The question of Jewish assimilation has always been vexed by two different considerations: how willing was the general community to accept Jews fully, and how willing were Jews to deliver themselves up to the norms of the general community. Usually, though, one of the considerations has been tabled in order to focus attention on the other. Thus, during the first half of the 20th century, advocates of assimilation were likely to take the desire of Jews to plunge into the melting pot for granted and to concentrate on describing and removing the barriers of social custom and prejudice that stood in their way. In the past two decades or so, many of these barriers have fallen, leaving Jews a more open entry to the degree of assimilation they wish to achieve. As a result, those who believe that assimilation still lags behind its potential are likely to look to the resistance among Jews to explain the delay. In a recent lecture to the American Council for Judaism, Robert MacIver, one of the elder statesmen of American sociology and an occasional social adviser to American Jewry, emphasized that its lingering alienation from the American mainstream was a consequence not only of the traditional suspicions between Jews and Gentiles, but also of the persistence of what he calls “the training for minority-living in Jewish schools and homes.” Such training Maclver identifies with the Saturday Sabbath, “the food taboos” and other “ritual ways and manners,” the “taboo on intermarriage,” and so forth.

Maclver's view represents an extreme version of a position that is becoming more evident among sociologists who specialize in intergroup relations. The most judicious and comprehensive statement of it is Milton Gordon's recent Assimilation in American Life¹ A former student of MacIver's (the core of this book appeared as an essay in the MacIver Festschrift), Gordon occupies much the same ground that his mentor first staked out fifteen years ago: that is, he remains respectful of the claims of pluralism while being impatient with its consequences.

Gordon identifies seven distinct steps in the process by which a minority becomes fully assimilated into a “core” culture. The first step is the adoption of the manners and mores of the core society—in other words, what is usually referred to as “acculturation” by anthropologists and sociologists, though in Gordon's parlance it is called “cultural or behavioral assimilation.” This is distinct from “structural assimilation”: membership in the dominant clubs, cliques, and institutions of the core society. Other steps are “marital assimilation” (large-scale intermarriage), “identificational assimilation” (the loss of a sense of peoplehood and the adoption of the ethnic identity of the core society), “attitude receptional assimilation” (the erosion of prejudice), “behavior receptional assimilation” (the erosion of discrimination), and, finally, “civic assimilation” (the reduction of conflicts over values and power between the minority and the core society). However awkward in terminology, Gordon's theory does help us to estimate how far a particular minority group has to travel to reach complete assimilation. Moreover, his breakdown of the process enables us to compare and contrast assimilationist tendencies among the various minority groups in America.

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Once having established this very useful theoretical framework, Gordon moves onto a more practical and prescriptive analysis, much of which takes off from the discrepancy he finds between the rate of cultural assimilation (generally high, or at least moving rapidly) and that of structural assimilation (generally low, or at least moving sluggishly). In his view cultural assimilation is not the crucial mode of the process, for group life continues in America despite considerable adaptation to white Protestant norms. The crucial mode is structural assimilation; as soon as it takes place, all the other steps will follow. Freer access to the social preserves of white Protestant America inevitably leads to a stepped-up rate of intermarriage, and to the new loyalties and involvements that Gordon calls identificational assimilation.

Gordon fails to make clear, however, why structural assimilation has proceeded so slowly in the United States. The best he can do is the following suggestion:

. . . A folk saying of the current day is that “It takes two to tango.” To utilize the analogy, there is no good reason to believe that white Protestant America ever extended a firm and cordial invitation to its minorities to dance. Furthermore, the attitudes of the minority group members themselves on the matter have been divided and ambiguous.

But this analogy applies much better to the experience of the first generation than to that of the second and succeeding ones. Gordon regards the persistence of the minority communities beyond the immigrant stage as more or less a response to the prejudice and discrimination that were encountered in the majority society. Thus, even the second-generation American who took one or another of the paths toward assimilation was often forced to return

. . . to the homelier but dependable comfort of the communal institutions of his ancestral group. There he found his fellows of the same generation who had never stirred from the home fires at all. Some of these had been too timid to stray; others were ethnic ideologists positively committed to the group's survival; still others had never really believed in the authenticity of the siren call or were simply too passive to do more than go along the familiar way; all could now join in the task that was well within the realm of the sociologically possible—the build-up of social institutions and organizations within the ethnic enclave. . . .

But has group life in America been founded mainly upon the loyalty of the rejected, the skeptical, and the unduly ethnocentric? Do prejudice, passivity, and ideology really explain why it has flourished? Gordon himself knows better, for at the beginning of his book he offers a different kind of description:

. . . the sense of ethnicity has proven to be hardy. As though with a wily cunning of its own, as though there were some essential element in man's nature that demanded it—something that compelled him to merge his lonely individual identity in some ancestral group of fellows smaller by far than the whole human race, smaller often than the nation—the sense of ethnic belonging has survived. It has survived in various forms and with various names, but it has not perished, and twentieth-century urban man is closer to his stone-age ancestors than he knows.

