Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - Broken schools, newsrooms, governments & other institutions — Fixable or forever broken? with Alana Newhouse

Episode Date: April 10, 2023

"Brokenism", by Alana Newhouse - https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/brokenism-alana-newhouse“The Vanishing”, by Jacob Savage - https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-vanishing 

We are so afraid of losing anything that we hold on for dear life to boats that are sinking. And the only way to know whether you're on a boat that just has one hole that can be plugged, or whether you're on the Titanic, is to look at your specific boat. We're going to save all the good ones, we're going to throw out the bad ones, and we're going to make new, even better ones for what's right for us as a society moving forward. Some 40% of Americans don't vote. But according to our guest today, among those who do engage, who vote, and who are active in American public life, civic life, political life, those that are engaged in

debates about the country's future are not, and I quote from her piece here, still stuck in the battle between Democrats and Republicans or liberalism and conservatism. The most vital debate in America today is between those who believe there is something fundamentally broken in America and that it's an emergency in those who do not. Close quote. I'm quoting there from Alana Newhouse, who's the editor-in-chief of Tablet Magazine, which she founded in 2009, originally conceived as a news and opinion platform for Jewish news and ideas, but it has grown to something much bigger, and it's regularly cited by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, and many other outlets. Alana is especially interesting

because not only is she a journalist, but she's a product of elite institutions. She's a graduate of Barnard College and Columbia University School of Journalism, and yet she wakes up every day thinking that these institutions, not only the ones she has studied in, but institutions across political life, the arts, education, business, that are broken. And she's written a very provocative essay called Brokenism. The real debate today, she writes, isn't between the left and right. It's between those invested in our current institutions and those who want to build anew. We talked to Ilana about this essay and another essay that she edited that appeared on her platform called The Vanishing. The erasure of American Jews from So Many Aspects of American Life. Alana Newhouse from Tablet on Brokenism and American Institutions. This is Call Me Back.

And I'm pleased to welcome to the podcast for the first time, my longtime friend, and I'd say thought partner of sorts, Alana Newhouse, editor-in-chief of Tablet Magazine and founder of Tablet, which is a huge force in, I would say, Jewish journalism, but not just Jewish journalism. It's actually become something much bigger than that, which we'll talk about. But Alana, thanks for coming on. Thank you so much for having me. Alana, there's a lot I want to talk to you about, but there's two pieces in particular that appeared in Tablet, one of which you were the author of,

and the other one you obviously commissioned and edited. But we'll talk about the one you authored, because I've been thinking a lot about it. It's the kind of piece you read, and you describe a certain kind of person. You actually describe two kinds of people in this piece, and as the reader you're constantly wondering which one you are, which I guess maybe is the effect you want to have, which is a piece you wrote in November of last year, but has been sent to me so many times since then that I keep thinking, did she just run a new version of it or something? Because

it keeps making its rounds um which is which is actually impressive uh in and of itself the durability of the piece because i think it touched a nerve it was called piece was called brokenism and i just want to quote from it uh briefly and then and then we'll talk about it you you write in the piece among the people and i'm quoting from you here among the people who do engage in debates about this country's future, the ones doing it most compellingly are not those still stuck in the battle between Democrats and Republicans or liberalism and conservatism. The most vital debate in America today is between those who believe there is something fundamentally broken in America and that it's an emergency and those who do not. And I think the those who do not, you describe later on as status quo as people who think, yeah, there's problems, but we can work them out. So what is this piece about? And what inspired you? What's the conceit of it? Why did you feel the sense of urgency

to scream from the hilltops about this kind of discovery you had made? The genesis of this piece actually started a couple of years before I published it. I wrote another piece which was called Everything is Broken. And in that essay,

I tried to articulate and explore a feeling that I had, and that I felt increasingly lots of other people had, that things weren't working. Things weren't working in politics, things weren't working in society, things weren't working in medicine, things weren't working in pop culture or high culture. It felt like you couldn't walk into a museum and actually have a good museum experience. And it also felt like you couldn't figure out your healthcare or kids school, like everything seemed to be decaying. And what I did with that piece was just try to express why it felt that way and some historical reasons for why it might be.

