzas, be that chain in these students’ lives. That answer, aside from the halachic creativity, was very moving of kind of reframing what is happening in these clubs.

You may come in and see kids doing all sorts of cute stuff, but it is so much more than that. You are serving as their rebbe. You are serving as their teacher, as their educator, as their link in our mesorah, to make sure that it continues, that the Jewish education is not deprived of anyone, especially someone who finds themselves in public school, and they’re outside of Yeshiva. Serving as that chain is something so moving.

I spoke to another educator, somebody who really is in the front and center of educating, and really knows the heart and spirit of what JSU is all about, the Jewish Student Union. I asked him a little bit about this moment and his experience, because this educator, my dearest friend, Rabbi Derek Gormin, who lives out on the West Coast, he is unique.

He’s not singularly unique, but he’s unique, because not only is he one of the most outstanding JSU educators, somebody who has educated other people who are running clubs, and explains how to create that moment, that experience, but what really makes him unique is he himself is a product of the public school system, and knows what that experience is like, which is why I think it is so important to share our conversation with my dear friend, Rabbi Derek Gormin.

I was wondering if you could kind of begin by telling me what exactly does the JSU Jewish Public School Club Network provide? What is it?

Derek Gormin: 
Sure. What JSU does, the Jewish Student Union, is we create a space for Jewish students, and friends, and non-Jews within the public school space, to be able to proudly be Jewish, to be able to learn about their heritage, to be able to chew on their own experiences, and try to figure out, what does it mean to me, to each individual student, to be a Jew?

It’s very challenging in today’s world to openly say, “I’m a proud Jew,” to actively be involved in your Jewish community. We provide a space to grab on a door, if you will, and a handle, and a key and say, “Here, here’s a door. You’re welcome to come through. We’d love for you to come join our community. There’s warmth, and there’s education, and there’s togetherness and community.” That space is slowly shrinking. We see youth in communities, in established Jewish communities, are shrinking.

Youth groups are not as strong as they once were. To provide these students that otherwise would not have a place to turn to explore what their Judaism means to them is so, so essential. That’s what we strive to do all around the country.

David Bashevkin: 
My favorite JSU alum, there is one picture, because you mentioned, both Jews and non-Jews. There are non-Jews who come. My favorite alum is there’s a picture with Chance the Rapper. I don’t know how often he was showing up, but he’s my favorite JSU alum. I just want to understand a little bit better.

In a JSU club, I’ve been to one, maybe two in my lifetime, I haven’t been to that many. There is a separation of church and state. You’re doing religious activities there. What are the boundaries of what you are able to discuss and not able to discuss?

Derek Gormin: 
An excellent question. The setup of each club is that the students are really in charge of the club. They’re student clubs, and we help support the drive and the desires of the students within the framework that their school provides. What does that mean? Additionally, for every club in a public school, there’s a necessity to have a faculty advisor, so the faculty advisor who is on active faculty for this school, a teacher-

David Bashevkin: 
Has to be a professional within the school who approves and is present?

Derek Gormin: 
Not necessarily Jewish, but often Jewish, who approves the happenings and particulars, educational material within the context of that club.

David Bashevkin: 
It’s a network that is so astounding and so overlooked, probably because so many people, rightfully so, in the Jewish community, are focused on Jewish schools and providing Jewish kids with a Jewish education. Nonetheless, the largest Jewish population in the United States of America, at least, is in public schools, dwarfing it. Do you have any idea how many clubs are being run by JSU at any given moment? How many kids are in these clubs?

Derek Gormin: 
There’s over 200 clubs around the country that represents over 20,000 students. We are, thank God, growing each day. Started a new club in Idaho yesterday.

David Bashevkin: 
What’s remarkable is looking at you. I see you have a big smile and an even bigger yarmulke, and it’s folded up, but a pretty big beard. You yourself are a public school graduate. You went to public school. Tell me a little bit about your Jewish experience in public school. Did you find it alienating? Did you find friends, allies? What is the struggle of Jewish identity inside of the public school system for you?

Derek Gormin: 
It’s an excellent question. I grew up in a public school, and in a family that was very proud to be Jewish. We were affiliated with the synagogue, and I had my Jewish friends, and then I had my school friends. I wasn’t ashamed to be Jewish, but it wasn’t at the forefront of my existence. I didn’t openly wear a yarmulke in public, and I would’ve been very uncomfortable to do so.

There was not a Jewish club at my school at the time. I’m not sure if I would’ve joined, it’s a good question, but I can say that the realities of when I was in high school have changed. The climate of the high school space has changed.

David Bashevkin: 
How has it changed?

Derek Gormin: 
Once upon a time, not so long ago, the horrific antisemitic trope that you hear, typically under the guise of anti-Zionism and the hatred therein, was relegated to the halls of academia as we find in many college campuses today. I know when I went to university, it was vile. It was scary. We had students who knew we were Jewish. I was the president of Hillel and the president of AEPi, a very proud, open Jew, and people would yell at us, and scream at us, and spit at us, and say disgusting things.

