We drove Cousin Leon home from a bar mitzvah a few years ago. He’s eighty, he’s been at that shul longer than the rabbi, and he spent the ride expounding on the ways of the world from the back seat. He wanted to tell me about August Belmont. Belmont, he said, was a self-hating Jew. Made his fortune, raised his children Episcopalian, changed his name from Schönberg so nobody would know. He said it the way people say things they’ve known for sixty years.
I remembered this story when I was reading Dara Horn’s People Love Dead Jews. Let’s unpack that title. Horn’s argument is that the world enjoys appropriating Jewish suffering once it’s over and they can make it instructive, and has considerably less patience for Jews who are still around and have opinions, or politics, or a yarmulke. Dead Jews teach lessons about tolerance. Living Jews complicate them. In 2017 the Anne Frank House told a young Orthodox employee to cover his kippah with a museum baseball cap, and took four months of board deliberation to decide he could take it off. Horn wonders why it takes four months to let a Jew out of hiding.
The book’s harder argument is about the stories Jews tell themselves. Many Jewish families have an Ellis Island story. The great-grandfather gets off the boat, the clerk can’t spell what he hears, and he ends up with an American name that only vaguely resembles his original one. It becomes an essential fact in their Jewish American story.
Horn says it didn’t happen. The inspectors at Ellis Island didn’t write names down at all. They checked arrivals against ship manifests compiled at the port of departure, and the people doing the checking were required to speak several languages. The name changes came later, in American courthouses, when they petitioned the court to change it.
Horn didn’t think any of this was news. She’d read it on the Ellis Island museum’s own tours. She mentioned it once at a lecture at a Jewish institution and was mobbed by furious, well-read people insisting their own great-grandfather was the exception, offering no evidence beyond “my great-grandfather wouldn’t lie.” They were educated American Jews, angry at a Jewish writer for telling them something true about their own grandparents.
They had good reason to change their names. In the 1920s the Ivy League passed quotas so its colleges wouldn’t be overwhelmed by Jews, and Harvard explained that this was good for the Jews, since too many of them on campus would only produce more antisemitism. Neighborhoods wrote covenants into their deeds to keep Jews from buying houses. Employment agencies in New York ran ads specifying Christians, or Gentiles, or Anglo-Saxons. Almost none of it was against the law, and most of it wasn’t hidden.
Kirsten Fermaglich went through the New York City Civil Court’s name-change petitions for her book A Rosenberg by Any Other Name. In the 1930s Jews were about a quarter of the city and roughly sixty-five percent of the people filing. Max Greenberger filed in 1932 to become Greene, and explained in the petition that a foreign-sounding name wasn’t helping his daughter get work as a musician or his son get a hospital internship. Dora Sarietzky, a stenographer, wrote that “my name proved to be a great handicap in securing a position,” and that she’d already started calling herself Doris Watson to find work.
What almost none of them wrote down was the word antisemitism. They wrote foreign-sounding. Even in the document where they abandoned the name, they wouldn’t say why.
Fermaglich’s argument is that American antisemitism ran unofficially, through private agreements and unwritten preferences, which is exactly why people changed their names. There was just a manager who went with the other resume and never gave a reason. When you can’t get a job, you don’t have the luxury of staging a protest. Greenberger had four children. He needed his son to get the internship. Nobody filing those petitions was trying to stop being a Jew. They were trying to get hired, and the word we reach for now arrived later, from people who never had to file anything.
The myth is the most comfortable story in every way that matters to the family telling it. It has a villain who isn’t America, just an overworked clerk with a pen and a bad ear. Nobody in it is ashamed, and nobody in it makes a decision. The grandfather steps off the boat and something is done to him, and whatever it is, he’s still the man who got here.
Take the clerk away and everything has to be re-examined. Now the grandfather filled out a form and wrote a different name on it, and somebody helped him decide which one. And now everyone in the room named Greene, who grew up hearing about the clerk, is carrying a name that was handed over rather than taken. Horn reads the clerk story as the thing the parents told the kids so the kids could keep believing in America, and she calls it an act of love. The question underneath all of it is whether the grandfather hid, and the man who wouldn’t hire him has been dead for sixty years.
Leon thought he had another story about a Jew who was trying to deny his identity. I looked it up when I got home. Cousin Leon’s self-hating Jew was born Belmont. His father held the name before August was born, and August carried it his whole life. There was no Schönberg to abandon.1
The Schönberg story came from his enemies. Belmont was the Rothschilds’ man in New York and, from 1860, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, which made him the most visible Jew in American politics at the moment the country was tearing itself in half. A Jew with a hidden name is a better villain than a Jew with an ordinary one.
The smear worked so well that it outlived every man who made it, and a hundred and sixty years later it got repeated in the back seat of my car, by a Jew, to a Jew, about a Jew. I pulled up in front of Leon’s house and he said he’d see me at the next bar mitzvah.
Footnotes
The name was his father’s doing, and it wasn’t a disguise. Simon Belmont was the son of Isaac, and until 1808 he went by Simon Isaac, which was how it worked before Jews in the region had fixed surnames. In 1808 Napoleon ordered every Jew in France and its German territories to take one. Alzey was under French rule at the time, so Simon chose a French one, Belmont, beautiful mountain. Schönberg is the same words in German, which is where the confusion comes from and probably where the smear found its foothold. August was born Aron Belmont in Alzey on December 8, 1813, five years after the name was settled, to a father who served as president of the town’s synagogue. The Encyclopaedia Judaica says plainly that his enemies circulated the story that his original name was Schoenberg. The sources for the rest are Richard Gottheil’s The Belmont-Belmonte Family (1917) and David Black’s The King of Fifth Avenue (1981). Plenty of reference works still print Schönberg as his birth name, including the Massachusetts Historical Society’s finding aid for his papers and the infobox on his Wikipedia page, which contradicts the article body directly below it. The myth is still winning on the page. ↩︎
This post is longer than my usual posts, but it’s important.
