The Decline and Rise
In his 1782 book Letters from an American Farmer, John de Crèvecœur asked the most famous and important question in Americanhistory: “What then is the American, this new man?” The authentic Americanleaves behind him “all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new onesfrom the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and thenew rank he holds.” The American “entertains new ideas, and forms newopinions.” Crèvecœur was enthusiastic about this new man whose “labors andposterity will one day cause great changes in the world.”
Mark Twain, Henry James, and other of our greatest writershave contrasted American innocence, newness, and freedom with Europeansophistication, corruption, and fatigue. Our most famous folk hero, the cowboy,continually strikes out for the west, rejecting everything to the east,including Europe. Our language values change over tradition. To be a go-getteris better than to be a stick-in-the-mud. While British politicians stand foroffice, American politicians run for office. Twentieth-century politiciansemphasized their break with tradition by naming their programs the NewNationalism, the New Freedom, the New Deal, and the New Frontier.
It is not surprising that some American Jews should rejectmuch of their past and develop new forms of Jewish identity. The issue ofidentity is more problematic for them than for other Americans, since there isno agreement among Jews as to what is authentically Jewish or even who can beconsidered a Jew.
Do Jews comprise a religion, a race, an ethnic group, anationality, or a cultural community with its own values, languages, andcustoms? Should people with a Jewish father but not a Jewish mother beconsidered Jews, as the Reform movement has declared, or is being Jewishdependent on matrilineal descent, as Conservative and Orthodox Jews believe?And what does Jewishness involve, when, as many have noted, the label “Jewish”is given to people of Jewish descent who have become entirely secular orassimilated or even deny being Jewish?
America, the land of the self-made man, is also the land ofthe self-made Jew. While American Jews have not generally thought of themselvesas a chosen people, as this would hardly be the way to make friends andinfluence people, they certainly have been a choosing people when it came todefining their ethnic and religious identity. A United States senator namedCohen could choose not to identify as a Jew, while a black Jew named Greenbergcould become the police chief of Charleston, South Carolina.
In America, Judaism was transmuted into a religiouspersuasion that could be modified, as one wag put it, at the drop of a hat (orskullcap). Jews became adept at selecting those aspects of Judaism andJewishness that harmonized with their identity as modern Americans. The mostpopular of these did not interfere with their acculturation, did not make themconspicuous, and were attuned to democratic values.
In keeping with that development, the key element in theethnic and religious identity of some Jews during the 1950s and 1960s was theirsupport for the civil rights movement. They pointed to the murdered civilrights workers Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner as models, even thoughGoodman denied that he was motivated by anything Jewish and Schwerner disownedeven being Jewish, preferring to call himself simply a human being. For stillother Jews, Jewish identity has revolved around such secular causes as lobbyingfor Israel, fundraising for Jewish communal institutions, fighting anti-Semitism,and venerating the victims of the Holocaust.
It is the various choices Jews have made that most interesthistorians, sociologists, demographers, and other onlookers. The historianJenna Weissman Joselit, for example, in her fascinating 1994 book The Wonders of America: Reinventing Jewish Culture, 1880–1950, emphasized thepenchant of American Jews to invent and then reinvent Jewish identity. InAmerica, Jewishness became “a malleable and protean social construct,” stemming“as much from American notions of consumerism, gender, privacy, and personalhappiness as from Jewish notions of tradition, ritual, memory, and continuity.”This combining of “the immediate and the transcendent, the quirky and thehallowed” was “virtually without parallel in modern Jewish history.”
This process extended to Judaism. New forms of Judaismemerged in America, including Reconstructionism, Conservative Judaism, ModernOrthodoxy, and humanistic Judaism. Hanukkah, a previously minor holiday, becamea major event on the American Jewish calendar in part because, coming in December,it coincided with Christmas and its orgy of gift giving. (Hanukkah had anadvantage in this respect since it lasted not one day but eight.)
The defining of Jewish identity did not become importantuntil the nineteenth century. Before then virtually everyone, Jews as well asGentiles, agreed that what distinguished Jews was their religion. But the Enlightenmentemphasis on reason, the rise of socialism, the growth of nationalism, theemergence of the modern secular state, and the impact of social and economicmodernization challenged traditional religion and gave rise to a host ofcompeting ideologies of Jewish identity, many of which were secular and evenantireligious.
