American Jews and the Problem of Identity Edward S. Shapiro

T

he question of identity has been more problematic for Jews than for any other American subgroup. This is due in the first place to the perplexing nature of what it means to be Jewish. The issue of "Who Is a Jew?" has vexed American Jews just as it has Jews in Israel. Thus the most contentious issue within American Jewish religious circles during the past two decades was the decision of the American Reform movement in the early 1980s to cast aside the definition of Jewishness that had delineated the Jewish community for thousands of years. According to this definition, a Jew had to have a Jewish mother or to have been converted according to Jewish law. Matrilineal descent was used to determine Jewish identity since the identity of one's mother, in contrast to one's father, was never in doubt. The Reform movement, however, broadened the definition of Jewish identity to include patrilineal descent if intermarried parents, for their part, involved their children in the Jewish community through such things as participation in religious services or enrollment in a religious school. This move was taken not because of any theological revelation but because of the rapid increase in intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews beginning in the 1960s. This resulted in hundreds of thousands of families in which there were doubts about the Jewishness of the children since their mothers had never undergone even a minimal conversion. Leaders from the Orthodox and Conservative wings of American Judaism strongly protested

this decision of the Reform movement. They claimed that it would result in a schism within American Judaism since Reform Jews could no longer be automatically considered as appropriate marriage partners for Jews who accepted the traditional definition of who is a Jew and who wished to avoid intermarriage. But the problem of Jewish identity goes beyond this intramural conflict over the religious definition of who is a Jew. It encompasses the broader and more important question of whether Jewishness is a matter of religion, history, culture, or ethnicity. The identity of other groups is not so muddled. There is no confusion, for example, over the fact that the ethnicity of Irish-Catholics is Irish while their religion is Roman Catholicism. A lapsed Irish-Catholic remains Irish although he or she is no longer a Catholic in good standing. But such clarity of religious and ethnic identity does not exist among Jews. A Jewish atheist or agnostic, such as an Albert Einstein or a Sidney Hook, remains a Jew in good standing. In fact, many of the fiercest critics of Judaism have been Jews, and modern-day Jewish movements such as Jewish socialism and Labor Zionism have opposed traditional Judaism. Jews also do not constitute a language group. Few Jews speak Hebrew, Yiddish, or Ladino (Spanish-Jewish). Nor are Jews defined by being the victims of prejudice and discrimination. This might have been true in Europe and the Arab countries, but it certainly is not true in the United States, where the income, occupa-

AMERICAN JEWS AND THE PROBLEM OF IDENTITY I 15

tional mobility, and social status of Jews is far higher than that of the general population. This ambiguity regarding the nature of Jewishness is particularly confusing to Americans, who tend to see Jews as comprising a religious group comparable to that of Protestants and Catholics. Books such as Will Herberg's Protestant-Catholic-Jew (1955) reinforced this disposition to see religion as the essence of Jewishness. One of the reasons that anti-Semitism has never been as strong in America as elsewhere is that Americans place a high value on religion and because they equate Jewishness with Judaism. This conflating of Jewishness with Judaism is also seen in academia, where courses in Jewish Studies, even when they are concerned with sociology and history, are often located in departments of religion. Complicating the definition of American Jewish identity is the relationship of Jews to America. Traditional Judaism emphasized the obligation of Jews to be good citizens and to defer to those in power, even if they were anti-Semitic. Thus in the early years of Nazi Germany, Orthodox rabbis in Germany told their followers to respect the edicts of the political authorities. Traditional Judaism, however, also taught that Jews were in exile and would eventually return to the Promised Land. But the nationalistic and religious impulses encouraging Jews in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to settle in Palestine were not as powerful as the social and economic"opportunities of America. For every Jew who left Europe for Palestine in these years, forty emigrated to the United States. Here was a land in which the government did not encourage or tacitly accept anti-Semitism, in which the property and lives of Jews were protected by the local and national governments, and in which there were no official barriers to the social and economic advancement of Jews. As George Washington noted in his famous letter of 1790 to the synagogue of Newport, Rhode Island, in America Jews as well as Christians will "possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship." If America was not the Promised Land, this "novus ordo seclorum" was certainly the land of promise for Jews, and they were fiercely loyal to their new country. "This synagogue is our temple, this city our Jerusalem, this happy land our Palestine," Rabbi Gustavus Poznanski told the congregants of Beth Elohim, the Charleston, South Carolina, synagogue, prior to the Civil War. Mary Antin, a Jewish immigrant raised in Boston, also saw America as the new Israel, with Boston being the New Jerusalem. The title of her 1911 autobiography is The Promised Land. Another Jew,

