As A Jew

How do you recover a tradition when you’ve been using the wrong map? In this book, Sarah Hurwitz argues that many Jews—and many non‑Jews who think they already know Judaism—carry the “wrong keys” to the Jewish home. We were handed categories shaped by Christian norms, assimilation pressures, and antisemitic distortions, then told to judge Judaism by standards that don’t fit it. The core claim: Judaism is not a thin set of holidays, political positions, or private spirituality. It’s a covenantal people sustained by texts, practices, and obligations that form a distinctive moral civilization.

Hurwitz starts with a confession: she fled her first college Shabbat in panic and shame, then spent years assuming Judaism was either childish ritual or a progressive culture with bagels. Later, in chaplaincy training, she noticed everyone assumed prayer meant spontaneous Christian‑style petitions, and that a “church” was the default sacred space. These are “wrong keys”—habits and language that unlock Christian doors but not Jewish ones. She comes to see how centuries of antisemitic pressure and a modern desire to be a “cool Jew” taught many to edit out the very sources that give Judaism spiritual power: text study, mitzvot, halacha, Hebrew, and peoplehood.

A turning realization

“For so many years, I’d had the wrong keys, and I had been locked out of my birthright without even knowing it.”

What you learn when you switch keys

First, you learn to read Torah differently. It’s not a catechism demanding belief or blind obedience (a frame borrowed from Christian theology), nor just a rulebook. Hurwitz shows you Torah as a covenantal charter for building a just society set apart—kadosh—from imperial cruelty. “Na’aseh v’nishma” (“we will do and then we will understand”) captures a cultural logic: you practice together first; deeper meaning grows through shared doing. “Chosenness” stops sounding like superiority and becomes responsibility—a demanding vocation to model justice.

Second, Judaism becomes a living conversation, not a frozen scripture. After the Temple’s destruction, the Rabbis engineered a revolution: study, argument, and halacha replaced sacrifice. The Talmud, with Mishnah and Gemara surrounded by commentaries like Rashi, is a training ground in “argument for the sake of heaven.” You inherit a culture that prizes chavruta (paired study), ambiguity, and rigorous compassion. The “textline” (to borrow Amos Oz and Fania Oz‑Salzberger) is what Jews carry through exile—words that bind generations.

Seeing the old hate in new clothes

Third, Hurwitz traces how anti‑Judaism morphed into modern antisemitism. Early Christian Adversus Judaeos rhetoric, medieval libels, and Enlightenment racialization congealed into three recurring tropes: Jews as disproportionately powerful, diabolically depraved, and secretly conspiratorial. In the 20th century, Nazis and then the Soviet Union rebranded these tropes into “anti‑Zionism,” equating Zionism with racism and Nazism. You learn to tell principled policy criticism from “political antisemitism,” the ideology that says Jews, via “Zionism,” are the central obstacle to moral progress. (Note: Bernard Harrison and Haviv Rettig Gur help parse this difference.)

Israel, refugees, and hard truths

Fourth, you get a sober, humane account of Israel’s creation and its aftermath. Zionism arose from persecution; many Jewish immigrants were refugees more than settlers. 1948 was a war of survival—and a catastrophe (Nakba) for many Palestinians who fled or were expelled. At the same time, around 850,000 Jews were driven from Arab countries, most absorbed by Israel. The Palestinian refugee issue persists uniquely because of UNRWA’s inheritance rules, unlike UNHCR’s model. Holding both truths—Jewish refuge and Palestinian dispossession—clears space for practical peace rather than abolitionist fantasies.

Practices that humanize

Finally, halacha emerges as compassionate particularism. The Talmud’s “but‑if” hypotheticals train you to imagine real people and their vulnerabilities. Visiting the sick (bikkur ḥolim) isn’t optional; it’s morally urgent. Hurwitz’s chaplaincy stories show how small acts—sitting beside a patient, honoring the dead with ZAKA’s meticulous dignity—carry Jewish theology into the hospital ward.

In this journey, you’ll learn: how Christian defaults and assimilation gave you “wrong keys”; how Torah as covenant and the Rabbinic revolution give you right ones; how to detect anti‑Zionism that smuggles in old hate; why Israel’s history is genuinely complex; and how halacha, peoplehood, and study can rebuild a resilient, “knowing” Jewish life. The invitation is practical: pick up the right keys, enter the house, and help repair it.

Hurwitz starts where many of us are: embarrassed, under‑taught, and judging Judaism through borrowed standards. Her first Shabbat in college triggers panic—unfamiliar melodies, ritual handwashing, a script that felt alien. Years later, chaplaincy supervisors assume a “church,” expect extemporaneous prayer, and equate spirituality with Christian forms. You’ve likely seen this: well‑meaning people who think spontaneous bedside prayers are neutral. They’re not. They’re Christian keys, and they don’t open Jewish doors.

