The Golden Era of Jewish-Muslim Dialogue

Episode Transcript

John Tomasi: Elisha Russ-Fishbane, welcome to Heterodox Out Loud.

Elisha Russ-Fishbane: Thank you so much, John. It's a pleasure to be here.

John Tomasi: You're a professor at NYU. Your title is Associate Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies. You're the research director of the Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism, a new center at NYU. Most important, maybe not most important, but most important to us in some ways. You're also an affiliate fellow at Heterodox Academy's Segal Center for Academic Pluralism. We're really happy to have you on the show. The Heterodox Academy is one of those special organizations that is very, although young, very dear to my heart and to all those who care deeply about the future and purpose of higher education.

Elisha Russ-Fishbane: Thank you, Elisha. I appreciate that.

John Tomasi: You studied Jewish-Muslim encounters. Could you just tell us a bit about who you are and how you came to be a professor? Did you know when you were two that you're gonna be at NYU at some point in your life? What's your story?

Elisha Russ-Fishbane: That's a wonderful question. And it's funny you should mention age two. Not that I have many memories of age two, but one of my earliest memories is playing in my father's study. My father was a recently retired professor years at Brandeis and then at the University of Chicago. And it was actually as a child in his office that I realized that there was something special about this particular craft and career, which is that as hard as he worked, he was also available for his family. I was able to lie on the floor and do my homework when he was doing his work in his office at home. And that made made a deep impression on me, the idea that I could do serious work, work very hard, and at the same time, prioritize my family was a primary impression as a child and a primary reason for choosing this profession. Not the only one, but certainly one that dates as back as my child.

John Tomasi: That's so interesting. I would often tell my graduate students at Brown that you're going to be a terrible person to be in a relationship with all the time you're in graduate school because there's so much pressure and you just have no time for anything or anyone except this trying to gather your thoughts on this important discipline that you're working on. But if you stay with it and find your way, you can become a remarkable parent. So I'm glad you say that too.

Elisha Russ-Fishbane: At least we could be, the possibility. The truth of the matter is that the academic career has become much more pressurized and challenging than even though I wasn't doing it in those days, what it looked like from my perspective when my father was at the height of his career. And I think part of the reason for that is there are more and more people trying to get in in this game of academia, wanting to do this good work, and fewer places to hold them. And certainly fewer and fewer places to give them full-time tenure track work.

John Tomasi: Right now, we're about a quarter of the faculty, on average, are tenure-tenure track.

Elisha Russ-Fishbane: Across 300.

John Tomasi: Exactly, exactly. It's a much higher percentage. It flipped from about 40 years ago, where it was about 75%.

Elisha Russ-Fishbane: And so I tell those who ask me, or tell me that this is their intended career, and ask for advice, I make sure that they know what they're getting themselves into in the sense that they look at it with eyes open for all of the challenges that it currently poses to people who have every intention of doing this for their career. In recent years, universities have made it their priority to educate not only master students of course, but doctoral students about important alternative tracks to the Academy and all of this is just is an outgrowth of the the growth of interests and the lack of growth of institutions and positions and which creates a more competitive and pressurized field than then I think probably would have given me more pause had I known about that at the time but I was I was one of the lucky ones for sure. I often say to my very best undergraduate students that that when I had students at Brown and at Stanford would come to me and say, they wanna be professors, I would say, don't do this unless you absolutely can't avoid doing it. Exactly what I tell them. If you must do this, then do it.

John Tomasi: Exactly. If you have anything else you could do and still be you, you should be doing that instead.

Elisha Russ-Fishbane: That's right. If this is your calling, if you really cannot see yourself flourishing in other ways, then this is your calling. This is for you.

John Tomasi: Yeah. The academic year that we've just come out of, 23, 24, was a really difficult academic year at NYU, as at many places. I've heard some people refer to that year as the year of October 7th. I refer to it as the annus horribilis of higher education. You were at NYU, obviously, teaching your courses last year. You taught a new class in the spring semester, a course, a freshman seminar, entitled The university, what it was, what it is, and what it could be, and you are generous enough to invite me to your class to be a guest teacher for one session. I want to talk with you about that class and your experience teaching that class. But first I just wanted to talk a little bit about or invite you to speak a little bit about about your work and the research you do. I remember when we walked out of the classroom you told me a few things about what it means to study Jewish and Muslim encounters in the medieval era, and I was just fascinated with that little snippet of conversation you and I had as we were walking through Washington Square Park, as I recall. Would you mind just sharing with the audience a little bit about your research and what about that period of interest to you?

Elisha Russ-Fishbane: Yeah, thank you for the question. I think that another story that is interwoven with the fabric of my life and the career, how they sort of intersect. So part of the path that I thought I was on started really anew when I came to myself to the University of Chicago. This was a...

John Tomasi: As an undergraduate?

Elisha Russ-Fishbane: As an undergraduate, correct. University of Chicago, still in my mind, is almost like a paradise of intellectual inquiry. It is a place where serious people come to do serious things. So serious, in fact, that it has that motto you might be familiar with, right? Do you want to say it or should I?