Last month my Swedish friend asked me a question I’ve been hearing for some time. “Why can’t the Israelis and the Palestinians just get along? Swedes and Norwegians killed each other for centuries,” he said, “and today they get along fine.” I needed some time to give him a full answer, so I’m putting it here.
What I’d tell him is that Israel has made peace with its neighbors before, over and over. In 2020 the Abraham Accords normalized relations with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco. Jordan signed a peace treaty in 1994. The big one was Egypt, which went to war with Israel in 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973. In 1979 the two countries signed a peace treaty, and Israel gave back the entire Sinai Peninsula, which is bigger than Israel and has oil, forcing its own citizens out of their homes to do it. Egypt and Israel haven’t fought since. It’s a cold peace, but it’s peace.
The peace was still spreading. By 2023, Saudi Arabia, home to Islam’s two holiest sites, was working toward recognizing Israel too. One theory about October 7 is that Hamas attacked to scuttle that deal. Two weeks later, President Biden said he believed one of the reasons Hamas moved on Israel was that it knew he was about to sit down with the Saudis. A week after the attack, Saudi Arabia suspended the talks.
What hasn’t worked is the offers that were turned down. May 14, 1948, the date that became Israel’s Independence Day, was also supposed to be the independence day of a new Arab state, which would have been the twenty-third. No Arab state was declared, because the Arab leaders of the time preferred destroying a Jewish state to creating a twenty-third Arab one, and the day after Israel declared independence, five Arab armies invaded. In 2000 Israel offered the Palestinians a state at peace talks. Yasser Arafat walked away without making a counteroffer, and the Second Intifada followed, with years of suicide bombings on buses and in restaurants.
What I believed at the time was that the Jews have a strong right to the land, that we’ve been there for three thousand years, and that the world just doesn’t want to accept it. What I didn’t realize until I read Dara Horn’s new book, The Final Solution to the Jewish Question: A Love Story for the Living, was that this was never two peoples, or two countries, who couldn’t agree. There’s coordinated action by people with a vested interest in keeping them fighting. Horn has been one of the leading voices on antisemitism since her book People Love Dead Jews came out in 2021. In late 2023 and early 2024 she served on an advisory group at Harvard, fielding complaints from Jewish students after October 7. Here’s what I learned from her.
The first thing I learned is that my friend’s question pictures two countries facing each other across a line, and that picture is wrong. Horn borrows an image from Matti Friedman, an Israeli journalist. Imagine a history class that taught about the America-Italy War. Students would learn that the United States invaded Italy, fought its way up the peninsula, and killed Italian civilians along the way. They’d come away thinking America was a monster, because nobody ever mentioned Germany. Studying the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is like that. The larger war belongs to Iran, which has spent decades paying for armies on Israel’s borders, with Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria, and later the Houthis in Yemen.
Hamas, which the United States has designated a terrorist organization since 1997, has a 1988 founding charter that calls for the genocide of Jews worldwide. It built about six hundred miles of tunnels under a strip of land smaller than 150 square miles, at a cost of about a billion dollars. Nobody spends that much money on tunnels unless they are planning to fight a war. That’s also the only way to explain putting tunnel entrances under and beside hospitals, including al-Shifa, Gaza’s largest, which otherwise sounds like a crazy thing to do.
The tunnels are one example of a much bigger problem. Almost anything well-meaning people sent into Gaza could be turned into something else. According to Israeli officials, cement meant to rebuild homes went into the tunnels. Hamas also taxed incoming goods, including medicine. Even water pipes donated by aid groups were turned into rockets, as a 2021 video from Hamas’s military wing showed, with fighters digging up pipes to make them.
The part of the book that rearranged my thinking most was about antisemitism itself. It’s a lie people use to gain or keep power, and the lie is always the same, that Jews are destroying whatever a society values most. Only the thing being valued changes. The historian David Nirenberg’s book Anti-Judaism traces how the West has used Jews as the name for whatever it feared, even in places with no Jews at all. Christians called Jews Christ-killers, and the Nazis managed to call them capitalists and communists at the same time. The Soviets went with racist colonialists. Today, among people who care most about human rights, Jews are the world’s worst human rights violators.
Today there are people who say they aren’t antisemitic, they’re only criticizing Israel, and that calling them antisemitic is just a way to shut them up. In a 2023 lecture, Nirenberg described a popular activist whose rhetoric got him accused of antisemitism. The activist argued that the accusation was just a way to silence criticism and shut down free speech, and, according to Nirenberg, he sued newspapers for libel over it and won. His name was Adolf Hitler.
Right now the worst thing anyone can be is a perpetrator of genocide, so that’s what Israel has to be. In mid-October 2023, hundreds of Harvard students marched behind a banner that said “Stop the Genocide in Gaza,” before a single Israeli soldier had entered Gaza. The news media was so hungry for stories of Israeli genocide that it eagerly ran with the 2025 announcement from the International Association of Genocide Scholars declaring the war a genocide. Fewer than a fifth of the members had voted for it, and the only requirement for membership was a thirty-dollar fee, which came out when pranksters started signing up their pets.
The war wasn’t clean. Like every long war, it surely involved war crimes and atrocities, and that should have been terrible enough. By Hamas’s own figures, Israel destroyed about 70 percent of the buildings in Gaza while killing about 3 percent of the population, combatants included. Those numbers don’t describe a genocide, but genocide is evil, and so it had to be Jewish.
