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The State of American Jewry
From: Columbia University
| By:
Samuel G. Freedman |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Assimilation in the American melting pot has been blamed for the dilution of Jewish religious practice over the last two centuries. Samuel G. Freedman, professor of journalism at Columbia University, points out that the millions of Jewish immigrants who came to America in the mid-nineteenth century had for the most part already succumbed to secularization in Europe and were not fervently religious. Perhaps unexpectedly, American Judaism has recently been moving toward more stringent and open religious practice. Freedman examines the reasons for this movement and predicts a restructuring of American Jewish denominations in the years to come. |
 oday there is an intense and unprecedented degree of friction within the American Jewish population. Much of this is a result of the unexpected rise of a vital and quite vibrant, if not numerically larger, Orthodox community in America, while the tone of the American Jewish community has been set by a secular cultural vision of Jewish identity brought by the immigrants from Eastern Europe from the 1880s through the 1920s. |
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| Hester Street in 1898. | |
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There is a false concept that American Jewish immigrant life was densely and fervently religious, and that this was diluted or lost through secularization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. That just wasn't so. Immigrants then, like immigrants now, are a self-selecting bunch. Some were already under the influence of the Enlightenment and the Haskalah--a kind of syncretized Jewish enlightenment--and had already thrown off religious observance to become trade unionists, Zionists, Communists, anarchists or just plain individualists. Or they came with a modicum of religious practice that they were willing to put at risk by going into the crucible of a new country. They were stepping outside all that was known and familiar about the theocracies of the shtetl and the ghetto by coming to America in the first place. |
In Europe, it was really impossible for a Jew to be recognized as part of the larger society. Even a Jew who got baptized was regarded as somehow distant from the society, as "other." When Jews were politically emancipated in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that was overtly or implicitly based on the condition that they be willing to throw off their Jewishness as an ethnic force as well as a religious force. |
 The Dreyfus case and the Holocaust are the ultimate proofs of that. All of this makes the American experience so singular. The lesson of the Diaspora in Europe up to twentieth century was, as Theodore Herzl said, that "our enemies have made of us one people"--that some kind of immutable, racial identity was imposed on Jews. You can't convert out of being a race. You can't marry out of being a race. You can't baptize yourself out of being a race. What America offered was liberation from the idea that "Jew" is a racial categorization. |
In America, those who had desired in Europe to step outside of a religious identity and try to become part of some kind of new hybrid human being in a polyglot society found that was possible. It was possible from the very beginning of the republic. What accelerated this in the last half of the twentieth century was the dissolution of a system of institutional anti-Semitism. There were quotas at schools like Columbia in terms of admissions and faculty appointments, and blackballing by social clubs and golf clubs, which are places where a lot of political and social power gets transacted. There were covenants against Jews living in certain neighborhoods or communities. |
That Gentleman's Agreement kind of anti-Semitism was destroyed by the Holocaust. The Holocaust has become the example of the logical extension of even this socially polite brand of anti-Semitism. It discredited anti-Semitism as a philosophy in America for all but the fringe. Suddenly, after the war, all these impediments were shattered. The ability for Jews to be socially mobile, to be geographically mobile, to be professionally mobile became available to a higher degree than ever before. |
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| Bobover Rebbe and his granddaughter, Borough Park, New York. | |
This creates a crisis of possibility for the American Jewish community. All of a sudden, it raised questions of identity. What is it to be Jewish? Why are you Jewish? Who is a Jew? What makes one belong? What are the credentials? What are the commitments required? These questions weren't even entertained when identity was imposed from without, when a racial identity was yoked to every Jew in the Diaspora. Those questions began to deeply animate Jewish life in this country. |
I think one reason for this unexpected resurgency of Orthodoxy in this country is that, whether you like their answers or not, they have very clear answers to all those questions. Their answer is that a Jew is one who practices Judaism. Religion is what defines identity. All these other things--ethnicity, folk culture, political sensibility--arise out of a foundation of religious practice rather than existing as alternative sources of identity. The prevailing view until the last third of the last century was: If you're going down the Jewish line of the cafeteria, you can take the platter marked religion or you can take the platter marked culture, and they're equally useful to you. |
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| Theodore Herzl on a ship bound for Palestine. | |
Something like 85 percent of American Jews say that separation of church and state is a very important value, while about 43 percent of the country as a whole does. Is that because of a love for secularism? I don't think so. I think it speaks to a Jewish historical experience, which is that a nonsecular society becomes a Christian society. A Christian society becomes an anti-Semitic society. Historically speaking, it's a perfectly reasonable assumption for Jews to have come to--it speaks quite accurately to the Jewish experience over 2,000 years of exile. The problem is that it doesn't apply in the American context. I think that's why some Christian intellectuals may be mystified by it. It's not mysterious if you realize that the core issue isn't secularization; it's the fear of pogroms. |
Stringency
People tend to mistakenly look at intra-Jewish issues as purely Orthodox versus non-Orthodox and miss where certain issues break down along denominational lines or other frontiers. For instance, with the "Who's a Jew?" issue, there's a huge gap between the Reform and the Conservative denominations as well as between both of those and the Orthodox. Who speaks for Judaism? |
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| Chicken market on Hester Street, 1937. | |
