How much of this endures today? Among the generation that went to war, a great deal. For example, a 1993 survey by Alan Fisher of the politics of Los Angeles Jews shows that its leadership, which is generally older (in its sixties and seventies), maintains a much more liberal political profile than the majority of Los Angeles Jews. Despite enormous demographic, social and cultural changes that have occurred in the City of Angels since the late 1960s, these Jewish leaders retain their fundamental commitment to values shaped in the crucible of World War II. Much of the Jewish communal agenda reflects these commitments. Israel's centrality for Jewish fundraising and American Jews' support of the state endure despite significant sociopolitical changes.
Even as Jews begin to adjust their communal budgets, leading philanthropists of an older generation emphatically reject the idea that money raised for Israel is charity. "I give seven-figure money every year, and I don't give it to charity," Max Fisher told a reporter. "Charity is what you give a homeless person on the street. I give money because I'm a partner with the state of Israel in a sacred cause." Indeed, many American Jews still hold a romantic image of Israel as a land peopled by heroes who made deserts bloom and rescued Jews from the destructive snares of anti-Semitism, an image shaped by Jewish GIs like Leon Uris. (In fact, Jews are not alone in searching out Ari Ben Canaans when they visit Israel. Gentile Americans share similar myths about the Jewish state.)
How much did the generation of Jewish GIs transmit to their children? That is more difficult to assess. Certain prewar choices and constraints disappeared. It became commonplace for American Jewish youth to attend college just as most boys after the war marked the end of several fitful years of Jewish education with bar mitzvah ceremonies. Indeed, the popularity of bar mitzvah encouraged bat mitzvah ceremonies to spread among American Jews who wanted and could afford to give their daughters a Jewish education. Nuclear family households still appear to be the norm among American Jews, and migration continues to be chosen by many Jews when they decide to start a career or family or when they choose to retire. Such mobility heightens distances among relatives, though American Jews appear to have acclimated themselves to maintaining family ties through telephone calls and occasional visits.
The dispersion of American Jews today presents a striking contrast with the Jewish urban world in the prewar years when a subway ride from the Bronx to Brooklyn was a major journey--indeed, when it was rare for Jews in the Bronx even to meet Jews from Brooklyn unless they went to a Catskill resort or a college campus. Not that parochial enclaves do not exist; they do. But Jewish horizons have broadened, not only about the United States but also regarding the diversity of the Jewish diaspora. Jews are also much more comfortable among Christians than they were in the prewar period and many Jews no longer think of themselves as members of an ethnic group, the self-evident reality of the prewar years.
How did American Jews, who had experienced discrimination and prejudice in the years prior to World War II, acquire today's freedom to choose to be Jews? How did a distinctive Jewish pattern develop linking wealth and education with political liberalism, secularism and a steadfast commitment to Israel? The possibility of a new Jewish synthesis emerged after World War II from changes it effected in a crucial generation. For Jewishness to become a matter of choice, the subtle and not-so-subtle barriers of discrimination in education, housing and employment had to be dismantled. Prejudice against Jews had to lose its respectability. Jews had to work at opening society before they could thrive in it and fashion an American Judaism appropriate to such a free milieu. Only then could they discover the "crisis of freedom": the opportunity offered by an increasingly open society to intermarry and the challenge it presented to maintain Jewish distinctiveness and collective continuity. The generation who went to war, returned ready and able to transform American Jewry. We live with their heritage today.
