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A Black writer explores how Germany remembers its ‘unthinkable’ past
(JTA) — For his 2021 book “How the Word Is Passed,” winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, poet and journalist Clint Smith explored the landscape of American memory — specifically how the history of slavery is explained, commemorated, distorted and desecrated in sites across the United States.
While on tour promoting the book, he explained in an interview Tuesday, he’d often be asked if any country had gotten it right when it came to memorializing its own dark past. “I kept invoking the memorials in Germany, but I had never been to the memorials in Germany,” Smith said. “As a scholar, as a journalist, I felt like I had to do my due diligence and excavate the complexity and the nuance, and the emotional and human texture, that undergirds so many of these places and spaces.”
The result is December’s cover story in the Atlantic, “Monuments to the Unthinkable.” Smith traveled to Germany twice over the past two years, visiting Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, its Topography of Terror Museum, the museum in Wannsee where the Nazis plotted the Final Solution, and the concentration camp at Dachau, talking to historians and curators along the way. As a Black man wrestling with how America accounts for the crimes of its past, he went to learn from the experience of the Germans, who “are still trying to figure out how to tell the story of what their country did, and simultaneously trying to figure out who should tell it.”
In an interview, Smith talked about the inevitable differences between the Holocaust and the Atlantic slave trade, the similarities in how two countries — and communities — experience their histories, and how his article could serve as a bridge between African-Americans and Jews in a time of increasing tension between them.
Smith spoke to JTA from his parents’ home in his native New Orleans.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: Your book is about the ways America succeeds and fails to come to terms with slavery, and your article is about the ways Germany is, in your phrase, “constructing public memory.” I was struck by someone who warned you, “Don’t go to Auschwitz.” What were they saying?
Clint Smith: It was Frederick Brenner, a Jewish man and a remarkable photographer who has photographed the Jewish Diaspora across the world for the past several decades, who said that, because people are standing [at Dachau] and they’re taking selfies, and it’s like “me in front of the crematorium” and “me in front of the barracks.” That was deeply unsettling to him, especially as someone whose family was largely killed in the Holocaust.
I don’t want to be reductive about it and say that you don’t want people to go to these spaces and take pictures. I think it’s all about the sort of disposition and sensibilities one brings to a space. If someone went to the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana, I don’t necessarily want them doing puckered-lip selfies in front of a slave cabin. I can understand why people wouldn’t want those places engaged with in that way, but you do want tourists to come, right? I mean, before the pandemic, 900,000 people visited Dachau every year, and part of what brings people to Dachau is seeing and taking a picture of the crematorium, taking a picture of themselves on this land in that space where history happened, and posting it online. And maybe that serves as a catalyst for somebody else to make that journey for themselves.
You did go to Dachau, which you call a “memorial to the evil that once transpired there.”
I am a huge believer in putting your body in the place where history happened. I stood in many places that carry the history of violence: plantations, execution chambers, death row. But I’ve never experienced the feeling in my body that I felt when I stood in the gas chamber at Dachau. And you just see the way that this space was constructed, with the sort of intentional, mechanized slaughter that it was meant to enact on people. The industrialized nature of it was something unlike anything I’d ever experienced before and it made me feel so much more proximate to that history in ways that I don’t think I would have ever experienced otherwise.
Physically standing in a concentration camp and physically standing and putting my body in the gas chamber fundamentally changed my understanding of the emotional texture and the human and psychological implications of it. Because when you’re in those spaces you’re able to more fully imagine what it might have been like to be in that space. And then you can imagine these people, these families, these women, these children who were marched into camps throughout Europe. You can never fully imagine the fear, that sense of desperation that one would have felt, but in some ways, it’s the closest we can get to it if you are someone who did not have family who lived through or survived the Holocaust. It provided me with a radical sense of empathy. And that’s why I took the trip in the first place.
A tourist takes a selfie inside the Memorial to the Murdered Jews Of Europe in Berlin, Sept. 25, 2019. (Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
By contrast, there are the memorials that are not historical sites, but either sculptural or architectural, like Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, nearly five acres of concrete slabs. What do you think makes an effective memorial that isn’t necessarily the historical place itself, but a specifically memorial project?
