The Questions

1. Do you feel that the situation of the Jew in America has altered in the past fifteen years? If so, has this had any influence on your present attitude toward your own Jewishness?
2. What are your feelings, if any, about the generation of Jewish intellectuals whose socialism provided the basis for their more or less antagonistic relation to the Jewish community in America and elsewhere? Do you believe there are viable elements in the tradition they represented?
3. Do you think that your experience as a Jew is importantly relevant to your experience as an American? Do you feel that Jewish culture—in the broadest sense of the term—exerts a significant influence upon American life? If so, how would you define this influence?
4. Considering that you are at least partly a product of Jewish tradition, do you feel any obligation—any sense of historical reverence—to that tradition? Does this obligation include an involvement in the Jewish community, or extend to transmitting the values inherent in Jewish tradition to your children? Or do you perhaps see no merit in the claim that the Jewish people have created or preserved certain special values?
5. Have you ever considered the possibility that your children may convert to another religion? If so, how do you feel about this possibility?
6. Do you feel any special connection with the State of Israel? Does it, in your opinion, exert a legitimate claim on your sympathies? Would you say that it embodies the values of Jewish tradition more clearly than the American Jewish community does?

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Raziel Abelson:

I shall follow the Jewish tradition of responding to a question by asking another question: What is a Jew? Is being a Jew an essence, like being animate or rational or mortal, or is it an accidental trait, like being a New Yorker, being liberal, or being susceptible to colds? I think it used to be an essence. One could change one’s residence and ideology and even do something about one’s colds, but one could not choose to cease being a Jew. Assimilation and even conversion did not prevent the world from identifying Disraeli, Heine, Marx, or Bergson as Jews. Excommunication did not expunge his Jewishness from Spinoza. But nowadays, conversions both to and from Judaism are easier and more accepted by society as real. It would seem that Jewishness, which was once an essential trait of a person, is becoming more superficial and accidental, thus confirming the Hegelian insight that ontology is a historical science.

Two groups of people still insist on regarding Jewishness as a fundamental, pervasive, and ineradicable trait: chauvinistic Jews and anti-Semites. Sartre described the anti-Semite as a man who insists on regarding both himself and his enemy—the Jew—as inert objects that cannot help being what they are. I think Sartre’s description also applies (with suitable changes) to the chauvinistic Jew who insists that there is something uniquely and unalterably superior about being Jewish, like the woman in a Philip Roth story who, on reading a newspaper account of an airplane crash, grieves only for the Jewish victims. I think these two attitudes are sides of the same coin. The anti-Semite feels that there is something ineradicably evil in every Jew: he cannot explain what it is, but that does not shake his conviction that it is eternally there. The chauvinistic Jew is equally convinced that there is something unalterably good about a Jew, although he cannot say in what this desirable essence consists. It cannot be for him a matter of religious belief, since surely even the Orthodox Jew mourns the death of the Jewish victims of Hitler who happened to be atheists. It cannot be biological continuity, since Jewish genealogy is notoriously obscure and since converts to Judaism have always been fully accepted as Jews. Nor can it be cultural identity, since the American Jew and Christian have far more in common culturally than, say, the American Jew and the Yemenite Jew. I am led to conjecture that it was the very persecution of the Jews that made Jewishness seem an inescapable essence, both for the Jew and for the anti-Jew. In attempting to stamp out Jewish identity, anti-Semitism succeeded in stamping it in. It is therefore not surprising that the decline of anti-Semitism in the Western world since the defeat of Hitler has been accompanied by a lessening of Jewish self-consciousness and an increase in adoptions and abandonments of Jewishness.

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In answer, then, to my own question, I do not believe that there is an essence of Jewishness, a property that all Jews and only Jews possess in common. Yet I do feel a bond relating me to all other Jews, past, present, and future, and this bond cannot be simply the common experience of persecution since I have never suffered in that way except vicariously. Perhaps, to borrow a Wittgensteinian metaphor from another context, this bond is like a rope made of overlapping strands, no one of which extends from beginning to end. If so, then I can only identify the particular strands that link me directly to some of my Jewish contemporaries and ancestors, without denying that I am just as strongly, if less directly, bound to my fellow Jews throughout space and time, yet without affirming that there is a Jewish essence. In tracing these strands, I shall try to answer COMMENTARY’S questions.

What I have said so far is already an answer to COMMENTARY’s first question, and partly an answer to Question 4. The question mentions “values inherent in Jewish tradition,” but I am unable to identify any values that have been preserved and cherished continuously through the long and winding course of Jewish history. The tribal pride and the love of life of the people of the Biblical kingdom seem to me to have very little in common with the devotion to ritual and reverence for Talmudic law by which the Jews of the Diaspora nourished their identity as a chosen people. Their belief in their unique destiny was, I think, a grand illusion that made a supernatural virtue out of their earthly misery, an illusion poignantly recognized in the story of the Jew who, on reaching heaven, proposes to God that, if the Jews are really His chosen people, would He mind choosing someone else for a while? However, the skeptical rationality and cosmopolitanism of the modern assimilated Jew seems as remote from the otherworldly ritualism of the ghetto Jew as both are from the tribalism and nature worship of the Biblical Israelite. The Enlightenment and subsequent spread of democratic institutions and religious tolerance drew the Jews slowly out of the ghetto and thus out of their eschatological fantasy. The assimilated Jew, discarding his own traditions and not deeply rooted in those of his adopted society, was particularly well suited to become a spokesman for rational social change. It is this aspect of Jewish history, whose heroic figures are Spinoza, Marx, Freud, and Einstein, to which I feel most directly linked. Consequently, the Orthodox Jew, steeped in the medieval traditions of the ghetto, the Reform Jew who, unconcerned about the contradiction involved, tries to bring ancient traditions “up to date,” and the dedicated Zionist who sees the fulfillment of the Biblical covenant in the advancement of the State of Israel, all seem to me to ignore the role that the modern Jew is best qualified to perform—namely, that of spokesman for a rationally organized, democratic world society, unfettered by parochial traditions and superstitions.

My answer to Question 2 must already be obvious: The liberal and socialist Jewish intellectuals of previous generations are my cultural ancestors whose birthright I hope to preserve for later generations.

As to Question 5, I have tried to make it clear that I do not regard Jewishness as primarily a matter of religious belief. The most profound and valuable insight of Judaic religion was, I believe, the ideal of universal justice, and this has become so permanent a part of Western civilization that it is no longer distinctively either a Jewish or a religious ideal. The special forms of religious worship to which many Jews still cling have only a sentimental meaning to me. But I would indeed be shocked if my child were some day to embrace another religion, for the simple reason that I expect him to have enough Jewish skepticism not to be fetishistic about any of the ceremonial forms that distinguish one religion from another. But I would like him to retain a sense of the sacred and sublime, enough to appreciate religious symbols without being habituated to any of them.

Question 6, as to my feelings about Israel and its claims on American Jews, is the most difficult to answer clearly and candidly. I have conflicting feelings about Israel as, I should imagine, most American Jews must have, considering how many incompatible values the Israeli state represents. It claims to be the fulfillment of the covenant, yet it is constantly defending its secular freedom against an Orthodox minority that takes the covenant seriously enough to want Israel to be a theocracy. Its political and cultural leadership was recruited mainly from the socialist intellectuals of European Jewry, yet its survival as a state depends on the very nationalistic and militaristic fervor that socialists have always regarded as the main obstacle to a world society.

Yet despite these ideological anomalies, I do feel that all Jews have an obligation to support the State of Israel, politically and financially, because there is no alternative but the unthinkable one of Israel’s extermination by its enemies. But it should also be recognized that, with the rise of Israel, the Jewish people have, to some extent, abandoned their historic role of a people who through their patient suffering preserved and nourished the ideal of a world order based on universal justice. It would seem that the American Negroes have now assumed this role, and that God has, after all, “chosen someone else for a while.” The Jew can hardly regret the lost mantle of martyrdom, but he should realize that, in discarding it, he cannot appeal as effectively to the troubled conscience of the world. Thus Israel has ceded its right to expect sympathetic understanding of nationalistic policies such as the invasion of Suez, the rigid position on the Arab refugees, the kidnapping of Eichmann, and (if the rumors are true) the development of atomic weapons. The support of Israel by American Jews should therefore not be sentimental and uncritical support, but should be given only in a way that exerts a more liberal, internationalist, and humanitarian influence on Israeli politics. I believe Israel can effectively represent the historic mission of the Jewish people only when it sacrifices its national interests for the sake of world peace and social justice.

[Raziel Abelson is an assistant professor of philosophy at New York University. He has contributed to the Philosophical Review and other journals.]

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Alfred G. Aronowitz:

The trouble with being a Jew has always been the trouble others go through to remind you of it. Today, of course, the reminders have undergone certain refinements. Where we once had Adolf Hitler to do this job for us, we now have David Ben Gurion. Where we once had the Pharaohs, we now have the presidents of the synagogues. Where we once had the Inquisition, we now have the United Jewish Appeal. To be sure, we also still have Gamal Abdul Nasser, the Ku Klux Klan, George Lincoln Rockwell, and the Scarsdale Country Club. But if invoking the Jewishness of a Jew can be an offense, then at what degree is it not? For my part, I advocate the immediate suspension of COMMENTARY.

As Thelonius Monk once said to Allen Ginsberg, “What do all those people mean walking around saying they’re white?” Or, in Ginsberg’s paraphrase, “What do all those people mean walking around saying they’re Negro?” Man’s tendency for ethnic cohesion may be as much a part of him as his yearning for individuality. But ultimately the one, as a fact of life, must be reconciled with the other, as life’s essence. With the Jew, looked upon through the centuries as the natural enemy of much of the rest of mankind, the yearning to be looked upon as an individual has become an eternal crusade. Unfortunately, it is less of an internal one. The very persons who have led the crusade have also founded the B’nai B’rith, the American Jewish Congress, the Hadassah, and, to some extent, the State of Israel. By definition, the man who claims to represent Jewish thought must claim first that he is a Jew. Would the Mayor of the Ghetto give up his job?

“Aronowitz,” a friend said to me recently, “the trouble with you is that you treat your being a Jew as an affliction rather than as a matter of pride.” Perhaps he is right, but in a lifetime when being born a Jew has been punishable by death, I believe that pride falls somewhat short of an effective antidote. Certainly it is little more than an emotion of self-defense. In the armory of the ethnic mercenaries, there are few stronger platitudes, and yet what is a platitude and where is the justification for pride? My brother-in-law, a Detroit Tigers fan to this day, says that every time Hank Greenberg hit a home run he rejoiced, first in the fact that Hank Greenberg was a Jew and only afterward in the score. But the question remains: did Hank Greenberg smite the enemy in the name of Judaism or in the name of the Detroit Tigers? Einstein, Disraeli, Mendelssohn, Modigliani, and Freud were Jews, but Einstein also was a violinist, Disraeli also was an Englishman, Mendelssohn also was a Lutheran, Modigliani also was an alcoholic, and Freud also smoked cigars. Are violinists, Englishmen, Lutherans, alcoholics, and cigar-smokers to be enjoined from the glory of their fellow members? The contribution of Jews to the culture of the world is unquestioned, but in the final analysis, is it the contribution of persons acting as Jews or the contribution of persons acting as individuals?

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Make no mistake. I often am deeply conscious of the fact that I am a Jew. I would never, for example, buy a Volkswagen and I can appreciate jokes about newspapers on the floor. Jews at all moments of history have shared some sort of common experience, and, whatever else they have been, they have been as much the products of their heritage—just as Roman Catholics, Zulus, or the inhabitants of the Principality of Liechtenstein have been the products of theirs. Even Allen Ginsberg has written a work entitled Kaddish. But heritages keep being added to and culture, on any given day, is the sum total of all the culture which preceded it. When Ben Gurion complains that Jewish traditions are being obliterated throughout the Diaspora and because of it, he forgets that the clocks are running in Israel, too. In twenty years, the jokes won’t be about newspapers on the floor.

Ben Gurion says that he is a Jew first and an Israeli second. I say that I am nothing if I am not an individual. Actually, there is nothing less important than being a Jew. Whether you smoke a cigarette is more important. Whether your fingernails are clean is more important. Whether you make love to your wife is more important. Whether the Detroit Tigers win the pennant is more important. My brother-in-law has felt other moments of pride. As a matter of fact, being a Jew is so unimportant that I accuse whoever is reading this of a grand waste of time. That is the United Jewish Appeal knocking on your door, not the Gestapo. By an irrelevance that remains one of history’s tragedies, you can’t join the Scarsdale Country Club. Your birth is no one’s fault but your parents’, and yet no matter where you may pledge your ethnic allegiance, you can’t escape the Nuremberg laws. O, Anne Frank, my poor murdered daughter, they think I am laughing at you. Let no man kill me because I am a Jew, but when they are burning Jews again, let me be the first to burn.

[Alfred G. Aronowitz is a staff writer on the New York Post, and is currently working on a major study of the Beat Generation.]