It was understood that within the context of university, that’s sort of what it’s going to be. When we graduated, it all goes away. Unfortunately, students are experiencing this in high school today. The last three weeks, we’ve heard tragic things from our students that they’ve been experiencing, not only chants of “From the River to the Sea,” which is sad in and of itself, but followed by things like “Gas the Jews.” Disgusting, disgusting things.

One student told one of our directors and someone said, “It’s too bad Hitler didn’t finish you guys off. We hope Hamas does.” Disgusting, disgusting things that no student should have to deal with, no person should have to deal with, Jewish or not. No one should have to hear things like this. JSU now is more important than ever. There needs to be a space for students to turn to say, “What do I do? Where do I go? To whom do I turn for support in this area?”

It’s not acceptable for us. We can’t accept, the established Jewish community cannot accept not having a landing space for these students, a warm hug for these students, a positive Jewish experience for these students. We have to dig deeper. We have to do better. It’s tragic, and we don’t want to lose all of these students to the beautiful history and heritage that we all share.

David Bashevkin: 
Rabbi Derek Gormin, I cannot thank you enough for sharing with me today. Continued success to your efforts in JSU and raising up Amcha Yisroel, whether in the United States, abroad, throughout the world. Really, really important work, and unfortunately, sometimes overlooked. This is a population that we need to take careful care of. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Derek Gormin: 
Thank you for having me. It’s been a pleasure.

David Bashevkin: 
There is an essay that was recently translated by my friend, Rabbi Nati Helfgot, in the latest issue of Hakirah, Volume 34. It’s an essay that was originally written in Hebrew by Avrohom Eliyahu Kaplan. Not a well-known Jewish scholar, but one who deserves far more attention, one of the great products of the famed Slabodka Yeshiva, who later served as a rosh yeshiva. He died far too young. There’s a lot more to talk about him.

He was a real iconoclast, and he wrote a work called Be’Ikvot HaYirah, which actually, my rebbe in Ner Israel, Rav Ezra Neuberger had recommended to me and told me to read. I do have a copy of it. It’s not a super well-known volume, but it is worth owning. If you can’t own it or you have trouble with the Hebrew, I would definitely recommend getting your hands on the latest issue of Hakirah, which as an aside, I shared it on social media. It’s something I read over Shabbos, absolute banger of an issue.

Really, it’s a wild issue. Rabbi Rakeffet writes in it. There are a bunch of really wild articles. My chavrusa, my old chavrusa, Jake Sasone, really, one of my closest, nearest, and dearest friends, has a really incredible article about the order to close the Volozhin Yeshiva, if you’re looking for some wild story to distract you from all of the horrors we’re witnessing. This article that, again, Rabbi Nati Helfgot, translated in the latest issue was originally published in Be’Ikvot HaYirah. You can look it up if you have a copy of it, you could find it online.

It is an article called “Al Herzl.” It is “Al Herzl.” It’s almost a eulogy for Herzl, which is a little unusual because Herzl was not a figure who was typically memorialized in kind of traditional yeshiva circles. This eulogy, this idea is so moving. It’s really an essay. I don’t think it was formally a eulogy. It was written, I believe, a bit after he passed away, but it is so moving and so powerful. I would like to read just the very beginning before we close out this episode with two really important interviews.
It’s called, again, “Al Herzl,” and he writes: Herzl did not teach us Torah. He did not teach us Jewish law. He did not teach us Jewish narrative. He didn’t teach us about Jewish thought, or about Jewish ethics. These are not things that he was teaching or involved in. He was raised in an environment where these things were not found, although his grandfather did daven in the shul of Yehuda Alkalai.

It’s an important footnote to that story and something that I discussed in my weekly Substack reading, Jewish History in the Parsha, which you can, of course, sign up for. I’m sorry for that incredibly gratuitous plug, but I did talk about that in the Parshas NoachSubstack. He says something, so what did Herzl teach us? He didn’t teach us Torah. He didn’t teach us Jewish law. He didn’t teach us Jewish ethics.

What did he teach us? He writes very movingly: He taught us to say two words, words that we have, until this moment, did not have the courage, did not have the strength to really proclaim. What are those two words? The essay continues, “Ivri anochi. I am a Jew.”

I think there was something very moving in this moment, particularly in this moment, with all of the persecution, and with all of the difficulty that people are relearning in this moment, how to say those two words, Ivri anochi, I am a Jew, invoking, of course, the description of Avraham Avinu, Avraham, our forefather, Abraham, who is described as Avraham Ha-Ivri in the 14th chapter of Sefer Bereishis, in the 13th verse, where Avraham is referred to as Avraham Ha-Ivri, which sometimes translate as the Hebrew.

