The Many Worlds That Make Us: Toward a Renaissance of Jewish Disagreement

Coming into college, I believed I had a strong understanding of what pluralism meant. I attended a high school focused on creating “ethically responsible Jews” who will “create a vibrant Jewish future and build a better world where human dignity will flourish.”¹ Drawn by the same pluralistic ideals, I spent a gap year at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, where I wrestled with questions of Jewish peoplehood, Israel, and communal responsibility in a community dedicated to deepening its “commitment to pluralism,” and helping “rebuild the covenant between Israel and the Jewish world.”² I have since realized that focusing on pluralism is not enough. Instead, we must work to rebuild a culture of disagreement in our contemporary Jewish spaces.

we must work to rebuild a culture of disagreement in our contemporary Jewish spaces.

Once, internal Jewish arguments animated Ashkenazi political culture.³ Thinkers like Simon Dubnow scaled the exegetical process — the Jewish practice of interpreting, questioning, and building meaning through layers of commentary — beyond the study hall, imagining Jewish autonomy not as territorial sovereignty but as a form of “social and cultural autonomy” sustained through networks of self-governing communities, culture, and argument. Rejecting the notion that Jews in exile were politically inert, he insisted that “the Jews always had a political life.”⁴

Our ancestors envisioned pages of Bava Kamma that swirled endlessly with commentary and brought those same instincts into their classrooms and workplaces. For Dubnow, this was political life: the cultivation of a people capable of governing itself through habits of argument, interpretation, and shared responsibility. The habits cultivated in the beit midrash — close reading, reverence for justice, the preservation of minority opinions alongside majority rulings — spilled outward into communal life. They became the cultural markers of diaspora life itself.

The Bund insisted Jews could be a nation and stay put, building a Yiddish socialist future in the very places they’d been persecuted. Meanwhile, Herzl and Jabotinsky put their faith in Jewish national self-determination, insisting that only territorial sovereignty could solve Jewish precarity. Both movements, Zionism and Bundism, emerged in 1897, born from the same crisis– the need to emancipate the Jews. The Bund championed doykeit (“hereness”), arguing that Jews should fight for equal rights, socialism, and cultural autonomy wherever they already lived rather than seeking a separate homeland. Zionism hinged on the belief that antisemitism made life in the diaspora fundamentally insecure and that Jewish people therefore required a homeland, making nation-statehood — not diaspora autonomy — the path to collective liberation.

churning ideological landscape was crucial to the formation of Jewish modernity.

Ashkenaz had not yet been flattened into a demographic category or a site of catastrophe; it was a civilization where public debate and disagreement were the natural modes of thinking through communal threats and challenges. This churning ideological landscape was crucial to the formation of Jewish modernity.

Long before Zionists and Bundists clashed about land and labor, Moses Mendelssohn — a central architect of the Jewish enlightenment — insisted that Jewish life depended on the ability to disagree without pretense: “Brothers,” he wrote in 1783, “if you care for true piety, let us not feign agreement where diversity is evident.”⁵ Mendelssohn embraced differences as a condition of community. He warned that “a union of faith is not tolerance,” but its opposite. He vouched for true understanding because he knew that enforced agreement weakens a people.⁶ Mendelssohn envisioned something far more durable than polite agreement: a culture in which argument itself safeguards survival. Jewish continuity, in his view, would not be secured by some arbitrary ideal of ideological purity, but by trusting that a people strong enough to contend with itself would be strong enough to fight antisemitism. By treating disagreement as a source of intellectual vitality rather than communal weakness, Jews could remain united by shared responsibility rather than enforced consensus. Mendelssohn saw that society grows wiser by allowing its members the freedom to question, persuade, and revise their beliefs. Two hundred years later, enforced compliance and an insistence on uniformity bring emotional comfort, but agreement for its own sake produces no higher wisdom. As honest arguers, we should stand strong against requiring agreement as the price of belonging.

