of interest - the rabbinic freakout over mamdani

[toastykitten]

This Jewish Currents/On the Nose podcast discussion is very interesting, still not done digesting but putting it here:

The thing that struck me, because I listened to Rabbi Cosgrove’s sermon to d’var Torah kind of recently, after reading all of the divrei Torah that the Halachic Left had put out for Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Sukkot, and then also reading the d’var Torah they’d recently just put out for Parshat Noach as we’ve started the cycle of Torah reading. I mean, put aside politics. If one wants to just evaluate these texts in terms of their engagement with Jewish text, there’s no comparison. The level of depth, of engagement with Jewish rabbinic literature that you’re seeing in places like the Halachic Left, is on a completely different plane than you’re seeing in what Rabbi Cosgrove is offering or Rabbi Hirsch is offering in their statements about Israel. I think that it’s the people who are actually trying to rethink Judaism outside of the framework of this kind of ethnonationalist framework who are actually doing a lot more interesting engagement, more serious engagement with Jewish texts. Because in some ways, I think the relationship to Judaism itself is really stultified and deadened by trying to put it in this box, in which you have to make Jewish tradition accord with this political project created in 1948. It’s also worth noting that one of the other groups where Zohran Mamdani seems to be having some degree of success, ironically, is—I can see Alex smiling—is among the Satmar Hasidim, who, actually, also are not Zionists but also have a relationship to Judaism which is separate from the connection to the state of Israel. Obviously, not a left politics, but there are a lot of those folks in New York. There are a lot of Satmar Hasids in New York. It’s just a reminder that these people who want to claim that they speak for a Jewish community are actually missing so much of the actual diversity of Jewish life in New York, and a lot of that diversity that they’re missing is actually very Jewishly creative and very Jewishly committed.