JACK WERTHEIMER

Why, one may wonder, should we give equal consid eration at this seminar to Jews, a small minority constituting roughly 2.5 per cent of the American population? According to the best estimates, there are approximately five and a half million Jews in this country, hardly a numerically significant population.

I would offer a twofold answer. First, Jews play a disproportionate role in several key sectors of American society. For a variety of social and cultural reasons, Jews have been drawn to high-profile occupations such as the professions, the media, academia, and certain entrepreneurial endeavors. (I should note that historically they have played a negligible role in other economic sectors, including heavy industry.) The reasons for this Jewish over-concentration in a few types of work are complex. Anti-Semitic discrimination kept Jews out of certain economic spheres, and so they tended to take greater risks in emerging, if initially peripheral, occupations. Jewish cultural values have also played a role, especially the emphasis Judaism places on textual study; Jews tend to pursue a higher education and then are drawn into fields that value such learning. There are also social considerations: long constrained in their occupational choices, Jews responded to the easing of occupational restraints with the explosive drive of a people that has much pent-up energy. (All these patterns have characterized Jewish occupational pursuits in other countries, too, during the modern era.)

Second, Jews are deserving of our attention because they serve in some important ways as a model ethnic and religious minority. In recent years, I have enjoyed a number of opportunities to speak at a variety of college campuses and have been struck by the level of interest in the American Jewish experience displayed by Muslims from the Balkans, Korean-Americans, Hindus from the Indian subcontinent, Christians from the Caribbean, and other recent immigrants who attended my lectures. When I asked these students why they were interested in Jews, they responded forthrightly, “Because we are struggling with many of the same issues.” Members of other minorities identify with the great dilemma facing contemporary American Jews: how do they, as Americans with strong religious and ethnic traditions, strike a balance between the drive for individual socio-economic and geographic mobility and the desire to maintain a distinctive group culture and cohesiveness?

This is not a new dilemma. The very first Jews to arrive on these shores in the second half of the seventeenth century already confronted an important aspect of it. The question they faced was: how does a religious/ethnic minority organize itself in the United States? During the Middle Ages and beyond, Christian states in Western Europe and as far east as the Byzantine Empire, and also Muslim rulers around the Mediterranean basin and in the Middle East, had required Jews to maintain and support separate communities. External coercion, then, imposed internal Jewish unity and organization. Such a system satisfied everyone's needs. Jews oversaw their own internal affairs; they collected taxes from amongst themselves and turned those tax revenues over to the government. Governments, in turn, were required to devote relatively little attention to Jewish communities, which relieved rulers of a burden. They therefore granted a good deal of autonomy to Jewish communal leaders.

Jews who arrived in colonial America (the first ones came in 1654) had to decide how they were going to organize themselves. Coming from lands in which governments compelled them to be members of a Jewish community, they were faced with a radically unfamiliar ethos: American voluntarism. Initially, they developed a model in which the synagogue served as the center of all Jewish communal life. Indeed, the half-dozen colonial synagogues monopolized virtually all Jewish goods and services, including the cemetery plot. A Jew who wished to be buried in a Jewish cemetery had to be a member in good standing of the synagogue. And if his or her membership dues were in arrears, then the heirs would have to pay those dues before the community permitted interment in its cemetery. Philanthropy and charity were funneled through the synagogue, as were such ritual-related services as the preparation of kosher meat and the baking of matzoh. The synagogue, as provider of all these services, then used its monopoly as leverage to convince Jews that they had to be members in good standing.

In a sense, these early Jewish immigrants tried to transplant to America the coercive form of community they had known in Europe. But American voluntarism soon triumphed: synagogue monopolies collapsed rapidly once new congregations were founded to compete with existing ones. There then ensued a great proliferation not only of synagogues but also of many other kinds of Jewish institutions, for social welfare, education, cultural pursuits, recreation, and fraternization. Each successive wave of Jewish immigrants established its own set of such institutions. In this way, over the course of the nineteenth century, Jewish communal life evolved from a highly concentrated and coercive system to one marked by fragmentation and institutional anarchy. The pressing challenge facing Jewish leaders at the start of the twentieth century was to bring some order out of this chaos.

Two Common Denominators

The solutions they devised are still with us. Early in the twentieth century, a Jewish attorney in New York named Louis Marshall created an organization called the American Jewish Committee. Marshall realized that Judaism itself was not what unified Jews; rather, religion divided Jews. He suggested that there are only two ways to organize Jews, two workable common denominators: all Jews have a sense of responsibility toward fellow Jews who are impoverished, and all Jews have a concern for fellow Jews who are victims of anti-Semitism. And so Louis Marshall founded an organization that would concern itself with these two matters, especially with combating anti-Semitism. But no sooner did Marshall announce his new approach than other organizations sprang up to meet the same needs.

Around the same time, American Jews began to develop something quite remarkable to deal with social problems. Local Jewish communities established federations of philanthropy in order to centralize the fund-raising efforts of Jewish agencies. By the end of the twentieth century, nearly one hundred and eighty federations existed in North American cities or regions, each serving as the central collection, allocation, and planning agency for local Jewish needs. Every federation runs a single fund-raising campaign and then, through a hierarchical and committee-driven process, determines how those funds should be dispensed. A central umbrella organization coordinates the work of the North American federations.

This aspect of Jewish life in the United States rarely gets reported, because it is a complicated and largely local story of how money is raised and dispensed. Yet it is through the federated system that a great deal of policy in the Jewish community is made, since allocation decisions force the community to define its priorities and ultimately its agenda.