There’s something very moving. Why is he called Avraham Ha-Ivri? The midrash actually says, “Why is he called the Ivri? What does that word mean?” The midrash and Bereishis Rabbah says: He’s called Ivri because Ivri means one side, because he stood on one side and the entire world stood on the other side. Avraham stood alone. He had that capacity, he had that courage.

He had that strength to scream out, like Rav Avraham Eliyahu Kaplan explains that what Herzl taught us to do, to scream out, to cry out, “Ivri anochi, I am a Jew. I am on the other side. The whole world may oppose me. The whole world may resent me. The whole world may persecute me, but I will stand strong, and I will stand resolute.” To be an Ivri, to be a Jew in that sense, is being willing to stand m’ever echad, to stand on one side, even though the entire world may feel like they are on the other side.

Learning how to proclaim and how to have that strength and inspiration, and capacity to cry out, “Ivri anochi,” is not easy. Sometimes that needs to be learned. There are a lot of people who don’t have that strength, or were never taught to have that strength. That’s part of the reason why I think JSU, more than anything else, is so absolutely crucial. It’s important that all Jews are safe wherever they may be.

Thank God, many, many Jews, particularly in densely populated areas, like in the tri-state area, in Florida, and the West Coast, there are a lot of Jews in those areas who can support one another. They’re in yeshivas, they’re in schools, they’re in seminaries, they have Hillels, they’re packed. There are Jews who find themselves somewhat alone.

That loneliness that Rebbe Nachman of Breslov writes about in the introduction to the second part of Likutei Moharan, where he has a very brief, I wouldn’t even call it an essay, it’s almost like a paragraph, where he writes about the solitude of Avraham, the solitude of Jewishness. Avraham is described as being one. What does it mean?

He says, “He had the confidence and the courage to be alone, to not be surrounded by people nodding along with him, but having the courage to stand alone, to be in Ivri, to be on one side even though the rest of the world does not stand with him.
I spoke to two JSU educators who really gave insight to some of the struggles that are taking place inside of Jewish culture clubs right now, what is being asked of teenagers, which is so unusual. They don’t have the background, the education, necessarily, to respond to so many of the disgusting, libelous accusations that are being levied and directed at Jews, let alone some teenage Jew who does not necessarily have the background or the education to respond to all that is happening.
I want to share with you a conversation that I had with two JSU educators, and talking about a specific incident that took place. Here is our conversation with my friends, Nati and Ben. How has the terrorist attack on October 7th, how has that kind of changed the calculus about the way you speak about Israel inside of club?

I’m curious what you felt and heard in your work as an educator inside of public school, Jewish public school clubs. What was it like before and what has changed now?

Nati Stern: 
Yeah, that’s a great question, thank you. Israel is always a topic out there, whether it’s we’re doing some sort of program, or get together an art project, or a conversation discussion at least once or twice here in Israel. It’s always kind of along the lines of just another club.

We’re talking about Hanukkah, we’re talking about Purim, we’re talking about Jewish holidays, and then there’s our Israel club. It’s almost like a checklist, almost like, we fulfilled another Israel club. This is another Jewish topic that we’re all part of and we’re exposed to.

David Bashevkin: 
Have you ever gotten pushback from students or faculty member previously?

Nati Stern: 
Never.

David Bashevkin: 
For speaking about Israel?

Nati Stern: 
No, no, never.

David Bashevkin: 
Never?

Nati Stern: 
It was very low key, not a big deal. It was kind of like, “Okay,” whether we’re drawing a map of Israel, like trivia, fun facts about Israel, never an issue. Never an issue, never pushback. Not from teachers, not from students. They’re always kind of engaged and happy to learn more, happy to be a part of the discussion.

David Bashevkin: 
How often are you going to a public school to run a Jewish culture club?

Nati Stern: 
Ever since I moved here about two and a half years ago, we started with four clubs. Then we went to six clubs last year. This year, we’re up to nine clubs already.

David Bashevkin: 
Wow.

Nati Stern: 
One club happens to be weekly. Every Wednesday, no matter what, we’re always there with the bagels. The kids love the fresh kosher bagels. It’s so fresh, when we put it in the bagel guillotine, we call it, that it crumples up because it’s so hot.

David Bashevkin: 
Tell me a little bit about what it was like running a club in a public school, a Jewish club in a public school, over the last two, three weeks.

Nati Stern: 
Yeah. Ever since the news hit, teens have been, their world has been in total shock. The amount of posts and social media that they’re sharing, that they’re, “Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh.” One of the ones that stuck to me the most was from a social media influencer, it says, “Your Jewish friends are not okay.” I don’t know if you saw that one.

David Bashevkin: 
I did. Sure.

Nati Stern: 
So many people have posted that. I was like, “That’s just number one. We’re not okay right now.” This is a really traumatizing, difficult, challenging time. For American Jewry, for Jews in Israel, for Jews, all over, teens all over. There was one student that said, he talked about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the Middle East in the past, and he said that you could see what you want, and there’s been fighting here and there.

