Episode 17: Transcript

"If you hate someone, you don't hate just one group." - with Eric Mazur

Doug French: And then we can talk about my experience working security for the synagogue for three hours.

Magda Pecsenye: Oh, yeah. Were you all ready for something exciting to happen?

Doug: Oh, yeah, I was in Kung Fu stance the entire time.

Magda: Yeah, but I mean, you know, like the whole, that whole kind of thing.

Doug: I spent the whole time thinking about the nature of religion and why all of these people, you know, many of them thanked me for being there. I was in my, you know, biggest badass mode because I had no hat on, you know, so my bald head and my aviator sunglasses and my walkie-talkie and my vest, so I didn’t look like someone that should be trifled with, even though you could totally trifle with me, no problem.

Magda: But you were in, like, Terrifying WASP Mode.

Doug: Oh, absolutely. Because I think even the aviator glasses make you look like your brow is furrowed the whole time.

Magda: Well, I mean, are we going to tell everybody what it is that you're talking about? So, yeah, our church shares space with another church that shares space with a temple. And so every year for the high holidays, people from our church volunteer to go basically guard the services so nobody messes with …

Doug: Well, guard is a strong term. There were cops there. They were the guards. We were just an extra presence.

Magda: Right. It's like you guys were basically like The Club of humans.

Doug: Yeah, well, they needed somebody on the inside. I was assigned to walk around the facility and just make sure all the doors that were supposed to be locked were locked. I had some great conversations with the cleaning staff. There's one woman who moved here from Memphis 20 years ago to be near her son. Her son had a child when he was 21 years old. And that child is now 22 years old. She's lived here the entire time working four jobs. But all she could say is like, man, I miss Memphis barbecue. But I chatted with her for like half an hour, and that was the joy of it, because you can meet people, so many people with so many different backgrounds than I have, and it just, I always feel great after a talk like that. And I thought the three hour shift was just because they needed me to help with setup maybe, or, no, it was the entire ceremony. The service was over three hours. A tight 3:07!

Magda: Well, it's New Year, right? “New year, new you.”

Doug: Right. I was there at my post watching people plod from the sanctuary to the bathroom and back. Just like, oh my God. Lord, help me. Eric Mazur is an old friend of mine who is now a professor of religious studies. He reminded me a lot of Emily [Swan] in terms of his appreciation for history as the formation of religion. Especially as it pertains to Judaism. 

And all I could think of was, all these people are together in a religion that was made up, and I'm working security to keep them safe from other people who think the religion they made up is better than the religion these people made up.

See, religion is a lot like money. Money is important, and it can be used for good, it can be used for ill, and it's completely made up.

Well, yeah. And I think people don't realize that money... 

Magda: Oh, crap. All right, hang on…

Doug: I just made a salient point and you're like taking calls.

Magda: Okay. I think that people didn't realize, well, some people realize that money is made up, right? Anybody who knows anything about going off the gold standard knows certainly that money is made up. But I think a lot of people realize that money is made up when crypto started happening and people are like, “Wait, what? This doesn't mean anything.”

And then it's like, oh, you know, our regular money that's not even crypto is also made up.

Doug: It just makes me laugh to think how many people have lost how much crypto because they don't remember their 16 character password to unlock it.

Magda: Well, but I mean, what does it even mean? You can't convert the crypto to real money. I mean, our child when he was 15 told me, “Mom, crypto is Beanie Babies for tech bros.”

Doug: Yeah, and I think it's not a coincidence that there's that new Beanie Baby show on Hulu.

Magda: I didn’t know there was a new Beanie Baby show.

Doug: I gotta watch that. That might be the new Friday Flames reference.

Magda: Wait, is it, oh, so it’s a documentary.

Doug: It’s a dramatization with Zach Galifinakis and Elizabeth Banks.

Magda: Oh, I am absolutely going to watch Zach Galifianakis and Elizabeth Banks in a dramatization of Beanie Baby World.

Doug: As usual, we've left the realm of Judaism and are now talking about...

Magda: Right, well, I mean, you know, I don't know what to say here. Like, I will firmly acknowledge that religion is made up, but also everything that happens in the world, a lot of it is made up. Art is made up. Literature is made up, right? This show about Beanie Babies... 

Doug: Based on mutual appreciation of something, right, yes. If you and I both acknowledge that this piece of paper is worth a dollar, then it serves a purpose, right?

Magda: Yeah, exactly.

Doug: And it's a cost-benefit thing, because as much hatred as religion has created, it's also created a lot of love. The whole idea that all these people are together sharing their values, never mind how divisive they can be, because even Eric just left his temple, for heaven's sake.

Magda: Well, but I mean, you say “even Eric,” I mean, so... 

Doug: Well, he was on the board, he was an exalted figure in that temple, and then things left the ways he wanted them to be, so he skedaddled.

Magda: Well, but I mean, that is the same way everything happens. Like, think about people leaving PTOs. Think about people leaving civic groups. Think about people leaving... 

Doug: Well, they don't create their new PTOs. There's a one and done with a PTO.

Magda: Well, yeah, but that's, I don't know, because there just isn't enough market share. Like, who are you going to get to join your rogue PTO? Let's not think that if I had ever thought that there was the possibility to develop a rogue PTO, I wouldn't have started one, right?

Doug: Well, you would have thought of it. You would have thought about starting one and then moved on to something else.

Magda: Absolutely. Because what would be the purpose of having a rogue PTO? Like you wanted... 

Doug: Just for you to bask in the idea that it could be done.

Magda: Exactly. But there's no payoff in actually doing it. If I had actually done it, I would have had to run a book sale.

Doug: Right. Well, that's the point that you need to follow through and delegate. And that's the halting point in your process. Right.

Magda: Okay, but I thought our conversation with Eric was great. He was talking a lot about sort of being Jewish in the United States right now.

And also how he's been pigeonholed in his career, like he is not just a professor of Jewish studies. He is a professor of comparative religion, but he has been pigeonholed into teaching almost sometimes only Judaism, which is kind of, it's limiting, right? And one of my good friends is a professor of comparative religion at a Jesuit college, and he is a Baptist pastor, the northern, the liberal Baptists, not the Southern Baptists. And he does not get pigeonholed into only teaching liberal Protestant Christian studies.