The other concern unifying Jews, the desire to combat anti-Semitism, gave rise to several new organizations early in the twentieth century: the previously mentioned American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, and the Anti-Defamation League. Each has implicitly said, We are the ones defending the Jews; therefore we are the ones who speak for the Jews. Initially these organizations were involved mainly in community-relations work, improving relations between Jews and their neighbors and combating anti-Semitism. But as time went on, and particularly during World War II, the organizations embarked on a more comprehensive program. They came to believe that anti-Semitism is a symptom of other social ills. They therefore determined that both self-interest and a commitment to the improvement of society required the Jewish community to fight all forms of discrimination.

Over the years, the agenda of the Jewish community-relations agencies broadened, first to encompass housing and employment discrimination and eventually, in our day, to stake out a “Jewish” position on virtually every conceivable public-policy question. Church-state matters were a natural, of course, but then other kinds of questions came into play. What is the position of the Jewish community on the environment, on vouchers, on gun control? Jewish organizations developed a mechanism to address all these issues. Of course, there is something quintessentially American about all this: one way to participate in American society is to take positions. But there is also something quite strange about such an approach. Why, one may wonder, should Jews try to speak with one voice about so many complex questions of social policy?

Jews as a Religious Group

Thus far I have been speaking about the ways Jews have organized themselves as an ethnic community; but of course Jews also constitute a religious minority. American Judaism has conformed to American models. Like their Protestant neighbors, Jews in this country have spawned a multiplicity of religious movements that have begun to call themselves “denominations,” a very Protestant category. These include Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist, and Orthodox Judaism, and also a movement for Jewish Renewal, Humanistic Judaism, and so on. Interestingly, each movement has created institutions that parallel Protestant denominational infrastructures—an organization unifying congregations, another one for the clergy, and denominationally oriented seminaries to train rabbis and cantors. American Judaism has also become very congregational. Not surprisingly, many of the same problems that beset Protestant denominations today, such as the increased blurring of denominational boundaries, are affecting Jewish denominations too, in part because of the strength of congregationalism and the extent to which the individual synagogue decides on its own policies. Here again, the proliferation of congregations with highly independent policies very much mirrors the American scene.

The early forms of Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist Judaism all emerged out of ethnic synagogues, and represented the responses of particular immigrant waves to the challenge of adaptation. Reform Judaism was initially the movement of religious accommodation founded by Jews who came from German-speaking lands in the middle of the nineteenth century. The Conservative and Reconstructionist movements reflected the needs and aspirations of people who came from Eastern Europe at the turn of the twentieth century. The case of Orthodox Judaism is a bit more complicated, because some Jews in each of these other groups identified with Orthodoxy. But Orthodoxy was primarily molded by immigrants who arrived just before and after the Holocaust. There has also been a class dimension to these movements. Until quite recently, one could assume that Orthodox Jews were the poorest, Conservative Jews were in the middle, and Reform Jews were the wealthiest. I'm not certain that this pattern has totally broken down yet, though one could certainly find rich Orthodox Jews and poor Reform Jews.

Fundamentally, then, each of these movements sought to accommodate to American society while maintaining some fidelity to Jewish traditions. While the solutions they devised differed, the underlying assumption was that if you do not accommodate to American society, you are lost. And until recently, these accommodations seemed to work very well. Since World War II, Judaism has been treated with great esteem and regarded, as Will Herberg famously put it, as an equally valid component of America's “triple melting pot”—on a par with Protestantism and Catholicism. But do these strategies of accommodation work today? And is the struggle for acceptance and esteem the major challenge of our time?

Let's address these questions by backtracking to the organizational arrangements of Jews as an ethnic community and as a religious community. A decade ago, the federations of Jewish philanthropy probably reached a peak of their power and authority. At that time they collectively decided to levy a tax on every single Jewish community to help underwrite a billion-dollar loan to Israel to be used to help resettle Jews from the former Soviet Union. The federations raised that staggering sum, a billion dollars, within three years. Today, ten years later, the federation system is struggling to hold together. It has been renamed, it has new leadership, and it has very little national presence at this point. Here we see the centrifugal forces of American society at work. New organizations are established, new individuals step up and say, “We know better,” and every centralized system seems to break down. That is the case in the federation world today.

Fissures of a different sort are growing in the public-policy arena. In this regard, the Jewish community is riven by a left-right split comparable to that dividing other segments of American society. Moreover, a number of Jewish groups have questioned the wisdom of trying to speak with one voice on environmental matters or other issues far removed from Jewish self-interest. Some are also challenging the content of these policy pronouncements: to what extent, they ask, do they reflect traditional Jewish teachings? Finally, some also question whether those who say they speak for the Jewish community reflect the actual views of most Jews. The upshot of this debate is a recognition that there is less consensus than had been long assumed.

Religious polarization is also increasing. The American media have reported on the various controversies in Israel over the question “who is a Jew?” Little has been written, by contrast, about similar controversies in the United States. But the issue is no less divisive here. The difference is that in Israel the question has political and legal ramifications, whereas in the United States differing groups of Jews simply don't recognize one another as Jews. In truth, there is no agreement within the American Jewish community on who is a Jew. Some continue to embrace the traditional rabbinic definition that a Jew is a person born to a Jewish mother, whereas others consider it sufficient if either parent is a Jew. There is also no agreement on the requirements for conversion to Judaism. Moreover, there is not even agreement on the nature and limits of Judaism. The one group that the Jewish community will unanimously read out of Jewish life is the movement of Messianic Jews, “Jews for Jesus”; but Jewish Buddhists, who call themselves “Jew-Bu's,” are patted on the head and told they are terrific. Yet both represent forms of religious syncretism.

