Civics Education for American Jews: Conversation with Mark Gottlieb and Rivka Press Schwartz

Mar 27

Aaron Dorfman

Aaron Dorfman is Founder and Executive Director of A More Perfect Union: The Jewish Partnership for Democracy.

Mark Gottlieb is Chief Education Officer at Tikvah and Interim Head of School at the Dr. Miriam and Sheldon G. Adelson School.

Rivka Press Schwartz is Associate Principal at SAR High School, Co-Director of its affiliated Machon Siach research arm, and a fellow of the Kogod Research Center at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America.

Over the 2024-2025 academic year, the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America and A More Perfect Union: The Jewish Partnership for Democracy have jointly convened a research seminar on American Jewish Civics Education. This group, composed of educators, historians, philosophers, rabbis, and others, has been thinking together about how Jewish communities should address political polarization and extremism, limited trust in government, a rise in political violence, and eroding commitments to pluralism, civil discourse, viewpoint diversity, and liberal democracy.

These are issues of wide concern for American Jews and others, and so, for this issue’s Conversation piece, we invited three members of the seminar to discuss American civics through the lens of education: Aaron Dorfman serves as convener, while Rabbi Mark Gottlieb and Dr. Rivka Press Schwartz are discussants. As you’ll see, they agree on a few points: all Americans need to know more about civics, and American Jews have particular reasons to be invested in protecting American democracy. But in their pursuit of what we might call the “essential virtues of American Jewish citizenship,” they are not afraid to disagree. Principled disagreement is itself both a civic and a Jewish virtue, and their arguments illuminate different aspects of patriotism, American history, and more, while also modeling how to have a conversation that is productive, respectful, and spicy.

Aaron Dorfman: Rivka, Mark, I am eager to get your thoughts about American Jewish civics in the context of the broader political moment in which we find ourselves. But to get us started, I want to invite each of you to briefly introduce yourselves and tell me something about what brings you to this conversation about civic learning.

Rivka Press Schwartz: I'm a teacher of American politics and government, and American history. I think and care a lot about American politics, about where we are as a body politic, and about where American Jews, in particular American Orthodox Jews, are in that body politic as participants and as citizens.

Mark Gottlieb: Like Rivka, I'm a high school educator by training and experience. The fact that my father served in the United States Navy in World War II tells you a little bit about my own predisposition towards trying to think deeply about American patriotism. I vividly remember the 200th celebration of America's birth when I was just seven years old, in 1976. We're about to celebrate another big milestone in American history in 2026. I'd like to think that my thought has deepened and become more subtle and more complex in the intervening years, but I still have a strong, if not strident, love of our country.

Aaron: One of the things that drives our American Jewish Civics seminar is the belief that American Jews need more civic learning and better civics education. I'm curious what you think animates that need.

Rivka: I think all Americans need more civics. I mean “civics” in a very particular sense, not in the understanding of how many branches of government we have and what they do, but in the sense of what we might call “civic virtues.” What are our responsibilities as participants in a democratic republic? What do we have to do to make this thing work?

Many of us have lapsed into a transactional relationship with our government, and we think of it only as providing me with certain services. If I'm a libertarian, I think I should pay fewer taxes and get fewer services. If I believe in a broad social safety net, I think I should pay more taxes and get more services. It's a kind of a fee-for-service model.

But I am thinking about what it means to secure the gift of democracy that we have been given, to keep it healthy, and to pass it on, asks more of us. The fact that we as a Jewish community haven't done a great job of educating towards this idea is a symptom of a broader American failing. But I do think that the Jewish community’s particular needs have come to obscure our vision of the broader American project and what it means to see ourselves first as custodians of this democratic republic.

The message that I'm trying to share is that if we don't worry about maintaining the health of the American democratic republic, it won't be here to stand in support of Israel or whatever else it is that you think it needs to do for the Jewish community.

As an educator in the Jewish community, I have the opportunity to convey this message and to talk about what it means to keep the enterprise going. It's not a message that I think only the Jewish community needs, but the Jewish community is the place where I am able to do some of the work.