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Aaron Asher:

1. Consult your files, please. All those articles on the situation of the Jew in America! Between us, though, nothing much has happened if we’re talking about the relative situation—I refer to the historical balance of hostility and acceptance. The prognosis in 1945 was favorable, though there were fears that economic depression might bring anti-Semitism with it. Instead we got xenophobia, anti-intellectualism, military arrogance, a political depression—all the other classic accompaniments of trouble for Jews. Yet, no significant anti-Semitic backlash, even when events like the Rosenberg case provided convenient nuclei. Is this an old-fashioned, Diaspora way of looking at the question? I’m saying that it takes apocalyptic events to influence my attitude: why didn’t you go back to what Grace Paley calls “the epidemics of 1940-41,” when people “died of Jewishness”?
2. I realize that your question is merely for guidance, and that objecting to it may be ungracious. Yet I feel that behind the imprecision of “the generation of Jewish intellectuals whose socialism . . .” lies a real confusion, a tendency to think with petrified concepts, groupiness, and a kind of “in” talk that may alienate younger readers from this and other worthy periodicals. Allow me to be obtuse. Does the question refer to the Yiddish-speaking socialists, many of them intellectuals by any standard? To the Stalinists of the 30’s and 40’s who, flailing Zionism, did so nevertheless with the cracked stick of Biro-Bidjan? To the Trotsky cultists, secretly proud that he was a Jew? To those whose feelings about the fate of Europe’s Jewry were surely something more than a humanitarian interest? The cluster of intellectuals who fit the question were small in number, restricted in influence, and were, moreover, largely literary types. Their socialism was almost an afterthought, their non-Jewishness mainly a revolt of sensibility against limiting bourgeois origins. What single tradition the entire generation represented, I don’t know—whatever remains viable in socialism, I suppose, plus a certain aesthetic, and a tough critical attitude perhaps ultimately derived from but going beyond ordinary Jewish skepticism.
3. Yes, of course. The point—now frequently made and possibly true—that American Jewish writers are exemplars of alienation, instructors in grief and wit, and thus particularly in tune with the new questioning America, can be extended. Uncle Sam is becoming the world’s Jew. Items: the familiar accusations of arrogance, rigid moralism, materialism, pushiness, secret and overt power; exclusion (Ike’s non-trip to Japan); spit and stones (Nixon in South America); “go home” scrawls. A sort of “Jewish” culture, with Jews prominent among the dispensers, therefore should be finding new audiences. And so it is. Nichols and May, Shelley Berman, Mort Sahl—their humor is patently Jewish—have counterparts on other levels and in other arts. Wryness and satire are in the air, and an increasing awareness of the possibilities of pessimism. Hasn’t this something to do with the Jewish presence in “communications”? All this, of course, is most diffuse and tentative, yet it seems strangely obvious. Where Jewish culture, in the traditional sense, seems to have no effect on American life, is on the moral front. And American Jews themselves seem to be submerging the ancient virtues (along with the vices) in the moral confusion of our society. I think it significant that the Beat bohemia is the first in a long time to lack a normal share of Jewish adherents. Can this be evidence that the rebellion is a fake? Or have American Jews lost their vocation for social criticism along with everyone else?
4. It should be evident by now that I do feel such an obligation. For me, the tradition represents a set of generally congenial ethical principles; an attachment to a history of suffering by kinsmen; valuable character traits (learned, not inherited) and intellectual virtues; and a religion that asks and answers its ultimate questions in a positively sane manner. This obligation or reverence does not necessarily make for involvement in the Jewish community, but for connection with a Jewish community. Children, one hopes, will adopt some part of one’s values. The technique of transmission is subject to time, place, and circumstance.
5. I do not practice any religion. If my children (as yet unborn) become observant Jews, I’ll probably admire their independence, ponder the strangeness of the world, and wonder whether they have more sense than I—or more capability for religious experience. Given my involvement with a Jewish tradition, I would take their conversion to another religion more seriously. In fact, I’d feel betrayed and would consider myself a failed parent. Should religion matter so much to me? No. But my lack of faith prevents me from being able to separate religion from history. And once history appears on the scene, what can I make of Christianity?
6. Connecting with Israel is like connecting with the Jewish community. Perhaps harder. Who wants to connect with cabinet ministers, police, an army, a parliament, parties, political resignations, capital investment, theocratic fanaticism, tourism? Very conventionally, I like the recent immigrants more than the sabras, deplore the attrition of admirable values, wrestle with a distant and strange ecology, disdain the belittlers of Diaspora achievements and Yiddish culture, and—sympathize with the ingathering, approve of the Israelis’ choice of enemies, forget myself and admire military feats. Mixed but legitimate feelings. As for comparing performance in the embodiment of Jewish tradition, no one would assign a perfect score to the ghetto or the shtetl or the Lower East Side. The returns are not yet in on Levittown and Tel Aviv.

[Aaron Asher is an editor of Meridian Books, a leading quality paperback series, and an associate editor of the literary periodical, The Noble Savage.]

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Werner Cohn:

(1) I do not. There may be differences on the surface, but I think that the four fundamental determinants of the position of the Jew in America are (a) the underlying ambivalence between Jew and Christian, originating from religious sources; (b) the setting of a modern, industrial society; (c) the religious diversity and democratic institutions of the country; and (d) the concentration of a large number of Jews in certain metropolitan centers. These four factors, of course, have not changed in recent years, nor are they likely to change in the foreseeable future. They make for an interesting dynamic tension between mutual acceptance and mutual alienation, the former often superficial, the latter profound.

I grant that the demise of the radical movement since the 30’s may have altered the style of participation of certain Jewish intellectuals in American culture. I would suggest, however, that these changes may have more affected the form than the content of the relationship between Jewish intellectuals and America. The role of the Jewish scholar, writer, or performer in the 60’s may not be so different from that of the Jewish radical in the 30’s. In either case, the role tends toward that of a critic, or at least toward that of an outsider in a certain sense. And the general social differences between Jews and Gentiles—this holds not only for the intellectuals—have remained, and may be seen in the characteristic Jewish occupational and geographic distributions, as well as in persisting differences in political attitudes.

(2) Some features of the socialists’ hostility toward Jewishness were quite naive. The socialist faith, which in theory promised to destroy all barriers between men, kept many from seeing the stubborn non-rational, non-religious (though religiously derived) barriers between Jews and Christians. An extreme of this position was described by Pavel Axelrod, a Russian Jewish Narodnik, reminiscing about the pogroms of 1882:

We . . . just as all Narodniks, were happy at the news, for we thought that the pogroms were a sign of the Russian revolution. We thought that the attacks would go beyond the Jew. We felt that the Jews were the swindlers. We weren’t concerned with the pogroms. We belonged to the Russian folk. How childish and naive we were!

However, I continue to be very much in sympathy with certain other aspects of the socialist position on Judaism. I refer to the refreshing radical agnosticism, which is like a sudden bit of fresh air in a room full of brocheh-reciting Hadassah ladies and cigar-smoking B’nai B’rith gentlemen. Let me add that what I object to is not so much religion as sloppy and sentimental religiosity. To my mind, there are indeed at least two ways of being a good Jew. I recently met a Hasid from Alberta whom I, the atheist, immediately recognized as a fellow good Jew.

(3)-(4) I regard my Jewishness as something that is given, something one cannot obliterate, something one must come to terms with in one way or another. Jews differ in the way they are Jews, not in whether or not they continue their Jewishness. Any discussion of good ways of being Jewish is a good discussion.

Some of my Jewish acquaintances solve the matter by becoming Unitarians. This, like any conversion to Christianity, is still a way of being Jewish, though not, to my mind, a good way. Despite the fact that one of my favorite quotations comes from a Unitarian source and seems to me quite Jewish (Emerson: “Let me admonish you, first of all, to go alone, to refuse the good models, even those which are sacred in the imaginations of men”), the Unitarian way (for a Jew!) is not much different from the old socialist naivety—the Narodnik’s fallacy—which assumes that a Jew can, by his own decision, cease being a Jew in the eyes of others.

I like to regard my Jewishness as a source of strength in my relationship to the world. The Jew is symbolic of, among other things, the outsider, the one who stands alone, the one who follows his inner direction while others mock. The great models are Jesus, Freud, Marx, Einstein, and Trotsky. Following this course without compromise means to make a significant and, to me, authentically Jewish contribution to American culture.

(5) Being both Jewish and in a sense an opponent of all religion, I cannot say that I would be happy to see my children join a non-Jewish faith. However, as there are good ways of being Jewish though religious within Judaism, there may be good ways of being Jewish though religious in other traditions. Should one of my children decide that his own life is best led as a Hutterite, Doukhobor, or Jesuit (their new regulations would allow it!), I might be persuaded that the decision is in its own way a good Jewish one. Were he to become a Christian Scientist or a follower of the Reverend Norman Vincent Peale, I would more certainly feel that I had somehow failed to make my way of being Jewish attractive enough to him.

In any case, many conversions of Jews to Christianity seem to me to involve rather severe problems of self-identification. Very frequently, there is an element of disingenuousness—an attempt to pass as something one obviously isn’t.

(6) I do. While I accept much of the anti-Zionist criticism of the Jewish Newsletter and Erich Fromm (though I wish it were less shrill), I feel myself involved with Israel and grateful for its existence. Our whole family recently attended a Chanukah celebration of a mildly Labor Zionist youth group. As always, I winced at the prayers and also at the manipulating professional “youth leader,” but when the Horah was danced and my little girl enjoyed dancing with the others, I was pleased that she had this way of making up for Christmas. I saw that the liberating spirit of free adolescents was still about, and that the way of the halutz is still indeed a good way of being a Jew in the Gentile world. This way I recognize mainly for adolescents, but that is another story.

[Werner Cohn is assistant professor of sociology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.]

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Malcolm L. Diamond:

It is now apparent that the much publicized revival of religion that has taken place in this country since the Second World War has been a revival of formal religious affiliation rather than of religious faith. Our age is not an age of return; it has more properly been characterized as an age of longing. Socialism, scientism, and other secular ideologies have been found wanting as objects of total allegiance and this has induced a groping for a new focus of ultimate concern. This groping is especially poignant in Jewish circles because the phenomenal success of the Zionist movement in helping to create the State of Israel has robbed Zionism of much of the fervor that enabled it to serve as a substitute for religion for so many American Jews.

If it is to be satisfied, the religious longing of American Jews must be satisfied here, in the United States; emigration to Israel is no answer. I say this not because emigration is impractical, but because Diaspora Judaism is a source of that peculiar insight that comes from living on the margin of alien cultures, an insight best expressed in the verse: “Do not oppress a stranger, you know the heart of a stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” This insight stands at the heart of the prophetic heritage and of the Jewish thirst for social justice that enriches the life of any culture with which Jews interact. In saying this, we must remember Nathan Glazer’s salutary corrective to self-righteousness about Jewish participation in the fight for social justice; it was not our prophetic heritage but our position as a minority seeking full enfranchisement that has, in recent history, been primarily responsible for this participation. But this underscores the point that it is in the Diaspora, with its peculiar pressures, that this most valued part of the Jewish heritage is apt to be activated. Nor should we overlook the fact that from the time of Abraham and Moses great visions have been granted to Israel outside the land.

In this age of longing, Jewish students and intellectuals often seek Jewish authenticity on a Protestant model. They read thinkers such as Buber and Heschel who play the same role that Niebuhr and Tillich play in Protestant circles, namely, that of mediators of the traditional faith to modern man. I myself have traveled this way. In a period of estrangement from Judaism, I was deeply impressed by the intellectual vitality of contemporary Protestant thinkers and, in studying them, I was directed to the creative Jewish thinkers of our time, especially to Martin Buber, who helped me along the road to a reaffirmation of Judaism.

I have since discovered that this kind of theologically-oriented approach to Judaism is far too limited. An extended sojourn in a Torah-centered atmosphere (at Jews’ College, the Orthodox rabbinical seminary in London) provided a sense of the vastness of Jewish studies, and a deeper realization of the fact that they are not primarily theological. No one can properly assess the Jewish attitudes toward God and man, sin and redemption, without being familiar with the word of Torah as it has resonated through centuries of prayer and commentary. Of course, learning is no panacea. Scholars who have immersed themselves in every stratum of the tradition disagree as to just what constitutes an authentic Jewish approach even to fundamental issues. However, there is a vast difference between informed judgment—sensitive to the nuances of a vast body of literature and to the total context of Jewish life and thought—and opinions based upon selections from a limited number of Jewish texts.

In Jews’ College I discovered a community of understanding that constituted a world unto itself. The Torah provided the matrix of daily existence and conversations were peppered with quotations from every aspect of Jewish literature. Here Judaism was self-authenticating; there was no agonizing over the “Why” of Jewish existence because the answer was embedded in the very act of living Torah. In this connection I recall a lunch at the College in the company of a number of students, one of them a rabbi in his mid-forties who was engaged in advanced Talmudic studies. He was an ineffectual man who could not sustain his end of the conversation, continually climbing on the back of what he conceived to be the intelligent observations of others. But in the chanting of the benediction at the conclusion of the meal he was transfigured; his face became vibrant, his voice confident, he was a Jew before his God, a man. It is obvious that this kind of religion cannot be marketed by peace of mind cults, but neither can it be attained by the most strenuous exercises in Jewish theology. It can only develop out of a Judaism that takes the total heritage seriously, and that means a Judaism that takes education seriously.

Education is crucial because it enables a generation to move beyond it own limitations. From the religious standpoint the Jewish people may be regarded as a womb out of which may be reborn that faith in God that makes the preservation of Judaism a meaningful goal. Without education the people cannot serve this function, and faithlessness—which in the generation of the parents may have been an honest reaction to the Jewish heritage—is imposed by default upon the children who lack any basis for authentic response and intelligent judgment.

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Looking at American Judaism with a concern for educational stringency, one finds two hopeful signs: the increasingly high caliber of college graduates electing the rabbinate and the continued growth of the Jewish day or parochial school. But proponents of Jewish education in depth ought not to obscure the fact that the Judaism it seeks to inculcate is highly problematical in the American setting. Although traditional Judaism in this country is largely attuned to American ideals, it nevertheless imposes an exclusiveness that is oppressive in this land of the melting-pot. The existence of the secular Jew often seems vacuous when compared to the melodious life of the religious Jew; but the secular Jew who has fully participated in contemporary culture is likely to feel constricted in a Torah-centered atmosphere, even in one that is relatively open culturally.

In any event, Jews with a command of Jewish literature are very much in the minority. For all the return to religion in the past fifteen years, the American Jewish community remains a community of citizens of Western civilization seeking Jewish roots rather than a community of Jews seeking a rapport with Western civilization. The estranged Jew of today does not have a Torah-centered community to provide the rhythms and gratification for which he would then find a rationale. Therefore, an intellectual approach to Judaism, whatever its limitations, must be the major mode of access for Jews seeking a return.

In past ages, a religious thinker could engage in theology with a profound sense of the difficulties involved but with confidence that answers were to be won. In our age, the theological enterprise itself has become questionable and with it religion. While I stand in awe of all that Judaism has been, and of its compelling witness to the God of our fathers—feeling arrogant at demanding that it somehow justify itself to a “sensitive and enlightened intellectual”—honesty demands a critical posture. It is one thing to say that I cannot believe in the God of the fathers in the way they believed in Him, it is another thing to wonder as to whether one can believe in Him at all. Faith remains more a struggle than a gift, but for me it is the crucial Jewish struggle, since a Judaism without God strikes me as idolatrous tribalism.

[Malcolm L. Diamond is assistant professor of religion at Princeton and the author of Martin Buber: Jewish Existentialist (1960).]

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Jason Epstein:

I am writing this from Lagos, the capital of Nigeria, a city of several hundred thousand Africans who live for the most part in a sea of excrement and regularly bury their relatives under the living room floor. The squalor is at first overwhelming, but gradually one senses that this does not translate itself directly into human suffering but into a positive, hour-by-hour struggle to survive whose cumulative drama becomes one’s main impression of Lagos. In these circumstances, COMMENTARY’s questions concerning Jewishness seem remote and a little bizarre. But not entirely. There is, for example, the solitary Israeli businessman to be seen in the elevators at the Federal Palace Hotel. He is different from the others. The Japanese go around in threes and fours, always grinning and in the freshest white shirts. They are businessmen too, but they could just as well be table tennis champions. The Germans go about in larger groups, talking endlessly and festooned with cameras and guidebooks, earnest and puzzled. But the Israeli is always to be seen alone, dourly gliding up the elevator shafts clutching his Hebrew newspapers. He seems worried and far away from home. And he reminds me that my contribution to COMMENTARY’s symposium is long overdue.