The 1948 war gets framed as a catastrophe too, the displacement of people who were driven from their homes. Today it’s called the Nakba, Arabic for “catastrophe,” and Palestinians mark it every May 15, one day after the date Israel declared independence. The displacement was real. In the fighting of 1948, about 70 percent of Palestinian Arabs were displaced from what became Israel, sometimes violently. About 20 percent stayed, and Arab citizens are still about a fifth of Israel today.
What almost never gets told is the other half. In the West Bank and Gaza, the areas that would have become the Arab state, the Jewish population went to zero. Across the twenty-two Arab states, nearly a million Jews were pushed out. Baghdad, Tripoli, and Aleppo were between 15 and 30 percent Jewish in the 1920s and 1930s, which is more Jewish than New York is now, and today the number in each is zero. The displacement was tragic, but it wasn’t special, since the same thing happened on a bigger scale between Greece and Turkey and in the partition of India.
Even the word has a history I didn’t know. It comes from a 1948 book by the Syrian intellectual Constantine Zureiq, who used it for the Arab armies’ failure to defeat Israel. As I read Horn’s account, the catastrophe Zureiq described was the humiliation of Arabs who might be forced to return to their homes, “there to live under the Zionist shadow.”
Anyone who says Israel is an apartheid state should compare how Arab citizens of Israel live with how Jews lived in Islamic countries. Arab citizens of Israel vote, serve in the Knesset, and sit on the Supreme Court, and in 2021 an Arab party joined the governing coalition. For roughly a thousand years in much of the Islamic world, Jews lived as dhimmis, a legal second class. They wore badges, paid extra taxes, lived in assigned neighborhoods, and stepped into the gutter to let Muslims pass. If apartheid means anything, it means that. The Soviets supplied the modern vocabulary. Mahmoud Abbas, now the Palestinian Authority’s president, went to Moscow to write a dissertation claiming Jews had collaborated with the Nazis, when in fact it was Arab leaders who did.
When the Soviet Union fell apart, Iran raced into the space it left, and in 2001 it found its opening in a conference about racism. The UN had announced the World Conference against Racism in 1997 and chose Durban, South Africa, a country that had just ended apartheid, as the host. The goal was to confront racism everywhere in the world. The documents for the main event were drafted at four regional planning conferences in early 2001, and the one for Asian countries was held in Tehran that February. By then Iran had spent years building proxy armies around Israel and was financing and training the terrorists of the Second Intifada.
Iran kept Israelis and Jewish organizations out of the Tehran meeting. The Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human rights group, asked Mary Robinson, the UN official running the conference, to move it. She refused but promised that Jewish groups could attend, and their permission came after the last flights to Tehran had left. With nobody in the room to object, delegates from Iran and other dictatorships, regimes that jailed, tortured, and executed their own minorities, drafted a declaration that named exactly one country on earth as a racist violator of human rights guilty of crimes against humanity. It was Israel. The draft accused Israel of “ethnic cleansing” and “a new kind of apartheid.”
In Durban, that draft became the template for the declaration of the NGO forum, the activist groups meeting alongside the official conference, which branded Israel a racist apartheid state guilty of genocide and called for isolating it. Copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the century-old antisemitic forgery, were on sale, and people who had come to talk about racism in Asia, Africa, and Latin America got pushed to the side. At a youth panel on antisemitism, Jewish delegates were surrounded and shouted down before they reached the stage, and one activist told a Jewish student, “I won’t speak to you until you take this off,” pointing at the student’s kippah.
The United States and Israel walked out. Tom Lantos, a California congressman and the only Holocaust survivor ever to serve in Congress, was part of the American delegation. He warned Robinson that letting these regimes use words like “ethnic cleansing,” “genocide,” and “crimes against humanity” about Israel would “forever debase their meaning.” Debasing them was the plan. Many of the regimes behind the declaration had long since purged their own Jewish communities and were busy persecuting other minorities. As long as everyone was looking at Israel, nobody was looking at them.
The thing that finally answered my friend’s question was about talking. Many antizionist activists practice what they call anti-normalization, which means refusing to treat Zionists as normal people, and in practice that means refusing to talk to them. Zionist describes about 80 percent of American Jews and more than 90 percent of Jews worldwide, half of whom live in Israel. At Harvard, Jewish and Israeli students told Horn that classmates physically turned their backs on them, the way white students once did to Black students entering integrated schools.
What fills the silence is slogans, and most of the people chanting them don’t know where they came from. “Zionism is racism” was Soviet propaganda before it was a campus chant. In 1975 the Soviet bloc and Arab states pushed it through the UN General Assembly as a resolution, which the UN repealed in 1991. “Antizionism isn’t antisemitism” sounds reasonable until you remember what Zionism is. It’s the national movement of the Jewish people, the belief that Jews should have a homeland in the land of Israel, and now that the homeland exists, it mostly means believing Israel has the right to keep existing. That describes the same nine in ten Jews.
“Free Palestine” has become a battle cry. In May 2025, the man who shot and killed two young Israeli embassy staffers outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington shouted it as he was arrested. It had nothing to do with freeing anyone.
Even the students who did talk often didn’t know how to argue. A Harvard administrator told Horn that students were arriving unprepared, which sounded absurd about the most selective college in the country until he explained. “They think that if someone says something happened to them, then that’s the end of a debate, rather than the beginning,” he said. Harvard’s president, Alan Garber, said the same thing in a public interview in late 2025. “Students came to us that way,” he said, “with a set of expectations that they would not hear language or thoughts that would be offensive to them.” Horn remembers a different Harvard, full of classmates who met hard problems by trying to solve them. Peace needs argument, and argument needs people who will talk.
