we will get going a couple minutes early. good evening. i am a co-owner of politics and prose and on behalf of the entire staff welcome. thank you so much for coming. we have a great program for you this evening. it features not only steve wiseman who has written the best book to come out and years about the jewish experience in the foundations of judaism but also another veteran journalist. they are going to be in conversation with steve. steve's book the chosen wars tells the story essentially of how judaism and america was transformed from old world religious traditions into the modern-day reform conservative. the history was nothing if not fractious. for those of you still collecting sat words. as early as page two writes about the tendency of the jews. you can all look it up. anyway, what makes that chosen words are at least two things. it's how steve connects the religious transformation. to the history of america itself. as a distinctly american phenomenon the second steve's ability to tell a story. drawing on the skills honed as as many years as a journalist and steve with his book and a lot of illuminating antidotes. as many of you no doubt know. steve was a longtime staff member of the new york times where he served as a foreign correspondent. covered the white house and set it on the editorial board. he is also written several books. he has been an executive with the peterson institute. the creator and guiding hand of the popular online forum on faith and has become very custom over the past decade since the form was launched to exploring matters of religion. and i'm sure she and steve are in for a very lively discussion this evening. sally herself was here. please welcome both steve and sally. >> i have to say i was talking to my friend richard cohen. and i was telling them i was going to interview steve today. and what should i ask them. he said the first thing you should say is to say steve i never knew you were jewish. i would also like to say that my husband loved steve wiseman. he was one of his favorite people in the world. and then was steve walked in the room he would run over and put his arms around steve and kiss him on the cheek. my son is an amateur genealogist. he came running and he said mom, mom he's been doing the family history, he said were jewish. i traced our heritage back to a man name joshua larkey. he was queen isabella. so i was thrilled of course and i tell steve that i was jewish. and i had traced my heritage. it is so interesting and tells you a part of american history. christopher columbus was jewish. who knew. they tried to get away from the imposition. and also abraham lincoln may have been jewish. it was filled with 70 vivid stories. really funny and amusing. and a lot of fistfights. i would like to ask you steve because you and i had been asked about this. it's a totally secular. you didn't take didn't take any part in religion. this is observing. what fascinated me as you have always written about economics and politics and all that. why would you want to write a book about judaism. thank you all. and for the lovely introduction. and thanks to sally. at least 16 years has done what you are never supposed to do. why did i write this book. with my first love of covering elections. the first reason i wanted to write this book was that i think it is so important. and is so filled with conflict. that there was room to write a narrative history that would read like a great political story. that's what i tried to do in this book. i searched out episodes that were revealing and full of conflict and once when i found out then in 1850s. with the congregation and albany. who later went on to be the founder of reformed judaism. or one of the founders. i got into actually a fist fight fistfight with the president of his congregation on the pulpit. it have to be cleared by the albany police. i thought to myself, what could that have been about. it turns out that it was about practices keeping kosher people violating the sabbath. but the biggest issue was also doing circumcision. that was a common practice in those days. the fact that the biggest dispute of source was over whether or not there was going to be a personal jesus like messiah all of these fascinating issues. now the second reason i wrote this book. as we all know it's an an era of conflict of all religions that including and especially judaism. we've reached a point. when they don't recognize or even jews. of course they are over practices and religious liberty. all of these things and of course israel and i wanted to write a book that would tell readers. that the history of judaism is the history of conflict within judaism going all the way back to ancient times the sadducees in the pharisees. but i focus on the conflicts in the 19th century that led to the breaking apart of judaism. >> it's like fission. breaking apart. and so the third reason that i want to write this book is really personal and that gets to the premise of your question which is that i did grow up in a secular household and someone once joked when i moved to new york. you must have been bar mitzvahed in line. it wasn't until i was a young adult that my life kind of changed by my best childhood friend. it's how i was in all of these concepts of traditional jewish law but the more i learned about i was not going to become an orthodox like my dear friend and then i then wanted to learn about the pioneer in the beginning in the enlightenment of europe. but then full flower in the united states who was brave to try to redefine judaism and bring it into the basic concepts and believe that you could be a without being strictly observant and i and dress and keeping kosher and keeping the sabbath it was a personal journey for me to find in american history the people who argued over this. and i came to admire them tremendously including the traditionalists who fought to retain the traditions. i learned in your book that the first ones that came to this country were 23 jews who came to 1664. i don't think they have any idea that it was that early and that there were so few and it seems to me that starting with the jews that came first and then later on there were like 