Tikvah Scholar
Academic Year 2010-2011
Ari Savitzky
Ari Savitzky grew up in Providence, Rhode Island, and graduated from Brown University in 2006. At Brown, he co-edited the opinions section of The Brown Daily Herald, served on the undergraduate student government and as president of the Class of 2006, and delivered one of the 2006 commencement orations. A history concentrator focusing on American political history, Ari was a frequent contributor and columnist for campus publications like Post and The Independent. After Brown, Ari managed a successful campaign for state representative in Providence, lived in Beijing for 8 months, where he copy-edited and wrote for an English language newspaper and developed his Mandarin language skills, and then came back to Rhode Island to work for democracy reform as the founding director of FairVote Rhode Island. At NYU Law, Ari is an Articles Editor at The NYU Law Review, and has served on the board of the NYU ACLU and as a Research Assistant for Professor Arthur R. Miller. Ari spent his 1L summer working on voting rights litigation at Project Vote, a DC-based non-profit. Last summer, Ari worked at Sullivan & Cromwell in New York City.
Research
(Mentored by Professor Gabriella Blum, Tikvah Fellow, Berkowitz Fellow)
My research will focus on contemporary American Jewish conceptions of fundamentalism and pluralism. My starting point is the general proposition that the American Jewish community is strongly supportive of and invested in the idea of America as a pluralist liberal democracy. From there, I want to explore two stories which complicate this aspect of American Jewish political identity.
First is the Chanukah story. Particularly in the last several years, popular writers like David Brooks and Christopher Hitchens have noted that the books I and II Maccabees tell a story very different from the popular American understanding of the Chanukkah story. How illiberal and intolerant were the Maccabees? What type of threat did Hellenistic culture present to Jewish life in their time? Brooks notes that the Maccabees “were not the last bunch of angry, bearded religious guys to win an insurgency campaign against a great power in the Middle East, but they may have been among the first.” How apt is his implicit comparison of the Maccabees to the Taliban? All of these questions in turn implicate one at the nexus of law and Jewish civilization: how can or should American Jews reconcile the Channukkah story with pluralist, liberal democracy.
Second is J-Street. Popular writers, most notably Peter Bienart in a widely discussed article in the New York Review of Books, have noted a generational attitude-shift within the American Jewish community with regard to both America’s (and Israel’s) policy choices in the Middle East. He identifies the tension as between Israel’s (and what he terms “The American Jewish Establishment’s”) defense of its policy choices with Israel’s (and said Establishment’s) description of itself as a liberal democracy. To what extent do young American Jews feel that tension? Does American Jewish political morality change when they are looking at their own country, versus looking at Israel? Should it?