The last thing I learned is why this keeps happening. Horn’s closing chapter retells the Jewish story as a set of ideas that were radical in the ancient world. In Egypt the pharaoh was a god, and a people who bowed only to one God, a God who belonged to all of them and not to a ruler, were a people who didn’t bow to tyrants. The Sabbath gave even the poor a day that was theirs, and Greeks and Romans who visited Judea decided Jews were lazy after seeing poor people not working. The idea that every human being is made in the divine image came from the same place.
A Nazi propagandist named Johann von Leers understood what he was up against. As one scholar sums up his 1933 pamphlet Jews Out!, von Leers believed the Jews had convinced the world of a great lie, that all humans are equal. Horn writes that the line stopped her short, because it was true.
My friend asked about two countries, and I understand why, because that’s how the war gets taught, like an America-Italy War where nobody ever mentions Germany. Once I put Germany back in, the picture changed. Israel keeps making peace with anyone who will sign, and the regime paying for the tunnels keeps making sure the Palestinians never do. If he asks me again, I’ll tell him the Swedes and Norwegians had it easy. Nobody was paying either of them to keep fighting.
P.S. This isn’t as far-fetched as you’d imagine. Denmark ruled Norway for about four hundred years, and the Danes and Swedes fought each other again and again. In 1814 Denmark lost a war and had to hand Norway over to Sweden. In 1905 Norway voted to leave, and Sweden let it go without a fight. If Denmark had been trying to build some sort of global empire, with Norway as one of its fronts, it’s quite possible they’d all still be at war.
Last week was Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. At the center of the day is when we confess our sins and try to make good in front of God.
The sin I kept coming back to this year is taking people for granted. I don’t spend enough time with my friends and family, and I don’t see them or call them enough. Someone crosses my mind, I realize how long it’s been, and I feel a small drop in my stomach. For years my move was to get rid of that feeling as fast as I could, either by promising myself I’d reach out soon or by feeling bad enough that the bad feeling counted as a kind of payment.
In the afternoon we read the Book of Jonah, which is about exactly that kind of running. God tells Jonah to go to Nineveh and warn the city to change its ways, and Jonah runs the other way, onto a ship headed for Tarshish. A storm comes up, the sailors throw him overboard, and a great fish swallows him. He spends three days in its belly, and then the fish spits him out onto dry land and the word of God comes to him a second time. There are three ways to read it that line up with three ways of thinking about sin and forgiveness.
Many people read the fish as the punishment. You run, you get eaten, and the lesson is that you shouldn’t have run. When I was a kid I understood the confession the same way, as apologizing, literally. You do things wrong, you say you’re sorry, you feel bad about it, and feeling bad is what makes you do better the next time. You’ve got to apologize, right? The confession is called the Vidui, and it’s alphabetical, a line for every letter. So I’d stand there going down the alphabet, and every word on the list would find something I had done, because who hasn’t mocked or quarreled or scoffed, and I’d leave the service feeling that I never did anything right.
Later I read it as a story of forgiveness and getting out. The fish spits Jonah onto dry land, and the point is that he’s delivered. Last year I wrote about forgiveness. You confess, the slate is wiped clean, and you walk into the new year purified and ready to be a better person. That’s a real improvement on wallowing in shame, and I still believe it’s important.
But Maimonides, the twelfth-century rabbi and philosopher, has an image for what happens when forgiveness is all we’re after. Confessing without letting go of the sin, he says, is like immersing yourself in a ritual bath while still holding the dead lizard that made you impure, so you come up out of the water exactly as you went in. I walked out lighter, and I still hadn’t called anybody.
This year I think the story is about the time Jonah spends in the belly of the fish. Now I read the fish as a consequence. Jonah got on a boat away from the thing he was supposed to do, and the belly is where that lands you, the same way the drop in my stomach is where putting people off lands me. It’s also the only place in the story where he stops. He’s in the literal belly of the beast, with nowhere to go and nothing to do but think about what he did, and that’s where he prays and works out what he’ll do differently. This is what it feels like during Yom Kippur.
Maimonides has four steps for repentance. First, you stop doing the thing. Second, you regret it, charatah in Hebrew. Third, you resolve not to do it again. Fourth, you confess it out loud, which is the Vidui, the part I always thought was the whole of Yom Kippur. The regret is the part I’d been trying to get rid of, and it turns out to be the part the whole thing runs on. When the fish finally spits Jonah out, the word of God comes to him a second time, same instruction, same city, and this time he goes.
Sitting with it is worth doing because there are two ways to think about regret, one that looks at the past and one that looks at the future. Regret about the past is the things I keep turning over in my head and wish I’d done differently, and it isn’t very productive, because I can’t change them. Regret that looks at the future treats the same moments as lessons for moving forward, which I can actually use. Most of what I do, I do over and over again. Family dinner, a favor I do or don’t do, a difficult situation with my spouse, these come around all the time. If I learn what I wish I’d done better, I can do it next time.
Viktor Frankl may have said it best when he wrote, “Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now.” The belly of the whale isn’t a horrible place to be. It’s where you get to work out how to do it better, and the good news is that there’s always a next time.
So if you’re reading this and you know the drop in the stomach, shoot me a note and we can stop running from each other.
Notes
One of my friends watches About Time every year. It’s about a man who can travel through time trying to lead his best life. It makes a great complement to this post. Afterward, if you want the backstory, Richard Curtis talked about writing it.