2 million germans and jews that came from europe. there was the distinction between the different types of jews. the clashes that they have. what struck me was how people wrestled with the difference between the moral teaching of judaism and what's in the bible and following the actual literal words of the bible. it seemed that it broke into three groups. talk to me a little about how that came. and how that came there. how did they divide up between the ashkenazi's. in the set of reform and conservatives and orthodox. the first one that you said it actually came from brazil from the coasting town. it was taken over by the dutch in the large jewish community in holland who then established themselves in brazil but than within the portuguese sees that community and they were still persecuting jews so they escaped. and possibly accidental anti- u.s. harbor. and they founded the congregation in israel which still exists on central park west. the synagogue. and it is orthodox if you go there today and the high holy days. you will see that they where top hat and tails in tennis shoes. and so that was the first division. there were many different ethnic divisions among jews. and they formed their own society. but i think the answer to your question as an has to do with this aspect of american judaism. because it has to do with trends that were underway starting at around 1800. and really going back to the 18h century enlightenment figures who were the founders of the united states that it just became increasingly difficult for any adherents of any religion to take the bible literally once the discoveries of science, geology, paleontology cosmology and it turned the history of the universe upside down. you could no longer believe that it was 6,000 years old. so how to come to terms with being religious was a struggle that was occurring among protestants but also jews in the 19th century. the trends and movement. and they could not help but be influenced by these debates. they were influenced also by the new science of literature very criticism of the bible. it really did not start until around 1800. it started in germany when people actually discovered all my gosh the torah how could it had been the word of god handed down to moses if their death is depicted in the torah. people begin to see the logical inconsistencies by reading the scripture. they have to find the moral precept that underlie these stories. one of the great lines in the late great chris hitchens. they are bronze age folktale. they are compelling. we still want to read them. we want to invoke them. the god of those tales are being imperfect. the contradictions and i think the jews of the 19th century embraced that idea of judaism and actually found strength in those in that idea. with the reform movement and it didn't start out as a reform movement. it started out as it americanizing movement. they wanted to form an american judaism they wanted to bring americans out here. and not just a superficial the superficial ones of making the services like church services having men and women sit together. and change the whole relationship between families and their congregations. they also wanted to democratize judaism. they wanted the congregations to decide what their practices were can be. this, baited in an establishment of the reform movement in the late 19th century but within that year. they carried out kind of a counter reaction. it established a conservative seminary. in the late 1880s. and out of that division. more in the 20th century how much of a moving into where away from orthodox or the conservative judaism. how much of it have to do with people wanting people to be assimilated. you talk about wanting to americanize judaism. were talking about them being purse laid -- assimilated in their personal lives. i think that was a major factor. they wanted to be americans as well as jews. the phrase i had used but i borrowed it from other scholars. they wanted to be part of america. they also wanted to be apart from america a bit. so that was the struggle for that 19th century. a lot of it as you suggest was practical. there is a hold generation for peddlers. they could not observe the dietary rules. a lot of it was practical. the embrace of america and their new identity as americans. which was why isaac mayer really wanted to create an american judaism as the forerunner for what later became reformed judaism. this is south carolina where they put i would never had known that that was a big deal to put that in there. and the other thing. they wanted to make sure that people understood. they wanted to go back and restore the temple. their place of worship in this country to be the temple. so that became a word they used more and more often. what was the significance of that. the organ was actually started as a matter of controversy. when i was doing research on this i'm just saying i have a blast reading the arguments about the origin in europe. it then became replicated in south carolina. but the arguments against that is first. it's like a machine. the traditional judaism held that violated the sabbath. with the prayer mission against to work. and other rabbis would point out. and yet, there are many passages in the bible that say that they created beautiful music. they engaged in these technical arguments. i have to say i just loved exploring them. they were so interesting to me. in charleston was a big training center. there was a huge fire in charleston in the 1830s that burned down when they rebuild it. the set off an absolute fear. there were divisions that people broke away. they tried to reach an accommodation. but eventually no surprise you probably can guess. and went to court they have each side hired the incredibly prominent lawyers. it was featured in my first book because he later became one of the worst jobs in america. it went all the way up to the highest court. and the reason that that decision was important was not because he ruled in favor of the organ faction but because he ruled that the state has no stake or say in how religions are going to organize themselves. and this was a powerful statement for religious freedom in the united