John Tomasi: Oh, go ahead.

Elisha Russ-Fishbane: You should say it.

John Tomasi: Where fun comes to die.

Elisha Russ-Fishbane: Which I found amusing, and it's a wonderful example. I ended up studying classics, actually. I'll come back to that, hopefully, in a moment. but when I was taking a final one day on Homer, there was a protest outside my window, outside the class, and the students were protesting that the university was putting more funds into a student activities and athletic center and not more funds for the library. This was what they were protesting.

John Tomasi: This is not a farce, this is actually serious, passionate activists on campus advocating for the library.

Elisha Russ-Fishbane: That's right. They built the activities at the Athletic Center. Anyway, but the fact that there was a cohort of students who were that serious about the academic side, about the intellectual inquiry side, speaks volumes about the nature of the place, right? The motto of the University of Chicago is Crescat scientia; vita excolatur. Let knowledge grow, let life be cultivated. And without a dedication.

John Tomasi: Let knowledge grow and that life be cultivated.

Elisha Russ-Fishbane: Exactly.

John Tomasi: Lovely connection between those two things.

Elisha Russ-Fishbane: Exactly. I think that the, I always thought, and I see it on my way into the library, that in order for life to be cultivated, one has to have a certain measure of dedication to knowledge. As a flourishing human being, as one of the defining characteristics of who we are as human beings, as we are thinking creatures with the ability to reflect and to move back from the instinctive to the reflective. And without that reflective and knowledge-seeking and wisdom-seeking aim, our life is sorely lack. So there was something very magical in those days. And I fell in very quickly to the classics, the world of Greco-Roman literature, philosophy, and so on. I started with the University of Chicago Core and the study of the great Western classics, and I fell in love with Homer and Plato and all these and Aristotle. I wanted to read them in the original. I wasn't satisfied with translations. I'm familiar with something that a modern Hebrew poet, Chaim Nachman Bialik wrote about translation, that to read in translation is to kiss the bride through a veil.

John Tomasi: Nice. Nice.

Elisha Russ-Fishbane: And to really understand something in its own terms, you have to go deep into its cultural valence, its language at the heart of it, how it expresses itself, how the ideas come to life through the nuances of speech. So I fell into the world of classics, I fell into, I chose to fall into, I fell in love with the world of classics. And my thought was actually to follow that with a study of what I came to love at the University of Chicago, which is the dedication to the liberal arts. I wanted to continue studying the history of the liberal arts. That was my trajectory. And I went to Rome after college to study with the world's last Latin-speaking instructor, Father Reginald Foster.

John Tomasi: I'm sorry, the last Latin-speaking instructor? What does that mean?

Elisha Russ-Fishbane: So, Father Foster, Reginald Foster, or Reggie, as he was often known, of lesser memory. He was the Vatican Latinist, and he was hired by the Pope at the time, well, at the time that it would be Pope John Paul II, to translate what the Italians translated from his Polish into Italian. He translated from Italian into Latin. But basically anything official having to do with the church, he put into Latin. But he also taught courses from every nook and cranny and every period of Latin literature. And he taught it all in Latin. And this was the, it was a dying breed, a dying phenomenon. And so I wanted to expose myself to the full breadth of this medieval Latin literature in order to be able to do this work well. And so I went to Rome to study with him.

John Tomasi: You just mentioned the word medieval for the first time.

Elisha Russ-Fishbane: Ah, did I? I wasn't even conscious of it.

John Tomasi: OK, that's interesting.

Elisha Russ-Fishbane: Yes. But in other words, the transition from basically what we consider to be a hallmark of American higher education, part of the American experiment in higher education, is the embrace of this ideal of the liberal arts model, which was inherited from the medieval universities and which in turn was inherited from the Greco-Roman ideals of what it means to have, to be education for a free person, which comes with a lot of baggage but had a lot of noble ideals embedded in it.

John Tomasi: Baggage because it was exclusive, an exclusive conception in a variety of ways.

Elisha Russ-Fishbane: Correct, it was only those who were free in Roman society would speak about, were capable of such free education, although there were slaves who themselves engaged in this liberal study and the study of philosophy and stoicism in particular, was able to redefine in a sense what slavery and freedom mean through this philosophical ideal of liberal studies that even in some cases was able to transcend, to allow them to engage as much as the free person in the Roman Empire, although that didn't mean that the enslaved person then went free, it meant that they redefined what slavery meant. So what I would say is that the medieval part of the story was the one that I intended to then pursue next. After studying the classics, I wanted to study the next phase of that in the Middle Ages, Martianus Capella and the seven liberal arts and so on. And then I would sort of see where that took me. And then I took a detour. I don't know if we want to get there yet, but this is, I guess, all part of the story.

John Tomasi: A detour where?

