In a recent talk at the Capital Jewish Museum alongside Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, Dr. Yehuda Kurtzer — president of the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America — offered American Jews a soothing bromide: embrace your “political homelessness.” “I don’t think some measure of political homelessness is a fundamentally bad thing,” he intoned, lamenting hyper-partisanship and warning that Jews are “stuck… between an illiberal argument on the right, which is currently in power, and an illiberalism of the left.” The solution? Fight for “the very liberal framework that resists the authoritarianism of the right and resists the authoritarianism of the left.”

Spare us the gaslighting, Rabbi. This isn’t some noble call to transcend partisanship. It’s the same slick sleight-of-hand Kurtzer and his institutional machine have peddled for years: rebrand intersectional progressivism as “the liberal framework,” shove it down the throat of even Modern Orthodoxy, then clutch pearls when the left’s Hamas-adjacent fever dream explodes in your face. Kurtzer didn’t stumble into political homelessness—he engineered the exile of classical Jewish particularism from American Jewish life. Now he wants us all to join him in the wilderness he created.

Let’s start with the man himself. Kurtzer, raised Modern Orthodox, proudly abandoned full Orthodoxy in his early 20s. The breaking point? “My growing commitment to gender egalitarianism” and the conviction that Orthodoxy “could and never would be fully embraced” with it. He now shops at the denominational........

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