In the wake of that piece, I received thousands of emails. It was a really incredible response to it. And what I did, because I'm a reporter and I like talking to people, is I reached out to nearly everyone who wrote me a heartfelt letter and asked if they would zoom or chat with me and a bunch of people did just pause you there that in and of itself is like a a dying sadly dying and decaying uh way to approach journalism into like I know all these young people go into journalism and it's all about the quick hit and it's all about the you know you know kind of ripping off other articles or other sources or the latest like social media frenzy to do reporting rather than actually making it one's business to sit down and have

real conversations with real people to inform how you think about an issue. So anyway. Yeah. And I sort of get it because it's hard and human beings can be rough to deal with. And one of the things that I tried to express with that first piece actually is that the way that the Internet wants to shave off the rough edges of our life. And it was an idea that I called flatness, that like everything is supposed to be smooth. We're supposed to have frictionless experiences throughout the day. And one of the ways that you could get friction out of your life really fast, if you're looking to, is to take human beings out of it.

Because human beings are complicated and they're craggly and they have rough edges. But I like that about human beings. And so I wanted to engage them. And I even Zoomed with a bunch of people who wrote me pretty nasty responses to that piece. And that was fun also. But one of the people who wrote to me was a man named Ryan, who identified himself, he said, I'm a 46 year old biracial American, I'm a third generation African veteran, military. And I live in Ohio and I don't know what I'm looking at. I don't know what this America is anymore. And I don't know what I am inside of it. So I ended up Zooming with Ryan and it turned out we had a lot in common, much more than I think either one of us assumed. And we became friends. And I spent a couple of years chatting constantly with Ryan about the news, about the latest story, new music that was out. One day we were talking about

politics and Ryan said to me, I don't even know what I am anymore. Am I a liberal? Am I a conservative? Am I a Republican? Am I a Democrat? I don't know know what I am anymore. Am I a liberal? Am I conservative? Am I a Republican? Am I a Democrat? I don't know what those labels mean. What I know is that I fundamentally believe in the premise of your piece, which is that whole parts of society are broken. And when I try to have conversations with people, that's the controversy. That's the line on which we agree or don't agree, is whether or not things should be burned to the ground and started anew, or whether they can be saved. And just quoting from your, just looking at your piece where you talk about Ryan, he's

referring to all institutions. He's talking about the arts. He's talking about education. It's not just about politics. Right. And so then when he said that, I realized that that's actually how I understood a lot of what I was seeing happening, both politically, but also in conversations about society, that it felt to me like the conversations that were most interesting that I was in were conversations where people were trying to get at this institution that I'm staring at, whatever it is, that I'm mad about, and I'm mad in some way about it.

The question is, can I save it, or can I fix it, or do I have to start something completely new? And when I realized that that was the angle from which the most interesting conversations that I was hearing was happening, I thought about trying to put language to it. And that's how you got that brokenism essay. So I want to quote again from it. So because you're not saying the sky is falling.

You say here, now to observe that a critical mass of American society is broken does not mean that America is falling like Rome or descending hopelessly into chaos like Weimar Germany. This country survived a civil war, the failures of Reconstruction, the Industrial Revolution, and its destruction of previous ways of life, plus the political violence of the 1960s and the economic shocks of the 1970s, and arguably came out stronger after these crises. So you're saying institutions that we have

historically relied on are broken. It doesn't mean the world is falling apart. It just means we have a real problem, and you're trying to get at, like, you can't work within these institutions to save them. Right. And what I'm trying to express or make people feel, I'm trying to make them feel a little less afraid. If the institutions that you always knew or that you always expected would be part of your life are not there. We're going to be okay. We'll make other institutions. It's okay to abandon and maybe even destroy things that don't work.

And one of the things that I think Ryan said that I found so evocative was, he was like, I think it's dangerous to let people stay attached to institutions that are failing them. It's like, imagine you have a building, and I know that building is deteriorating and dangerous to live in. And I'm telling everyone to go stand inside the building. I don't want people to be attached to institutions that might come apart because then they're going to be left without the buttressing and support that those institutions gave them. So this wasn't an effort to scare anyone. It was an effort to actually reframe how we think about security and how we think about what we want the institutions that we rely on what we need out of them so can you give a couple of very specific examples just just to make this more practical for for people listening like what is an

example of an institution that there's this divide between some where everyone would agree that there are problems the institution, but some say, look, we need to just do some chiseling, maybe a little bit of reorg, maybe a little like a modernization program versus no, no, the building is fundamentally broken and to your and Ryan's point, dangerous, and we need to walk away from it. What is an example of an institution that falls into that category? Well, I think for some Americans, the institutions that represented public health in the last few years have called their own trustworthiness into question. And again, I know I'm speaking about a complex of institutions,

but those institutions were from governmental institutions like the CDC or the FDA to experts, epidemiologists, people who are associated with academic institutions. These were the voices that we imagined we could turn to and would speak somewhat in unison, or they would be, they would have, there would be an expert opinion that was trustworthy, and that we, it would help us through a crisis. And I think that there is a sense that whoever is at fault, there's a sense that that didn't happen during COVID. That's one example. Another example for many people are public schools.