This will strike many Christian readers as strange. Isn’tthe term “secular Judaism” a contradiction in terms? If a Christian issecularized and becomes an atheist or an agnostic, he ceases being a Christian.Shouldn’t the same be true of Jews? But a Jew who rejects Judaism, and many ofthe fiercest critics of Judaism have been Jews, remains a Jew in good standingin the eyes of fellow Jews. Elaine Marks, a professor of French at the Universityof Wisconsin, indicated just how far notions of Jewishness could be stretched.Central to her sense of Jewishness was her apostasy. “I am Jewish preciselybecause I am not a believer,” she said paradoxically, “because I associate . .. the courage not to believe with being Jewish.” The non-Jewish Jew, to useIsaac Deutscher’s terminology, becomes in Marks’ telling the most committed ofJews.
Throughout the twentieth century, peoplehood has generallytrumped religion when it comes to defining Jewish identity, and Jews took pridein their religious dissenters. Albert Einstein, a religious skeptic, wasarguably the Jew most widely admired by other Jews during his lifetime. He wasoffered the presidency of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and the medicalcollege of Yeshiva University, the leading American Orthodox institution, bearshis name.
There are limits, however, as to how far definitions ofJewish identity may be stretched. Converting to another religion will remove aJew from the Jewish people, at least in the eyes of other Jews, while becomingan atheist, an agnostic, or professing an antireligious ideology such asMarxism will not. Jews in the messianic Jews for Jesus movement might arguethat their Jewish background logically leads to their becoming Christians, butsuch claims are rejected by Jews who perhaps remember Heinrich Heine’switticism that no Jew could become a good Christian because no Jew wouldbelieve another Jew could be God.
The contemporary tendency to conflate Jewishness withJudaism and Jews with religious believers is a particularly Americanphenomenon. This is true today even though the majority of American Jews rejectboth the beliefs and the practices of normative Judaism. In Israel, bycontrast, everyone recognizes that there are two types of Jews, the religiousand the secular. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,approximately two million Jews from Eastern Europe immigrated to America.
Legend has remembered these immigrants as pious souls, butthis was hardly the case. Many Jews living in Eastern Europe by 1900, andperhaps most of them, were well along the path of modernization, acculturation,and secularization. They might have continued to identify as Orthodox Jews, butoften did so more out of inertia than conviction, and also because Orthodoxywas an integral aspect of Eastern European Jewish culture, which they lookedback to with a certain degree of nostalgia.
Religious laxity increased exponentially in Eastern Europeduring the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the atrophying ofOrthodoxy created in Jewish identity a vacuum that was partially filled by ahost of competing secular ideologies. Expressive of this is the musical Fiddleron the Roof, in which of Tevye’s three married daughters, only one lived asa traditional Jew. One married a Gentile in a Russian Orthodox church andbecame estranged from her family, and the other married a revolutionarycommitted to the overthrow of the tsarist regime.
Remaining in East Europe was still, in the eyes of therabbis of the time, preferable to settling in America, a trefa (impure)land where Jews work on the Sabbath and eat non-kosher food. Such warnings, asone might have anticipated, were ineffective. The conditions in Europe were toobleak and the opportunities in America too bright for such advice to be takenseriously, and, in any case, it was precisely those Jews most unshackled fromreligious orthodoxy and least likely to listen to rabbinic admonitions who weremost likely to emigrate.
A significant minority of these Jewish immigrants, then,came to the United States imbued with various nonreligious and evenantireligious ideologies, including socialism, communism, secular Zionism, anddiaspora Jewish nationalism. None of these had much relevance to Americansocial, economic, and political conditions and were, in their pristineversions, generally one- or two-generation phenomena.
The history of Zionism is particularly revealing. The modernsecular Zionist movement emerged in Europe in the late nineteenth century inresponse to growing anti-Semitism and worsening economic conditions. Zionistsargued that the only solution for the Jewish “problem” in Europe was totransplant Jews to Palestine, the ancestral Jewish homeland. The ideology ofsecular Zionism had little appeal to American Jews, who had no intention ofleaving the United States for life in Palestine. If America was not thePromised Land, it was certainly a land of promise. Here anti-Semitism was farweaker than in Europe, and, in any case, it did not seriously impede theireconomic and social advancement.