A manager friend of mine was on a Zoom call with his team, walking them through the new project plan. When he got to the end he said, “This is just my opinion. What does everyone else think?” Crickets. A grid of faces, a few of them nodding, nobody unmuting. He waited. Then he moved on.
He told me about it afterward, and what struck me was how baffled he was. He asks his team for feedback constantly. He wants them to tell him he’s wrong. He wants an argument. What he gets is silence, or a nod, or “makes sense,” and he cannot understand why. He isn’t asking for politeness. He is asking for a fight, and nobody will give him one.
He’s an Orthodox Jew, and I think he’s running on an ideal he has probably never had to put into words, because it was in the water he grew up in. Jews don’t study alone. They study in pairs. The partner is called a chevruta, and the whole point of a chevruta is that they argue with you. There’s a practice called Daf Yomi where you read a page of Talmud a day, the same page every other person doing it is reading that day, and at 2,711 pages it takes seven and a half years to get to the end. A lot of people do it with a chevruta, which means signing up for seven and a half years of someone telling you you’re wrong.
Rabbi Angela Buchdahl, the senior rabbi of Central Synagogue in Manhattan, gave a sermon on Yom Kippur in 2021 called “The Third Opinion: Why Jews Value Dissent.” It starts with the old joke. Two Jews, three opinions. She says the line always puzzled her. If the point is that Jews disagree, two Jews and two opinions would cover it. Where does the third one come from?
Her answer comes from the Talmud’s most famous study pair. Rabbi Yochanan was the head of the academy. Resh Lakish was a former bandit with no formal training who turned out to be brilliant. The two of them would go back and forth on every point “until the matter became clear to both of them.” That, Buchdahl says, is the third opinion. It’s the one neither of them walked in with.
Then Resh Lakish dies, and the community finds Yochanan a new partner, a gifted scholar who, every time Yochanan makes an argument, produces a text that supports it. Within days Yochanan is miserable. He doesn’t need anyone to tell him he’s right. He already thinks he’s right. He wanted someone who would raise twenty-four objections to everything he said, and now there is no one, and the story ends with him losing his mind and dying of grief.
Buchdahl’s larger point, and the one I keep turning over, is that this was a choice. In 325 the Council of Nicaea produced a creed, a single statement of what a Christian believes. The Talmud was being assembled in the same era and did the opposite. It records the minority opinion next to the majority. It answers questions with more questions. Later rabbis wrote their arguments into the margins, so that today you can disagree with someone across centuries. One tradition hands down what to believe. The other hands down how to arrive at a belief. That contrast is hers, and it’s the engine of the whole sermon.
Reading it, I found myself nodding along, and that is the trap. Of course you want a study partner who tells you you’re wrong. Of course the best answer is the one neither of you brought into the room. It’s obvious.
But it’s obvious to us. I work in an intensely multicultural place, and on any given call there are people who were taught the opposite and taught it as a virtue. It’s tempting to explain that with one idea, how seriously a culture takes rank. Erin Meyer, who teaches at INSEAD and wrote a book called “The Culture Map,” argues that’s really two separate dials. One is deference, how much respect you show authority. The other is argument, how comfortable you are with an open fight, and the two don’t move together. Japan and China are high on deference and low on argument, which is the combination people expect. France is high on both, which is why a French meeting can be rigidly hierarchical and still a brawl. Israel and the Netherlands are low on deference and high on argument, which is the room my friend thinks he’s in.
So the ideal he’s running on, the one about arguing until the matter becomes clear to both of you, needs both dials turned all the way up, and he has no idea he’s asking for either one. When he says “this is just my opinion” he thinks he has opened a door. Someone raised in Tokyo hears a senior person state a position and then invite the team to agree with it, which is what those words have always meant where she comes from, and she gives him what respect requires. She isn’t withholding. She is doing the right thing, exactly as she was taught it.
My friend has been handed the study partner who agrees with everything, and he’s the only one on the call who knows how that story ends.
Notes
Note 1: While writing this, Claude couldn’t help but point out that Buchdahl’s sermon names the study partner as Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai, and the Yochanan in the Resh Lakish story is a later rabbi, Yochanan bar Nappaha.
Note 2: I spent years at AWS, where this whole idea is company policy. One of Amazon’s leadership principles is “Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit,” and it says leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree, even when that’s uncomfortable, and that they don’t go along with something to keep the peace. Then once the call is made, everyone commits. Which is more or less what the Talmud does. Record the dissent, follow the ruling.
Apologies for posting this on a nonstandard day, but I wanted to post this in time for January 27th, Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The remains of the fire that tore through Beth Israel Congregation, the only synagogue in Jackson, Mississippi in January 2026.
I’ve been thinking about Kristallnacht—the Night of Broken Glass. It’s a strangely beautiful name for such horror, and the word has actually fallen out of favor in Germany, where people now recognize it as a euphemism that downplays the violence and brutality of the pogroms. They prefer alternative names: Novemberpogrome (November Pogroms) or Reichspogromnacht (Reich Pogrom Night). These names capture the truth more honestly—violence, desecration, a turning point.
A few years ago, listening to a survivor speak at our synagogue, something struck me about that night. Not just its historical significance, but something more fundamental about the nature of evil itself.
The Banality of Evil
The woman who spoke was quite old. She had been a child during Kristallnacht, which means we’re approaching the end of an era when people who actually experienced the Holocaust can speak on their own behalf. Once they’re gone, these events become history—easier to file away, easier to forget the ordinary horror of it all.
She described how people came into synagogues and desecrated the Torah. Synagogues were torched. Torah scrolls were ripped and trampled. Cemeteries were defiled. Jewish books were burned. Jewish men were rounded up and sent to concentration camps.
