Because of the war and the extermination camps, America’s Jewish community has today become the largest and strongest in the world. This statement has been dinned into the ears of American Jews from pulpit, press, and platform, and above all by the spokesmen of fund-raising campaigns. Though in the process of repetition it has become almost a cliché, it still remains a fact. It is the most significant thing that has happened to American Jews, changing their outlook and their attitude toward the remaining Jews overseas as well as toward themselves. Traveling around the country and talking to Jews of various shades of opinion and of various degrees of Jewishness, one becomes inescapably aware of this.

Last year’s Roper poll on Zionism among American Jews corroborates this, and no less in its negative than its affirmative answers. The 10 per cent who expressed opposition to Zionism took pains to explain that their opposition implied no lack of interest in the welfare of non-American Jews. And one found, in discussion with young and old, men and women, “nationalists” and “anti-nationalists,” over the length and breadth of the United States, that the 80 per cent approving Zionism were usually not thinking of Zionism at all. They confusedly identified a Jewish state, which is a political concept, with a homeland-refuge, which is a social-cultural, and in many cases a quasi-philanthropic, concept. Their pro-Palestinism was primarily an expression of a heightened sense of responsibility, as members of the largest Jewish community in the world, for the Jews left in devastated Europe.

It is regrettable that American Jewry’s new status and new self-consciousness have been left unexplored and unexamined, are indeed mentioned only when hearts are to be touched and money is to be gathered. For the fact carries profound implications. It was Dubnow who pointed out that the history of the Jews, while a dispersed global history, is essentially a history of centers—Palestine, Babylonia, Spain, France and Western Germany, Poland, Russia. Always, amid the multiplicity of their environments, the Jews possessed one or more centers of gravity, thus rendering them cohesive, however scattered. Through this pattern, they were enabled to lift themselves above the two lower levels of nationhood, racial and territorial, to the third level, the cultural or spiritual. If Dubnow is right, the American Jewish community is now on the threshold of history. It is confronted by a fateful opportunity to shape here, in an atmosphere of tolerance and freedom, the good Jewish life on the highest level.

Now this opportunity demands more, than stereotypes and an eagerness to gather funds, vital as this last may be. It requires an understanding of the American Jew in terms of the American scene, as well as in relation to Jews abroad, an analysis of his institutional and communal experience as a Jew, and a redefinition of values, an appraisal of the content of Jewishness. Unfortunately, there is little evidence of any deep changes in organized Jewish life in America; all is as it was. By and large, thinking and leadership move down the same time-honored and time-worn paths. Of course, there can be no quarrel as to the urgent need and the imperative duty to bind up the wounds of Jews in Europe, to help them find places of safety or to reconstruct their lives in their pre-war homes, and to continue aid toward the upbuilding of Palestine. But one can quarrel with American Jewry for its passive acceptance of a purely secondary role. For all its power and its promise, our community seems still content to remain an auxiliary and submissive means to Jewish ends elsewhere, conceived of as somehow more real and more worthy. Is America, after all, just another center, an inferior one at that, without too bright a future, or is its destiny—as all facts seem clearly to indicate—that of the center for our day and for our generation?

_____________

In the eyes of ardent Zionists, the survival of the Jews as a people and a culture is impossible without Jewish statehood. Europe must be emptied of its remaining Jews. In America, Jews may linger on, but without real hope. Shlomo Katz’s article in the April issue of Commentary, “No Hope Except Exodus,” is not exceptional; it is representative.

Jacob Lestchinsky has dealt with this theme repeatedly in Der Yiddisher Kemfer, organ of the Labor Zionists, and has given it its most extreme formulation in his book Vohin Gehen Mir? (“Where Are We Going?”—reviewed in the November issue of Commentary). In this book he does not hesitate to predict, in Cassandra-like accents, the darkest future for American Jewry.

Not many weeks ago, this writer heard with amazement a noted Hebrew poet declare that the hundred thousand Jews in the camps in Germany should be sent at once to Palestine, not only because they must have a chance to live like normal human beings, but because in Palestine they would become the repositories of our future too. The irony is that this statement was made in the auditorium of one of the most prosperous synagogues in America, under the chairmanship of a Jewish leader, a very prominent rabbi, whose indorsement is sought even in presidential elections. It was warmly applauded by men and women who almost without exception will stay in America, as will their children. They were conceding that they could not-hence need not-search their own souls, clarify Jewish experience in America, and turn their minds to the task of making the Jewish community here not only substantial but creative.