Even more than in the civic arena of Jewish life, the religious sector is riven over these kinds of issues. Each area of dispute points to a weakening of consensus among American Jews about crucial contemporary issues. Without such consensus, it is hard to maintain institutional coherence.

Fighting an Obsolete War

Perhaps the central challenge now confronting American Jews is to determine whether the strategies that served them so well in the past can address contemporary needs. To what extent does the Jewish community continue to fight the last war? Does it grasp the radically different reality of the current battle? The last war was a struggle for social acceptance, for an end to discrimination, and for the legitimation of Judaism as a respected religion. In 1951 the president of the Jewish Theological Seminary, Louis Finkelstein, made the cover of Time magazine, in large part because he was a leader in the campaign to win respectability for Judaism. I believe that battle has been won. Jews have achieved respectability, and Judaism is treated with a great deal of acceptance within American society. The issue now is whether Jews who have integrated so well can maintain themselves as a distinctive group. To what extent can they survive as a religio-ethnic group if they do not define limits to their community and establish boundaries to acceptable behavior?

One of the symptoms and also causes of the fuzzy boundaries is the rapid upward spiral in rates of intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews. Like many other religious and ethnic groups in this country, Jews have witnessed a dramatic surge in intermarriages over the past thirty years. As a consequence, the rituals and outlooks of many other cultures are being absorbed into American Jewish life. Jews are eager to integrate Asian, Native American, and other religious and cultural practices into their Judaism; this religious syncretism makes it increasingly difficult to discern what remains distinctively Jewish about the religious rituals or world view of many Jews.

Two symbolic battles that took place in recent years shed light on some of these conflicts. One was a minor skirmish fought in 1997 at Yale University, when five Orthodox Jewish undergraduates sued the university on the grounds that they were compelled to live in co-ed dormitories in their freshman and sophomore years. Since such arrangements were at odds with the sexual comportment expected of Orthodox Jews, the students asked to be exempted from the dorm requirement—and the fees. When Yale refused, the students sued the university.

The overwhelming response of the Jewish community was to stigmatize these five students for their “ghetto mentality.” If you really want to live that way, they were told, go to Yeshiva University. Lost in the fray was a recognition of how much Jewish life had changed in this country. Here were students, after all, who had made it to Yale, an institution that like so many others of its type had imposed strict quotas on Jewish admissions until fifty years ago. But the students felt themselves so at home at Yale that they took action to sue the university. Taking for granted their own social acceptance, they waged a court battle to protect their right to be different, to stand out, to resist the powerful culture of the campus with its attendant sexual morality. Significantly, they found allies in both Protestant and Catholic circles, not only at Yale but at other institutions as well. But fundamentally they were fighting for the right to live according to the distinctive requirements of the Jewish religion, as they understood it, rather than capitulate to the powerful dominant culture. Compared to their Jewish predecessors a half century earlier, they waged a very different kind of battle for acceptance, one that stresses how Judaism differs. Not surprisingly, they won scant support in the Jewish community, which is still preoccupied with fitting in, with social acceptance.

The second symbolic battle I wish to mention has evoked far more debate than the Yale case, and that is the brewing battle within the Jewish community over school choice, vouchers, and the like. The background of this new debate is the remarkable growth over the last forty years in the number of Jews who enroll their children in all-day Jewish schools. Almost 40 per cent of children receiving a Jewish education today are enrolled in these all-day schools. That is a staggering figure, which needs some qualification. First, we must note that some Jews never enroll their children in any Jewish educational program, and so the 40 per cent does not relate to the total population of Jewish children. And second, all-day Jewish schools now begin in pre-school and continue at least through lower and middle school, with a movement building to extend that education through high school.

What makes these Jewish day schools remarkable, and I believe different from Catholic parochial schools, is that in many of them, the day is divided equally between religious education and general education. In Catholic schools, from what I have read, usually just one period a day is devoted to religious instruction. And so Jewish children in day schools receive a much more intensive religious education. The point here is that parents feel secure enough to send their children to these schools, even though they still want those children to become doctors, lawyers, and dot-com-ers, no less than do other upwardly mobile parents. They feel that these vocational goals are possible even though their children are attending Jewish schools. (The five Yale students, we should note, all attended Jewish day high schools, and that did not prevent them from winning acceptance to a prestigious university.)

As the population of Jewish day-school parents continues to grow, and as those parents stagger under the burden of paying both steep taxes for public schools their children do not attend and high tuition fees at day schools, more and more are coming to see vouchers and other plans that help parents afford school choice as an attractive if not financially necessary option. This, in turn, is prompting some reconsideration of Jewish policy positions on matters of church/state separation.

This is a remarkable development in a community that has long been a great supporter of the public school. Jewish advocates argued for much of the twentieth century that public schools are the instrument by which American society brings together a great diversity of children so that they can learn about one another. Where else will young people learn to respect Jews if they do not befriend them in public schools? Yet a growing number of Jews feel secure enough to send their children to intensely Jewish schools instead of to public schools because they no longer consider winning respect to be the most crucial issue facing Jews.

Having succeeded in gaining acceptance into American society, Jews in this country must now confront new and perhaps harder questions. How distinctive are they prepared to be? How out-of-step are they willing to march? Where will they draw boundaries between themselves and their neighbors? Given the wide diversity of the Jewish community today, there are no consensus answers to these questions. But as a small religious and ethnic minority, America's Jews face no more pressing set of questions.