Instead of themselves settling in Palestine, AmericanZionists raised funds to help other Jews settle in Palestine. American Zionismbecame not a movement of national revival but a philanthropy. For Israelis suchas David Ben-Gurion, American Zionism was not truly Zionist, since it rejectedthe fundamental Zionist principles of negating the diaspora and urging theingathering of the exiles into a Jewish state. The Israeli statesman Abba Ebanquipped that, after the establishment of the state of Israel, American Zionismhad demonstrated the truth of a fundamental religious belief: that there couldbe life after death.
The story was even bleaker for left-wing, Yiddish-speakingJews who hoped to transplant their institutions and ideas to the friendly soilof America. The history of socialism in America, in contrast to its historyelsewhere, is a story of failure. As the world’s largest industrial power, theUnited States should have been open to socialist panaceas. If socialism failedin America, Jewish socialism was doubly doomed, since it was embedded in animmigrant secular culture that would inevitably disappear.
But for a few decades during the early twentieth century, itwas possible for an immigrant secular Jewish leftist to live in an encapsulatedworld of like-minded persons, a world believed to be part of the wave of thefuture. Each of the various leftist Jewish movements had its own schools,summer camps, publications, and even neighborhoods. Between the two world warsthere were in the Bronx four separate apartment complexes inhabited by Jewishfamilies professing different versions of socialism ranging from worker’sZionism to communism. One of these families was headed by a house painter namedMyerson, whose daughter Bess was named Miss America in September 1945.
These immigrants’ radical secular Jewish identity begandissolving almost immediately on their arrival in America. The best indicatorsof Jewish acculturation were to be found in the pages of the Forward,the most widely read American Yiddish newspaper and the most popularforeign-language newspaper in American history.
From February through April 1905, the Forward publishedsome fifty letters to the editor on the momentous question of whether afreethinker should assist a religious coworker with his work on Fridayafternoon so that the religious individual could arrive at home in time for theSabbath. That a socialist and nominally antireligious paper would open up itspages to such a debate is surprising, and so were the sentiments of some of itsreaders. While some said that giving any assistance would encourage religiousfanaticism and intellectual darkness, others said that in America freethinkers shouldbe tolerant toward the misguided and try to wean them from their religiousfoolishness.
Another issue debated in the pages of the Forward washow a socialist organization should respond to members who attend religiousservices, since they were betraying their organization’s principles. Hereagain, tolerance toward the misguided was recommended. A more interestingquestion was why these individuals would attend such services in the firstplace. One answer was provided by a joke that recounted how Abraham, a memberof the Arbeiter Ring (Workmen’s Circle, a socialist Jewish mutual-benefitorganization), was berated by another member after he was seen leaving asynagogue. In defense, he pointed to his synagogue-going friend Jacob. “Jacob,”he said, “goes to synagogue to talk to God; I go to synagogue to talk toJacob.”
But after World War II there were fewer and fewer Jews who,like Abraham, craved speaking Yiddish with fellow immigrants. The world ofsecular left-wing Jewish culture was destroyed by acculturation and social andeconomic mobility, and the Holocaust murdered those potential immigrants whomight have temporarily rejuvenated it. American secular Judaism lived on onlyin a host of novels, memoirs, and histories, most notably Irving Howe’s World of Our Fathers, published in 1976.
The Yiddish newspapers, the summer camps, the schools, andthe mutual-benefit societies are now gone or are hanging on by theirfingertips. By the 1950s and 1960s, Abraham’s prosperous and English-speakingdescendants were safely ensconced in suburbia, where attending religiousservices was a norm of middle-class behavior. More than anything else, theywanted to be considered good Americans, and to be a good American required thatone at least go through the motions of being religious. Americans were, as thePledge of Allegiance stated, “one nation under God.”
The immigrants’ faith in socialism was transmuted into theirchildren’s faith in liberalism. This development had been portended by the Forward’sendorsement of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936. Socialist true believers werehorrified that an ostensibly socialist newspaper would endorse the candidate ofa capitalist political party. The endorsement was evidence of the Forward’sacculturation and of its recognition that socialism was neither relevant norimportant to its increasingly Americanized readership.