Well, for example, the big one in Berlin. It’s just so enormous. The scale and scope of it was unlike anything I’d ever seen before. I tried to imagine what an American analog would be like. What if in the middle of downtown Manhattan there was a 200,000-square-foot memorial, with thousands of stone columns, dedicated to commemorating the lives of indigenous people who were killed in the early Americas? Or a 200,000-square-foot memorial in the middle of downtown D.C., not far from the White House, to the lives of enslaved people?
With that said, what I found really valuable were the people I spoke to, who had very different relationships to that space. Some thought of that memorial as something that was so meaningful because of its size and because of its scope, and because it was a massive state-sanctioned project. And then there were others who thought that it was too abstract, that it was too passive, even in its name, right, the “Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe,” which sounds as if something happened to people without naming the people who enacted the harm and who committed the crime. Those are the sort of nuances and complexities that I wanted to spend more time with, and found really valuable because, in the same way, descendants of enslaved people here in the United States have many different conceptions of what the iconography of slavery should look like or what repair and reparations to slavery should be made.
You write about the “stumbling stones” or “Stolpersteine”: Those are the small brass plaques placed in the streets, inscribed with the names of Holocaust victims and placed in front of their last known residence. The stones are exactly the opposite scale of the Berlin memorial.
Right. I think that is the memorial that I was most struck by: the largest decentralized memorial in the world, with 90,000 stones across 30 different European countries. I remember the moment I was walking down the street looking for landmarks and saw my first Stolpersteine, and I only saw it because at that moment the clouds moved and the sun shone off the brass stone. You see the name, the birth date, the deportation date, the death date, the place where the person was killed. You walk past another home, you see seven; you walk past another home, you see 12. You begin to imagine entire lives based on the names and information that exist on these stones. It creates this profound sense of intimacy, this profound sense of closeness to the history and it’s so human, because it’s individual people and individual names.
One of the most valuable things about the stumbling stone project, I think, is all the work that precedes it. It’s the school students who are doing research to find out about the lives of the people who were taken from the home across the street from their school. It’s the people in the apartment complex, who come together and decide that they’re going to figure out who were the Jewish families who lived in that apartment complex before them. And sometimes it’s really remarkable, granular details about people’s lives: what their favorite food was, what their favorite flavor of ice cream was, what the child liked.
Artist Gunter Demnig lays “stumbling stones” that memorialize persecuted or murdered Jews on the streets of Frankfurt. (Boris Roessler/picture alliance via Getty Images)
As Gunter Demnig, the originator of the project, says, 6 million people is a huge abstraction, and now it becomes about one man, one woman, one child, and [people] realize that it truly was not that long ago. There are so many survivors of the Holocaust who are still with us. Gunter Demnig, his father fought for the German army. He represents this generation of people who are engaging in a sort of contrition for the acts of their parents and their grandparents.
You ask in the piece what it would look like for a similar project to be created in the United States as a memorial to enslaved people.
I’m from New Orleans, and the descendant of enslaved people in New Orleans, which was at one point the busiest slave market in the country. And as Barbara Steiner, a Jewish historian, said to me in Germany, entire streets [of New Orleans] would be covered in brass stones! That was such a striking moment for me. That helped me more fully realize the profound lack of markers and iconography and documentation that we have to enslaved people in our landscape here in the United States relative to that of Germany.
Why are physical monuments important? I have sometimes wondered why we spend so much money on the infrastructure of memory — statues, museums, memorials — and if that money could be better used for living memorials, like scholarships for the descendants of victims, say, or programs that study or archive evidence of genocide. Why is it important to see a statue or a museum or even a plaque?
First off, museums and statues and memorials and monuments are by no means a panacea. It is not the case that you put up some memorials or you lay down some Stolpersteine and suddenly antisemitism is gone. Obviously, Germany is a case study and is experiencing its own rise in antisemitism. And that’s something that’s deeply unsettling, and is not going to singularly be solved by memorials and monuments.