One’s first thoughts, thinking of the Jews, are of course of the concentration camps which taught us something new about the human condition. We had long suspected the fallibility of our species and theologians have dwelt extensively on human depravity. But nothing had quite prepared us for Auschwitz and as every serious person now knows, our species can never recover the dignity lost in this astonishing demonstration of behavior which would be shocking in wild animals. Jews are also human before they are anything else and therefore what we know to be true of humanity at large, we know must also be true of Jews themselves, even though they happened to be the particular victims of this outrageous suffering. We all have less reason now to be confident that humanity is the culmination of a process tending toward perfection. For those who still have doubts, there is always the hydrogen bomb to contemplate.

These are the first thoughts inspired by COMMENTARY’s questions: that preeminently I represent a biological phenomenon whose value on earth is much to be doubted. One spends his time in the effort to prove the contrary, and in Lagos the opportunities to do so seem to abound, but still one goes about his work somewhat resigned. That I am also a Jew seems relatively unimportant, but perhaps I am missing a point. The facts are these: I was born a Jew of Jewish parents and as far as I know (which is not very far) there have never been any exceptions in my family. My maternal grandparents who are still alive have lived in Maine for sixty years and speak Yiddish with a Yankee accent. My own parents had no interest in Jewishness and I was never confirmed. I was raised in a town where there were no other Jews, and almost no anti-Semitism that I could perceive. If I had looked, I might have found some. But it didn’t occur to me to look. My son, whose name is Jacob, to offset the euphemism of my own, may become a Jew or anything else he chooses. I doubt that I’ll care, though I don’t understand the religious impulse and would be puzzled to find it in him. Many of my friends are Jewish intellectuals, but almost none of my friends are not intellectuals, and most intellectuals are Jews. I don’t really understand this phenomenon, but I doubt that it proves anything about either Jews or intellectuals. I have been in a synagogue three times in my life that I can recall, and the last two occasions were a wedding and a funeral.

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Israel is an admirable experiment about which I know very little but some of whose aims are laudable. It would be good to live in a country where a national language presumably reverberates and where political activity may have real consequences. But I doubt it will work. It is too much a creature of will and not enough the result of long, slow organic history. Like Togoland, or for that matter Disneyland, its foundations are too visible for its future to seem secure. Nor is it mainly the Jewishness that impresses me about Israel but the political skill and creative energy that have gone into it.

I have the impression that the traditional human groupings are on the way out. As we hear of new cultures and watch new societies grow, the old ones seem less inevitable. We are all pretty much alone in the world and if we are honest with ourselves, there is little real comfort to be found in the conventional alignments. Perhaps it would be good to feel oneself engaged in a highly auspicious tradition. But I happen not to and don’t feel at one with those who do.

[Jason Epstein, as editor in chief of Doubleday’s Anchor Books series, was generally credited with having inaugurated the quality paperback revolution in American publishing. He is currently a vice president of Random House and editor in chief of its Modern Library.]

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Irving Feldman:

I doubt that the situation of the Jew in America has changed radically during the past fifteen years—it has only become more so. On the one hand, my generation, which seems to have been born half-assimilated, has grown up; on the other, democratic apostolic inclusiveness has extended itself more generously toward the Jews, largely because circumstances have placed us further this side of xenophobia. Judaism, Jewishness, Jewish identity—these are fundamentally, that is, most vitally, a church constituted by the communion of all individual Jews with the history of the Jewish nation and its relation to God. So, the present existence of the Jewish nation is founded on its sense of its historical continuity and of its election and apartness—after two thousand years how could the Diaspora be anything but an end in itself? or so it seems to me in my relative comfort—and the American assimilation of the Jew must end in the complete digestion of the Jewish nation here. Whether for good or for ill I don’t know, but it seems clear that, in the easily foreseeable future, there will be in America only individual Jewish consciousnesses and personal Jewish identities. And somewhere up above these, the “values inherent in Jewish tradition,” having escaped from the social body that made them meaningful and now grown abstract, mysterious, legendary, transcendent, will float like so much “space junk.” Without a Jewish nation, these “values” and identities can be little more than bibelots, interesting conversation pieces somewhere between the scar of an operation and a bewildering dream.

Perhaps I can add a new instance of this commonly observed phenomenon of decadence-and-transcendence. I am thinking of the shift in the meaning of “messianism.” For the Talmud-centered Jewishness of the disenfranchised, self-contained ghetto and shtetl, messianism was the customary passive expectation of deliverance. But among second-generation American Jews, who, like Kafka’s Chinese “live under no contemporary [Jewish] law,” the Talmud is inoperative and unknown and our main contact with the Jewish past comes through the Bible. We are, so to speak, the involuntary Protestants of Judaism. For my generation, therefore, messianism has largely come to mean a mission, a messiahship in which each Jew must imitate the patriarchs and prophets, in which he is responsible not only for the deliverance of the Jews but also for the perfection of the world (or in which the world is responsible to him for its imperfection) . No living society ever set its members such impossible, deranged tasks.

Those other Jewish values—ethicalness and communalism—that are closest to me have undergone a similar transformation. By “ethicalness,” I mean a sense of living under a broad and clear law, coupled with a desire to reduce all situations to simple moral choices; a capacity for ethical inspiration; a feeling that the soul is at its most healthful tension when one is engaged in judging and blessing, in acting righteously; and, finally, a sense that one’s true adversary can be located and made palpable, can be grappled with. I suppose this is what used to be called the Hebraic spirit. It is old-fashioned and patriarchal, and probably not specifically Jewish. Whatever its provenance, it stands counter to the lust for psychic consumption, the professionalism and cynicism, the mass-anonymity and spurious “personalizations,” the traffic in merely social identities with its accompanying dream of being “alienated,” a stranger, an outsider, the titillations of self-righteousness, and the impalpability of moral choices that go to make up the fog of the American moral climate. But without any tangible and living law, this Jewish ethical appetite now devours itself in endless self-inquisitions, in self-accusation and self-pity. (This is, again, general for all social breakdown and in our time. A great theme of modern literature is the self-consciousness produced when, in Pirandello’s metaphor, there is no “author.”)

Similarly, our communalism—our sense that the Jewish nation is prior to the individual Jew, who possesses, therefore, no private destiny but only the corporate destiny of the Jewish folk—this, too, has ceased to be a ground, has become a burden. The breakdown of the Jewish nation in America has issued, then, in the ultimate persecution of the Jews: our persecution by our own Jewishness, by our sense of having betrayed the Jewish mission. We are the twice-circumcised. Once, to mark us of the nation; again, by our own hands, to mutilate the Jew within us.

And yet those Biblical figures are not solely “self-born mockers of man’s enterprise,” for they enable me to conceive of a “tradition” and “values” that go beyond the categories of a social pathologist who would identify the lost vitality of the corpse before him. Insofar as Jewish tradition is a living thing for me, it is the always enlarging and edifying sentiment, deriving mainly from the Biblical tales I knew as a child, that I live within a community or family extending in space and time far beyond my own biographical circumstances. Telling of the passage of generations, following an Isaac or Jacob from youth into old age, setting these heroic fathers in judgment over the living father, these tales purify the child’s ideals of the accidents of his biography. And so these figures are now the society of my imagination; they provide a source of power that seems to make my knowledge morally sufficient—or would, were I called on to do more than make poems, have thoughts, build systems, take positions.

I have a Romantic painting in my head whose theme is the decline of the Decalogue into the ethics of fair play of the streets of New York. It shows the Marquis of Queensbury receiving the Tables of the Law on Mt. Sinai. Well, this is a moth-eaten image, but let it stand for the incompleteness and confusion of my Jewishness, the neither-American-nor-Jew of the secular Jewishness of many second-generation American Jews. No less moth-eaten is the sentiment—whimsical, embarrassed, nostalgic—that has gone to form this image. Let it stand for my relation to Jewish culture, past and present. A relation that is merely sentimental, made up of feelings more or less strong that never become actual, never develop into choices.

For the rest, my horror of the sacerdotal is such that I would be discomfited were a child of mine to convert to any religion. For the part of me that entertained messianic hopes for the kibbutz movement, the State of Israel is a disappointment; another part of me has learned to enjoy the goods of the Diaspora and welcomes the State of Israel as its scapegoat of salvation.

[Irving Feldman, who teaches English at Kenyon College, has a volume of poems, Works and Days, to be published by Atlantic-Little Brown in September.]

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Herbert Gold:

(1) Fifteen years ago anti-Semitism was still a semi-acceptable social attitude. Now the pressure from outside on individual Jews to remain separate from other Americans has been much diminished. If they still remain partly separate, it is less likely to be because of ghetto habits or fears; but it may also arise from the positive belief that, within the Jewish tradition of finding virtue here and soon, on earth, rather than in heaven, there is an important guide to all the perplexed.

Jewish pleasure in the senses, Jewish risk-taking and daring, Jewish generosity and originality all provide sources of my own non-religious pride in a family tradition. The State of Israel gives special support to a history of holding fast. Today the Jew has an exhilarating choice among several alternatives: to accept Judaism as a religion and/or a national identification, to accept assimilation, or to draw a complex strength from solidarity with Jewish history while remaining nonetheless unambiguously committed to the fate of America. (These complicated choices overlap, of course. No important choice is pure.)

Platonic idealism in various corrupt forms has led the world to the edge of suicide. I hope that something like Jewish practicality—present also in non-Jews!—can build both personal and social means toward the preservation of humankind on earth.

(2) Jewish intellectual socialism was often a curious outcropping of abstraction against a mountain of practical injustices and horrors. The intensity of the Jewish radical’s rebellion against a day-to-day confrontation of reality ran an exact parallel to the intense day-to-day struggle of the majority of American Jews in the commercial community. An element of reaction against the Jewish community will probably diminish as the intellectual’s bond with that community is weakened. Middle-class, time-serving, togethered Jews are too much like all other time-serving, togethered Americans to be singled out for despair. There is a danger here: much of the originality of Jews seemed to come from this tension between their aspirations in the middle—Jewish and non-Jewish hostility at either end. What a waste if psychological homogenizing reduces passion and discipline!

(3) My experience as a Jew partly locates me as an American—especially with the practical, meliorative, answer-seeking side of Americans. It has protected me from the passivity of much of American life: I know that there is no heaven, that like a peddler T can carry only what is on my back and in my head, that what T do is what I am, that I am responsible for my fate. This Jewish acceptance of what the world offers, an energetic rather than a passive acceptance—a continual redefinition of the terms of life—contributes an important element in the American style. As a writer, I find Mark Twain and Thoreau “Jewish” in this way. The Jewish contribution reinforces a general pattern in American life, with individual men of genius sounding their individual notes.

(4)-(5) The implications of Jewish religious doctrine and ritual are important to me. For example, the weakness of the rabbi in the synagogue I find very appealing; the fact that every man follows his own lead in prayer is a significant difference between Judaism and most forms of Christianity. But this pride in Jewish individualism is very far from faith in doctrine. My identification with Jewish aspiration, suffering, and dignity is far from providing a total identification for myself as a Jew. Because of my own history, I choose to describe myself as a Jew—it is a part of my fiber—but I see no way of turning history back for my children. They will know other pains and joys of growth in a different period of history. Vividness cannot be willed outside of the given possibilities of a life. I believe it unlikely that my children will convert to any religion. I would be puzzled if they became religious Jews, also. I suspect that the Temple branch of the Girl Scouts does not provide much stimulus for religious crisis.

The special values which the Jewish people have created and transmitted will survive, if at all, through other institutions than the religious ones. The problems of our lives are political, social, economic, and also moral. I see no chance of solving the ethical problems through a Jewish community life in which the normally religious element has inevitably been “adjusted” to the fact that it is no longer a serious matter except for isolated individuals. Chicken soup and Yiddish jokes will tarry awhile. But the history of the Jews from now on will be one with the history of everybody else.

(6) I feel both a sentimental and social connection with the State of Israel: sentimental because of my history as a Jew, social because of a hope for Israel’s growth as an exemplary force. To some extent this personal interest in Israel is contradictory. But family feeling is strong and can perhaps be justified simply as a fact of human nature (the alternative is the perversity—“Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself—explored in the Platonic dialogue, “The Euthyphro”).

The freshness of danger, the vigor and intelligence disposed for public purposes, the sense of public hope which permeates life in Israel—these elements bring me closer to Israel than to the American Jewish community. Though for it too I suffer complex family attitudes, as I do for all of American life, which I despise, hate, fear, admire, relish, love. The American Jewish community is most important to me as a writer because it is a mirror in which the rest of America can be seen. Like all mirrors, it invites distortion.

[Herbert Gold is the author of two collections of short stories and four novels, the latest of which, Therefore Be Bold, was published last year.]

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Enoch Gordis:

(1) Bigotry is less fashable nowadays, due in part to relative prosperity, in part to frequent public presentations of intergroup problems. This change has no bearing on my attitudes toward Judaism.

(2) I refrain from the obvious detailed exposition of the combination of rebelliousness, Selbsthass, and idealism which spawned the Jewish socialist, who, by the way, owed much to the tradition he despised. I believe there is no viable element in this movement, because being Jewish is now respectable in America and the welfare state has adopted much of the old socialist platform.

(3) Jewish culture has many subtle and indirect influences on American life. But to determine if in total they are significant, consider for a moment what would happen if all the Jews were to disappear from America. Except for the loss of a slight Yiddish tone to New York City, the change would be undetectable in that America which extends from the Atlantic to the far Pacific.

(4) The two words in defining a person’s relation to his tradition, “historical reverence” and “obligation,” are not equivalent. I may have great regard for a museum of antiquities and not want to fill my house with them. On the other hand, participation in cyclic rituals and institutional activities does not necessarily imply a genuine regard for the tradition they are supposed to be part of.

My present position is an often inconsistent mixture of conviction, habit, and weighted practical alternatives.

I am firmly rooted in the Jewish tradition, having grown up happily in a richly Jewish home. I believe that in four key respects Judaism is unsurpassed in Western religion. (A) It has consistently applied its ethical insights, for which its spokesmen showed a remarkable talent very early in history, to a variety of mundane matters, at the same time keeping its sights on distant goals such as universal peace. (B) It is explicitly tolerant of other points of view. (C) It makes minimum demands on credulity, and concentrates on the human, physical, and practical. Knowledge and action are paramount over faith. It is refreshingly free from cloying otherworldliness, emetic concern for the “soul,” and biological nonsense. (D) It has led, in its adherents, to a frequent and attractive combination of attitudes: idealism and skepticism.

