Expanding the Conversation: Nurit Novis-Deutsch

In this episode of Expanding the Conversation, we explore pluralism in Israel with Dr. Nurit Novis-Deutsch, a lecturer at the University of Haifa. She delves into the challenges and paradoxes of pluralism, distinguishing between diversity and a true pluralistic mindset. Through thought experiments and real-world research, she reveals how pluralism—or the lack of it—shapes Israeli society, especially in times of conflict. Can embracing multiple perspectives strengthen both Jewish identity and democracy? And how do we teach pluralism without eroding core beliefs?

Discussion Questions

  • Dr. Novis-Deutsch discusses pluralism towards groups vs. pluralism towards ideas. Do you think it’s easier to accept different people or different beliefs? Why?
  • Dr. Novis-Deutsch’s research shows that sacred values often limit pluralism. Can you think of a belief or value that feels “too sacred” to compromise on? How does that affect your openness to opposing views?
  • The Magic Wand Thought Experiment asks if you would erase differences to make others think like you. How did you react to that idea? In what areas of life do you wish others shared your views?
  • After war, societies must rebuild. How might pluralism shape Israel’s future? What lessons from Jewish tradition could help guide this process?

Show Notes

Transcript

Ellie Gettinger

Welcome to Expanding the Conversation to a podcast series that brings the Jewish Theological Seminary to you. This series focuses on the messages that emerged from Zionism today, Tomorrow, the a convening that took place at Gates in October 2024. I’m Elie Gettinger, director of outreach for the Center for Lifelong Learning at Gates, and I will be curating this series, which will highlight key messages from the convening itself with insights from our panelists that were recorded separately.

In this episode, we will hear from Dr. Nurit Nova’s. DEUTSCH Dr. Nova is a lecturer at the Department of Learning and Instructional Sciences at the University of Haifa. She presented in the panel Liberal Zionism, Jewish Pluralism and Democracy. In her talk, Dr. Novus Deutsch began by describing how she became interested in the topic of pluralism.

Nurit Novis-Deutsch

The last time I was here, I was a 17-year-old high school student who arrived with great trepidation at the gates to interview the then chancellor, Ismar Schorsch, about his take on his principles of faith.

My final high school project was a set of interviews with leaders from various Jewish denominations about their theological differences and similarities. Although I didn’t know it then, I had embarked on a lifelong mission to grasp the challenges of pluralism. The more convinced I am that it is simultaneously both an unattainable ideal and an essential mindset for Israelis to embrace.

And I hope to convey some of the sense of the paradoxical nature of pluralism. In my talk today. I’ll do it through the exploration of a question that was posed to us by the organizers of this panel. Could a more pluralistic orientation towards Jewish observance among Jewish Israelis lead to a more equitable treatment of minorities? So since the answer to this question hinges on how we define pluralism, let’s begin there.

For the US, the term pluralism is often used to connote the fact of diversity. But I would like to go the European way and distinguish between plurality and pluralism. So some countries, such as Israel and the US, include multiple sizable religious minorities, while other countries such as Poland and Afghanistan are more homogeneous. So in Poland, nearly 90% of the Polish are Roman Catholics.

In Afghanistan, nearly 100% are Muslims. This is a question of plurality rather than pluralism. Pluralism, on the other hand, is a member of the “Ism” family. So that connotes an ideological stance. Pluralism goes beyond acknowledging the fact of plurality and also beyond enabling diversity, which is the stance that we term tolerance, to actively promoting the diversity for a variety of principled reasons.

People in Poland or Afghanistan can be deeply pluralistic, just as people of Israel or the US can be non-pluralistic. When considering our own attitudes towards diversity, we can distinguish between pluralism towards groups and pluralism towards ideas. Pluralism towards groups is the positive evaluation of others groups or people representing them. Some call this cultural pluralism and its opposites.