Doug: Well, he even got deeper into discussions about race. When you think about, because Jews are supposed to be a different race.

Magda: Right.

Doug: But they pass as white. So when you're antisemite, are you also a racist? Again, things that 13th generation American WASPs just don't even think about.

Magda: Yeah.

Doug: But I'm sorry, I'm going to miss you when you get here. I have a call into Robert to see, you know, to make sure I pack enough, you know, how much I can pack into an area. 

Magda: Because it's Colorado, it could be 12 degrees and 90 degrees on the same day. 

Doug: That's the thing. I'm going to be filthy the entire time. So it isn't like I have to pack a billion things. And I just love the idea of getting on a plane with a knapsack full of underwear to spend in the woods for eight days.

Intro music crossfades in, plays for twenty seconds, then crossfades out.

Doug: I can't thank you enough for that piece that you sent us.

I mean, that's... 

Eric Mazur: Oh, true. That brings to five the number of people who have read it.

Doug: Cool.

Magda: I read half of it.

Doug: That's funny.

Magda: So you're at five and a half.

Doug: When you think about encapsulating 35 years of your life, how long did it take you to put that together?

Eric: 32 years? A lot of it is material, things that have been kicking around in my head for a long time. A lot of it was actual life circumstance, so I just had to remember it, right? The hard part was polishing it to make it presentable as a coherent whole, to figure out what it all meant to me.

But probably more important was the fact that it was situated between two other obligations. So I just had to get it done. So it might have been a couple months. Because it's an interesting legacy tool as well.

Doug: I mean, I think when you reach your fifties, you start thinking about what you're going to leave to your kids to make sense of the life you've led since you got out of college with certain ideas of how your life would be. And now you're looking back a bit more in terms of the decisions you made and the data you had to make them. I mean, I think everybody should write something like that just to get a sense of what they did, when, and not necessarily even explaining yourself to other people, more like explaining yourself to yourself.

Eric: That's exactly it. You know, I would love to think that my kids will one day be interested in anything I've written, but I'm not so sure. But it was helpful to me to go through the exercise. It's like journaling. This is not the usual kind of writing that I do because it was a lot more personal.

Most of the writing I don't have a personal stake other than the quality of the scholarship. I'm not really revealing much about myself when I write about some church state issue or some pop culture issue. But this was personal. I had to figure out, I've written a great deal as an academic. And so I have a voice, right? I've sort of figured out my style. But that's not been as a writer of personal memoir.

Doug: Yeah, well, welcome. You know, I mean, Magda and I were parent bloggers. We've been journaling all our damn lives as, you know, navel gazers. So welcome to the pool.

Eric: Thank you. And I really admire people who do that. It's not a pool into which I will dip often.

Doug: Well, the jacuzzi jets only work every so often. We have to get them serviced every so often. And I'm really glad you get to meet Magda and Magda gets to meet you just because 

Eric: I've heard wonderful things about you for years. It's a real pleasure.

Magda: Oh, thank you so much. 

Doug: How does that make you feel?

Magda: It makes me feel great. Especially because I haven't been talking to you, Doug, about anything for many years until recently again. But yeah.

Doug: Well, yeah, the day she got engaged, we became Facebook friends.

Magda: Yeah, that's true.

Eric: But I knew about the hard work that you guys did in figuring out your path.

Magda: Yeah.

Doug: I told Doug the other day, I really admired that, I thought. And still, I admire that. I think that's a very difficult thing to have done and to do.

Magda: Thank you so much.

Doug: Yeah, I appreciate that. I mean, I've been quick to say that, I mean, there was some work involved for sure, but there's also luck and there's time. It's a mix of all three, but all you can do is all you can do. But I thought of you just this week, just because as this airs, the new year will have already rung in. So happy 5784, is it?

Eric: Yeah.

Doug: So how will you be celebrating the holidays this month?

Eric: It's possible that I'll be driving with the family to North Carolina to spend Rosh Hashanah with my sister and her family. Probably won't involve attending services. My wife and I, about a year and a half, maybe two years ago, left the synagogue where we were members. I was on the board, I was vice president, and I felt that the leadership was playing fast and loose with the rules, and so I was going to step down from the board. And then the president of the congregation responded inappropriately about something Claudia had written as a Facebook post, and responded inappropriately to Claudia's boss, who also worked

I was a volunteer at the synagogue.

Magda: Oh, wow.

Eric: And so we decided we'd had enough, that we didn't need to belong to a synagogue that we didn't feel entirely comfortable in.

Doug: Well, sure, yeah, that's the exact opposite of the point.

Eric: Yeah, and you know, there's that old saying, the two things you don't want to see being made are laws and sausage.

Magda: Yeah.

Eric: You don't want to see how a house of worship functions either.

I don't think it's only in the Jewish community, but... 

Magda: No, it's not.

Eric: It's horrible, I suppose, because there's an inevitable clash between the ideals of the community and the realities of life, right? So personalities, and finance, and nostalgia, and memory, and you know, all these things are at play. Years ago, when I was at Bucknell, and well, actually, this goes back to high school, I've toyed with the idea of being a rabbi for, I guess I mentioned it in the piece, I've talked about it on and off for years. But the most recent close call, I suppose, was when Claudia and I were looking to get out of central Pennsylvania. And I had, in college, I suppose we would have called it an informational interview at the conservative seminary, Jewish Theological Seminary in New York.

And I was expressing to the dean that I was chatting with that I felt rather old to be starting rabbinical school. And he said, well, you'd be surprised how many second career people we have. I said, but on the other hand, having reached the age that I have, I have no illusions about how a synagogue works. You know, it's the fundraising, it's the counseling, it's the social work, it's the politics. You know, every once in a while, you might have an enlightened thought and share it with people. But most of the time, it's all the other crap. And Claudia and I just decided that it had reached a level of crap that we were no longer willing to put up with. The kids had had their bar mitzvahs, and we weren't going to be made any more or less Jewish by our attendance. I do miss the services, not just Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, but we were fairly regular attenders.