Mark: Rivka, I think you are absolutely right that the Jewish community suffers from a hyper transactionalism in relating to our nation and state—which are two different things, of course. In our highly politicized world, we think more about the state and less about the nation. Maybe that's because the very notion of a nation is itself extremely complicated in our pluralistic world. It also has something to do with Israel and the idea that our first affections, our first loyalties, must go there. The old canard of dual loyalty still plagues us, and we're fearful about possessing truly deep loves and affections for two different homelands and two different countries. But I think the solution lies in the heart, not only in the head.

Civic education in a purely cognitive or intellectual sense is not enough. We have to cultivate certain affections, I would say, even before civic virtues. I think the key to educating towards patriotism or towards a love of country is through the emotions. Not emotions that can go off the rails and foster chauvinism and jingoism, but emotions that are grounded in gratitude and love. The country should be an extension of family and clan. These are feelings that most Americans in earlier eras shared, even peoples of persuasions or collectivities that weren't always included in the American narrative in the way that they ought to have been.

There's no doubt that America, in my mind, has been the greatest boon for Jews in an exilic life, in the diaspora world that we know. But part of that boon, I think, has moved people away from a deep understanding of the nation and a deep affective relationship with the country. America has given birth to us, it is our homeland, the place where, in Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch's words, our cribs were rocked when we were babes.

From the very earliest stages of our life, we should have a sense of gratitude and deep appreciation for what this country or nation or state has done for us. I think that our affluent culture blurs this sense of bounty. We take for granted that we have it, and citizenship is no longer seen either as a gift or as something that we have to work hard to acquire. And I think that certainly compromises the ability of some Jews—and other Americans—to feel more fully indebted to or loyal to the country that we belong to.

Rivka: Mark, you and I are using a lot of similar words, and I think that in some places we probably mean similar things by them, and in other places we mean pretty different things. In terms of love of country, I agree, it would be devastating to me as an educator if I left kids feeling like there was nothing here worth investing in, if I left them feeling it's all hopeless, we're all screwed, don't bother trying. And so, I agree to some extent about the need for the affective component of education. But I think that this sort of affective education has to include a lot of clear-eyed recognition of shortcomings that existed at every point in American history.

The kind of love of country that I would like to cultivate is the love of country that James Baldwin described when he wrote, “I love America more than any other country in the world. And exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” That my love is manifest, as Martin Luther King, Jr., said at the March on Washington, in demanding that the nation “live out the true meaning of its creed,” that it live up to its founding documents, that it live up to its founding statements. That means teaching kids to be thoughtful and critical in a way that is moving the country towards something better, demanding something better, but not critical in a way that means turning one’s back on the country and giving up.

Mark: Rivka, it sounds like we share a foundational commitment to the affective love for, or the affective attachment to, one’s country. I also agree with you that a love that has no critical capacity, a love that has no reflective component or that does not allow for real critique, will eventually become a form of idolatry. I think the critique that you're invoking in terms of Baldwin is right. But my question, really my conviction, is that it really matters when, in terms of student development, we introduce that critical element into the discourse. We want to produce young men and women who have all of the sophistication, intellectually, to identify the critique, to identify the shortcomings of our country, of our people. But we don’t want them to lack or to lose an emotional connection.

I fear that an education that doesn’t developmentally attend to students’ ages and students’ levels of sophistication, will actually undermine the root of their connection to the country and never allow for the love that is necessary for the republican virtues you want to defend.

If you're not able to root love for country in a young person using the symbols, myths, songs, poetry, and history of the country, if you only treat the country as the object of reflective critique, students will see it no differently than any other country. And this type of educational approach to civic virtue will not be enough when life and limb are at stake.

Aaron: We’ve hit on a place of some useful and healthy tension, which I want to probe a little bit. My wife shared a powerful observation with me a while ago that feels really salient here. She noted that people have a really hard time loving things that are broken, and I think that insight can help us understand some of the challenges confronting both the Left and the Right in this country. This is an over-generalization, but I think one can say that the American Left sees so much of what’s broken about America that it has a hard time loving this country. On the other hand, people on the Right—and again this is a broad generalization—their love for America makes it hard for them to see the ways it is broken.

