Jewish Identity
A Bias of Reflections.
by Nathan Perlmutter.
Arlington House. 181 pp. $6.95.
Subtitled “the Confessions of an Incipient Old Jew,” A Bias of Reflections is a gentle, sensitive, and profoundly sad volume. Like many Jews of his generation, Perlmutter laments the passing of the things that were critically important to his own Jewish identity. The old neighborhood in Williamsburgh is gone. The memory of the Holocaust seems to be fading. Many younger Jews are turning against Israel. The vigorous secular Jewish commitment of organizations like the American Jewish Committee seems much less confident than it once was. The sons and daughters of his generation (including his own child) seem prone to marry Gentiles. Maybe it’s the end of the line for a distinctive Jewish identity. Maybe being a Jew won’t mean anything at all to a future generation of American Jews.
Perlmutter agonizes over these issues, not so much by explicitly raising them, as by reflecting on a series of vignettes from his own experience. For a Gentile, A Bias of Reflections makes fascinating and haunting reading; for an Irishman it is also disturbing reading, for it turns out that among the many other things that the Irish and the Jews share is a common propensity to think that one’s own generation is doomed to preside over the tragic end of the tradition. For a millennium or more, the Irish have been staring into the mists over the peat bogs and bewailing the vanishing of the Irish race. Strange that Jews should do it, too.
How does one on the outside say to Nathan Perlmutter and other Jews of his generation that they should stop worrying? From the secure perspective of my Irish position, I can assure him that America without the strongly self-conscious Jewish community is inconceivable. I can argue vigorously that Williamsburgh, the Holocaust, and Israel are by no means the only possible components of a strong Jewish sense of identity. I can insist that my data show that among young Jews who still define themselves as Jews the intermarriage rate is very low. I can insist that a people which has persisted for so long is not likely to vanish under the impact of American suburban culture.
Mr. Perlmutter will listen courteously, nod his head sympathetically, but still not really believe me. No more than his Irish Catholic counterpart, Daniel P. Moynihan, is prepared in the depth of his morose Celtic soul to believe that the passing of Camelot was anything less than the twilight of the American Irish. The truth of the matter is that both Celts like Mr. Moynihan and Semites like Mr. Perlmutter enjoy twilight immensely. “Ah, ’tis the end of everything. Those were great days in the past. Too bad it’s all over, too bad we’re the last of our kind!” Thus have Celts, and apparently Semites, spoken among themselves since the memory of man runneth not to the contrary.
I do not mean at all to make fun of Mr. Perlmutter’s sadness, for I feel the same sadness myself. It comes from growing old (even incipiently), from realizing that one’s own past is definitely past, and from discovering that every generation must make its own mistakes. But thus far in the history of the human race, and indeed in the history of the Jews, twilight has inevitably been followed by dawn. One can make out of such a phenomenon whatever religious symbol one wishes, and Mr. Perlmutter wants rather little to do with religious symbolism, but I think that’s a shame and not merely because I have certain professional interests in religion.
For unless I miss my guess, the religious agnosticism with which Perlmutter and his generation were able to live rather comfortably is waning and religion will again become an important component of the New Jewish Religious Identity (a new identity which, incidentally, will be no more widespread than the New Politics are—not very widespread, in other words). While I’m not suggesting that the sons and daughters of Westchester County and Skokie, Illinois are going to become extremely Orthodox after the fashion of their great-grand-parents—though I’ve seen more yarmulkes around the University of Chicago this year than in all the other years put together—if the present Catholic experience is any indication at all, I wouldn’t be very surprised if many young Jews in the years ahead put much greater emphasis on the joyous and mystical components of the Jewish tradition than have their recent predecessors. In fact, given the very strong mystical strains that are appearing in American society, I don’t see how it is possible to avoid a revival of Jewish mysticism.
Mr. Perlmutter may be no more at home with Jewish mystics than I am with Catholic Pentecostals. But Jews they will be and I suspect that for all the joy that I think will be part of their mysticism they, too, when they reach their middle forties, will begin to lament the fact that with their generation the end of everything has finally come. But, like their predecessors, they will know deep down in their hearts that it really isn’t so.
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