Prejudice, ethnocentrism, racism have been extensively studied in social psychology. But the pluralism I am more interested in has been studied less by psychologists. It is pluralism towards ideas or the positive evaluation of different sets of beliefs, attitudes and underlying values. This can occur independently of our attitude towards the people carrying these ideas. It’s the opposite of monism.

Ellie Gettinger

In our conversation after her talk, I asked Dr. Novis-Deutsch to comment on the pushback she receives about teaching pluralism.

Nurit Novis-Deutsch

So that’s something I hear quite a lot in Israel, especially when I talk to people from the religious community. They’re very wary of pluralism. They’re very concerned. And their concern is that it’s going to in some way eat into their identity, to the commitment of their, you know, the people that belong to their community. So they say to me, why don’t we just wait with this pluralism saying, okay, let’s let children develop up their identity, be really certain about it for 12 years.

We won’t really tell them about much else, and then we can introduce them. Of people say when they go to the army, they’ll meet other people. Right. That’s like a typical sort of response I get from Modern Orthodoxy when I talk about pluralism. And I say to them, I say this, I say, listen, think about how a child learns to walk.

Where is it going to be? How is it going to be more stable? If he uses one foot in, he’s just jumping on one foot. That would be his own identity, right? Or if he’s walking on two feet and I think the two feet are a step towards strengthening your identity, a step towards accepting diversity and then taking those steps one by one.

And gradually both your identity gets solidified. And at the same time, you’re not threatened by others. That’s the big danger of many ideologies and religions, Right. It’s that when you’re trying to believe, be strong about who you are. At the same time, you kind of become really scared of anybody who thinks differently unless you develop this kind of pluralist but committed identity.

Ellie Gettinger

Dr. Novis-Deutsch continued in her talk, identifying the key markers of a pluralistic identity and illustrating some of the ways that she tests for pluralism in individuals.

Nurit Novis-Deutsch

But it goes beyond this to include beliefs, attitudes, ideologies and worldviews. I think this type of pluralism is crucial because it forms the cognitive backbone of what can later become institutional pluralism.

Could higher levels of pluralism among Israelis towards religious beliefs lead to higher levels of pluralism towards ethnic groups? So that’s the question I’m going to try to answer and to test levels of idea pluralism. I use a thought experiment called the “Magic Wand Survey.” Let’s try it. Imagine you have a magic wand, and the property of this wand is the ability to change other people’s beliefs or behaviors to closely match your own.

Thus erasing variance on a particular subject. So think of a hobby you really love, like playing tennis or reading Kafka. Let’s say you could turn everyone with the wave of a wand into fellow hobbyists. You’ll never lack  a tennis player again. And your Kafka book club will be the most popular club in New York. Would you use it?

I’m not risking much by betting that you wouldn’t. We all learn early on that personal preference is not something to be monistic about. Let’s try another example. So you could turn everyone into believers in God or atheists, as your preference may be. Would you use the one? My guess is that most of you still would not. The US has a pretty strong tradition of religious pluralism.

In Israel, I found that the more religious people are, the more likely they are to use the magic wand. And what if you could, with the wave of the wand, make everyone as conscientious about recycling as I’m sure you all are? Would saving the earth be a good enough reason to wave that wand and forgo pluralism? You get the idea too.

The magic wand question I always add for each scenario. Another question. Regardless of whether you would use the magic wand, how strongly do you believe that both alternatives are legitimate and worthy? So in studies, my team and I conducted with thousands of children, teenagers and adults in Israel, religious and secular, Arab and Jewish. For using this scale, we found first that people may be pluralistic on one set of issues such as religion and monastic on another, such as human rights.

Second, that there areas of pluralism are strongly negatively correlated with the importance of that issue to them. So the more important it is, the less pluralist they are. Third, that when someone’s sacred values are triggered, the likelihood of their being a pluralist on that matter plummets. And finally, across issues, we found group differences in the average levels of pluralism with people from more traditional societies saying they’d be willing to use the magic wand more often.