RESPONSE BY DAVID BROOKS

At the beginning of the twentieth century my mother's grandfather moved into the Lower East Side of Manhattan and became a kosher chicken butcher. It was always a matter of pride in my family that when the kosher chicken butchers in his area set up their collusive price arrangement, he was the one who got to hold the pot of money. Everybody chipped in a few thousand dollars, and if you broke the price rule, you lost your two thousand. Apparently my great-grandfather was the most honest of the colluders! He married a German Jew, which was an immediate step up. Then, as soon as he could afford to, he moved uptown, out of this vibrant Jewish community, and eventually ended up in the South Bronx. There he spent all his money on real estate, which was not a good move.

When I was growing up in New York City, Anglophilia was one of the dominant moods in my house. This was a popular assimilationist impulse for Jews; the phrase was, “Think Yiddish; act British.” The Jews gave their kids names like Irving, Norman, and Milton, which seemed very English, though we now think of them as Jewish. The English way—all that nobility, all that grace—seemed like a most admirable thing to us striving, vulgar Jews on the Lower East Side. My pet turtles were named Disraeli and Gladstone. Disraeli is the perfect Jew for this mentality: he was proud of his Jewish roots, and yet he got to be Lord Beaconsfield.

So I was all set to carry on the family tradition of assimilation. I voted Republican, I married a Protestant, and I went to work at the Wall Street Journal. But a couple of years after we were married, my wife decided to convert to Judaism, certainly with no pressure from me. She got very serious about it, to the point of deciding she wanted to become a rabbi. She has studied very hard and knows a lot of Hebrew. Our kids go to Jewish day schools where 50 per cent of the day is devoted to Jewish instruction. I now live in an incredibly Jewish household— really despite myself.

There are three services every Saturday morning in our Washington synagogue. The one in the main sanctuary with rabbis feels a bit like a Protestant service. The rabbis use microphones, which the other two services would never use. There's a choir on high holy days. The other two services are newer, and these we go to on alternate weeks. The Havurah (“fellowship” in Hebrew) started in the early seventies, and it was very much a sixties thing. It's lay-led. No rabbi. No authority. A woman can read from the Torah, and my wife now does. In the middle of the service there is a forty-five-minute seminar, where they talk about the Torah portion for that week; the leader conducts a Socratic dialogue. Nearly everybody is very knowledgeable, and the discussions are usually quite sophisticated. But whenever the Torah grates against pluralism, they draw back and start doing intellectual gymnastics, explaining why it doesn't mean what it seems to mean. This happens when it says “our enemies will be vanquished,” for instance, or whenever there's an imputation that there is one true way.

The third service is called “Traditional Egalitarian.” It's huge. On high holy days there are maybe five hundred or more present at this service. Even on ordinary Saturdays the group is very big and very vibrant. I'd say 70 per cent are in their twenties to mid-thirties. It's a very rigorous service, more rigorous than the Havurah. While the Havurah reads only a third of the Torah portion, the Traditional Egalitarian reads the whole thing. They say a particular prayer and then repeat it. These young-ish people are really impressive in their knowledge of faith and scripture. They too have a seminar-thing in the middle, but it's much more therapeutic than the one in the Havurah. It's a bit jarring. There might be a discussion, for instance, of why vegetarianism is really the ultimate in Judaism. One woman wrote a short story that had Isaac talking to the grave of Abraham, saying, “You know, we never really communicated since that day when you held the knife”—very New Age-y. It's as if you're in an Orthodox shul and suddenly the Oprah Winfrey show breaks in.

What we see in these two services, the Havurah and the Traditional Egalitarian, is a return to something more serious, but it's a funny kind of return. In some ways it's rigor without submission. It's the idea that you can bend the rules to fit your sensibility.

I differ from Jack a bit in saying that this return to serious Judaism is not distinctly Jewish but has been caused by intellectual pressures in the outside world. I would say that educated people, whether Jewish or non-Jewish, share a similar trajectory. Remember The Organization Man, The Lonely Crowd, all those books from social scientists in the 1950s? The main thrust of them was that society had become too orderly, too group-oriented, too passive, too conformist. John Hewig drew a distinction between customary and reflective morality. Customary morality was sort of what you inherited; it was based on long established rules, deference to eternal maxims. Reflective morality was based more on conscious deliberation. It was the moral directives you figured out for yourself. The assumption was that reflective morality was better. This went down well in popular culture, with the beats and the hippies—go your own way, find your own spiritual destiny.

In many ways that cultural force walked through an open door and has triumphed. Now it's better to be seen as unconventional than conventional. It's better to be called a non-conformist than a conformist. It's cooler to be a rebel than an obedient foot soldier. In this sense individualistic pluralism is the foundation for people both in the Havurah and in the Traditional Egalitarian group, and probably for all members of the educated class since the boomers. In the 1970s, of course, that sort of “breaking free,” that desire for emancipation from the traditional, led to the rise of the New Age movement. By the mid-eighties the New Age had cooled down a bit, but Robert Bellah and his associates tell in their book Habits of the Heart about a woman whom they took as representative of a sort of spirituality that was out there. This young nurse named Sheila described her religion as “Sheila-ism.” You custom-designed your religion to fill your needs. “It's just trying to love yourself and be gentle with yourself, you know, take care of each other,” she explains. Robert Wuthnow found a daughter of a Methodist minister who called herself a Methodist–Taoist–Native-American–Quaker–Jewish–Buddhist. She's a Jew-Bu and then some.

