A Minority’s Minorities
A Coat of Many Colors: Jewish Subcommunities in the United States.
by Abraham D. Lavender.
Greenwood. 324 pp. $17.95.
It is an operating assumption of the “new pluralism” that there is greater heterogeneity in American life than was once believed by academic sociologists and social planners alike. A Coat of Many Colors: Jewish Subcommunities in the United States is a product of this view. Like Americans in general, writes the editor, Abraham D. Lavender, American Jews are more various than one might think; they cannot simply be “characterized as a white, middle-class group, primarily of German or East European background, concentrated in the Northeast part of the United States or at least in urban areas of the country, acculturated into the American society, and led by males.” Although Lavender does agree that this characterization is not altogether inaccurate—after all, 99 per cent of American Jews are white, their income level is far above average, 98 per cent do have European backgrounds, and nearly two-thirds do live in the Northeast—it is his contention, and the purpose of his collection of essays to demonstrate, that it by no means accounts for all of American Jewry.
A Coat of Many Colors consists of essays culled from a variety of sources on a number of “minorities” in the American Jewish community: small-town Jews, poor Jews, Hasidim, black Jews, Jewish women, and Sephardim. A quick glance reveals that Lavender has been eclectic in his choice of “minorities” and has not limited himself to a single theme or guiding principle; some of his categories are the results of geography, others of economic status, and still others can be accounted for by gender, migrational patterns, or religious affiliations. Given the lack of thematic unity, a volume like this one stands or falls on the quality of its selections or the skills of its editor. In this rare instance, the editor triumphs over his material; in his various introductions and notes, Lavender has provided a wealth of scholarly information and has made this work a bibliographical treasure for readers unable or unwilling to make their way through the large literature on various groups in American Jewish life. As for the selections themselves in A Coat of Many Colors, the most that can be said for them is that some were well worth including and others had better remain forgotten.
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Four essays on small-town Jews constitute the first segment of Lavender’s collection. Much of the material, while informative, is rather impressionistic, and on the basis of it one would hesitate to come to any hard conclusions. Peter I. Rose, a sociologist, finds small-town living for Jews a positive experience; Eugen Schoenfeld, another sociologist, finds it to be a negative one. On the relation of small-town Jews to their non-Jewish environment, any number of variables seem to make a crucial difference: what the individual family brings by way of Jewish identity; the aspirations it sets for itself as a family unit; the number of Jews who live in the community, which determines whether or not a synagogue or Hebrew school can be established; where the town is located—in New York State or in Louisiana; and how far it is from an urban center.
Despite the differences expressed in these essays, one fact remains clear: Jews tend to settle in small towns for the economic opportunities they offer and rarely, by choice, on other grounds. This is hardly a new phenomenon. Decades ago the Yiddish poet J. J. Schwartz depicted (in Kentucky) the fate of three generations of Jews in a small town in the upper South after the grandfather, a Litvak peddler, was asked by his Gentile customers to come and settle among them. The resulting terms of life as portrayed by Schwartz have not greatly altered since then. For the small-town Jew, Jewish identity, whether expressed in a positive way or repressed in some negative syndrome, is purchased at an emotional and cultural price. Not surprisingly, many second-generation Jews abandon the small towns of their youth for the city; and regardless of the advantages some may see in small-town life, one should not expect the number of small-town Jews to increase in coming years.
If the small town is one “minority” experience for American Jews, the South offers another. In an essay of his own, devoted to the Jewish subculture of the South, Abraham Lavender draws on the writings of W. J. Cash, Willie Morris, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, and others to draw a portrait of the typical Southern Jew. According to Lavender, while the Jew shares the Southerner’s Protestant ethic—the virtues of thrift, hard work, and individual advancement—he generally rejects his religious fundamentalism and aggressive regionalism, and tends not to share the white Southerner’s racist views.
