An Interview with Dr. Rivka Press Schwartz

Dr. Schwartz is the Associate Principal of SAR High School and the Director of Research and Program Development at SAR’s Machon Siach. She served as a Fellow at the Kogod Research Center at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America and earned her PhD from Princeton University in the history of science.

For this inaugural issue of The Yarid, Miriam Goldberger, a member of the editorial board, sat down with Dr. Schwartz to hear her perspective on the Jewish future. Their conversation, below, has been edited for clarity, length, and precision.

MiriamI think you have an interesting perspective given that you work with high school students and are familiar with a younger generation of the Jewish community. I’m wondering what you find the most worrying about the Jewish future? And what do you find the most hopeful?

Dr. SchwartzI think that as a historian by training, I get very frustrated when people say “this is the worst that things have ever been.” Things have been worse, and the Jewish people have survived a lot.

I mean, I will say this to you, and you can decide whether to print it or not—but if you think about October 7th, as horrific as it was and as traumatizing as it was, 1,200 Jews massacred is not on the scale of Jewish history. I don’t know how far down you’d have to get on the list of massacres in Jewish history until you got to the number 1200, but you’d have a ways to go.

I’m not minimizing the seriousness of it. I’m not minimizing the trauma. I’m not minimizing the pain. I’m not minimizing a particular way in which people who thought that living in a Jewish state protected by a Jewish army—they were secure and safe—all that is true. The point is not to minimize any of that. It is only that this feels acutely more awful than anything else because it’s what we live through, we remember, but it is not by the measures of Jewish history acutely more awful than anything else. So that is, I guess, what we call cold comfort.

Miriam I am curious to hear about the ways in which you think the period we are living in is unique or distinct.

Dr. Schwartz We spent 2,000 years being confronted by the dangers, risks, and threats of powerlessness, and we have really elaborate ways theologically and otherwise to face the problem of powerlessness. Today, we are confronted by the challenges and problems of Jewish power, and I’m not sure that we have the ways we need yet to think about these issues. This is true in the United States even though our community's narrative is one of powerlessness, beleagueredness, and antisemitism. The American Jewish community wields enormous wealth and power in ways that we don’t always want to acknowledge and which require us to think with more rigor and moral clarity than we do.

Miriam As a historian, and specifically, a Jewish person who is a historian, do you think that there are certain movements or moments, either in Jewish history or history in general, that you find instructive for this one? Things that they got right that we’re missing or forgetting?

Dr. SchwartzOne thing that I find instructive, which I’ve been talking about a lot for the past 10 years, is that we tell stories about social movements pushing for change and we tell neat, tidy narratives. You know: Rosa Parks didn’t give up her seat on the bus, and then Martin Luther King had a dream, and then John Lewis walked across a bridge at Selma, and then there was a civil rights movement.

And if you look at the history of Black Americans fighting for their rights, you’re talking about a fight that took decades, if not generations.

If we want to make things better, whether it’s in our Jewish community or American community or anywhere else, we have to be in this for decades if not generations. One of the things I say to my students who are very frustrated with things they see in specifically the Orthodox community—that’s where I both live and work—is I say to my students: you are very frustrated because on your timeline things are very frustrating, but see, I remember the 1990s, so I know how different a place you are in than we were in 30 years ago. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t feel frustrated, but I also can see how much change has been made.

One of the things I learned about in graduate school is the contingency of history.

Nothing had to turn out the way it did. And when, you know, textbooks say things like, “From the moment the Missouri Compromise was agreed to in 1820, the Civil War was inevitable,” historians will rip their hair out of their heads. The Civil War was not inevitable. Or “From the moment that Adolf Hitler acceded to power in 1933…”—no, it wasn’t. Nothing was inevitable. A lot of different choices could have been made differently along the way. Nothing is foreordained about the course we’re on.

The contingency of history is wild. It’s wild to see it, to live it in real time. It can be incredibly frustrating, but it also means we can do things differently and think about things differently.

Miriam How do you think that we can encourage young Jewish people to be invested in the future, especially when, as you have shared, change often happens over a long period of time, and there are ways in which we’re in a particularly challenging moment?

Dr. SchwartzI don’t know everybody but in the particular little piece of the Jewish community where I spend my time, I think that the biggest challenge to seeing young Jewish people work to make the kind of change that is needed inside and outside the community is that for many of them, the imperatives of what I’m broadly going to term American meritocracy and the socioeconomic class demands of our community don’t make space for the kind of work. She says as she speaks to somebody who is an undergraduate at Harvard College—no shade to undergraduates at Harvard College.

People will attribute it to the high cost of modern Orthodox life, although I pretty much reject that contention. I think that that’s the cost of a certain kind of upper-middle-class or lower-upper-class life that our kids aspire to, that looks pretty much the same whether parents are sending their kids to SAR, or Horace Mann, or Fieldston, or Riverdale Country. I don’t actually think it’s a function of Orthodox life. I think the cost of day school tuition becomes a convenient thing to hang onto, but there are plenty of people who are living the same reality.

The thing that I think our young people don’t have right is what Pharaoh identified in Shemot Perek Hey (Exodus Chapter 5), when he says: increase the workload on the people and they won’t spend all their time on this fanciful nonsense about redemption. And I think we’ve made ourselves Pharaoh. We are increasing the workload on ourselves so that we have no time for thinking about a better future.

I will tell you about someone whom I randomly happen to know about, a journalist, whose name is Garance Franke-Ruta. When she was a high school student, she got involved in the early days of ACT UP, fighting against AIDS at a time when the federal government was ignoring AIDS and the activism was entirely grassroots. They became the biggest experts in the country on what treatments were possible.

She functionally dropped out of school and was doing this work that was life-changing and life-altering. She’s now a middle-aged person. She’s a journalist. She has a “real” job, but there was a point in her life in which she stopped doing anything else in order to fight to save the lives of a community that was basically treated as disposable by the country.

Young people who could be doing that in our community I think often are not because of the system that we’ve all bought into, in which the end product of the system is maintaining the lifestyle to which you’re accustomed.

I will say—and I think it’s important to say—that many young people in our system are demonstrating their idealism and commitment in other ways. They’re demonstrating their idealism and serious commitment to Torah learning, and going into the rabbinate, Jewish education, Jewish communal work. So it’s not as though no one in our system is doing that; that idealism does get manifested in other ways.

MiriamWhat is one specific thing that you believe is absent, misunderstood, or underappreciated in Jewish life but holds real promise for the future?

Dr. SchwartzThe Orthodox Jewish community does not begin to appreciate the ways in which we benefit so enormously from the social capital, as Robert Putnam would call it, we have accumulated in our community, from the rich web of networks, associations, relationships, connections, and organizations. The community will help you with everything from finding a job to helping you with an interest-free loan, to looking out for you at a time of loss or bereavement, to organizations that are going to help cover the cost of fertility treatments, IVF and other assisted reproductive technologies, if you can’t afford them. We are enormous beneficiaries of that incredibly rich web of associations in a way that I’m not sure that we actually always see.

And I think that trying to see it and notice it would let us think about both what we have, what other people might not have, how we think about that in connection to our community, and how we think about that in connection to American society.

There’s a guy named Yuval Levin who’s a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, which is a right-wing think tank, and he wrote a book called A Time to Build about the need for more organizations and associations and connections in American life. He argues we are actually better off when we are not isolated, atomized people moving through space but part of organizations, of which churches, synagogues, religious associations are only one example.

There is real promise in recognizing how enormously valuable, powerful, and wonderful that is.

MiriamHow is your vision for a better America related to your vision for a better future for Jews or a better future for the Jewish community?

Dr. SchwartzWe are going to build a better America by relating to each other as actual human beings. There’s a political scientist at Tufts named Eitan Hirsch, who wrote a book called Politics Is for Power, which I think is an amazing book about how the purpose of politics is to accumulate power so you can make change, which means that sitting on social media and being mad is not politics. You’re not doing politics.

And when you actually do politics—whatever that means—you join your local political party organization; you canvass for a candidate; you knock on doors; you meet other real human beings in real space and do real work together. It is soul-nourishing, it is community-building, it is actually effecting change.

And to the extent that what the Jewish community has is real networks and real connections with people in the world, we should notice that, value it, and maybe think about how to share that with other people.

What’s going to help us in America is actually putting down our phones, going to actually meet other Americans, and working with them together on the things that need working on.

So any time that I’m feeling miserable, getting out into connection with other human beings is energizing and sustaining, and sitting alone at home marinating in your anxiety, fear, and anger is depleting and immiserating.