It’s like, I’m not even so sure what to think about the situation, but he said that this feels different. This story, this what happened on October 7th, felt very, very different.

David Bashevkin: 
I think what’s important to surface is that for many of our listeners who live in densely populated Jewish areas, there has been an upsurge, but we kind of forget about the teens who are not in Jewish schools. They’re in the public school system. Their Jewish identity is always, I would call it more fraught, but it’s not as pronounced, or maybe it’s even more pronounced, because they are a minority population in the public school system.

One of the things that I want to know, and maybe we could hear from Ben, is take me through, you had an unusual confrontation inside of one of your clubs. What exactly happened?

Ben Spanjer: 
Rabbi Nati put together a presentation a couple of days after October 7th, and it really was a Jewish solidarity PowerPoint, meaning your Jewish friends aren’t okay. We wanted to talk about that a little bit. We start off just what happened, just to give the kids some background. A lot of the kids maybe kind of know what happened, they’re not so sure. They’re not as, I guess, keyed in as we are into the conflict necessarily.

We started off with the current numbers, what’s going on in Israel, how many people were killed, what’s the impact on their villages, things like that. We talk a little bit about Simchat Torah also, just because that’s the day it happened on. Then we kind of get into the Jewish solidarity part, which is really the first post of the slide is “Your Jewish Friends Are Not Okay.” We talk about it a little bit. We ask the kids that are there. Some of the kids are Israeli, some of the teens are Israeli.

David Bashevkin: 
What state is this club in?

Ben Spanjer: 
Texas.

David Bashevkin: 
Okay.

Ben Spanjer: 
Some of the teens are Israeli. Some of the teens are not Israeli at all. We’ve asked in every single club, “Has anyone here been affected by what’s happening?” Whether it’s a camp counselor, their uncle, their cousin, sometimes even their older siblings, every single person in the club tends to raise their hand. Some of these teens have never even been to Israel. Every single person raises their hand.

Then we go on. There’s a post by a writer, I don’t remember his name, I think Baruch, who says, someone asked him in his workplace, “Do you have any family in Israel?” He says, “Yes, I have a few million brothers and sisters.” It’s really a Jewish solidarity PowerPoint. The whole point is just talking it over with our teens who are really, really going through it. A lot of them have started wearing the Jewish star necklaces out.

David Bashevkin: 
You’ve noticed that? Beautiful.

Ben Spanjer: 
A lot of them, unfortunately, have started tucking them in. You’re allowed to have differing responses to the situation.

David Bashevkin: 
Sure.

Ben Spanjer: 
It happens to be, I travel throughout the state for my line of work. I recruit for our Israel trip, TJJ, and I’m also involved in JSU on a little bit more of a regional level. I actually had the opportunity, I worked with Rabbi Nati, and I made a version of this PowerPoint for when I went to go present at two clubs in Dallas.

Every time we presented this PowerPoint, it was very well received. It was very meaningful to the kids. It doesn’t have the word Palestine in it at all. We really try to talk about what the Jewish people are going through right now, that, what we thought was the most important way to address it.

David Bashevkin: 
Appropriate. I fully understand that.

Ben Spanjer: 
Yeah. That’s the way they’re really being affected by it. We presented at one of our high schools in Houston this past Friday, and usually, there’s a teacher in the room, just depending on what the format of the club is.

David Bashevkin: 
What’s your relationship to the teacher who’s in the room? Is the teacher usually Jewish, not Jewish? Do you have a relationship with them, generally?

Ben Spanjer: 
It tends to be the teacher’s usually not Jewish.

David Bashevkin: 
Okay.

Ben Spanjer: 
Right now, we have a club where the teacher is Jewish. That’s our biggest club, which is our weekly club. Usually, the teacher’s not Jewish. They’re usually very, very friendly. We give them a bagel when we come in.

David Bashevkin: 
When you say biggest club, how many kids are we talking about here?

Ben Spanjer: 
Usually 75 kids a club.

David Bashevkin: 
Wow.

Ben Spanjer: 
Yeah.

David Bashevkin: 
That’s really, really impressive. Okay. What happened next? Was this the regular teacher who was in the room?

Ben Spanjer: 
No. This is a long-term sub for one of the teachers that usually teaches a class in that room. He was actually our affected student president’s current math teacher. Her math teacher was on maternity leave, so this is a long-term sub, and she was just sitting in the back of the room. It happens. I presented this PowerPoint a few times, Rabbi Nati’s presented it a lot more than I have, and every time, the teacher is usually in the room. They either say thank you, they don’t say anything.

That’s par for the course with pretty much every club that we run. At the end of this club, we’re really, again, the only thing we address is Jewish solidarity. We don’t think it’s appropriate necessarily to bring politics into a public school. It’s really a Jewish cultural club. The teacher got up and started screaming. She didn’t try to start a conversation. We’re always happy to have a conversation. She started screaming and yelling.