Irving Berlin, wrote "God Bless America," while a third, Emma Lazarus, wrote "The New Colossus," the sonnet placed at the base of the Statue of Liberty celebrating America as the refuge for the "huddled masses yearning to be free." Lazarus, who was involved in efforts to ameliorate the conditions of eastern European immigrants in New York City, was undoubtedly thinking of her co-religionists when she wrote her poem. Eager to become part of America, American Jews were skeptical of ideologies and movements that impeded their movement into the American mainstream. Zionism, for example, was unpopular among America's Jews until the 1930s, when it became obvious that a Jewish homeland was necessary for Europe's beleaguered Jews. But American Jews had no intention themselves of migrating to Palestine or, later, to Israel. They feared that the Zionism movement would raise doubts among Americans as to their political loyalties. Rather than rejecting Zionism, American Jews transformed it to conform to American realities. For them, Zionism was not a nationalistic movement encompassing all Jews but rather a philanthropy to succor other Jews. This gave rise to the quip that American Zionism was a program in which one group of Jews gave money to another group of Jews to bring a third group of Jews to the Middle East. For Israelis, most notably David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel, American Zionism was not truly Zionist since it downplayed the fundamental Zionist principles of the negation of the Diaspora and the ingathering of all exiles to Israel. With the establishment of a Jewish state, American Zionism seemed to be an anachronism to the Israelis. How could one claim to be a Zionist and yet not settle in the Jewish state? The Israeli statesman Abba Eban joked that American Zionism demonstrated the truth of one religious principle: that there could be life after death. Traditional Judaism suffered the same fate as Zionism in America. The dietary and other restrictions in Judaism that promoted a sharp separation between Jews and Gentiles and discouraged the movement of Jews into the American economic and cultural mainstream fell by the wayside. New religious ideologies, such as Reform Judaism, Conservative Judaism, and Reconstructionism, partially filled the vacuum created by the diminished appeal of Orthodoxy. As one wag put it, Jews gave up Orthodoxy at the drop of a hat. This refusal to cover one's hair or to refrain from eating forbidden foods or to observe the Sabbath was symptomatic of a deeper problem: the fact that only a

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small minority of American Jews believed that they were a chosen people, elected by God to serve a distinctive purpose. The Bible talks about the Jews being a "peculiar people," and for thousands of years there had been no doubt among Jews as to the source of their distinctiveness. Every morning religious Jews had blessed God for having "chosen us among all peoples and given us thy Torah" and for not having "made me a heathen." Jews were anxious to be thought of as no different than other Americans. In June 1952, Look magazine published Rabbi Morris Kertzer's article "What Is a Jew?" The thrust of Kertzer's piece was that Jews and Christians "share the same rich heritage of the Old Testament. They both believe in the fatherhood of one God, in the sanctity of the Ten Commandments, the wisdom of the prophets and the brotherhood of man." If Kertzer was correct that Jews were like everyone else, then what reason was there for them to maintain their distinctiveness? Why should they choose to remain Jewish if they were not different from their Christian neighbors? Had not the type of thinking expressed by Kertzer deprived Jews and Judaism of the raison d'etre for any peculiarity? In 1960, the sociologist Erich Rosenthal used the phrase "acculturation without assimilation" to describe the process of social adaptation of Jews in America. Jews, he argued, had adopted the values and lifestyles of the general society, but they separated themselves from the rest of America in choosing marriage partners, friends, and places to live. In America even this limited sense of separation could not long be maintained, not when many Jews were attending colleges in which they were a minority and were rapidly moving up the social and economic ladder. Life was simply too attractive and open for Jews to isolate themselves. Yeshiva University could not compete with Columbia or Harvard, nor could the dense Jewish neighborhoods of New York City, Philadelphia, and Chicago compete with the beckoning suburbs. In the case of Kerri Strug, who captivated the country when she won the gold medal for the American women's gymnastic team at the Atlanta Olympics despite having an injured leg, Jewish identity lost out to the attraction of the uneven bars and the balance beam. Jewish newspapers informed their readers that Strug's parents were active in a Tucson synagogue but that their daughter had been too busy with her athletic development to be involved in anything Jewish. In America, Jews ceased to be a chosen people and instead became a choosing people, and Judaism became a religious persuasion which could be accepted