Christian normativity as an invisible frame

In public institutions, Christian language often remains default. Prayer equals speaking to a personal God in improvised English; “faith” means belief propositions; holiness is inward piety. But Jewish prayer centers on fixed liturgy, Hebrew rhythm, and a communal frame. “Faith” leans toward emunah (trust/steadfastness), and “holy” (kadosh) means separate—structurally distinct ways of living. When you use the wrong frame, Judaism seems incoherent or childish. The problem isn’t Judaism; it’s the keys.

Assimilation’s bargain and the “cool Jew” temptation

Enlightenment emancipation offered Jews a deal: be “men of the nation” and privatize Judaism. Much 19th‑century Reform trimmed Hebrew, ritual, and peoplehood for respectability—organs in synagogues, vernacular sermons, even renaming synagogues “temples.” Dara Horn’s frame clarifies why: Hanukkah‑style antisemitism doesn’t want you dead (that’s Purim‑style) but wants you “cool”—willing to discard uncool parts of a civilization. Hurwitz sees this in herself when she reflexively tries to present Judaism as palatable to a patient, smoothing edges to reassure non‑Jews.

Horn’s warning

Hanukkah antisemitism asks for “cool Jews”—Jews who will destroy the uncool parts of their civilization.

The cost of edited Judaism

A childhood of “holiday vignettes” leaves you culturally Jewish but spiritually starved. A brief seder, a Hanukkah party, a bat/bar mitzvah, a Holocaust unit—without Torah study, halacha, or Hebrew—teaches you a flattened story: Judaism equals cuisine, social justice rhetoric, and Christmas takeout. Hurwitz names the emotional aftermath of later discovery: grief and anger at being cut off from inheritance by structural forces—persecution, assimilation, Christian frameworks—that edited out the depth.

America’s warmth, and why it didn’t fix this

The U.S. has been unusually hospitable since WWII—Washington’s letter to the Newport synagogue promised liberty of conscience; overt discrimination declined; Jews integrated professionally. Yet “acceptance” did not restore erased keys. And recent campus crises (especially after October 7, 2023) reveal a new conversion demand: renounce Zionism or be excluded from progressive circles. Hurwitz documents RA snubs, student‑government denunciations, and online threats. Old pressures return in new moral languages.

What changing keys looks like for you

Stop judging Judaism by standards optimized for other faiths. Learn prayer as liturgy and choreography, not performance; see mitzvot as habits that form a people; treat Hebrew and text study as spiritual training, not denominational gatekeeping. Diagnose where shame made you choose “coolness” over inheritance. When you switch keys, the house opens: you find rooms filled with argument, ritual, law, and love that were never designed to impress outsiders—they were designed to make you and your community more humane.

(Note: The point isn’t anti‑Christian polemic; it’s cultural literacy. Just as Christians shouldn’t judge their tradition by Jewish standards, Jews shouldn’t judge theirs by Christian defaults.)

If you approach Torah wanting a tidy belief system or a list of private dos and don’ts, you’ll miss its point. Hurwitz reframes Torah as a covenantal charter for a people tasked with building a society distinct from empires. Much that looks odd—farm laws, sabbatical cycles, ritual boundaries—emerges as political‑ethical technology aimed at solidarity, limits on power, and care for the vulnerable.

Doing before understanding

At Sinai, the people say “na’aseh v’nishma”—we will do and then we will understand. Hurwitz leans on this to flip modern assumptions: in Judaism, comprehension is often a fruit of practice. You light Shabbat candles long before you can parse holiness; you give tzedakah before mastering economic theory. Shared action binds you to a people and tunes attention so meaning can grow.

Kadosh means distinct, not aloof

Holy (kadosh) means separate—structured difference for ethical purpose. Many commands read as critiques of Egypt and Mesopotamia. Weekly Shabbat rest counters imperial overwork. Agricultural cycles like shemitah (sabbatical year) and yovel (jubilee) disrupt wealth concentration and offer debt relief. Equal legal standards restrain class bias. Read this way, Torah is “one long protest” against empire’s cruelty and idolatry of power.

A polemic against empire

“The Torah is essentially one long protest—a polemic—directed at the powerful empires of its time.”

Mitzvot as civic technologies

Treat commandments as habit‑forming civic tech. Sabbath isn’t private austerity; it’s architecture for equitable rest. Honest weights and measures fight market exploitation. Leviticus’ gleaning laws institutionalize dignity for the poor. Even esoteric rules signal that no life is disposable. Do them together, and a culture emerges that resists the empire within you—the temptation to treat others as means.

