Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - Western ideas at their best & why they're under attack - with Eric Cohen

Episode Date: March 6, 2023

Eric Cohen is the CEO of Tikvah. He was the founder and remains editor-at-large of the New Atlantis, and he serves as the publisher of Mosaic. Eric has written for The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and Commentary, He is the author of In the Shadow of Progress: Being Human in the Age of Technology. He previously worked for the U.S. President’s Council on Bioethics. Eric's work can be found at: TikvahFund.org The Mosaic essay we discuss in this episode: "The Spirit of Jewish Classical Education", by Eric and Cohen & Mitchell Rocklin https://mosaicmagazine.com/essay/history-ideas/2023/02/the-spirit-of-jewish-classical-education/ Column by Tyler Cowen: "Wokeism Has Peaked" https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-02-18/wokeism-has-peaked-in-america-but-is-still-globally-influential#xj4y7vzkg The New Atlantis https://www.thenewatlantis.com/

Think about one of the great crises of the West, the collapse of birth rates, right? Western civilization has basically decided we are not significant enough to pass down into the next generation. And so here you have a civilization with the most advanced reproductive technologies we've ever had that is choosing not to reproduce. There's a kind of tragic irony in that. Here we have a nation with the most sophisticated antidepressants we've ever had that's more depressed than any civilization that's ever been. Before we begin today's episode, one housekeeping note. Our next episode, we welcome back to the podcast Josh Rogan from the Washington Post. Josh was a big hit when we had him on an episode about

China over a year ago, and we will be taking listener questions for Josh, so please do record a short voice memo if you have a question for Josh, keep it to under 30 seconds. Send it to dan at unlocked.fm. That's dan at unlocked.fm. The topics we will be hitting with Josh are China, recent revelations about the lab leak theory, and also developments in Russia, Ukraine, a series of topics he has been prolific about recently in the pages of the Washington Post. Now on to today's episode. What do we mean when we talk about Western civilization? What is the West?

Or what is the West at its best? And why is this current moment, some would call it wokeism, but it's not limited to wokeism. What is it about this moment that's an attack on the best of the West? It's a conversation I've been having on and off with my friend Eric Cohn, who joins us today. He's the CEO of Tikva, an innovative nonprofit working on, among other things, educating and developing future leaders, developing them intellectually for careers in politics and journalism and other areas of public life. Eric was the founder and remains the editor at large of the New Atlantis, a very interesting journal that we'll talk about in our conversation, and he serves as the publisher of Mosaic. I highly recommend subscribing to Mosaic for thought-provoking

and sometimes very contrarian essays. Eric has written for The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and Commentary Magazine. He's the author of In the Shadow of Progress, Being Human in the Age of Technology. Eric also worked for the President's Council on Bioethics under President George W. Bush, which is where I first got to know him. This is Call Me Back. And I'm pleased to welcome to the podcast for the first time, my longtime pal, Eric Cohn, who's the CEO of Tikva.

He's a prolific writer. He's a teacher. He's a teacher of, he's taught me. He's taught one of my kids, actually, directly. He's taught a lot of other folks, some most more influential than me. Eric, welcome to Call Me Back. Damn, it's great to be here. So, you know, we should have done this, you know, it's odd that you're only here for the

first time because I feel like I talk to you all the time and we go way back. So I want to talk a little bit about going way back. We first met, was it in Germany? We met in Germany? I think it was in Germany onany we met in germany i think it was i think it was in germany on a very strange trip in germany okay so so so lest our our listeners uh imaginations run wild with with a leaving it at just a strange trip in germany in 2002 uh eric and i were both what what was it, the Young Leaders? It was this organization called the Young Leaders.

Is that what it was called? Some kind of young friends of Germany or Young Leaders. No, no, no. It was like Young Leaders. So basically, we were both recruited to take this trip with, I think there was like 50 people, 25 Americans, 25 Germans, all viewed as young leaders in their respective countries to spend like a week together, right? And you kind of study and you debate and you build transatlantic relationships, friendships. And we were on this trip and it was after 9-11,

before the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and we got into some like heated debates um with our German friends about American foreign policy and that was the strange part it was strange it did it did make you appreciate how important America is to the defense of the west I'll leave it at that right and there was that ultimately bizarre moment that William Sapphire wrote about which we won't get into the um the origin story of but there was that amazing william sapphire wrote this column about a member of uh of whose government would that have been uh it was one of the german governments it was a minister one of the german governments or maybe it was a former minister in in that uh government who gave a speech to us where he explained that the reason, I can't remember, it was

something like the reason Bush was going to war after 9-11 was to help his brother, Jeb, who wanted to run for president, or was up for re-election in Florida. That was it. Jeb was up for re-election as governor of Florida in 2002, and President Bush was taking this very hawkish stand towards in the Middle East to help his brother with the Jews, because the Jews would want a hawkish war in the Middle East, and this was all connected, and he gave the senior official or former official gave us a speech, and your and my collective chins dropped. It was an odd moment. And it felt to me when I was there like a haunted place. I'd never been there, you know, as a Jew, going to Germany. And on the one hand, a place that

had tried to commit itself to the spirit of tolerance and to reckon with the dark side of its past. But it had no seeming, you know, capacity to pass down the nobler parts of its own heritage, and so it seemed like our young peers there were kind of lost. The German peers. The German peers, yeah. It made me proud to be an American and proud to be a Jew and worried about Europe. Yeah, so that is, I think, a good jumping-off point to the work you're doing today at TICFA. Before we get to the work you're doing today at TICFA, I just want to just quickly move through your bio so our listeners can understand where you come at, the work you do today.