We like to think that if we had been there, we would have known. We would have seen the evil clearly and stood against it. We imagine we could have explained things to people, made them understand. But the reality is that evil is far more banal than that. It doesn’t always announce itself with horns and pitchforks. It begins quietly, by gradually stripping away their humanity, and what better way of destroying their humanity than destroying the things they hold most sacred?
That’s why the desecration of the Torah hit me particularly hard that day.
From Sacred to Profane
The word “profane” originally means to make something ordinary, to strip away its holiness. I thought about my son when he was two years old, trying to climb into the ark that stores the Torah scrolls in our synagogue. To him, it was just a cabinet—an object with its profane, functional purpose. But to us, it’s sacred space, the holder of our most important text, our connection to thousands of years of tradition and meaning.
Profane also means to violate or treat with contempt. That’s what happened during the Jewish pogrom that night—the systematic profaning of sacred objects, the desecration of things that held deep meaning for an entire people.
When they destroyed the Torah scrolls on Kristallnacht, it wasn’t simply about destroying Judaism or trying to destroy the Jews. When you destroy the sacred objects of a people you’re ripping away their humanity. Once you do that, you can do whatever horrible thing you want to them, because these people are no longer human in your eyes. They’re objects. Worse than objects, actually—they look like humans but you’ve decided they’re not. That’s why the Nazis could do all of these horrible things to the Jews—because we were no longer human.
Where are We Now
Dara Horn captures something devastating in her Atlantic article Is Holocaust Education Making Anti-Semitism Worse? She writes that Holocaust education treats Jewish murder as a universal metaphor instead of honoring Jews who died. The dead Jews of the Holocaust are being used to teach a general lesson on tolerance and genocide—profaning their memories.
She points out that the National Museum of African American History doesn’t end its slavery exhibition by pivoting to “other enslaved peoples throughout history.” That would be insulting. But Holocaust museums routinely do this to Jews, ending with other genocides and generic “upstander” pledges. Jewish experience becomes a metaphor, never something valued for its own sake.
While we talk about the atrocities of the Holocaust, students make “Jew jokes” without stigma. People throw pennies at Jews in 21st-century America. Shopping carts “accidentally” ram someone wearing a kippah. When you set the bar for bigotry at mass murder, most of it doesn’t make the cut.
David Baddiel captures the double standard in Jews Don’t Count. We’ve created a hierarchy of protected minorities, and Jews don’t make the list. Whoopi Goldberg can say the Holocaust “wasn’t about race”—just “white people doing it to white people”—as if Jewish identity doesn’t count. “What should we do about Israel?” has become the new “What should we do about the Jews?” The rhetoric around Israeli “misdeeds against humanitarianism” is eerily similar to the Nazis’ reliance on science—different vocabulary, same structure.
When those men desecrated the Torah scrolls on Kristallnacht, they stripped away Jewish humanity by profaning the sacred. We can’t just teach people about gas chambers and expect them to recognize anti-Semitism—yet that’s exactly what we’re doing. Holocaust education has trained a generation of “upstanders” who will spring into action the moment they see another Holocaust—and do nothing about everything that comes before it. We need to teach the continuum: the constant dehumanization of Jews throughout history and today.
Jews don’t count. Except they should. They must. That’s how we honor both the dead and the living.
I’m writing this for one particular friend, but thought the rest of you might enjoy it.
As an atheist, you probably think of religion like Richard Dawkins. He talks about religion this way. Imagine someone tells you there’s something incredibly important hidden in your backyard. You start digging. When you don’t find anything, they say you’re not digging deep enough. You keep digging. Still nothing appears. Eventually, the hole gets so big and destructive that you’ve ruined the entire yard. Yet you’ve convinced yourself that digging is virtuous.
The problem is that Dawkins views religion in a particular way. He sees it as an end in goal—a claim about what’s literally true about the universe. And a lot of people think of religion that way. But that’s not what religion is, at least not for me.
Here’s my short answer: Religion is a means to an end. What end? The end of being a better person. It’s a framework for asking the right questions about how to live, a way of making the ordinary sacred, and a path toward holiness that neither science nor art alone can provide.
Let me explain.
What God Is (To Me)
As Rabbi Harold Kushner often said, when someone told him they didn’t believe in God, he would ask them to describe the God they didn’t believe in—and usually found he didn’t believe in that God either.
For me, God isn’t a man in the sky who created the world in seven days. I believe in Rabbi Kushner’s God —a God who represents the best of what we can become, who calls us to be better.
You know that old story where several blind men encounter an elephant for the first time? Each touches a different part—one feels the trunk and thinks it’s a snake, another touches the leg and thinks it’s a tree, another feels the ear and thinks it’s a fan. Each has grasped part of the truth, but none can see the whole.
That’s how religion works, because god is literally impossible to fully understand. But it does a good job of helping us grasp at least some of the pieces, like feeling the elephant’s foot here, its trunk there. It’s not God, but a representation of God.
God is the sacred beauty we encounter in the world. It’s the courage that shows up when life gets hard. The kindness we didn’t know we had. It’s the connection I feel to my grandparents, even though they’ve died—that transcendent feeling, that awesome sense of having my grandparents inside me. When I read that God brings life back from the dead, it’s not about resurrection but this amazing ability for our essence to live inside others.
God Is Not Science. God Is More Like Poetry.
I once had a conversation with a wise high school Principal. I asked him what the most important thing for high schools to teach was. I thought the answer was obvious: the ability to read and analyze things, to think critically and move ideas forward. This would help people make money, make good decisions, and be productive members of society.