Elisha Russ-Fishbane: While in Rome. This was in the aftermath of September, and I did a lot of soul searching while I was in Rome. And in particular, as a traditional observant Jew, I began to learn more about the Al-Qaeda attacks and having studied a couple of years of Arabic at the University of Chicago also just out of interest, because part of my reason at the time was because I wanted to read the great Judeo-Arabic classics of medieval Jewish philosophy that I also love, the likes of Maimonides or before him Saadia Gaon and other classics. So I wanted to read them in the original. That was my, I guess that's a pattern, right? So I took a couple of years of Arabic. So I was able to follow some of what was going on and I became aware to my shock and horror that the Jews were somehow intended as a target of the al-Qaeda hostility toward the West, and that there was a twinning, there was a pairing in the Muslim fundamentalist mindset of the United States and Israel, or what they call the Crusaders and the Jews. And so I became very concerned in a more personal way than the liberal arts, you know, is more visceral in a sense, went much deeper. And I did a lot of soul searching and thought, how can I, I said, one thing I know for sure is that I want to be a teacher in higher education. I almost prefer that to a professor, I'm a professor, but I see my primary work and calling is as a teacher in the classroom. Classroom is the laboratory where things happen. I never want to lose sight of that. That's why we're there, that's our main purpose. Even in research universities.

John Tomasi: I just want to say to our audience that I share that view, but I think it's just worth marking how rare that is, especially among scholars of your stature and abilities and reputation. I just want to just note that I think it's in all of us. I think within every professor, we get so involved in our careers. And we love the research that we do. There's a real tendency to want to close the door and do your research and let the whole world burn or just do your thing. And just as a side for HXA, one of the main things we try to do is encourage our professors to remember why they got involved in this in the first place, that they were once students too, that opening the door to students is a wonderful humanizing part of what we do.

Elisha Russ-Fishbane: Book one. So you- Absolutely. Hopefully we'll talk more about that. But this was, I would say for me, they're intertwined because the research that I do to in some ways exist in a vacuum in the sense that you have to truly keep your ear to the ground and listen to what the sources are saying, and not to confuse what the sources say with your own agenda.

John Tomasi: Are you talking about research now or about teaching?

Elisha Russ-Fishbane: Correct. Correct.

John Tomasi: So I wanted to emphasize- It sounds like teaching to me.

Elisha Russ-Fishbane: Right. So the reason why I say this is because I never lose sight, and I try not to lose sight, of the reason why all of the study and research is of value, which is to say, to share it with the public in your classroom and in writing for the broader society. I would just say you're one of the most influential people that I credit with this perspective when I was already in graduate school studying, but I'll tell you about in a moment, studying Jewish-Muslim interactions was the late Rabbi Dr. David Hartman at the Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. I was a fellow there. Very unique place. A place dedicated to democracy and thinking thoughtfully about the place of Israel as a democratic and Jewish state. But it also fostered research in Jewish thoughts and so on. So I was there as a fellow and David Hartman asked me what I was planning to write my dissertation on. And as I was fumbling to give words to answer him, he said, Elisha, don't forget one thing. Whatever you focus on, let it be for the greater good of the public. He used the Hebrew expression, to better the public. And I never lost sight of that. there was something very, very moving and sort of primary. And that's true for the classroom and it's true for the research that they have to be ultimately intertwined to truly stay true to their mission, in my view.

John Tomasi: And for a scholar heading out, for a young aspiring scholar heading out to be a public policy professor, that advice is natural and familiar. But for a scholar heading into medieval studies focusing on Maimonides, I believe. That's unusual, that's unusual advice and very interesting advice.

Elisha Russ-Fishbane: Yes, yeah, so this was a, so I'll circle back to Maimonides in a moment, but I should just say it was really 9-11 that changed me. And that at that moment I realized that I want to be a teacher in higher education, but I wanted to devote my studies and my teaching to the intersections of Judaism and Islam with hopefully the goal of bettering understanding historically and for the good of those living today.

John Tomasi: Can we talk a bit about that? Tell us about your work then.

Elisha Russ-Fishbane: Yeah, so I chose to focus on the medieval period precisely because that was a time that exemplified and really represented the best of the interaction between these two civilizations when you find not only professional and economic cooperation, which is itself really truly important and interesting. And to think about people whose professional alignments cross confessional lines or whose economic interests cross confessional lines.

John Tomasi: We're talking about the 10th, 11th and 12th centuries, which are not widely regarded as a time of harmony.

Elisha Russ-Fishbane: Yes.

John Tomasi: Between Jews and Muslims, can you say more?