So, as I said, we met in 2002. You were, at the time, working on President Bush's bioethics council, is that right? That's right. I had the great privilege to work with Leon Kass. You know, it's hard to remember, but the first big speech that President Bush gave, you know, President George W. Bush, was on August 9th, 2001, and it was about stem cells. And the country had been wrapped up in this big ethical debate for months and months about whether there would be federal funding for this research that would use human embryos to try to make medical advances. And he gave this dramatic speech, a very, it was his first White House address,

and he was quoting Aldous Huxley, and he was taking up this incredible moral question about what do we owe nascent human life? Are there limits to scientific progress? And he named Leon Kass to chair this White House council. And I had been writing about those issues as a young kind of journalist and intellectual, you know, had worked for Irving Kristol for a a while and Leon found me and asked me if I'd help him run this commission, which I did for a number of years and among other great privileges was spending a lot of time with another regular guest of yours, Yuval Levin, who was also a young guy at the time and helped run that council. But

it was then that I really got to appreciate in a much deeper way why Jewish ideas matter. Leon was actually working on a commentary on the book of Genesis, and here we were thinking about... I know we're doing a little bit on your background, but do 30 seconds on Leon's background, because his is an extraordinary... Yeah, so Leon casts this extraordinary figure, you know, trained in biomedical science as a doctor, as a chemist in the 60s and 70s, but who at that point when the first experimentation was being done with in vitro fertilization and these kind of new powers over early human life and in general kind of our new masteries of modern biology, he began thinking about the moral questions that these new technologies raised. And he started writing about it and thinking about it

and became one of the real founding figures in the field of bioethics and then eventually became one of the great teachers of just Western culture and civilization. I mean, he was a kind of master educator along with his wonderful wife, Amy Cass, of the great books and why we needed those great books to understand who we are and why life matters and how to think about the big enduring questions that faced us. And he eventually realized that the greatest book of all was the Hebrew Bible. And he devoted the last many decades, he's still working and teaching at Shalem College, but he's devoted the last many decades of his life

to trying to make sense philosophically of the masterwork, foundational work, of the Jewish tradition, and really of the West, which was the Bible. And this work that you did for President Bush's council was the inspiration for the journal you ultimately founded, The New Atlantis? Yeah, so I was working at the council and we were thinking about cloning, stem cells, end-of-life issues, issues in human reproductive technology, organ transplantation. And I just had this sense that the broader question of how is the West going to deal with the most sophisticated and dramatic advances in technology, not only biotechnology,

but information technology, military technology, communications technology, that we needed a way to think about the social and moral challenges that these, you know, technologies put before us. And I didn't have a strong background in science. And it was probably a little brash of me at 25 to start a magazine, but I felt like there was a need and an opening to create a forum to think about these things. And so that's how I started the new Atlantis back. Gosh, it's 20 years now.

It's 2003 and it's still running strong. So it's an important forum for those questions. Before we get into where you went next and what inspired that, I do have a question. I mean, if you think about the advances happening today, I mean, if you kind of go to January of 2020 to the mRNA in basically a single day coming up with the code that has created a vaccine to navigate us through a pandemic. And obviously it wasn't in one day.

It was 20 years in the making, the mRNA R&D. centric advances in in biomedical research producing mrna vaccines producing you know from what i understand um that drugs and and other measures to counter malaria there's these there's these advances out right now that are sort of i don't even know how to i mean that are designed and apparently with with much effect to combat obesity. Some of these advances may be able to contribute, the AI-based advances contribute to combating some cancers. It just seems in a very short period of time, right now, we're dealing with this unbelievable transformation in biomedical research. Did you see this coming and do you almost feel like you

were ahead of your time, like this was the time to launch the new Atlantis? I think so. You know, it's very rare in American public life when you're having these kind of big moral debates. And that's what the stem cell question put on our map. And then you have this one great figure, namely Dr. Cass, who wanted America to think in a different way about these things. I mean, I think precisely because he was informed by reading Homer, by reading Greek philosophy, and then by reading the Bible, he wanted the country to recognize that these incredible advances in science show the two sides of humanity. On the one hand, being godlike in the best sense, meaning using reason, using our creative ingenuity to try to improve human life and to correct nature when nature is broken. What is more horrible than a sick child, you know, with cancer or something? And what's more noble than those who work relentlessly to

try to heal? I mean, it's very redemptive. But he also saw the dark side of our powers over science and technology. And so think about one of the great crises of the West, the collapse of birth rates, right? Western civilization has basically decided we are not significant enough to pass down into the next generation. And so here you have a civilization with the most advanced reproductive technologies we've ever had that is choosing not to reproduce. There's a kind of tragic irony in that. Here we have a nation with the most sophisticated antidepressants we've ever had that's more depressed than any civilization that's ever been. And so, Cass saw that the human drama was playing out in modern science and technology, and that if we didn't look for deeper sources of wisdom,

classical literature, the Bible, our first session of the President's Council on Bioethics, can you imagine this? A presidential commission was a seminar on Nathaniel Hawthorne's story, The Birthmark. You know, as we think about wokeism and the cultural challenges we face today, I think there are lots of angles into those challenges, but certainly the problems of technology are one of them. And I think... The problems and the promise. Yes, the problems and the promise. And by the way, I think Judaism has always uniquely understood both sides of man. Meaning if you look at this classic work by Joseph Soloveitchik, The Lonely Man of Faith, right? He describes the two creation stories, Adam 1 and Adam 2. And Adam

1 is sort of the creative man of dignity who kind of conquers nature through his own creative power, and that to be in the image of God means our creative ability to make life better, and that there is an arc of progress in human history. But Adam 2 recognizes the permanent limits of human ingenuity and our need for God, our need for redemption, our need for limits. And I think the Hebrew Bible is a unique window into the very kinds of hyper-modern problems that you were just talking about. And that's, just speaking personally, I didn't have a very strong Jewish background at all,

and it was only through thinking with Dr. Kass and Yulia Olivin and Peter Berkowitz as a part of this, Alan Rubinstein was a part of it, like, there were a lot of smart, happened to be a lot of Jews thinking hard about these issues, that led me to rediscover my own Jewish heritage. Okay, so I want to come to, by the way, for those listeners who aren't going to take the time to read long form soloveitchik sorry sally with no disrespect to your to your uncle we will uh post on the show notes a terrific column by david brooks new york times a few years ago where he actually does a good summary of if you want like 800 words on exactly uh what um what eric is is talking about, summarizing Joseph Soloveitchik. Okay, so during this entire time, you just hinted at this, during this entire time, you were basically an assimilated secular Jew?

