A New Disguise
The Mask Jews Wear: The Self-Deceptions of American Jewry.
by Eugene B. Borowitz.
Simon & Schuster. 222 pp. $5.95.
Every so often some development on the American-Jewish scene is hailed as yet another indication that American Jewry has come of age. It might be college students demanding funds for Jewish education, or women insisting on a greater role in synagogue life, or Reform rabbis stating their opposition to intermarriage. Whatever the event, if it runs sufficiently counter to established views or practices it is invariably taken, in some circles at any rate, as further proof that American Jews are at last facing up to reality.
Eugene Borowitz's The Mask Jews Wear will without a doubt find its way into the collection of exhibits purporting to show the growing “maturity” of the American-Jewish community. For what Borowitz, a prominent Reform rabbi, editor of Sh'ma, and professor of education and Jewish thought at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, has set out to do is to expose “the self-deceptions of American Jewry,” to strip away the myths and illusions to which American Jews hold fast. Unfortunately, The Mask Jews Wear fails singularly in its task. Rather than providing a touchstone of realism for the conduct of American-Jewish life, Borowitz manages merely to reinforce certain cherished myths of his own, if not to carry them to absurd extremes.
The main object of Borowitz's polemical attention is American society. Speaking out in “prophetic witness,” Borowitz lets loose a clutch of familiar charges: the United States is a “materialistic and dehumanized” society in which “conformity is a prerequisite of acceptability and conscience a stigma”; Americans worship a technology that is “inherently impersonal and anti-human,” and support an economic system that “is in its very form designed to depreciate the ethical”; America's “political, economic, and social structures dispose us, at best, to live amorally most of the time”; and so on. Stirring his clichés to a full boil, Borowitz concludes: “Our civilization is creating a new paganism. Outwardly we are elegant and assured, as befits our growing wealth and increased experience. Inwardly we are becoming as empty as the ancient Greeks and Romans came to be.”
The only surprise in this stale catalogue is that Borowitz, contrary to expectation, exempts American Jews from his indictment. Indeed, as far as Borowitz is concerned, American Jewry has a natural affinity for the good, and constitutes a genuine ethical elite. In bold contrast to their hapless fellow citizens who have created a mean and ugly civilization, American Jews, according to Borowitz, retain a “high sense of what a human being ought to be.” He asserts:
Being Jewish . . . connotes a life of rich humanity and high character. . . . To be a Jew has always meant to care about how one and one's family and one's community lived. It means somehow still today books and thinking, celebrations and fidelity, industry and compassion, accomplishments and sharing, an affirmation of life and a covenant with humanity.
The United States may be going the way of ancient Greece and Rome, but the Jews continue to demonstrate a unique capacity for “radical social judgment combined with commitment to betterment from within.” American Jews, Borowitz in effect argues, form a saving remnant in an otherwise sick society.
Such a striking phenomenon calls out for an explanation and Borowitz is quick to oblige. Most American Jews, he contends, if asked to account for their high quotient of social concern, would invoke the liberal/universalist outlook that is the presumed hallmark of modern, post-Emancipation Jewry. But this in Borowitz's view is simply self-deception—an attempt on the part of contemporary “Marranos in reverse” to hide from the reality of their Jewishness. Were American Jews more open to that reality, he insists, they would see that their liberalism is a direct continuation of the classical Jewish religious tradition:
[Social passion] has been an intrinsic part of the Jewish life style passed on from parents to children down to the present day. . . . [That Jews] are devoted in overwhelming numbers today to all manner of causes to improve human relations goes back to the academies of the Pharisees, the marketplaces of Babylonia, and the community councils of German ghettos and Polish provinces.
Each modern Jew is personally heir to that diverse tradition. Millenniums of teaching, preaching, practice, and expectations make him, so distinctively and disproportionately, a socially committed person.
American Jews, Borowitz maintains, have kept this truth from themselves out of a desire to blend harmoniously into the surrounding society. But since that society is now bankrupt, the time has come for Jews to cast aside “inauthenticity and learn again to say without hyphenation or other qualification: We are Jews.”
_____________
It is Jewishness, then, as Borowitz conceives Jewishness to be, that is the reality behind the mask that Jews wear. And this, to use his favorite term, is the greatest self-deception of all in The Mask Jews Wear. What Borowitz has written is a sycophantish tract, designed to polish the self-image of Jewish liberals by telling them they are more Jewish than they admit. The truth, of course, is that the large majority of American Jews are far less Jewish than they wish to believe. Jewishness, after all, is no will-o'-the-wisp. Whether it is defined in religious or cultural terms, it is something specific and concrete, and it offers a straightforward standard by which all claims to Jewish “authenticity” can be measured.
Nor is there the smallest shred of evidence that the political liberalism of American Jews has roots in the Jewish religious tradition; if that were the case, one would find the greatest degree of liberal sentiment in those circles where classical religious texts are seriously studied and where classical religious teachings are maintained. In reality the opposite situation prevails. The political liberalism of American Jews may very well tell us something about their Jewishness, but that “something” is mainly sociological, having to do with the Jewish position in modern society, and it is far removed from Borowitz's platitudes about the Jewish tradition.
“I hope,” writes Borowitz in the opening chapter, addressing his would-be Jewish readers directly, “to find a way to move you to respond from your depths. I am sorry if that also irritates you.” He then proceeds to give fawning approval to their most cherished and naive notions about themselves, offering his personal imprimatur as a Jewish theologian to a whole set of self-gratulatory delusions about the spiritual condition of the American-Jewish community. The Mask Jews Wear, then, is itself another mask, even more distorting of reality than the one it purports to rip away.