Elisha Russ-Fishbane: Absolutely, yeah. So there was a unique moment, it actually kind of intersected nicely for me as a classicist originally, because it was really, between the eighth and the 10th centuries, that we find this unique moment of inter-confessional interfaith discourse and dialogue discourse, and dialogue centered on rational discourse, rational conversation. The way that this developed was an official sponsorship by the Abbasid government in Baghdad at the time to translate the Greek classics into Arabic, and so this is the first time that you begin to have the likes of, not Homer, but you have Plato, you have Aristotle, you have sciences and mathematics, medicine, right? These are secular philosophers, secular, what we now would call scientists. So yes, some were certainly, those who were sponsored and patronized, I should say, by the government, some of them might be called sort of free thinkers, we might call secular today. But many were not. And I want to emphasize the not, actually, because this is one of those fascinating cases in which a government-sponsored policy that had a specific intent took on a life of its own that had a tremendous impact on Muslim Jewish, Muslim Christian, and as as well as Christian Jewish connections. So the original goal of all these translations was to be able to have all the tools, intellectual, scientific know-how, to combine with rhetorical excellence, to put to good work in the promotion of the religion of Islam, to be able ultimately to convert non-Muslims At a time when the majority of the population in the Islamic Empire were not Muslim yet. Around the 10th century, we start to see that tipping point. So there was a big push. So, for example, the use of Aristotle's rhetoric to use to convince and they sponsored these unique sessions of scholars from various religions, representative from Islam, from Christianity, from Judaism, Zoroastrianism, and others, and they would come together and they would each argue for the sake of their faith, or on behalf of their faith, without the use of scriptural or traditional sources, just on the basis of reason alone. The goal was ultimately to win them over to Islam.

John Tomasi: And let me just be sure I understand. As you read the Quran, does it allow for compulsion?

Elisha Russ-Fishbane: No. So this is an important point. There's a verse in the Quran, there was no compulsion in religion. And that's exactly the reason why the aim was conversion, but the method was persuasion. It was not compulsion. And even to the point that when there were moments of forced conversion under Islam, eventually it was reversed, unlike in the Catholic Church where they also didn't force conversion according to official Church Catholic policy. For example, Pope Innocent III and his Sicut Judaeis, this famous bull in which he's following a Augustinian doctrine, you allow for the toleration of the intolerable Jews, you can't forcibly convert them. But according to Catholic law, when they are forcibly converted, that you may not walk it back. And that would be to the detriment of the church. In Islam, it was different. Because of the fundamental bedrock principle in the Quran, there is no compulsion of religion. It was walked back when that did happen. There are exceptions, but this is the, so the story started with an effort to persuade for the sake of Islam.

John Tomasi: And so we have a, we have a Muslim government now sponsoring these, convening and sponsoring these kinds of conversations between Muslim scholars alone, Jewish scholars as well, who was, how wide was the circle of we?

Elisha Russ-Fishbane: So these were individuals, first of all, who, the participants in these sessions, so Majalis in Arabic, they were people who were themselves very well-versed in the intellectual discourse at the time. They had read these classics from, you know, Greek translated into Arabic. They knew their philosophy, they knew their rhetoric, just as well as the Muslims did at this point. And they argued for their faith. But it was a unique breed. It wasn't like just anyone would speak for the faith. They were the select few, the very, very elite intellectuals who had this training and background and read broadly beyond just the Greek classics translated into Arabic, but they also read, for example, the Jews and Christians read Muslim works as well. So there are very few Muslims who actively read, some more read into Christianity because it was considered a bigger threat politically. Jews were not much of a threat to be perfectly honest. They were a far smaller number. And so there's much, much less knowledge of Judaism and far fewer Muslim scholars who took an interest in learning about Judaism from its own sources or learning Hebrew, very, very few. So there were more of the minorities, so to speak minorities, even though it wasn't exactly a demographic minority in every case, certainly Jews were a minority, but those who were considered non-Muslims in these sessions would be much more knowledgeable about Islam as well as the whole philosophical background. So they had a whole series of these sessions throughout Baghdad and they're described in the sources that was a unique moment and it had consequences that far outlived its purpose. The fact that all these works were in translation and reason was held to a high premium and study of philosophy and science was valued. You begin to see the rise of serious non-sectarian, non-confessional philosophical scientific work. People who are interested in everything from medicine to philosophy and theology had a a very broad base of knowledge and reading and training that span from reclassics into the medieval period.

John Tomasi: Elisha, I'm wondering- That's the world that I began to study. I'd like to know, so do we know the effect of these conversations on the participants? For example, was the encounter of the other in this kind of deep way, you're describing it almost as an open-minded way, and I'm interested to hear your take on that phrase. But was the encounter with the other dislodging of their own faith commitments, do we know about that?

Elisha Russ-Fishbane: Yeah. My understanding of the outcome is that it was an abysmal failure from the perspective of the original goal. Those who were participating were just as educated in these same sources and the art of persuasion and rhetoric as the Muslims were at this point. The people that ended up representing their communities were the leaders of the communities who were not about to abandon ship. At the same time, conversion was on the rise for other reasons. It was certainly much more convenient to be a member of the ruling majority where you weren't stigmatized. You had more opportunities, fewer special taxes for the minority religions.

John Tomasi: This is a period, I believe, when Jews were required to wear special clothing, even if they converted because their conversions were not considered legitimate or at least they were suspect. Is that right?