It is therefore not surprising that the traveler through America meets innumerable Jews, particularly in smaller cities, whose burning Zionist nationalism goes hand in hand with a cold indifference to Jewish education, to the cultural enrichment of America’s own Jewish community.

Of course, some Zionists do attempt to integrate their nationalism with a serious interest in the Jewish community in America—not only as auxiliary to the upbuilding of the Palestine Commonwealth, but as important for its own present and future. But here, too, the effort bears curious fruits. In the final balance, the integration turns out to be a frail affair, with the interest of the American Jewish community receding into the background.

It is the professed belief in an American integration that supposedly marks the margin of difference between the American Jewish Congress and the American Zionist Organization. Thus this year’s pre-convention issue of Congress Weekly contains, in its leading editorial, the following statements among other similar ones—“Out of its deliberations [those of the Congress] should come leadership and guidance for a Jewish way of life in the American community”; and again, “we cannot make our life as totally Jewish as Palestine’s Jews do, we must strive to make it as thoroughly Jewish within the framework of the American democracy as will express our historic awareness and will to survive.”

In the same issue, however, there is an article, “Congress Ideology Redefined,” in which America is graciously placed in an intermediary class between Land of Israel and Exile. The writer, Max Nussbaum, speaks of America as hutz la-aretz—“outside the land.” But even at that, the writer feels he may be doing an injustice to Palestine, and hastens to add apologetically, “Palestine will always reign supreme in Jewish thought, and even the reintroduction of hutz la-aretz will not detract from its paramount importance.”

Little wonder that the initial paragraph in the editorial has this to offer by way of “leadership and guidance”: “The violent anti-Semitism rampant in defeated Germany and in the so-called new European democracies will have repercussions on Jewish life in America, for germs of Nazism are being carried to these shores by American soldiers returning from Germany”! This accords with the ultra-nationalist tendency to disparage the American Jewish community, to cast shadows on its long-range security, even when summoning it to service and to action. To achieve this, it habitually exaggerates, as here, some isolated phase of the multiform relations between Jews and the rest of the people in America. (Incidentally, this distortion also colors a good deal of our anti-defamation activity.)

_____________

This “integration” loses much of its cogency in yet another manner. There is a disposition, even among some of the sincerest adherents of Jewish cultural creativity, to render the task easier by the simple device of some kind of purge. Thus, Menachem Boraisha, an outstanding Yiddish poet, tells us in Congress Weekly (April 12) that “if the truth is to be recognized without fear or reservation, it must be realized that it is foolhardy to build a Jewish future on the strength of all five million American Jews,” and that “a million men and women ready to bear the burdens and privileges of full Judaism will be greater safeguards for Jewish continuity than five million Jews to whom their future is either a curse or an accident.”

There is, of course, an element of truth in the indictment. President Louis Finkelstein of the Jewish Theological Seminary has been calling attention to the failures of Jewish education, to the threat of extensive intermarriage, and to the disregard of Jewishness as a heritage and as a set of contemporary values among many of our Jewish youth. There is also historical evidence to confirm the notion that a self-conscious and devoted core may save Israel as a people today just as it has done in preceding centuries. But Mr. Boraisha’s words are nevertheless a counsel of despair and the bitter fruit of a “failure of nerve,” of a refusal to deal soberly and constructively with Jewish realities in America. And recent history should make us cautious about all schemes to build national futures on self-appointed “élites.”

Mr. Boraisha may be right in saying that “the 25 per cent who give their children a Jewish education are the Jews who count.” But one is equally right in adding that education cannot be cut off from the main stream of social experience, that it cannot be an “island by itself.” His concept would mean isolating the Jewish child twice—once, from American society as a whole; and again, from the majority of American Jews. The healthier plan would be to develop the kind of program that would enable 80 or go per cent of American Jews to give their children a Jewish education. That would provide a rounded rather than a truncated expression of cultural variety within the framework of American democracy.

This is a hard goal to reach. But nothing less will do. Now that we have lost one third of our people and the European citadels of Jewish culture, it is with a sick heart that one reads of a “purge” of American Jews that would cast off four millions, no less.