I'm pretty old school, and I really dig ritual. And, you know, I'm also obsessive compulsive enough to just like things the way they are and not be a big fan of change. And so I enjoyed going to the synagogue. I enjoyed the liturgy. I enjoyed the ritual. And I miss that. And I enjoyed the people there. And Claudia misses the, you know, two hours of quiet.

Doug: Well, are there any other options down there? I mean, is that the only game in town?

Eric: Yeah, there are other synagogues, but we joined the one we joined.

because the rabbi at the time and the congregation seemed very friendly toward kids, and the other synagogue didn't, which is probably why they don't have many kids there. It's an aging congregation. Demographically, in many ways, we don't fit in the congregation that we were members of because a lot of the members, their family names are on buildings all over Norfolk and Virginia Beach. I don't know if this is true in a lot of churches, but it's true in just about every synagogue: “This window donated in memory of Ira Goldblatt,” and “this room dedicated in memory of, you know, Ethel Schmalzberg,” you know, whatever. And I think part of it is about a community that came here with nothing, right? So these people came to this country without two nickels to scratch together, two kopeks to scrape together. And then they made something of themselves, and they wanted people to know it, they want to feel like they belong. But we don't have that kind of money. So I joked with the rabbi that I just wanted a plaque over one of the urinals in the men's room. That's all it was.

Doug: But that's interesting that you're now prepared not to be part of a congregation for the foreseeable future. I mean, if you don't have plans to join a new synagogue.

Eric: It hurts.

Doug: As far as the state of your religious viewpoints are, I'm on the fence about whether I'm going to join this church, but I do enjoy the company. I enjoy the people.

Magda: Well, it's the kind of church that you don't have to join, right?

Like you can go to the book clubs and all that kind of stuff and never join.

It's fine.

Doug: Yeah, she wears jeans and Birkenstocks and there's like three kids with electric guitars behind her.

Magda: The pastor, he means. The leader of my small group is Jewish.

Doug: Yeah, and the pastor came on the podcast and talked a lot about the purpose of religion going forward. I mean, how to keep it relevant and the importance of low church. I mean, and the contrast between the high church that Magda was raised in and that our kids were baptized in, versus now, let's just get down to brass tacks. Let's kind of separate out the ornamentation and recognize what we're here for. We're here to heal.

We're here to meet and congregate and help each other through the crises we're all going through. And it seems somehow there's always some other bullshit that gets in the way of that.

Eric: Yeah, I think there's a place for both. But I think the options attract different people, and I think that's a good thing. It's funny, we call it organized religion. Having worked in it, I can tell you it's anything but organized. Institution-based religion has always been the benchmark

used to measure religiosity in America. And so when numbers dipped, people thought, oh, people are becoming less religious. No, it's that institutions are failing people. And they're looking for other alternatives.

And this has been going on for decades. Really, you know, one of the legacies in terms of religion post World War II era, is the freeing of the individual from the burden of having to belong someplace, either because of an external social expectation, or an internal familial expectation. You know, we often find that most people in metropolitan areas, I wouldn't say cosmopolitan necessarily, but metropolitan, are much more likely to find themselves at the end of their lives in a house of worship or community that's entirely different from the one they were born into, because of exposure to different styles, but also because people have a sense that it's theirs to control. You don't have to go just because your parents went or because the government considers you this category or something like that. And so the diversification of religious options, I think is a good thing because religion is not about institutions. It's about the balance people feel between the self and the community. 

Magda: The topic of having to leave your house of worship that you were in, I think there are a lot of people in that situation. Right now, I think the pandemic especially, a lot of people just didn't agree with the decisions, mostly administrative, like not theological at all. It wasn't about the beliefs. It wasn't about even the social aspects of the community.

It wasn't about the culture. It was about the administrative decisions and sort of feeling safe within the organization. I think there was just sort of like a big switching up of people, at least in non-Evangelical Protestant churches. So Mainline and the sort of Mainline-adjacent were just a lot of people I know who left where they had been going, started going someplace new, started dipping into other churches online to see what they were interested in, all of that kind of thing. And I know, you know, my church went online right away when the pandemic started and we picked up a whole bunch of new actual people who decided to join, be members that are not even remotely within driving distance of the church to the extent that we now have this sort of two-part congregation that we call the Roomies and the Zoomies, and so I started going to all the Zoomie stuff a couple months before I moved here in preparation for being a Zoomie instead of a Roomie. I don't think we're unusual at all, except that there were a lot of institutions that didn't know how to manage being outside of their building and their space. And the ones that didn't know how to sort of be flexible with their logistics also seemed to not be flexible with other kinds of policies and following rules and stuff like that, and just sort of didn't know how to receive people during the pandemic the way people needed to be received.

Doug: And how many churches have your folks left since I've known them?

Magda: Not very many.

Eric: That sounds like a very old Jewish joke about a rescue operation finding a man who'd been stranded for years alone on an island. And when they come ashore, there are two big buildings in addition to the hut where he lives. And they say to the man, well, what's with these two buildings? He says, well, that one over there, that's my synagogue.

That's where I worship. And what's the other one? He said, “I wouldn't step foot in that place.”

The pandemic was a particular dilemma for the Jewish community on a variety of levels that were not shared with non-Jews, and that has to do with the use of electricity on Shabbat. On Shabbat, on the Sabbath, from sunset Friday night to sunset Saturday night, you're not allowed to change the status of certain things. So if the light's on, it stays on. If the light's off, it stays off, because it's your action that is perceived to violate the tenet. And that has to go back with making fire. Ben Franklin, lightning, key, right? Electricity equals fire. And there are a host of other restrictions. But in terms of the pandemic, you couldn't just set up a camera in the sanctuary and leave it running, because there was also the recording that was considered inappropriate in the Orthodox community.

