The Jew in American Society. Edited, with introductions and notes,
by Marshall Sklare.
Behrman House. 404 pp. $12.50.
The Jewish Community in America. Edited, with introductions and notes,
by Marshall Sklare.
Behrman House. 383 pp. $12.50.
Marshall Sklare is unique among ranking sociologists in that his reputation is based exclusively on the scholarly study of American Jewish life. Indeed, Sklare can be credited with almost single-handedly establishing “contemporary Jewish studies”—a discipline which in his own words “utilizes the perspectives of social science to gain an understanding of the Jews of today and their immediate forebears”—as a recognized field of scholarship. In addition to the definitive essays he has published in this area in COMMENTARY over the years, Sklare has also conducted important community surveys (the Riverton and Lakeville studies), written the standard introductory text (America’s Jews), and compiled the basic reader (The Jews: Social Patterns of an American Group). With the publication of these two companion volumes, Sklare has further enriched his chosen discipline.
Both of these books are anthologies, bringing together a sampling of the best social-science studies of American Jewry that have appeared to date, but each has a different emphasis. The Jew in American Society focuses on the individual American Jew, and thus contains sections on demographic factors, family life, religious patterns, identity formation, and ties to Israel. The Jewish Community in America, on the other hand, deals with aspects of Jewish communal life—informal and formal communities, religious movements, educational developments, and Jewish-Gentile relations. Within both volumes, each selection is prefaced by a brief introductory essay in which Sklare focuses the issues under discussion, provides requisite background information, and points out areas where further research is required. Both volumes contain valuable bibliographies, and The Jew in American Society includes an excellent general introduction outlining the historical and sociological factors which have both helped and hindered the development of contemporary Jewish studies.
Though most readers will turn to these books for information about various facets of contemporary American Jewish life, they are no less interesting for what they reveal about the contemporary study of American Jewish life—specifically, the changes that have taken place in the field since 1958, when Sklare compiled his first anthology of readings. What is most striking in such a comparison is the large amount of published material now available to choose from as opposed to the relative paucity earlier, when Sklare had to rely heavily on retooled M.A. or Ph.D. dissertations and on studies specifically commissioned for the purpose of his collection. The large body of literature available today is attributable of course to the fact that contemporary Jewish studies have attracted a growing number of full-time practitioners. Thus, the present two volumes include the work of such productive scholars as Daniel Elazar, Charles Liebman, Leonard Fein, and Calvin Goldscheider (not one of whom is represented in The Jews).
But contemporary Jewish studies have undergone more than quantitative change in the last decade-and-a-half; a comparison of Sklare’s new volumes with his earlier one also sheds light on the shifting interests of researchers in the field. The Jews is very much a product of the 1950’s, in its concern with documenting Jewish achievement of middle-class status and with measuring Gentile acceptance of Jews. Typical of the book’s selections are “The American Jew and the Attainment of Middle-Class Rank,” “The Role of Social Clubs in the Atlanta Jewish Community,” and “Jewish Participation in the Life of Middle-Sized American Communities.” The present volumes, on the other hand, reflect a post-middle-class, post-suburban situation in which the central concern is the maintenance and transmission of Jewish identity. The Jewish Community in America, for example, includes two lengthy analyses of Jewish education, a subject that is completely ignored in The Jews. And in a section entitled “Jewish Identity: Self-Segregation, Acculturation, Assimilation,” there is an examination of the data on intermarriage, a subject disposed of in The Jews in less than a paragraph.
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The picture of American Jewish life which emerges from the new readers is one in which problems and weaknesses clearly predominate—not too surprisingly, since Sklare and most of the contributors to The Jew in American Society and The Jewish Community in America are survivalists, and survivalists almost always stress threats to Jewish existence. Indeed, Sklare himself is most emphatic in rejecting favorable assessments of the American Jewish situation:
. . . while the optimism of outsiders about the state of the Jewish community is understandable, it is the insiders whose assessment has been in accord with Jewish needs. The constant dunning of the Jewish community, the restless urging that it do more and more, is not simply the voice of a few malcontents. This criticism is sensitive to the changing tides of history; it reflects an awareness, however unarticulated, of the awesome responsibilities which have befallen American Jewry, and as often as not, it is directed at encouraging actions which will help to assure the survival of Jewish life.
It is the prospects for Jewish survival, then, that Sklare is seeking to assay in his readers, and to his mind those prospects are anything but bright.
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To anyone familiar with the situation of American Jewry, the problems delineated in The Jew in American Society and The Jewish Community in America—a declining birth rate, a rising intermarriage rate, a generally ineffective educational system, a largely impoverished religious life, a seriously disaffected youth population, etc.—will not come as revelation. But novelty is not what these books are after. By bringing together the best available analyses of just these problems, Sklare enables us to see that they do indeed add up to a very real “Jewish identity crisis.”
Thus, it is startling to read a study of Reform Judaism (Leonard Fein’s “Reform is a Verb”), which, though sponsored by the Reform movement itself, proceeds on the assumption that Reform “as a belief system has come to a dead end.” And equally startling to discover, in Seymour Martin Lipset and Everett Ladd’s “Jewish Academics in the United States,” that 29 per cent of academics born to Jewish parents consider their own religion to be “none.” Not to mention the fact that (according to Morris Axelrod’s “The Jewish Community of Boston”) half the Jews in Boston do not belong to any Jewish organization or synagogue, or that a leading educator (Walter Ackerman in “The Present Moment in Jewish Education”) can categorically state that “most Jewish schools . . . have not . . . succeeded in imparting any kind of Jewish knowledge to their students.” Or—again—that the rate of Jewish intermarriage (as analyzed by Arnold Schwartz in “Intermarriage in the United States”) has climbed to over 20 per cent. The term “crisis” begins to seem like an understatement.
The picture is not entirely gloomy, however. Charles Liebman’s “Orthodoxy in American Jewish Life” offers one bright spot in its account of the remarkable renaissance of Orthodox Judaism on the American scene; Sidney Goldstein and Calvin Goldscheider (in “Jewish Religiosity: Ideological and Ritualistic Dimensions”) take note of a rise in ritual observance among the Jews of Providence, Rhode Island; and Zena Smith Blau (in “The Strategy of the Jewish Mother”) has some positive things to say about the much maligned Jewish matriarch.
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Such scattered findings may offer scant consolation to those who yearn for a strong, disciplined, and creative Jewish community, but perhaps a final, cautiously optimistic note is in order. Because Sklare limits himself to social-science studies of American Jewish life, the selections in both volumes necessarily depict the situation that existed at the end of the 1960’s. Since that time there have been a number of important developments on the Jewish scene that point to a strengthening rather than a weakening of Jewish identity. I refer specifically to the phenomenal growth of Jewish-studies programs on university campuses, the development of Jewish student newspapers, magazines, and havurot, and the blossoming of a wide array of weekend retreats, camp institutes, and educational programs for adults. Considerations of quality aside, something is clearly astir in the American Jewish community. Whether these developments will be short-lived or whether they will help transform the dream of Jewish survivalists into a reality will become clear only with the passage of time.
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