If you haven’t yet listened to the podcast above, please wait. I want to introduce it below. And if you have, all good. The introduction still matters, as does the (very different) second podcast that follows later in today’s post.
Many years ago, one of my nieces participated in a program run by her local Federation in which high school kids were taught to counter the anti-Israel arguments they’d hear on their college campuses. Towards the conclusion of their almost year-long program, they visited Israel and one of the faculty people asked me to speak to their group. It was hard to say no; it was my niece, after all.
So I made a brief presentation, and then opened things up for questions. The first kid to speak raised the issue of “occupation,” and suggested the response he’d offer to the particular challenge he anticipated. Then he asked me what I thought.
His proposed answer wasn’t bad, but it could have been sharper. So I decided to have the kids figure out for themselves how it could be improved. “OK,” I said, “before we get to how you might slightly reframe the answer, let’s just review the history. Let’s start with this: when did the occupation begin?”
I expected a sea of hands to go up, but there was silence. They hadn’t seemed that shy before the session had begun, but perhaps? “Just give me a date,” I said, trying to encourage them to speak up. “When did the occupation start?” No one in the room had a clue.
“It was after a war,” I hinted. Still nothing, except for the teachers shifting uncomfortably in their chairs.
“After a very, very short war.” Then, of course, some smiles and some hands. 1967.
Great.
This, towards the conclusion of their months-long program.
I remember asking myself on my way home, “What is the point of that program? If they don’t know anything at all about anything, what’s the purpose of helping them hone their answers for campus challenges? They’re going to be out of their element in about five seconds.”
This was more than a decade ago, long before campus encampments, long before October 7, long before anti-Zionism became the calling card of most of the left ׂ(and parts of the right). But even then, long before things got much worse, it was obvious that something very basic wasn’t working.
But everyone was pretending that it was.
What we’re beginning to see is that the age of pretending is beginning to crack. Almost everywhere one turns, one hears hints or explicit suggestions that the major institutions at the core of American Jewish life have failed, and that it’s time to let them die.
A few weeks ago, we posted a podcast conversation with Jordan Hirsch, based on his piece in Sapir Magazine, called “The Need for a Jewish Sovereign Wealth Fund: A new model of self-reliance.” In that podcast, I made a point of reading out loud the opening sentences of Hirsch’s article, because they struck me as so honest, so hard-hitting, so clarion a call for some serious rethinking.
Here’s how he began:
The golden age of American Jewry is indeed ending — and the Jewish community can’t see past its fading reflection. The institutions upon which American Jewish flourishing once relied are crumbling. It’s time for American Jewry to build new foundations for its next phase of achievement, and to build them stronger than before.
Shortly later, he argued that it was time for an entirely new model of how the Jews represent themselves to and make their case before the political powers that be. It was time, Hirsch argued, to end the period of shtadlanut.
Shtadlanut (Yiddish for “intercession”) was the survival strategy by which the Jewish communities of Europe had interacted with their non-Jewish rulers. It involved courting the establishment power of the land and placing a shtadlan (intercessor) to represent the Jewish community in the ruler’s court.
Hirsch’s thoughtful piece has engendered a great of discussion, online and more privately, among many individuals. Many people have read it (I’m not taking a side as to whether or not this is a correct read of his piece) as a comment about AIPAC (which may explain why you haven’t heard him on some of the podcasts where you would have expected him to appear). More on all that next week, when Netanyahu is scheduled to address the group.
Hirsch was a shot across the bow. Something critical is not working, he said, and it’s time to get honest.
Hirsch did not remain a lone voice for long. Shortly after his piece appeared, Bret Stephens, speaking at the influential 92NY annual “The State of World Jewry” lecture, argued that other institutions weren’t working. The headline of the article in ejewishphilanthropy read: “Bret Stephens: Fight against antisemitism is a ‘mostly wasted effort’”
“The fight against antisemitism, which consumes tens of millions of dollars every year in Jewish philanthropy, is a well-meaning but mostly wasted effort,” he said in his speech. “We should spend the money and focus our energy elsewhere. The same goes for efforts to improve pro-Israel advocacy.”
In a follow-up onstage interview, Rabbi David Ingber asked Stephens what he would do differently if he were “the head of the UJA or the ADL or the AJC or any of the other sacred acronyms that we have in our community.” Stephens responded by apologizing to ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, who was in the audience, and said that “if it were up to me, I would dismantle it.”