And another example are private schools. And another example, which is maybe the example that I think is most evocative for a the way that our physical health is managed in this country. So, and I think that at some point there have been a lot of people, for example, people who had chronic illnesses or people who had kids with disabilities. These are people who have known for a decade or more that that whole system is broken. A lot of other people have come online and joined them in that, in grokking that that actually might be happening. So there's a series of studies that have recently come out that have shown that American children have really been set back. We can post one of the studies or some of the press coverage around it in the show notes, you know, that basically American young people were

doing well or at least holding their own in math and in other school subjects. And then there's a clear, like, decline, clear drop or clear deterioration. And it correlates, of course, with COVID and our policies around schools during COVID. And so now, so many of these platforms that were vessels for the conventional wisdom about what you're talking about during COVID, which we've got to shut down schools, we've got to quarantine. Yes, there's no data that shows that kids are actually suffering from COVID in worrisome enough numbers, but we still need to shut down all the schools and all these policies that you're talking about or pointing to here that have become so controversial. So now all these studies have come out. A, we now know that children were really not at serious risk. And two, we know that by keeping them out of schools, they have been set back.

And so now all the platforms, the kind of vessels of conventional wisdom can see that. Like you read the Atlantic, for instance. So the Atlantic magazine was, and there are many good people there and many several folks that you and I, friends we have in common, but they were the megaphones the, you know, they were the

megaphones for a lot of these ideas around COVID about, about these, what we now, now look like pretty extreme, and in many cases, unnecessary policies, making the case for them. And now, the same platforms are acknowledging. Derek Thompson, who's, who's a, who's a friend, he's been on this podcast, I mean, he's written now extensively that the school's policy was wrong. You know, and he wrote he wrote he was writing almost like weekly, if not daily, about COVID and was echoing many of these the sort of conventional wisdom from the CDC and other platforms and the sort of public epidemiology community. And now he is saying it was a huge mistake. This was a huge setback. We have to learn from this. So what's your reaction to that? Because in a sense, you're saying these systems and these platforms and these institutions are broken and we need to just walk away. And yet you are seeing these same platforms saying,

or at least some of them saying, maybe we got it wrong. Well, on the list of things that feel broken to a lot of Americans, one of them is the media, which I probably as a journalist should have put that number one on the list just for intellectual honesty's sake. an outlier. As a person who got it wrong, and now writes about how that he got it wrong, and writes about how to get it more right, at least now, that's actually unusual. And in fact, many of the people who wrote many of the biggest pieces, not only did they never issue any kind of mea culpa, but they still, they're avoiding it, and they're not writing that, or they're actually even digging their heels in and saying that it's still the case. I also think that there's something that happened with the media, and the media is broken in its own interesting way, which is maybe worth a digression. But, you know, part of the thing that would have been nice would be for the media to ask itself, why, who got it right? Who understood right from the beginning

that there was something wrong here? And why did they get it right why did the satmar chassidim open their playgrounds take actual like break locks so that they could i was talking to chassidim to the satmar chassidim in march of 2020 and this woman looks at me she says i don't understand it's an airborne virus and you want me to stay in my house? Right. Now, what did she know that every epidemiologist on MSNBC couldn't figure out? It's worth asking ourselves the question and surfacing that question so that readers or listeners understand that we're at least, we're truly sorry for getting it wrong. And we want to make ourselves better. Instead, there's a feeling of trying to wriggle out of it. Like, oh, we're just journalists.

We're just parroting experts. We're just telling, it's what, who could have known? Who could have known? The answer is there were a bunch of people who knew. Yeah. So last spring, I had a dinner with Governor DeSantis from Florida where I asked him, it was a small group of people, I wasn't the only one. I'm just genuinely curious on this question.

Like I wasn't like a setup. I was genuinely curious. I said to him, I now get why now there are many parts of this country, many parts of society that think Florida's policies during the height of COVID were the right policies. I get that. It's like, you know, it's more broadly acknowledged, conceded. I said, but take me back to spring and summer of 2020. Because at that point, you know, the whole country, the whole world, like, zigged and you zagged.

