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Friday Noon Study Group for April 17, 12-1
Last Friday, eleven participants attended the inaugural session of our groups new discussion topic: selected articles from the journal SAPIR: Ideas for a Thriving Jewish Future. It didn’t take long for us to all agree that trying to discuss three articles a week was not going to work out; Sapir articles are too rich and thought-provoking for us to only devote twenty minutes per article. This became abundantly clear to us since we spent an entire our on April 10 discussing Dara Horn’s “How to Teach the Jewish Story: The Opposite of hate isn’t Love, It’s Curiosity” https://sapirjournal.org/aspiration-ii/2026/how-to-teach-the-jewish-story/ .
In her article, Horn advocates teaching the Jewish story by moving beyond a narrow focus on victimization and the Holocaust. Instead of focusing on “dead Jews,” Horn argues, schools should start teaching the living Jewish civilization, focusing on Jewish survival, joy, and the “living traditions, texts, and ideas that have sustained Jewish people for millennia.” Our group concurred with Horn’s suggestion: we received little education about Jewish history, civilization, and contributions to world culture. Whatever focus there was on Jews was usually on their being victims of persecution and genocide. We also agreed with Horn that this education should begin early and continue throughout the curriculum, and that reducing public ignorance about Jews would likely also reduce misunderstandings and anti-semitism.
Our group took some issue with some of Horn’s claims. We all acknowledged that antisemitism was on the rise, and that it was often propagated by institutions that wished to dominate, to crush dissent. We did not fully agree with Horn’s claim that antisemitism was the result of what she called a “Big Lie,”–“Jews are destroying whatever their societies value most” (Horn offered no evidence of Jewish efforts to destroy capitalism, democracy, or educational and family values). We also did not agree with Horn’s emphasis on “non-conformity” (resistance to tyranny and suppression) as being the best descriptor of Jewish culture and civilization. Other qualities–particularly a tolerance for differences of opinion as exemplified in the Talmud–struck some of us as being just as important as non-conformity, if not more so. Finally, though Horn’s article does not say otherwise, we stressed that any accounts of Jewish culture should be balanced, showing “warts and all” (e.g., Maccabees as heroes and suppressors of dissent).
Our informal discussion group, which has been in operation for 25 years, now meets via Zoom every Friday from 12-1 (check CBI’s website for a link). All are welcome to attend. A free subscription to Sapir can be accessed on the following link: https://ezsubscription.com/sap/subscribe?type=qualify. Specific weekly topics and links will be posted on the CBI website. If you have questions, contact Jay Jacoby at jbjacoby@charlotte.edu.