I mean, I had a pretty typical suburban Jewish upbringing. You know, I grew up near Boston, wonderful parents who just, their Jewish identity was never in question, but they just didn't know much. You know, my father had passed away very young. There was the kind of rupture between the old world and the new when it came to Jewish tradition. And so, you know, I went to Hebrew school grudgingly like so many others. But not day school. I mean, this was like once a week. Not day school.

Like a couple times a week. Yeah, and never got any sense of the kind of majesty and significance of Jewish history, of the great figures of the Bible, of how our ideas informed the West, and never got any sense of what a thick, committed Jewish community was like. I wouldn't have known what an Orthodox Jew was until after college. But I will say with gratitude that I got just enough for the seeds of renewal to at some point spring. And it's almost like the generation in the desert, you know, it was just enough for them to get to the promised land. And so that's what I had. And I ended up getting a scholarship to go to Groton, which is one of the least Jewish places imaginable.

It's this sort of famous boarding school that the way I describe it- This was for high school? This was for high school. And I say this mostly with kind of respect. It had the ghosts of the old American aristocracy there, meaning a lot of it had been hollowed out, but carved in wood on the wall at Groton were names like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Dean Atchison, McGeorge Bundy. These were graduates. These were alumni. And even more profound, if you look at the Groton graduates in World War I and World War II, literally like two-thirds of the graduates served in these wars, many of them giving their lives. And they had a sense of kind

of American service. And so I learned Greek and Latin. I didn't learn Hebrew. I knew I was sort of weirdly out of place. I would go to morning chapel and sit in silence while they sang Christian hymns, although the chaplain was an atheist who didn't believe in God. So it was like a weird moment in the history of this school. And I just knew I didn't fully belong there. But I also appreciated that this was the kind of institution that great leaders could be formed in if it were informed by the right spirit. And I took that away from me. And actually, it's in a way I think about it a lot more now as we're thinking at Tikvah about starting these Jewish classical schools. I think

about the best of Groton and the worst of Groton and how much it informed me. So that was high school, and then I went to college. I had basically no Jewish life or interest at the time. Where did you go to college? It was only, I went to Williams. Yeah. And did you find that this was, I mean, I think it's also for a number of younger, of our younger listeners, it's, while williams back when you were going

were probably was probably liberal it was not crazy am i right it wasn't it wasn't crazy progressive well it was it was i mean i mean on this on your i'm grading this on a curve relative to yes going on today look here's what i. Back then, and I think it's harder today, but it's still the case, there were a handful of great teachers who taught me important things, you know, in political thought and philosophy and literature, and so I was able to learn.

But the most important education I got at Williams was being the editor of the conservative paper. And like any young undergraduate, wildly overstating things and enjoying the fights. But in a much deeper level, that's what exposed me to people like Irving Kristol and Norman Pidhoritz and this whole other tradition of conservative intellectuals

that became my home after college. And so you always try to look for the good things in what formed you. And I would say, looking back at Williams, because I was sort of like conservative in opposition, I got a kind of education that has been very valuable, you know, moving forward. But there was no Jewish life for me then. Right. Okay, so now let's fast forward to the President's Bioethics Council. Then you start the New Atlantis, which we'll put in the show notes, a link to the journal, which still exists. And then take us to TICVA, why TICVA was founded and what TICVA is doing today? So 2005, 2006, you know, that period, I became much more deeply engaged,

you know, for the reasons I discussed. A lot of it, I think, having to do with Leon's influence, Irving Kristol's influence in Jewish ideas and in Jewish life. I didn't know where it would lead, but I knew I needed to know who I was and where I came from. And I also, I came to believe that the defense of American culture and civilization depended in some deep way on a recovery of its Judeo-Christian roots. And I wanted to take seriously the Judeo side of that. And so I just started to try to learn and think. And it was at that period that I got an invitation, and it's a good story, actually. Yuval Levin and I came together to go see Roger Hertog. And for those of you who don't know Yuval, most people probably do know Yuval, he was born in Israel, you know, fluent in Hebrew, read the Bible carefully.

He's a genius, and he was a deeply learned kind of Jewish guy. And here I was, didn't know very much about Judaism, but knew I wanted to make a contribution to Jewish life and civilization. And we both came up to meet Roger. Roger at the time was looking to really jumpstart Tikvah. You know, Tikvah was this foundation that had been created by his partner, Zalman Bernstein. And its core purpose was to try to invest in Jewish ideas and to try to support the education of Jewish and Zionist leaders at the highest level. That was the big concept. And there was no staff at the time. There were no activities in America at the time. The only thing it was doing then was making a grant to the Shalem Center, which was a

think tank, publishing a journal called Azure and doing some other book translations. And so he basically said to Yuval and I, look, I hear you guys are pretty young, smart guys. This is what I want to do. If you're interested, call me. And I went home that night and felt like maybe I had found a purpose in life, that I knew I didn't know enough, but I thought maybe I would be able to contribute some of my other skills, and I'd learn along the way. But Yuval, of course, was the most obvious choice. But he went home that night and said, I'm so grateful, Roger, but I have an American soul more than a – I'm committed to the American project first and foremost.