You have both acknowledged the importance of patriotism and commitment to the project of America, and you have both also acknowledged the importance and necessity of healthy critique. How do you strike that balance in the classroom with your students? How do you thread the needle of cultivating a critical patriotism, a love tempered by truth seeing?

Mark: The American historian Wilfred McClay recently published a book called, Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story, which is a narrative history of America. The very title already points in the direction of a compelling response to your question.

You have to be very careful when you introduce the notion of brokenness. I would contend that if you introduce it too early in the educational development of a student, you preclude the ability to cultivate a love for country.

Rivka, you and I are roughly contemporaries, and we were raised in an era where that sense of American patriotism was still, I think, fairly robust. But I am worried about the direction of education today. We can use the 1619 Project as a stand-in for the larger dynamic I’m talking about. If the 1619 Project’s critique is taught too early, I think students stand the chance of losing any hope and any love they might have for America. Why would a student who is taught that the most authentic, most relevant narrative about America is one of dehumanization, love America? Why would they love a country that perpetrated an “original sin” which still plagues our nation today? Often that same narrative denies that we’ve even made significant progress addressing that plague. How is that narrative going to inspire civic virtue, let alone a love for country?

The key question is not whether to cultivate a reflective, critical stance on our country but when that critical stance should be introduced. When you’re in upper high school or college, of course you want to know the entire history, warts and all. But before you can do that, you need to ask: are we moving in a certain direction? Are we moving in a trajectory towards hope, towards the hope that allows us to affirm that we started with noble and good ideals that were never before introduced into civic government, into republicanism, but were incomplete and faulty, in some ways tragically and devastatingly so, but that there is a long-term directionality to the history of this nation precisely because of the principles that it was built on. Now, whether it was the Declaration more than the Constitution, whether it was Lincoln and the Second Founding, those are details. Important details, but details. But if we're not creating love early on in a student's life, in elementary school, in middle school and early high school, I think we preclude the very possibility of any true patriotism and your wife's insight, Aaron, will become true—that you'll never be able to love that which is broken.

Rivka: There are a few things I want to disaggregate here. The first thing I want to say—and I will use a word that might get Mark’s dander up—is that we have to recognize the privilege that we are bringing into this conversation. We are white Americans who can decide at which point we will introduce America's complexity, its problematic history, its original sin, its brokenness into the conversation. My family's American story, Mark, sounds like it's reasonably similar to yours. My grandfather was an immigrant from Poland who served in the United States Army in World War II. Just a few years after he got here, he was sent to the European theater. Then after the war, the GI Bill, and then, after the GI Bill, he made it.

And here we are as an American family with an American story. But this is not the story of all American families, including many American families whose grandparents also served in the military in World War II, but weren't afforded the benefits of the GI Bill.

I'm not saying anything any of us doesn't know—we have heard firsthand or read accounts of this so we know that when their sons are pre-adolescent or early adolescents, Black American parents need to have conversations with them about growing into the body of an adult Black man, saying, here is how you have to interact with the police to keep yourself safe. If you've had that conversation with your son when he's 11 or 12, you don't have to decide when you introduce him to the complexities of America. He has understood the complexities of America perfectly well long before he's reached upper high school.

The standpoint from which we come is one of people who are members of community that have genuinely lived the American dream as American Jews, particularly if they appear white. We genuinely have. And the gratitude that Mark spoke about earlier is very much a part of my own family’s experience and story as I'm guessing it is for many of us. But we have to recognize that it is not all Americans’ American story.

The other thing I just have to say is that it's strange to me to hear the 1619 Project stand-in as an example of a radical critique of America. Nikole Hannah-Jones’s introductory essay to the 1619 Project is about her Iowa-dwelling, flag-flying, veteran father’s deep patriotism, which he has despite his experiences as a Black man in America.

She writes about what it means that every time the flag that he flies on the front of his house gets tattered, he takes it down and hangs a new flag, what that says about his relationship to the United States of America. Her argument in that essay is that Black Americans are the ones who have made the promise of democracy real precisely because they’ve always had to live with an awareness of its shortcomings and to fight to make it a more perfect union. For them, it’s not “when do we enter into this and how do we take this on?” but “we are born into fighting for a more perfect union.”

