Mr. Cohen’s article, it seems to me, fails to touch upon the core of the problem.
If American Jewish culture be defined as those cultural achievements which are produced by the Jews of America, then there is certainly at present, and there will be in the future, a tremendous Jewish culture on this soil, fairly in line with the massive contributions of our people to the national cultures of Germany, France, Austria, and Hungary. However, if men of Jewish birth contribute to American or world culture as Americans and as citizens of the world, there is no special reason or justification for organized Jewish community effort on behalf of such a culture. . . .
If we should think of ourselves as primarily an underprivileged group on the American scene (which I do not think we are), then a good case can be made for the organization of a special effort on behalf of artists, scientists, and writers of Jewish faith. I believe such an effort would defeat its own purpose and would ultimately degenerate into a ghettoized WPA. In any event, such a project has nothing whatever to do with Jewish culture, even in the vague sense which Mr. Cohen assigns to the term.
If then, as Mr. Cohen agrees, we are not to equate Jewish culture with the manifold productions of racial Jews, it becomes necessary to know what we are talking about and what we are striving for in the endeavor to build up a Jewish culture. Mr. Cohen tries to take advantage of the current popular distrust of reason by ridiculing “the Man with the Plan.” But, the plain fact is that, in advance of such a plan or program, built around a goal or set of goals, he is talking about nothing at all. When the collective activity of Jewish people derives from a central drive or purpose, then all activities, no matter how peripheral and unimportant in themselves, add up to form an organic whole. But, when all you have are disparate, unrelated undertakings, that are supposedly justified by reference to an entity called “Jewish culture,” which is itself amorphous, rootless, and purposeless, then you have nothing but chaos and confusion.
Mr. Cohen mentions in the beginning of his article a number of elements constituting culture, but forgets about those elements in the rest of his article. Jewish culture, he rightly says, is of “deepest necessity.” It should provide the raison d’être of Jewish life, especially for the masses of the religiously “unaffiliated.” But it is this very purpose of Jewish community existence that he studiously ignores in the remainder of the article.
When he speaks of the content of Jewish culture, he mentions the persistent questioning concerning problems of human destiny. Obviously, these are the central questions of all cultures, barring none; they are “persistent” to the extent the culture thrives. One need not begin by tackling the problem of defining Jewish culture, if one lives within the traditional stream of Jewish life and aspiration. Life is prior to thought. But when one dismisses out of hand the traditional and Zionist strands of culture in the name of a new creation, the least he can do is to envisage clearly what he wants to do and why.
He rejects, I think rightly, bare group-survival as a worthy goal. Though he condescends to place the Talmud on a par with Jewish humor, he does not accept a Hebrew, Zionist culture. What purpose of group existence then will so-called Jewish culture serve? In American Jewish life, we must not forget, Jewish cultural activity, however variously conceived, must stand as the goal of Jewish group life. Otherwise, why should not Jews assimilate and disintegrate within the American melting pot even as all the other national-cultural groups willingly commingled to produce the great American nation? Jewish group persistence is not now the product of natural environmental factors. The natural course of development for individual Jews, stripped of the loyalties of Judaism, is to drift into the gray mass of the outside world. “Enhancing self-respect” is not going to slow this trend; all the ethnic groups which comprise the American nation respect themselves, yet they freely intermarry with other groups and contemplate with equanimity the eventual disappearance of their ethnic minority in the stream of American life.
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Jewish culture must be conceived within the framework of the emergent status of American Israel; otherwise, it is merely meaningless noise in the midst of a rapidly dispersing crowd. There are three types of status available in American life: racial, national, and religious. The term, cultural, is in itself neutral, since it may be of any one of these three types. To say, therefore, that one doesn’t care about intellectual quibbling as to what we are and what we want to become, and that he is interested in Jewish culture, is to evade the issue. One is reminded of the girl who raved about a lecture she heard. Her mother asked her what the lecturer said. The girl protested, “He wasn’t supposed to say anything; it was just cultural.”
If American Israel is to occupy the status of a religious community in American life, then the Jew who belongs to it, however tenuously, knows the purpose of Jewish group existence, and the non-Jewish world, too, accepts completely this status in our uni-cultural but multi-religious nation. So. long as a Jew does not openly sever his ties with Judaism, he belong within the periphery of the faith. Around the core of the Jewish religion, there are numerous concerns, relating in a variety of ways to the central core, which may be denominated “cultural” activities. Jewish culture in that event has meaning, purpose, content, and a fairly definite border-line, which, by the way, does not include “Jewish rye bread,” in spite of Mr. Cohen’s testimony concerning its “inner value.” If the status he advocates is the one of a national minority, then Jewish culture must be molded into a Hebraic or Yiddish pattern. Doubtless then, Mr. Cohen realizes that this status is in American life merely a phenomenon of transit.
All national groups merge slowly or rapidly into the American nation. If, then, the “home of Israel is like all the other nations,” there is no reason to labor for a reversal of the current of Americanism in the case of the Jewish group. Secular Jewish nationalism is in America an invitation to assimilation, even as in Eastern Europe it functioned as an anti-assimilationist philosophy.
Mr. Cohen’s words make sense only on the assumption of American Israel constituting at present and seeking for the future the status of a self-inclosed racial group. To be sure, he specificially rejects this conception, yet the concept of a “Jewish culture,” which he advocates is meaningless on any other basis. Since it is not religious and it is not nationalistic, it can only be racistic, no matter how strongly racism is consciously disavowed. I agree that it is possible for the American Jewish community so to organize or rather mismanage its life as to become in its own eyes and in the eyes of the non-Jewish world a segregated community. . . . I strongly challenge the assumption that we are even now reduced to this category, and I bitterly condemn those aggressive secularists who, by the momentum of their own so-called “Jewish leadership,” would drive American Jewry into the status of racial minority. I cannot see how any Jewish young man could possibly be happier thinking of himself as a non-Aryan than he would be as a member of a religious congregation of Israel.
It is the business of the Jewish community to cultivate and to foster the ideals and standards of Judaism, not of “Jewishness.” It is the business of writers and editors to serve the ends of Judaism, and not to distort them by making confusion worse confounded and levelling Jewish culture to the point where it cannot but become a self-hating and self-glorifying racism, sometimes mystically self-segregating, sometimes passionately battering against the barriers of segregation: an altogether unlovely phenomenon without meaning or purpose.
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