These self-created religions were unsatisfactory for several reasons. In the first place, you might find there was no real self to discover if you kept digging down; maybe it's only for social contact that the self is created. Second, the self-religions didn't really help you much with the transitions of life: birth, death, marriage. Third, they made it very hard to pass your faith on to your children. The organized religions are really good at that and know how to structure things, which the self-religions didn't. And finally, the self-religions never gave you something to hold fast to—you were always experimenting. The Book of Samuel has a great sentence that represents what people long for: “Moreover, I will appoint a place for my people Israel, and I will plant them that they may dwell in a place of their own and move no more.” That sense of moving no more is important.

So there has been, I think, in American society over the past ten years, a return to order, a return to community. In contrast to the social critics of the fifties who were saying, “We need less order, less group conformity, less community,” today's are saying, “We need more community, more order, more civil society.” Robert Putnam wrote “Bowling Alone,” that famous essay about the loss of civil society, in 1995. What 1950s or 1960s intellectual would have taken the loss of participation in bowling leagues as something to be worried about? Bowling leagues would have seemed like absurdities that we should get rid of—sort of bourgeois, small-minded parts of Middle America.

We see every day that the main project in the political sphere is the restoration of authority, community, compassionate conservatism. And I think that vibrant movements like the Traditional Egalitarian and Havurah groups I described are the religious component of that same project. One of the striking things in these new movements is the emphasis on the Talmudic scholars of Judaism. They are looking for intellectual authority figures. In an earlier age they would have been talking about Freud or Marcuse, but now it's Maimonides. The tremendous emphasis in both of these services—and I may be overstating this, because it is true to some degree for all Judaism—is on a return to the past, a sense of the linking of generations, a desire to preserve the great chain of rituals and traditions. The New York Times had a great headline: “Religion Makes a Comeback (Belief to Follow).” The discussion was about whether, with rituals coming back, there is also belief. It was an open question.

Two final points. First, it could be that the political cleavage in the future will be, not Catholic versus Protestant versus Jewish, or anything like that, but a split between the orthodox of all faiths who are interested in fighting these cultural issues and the ambivalent who don't want to fight. Second, I wonder how long the mixture of orthodoxy and flexibility can last. When a circuit rabbi in Montana named Gershwin Winkler was asked, “What kind of shul do you run?” he replied, “It's 'flexodoxy.'” It's an expressive term. This urge for orthodoxy and this desire for flexibility—how long can they co-exist? Can you worship God rightly if you insist on deciding for yourself which of the Bible's teachings you will follow? Can you establish ritual and order if you feel that you must continually experience new things? Can you be tightly bound to your community and still feel part of the larger diverse America?

I can imagine a future generation saying to us, “You know, you are all caught up in your ambivalences. You are divided against yourself. It makes you tepid. It gives you no fervor. Enough with being both a modern, liberal person and a religious person. We are going to go whole hog—well, maybe not in Judaism—all the way in one direction or the other and be pure.”

I have this scenario: after my whole family spends a hundred years trying hard to be assimilated, my wife reverses the whole process just like that. I have this vision of my kids out there in Hebron. The whole return will have fulfilled itself.

Michael Cromartie: Thank you, Jack Wertheimer and David Brooks. Now others are invited to join the discussion. [These participants will be identified at the end.]

Robert Shogan: First I want to express my appreciation for both the presentation and the response. Jack Wertheimer struck a chord with the question “who is a Jew?” I was raised Jewish—both my parents were Jews—but eventually I drifted away. I married a Catholic woman. And since I was Jewish and she was Catholic, together we became Unitarian.

You spoke about the forces that compel Jewish unity: the desire to help the less fortunate and the desire to fight anti-Semitism. It seems to me that those motivations are waning. More Jews are better off, and anti-Semitism seems to be at least in ill repute. While both of these earlier motivations still play a part, it seems to me that the singular force behind Jewish unity today is the existence of the state of Israel. What is the effect when people who want to assimilate and want to maintain their identity have what amounts to loyalty to a foreign state?

Jack Wertheimer: I don’t think the issue is one of loyalty to Israel in the sense of patriotism. American Jews have convinced themselves that there’s a complete convergence of interest between Israel and the United States, and that is the case they have made all along. They don’t want to think about any serious divergence of interest between the two nations. Certainly, in the current era of good feeling, American Jews perceive strong agreement between the Clinton and Barak administrations.

The evidence seems to suggest a waning of zeal about Israel among certain populations of Jews, especially younger ones. The generation that lived through the 1967 and 1973 wars identified wholeheartedly with Israel as an embattled and endangered population. Last year one of my undergraduates asked me, “Professor, how long have you been teaching?” I told her I began teaching full time in 1978. Her response was, “Oh, that was the year before I was born!” This sense of Israel as an embattled population understandably has less resonance with the young people of today, who cannot recall the time when Israel was in mortal danger.

As for the decline in anti-Semitism and its effect on the Jewish social conscience: survey research indicates that there is no necessary contradiction between being involved in social and civic issues and being involved in “particularistic” Jewish issues. It’s not either/or: those involved in Jewish issues tend to be more involved in their local communities—which leads me back to some of David’s very interesting comments. I don’t think we really disagree about there being a climate within American society that very much influences Jews as well. That climate is reflected in bookstores, where there are huge sections on religion and mysticism. Jews are certainly a part of that larger world.

