opinion
Can Jews Agree to Disagree?
BY ANDREW SILOW-CARROLL
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H ere’s a story I recently shared on
Facebook: I was paddling my inflatable
kayak on a lake in the Berkshires. Granted,
it is not the sleekest or coolest-looking
conveyance, but it gets the job done and it fits
in the trunk of my car.

At one point I passed two guys in a very
lovely canoe. One of the guys says to me,
“That looks like fun!” And I say, “And you
have a beautiful boat,” which it was. And
then the guy in the stern of the boat says,
“It’s a lot more expensive than yours.”
His response sort of stunned me: Why
was he talking about the price of our boats?
Had my clunky kayak offended his sensibilities
somehow? My Facebook friends mostly agreed with my
initial reaction: The guy was a jerk. But then a few
people weighed in with an alternative interpreta-
tion: The guy was actually making fun of himself
for spending so much on a canoe. One friend, a
Jewish educator, channeled the guy’s thinking this
way: “Our boat might be beautiful, as you say, but
I’m not sure it’s worth it, considering we could be
getting a lot of fun from rowing in a kayak like yours
and would have spent a lot less money to do it.”
True or not, I love that interpretation. It reminds
me of something from Pirke Avot, the Mishnah’s
compilation of ethical principles: “Judge to the
side of merit.” (1:6) That is, in life and conversation,
give the other person the benefit of the doubt.

How many conversations slip off the rails because
we assume the worst of the other person?
The story was fresh in my mind when I attended
an invitation-only event on July 26 on “view-
point diversity,” put on by the Maimonides Fund.

The day-long seminar brought leaders of various
Jewish organizations together to discuss our
society’s inability to engage in what the keynote
speaker, NYU social psychologist Jonathan Haidt,
describes as “constructive disagreement.” In
Haidt’s 2018 book “The Coddling of the American
Mind,” he and coauthor Greg Lukianoff dissect a
“callout culture” in which “anyone can be publicly
shamed for saying something well-intentioned
that someone else interprets uncharitably.”
Because Haidt’s book is mostly about the col-
lege campus, I thought the day might shape up
as an attack on “wokeism.” But the speakers and
attendees were diverse, and liberals and conser-
vatives alike fretted about the demise of civility
and tolerance in their polarized worlds. A Jewish
education professional said she is wary about
bringing up Israel in front of donors, many of whom
treat any criticism of Israeli policy as “anti-Israel.”
And the leader of a right-leaning think tank com-
plained about a left-leaning Jewish “monolith”
that dismisses the views of Jewish conservatives
or considers them somehow “un-Jewish.”
A considerable number of people spoke about
what they characterized as self-censorship, fear-
ing the consequences they or colleagues might
face if they utter an ill-considered thought — or
if their opinions diverge from emerging small-o
orthodoxies on gender, race, politics and, once
again, Israel. (I agreed to Chatham House Rules,
which means I could characterize our conversa-
tions but not quote or identify participants.)
After the event, Mark Charendoff, president
of the Maimonides Fund, said he and his col-
leagues — Ariella Saperstein, program officer
for Maimonides, and Rabbi David Wolpe of Los
Angeles’ Sinai Temple put much of the program
together — had been thinking about these issues
for a while. “It seems to us that it’s just become
more difficult to have some of these conversa-
tions,” Charendoff told me. “It started off with
Israel — what are you allowed to express regard-
ing Israel, and then, you know, politics in America
has become obviously a dividing line. And it
doesn’t seem to have gotten any better.”
Although few if any members of Gen Z were tak-
ing part in the convening, the group born after 1995
seemed to be on a lot of people’s minds. That’s
partly because of Haidt’s framing of the issue; in
his book, he dates strict campus speech codes and
polarizing identity politics to the arrival of Gen Z on
college campuses. A leader of a secular Jewish
group that works with young people said
she is often under pressure from Gen Z-ers
to take an organizational stand on hot-button
issues, when her mission is to encourage par-
ticipation from a politically diverse population.

On the flip side, a leader working with the
same cohort said Gen Z-ers complain that
they were “lied to” about Israel by their Jewish
elders, and that their own ambivalent or
anti-Zionist viewpoints are shunned in Jewish
spaces. Indeed, a few participants defended
“red lines,” saying viewpoint diversity does
not mean “anything goes.” As one fundraising
executive told the room, “When it comes to
Israel, the last thing I want is nuance.”
When I brought this up with Charendoff,
he said, “One-hundred percent I want to
hear from young people who are uncomfortable
with Zionism, because I want to understand why,
and I think our young people are smart and pas-
sionate. That doesn’t mean … that we have to be
completely neutral to who the convener of a dis-
cussion is and what their motivations are.”
At times I lost track of who is to blame for con-
stricted speech and cancel culture, especially on
college campuses. Is it the student governments
at liberal universities that block campus Jewish
clubs from organizing because their support for
Israel made other students uncomfortable? Or
is it the Jewish groups that insist campuses that
allow harsh criticism of Israel are making Jewish
students feel unsafe?
I also thought about the value of “viewpoint
diversity” if one side or the other is playing fast
and loose with the facts, or refusing to argue in
good faith. Haidt warns against the tendency
to “inflate the horrors of a speaker’s words far
beyond what the speaker might actually say”
— he calls this “catastrophizing” — but how do
we respond to actual catastrophes? Viewpoint
diversity may seem a luxury in debating, say, the
climate crisis or threats to democracy.

Still, the general thrust of the day was encour-
aging people to do their part in lowering the
temperature in Jewish circles: to urge ideological
opposites to listen to one another with more gen-
erosity of spirit, to assume the best of others and
to consider the possibility that they may actually
be wrong about a given issue. Because when it
all comes down to it, we’re all in the same boat. JE
Andrew Silow-Carroll is editor-in-chief of the New
York Jewish Week and senior editor of the Jewish
Telegraphic Agency.

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