This much said for the “reverence,” I now confess that my feeling of “obligation” has been attentuated for several reasons. (A) I can accept no theology, since theological assertions are invariably arranged so that experimental validation of their consequences is logically as well as practically impossible. (B) Ethical insights, in my view, are in principle derivable from many sources, so the Jewish religion and others are dispensable in this regard. I must also reject the theological concept of sin when applied to both unethical behavior, and, a fortiori, ritual disobedience. (C) I am impatient with institutional activities, and find the quality of verbal and musical expression in communal worship intolerably bad.

Pushed to their legitimate conclusion, these attentuating forces might render my “obligation” nil. For several reasons, however, I have not wished to throw out the whole structure despite its unacceptable philosophic foundation. (A) The holiday observances and many of the home rituals are beautiful, and like any art which has taken centuries to find its current expression, they ought not to be dismissed without seriously considering whether the loss is not greater than the gain in consistency. The values which the holidays stress and ornament are those to which I subscribe, despite my rejection of their “official” derivation. Deaf to any “divine imperative,” I reserve the right to choose my observances. (B) A significant gap in the emotional resources of many modern children is their inability to feel reverence for anything. Reverence is an attitude which must be learned, and once learned, is transferred easily to new areas. Children learn it by seeing adults behave in a manner that suggests that solemn, important, and permanent things are being considered. Regarded in this light, the unacceptable philosophic basis for many observances should be occasionally neglected. (C) If the Jewish tradition is not indispensable for the derivation of ethics, it certainly has served as the vehicle for their transmission. The Jewish tradition is the one whose language I know, whose nuances I fathom, whose insights are expressed in a variety of contexts with which I identify. I can summon no other language to speak them to my children. I do not doubt, however, that my position leads to a gradual attrition of the specifically Jewish after a few generations, but for me, at present, there is no alternative.

(5) I believe that most Americans can lead a fruitful, decent, and happy life in any of the popular religious traditions. I have the uneasy feeling that in most cases, religious conversion in America in any direction reflects more on the emotional instability of the person involved than on the merits of the religions. Ignorance of one’s own traditions is an ancillary cause. What my wife and I can do to repair the ignorance our children were born with and to make them secure, we will do. After that, the future is out of our hands, and I spend no more time worrying about conversion than about the possibility they may some day have diabetes.

(6) Israel has and will continue to have my sympathy. Israel, however, is not concerned with my sympathy except when it leads to financial support or useful pressure on Washington.

That the zeal of the “kibbutzniks” and other early settlers reflected the ultimate in the practice of Jewish ethics is obvious. It would be naive to expect anything other than what has happened: a thinning out of the initial idealism, and the emergence of racial bigotry, political machinations, and an excess of nationalism. Whatever the proportion of the wonderful and the less-than-wonderful in Israel—and the former predominates—it is meaningless to ask whether Israel “embodies” Jewish values more than America. Israel is the continuing Jewish tradition, the tradition which contains villains and fools, as well as prophets and scholars.

[Enoch Gordis, M.D., received his specialist training in internal medicine at Mt. Sinai hospital and is now a research fellow at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research.]

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Philip Green:

As a political radical I take an oblique approach to the subject matter of this symposium. My feelings about both Jewishness and American society derive from my radicalism and suggest essentially a single answer to the various questions you have listed for discussion.

As I understand it, the ethical tradition of Judaism is, like the ethical tradition of Christianity, on the whole incompatible with the practical requirements of the kind of society we have created in the Western world. I believe that Christianity has long since clearly betrayed its origins (with the exception of a few minor sects such as the Quakers). About Judaism, however, I feel somewhat differently. Although the Jewish tradition undoubtedly contains many elements of authoritarianism, it also has had a strong undercurrent of concern for humaneness and social justice throughout its existence. Due perhaps to the enforced social isolation and minority status of Jews wherever they lived—which of necessity impelled at least a passive resistance to the organized societies around them—that aspect of the Jewish tradition was for a long time able to remain partially true to itself, and continually to produce a leavening ferment of teachers and prophets who helped to justify Judaism’s existence; at least until the recent past, that is, Jewish life could in some sense be held meaningfully accountable to that part of the Jewish tradition. I am greatly concerned, therefore, that the twin advent in the West of “Liberalism” and modern nationalism, with their doctrine of national citizenship for all (which tends to integrate minority groups into the greater society), are in the process threatening to destroy the little that has remained of the integrity of Jewish culture—the integrity inherent in being an opposition element in the modern world.

American liberalism in particular has presented its (immigrant) minority groups with a simple, attractive, and ultimately destructive prospect. If they were but willing to discard their traditional cultural values—values which have usually been reactionary with regard to the pursuit of capitalist affluence—they would then be allowed to participate with almost equal opportunity in the fight for material well-being which has been the most obvious value of American society. Since the end of poverty and even of persecution and discrimination (though I think much of the latter still remains) is held out as the reward of full assimilation, it cannot be surprising that most Jews, in common with their fellow-immigrants, have snatched at the offer.

But what a price the reward carries with it! Everything positive which was contained in the culture the immigrant Jews brought with them (and though I know of it only through hearsay, I feel quite certain that it was profoundly superior to the dominant culture of their new nation) has been given up along with the ghetto: smashed, shattered, almost totally destroyed. For what? Not for the fine words of the Declaration of Independence (that might have been a fair trade), but for the casual acceptance of violence and corruption, the pursuit of the fast buck, and the uncompromising “cash nexus” between man and man, which together constitute so crucial a part of American culture during the past century. All that is left from the old ways is a vague sense of social responsibility—the welfare board syndrome; all that can be said for American Jews is that perhaps slightly more than other Americans they attempt to demonstrate the truth of Adam Smith’s contention that the pursuit of private good adds up to an overall public good, but the connection between the two types of “good” grows more tenuous every day. Too often, they go into the professions and charge high fees and try to avoid wasting too much time in the clinics; they move to the suburbs and adopt the peculiarly complete form of selfishness that pervades suburban America; worst of all, they move South and learn to “understand” the abomination of segregation. Seeing their choice as one between “Americanism” and Judaism, and electing to choose the former whenever a real conflict arises, they have lost sight of the one alternative which would be true to the essential meaning of each: to behave as humane individuals building a humane society.

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All this would be much more acceptable if the Jewish intellectuals too were not implicated in the trend which finds salvation in the capitalist welfare state. When the intellectuals “assimilate” and “accommodate,” then nothing defensible can be left of Jewish values. For the role of Jewish intellectuals especially should be the role of all intellectuals, anywhere: to dissent, to oppose, to prophesy. The Jewish socialists and other radicals of the earlier part of this century were no doubt shortsighted in some ways: they emphasized material goals too much, and thus were hopelessly compromised by the economic achievements of World War II and the postwar welfare state. Otherwise, however, the only thing wrong with their political tradition is the ease with which so many of them have abandoned it. When they belonged to the broad community of radical politics, they were being faithful to the profoundest traditions of Jewish thought; now that they have deserted that community, they have lost their vocation. They are no longer anything but hangers-on, back-stoppers to the real wielders of power. As such, they share responsibility for every injustice that is permitted to exist in the name of the system which they uphold with tenacious conformity.

Perhaps in a society which was progressively making itself into an approximation of The Good Society, dissent might become superfluous (I doubt it, though). But our society is moving in quite another direction, toward the inhumane combination of neo-feudalism and quasi-totalitarianism that has been perceived and described by Roderick Seidenberg, Lewis Mumford, Erich Kahler, and Erich Fromm, among others. Real political freedom (that is, a genuine relationship to the decision-making process) has become a luxury; the individual’s economic freedom is almost completely restricted, except for the ability to engage in the mad consumptionism that rarely gives full satisfaction. The ranks of the millions of exploited remain substantially undiminished since the New Deal, and new—“modern”—methods of exploitation are constantly being devised; the true community of a shared social existence which respects equally both the individual and the group does not exist.

In such a situation a Jew can best fulfill his moral obligations not by becoming especially involved in “the Jewish community” (which is not really a community at all); nor by joining up wholeheartedly with the Americanized majority; but by joining the community of radical political action (as well as by exemplary personal behavior). If one feels, as I do, that some of the special values which have been nurtured by Jewish life—humaneness, resistance to mechanized organized society, an emphasis on social justice—can enrich that community, it will be enough of a “Jewish” contribution to American life and culture to maintain and transmit them. On the other hand, where elements of Judaism conflict with the necessities of radical action and thought, I would drop them instantly, as radical Jews have often done in the past, and call upon others to do the same. For the commitment to broaden the contours of human freedom and justice must take precedence over everything else; to me, the Jewish tradition has no meaning except when it is incident to that greater tradition.

Finally: the commitment I speak of should of course be transmitted to one’s children as far as possible. To the extent that it is bound up in one’s own mind with one’s Jewishness, that too should of course be transmitted—not by means of the formal institutions (which to me seem all too irrelevant), but through the explanation and example of one’s total ethical outlook and daily behavior. To do less would be a breach of faith with oneself.

[Philip Green is an assistant in instruction in the politics department of Princeton University, and has been a contributor to the New Republic]

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Andrew Hacker:

(1) What concerns me is the increasing acceptance of Jews by institutions which have hitherto been closed to them, and the effects of this acceptance upon our outlook and behavior. My feelings on this matter were aroused as a result of what I observed when I was at college a dozen years ago. I went to a small New England college which had thirteen fraternities, none of them Jewish. In the pre-war years this did not matter: the admissions policy of the college was candidly anti-Semitic and there were never enough Jews on the campus to set up a fraternity chapter of their own. Since the end of the war, however, not only has the college been admitting a high proportion of Jews, but in addition the fraternities have been exhibiting an unusual tolerance. Each house takes in several Jews each year, with the result that these students are soon bound in brotherhood to their Gentile classmates. The Jewish boys half-consciously understand that they are expected to dress, talk, act like the Gentiles who have embraced them—though this is never suggested in so many words. They keep their academic grades hovering near the house average; they tend to date Gentile girls. Wanting acceptance, we bend over backward in an exhibit of gratitude when that acceptance is forthcoming. I think we have reached the point where we are blurring the distinction between admittance and acceptance. (Negroes understand this distinction better than we do. They have to.) Quite clearly this problem is going to become accentuated in the whirl of suburban life, in corporate employment, in academic preferment. The toleration we have so long asked for is now beginning to have consequences that we may not have the strength to resist.

(2) I have never doubted that Jewish socialism was genuine protest against injustice. But it must also be understood as yet another expression of the Jews’ alienation from the established community. Except for isolated pockets, the socialism is gone; the alienation has certainly diminished. The radicalism of the pre-war years was, to my mind, less important as a political movement : its chief contribution was the development among its adherents of a shrewd understanding of man and society. As social scientists Jews have always possessed a profound insight. It does not matter what ideological labels we now assign to men like Ricardo, Marx, Durkheim, or Freud. What is important is that their insight derived from their ability to stand off from society—even from themselves—and see the world as others could not. What impresses me, furthermore, is that so many of the eminent Jewish social scientists of today received their first exposure to the intellectual world as socialists in the 30’s. This is not to say that the Marxist lens gave them an accurate depiction of reality. But the Marxist posture encouraged these young students to ask significant questions and to by-pass conventional approaches. The profit, in other words, was intellectual rather than political. My generation has undergone no such initiation. And our work shows it. In terms of the breadth of the subjects we choose for study and in terms of, the power of imagination we bring to bear, our efforts are markedly inferior. An intellectual who was a Marxist in the 30’s never forgets all of his adolescent lessons. No one should apologize for having such a past, and it is important to note that a substitute for it has yet to be found.

(3)-(4)-(5) The phrase “experience as a Jew” is the key one for me here. Most of my experience has not been as a Jew: the Gentile world has been too hospitable to impress my Jewishness upon me. (Personal note: I do not look like a Jew, my name is not Jewish, people do not usually react to me as a Jew. All this contributes.) What is important, then, is that the environment is not hostile; circumstances do not drive me to find an identity in Jewish culture and the Jewish tradition. But yet: I have a deep pride in this culture and tradition. We are superior people—not innately, but because our history has brought out the best in us. (As a teacher in an Ivy League college I am in a position to see that the watershed has been reached. We now admit dumb Jews to my university, not just a handful of smart ones. I suppose some will call it a sign of progress that dumb Jews now have equality of treatment with dumb Gentiles.) Obligations? To continue to retain a Jewish self-consciousness despite the temptations to become a thoroughly assimilated American. (I do not mean becoming a Christian-American; I mean becoming an American-American.) These temptations are particularly powerful because the American establishment is especially happy when Jewish writers and intellectuals celebrate the American way. Jewish praise for American virtues finds a readier market, I often think, than that falling from white Anglo-Saxon Protestant lips. My children? I do not believe that the problem is conversion to Christianity. for one is always a Jew if one’s parents are, as any convert soon learns. The problem is intermarriage. However, it is a bit idle to talk of so shaping my children’s environment that they will marry Jews as a matter of course. After all, I am happily married to a shikse myself, and if I do have suppressed guilt feelings (who can tell?), it is hardly fair to take them out on my children.

(6) I have a profound feeling of identification with Israel, and I have a frank distaste for American Jews who try to disclaim their obligations toward that beleaguered nation. Some of us, I suspect, are trying too hard to be good Americans—100 per cent loyal and no room left over for alien sympathies. But let me be altogether frank in stating what is my personal dilemma. I am also pro-Nasser. I know as well as any Jew that his United Arab Republic presents a mortal threat to Israel. I fervently wish he would turn his aggressive impulses elsewhere. Furthermore, I regard Israel as an advanced nation (probably more sophisticated than the United States), whereas Nasser’s UAR is “underdeveloped” in quite a few senses of that term. But I also know that Nasser is carrying out a genuine social revolution in his country and I am fully persuaded that he has the future on his side.

(For the same reasons I sympathize with the Algerian rebel FLN, even though as Moslems they too are potential enemies of Israel.)

In our anxiety over Israel’s survival and in our concern for the general security of Western interests, we are apt to forget that the leaders of new nations deserve our encouragement. Nasser stands in the company of Nkrumah of Ghana, Toux6 of Guinea, Sukarno of Indonesia, and (yes) Castro of Cuba. I believe that he—like them—is dedicated to bettering the condition of life of the ordinary men and women in his part of the world. I am on his side because he represents something I welcome: the awakening of the non-white non-Western world. But I am also on the side of Israel without reservation or qualification. Such an ambiguity of outlook is both tragic and impossible: conciliation and compromise are as far off now as they ever have been. One solution is to get Nasser involved in African affairs, not simply in Algeria but south of the Sahara as well. But I am groping for an answer, and I freely admit my quandary.