But to get back to the question you posed, Aaron, I do think that working within a faith community is helpful in the sense that we come equipped with a sense of what Mark called “long-term directionality.”

But I also have to say, looking at American history right in this very moment, I think it's very hard to make a directional argument about things getting better. I think we are in a moment of things getting significantly worse, and there have been other times in American history when things got significantly worse. There’s the period that white Southerners called “Redemption,” the period at the end of Reconstruction when Black Americans were stripped of their voting rights and other civil and political rights, and white supremacy was restored across the South, or when Woodrow Wilson systematically re-segregated the federal workforce. This is not the first time in American history we've lived through something like this.

Overall, things have gotten better, and things have gotten worse. But I think that as religious people, we have an inclination to think that things ultimately get better, that the arc of the moral universe is long but bends towards justice. King, the person who said that, was a deeply religious man. If you're a religious person, if you think that there is ultimately some place we are going or getting to, some ultimate purpose, then maybe it is easier in some way to keep faith and to keep hope, to keep courage, even through long, difficult, painful slogs.

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eduMark: It's a fair point, Rivka, not to paint the 1619 Project with too broad a brushstroke. But despite Nikole Hannah-Jones’s family story and the beautiful image that you just shared with us, an image that really invokes a kind of patriotism that’s possible for all Americans, I think that if you would teach the 1619 Project as your elementary, middle school, or high school curriculum you might cultivate a sense that this republic is always going to be tainted in our students’ eyes.

I worry that teaching a narrative, whatever its factual merits or demerits, that focuses on the country’s many flaws, might hold sway over a student’s imagination and prevent them from developing a real loyalty to the country, a real sense of patriotism.

We need a sense of love and loyalty in our students so that, among many other things, people will stand up to fight for our country in another war. God willing, it should never happen, but what if there is another world war, and people have to give their lives and their liberty to defend not only the idea of a country but the actual country? How many people are enlisting in the army today? How many young people think about that as something to do because it seems good or proper to die for one's country? This is a sentiment that we almost mock today—at our own peril, I might add.

Rivka: Americans didn’t fight in World War II for some abstract notion. They fought because their country had been attacked, and they were defending it. American isolationist sentiment was pretty strong before Pearl Harbor. I'm fairly certain that if America were under attack at any point in the future, young Americans would again fight to protect their country.

The history is helpful here. The army that your father and my grandfather served in during World War II was not a volunteer army, and it was not a peacetime army. People were drafted, and they served for all kinds of reasons, most of which had to do with the perception that the country was under attack.

What I am more concerned about is the sense that there are things that sound very abstract but are actually very real and important to preserving the health of our democratic republic.

People need to believe in and fight for not just whatever particular policy outcomes they want, but things like the rule of law and democratic accountability and the peaceful transfer of power.

I can’t fix all citizens; I can’t fix the whole country. Maybe I can't fix anything, but I have 684 students in my school, and I can try there, try to say to them, what has made this country work is that, since the so-called “Revolution of 1800,” when a candidate loses an election, they say, “the American people have spoken, and I'm vacating the premises.” This is an enormous thing, even more enormous than having somebody in office who agrees with you about abortion or affirmative action or gay rights or whatever policy issue is near and dear to your heart.

Aaron: I think it’s worth noting and appreciating that the two of you are really modeling a makhloket leshem shamayim, an argument for the sake of heaven, here. And that’s something to which we give a lot of lip service as Jews, but it’s noteworthy to see it modeled, particularly in a conversation about civics, which depends so much on our ability to engage productively with people whose values, beliefs, and perspectives differ from our own.

Now, though, I want to shift gears a little bit. Much of what we’ve been discussing is relevant for how we approach civic learning for Americans in general. Do you think there are knowledge, skills, or dispositions that American Jews in particular need to function well as American Jewish citizens? Are there ways in which civic learning has a distinctive salience for American Jews?

