This episode is really about an attitude issue. I advocate for tolerating ambivalence. I understand that to mean an attitude in reading political theory texts that challenges you to see the complexities of the text and see the good, the bad, the boring and the strange in it. Yet not judge the text on whether it is right or wrong, true or untrue (Here I am very skeptical of the general use of these categories anyway), good or bad. Any judgement in these regards is likely to be unhelpful at best. Instead, it is almost always more productive to ask “What can this text do for me? What new perspective does the text give me? How does the text help me to understand the world (or not)? Where is my discomfort with the text and why do I feel uncomfortable with it? And what does that tell me?” – in other words, sit with the discomfort and make it work for you. No final judgement required.
Now, the concept of ambivalence tolerance has been researched for a while in psychology and, of course, there is a large debate on its validity. Psychology articles are often very technical, but link two of them anyway, because even skimming the abstracts gives you at least some sense of what the debates are about. The second one is on ambiguity tolerance, which is closely related and sometime both are used interchangeably.
Matthias, Julia & Baranowski, Andreas & Culmann, Anna & Tüttenberg, Simone & Erim, Yesim & Morawa, Eva & Beschoner, Petra & Jerg-Bretzke, Lucia & Albus, C. & Mogwitz, Sabine & Geiser, Franziska. (2025). Validation of the Ambivalence and Uncertainty Scale. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. 23. 46. 10.3390/ijerph23010046. file:///home/ulrike/Downloads/Validation_of_the_Ambivalence_and_Uncertainty_Scal.pdf
McLain, D. L., Kefallonitis, E., & Armani, K. (2015). Ambiguity tolerance in organizations: definitional clarification and perspectives on future research. Frontiers in psychology, 6, 122037. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00344/full
And the, of course, there is Marx. There is no way of explaining all of Karl Marx in 7-8 Minutes. But the people at The School of Life make a valiant effort.
And this is the promised link to the Marx Text itself, so you can go and see for yourself. There is many copies around the internet and I could read the text in its original German, being German and all, but this version does nicely.
Karl Marx (1844): The Jewish Question. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/On%20The%20Jewish%20Question.pdf
Googling will get you many more, but this is one article handling Marx and the question of anti-semitism. There is a lot behind paywalls (Don’t get me started on that absurd model – because, no, this definitely is not about “paying” the creators.), but this one isn’t:
David Martyn 2024: Expropriating Antisemitism: Universal Noncommonality in Marx’s “On the Jewish Question” in: MLN, Volume 139, Number 3, April 2024 (German Issue) pp. 390-411 https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/945082/pdf
This is only a start, but I am sure you can dig your way further in. As always, read and think for yourself. Amongst other things, it is more fun.