Elisha Russ-Fishbane: So this is something that develops, the special clothing that becomes a hallmark of later Christian anti-Jewish legislation, special colors and sometimes hats and so on that we know later on in the form of the Jewish star actually does start in the medieval Muslim world. But it was not consistent. We first find in the eighth century, again, the Christian era, not the Muslim calendar. And a lot of that has sort of fits and starts. Typically the more religiously zealous the ruler, the more he would want to adhere to the strictest interpretation of the conditions for the non-Muslims, how they had to do and how they had to dress and so on. But very often those expectations were observed only in the breach on the books alone. So it depended on the time and the place. Very often they were not enforced. up until the 13th century, or the mid-13th century when things began to change. But that was, it was on again, off again, in terms of that form of discrimination. But there were many reasons why people, minorities, non-Muslims, I should say, were eager to shed the discrimination and the subjected status that went along with that reality. reality.

John Tomasi: You haven't said much about Maimonides, which surprises me. So tell us, how does Maimonides fit into this story and into your story?

Elisha Russ-Fishbane: Yeah, I appreciate that. So I thought of him actually when you mentioned it briefly in the course of the conversation about these intellectual sessions. So one of the interesting things we find with Maimonides, Maimonides, for those who are listeners who aren't as up on this as I might like. Moses Maimonides, Moses son of Maimonides, okay, Maimonides of the Ides, the Greek patronymic, son of Maimonides, lived in 12th century initially in Cordoba, in Al-Andalus, right, in Muslim Spain, and then traveled to North Africa. Morocco. The the Maghreb, or now known as in the west of Morocco, and then eventually made his way to what was then crusader controlled Palestine, and then down to Egypt. And he spent the bulk of his career in Egypt, although a lot of his intellectual rearing and cultural sort of foundation was in Muslim Spain, Al-Andalus, which was a sort of an extension of that old Baghdad world. Maimonides was educated in the very best of the Jewish tradition and came to be almost representative, almost a symbol for the Jewish tradition in the sense that he wrote the first comprehensive Jewish code of law among many other classic works. But he also was educated in the best of this Greco-Arabic philosophical scientific tradition. He specifically mentions that he studied, for example, the sciences like astronomy or medicine with non-Jewish teachers. But Maimonides' relation to this whole story is that he very much viewed himself not simply as a theological advocate for Judaism, the way that those old sessions in Baghdad designed it to be, that each one defended and represented their faith. He was a strong advocate of what he called philosophy in the Aristotelian tradition, by which he meant open-ended inquiry. We might not consider all of his inquiry purely open-ended. He clearly had Jewish commitment. But he speaks very harshly of that older model of what is typically known as Kalam theology in the Muslim world, in which you find rational arguments to defend the faith, and you know already at the outset what the end result has to be, and you find the arguments to support your claims. Maimonides' approach was, his contrast of that form of theology with philosophy is that philosophy is committed to open-ended inquiry. And that comes with a tremendously important principle that I like to call intellectual humility. term is coming back and I think I've seen it even in use in the Heterodox Academy, it's on the list.

John Tomasi: Yes. Number three. Sitting across the wall from us here in the studio is the HXA way, I'll just read it out loud.

Elisha Russ-Fishbane: Please do.

John Tomasi: I read it almost every session. I read it out loud.

Elisha Russ-Fishbane: Please do. I'll do it again. Yeah. I love it.

John Tomasi: Number one, make your case with evidence. Be intellectually charitable. Three, be intellectually humble, the point you just mentioned. Four, be constructive. and five, be yourself.

Elisha Russ-Fishbane: No, I was so delighted to discover that by the way.

John Tomasi: But let me understand. So he was an observant Jew.

Elisha Russ-Fishbane: Yes, very much so.

John Tomasi: And yet he was, you're saying, he was committed to something like open inquiry, not motivated reasoning, convinced others for particular purpose to conclusions that he holds. But as an observant Jew, by definition, I think, he's committed to certain conclusions. Are they conclusions? How do you describe Maimonides approach to the world in that way?

Elisha Russ-Fishbane: That's a great question. So, and then hopefully this will take us back to intellectual humility, but it's all connected. Maimonides was deeply committed to Judaism. And it's hard to wrap our heads around how he was also committed to open inquiry. That is to say open-ended inquiry, where you don't know yet what the end results are. And I often think about this in terms of Hannah Arendt's description of thinking as a dangerous act in her Life of the Mind is one of the essays published in Life of the Mind where she describes thinking itself as fundamentally dangerous. Why? Because one never knows where it's going to lead. If it's truly an act of thinking and not simply an act of the support of a credo or of an accepted principle.

John Tomasi: Well, you used the word persuasion before.