Rivka: I guess it's pretty predictable that as an historian, I'm going say it's the history of the American Jewish experience that speaks to me. One could adduce Jewish texts that give all kinds of support to the idea of engaging as citizens. But you could equally well adduce other Jewish texts that support precisely the opposite. I'm not arguing that Torah supports my position on American citizenship or any other such thing.

But I do think that the particular American Jewish interest in this is that we have been, as a community, incredibly well served by this country. The freedoms, protections, and opportunities it has afforded us are very different than they were in most of our historic exilic experience. Yes, there have been other points in our 1900-year history of exile where things were reasonably good for whatever amount of time, but then they stopped being reasonably good. They certainly have never been as good as they are in the United States of America.

It's important that we consciously recognize what the special features of American government and society have afforded us. We need to understand, preserve, and safeguard these features, and we need to make sure these benefits are available to as many other people as possible, including those who, as we discussed earlier, have not had the same kind of opportunities, protections, and freedoms that American Jews have had.

Mark: In a lecture and essay called, “On Creative Minorities,” Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, z”l, argued that Jews are perhaps unique among all peoples and minorities for maintaining a very fragile dialectic between separation and distinction, on the one hand, and engagement, on the other. It’s the ger vetoshav, the resident alien model, that Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik speaks about so powerfully in his essay, “Confrontation.”

The Jew maintains a dialectic between otherness and sameness, or perhaps otherness and engagement and participation. We don't always get it right, but when the Jewish community does get it right, it could be a model for other groups, other hyphenated Americans that struggle in ways that are similar to us Jews.

Aaron: Now, before we close, I think we have to speak about the very particular political moment in which we find ourselves. A lot of us are feeling caught between the need to invest in the long-term work of civic renewal and strengthening democratic culture in this country, on the one hand, and the short-term need to resist rising authoritarianism in this country. How are you approaching and navigating this tension?

Mark: I see some truth in your framing, Aaron, but I think it already presupposes a certain stance on the moment. I don't think that we are facing imminent democratic collapse or a return to earlier authoritarian periods in American history. I don't like everything that happens in Washington, or everything that comes out of the White House, but I don't find rhetoric about “rising authoritarianism” to be that helpful. I think it causes more polarization and more internal strife between people who actually have a lot in common politically and otherwise.

As an educator, I certainly want to be truthful as to what I see is happening and point out to my students in unambiguous terms what I think is wrong and what I think is right, what I think is dangerous and what I consider just politics as usual. I want to make refined, clear distinctions.

But I also have many good friends and people that I respect and trust, including Rivka and yourself, who feel that the case is radically otherwise. So, I want to be open to hearing that, to not silencing other people's voices, even as I don’t take that stance myself.

Rivka: I don't think that the two goals are unrelated at all. In terms of education, I think both longer term civic renewal and the needs of the moment require me to beat the same drum. We need to keep saying, these are the things that matter beyond policy outcomes. This is why the independence of the judiciary, why law enforcement that is not an arm of personal retribution, and so forth, are American ideals that matter.

That is not to say these ideals have always been honored in American history. All kinds of things could actually not be unprecedented in American history and still be pretty bad. But to explain that, I have to teach not that this particular action by this particular person is bad, but I need to explain why it is not healthy for a democratic republic to have a Department of Justice that exists to do the bidding of one individual; why it is not healthy in a democratic republic for all spending power to reside with one individual who was not elected to any office. I have to explain why it is important that there be a separation of powers with checks and balances.

Talking about the basic principles of a democratic republic is not partisan sniping or name calling—it's about the deepest foundations of this country. Conveying all of that to my students is the most important thing I can do, both for the short term and the long term. I'm not going to class and calling for or against activism in the streets, that's not the role I inhabit as an educator. But to have people understand both the stakes of the current moment and what's going to be called for in the long term, that’s the kind of education I need to be doing.

Aaron: Thank you both. I’m going to take a page from journalist Ezra Klein, who closes his podcast interviews by asking for book recommendations. Could each of you please recommend two books? One Jewish book, and one general or non-Jewish book that you think make for essential reading about what it means to be a serious Jewish citizen of this country right now.

