Jewish "Continuity" and the Challenge of America’s Free and Open Society

The future of the American Jewish community is being discussed by some observers in increasingly apocalyptic terms. Sociologist Egon Mayer of Brooklyn College recently wrote that, "Fifty years after the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps in which European Jews faced the prospect of total annihilation, American Jewish life is overshadowed by the specter of group extinction."

In Dr. Mayer’s view, "The danger this time is not hate and murder. It is love and marriage, more specifically interfaith marriage." He laments the fact that since 1985, more than half of Jews marrying are choosing partners from other religious backgrounds and states that, "The demographic prospects of American Jewry are gloomy indeed."

Various Jewish groups have, in response, launched a campaign focusing on "Jewish continuity." This involves programs to send Jewish teenagers to Israel, urging aliyah (immigration to Israel), and vigorously opposing inter-faith marriage.

This entire community effort, in the view of many observers, is seriously out of focus. Rabbi Sami Shapiro, writing in the South Florida Jewish Journal, notes that, "Continuity implies an unbroken link with the past, yet the one defining characteristic of North American Jewry is its discontinuity with the past...Continuity calls Jews to marry Jews in order to make new Jews. Most Jews, like most Americans, don’t feel obligated in this way."

A thoughtful new book, Jews and the New American Scene, by Seymour Martin Lipset, Professor of Public Policy at George Mason University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, and Earl Raab, who served for thirty-five years as Director of the San Francisco Jewish Community Relations Council and is currently director of the Perlmutter Institute for Jewish Advocacy at Brandeis University, explores these questions with thoroughness and rare insight.

Unique Experience

The authors point out that the American experience has been unique in Jewish history, and was not taken into consideration by the theoreticians of Zionism and Jewish nationalism, for they failed to understand its dimensions and consequences.

In his novel, The Rise of David Levinsky, the chronicler of American Jewish life at the turn of the 20th century, Abraham Cahan, described the following scene in a Catskills hotel. The musicians were having trouble rousing a dining room full of successful Jewish immigrants: "Finally, (the conductor) had recourse to what was apparently his last resort. He struck up the ‘Star Spangled Banner.’ The effect was overwhelming. The few hundred diners rose like one man, applauding. The children and many of the adults caught up the tune joyously, passionately...There was the jingle of newly-acquired dollars in our applause. But there was something else in it as well. Many of those who were now paying tribute to the Stars and Stripes were listening to the tune with grave, solemn mien. It was as if they were saying: ‘We are not persecuted under this flag. At last we have found a home.’ Love for America blazed up in my soul. I shouted to the musicians, ‘My country,’ and the cry spread like wildfire."

The authors declare that, "In their extravagant style, these immigrants were applauding America for providing a new order of freedom, status, and opportunity for Jews."

America has, indeed, been something new in history, not simply in the history of Jews. In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville writes that the U.S. is "exceptional"—that is qualitatively different from other nations in a variety of respects. Lipset and Raab write that, "Almost every country with the exception of the U.S. and the now-deceased Soviet Union is a historically defined nation, united by a common history, not a political doctrine. Though immigrants may acquire citizenship almost everywhere, the meaning of being English, French, German or Russian is predominantly a birthright status. As a new nation legitimated by a revolutionary ideology, America differed from all these other countries, and the meaning of being an American was different ....As the self-conscious center of liberal revolutions from 1776 into the 20th century, the U.S. has been open to new citizens who are willing to accept the creed. Conversely, one may be proscribed as un-American regardless of birth, by rejecting the doctrine, by accepting an alien one. The exceptional character of America entailed norms of universalism and equality that were conductive to individualism and the development of capitalist markets. The U.S. began a new society, making it the one major industrialized country that is not feudal....America’s major difference from Europe was that social status as well as wealth could be secured by achievement."

Free and Equal

From the very beginning, the authors show, "for the first time in history of the Diaspora since the dispersal from Roman Palestine, Jews in the U.S. became free to partake in the society and polity as equals with everyone else....The pariah status they experienced in Europe and the Islamic world has had no parallel in the New World."