Like, they were all going in one direction, and you were like, no, I'm going to do it a different way. And you had everybody breathing it down your throat, from Tony Fauci to Governors Newsom and Cuomo to, I mean, they were, the media, everyone was talking about you like you were responsible. You were going to be responsible for like mass murder, mass slaughter of a huge percentage of your population, that you were utterly irresponsible. Brian Kemp, same thing, governor of Georgia, went through the same thing where he, you know, the whole

country is going one direction, he went in another direction. So I was like, so I asked him, I said, like, take me back to that time. Like, what were you thinking? Because that, again, this is not like an endorsement of Ron DeSantis, generally, you know not i'm just i'm just so curious that a couple of these governors more than a couple like really went in a different direction when they were being told by all the quote-unquote respected authorities right tony fauci andrew cuomo they're holding their daily press conferences the press are like feeding out of their hands i mean everything they said were like tablets coming treated like tablets coming down from the sinai and and and you were just doing something that was

completely antithetical to what all the great gods of public health and quote-unquote responsible government were prescribing what did you see like what were you thinking were you not worried that you and and he said two things. I mean, he said many things, but the two that most struck me were, one, he saw a study that basically said, once you have a little bit of COVID in your population, right, if you have, if you're detecting a certain percentage, I can't remember what the threshold number was, it's far more widespread than that tiny percentage. So if you think, oh, it's far more widespread than that tiny percentage.

So if you think, oh, it's just this little percentage, and then I'm going to quarantine everyone, and I'll contain it, it's over. It's far more dispersed and proliferating and all over the place than your studies are capturing, A. B, if that's the case, the worst thing you can do, if all these people are walking around with COVID and they don't know it, is to keep them all bottled up in their homes with other people who may not have it. And so he was just like, it's just logical. If you believe that it's far more widespread than we realize, why do you want everybody, young people, old people, especially old people, locked into their homes with a bunch of other people who may or may not,

but very well may, have COVID. And I was just like, struck, because it sounded so practical. And yet he was treated like, I'm not exaggerating, if you look at some of the press coverage of him, like he was going to be responsible for like a mass slaughtering of people. I want to add something to his answer, which is that, and I don't know him at all, and I've never met him, but I will say that there is another thing that was going on for him,

which is from an emotional and psychological perspective, he was willing to imagine that experts could be wrong. Which is, one of the ways that American society worked was that we outsourced our decision-making to people who we believed and who, many instances were experts and they were credentialed and the credentials meant something. But if you look at how those credentials are, have developed, and if you look at the, particularly when it comes to academia, which is such a, it's a heart of a lot of our, what we think of as expertise in the country. If the credentialing doesn't have the legitimacy that it had, well, then neither do the experts that it's making.

And if you are like, wait a minute, I don't know, I'm willing to question this whole thing, which isn't to say, as some people do, anything out of an expert's mouth is garbage. But if you're willing to say, no, no, no, hold on. I have to retain, I can't outsource the comprehensive decision-making in my life, especially if I'm a governor, right? So what I'm going to do is I'm going to bring my own faculties to this conversation. I'm going to read, but I'm also going to add my own common sense because I can't rely on experts to make these decisions for me. It's literally the heart of the conversation that I was trying to develop with that piece. If you wake up every day and you are miserable with your kids school, every day, you have to at some point ask yourself if maybe you're right.

Right. Okay. So that's, yeah. So let me quote again from your piece here. You say, you write here, I'm quoting here, proof of this decay, the brokenists argue, can be seen in the unconventional moves that many people, regardless of how they would describe themselves politically, are making. So what are these moves they're making? children to avoid the failures and politicization of many public and private schools, which you're referring to now, consuming more information from YouTube, Twitter, Substack, and podcasts than from legacy media outlets, and abandoning the restrictions, high costs, and pathologies of the coasts for freer and more affordable pastures in the Southeast and Southwest. Now, you're absolutely right. We are seeing these record numbers of people moving from places like California, New York, to places like Texas and Florida.

But I want to talk about technology because you talk here about YouTube, Twitter, Substack, and podcasts. To me, those platforms cut both ways you could argue it both ways that they are they are a vessel for for brokenness to get some some liberation but they are also the sort of advancements in information technology and these platforms are also part of the problem do you see what i'm saying i mean it's not okay so can you can you talk about that you know i have a friend um who is my the closest friend to me who's a status quoist, a person who really believes that nearly all these institutions can be saved. A status quoist that's still your friend. Yes.

I have many status quoists who are friends, but this is the person who's closest to me. And when I sent him a draft of the piece, he said, you know, here's the thing, Alana, here's what I don't get. What's your monocausal theory for all of this? How did all of the institutions of American life, many of which started at different stages, why are they all failing all at once now? What could it, like what one thing could possibly cause it? And I was like, okay, you just, you're so close. Just think for one more minute. And the answer is we had an economic revolution. And in the same way, just after the industrial revolution, very, very, very similar effects happen on society. And we had an economic revolution that was the totalizing adoption of

technology in every aspect of our lives. And what that meant is that every institution, whether it started in 1865 or it started in 1970, was faced with a challenge. Can it mature? What's its answer going to be to technology? How fast can it adopt it? And how efficiently can it adopt it? And some of them, every one of the institutions answered that question differently, but we were all faced with the same question. And so technology is actually an incredibly important, it's the central beating heart of this conversation. And like with every other economic revolution, it is both the weapon and potentially the salvation. And we're seeing it get used as both. So it's but it's important, I think, to see it that way.