I want to pick up on this question of “flexodoxy”—I’d never heard the term before, and I love it. But I have a problem with that approach to religion. We live in a time when people in many faith communities are paying greater attention to religion, and in new ways. They are motivated by highly individualistic preoccupations. To put matters crassly, they are asking, “What’s in it for me?” Some people attend religious services because they find it enriches their lives. I worry about their ability to go beyond themselves and realize, “That’s what brings me into the institution in the first place, but the institution still stands for certain things. To what extent am I prepared to buy the package?”

Sociologists who have studied modern churches have found that congregations do much better when they communicate a clear message of basic expectations rather than say, “Come, we’re inclusive, we will accept you as you are, no matter how you live your life.” This literature on churches is now being scrutinized by people in the Jewish community who want to make a similar case. It’s not enough to attend synagogue services because it makes you feel good. That’s part of the motivation, but to what extent do you have a commitment to the core values and expectations of the institution—even if some do not necessarily make you feel good? I think this is a challenge to religious and institutional life that crosses religious boundaries.

David Brooks: It’s a bit more problematic than that, because modernity happened. The apple of knowledge, the apple of individualism was offered to us, and we took it. It’s not going away. It’s harder now to go back to the sense of immersion in the group, to a suspension of individual judgment.

Just one thing about Israel. Jack mentioned that it is no longer as embattled. It’s also a much richer country, so why should I give them money? I think the other thing that’s coming across is that the Israelis themselves are much more ambivalent about our assistance. There’s a much greater sense among them that “we don’t need your help.” Zionism is definitely a waning force in the synagogue I was mentioning. The one service that is not so vibrant is the most Zionist; in the other two, Israel just doesn’t loom large in the discussion.

Larry Eichel: I want to explore the voucher issue in the Jewish context a little more. In Philadelphia we have a very competitive mayor’s race going on. The Republican candidate is Jewish; he sends his children to Jewish day school, and he is advocating vouchers on a limited basis. His Democratic opponent is African-American and Seventh-day Adventist, and he has tried to make the Jewish candidate’s support of vouchers a very big issue, primarily to appeal to Jewish voters. Despite the increasing use of Jewish day schools, Jews as a group are more opposed to vouchers than any other segment of society, mostly for the old church-state reasons that we are all familiar with. Is a strategy like this wrong-headed?

Michael Cromartie: Peter Beinart has an article on Jewish schools in the October 1999 Atlantic Monthly, so let’s get Peter’s opinion on this.

Peter Beinart: My strong sense is that the opposition to vouchers really is waning. In the Conservative movement, where there was strong opposition to vouchers, there’s a real and growing change, and even in Reform circles a significant minority is in favor of vouchers.

I have a question about Modern Orthodoxy: do you think it is moving more to the right or to the left? The Modern Orthodox are the ones who have had the Jewish schools all along. Their congregations are basically well educated. And it seems to me that if indeed the Conservative movement is becoming more traditional, then you can see your way toward a synthesis that might bring the community together in a new consensus about how to deal with questions like vouchers and the role of women. One of the things that struck me about the Yale Five was that they did not refer to themselves as Modern Orthodox. They said, “We call ourselves yeshivaish.” They wouldn’t have anything to do with the Modern Orthodox movement at Yale. I found this encouraging, in that it suggests there may not be as much of a difference between the kind of Conservative you’re talking about and Modern Orthodoxy.

Jack Wertheimer: Modern Orthodoxy—and this is a very narrow part of the story—was a sector of the Orthodox world that in the 1950s and 1960s believed that the future belonged to them. Its leaders were the spokesmen for Orthodox Judaism. As time goes on, they are coming more and more under siege. The world of Orthodox Judaism is moving to the right; it is now driven far more by people who really want to remove themselves from the rest of the Jewish world. The burning question in the Orthodox world is, to what extent can the Modern Orthodox reassert themselves?

On the voucher question: the issue is a very complicated one in the Jewish community, in part because there is still a great deal of nervousness about taking care of one’s own. What has turned opinion around more than anything else is not whether vouchers would be good for Jewish day schools, because most people understand that the amount of government funding that would come to these schools under current plans would be just a fraction of the tuition they charge. When day-school tuition runs between $8,000 and $18,000 a year, the kinds of vouchers now available, running around $2,000, would not be a major factor. What seems to be turning Jews around is a much greater interest in vouchers among inner-city populations, specifically minorities. These are the traditional allies of liberal Jews, and so suddenly Jews have to pay new attention to vouchers because their traditional allies are telling them, “This is really good for inner-city kids.”

George Weigel: I’d like to revisit the Yale incident to suggest that what was going on there was not simply a request to “respect our morality.” It was a statement: “Don’t impose your morality—which is in fact a negation of morality, a kind of debonair nihilism—on everyone.” If that is indeed what’s going on, if parts of the American Jewish community may be beginning to recognize that life-style liberty is in fact a new kind of totalitarianism, I wonder if there isn’t a parallel in what we conventionally call church-state relations but I would rather call the religion-and-public-life realm. What began as an intention to make room for genuine pluralism has in time turned into a new establishment, the establishment of an ideology that is absolutely unable to give kids reference points from which they can deal with the pressures of a consumerist society. Is there a rethinking in the Jewish community about church-state issues?

Jack Wertheimer: Only in some sectors. I think that the orthodoxy of strict separationism is still very strong. I don’t agree with it, but I understand it. There is a fear: what’s going to happen to a small non-Christian minority in a land that is overwhelmingly Christian if this wall of separation is breached? American Jews historically were not as obsessed with church-state questions and were far more open to breaches in the wall of separation than they are today. I don’t see evidence of a really strong turnaround on these issues. Rather, more Jews today are open to a reconsideration of selected issues, to some small breaches in the wall.