Most conservative communities got around that by turning it on before Shabbat, turning it off afterwards, and it was running. Or they had what is permitted, but often misunderstood in Jewish law, and it's unfortunately referred to as a “Shabbos Goy.” Meaning, if you're not Jewish, who's willing to do things for you, it's inappropriate to ask somebody, even somebody who's not Jewish, to do something that you're not allowed to do on Shabbat. That's considered inappropriate. But if there's an understanding that it comes in, it turns on the lights or whatever, it's fine.

Magda: Is it appropriate for somebody to just volunteer to do it?

Eric: Yeah, I would imagine so. I have to admit, the intricacies of Jewish law,  it's referred to as Jewish law. I hate that term because when you say Jewish law, people think one of two things. They think law equals punishment or violation of law equals punishment. And in Judaism, we have such a different notion of sin from Christianity that it's hardly worth making that comparison. But also, people turn to a very old anti-Semitic position that Judaism is about rules and laws, and Christianity is about freedom and love. You know, nobody would follow the rules if they didn't have the love, right? I mean, what kind of idiot would refuse to eat certain things or would walk on Shabbat when they could drive if they didn't really believe in what was behind it? The Hebrew term is halacha, which comes from the word halech, which means the walking or the going or the path. And so I refer to it as a Jewish style of living. But I'm not an expert, so I don't know if volunteering is appropriate. Probably? But whatever the case, conservative synagogues weighed the benefits and the detriments. In the 50s, when Jews were moving out of the cities into the suburbs, and synagogues were no longer within walking distance, the conservative movement said, you can drive on Shabbat as long as it's to the synagogue and home. And the Reform movement, which doesn't really put a lot of emphasis on these kinds of positions, there's no problem at all. But that was only one of the problems, right, whether you Zoom or not. And the synagogue that I left, they Zoomed. And the danger there is that, like newspapers in the early internet age, people haven't figured out how to monetize it. And so why should I pay money to belong to this shul when I can go to services at this much better shul 150 miles away or whatever? 

Doug: Yeah, well, Magda and I will remember, you know, tutored a lot of Jewish students in New York City, and they just put their lights on timers.

Eric: And, you know, there are all kinds of interesting conventions. I don't know how new your ovens are, but if you look at the instruction manual of your ovens, you will see that it has what we would call a Shabbat setting, which means you can set it to turn on at a low level at a certain day at a certain time, because if it's already on, then you can heat whatever's already on it. You're not allowed to make or destroy anything.

So no cutting, no burning. 

Doug: Well, do you see the arrival of appliances like that as at least some level of inclusion, some level of progress, some level of understanding that some people need this?

Eric: Sure. Yeah, yeah. Look, you know, there's an old saying in Judaism that money has no odor, right? It's what you do with money that makes it good or bad. And as soon as people realize that, you know, I can either be anti-Semitic, or racist or misogynistic, or I can sell my products.

Magda: Right. Well, and I mean, that timer costs them maybe $2 to put into the stove, right? So why would they not?

Eric: Absolutely. I'll tell you a couple of stories related to that. One is

that as difficult as this might be... 

Doug: I love that you've become this nice Jewish gentleman who tells stories.

Eric: People say I should be a rabbi.

Doug: It's who you were destined to be, Eric, absolutely.

Eric: And I apologize if I slip into either rabbi or professor mood.

Doug: Not at all. That's definitely... That's a part of you.

Eric: Oreo, the cream filling, used to be made with lard. That kind of makes me gag a little bit. Yeah. That's how it was made. Yeah.

Lard is a byproduct of pork, of pigs. So Oreos were not kosher. And that enabled its competitor Hydrox. I don't know if you remember Hydrox.

Magda: I do remember Hydrox. And I remember thinking it was such a fascinating name for a cookie. And then when I was old enough to find out that it was for hydrogenated fat, that's why it was called Hydrox.

Like, well, well, yeah.

Doug: Wow, that must have been a great naming meeting. Of all the things, let's call it something chemical.

Eric: Yeah. Pig vomit.

Doug: Brave.

Eric: But at a certain point, people at Oreo and Nabisco or whatever realized that you could make the cream filling almost as good, I'm sure, without using lard. You can use vegetable shortening or whatever. And so Oreo is now kosher. And I got to tell you, there's like Israel Independence Day and the day Oreo became kosher. They're like the two biggest celebrations that are not in the Torah, in the Jewish community.

Doug: I wonder what JoJo's have in them, you know, because Trader Joe's has their own rip-offs that are probably made with hemp.

Eric: Yeah, Trader Joe's is pretty good in terms of products in the kosher world. The other story is that years ago, forgive me, I don't remember if it was Dole or Jolly Green Giant. Somebody who cans vegetables, right?

The machinery that rolls the cans, they were lubricating it with lard. And members of the Jewish and Muslim community went to them and said, if you use some other lubricant, then Jews and Muslims will be able to buy the vegetables that are in those cans. And so they said, okay, and they did it. And if you make it about money, money talks and bullshit walks. And you know, people hear it, and they're like, oh, I can make a buck. 

Magda: For something like Oreos, they're not just getting Jews or Muslims to buy them because they took the lard out. They're getting every parent who has to bring a class snack to a class that has one Jewish or one Muslim kid in it. Because, you know, if it's your turn to bring your kid’s snack to class or birthday or whatever. And you are told no gelatin, no pork, no whatever. There's a pretty limited set. I mean, I remember when Robert was in first grade, second grade, something like that. And there was a kid in his class that had horrible, horrible dairy allergy and something, I think, egg allergy or something else like that, too. And his mother said he's allowed to eat Oreos. Well, okay, that was it. Oreos were the class snack forever and ever and ever, anytime anybody had a birthday. And the mothers were thrilled because then we didn't have to, you know, go through the rigmarole of buying cupcakes or making cupcakes or all that craziness, right? 

Eric: Yeah. Although, you know, this student aside, the percentage of Jews that actually observe the laws of kashrut is pretty small, but the optics are important.

Magda: Right.