The Ashkenazi civilization that preceded the Holocaust didn’t survive in spite of its debates–its vitality came from intellectual collision. As the Proverb teaches that “iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another,” it describes not just a study method but a civic ethic⁷. A havruta is not a companion who agrees with you; it is someone who exposes the gaps in your reasoning and forces you to defend what you thought you knew. Through that friction, both parties are refined. The argument becomes sharper, more precise, more worthy of the idea it seeks to illuminate and more worthy of our attention.

Ashkenazi civilization produced not one political vision but many: socialists, capitalists, and anarchists, Yiddishists and Hebraists, all arguing ferociously about how Jews should live and where we belong. Collectively, these arguments were all ways to seek out actionable truth. Our history suggests that solitary contemplation yields little; it is in rigorous, often combative encounters that understanding is made. In the Talmud, we preserve the minority opinion, not because it might be correct, but because understanding the fullness of debate around an issue might lead us to better ideas in the present. Our renaissance will not rest on consensus. Channeling these older styles of disagreement — the willingness to keep arguing when the room becomes tense over Zionism, or the value of halakha in our modern day — will transform our ideological tensions from existential threats into generative opportunities. I have benefitted from institutions that make the brave choice to criticize themselves harshly, invite marginal identities into their communities, and sustain change. Instead of alienating these outsiders, my communities have shaped them into leaders.

To my peers and colleagues everywhere in the Jewish world: now is the moment to embrace your unique intersectionality. Consider your place in the world and speak from it honestly. Refuse the false choice between the many worlds that made you. History moves forward through people willing to speak from the full complexity of their position. Argue viciously with your friends in pursuit of justice and you may find that disagreement creates more than it destroys. To my yeshiva-attending peers: find a labor-organizing Jew to argue with. To my downtown art-scene Jews: spend an evening with someone who believes halakha places real obligations on their life. To my uptown kiddush-circuit Jews: read someone whose politics make you uncomfortable before dismissing them. To my group-chat warriors: leave the chat and have the argument face-to-face. To my politically homeless bedfellows: stop treating uncertainty as a private burden and turn it into a public practice. May all your machlokot be l'shem shamayim.⁸ The best Torah comes not from isolation or echo chambers, but from remaining intertwined, like tangled root systems, with the visible world.

To my yeshiva-attending peers: find a labor-organizing Jew to argue with. To my downtown art-scene Jews: spend an evening with someone who believes halakha places real obligations on their life. To my uptown kiddush-circuit Jews: read someone whose politics make you uncomfortable before dismissing them. To my group-chat warriors: leave the chat and have the argument face-to-face. To my politically homeless bedfellows: stop treating uncertainty as a private burden and turn it into a public practice.

This semester, I lived in Prague, in the afterlife of that argumentative world. Under Rudolf II, Jewish and Christian scholars, astronomers, philosophers, and artists inhabited overlapping intellectual circles. It was here that the Maharal insisted that Jewish thought belonged in Europe's intellectual conversation. Through correspondence and debate, he argued for the validity of Jewish legal and philosophical traditions alongside Europe's intellectual life. He insisted on testing Jewish thought through sustained engagement with Christian theologians and Renaissance intellectuals, trusting that rigorous debate would reveal the stronger argument. Prague's Jewish community demonstrates that Jewish continuity has often depended less on isolation than on confidence: the confidence to engage the surrounding world without surrendering distinctiveness.

Walking through Prague today, I feel the striking absence of that confidence. German inflections linger in the streets, familiar to the point of terror but unlocatable in meaning. Brass stumbling stones interrupt the pavement with names I cannot pronounce and histories I can never fully honor. The Holocaust did not simply empty Prague of its Jews; it dismantled an intellectual ecosystem. The conversations that once connected rabbis, scientists, philosophers, and artists disappeared, leaving behind monuments without the living arguments that gave them meaning. I can see what remains, but I no longer inherit the methods that once animated it. I no longer inherit a shared method of knowing what Jewish life requires of us, or how competing obligations should be weighed on a personal or communal level.