With the collapse of left-wing secular Judaism in America,religious Judaism came to the fore as the most popular way for Jews to definetheir Jewish identity. This does not mean that American Jews had suddenlybecome more religiously observant, only that increasingly they saw religion asthe key element of their Jewishness.
Will Herberg’s influential 1955 book, Protestant-Catholic-Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology, reflected this new mood. Herbergdescribed Judaism as one of America’s three great religions. ConflatingJewishness with Judaism, he ignored the manifold nonreligious ways by whichJews had defined and lived out their Jewish identity. He wrote at a time whenJudaism seemed to be flourishing, and when each of the major Jewishdenominations—Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox—exhibited or would soonexhibit a sense of triumphalism. In academia, this equating of Jewishness withJudaism could be seen in the common practice whereby departments of religionoffered courses in Jewish studies even when the courses focused on sociology orhistory.
Reflective of Judaism’s now elevated status among Jews wasStephen J. Whitfield’s perceptive In Search of American Jewish Culture,published in 1999. Only religion, he asserted, provided the core of a viableand meaningful Jewish culture. “There is simply no longer a serious way ofbeing Jewish—and of living within Jewish culture—without Judaism,” he claimed.“As the various secular bases of Jewish life have vanished or have beendiscredited, religion alone remains standing.” Any attempt to resurrect anideology of secularist Jewish identity “looks like the future of an illusion.”He concluded that “what makes Jews different is, finally and fundamentally,only Judaism. . . . A Jew is someone who subscribes to Judaism. Period.”
Judaism is “irrepressible,” Whitfield wrote. Recentdemographic studies indicate that it is not. The latest of these, A Portrait of Jewish Americans, published by the Pew Research Center last October,emphasizes that a growing percentage of American Jews are alienated fromJudaism. Of the nearly thirty-five hundred surveyed, over one-fifth claimed tohave “no religion,” and these religious dropouts were disproportionately foundamong younger respondents. While 93 percent of those born before 1927 identifiedthemselves as Jewish because of religion, only 68 percent of those born after1980 did so. Increasingly, it would appear, American Jews believe Jewishnessrevolves around culture and ancestry rather than religion.
A majority said it was not necessary to believe in God to beJewish. Only 19 percent believed that observing Jewish law was important, while42 percent thought that having a good sense of humor was essential to their Jewishidentity. Evidently Jerry Seinfeld, Joan Rivers, and Sarah Silverman havetrumped the Almighty and Maimonides. Nevertheless, while the “nones” areestranged from Judaism, they remain strongly connected to the Jewish people andthe State of Israel and claim to be proud to be Jews. They form a largepotential constituency for various versions of contemporary secular Judaism.The title of the Pew survey is itself revealing: not “American Jews” but“Jewish Americans.” “American” is the noun, not the adjective.
The status of contemporary secular Judaism is the subject ofa fifty-two-page article in the 2012 American Jewish Year Book titled“American Jewish Secularism: Jewish Life Beyond the Synagogue.” Theauthors—Barry A. Kosmin, director of the Institute for the Study of Secularismin Society and Culture at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and ArielaKeysar, the institute’s associate director—are clearly secular partisans,although the institute self-identifies as “nonpartisan.”
In their article, Kosmin and Keysar claim that contemporarysecular Judaism, through the use of “pluralistic market forces and the newinformation technology,” is invigorating American Jewishness and creating “newties and forms of community” distinct from those involving religion. No longercan secular Jewishness be considered a vestige of the immigrant experience or astep on the road to assimilation and acculturation. Rather, it is an organicand vibrant cultural phenomenon that provides a way for Jews to express theirJewish identity in a nonreligious manner.
These Jews are the audience for Jewish museums, Jewishcommunity centers, Jewish concerts featuring Klezmer and Sephardic music,Jewish film and book festivals, Jewish book clubs, Jewish websites, all-dayJewish television programming, and Jewish-studies courses in colleges anduniversities. Contemporary Jewish secularism, Kosmin and Keysar note, comprises“disparate communities” and “takes multiple forms and varies across differentcontexts and social environments.” It is “malleable and flexible” and “rich anddiverse.” This flexibility and openness is undoubtedly one of its greateststrengths. But it is also one of its greatest potential weaknesses, since amovement without clearly defined boundaries runs the risk of becoming vacuous.What, after all, is distinctively Jewish about watching Seinfeld or CurbYour Enthusiasm? Don’t Gentiles do the same?