George Weigel: In the history of the twentieth century, it seems very clear that a society constructed by people who believe that tolerance of other religions is a religious obligation is much safer for Jews than an utterly secularized environment. An intensely religious country has historically been the best place for Jews.

Jack Wertheimer: I agree with your point of view, but I’ve had many conversations with Jews on this issue, and what they always trot out is the marginalization they experienced as kids when religion intruded in public schools: “Let me tell you how uncomfortable I felt at Christmas time when we all had to sing those Christian songs.” My response to this tale of woe is to ask, “Did you survive it?” “Oh yes, I did, and I felt more strongly Jewish because of it.” But these people want to shield their children from that kind of experience even though they survived it intact, and were actually strengthened by it.

Michael Barone: Well, I think Jews are still voting against the czar. The experience of czarist Russia was that of a church united with the state that actively persecuted people, that had public policies of forced conversions. I take this to be one of the reasons why American Jews are so sensitive about the matter of conversion. If a bunch of Baptists want to convert me, it doesn’t bother me. They can’t compel me to convert, so what’s the threat? The threat comes when you are going against that background of czarist Russia, which is the ancestral home of most American Jews. You look at it through that template and you see Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey as the vanguard of the Cossacks. When I talk to forty-something, fifty-something, eighty-something Jews in well-established Jewish neighborhoods across the United States, again and again I hear people voting against the czar.

Elliott Abrams: I’d like to ask a question about faith. One could, I think, handle everything Jack described sociologically, politically, institutionally, without much reference to religious faith itself. Is there much knowledge about whether, for example, the people in David’s Traditional Egalitarian service actually are people of deeper religious faith? Do they like that service because they like the singers? Or do they like it because somehow it is more deeply spiritual? To what extent—if at all—is there a revival of Jewish religious faith?

Jack Wertheimer: That’s hard to say. We can observe from the outside that people are engaging in a particular religious ritual. The question is whether they believe that the ritual is important to God, not only to themselves. “I fasted on the Day of Atonement, and now I feel a sense of catharsis” is a very different statement from, “I fasted on the Day of Atonement, and I believe my fasting and prayer make an impression upon God.” We do not know whether people believe in the religious efficacy of the rituals they perform.

It’s very difficult to know whether we’re actually seeing a great increase in faith rather than just good feeling. What complicates the matter is that the whole language of faith and spirituality is not the natural language of Judaism. The natural language of Judaism is one of actions and ritual observances. There’s a lot of wiggle-room, traditionally, about faith, about debating with God, about God’s actions, so it’s really hard to know how much people believe and how important their belief is to them. I think the greater emphasis is on some of the things we have mentioned, like community, a sense of continuity, the link that rituals and traditions provide to our ancestors.

E. J. Dionne: Before I make my comment, I’d like to thank George Weigel for the wonderful phrase “debonair nihilism.” When he said it, I could see an ad in Cigar Aficionado!

Part of the problem we’re trying to get at here goes back to George’s point that a belief in tolerance, rooted in faith in God, is a strong bulwark against oppression. I believe that’s true. However, historically, we Catholics have not always thought that tolerance was taught by God. Indeed, we have tended to be much more for tolerance in societies when we were in the minority than when we were in the majority. We are not exceptional in this way. I think that’s why this conversation is so difficult. In a way people who are defending an orthodox position, especially in America, are people deeply affected by liberalism—liberalism in the broadest sense, in the sense that the Wall Street Journal editorial page, too, is liberal. We really don’t want to let go of that. In the Jewish community, because of the history of oppression and because liberals were tied to the forces that opposed it, there is an enormous and understandable reluctance to give it up.

So we’re stuck with the quandaries that David Brooks described, with flexodoxy (a wonderful term), and I think that anyone who is religious is struggling to balance this notion that what he or she believes is indeed the truth with a deep desire to preserve tolerance. That’s not an easy thing to do. Dwight Eisenhower was laughed at when he said that “our government makes no sense unless it is founded on a deeply felt religious belief—and I don’t care what it is.” But in fact what we are hearing now from certain kinds of conservative or orthodox people is, “Everyone must belong to an orthodox, demanding religion that insists it has the truth, and I don’t care what it is.”

David Brooks: None of us here are going to the Christian Coalition meeting this year, apparently, because it’s going on right now, but in past years it looked like Ratner’s with the number of rabbis who were up on the platform. There seems to be a natural alliance of people who are orthodox in their religion, whatever that religion is. The Yale Five got tremendous support from Christian conservatives.

E. J. Dionne: The religious situation in America was well described by a Jewish friend of mine who is principal of a Quaker school. He told a group of parents, “This is a place where Episcopalians teach Jewish kids to be Quakers.” I think that what David said about Jews, that to some extent they model themselves after Protestants, is true of all Americans. When I was covering the Vatican, people there used to tell me this all the time, with great unease or displeasure.

Jack Wertheimer: The Protestant model has been dominant in many areas. Take education as an example. The Protestant model is that we all attend public schools to receive our general education, and we get our religious education separately in Sunday school. A hundred years ago, Jews totally bought the Protestant model. Jewish day schools are in fact a reflection of a greater openness on the part of Jews to the Catholic model of schools, where religion is an integral part of the curriculum.

Jody Hassett: I want to go back to an earlier point about a sense of obligation. Last year, Abe Rosenthal was chastened by certain religious leaders about his series of New York Times editorials on the persecution of Catholics and Protestants that is going on in various countries today. While the Jewish community certainly has quite a track record when it comes to defending the oppressed, the poor, and ethnic minorities, where is the sense of obligation toward others oppressed in the name of religion?