In an essay on "American Religious Exceptionalism," Edward Tiryakian points out that, "...Jews in America have not been marginalized...by virtue of their religion...there has been no historical ghetto experience, no pogroms. In fact, because of a deep-structure affinity of Calvinist Puritans for Judaism, it is in America that Jews have increasingly found full societal and cultural participation and acceptance, symbolized by widespread acceptance in recent years of the term ‘Judeo-Christian.’"

In the colonial period, Jews were already an intrinsic part of the American society. The playwright Joseph Addison wrote in 1712 that Jews were "the pegs and nails in a great building, which, though they are but little value in themselves, are absolutely necessary to keep the whole frame together." George Mason said the Jews "were not only noted for their knowledge of mercantile and commercial affairs, but also for their industry, enterprise, and probity."

On July 4, 1788 in Philadelphia, at the greatest parade the country had seen, held to celebrate the ratification of the Constitution by the requisite number of states, a 15-year old Jewish boy named Naphtali Phillips marched and later described the event in a letter, making special mention of the food served the marchers: "There was a number of long tables loaded with all kinds of provisions, with a separate table for the Jews who (for religious reasons) could not partake of the meat from the other tables; but they had a full supply of soused (pickled) salmon, bread and crackers, almonds, raisins, etc. This table was under the charge of an old cobbler named Isaac Moses." In the parade, a rabbi walked arm in arm with ministers and priests. The authors declare that, "The favorable position of Judaism in early America was a function of the special character of American Christianity. The sectarianism of the religious sphere is an important dimension of American exceptionalism, contributing...to a genuine religious pluralism..."

In his message to the Jews of Newport, Rhode Island in 1790, George Washington stated that in the new republic "all possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship." Even more significantly, at a time when Jews lacked citizenship rights in Europe, Washington emphasized that the patronizing concept of "toleration...of one class of people by another" has no place in America, that Jews are as much Americans as anyone else. Thomas Jefferson stated that America was different from Europe and that the discrimination against Judaism prevailing there did not exist here, where all are "on an equal footing." He approved of heterogeneity which he believed was the best defense of liberty.

Achievement Drive

Because "Jewish characteristics and values, including their achievement drive, have been especially congruent with the larger culture," write Lipset and Raab, "Jews have done uncommonly well in America...These traits strongly resemble the modal national pattern set by the New England Protestant sectarians. Writing in the 1920s, the sociologist Robert Park suggested that Jewish history and culture be taught in the schools so other Americans can learn what America is. Park argues that the Jews were quintessentially American."

Jewish success in America’s free and open society has been widely noted. The authors report that, "...Jews achieve higher levels of education, professional status and income than all other subgroups....During the last three decades Jews (who constitute less than 3 percent of the national population) have made up 50 percent of the top 200 intellectuals, 40 percent of American Nobel Prize winners in science and economics, 20 percent of professors of the leading universities, 40 percent of partners in the leading law firms of New York and Washington...At the beginning of the 1990s, 87 percent of college-age Jews were enrolled in higher education as compared with 40 percent for the population at large...In sum, the scions of the German Jews who immigrated in the 19th century and the European Jews who came later have been able to become the best educated, the most-middle class and ultimately the most affluent ethnoreligious group in the country."

Given the history of religious freedom and equality in the American society, why are Jewish organizations so troubled about the Jewish future? The authors argue that, "American exceptionalism has been a double-edged sword. The same factors that encouraged Jews to partake in America’s abundance have undermined traditional Judaism and encouraged Jews to integrate into the majority society. Most American Jews are not willfully abandoning their identity in the way that some did in other times and places, particularly in Europe, in order to avoid oppression and disadvantage. The erosion of identity is mainly a natural product of living in America. But if Jews are not doing anything ‘wrong,’ neither is America. The problem is that American society has been doing what most people think is right: providing citizens with individual freedom to achieve success and status on the basis of their capacity, unencumbered by ancestral background."

In 1783, on the occasion of the end of official hostility between Great Britain and the U.S., Mordechai Sheftall, a second-generation Jew in Georgia who had been active in the Revolution, summed up the feeling of Jews about America when he wrote to his son: "An intier (entire) new scene will open it self, and we have the world to begin againe." Lipset and Raab state that, "...there was another aspect of America’s...freedom which he could not foresee: that it would be so open and egalitarian that second and subsequent generation Jews would enter the larger society and drop away from involvement in the ancestral community...That kind of identity crisis brought on by the pressure to assimilate...also a function of exceptional America—is today more threatening than ever to Jews."