David Bashevkin: 
What was she screaming?

Ben Spanjer: 
She was accusing us directly, not Israel, she said, “You’re supporting genocide, you’re committing genocide. You’re bombing a hospital.” This was after that claim had already been…

David Bashevkin: 
Sure.

Ben Spanjer: 
… Fully debunked by some…

Ben Spanjer: 
… hospital. This was after that claim had already been fully debunked by several countries. You’re committing a genocide against the Palestinians. You’re making them feel unsafe. You’re killing innocent civilians. And so from our part, we’re not going to yell over anybody. That’s not our job.

David Bashevkin: 
Were the students taken aback to see a teacher, their own teacher, who they probably have to show up to their class tomorrow, were they taken aback by that?

Nati Stern: 
Yeah. Sure. Yeah. The students were in shock. It was right as the bell rang. So some people were like, “What is happening right now?” And they kind wanted to stay and kind of see where this goes. But they also had to leave and there were a bunch of teens standing right outside the room because they were hearing it getting loud. And at the end of this whole thing, one of the students went to speak to the dean to call her over, to let her know what happened. When that teacher left the room, they said, “Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry you had to go through that. I’m such in shock. If you need me to be a witness for you, we’ll be a witness for you. I’m so sorry.”

And I said to them, “Don’t worry about it. This is totally between us and the people present and nothing to do with you guys. You just focus on your schoolwork, but don’t worry about it. We’re going to take care of this. So immediately we went to the dean to file an incident report, and the teen had a very difficult time in getting her mom on the phone just dealing with the administration.

David Bashevkin: 
Did you find the administration responsive?

Nati Stern: 
For the most part, yes. Then they said that they want to bring her over to have a conversation with her. Once they brought her over to have that conversation, they told the teen she doesn’t have to go to school the rest of the day, but she will have to go back to school on Monday.

Ben Spanjer: 
It’s important to recognize this long-term sub was her math teacher that period.

David Bashevkin: 
Wow. That next period.

Nati Stern: 
Yeah, she’s going to have her the very next period. Right as the bell rang, she was going to stay in that classroom and continue to learn from her, and the teen felt, “I don’t feel safe learning from a teacher who just accused me of genocide. How am I supposed to learn from a person like that?”

David Bashevkin: 
Do you have any idea if there are going to be long-term repercussions for a teacher like that? I’m deliberately keeping it vague. I’m not asking our listeners to get involved. I think it’s most important that people local on the ground kind of speak to the institutions that you’re involved in. But do you have any sense of… Is that out of line for a teacher to say that, is the school going to take long-term action in this or you’re not even sure?

Ben Spanjer: 
Right after it happens, it seems as though the school said, “We don’t really see why someone would scream at one of our students,” really deserves to have a place in the school, especially about playing politics. And then they spoke to the teacher and then their tune seemed to change a little bit. They said to our student, our club president, who at this point was not doing well, very traumatic experience, that they had spoken to the long-term sub and that she wouldn’t be allowed to talk to our student anymore about it. Which to me does not seem like an appropriate way to protect your student in the school. As of right now, our student has not yet gone back to school. I know that some of the parents in the school and without the school are filing complaints. Our student’s mother works in the same school district in one of the middle schools, and has been aghast about the response from the administration.

David Bashevkin: 
It’s important to remember, and I’ve emphasized this a lot, that the largest Jewish population in the United States of America is being educated in our public schools. And it’s probably the most important time to instill a place for Jewish pride, a place where Jews can feel comfortable to gather, to feel in solidarity to Israel, to our brothers and sisters in Israel. And it is your work, Nati and Ben, that I find so important and with all the conversation, and it’s not a distraction. It is incredibly important. The conversations that are taking place in higher education, just the stories that I have seen that have been somewhat overlooked, are really what’s going on in our high schools. So I really thank you both for joining me today, sharing what’s happening and just continued strength and success in instilling Jewish pride at this moment in time to a population that sorely needs it. Really, ashrecha, God bless all of your work and continued success. So thank you so much for speaking with me today.

Nati Stern: 
Thank you so much.

Ben Spanjer: 
Thank you so much. Really appreciate that.

David Bashevkin: 
And you can hear in their voices, these are people who are showing up every day to be that Rebbe to be that link in the mesorah, like that question that Rabbi Sobolofsky was asked about giving out a pie, a pizza in the middle of sukkahs. They come in laser focused. We want to give people the strength to say “Ivri anochi,” “I am Jewish,” to be proud of their Jewish identity, to be proud of their Jewish pride. And the person who moved me most, because I was not raised in a world where I was faced with these challenges. I went to a very Jewish elementary school. I went to a very Jewish high school. I spent two years studying in Israel. I spent four years in a yeshiva in Baltimore after I spent another four years afterwards studying in Yeshiva University and getting smicha and a master’s, rabbinic ordination.