[Andrew Hacker is assistant professor of government at Cornell, and the author of Political Theory: Philosophy, Ideology, Science, published in February by Macmillan.]

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Nat Hentoff:

(1) There is markedly less overt anti-Semitism, although there is a considerable residue of diffused distrust of the Jew in large sections of the society. In fear of rejection (less conscious perhaps than it used to be), a majority of Jews—including most of the younger suburbanites—still limit their social relations largely to contacts with other Jews. In this respect, I feel now about my own Jewishness as I did fifteen and more years ago. I reject the perpetuation among many Jews (whose other ties to Jewish culture, let alone religion, are as tenuous as mine) of tight islands of mutual “acceptance.” I include Jewish fraternities and sororities, Jewish country clubs, and those absurd Conservative and Reform “temples” where God has become honorary chairman of the UJA, and the Jewish past—when it is evoked at all—is embarrassedly sentimentalized according to the Haggadah of Paddy Chayefsky.

(2) I mourn—uselessly—the absence of that generation of Jewish socialists who considered it an obligation and joy to radically question the organization of society (its values as well as its system of production). Certainly there are viable elements in the tradition they represented, but most of those who remain have become all too respectable labor leaders such as David Dubinsky (try to start an old, unrestrained Yiddishe debate in that union) or such daring, empirical intellectuals as Max Lerner, whose flaccid optimism is an all too symptomatic omnibus of “liberal” clich6s. There are a few young Jewish radicals who are roughly in the older tradition, but most of them are involved in literary and cultural criticism rather than in politics or in labor. Most of today’s “engaged” young “political” Jews are careful warriors in “reform” politics, or if particularly adventurous, in the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy. Activity that might lead to more organic and distinctly more uncomfortable social and emotional dislocation is generally regarded as “naive” and “unrealistic.” (And what, incidentally, have the younger Jews in Southern congregations been saying publicly about integration? Jews of all generations in the South, in fact, have with very few exceptions been disgracefully self-involved with their own “status” in the community since the Supreme Court decision desegregating schools.)

(3) Growing up as a Jew, I very early and involuntarily acquired some understanding of and empathy with other minorities. I expect, in short, that my concern with civil liberties was first stimulated by being beaten up as a child because I was Jewish. Also, the almost compulsive respect for learning with which I was imbued certainly influenced my early addiction to reading. (Obviously, I could have been exposed to this emphasis on intellect in many other kinds of families, but I was taught that this was a rather special vocation of “my people,” and accordingly, I may have been even more spurred by this feeling of a tribal obligation not to be a dummy.)

I also, however, reacted negatively to some aspects of my Jewish upbringing; and in that sense, my present beliefs and neuroses are “partly a product of Jewish tradition,” or at least the Jewish tradition I knew. I reacted, over-reacted, to what seemed to me the suffocating “closeness” of Jewish family life which was seldom a spontaneously loving and raging inter-reaction, but rather an almost codified attempt by the parents to finally live a life, through their children. (This kind of “closeness” is hardly exclusive to Jewish families, but I rather think that the “Yiddishe Mamma,” by and large, is a particularly lethal example of her international, interracial type.)

I also tried to resist that community contempt for the “goyishe kop” which was, of course, one way to keep warm but which produced its own quota of smugness.

I expect, too, that my sense of humor, such as it is, is at least in part “generically” Jewish, although I increasingly find it not too dissimilar from Negro wit, for the usual obvious reasons. I suppose that what I most owe to having been brought up a Jew (in Boston, a particularly anti-Semitic city) was the early realization that I had to depend on myself to get where I thought I might be going. I was conscious of myself as a Jew before I was especially aware of being an “American”; and I don’t regret that sequence because the initial feeling of rootlessness insofar as that specific place and culture were concerned made me more “self-reliant,” in a way. Later came the acculturation; but being somewhat detached by then, I was able—I think—to be somewhat more selective as to what I chose to be assimilated into. As to whether Jewish culture now exerts a significant influence upon American life, what vital, viable body of Jewish culture is left in America? Jewish culture has become thoroughly influenced by American life. No, I do not think Norman Mailer is a “Jewish” writer.

(4) I feel “historical reverence” (your phrase, not mine) and obligations to parts of many traditions, including the Jewish; but I’m not so sure I give priority to the Jewish tradition, having learned more, I feel, from such as Montaigne, Dostoevsky, and Bessie Smith than from my admittedly meager readings in Jewish literature, history, and thought. I do feel “historical reverence” for the Jews’ stubborn capacity for survival; but I do not feel there is now a meaningful, autocthonous, continually questioning Jewish tradition per se in America.

I feel no more involvement with the Jewish “community” as a whole than I do with any community. I suppose, in fact, that I currently feel most involved with that section of the Negro community which, while fighting out of its ghetto, is also beginning to question just what it is being “integrated” into. Most “regular” members of the contemporary Jewish community have never thought to ask that question.

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With regard to my children, I expect to tell them what I consider to be those elements of the Jewish past in which they can take whatever pride they may choose to as nominal Jews (for that is exactly what they are, having had even less actual contact with the shape and touch and smell of the Jewish past than I did). I do believe there were special values, good and bad, in that past; but in America, those values have become thoroughly blended into the over-all unspecialness of most of our lives.

It will not be as Jews primarily that my children will retain and develop their individuality—if they do. Nor, I hope, will it be primarily as Americans or as members of any other nation-state, religion, etc. I have no illusions that cultural pluralism will end, nor desire for its decline, but I’d like its manifestations to become considerably less restrictive and tribal. I, for example, do not recognize Israel’s “right” to try Eichmann.

(5) As an atheist, I hope my children will have no need for any “religion,” Judaism included. In any case, since their only present religious observance in a home that is not mine is the lighting of Chanukah candles (sometimes with a Christmas tree as backdrop), they could hardly “convert” from anything. If they do eventually choose a religion, I would prefer it not to be either the empty and atavistic ritualism of Orthodox Judaism or the dull charades of Conservative and Reform Judaism. Nor, however, do I have an alternate choice. Better they should stay off both religion and fried foods.

(6) Emotionally, I am drawn to the idea of Israel as a beginning again for those Jews who had no other places to go or no places they wanted to go. I am glad there finally is a “home,” however chauvinistic, for any Jew anywhere who wants one—and can get out of where he is. It could not be a home for me, however. I am decidedly unsympathetic to the way Ben Gurion has tried to run the country as a personal fief (nor am I a partisan of the equally “benevolent” Big Brotherism represented by Lavon). I object to such understandable but no less noxious anachronisms as “state religion,” laws concerning intermarriage, etc. Basically, I feel thoroughly disconnected from the proliferation in microcosm in Israel of the chronic, aggressive insecurities of all nation-states. (If there were no United Arab Republic, Ben Gurion would have had to invent one.)

As for Israel’s embodiment of “the values of the Jewish tradition,” I expect it does (though not for long) come closer to a more sharply defined if partial practice of some of those traditions, good and bad, than does the vapid American Jewish community.

[Nat Hentoff conducts a regular column in the Village Voice, and has contributed to a wide variety of magazines, including the New Yorker, Esquire, and the Reporter. He is co-editor of three volumes on jazz.]

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John Hollander:

My experience as a Jew is fundamentally relevant to the nature of my experience as an American. It helps to resolve an otherwise ambiguous picture, just as to say that I am in my early thirties, a New Yorker by birth, an academic, and a writer would do.

The question of Jewish identity for writers and intellectuals has in the past fifteen years grown more complicated and at the same time easier to finesse. The over-all situation for the Jew in American life is now more comfortable than it has been since, perhaps, the early years of the 19th century. During the Eisenhower era synagogue affiliation became as respectable—in large urban centers, at any rate—as compliance with the age’s balmy injunction to “attend the church of your choice.” For intellectuals, the situation has been even more gratifying. Disaffiliated, for the most part, from formal observance; cognitively aware, in varying degrees, of Jewish history and tradition; emotionally linked to a past made viable for them only insofar as it has engaged their own personal histories; sharing a sense of confraternity in a group markedly effective in shaping the very notion of the urban intellectual in America (vide Question 2); their lot improved by lacunae in the boundaries against Jewish participation in certain academic fields and in the demi-professions which publicly disseminate The Word; and at the same time unconcerned with the kind of social discrimination against Jews that still obtains in the world of resort hotels and country clubs (their attitude being that if bores want to exclude each other’s company on any ground, who could care less?)—Jewish intellectuals in the post-World War II years have in some ways contrived to eat their cake and have it too.

The irony of all this, it seems to me, is that—aside from the dubious significance of knish-eating by gubernatorial candidates, the passage of many Yiddish expressions into the lingua franca of part of the entertainment world, the emergence of suburban, center-oriented Reform congregations as something rather resembling a kind of liberal Protestant sect, and the like—the only interesting influence of Jewish traditions on American life has been exerted, sometimes indirectly, by intellectuals, including some who feel somewhat ambivalent toward those traditions. The elements of Jewish tradition which they pass on are those comprising a kind of critical secular humanism, ironic and historic, valuable to society because of its vantage point, complicatedly alienated from society at large and from society’s official notion of what the Jewish community, as a proper subgroup of it, ought to be.

I suppose that Jewish intellectuals show a broad spectrum of associations and ambivalences toward their own identities. In their case, the ever-operating dialectic of identification and assimilation of the Jewish community at large is intensified and rendered more complex. The question is perhaps not so much of the degree of assimilation, but of the level at which it takes place. Individual differences of background and training are important here, as are the various ways in which individual writers and thinkers emerge from their early homes.

In my own case, for example, I learned what little Yiddish I know only the way my mother learned it, on the basis of previously learned German. My sense of “Jewish tradition” is bound to differ from that of my friends whose homes as children were Yiddish-speaking, whether or not their thinking lives have crystallized around a rejection or a cultivation of this background. Perhaps my sense of tradition, too, may seem superficially a bit factitious.

My own background is that of the parochial New York liberal with enlightened second-and-third-generation parents (kashrut continued up to the death of grandparents, Reconstructionism, private Hebrew teachers for my brother and myself) whose Judaism was intellectualized and somewhat self-conscious. My wife is only part Jewish and not “Talmudically” so. As an academic, I am part of a generation who might never have entered the formerly genteel, gentleman-scholarly field of literary studies were it not for the impingement upon it of urban intellectual life. Aside from some literary scholarship and criticism, my own writing has been primarily poetry. The situation of the contemporary Jewish novelist or literary journalist (in the best sense), vis-à-vis his identity, is different from that of a poet, I think. The former tends more to start out as a writer by confronting his identity in the most general way; and if his Jewishness does not come up somewhere in the course of this confrontation, we tend to suspect its authenticity. The poet’s problems, in the past forty years in particular, concern themselves at the outset with language and form, style and rhetoric. His quest for his own “voice” aims toward two goals. The first of these, to be sure, is the discovery of himself. But the other is the discovery of the woof, as it were, of the English language and its traditions onto which the warp of the self is woven. That is why a writer like myself may appear to be slow in arriving at a topical treatment of Jewishness. Such a “discovery” can only come along with the poetic (as opposed to the pragmatic) “discovery” of such domains as the significance of one’s sexuality, one’s sense of the real, and, ultimately, of one’s mortality.

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About the “values of Jewish tradition”—discussion of this often bogs down in persuasive definitions of what it really is. I identify it with modern Galut in its various phases (I should include here the recent intellectual tradition described in Question 2). The days of the Temple, prophetic ages, and even the rabbinic period remain myths of a golden age whose legacy of scripture must be read with a method of n-fold interpretation that makes the early Christian allegorizing of the Old Testament pale into relative literalism. Practically speaking, I see nothing in conventional affiliations with synagogue-stimulated Jewish culture that would bring me any closer to “tradition” or to enable me better to transmit it. If I ever decide to study Mishnah, I know where to do it. Worship I detest. Self-congratulation I distrust. In another age, my anti-clericalism would not preclude my affiliation with the synagogue. In America today, unfortunately, it does, and I have no personal disposition toward the modern neo-Orthodoxy itself modeled in good part upon developments in Protestantism.

About my daughter possibly converting—I view the prospect, along with other prospects, with some horror. In this, as in other cases, I shall not be consulted. I also view with milder horror my desire to manipulate her destiny. In this matter I feel that no ad hoc contrivance could work, and that if I am selfishly pleased with what happens to her, her sense of a complicated ambiguous Jewish identity will in the long run increase her capacities for knowledge and love.

About Israel—again, I have complicated feelings. On the one hand is the sense of the human necessity of a place for a rejected remnant to go. There is the kind of family joke aspect of the very idea of a Jewish polls. But I have also a mild distrust of any political entity currently founded on a notion of manifest destiny, theological or otherwise, and a real bewilderment at the level of Realpolitik. Pros and cons of colonialism, self-determinism, international justice, and the ultimate preservation of the planet (which is either a meaningless consideration or the most important one of all) are involved here in very confusing ways.

Henry James observed of all articulate Americans that our “complex fate” was to have constantly to struggle against our over-evaluation of Europe. Just so must the Jewish intellectual wrestle with his tendency to shape himself to a role as Jew into which sympathetic European non-Jewish writers and thinkers have sought to cast him. But it is always hard to look into mirrors and decide which of one’s attitudes and gestures are less authentic than others.

Perhaps it is finally to describe my position to say that I observe the complexity of the attitudes I have here expressed with great interest and some exhilaration.

[John Hollander, who teaches English at Yale, is the author of A Crackling of Thorns, which won the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1958, and the recently published critical study, The Untuning of the Sky. He is also Partisan Review’s editorial associate for poetry, and a contributor to many periodicals.]

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Judith Jarvis:

Normally, I suppose, I haven’t any attitude toward my own Jewishness, because normally I’m not aware of it. The question seems to me to be this: on what sorts of occasions is one made aware of it. I say “made aware of it” rather than “become aware of it” because for those of us whose parents were born in America, and whose homes were in no profound way touched by Jewishness—no more than a smattering of religious training, which it was clear to us, was not taken seriously at home, and a smattering of Yiddish tags and phrases, and certain kinds of food for Sunday breakfast and supper, and large family dinners with the relatives—for those of us, that is, whose parents had already rebelled against the Orthodox traditions before we were born, there is nothing in being Jewish which is present in us in daily life as a matter of course. A cue from outside is necessary to remind us of it. And for many quite obvious reasons, there are fewer jolts and shocks from outside than there were fifteen to twenty years ago.