Problems of Continuity

The problems with regard to "continuity" exist, the authors show, for virtually every religious and ethnic group in the American society. The "melting pot" is at work. Michael Lind, a senior editor of The New Republic, writes that, "The European ethnic groups that seemed so distinct at the beginning of this century have almost completely faded away. Four-fifths of Italian-Americans born since 1950 have married outside their ethnic group. Half of all American Jews marry gentiles. Nor is intermarriage limited to white Americans. One third of Hispanic Americans and one-half of Asian-Americans marry outside their officially designated categories...the American melting pot continues to bubble."

While ethnic separatism in the open American society is not possible, even if it were desirable, what is possible, the authors argue, is the transmission of religious faith. Yet, the substitution of Jewish "ethnicity" and identification with Israel for religion, has been, the authors believe, counterproductive: "Give their low level of religious commitment and practice, if Jews are to prove even a partial exception to the almost inexorable American pattern of decline in tribal cohesion, they will presumably need some cohesive factor beyond defensiveness on behalf of themselves or Israel."

Zionism has never been a dominant philosophy among American Jews, the authors show. Even those who called themselves "Zionists," never meant that they and their families viewed Israel as their "homeland" and hoped to emigrate. They write that, "Zionism became a movement of some respectable consequence in America only after the involvement of Louis Brandeis, then a wealthy and influential Boston lawyer. Brandeis brought the benevolent American temper to the movement in this country. One Jewish leader later wrote that the Zionism of Brandeis and his followers ‘was almost entirely philanthropic in nature. It was no more than a desire to "help others." They did not feel that they needed Zionism for themselves in any way.’"

The vigorous opposition to Zionism among American Jews is described in some detail. In 1869, a conclave of rabbis explicitly renounced the idea of a homeland in Palestine. When Reform rabbis adopted the Pittsburgh Platform in 1885, they formally took the position that "we consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine...nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state." In 1897, with the first Zionist congress approaching in Basel, Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, then president of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, commented on "the utopian idea of a Jewish state." He declared: "We are perfectly satisfied with our political and social position. It can make no difference to us in what form our fellow citizens worship God, or what particular spot on the earth’s surface we occupy. We want freedom, equality, justice and equity to reign and govern the community in which we live. This we possess in such a fullness that no state whatever could improve on it. The new messianic movement over the ocean does not concern us at all."

Nazi Genocide

After World War II, shocked by the genocide of the Nazis, the majority of American Jews supported the creation of Israel, but viewed it primarily as a refuge for the victims of war, not for themselves in any sense. Referring to the opposition to Zionism by the American Council for Judaism, which continues to maintain the philosophy of the Pittsburgh Platform of 1887, Lipset and Raab are seriously in error when they write that, "The Council for Judaism faded away." Not only is the Council still very much in existence but, as the authors show, the Council’s philosophy is indeed shared by the majority of American Jews. This may not be articulated, but it is evident in a multitude of ways.

While Jewish groups have, since World War II, often substituted concern for Israel for religion, the fact is that American Jews and Israelis are growing apart at a rapid pace. "There are signs that the common cultural and spiritual identity has in fact been eroding rather than growing for most Jews," the authors conclude. Recent national surveys show that only 34 percent of Jews under 40 registered as "high" in their attachment to Israel. In a 1990 survey of Jews formally affiliated with nine middle-sized American Jewish communities, only 40 percent said they felt "close" to the Israeli people while 75 percent felt "close" to the American people. When the Los Angeles Times asked a national sample of Jews in 1988 which of three qualities was most important to their Jewish identity, over five out of every ten American Jews in the sample, a majority, chose "equality," two said Israel, and two said "religion." The authors provided this assessment: "Those indicators of attachment suggests that emotional and cultural affinity to Israel is relatively high for about two to three out of ten American Jews. Interest in Israel is peripheral at best for a similar proportion at the other end of the scale. For half of American Jewry, Israel is not at the center of their Jewish identity..." Charles Liebman, an Israeli political scientist of American origin, believes that, with the exception of Orthodox rabbis, Israel "is not a spiritual, cultural or ideological center for American Jews."