With that said, I think there is something to be said to regularly encounter physical markers and manifestations of the violence that has been enacted and crimes that have been done in your name, or to the people that you are the descendant of. I try to imagine Germany without any of these memorials and I think it would just be so much easier for antisemitism to become far more pervasive. Because when your landscape is ornamented by things that are outlining the history that happened there, it is much more difficult to deny its significance, it is much more difficult to deny that it happened, it is much more difficult not to have it shape the way you think about public policy. I do believe that if we had these sorts of markers in the United States, it wouldn’t solve the racial wealth gap, it wouldn’t solve racism, it wouldn’t solve discrimination. It wouldn’t eradicate white nationalism or white supremacy. But I do think it would play some role in recalibrating and reshaping our collective public consciousness, our collective sense of history in ways that would not be insignificant.
And to your point, my hope is that those things are never mutually exclusive. It’s a conversation that’s happening here in the United States with regard to how different institutions are accounting for their relationship to slavery. Universities are coming up with reports, presentations, panels and conferences that outline their relationship to the history of slavery, especially since the murder of George Floyd [in 2020]. Activists and descendants have pushed them to not just put out a report, or put up a plaque or make a monument. It’s also about, well, what are you going to do for the descendants of those people? Harvard, where I went to grad school, put $100 million aside specifically for those sorts of interventions. Places like Georgetown have made it so that people who were the descendants of those who are enslaved have specific opportunities to come to the school without paying. And people of good faith can disagree over whether those initiatives are commensurate with or enough to atone for that past, and I think the answer is almost inevitably no.
Certainly people on what we like to think of as the wrong side of history understood the importance of physical monuments in creating memory.
The origin story of my own book was that I watched the monuments come down in 2017, in my hometown in New Orleans, of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee. I was thinking about what it meant that I grew up in a majority Black city, and there were more homages to enslavers than there were to enslaved people. What does it mean that to get to school I had to go down Robert E. Lee Boulevard? That to get to the grocery store, I had to go down Jefferson Davis Parkway? That my middle school was named after a leader of the Confederacy? And that my parents still live on a street today named after someone who owned 115 enslaved people? The names and iconography are reflective of the stories that people tell and those stories shaped the narratives that communities carry. And those narratives shape public policy and public policy is what shapes the material conditions of people’s lives.
One thing about Germany is that its national project of memory and repentance has been accompanied by a vast reparations program — for Israel, Jewish survivors, their families and programs to propagate Jewish culture. I wonder if you think Germany could have moved ahead without reparations? And can America ever fully grapple with the legacy of slavery without its own reparations?
The short answer is no. America cannot fully move forward from its past without reparations. The important thing is not to be limited and reductive in the way that we conceive of what reparations are or should look like. In some ways, I’m as interested if not more interested in what specific cities and states are doing in order to account for those histories and those crimes. For example, in Evanston, Illinois, they created a specific program to give reparations to Black families who experienced housing segregation, in a certain period of time, given how prevalent redlining was in and around Chicago in the mid-20th century. I know in Asheville, North Carolina, there’s a similar program that’s thinking about how to meaningfully engage in repair to the descendants of communities that were harmed from some of the policies that existed there. This is not to say that those programs themselves are perfect. But I think we sometimes talk about it so much on a federal level, that we forget the local opportunities that exist.
West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer signs the reparations agreement between his country and Israel, Sept. 10, 1952. (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Benjamin Ferencz, from “Reckonings”)
Many people who were redlined or experienced housing covenants — all the sort of insidious manifestations of wealth extraction that were part of Jim Crow — are still alive today. So sometimes it’s not even a question of what you have to give the descendants. Sometimes it’s like, what do you give the actual people who are still here?
That’s an important distinction you make in your article, about the difference between grappling with the past in Germany and the United States. In Germany, there are so few Jews, while in the U.S. we see the living evidence of slavery, not the evidence of absence.