Elisha Russ-Fishbane: That's right. So in order to persuade, you have to have a truth value that you adhere to. How you arrive there is really the question. I just wrote an article actually on intellectual humility in Maimonidean thoughts and in his life as the evidence as we have it in descriptions of him as a person as well. And as part of what I try to hash out is, his commitments to open inquiry in the sense that, Number one, to admit when you don't know what you really don't know, or the Socratic principle of the wisdom lies in knowing what you don't know, and acknowledging that, which propels a search for the truth. And number two, that when you think you've got it, to allow for the possibility that you might've gotten it wrong, and that someone else could have a better answer. So it's humility in both senses. Commitment to truth is fundamentally a stance intellectual humility. It's a commitment to a patient long-term goal. And number two, it's the ability to acknowledge that someone else has a better argument or a better evidence than you and that you're perfectly happy to admit when you're wrong. So those are two bedrock principles that Maimonides applied. And in one famous case where he is appealing to his fellow Jews to basically accept all the non-Jewish sources that he brings in to bear in his writings. He tells them that sort of a famous line that ultimately was placed on this kind of memorial coin that the state of Israel put out on the anniversary of his passing 800 years later, which was the line where he said, heed the truth, or listen to the truth, no matter who says it. Don't pay attention to the bearer of the truth. It could be a prophet, it could be a gentile, it could be, as he says it, it could be a Jew, it could be a Greek, it could be a Muslim. And in fact, he was saying this in a place, in a work, prefacing a work where he was drawing heavily from the Muslim philosopher Al-Farabi, who himself studied with a Christian in Baghdad, a very famous sort of example of this cross-pollination. So Maimonides himself, this is one of the things that's so fascinating, is that we know that Maimonides was advocating for this kind of intellectual humility, the embrace of other sources of wisdom beyond one's own faith commitment and community, and encouraging his fellow co-religionists to embrace that mindset. But the amazing thing is that he didn't even invent that line. He drew it from the first Muslim philosopher to draw upon Aristotelian philosophy in the ninth century, the philosopher known as Al-Kindi in his work on metaphysics. In his introduction, he basically says the same thing. Why? Because he's now citing for the first time from the Greek philosophers. And he's telling his Muslim readers, Don't be alarmed at the fact that I'm drawing from non-Muslim sources, except the truth, no matter who says it. Isma' al-haq min man qalahu. And what does Maimonides do? He then turns to his fellow Jews and says the same thing, but now not only to heed the truth from the Greeks, but also from the Arabs. So it's an incredible moment, and I think it encapsulates Maimonides' principle of intellectual humility.

John Tomasi: At the very start of this conversation, Elisha, you said that research and scholarship is, in your view, always ultimately in service of what we do in the classroom. So let's turn to that now and talk a bit about your teaching. And you teach a variety of courses, I know. I'm especially interested in this freshman seminar, the class that I visited. Could you tell us a little bit about that class, how you came to teach it and what... So this is the first time you taught it, I believe, it's a pilot course.

Elisha Russ-Fishbane: Correct, yes.

John Tomasi: And you're teaching it just last spring, during the spring of, and it's horrible as I think of it.

Elisha Russ-Fishbane: Yes.

John Tomasi: Can you just tell us a bit about what led you to teach that class, how you taught it, and what you saw?

Elisha Russ-Fishbane: Yeah, it was a wonderful, sort of a nice segue. Really, it was the origin, the happy origin of our conversation, where I had the good fortune invite you to the class which made a big impact on the students and I know that because they wrote response papers. Thank you. Where they really took to heart the message that you brought, the examples that you brought from your experience at Brown. We brought in an example of two students from different sides of the political spectrum who wanted to study with you and have a conversation. Really made a deep impression on them and what we discussed in class clearly made a mark. So this is a course that actually I had thought of years ago when as a result of my University of Chicago roots, the moment when I realized that this life was for me beyond the kind of the childhood thoughts was the week before my first year at the University of Chicago when they marched all the the freshmen in Rockefeller Chapel for the aims of education address. The aims of education address is the University of Chicago tradition going back to the very, very early on. 1902 perhaps. Yeah, but as an annual event, I think it was jumpstarted in the 60s. It was actually a student led initiative that dated back to an old address by University of Chicago faculty member on the aims of education, but it was it was reignited as an annual address in the 60s and ever since has become a beloved cherished at UFC tradition and it blew my mind. Because what it did is it really brought out for me what it means to to to be fully thoughtful and deliberate about what I was about to do for the next four years. Almost like this Thoreauian moment, Thoreau famously says, why did he go to the woods? In his life, it was a Walden or Life in the Woods, he says, I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately. I wanted to face the only essentials of life and to discover if I could learn what it had to teach and that not when I came to die, I discovered that I had not lived, this famous line of Thoreau. To go to the woods, why does one need to go to the woods to live deliberately? In a sense, the way I understand what he was after is that he needed a space outside of the race of life, of educating for employment, and then the race for professional advancement that higher education promises. This space free of economic pressures, ideally, okay, this is an ideal, really not anymore free of economic pressures, and that's a serious issue that we dealt with and that others obviously are looking at. But ideally speaking, it's this unique space outside of the race of life.

John Tomasi: May I just add that as you know, Plato's Academy is described as a place convened in the grove outside of the city, separate from Oikos, the house water from which we got economy, separate from polis, separate from the political everyday debates about virtue and emulation as they would do them, but a place to do something different, something special. Can you go on and say more what you thought that might be?

Elisha Russ-Fishbane: Yes, precisely. So it was a place, in order to be deliberate, in order to be thoughtful about what one's intentions are, what one's goals are, what the aims of this space is or are and what my aims are, one in a sense needs to take the time to reflect. So the space itself, a higher education, the college or university experience is just that kind of a forest-like space in which one is outside of the normal rush of things, but one can have the leisure, ideally, to truly think and reflect and understand and study and do the patient hard work of learning.