I didn’t have to face this, and so many Jews thankfully have never had to face this in their lifetime. But I wanted to share a conversation with a teen who had to face this, a teen who really has a unique story and who inspires me and heartens me of somebody who not just learned how to proclaim Jewish pride, even amongst adversity, even when you are a very obvious minority, even when you are being challenged by your very own teachers, but somebody who also has the strength to encourage others to embrace their Jewish identity and their Jewish pride, to not back down, to not be embarrassed, but to hold your head up high and to proclaim without qualification, “I am Jewish and I am proud.” Here is our conversation with an incredible high school student, Celeste. So Celeste, tell me a little bit, what grade are you in right now?

Celeste: 
So I’m a senior right now. I’m in 12th grade.

David Bashevkin: 
And tell me a little bit about how you discovered JSU. Where did you find that? What was your first experience finding out about JSU?

Celeste: 
So I started in NCSY really early, and then from there, I learned about JSU, also because my brother was the president of the JSU at his school, which is a school I go to now. So it kind of got passed down from my brother to me. So it was like NCSY, but also my brother.

David Bashevkin: 
And when you first joined JSU, what do you think brings most of the kids? They’re in public school, I’m sure they have Jewish friends, they might have synagogue affiliation. What’s the draw to go to a Jewish culture club? We’re talking initially, not in the last three weeks. We’ll get to that in a second, but what do you think is bringing most of the kids to the JSU clubs that they run?

Celeste: 
So the two biggest, I’m going to be honest, the free bagels.

David Bashevkin: 
Free bagels. There’s nothing more Jewish than that. Okay.

Celeste: 
I know, free bagels and cream cheese, but also, it’s a safe environment where everyone should feel safe, where it’s a community where it’s your people. You guys have the same values and morals. That’s what really drew me in. Aside from the bagels.

David Bashevkin: 
Are there leadership positions, meaning it’s student-run essentially? So what exactly does that mean? What is the student’s role in the actual JSU clubs?

Celeste: 
So we get in contact with our teacher sponsors. We organize the timing. Let’s say we do a game like a Kahoot! Or some kind of word game. We set that up. We set up anything we want to talk about. We kind of make an agenda of what we’re going to discuss in the club. There’s a lot of student roles. It’s basically student-run and with the help of the rabbis.

David Bashevkin: 
That is really incredible. So let’s fast forward a little bit, because a lot has changed since the kind of horrific attacks on October 7th. What was your first club that you had after October 7th?

Celeste: 
So my first club after October 7th was my first club of the year.

David Bashevkin: 
You hadn’t gotten together before October 7th?

Celeste: 
That was the very first one. Friday the 20th. I specifically remember.

David Bashevkin: 
Did you think that there were more kids who wanted to come to a JSU club then or less kids? How do you think the events of what was taking place in Israel affected the climate among the Jewish teens within your school?

Celeste: 
I honestly feel like it kind of made people a little bit more scared to go, if anything. I noticed a little bit less attendance than usual, but also that could be because some graduated, but I have a feeling that it was the fright, just everything going on. We feel so attacked and we feel like we need to hide ourselves. So people are scared. I think the attendance went down.

David Bashevkin: 
I know you had an incident with a faculty member. Can you just take me through exactly what happened? People talk about being scared, or feeling, for the first time, the heaviness of their Jewish identity through your own eyes. What exactly happened? And then we’ll talk a little bit about how that made you feel.

Celeste: 
It was our first club meeting.

David Bashevkin: 
First club of the year.

Celeste: 
First club of the year. It was supposed to be the kickoff. It was supposed to make it a great year .even with everything going on, it’s just our environment for us, our safe space. And so we started off the rabbis. They came, they brought the bagels, they brought the cream cheese, they brought Israeli snacks and things like the usual, our comfort food. And the rabbi, Rabbi Nati, he gave a beautiful presentation about just showing solidarity for Israel and how to support the Jewish people right now, and just explaining kind of what’s happening. We all shared personal stories. There was one point where he asked, he said, “Raise your hand if you know someone in Israel.” Every Jewish student in that room raised their hand. Everyone raised their hand. It was very emotional. It was a really sensitive topic, but of course we had to talk about it.

And so there was… she’s a long-term substitute teacher. She’s supposed to be there until February. She was in there. She was sitting over in the corner.

David Bashevkin: 
She’s not like the faculty member, because you need a faculty member to sit in on every club, correct?