states. when they lived in europe. were accustomed to the states where they lived for to the rabbis to set the rules for the jewish community. the democratic processes of each congregation in the state was not went to enforce the root of the rabbis. what state in the world today the first of the rabbis to enforce civil laws. there are a couple things. i did not exist. once israel was founded became a huge issue and today american jews are really divided over their views about israel you pointed out in your book that something like 70 something percent of israelis and much fewer people in this country they are blue states. and so the interesting thing to me as i'm going to divert a little bit, we talk about the morality of judaism and how it went from being following the bible to doing good works the idea is repairing the world i always thought that that was an ancient concept repairing the world. as it turns out it's not. it's a fairly recent concept. in sort of social justice. this is obviously a conflict that has been going on for a long time. but really reaching a peak when you start talking about israel and the response to the palestinians. .. .. to look at us and you repair the universe and restore it to a primordial state which only, it does mean repairing the world but only in the last 50 or 60 years has that term been adopted by the reform movement to refer to because of social justice. when i wrote that, i called it in the alleged listen, maybe that is not -- an ancient term to apply to modern ethical precepts. jews since the fall of the temple, twice in antiquity to the babylonians and the romans, and essential ingredient of judaism to pray for a restoration of the temple and actually if you see the precepts, not only to pray for the restoration of the temple but to pray for the restoration of the house, david and the return of animal sacrifice which is what judaism was before the fall of the temple. the religion of animal sacrifice. >> you are saying some orthodox jew -- >> orthodox jews still pray for a messiah to deliver the jews back on the day of days. if you go into communities and come up to you in brooklyn, are you jewish and they grab you and so on and pray, praying will hasten the day you bring the jews back to israel. we are going to discard and take them down from the walls of the synagogue. one more little footnote i found fascinating is there was a counter reaction to this discarding of this idea. this was interesting, the 1870s, a group of traditionalists, and so upset about the decline of interest in restoring the temple, they took this obscure, or secondary holiday called hanukkah, making it more central to judaism and a big hanukkah celebration and maybe they once to have a holiday as we now know that competes with christmas and all that, but they wanted to emphasize, wanted to bring back the emphasis, the story of whatever it was, 160 or so bc. for a period restoring the festival of lights, lasting eight days, but hanukkah was a means to bring back the idea that jews, the centrality of the temple essential to judaism. >> i want to talk about anti-semitism. they fought in the civil war, 2 or 3000 from the north, but even when they fought, there was a lot of anti-semitism even towards the people who fought for the cars. you talk about how there was a sense of being the chosen people and how they -- that was an issue for a lot of people who are not jewish, that the jews were saying we are the chosen people, in darwinian terms, survival of the fittest and we are the fittest and here we are and that contributed to anti-semitism but anti-semitism still remains today in this country but there were periods it wasn't so strong and it is cyclical. how do you explain anti-semitism? >> let me ask you any easier question. because the jews in this country, particularly reform jews did so much to americanize and assimilate yet there still remains this sense of anti-semitism. >> it never dies as we now discovered, i see jonathan back there, my namesake, it never really dies. the civil war was a real watershed for american jews because it really integrated them into american society in a dramatic way. they did fight on both sides and historians say, just an example of jews wedding -- wanting to sit in, jews in the confederacy where as fiercely loyal to the confederacy is anyone there. a trick question covering the state department, who was the first jewish secretary of state, i say henry kissinger. i say benjamin was the secretary of state of the confederacy and still there was anti-semitism on the north. general grant, general order 11 ordered the evacuation, eviction of jews from occupied territories, black-market tears in league with his father, and judah benjamin was the focus of anti-semitism polemics on both sides, confederates blames them for the failure of the war and the north saw him as the evil paymaster of the confederacy and benjamin and her distinguished career after being in the competitor is the. -- confederacy. he had a distinguished career as a jurist, he is buried in paris. >> you said something like 41/2 million jews in this country today. i don't see how that is possible since everyone i know is jewish. i found that stemming -- stunning. i always compared jews with mormons because the mormons are missionaries. they go out and proselytize and convert people in jews don't do that. why is that? >> jews have a very mixed view about conversions even today. jews don't convert and are very suspicious about anyone who wants to convert. there was a big debate in the 19th century whether or not in order to convert you had to have somebody even an adult male who wanted to convert had to be circumcised. david einhorn, who is liberal on almost every one of his attitudes was one of those who argued this would be a disincentive. i don't think he used that word. a ritual circumcision. jews don't seek converts except for those people in williamsburg who grab you if you ever go there and try to put on, fill in and all that and they do that because if they can convert secular jews into religious jews that will hasten that. >> we will open it to the floor. and what was your main take away from writing this