Eric: I think I may have mentioned this in the piece. I worked in Washington as a lobbyist, and a guy who was a lobbyist at another Jewish organization always ordered a kosher meal on the plane. He didn't keep kosher, he just wanted to make sure they always had them, right? And if you're Muslim or Jewish, and all of a sudden Nabisco makes cookies that your fellow religious community can eat, whether you were eating them all along or not, it sends an important signal. It makes you a hero. You know, Coca-Cola, New Coke and Old New Coke and all that stuff was about changing from sugar to high fructose corn syrup. Well, high fructose corn syrup comes from corn. Corn is not to be eaten during Passover. So Coke, though kosher, 51 weeks out of the year for the eight days of Passover is not kosher. So they said, you know, what if we put sugar back in it? And so you can now get regular Coke, that's kosher for Passover, that's probably as close as you're going to get to original Coke, unless you buy original Coke from Mexico, which still has the sugar in it. But those things matter. And if you buy a Coke that's kosher for Passover, that has a different colored cap, and so it's  immediately identifiable, if you're Jewish, whether you care or not, you're going to see it, and that matters. I think a lot of this has to do with the maturation of part of the American population. That really, at the end of the day, who gives a shit whether you're black or Jewish or gay? You know, it's like, the wealthiest subculture in America is probably gay men.

So why would you not want to market to gay men?

Magda: Right?

Eric: You might as well. And if they're gay, Jewish, black men who are left handed, that's the magic formula.

Doug: Well, the optics is the real story now, right? Because we've got a very high-profile fight between the ADL and the guy who's flushing Twitter. You had Charlottesville. You had the Tree of Life shooting. When you think about the trajectory of antisemitism, if you think about where we are now versus the experience you had in college, do you see this as an uphill trajectory or is it more flat in your mind just because it's been around forever?

Eric: Yes and yes. I think that there are certain factors that make it more present in our awareness. The internet, the 24-hour news cycles, social media in particular. People are able to spread information immediately, good or bad. The democratization of the spread of that information  means that really horrible people can be saying whatever they want online and all they need is a computer and Wi-Fi. And so, you know, I think a lot of people, maybe just members of the Jewish community would say, it's always been this way. It's just now people are more aware of it. And, you know, I don't blame Trump. That's not true. I blame him for so much. But I think he was more of a byproduct than a catalyst. Once you start with, you know, people like George Wallace, you know, Strom Thurmond go, you know, there's always been political gain in separating one group from another, right? But the change in the civil rights era brought into the political arena a greater diversity of participants that threatened people who were racist, right? Before that, if you were racist, you had power anyway, so it didn't matter. And if you were sexist, you had power anyway, so it didn't matter. You weren't challenged by women. You weren't challenged by African Americans. You weren't challenged by Native Americans. Native Americans who live on the reservation only got the right to vote after World War I, you know? And the progression of rights meant that the people who traditionally held onto power didn't have a monopoly. So you had to set people against each other in different ways. People have always been setting people against each other. It might be economically. It might be industrial versus rural or whatever. But now it was about race, it was about gender, it was about religion. And, you know, the Southern strategy of Nixon in the late 60s, a lot of the byproduct of that, the new Christian right, the moral majority, a lot of these movements, what they suggested was that a greater us versus them. And, you know, as I've said, and many people have said, if you hate someone, you don't hate just one group. You've got a list. And so the question is, where does my group fit on your list? Am I above people in wheelchairs but below people who are left-handed? I mean, you know, I'm on there. I know I am, but... And so a lot of the stuff that's going on now, I think, is just because people have a greater feeling that they have the right to say it, and they have a greater, a broader platform to say it on. But, you know, there have been neo-Nazi groups in America since there were Nazis in America. And there were Nazis in America long before World War II, you know, from the beginning of the National Socialist Party. And American history is filled with moments of violent antisemitism, violent racism, violent Islamophobia, violent anti-Asian reactions. It's like when we started putting lost kids on milk cartons.

All of a sudden we thought, holy crap, there are a lot of lost kids. It's just now we knew it.

Magda: Well, and I think that's part of it, too, is that the sort of like average Middle American cultural Christian now knows Jewish people, even just one. And so they're aware of antisemitism in a way that they would never have been able to be before. And I also think people understand dog whistles now in a way that they didn't necessarily before.

Eric: I suppose they may just not know which terms they are. The sign of acceptance will be when people don't use your identity as an adjective. So, who am I? I'm the Jewish guy, right? That's my Jewish friend. Who's that? Well, that's the black guy. You know, it's the woman in the group.

You know, if you just say, well, it's a friend of mine. Rarely do I introduce people as my Catholic friend. It just doesn't matter.

Doug: They're all in the Supreme Court together. Isn't that weird that there are six and a half Catholics on the Supreme Court.

Eric: There was one point when there were no Protestants on the court.

They were either Jews or Catholics. And given who was on the court at the time, it wasn't as troubling, the membership. And I found it a delicious irony. Because I think, you know, Jefferson... 

Doug: The best ironies are delicious ones, for real, you know.

Eric: Yeah, Jefferson and all those guys were probably just spinning in their graves at the thought of that.

Magda: Yeah, my mom said that there was a huge, huge scandalized furor when JFK was elected because he was Catholic and people were just horrified by that. And she said there was this like national joke that they were collecting bowling balls to make a rosary for the Statue of Liberty because JFK was Catholic. Can you imagine?

Doug: And to speak about progress. Yeah, I mean, people are just as horrified about Biden, you know, which is adhesion to an ism versus actual facts.

Eric: Well, what people forget is that Biden was the first Catholic vice president in American history, for what it's worth. But, you know, when Al Smith was running for president in 1928, there were fears that the Pope would come up the Potomac in a submarine and pop out and take control of the government.

Doug: Now, were those were those stoked by anybody in particular?

Eric: Well, yeah, Protestant clergy and what we call the border states, you know, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, and in the South, but also a lot of cartoons, cartoonists, political cartoonists. Thomas Nast, is that his name? 

Doug: Yeah, he's in every third crossword puzzle.

Eric: Yeah, yeah, that's right. He was born into a Catholic family but became a staunch anti-Catholic in his writings and drawings later in life.