Chosenness without superiority

Hurwitz reframes “chosenness”: it’s a burden of responsibility, not a claim of moral rank. The role is to steward a difficult, public project and become a signpost that another kind of society is possible. This dissolves the caricature of Jewish arrogance and sidesteps universalist pressures insisting everyone adopt Jewish forms. You can honor particular obligations without denying others’ paths (compare Michael Walzer’s “thin” vs. “thick” moralities).

Practicing a public ethic

This covenantal lens makes Jewish life intensely public. Kashrut disciplines attention and care, Shabbat resists endless productivity, and the calendar binds you to a people with shared memory. If you’ve felt “rituals are arbitrary,” this key changes the lock: mitzvot form citizens who can pursue justice in ways that stick. Understanding follows.

(Note: If you’ve wrestled with troubling biblical portrayals of God, Hurwitz suggests reading with historical context and rabbinic debate in view. The Rabbis often limit, reinterpret, or redirect literal texts toward humane outcomes.)

After the Temple’s destruction in 70 CE, Judaism could have died. Instead, the Rabbis engineered a civilizational pivot: from sacrifice to study, from priestly centralization to distributed communities sustained by law, prayer, and learning. Hurwitz shows how the Mishnah (c. 200 CE), Gemara, and centuries of commentary made Judaism portable and adaptive—a technology for survival in exile.

Oral Torah and respectful argument

The Talmud records disagreements as part of revelation, not threats to it. “Argument for the sake of heaven” trains you to hold competing values and test edge cases. The visual page—with Rashi and Tosafot encircling the core text—embodies a live conversation across centuries. Hurwitz emphasizes that Jewish intellectual rigor is sacred labor, not a secular detour.

Chavruta and the art of being sharpened

Chavruta study pairs you with someone who challenges you. The Talmud’s story of Rabbi Yoḥanan mourning his partner Reish Lakish captures this: a compliant study‑mate is useless compared to one who pushes you. You learn to love critique because it makes the truth clearer and your judgments kinder. This is how a minority people built resilience: not by unanimity but by disciplined disagreement.

Textline: the portable homeland

Amos Oz and Fania Oz‑Salzberger call Jews a “text‑carrying” people. Hurwitz adopts this: Torah, Talmud, siddur—recited, disputed, sung—became the DNA of dispersed communities. Literacy rates, multilingual Jewish cultures (Yiddish, Ladino, Judeo‑Arabic), and yeshivot emerged from that commitment. Entering Judaism means entering that conversation. It’s how a Moroccan Jew and a Lithuanian Jew could recognize each other’s prayers and values across continents.

Halacha as compassionate particularism

Halacha’s “but‑if” method looks fussy, but it trains moral attention. Don’t ask a price if you won’t buy; don’t “accidentally” humiliate a debtor; anticipate the clerk’s time and the neighbor’s dignity. The Talmud demands visiting the sick, with hyperbole that failing to do so “sheds blood,” and insists presence matters: sit beside, not over. A beloved teaching says a sufferer is like a prisoner; only another can “raise” them out. Hurwitz’s chaplaincy work makes this concrete: sometimes the mitzvah is to stay, hold a hand, or—like ZAKA volunteers—gather the blood of the murdered so no fragment of a person is abandoned.

Peoplehood and the ethic of proximity

Peoplehood isn’t chauvinism; it’s concentric obligation—family, community, then world. The midrash of the two‑headed man (Solomon proves both heads feel one body’s pain) mirrors Jewish fate: we’re responsible for each other. Hurwitz’s scenes—West Point cadets touching a mezuzah, a Shabbat table opening to gentile colleagues—show how practiced, “uncool” difference commands respect. The Ezra moment—public Torah reading after exile—becomes a model for now: mass adult learning to rebuild a knowledgeable people.

(Note: This stands against performative identity. Hurwitz urges becoming “knowing Jews,” not as nostalgia but as strategy for dignity in hostile times.)

Hurwitz maps a lineage: theological anti‑Judaism becomes racial antisemitism, then rebrands as anti‑Zionism. Early Church polemics caricatured Jews as blind and stubborn; Augustine’s “witness” doctrine tolerated Jews as living proof of scripture under divine punishment. Medieval Europe added blood libel and expulsions. Enlightenment thinkers recoded difference into race; modern nationalists doubted Jewish loyalty. The three tropes—power, depravity, conspiracy—persist throughout.

The propaganda turn

The 20th century industrialized the myths. Nazis broadcast Arabic‑language radio full of conspiracies (Jeffrey Herf documents this). After 1967, the Soviet Union orchestrated anti‑Zionist campaigns (Izabella Tabarovsky shows) equating Zionism with Nazism, colonialism, and racism, culminating in the 1975 UN “Zionism = racism” resolution (revoked 1991). Translations of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion saturated the region; later, state TV dramatized them. These narratives fused older Jew‑hate to anti‑Israel politics.