Although Gordon tacitly recognizes, then, that the sources of group identity cannot be reduced to minority status, he does not systematically explore the other more basic, not to say more positive, motives for maintaining it. One reason for this omission possibly stems from the perspective which identifies modern-day group loyalties with the behavior of the “stone age”—a perspective which is, of course, connected with Gordon's own attitudes toward ethnic identity. To be sure, his feelings are complex: he is attracted to pluralism as much as he is repelled by it. When he analyzes the opposing theories of group life in America—notably “Anglo-conformity,” the “melting pot,” and “cultural pluralism”—he allows each to have its say and strives for balance and reconciliation. But whenever Gordon confronts the crucial question of whether American social policy should encourage pluralism or assimilation, his personal feelings inevitably condition the tone and bearing of the discussion.

Thus he says that “. . . cultural and structural pluralism in a moderate degree are not incompatible with American democratic ideas,” and tries to work out a compromise position that would legitimate pluralism rather than either encourage or discourage it. But what is “pluralism in a moderate degree”? Gordon himself recognizes that to legitimate pluralism is by no means to insure the survival of group life; if anything, it makes the problem of providing for its survival that much more complex and delicate. In discussing the new setting of pluralism, however, his prescriptions of permissiveness and moderation frequently end in irritable criticism of the efforts of the minorities to maintain their distinctiveness. At one point, for example, he calls for “. . . careful consideration by those ethnic agencies, institutions, and officials . . . of the desirability of heightening the level of structural separatism now existing,” citing their “capture” of the Boy Scouts (more than 50 per cent of all troops are today under sectarian sponsorship) as a significant instance:

A generation or so ago, boys . . . who joined these organizations . . . were likely to find themselves participating in troops organized on an all-community basis (even when, in some cases, under Protestant church auspices) and thus to be thrown together with young people of faiths other than their own. In the mid 1930's . . . the Catholic Youth Organization accepted Scouting as a part of the Church's program . . . on the basis of arrangements under which sponsorship of local troops would be undertaken by Catholic institutions and such troops would be considered as reserved primarily for Catholic boys. . . . The Scouting organizations, anxious to spread the principles of their respective movements, have . . . acceded to arrangements of this type. There are now many Scouting groups sponsored by Protestant and Catholic Churches, and Jewish synagogues, as well as by YMCA's, YMHA's, parochial schools, Jewish community centers, and other sectarian groups.

Instead of harking back to an earlier and better age, a more disinterested observer might conceivably applaud a development which places Scouting before Anglo-conformity. And even one who esteems Scouting more than pluralism might still conclude that it is better to have Catholic and Jewish troops in a united Boy Scouts of America than separate scout movements for each religious and ethnic group.

Elsewhere, Gordon observes that “what keeps our groups in existence is that there is structural separatism in lieu of cultural separatism.” Given this situation, if Gordon were a fully committed pluralist, his warning against structural separatism would naturally lead him to emphasize the need of the minorities to strengthen their cultural appeal in order to take up the slack in group ties. His failure to do so leads one even closer to the conclusion that while he accepts pluralism because it exists, because our ethnic and religious groups affirm its value, and because he believes they have a right to enjoy it, he himself regards pluralism as finally a primitive form of social organization which will wither away at a higher stage of social enlightenment. Thus in spite of Gordon's best intentions to be circumspect and generous, his personal predilections carry him almost imperceptibly toward the pole of full assimilation, or Anglo-conformity, though he would be among the first to recognize that the group consciousness and culture of the contemporary WASPs is in no way superior to those of minorities.

In sum, then, Gordon has enough faith in pluralism to accept it in the abstract but not enough to approve of the sectarian instrumentalities and values by which groups continue to maintain themselves. Moreover, he lacks the fuller understanding of pluralism which would enable him to grasp the broader reaches of its influence. Gordon focuses on the benefits pluralism confers on the minorities (freedom of expression and the freedom to develop a sub-community) and also on the significant role it can play in the development of individual personality, but he does not perceive how it benefits the society at large. That is to say, he does not see that pluralism provides a more desirable alternative to other forms of social organization, such as one rigidly stratified by class interests. Since Gordon himself is a student of social class, he might be expected to think of pluralism not only as a permissive acceptance of minority rights but as a force that creates a variety of non-economic interest groups, thus reducing the tendency of class to confront class and facilitating the diffusion, rather than the centralization, of power. To take Gordon's own example, it is much better for democratic society if a Scout Troop meets at a Catholic church than at a union hall, or at a recreational center owned by the corporation which employs the fathers of the boys, or as part of a “youth movement” conducted by a political party or by the government itself.