If Jewish continuity cannot be based on a connection with Israel, it is equally irrational to believe that such an identity can be based on "defensiveness," an area of much activity by Jewish organizations.

Ancient Fears

Jewish concern about anti-Semitism is, Raab and Lipset show, based on ancient fears caused by persecution in other times and places, not on the American reality. In 1985, about a third of those affiliated with the Jewish community in the San Francisco area said, in response to a questionnaire, that Jewish candidates could not be elected to Congress from San Francisco. yet, three out of the four congressional representatives from that area—as well as the two state senators and the mayor of San Francisco—were, in fact, well-identified Jews at the time the poll was conducted. And they had been elected by a population that was about 95 percent non-Jewish.

Because of the reality of their lives, which contradicts the notion held by some, particularly Zionist theoreticians, that anti-Semitism is, somehow, endemic to the world, American Jews are not likely to remain Jewish out of some "defensive" need. "As a consequence," the authors write, "the large sector of American Jews who are primarily ‘defensive’ in their group identity will tend to melt away, to leave the community. That prophecy is largely based on what is happening within American society itself....Defensiveness is not a long-range prescription for tribal cohesion in option-rich America."

Part of the concern for "continuity" confronting American Jews is similar to that which other American groups have faced. An Irish immigrant, Agnes Kelley, writing in the 1870s to her family, expressed the positive side of the American integrative experience with these words: "When we left (Ireland) we left the old world behind, we are all American citizens and proud of it." Another, Jane Crowe, wrote, "It is home to us now." Yet at the same time some immigrants were voicing the downside of the tribal dilemma. As another Irish-American put it in 1882, "How shall we preserve our identity? How shall we preserve our faith and nationality, through our posterity?"

Clearly, "ethnicity" cannot be preserved in the American society, nor should it be, lest we find ourselves in a Balkanized country rather than in a unified society which has created a new nationality, comprised of men and women of every race, nation and faith. "In the new century of the coming millennium," state Lipset and Raab, "America may finally approach the destiny Ralph Waldo Emerson once saw for it, the construction of ‘a new race...as vigorous as the new Europe which came out of the smelting pot of the Dark Ages.’ His comment reminds us that the ancestry groups of this nation do not date back to Adam, or even to the Tower of Babel...but were themselves created in the crucible of history. America may well outgrow the tribal dilemma. Its historic role may have been to demonstrate a new political idea which allows associational diversity to flourish within an integrated, achievement-oriented society—but neither that diversity nor the communities to which humans typically aspire need to be based on ancient national backgrounds."

Integrative Forces

The authors predict that, "Give the inexorably integrative forces of American society and the resultant parallel trends among Jews, it is reasonable to predict that the Jewish community as a whole will be severely reduced in numbers by the middle of the next century."

The extent to which the remaining core will survive, or even possibly recoup, they believe, "will depend on more intrinsic factors than defensiveness, structural similarities, or even institutional depth....There is no escaping the fact that the religious dimensions of Jewishness is the key to continuity. This is obviously true for the relatively small minority who are personally devout, but it is also probably true for the much larger body of Jews who are primarily affiliated for communal reasons. If they yield their sense of religious tradition and history attached to the Jewish community, they will eventually lose any sense of its particularity. In that sense, experience strongly suggests that, given the possibility of fuller integrative achievement and absent the need for defensive reactions, other communal and familial involvements will not sustain commitment."

The rhetoric we now hear from groups promoting a variety of programs to further "Jewish continuity" is often irrelevant, if not counterproductive. It is, Lipset and Raab write, "often tautological: Jews would be better and stronger Jews if only they would be better and stronger Jews. Research projects have been multiplied in an effort to find the social engineering that will fix the problem. But, for the most part, the problem is beyond social engineering, as it is for other tribal groups; it is rooted in the dynamics of American society."

Particularly fanciful are Zionist efforts to convince American Jews that they are, somehow, in "exile" in their native country and that a foreign country, Israel, is really their "homeland." Only a relative handful of American Jews have accepted this notion and emigrated to Israel. Tens of thousands of Israelis, on the other hand, have emigrated to America. Further pursuit of such a policy is certain not to attract young American Jews but to drive them away.

