A Jewish Case Against the Naked Public Square

When people ask where I intern, I watch their faces carefully. I say: First Things, a journal of religion and public life founded by a Lutheran pastor who soon thereafter became a Catholic priest. The response, almost always, is some version of the same question: Why would a Jewish girl from Yeshiva University want to work there? 

The question assumes a premise I have come to reject. We have grown so accustomed to the idea that Jewish safety requires keeping our identity separate from Christianity, from public religion, from any arrangement that might privilege the majority faith, that genuine engagement has come to feel like betrayal. My identity as an American Jew, as a Yeshiva University student, found its fullest expression at an interreligious magazine with a strong Christian voice.

First Things has provided me with confidence. I remember sitting with an editor as she worked through a piece on natural law and subsidiarity and realizing that the ideas on the page, though they moved in a different register, pressed toward the same territory that Halakha had taught me to inhabit in a very different classroom. Natural law grounds its claims in the universal structures of reason; Halakha grounds its claims in the particularity of revelation. Yet both traditions refuse to surrender the moral world to the calculus of utility or the logic of the market. My Jewish formation, rooted in the study of Talmud and the categories of Halakha, sharpened rather than hindered me in these conversations about the moral foundations of our society. Jews like me share with the Christians who staff First Things a seriousness about moral truth, one that the naked public square would dissolve and that both traditions exist to defend.

That realization of shared purpose deepened some weeks later, when I told an editor I could not stay late because of Shabbat. There was no awkwardness, no explanation required. He nodded and said, simply, that he understood the obligation. First Things is my first professional environment outside the Jewish world, and this was the first time a workplace received my observance not as a scheduling inconvenience but as a noble commitment to be encouraged and honored.

The Jewish wariness of Christian religiosity is historically earned. For most of Western history, the cross was not merely a symbol of faith but an instrument of Jewish suffering: the Crusades, the Inquisition, the pogroms carried out in its shadow. When the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, swept through Europe, its adherents made a deliberate wager: Safety lay in secularism, in stripping religion from civic life. If Christianity could be confined behind church walls and restricted to private belief, Jews could breathe in the open air of a secular Europe. 

That wager failed. Emancipated European Jewry discovered that secular nationalism could sponsor mass murder with terrible efficiency. Hitler’s racial laws made no exceptions for the assimilated or the secular. And yet the defensive reflex endured. American Jewish leadership spent much of the twentieth century championing strict church-state separation, treating any religious presence in public life as a quiet danger to Jewish survival. The logic was understandable. But it has been, over time, self-defeating. 

In attempting to secularize America for protection, the Jewish community secularized itself. Elliott Abrams, in a 1997 First Things essay, diagnosed the costs precisely. American Jews had replaced religious practice with substitute faiths: left-wing politics dressed as prophetic Judaism, Israel, Holocaust remembrance, ethnic identity—all held up as a way to hold the community together without God. The numbers tell a sad tale. Intermarriage rates among non-Orthodox Jews now exceed 70 percent; synagogue membership has declined across every denomination. As Abrams put it, this kind of Jewishness is “a counterfeit faith, a passing phenomenon.” 

The magazine was founded by Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, who warned against what he called the “naked public square”: a civic life stripped of religious voice that does not remain empty, he argued, but fills with ersatz religion, ideology dressed in the vestments of the sacred. Democracy, Neuhaus believed, requires the moral foundations that religious communities provide; without a shared language of right and wrong, the public square becomes a battleground for power alone. Jews and Christians, he insisted, had every reason to stand together to resist the naked public square. 

Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, in his 1964 essay “Confrontation,” cautioned against communal theological dialogue with Christians, believing that sustained interfaith debate might blur Judaism’s distinct religious convictions. But he did not forbid all engagement. He called for Jews and Christians to join forces against “the threat of secularism.” I see my work at First Things as answering that call. 

Yeshiva University’s founding principle, Torah U’Madda, the synthesis of Torah and secular knowledge, makes a similar claim. Authentic Jewish life requires no quarantine from the broader intellectual world. To engage seriously with the Christian tradition on natural law and political order is not to compromise one’s Judaism. It is to fulfill what the Talmud calls chokhmah ba’goyim—wisdom found among the nations—an obligation the Rambam himself honored when he absorbed Aristotle into the architecture of Jewish law. 

First Things does not ask Jews to leave their Judaism at the door. It publishes essays on Halakha, Jewish theology, and the Hebrew Bible with the same rigor it brings to Christian thought. David Novak has argued that Jews and Christians share a common adversary in ideological secularism, which seeks to strip God from public life entirely. In the struggle against an aggressive secularism, the distance between synagogue and church matters far less than the shared conviction that neither belongs in exile. 

Full membership in American civic life does not require the erasure of difference. It requires the confidence to enter the room as oneself, to recognize that the Baptist, the Catholic, and the Orthodox Jew can argue together about the good without ceasing to be who they are. That argument, conducted by religiously serious people, is the American experiment at its best, and it is what First Things has been hosting since its founding.