But while the cues no longer come in the violent form they took then, no Jew living in a society as saturated with the forms and language of Christianity as America is can fail from time to time to be reminded of the fact that he is a Jew. One doesn’t fear anti-Semitism, one doesn’t in fact fear anything at all—but one is reminded: when political conventions are opened with a prayer, when one meets the expressions “Christian country” and “Jewish vote,” when hymns are sung at the opening or closing of meetings whose purpose is totally non-religious. In fact, anything that smacks of religion at all will do the trick.

Of course no one intends anti-Semitism, nor do I take these reminders as anti-Semitic. The hymns are chosen with care, and no one could possibly take offense. Christmas is the (exhausting) season during which one goes to parties and gives and receives presents.

But the curious thing is that these things should remind us of being Jewish. I think the reason lies in just the sort of non-religious background I mentioned. One meets very few actively practicing Catholics in and around a large university; when a Catholic turns against his religion, he will hesitate before calling himself a Catholic in a way in which a non-believing Jew will not, and yet, however opposed he may now be to religious articles of faith in general, he can understand how it is that others may retain their faith. Perhaps there are several reasons for this, but at any rate one reason seems to be the fact that he was raised in his religion, and there was no ambiguity of attitude toward it in his home. The striking characteristic about us, on the other hand, is that we find it quite incredible that anyone should actively believe in a body of religious dogma. That our children should convert to another religion no more strikes us as a real possibility than that they should convert to Judaism itself. It fascinates us to think that there are those who believe, and we may even try to provoke such beliefs in ourselves, but in the end we cannot really imagine what it is like.

It would be absurd to call this “emancipation from superstition” on our part. Its source is probably a more subtle kind of fear, fear of the possibility of anti-Semitism, of the possible effects of adherence to dogma; after all, only the Jewish non-believer is so intimately affected by these marks of religious belief in others. But, as I said, I am aware of no such fear. And the only thing to which I can consciously trace this utter inability to understand the feelings of the true believer is the sense I had from my earliest years that belief was not demanded of me, that it was not even expected that I should or supposed that I would. Belief had no role to play. Judaism itself of course calls for very little active belief in dogma, and so the religious training (particularly my own Reform training) could not outweigh the casual attitude of my home.

One is, in America, very often reminded of religion, and of the existence of those for whom belief has a role to play, or at least of those for whom it appears to have a role to play. If I lived on a kibbutz, I should probably not think of myself as a Jew from one year to the next. It is because I am an American that I am aware of it. In just the same way as one finds oneself aware of being an American only while in Europe.

Israel, in fact, seems to play a rather curious role in this matter of being a Jew. In my image of it, there are four types of Israelis: first, the Orthodox Jew with a beard and black coat and broad-brimmed black hat; with him one feels an immediate sense of kinship. He’s the only real Jew in Israel, and he isn’t even an Israeli: one can find him in any large city in America. Then there are the shopkeepers and dentists. These are like our parents; they don’t really belong in Israel, they just happen to live there. Third, there is the Oxford-educated diplomat; he isn’t a Jew at all. And last, the fair-haired, Aryan-looking sabra (khaki shorts, open collar, he stands on a hilltop and gazes into the future)—he’s a rather frightening figure. Lurid fantasy: the sabras having themselves a pogrom, and throwing the Jews out of Israel. No, now that there is no longer the kind of need for an Israel that there was some years ago, I no longer feel any commitment to or personal sympathy with it. (Though I do feel I’ve a stake in the comfort of those bearded Jews.)

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People say: so is there no content to being a Jew? Is it all defensive, negative? Well, perhaps there isn’t much, but to say there isn’t much isn’t to say there isn’t anything. “Jewish culture” isn’t what does it; I suppose this expression stands for Talmudic study and the Yiddish storytellers, and these, as I said, we had only a nodding acquaintance with in childhood. The “value inherent in Jewish tradition”? Respect for the book, for books in general, let us say. But there are other traditions in which one finds this. And in fact, too much of it—that is, where it hinders direct looking at and listening to the world—can be a bad thing; it is perhaps one reason why, with just one major exception, and that a man who was excommunicated for his pains, there have been no important philosophers (as opposed to philosopher-theologians) in our tradition. Only in the present century is good philosophy being written by Jews. Nevertheless, respect for books is a part of our tradition. And add a conviction that social distinctions are fundamentally irrelevant. Add energy and patience and the capacity to survive—one is reminded of Plato’s image of the just man crouched down under the wall, waiting for the storm to pass. And above all, an intense concern with moral issues. These things are worthy of respect; and a sense that one springs from this is part of the positive content of the belief that one is a Jew.

And together with this there are certain characteristics which we share—the sound of Yiddish moves us and we like certain kinds of food. We like a joke, and our humor has a distinctive wry irony. “Oh, if it’s just that . . .” people often say, forgetting that what may be insignificant standing alone may figure importantly when conjoined with other things. Being a Jew is not having a religion, it is like having a nationality—Judaism is not international—and these, and others, are our national characteristics. They persist just as any set of national characteristics does; some of our foods, for example, everyone likes, but others only a Jew likes. Loves, in fact, and his children learn to do the same. Moreover, these things just by themselves constitute a tie with the past. So far as I can see, one need not make any special effort to transmit these characteristics, and the past history they are associated with, to one’s children—so far as I can see, our children will be Jews in both these negative and positive senses no matter what we may think or do about it.

[Judith Jarvis is assistant professor of philosophy at Barnard College, and has contributed to Mind, the Journal of Philosophy, and other periodicals.]

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Elihu Katz:

(1) The situation of the Jew. Certainly the situation of the Jew has changed. Jews, nowadays, are more interested in Jewishness—and non-Jews are interested too. The relevant factors are widely agreed upon: apart from the openness of American social structure and the doctrine of minority rights, the more immediate factors include (a) the reaffirmation of these rights in connection with the war effort; (b) the agony, and the guilt, of bearing witness to the destruction of European Jewry; (c) the redemptive joy in the triumphant emergence of Israel; (d) the rise of a third generation, unself-consciously American; (e) the cessation of Jewish immigration and, with it, Jewish visibility (imagined or real); (f) the decline of radical social movements (and Jewish participation therein) along with economic prosperity and ideological second thoughts; (g) the religious “revival” in America and the continued respectability of religious pluralism.

There has been a decided decline in self-hatred, I feel. All the indices show increased (if shallow) participation in Jewish affairs—though these center, more narrowly, in and around the synagogue. Ideologies of “defense” seem to be losing ground to a “that’s their problem” attitude toward the American brand of anti-Semitism. In academia, Jews feel at least as much at home as anybody else, and I suspect that this is true, more or less, of most other pursuits (with the possible exception of big business). The intermarriage rate still seems intriguingly low and the mixed marriages that I know show a decided leaning toward Jewish identity and Jewish traditions. I believe that the leaning was in the other direction a generation ago.

(2) Jewish values. Ironically, the new “normalcy” which accounts for so much of the resurgence of Jewish identification acts to suppress the expression of Jewish values. In a sense, it’s almost too easy to be a Jew. I am not so much concerned with theological or doctrinal values, though some of these (such as the refusal to personify God or reduce him to a lower level of abstraction; the insistence on the moral distinction between intention and action; the affirmation of this-worldliness; the negation of loving one’s neighbor more than oneself) are certainly important. What concerns me more are the values that were forged out of the struggle for Jewish survival and ultimately, therefore, out of Jewish self-consciousness (or better, group-consciousness). It is the marginality, and yet the group-belongingness (voluntary or enforced), which explain values as diverse as “chosenness,” non-conformism, scientific and artistic achievement, or cosmopolitanism. Taking an even larger giant step, it might be still more accurate to say that self-consciousness is responsible for the basic tension in Jewish values between universalism and particularism, between a concern for the world and a concern for the group.

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These were the values that were embodied in some of the Jewish institutions that were left behind in Europe and some of those that have declined in America (Yiddishism, Zionism, radical social movements). But the synagogue, into which most of Jewish life has retreated, cannot do very much with them. The synagogue in America stands for the local community, ethnic warmth, a smattering of Jewish learning, a sense of continuity, holidays and traditions, and occasional reaffirmations of where Judaism differs. But the synagogue also stands for Jewish success. America understands the synagogue. The rabbi on TV sounds very much like his non-Jewish colleague (and “decorum”—that campaign-slogan for Americanizing Jewish immigrants—has long since won out). By and large, this is wonderful. But it hardly seems the social context in which those Jewish values which emerged from unsuccess—and maybe even those which didn’t—are likely to persist. The question is what will the Jews do with normalcy?

The same question holds good for Israel (Ben Gurion notwithstanding). Jewish values demand that Israel be different somehow. But how? The real goal of Zionism—even for Orthodox Israelis—means that “you no longer have to think about being Jewish.”

Perhaps something new and valuable will emerge from this. But in the meantime, it is difficult to overlook the fact that the very basis of Jewish values—self-consciousness—is disappearing. Preservation of a historical sense may help. Or, it may be that the peculiar abnormality of Israeli and American Jews—that each has the other—may be a creative force making for “self-consciousness.” Israel may remain “self-conscious” because of the American Jews in the audience, and American Jews may continue “self-conscious” because of Israel.

(3) Jewish socialists and their relation to the Jewish community. The universalism-particularism dilemma, I think, explains the Jewishness of the Jewishly-alienated radical intellectuals. I think there is a kind of classical resolution of this dilemma in Jewish thought: one can be concerned with the world without abandoning the group, and concerned with the group without abandoning the world, by being a kind of “pilot plant” for social and moral change. This is clear in the prophets, I think. It may explain the kibbutz in part. It may be a hope for Israel. But, obviously, it is easy enough to climb onto one or the other horn of the dilemma and dive off: there are particularistic Jews who reject the world, and universalistic Jews who reject the Jews. But these extremists may be more Jewish than those who have not experienced the dilemma at all.

(4) Personal obligations. I often feel the hand of Jewish history on my shoulder, and it is heavy, but it does not seem to push in any clear-cut direction. I sometimes have the snobbish feeling that other people have been moving toward me (though I am other-directed enough to be uncertain), but even if I am positively oriented toward my Jewishness, I have done very little about it.

On the whole, I think I led a very uncomplicated and warm American Jewish childhood and youth. I can remember only occasional surges of self-hatred, such as my decision to attend the more dignified Conservative service with the Gentile College Board proctor who was spending the Sabbath with us (so that he could administer the exam after sundown). The only outright anti-Semitic episode I can recall was some jeering in the barracks one day during basic training. My Jewishness and my Americanism were clearly compatible and were obviously the joint product of the second-generation, enlightened Orthodox home in which I was raised and the bilingual (English and Hebrew) religious day school which I attended through the eighth grade. I look back with amazement at the incredibly successful formula for American Jewish education that was worked out in our corner of Brooklyn. I am even more impressed to see how viable it still is.

As a child, and even through college, I considered myself religious and was rather strictly observant. Only later did I realize that my religiosity was the peculiar kind of Jewish ethnicity to which I still feel strongly and warmly committed. I do not now consider religious participation an important arena for personal commitment or action; and although I am aware that Jewish continuity is threatened every time religion and ethnicity are disconnected, I do not especially welcome the new theologizing in Judaism. Yet, I find pleasure and meaning in many traditional forms.

I do consider Jewish education a crucial arena. I do not much worry about the problem of “consistency” between the content of traditional Jewish education and the religious beliefs of the home—though it is a genuine concern, I suppose. (Our day school did very well with children from non-religious homes). I feel strongly about higher Jewish education—not for rabbis and professionals, but for laymen. I feel that Jewish imagery must be kept alive because this is the basis of Jewish creativity. I think Hebrew should be thoroughly taught The word is still a paramount value in Judaism. But all this is very difficult to achieve.

Surely Israel will do better in these respects. I have seriously considered living permanently in Israel and still may decide to do so. The trouble with Israel is that it is such a big idea in the perspective of world history and such a little idea in the perspective of modern history. That the Jews survived as a more or less unified people, that the “longing for Zion” could have been kept alive, that a Jewish state could arise out of the embers—these are big ideas. That the Hebrew University should speak a language that only a few million people understand, that careers in the arts and sciences should be limited by ethnically determined geographical boundaries, that ordinary old nationalism should preoccupy the Jews—these are little ideas. Only some uniquely Jewish product can justify this ultimately.

I feel strongly about remembering the Nazis. I do not see how to do this without institutionalizing personal and communal rituals of remembrance. I try to avoid social contacts with Germans for this reason. As a social scientist, I feel that my profession has sorely neglected the opportunity to analyze what happened in Germany and how it all was possible. But, again, I have done nothing about this myself.

[Euhu Katz is associate professor of sociology at the University of Chicago and the author (with Paul Lazarsfeld) of Personal Influence.]

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Joseph Kraft:

Community is for me the touchstone of Jewishness. Raised without religious training of any kind in a home that observed even holidays only casually, I find myself indifferent to the faith of my fathers. Neither does the history of the Jews as a people invoke keen interest. But at all times I have been fascinated by the story of Joseph in Egypt; and equally by its modern counterparts: Disraeli in Britain, Trotsky in Russia, Judah Benjamin in the South.

That is to say that I have a Jewish consciousness not imbued with religion or tradition. It derives instead from the circumstances of being raised in a certain New York neighborhood, of going to a certain school, and to certain summer camps. Not only were almost all the people in these places Jews, but everyone I knew as a boy frequented the same, or like, places. Among these families there was a rough similarity of income and occupation. We listened to the same radio programs, played the same games, ate the same food, wore the same clothes, lived in the same kind of apartments, and knew the same people. Even with chance acquaintances we could never play “Do You Know” beyond a round or two without scoring a hit. We were as tight-knit as a testudo—and perhaps, ultimately, for the same reason: to hold a shield against the outside world. We constituted in short a community—a Jewish community.

I like to think—but cannot prove—that a special spirit animated the members of that community. Though removed from the presence, and remote from the doctrine, of the socialist intellectuals, we felt their impact in an instinct for doing good and a constructive approach to problems. We valued money, comfort, health, status, and pleasure; but also work, books, education, settlement houses, art, and the New Deal. We were the opposite of what I understand by the word “Beat”: we cared.

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By comparison with, not only our parents, but even our expectations, we have doubtless improved our lot over the past fifteen years. We are, I would say, happier. We make more money, hold better jobs, live in more attractive homes. We have certainly a wider, and probably a deeper, range of human contacts. These have carried us much further into the outside world of Gentile society, which has proved to be far less hostile than most of us must have foreseen. The “Jewish Problem,” if it has not ceased to exist for us, has been much softened.