In the absence of a shared method for thinking politically as Jews, belonging is increasingly expressed through aesthetics and affiliation rather than argument. I find myself drawn to Jewish pop culture and symbolic gestures, trying to build meaning out of fragments: writing about Jewish media, fixating on characters like Dr. Robbie on The Pitt… Is Doja Cat Jewish? Should we offer underage students cocktails at Chabad? Is voting for Trump in line with halakha? These questions are not substitutes for political thought. They are attempts to recover culture where our institutions have learned mainly how to manage politics. This is another place where the Jewish culture of argumentation would help revitalize us. Deep conversations about our faith and peoplehood would be good replacements.

A 2020 Pew survey found that American Jews are more likely to describe Jewishness as a matter of culture (55%) or ancestry (52%) rather than religion (36%).⁹ Yet much of Jewish communal discourse continues to treat cultural attachment as secondary to religious or political engagement, rather than recognizing it as one of the primary ways contemporary Jews understand themselves. I meet students who express that identity through media, humor, food, genealogy, social causes, and cultural references.

Increasingly, we learn to recognize one another through signals — a podcast recommendation, a slogan, a style of dress, a social media post, a political aesthetic — before we encounter one another's reasoning. Every community develops its own signals of belonging. The specific symbols differ, but the dynamic stays the same: we can recognize what camp someone belongs to while losing some of the habits required to understand how they arrived there. The result is a community full of love for Jewishness but unaccustomed to the difficult work of arguing toward meaning.

we can recognize what camp someone belongs to while losing some of the habits required to understand how they arrived there.

When a culture forgets how to argue, certainty and power destroy the oxygen that interpretation requires. In college, I have learned that extremism erupts out of this vacuum. Unchallenged, fervor appears in political rallies on every side, in slogans shouted in public parks, and in rituals of belonging that demand allegiance without reflection. Yet, if there's another lesson I've learned on campus, it's that, inspiringly, anyone will argue with you. Pirkei Avot urges: “Appoint for thyself a teacher, and acquire for thyself a companion and judge all men with the scale weighted in his favor.”¹⁰ The Mishnah has taught me to recognize the Torah held by others and to continually widen my understanding of where it can be found, discovering time and again: this, too, is Torah. I have learned everywhere—new zemirot in dorm rooms and at Shabbat dinners; how to show respect for my peers in seminars and student meetings; conflict-resolution skills among Zionists and anti-Zionists; the nature of Jewish peoplehood from both the devout and the militantly secular; and even how to pray at the Kotel from both the ideologically obsessed and the indifferent. None of us arrives at our convictions alone. We carry traces of the teachers who shaped us, the communities that raised us, the books we have read, and the generations that argued before us. Their voices become part of our own, reminding us that we are never truly alone.

And I wish I could tell you it was easy—that genuine engagement did not also expose prejudice, fear, and ugliness where you least expect to find them. Sometimes it means realizing that people you trusted are not who you believed them to be. But I have come to think that ignorance is too high a price to pay for comfort. Mine is a stubborn curiosity, coupled with the conviction that every honest encounter leaves us more capable of understanding the world — and one another — even when it leaves us disappointed.

When war redraws emotional fault lines, when birthrights demand allegiance, when neighbors live wall to wall and worlds apart, when halakhic boundaries are tested, when some Jews locate home in sovereignty while others locate it in diaspora, when iron sharpens iron, the challenge is not whether disagreement will emerge but whether a community can withstand it. Like the Psalmist who cries, “Min ha-meitzar karati Yah, anani b’merchav Yah” — from a narrow place I called out, and was answered in great expanse — we learn that divine reply is not a verdict but a widening: a world expanded, a mind burst open, another chair pulled up to the table. Disagreement will not guarantee comfort or uniformity. But it may reveal something even more radical: that Jewish peoplehood can be sturdier than assumed. A tradition that has survived exile, dispersion, censorship, quotas, and catastrophe should be more than capable of surviving its own internal strain.

divine reply is not a verdict but a widening: a world expanded, a mind burst open, another chair pulled up to the table.

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