It is seldom realized to what extent the Jewish education movement in the United States—both in ideology and practice—proceeds under the twin signs of defeatism about America and the priority of Palestine. But for evidence one need only look at the official literature of the Jewish education movement. Need one wonder at its limited appeal, the weakness of its creative impulse in American terms? (But Jewish education requires an article in itself.)

_____________

Even if, in view of the magnitude of the emergency, concentration of our community’s efforts upon Europe and Palestine was completely understandable, it is not so easy to condone the almost total disregard in these “years of destiny” of the legitimate diversity of Jewish life in America, and the almost purely exploitative attitude of Jewish organizations to the American Jewish community.

Their interest in the community has been confined to using it for their own ends. And each organization has presumed to speak, without modesty and without reservation, for all American Jews, as well as in the hallowed name of those millions who perished in Europe.

At one of the Washington sessions of the Anglo-American Commission of Inquiry on Palestine, a prominent Jewish figure interrupted a speaker in fiery protest, insisting that he did so on behalf of five million American Jews. The sheer comedy of his pretension was revealed in the same session by the variety of outlooks that were presented, in keeping with the diverse character—social and political—of the Jewish community in America.

“Unity” was the catchword of Jewish organizations. There were times, as in the months preceding the sessions of the American Jewish Conference, when it was impossible—almost heretical—to discuss anything else.

The “sound and fury” of the national Jewish organizations resound more violently in the closer confines of the smaller localities. But the amazing thing about it, whether in New York or in the provinces, is that the agitation is limited to the small minority of the “organized” Jews. It does not reach—it is not interested in—the “plain” Jews, the unorganized and unaffiliated, who happen to be in the vast majority, and whose interest in Jewish political programs is at best nominal, and in most cases nil. Somewhat less than 50 per cent of this vast majority can even claim membership in synagogues.

Behind the slogan of unity, there is, of course, a real need. It is reasonable that Jews—as they look at the problems of Central and Eastern Europe, of Palestine, and of their own community in America—should want to achieve a measure of coherence, the elimination of organizational duplication and conflict, and the wise conservation of energy and imagination and idealism for the things that must be done both here and abroad.

But, as one observes the mechanism of Jewish “unity” in America, it becomes clear that the organizations most loudly clamoring for it are more interested in a show of total unity for their own programs than in the substance of working agreements for aims on which there is genuine accord. Some of the constituent members of the American Jewish Conference, which was presumably the vehicle of “unity,” bear names that are far more ostentatious and déceptive than that of the Conference itself. This is no harmless “semantic” misdemeanor, but a serious source of public confusion. To those interested in “unity” as a political tool, the creation of the American Jewish Conference represented a triumph. But today, even its most enthusiastic supporters would be constrained to confess that in the end it proved a hollow victory. Complete political or ideological unity of American Jews is impossible—and undesirable. It would involve uniformity of spiritual and political attitude and belief—it would exclude variety and diversity. Such unity is achievable, in the sense that the American Jewish Conference sought it, only under totalitarianism, which is in turn possible only through a police-state. No free democratic society can achieve such unity without losing its freedom and its democracy. It means enforcing the violent ascendancy of one set of dogmas—and the eradication of all dissent. It means the reduction of cultural content to the lowest common denominator and the bartering away of principles for expedience.

The American Jewish Conference was doomed to failure because its sponsors selected one particular program—that of political Zionism—as the program of the Conference, and made dissent from it a treasonable heresy. Thus, from the beginning, the Conference undermined its ostensible purpose, which was to bring every possible recognized Jewish group and organization, and even “unaffiliated” Jews, into a single representative body. However, had it started out with a recognition of the difference and variety in American Jewish life and thought, it could have easily achieved, not a regimented unity, but a functional unity, a unity of action on specific undertakings and definite aims agreed upon. One feels confident that such agreement for unified action could have been found for a fight against the White Paper, for the liberalizing of American immigration laws, for relief and “rehabilitation,” and for broader Jewish education. But the Conference chose to espouse the maximum program of Zionism, to devote itself to the ecstatic consideration of abstract political matters, and to brush aside, quite heedlessly, the hard and immediate realities of Jewish experience. As a result, it organized only those it had already organized, and its unity included in the end only those who were from the start its loyal rank-and-file.

Is it far-fetched to see the source of this contemptuous effort to manipulate American Jewry in the almost pathological insistence by the “nationalist” organizations upon a sort of “self-effacement” for the American Jewish community, in their ardent desire to tie the future of our people to the chariot wheels of Palestine and Palestine only, to deprecate the rest of the world, including America, as Galut, or with kinder condescension as hutz la-aretz, a kind of limbo?