There’s a missing ingredient in the attitude cocktail in Israel, and until we add it, the infrastructure of pluralism will be weak. My suggestion for the missing ingredient is to cultivate a skill called both and reasoning. The one expressed in the second question of my survey. I’ll explain this concept to a quick story. Two men go to a rabbi. They want to settle the dispute. The rabbi listens to the first. He says, “You’re right.” And the second insists on being heard. So the rabbi listens to him and he says, “You’re also right.” And the wife, having overheard from the kitchen, calls out, “But they can’t both be right.” And the rabbi reflects and nods before concluding, “And you’re right, too.”

So the rabbi was using both/and reasoning. Right. Which underlies the generalized pluralism mindset and is opposed to either/or reasoning. The rabbi’s wife raises a structural problem with both and reasoning. How can contradictory truths both be right? But that is exactly the point of cognitive pluralism. It asks us to contain this paradox to hold space for multiple truths and to embrace the complexity of differing perspectives.

And at the same time, this is key to retain a committed worldview of our own. Although this mindset is quite common in traditional Judaism, and for those familiar, think of elu, v’elu or Shivim Panim L’Torah. It is far less common in Israel today. Israel is rife with sacred values on both sides of the political and the religious divides. People who are pluralist about religion tend to be highly monastic liberals, for whom liberalism is a sacred value, while others reject religious pluralism because faith is their own sacred value.

And here’s what I found. When sacred values take the stage. Pluralism goes out the back door. My research indicates that the thing that separates pluralist from non pluralist is not that pluralist care less. It’s their ability to be deeply committed to their community and values without sanctifying them. And that is a mindset we can teach people. Recently, I developed and tested a program in collaboration with the TALI Foundation, a foundation that promotes pluralistic Jewish identity.

And the program is meant to teach students both/and reasoning skills while at the same time cultivating commitment to their Jewish identity. The program is a game-based set of lessons in which students imaginatively travel from the land of either/or to the land of both/and, it sounds better in Hebrew and it focuses on learning and practicing and implementing four skills: perspective-taking, listening and speaking from the heart, seeing value in multiple truths, and judging others positively.

Ellie Gettinger

In your talk, you focused on ways to teach pluralism to those who are young. Is it possible to become a pluralist later in life?

Nurit Novis-Deutsch

So, first of all, I do think that educating for pluralism should start in kindergarten. And it’s not happening right now, certainly not in Israel. And this is one of the things I’m working really hard to change.

But that means that most of us didn’t learn to become pluralistic or didn’t learn about pluralism. I think of pluralism more as a set of skills than as a knowledge base. Okay. So I should say that we weren’t trained, so to speak, in thinking pluralistically. I think we can train ourselves. It’s a lifelong journey to train ourselves.

We can and we do, by the way, according to research. Gradually, we become more pluralistic as we grow older when wisdom sets in. Because what is wisdom? Wisdom is perspective-taking. Wisdom is the ability to know that different people tell different stories. And that one story is not better or truer than another. There are just different ways of looking at a very, very complicated social reality.

So how can we as adults train ourselves in that direction? We can try to absorb as many narratives, perspectives and stories as we can through reading books about people who are really different from us and watching films that are not made in Hollywood but are from all over the world and talking to people, people we meet on the bus, people we meet in any random place.

The more we engage people in their stories, the more likely we are to become pluralist, I believe.

Ellie Gettinger

Let’s return to Dr. Novus Deutsch’s research. In this next section, she describes the impact of October 7th on her project.

Nurit Novis-Deutsch

My research team and I tested the program in five schools in Israel. This year. Unfortunately, just as the teacher program was, training program was about to start, October 7th occurred.

And as you all know, Israel has been at war since. Just like sacred values, war and conflict are major threats to pluralism as the compromised sense of security during war means that both people and institutions tend to close ranks against others and they don’t have the mental capacity or the political freedom to be open minded and embrace diversity.