That’s perhaps the greatest difference that allows for both a landscape of memory to be created in Germany, and also allows for Germany to pay reparations in ways that the United States is reluctant to do: Jewish people in Germany represent less than one quarter of one percent of the population of Germany. One of the folks I spoke to told me that Jewish people in Germany are a historical abstraction. Because there’s so few Jewish people left, because of the slaughter of the Holocaust. I think about the reparations that were given to Japanese Americans who were held in incarceration camps during World War II. They got $20,000 checks, which is not commensurate with what it means to be held in a prison camp for multiple years, and cannot totally atone for that. But part of the reason that can be enacted is that there’s a limited amount of people. There are 40 million black people in this country. So the economic implications of reparations are something fundamentally different here in the United States.
So let me ask you if there’s anything else you wanted to mention that we haven’t talked about.
I want to name specifically for your readers that I’m not and would never intend to conflate slavery and the Holocaust. They are qualitatively different historical phenomena that have their own specific complexities and should be understood on their own terms. With that said, I do think it can be helpful to put the two in conversation with one another, specifically in the profound ways that these two monumental periods of world history have shaped the modern world and how they are remembered in fundamentally different ways.
And there are similarities as well, which you write about.
I did find so many parallels. The Jewish people I spent time with in Germany explained that some of the manifestations of racism and anti-Blackness in the United States are not so different from the sort of manifestations of antisemitism that exist in Germany, especially as it relates to public memory. When I was at the museum devoted to the Wannsee conference, the executive director, Deborah Hartmann, told me that she and Deidre Berger [the chair of the executive board of the Jewish Digital Cultural Recovery Project Foundation] were talking about how Jewish people did not always have a seat at the table when these monuments and memorials were being built. Jewish people were not allowed to participate beyond a certain extent, because many Germans felt that Jewish people were not objective. Jewish historians couldn’t be taken seriously because they were too close to the history.
That just echoes so much of what Black scholars and historians have been told about their ability, or the lack thereof, to study the history of Black life. The godfather of African-American scholarship, W.E.B. Du Bois, was told by white scholars that he couldn’t be taken seriously because he was too close to the history of slavery.
Meanwhile, Deborah Hartmann talked about how so many of the historians and scholars who played a role in shaping the landscape of memory in Germany were themselves “close to the history,” including former members of the Hitler Youth.
Somebody sent me a message that really meant a lot to me this past week, basically saying that my essay is an exercise in “solidarity via remembrance” — in a moment where, unfortunately, there have been a lot of public manifestations of ideas and antisemitic remarks that might threaten to rupture a relationship between Black and Jewish people. Obviously, we didn’t time it this way: I worked on this piece for a year. But it’s my hope that as someone who is a Black American, who is the descendant of enslaved people, who is not himself Jewish — that my respectful, empathic, curious, journey reflects the long history of solidarity that has existed across Black and Jewish communities and that that I hope we never lose sight of.
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Pro-Israel Event Was Cancelled at Brooklyn Law School, While Palestinian ‘Celebration’ Was Allowed to Proceed
Brooklyn Law School. Photo: Wiki Commons.
The Jewish Law Students Association (JLSA) at Brooklyn Law School recently attempted to host an on-campus event featuring Hillel Fuld, an Israeli tech columnist, global speaker, and pro-Israel advocate.
Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) then sent a letter to the administration that also circulated around campus, accusing Fuld (and by extension JLSA) of such extreme Islamophobia that his mere presence would pose a threat to Muslim and Palestinian students. While a few other student groups endorsed SJP’s statement, these claims are categorically false. The administration effectively caved to the angry mob, and members of JSLA let them off the hook.
Ultimately we were forced to cancel the event in all but name, supposedly because the national accreditation committee was visiting the same day, and the school could not offer adequate safety resources or administrative support. Specifically, they explained that our event required administrators to be present to support sensitive students and make immediate decisions, but that none were available due to the accreditation committee.
The problem with this explanation is that no other group’s events were given the same treatment. What’s worse is that when SJP went ahead with their now celebratory “protest” — itself arguably a violation of the Time, Place and Manner school policies — not only did the school provide security, but multiple administrators showed up to monitor the situation. When I spoke with one of them, she rebuffed my concerns about Jewish students being afraid to be on campus due to this sort of behavior. So much for neutrality.