And it's important to understand that that's your option, too, is how you use it. Yeah, I'm just struck by this. I remember when Obama ran for president in 2008, and he was the first candidate to really use social media in a way that, you know, his campaign team did things with social media that no other presidential national campaign had ever done, and it was considered key to his, you know, getting this real altitude in his candidacy. You fast forward to the Arab Spring 2011, you remember that it was the YouTube or the Twitter revolution, all these people organizing in Tahrir Square in Cairo with social media, and social media was now not only useful in American politics, but it was useful in fomenting

revolution against autocrats. And it was celebrated. And you'd go to these conferences, like at the Aspen Ideas Festival or the Council on Foreign Relations, and they would talk about technology as this accelerator of democratic change and reform. And you go to those same conferences today, and they talk about technology as this polarizing force that's making people crazy. So in like less than a decade, it went from being the salvation, if you will, to this ultimately destructive force. Is that also normal that we could like latch onto something as this key driver of change that we celebrate. And in no time, people are pulling their hair out because they conclude that it is the evil.

So there's a piece that we published in Tablet last week by Jacob Siegel, which is about the, it's a really masterful piece that in a beautiful and I think pretty comprehensive way answers your question about how the internet went from friend to enemy. And Jake answers it a lot better than I can, but the short answer is that the power of the internet became so clear. But then when that power looked like it might be that unchecked, it could have dangerous implications. You had the taking over of a lot of these sources and then also a throttling. I think that there's part of what's going on now with tech, which is so interesting to watch, is what do we do with a weapon that's incredibly powerful?

And all of a sudden, what do we do with something that went from looking like it was just a window into how people live in Bangladesh to, oh my God, this actually might be able to elect people who fundamentally I believe are dangerous for the country or who potentially might be dangerous for other societies. Then all of a sudden people look at it and they think, I don't know. I don't know whether or not I can orient myself toward technology as simply a good. I just want to read you one quote because it's fascinating. In Jake's piece, he has this quote from somebody from the Clinton campaign. The lesson they took from Trump's victory was that Facebook and Twitter, more than Michigan and Florida, were the critical

battlegrounds where political contests were won or lost. Quote, many of us are beginning to talk about what a big problem this is, Clinton's chief digital strategist, Teddy Goff, told Politico the week after the election. Quote, both from the campaign and from the administration and just sort of broader Obama orbit. This is one of the things we need to take on post election. So that was the turning point when all of a sudden they were like, you can hear it in their quote. They said, I don't know if this is good. Fascinating. We'll post that piece in the show notes.

Do you talk to people? I mean, so we hear all the time people are frustrated with these institutions. You know, in my circles, I'm constantly hearing people lamenting. You and I were just talking offline about this, about a family I know that got very frustrated with an elite secular private schoolork and how um they they felt the place was broken and they just left so you hear anecdotally that people are are saying you know i i just got to go but do you you really i mean it's a big deal to give up on these elite institutions it's a big deal and and it just the the human it seems like human nature is so—the most risk-free thing to do is to just say, I'll fix it from inside. And there's precedent for it, by the way. You point

out, I think, that the Ivy Leagues were hotbeds of anti-Semitism and racism going back half a century, three-quarters of a century ago, and they got better. They were reformed from within and made into places that are better and places that, by the way, American Jews have, we will get into that topic generally in a moment about where American Jews fit into these institutions going forward. But for the better part of a half century, they were places that American Jews thrived in.

And so isn't there precedent for tinkering? Tinkerists? Are there tinkerists? Yes, there are tinkerists. Absolutely. the debate that I want to illustrate or highlight, which is that it does better more locally, meaning the debate over whether something is broken or salvageable does better when we talk in specifics. So for example, I was in a conversation with a bunch of Jews talking about anti-Semitism on Ivy League campuses. And there was a distinct feeling. Now, I don't know if this is right, but there was a

distinct feeling that Columbia was potentially not salvageable, whereas Brown was. Now, there's a head of the president of the president of Brown is she's very committed to not letting the place go crazy. Right. And that's why. Like, so, and then the question becomes really what we want to ask ourselves is, can I look at a specific institution and can I ask a set of questions, almost give it a health assessment?