_____________

Yet America’s Jewish community remains the largest and the most fortunate in the world. But it can succor and safeguard less fortunate Jewish communities, in the long view, only if it maintains its own self-respect. It must look upon itself too—in Ahad Ha’am’s classic description of the new Palestine—as a “spiritual center,” as a home of Jewish living and learning and doing.

The Jerusalems of Lithuania and Poland and other European lands lie in ruins for the present—although even there Jewish life may yet be restored. The communities in South America and Africa are relatively small. There are more than two million Jews in the Soviet Union, but there is a curtain between them and us; to be sure, Yiddish is an official language, yet there is not a single Yiddish daily newspaper in the whole of Russia, and not a single Russian periodical in any language, devoted to Jewish affairs. In a sense, this may not be strange at all, since cultural autonomy in the Soviet Union is merely linguistic, according to the formula—“socialist in content and nationalist in form.” As to Biro-Bidjan, proclaimed as an autonomous Jewish region, we have no information—and it is pathetic to watch the American sponsors of Biro-Bidjan try to establish by mere conjecture the number of Jews in Biro-Bidjan.

America, the Soviet Union, and Palestine today contain the largest Jewish communities, and Palestine is unquestionably a shining star in our sky. It has developed rapidly and has provided a home against all odds for hundreds of thousands of Jews in the recent dark years. And especially gratifying to the humanist, Jew and non-Jew alike, is the fact that it has produced in the kvutzot and moshavim not only a new type of Jew, but a new type of human being—one who can live the cooperative and the good life without regimentation, without sacrificing his individuality.

But the passion of Zionism remains political, and Zionism continues to cling to an antiquated notion that equates peoplehood with statehood. And so it regards Palestine not only as one bright star in our sky but as the sky itself, with all else shadow.

But the United States is neither Galut nor hutz la-aretz. It is the home of five million Jews. And it is, in the final consideration, our freest home. It is folly, and almost a kind of blackmail, to hold over us the threat of the imminent destruction of that freedom. Granted, there are forces at work in America for the curtailment of that freedom; but there are forces at work for its expansion, too. And we ourselves can help tip the scale, we too are involved in the “destiny” of America. Moreover, the world is small and hatred travels fast. Should America’s democracy wither away, what Jews anywhere could live in safety and security, even in Palestine?

There is hope, although no guarantee, in the historic fact that not a single country that has gone through the period of expanding political democracy, beginning with the English, French, and American revolutions, has succumbed to totalitarianism. By the same token, all the countries that embraced totalitarianism are, without exception, countries that had little, if any, democratic tradition, and where the transition from feudalism to capitalism was sharp and sudden, or belated and incomplete.

America in crisis is an America that must link together intelligent social control and technological advances within the framework of its democratic heritage. That way lies hope for America and for the Jews in America. The distinctive trait of the Jewish ethos has always been its universalism and the effort to translate its ethos into the just action. By committing ourselves intimately to the democratic destiny of America, by aligning ourselves with the forces for its preservation and its deepening, we not only build firm foundations for our own survival—we act out the spirit and the implications of the Jewish ethos.

_____________

If America’s Jewish community is to come of age, it must acknowledge itself, in Dub-now’s terms, as a Jewish center. But there are two preconditions. First, Jewish organizations must not, in any circumstances, demote America to a lowered status; they must not regard our own community as inferior in Jewish worth, as incapable of cultural creativity. Second, “American-minded” Jewish organizations, although theoretically opposed to this view, must not unwittingly sustain it by pursuing a negative and “defensive” policy, directed largely against anti-Semitism, rather than a positive and fruitful policy for a “tolerant and abundant” America.

Happily, there are manifest the beginnings of an earnest, self-sustaining Jewish life in America. As one observes not only New York, but numerous smaller localities, one carries away the impression of a growing and self-respecting “feeling for Jewishness” among American Jews. Often, it is vague and inarticulate, expressing itself in almost trivial ways. It is amusing but also touching to hear “assimilated” young parents with little Jewish knowledge say that they have named their child Ilane rather than Elaine because of reverence for their grandfather who was called Isaac. One is taken aback when “secular-minded” young parents ask whether they would be committing a grave “sin” if they were to affiliate themselves, for the sake of their children, with a synagogue or temple. One recalls a modern young mother lighting Sabbath candles long after the sun had set (when it is no longer permissible to do so) simply because of her “feeling for Jewishness.” One hears another young mother planning to have her child taught Yiddish so that her child may speak the language of the common folk, because “it holds the tears and laughter, alas, mostly the tears, of the millions who died al kiddush hashem in Europe.”