And I decided I'm committed to the Jewish project first and foremost. And one thing led to another, and against all rational odds or judgment, Roger offered me this job to be sort of the founding executive director of TickFund. And that's what I did. I started in 2007. I was the first employee, and it's what I did. I started in 2007, I was the first employee and it's grown since then. And full disclosure, I've been supportive of TICFA and its various projects. I've taught a seminar there, I have, my kids have taken class there, one

of them's taking class there right now, my wife's taking a class there, so we are, we're big fans. Can you tell us, spend a few minutes on what Tikvah is working on now, and then we'll get to the issues. So look, Tikvah does a lot of things, but I break it down into three. The first is we try to invest in ideas, meaning we try to support the most important thinking about both the great challenges facing the Jewish people today, you know, whether it's questions facing modern Israel, questions about America and assimilation, questions about the crisis of anti-Semitism, the defense of religious freedom. We created a bunch of institutions that try to advance the highest level Jewish thought, both on the urgent issues

of the day and then more deeply on the enduring questions of life. So this is everything from Ruth Weiss just released a course on the great New York intellectuals that we did. We've done courses on the Hebrew Bible, courses on Zionist history. Mosaic is a key centerpiece of this, the Tikickford podcast. So it's investing in ideas. That's the first part of it. The second, which I hope will come back to, and I think is really central, is trying to educate young people. And originally that meant a couple dozen exceptional young people that we thought had real leadership potential. Now it's thousands of young people that we hope have real leadership potential. And it began thousands of young people that we hope have real

leadership potential. And it began really focused on only college students. And then we realized we have to go much younger. Because if we don't get these young Jews in the diaspora earlier, then we risk losing them. And that includes both young Jews who are in day school and young Jews who are outside the Jewish day school world. So that's – And not just Jews that are in traditionally Jewish, highly Jewish-concentrated areas like New York City. Yeah, we work with kids across the spectrum of Jewish life and across the country and really the world. I mean, my son, who's taking a class right now,

told me – this is a weekly class he takes on Thursday evenings, I think. Yeah, Thursday evenings. And he tells me there's a kid from Denver. There's a couple kids from Miami. There's a kid from like Dallas. There's so it is. You really cover the geography and parts of the country that may not. COVID really broke this open because we had all these young kids trapped at home, open to learning in ways that they hadn't been before in terms of time.

And I also mean at a deeper level. That was a period where people were searching for a connection, searching for depth. And so we created Tickfaw Online Academy. And we went from a couple dozen kids taking a couple of Zoom classes to thousands of kids. And Zoom has its great limits, but one of its great strengths is it collapses geography. So you can connect Jews from across the country who have a shared interest in some subject with a great teacher, and it doesn't matter whether they're in California, Texas, or New

York. They can learn and study together and that really exploded so that I assume we'll come back to the education but just to finish the the full picture that the third part of our work is really uh Tikva Israel and we've created a significant web of institutions in Israel that are all focused in different ways and trying to advance a kind of high-level conservative movement but around ideas you know politically yeah politically and culturally conservative so books magazines yeah um we created an israeli version of the federalist society we translating important books we translated wilford mcclay's great book on america into hebrew where the

hebrew language publisher the Netanyahu biography. So Tikva Israel's become a kind of important institution in the public life of Israeli democracy. I think Tikva in America is as well, but our heart and soul is educating young people because our thesis is that if you want to renew Jewish, American, and Western civilization here, you've got to begin in the schoolhouse. And you've got to begin by renewing how we think about education. And so if you believe, as I do, that wokeism is not destiny, then the antidote to wokeism and the heroes in fighting back, I think, are going to be the school builders.

They're going to be the people that transform how we think about the education of young people, and that's really what we're focusing on now here. Okay, so I want to talk now about wokeism. Now, because I think what you're working on and what you're seeing is really interesting as a sort of antidote to—an upbeat, inspiring antidote to wokeism. So—and why do I think that is so important? I am on the receiving end, as I'm sure you are, Eric, and I'm sure many of our listeners are, of what I call the kind of can-you-believe subject line, or the can-you-believe WhatsApp message, which is people read some story in the New York Post or wherever about

some crazy incident happening at a, you know, at elite secular institution, private, you know, private high school or, you know, an Ivy League school, and they're like horrified and they, can you believe this is happening? You know, can you believe they're doing this to our kids? Can you believe people have lost their minds? Everyone feels like they, you know, that everyone else is taking crazy pills. And it's very easy to get sucked into the can you believe and just spend all your time doing can you believe without actually taking a step back and asking what's important, what's important

about this moment and what can we do to, you know, find kind of kernels of important projects in the midst of the craziness rather than just like stressing about the craziness. And you've been focusing on this defense of the West. You wrote about it in this essay I spoke about in the introduction, which we'll link to in the show notes. Just define for us, what is the West? What do you define as the West when you talk about the defense of the West? Or what is the West at its best? And why is wokeism an attack on it? What is the West? At least you don't give me the hard questions.