Some things are healthy and some things aren't. I'm not saying we take the entire Ivy League and throw it in the middle of the ocean, but I'm also not saying we are so afraid of losing anything that we hold on for dear life to boats that are sinking. And the only way to know whether you're on a boat that just has one hole that can be plugged or whether you're on the Titanic is to look at your specific boat. And so that's where I want to get. I want to get into a conversation, not about public school, although that's a good one, but about your public school, about your public school district specifically.

And I want to get into a conversation not about doctors, but about your doctors. Like to me, that's where we're going to build from the ground up. And by building from the ground up, I mean we're going to save some of all the good ones. We're going to throw out the bad ones and we're going to make new, even better ones, not by applying a philosophy globally, but by picking and choosing and figuring out, literally shopping for what's right for us as a society moving forward. That's where I want to get. So to me, the status quo is very important because they keep us honest. There are a set of institutions that are salvageable. And the status quo is if they can defend those institutions to us, the brokenness. I will, as a brokenness, work as hard

to make sure that a salvageable institution exists in five years as I will in building and replacing the ones that won't. So I want to before we move on to our next the other piece I want to talk to you about, I will say just anecdotally and so much of this is anecdote, at least for me. George Floyd, post-George Floyd riots, the summer of 2020, when all these leaders from the public health community signed onto these letters, not just saying it was okay to go join the protest, but encouraged it as though, I mean, they literally talked about it being a public health issue, addressing these inequities in the American criminal justice system, was a public health issue. I'm not quite sure how, but it was, and people should go out and protest after they had been prescribing and fiercely, fiercely helping enforce, as far as policy is concerned, these quarantines. And every doctor I would speak to, whether it was a friend or whether it was one of my doctors, I have a, you know, who works with me or my family, I just ask them, hey, what did you think of this? You know, everyone, the medical community was prescribing X, and now they're prescribing counter X because is it really a public health issue?

And they would all, every single one of them, roll their eyes, embarrassed, can't believe it. It's, you know, ranging somewhere from embarrassment to finding it like atrocious, terrible, that this was happening. And it was really, they felt that it was corrupting those on the more extreme end. But they're not extreme people in meaning I have no idea what their politics are. Literally, these are people I don't talk about politics with. And yet they felt that what they were watching the summer of 2020 was corrupting their profession.

And I just was struck by that because I was thinking some of these people are Republicans. They're doctors in New York. Probably a lot of them are Democrats, and yet they were horrified. So then the question becomes, what do you do with that? Right? Now, you don't want to say, I'm throwing out all the doctors. Right. But you also don't want to say, I trust all doctors. Both of those statements are the statements of people much more privileged than we are today.

They're the statements of people who don't have to think in detail because either they don't have any experts or they have a ton of really good and trustworthy experts. We don't actually live in that country right now in 2023. We live in a country right now where we have to apply a certain amount of our critical faculties to situations so that we can determine whether or not the person we're talking to is actually trustworthy. Yeah. Okay. So now I want to transition just for a brief conversation about another piece that appeared in Tablet in late February that I've been eager to talk to you about it, talk to you about on this podcast since it came out. This is another one that really got around.

So it's called The Vanishing, and the subhead is The Erasure of Jews from American Life by a gentleman by the name of Jacob Savage. And he writes in this piece inlet about the disappearing. He writes, suddenly, I'm quoting here, suddenly everywhere you look, the Jews are disappearing. You feel it like a slow-moving pressure system, an anxiety of exclusion and downward mobility. Maybe you first noticed it at your workplace, or maybe it hit you when you or your children applied to college or graduate school. It could have been something as simple as opening up the net netflix splash page it's gauche

to count it's gauche to count but you can't help yourself in academia hollywood washington even in new york city anywhere american jews once made their mark our influence is in steep decline and then he goes on to provide a lot of data now i'm not going to go through all the data but it's because he's got a, that's what's so shocking about the piece is that I found was just the data he laid out. But I'm just going to cite a couple of the numbers using YouGov data. YouGov is a prominent international polling firm. Just 4% of elite American academics under 30 are Jewish. That's 4% of elite American academics under 30 years old are Jewish, compared to 20% of the baby boom generation. And he writes, the steep decline of Jewish editors at the Harvard Law Review, down roughly 50% in less than 10 years. Then he goes on, the same

pattern holds across American elite institutions, a slow-moving downward trend from the 1990s to the mid-2010s, likely due to all sorts of normal sociological factors. But then he says, but then there seems to be like there's this purge, and it's not just in academic institutions, as he says. Look in the arts. In 2014, he writes, there were 16 to 20 Jewish artists featured at the Whitney Biennial. After a very public campaign against a Jewish board member with ties to the Israeli defense establishment, the curators got the message, the 2022 biennial featured just one to two Jews. So in less than a decade, 16 to 20 Jewish artists to just one to two. And he goes through all the museums. He goes through the MacArthur Fellowship class. He goes through academic institutions.