John Tomasi: May I add a word?

Elisha Russ-Fishbane: Yeah.

John Tomasi: A verb. And to grow.

Elisha Russ-Fishbane: Beautiful.

John Tomasi: describe the university as being a kind of garden of curiosity. They need some kind of a barrier or some kind of a wall to keep the ordinary run of politics and economics and life a little bit separate. So that in these specialized conditions, perhaps some specialized thing can occur. Something like, I don't know what to call it, accelerated growing, accelerated individuating, perhaps becoming, finding who you are, a path for your life.

Elisha Russ-Fishbane: Yeah, right, very, very nice. And there's actually a piece that we read by the educational theorist Richard Rorty on this sort of topic that pre-collegiate education is really about the consolidation, the crystallization of social norms and understanding the foundations of the society we live, where it comes from, what it looks like, how it fits together, whether it's in the political or intellectual or scientific sphere, whatever it might be, understanding how the world works and our place in it. And the collegiate moment is the moment of individuation, of questioning, of critical thinking, where you question all the things that you thought you took for granted. That's certainly a very powerful way of understanding what that is. But it only happens when it has the freedom and the leisure to do so. But it also now that collegiate education has become an expectation for success in society and certainly in the West. What that means is that fewer people actually reflect on the why. Of course it's important. In the class, that aims of education address that so moved me originally and ultimately led me to this course on the university has almost become their regard. Nobody bothers to ask what we're doing there, what the university is for, what my aims of my education are, because it's almost obvious that they're supposed to be more pragmatic to give me a push forward in my career. In fact, the very first day where we were discussing aims of education...

John Tomasi: This is in the freshman seminar.

Elisha Russ-Fishbane: Yeah. I had them read and watch some aims of education addresses actually from the University of Chicago to give them a sense of this question. And I asked them to write down on the board both what are the aims of our education collectively in this university space and what are the aims of your education, sort of two separate boards. And the aims of our education, much more lofty and noble, the aims of their personal education was much more pragmatic, gaining the skills to be successful in their careers. Very, very few people wrote something something like to be challenged in my views, like one or two people really wrote that.

John Tomasi: And these are all NYU freshmen.

Elisha Russ-Fishbane: Correct.

John Tomasi: 20 of them, rough 18?

Elisha Russ-Fishbane: It was 18.

John Tomasi: Right. Can I just ask you something about you said a minute ago, because I'm just, my radar went up when you mentioned Richard Rorty's idea that education before college is of a different character than collegiate education. And the way you describe Rorty's position, I think it's interestingly ambiguous between two readings, I just want to bring that down to you so we can think of that. I think you said that Rorty's view is that collegiate education is now specialized in a sense of being a time for questioning inherited norms. One reading of that is what I think you're describing, which means that it's a time for reflection, contemplation, deep reading, deep thinking. Another way to think that the time for questioning social norms means It's a time for, and a place for, activism. It's a time to organize, get out in the green, challenge the status quo, fight the man, and so forth.

Elisha Russ-Fishbane: Right.

John Tomasi: There's a tension, we think, in HXA between the idea that the university is a place for scholarship, this kind of unnatural and vital human practice, and the university being a place for activism, political activism in particular. Does Rorty's view tilt one way or the other? Do you see that ambiguity? What sense do you make of that?

Elisha Russ-Fishbane: Right, I think that Rorty's position can move in both directions. Intellectual individuation and social individuation. I'm not sure it's really the case that it's really social individuation. It's more tribalism, politics in the form of finding the cause that you can align with and securing yourself in its ranks, my real concern with the activism that we saw this past year is not the activism or the fact that they're politically engaged or the fact that they care. Thankfully, that's a good first step. People should care. They should be engaged. If they're not, then we really have a problem. And in that sense, I like, you know, the, in broad strokes, the, you know, what's Michael Roth recently said in the, I think it was the Times where he said, you know, I want them to be more political, not less political.

John Tomasi: That's Michael Roth is the president of Wesleyan.

Elisha Russ-Fishbane: Wesleyan, where I actually was a professor before NYU.

John Tomasi: Oh, nice. He's also an HXA member.

Elisha Russ-Fishbane: And actually it was his book on Beyond the University that helped me sort of my thinking and coalesce actually about the course on the university.

John Tomasi: I'd like to ask you about your, as we're coming toward the end of the podcast now, I'd like to ask you about your experience in that classroom and what the students, what the students learn, what did you learn from them? What happened in the first batch of this class?

Elisha Russ-Fishbane: Okay, excellent question. I actually believe first of all, my experience, my takeaway in a sense was but two opposing experiences. Number one, a sense of the terror of the moment that we're in. And then the flip side of a sense of optimism. I'll explain what I mean.

John Tomasi: The terror, what do you mean by terror?

