Yehuda Kurtzer, President of the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America

Jewish People & Ideas: Conversations with Jewish Thought Leaders

Yehuda Kurtzer is the President of the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America. Yehuda is a leading thinker and author on the meaning of Israel to American Jews, on Jewish history and Jewish memory, and on questions of leadership and change in American Jewish life. He is the author of Shuva: The Future of the Jewish Past, which offers new thinking to contemporary Jews on navigating the tensions between history and memory; and the co-editor of the forthcoming volume The New Jewish Canon, a collection of the most significant Jewish ideas and debates of the past two generations. I sat down with Yehuda in his office at the Hartman Institute in Jerusalem when he was visiting from New York to discuss his relationship with God, American Jewry, the Reform movement, Israeli-American Jewish relations and much more.