There is a very important friction within Orthodoxy, between the Modern wing and the Haredi wing. Non-Orthodox Jews see Modern Orthodoxy as an atavistic way of life--superstitious and ill-suited to the modern world. It's attacked by the right-wing Orthodox for being weak-willed and too compromising. Kashruth (the Jewish laws of keeping kosher) is a good barometer of this. When kashruth standards were formalized in the Orthodox union for American society in the 1930s, there was no such thing as glatt kosher. Glatt kosher is a great example of social construction. It is a term that Hasidic Jews popularized after World War II. Relatively few Jews bought kosher meat, but all Hasidic Jews did. They tended to live clustered together, so it made sense for butchers to start hewing to the standard of glatt, which involves lung tissue and tumors and interesting stuff like that. So glatt started to catch on because of market share. But in some way it became socially understood to mean "real kosher." What used to be kosher isn't enough anymore; now it's got to be glatt. Certain butcher shops even advertise "Lubavitch meat only," which is a higher standard still. It's got to be slaughtered and handled at every stage by Hasidic Jews. |
The great historian Haym Soloveitchik calls this "text culture"--stringent rules that have begun to trump what he called a mimetic kind of Orthodox practice in this country. These stringent rulings are called chumrot, and they have become so pervasive that there's a joke in Orthodox circles about the "chumrah of the month club," that every month there's a new stringency issued. |
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| Bar/bat mitzvah class at a Conservative synagogue in Little Rock, Arkansas. | |
Part of the other reason it's taken hold is that Joseph Soloveitchik, Haym's father, was a titanic figure in Modern Orthodoxy. He was so renowned and from such an incredible rabbinical lineage that even those ultra-Orthodox who disagreed with him had to respect his stature. Since Soloveitchik died, there has been no one in the Modern Orthodox world with that kind of power over Orthodoxy as a whole. There's no one who can hold down the left wing of Orthodoxy in terms of these stringencies, and there are plenty of very articulate and very influential rabbis and Talmudic scholars who argue on the right wing and who exert a great pull. A colleague of mine who grew up Modern Orthodox remembers mixed dancing in his Young Israel congregation in the 1950s and 1960s. That would be absolutely impossible in any Orthodox congregation today. Congregations that didn't have mechitzas (dividers between men and women) have put them up. Congregations that had low mechitzas have raised them higher. |
Jewish Reformation
In terms of practice, if not in formal denominational changes, the next century could bring a Jewish Reformation. There is an incredible revolution of rising expectations in the Modern Orthodox movement. The Modern Orthodox movement is nearing a huge confrontation over whether to ordain women rabbis and whether to have egalitarian worship. There is more than a generation of women with religious education that is equivalent to that of young men in day school, who've gone to seminaries in Israel before going to college, who are encouraged to go into professions in their secular lives, and who are in some cases allowed to do a certain amount of pastoral work as "congregational interns." |
Can they keep a cap on those rising expectations indefinitely and say, "No farther, never egalitarian worship" or "You can have a women's tefillah group"--a women's prayer group--"we'll let you have a simulation of worship, but we won't actually let you have the Torah"? I just don't think that that's tenable over the long term. |
When that moment comes, I think the Orthodoxy could split in two, into the ultra-Orthodox Haredi, who won't even entertain those possibilities, and Modern Orthodoxy crossed with egalitarian worship, finding partners in the right wing of the Conservative movement. The right wing of the Conservative movement is already filled with people who follow the Commandments, who are truer to them than much of the laity. But, largely because of the issue of egalitarian worship, they choose not to cross over into Orthodoxy. I call this block "Conservadox." |
The remaining part of the Conservative movement is more socially liberal. I think the Conservative movement will divide on issues like gay marriage, and the more liberal part of the Conservative movement will find partners in the neotraditional part of the Reform movement, which is very strong among the Reform clergy and the active Reform laity. I sometimes call it the revolt of the 10 percent. If you go to a typical Reform congregation for any given Friday-night service, you'll see maybe 10 percent of the people on the rolls actually there. |
For most of the years since the Pittsburgh Platform of 1885, the operations of the Reform movement have been based on the idea that if they open up the corral a little bigger, if they modernize elements of worship and liturgy and practice, if they drop some of the atavistic things like kashruth and wearing talit (prayer shawls), if they use more English, Reform can bring in the strays. It hasn't brought in the strays. The 10 percent are the people who've been there all along, who like Reform theology but are also serious about practicing. Their revolt is to say, "We've been waiting for the strays to come back, and guess what. They're never coming back. So why should we dilute our Jewish experience?" There is a neotraditional movement that is bringing back more Hebrew, using Hasidic songs in worship and starting day schools--something that would have been totally beyond the ken of the Reform Jews of the Pittsburgh Platform. |
In 1999, this movement issued a Statement of Principles, a kind of Magna Carta of neotraditional Judaism. That neotraditional part of Reform will become a natural ally with the socially liberal part of the Conservative movement, and that's what I call "Reformative." |
The rest of Judaism is called "Just Jews" in social science and polling, but to myself I often refer to that other group as the Lemba. The Lemba is a tribe in South Africa that has an oral history saying they are one of the lost tribes of Israel. They have these odd retentions of Judaism--they didn't live around pigs, but they applied the rule against eating swine to rhinoceros or hippopotamus. They have a priesthood caste, and some Israeli geneticists found that the Lemba have a phenotype that's unique to the Cohanes, to the priestly caste in the Jewish gene pool. It seems like they were descended from Jews, and they had some of the rituals and a vague collective memory of having been Jews at one time. |
I think that's where this vital, vibrant, exciting, thriving secular and cultural Jewish population in America is likely to end up in the next 50 or 70 years--more and more estranged from its own path, without institutions to perpetuate its own nonreligious version of Judaism, marbled with intermarriage and, like the Lemba, having some kind of collective memory of the past but being quite distant from the day-to-day practice of Judaism. |
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