Doug: Magda, you remember that colleague of ours when we met who grew up in the northern Midwest and grew up thinking that all Jews had horns.

Magda: Kids at college said to me, okay, Jewish kids at college told me that they knew that Gentile kids thought they had horns. And I was like, “What??”

Doug: Number one, how could anyone think that? Number two, how could it be such a widespread thing to think?

Eric: Well, it's widespread because it fits the narrative. But the urban legend is that it came from the Moses sculpture, I guess Da Vinci.

Doug: We'll Google that and link to it in the show notes, for sure.

Yeah, whatever.

Eric: I'm embarrassing myself in my... 

Doug: Well, that's what the Internet's for. I mean, it's killing all of our instant recalls. No big deal. I mean, it's... 

Eric: We just Google it and figure it out. Look it up. I'm not here to do that for you. But there's a statue of Moses, a classic statue of Moses, and there's supposed to be rays of light striking Moses as he's holding the tablets. But they look like horns. But I think… It probably predates that.

It's just that whatever the intention of the sculptor, that fit an understanding of Jews that was already present, was that they were satanic, that they were evil, that they were the cause of everything bad, from the death of Jesus to the present.

Doug: And there are still people who can't process that Jesus was Jewish.

Eric: Yeah, I mean, we used to joke when I was a kid, roses are red, violets are bluish. If it weren't for Jesus, you'd all be Jewish. Then I went to grad school. I learned the truth. The truth was roses are red, violets are bluish. If it weren't for Paul, you'd all be Jewish.

Magda: It's very true.

Eric: We joke about recall, but you have a lot of knowledge about history.

And our previous guest, Emily Swan, the pastor, she was training to be a history professor and left that to become a pastor. So when you think about the nature of history and the nature of religion, how important is it to understand how religion has evolved through the history of humanity?

And how do you involve that in your teachings when you teach your students?

Eric: I'm trained as a historian. That's my primary training. In the academic study of religion, we like to say we borrow. We steal from all the disciplines. So there are people who do art history, and there are people who do philosophy, and there are people who do language and sociology and history. My primary training is in American religious history with a secondary training in sociology of religion. And I tell my students all the time that I can't understand a thing until I understand how it got to be that thing. And so, for example, the class I'm teaching this semester, Sports and Religion, is really a course in religion in America since the Civil War, through the lens of sports. And if I called it “American religious history since the Civil War,” nobody would take it.

I call it “Sports and Religion,” I've got baseball players, I've got hockey players, I've got field hockey players, I've basketball players, the class is full. The hard part about the academic study of religion is that it's overcoming a great deal of momentum, because it started as theology.

And so people still have a lot of their own interests at stake. You know, I tell my students, look, we're going to be looking critically at, you know, whatever topic. I said, if you can't handle that, because it might be your religious tradition comes under the microscope, we're not going to be criticizing, but we will be critical. If you can't handle that, then don't take the class, you know. I've never had kids not take class, but I suspect that a lot of kids don't take my classes because they know that's what they're in for. But, you know, in terms of religion in America, you not only have to have a sense of the development of the major religious traditions in America, or even the minor or, you know, lesser, smaller religious traditions in America, but the interplay between them and how that's had an impact. So if you're just a Protestant historian or a Catholic historian or a Jewish historian, you're not seeing the whole picture. And I, in my thinking, if not in my writing, often distinguish between Judaism in America and American Judaism, because they're two different things.

Magda: Yeah, our older son had a friend at college who was from Israel, and she was just sort of stunned by American Judaism when she got there and just was like, it didn't look like anything that she had experienced. It didn't look like the daily and weekly and monthly rituals that her family was engaged in. And she just, it felt very, very foreign and really different to her. She said almost as if it was not even the same religion. I thought that was interesting.

Eric: Yeah. And any group that finds itself in the midst of other groups is going to be affected. I took an astronomy class my first semester at UVA, and I learned just enough so that I can use analogies without really understanding. So one of them has to do with gravity, right? And a little body is attracted to a big body and can move because of gravity, you know, be attracted to it by gravity. But even if it is not measurable, the big body is also attracted to the little body. And the same is true with Protestantism in America. That's the big body, but it's been affected by its encounter with Catholics and Jews and Muslims and Hindus and Buddhists. And it's either been incorporated in some way into the Protestant worldview, or it's been a reaction against and other versions of more theologically conservative forms of the Constant World View.

You can't help it. You know, nobody grows up in a ziplock bag.

Doug: I just love people trying to interpret that out of context. I think that's a very important scholarly exercise. And something that should title your next publication. You mentioned about all the money that people are spending to put their names on things for the optics of it.

And I'm also aware that your family came to Tidewater and left central Pennsylvania because you wanted to be among more Jews, and the sense of being together was important. When you mention now that you've kind of, you've drifted away from that, and the overall kind of sense of how things tend to fragment and balkanize, the push-pull of being together versus being together apart, how do you see that evolving as we go forward?

Eric: I think that like American Protestantism and American Catholicism,

I reckon Judaism's a turning point. It used to be that people went to synagogue because that was the only place where they were welcome, right? If you look at some of the old pictures from the 30s and 40s and even 50s on the walls of the synagogue, they had these various events.

Some were religious, like a Passover Seder, and some were just social, you know, some event. And they were packed. Why? Because in this area, like in many areas, Jews weren't allowed into the country clubs. There were no sort of other social outlets for Jews. If you kept kosher, you couldn't go to any of the restaurants. There were limits on certain professions, right? UVA had a quota at the med school and the law school from admitting too many Jews. So there were just limits everywhere. So the synagogue was it. Now, there are no limits. I'm sure there are still plenty of places people don't want me, but you know, I can join a health club. My son is working at a country club, a yacht club that used to be exclusive. And, you know, we take some humor in that, but he's working there. Another delicious irony.

Magda: Yeah.