In preparing their essay, Kosmin and Keysar receivedassistance from the Posen Foundation, as did David Biale in writing his Not in the Heavens: The Tradition of Jewish Secular Thought, published the yearbefore. Posen’s financial support of scholarly efforts to uncover the sourcesof Jewish secularization “have had an enormously stimulating effect on ageneration of Jewish Studies scholars,” Biale notes. The foundation underwritesseminars and courses on secular Jewish culture at Brandeis, Harvard, Brown, anda couple of dozen other American universities.
Felix Posen, the wealthy British Jewish philanthropist whoendowed the foundation, denies that it is antireligious. It is, instead, heargues, pro–Jewish culture, which is heavily secular. “I feel completelycomfortable studying Judaism,” Posen said. “I just don’t believe in it. It’spart of our culture. . . . I have to stress that I will have nothing to do withanyone who is anti-religious. I’m only interested in the positive aspects ofour culture.”
Today’s secular Judaism is different from that of theimmigrant generation of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Itis less ideological, less political, and less hostile to religion. SecularAmerican Jews have worked out a modus vivendi with religion and oftenincorporate religious ideas and customs, suitably secularized, into theirprogramming. They acknowledge that religion is a major element in Jewishculture while rejecting the claim that the essence of Jewishness lies inreligion.
Nor is contemporary Jewish secularism in America deeplyideological. Secularism, Biale notes, is a response to the peculiar Americanemphasis on “self-fashioning and self-invention” and not to philosophicalconstructs. America is, after all, the land of William James and John Dewey andthe birthplace of philosophical pragmatism. “The hallmarks of secularism inAmerica,” Biale writes, quoting Amos Oz, “are lack of dogma and resistance touniformity. . . . No hegemonic authority, either religious or nationalist, candictate its agenda. No trajectory toward the future can be charted with confidence.Secularism can make no promise of continuity or survival, but it does guaranteethe freedom to experiment, without which neither continuity nor survival ispossible.” According to Laurence J. Silberstein, a professor of Jewish studiesat Lehigh University, contemporary Jewish secularism prizes “process overproduct, multiplicity over unity, and becoming rather than being.”
The key question regarding Jewish secularism in America iswhether it has any future. Can its devotees pass on to their children and theirchildren’s children an interest in the artifacts of secular Jewish culture?Israel’s secular Jews have a state to protect, a language to speak, a cultureto preserve, and a strong sense of nationality. America’s secular Jews havenone of these. Is it likely that a love of Jewish-themed movies, an interest inYiddish literature or the history of the Holocaust, or fond memories ofvisiting Jewish museums can provide a lasting Jewish identity?
With Jewish identity increasingly a matter of ascriptionrather than prescription, what likelihood is there that, outside thetraditionally religious, there will ever be enough Jews choosing the samethings to constitute a community? What will be the cement of community whenJews come to believe that Jewishness sanctions whatever is the cultural rage ofthe day? Secular Judaism appears to be a Jewishness without boundaries. So farit has not been acceptable to be a Jewish Christian, but, in light of askyrocketing intermarriage rate, is there any certainty that this willcontinue? Already there are Gentiles on the board of directors of some Reformcongregations.
Judaism as religion might not be the entirety of Jewishidentity, but it is difficult to imagine a vibrant Jewish identity completelysevered from it. Certainly this is what the social-science literature wouldseem to indicate. The fastest growing segments of American Jews are the nonesand the Orthodox, and the potential constituency for secular Judaism appears tobe limited.
“Outside of Israel, where secularism flourishes in thehothouse of nation-building,” writes the journalist Andrew Silow-Carroll, “theJewish future belongs to religion.” If this is so, then future estimates of theAmerican Jewish population will have to be revised dramatically downward. Asthe Talmud warns, with the passing of the prophetic age, prophecy became theprovince of the childish and the foolish, but one can safely make oneprediction: The issue of Jewish identity will continue to be salient.
Edward S. Shapiro is professor of history emeritus atSeton Hall University.
Image by Rhododendrites licensed via Creative Commons. Image Cropped.
