You Shouldn’t Be Afraid to Ask Questions

Reader responses on race, science, and race science

This is a subscriber edition of Deep Shtetl, a newsletter about the unexplored intersections of politics, culture, and religion. Forwarded this email? Sign up for the newsletter here, and subscribe to The Atlantic for access to exclusives like this.

If there’s one theme that runs through the emails I receive in response to this newsletter, it’s gratitude for addressing questions that people were afraid to ask. When you cover a lot of controversial topics, as I do—from race to religion to geopolitical subjects like Israel-Palestine—you soon discover that lots of folks are confused about them, but worry that if they admit their confusion, they will be branded as benighted or bigoted.

But life doesn’t actually work that way. No one is born knowing everything. We all have blind spots about issues and communities that we haven’t encountered. Seeking to understand what we don’t know is not a failing; it’s how we learn and grow. A society that discourages such questioning is one that functionally fosters ignorance.

To take an obvious example: Jews constitute just 0.2 percent of the global population, which means that most people have never met one of us. This means that what they know of Jewish people typically comes from cultural stereotypes, television, and the internet. You can see how this could go wrong. The reason so many people are susceptible to anti-Semitic ideas is because they lack reliable sources of information about Jewish people. The only way to rectify this situation is for people to meet and read real Jews, and find answers to their understandable questions about us.

Today, especially on social media, it’s common for people to pretend to already have all the answers. But what we really need are safe spaces for well-meaning people to discuss complicated issues and areas of ignorance without feeling belittled. I hope this newsletter can be that place for many of you. And I want to highlight some readers who have leaned into this idea.

Untangling Race and Jews

Unsurprisingly, readers had many thoughts about Whoopi Goldberg’s misguided remarks about the Holocaust not being “about race.” Javier writes about how the controversy helped him finally understand the racialization of Jews that he witnessed as a child:

My friend Jimmy lived a few houses down. My parents didn’t like him, called him “El Amarillo” because literally he was yellow: Yellow hair and jaundiced skin. One day when we were playing in our yard (my poor mother’s garden which we mercilessly destroyed), he offered me this piece of wisdom. (I paraphrase.) “Do you know why Jews have such big noses? It’s because air is free and that way they can consume more of it.” It’s pretty remarkable that after 65 years or so I still remember that. In any case I knew Judaism was a religion and that Jesus was a Jew (we were very devout Catholics). That was the extent of my knowledge of Judaism. But still even as a 9-year-old that was a truly puzzling statement. How does a religious belief affect the size of your nose? I don’t recall having said anything in response. Maybe my sense of gringoness was too precarious to make a completely logical observation.

65 years later, your comments on race and Judaism finally provided some context.

Katrina writes about how we all have blind spots about other communities, and why it’s important to create space to fill those in, rather than punish people for not knowing:

I am an African American woman who grew up in the Deep South of Arkansas and I never saw or knew of any Jewish people outside of watching Fiddler on the Roof. When I moved to attend graduate school at the University of Michigan, that is where I had a culture shock. I had never seen so many Jews. Yair, when I was in elementary and high school, our school textbooks did not teach an in-depth history lesson on Jewish history and culture. Down south they screen a lot of information (as evidenced currently by senators and state representatives trying to remove books from school libraries). There were TV movies that were not allowed in Arkansas that I saw in Michigan.

I will tell you that I have been miseducated as it relates to Jews as a race. Many people do not understand that African Americans don’t even learn about their own culture in school, especially down south, and they sure did not give full history lessons on the Jews. The lack of content in the schools has left many thinking like Whoopi, not out of any desire to be ignorant, but just really not knowing and understanding.

I am glad that you came on Joy Reid’s show and provided a positive take, and that you understand that these are misconceptions that many people have.

Scientific Uncertainty

As Harvard historian Steven Shapin explained in last week’s edition, it’s easy to talk about “following the science,” but it’s a lot harder to actually do it. Dr. Steven Gorelick of Hunter College writes:

I co-taught college honors courses on statistics and the scientific method, and every time I hear requests that we “follow the science,” I am both slightly encouraged and more than slightly disappointed.

I am about as evidence-based as a person can get, but to say there is some consensus on what the science is at any given point in time also betrays our continuing scientific illiteracy. It’s wonderful when there is a consensus, and in the current pandemic, the result has been a life-saving vaccine. But science is a confusing, nonlinear, unpredictable process that only occasionally offers absolute axioms. New findings are constantly confounding and reversing certainties we may have cherished the day before.

From the very start of the pandemic, I’ve known that many people would eventually lose the ability to tolerate the uncertainty that is absolutely routine in science, and think that once science has answered a question, that question will remain answered.

Elsewhere

Along similar lines, one of the things I discussed with Shapin that didn’t make it into our published conversation was how it’s a lot harder to communicate to the public about a live, developing science. My colleague Charlie Warzel has a perceptive piece exploring this and related ideas in his Galaxy Brain newsletter:

Most of us are not used to seeing the sometimes messy, iterative form of science, where hypotheses are tested, refuted, retested, and eventually confirmed. We’re used to that process happening outside of our view and then having more definitive, fully formed conclusions presented to us. But when a novel virus spreads swiftly around the world, we’re forced to take in new information in real time. A lot of us aren’t used to this as news consumers but more importantly, our brains don’t exactly love it, either.

Arash Azizi argues that my points about Jewish identity not fitting into “Western” boxes apply far more broadly than I or others allow.

Noah Millman and Samuel Goldman offer thoughtful complicating critiques of my piece on the surprising success of Holocaust education in America. They are both more pessimistic, but for somewhat different reasons.

NPR’s Aisha Harris kindly recommended “Your Bubble Is Not the Culture” to the audience of the Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast. And I joined The Big Story podcast to discuss that piece in more detail.