Much of the credit for its easing goes to the State of Israel. Its existence has raised what used to be an invidious, miasmic social question to the plane of international conflict—that is of open discussion. Besides, because so much of Israel’s background and justification lie in the Nazi era, its success represents a triumph over malignancy that gives confidence and strength. I do not like to think of myself as a “narrow nationalist”; I have lived in Moslem lands and count Arabs “among my best friends”; Nasserism seems to me a step forward in the Middle East. Still, at the time of the Sinai campaign I felt a distinct physical élan: a sense of victory.

Even Israel, however, cannot save us. As a group we lack inner economic balance, and could be crushed in a new time of troubles. As individuals—and it is our great weakness—we have built no resource against failure. I hope to pass on to my children the instinct for caring: the spirit of constructive achievement. I know that the community which was my Jewish inheritance cannot be passed on: the testudo has broken up, and I myself have strayed from the fold. But beyond that I am not clear.

[Joseph Kraft, who has worked on the New York Times and the Washington Post, and is at present a free-lance political journalist, won the 1959 Overseas Press Club Award for the best magazine reporting on foreign affairs. He is at work on a book about the Algerian war.]

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Robert Langbaum:

I think that the situation of the American Jew has changed radically since World War II and that the change has most affected my generation, the generation that fought the war and is now in the neighborhood of forty. Those much older, who were established in their careers when the war started, cannot be as aware as we are of how much things have changed. Those much younger would not remember how things were before the war and would therefore be less aware than we that the present situation is a change. The change I have in mind is the opening to Jews of so many vocations, and consequently of so many social milieus, that were once considered closed to them. The change means that Jews, like other Americans, are better off materially than they were before the war. But more important is the psychological result of the change—the fact that young Jews now expect all doors to be open to them.

Before the war, Jews were always talking about how this and that field was closed to them, and young Jews did not aspire in those directions. There are still, of course, plenty of jobs for which Jews are at a competitive disadvantage, and young Jews are perfectly aware of this. Yet it is years since I have heard anyone renounce a profession because there is no chance in it for a Jew. Jews talk very little these days about closed fields, and young Jews are less inclined than their fathers would have been to blame it on discrimination when they do not get a job or a promotion. My impression is, however, that young Jews react more indignantly to cases of real discrimination than did their fathers for whom such things were accepted as a condition of life. In other words, Jews have since the war come closer to really feeling like first-class citizens. My generation is in the peculiar position of having been, both as Jews and children of the depression, prepared for a harder future than actually materialized. No wonder they are well-disposed toward society. The dissident Beats are on the whole younger; most of them do not remember the depression and did not fight in the war.

The change is most apparent in the universities, where the large number of Jewish students has pretty much put an end to the old talk about quotas. Before the war, the Jewish university professor, especially in the humanities and most especially in English, was rare enough to be worth exhibiting. Now the steadily increasing number of Jewish professors is no longer even a subject for favorable comment. Jews have profited from the momentous opening up of American life since the war, the main cause of which has been the expansion of our economy with the consequent demand for more manpower. In the case of the universities, the same expansion which has made room for Jews has also made room for creative writers, practicing critics, for intellectuals, who are not necessarily the same thing as professors and for whom there was little place in the universities before the war. Since it makes a big difference to the attitudes of intellectuals whether they carry on inside or outside the “establishment,” the intellectual tone of our time—the tone of affirmation and responsibility, of “conformity” as the hostile critics say—is undoubtedly influenced by the fact that most intellectuals are in the universities (some even, in the new Kennedy Era, are to be in the highest circles of government). Jewish intellectuals, therefore, now find themselves on two counts, both as Jews and intellectuals, on the inside track where they would probably have been outside before the war.

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The effect on their jewishness is to make them think less about it. Not that they renounce it. There are fewer definite renunciations than before the war. There is, if anything, more observance of Jewish rituals—especially among college students, who are no longer embarrassed, as they used to be when I went to college, about being Jewish. Judaism, as a thing to be accepted or rejected, is less of an issue in our lives. For it looks less like the position of an embattled minority, saying no to the rest of society, and more, as it loses its connections with Yiddish culture, like one of those liberal Protestant denominations to which so many Americans loosely belong.

It can be said that American Jews are simply assimilating as the Jews did in Western Europe fifty years ago, but there is, I think, a difference in that Jews here are following a general American movement peculiar to our time. You have only to teach the older literature to realize how few students seem to know any more what, according to their religious affiliations, they are supposed to believe, that all in fact subscribe to the same secular, democratic, humanitarian faith—belief in a more or less impersonal deity and in tolerance, good will, peace, progress, and social justice. The truth is that American Jews are not so much going Protestant as that all Americans, including Protestants, are shedding divisive traditional identities in favor of a new American amalgam.

What then is the remaining influence of one’s Jewishness? This is like asking who you really are. To answer such a question requires more self-understanding than most of us have. One has one’s identity on so many different levels of consciousness. Many Jews reject Judaism and then express it through a secular equivalent. This explains, I think, the attraction Marxism used to have for Jews, who rejected one morally strenuous, no-saying minority to join another. I am reminded of an evening I spent not long ago with some Jewish intellectuals of the generation older than mine, the generation that came to maturity in the 30’s. They were ex-Marxists, and I was struck by the assumption behind all of their talk that it was in the nature of things for the majority to be always wrong and that only their circle could be expected to be right. They made me think of my Orthodox grandfather, for their mentality was not only still Marxist, it was also still Jewish in the old, no-saying sense. Jewish intellectuals of my generation associate themselves instead with what is right and wrong in the world around them.

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Nowadays freud has the special appeal for Jews that Marx used to have. Since both men were concerned with redemption but with redemption in this world, their moral quality is Jewish. Freudianism, however, is the more appropriate secular expression for Jews who no longer feel outside society, for it is not revolutionary—it turns our attention to the deficiencies not of others but of ourselves. I find myself drawn—and I have the impression that this may be true of many other Jewish students of the humanities—to monistic philosophies, to writers like Blake and Browning who deny the dualism of body and soul and speak for the intensification of this life. They appeal, I am sure, to something deeply Jewish in me. Jews, I observe, take life more seriously than other people do; hence their unusual exertions to make a success of it, whether in getting money or learning. Even those Jews who think they have rejected Judaism carry it on through their attraction to the Hebraic elements in Western culture.

But we are attracted, it can be argued, because of the moral capital of our Orthodox grandfathers which will soon run out. True. If Jewish energies are to continue extraordinary even in their secular expression, they must be fed by some source of vitality in organized Judaism. Unfortunately, I see little promise of such vitality in the organized Judaism of America, which for all its admirable bustle is remarkably uncreative as compared, say, to the secular creativity of American Jews. Israel is the only place, I think, where Judaism stands a chance of again being creative as Judaism. On that chance alone Israel is important to Jews and the rest of the world.

In my own case, I expect to give my daughter as much Hebrew education as possible because I believe one ought to know one’s past. I do not seriously envisage her conversion to another religion, but see it as a distinct possibility that she might marry a non-Jew with as loose a religious affiliation as hers. This would be disturbing, but it is rather a shock for me to realize that it would disturb our way of life less than if she were to marry the kind of Orthodox young Jew who would enter our house with hat, beard, and disapproving look, and could not even sit down to dinner with us.

[Robert Langbaum is associate professor of English at the University of Virginia and the author of The Poetry of Experience. He is now at work on a book-length study of Isak Dinesen.]

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Robert J. Lifton:

Thinking about what it means to be a Jew in America from the vantage point of Tokyo does not give me a feeling of detachment. Rather, I am struck by the universality of what we sometimes think of as a peculiarly Jewish paradox: the focus upon one’s specific historical identity sets one apart in some degree from all who do not share it; yet one requires some such focus, at least inwardly, in order to feel connected to mankind. In life, as in art, the particular is one’s only connection with the universal. This applies even in relationship to barbarism: the Nazi atrocities were both a specifically Jewish and a broadly human tragedy.

I look upon the complex of emotional influences which comprise my Jewishness as a loosely defined but strongly felt style of existence, whose significance lies primarily in the way in which it permits me to be related to humanity. And I am convinced that the Jew in America need not posit the senseless alternatives of either tribal exclusiveness or disembodied “melting” into a hypothetical Anglo-Saxon community.

Members of my generation—now in our mid-thirties—can perceive from personal experience something of the changing relationship of three generations of Jews to American life: European grandparents with a limited penetration of American life, grateful for the refuge offered by American liberality, yet viewing this same cultural liberality as a profound threat to the purity of Jewish identity in themselves and their offspring; American-born parents who rebelled, quietly or fiercely, from what seemed to them a closed system of Jewish thought and ritual, carrying their Jewish heritage in their bones as they made their heroic forays into an inviting, discriminating, ultimately (at whatever psychological cost) liberating American society; and ourselves, nursed as much upon the American liberal dream as upon the special struggles of the Jew within it, finding that as adults we are more consciously connected to American life than to Judaism, sometimes longing for elements of what seems to be a denied Jewish heritage, yet knowing that we move, inevitably, toward a new psychological and cultural synthesis.

I suspect that many of us treasure the special identity of the cultural outsider which the Jew still carries within himself in America, an identity of profound creative value, but not without its dangers. Its value lies in the courage it may provide to express oneself in opposition to prevailing thought and to reach beyond cultural prejudices—the two elements of “inner identity” which Freud attributed to his Jewish heritage (but which, one must add, are possessed by the true intellectual of any heritage). The danger lies in the cultural outsider’s powerful urge to divest himself of this painful identity and become the arch-insider—a yearning that can be pursued, literally with a vengeance, as perhaps in the case of those cultural outsiders of various backgrounds who direct their energies more toward the build-up of American military power than toward the preservation of all human life. Yet these generations of Jews who have faced the problems of the cultural oustider have been very American after all, following the American pattern of the dramatic break with one’s past (often to the extent of a myth of total severance) which later creates a nostalgia for “the past” so profound that I suspect it has much to do with America’s peculiar present predicament of being a “post-modern” nation which has great difficulty in finding a vision for die future.

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Nevertheless, I feel that individual bearers of Jewish culture and character have had a profound effect upon American life. Let me mention just one form of influence, which is perhaps the most basic. I find myself grouping together the Jewish comedian, the Jewish writer, and yes, the Jewish psychoanalyst—an influential trio because they have contributed something powerful which America seemed ready to accept. What these three possess in common, I believe, is a special concern for basic human emotions, and for the relationship between emotions and ideas. All three are impelled toward, even obsessed with, the discovery and the expression of those passions which lie hidden beneath the protective coating of pretense, subterfuge, and “logic.” And all three use techniques of interpretive probing, teasing, and gentle (or not so gentle) irony—attitudes derived from a historical experience sufficiently varied and bitter to make Jews aware of the elemental forces in man and suspicious of claims to heroism. At its best, this “Jewish style” blends emotional wisdom, critical acceptance of human foibles, and a noble humanistic effort to get to the truth about people. At less than its best, it can degenerate (in comedian and audience, writer and reader, psychoanalyst and patient) into shallow sentimentalism or cultish psychologizing, both of which flatten out human energies by molding them into conventionalized, comfortable forms. And there is the additional danger lest this attraction to basic emotions become attached to excessive intellectual claims in a pattern of messianic extremism, or ideological totalism. Fortunately, the “Jewish style” very often possesses specific antidotes for such totalism: a mocking humor, and a genuine use of the intellect—a passion for ideas in which the entire being opens itself to the world.

I find it very difficult, however, to separate fully the Jewish from the American elements in my personal identity. I have been deeply, although not uncritically, inspired by the hard brilliance and personal courage of Sigmund Freud; yet in my automatic human judgments I think I have been equally influenced by currents initiated by Thomas Jefferson and William James. And for a moral and philosophical viewpoint that makes sense to me in the contemporary world I turn neither to a Jew nor to an American, but rather to Albert Camus.

When I visited the State of Israel five years ago I felt profoundly involved with people I met, and moved by what I encountered; the experience called forth simultaneously a greater awareness of both my Jewish and American identities, as I tried to distinguish to my own satisfaction the similarities and the differences between myself and those Jewish intellectuals who had become Israelis. My sense of involvement with Israel makes me all the more concerned that it overcome its remnants of cultural fundamentalism—a concern shared by many Israeli intellectuals, and a requirement which I would make of America and of all other countries as well.

As people throughout the world move, willingly or not, toward greater personal exchange, one’s relationship to his own heritage cannot help but be altered. For me It becomes increasingly essential to be able to draw deeply upon Jewish, American, and broadly human roots in order to roam freely in intellectual and moral quests, to be more concerned with universal values than with any specific ritual. A conversion to a different religion by one of my children might sadden me, or trouble me in ways that I do not know, but not nearly so much as would a failure—in them or in me—to live up to this wider ideal.

[Robert Lifton, M.D., is research associate in psychiatry and associate in East Asian studies at Harvard. At present he is in Japan making a study of psychological patterns of Japanese youth. His book, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, was published by Norton earlier this year.]

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Michael Maccoby:

Although I am not a believer and only the promise of a particularly beautiful service would move me to a synagogue, I feel firmly planted in the Jewish tradition, and I recognize in myself, despite the ravages of a suburban and Ivy League education, the mysterious Jewish Weltanschauung. It seems to me that two instincts continually war within this tradition, and they play themselves out wherever the Jew may be, even in the United States today. The nobler of these instincts preaches a transcendence of incestuous and nationalistic bonds. Without blind optimism, rather permeated by tragic understanding, it believes in the possibility that man by his own efforts can perfect himself and the world. It is this spirit, with its roots in prophetic messianism, which best describes the great Jews of the past century: Marx, Einstein, and, paradoxically, Freud who argued a skepticism of the Jew’s “presumptuous attempts to conquer the outer world of appearances by the inner world of wishful thinking.” Such presumption also characterized Jewish intellectuals in America when labor was beginning to organize and during the 30’s, when many were associated with radical but humanistic movements in politics and the arts, and with psychoanalysis which, having not yet lost its revolutionary beginnings, was still exploring the sources of man’s unrest and fighting the remaining resistances of Victorian prejudice.

There are still notable Jews who fit this heroic mold, but by and large the scene has changed, and today when I consider American Jews as an intellectual group, I feel the loss of the radical spirit and the dominance of the opposing tendency in Judaism, the instinct toward narcissism and exclusiveness. Of those Jews who speak out on contemporary political questions, there are many who claim to be convinced conservatives or super-patriots. More often, the Jew today lacks any political coloring but that of lobbyist for Israel, or he may be an “expert” who leaves political decision-making to others, but implicitly supports some of our society’s worst traits. Such are many of the weapons experts and some psychoanalysts, now fat and successful high priests of adjustment.