The difference between old-line Southern Jews, whose ancestors settled in the South in the 18th and 19th centuries, and the first- and second-generation East European Jews who came in more recent times, serves as the theme of an illuminating essay by Theodore Lowi. Through an inquiry into the Jewish community of “Iron City,” Lowi posits the existence of two distinct Jewish subcommunities—“old” and “new”—within every Southern town and city, each with its own history, memories, identity, value system, way of life, and mode of relating to the non-Jewish majority. While Lowi finds both groups conservative on social issues and liberal on economic issues, the two groups differ sharply when it comes to Jewish identity and relations with the non-Jewish community. Thus when the Kahn family, “new” Jews in the haberdashery business, propose that the Jewish congregation of “Iron City” contribute to a reward-fund established for apprehending those who had placed a bomb under a synagogue in nearby Birmingham, Alabama, the “old” Jews argue against the proposal, and in the end prevail. The “old” Jews still carry fearful memories of the Ku Klux Klan, while the “new” Jews cite the fate of those who failed to stand up to the Nazis. On the matter of identity, Lowi finds that “new” Jews favor an ethnic definition of Jewishness, whereas “old” Jews define themselves by religion—although, as Lowi notes, given their lack of religious ritual or belief, their Judaism, in actual fact, tends to assume an ethnic expression.
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In a section on the “Jewish poor,” a case is made by Ann G. Wolfe for the existence of a sizable number of poor Jews who have been neglected by the organized Jewish community. The charge that the “invisible poor” constitute a serious problem within the community is reinforced by two other selections-sensitive reporting by Elinor Horwitz on elderly Jews from the North who have retired to Miami Beach, and Mark Effron’s “Left Behind, Left Alone,” a study of Jews who have remained on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Mrs. Wolfe’s findings are rejected, however, by Saul Kaplan and James P. Rice of the Jewish Federation of Chicago, and Rice defends the organized Jewish community against the charge of neglect.
It would appear that the controversy over the Jewish poor is more an issue of ideology than of statistics (although there are differences on the latter ground, too). As Mrs. Wolfe suggests in her rejoinder to Kaplan and Rice, there are “unresolved issues in the Jewish community . . . : Who decides what service gets how much money? . . . How are priorities set? Who sets them? . . . Does the Jewish community need to reorder its priorities?” These are large and possibly unanswerable questions. In the meantime, one is left with the perceptive observations of Dr. Samuel Silverberg, an erudite Jewish physician who is spending his retirement years helping out the Jewish Daily Forward. Reviewing the history of the Lower East Side and the condition of the elderly Jews in the area, Dr. Silverberg observes: “People are living in fear everywhere in the country. . . . Colored people themselves live in fear. Jews go to shul in groups. They are afraid to go to meetings at night. Things start earlier so people can get home before they find themselves solitary passengers on empty streets.” Dr. Silverberg lays the blame for much of this not on the Jewish organizations but on the decline of the extended family structure in America. With sadness, he concludes: “It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.”
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In the section on the Hasidim, Lavender includes a scholarly piece on their European origins; essays on the various hasidic groups living in Brooklyn and one on the Squarer Hasidim who fled New York in order to replicate their European shtetl in suburban Rockland County; and a portrait of the Lubavitcher rebbe which emphasizes his charismatic qualities as a scholar, therapist, and revivalist. While none of these selections addresses itself directly to the question of why Hasidism now enjoys a vogue on the American Jewish scene—particularly among the young-some clues may be found in several of the pieces.
In his portrait of the Lubavitcher rebbe, the late Irving Spiegel suggests that the hasidic revival is to a great extent traceable to the singular characteristics of the rebbe himself—the catholicity of his interests, the sagacity of his advice, the practicality of his program, the loftiness of his vision. In a more academic vein, Israel Rubin posits the notion that the strength, if not the popularity, of Hasidism lies in its capacity to transcend what sociologists have termed “the eclipse of community,” the breakdown of Gemeinschaft in modern mass society. Rubin concludes that what Hasidism offers is a kind of portable community, one which is not based on a common place of residence but which still “fulfills the basic functions that community is believed to fulfill.”