SJP boasted in an email to their list-serve that “this outcome is exactly the kind of awareness and action our coalition was created to achieve.”
There is a pervasive double standard at my school that has emboldened the local anti-Zionist ideological movement on campus. The latest incident involving the Jewish Law Students Association has shown that it doesn’t matter if pro-Israel Jewish students follow all the rules and SJP actively breaks them.The outcome is predetermined: SJP is supported, and we are marginalized and pushed off campus.
Before SJP hosted a vigil on October 7, 2025 that disregarded Hamas’ war crimes, JSLA requested to move it to another day so our community could mourn, but they refused and the school said nothing. Last April, they hosted a so-called “Passover Liberation Seder” on campus featuring a woman in a keffiyeh — an act of cultural appropriation mocking an important religious holiday to demonize Zionist Jews.
That same month, multiple bathrooms were vandalized with “Free Palestine” and nothing substantial seems to have been done about it.
If the school considered Hillel Fuld’s Tweets too controversial, there are dozens of National SJP tweets that fall into the same category. But that doesn’t matter to school administrators.
Unfortunately, this situation isn’t unique to Brooklyn Law School, and Jewish students across the country have responded in various ways. I believe that our community needs to fight this head on to ensure that antisemites like SJP are not permitted to discriminate with impunity, and to prevent incidents like this from becoming the status quo. But there are some who have chosen a more passive route. They believe that trusting the administration and taking a soft stance on SJP’s behavior will eventually ease the targets on our backs.
While I sympathize with that line of thinking, it is ultimately a mistake.
It is easy to believe that if you behave in a respectable manner, then people will respect you in return. As someone who believes in the inherent goodness of people, I would love to be able to assume that others would treat me fairly. Unfortunately, SJP will not stop antagonizing us, and we cannot expect the administration to stop them for us.
Thankfully, some members of JLSA agree with me. We have upcoming events and will continue hosting speakers. Each one of these will be a test for the administration to prove that they aren’t a bunch of cowards or low-key antisemites. We will not stay silent in the face of these inconsistent applications of policies and seemingly arbitrary constraints.
Instead of trying to personally reassure alumni that there isn’t a systemic antisemitism problem, maybe Brooklyn Law School should come out with a statement admonishing SJP for their behavior.
The discrimination Jewish students like me are facing will continue until the pressure to abandon it exceeds the pressure to maintain it. There’s a fundamental difference between imposing censorship and demanding equal treatment, which is exactly what I’m calling for. As it says in Pirkei Avot ,“If I am not for myself, who will be?”
Robert Dweck serves as Vice-President of the Jewish Law Students Association and the Federalist Society at Brooklyn Law School. A second-year law student and CAMERA Coalition member, his work focuses on antisemitism, campus climate, and freedom of expression.
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Reclaiming the Rabbinate: Why This Moment Demands Moral Seriousness and Urgent Action
The interior of Geneva’s main synagogue. Photo: Geneva Jewish community
Three years ago, a mid-sized Conservative synagogue in the Midwest began searching for a new senior rabbi. The search committee received 42 applications. Not one candidate combined deep Talmudic learning with congregational experience. Most were second-career professionals with limited textual fluency. Several had never led a community through a full Jewish calendar year. The committee eventually hired a capable rabbi, but the search exposed something deeper: the pipeline of traditionally-formed Jewish leaders is running dry.
This is not an isolated incident. It is a pattern. And now we have the data to prove it.
The newly released Atra report, “From Calling to Career: Mapping the Current State and Future of Rabbinic Leadership,” is the most comprehensive study of the American rabbinate in a generation. It offers something rare in Jewish communal life: clarity. We now know who today’s rabbis are, how they are formed, and what the next generation will look like. The portrait is sobering. But it also reveals an extraordinary opportunity, if we have the courage to seize it.
This moment could mark not the decline of rabbinic authority, but its renewal. Everything depends on what we do next.