Elisha Russ-Fishbane: What I meant, what do you mean by terror is the first time that I came face to face with the fear that the Gen Z experiences as far as the fear of speaking openly for fear of being shunned, canceled, censored, right? To the point that they censor themselves.

John Tomasi: We talked about this in the class that I visited. I asked them at one point, you remember, they weren't saying, they weren't responding much to my questions at first. And you may recall that I asked them, I told them some of the data from HXA studies about self-censorship, asking the questions like, We do it on our national survey. We ask students, if you self-censor, is it because you're afraid of the professor? And what we find nationally is that most students say, and that's not why they self-censor. They censor because they're afraid of each other.

Elisha Russ-Fishbane: Yes, that's what they all said.

John Tomasi: And in your class too, that seemed to be.

Elisha Russ-Fishbane: So exactly, there was a moment when we basically asked them to raise their hand, not to give examples, but if they self-censored since they came to NYU, And everyone, to a person, raised their hand.

John Tomasi: I remember.

Elisha Russ-Fishbane: And the follow-up question was, are you censoring because of fear of what the professor will say or think about you, and no one raised their hand. They were all afraid of each other. That I found terrifying. There's a great deal of vulnerability that we know of Gen Z. I've talked about Jon Haidt's work, a lot of concern about the effect of social media, the effect of the cancel culture. But what I find is that it's very, very challenging to foster a robust conversation on controversial questions in the classroom when they're all afraid, not only of what people will think of them in a classroom, but how they're going to be voted and shunned in social media platforms. So that was what was terrifying to me. What was refreshing and invigorating and made me optimistic was the fact that they really did seem to care about that crisis and they could see the better alternative reality. They all wanted a space in which they didn't have to self-censor. In fact, one of our students wrote that in a response paper to your visit, that she was actually afraid to speak her mind because she might trigger the professor, right? And that was sort of an exception.

John Tomasi: That she might offend their professor.

Elisha Russ-Fishbane: Yeah, exactly. She used the word trigger the professor.

John Tomasi: Very shocking to me.

Elisha Russ-Fishbane: for the vast majority was there themselves. And so to get to a point where there can be a truly genuine back and forth, where we can have open inquiry and respect for difference, where the person who disagrees with me most might just have the idea I need the most in order to fully understand something that I only understood from a partial perspective, or something, a reading that some people might consider triggering or dangerous, might just be, right, even as much as I might disagree with a lot of its points, it might just be the thing that I need the most to understand something that I'm missing. And so all of this, this whole perspective was something that they were craving. The ability to envision that alternate reality, all of them, they saw it and they could almost touch it. And there's something that brought out the optimist in me that it's not dead. It might be deeply sick, but the goal of higher education as a laboratory for diverse views of truly educating oneself and engaging in a dialogue with people very different from you and with different views than you is not dead. simply very, very sort of in a bad place. But the students want it and many of the professors want it.

John Tomasi: Elisha, just as a closing question, do you plan to teach that class again?

Elisha Russ-Fishbane: I have it on schedule for the spring.

John Tomasi: You're doing it again this spring?

Elisha Russ-Fishbane: Yeah, yeah.

John Tomasi: I think it'll be fascinating to see, I mean, it was such a difficult moment and so challenging for all of us involved on campuses, but imagine for a freshman to be on a campus like NYU, a great university where there was so much conflict happening on campuses in the city. What are your, do you mind just by closing by saying something about your hopes for that class next time you teach it?

Elisha Russ-Fishbane: Yeah, yeah, I do hope to spend some time reflecting on the crisis of the previous year and something which we're not over with, but to really have them reflect vigorously on what it means to be both intellectually and politically engaged. The goal of all this education is not to silo ourselves. It is to be publicly engaged. But to be publicly engaged, not necessarily to be politically engaged. Because to be politically engaged is very often to continue with the silo-ization of listening to one's own. To be publicly engaged is to be committed to the public project of the university as in the public trust, something which is there for the good of all. In a sense, almost like a public service, to become like Washington and Jefferson dreamed about, educated citizens, thoughtful citizens, and to become able to overcome one's biases and prejudices by engaging with different kinds of people and learning about different types of things. Not only for my own benefit and advancement, but the way that it really functioned in the early American experiment and the public school experiment, public university experiment of higher education for the public good. I hope that we can sort of spend more time thinking about the difference between political engagement and public engagement and how we sorely need more public engagement and how political engagement looks like it's the same thing, but very often leads to less dialogue, more isolation, less understanding. And the goal is really to see my education as a springboard, as a pathway to engagement with not only other people, but how my education can be of benefit to the public good.

John Tomasi: Elisha Russ-Fishbane, thank you so much for being on Heterodox Out Loud.

Elisha Russ-Fishbane: It's truly my pleasure. I thank you for the invitation, and I welcome the continuation of this conversation between us and hopefully our listeners.

John Tomasi: The same, the same.

S2 Episode 25: The Golden Era of Jewish-Muslim Dialogue: What Can We Learn Today?

How did a classicist's journey through Greco-Roman literature and Arabic studies shape his unique approach to academia?

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