Despite the superficial attractiveness of this analysis, it is hardly sufficient to explain either Hasidism’s current popularity or its historical durability. Ultimately, what enables Hasidism to transcend the so-called “eclipse of community” is Halakhah, rabbinic law, the bedrock upon which hasidic faith rests and that which Hasidism has in common with every form of Orthodoxy. The continuing strength of Orthodox Judaism, and the declining strength of all those chic emulations of Hasidism which were a feature of the 60’s Jewish counterculture, may offer evidence that it is not Hasidism as such but rather Jewish religious law which provides those socio-psychological supports so many Jews appear to be looking for today.
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While Lavender’s volume includes a number of selections on Jewish blacks and on the Sephardic Jews who have come to the United States in the 20th century, these groups are not as controversial and do not affect the Jewish community as pervasively as another “minority” movement, women’s lib. An essay by Eugene Lipman on the status of women in Jewish tradition concludes, somewhat defensively, that rabbinic law prescribes equality and respect for women, but these conclusions are challenged in selections by two representative “spokespersons” of Jewish feminism. An angry piece by Ruth F. Brin asks, “Can a Woman Be a Jew?” and a more cerebral treatment of the topic by Blu Greenberg poses the question, “Feminism: Is It Good for the Jews?” Both authors advocate greater equality for women before Jewish law and a larger role for women in contemporary Jewish life—in religious ritual at home, in the synagogue, in Jewish education, and in community organizations. Mrs. Brin, however, argues from a point outside traditional religious law, while Mrs. Greenberg appears hopeful that the changes she advocates can be effected within the framework of Halakhah.
In retrospect, it was inevitable that the women’s-lib controversy would erupt in the Jewish community, given the tension between a millennia-old religious tradition in which women were assigned an inferior status and the upper middle-class position of today’s American Jews, a group especially susceptible to avant-garde notions in both politics and culture. It is, in fact, a measure of the extent of Jewish acculturation to American life that the ideas associated with women’s lib have moved beyond those Jewish women who are uncommitted or hostile to Jewish traditions and values, and penetrated the thinking of those concerned for the future quality and vitality of the community.
Good intentions are not, however, a substitute for cogent analysis or realistic goals. The essay by Ruth Brin suffers from several shortcomings: a tendency toward selective quotation to document her generalizations about the biblical, the talmudic, the rabbinic attitude toward women (as the essay by Eugene Lipman shows, similar sources can be cited to make points opposite to Mrs. Brin’s); a lack of historical perspective, and especially a failure to recognize that the historical process has itself continuously affected the status and rights of the Jewish wife and mother, usually for the better; and a failure to recognize that generally Jewish tradition and practice have been favorable to women.
The central flaw in Blu Green-berg’s highly ideological essay stems from her desire to have the best of all worlds, and at no cost. Mrs. Greenberg wants to preserve her commitment to the Halakhah, a relatively changeless body of religious law, and at the same time to enjoy all the fruits of modernity—feminism, innovative family roles, abortion—to “upgrade” the status of women in the synagogue, the home, and the community. Yet given the glacier-like pace with which the Orthodox rabbinate approaches even the most minute of proposed alterations in the Halakhah, it is completely unrealistic to expect Mrs. Greenberg’s many suggestions to be adopted soon. Her ability to ignore this, and to go on blithely advocating a kind of do-it-yourself Halakhah for Jewish women, amounts to a kind of deception.
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What are the future prospects of “minorities” in American Jewish life? The acculturative process which is eroding the social, ethnic, and geographic differences among Americans generally has been having its inevitable impact upon the Jewish community. While poor Jews, black Jews, and Hasidim may remain identifiable subcommunities, other Jews who want to adhere to a distinctive way of life while eschewing Orthodoxy may ultimately find it necessary to follow the example, if not the precepts, of the Squarer Hasidim, and create for themselves a “reservation” where they can resist the homogenizing processes of American life. As for the Orthodox themselves, whether of the hasidic variety or not, they will no doubt hold out the longest of all; and they may well find themselves numerically rewarded rather than punished for their obduracy.