He had a different answer. He said the most important thing was for kids to read books and understand other people’s points of view—to get inside other people’s heads.
That’s the core difference between Dawkins’s view of the world and mine. Science tells us what we know. Poetry tells us what has meaning. Religion gives us a path toward holiness—a way to get there that neither science nor poetry alone can provide.
Camus wrote that “fiction is the lie that tells the truth.” He meant that fiction helps us build empathy, showing us what it’s like to be someone else. You get to feel things, visit places and worlds you would never otherwise know. You learn that everyone else out there is a “me” as well.
Religion works the same way. The stories may not be literally true—the world wasn’t made in six days, and Noah didn’t actually gather every animal on earth. But these stories are doing something more important than conveying facts. They’re helping us understand how to live, how to connect with each other, how to find meaning.
Just knowing the facts is different from really understanding them. Acquiring wisdom is putting your facts together in the right way. That’s where religion comes in. Religion helps provide a framework and a way of seeing the world that goes beyond the facts. It helps you expand what it means to be a human being.
What Religion Does (That Nothing Else Can)
Religion offers things that neither science nor poetry can. Poetry is still individual. Religion is about groups of people coming together.
One of the most important things religion provides is a framework for the most important lifestage events—births, deaths, marriages, and coming-of-age ceremonies. These are essential to being human, and you really can’t find them anywhere else.
I saw this firsthand at Ari’s bar mitzvah a few months ago. What could have been just another birthday party became something sacred. When God comes to your party, something shifts. What was merely fun becomes a simcha—a holy joy. Everyone came not just to have a good time, but to witness an important milestone: Ari’s sacred transition from boy to man in Jewish tradition.
Harold Kushner sums it up nicely when he says, “The goal of Judaism is not to teach us how to escape from the profane world to the cleansing presence of God, but to teach us how to bring God into the world, how to take the ordinary and make it holy.”
What makes occasions like these special isn’t the logistics or even the food—it’s that people feed them with something vital: their time. To really create a wonderful simcha, everyone must give part of their life to it—their presence, their energy, their attention. Each person becomes a contributor to something larger than themselves, breathing life into the celebration until it becomes truly alive with shared joy and purpose.
Religion also carries wisdom that endures. Yes, there are principles and rituals and things that seem silly and traditions we’ve inherited across millennia. You might ask, “Do we really need all of this stuff? Can’t we just keep the stuff that matters?”
The problem is, that as hard as we try to do this, it just doesn’t seem to work very well. Take Jonathan Haidt’s book The Happiness Hypothesis from 2006. It’s a great book that tries to link the wisdom of the ages with modern psychogy. Even though the book is only 20 years old, the wisdom of the ages stays constant but many of the views in psychology have been upended.
In Judaism, we’re constantly revising and changing and arguing. That’s the core of the religion—the endless debate, the wrestling with text and tradition and each other. It’s not about having the right answers. It’s about asking the right questions, together, and trusting that the tradition carries wisdom even in the parts we don’t fully understand.
What Really Matters
So what do we do? Last year, I was sitting around thinking and remembering those wonderful college days when we would just sit around and have these profound conversations—the kind that stretch late into the night because you never want them to end.
Then one Shabbat, while Abigail and the kids were busy, I went to shul alone. I planned to meditate, reconnect with friends, and recharge. I ran into my friend Joe, and we started talking.
When they kicked us out after lunch to clean up, we kept going on the street. I didn’t want it to end, so I offered to walk him home. “Otherwise you’ll never get there,” I joked.
At his apartment, Joe invited me up for a drink. We talked for hours—exactly the kind of conversation I’d been craving.
We talked about how many people view religion as a burden rather than a benefit. Many people view religion as a burden, something they can only do “when they have time.” They are running around, working, or going to the kids’ soccer game, but they never quite have enough time for religion.
Yet when you really examine it, going to shul matters deeply. These are the things that really matter in life. Religion is about getting closer to God every week—pausing, thinking about becoming a better person, seeing friends, and engaging in the wisdom literature. These are the things that actually matter.
At some point, we both said at the same time, “This is living!” Not excelling at sports or getting a promotion. We’re conditioned to think those activities were more meaningful, but they’re not. This—sitting together, wrestling with big questions, connecting deeply with another person—this is what really matters.
A few weeks ago, we celebrated Ari’s bar mitzvah. Words can’t really capture the feelings I have about it. Watching my son become an adult, surrounded by family and friends—there’s nothing like it. Yes, we had a fun party. But a bar mitzvah is more than that. It’s a spiritual life event.
This transformation—from ordinary celebration to sacred moment—is the heart of Jewish practice. As Rabbi Harold Kushner says in his book To Life!: “Everything in God’s world can be holy if you realize its potential holiness. Everything we do can be transformed into a Sinai experience, an encounter with the sacred. The goal of Judaism is not to teach us how to escape from the profane world to the cleansing presence of God, but to teach us how to bring God into the world, how to take the ordinary and make it holy.”
Ari’s Moment to Shine
First of all, I need to give Ari all the credit in the world. He stood in front of everyone—family, friends, our entire community—and led the service, read Torah, and delivered his d’var Torah with a voice that was loud, clear, and thoughtful. This was his moment, and he owned it.
For his d’var Torah, he worked with our friend Doron. They studied together for many sessions as Ari figured out what he wanted to say. Doron pushed him, as his study partner, to dig deep and find his own meaning. His Torah portion, Nitzavim, was almost impossibly perfect for the occasion. “You are all standing today,” it begins—and there was Ari, literally standing before us, taking responsibility for his own Jewish life. He taught us that the Torah “is not in heaven”—it’s not distant or unreachable, reserved for angels or scholars. It’s here with us, in our mouths and in our hearts, in the way we walk, think, and act.