At the Crossroads
The numbers tell a consequential story. There are approximately 4,100 non-Haredi rabbis currently serving in the United States. Only six percent are under 35, while more than a quarter are over 65. The long-anticipated retirement wave is cresting. At the same time, the pathway into the rabbinate has fundamentally shifted. Many new rabbis now enter as second-career professionals — often with limited immersion in traditional Jewish learning and communal life.
Why does this matter? Because rabbinic formation isn’t simply professional training. It is the transmission of a civilization.
Rabbis formed young develop textual fluency that becomes second nature. They absorb communal norms through years of apprenticeship. They build mentorship relationships that span decades. They learn to think in Jewish categories before the default assumptions of secular culture take root. They spend Shabbat after Shabbat in communities, watching master rabbis navigate conflict, comfort the mourning, inspire the indifferent. This kind of formation cannot be replicated in a compressed professional program, no matter how well-designed.
Second-career rabbis bring valuable life experience — maturity, professional skills, perspective that comes only with age. These gifts are real. But when second-career entry becomes the dominant pathway rather than one pathway among several, something essential is lost: the deep grammar of Jewish thought and practice that has sustained our people through every upheaval.
To its credit, the Atra report highlights rabbis’ enduring sense of calling. Ninety-seven percent report that their work remains meaningful. This devotion is real and admirable. Yet many also speak of unclear expectations, emotional strain, and insufficient institutional support. The rabbinate increasingly resembles a helping profession under strain rather than a moral office grounded in tradition, discipline, and collective purpose.
This is not merely a workforce challenge. It is a civilizational one, for rabbis do not operate in isolation. They shape schools and federations, influence donor priorities, frame communal responses to antisemitism, and articulate the public moral voice of American Jewry. When rabbinic authority weakens or when it becomes culturally detached from the communities it serves, the entire ecosystem of Jewish institutional life feels the strain.
Formation, Not Demographics, Is Destiny
The next generation of rabbis will look markedly different from previous ones. Among current rabbinical students, 58 percent identify as women and 51 percent identify as LGBTQ+, with a significant portion identifying as trans or nonbinary. Many come from non-traditional Jewish backgrounds — converts, children of intermarriage, Jews who found their way to serious practice later in life.
These demographic shifts are inevitable and, in many ways, enriching. A diverse rabbinate that reflects the breadth of Jewish experience can strengthen our communities. The question is not who enters the rabbinate, but how they are formed.
A diverse rabbinate formed in deep textual literacy, halachic fluency, and communal responsibility will serve the Jewish people brilliantly. A diverse rabbinate formed primarily through ideological conformity and therapeutic training will not. The issue isn’t identity. It’s formation. It has always been.
Religious leadership cannot long endure when it becomes unmoored from the moral instincts, lived traditions, and covenantal expectations of the communities it serves. A rabbinate shaped more by the ideological grammar of elite secular culture than by the rhythms of Jewish religious life will struggle to command authority, inspire loyalty, or sustain continuity — no matter how sincere or well-intentioned its members.
Judaism has always thrived on creative tension: between past and present, law and compassion, authority and humility, particularism and universalism. The best rabbis hold these tensions with grace. They can advocate for change while honoring tradition. They can welcome the stranger while maintaining boundaries. They can engage contemporary questions without flattening either the questions or the tradition. But this capacity doesn’t emerge naturally. It must be formed — through years of study, through apprenticeship with master teachers, through sustained immersion in communities where these tensions are lived rather than theorized.
What Excellence Looks Like
Before charting the path forward, we must envision the destination. What would a renewed rabbinate actually look like?
Imagine rabbis who combine the textual fluency of traditional yeshiva training with genuine pastoral sensitivity. Who can navigate both Talmudic argumentation and congregational politics with equal skill. Who arrive in communities not to affirm what’s trending, but to guide toward what’s enduring. Who lead with moral authority earned through learning, humility, and years of service.
This isn’t nostalgia. It’s the future Jewish life requires.
And we already see it emerging. There are communities where young, traditionally-trained rabbis are revitalizing Jewish life through serious learning and warm welcome. There are synagogues where Torah study, social justice, and ritual observance reinforce rather than contradict each other. There are day schools where rabbis teach with both intellectual rigor and deep care for students’ spiritual lives, and campus settings where rabbis offer students substantive Judaism — not watered-down platitudes — and find eager audiences hungry for depth.
