“To Be A Jew Is To Be Different”

As Kol Nidre approaches and the holiest day of the year begins, I wanted to share my recent conversation with Sarah Hurwitz, the author of the new book As A Jew. 

Sarah is a former speechwriter for President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama, and her gift is making complicated ideas digestible. It’s a skill she deftly brought to her 2019 book, Here All Along, which was about embracing her Judaism as an adult. The subtitle was: Finding Meaning, Spirituality, and a Deeper Connection to Life—in Judaism (After Finally Choosing to Look There). Hurwitz is honest and open about her journey, and brings readers along for a crash course in Jewish customs, culture, and history. 

Her new book challenges us. The subtitle of this one is Reclaiming Our Story from Those Who Blame, Shame, and Try to Erase Us. It’s about how 2,000 years of antisemitism has made a lot of us uncomfortable with our Jewish identity—eager to downplay what makes us different and distance ourselves from our history—and far less knowledgeable when it comes to what our tradition actually is about. 

I’ll be honest: reading this book made me uncomfortable. It made me realize how often I (someone who has made a career out of being proudly Jewish!) fall prey to what Hurwitz describes in her own life: a willingness to make myself and my Jewish identity smaller, more palatable, less controversial to the world around me. I imagine many of you might feel something similar. 

Which is why, on a day where we confront who we’ve been as Jews and set our intentions for who we want to be, I think it’s so important to engage with what this book offers: a roadmap not only for how we got here, but how we can chart a new, confident path going forward. 

Sarah is brilliant and lovely, and I was excited to get the chance to catch up with her. Here’s an edited version of our conversation. 

(And if you missed it, here’s yesterday’s newsletter on the perfect shoes for Yom Kippur. All in a week’s work here at GOLDA.) 

Your first book, Here All Along, very honestly describes your rediscovery of Judaism and its value in your life. Where does this new book, As a Jew, find you on your spiritual journey?

Here All Along is me rediscovering Judaism at the age of 36, finding 4,000 years of profound wisdom about the human condition, and being like, “Oh my gosh, where's this been all my life? I want to tell people about it.”

And this second book, As A Jew, is me saying, “Wait, no really: Where was this all my life?” 

Why did I see so little of this in the Judaism I was exposed to growing up? Why did I have this incredibly apologetic Jewish identity of, “I'm Jewish, but not that Jewish.” It was never like, “Yeah, I’m a Jew.” It was, “I'm a cultural Jew”—but I knew nothing about Jewish culture. What the hell was I talking about? Or “social justice is my Judaism.” Again, I knew nothing about what Judaism said about social justice. I had this contentless Jewish identity that was basically just an ethnic joke. 

I think this is a pretty common Jewish identity: I'm vaguely proud to be Jewish. I don't really know what that means. I have a sense of something about social justice, and that's kind of it.

I don't think it's the most satisfying or profound identity, but you can probably sustain that identity in good times. But post-October 7, when Jewishness and Jews are being attacked from all angles, saying “I love bagels” is not going to equip you to process what's happening.

We still can love bagels, though, right? 

Absolutely! I think being a cultural Jew is such a beautiful way to be Jewish. If you connect to Judaism through Jewish history, art, food, literature, music, that's so gorgeous. That’s such a profound way to be Jewish. But again, when I said I was just a cultural Jew, I didn't know anything about Jewish culture. 

I want to be very clear: I'm not making an argument for traditional halachic observance. I'm making an argument for knowing something about the tradition and then acting accordingly.

There are so many ways to be an amazing, passionate, committed, proud Jew. But there is one wrong way, and that is to be contentless. We need to know who we are, where we came from, the project and process of our tradition, and what we have to say to the world. That's my argument.

It’s a powerful moment to be thinking about this, as we welcome the Jewish New Year and think about who we want to be and what we want to prioritize.

Yes! Our tradition has 4,000 years of wisdom about what it means to be human, how to be a good person, how to lead a worthy, meaningful life, how to find profound spiritual connections. That is our inheritance as Jews. That is our birthright. This wisdom and this tradition are ours. 

Persecution may have led our ancestors to erase themselves, to leave behind tradition, but we don't have to. We can reclaim the tradition. 

Judaism is countercultural. To be a Jew is to be different. And to be different is to be uncomfortable. I think we've lost sight of this in America, where we have worked so hard to be comfortable. I want everyone in America to be comfortable, people of all identities. But you know what? Our comfort with our own comfort, it's made us forget that to be a Jew is to be different. 

Monotheism was different when it was introduced into the world. It wasn't comfortable. The six-day workweek was different. That wasn’t comfortable. The idea that every human being is created in God's image? That was a different idea and wasn't comfortable. We have so much countercultural wisdom.

Jewish wisdom and Jewish thinking operates in polarities. It demands that you hold two or more opposing truths. The Torah says “Love the stranger, love the non-Jew, love the foreigner, love the immigrant, love the person who is not in the in-group and care for that person.” It also says “Remember Amalek; Remember that there was an enemy tribe that attacked you from behind.” Be compassionate, be openhearted, care for the stranger—but also remember there are people who want to kill you.