Of course, one sees also the drabness, the vulgarity, and above all, the indifference, rampant everywhere. But the drabness reflects, in part, the cultural poverty of the general environment; the vulgarity is, in a measure, the product of our commercial civilization; and the indifference flows from sheer ignorance of things Jewish, both in their historic meaning and contemporary values.

_____________

On the organizational level, the traveler, as he visits town after town, learns to appreciate the magnitude and sweep of Jewish philanthropy. Doubtless it is not always marked by the finest moral perceptions, and social pressures play their part. But philanthropy among American Jews is more than charity. It is the sole non-partisan, non-political means available for Jews to identify themselves with their people, to express their sense of solidarity and Jewishness. It is precisely in the sphere of philanthropy that American Jews have exhibited their greatest tolerance for difference and variety, and have contrived to sit together, though often with opposing views, on behalf of large and agreed-upon purposes. Here, unity in Jewish life achieves decent and useful expression. This pattern is being followed to good effect in many cities in connection with Jewish education.

One finds a growing interest in books on Jewish subjects. The Yiddish newspaper is still ubiquitous in America, and its influence, confined to the older generation, impinges to some extent, through casual discussions at home, upon their children as well. It reaches approximately three hundred thousand homes and is read by over half a million Jews. Although there are no Hebrew daily newspapers, copies of current Hebrew periodicals can be found in every town. And though the Anglo-Jewish press in the smaller localities is provincial and often insipid, some national publications in English are coming to the fore and beginning to play a role in the shaping of Jewish public opinion.

One hears with gratification of the increased interest of a number of national organizations in cultural activities and in programs aimed at encouraging creativity in American Jewish life. The sponsoring of this very magazine by a national organization as an organ of free cultural expression, hospitable to diverse views and unhampered by propagandistic or political aims, may stand as a symbol of this new and most hopeful development.

However, these harbingers of a better future are still the exception, not the rule. The “feeling for Jewishness” among younger people and the cultural allegiances of the older folk are still used primarily by Jewish organizations for political ends. The paramount concern is always to win adherents for some Jewish political cause rather than to build a knowledge of Jewish values and culture. Today the knowledge of things Jewish among young people who belong to the “nationalist” organizations is little superior to that of the “unaffiliated”; where there is some knowledge, it is fragmentary, indoctrinated, and shallow. The rich cultural activity of the Zionist organizations in America is a thing of the past.

_____________

Now if American Jews are to constitute a community, they must have shared experiences, and such experiences cannot be merely “political” nor can they always be imported from the outside. They must be cultural, “spiritual” if you will. And they must grow out of one’s “native soil,” that is to say, they must be authentic and organic. Above all, we must have a plan and program of Jewish education that, in an atmosphere of freedom and breadth of understanding, will give substance to our “feeling for Jewishness.”

This education must neither be “tribal,” on the one hand, nor so general, on the other, as to lose all Jewish distinctiveness. It must be at once unique and universal. The roots of religious liberty in America are deep and strong, and it is possible, within the framework of religious education broadened by our concept of cultural democracy, to include many elements of “secular” Jewish culture together with our full heritage of social and ethical idealism. That heritage reaches from Micah’s deathless pronouncement—“It hath been told thee, O man, what is good and what the Lord doth require of thee; only to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God”—to the poems of indignation and compassion just come to us from the ghettos and concentration camps of eastern and central Europe. In all likelihood, the instrument of this education will not be to any great extent the parochial school, supplanting the democratic public school where children of all religions and ethnic groups meet together, but Jewish schools that supplement the public schools.

America’s Jewish community is at the crossroads. The way ahead is surely not straight and smooth, but it is visible. The question is irrepressible: Will Jewish organizations in America give up the delusion that this is Galut—exile, and settle down to the task of building here, in freedom and security, the good and creative Jewish life? In sum, will they recognize as organizations what Jews as individuals have long ago acknowledged: that we—and our children and our children’s children—are here to stay, that this is home!