The Orthodox Invitation
This brings us to the most consequential omission in the Atra report: the absence of Yeshiva University’s Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary (RIETS) from full participation.
Founded in 1896, RIETS has been the backbone of Modern Orthodox rabbinic life in America for over a century. It ordains approximately 50 rabbis annually — a significant portion of the Orthodox rabbinate. Its graduates populate synagogues, day schools, and communal institutions across the country. They embody a leadership model rooted not in expressive identity, but in disciplined obligation: years of intensive Talmud and halachic study, rigorous preparation for pastoral work, and formation within a tradition that sees the rabbinate as a sacred responsibility rather than a personal calling alone.
Yet RIETS did not fully participate in the Atra study. Its student data was estimated rather than integrated. Its voice was muted. This omission distorts our understanding of the American rabbinate and inadvertently shifts the perceived center of gravity toward institutions more aligned with progressive formation models.
But absence is not destiny. And critique can become an invitation.
This is RIETS’ moment. For over a century, it has quietly trained rabbis who embody halachic seriousness and communal service. Now, it has the opportunity to demonstrate publicly what rigorous traditional formation produces: not rigidity, but resilience. Not narrowness, but depth. Not exclusion, but excellence that genuinely serves diverse communities.
By fully engaging the national conversation about rabbinic leadership, RIETS would provide an essential counterweight — not through opposition, but through demonstration. It would show that there are multiple pathways to rabbinic excellence, and that the path rooted in intensive traditional learning has produced extraordinary leaders for generations.
In an era when data increasingly drives philanthropic priorities and institutional strategy, presence is leadership. Participation is not capitulation to progressive norms — it is stewardship of a vital tradition.
The alternative is to cede the narrative entirely. And that would be a loss not just for Orthodox Jews, but for everyone who believes that Jewish leadership requires both deep learning and moral seriousness.
Building the Future
The Atra report hands us a gift: clarity about where we stand. The data is sobering, but the opportunity is immense. Yet this requires action and courage from multiple actors.
Seminaries and training institutions must reclaim non-negotiable standards. Textual fluency cannot be optional. Every ordained rabbi should be able to navigate a page of Talmud, engage classical commentaries, and ground contemporary questions in traditional sources. This isn’t fundamentalism, it’s literacy.
It’s the difference between a doctor who can read an X-ray and one who cannot. Extended apprenticeship must become standard. Classroom learning must be complemented by years of embedded communal experience. There is no substitute for watching a master rabbi navigate a contentious board meeting, comfort a family in crisis, or inspire a reluctant bar mitzvah student. These skills are caught, not taught.
Seminaries should create exchange programs between institutions. Let students experience different formation models while maintaining their home institution’s standards. Imagine HUC students spending a summer immersed in Talmud study at Yeshiva University — not to change their denominational commitments, but to deepen their textual foundation. Imagine RIETS students learning pastoral counseling from master teachers at the Jewish Theological Seminary. This kind of cross-pollination would strengthen the entire field.
Donors and philanthropic leaders must shift funding from innovation theater to formation infrastructure. The Jewish communal world loves pilot programs and convenings. What we need now is patient capital for the slow work of formation. Endow rabbinic chairs at institutions committed to traditional learning combined with pastoral excellence. Make 10-year commitments, not three-year grants. Create post-ordination fellowships that place newly ordained rabbis in strong communities with master mentors for two or three years before they take senior positions. Fund the apprenticeship model that produces excellence. Fund gap-year programs in Israel and intensive pre-seminary preparation. Give talented 35-year-olds considering a career change the resources to spend a year studying Talmud seriously before they apply to rabbinical school.
And measure what matters. Ask grant recipients not about diversity metrics or innovation buzzwords, but about textual competency, communal integration, and long-term placement success. One major philanthropist could transform the field by endowing a fund that provides significant annual support to institutions meeting rigorous standards for traditional learning, pastoral training, and placement support, regardless of denomination.