Political vs. social antisemitism

Bernard Harrison and Haviv Rettig Gur help you distinguish bias from ideology. Social antisemitism sneers at Jews as individuals. Political antisemitism claims “the Jews” are a hidden world‑controlling force thwarting justice—today rephrased as “Zionism drives global oppression.” Hamas’s 1988 charter reads like a trope anthology (“With their money they took control of the world media”); Osama bin Laden’s 2002 letter recycles the media/finance myth. These aren’t policy critiques; they’re grand conspiracies.

America’s relative exception—and its limits

The U.S. long had “natural competitors” to antisemitism—religious pluralism, constitutionalism, diverse immigrant streams. Yet Henry Ford, Father Coughlin, quotas, and immigration laws show deep ambivalence. In recent years, Hurwitz notes, protections feel thinner. On campuses post–October 7, some activists demand Jewish students renounce Zionism to belong. Job‑market studies point to bias against Jewish/Israeli affiliations. If impacts matter for other prejudices, they must matter here too.

A practical test

Critique of Israeli policy is legitimate; arguments to strip Jews of political self‑determination are political antisemitism in effect, whatever the intent.

How to use this history

Treat “Zionism = racism” and “Israel is Nazi” slogans as engineered narratives with deep roots, not spontaneous insights. You can then respond on two levels: factual correction and story‑level diagnosis. Ask whether a claim relies on the power‑depravity‑conspiracy triad. If yes, you’re likely seeing rebranded antisemitism. This approach helps you defend pluralistic spaces without suppressing legitimate debate.

(Note: Hurwitz stresses most Muslims and most left intellectuals reject extremist myths; tracing lineages targets ideas, not people.)

Hurwitz resists slogans and invites you into contingency. Zionism rose from fires: pogroms, Dreyfus, Nazi annihilation. Many early arrivals bought land (often from absentee landlords), sometimes displacing tenant farmers—real harm—and some leaders wrote paternalistically about Arabs. Yet “refugees” often better describes Jewish immigrants than “colonizers,” given the relentless persecution they escaped. British imperial maneuvers (Balfour, Mandate white papers) further tangled politics.

War, independence, and catastrophe

The 1947 UN partition offered two states. Palestinian leadership rejected it; civil war followed; neighboring Arab armies invaded in 1948. The Haganah, Irgun, and Lehi fought—sometimes at odds—and the King David Hotel bombing signaled escalations. Israel’s survival required victory; the price included the Nakba: 700,000+ Palestinians fled or were expelled, becoming refugees. In parallel, about 850,000 Jews fled or were expelled from Arab lands—650,000 absorbed by Israel. Two traumas unfolded at once.

The UNRWA/UNHCR asymmetry

Why does the Palestinian refugee count grow across generations when other mid‑century displacements closed? Institutional design. UNRWA preserves refugee status for descendants and doesn’t end it on naturalization; UNHCR typically resolves it via resettlement or citizenship. Thus today ~5.9 million Palestinians are registered refugees, while analogous crises (e.g., Germans expelled post‑WWII, India/Pakistan Partition) did not multiply legally. This keeps 1948 perpetually open as a political question and sustains a maximalist “right of return” that would erase Israel demographically.

Facing the moral tangle

Hurwitz holds two truths: Jews needed refuge and sovereignty after centuries of terror; Palestinians suffered dispossession and deserve dignity and political horizon. Denying either truth dehumanizes someone. She also critiques Israeli policies that worsen prospects—settlement expansion (about 500,000 settlers), inadequate prosecution of settler violence, and destructive home demolitions—alongside the devastating priorities of Hamas, which poured hundreds of millions into a tunnel metropolis (350–450 miles, thousands of shafts) beneath civilian life, using human shields.

Against abolitionist fantasies

Historian Dina Porat notes: abolishing a long‑recognized state would require a “colossal” justification; there’s no modern precedent for the abolition anti‑Zionists demand.

Practical peace work

Hurwitz urges redirecting energy from erasing a polity to improving lives: curb settlements and prosecute violence; expand Palestinian civil freedoms and economic mobility; build security‑first pathways to sovereignty; invest in institutions that can govern without terror. The moral north star is reducing human suffering now while widening the future’s possibilities. Abolitionist rhetoric empowers maximalists who thrive on endless conflict; practical reforms empower neighbors who want to live.

(Note: On campus, the demand that Jews “renounce Zionism” to belong reprises the Hanukkah‑style conversion pressure. A peace ethic rooted in peoplehood rejects both erasure and triumphalism.)