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Video: What Does Jewish Thought Have to Say about the Worldwide Epidemic of Political Polarization
(Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs) Dr. Micah Goodman - Political polarization is not exclusively an Israeli problem. In 1995 Americans were asked to identify themselves politically, left or right, and then asked if they could identify with at least 20% of the opinions of the opposing camp. Roughly 35% said they could see the light with a part of the ideas of the other side. By 2015, this had dropped to less than 10%. In 1994 Americans were asked to identify themselves politically, and then asked how they feel emotionally towards the other side. Both left and right responded with a temperature of 45 out of a hundred. Twenty years later, the average temperature is 8 for the right, 6 for the left. You start hating people for having different views than yourself and intellectually you're not curious about their worldviews anymore. Before you learn about them, you already know what you think about them. You know they are wrong. In Jewish law, the Mishnah is a recording of disagreements. The Jews canonized disagreements. Jewish tradition has a model of a culture of healthy disagreement, an expectation to have curiosity that breaks the boundaries of your opinions, an expectation to have an intellectual world that contains ideas and opinions that you'll never live by. The Jews understood something very deep: the power of conversation, the power of talk, the power of disagreements. Dr. Micah Goodman is the founder and director of the Ein Prat Midrasha in Alon, where secular and religious Israeli young adults study together. He is also a research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem and the author of Catch-67: The Left, the Right, and the Legacy of the Six-Day War (2018). Goodman spoke at the Memorial Lecture in honor of Prof. Daniel J. Elazar, z"l, founding president of the Jerusalem Center, on Jan. 9, 2020.