Communities and search committees must become more sophisticated consumers of rabbinic talent. During interviews, probe beyond résumés and talking points. Ask candidates to walk you through their approach to teaching a page of Talmud to diverse audiences. Ask how their formation prepared them to navigate tensions between tradition and change. Ask about their longest mentorship relationship and what they learned from it. Ask what it means to be a link in the chain of Jewish tradition.
An Urgent Call
The American rabbinate stands at a crossroads. One path leads toward continued fragmentation: rabbinic training driven by ideological fashion, second-career professionals with limited formation, institutions talking past each other, and communities unsure what excellence even looks like.
The other path leads toward renewal. Seminaries committed to both traditional learning and pastoral care. Donors funding formation rather than innovation. RIETS and other serious institutions leading publicly. Communities demanding rabbis who are both deeply rooted and genuinely responsive.
We don’t have to choose between tradition and inclusion, between excellence and accessibility, between past and future. These are false choices designed to paralyze us. We can have — we must have — rabbis formed in the deep grammar of Jewish thought who can lead diverse communities with wisdom and grace.
The Atra report should be read not as a warning of inevitable decline, but as an invitation to institutional courage. It surfaces truth. And truth creates possibility.
A rabbinate with moral gravity will not simply anchor Jewish life in an unsettled age. It will renew it. It will produce leaders capable of holding both tradition and change with grace. Leaders who can welcome the stranger without abandoning boundaries. Leaders who can engage modernity without being captured by it.
This is not the moment to retreat into tribalism or settle for mediocrity. This is not the moment for hand-wringing or passive resignation. This is the moment to build — not to drift, but to define. Not to mirror culture, but to shape it. Not to manage decline, but to engineer renewal.
The data is clear. The path is visible. The opportunity is now.
All that remains is the will to lead.
Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
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Palestinian Authority TV Denies Holocaust for Second Time in a Month
French President Emmanuel Macron welcomes Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas at the Elysee Palace in Paris, France, Nov. 11, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Benoit Tessier
Two weeks ago, Palestinian Media Watch exposed that Palestinian Authority (PA) television hosted a journalist who insisted the gas chambers “narrative” could be dismissed with “very simple evidence.”
Now, PA TV has done it again. This time, the channel invited a Syrian journalist who said the war in Gaza is the “real” holocaust while the history of the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews is a “game that Israel plays”:
Senior Syrian journalist Mustafa Al-Miqdad: “It is incumbent upon the Palestinians today and those who support them to show the extent of the holocaust and genocide that the Palestinians have experienced for two years and almost a month in the Gaza Strip …
[They] were subjected to this holocaust, the real one- Regarding the Holocaust of the Jews there are many question marks from the Westerners, and not from our side that we deny it. Even from the West in general there are many stories that refute the accuracy of the [Jewish] narrative even if they talk about part of it, they talk about this [lack of] accuracy. This is the game that Israel plays.” [emphasis added]
[Official PA TV, Capital of Capitals, Nov. 16, 2025]
Antisemitism and demonization of the Jews constitute a core ideology of the Palestinian Authority and pave the way for it to incite and justify terror against Israelis. A key PA strategy towards this end is to delegitimize the Jewish people and their history, while replacing it with a fabricated story.
Whether denying Jewish history in the Land of Israel to brand Jews as “colonialists” — or denying and appropriating the Holocaust — official PA TV consistently broadcasts content designed to cultivate hatred of Jews and Israel.
It is difficult to comprehend how any Western government, particularly France with all that it went through in World War II, can still speak of the Palestinian Authority as reformed or of its chairman as “charting a course toward a horizon of peace” when PA media continues to broadcast shocking forms of Holocaust denial and appropriation.
Yet French President Macron and others insist on rewarding the Palestinians with a state governed by this very PA. Instead of demanding the most basic moral prerequisite for statehood — ending institutional antisemitism — Western leaders turn a blind eye.
Ephraim D. Tepler is a contributor to Palestinian Media Watch (PMW). Itamar Marcus is the Founder and Director of PMW, where a version of this article first appeared.