Religion and "Ethnicity"

Because organized Judaism in America has often placed religion in the background and placed Israel, "ethnicity," and other concerns in the forefront of its attention, many Jews seeking religion and spirituality have found it in other sectors. The Guru of a prominent Buddhist movement once came to the U.S. to find out why a majority of his members in this country were of Jewish background. The members of the Hari Krishna sect and the followers of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon are disproportionately of Jewish ancestry.

The authors warn against pessimism, pointing to the fact that all through history there have been dire predictions about an end to Judaism and the Jewish people. According to Simon Rawidowicz, "He who studies Jewish history will readily discover that there was hardly a generation in the Diaspora period which did not consider itself the final link in Israel’s chain." Such sentiments, Lipset and Raab declare, "would give pause to any prophet of the Jewish people’s demise. Of course, history documents that some past Jewish communities have severely declined, but as Nathan Glazer hopefully cautions with respect of American Jewry, ‘There is no reason to believe that there will not be further surprises in the future.’"

What the authors particularly lament are those efforts which would isolate Jews from their fellow Americans. Opposition to inter-faith marriage, they point out, flies in the face of the open society and the values held by most Americans of all faiths. What can survive in America in the long run, they believe, is not Judaism as a "tribal" identity but only Judaism as a religious faith: "...the remnant—both the more devout and the fellow-travelers—will tend to be those who feel somehow connected to the religious core of their tribal identity. As a result, unlike most ancestral groups whose defensive need has waned, the remaining body of American Jewry may well be significantly less ‘fragile’ than it is now. Yet, even that religious core cannot be durably nourished by isolationist remedies. The tribal dilemma in America is not to be solved for most Jews—or most members of this country’s ancestral groups—by requiring them to forego those exceptional qualities of American society that have so beneficently created that dilemma."

Recoiling from Freedom

It is sad, indeed, to see so many in the organized Jewish community recoiling from the freedom of the open American society. Some, it seems, would like to rebuild ghetto walls which never existed in America, but did provide for Jewish "continuity" in medieval Europe. Professor Israel Shahak of the Hebrew University points to the fact that, "A great many present-day Jews are nostalgic for that world, their lost paradise, the comfortable closed society from which they were not so much liberated as expelled. A large part of the Zionist movement always wanted to restore it—and this part has gained the upper hand."

All through history, some Jewish leaders have preferred the control they were able to wield in closed, ghettoized societies. In a letter written in 1832, the famous Rabbi Moshe Sofer of Pressburg (now Bratislava), in what was then the autonomous Hungarian Kingdom in the Austrian Empire, wrote of the Jews in Vienna, in Austria proper, who had been granted considerable individual rights. He laments the fact that since the Jewish congregation in Vienna lost is powers to punish offenders, the Jews there had become lax in matters of religious observance, and adds, "here in Pressburg, when I am told that a Jewish shopkeeper dared to open his shop during the Lesser Holidays, I immediately send a policeman to imprison him."

Ironically, some Zionist leaders even welcomed the ascent of Nazism in its early years because it would force German Jews to identify as something other than "German." Dr. Joachim Prinz, a Zionist leader in Germany who would later emigrate to the U.S. and become a leader in the World Jewish Congress, published a 1934 book Wir Juden (We Jews) in which he said that the Nazi requirement that Jews were forced to identify themselves as Jews was "the fulfillment of our desires." He declared that, "We want assimilation to be replaced by a new law: the declaration of belonging to the Jewish nation and Jewish race....Only he who honors his own breed and his own blood can have an attitude of honor towards the national will of other nations."

Something New in History

The fact is that America is something new in human history, which authors Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab understand very well. In its open marketplace of ideas, Judaism can survive as a religion if it is meaningful and relevant to the spiritual needs of Americans. It cannot survive as an ethnic or "tribal" identity. Continuing discussion of programs to send young people to Israel to discover their "identity," or to fight an anti-Semitism which exists at the fringes of society, will hardly promote the "continuity" its advocates so fervently desire.

Jews should not fear freedom, but welcome it. Abba Eban once said that, "The Jews are a people who cannot take ‘Yes’ for an answer." American Jews have an opportunity to prove him wrong, if only they have the will and confidence to do so. •

JEWS AND THE NEW AMERICAN SCENE

by

Seymour Martin Lipset

and Earl Raab,

Harvard University Press,

239 Pages,

$22.95.