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Although Gordon does not tell us explicitly how he feels about his own Jewish identity, Assimilation in American Life is suffused with the problem in its most characteristic form. In one passage—the most deeply felt in the book-Gordon speaks in behalf of the children of the ethnic enclaves who feel restricted by their group ties and who wish to move out into a realm of society where such ties are no longer binding:

. . . the individual, as he matures and reaches the age where rational decision is feasible, should be allowed to choose freely whether to remain within the boundaries of community created by his birthright ethnic group, to branch out into multiple interethnic contacts, or even to change affiliation to that of another ethnic group should he wish to do so as a result of religious conversion, intermarriage or simply private wish. . . .

While this appeal is couched in the language of the social scientist, it is clearly the Jew in Gordon that is speaking; the products of no other group in America feel compelled to defend the right to assimilate. An American Irishman who has lost his group identity does not need to justify his freedom of choice—he (or his descendants) merely cease being Irish. Nor, unlike Jewish assimilationists, do those who break away from the non-Jewish minorities ever appear to expect a release from feeling guilty about doing so. Gordon does:

If . . . the ethnic group places such heavy pressures on its birthright members to stay confined to ethnic communality that the individual who consciously wishes to “branch out” or “move away” feels intimidated or subject to major feelings of personal guilt and therefore remains ethnically enclosed, or moves out but at considerable psychological cost, then we have . . . cultural democracy for groups but not for individuals.

What finally animates Gordon is that dream of a neutral society which has preoccupied many Jews since the Emancipation. The dream, of course, has taken many forms, depending upon the situation and passions of the dreamer. Gordon's version of it is modeled on the kind of “subsociety” of intellectuals that can be found in the modern academic community. Such a community brings “men and women . . . together because of an overriding common interest in ideas, the creative arts, and mutual professional concerns,” and thereby serves as “the classic sociological enemy of ethnic parochialism.”

Gordon would be less tolerant of pluralism did he not believe that a neutral society has at last emerged, that it is gaining strength and scope, and that ultimately all people who are not timid, ethnocentric, or psychologically maimed will seek membership in it. The shock troops of assimilation, according to Gordon, are the young intellectuals who no longer have to retreat from the dream as so many of their parents had to do in the previous generation. Although Gordon does not identify these young intellectuals, he must certainly—given the disproportionate percentage of Jewish college students—have his own group primarily in mind when he tells us that “. . . each ethnic group tends to lose, in any functional sense, a large percentage of its intellectually oriented young people to the newly formed subsociety composed of intellectuals.” Moreover, the marked proclivity of young Jewish intellectuals in recent years to choose academic careers is due, in good part, to the yearning they share with Gordon for a neutral society. All of which is further evidence of Gordon's unconscious tendency to think about assimiliation in typically Jewish terms.

This tendency is also implicit in Gordon's analysis of the functions of the intellectual community. First, it provides a “. . . safety valve for those individuals who, because of widely ranging interests in ideas, the arts, and people find ethnic communality uncongenial.” Secondly, it offers a congenial environment to the intermarried couples who require a neutral milieu because of their special situation. But most of all, it “serves the rest of the nation as a symbol of the possibility of inter-ethnic harmony and integration at the meaningful primary group level of communal living.” It “provides a testing ground for the problems and processes inherent in the achievement of . . . [an integrated] society and stands as a symbol of its potential development in larger scope.” Such eager claims and Utopian hopes are not characteristic of members of a contented majority; they are the mark of an aspiring minority.

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Why is it that sociologists like Gordon and MacIver, who can so readily understand the attachment of people to their class, have so much difficulty in understanding their attachment to a religion, an ethnic group, or a race? Perhaps because sociologists are so secular, they cannot fathom why anyone should wish to preserve a religion. Perhaps because they are so attached to the urbanities of the academy, they cannot fathom why individuals of any sensibility could be satisfied with the parochial life of a minority and must attribute their loyalty to an ethnocentric ideology or to disabilities produced by social rejection, whether actually experienced or only imagined.

As I have said, Gordon brings more understanding to these complex matters than do most of his colleagues in this field. He is willing to abide a temporary pluralism, while he looks forward to the day when all men of good will can be enrolled in a kind of secularized yeshivah. Those like myself who believe they belong to a long and profound tradition rather than merely to an ethnocentric ideology will find Gordon's social eschatology singularly unattractive. However, the immediate questions which require research are whether a neutral society is indeed emerging in America rather than a more genuinely pluralistic one, and whether enough Catholics, Protestants, and Jews, whites and Negroes, bluebloods and new bloods, are willing to enter the brave new world that Gordon already finds in the academy. Judging from the recent literature on the bland conformity of the academic life, those on the inside have begun to have some doubts of their own.

¹ Oxford University Press, 276 pp., $5.25.