"I was raised Orthodox Jewish and there's a huge premium placed on debate and discourse and argumentation and being disputatious. And in 2016, Trump got 55 percent of Orthodox votes.
So what that means is that at many Jewish Shabbat tables across the nation, you would have people who voted for Trump and people who voted against him breaking bread together. That is really one of the few places left in America that I know of, apart from a few evangelical communities where half the community is black and half the community is white, where you really had that. You had people breaking bread and debating politics.
Of course, you know, humans are tribal and religious people tend to value their communities and so forth. But in terms of how that maps onto American politics, you don't have the same sorting between red and blue. You don't have the same sorting between people with a college education and people without a college education. You know, people who get a college education in the Orthodox community stay in the Orthodox community and they don't then look down on their fellow Jews or community members as a result of having had that education in the same way that you see in America. There just isn't this great sorting.
When communities are built around a sort of higher purpose, a higher power, not answerable to Twitter, but you're answerable to something else in a different way. You don't fall into the same kinds of the contempt that the elites and the educated have for the uneducated in America today.
My book is about contempt. It's about the contempt that the journalist class has allowed itself to develop in the name of social justice."
- Batya Ungar-Sargon on the Quillette Podcast
Host Trending in Ed | Founder Palmer Media | External Communications, Thought Leadership, Media Strategy
3moFantastic conversation.