Not everyone, of course, agreed with Stephens; there was bound to be pushback to such a counter-establishment call. Jonathan Greenblatt wrote a very powerful reply, while Melanie Philips, whom we’ve also had on the podcast, responded on her Substack:
Even the Super Bowl elicited discussion of the degree to which major American Jewish institutions have outlived their usefulness. As Liel Leibovitz wrote in response to the “anti-anti-Semitism” ad that aired during the game, in an article entitled, “Waiting for Bilal: Robert Kraft’s Super Bowl ad …”
And along comes this ad to show us that the old establishment Jewish organizations aren’t just dozing—they died in their sleep a long time ago.
It should not surprise us (hark back to my niece’s program mentioned above) that the tsunani has also begun to hit the world of Jewish education, and Israel education specifically. The iCenter, long regarded as one of the pillars of American Judaism’s Israel education efforts, just announced that it’s shutting down.
Now, for those podcasts …
“The Deep Dive” doesn’t exist
If you haven’t yet listened to the “podcast” about Israel’s Declaration of Independence, I hope you will, in a moment. But first, why “podcast” in quotes?
Because it’s not a real podcast. It’s a product of Notebook LM, one of the many AI engines around that people use for all sorts of things. To “create” the “podcast,” I did two things. I gave Notebook LM a link to the Knesset website’s page with the text of Israel’s Declaration of Independence, but I gave it nothing else at all. And then I asked it to create a podcast on “whether or not the creation of the State of Israel was a good idea.”
I had no idea what I’d get. The result, which you can hear above, is not 100% accurate, though for the most part, it’s darn close; if you listen carefully, there are hints here and there that this is not a real conversation between two people. But it’s still very, very impressive. (“Contradiction is a condition of survival.” Geez.) More important than the technology being ridiculously potent is my sense that had those kids in that high school Federation-sponsored group studied things like the Declaration of Independence or the “occupation” or what “indigenous” means or whatever subject you might think of using this kind of technology (which of course didn’t exist), they would have learned a lot more than they did.
Now, why would they learn more? Isn’t this just another “lesson” in a different form? No, not really. First of all, it’s entertaining, which isn’t unimportant. Universities have their legendary teachers for a reason, and it’s not usually their research. Second, it’s actually very, very insightful—I have spent more than my share of time studying, reading about, learning about, thinking about and writing about Israel’s DoI, and there were suggestions of ideas in this “podcast” that I’d never thought about quite that way.
How much could something like this teach kids to think about Israel in a much more sophisticated way than almost anything else that we’ve tried (and failed at)? Then I asked myself, what else could one do, even beyond this, to spice up the conversation these young people (or us, too) might have and give them even more to sink their teeth into?
I went back to Notebook LM, gave it exactly the same link to the same webpage with the Declaration, but I changed my question a tiny bit. Instead of just asking it whether or not the creation of the Jewish state was a good idea (which of course it can’t know just from the text), I asked it to create a “talmudic discussion” about whether or not the creation of the Jewish state was a good idea. That’s all I changed.
And note how very, very different this “podcast” (much shorter than the one above) is.
There’s nothing obviously Talmudic about the “podcast” it produced (I have no idea what Notebook “thinks” the word “talmudic” even means), but it’s definitely a lot edgier. And it suggests a somewhat different answer to the question of whether or not creating Israel was a good idea.
Even if one had learned everything presented in the first podcast, this one would get anyone (high school or otherwise) to think all over again. Imagine a world in which Diaspora kids, but also Diaspora adults and then add in Israeli adults and Israeli kids, encountered these two radically different responses to what was virtually the same question, and had to try to adjudicate between them. Imagine Diaspora-Israel dialogue that wasn’t about accusing one side or the other, but about both learning and rethinking assumptions, when the “facilitator” isn’t human and thus has no axe to grind?
This I guarantee: they would leave the conversation knowing much more about the DoI than they did after any of the other classes, lectures, workshops and the like in which they’d previously studied it.
And this I almost guarantee: they would have a very different kind of conversation about Israel because there’s no person to object to. You can’t say about Notebook LM (or Gemini, or Claude, or Chat or Perplexity or whatever) that you don’t want to hear it because it’s “Zionist.” Or because it’s “anti-Zionist.”
These engines aren’t any of those things. Much about them is scary; if you haven’t read Matt Shumer’s now wildly viral “Something Big Is Happening” (he’s a tech guy, not the Senator who keeps reminding you that he’s a “shomer”), you should. Shumer’s piece will rightly terrify you about where our world is headed, but it will also reassure us that as the old institutions grind their way to a close, either immediately or sooner than they’d like to think, there are infinite possibilities for Israelis and Diaspora Jews to use these tools to engender the kinds of serious, honest, respectful conversations that we desperately need if we’re to keep the world’s Jewish communities united about anything at all.
So now, listen to the second “podcast” see how our world changes:
