By Cindy Mindell ~

How do Jews deal with our collective past? In some cases, we are encouraged to embrace history on a personal level, even if we were not present at the original event. In others, we are asked to take a more removed stance, as witnesses and observers.

Dr. Yehuda Kurtzer

Dr. Yehuda Kurtzer focuses on these issues of Jewish identity and meaning in his newly released book, “Shuva: The Future of the Jewish Past” (Brandeis University Press, 2012), offering new thinking on how contemporary Jews can and should relate to our past.
Kurtzer will present “Personal Narrative and Collective Memory: The Holocaust, Israel, and Modern Jewish Identity” on Monday, Apr. 16 at UConn Stamford Center for Judaic and Middle Eastern Studies.
President of the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, Kurtzer was visiting assistant professor and the inaugural chair of Jewish Communal Innovation at Brandeis University, where he taught courses in Jewish studies for the Hornstein Jewish Professional Leadership and DeLeT programs. An alumnus of the Wexner Graduate Fellowships and Bronfman Youth Fellowships, he was a research fellow for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He has lectured and taught widely in adult-education settings. He received his doctorate in Jewish studies from Harvard.
Kurtzer spoke with the Ledger about how Jews use memory and history to define contemporary identity.

Shuva: The future of the Jewish Past

Q: How did you land on the subject of your latest book?
A: My book was a project I worked on while teaching at Brandeis University — the product of a two-year position that I held as part of the Bronfman Prize. The call for proposals asked for an idea for a book that would change the way the Jewish community sees itself and its identity. As part of the Bronfman Prize application, I had submitted a five-page proposal discussing the ways in which memory and history relate and compete. This was an area that I cared about most and why I went to graduate school – even though my doctoral work focused on a specific historical problem. But I wanted to get back to exploring memory and history. So I worked on the “memory problem” contemporary Jews have – how we relate to Israel, the Holocaust, traditional ideas.
The problem is that we know in some deep way that our past is essential, but we are lacking the critical tools necessary to understand our deep relationship to that past without either tearing it down or being obsessed with it.

Q: What is “memory anxiety?” Where does it manifest?
A: Memory anxiety is a contemporary Jewish problem, and a contemporary problem for people in general. As humans have risen to the top of the evolutionary trajectory, you look down and realize you’re nervous about where you’ve gotten to and that it’s lonely. There’s a craving for how things “once were.” You see that yearning in the rhetoric of the current presidential campaign. I find that language grating; people are pretending that things were better in the past when they weren’t. I understand the human impulse that wants to understand how we got here. I am okay with people wanting to take specific things from the past that worked, but not with assuming that everything was better.
There are a few different areas where I see memory anxiety playing out in contemporary Jewish life. Some of the key conceptual moments in the last couple of years, in all the denominations, have hinged around a memory problem: we’re not sure how we’re to be obedient to the past and, at the same time, transcend it.
For example, the Central Conference of American Rabbis [the rabbinical arm of the Reform movement] issued the “New Pittsburgh Platform” in 1999, a revised version of the original Pittsburgh Platform of 1885. The 1885 document was revolutionary, stating that the movement rejected all that “old stuff.” The 1999 version is a way of saying, “Maybe we spoke too soon.” It’s a very traditional document, which is fascinating because the average Reform layperson lives a highly untraditional life by the standards of what we call “tradition Judaism,” and yet the movement is trying to hold onto both personal autonomy and our rich Jewish past.
In the Conservative movement, JTS chancellor Arnold Eisen launched the Mitzvah Initiative at the seminary in 2010, meant to prop up a language of “commandedness.” While this is valuable, it is also poisonous to American Jews who don’t want to be told what they have to do. On Passover in 2001, Rabbi David Wolpe gets up before his congregation at Temple Sinai in Los Angeles, and gives an incredible sermon, explaining why the Exodus can’t be historically proven and is a historically problematic idea – there is no archeological evidence to back up Biblical accounts. [Wolpe said, “The way the Bible describes the Exodus is not the way it happened, if it happened at all.”] Then he explains why that doesn’t matter and how we need to think of ourselves as leaving Egypt. But everyone was fixated on the first half of his sermon and he drew a lot of criticism and sparked a controversial theological debate. Rabbi Wolpe assumed that, if you speak in a Conservative shul, your audience already has a grasp of Jewish history and doesn’t believe this stuff – but it wasn’t the case and he had to work very hard to reverse the damage.
In liberal Jewish circles, as well as in Orthodoxy, we struggle with how to understand the meaning of the past in terms of how we are Jewish in the present.

Q: How does memory anxiety relate to our engagement with the Holocaust?
A: The phenomenon is much more palpable in contemporary Jewish society, where you see many op-eds about what happens when the Holocaust survivors aren’t here. There’s an overwhelming programmatic response to that issue, which is to put the stories on tape and archive them. I have real concerns about that approach. Why is that conceptually problematic in the Jewish tradition? Historically, we dealt with the passage of time by keeping certain things from our past, rather than chronicling our past. We need to ask, what of the survivor’s story matters and what is it supposed to mean? This is dangerous and confusing and almost offensive to the survivors themselves, to say, “I need to extract something out of your story, but not your story itself.” The fact that it’s on tape doesn’t give it any staying power in terms of the preservation of Judaism, and won’t have the necessary resonance.
One thing I would hope for, as the survivors’ stories become like the game of “broken telephone,” that we don’t wring our hands and panic about the loss of historical accuracy. Ruth Franklin, senior editor at “The New Republic,” wrote “A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction” [Oxford University Press, 2010]. One of her claims is that, in our hierarchy of Holocaust literature, a poorly written testimonial that’s true is better than a well-written fictional account. [From the Oxford University Press website: “Franklin argues that the memory-obsessed culture of the last few decades has led us to mistakenly focus on testimony as the only valid form of Holocaust writing. As even the most canonical texts have come under scrutiny for their fidelity to the facts, we have lost sight of the essential role that imagination plays in the creation of any literary work, including the memoir.”]
Our anxiety about the Holocaust is tied into historical accuracy rather than meaning, and it’s hard to have that conversation, especially in the presence of survivors.
I grew up with Yom Hashoah being a day of listening, not speaking, about the Holocaust. It’s a somewhat crude contrast to compare to how we remember the Holocaust to how we remember the Exodus, but during the Passover seder, you don’t hear anyone’s personal story. You’re remembering your seders from previous years rather than the actual Exodus – but people still feel that they are part of the experience of leaving Egypt. You talk around the Exodus, and you read about how others made meaning of the Exodus. If Yom Hashoah is to have the same kind of quality, it has to be more like the way we celebrate the Exodus.
Jewish tradition gives us the tools from past destructions and crises to take the collective story and make it part of your own story – and none of this is predicated on historical accuracy. Rather, in each case, you are creating something that makes it your own personal narrative.
Q: Is memory anxiety a particularly American-Jewish problem?
A: Israeli Jews have the same problem: they have ridden on the back of personal narrative, those who grew up during the war in 1948 or 1967, and they’re dealing with how to hold onto that. It’s not uncommon for them to feel anxiety about staying connected to the story of those eras. There is an effort now to preserve stories from survivors of the 1948 war. But what happens when you debunk the story itself, as seen in the recent rise of revisionist Israeli historians? What does that do to your sense of communal identity when the stories you grew up on and believed and incorporated into your identity may not be real?

Q: What will you address in your Apr. 16 presentation?
A: I will tackle two areas that are most resonant to me. In my book, I explore theological issues and how we think about Jewish law and practice, but I also try to get at two core issues: How Jews born before 1948 and after 1967 think about their relationship to Israel? Both groups have a deep relationship to Israel through personal narrative and our collective story. The second topic is, how do we as a community deal with the Holocaust when we no longer have survivors among us?
One of the reasons I’m excited about the talk in Stamford is that I do a lot of work discussing sophisticated Jewish ideas with Jewish communal leaders in Jewish institutional settings – lay leaders, rabbis, education directors. I am excited to have this kind of dialog on a college campus because I have an academic background, and also because speaking to a mixed audience of academics and students, and community-members breaks down the boundaries between how we talk to the community and how we talk on campus. There is so much richness for contemporary Jews on college campuses that is enriched from being in dialog on creativity and idea development that takes place on campus. I’m hoping that’s what resonates for the participants – both an academically credible conversation and something that matters to their lives.

“Personal Narrative and Collective Memory: The Holocaust, Israel, and Modern Jewish Identity” with Dr. Yehuda Kurtzer: Monday, Apr. 16, 11:30 a.m.-1:15 p.m., UConn Stamford / RSVP/info: (203) 251-9525.