Jack Wertheimer: I believe the Jewish community has a pretty strong track record on this, too. Both Abe Rosenthal and Michael Horowitz have been leading voices in the campaign against the persecution of Christian minorities. There are other examples. Officially, at least, the Jewish community mounts campaigns to raise sums for the victims of disasters, such as Muslims devastated by the earthquake in Turkey. I know of no serious disagreement within the Jewish community about this. You can say there are elements of self-interest at work: Jews want to show the world that they are not concerned only about their own, that they reach out, just as they want others to be of help in times of crisis for Jews. Still, there is a track record of considerable aid to victims of catastrophe, regardless of their religion.

Kenneth Woodward: Most of the Jewish people I run across in my line of work have almost no religious background and are in no way religious, though they’re pretty predictable in terms of where they stand on things. When I look at Unitarians, I find they are half to three-quarters Jewish. Ethical Culture is something like 98 per cent Jewish. When Mata Amritanandamayi, the Hindu goddess, comes to town, the people who are organizing the event are all Jewish. We’ve already mentioned the Jew-Bu’s. How many people are so far out of the faith that they’re Jewish in name only? Where is the religiously committed Jewish population?

David Brooks: It hasn’t been mentioned but it should be, that for every person like me there are four or five others who intermarry and just drift away from Judaism. Elliott Abrams has written a book on the danger this presents. It seems to me there really are two mind-sets: that the czar is the greatest danger, and that the anti-czar, the lack of any religious context, is the greatest danger.

Jack Wertheimer: A bi-polar movement is occurring in the Jewish community. A sizable faction, perhaps the majority, is drifting away from Jewish life, while a large minority is intensifying its involvement with Jewish activities. The challenge lies in devising ways to enlarge that minority. Jews who are really not terribly interested in religion per se but who nonetheless still feel ethnic and communal ties have enormous difficulty transmitting that bond to the next generation.

Michael Barone: Just to put a few data in line: In the 1930s you have 4 per cent of the American electorate Jewish, and 20 per cent Catholic. The corresponding figures for today are more like 2 per cent and 28 per cent. I think we’ll be looking at a different Jewish community twenty or thirty years from now—smaller numbers, a smaller percentage of the population, more tradition-minded. There will be less what I called voting against the czar. I don’t mean to use that as a demeaning phrase. The Irish voted against Sir Robert Peel for a hundred years. The South voted against General Sherman for a hundred years. Experiences that go deep to the heart and really change people’s lives are passed down in families and continue to influence behavior for a long, long time.

What are American Jews going to be like in forty years? What should we look forward to?

Jack Wertheimer: The answer depends on where the respondent stands ideologically. In the Orthodox world today, the assumption is that the only Jewish group that will survive is the Orthodox; we can write off these other populations. More liberal Jews have convinced themselves that there’s going to be such a wide diversity of Jewish expression forty years from now that we should be open to all options.

I daresay nobody around this table worries whether there will be Catholics in this country in forty years, or whether there will be evangelicals, or even mainline Protestants. Their continuance is taken for granted. Jews do worry about this; they are always convinced that they are on the verge of extinction. But whether this small minority will be able to muster the resources to perpetuate itself is not an idle question. Jewish communities in Europe were obviously decimated by the Holocaust, but there were still hundreds of thousands in them after World War II. Now those communities have drastically shrunk, largely through assimilation and intermarriage. There’s reason to be concerned. When Jews contemplate a 52 per cent rate of intermarriage for Jews who married between 1985 and 1990, they wonder, Will the offspring of these interfaith marriages be raised as Jews, and if not, what does that portend for the future of the American Jewish population?

David Shribman: Jack opened his remarks with a thoroughly unremarkable comment about Jewish over-representation in certain professions and in certain areas of American civic life. But I wondered what the reaction would be if Patrick Buchanan made the same comment. Why is it no big deal when Jack says it but a very big deal when Buchanan says it?

Jack Wertheimer: Because Patrick Buchanan makes it sound as if there’s a conspiracy. When I said it, I tried to offer an explanation, which has to do not with a conspiracy but with the unleashing of a group with a lot of pent-up energy.

David Brooks: When Buchanan says it, he means there is a monolithic or cohesive Jewish group in the media. When Jews say it, they know that . . . well, there were two Jewish guys on a desert island, and there were two synagogues. When the rescuers asked, “Why do you have two synagogues?” the answer was, “That one I wouldn’t go to.” Every group says things about itself that other people can’t say.

Kenneth Woodward: Pat Buchanan also seems to suggest that Jews in public policy positions are sending other people’s kids to war to get killed because they are more concerned about Israel than the United States. That kind of argumentation is really poisonous to society. The achievement of Jews—and particularly Eastern European Jews in this country—is an astonishment, unequaled in human history. Second-caste people from a third-rate society becoming, many of them, the top people in the top society. Astonishing.

DISCUSSION PARTICIPANTS

Jack Wertheimer, Jewish Theological Seminary; David Brooks, The Weekly Standard; Michael Cromartie, Ethics and Public Policy Center; Elliott Abrams, Ethics and Public Policy Center; Michael Barone, U.S. News & World Report; Peter Beinart, The New Republic; E. J. Dionne, Washington Post; Larry Eichel, Philadelphia Inquirer; Jody Hassett, ABC “World News Tonight”; Robert Shogan, Los Angeles Times; David Shribman, Boston Globe; Kenneth Woodward, Newsweek.