He goes through the Ivy League, what's happening at the Ivy League. He looks at New York City politics. He looks at the New York City City Council. I mean, when he lays the data out quite comprehensively in this piece, you kind of, I read it and I was feeling, I have felt this from time to time. I've never been able to articulate it, but then you see the data and it's shocking.

So you are a chronicler of what's happening in the Jewish world and Jews in the world. Were you shocked by this before Jacob Savage submitted his piece or did it just confirm what you had been feeling and seeing? Yeah, I wasn't shocked by it. There was another editor on staff at Tablet who actually, when he read the piece I said I think the piece is probably gonna do well that's an understatement by the way I

don't know what the numbers are you have the numbers but I'm just telling you there's like three or four tablet pieces the one you guys did several years ago in the Women's March look there are a few pieces that like everybody I know read the piece that's like my little focus group. This was one of those pieces. Right. So, you know, you never, virality of pieces online is such a, it's like a magic art. Like we, it's literally, it's like for witches and warlocks at this point. But you kind of have some sense of it. I had some sense. I didn't know the piece was going to do as well as it did, but I knew it would do well. But what was instructive for me was there were people at Tablet that said, I don't know if anyone's going to read it. It feels like a rehashing

of like so many of the pieces that we've been writing over the last five years. Why is this any different? And I tried to explain this is before the piece went online. I said, I think putting it all together for people is going to have an effect. The reason why I tell that story is because it's just instructive that for a bunch of people who've been following this story as reporters, as journalists for the last five or six years, none of that felt new. None of it felt shocking. None of it felt outrageous. And yes, it confirms all in one place a lot of the feelings that, or the impressions that people have gotten from this or that angle of the story, but it didn't feel new at all. And it didn't feel new to me either. But on the other, but it didn't feel new at all. And it didn't feel new to me either. But on the other hand, it didn't feel new to a lot of readers. I think most readers had the experience that you did, which is this doesn't, it doesn't shock me that it's happening. It shocks

me that it's so provable all over. Yeah. Okay. So, so then the question is, I mean, he gets it, I mean, Jacob gets into some pretty dark theories, if you will, about how, you know, comparing it to, you know, purges in the height of the Cold War and the former Soviet Union.

And I mean, some of it I thought was pretty intense, certainly thought-provoking, conversation-provoking. What do you think is actually going on? I mean, now, you know, coming back to broken, what broke? Because what's striking about the data, it's like it wasn't, it's sort of a gradual decline, and then it's a plummeting of Jewish presence in these areas of American life that we just assumed Jews would be welcomed, celebrated, have a very prominent role. And then it's just like, there's like a, it's like a collapse.

It's like a, you know, and so what's going on? You know, I think that a question like that is a little bit like a Rubik's cube. There are a lot of different ways to get to the destination. And in some senses, if you get to the destination, you were right on some level, even though you took different paths. of the American Jewish quarter century that we've just had. Some part of it, I guess it really depends on what part is most exciting for you and you're most invested in. So as somebody who's invested in Jewish communal life, I think and wonder a lot about the role of Jewish institutions in the story of, let's just call it a separation of American Jews from many of the institutions that felt central and vital to American Jewish achievement and success. So I try to think about what role we played.

And by we, I mean the Jews and then Jewish institutions. There's also obviously the role of the larger political landscape. And I think that the two, if I had to focus on understanding one from each of those buckets, sort of one way of understanding each of those buckets, I would say that they actually, in a funny way, it's the same problem, which is the problem of Jewish difference. I don't know that I think a lot of American Jews didn't quite know what to make of how different they were or weren't from other Americans, and didn't quite know what to do with the discomfort of being different. And maybe decided that they didn't want to be different, or they didn't want to be different, or they didn't want to be different

in the ways that other Jews were different. And so they abrogated their attachment to what made us distinctive. At the same time, a lot of American institutions were themselves becoming uncomfortable with Jewish difference and were particularly in the last few years were had come to a feeling that identity and the conversation around identity, which itself is fairly new, was going to be race-based. And the race-based understanding of identity was going to also intersect with privilege in a way that whatever people intended or didn't intend pointedly meant that Jews were going to be left out

of a bunch of conversations and a bunch of spaces that they previously were not just in, but central to. So basically, both the Jews and everyone else, everyone was becoming uncomfortable with Jewish difference. And I guess what's strange about it for me, I went to Barnard and Columbia. And so it's not like I lived my life as a Breslov Hasidic. I'm just like, I'm in the world. I think Jewish difference is amazing. I live inside of it. I want to highlight it.