book? were you surprised or shocked to confirm things you knew. what did you come away with. >> the biggest discovery was i slapped my head one day and said judaism is an american religion and my dear friend erica brown, and and and and the biggest, emotionally personal, just a sense of admiration and touched by the people we got to know in your book. on all sides. a bombastic kind of frumpy in character. and his daughter -- the numbers i worked for in the new york times, the central character of this book is much as they are, i became very touched by isaac reefer, who was his traditionalist critic and sometimes how i, and foremost, a brilliant exponent of traditional judaism and i found his life story incredibly moving. and it went off the deep end and became an atheist even though he was expected to be a rabbi at temple emanuel and succeed his father. i was talking about the journey the characters in the book and the women, and the sunday school in america, i was moved learning about these people. >> i didn't get into the role of women, conservative and reform judaism, it is not really an issue as it is with the orthodox. i wanted to ask you, this is my final question about your own personal life because you were not particularly observant growing up. when you got married and steve was married to elizabeth miller, arranging flowers for the national cathedral. you wanted your children to be raised jewish. why was that? why did it matter to you? >> i can't articulate why it mattered to me. i have to say my wife understood why it mattered to me more than i understood and when we got married, there was never any question that she was going to convert or anything like that. i love her tradition and i learned a lot from her family and her teaching but she said to me i want to raise our children is jewish but you have to do it. she went to hebrew school, and some of you know, but i felt obligated to set an example. i don't want to say my parents were anything less than wonderful. i felt i needed to set an example for my children and study my religion as the best way to inculcate with them the significance of it. it was out of that that this book grew. it -- my daughter referred to it as dad's do book -- do book but i love her for it. >> you go to yom kippur. i was lucky to be your guest for many years in a row. do you think you have become more jewish? a lot of people do go back to their original religion. i can't say my jewish identity means more to me than it ever did. >> and you are -- judaism means more to you than the book. >> i do. you can see that. [applause] >> reporter: why don't you take this? >> i think you said south carolina was the place most jewish people resided, how is that possible? they didn't convert so how is it possible all those people went south and not some other section of the us? >> good question. tradition of jews in europe, to gather imports and that is why there is a large jewish community in amsterdam. charleston is the major trading post on the east coast in the early 19th century. it was very well located. they traded all over the atlantic up and down the coast, all kinds of exotic food and cotton. jews participated in that trading and that is one of the reasons that drew them to south carolina. to charleston. >> the german jews, do you talk about the russian jews who came in 1890-1910, four of my grandparents came from there but their history is different. in the 30s they tried, some of them tried not to be jewish at all. there was a lot of anti-semitism and there was world war ii, and the holocaust, and that changed a lot of -- >> the simple answer to your question, >> just as jews from russia and eastern europe arrived. the thesis of the book, even though forces in the 20th century that you mentioned did shape jewish identity for sure and jewish political views and jewish attitudes towards zionism, what i wanted to do -- contrary to conventional wisdom. the 19th century was where the foundations of american judaism were laid and the 2 million or so jews that came starting in the 1880s, they inherited that foundation, they revived it and the foundation that continues to characterize american judaism today. i will be back in ten years. >> with all the division conflicts, back to the time of ezra from that time on. the disagreement on the talmud literal tell mode and disagreements about the temple and disagreements that you mentioned, would you say there is a central kernel of unanimity among all the divisions, the religious divisions and the national divisions? would you identify one thing at the heart of it all that brings everybody together? >> yes. i think belief in god, although, the central belief of all jews. i was about to say, jews who don't believe in god were drawn to that aspect, walter isaacson, in his biography of albert einstein, described albert einstein as an atheist who believed in god because einstein felt, unification, to understand what he kept searching for. and literally, jews say i can't believe in god and has sally writes in her book, never liked the term seeking or searching. i think searching for that meaning and for that ideal is what unifies judaism. >> quite a few colleagues would disagree about belief in that sense. what about the concept of shabbat? is that not dating back to as russia, the one thing that all observant jews would affirm? >> it is more honored in the breach as they say. >> the almost answer to my question, you addressed it when you talked about geographic loyalty of jews in the south and in the north during the time of the civil war but you didn't directly say anything about the issue of slavery among jews. any difference, were jews any different in the fraction that were concerned about the morality of slavery versus those who saw it as an economic necessity. how did that play out among conservative jews versus not so conservative jews? >> did everyone here the question about slavery? i tried to wrestle with that in the book. jews were as conflicted about the morality of slavery as many people were at the time. so-called liberal or reform jews didn't object to slavery that much. a lot of jews in new york were dependent on the cotton trade and new