I see so many people clinging to one of those poles, and saying that the other pole is the wrong side of history or not the truth. That's not Jewish. Being Jewish is holding both of those poles and wrestling with them. We need that kind of polarity thinking in our society. That is what Judaism offers.

It is so important that we know what our tradition has to say. I had to grow up; I had to become an adult Jew. It was really hard. Many of us are like 9-year-old Jews. And that's fine when you're 9. But when you're a grown adult, it doesn't work. We have to grow up. And growing up means reading some books, taking a class, listening to some lectures. You’ve got to actually do some learning. 

We’re in a moment that a lot of us find very disconcerting. But this moment is in many ways contextualized by history, and it seems like you’re saying our response could be better if we knew a little more about that history.

We are spending so much time saying “We have to fight antisemitism.” And, look, that's great. There are many people doing great work to fight antisemitism. But there are 16 million of us—with an m—out of 8 billion people in the world. This is a hatred that is thousands of years old. The idea that we are going to control what billions of people think? I appreciate the ambition, but I'm not sure we should be spending all of our time on other people. 

I will just gently and respectfully point out that if you know nothing about Jewish tradition, you are absolutely unequipped to fight antisemitism. If someone says to you, “The Jewish God is violent and vengeful, and Judaism is legalistic and unspiritual,” and you're a contentless Jew, what are you going to say? “I love bagels?”

If they say “Israel is a colonial, genocidal state,” and you know nothing about Jewish history or Israeli history, what will you say? 

You can't fight against antisemitism if you don't know what you're fighting for. Our tradition has so many beautiful pieces of wisdom, beautiful rituals, ways to create strong communities and strong families and worthy lives. That is what's going to equip us to not just survive in this moment, but to thrive. 

It's not the first time that Jews have been ostracized in America. We've been here before. We try our best to be part of the broader society, and we should still do that. But what I always tell college students is if the climate club won't have you because you're a Zionist, then form your own climate club and make it welcoming to everyone. Be radically inclusive. You let anyone who cares about climate change into your club, and you make that club the best your campus has ever seen. Period.

That's what we did in the 1950s. They didn't let us into their law firms? We made the best law firms. They didn’t let us into their hospitals? We made the best hospitals. And then everyone wanted to come in and we welcomed them. We were radically inclusive and welcoming. We said anyone who's committed to excellence, who is committed to this project of law or medicine or climate change, is welcome here. 

I actually think that kind of disruption is super exciting. There are a lot of institutions that have become kind of mediocre, and if we're going to be excluded from them, I don't think it's a terrible thing for us to start our own. And make them totally open to anyone who wants to come in and focus on the actual content, rather than on hating Jews.

I have to ask you the Hannah Einbinder question. She literally used the phrase “As a Jew” to explain her acceptance speech at the Emmys where she said “Free Palestine,” and then posted a picture of pickles as sort of a rebuttal to critics and proof of her Jewish identity. 

Look, I can’t speak to her in particular. I don’t know where she’s coming from or why she did what she did. But I think that it's very easy, as a Jew, to listen to and become persuaded by the story that people around you have been telling about you for thousands of years. 

What is harder, and what I think is critical at this time, is to actually learn our story. To actually know the truth of our story. I'm pretty confident that when we actually know the truth of our story, we will realize that the people around us have often been wrong about us. They have often told a story that's filled with lies and hatred.

I think there are different reasons why people subscribe to these stories around them. Oftentimes people just don't know our story, or they know a very distorted version of it. It's sort of a hard sell that I'm making, where I'm like, “You have to do some work now.” 

But I think it's interesting: When we were told in 2020 and 2021 that we needed to do the work to understand systemic racism, we had no problem with that. Many of us were like, that makes perfect sense: I need to know American history, I need to understand how race works in this society. And I don't need to just know about racism–I need to understand American history, black history. I think we all understood that. 

We have to do the work for ourselves too, right? We have to understand not just the history of antisemitism, but Jewish history and how it's part of American history.

So what are you taking with you into 5786? 

I feel so incredibly lucky to be a Jew. I cannot get over my incredible good fortune to be part of this people. The more I study our history, the more I dig into our wisdom, the more I see how we have survived and thrived for thousands of years. How we have brought our difference—a difference which has enraged people around us for millennia—to the world and brought our wisdom to the world, wisdom that has very much shaped the world and that challenges the world. 

I’m just in awe of our tradition. I'm in awe of us as a people. I just feel so incredibly lucky to be a Jew. Really. I wake up and I'm like, I'm so lucky to be a Jew.

You can get Sarah Hurwitz’s new book, As A Jew, here. Here’s to challenging ourselves in 5786—and coming out all the more confident and proud.

Stay GOLDA,

Stephanie 

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