Celeste: 
… do, but it wasn’t supposed to be her. We don’t even know why she was there. She was just in there. She chose to be in there. She had no reason to be in there. So the bell had rang lunchtime. This was during lunch. Lunchtime was over. It was switching period. We have five minutes to switch to the next class. I was chatting, talking with my fellow members of the club, cleaning up, just wrapping up, and she calls Rabbi Nati and Rabbi Ben over to her. She’s already very hostile towards us. She’s like, what about the innocent Palestinians? What about this? And just a lot of the points that will be usually brought up with someone who doesn’t have the same beliefs. And Rabbi Nati, he was like, this is about showing solidarity and how to support our Jewish friends. This is the Jewish Student Union Club. There was nothing political in the presentation. It was just personal stories. It was nothing political. And she started attacking us. She started verbally attacking us. She was yelling at us. She was yelling at me, the student. She was yelling at me.

David Bashevkin: 
What was she yelling?

Celeste: 
She started accusing us of genocide. She was like, “You guys are committing genocide.” She brought up the hospital that was bombed, bombed by Hamas. On top of everything, she was very uneducated. She didn’t know what she was talking about. She was yelling, screaming at us, spreading misinformation. There were students coming in and out of that classroom. There was still some Jewish students sitting in there. There were students in the hallways passing. They could hear everything she was saying. She was yelling. So she started blaming us for everything happening. She’s saying, “You guys are committing genocide. You guys support genocide.”

David Bashevkin: 
Were you taken aback? Have you ever had an experience like that?

Celeste: 
Never in my life have I ever experienced anything like that.

David Bashevkin: 
Are non-Jewish students reaching out and sharing words of comfort? Is there any hostility among students about kind of affiliation to Israel?

Celeste: 
Well, to be honest, at first, I was really scared to go to school and everything. The very first day after the attacks, I was just anxious all day. I could not handle it. And my friends, they’re non-Jewish. They kind of knew what was going on. They’d seen the news, but they would just tell me, “Well, I don’t want to take sides. I think both sides are wrong,” or “I don’t know enough.” And that already started to make me feel a little like, “Of course they don’t have to take a side.” I just felt so alone. No one really understood how I was feeling, why I was feeling just so anxious, why I had to check my phone every second just to get updated and updated. And eventually halfway through the day, I couldn’t handle it. I went to talk to administration just… And they were very supportive.

My principal actually came and spoke to me. She was extremely supportive. She knew I was the president of the Jewish Student Union. She had me give a… not a speech, but a presentation about what was happening, because me and my vice president, we reached out about it, and she said, “Yeah,” she arranged for it to happen. The whole school was welcome to come for that. I really did feel a lot of support at first from school counselors, from just administration. They were very, very supportive. But after a few days in, kids started to talk when people really were finding out, I’ve seen on the social medias of students in my class just spreading misinformation, and it’s just so frustrating to see how they could be so wrong and spread it even more. They don’t know what they’re talking about, and they continued to spread it, and it was really frustrating to see. There was one post that a kid posted on a story, and it was actually in defense of Hamas. He was calling them Freedom Fighters, militants, not terrorists.

David Bashevkin: 
This is a kid you know from your school. He’s in your class.

Celeste: 
Yep. Mm-hmm.

David Bashevkin: 
I noticed now you are proudly wearing a Magen David necklace, and obviously you’re identified through being the president of the Jewish Student Union. Did all of your non-Jewish friends always know that you were Jewish?

Celeste: 
They did. They did always know. I had a big friend group. They didn’t know at first, but then when they did find out, because I started posting a lot about Israel, this was maybe when I was in 10th grade. I would post a lot about Israel. I would-

David Bashevkin: 
Meaning when they first met you, just to be clear, they didn’t necessarily know you were Jewish. There was no…

Celeste: 
Mm-hmm.

David Bashevkin: 
You’re able to go through, and then they saw you post. Have you ever had conversations with friends saying, “Oh, I didn’t know you were Jewish,” and then-

Celeste: 
Yeah, and also I’m Hispanic, so a lot of them were like, “Oh, I didn’t know you could be Mexican and Jewish.” “Oh, you’re not Jewish, you’re Mexican.” And I was like, “No, I am.” And a lot of them, yeah, a lot of them, they just didn’t know. They’re like, “Oh, I didn’t know you don’t look Jewish.” I was like, “What do you mean?”

David Bashevkin: 
When people find out that you are Jewish, are they usually surprised, or it’s not much of a conversation? How do they usually react?

Celeste: 
They are usually surprised. I really don’t know why, but a lot of them are like, “Whoa, I wouldn’t have guessed,” and “I didn’t know that.”

David Bashevkin: 
Tell me for you, your Jewish identity. I assume, at some point, you’re either back in school. We’ll talk a little bit about what you’re involved in now, but do you still want to wear a Magen David necklace out now? Do you feel like you’d rather not draw attention to it? What is your thinking regarding publicly identifying as Jewish right now?

Celeste: 
More than ever, I want to wear my necklace. More than ever, I want to, not stand out, but show that I’m not scared. That, of course, I’m scared deep down, but I’m not going to show I’m scared. That’s what they want. They want me to be scared and I refuse to show them that. I wore my Israel flag the entire day for a few days after everything started. Nothing’s going to stop me from being Jewish. I’m not going to hide it. I’m not scared.