He illustrated this lesson with his own observation. At Camp Ramah, he noticed that the song during the Torah procession was much faster than at Habonim. At first, he thought it was just a different tradition. Then he realized: at Habonim, you walk all the way around the shul, so you need a longer song. At camp, with a smaller space, the song had to be faster—like how the Jeopardy music is exactly 30 seconds because contestants have 30 seconds to answer.
He owned this whole line of thought—taking the general lesson that we need to adapt Judaism to our context and making it his own, all within the framework of Jewish tradition. He was proud of his thinking, and everyone was impressed. The Cantor even cried. This is the kind of thinking of an adult.
Over the past few years, I’ve watched Ari take responsibility for this work. He studied hard for his Torah portion, showing up week after week to prepare. He volunteered for his mitzvah project, packing care packages and writing cards for American soldiers overseas through an organization honoring Stu Wolfer, a Jewish American soldier killed in Iraq who worked with my wife. As Ari pointed out, real tzedakah costs something—it comes from the prime hours of your day, not just leftover time or money.
Ari’s best moment happened at an unlikely point. The Rabbi made a joke during the service. It was kind of an awkward joke, as he’s a new Rabbi and didn’t know the community that well. In fact, this was his first large event. He said, “I’m going to tell you a secret. You became a bar mitzvah when you turned 13.” Ari, genuinely surprised, did this very physical double-take—hands to his head, “Oh my God, you’ve blown my brain!” The whole crowd cracked up. That humor, that ease in front of everyone, helping the Rabbi co-lead the congregation—it was pure Ari.
The Power of Ritual
What does it mean for a 13-year-old to become a man? He still can’t drink, vote, or drive. But rituals serve a purpose—they take ordinary events and make it holy.
I used to scoff at the idea of birthday parties: “Why celebrate? It’s just another day.” But I’ve realized that a birthday is an opportunity—it’s a vessel, an opportunity you fill with meaning. It becomes a moment for people to focus their energy on you, to make it special.
A bar mitzvah is a birthday party on steroids. It’s one of the few times in life when friends and family will fly across the country to mark an occasion.
When God comes to your party, something shifts. What was merely fun becomes a simcha—joy with purpose. It’s about sanctifying life itself. Everyone came not just to have a good time, but to witness an important milestone: Ari’s sacred transition from boy to man in Jewish tradition.
The Gift of Presence
In addition to having God’s presence, we also had the presence of all the people who came to celebrate. Those who traveled from out of town, those who participated in the service, and even those who simply woke up on a Saturday morning, rolled out of bed, and came to shul.
This collective energy is what fuels a simcha. As William James wrote, “My experience is what I agree to attend to.” Each person who shows up is making a choice about where to direct their time and attention—and that choice matters.
The pandemic taught me just how much. Suddenly it became easy to “attend” a bar mitzvah or funeral virtually. You could drop in on an event without changing out of pajama pants, maybe playing Angry Birds when things got boring. No travel required, no time lost, no real inconvenience.
But something essential was missing. These virtual gatherings felt hollow, and it wasn’t just the technology’s fault. What makes occasions like these special isn’t the logistics or even the food—it’s that people feed them with something vital: their time.
This is when I finally understood something I’d always dismissed as a cop-out. In the days of the Temple, we gave animal sacrifices. Today, we’re told, the sacrifice we bring is our time. I used to think this was just a convenient excuse for the absence of ritual offerings. But now it makes perfect sense.
Time is the most valuable thing we have. We each have limited time on earth, and how we spend it defines our lives. When people gather to celebrate together, that collective sacrifice creates something sacred. As William James also wrote, “The greatest use of a life is to spend it on something that will outlast it.”
To really create a wonderful simcha, everyone must give part of their life to it—their presence, their energy, their attention. Each person becomes a contributor to something larger than themselves, breathing life into the celebration until it becomes truly alive with shared joy and purpose.
I went into Ari’s bar mitzvah expecting to feel proud, but I experienced so much more. When my friends and family give their time—the most precious thing they have—to sanctify a moment in Ari’s life, something shifts. I’m not just throwing a party. I’m participating in something ancient and sacred, bringing God into the world one shared moment at a time. No wonder words felt inadequate.
Over the past year, I’ve been practicing mindfulness. I’d meditate for fifteen minutes a day, sitting quietly, watching my thoughts drift by. I was also working on my psychological flexibility, separating my thoughts from my emotions. At first, it felt like exercise for the brain: uncomfortable, sometimes boring, but strangely strengthening. Over time, though, I noticed something deeper.
I really saw the benefits of this on Yom Kippur. I realized how closely these practices mirror the essence of the holiday. In many ways, Yom Kippur is a 25-hour meditation—an invitation to step away from food, distractions, and earthly concerns, and instead focus on prayer, presence, and who we are in relation to God.
I’m used to walking down the street and seeing someone sitting on the sidewalk with a sign:
“Homeless. Please Help.”
And I feel it—that tension. That deep, emotional tug to help.
But then the mental calculus starts. There are so many great causes I could be supporting with that dollar. I could give to a food pantry. Or support addiction recovery. Or donate to a shelter with wraparound services. Or contribute to an organization that tackles root causes like housing policy or mental health care.
On July 4th, we usually remember the events of 1776, when America cast off the yoke of British rule. But something else happened on that date—exactly 200 years later. On July 4th, 1976, Israel carried out one of the most daring military operations in its history.
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