Rivka: I'm not going to follow the assignment of the Jewish and general categories. I read almost no fiction, but I do read nonfiction, and I read poetry, so I’ll name one thing from each of those camps.

The thing from the nonfiction camp is something that I've actually been teaching for a while, a 2015 report on democratic backsliding called, “Unwelcome Change: Understanding, Evaluating, and Extending Theories of Democratic Backsliding” by Ellen Lust at Yale University and David Waldner at the University of Virginia that, in a bitter irony, was put out by USAID. The term “democratic backsliding” refers to a country that had been more democratic becoming less democratic through failures of mechanisms of accountability, various kinds of freedoms, electoral procedures, etc.

This report is not a response to any particular candidate or moment in America, but it is bracing and upsetting to see how much it applies to our current situation in our current moment. It is also instructive because in some countries, they’re writing about democratic backsliding that has been arrested or reversed, and in other countries, it hasn’t. It’s helpful to know what other people have tried that has worked, or perhaps that they needed to but didn't try.

The poem that I want to share is called, “Hope Is Not a Bird, Emily, It's a Sewer Rat,” by Caitlin Seda. It was circulating after election day, and I still have it open on my computer:

Hope is not the thing with feathers
That comes home to roost
When you need it most.

Hope is an ugly thing
With teeth and claws and
Patchy fur that’s seen some shit.

It’s what thrives in the discards
And survives in the ugliest part of our world
Able to find a way to go on
When nothing else can even find a way in.

It goes on from there. Mark, you talk about keeping hope, and I find encouragement in this moment in the idea that hope is not a pretty thing with feathers.

Mark: Well, that’s a darker but maybe more realistic image than the one I would have come up with, Rivka. So, thank you for that.

But I'm going to be a little more conventional here. Toward the end of his classic work, Horeb, Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch talks about patriotism. He cites the prophet Jeremiah telling the Jews of Babylon to build homes, plant orchards, marry off their children, and pray for the peace of the city (Jer. 29). We're familiar with praying for the peace of Jerusalem, but Hirsch is saying that the diasporic Jew, the Jew in exile, must pray for the peace of the city that is not quite home.

Today, some reject Hirsch's patriotic commitment to a foreign nation because he was writing in Germany, where the greatest scourge to humankind was ultimately released on the world, and the Jews who really believed in Germany were proven wrong and paid with their lives. But I think we can learn a lot from Hirsch’s articulation of loving the place where your crib was built and rocked.

My other selection is C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man. It's a thin little book written and published during World War II. Lewis writes that patriotism has to be built on something solid. It can't be a mere fetish or a mere emotion. If it remains purely emotional, it will be abused by authoritarians and cowards, and it'll never become the basis of something more durable. At the same time, he argues that that's why we need to create men and women with instinct and will as well as with intellect. His image of “Men Without Chests,” people who haven’t fully cultivated the appropriate affective stance towards things that are worthy of our loyalty, is very powerful. Without educating the heart, we become like brains in vats, only knowing how to argue back and forth over rationalist principles but never wholly or holistically. I think it's an important lesson for patriotism and love of country, which has to be built on foundational grounds, mind, body, and spirit.

Aaron: Wonderful. Well, you've given me my homework assignments for the next six weeks. Thank you both for this conversation. As always, I'm so grateful to learn with and from both of you.

Works Cited

James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (1955).
Nikole Hannah-Jones, et al., The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story (2021).
Samson Raphael Hirsch, Horeb: A Philosophy of Jewish Law and Observances (1835).
Martin Luther King, Jr., “I Have a Dream” (speech) (1963).
C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (1943).
Ellen Lust and David Waldner, “Unwelcome Change: Understanding, Evaluating, and Extending Theories of Democratic Backsliding” (2015).
Wilfred M. McClay, Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story (2019).
Jonathan Sacks, “On Creative Minorities” First Things: (January 2014).
Caitlin Seda, “Hope Is Not a Bird, Emily, It’s a Sewer Rat” (poem), originally published in My Broken Voice: Poetry from the Edge and Back (2018).
Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “Confrontation” Tradition: A Journal of Orthodox Jewish Thought (1964)