In a minute or less. That's it, in a minute or less. Look, you know, we should not take our cues from what we're against, first and foremost. Like, wokeism is a problem. Meaning don't overreact. Don't spend your life reacting to these. You have to know what you're for. You have to know what is the elevated thing, the majestic thing,

the value system that you're trying to defend. And so, you know, what is the West at its best? You know, I would say to try to capture it in imagery rather than in simply an argument. It's the three M's. So what do I mean? First, it's the mezuzah. Now, what do I mean by the mezuzah? The mezuzah is this small container, I guess you could call it, you know, on Jewish doorposts around the world. But what's inside it is a... For our non-Jewish listeners, of which we have many, although you wouldn't know it by sometimes the heavy Jewish and Israelian content of these podcasts, but if you walk into any,

not even observant Jewish home, most even secular Jewish homes have what Eric is describing, which is this, it's almost like a little glass, what would you say, like a tube almost, right? It's like a little glass tube on the right side of the door when you're walking through a doorway of someone's Jewish home. And often it can be quite artistically done, but it's a thin, you know, it's usually three inches or so, not even, but inside of it is a scroll, a short piece of text from the Hebrew Bible. It captures in a very deep way the foundational ideas of the West, namely that there's a God, one God who created the world, that God put human beings at the center of that creation, that he entered into this covenant with

us, that human beings have to live under God's commandments, but within that are the creative force within history. And it emphasizes very specifically not only that we have to live under commandments, but that we have to pass these down from generation to generation in our children. So, in this tiny little scroll are a set of ideas that transform and shape Western civilization. God as creator, God as a covenantal being, God as someone who enters in, as the being that enters into a relationship with man who makes history and is at the center of history, who's made in the image of God, that man have to live under certain commandments,

that our lives have a moral order that ought to be respected and understood, and that that moral order is transmitted through the family. It's transmitted through husband and wife coming together in marriage and rearing children. In fact, what's the first commandment? Be fruitful and multiply. The first M is the mezuzah, which I think captures the Hebraic foundation of Western civilization. The second M is Michelangelo. Now, what does Michelangelo represent? Michelangelo represents the creative genius of the West, right? I mean, what is the Sistine Chapel? Well, the Sistine Chapel is a rendering of these biblical ideas with beautiful human ingenuity as an act of devotion. And so, if you look at the creative achievements of the West

in art and architecture and music and literature, it's been an engine of incredible testaments to the human spirit that are worthy of reverence and admiration and that are often themselves kind of acts of devotion. And so, Michelangelo kind of epitomizes that, and I don't think it's an accident that his greatest painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is straight out of the Hebrew Bible. And then the third M is the microscope, right? You know, the microscope representing human creativity in the arena of science, which we were talking about earlier, right? And that what drives us in the scientific arena? Well, one, our God-given human curiosity to just make sense of the world,

to uncover through reason how nature works and who we are. but it's also the human need to heal and fix nature because nature's often broken. And at the summit of modern technological creativity is medicine. And so, you know, when I try to come up with like, what's a clear way to understand what's the West and why is it worthy and why is it worthy of defense? Well, it's the mezuzah, Michelangelo, and the microscope. But the mezuzah is it first because all of our creativity in science or in art or in literature is answerable to who we are as commanded beings. And that's laid out most profoundly, I think, in the Bible and I think centers on the kind of nature of the family. And so if you want to now look at the crisis that we face in the Bible, and I think centers on the kind of nature of the family. And so if you want to now look at the crisis that we face in the West, well, what are the things that are breaking

down? Things that are breaking down, I mentioned earlier, birth rates. I mean, birth rates across the Western world are collapsing. We are committing civilizational suicide, except for Israel, which is a kind of remarkable exception to this. And parenthetically, Israel, the exception, the Israel exception here is not just among what people would think of very religious or ultra-Orthodox Jews, but even secular Israelis in Israel are having lots of kids. Yeah, it's the only advanced nation in the world that has a birth rate, and it's not even close. It's like at three right when everyone else is way below two which is mirror the replacement rate and some of these nations are like one they're literally choosing not to perpetuate themselves and and what are they

saying not consciously but subconsciously our civilization is not important enough to pass down in the flesh and blood and life of the next generation. The family is in crisis and breakdown, meaning all kinds of fractures and ruptures in family life, high rates of despair and depression. There's a crisis of meaning in the West that is very real. And what I would argue is that we need kind of Hebraic remedies for our modern disorders, meaning that if you want to improve culture and civilization, you gotta go back to the Jewish beginnings and that means you gotta go back to the idea that God summoned the Israelites to be a light unto the nations. We through us, certain ideas were gonna be transmitted into the world and into history and into the culture,

and that it's not enough for the Jews to simply isolate themselves from the parts of the West they don't like. We have to take responsibility for Western civilization. And that's not an easy thing to say because the great irony of Western history is that we gave birth to a lot of these ideas and a lot of them played out through Christianity. And yet the Jews themselves in history didn't always live so easily or so well. I mean, we were often persecuted and ghettoized and mistreated. And so we often lived in shtetls rather than building the Sistine Chapel, even though it's Jewish ideas in a Christian way that make their way to the Sistine Chapel. Well, fortunately, we live in

a moment in history where in America and in Israel, you know, Jews are either sovereign or they're celebrated. Yes, there's more anti-Semitism in America, there are issues and there are problems, but at the heart of America, there's a kind of Hebraic founding. And at the beginning in Washington's letter at Newport, the people of Abraham were respected and celebrated. And so, I think Jews have a huge contribution to make to the renewal of the West that begins with renewing our own educational institutions, but that has a light that will shine beyond the Jews themselves. That's why we argue at the end what we need is the menorah Jew, right? Because the menorah kind of shines a light that's brighter and more significant

than any other civilizational light. That's the argument we were trying to make. But just to be clear, just to succinctly explain why wokeism is an attack on these ideas. So, look, wokeism is a kind of anti-Hebraic religion, right? I mean, if you look at all the things that it's going after, it's going after the three M's, right? It's hostile to the kind of family-centered commandments that you see in the Hebrew Bible. It's hostile to the idea that there is a difference between, you know, men and women and that that difference means something, you know. It's trying to impose a different kind

of religion on the West. You look at art and culture, you know, what is wokeism? Well, we've lost any sense of the distinction between high art and culture like Michelangelo and, you know, renegade artists who put urine in a cup and call it art. And so it's an attack on the very belief in beauty and aesthetic excellence. It's an attack on history. It's an attack on history. And it has its own kind of theology of guilt and sin, right? Meaning it radically minimizes the idea of personal sin, right? Because it gives people, you know, a sort of radical belief in autonomy that everyone can live however they want. And yet it has its own drama of they're the good actors and they're the bad actors. And, you know, those who don't bow before the idols of wokeness are punished.

