In a recent talk at the Capital Jewish Museum alongside Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, Dr. Yehuda Kurtzer—president of the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America—offered American Jews a soothing bromide: embrace your “political homelessness.” “I don’t think some measure of political homelessness is a fundamentally bad thing,” he intoned, lamenting hyper-partisanship and warning that Jews are “stuck… between an illiberal argument on the right, which is currently in power, and an illiberalism of the left.” The solution? Fight for “the very liberal framework that resists the authoritarianism of the right and resists the authoritarianism of the left.”
Spare us the gaslighting, Rabbi. This isn’t some noble call to transcend partisanship. It’s the same slick sleight-of-hand Kurtzer and his institutional machine have peddled for years: rebrand intersectional progressivism as “the liberal framework,” shove it down the throat of even Modern Orthodoxy, then clutch pearls when the left’s Hamas-adjacent fever dream explodes in your face. Kurtzer didn’t stumble into political homelessness—he engineered the exile of classical Jewish particularism from American Jewish life. Now he wants us all to join him in the wilderness he created.
Let’s start with the man himself. Kurtzer, raised Modern Orthodox, proudly abandoned full Orthodoxy in his early twenties. The breaking point? “My growing commitment to gender egalitarianism” and the conviction that Orthodoxy “could and never would be fully embraced” with it. He now shops at the denominational buffet—Conservative shul, Orthodox high school for the kids, pluralistic think-tank gig—while insisting his “traditional egalitarian” stance sits at the “intersection of liberalism.” Translation: progressive litmus tests trump halakhic fidelity. This isn’t neutral liberalism; it’s the very intersectional progressivism that treats Jewish law as a suggestion box for equity workshops.
And he didn’t stop at personal drift. Under Kurtzer’s leadership, the Hartman Institute has become the premier conveyor belt importing this ideology into Jewish spaces—especially the Orthodox ones he claims to “linger around.” The Beit Midrash for Israeli Rabbis (Rabbanut Yisraelit) and its North American counterpart train educators and aspiring rabbis across the spectrum in “pluralistic” frameworks that prioritize “shared society,” gender equity, and Palestinian “dignity and legitimacy” alongside Jewish self-determination. Programs like iEngage, Created Equal, and the Center for Shared Society embed the language of social justice, identity politics, and anti-nationalist critique as core Jewish values. Thousands of North American Jewish leaders, including Orthodox rabbis and educators, have been processed through this mill. The result? Even centrist Orthodoxy now grapples with the “rightward drift” Kurtzer himself finds “interesting”—a backlash against the progressive pablum he mainstreamed.
This wasn’t accidental. It’s familial and ideological. His father, Daniel Kurtzer—U.S. ambassador to Egypt and Israel under Clinton and Bush—embodied the dovish diplomatic tradition that pressured Israel into “land for peace” concessions while treating Jewish settlements as the real obstacle to liberal internationalism. The Kurtzer family podcast episode on their “legacy of service” frames this as civic virtue. From a Jewish standpoint, it was the pre-October 7 version of subordinating Jewish security to progressive globalism. Yehuda inherited the playbook and scaled it educationally.
Pre-October 7, Kurtzer’s crowd was already machanef-ing (enabling) the left’s open Hamasian turn. His 2023 Forward essay celebrated the “troubled-committed” liberal Zionists re-engaging after the massacre—people who had spent years obsessing over occupation, settlements, and Palestinian rights as the moral core of Judaism. He insisted the “big tent” must include them, while gently critiquing the far-left’s “genocide” rhetoric. Post-October 7, he still frames the solution as “respecting the dignity… of Jewish lives and Jewish self-determination while advancing the cause of Palestinian human, civil, and national rights in the same breath.” That’s not liberalism. That’s the two-state, context-providing, intersectional Zionism that blurred the line between critique and complicity long before the pogrom.
Now the left has gone full authoritarian—campus encampments, Jewish student harassment, “Zionist = Nazi” chants—and Kurtzer suddenly discovers “illiberalism of the left.” Too late. His Substack frets about “misplaced pluralism” when liberals platform figures like Hasan Piker, who celebrated October 7 atrocities and Hezbollah flags. Yet Hartman’s own programming spent years normalizing the Palestinian cause as a Jewish moral imperative. Trumpism, with its unprecedented Judeophilia—Abraham Accords, embassy move, Golan recognition—gets zero credit. The right is simply “authoritarian in power.” Classic.
Kurtzer’s “liberal framework” isn’t liberal at all. It’s the enemy of unapologetic Judaism and America: color-conscious equity over merit, shared society over Jewish sovereignty, perpetual self-critique over self-defense. It’s more intersectional than Jewish, more obsessed with Palestinian rights than with the survival of the Jewish state. He and his father’s generation didn’t just watch the leftward lurch happen—they midwifed it. They trained the rabbis, shaped the educators, funded the think-tank echo chamber that made “progressive Zionism” the only morally legitimate Judaism in polite company.
So take your own medicine, Rabbi. You preach political homelessness? Exile yourself first. Retire from the Hartman presidency. Stop training the next generation of Jewish leaders in the very ideology that hollowed out Orthodoxy and mainstreamed the illiberal left you now decry. Write your essays to yourself in the wilderness you helped create. The Jewish people—Orthodox, centrist, Zionist—don’t need another lecture from the architect of their dispossession. We need leaders who fight for Judaism on its own terms, not as a progressive accessory.
The gaslighting ends here. The scale-tipping was your life’s work. And your family's.
Own it—or get out of the way.