This was a challenge. In fact, at first we debated whether to delay implementation, but we realized that if ever there has been a time for in Israel’s history where pluralism and moderation were needed, it was now, by the end of the year, we were finding that the skills had been internalized by students, but mostly towards friends, classmates and family.

However, in many classes, the level of pluralism towards external others was low. Before the war, the teachers we recruited were eager to try out the educational intervention we were offering. But once the war started, they lost much of their enthusiasm. It was as if something about the idea of seeing multiple perspectives as valid became mentally challenging. One teacher said, I have suddenly become a non-pluralist person. I don’t know. I don’t want to hear. I don’t want to be interested. It doesn’t make me curious. It just annoys me the opinions of others. She was very honest and and another one said pluralism today is a curse word in our society.

Ellie Gettinger

In theory, I think most people will like the idea of pluralism. But at the convening, there were numerous questions about younger generations and their relationship with anti-Zionism. What would you say about these particular generational fears?

Nurit Novis-Deutsch

This fear is something that really exists, and that’s the reason I think that when we teach pluralism, we have to simultaneously engage in identity building. That’s number one. So I wouldn’t want any student to just learn about others and end up with a sort of an empty shell of a personal identity, but loving everybody else that wouldn’t work.

Having said that, I think it’s important to be honest with ourselves and say that, yes, when we become pluralist or when our children become pluralist, there’s we could think of it as a risk. There’s a chance that they will hold different opinions than the ones we want them to hold. And I think that’s not only okay, I think that being human is having that choice.

And I think parents as parents, we’d love our children to be like us. But we know that we’d love even more, I hope, for our children to have free choice, and that involves opening them to alternatives and letting them make their own choices.

Ellie Gettinger

To close her talk, Dr. Novis-Deutsch explored the role that pluralism should play in guiding Israel after the current war ends.

Nurit Novis-Deutsch

No war in history has lasted forever. I hope our findings do give cause for hope that once the war ends, we might be able to educate students towards a pluralism and based on both and reasoning. And we have no time to lose. It is critical that we as educators, leaders, Jews, both in the United States and in Israel, begin to prepare for the post-conflict day after the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska wrote.

“After every war, someone has to clean up and tidy up. Things won’t straighten themselves up after all.” And we can be those cleaners. We can do it by offering visions of a pluralist Israel, both religiously, nationally and in many other domains and heroic institutions of pluralism. Back up to end, because after the war, we will need both the institutional and the individual variants.

We will need group pluralism and media pluralism. We will need educational programs, legal programs, political strategies ready for the day when the destruction will cease and bridge building will be required. We should make sure we have something constructive to say to offer when that day comes. As a pluralist, stuck in a very modest war. I hope that day arrives soon.

Ellie Gettinger

Thank you for listening to this episode of Expanding the Conversation. Next time, we will hear from Dr. Eilon Schwartz, founder of Shaharit and Senior Lecturer at the Melton Center for Jewish Education at the Hebrew University. He will continue this theme of pluralism, focusing on the particular challenge communicating and building trust, particularly between Israeli and North American Jewish communities.

If you want to see complete footage of this session or any of the sessions of the JTS Convening “Zionism: Today, Tomorrow, and Beyond” you can find a link on our website, jtsa.edu/podcasts—look for the Expanding the Conversation Icon. Each episode includes discussion questions for individuals or groups to consider and links to our speaker’s organizations and publications.

If you would like to attend a JTS Convening, you can find information about our upcoming programs at jtsa.edu/convenings. I am Ellie Gettinger, director of outreach for JTS. This podcast was produced by me with editing assistance by Sarah Brown and technical support from Chris Hickey, Director of New Media. This is a production of the Jewish Theological Seminary. No part of this podcast may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the written permission of the Jewish Theological Seminary. The views expressed herein may not be those of the Jewish Theological Seminary.

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