or denied. In America, the sociologist Samuel C. Heilman wrote, being Jewish ceased being "simply a matter of birth, or, more precisely, a matter of irrevocable destiny." Much as patrons at a Chinese restaurant will choose items from column A and column B, so Jews became adept in selecting those aspects of Judaism and Jewishness that harmonized with their identity as modern Americans. The most popular of these did not interfere with acculturation, did not make Jews conspicuous, and were attuned to democratic values. In making such selections, American Jews were exhibiting that sense of individualism that commentators since the time of Alexis de Tocqueville have seen as quintessentially American. In America, a Jew could be any kind of Jew he or she wanted, or even cease being a Jew at all. In America, the historian Robert Seltzer wrote, Jews "have been remarkably free to decide what of their heritage to conserve, reform, and reconstruct." He could have added they were free as well to discard elements of this heritage. David Gelernter, the polymath Yale professor, protested against this tendency to recast Judaism in order to conform with the latest sociological or intellectual fad. "Like most American Jews," he wrote in 1996, I find myself able to observe only a tiny fraction of the Torah's commandments. Unlike some, I believe that the commandments are binding. When I fail to perform a religious obligation, I do not want a soothing Reform or Conservative authority to tell me I am in luck-that particular obligation has been dropped from the new edition and I am free to ignore it. I am not free to ignore it and commit a sin when I fail to do it. I acknowledge my failings and recall that God is merciful.. .. This infantile insistence that religious ritual conform to you rather than the other way around is the essence of modern American culture, and is strangling Judaism. Gelernter's view of American Jewry's future is bleak. Being Jewish, he predicted, will come to mean what "'being Scottish in America' means: nothing. Certain family names will suggest Jewish or Scottish origins." That is all. Reinforcing the centrifugal nature of American Jewish identity was the absence of any official rabbinate or politically recognized communal officials with the power to determine who is and is not Jewish and what being Jewish entails. The result was a Jewish community of incredible religious and cultural

AMERICAN JEWS AND THE PROBLEM OF IDENTITY I 17

diversity. America has been the birthplace of new religious ideologies such as Conservative Judaism, Reconstructionist Judaism, the Havurot movement, and Jewish feminism. Though "We Are One," the motto of the United Jewish Appeal in America, might have been an effective fund-raising slogan, it certainly was not an accurate description of the reality of American Jewry. This Jewishness without barriers has had its bizarre side effects as well. Thus there is even a group of "Messianic Jews"or "Jews for Jesus" who claim that they are good Jews despite their belief in the divinity of Jesus. The enigmatic nature of American Jewish identity is responsible for the curious fact that the three major interpretations of what it means to be an American were provided by Jews. Emma Lazarus's "The New Colossus" argued for integrating the "wretched refuse yearning to be free," and her own assimilated life was a model of what she hoped the immigrants from Europe, and particularly the Jewish immigrants, would conform to. Two decades after the Statue of Liberty was dedicated in 1886, Israel Zangwill published his play The Melting Pot. This tale of an intermarriage in New York City between David, a Russian Jew, and Vera, the daughter of a Christian Russian responsible for a pogrom in David's hometown, reflected Zangwill's belief in the beneficence of the ethnic amalgamation that he believed was taking place in America. The glory of America, he emphasized, lay in the ability of Americans, nativeborn and immigrant alike, to put aside ancient rivalries and to create a new nationality combining the best traits of the various ethnic groups peopling America. Zangwill did not regret the fact that in America the Jew would disappear, as would the Italian, the Irishman, and the Yankee. Zangwill himself had married the daughter of a Protestant clergyman and did not rear his children as Jews. The most important answer to the melting pot idea was Horace Kallen's 1915 essay "Democracy versus the Melting Pot." Kallen, the son of an Orthodox Jew who had settled in Boston, argued that the most accurate metaphor for the process of Americanization was not a melting pot but an orchestra. Just as each instrument in an orchestra made a distinctive contribution to the symphony, so each ethnic group made a distinctive contribution to American life. And just as it would be foolish to melt down the instruments of the orchestra, so it would be equally foolish to melt down America's ethnic groups. Out of this ethnic diversity, Kallen predicted, there was emerging a new "symphony of civilization" in which "each nationality would have its emotional and involuntary life, its own

