Sapir Journal is a new journal of Jewish Conversations, published by the Maimonides Fund, and edited by the Pulitzer Prize winning columnist, longtime opinion editor for the Wall Street Journal, and since 2017, columnist for the New York Times,

Brett Stevens.

Sapir's website announces that it seeks to explore the future of the American Jewish community

and its intersection with cultural, social, and political issues.

Its first volume is dedicated to a theme that's a perfect totem at the very center of American jury's

inner disagreements, the theme of social justice. Social justice, the very term itself,

marks a cleavage in the American Jewish consciousness. Advocates of social justice,

now what this term really means will come back to, but for now, suffice it to say that no one

really knows

with very great precision what it means unless the person you're speaking with defines it for

you. But in any event, advocates of this concept think that it represents the very best

ethical impulses of the Jewish tradition and that the pursuit of social justice is an

authentic way of engaging the Jewish tradition.

That's a generalization, of course, but I think it's an accurate one. And now to generalize the

critics of social justice, too. Its critics don't, of course, deny that the establishment of

justice is a tradition of Jewish thought and law, perhaps a central tradition. But they question

whether devotees of social

justice, as that term is now used, are really engaging that tradition in the serious way.

That's the view to put a name to this kind of critique of Jonathan Neumann, a previous guest on the

podcast, and the author of the book, To Heal the World, How the Jewish Left Corrupts Judaism and Endangers

Israel. Now, champions of Jewish social justice have a response to Noemann and the many others who

share in his critique. And it is that he himself abuses the Jewish tradition in order to replace

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