york was a confederate sympathizer of the confederacy, the mayor of new york during the civil war wanted to secede from the union and join the confederacy. the most -- the interesting thing about your question to me that i try to deal with in the book, the debate about slavery, there was one of the most respected rabbis in america, who was from new york. gave a whole sermon on the eve of the civil war justifying slavery and saying anyone who thinks jews have to be against slavery is crazy. there is lots of slavery in the bible. abraham had slaves. a lot of the talmud discusses how you should treat your slaves. obviously, he said, slavery is fine if you're jewish. his main antagonist, david einhorn, one of the founders of the reform movement gave his own sermon rebutting that and not only, obviously you would site exodus and the story of jews being slaves themselves but what this demonstrated to me, it was an argument about text and jews have always argued about text. what do the words mean and the fact that jews during the civil war could argue about text, and so many -- in the bible, justification for slavery, discredited the text driven part of judaism in the eyes of many jews. enough with the text. slavery is immoral and that is that. all the rest is common sense. >> i meant to ask you about slavery but you had some other explanations i felt were interesting. there were very few jewish slaveowners because most didn't have plantations. most were in reconcile endeavors and also those who did have slaves, a lot of them did it because they didn't want to seem like the other. they didn't want to be not with -- didn't want to go up against their southern compatriots by turning against slavery because they wanted to be part of that. also a lot of the jews who did have slaves treated them well. >> most of the texts that your kids get in sunday school or whatever, the jews were slave owners but treated them well and i don't know there is any evidence that that is true or not true but it is an article of jewish teachings. just as there has been revisionism, civil war revisionism, starting in the 1960s, when america itself came to terms with the history of slavery in reconstruction, so jews in the last few decades, the last 50 years looked more surgically at the jewish role in the trade, in slaveowning and came to terms with the fact that jews did own slaves and engage in the slave trade, not disproportionately as some anti-semitic writings suggest. but they did. judah benjamin like he said, when he was up and coming in louisiana as a politician, it is possible he acquired slaves, did it for his wife, wanted to be a big man in louisiana and that was part of it. >> i have a question. you end the book on an optimistic note saying given the issues jews today are facing ranging from assimilation to israel, should take heart in the way they dealt with challenges in the 18th and 19th century, not only survived but flourished. would you elaborate on that? what are the lessons that should be drawn from the earlier experience to apply today? >> just like the era we are going through now in the era of donald trump you have people like john beauchamp who is trying to tell us don't you lose your call, we have been through this before, we have been too bad times before, we come out usually in a better place. i just chose to echo that hopeful tone in my conclusion in my book which you are kind enough to mention. i can't prove that is going to be true but the more we study the past and the conflict of the past the more we can appreciate, put into context our conflict today. these conflicts were big big big. the mcabees and helen eisner's, that was huge. you actually can go to israel today and here orthodox jews refer contemptuously, it still echoes through jewish history so i think, i just think understanding our past makes is prepared to cope with the present. >> what i want to say. so this is exactly what i want to say, very characteristic about judaism in general. hanukkah was actually a civil war between our nights and traditional jews. for example, the few against the many. it is not true. because they were out of places. it was easier for the mcabees to fight. the country -- it was not a holiday. it was getting soldiers and over the years it became a holiday. all kind of things, a small legend, the talmud. >> you make a good point and i think you could write a whole book about hanukkah. the point, the effect of greek culture on judaism in antiquity is huge. both good and from the tradition that it is bad. the jews who lived in the holy land where alexander the great's empire when it broke up and the solutions took over, they had strayed from jewish problems. they were eating pork, they had statues of god. they wrestled naked in the gymnasium. maybe there was a little bit of homosexuality going on. you can see mcabees as the taliban of their day. they were horrified by this and they conquered the area and retained control, last time until israel that the jews were in charge. i gather from the histories that i read that jewish behavior didn't change much even after the mcabees took over. >> the influence, it doesn't -- there are 3000 greek words. >> thank you for that. jonathan weisman. >> a contemporary question here, the notion of american judaism has its own religion, the israeli government is defying judaism as an orthodox religion and spent a lot of effort to distance their conception of judaism with reform judaism and conservative judaism in the united states. do you think, can american judaism survive as its own religion if his real -- israel is intent on distancing itself, israel might not love us so much. >> we are part of the deck of a great schism. don't know how it is going to turn out. these two largest jewish communities in the world are drifting apart. there are secularized jews, the joke in israel, orthodox shawl is the one you don't go to. i am not an expert on the situation of judaism itself. we are as an inflection point, historians are going to see that they are becoming two different religions. >> thank you, steve. >> this your booktv marks the 20th year bringing the

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