peculiar dialect or speech, its own individual and inevitable esthetic and intellectual forms." And just as a democratic government was obligated to safeguard the rights of the citizens to join whatever religious and social groups they chose, so a democratic government should encourage the people to preserve their ethnic identities, which, Kallen mistakenly believed, were inalienable: "There are human capacities which it is the function of the state to liberate and to protect in growth," Kallen said, "and the failure of the state as a government to accomplish this automatically makes for its abolition." The pluralism expressed by Horace Kallen has been American Jewry's greatest strength and its greatest potential weakness. Elaine Marks, a professor of European literature at the University of Wisconsin, recently showed just how far a Jewishness without boundaries can be stretched: "I am Jewish precisely because I am not a believer," she said paradoxically, "because I associate from early childhood the courage not to believe with being Jewish." For Marks, choosing to deny Judaism is thus a quintessential Jewish act, and the Jew who rejects Judaism is transformed into the most committed Jew. With Jewish identity increasingly a matter of prescription rather than ascription, what guarantee is there that a sufficient number of Jews will ever choose the same things? What will be the source of Jewish communal affiliation when many Jews have come to believe that Judaism sanctions whatever they believe or wish to do? What is the lowest common denominator of Jewish belief and practice that can act as the cement of Jewish identity? Certainly traditional Judaism no longer fills that role. No more than one-quarter of American Jews observe the dietary laws, less than 10 percent keep the Sabbath as a day of rest, and over half do not light Sabbath candles (90 percent even think that a Jew could be religious without being observant). These same persons claim that being Jewish was very important to them and that they consider themselves to be "very good" Jews. For them, being Jewish has little to do with practicing Judaism. In their own minds, they are very good Jews because their version of Jewishness demands nothing of them. It is a Jewishness without content. Neither Israel nor the memory of the Holocaust can be the core of an American Jewish identity. In an age of jet travel, when it is easy and relatively cheap to travel to Israel, less than 30 percent of American Jews have even visited the Jewish state. As time goes on, the heroic memories of Israel during 1948, 1967, and 1973 will resonate less clearly for new generations of

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American Jews. And the same thing is true of memories of the Holocaust. Furthermore, the memory of the Holocaust is certainly not a sound basis for inculcating Jewish identity. Not many people will be attracted to a Judaism that holds out victimhood status. For decades, the lowest common denominator of Jewish identity in America was contributing to Jewish causes, the most important of which was the United Jewish Appeal (UJA). The UJA's major selling point was the aid it provided to the struggling state of Israel. But the Israel of 1997 is not the undeveloped and beleaguered Israel of the 1950s and 1960s. The Jewish state has grown up. With a gross national product of more than $80 billion dollars and with a per capita income approximately that of England and Italy, Israel is not desperate for American dollars. With the financial support for Israel having less emotional appeal, what will play its role in recharging the ethnic and religious identities of American Jews? A survey among Los Angeles Jews in the 1980s revealed that the most important element in their Jewish identity was not the ritual obligations of Judaism or even support for the state of Israel. It was, instead, a commitment to social equality. This belief in liberalism as the essence of Jewishness was the theme of Leonard Fein's 1988 book Where Are We? The Inner Life of Americas Jews. Only a commitment to economic and social justice, Fein said, "can serve as our preeminent motive, the path through which our· past is vindicated, our present warranted, and our future affirmed." The question of Jewish identity is particularly important today when it can no longer be assumed that Jewishness, however it might be defined, is being automatically passed on from one generation to the next. In his 1959 apologia, This Is My God, the novelist Herman Wouk, an Orthodox Jew, described a mythical Mr. Abramson, a Jewish amnesiac, "pleasantly vanishing down a broad highway at the wheel of a high-power station wagon, with the golf clubs piled in the back." When his amnesia clears "he will be Mr. Adamson, and his wife and children will join him, and all will be well. But the Jewish question will be over in the United States." For Jewish survivalists, the most troubling aspect of American life was the rapid increase in intermarriage beginning in the 1960s. The 1990 National Jewish Population Survey, an important demographic study of contemporary American Jewry, reported that 52 percent of Jews were then choosing non-Jewish marriage partners. But could anything be done to reverse this development, or would Jews have to learn