They're put on public trial. They're canceled. So I think wokeism is what happens when you lose your moorings as a people and as a culture. And I think Jews can play a unique role in reminding the West to return to their moorings, because we are the moorings. So I want to quote here from Tyler Cowen, who's an economist. He's widely read.

He's a very popular podcast. He runs something called the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. He has a terrific blog called Marginal Revolution. He does a lot of things. Interesting thinker, best-selling author. He wrote this column for Bloomberg a year ago. And I'm going to quote from his column.

He says, I'm calling it. Wokeism has peaked. Quote, wokeism has peaked. Yes, it will remain a highly influential movement and it will probably continue to spread globally, but in the U.S. at least. Wokeism and the woke will ebb. By wokeism, he says, I refer to a movement that on the positive side is highly aware of racism and social injustice and is galvanized towards raising awareness.

On the negative side, it can be preachy, alienating, overly concerned with symbols and self-righteous. The turning point for the fortunes of the woke may be this week's, this was a year ago, this week's school board election in San Francisco where three members were recalled by a margin of more than 70%. Voters were upset that the school board spent time trying to rename some schools in a more politically correct manner, meaning getting rid of figures, historical figures, names,

from the founding of the country from from the names of schools rather than focusing on reopening all the schools there was also considerable opposition to the board's introduction of a lottery admission system for a prestigious high school in lieu of the previous use of grades and exam scores and tyler goes on and on and on and separately he's told me that he has data that shows that you just look at all the language around wokeism he's done like these these has data that shows that you just look at all the language around wokeism. He's done these internet-wide searches, and actually the numbers are coming down. It's not to say that it's not out there, but it is on the declining side of the slope, not on the incline side of the slope.

And that has happened over the last year or two. Again, not saying the problem is over, not declaring V for victory, but saying it is not – the crisis may have peaked. Do you agree with that? And if so, why? I agree with that, and we're seeing it on the ground in the work that we do. Look, I think COVID was one of these great mugged-by-reality moments for parents because they saw up close for the first time at a moment when wokeism was on the ascendancy is when that you had maximum transparency because parents were sitting across the room while their kids were in these classes and you know

their their elementary school kids were being taught about transgenderism and all these other ideas. And even beyond that, they saw that what they were learning was not enough. It was not rigorous. It was not deepening their mastery and attachment to American civilization. It was often doing quite the opposite. And so it was the great mug by reality moment that has now led many parents to say, we want something else. We want something better. You know, we started a tick for this initiative about a year ago called the Jewish Parents Forum, just sort of a kind of an intuition that there were Jewish parents out there that were concerned about this, thousands of people have signed up, you know, and they're looking for something different and something better. So, look, I'm ultimately very hopeful, you know, and I think this is a moment of great institution building.

And alongside, you know, the wokeism triumph and the, you know, the rise of kind of progressivism gone mad in education, we've seen a parallel movement over the rise of kind of progressivism gone mad in education, we've seen a parallel movement over the past couple decades of an incredible rebirth of classical education, especially in the Christian world and in the charter world. These are heroic people that are building schools that are— So, Eric, I guarantee you most of my listeners don't know what you're talking about. And I don't say that um

in any kind of critical or belittling way i i literally don't think they know what you're talking about so and you have been on you are traveling to these places and you are seeing these these case studies like live in action so can you please please be very descriptive in describing yes so what so what's going on? I'll tell you about one of my most inspiring field trips. A couple months ago, I went to Louisville, Kentucky to go visit Highlands Latin Academy. So Highlands Latin is a Christian classical school. It was started, I don't know, about 25 years ago by this woman, Cheryl Lowe, who, when she was around 40, looked at what was going on in education, was thinking about the upbringing of her own children and said, this is broken.

We need to do something else. And so in her living room, she started teaching classes in Latin. She said, you know, if we're going to have an alternative to what's wrong, we got to go back to what the highest forms of education were in the West for many, many centuries. So she started teaching Latin at home, and then she started teaching other classes at home, and then she created a little school. Now fast forward 25 years. Highlands Latin is a school for about 750 students. Their kids are learning classical languages, Greek, Latin, from a young age forward. They're reading the great works of Western civilization.

They're building their own deep attachment to the values of the Bible. And by the way, I think they're the highest performing school in Kentucky. I mean, their average SATs are like 1,400 or something. And by the way, not only are they doing this in one school, they've scaled it. So there are about 25 other Highlands affiliated schools around the country. And over the past 20 years, even more profound, they've created this curriculum every day, every week, every grade, K through 12, taking you

through all these core subjects now being used by thousands of students around the country. This is what it means to be a builder, meaning to say, look, we're not going to just gripe about what's wrong in our schools and all this kind of silly madness and, you know, wokeism and critical race theory. We're going to actually build something deeper, thicker, and richer, which are these classical schools. And there are now hundreds and hundreds of them that are being built around the country. Some of them are Christian. Some of them are charter schools. Great Hearts Academy has built this whole network of classical charter schools. Hillsdale has been involved in this.