I want to sharpen the distinctions. I think that what made jews different was what made them special and so i don't really understand the allergy to it but i will say that i see it a lot so i sent your piece to someone um prominent in circles close to the the current the close to the current, close to the Biden administration, and he reacted without reading the piece, okay? So without reading the piece, he listed off, he says, I don't know, I don't see much of a vanishing. Look at the Attorney General of the United States, look at the Secretary of the Treasury of the United States,

look at the Secretary of Homeland Security of the United States, look at the second husband of the United States, look at, I mean, he went on and on and on. You know, the Secretary of Homeland Security of the United States. Look at the second husband of the United States. Look at, I mean, he went on and on and on. You know, the Secretary of State has Jewish roots. All these people either have Jewish roots or are Jewish. Look at the Senate Majority Leader. I mean, he just rattled off, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Like, this doesn't look like a vanishing.

And he read the piece, and then he was like, okay. He's like, so it's what I just laid out, meaning him, what he just laid out, he says maybe that's just like the last vestige of a bygone era that we're heading into a new phase. I had a different reaction, which relates exactly to what you just said, which is it's not whether, oh, these folks in power are Jewish, but that's changing. It's that these people who are in power, not all of them, and I don't want to generalize. I don't know every one of them,

so I'm not making a sweeping judgment about all of them. But for many of them, they're not about sharpening the differences. These are not people about sharpening the differences of the Jewish life. So it doesn't really matter that they are technically Jewish. They're not, they're not, their Jewish identity is not a big part of their lives. They're not living rigorous, robust Jewish lives where you could look at them in a position of power and say, wow, Jews in America are thriving. Yeah. You know, look, I think Louis Brandeis wrote pretty movingly about Jewish issues, his own Jewish identity, how it fed into jurisprudence, etc. I don't believe Janet

Yellen has ever talked about how her Jewish identity informs the policies that she backs. And that distinction's important. Now, again, I don't think, I want to be careful about this because you don't want to get obsessed with representation and with the question and then with like bean counting. How many do we have? How sizes are, what number do we represent in the overall population? Should our number at the Ivy leagues or on the New York city city council represent our. Right.

And also like just to, it kind of gets a little icky, right? Like you start, you get, so, so I want to be mindful of that. The point of the bean counting though is

that you give your sense which tablet did over the course of six or seven years your impression and all people say back to you is where are the numbers where are the numbers where are the numbers then you give the numbers and they say why are you so obsessed with numbers and the answer for those people is why don't you want to look at reality what about the idea that jews may be disappearing from american public spaces makes you nervous because you seem more anxious about this possibility, you could say, as I said to a lot of people who reacted negatively to the piece, than I do. I'm simply looking at it saying, I don't know why this is happening. Can we talk about possible reasons for why this is happening? When you say there are a lot of kids on American college campuses now that feel an uptick in anti-Semitism that they never imagined that they might experience.

And the answer is there's no such thing as an anti-Semitism problem on American campuses. And then you start to say, okay, here's the thing. 15 years ago, almost no kids on these campuses were saying that. Now we hear it a lot. Oh, no, that's only because you have social media. At some point, you start to look at people and you say, I don't know what kind of society we're building, but it feels like you live in the past. And I'm trying to answer questions about the

future. And I don't know what the right answer to this question of this moment in American Jewish representation in institutions is, but I have a lot of questions about what the future is for American Jews. All right, Alana, we will leave it there. Thank you. I've had plenty of illuminating conversations with you offline. I'm glad to now have you on this podcast, waking us up, I'm sure.

I was horrified by both of these pieces. I'm sure we'll have a lot of people horrified by this conversation, but that's good. I have a chicken soup recipe I can send. I'm full. We're a full scale operation here. That's right. A self-contained unit. That's right. All right. We will have you back on. Alana Newhouse, editor-in-chief and founder of Tablet. Tablet, I highly recommend you subscribe to folks and also their podcast, especially the Unorthodox podcast.

There's plenty to follow. We'll provide all the information. Alana, thanks for being here. Thank you. That's our show for today. To keep up with Alana's work, you can track her down and all the other terrific writers at tabletmag.com. You can also follow them on Twitter at Tablet Mag. And we'll post the articles and essays we talked about in the show notes, as well as a link to Tablet. Highly encourage you to

subscribe to Tablet, to subscribe to their podcasts, and keep up with their very important, often controversial reporting and analysis. Call Me Back is produced by Ilan Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.