David Bashevkin: 
That is incredibly moving. You spent a few days at a conference with other JSU presidents. Tell me a little bit, I guess it was the first time you were coming together with kind of the wider community of JSU leaders. What were you hearing from other presidents? Was there any clear themes that emerged talking to other presidents?

Celeste: 
A lot of the common themes were just social media attacks. A lot of us had the same experience of just being bombarded on social media. We all have the exact same frustration when seeing misinformation being spread and there’s nothing we can do. We just witness it because you can’t change their minds when they have their minds set. You’re not going to change it. So that was a big common theme that we saw.

David Bashevkin: 
I was absolutely shocked when we were trying to coordinate of when we could find a time to speak of where you are now. You’re no longer at the JSU Conference of Presidents where it took place earlier. You are now in a different state than where you live at a different conference about potentially spending a gap year in Israel. Not everybody takes a gap year. Certainly most people don’t take a gap year to Israel. Were you motivated because of everything that’s happening? Would you realistically spend time in Israel right now?

Celeste: 
Honestly, since I started getting really affiliated with JSU, I’ve known ever since then that I need to be in Israel, that I need to take a gap year for myself. I want to go to seminary. I want to learn more. I didn’t grow up religious. I’m starting a little bit more to become more religious. I’m starting to practice more, and I love it. I feel like it’s really changed me. I need to go to seminary. What’s happening right now isn’t going to change anything for me. My parents, on the other hand, that’s something else, but for me, I know that’s where I need to be, just for myself, to continue to grow into the next chapter of my life. I need to be in Israel.

David Bashevkin: 
Celeste, I cannot tell you just your resolve, your commitment, your strength, your maturity, every ounce of it is just so impressive. It is so moving. And really sending my warmest to you, all of your friends, your family, and just continued strength and courage in everything that you do. Thank you so much for joining today.

Celeste: 
Thank you so much for having me. It means a lot.

David Bashevkin: 
There is nothing that makes me more proud of my Jewish identity, then hearing other Jews, Jews younger than I, Jews with less educational background than I, but Jews who embrace that instinctive feeling that I am a part of something so much larger. I’m a part of Amcha Yisroel. I’m a part of a people. I’m a part of this unfolding story, and I will not let go, and I will not back down, and will look at all of the pain, all of the horrors of what is unfolding in the world, and just grasp tighter to their Yiddishkeit, grasp tighter to the Jewish people, grasp tighter to Torah, grasp tighter to their relationship with God and divinity and spirituality, who hear that vertical seizure that Leonard Cohen told us to search for echoing throughout history, who are able to see the vertical seizure, that voice of God, even in our horizontal connections with one another.

There is one essay that was published by a former guest of 18Forty. She has many other accolades. Her name is Dara Horn. Of course, we had her in our Books, Books, Books series. She wrote a beautiful op-ed for the New York Times called Why Jews Cannot Stop Shaking Right Now, and even if you’ve read it already, I’d like to leave you with her concluding words because I found them so beautiful.

What defines Jewish life, she writes, is not history’s litany of horror, but the Jewish people’s creative resilience in the face of it. In the wake of many catastrophes over millenniums, we have wrestled with God and one another, reinvented our traditions, revived our language, rebuilt our communities, and found new meanings in our old stories of freedom and responsibility, each story animated by the improbable and unwavering belief that people can change. Right now, many of us feel trapped in this old, old story, doom-scrolling through images with terrible outcomes. But in our grief, I remind myself that each year as we finish the reading of the Torah, we immediately at that very moment and at the moment of this newest oldest horror, scroll back to the story of creation, and the invention of universal human dignity. We recall once again that every human is made in the divine image. The story continues. We begin again.

And it’s that definition, in her words, what defines Jewish life is not history’s litany of horror, but the Jewish people’s creative resilience in the face of it. It’s that creative resilience that I see in the stories of students throughout the world, Jewish students who proudly wear Magen David necklaces, who proudly put on tefillin, who proudly wear yarmulkes, who proudly study Torah, who proudly light Shabbos candles, who instead of feeling suffocated and scared, though those feelings are very real and very true in that old, old story, find a newness, find a new purpose, find those echoes of history reverberating in us and through us at that very moment, and find that strength, that courage, and that resilience to continue moving forward.

So thank you so much for listening. This episode, like so many of our episodes, was edited by our dear friend 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. It really helps us reach new listeners and continue putting out great content. You can also leave us a voicemail with feedback or questions that we may play on a future episode. That number is 516-519-3308. Once again, that number is 516-519-3308. If you’d like to learn more about this topic or some of the other great ones we’ve covered in the past, be sure to check out 18forty.org. That’s the number 18, followed by the word forty. 18Forty, F-O-R-T-Y, 18forty.org, where you can also find videos, articles, recommended readings, and weekly emails. Thank you so much for listening, and stay curious my friends.