I agree

...

even regardless what side we're on of the political map, right? The rational and the reasonable.

We are watching the erosion of democratic norms in a whole bunch of ways.

I tend to view the emergence of antisemitism as a symptom of the larger collapse of democratic norms, right? Once people are, have, have permitted openly hostile discourse and violence against other minority groups, that means that the safeguards that in, were in those societies, which were sometimes rule-based and oftentimes norm-based, have eroded.

That there's larger cultures of lack of trust, which emerged because of partisanship and, and polarization taking place all over the globe.

That there's serious like forces, economic pessimism, climate pessimism, et cetera, that are making that possible.

Yeah.

How do we live with this? And by the way, the amount of online antisemitism and social media, it's really starting to get to me.

No, it's quite terrible.

That's to say the least.

Look, I...

One of the most common talks that I've given to North American Jews over the past 16 years since I came to Hartman was to make some version of the argument that American Jews are the most affluent, influential, powerful, and privileged Jewish community in history with the possible exception of the contemporaneous state of Israel, meaning an exceptional story.

And I have outlined all of the ways in which American Jews have really broken new ground in our history of a diaspora Jewish community.

In some ways, we transcended diaspora because we stopped thinking of America as a stop on the journey and thought of it more as at home, whether consciously or unconsciously, the way we behaved was an indicator of at-homeness.

What's your sense of that?

So I think there's a lot of creative and important ways to think of boundaries that don't make us into fortresses that just alienate people, but that come with a certain confidence of saying we, we have to stand for something.

I guess I'll step one step back here.

I think that there are two ways that communities set boundaries.

One is they stipulate them and then enforce them, and one is that they emerge naturally, organically.

People do things that push the limit, and then a community has to step in and notice and name that a boundary has been crossed.I guess what I was trying to argue is that I think that happened post October 7th.

I think we've rediscovered, uh, where these boundaries are.

What I'm fearful of is that we stay now [chuckles] in the business of...

Mm