Eric: And now, you know, if you've got the money, you can join. So religious institutions, but particularly the Jewish community, has to figure out what is it that people want. And the two of you have talked about, you know, what attracts you to your community. And the leadership of the Jewish community has to go through that conversation, too. Some people have. There are some interesting dynamics in Judaism to keep people connected to Judaism without going to synagogue. And what's interesting is that of all of the religions that people identify with in America, besides like Pastafarians and Matrixists and things like that, of the more traditional religions, Judaism is the one that has the highest level of association with the lowest level of participation. You know, there's a huge debate in the Jewish community and beyond about whether Jews are a race or not. And race is such a construction that I'm a separate race to people who consider me a separate race, and I'm not if I don't consider myself. There are plenty of times where I am happy not to be considered white, but there are elements, certainly of culture within Judaism, that are, because of segregation, you know, segregating Jews, ghettoizing Jews, have grown up within the Jewish community that non-Jews may be aware of, but really link members of the Jewish community. 

Doug: So when you think about the future of Judaism, of a religion as a religion or as a community, do you see people gravitating more toward, to use terms like high church or low church, which direction do you think the congregations might head?

Eric: I think they'll go in both. I think one of the things the reform movement is dealing with, the conservative movement is going to have to deal with, is intermarriage. Jews marrying non-Jews. And who do you consider to be Jewish? If you're Catholic, if you're admitted into the church through the various rituals. But even if you're not, you're just sort of a bad Catholic, but you're still Catholic, right? But the big break with the Protestants was that it was a choice. That's why they didn't baptize infants. They baptized adults, because you have to choose, right? You have to feel the Spirit or, you know, whatever the qualifications are in the community. In Judaism, it's always by birth. What do you do, for example, in a synagogue, where you've got, you know, one of the couple is not Jewish? Can the non-Jewish spouse participate in Jewish ritual? Can the non-Jewish spouse participate in leadership positions? I mean, it becomes kind of weird to think that the president of a congregation is Catholic, right? That's like, you know, it's okay that I'm not required to be recruited by the NBA, right? Because I'm short and can't jump and old.

And that's a Protestant model, right? People who feel drawn to a community are members of the community. That's something that's very new in the Jewish community. It will never be acceptable the way the Orthodox movement is constructed today. But that will be the place where people who feel that's important will go. The conservative movement, which has always been sort of the middle, has always defined itself by what it's not. “Well, we're not Reform, but we're not Orthodox.” I don't know that that's going to survive. You know, it's going to be one way or the other. It's going to be a much more open understanding of Judaism, or it's going to be a much more traditional form of Judaism. I think, you know, one of the things that Judaism experienced when it came out of the shtetl and out of the ghetto was the opportunity to search for your identity rather than have your identity

forced upon you. And this is where we see the diversification of Jewish institutions. Some people just wanted to pass as not Jewish. Other people wanted to dig their heels into a traditional Jewish identity and everything in between. The Woody Allen in me with the Angel of Death standing behind me, the Nazis killed them all., it didn't matter whether they were observant or not. And so that's sort of the realization that

other people might consider you Jewish, even if you don't consider yourself Jewish. But in 21st century America, there are many, many shapes of Jews. I'm writing a piece now on the Barbie movie, and there are interesting connections and reverberations in the Barbie movie to Judaism. But if you could... 

Doug: Oh, I can't wait to read this. I mean, that makes me even want to go see it even more.

Magda: But you still haven't even seen it, Doug, despite... 

Doug: Well, I'm going to. I'm just not going to go to the theater to see it.

It's going to be on Disney Plus in a week. I'll wait.

Eric: Jewish or not, it was a very thought-provoking film. I thought it was very enjoyable. But if you want to have a sense of this, there's an 18-minute The Tribe. It's an 18-minute documentary. where the documentarian uses Barbie to explore American Judaism. It's very clever. You know, there are Jews who are attracted to Buddhism, and we even have a name for them. There are Jews who are... 

Doug: Jew-boos.

Eric: Jew-boos.

Magda: Yeah, we talked to someone a few weeks ago who taught us the phrase Jew-boo, or the word Jew-boo.

Eric: There are a lot of parallels. You know, what are the Four Noble Truths? Life is suffering. Yeah, that's all of Judaism, right? It's all about the suffering. Suffering comes from desire. Yeah, okay, that makes sense in Judaism. Suffering can be stopped if desire is stopped. Now that, forget it. There's no end of suffering in Judaism. There's no way to stop it. It's all about the suffering. You know, there are all manner of Jews in a way that there are all manner of other people. And I think that's a reality that is dawning not just on non-Jews, but on Jews as well.

Doug: Well, yeah, no group is a monolith, right? There's varying degrees of everything within everything. So help me out with the Barbie reference then. I mean, we'll announce that there could be spoilers coming up, but I don't care. I will see the movie eventually, and I want to look out for this now. So what would your paper be about?

Eric: First of all, there are an awful lot of connections between Barbie and Judaism. Ruth Handler, who invented, developed Barbie, who's Jewish.

Barbie is named for her daughter, Barbara. Ken is named for her son, Ken. Which is kind of weird when you think about the romantic coupling of Ken and Barbie.

Magda: Yeah, it's a little Luke and Leia, isn't it?

Eric: Yeah, it's a little weird.

Doug: My best friend in high school, his parents' names were Barbie and Ken, and boy, did he hear it.

Eric: That's funny. For me, the light bulb went off. Will Ferrell plays the CEO of Mattel. And he's trying to convince Barbie that Mattel is not misogynistic, is, you know, friendly. He even says, you know, it's not a patriarchal organization. And then out of the blue, he says, some of my best friends are Jewish. That's the only mention of religion in the entire film. And so I started thinking about some of the other comments, like Barbie feels condemned because she's accused of controlling the capitalist system. That sounds kind of familiar. So, okay, we're talking stereotypes. There's something more going on here that I'm scratching on. I don't know exactly what. But I suspect that some of it has to do with the fact that in contemporary society, anti-Judaism is called antisemitism, not racism. But the people who hate Jews consider them a race. So why is it not called racism? Because racism is serious. But antisemitism? It's just Jews, right? They're okay. They're all wealthy. They all control the media, right? They all control the banks. So we really don't have to worry about them. 

