Conversations with Tyler / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
24 published records
01 / belief
“If I think about a lot of 19th-century or even early 20th-century Jewish writings, that’s arguably the most dynamic tradition, again, at that turning point.”
02 / belief
“I think that Judaism has the same problem that any thick civilization has in a world in which, as you say, context is stripped away.”
03 / belief
“I think that Jewish faith rises or falls — Jewish faith — whether the Jewish people does is as yet an unasked question.”
04 / belief
“I think the brief biography, and some of you may not know, Jacob Neusner was the most productive and prolific scholar of the 20th century.”
05 / belief
“If I look at the history of the arts in other areas, I see a tendency for centralization of the past. So I think today, actually, many more people read Shakespeare than they did 30 years ago.”
06 / uncertainty
“I don’t know if you know that: that’s an old joke about the rabbi who has two people in front of him, and they each make their case.”
07 / belief
“What I would say is that Hasidism, which is a tradition that I deeply love — in some ways my greatest religious hero was a very offbeat, strange Hasidic rebbe called the Kotzker Rebbe — Hasidism, what it did was, at least from the Baal Shem Tov, is it sought, yes, to restore the sense of God’s immanence in the world, the sense of joy in connecting to God and to other people.”
08 / evaluation
“Look, the one thing that I would say that is important to keep in mind is, it’s not 1942.”
09 / belief
“If you take out “The entire burden of the Torah,” I might agree, but I think that there’s a lot of other things that you could just as easily say the Torah is about.”
10 / belief
“Given how many literally billions of people have been elevated from poverty by, what is mostly in my account, capitalism, not only capitalism, Milton Friedman saw this, but still the weight of Jewish intellectual opinion in the United States has mostly been on the Left. I think that’s a well-established regularity.”
11 / belief
“When this synagogue here was also the second home for Adas Israel. When Adas Israel left here, in 1959 I believe [1951— Ed.”
12 / belief
“I think the attempt to say everything happens for a reason can lead you to some moral obscenities like, “Oh, this kid in the Sudan who was born with amoebic dysentery and lived for three years and suffered and died, it happened for a reason.”
13 / belief
“Here’s what I would say. He’s portraying the Hebrew David, but the idea of having such a magnificent David statue is a Christian idea.”
14 / evaluation
“I think probably the best non-theological case for choosing Israel is that you would be part of an astonishing experiment — that is, the revival of a people in its land after thousands of years, in an attempt to create something that is important and lasting and a legacy that involves tradition but is not enslaved to it.”
15 / evaluation
“He incites David to do something bad, so that way you don’t have to blame David that he did it. And in that sense, I think the Chronicles is a sanitizing of the real history of David, even though it may be a more interesting political — I don’t know — more interesting, a different political lens.”
16 / preference
“The Koran is — and this you should excuse me, for the home team, I like Judaism much better — the Koran is very unwilling to allow any sinfulness in its heroes.”
17 / preference
“I can’t speak in those words, but I think that any deal — first of all, knowing something about Iranian culture because so much of my congregation is Iranian, and any deal where the American side didn’t leave the table even once is to me, by definition, a bad deal.”
18 / evaluation
“I would say, if I had to pick one thing that is at the heart of Islam that is antidemocratic, it is the concept that’s very deep — that is, in the very name of the religion — of submission.”
19 / evaluation
“I would say probably what strikes me when I visit Israel is that there is an increasing dissatisfaction and disaffection with all political life and activity that is dangerous for the country because the left wing is virtually declawed.”
20 / evaluation
“In terms of whether he changed the course of Jewish history, I think you almost can’t say no because Maimonides is probably the single most important figure in Judaism.”
21 / evaluation
“Love in the words of Shir Hashirim, the Song of Songs, is strong as death. So if the American Jewish community, even if not wholly — because I’m not a believer in universal love, because then love is diluted; it has no meaning.”
22 / evaluation
“I’ve read several of them, but some of them were produced by his students and some of them are translations and so on, but even when you strip away all the accretions, he still was a phenomenally productive scholar, and in many ways changed the field of Talmud studies, even though traditional Talmudists didn’t like to think that, in part because they didn’t like to think that and in part because he was a notoriously difficult character, and I will leave it at that.”
23 / evaluation
“Primo Levi is a problematic figure in some sad way because, although it’s not a universal consensus, most people believe he committed suicide and Elie Wiesel said that he “died at Auschwitz 40 years later.”
24 / preference
“There were two thinkers who were most important to me in different ways, although it’s hard to say, partly because of where I grew up, and I think one was Heschel, the other [Martin] Buber.”