The Association of Classical Christian Schools is a network of over 300 schools. I'm reading from your essay. The Association of Classical Christian Schools is a network of over 300 schools. I'm reading from your essay. The Association of Classical Christian Schools is a network of over 300 schools teaching more than 40,000 students. That's amazing. They just had a couple weeks ago their big annual conference in Phoenix.

My co-author, Mitch Rocklin, was one of the speakers, and they're actually intrigued that the Jews are now interested in this. But what's inspiring is in the face of a crisis and of something broken, they've been builders. And I think the Jews of all people appreciate that when you're faced with a crisis, build a school. And there's a great Jewish wisdom to that, and that's how you play the long game. You've got to – how have – they've educated a generation of young people in these kind of broken progressive ideas. We need to educate a generation of young people in the best of Judeo-Christian

and Western heritage, and that's how you win the long game culturally. That's why I think the schools are the key. And can you just, in terms of describing when we talk about a classics-based or classical education, and you go through this in great detail in the Mosaic essay, which again I'll post, but it begins with the Greeks, right?

Can you just give us a little history of the evolution of what you are describing here as a classical education? Yeah, so, you know, the Greeks developed these modalities of teaching grammar and logic and rhetoric. And to be clear, there were many cultures predated the Greeks, you know, the Chinese, the Tamians. Yes, there are many great civilizations that predated the Greeks, you know, the Chinese, the Tamians. Yes, there are many great civilizations that predated the Greeks, but what made the Greeks unique is that they were the first culture open to culture, by which I mean they were the first culture that debated rationally their own direction, their own quest. They put the quest for truth at the center of their civilization.

Now, and they developed all these modalities of doing it so if you look at all the great disciplines of modern you know or learning in the history of the west history the forms of comedy and tragedy perspective in art proof-based mathematics this all goes back to the greeks um and then eventually the romans conquer the greeks and develop it further in their own ways and latin becomes the kind of foundational language of the west and so the idea of these classical schools is we got to go back to these foundational ways of learning memorizing great literature to teach us how to write, understanding the great books that have formed Western culture, learning the hundred greatest works of art, learning music.

And by the way, this is the way great leaders have been trained throughout history. I mean, you know, Plutarch's Lives is the most important book in the education of leaders for a reason. And so these schools want to recover that. Hold on. Now, Eric, just to stay on the Roman influence, how the Romans took the Greeks' role in this education to the next level, I just want to dwell on one point for one moment, which is the importance of history, where, as you say, the Greeks saw a series of events that were, you know, fated by nature. The Romans focused on man's role, the individual's role in shaping,

you know, his destiny, the destiny of his people, that, you know, people matter, history matters, events matter. Right. And here, by the way, the Jews are also central to this story. I mean, it's one of the great ironies, right? The Romans sack the Jews, but Jewish ideas end up changing the world. And how does that happen? So the Greeks make these incredible breakthroughs in the arts of human reason, but they're still trapped in a view that life is fundamentally more cyclical, that our nature is written into our beings, that the tragic is destined, that history is more the eternal recurrence of the same rather than a providential story with a beginning, a meaning, and a redemptive future. And the Hebrew Bible offers a very different view of why history is so important and what is possible in human life, and it reshapes the West. Now, it ends up doing

a lot of that through Christianity, but it fundamentally reshapes the West. So you think about, compare Hamlet, right? Hamlet is probably the greatest tragedy in the kind of modern age. It was a real innovation. Right, meaning in Hamlet the tragic outcome is a choice, it's not destined. That's what I mean. Right. And human beings can shape their own fate and future. And I think what the Jews appreciate is that God bets on man, right? There's this famous thing, Pascal's Wager, I'm oversimplifying it, but where, faced with the existential yearning for God and the inability to know for sure if he exists, you might as well bet and live as if he exists. And I think the truth is in a way inverted, right? God bets that human beings will make a history that is elevated. And it has lots

of twists and turns, but the Jews are the proof of that possibility, right? What people have lived through more and yet endure against all rational odds. And so great writers like Mark Twain and Walker Percy have these famous riffs where they basically say, all these other cultures come and go, and yet the Jew endures. What's the secret of his immortality? And Walker Percy describes it as saying, well, Jews are like the message in the bottle of history. Like, you know, we are the constant reminder and the possibility of renewal and the reason to be hopeful. And so I think this all comes back to wokeism is not destiny. I mean, it goes back to the fact that I think you can turn the tide against this stuff, and who better than the Jews to remind us that that's possible?

So we talked about the Greek period, and then we talked about the Roman period, or the Roman innovation or evolution, taking this Greek base and taking it to the next level. Now talk to me about what happened in your story in Germany in the 19th century. So, you know, in the mid-1800s in Germany, there was actually this early flourishing of this kind of classical model of Jewish education, and the real leader of it was this figure, Samson Raphael Hirsch, who, you know, was trying to, on the one hand, defend traditional Jewish life against its detractors. And the detractors was this new reform movement, new at the time,

that basically said, we should give up on Jewish particularism. We should give up on all these weird old rituals. We should just see Judaism as a kind of ethical monotheism, cut out all the parts of the Bible that seem archaic. And so he was trying to stand up against them. He was trying to stand up against kind of real fidelity to the Jewish way of life as traditionally understood, but he also believed that Jews ought to understand the Western culture that they both helped birth and of which they were a part.

And so he created this whole movement of classical learning that spread to cities around Germany, where if you look at what these kids were learning, by the way, these weren't schools only for the uber intellectuals. These young Jews were learning Torah and rabbinics, but they were also learning multiple languages, including Latin. They were learning modern classical literature. They were reading what were the great works of their own time.

And he had this vision of the classically educated Jew. And they were learning French. And I mean, they were. Yeah. Yeah. In some cases, they're learning like five or six languages. Exactly. And, you know, he look, you could say the German story didn't end so well.