Doug: Antisemitism doesn't even have a capital S in it anymore. The style rules have changed.

Eric: Yeah, but that's for a very specific reason. To fight the notion that Jews are Semites and therefore a separate race.

Doug: Oh, okay.

Eric: So it's just, this is what hating Jews is called. When really, it's just racism.

Doug: Well, I also was thinking too, life is suffering and Barbie wears high heels everywhere. And I remember, I've seen the trailer, like apparently one day she wakes up and her feet flatten and she's all of a sudden, that's a level of suffering that's removed from her existence.

Eric: Well, and she goes out into the world and realizes that she doesn't run the world, that women don't run the world. But back in her cocoon, she's nice and safe, which is the experience of every minority culture, right? In their cocoon, they're safe. Then they go out into the world and realize that, you know, it's the white man's world.

Doug: Yeah, it's Will Ferrell's world. He's getting all these roles now.

He was President Business in the Lego movie. Now he's playing these terrible CEO types.

Magda: Well, he's a parody. In the Barbie movie, he's cast perfectly because the CEO is nothing, doesn't understand anything. He's just a mirage.

Doug: Okay, so he's not President Business in terms of an arch villain.

He's just a... 

Eric: No, he's just... 

Magda: No, not at all.

Doug: He's a non-entity like Ken is.

Magda: Yeah.

Doug: And that's why all these dickheads are getting all upset about how Barbie hates men and Greta Gerwig hates men because all these men are predicted as non-alphas.

Magda: Well, it's not that Barbie hates men. It's that Barbie doesn't need men or care about men.

Doug: And I think that's, as we wind up here, I think that's the next question. We talk about the state of men in our culture now and those who feel particularly wronged and the damage they're infecting us with.

You're a professor, you have students, you're thinking about maybe your legacy as a writer, as an academician. I like to ask people what they'd like to accomplish in the next several years at this stage in their lives. And in your case, it has to deal with maybe the next waves of students you send out into the world. So when you think about the next years of your career as a professor, what would you like to achieve and what would you like your students to walk away from your classes for their better understanding of it?

Eric: In terms of my actual impact on students, you're very generous, you're very kind. If I have affected anyone's mind, it doesn't show up on their exams. But what I really want to teach my students is just to be critical of the world around them. That if you live in a world among humans, then everything humans make has meaning and significance on some level. 

Doug: And context, and motive. 

Eric: I always say, you know, monkeys can do this, my dog can smile, whales can talk, but only humans seek to make meaning when there isn't necessarily meaning. That's important.

Doug: And so much of your teaching involves history, and we know who writes history. You know, there's the history textbooks, and there's Howard Zinn. So how do you teach your students to find more primary source material and seek the truth, especially now that that truth seems so much more elusive given the levels of disinformation and misinformation that are swirling around?

Eric: Yeah, well, most of the primary sources that I have easy access to are the ones that are obvious, right? But they can all be questioned. You can always ask, well, you know, who's benefiting here? Whose ox is getting gored? And that's what I try to do with everything. You know, it's every case in my religion and constitutional law class. You can't assume the Supreme Court is right. You can just assume that they're final. So if they're not necessarily right, what's going on here? What's in the background? What documents are they drawing from and why? And that's where I try to lay the groundwork for them to understand that, you know, there are certain people who are in and certain people who are out, and the people who are out had no voice, and they should understand that. It's like we used to yell at basketball games, right? You know, “Ref, put on your glasses, you're missing a good game.” I want the students to put on their glasses because they're missing a great game.

Doug: I'm really grateful for the time. I could go on for hours about this.

It's great to talk to people like this, especially those who devoted their lives to studying these things and have a body of knowledge to share with us all.

Eric: Well, I appreciate participating and having a conversation. It's always a pleasure, Doug, to check in with you. Magda, it's a real pleasure to meet you face to face.

Magda: Yeah, it's wonderful to meet you, too.

Eric: Magda, I also wanted to wish you mazel tov.

Magda: Oh, thank you very much.

Eric: I hope you find much happiness.

Doug: If I just go to the corner and wave a chair around, can I have my own private hora somewhere?

Eric: Always.

Doug: Always?

Magda: Okay, can you possibly imagine that I would ever let anybody pick me up on a chair and parade me around?

Eric: This, by the way, these are elements that have entered the non-Jewish mainstream. The picking up of the people on chairs was traditionally for the parents when the youngest child got married. Because now they were done. But Fiddler on the Roof, everybody figures, well, that's the way Jews do things, right? Like the bottle dance, right? The great bottle dance, where the men are doing the kazatzka or whatever with the bottle. Total invention of Broadway.

Magda: That's funny.

Doug: See, that's the future for you there. “Eric Debunks Everything.”

Eric: That's my job.

Doug: Well, listeners, thank you so much for listening to Episode 17 of the When the Flames Go Up podcast with Magda Pecsenye and me, Doug French. Our guest has been Eric Mazur, Professor of Religious Studies…

Eric: Gloria and David Furman, Professor of Judaic Studies.

Doug: Oh, that's even better. So he does that at Virginia Wesleyan University. Great to see your face and thanks for coming along.

Eric: Thank you very much.

Doug: We are off next week. I will be in the woods. So we will see you again on October 4th for Episode 18. Until then, Shana Tovah, gut yontif, have an easy fast, and we'll see you next month. Bye-bye.

<music>

Doug: What are you laughing at?

Magda: “Have an easy feast?”

Doug: I hear that's what you're supposed to say. 

Magda You’re supposed to say have an easy fast. Feast is not hard.

Fast is difficult. 

Doug: Is it easy feast or easy fast?

Eric: Traditionally, it’s “easy fast.” But, you know, it's the effort that counts.

Magda: Yes.

Doug: It's just, okay, well, you know, the great thing about podcasting is I can... 

Magda: You're just going to record that one word and punch it in.

Doug: I'll just say, have an easy fast and appear like less of an idiot.

Eric: As friends of mine would say, you couldn't appear as less of an idiot.