to live with it? In other words, was intermarriage a problem for which there was a solution, or was it a condition that could not be changed? For Conservative Rabbi Robert Gordis it was the latter. In Judaism in a Christian World (1966), Gordis argued that "intermarriage is part of the price that modern Jewry must pay for freedom and equality in an open society." This was scant comfort for Jewish survivalists. Such statistics seemed to confirm the apprehensions of pessimists such as Hayim Greenberg regarding the future of American Jewry. Greenberg, a Labor Zionist, had feared as early as 1950 that American Jews were in "grave danger of becoming merely an ethnic group in the conventional sense of the term ... only a group with a long and heroic history which, when cultivated, can arouse much justified pride ... but without the consciousness of a specific drama and tension in its life." During the optimistic postwar years, Jews viewed Greenberg's fears as unduly alarmist. By the 1980s and 1990s, however, pessimism was in style. Thus Samuel Heilman ended his 1995 volume, Portrait of American Jews: The Last Haft of the 20th Century, by speculating on whether Judaism and Jewishness had any future in America: "If I am to be certain that my children and their children will continue to be actively Jewish," he wrote, "then the boat that brought my family here to America in 1950 may still have another trip to make." Certainly there is much to justify the pessimism of Gelernter, Greenberg, and Heilman. But there is also much that belies their gloom as well. Despite Greenberg's fears, Jews have not become a "conventional" ethnic group. During the four and a half decades since Greenberg uttered his warning, American Jews have experienced an unexpected flowering of institutional and intellectual life. During these years, over five hundred ali-day Jewish schools were established, American Jewry produced a home-grown intelligentsia that now staffs the country's many rabbinical seminaries and university programs in Jewish Studies, and Jewish fund-raising expanded into an operation collecting well over a billion dollars a year. If most of the nation's Jews can be described as Jewish Americans, there still remains a sizable minority of American Jews. The key question is whether, to quote Heilman, "these few can continue to exert such influence and define the character of American Judaism, and whether they can continue to be actively Jewish while the majority drifts away toward a peripheral involvement with Judaism." In The Ambivalent American Jew (1973), the sociologist Charles Liebman noted that American Jews

AMERICAN JEWS AND THE PROBLEM OF IDENTITY I 19

were "torn between two sets of values-those of integration and acceptance into American society and those of Jewish group survival." Jerold A. Auerbach, a historian at Wellesley College, agreed with Liebman. In Rabbis and Lawyers: The Journey from Torah to Constitution (1990), Auerbach argued that American Jews were heirs to two disparate and, at times, contradictory traditions-Jewish and American-and that committed American Jews were fated to live in two competing and discordant worlds. "The synthesis of Judaism and Americanism," he said, was "a historical fiction." The symposium in the August 1996 issue of Commentary magazine on "What Do American Jews Believe?" indicated that a significant number of America's leading Jewish religious thinkers agree. If the buzzwords of the 1930s and 1940s for American Jews were "survival" and "anti-Semitism," the buzzwords of the 1980s and 1990s have been "continuity" and "identity." While Jews do not fear for their physical safety, they are concerned about the viability of a Jewish population that is experiencing major demographic hemorrhaging due to religious apathy, a low birth rate, a high rate of exogamy, and the lure of

a secular culture emphasizing individual autonomy and personal gratification rather than religious obligations and communal commitment. History should instill caution on the ability to predict the future. Who could have predicted in 1988 the demise of the Soviet Union, a peace treaty between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the election of an obscure governor of Arkansas as president? In May, 1964, Look magazine published an article entitled "The Vanishing American Jew." Well, the American Jew did not vanish, but Look soon did. But whether the editors of Look will have the last laugh remains to be seen. The experience of Jews, more than that of America's other ethnic groups, "is the supreme test of how far acculturation can go without eroding the sense of distinctiveness," Stephen J. Whitfield wrote recently. "So far American Jewry as a whole has not flunked this test of an open society. Sometimes they are in the dark, however." EdwardS. Shapiro is proftssor ofhistory at Seton Hall University and author of A Time for Healing: American Jewry since World War II.

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