And Hirsch actually was not a Zionist. I think he would probably if he could look back, you know, mysteriously in his own life, would have seen that you have to marry Jewish learning with Jewish power. And yet he built something real that then got destroyed. It got destroyed because of, obviously, the tragic fate of German Jewish history, and it got destroyed because of the sort of wave of progressive education that at that time was an attack on all classical modes of learning. And so there was this sort of this new idea, John Dewey and all these figures who had a very different vision of what education ought to look like. And that vision, you know,

ascended and the classical vision receded. I think that's hopefully now going to change, but that's what happened. So you and Mitch Rocklin in your essay draw a distinction between classical education and progressive education, but not progressive in terms of what we think of progressive today, meaning not ideologically, politically progressive. So I just want to read here, I'm quoting from your piece,ical education was always geared towards the liberal arts, preparing students for liberty by initiating them into the Western intellectual tradition and immersing them in the, quote, best that has been thought and said, in the words of Matthew

Arnold, the British essayist, progressive education was much more practical in its aims, producing competent workers for the new industrial economy and reliable citizens for the new forms of democracy that were replacing the age of emperors, kings, and high priests. So explain, what was progressive education giving up by moving away from from classical education yeah I mean look it's obviously a complicated story but you know the progressivists and one should give them their due right they basically said look we're entering this new industrial age one we got to just train people for the trades at scale so the you know they wanted to they thought themselves being more practical you know

what are we gonna you know we're not we're not, we're not going to, we're not going to have the mass education of kids in Latin. We got to teach them how to be practical workers. But then they went further and they said, you know, we got to abandon all this idea of memorization of these texts and mastery of these old languages. We got to put the student at the center of his or her own education. So this whole idea of student-centered learning, that young people can shape for themselves the pathways of their own education. And so progress, like all these things, there are tensions. Like on the one hand, it wanted to make, you know, narrow workers for the industrial machine. On the other hand, it wanted to offer the solace of education would be more fun and less, you know, you know, driven by mere memorization.

Well, of course, what are you doing when you memorize a Shakespearean sonnet? You're learning how to write. You're getting the kind of the famous phrase, you know, the furniture of the mind that is necessary if you're going to understand who you are and where you came from. And I think what happened is we sort of threw the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak, meaning we embraced this forward-looking education that said, we don't need to learn all this old-fashioned stuff. We should be oriented only to the future. And we created schools without moorings and therefore cultures without moorings. And I would say the best classical education is not only about the past. It's also very much about the future. It's about educating the kind of leaders that we need

for the future who understand history, who understand the shaping influences in our culture. It's about creating people that have the creative range to build. What is the Renaissance, right? The Renaissance was a creative carrying forward of ancient Greek culture and a kind of Christian spirit creatively re-envisioned on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Our most creative spirits need a bit of the Renaissance spirit if we're going to build our own healthy moral and human and civilized future. That's what classical education in the modern age is trying to do. But when you try to explain this to parents today, figuring out how they want their kids educated in an age of, you know, internet search engines and chat GBT, doesn't memorization seem to a lot of

them like a waste of time? I think you've got to ask them, how are the greatest figures in history formed? By the way, in Jewish history, look at the great leaders of modern Zionism. Herzl, Rav Kook, Jabotinsky, Ben-Gurion. These were men steeped in the classical ideas of the West. Look at the great builders of Diaspora Judaism. Soloveitchik, Schneerson, Heschel. These were figures steeped in the great ideas of Jewish and Western culture. And no one's saying that the point of education or an educational system is primarily to create great figures. The point is, don't you want your young people to have some sense of what human

excellence is and to have their souls oriented toward an appreciation of their own Jewish and American and Zionist heritage. You can do that while also teaching them the skills and the tools they need to thrive in the modern economy. No one's saying we're not teaching advanced math or other ways of mastering these skills. The well-educated mind can master these skills easily the poorly educated mind even with these skills will live only in these skills and and so you know they'll have they'll have a one-way ticket to computer programming as opposed to an ability to understand how that relates to anything larger as opposed to people that are classically and liberally educated who can master the arts of computer programming

that will understand why it matters and what it ought to be used for. That's the difference. And I think that's the case that we have to make to parents that this is a better way of rearing citizens and souls for the future who have a sense of where they came from. All right. Eric, we will leave it there. That's like the single best advertisement for real classical education.

So, you know, I hope folks listen to this entire conversation from beginning to end. I hope we didn't put anyone to sleep. I certainly enjoyed it. I geeked out on it. And we will provide all the references here, particularly to the mosaic piece in the show notes. And I

hope this is not the last time we have you on. Dad, I'd be thrilled to come back. Thanks for having me. We got a bunch more topics that you and I talked about talking about. But we're over time you know isn't it called call me back so call me back i'll come back you know new new call me back it's like a jewish mother's guilt trip you know call me back that's it that's it well i don't

know whether you're the jewish mother in this story or i am but but uh but it's been been great great to have the conversation with you. All right. Thanks for coming on. That's our show for today. To keep up with Eric's work, you can find him at tikvahfund.org. That's T-I-K-V-A-H-F-U-N-D.org. You can find Mosaic through Tikva. You can find a bunch of interesting classes and programs and seminars through the tikvafund.org website. And of course, their own podcast, which I highly recommend, which is actually a few podcasts, a few different programs you can find in their audio offerings. And remember, Josh Rogan from

the Washington Post is our guest in our next episode. So please send questions for Josh. You can do it by emailing me, dan at unlocked.fm. That's dan at unlocked.f as in Frank, m as in Mary. Please do a voice memo and just send that. Just keep it to under 30 seconds. Call Me Back is produced by Alain Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.