In judging the Jewish community, it is important to remember that the turnabout from radicalism was a mass movement of American intellectuals, a result of many factors including an awakening to the realities of Communist totalitarianism, the dampening spirit of the cold war, and the wounds of the McCarthy era. The latter placed a stamp of political danger on radical thought and also turned the attention of sincere patriots toward resisting any and all ideological encroachment on political liberty. The result was that few took up the task of distilling a new, positive ideology from the old mixture, tainted by totalitarianism. In the pressure of these struggles, many intellectuals withdrew totally from politics and sought to fulfill their social instincts in fields such as mental health, city planning, and education, which were not yet in the political spotlight. In themselves, such efforts were constructive for the society, but the danger was that the withdrawal of radical spirit from the larger arena would be rationalized by a potentially destructive ideology based on the pessimistic theology of men like Reinhold Niebuhr and buttressed by the skeptical trend in psychoanalysis. The “New Sanity,” as it might be called, was an attack on worldly Utopia as either sinful or illusory, and it carefully marked out sanity as a narrow path between various form of madness, while the road to a more evolved and rational society was left to the weeds.

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Perhaps the Jew was more susceptible to the logic of the new sanity than most. The events in his recent history tended to make him particularly careful lest he in any way seem disruptive or disloyal to a nation entering the cold war, and many Jews in whom radicalism slept fitfully could not suppress a feeling of relief that there existed a Roy Cohn to counterbalance the Rosenbergs. Of the particular Jewish circumstances creating a mood of caution, the first was the trauma of the Nazi era which reawakened the thought in the Jewish unconscious that no matter how much he seemed at home, the Jew was potentially an alien in any stranger’s house.

Related to this shock and the innumerable tragedies borne by Jews, was the creation of Israel and the conflicts it produced in every thinking Jew. On the one hand, it became a deserved homeland for the suffering and a source of pride for all Jews who needed the proof that they could be fighters and farmers. On the other hand, the American Jew cannot blot out the unpleasant facts about Israel: that it is a bellicose and nationalistic country which has immorally treated its Arab population and which, although supported mainly by Americans, has interests which are often contrary to those of the United States. Recently, as Israel tries to build an atomic bomb and Ben Gurion hysterically demands the complete loyalty of all American Jews, the conflict has become even more intense. And caught in the position of supporting Israel for humane as well as narcissistic reasons, the Jew is somewhat in the position of the white Southerner who, while suppressing the implications to true patriotism of his immediate moral dilemma, is tempted to prove his American loyalty by an intransigent cold war stance and by adopting the conservatism and flag-waving which the mob often mistakes for patriotism. (I would like to think that the great majority of Jews who voted for Kennedy were voting for the New Frontier rather than for the Democratic party’s pro-Israel record. But there is no question that Jewish influence is greater in the Democratic party, as the choice of cabinet members and the quick blackballing of Senator Fulbright for the position of Secretary of State testify.)

The question of the State of Israel is a particularly crucial problem, for as long as the American Jew refuses to accept consciously the questions it poses, he will probably remain uncommitted to the great issues of the day. And it is just these new frontiers which in America most demand the Jew’s optimistic faith spiced with tragic knowledge—necessary to offset America’s loss of the simple belief that history would continue to reward like a mother who expects nothing in return, rather than like a father who demands constant proofs of achievement.

Today, when a Jew calculates how many casualties may be profitably sustained, given so many bomb shelters, or when a Jew concentrates on adjusting his patients to a corrupt system, the Jewish essence is being repressed. And what is the pure Jewish essence? As Freud wrote: “It was only to my Jewish nature that I owed the two qualities that have become indispensable to me throughout my difficult life. Because I was a Jew I found myself free of many of the prejudices which restrict others in the use of the intellect: as a Jew I was prepared to be in the opposition and to renounce agreement with the compact majority.” Although Freud would not have claimed it, there is also within the Jew the ancient belief in the power of the word and in the necessity of man’s continually remaking himself, and in the painful process creating a more loving and beautiful community.

[Michael Maccoby has taught in the social sciences both at Harvard and the University of Chicago, and has contributed to a variety of periodicals. Currently he is in Mexico, engaged in a special research project with Erich Fromm.]

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Wallace Markfield:

On Fridays, an hour or so before sundown, The Collector would limp into my mother’s kitchen and take what there was to take from the pushkeh. Wasted, gloomy-eyed, wearing the thinnest of coats and unlaced sneakers in all weathers, he might have been lifted, kicking and nagging, from the pages of a Malamud story. He would stack the coins—pennies, nickels, once in a while a dime, quarters never—sweep them into a shopping bag, and, then, with the remnant of a pencil scratch out his meager receipt: From Markfield, a Contribution. Thereupon he would sway and sigh and drop a few heavy hints about hard times. How the boys in the yeshiva lived on day-old bread and the cheapest of meats, how egg crates served them as study tables, how they could not afford, nebach, to replace a light bulb. Before he was gone my mother would promise to do better, far better in the weeks to come, while I, deft pilferer of the pushkeh pennies, would swallow down a bitter lump of guilt.

Though he is dead probably these twenty years, I nevertheless expect The Collector, like Bardamu’s Robinson, to pop up in my life again. I see, with appalling clarity, a fund-raising affair, the kick-off dinner, say, of the National Council for the Comfort of Jewish Lonely (NCCJL). The waiters have cleared the tables, the pledge cards are in place, and all eyes turn upon the dais. Nervously rasping, the chairman fiddles with his notes, gives a few healthy bangs with the gavel. “Order, please, ladies and gentlemen, a little bit of order!” He is met by the scrape of chairs, the chime of glassware. But soon the hullabaloo dwindles into a reverent hush. “Distinguished guests,” says the chairman, as the photographer hoists his strobe unit, “distinguished guests and fellow officers—” When all of a sudden The Collector, his hour come round at last, shlumps on floppy sneakers across the vast expanse of ballroom, drawing slowly near the dais, his pencil poised, his shopping bag open . . .

Admittedly, I am a special case. From my cubicle in the publicity mill of one of the medium-sized Jewish philanthropic agencies I see the American Jew and the American Jewish community as a fish might see the world from his tank—clouded, freakish, sometimes smaller, sometimes larger than life. In my time I have catered to and cajoled a thousand big givers, filled them with compassion and passion, brought to their eyes tears enough to irrigate the Negev. I have raised up images of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, of sun-bronzed sabras gallantly picking oranges under sniper fire, of forlorn Jewish aged wasting their golden years on park benches, of scapegoats and pariahs, of the broken families and chronically ill seeking help in time of need. Who can say, at this point, if I have chronicled these agonies or created them? And that golden-ager on that park bench—where have I seen him before? No matter; as one publicity director pointed out in a masterful memo on the use of stock photos:

Many illustrations may be used for more than one field of service. For example, a change of words in the caption and heading can transform a community center illustration into a child care photo: a care of the aged picture may be used equally well to depict vocational rehabilitation, etc., etc.

Once each week I scan scores of Anglo-Jewish newspapers. From year to year and community to community the lead stories seem to issue from one mind and one mimeograph machine. There is the crisis (“Morocco Revokes Exit Visas; No Aid to Emigration of Jews”); the remembrance of things past (“Twenty Years Ago: Maimonides Hospital Opens Out-Patient Wing”); the celebration of the present (“Combined Jewish Appeal Pledges Top $750,000 Mark”); the anxious peek toward the future (“Jewish Culture Taking Back Seat, Study Group Charges”); the invocation of the name (“Feldman Takes PPJS Helm for Second Term”). A blurred four-column cut dominates the bottom of the page; President Kennedy is recieving a laminated, illuminated scroll from the Daughters of Israel.

The inside pages are made of warmer, more intimate and heimishe stuff: S. Lawrence Layman’s trip to Israel, the Temple Sisterhood bazaar, the Junior Hadassah production of The Wall, the recent Center lecture by Maurice Samuel on “Jewish Types and Stereotypes in the American Novel.” Next I cast a cold eye upon the editorials, passing, without a tremor in transition, from the solemn, Max Lerner-type moralizing (“. . . somehow we are all responsible”), to the orotund optimism of Benet-cum-Macleish-cum-Corwin (“out of the ashes of the crematoria there rises a phoenix in Israel”), to the catchy parallelism-into-half-truth style of the Luceman (“In an age of anxiety, a time for greatness”) and thence to the somber sociological speculation (“Is not our status-seeking and object-hunger drawing us farther and farther from the faith of our forebears?”).

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It is the social news that holds me longest, the chit-chat about births and brides and Bar Mitzvahs. How I envy Andrew William, Edwin Bruce, Don Craig, and Michael Adam as they pose in talleisim and bow ties! No rebbe cracked their knuckles or meted out arid stretches of chumash to memorize, no bearded, brooding, vindictive Jehovah fevered their dreams. Percival Goodman designed their Sunday schools, John Dewey laid out the rules for their instructors, and that Old Testament God has long since grown affable and even-minded; his beard is gone and he now resembles Norman Vincent Peale. And soon, all too soon, Andrew William will be paired off with Linda Jane, Edwin Bruce with Susan Lynn, Don Craig with Sandra Lee, and Michael Adam—somehow I wouldn’t be surprised if Michael Adam marries a shikse.

The mothers and fathers bother me, though. I linger and linger over the smooth, bland, untroubled faces that preside over installations and elections, Sisterhoods and Brotherhoods, fashion shows and theater parties. Something, something is amiss in these faces, but what and why? For in six thousand years has there ever been so large, so powerful and prosperous a Jewish community? What needs are there yet to meet, what agencies remain to be created? What tension, what anxiety lies beyond the surveys and statistics of the social worker and human relations expert. . .?

Meanwhile, my old Collector has reached the dais. He is lifting a hand and pointing a prophetic finger at those who sit on boards and those who sit on committees, at those who give and those who get others to give. He has come to tell them all one thing, and one thing only: Es vell dir gornisht helfen.

[Wallace Markfield, whose stories and reviews have been widely published, is now at work on a novel of New York intellectual life.]

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Hugh Nissenson:

I’ve been thinking about that scandal in Scarsdale; the case of the Episcopal convert who was refused admittance to a country club dance because his father is Jewish. Yesterday I had a long talk with L. about it. Brought up as an Episcopalian himself, but now an agnostic who is fond of quoting Camus’s “I want to know if I can live with what I know and only with that” as an article of his faith, he was frankly appalled at my reaction to the whole business: that barely repressed satisfaction that one somehow derives from having his worst expectations fulfilled.

“I just can’t get over it,” he tells me. “You sound like a racist yourself.”

“Why?”

“Because they’re saying that a Jew remains a Jew no matter what, and you seem to agree. You’re agreeing with the tacit assumption that being a Jew isn’t just a matter of religious conviction.”

“That’s not what I said at all.”

“It’s what you implied. What else can I think? . . . Take yourself. You consider yourself a Jew—more—a Jewish writer. What does that mean? You can’t tell me that you’re religious.”

“I’m not observant—no.”

“Then you’re no more of a Jew than I am a Christian.”

“Maybe so, but the fact remains that you can deny it without humiliation, whereas I can’t.”

“Shades of Sartre . . . all you’re saving is that you are what you are because it’s what people think you are.”

“Partly, and I admit that’s humiliating too, but who isn’t? . . . never mind. I don’t know. Maybe you ought to speak with my father.”

“Why?”

“He would agree with you. He says that one can’t be a Jew without God.”

“Of course. It’s just a question of religion.”

“No.”

“Then what?”

“Well, maybe you’re right . . . at least I sometimes think that it presupposes a certain relationship to the idea of God.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Well, without what I would call—how can I say it?—a kind of spiritual obsession with the idea, being a Jew is simply a condition and nothing more. . . .”

“I still don’t get it.”

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But I let it go at that. In all the years that we’ve been good friends, it is this which has always divided us. The same age, with much the same background and education, political affiliations and intellectual interests, it would be only fair to say that we have both found that American society offers us practically the same opportunities. All in all, I suppose it’s this very unprecedented freedom of choice that constitutes the real change in the situation of the American Jew in the last fifteen years. The generation that has matured since the end of the Second World War has found it possible as never before to identify itself completely with the secular, pluralistic culture that surrounds us, and we’ve done so, gladly. Admit it or not, what L. resents is our attempt to try and maintain separate identities as Jews. In a certain way, he is justified. To be honest, it would be hard to say just how much of this self-assertion is an expression of hostility against the Gentile, for it is the mass murder of European Jewry, regardless of the degree of assimilation that it may have attained, that determines our attitude toward the problem of Jewish identity as much as that of surviving Jews anywhere.

“We were condemned to hang one another,” says a former inmate of Auschwitz. It is the anticipation of such complicity with an evil that obviates the innocence of the victim that secretly anguishes us all. Given the same, or similar circumstances happening again, who can say that he could not be forced into becoming an accomplice?

The Israeli, perhaps; hence our obsession with the Jew armed; blond and blue-eyed, or so we like to believe, with a rifle over his shoulder, invested by our humiliation with some of the attributes of our tormentors. Is he a Jew at all? Malraux answers that “. . . a retreat from God was necessary before the hero would at last confront religion so that the indomitable submission of Jewry could come to an end.” Curiously enough, we are convinced that such a confrontation is characteristically Jewish insofar as it is the result of an outraged sense of justice. Who can say who is to be more revered than Abraham or Job or Levi Yitzhak of Berditchev who would have brought the Almighty Himself to trial for what He had done to the Jews? If now, as in all throughout our history, we cannot be reconciled to Him, what is inescapable is that even when we renounce Him we do so in His Name.

I suppose this perpetual crisis of faith is really what I meant when I spoke with L. about the spiritual obsession of the Jew. In this light, observant or not, at least I am able to comprehend the source of the religious tradition that requires a man to repeat his berachot over all the acts of his life: whether he studies, eats, goes to the john, smells a flower, makes love, or stands at an open grave. It is an attempt to sanctify, actively affirm the totality of this world, deriving from a belief that fundamentally denies a dualistic origin of evil, or the dichotomy of spirit and matter, the religious and secular life; a belief that ultimately must dare to suggest that we must worship God with the evil impulse itself.

Right now, of course, it can be argued that the real crisis of faith is that there is no crisis at all; that the very absence of any such preoccupation in the modern Jew explains why so many of our contemporary writers feel drawn toward a recreation of the past, or a strangely arid objectification of a present that lends itself to satirization best of all. It may very well be. But when was it different? The greatness of our literature from the Bible to Isaac Bashevis Singer and Jacob Presser is that it is eminently “realistic” and “symbolic,” “immediate” and “transcendent” at the same time—or rather tries to be. The almost intolerable tension which results is what specifically characterizes it as Jewish, and ultimately, now as always, it is the individual writer himself who must assume the burden of this expression regardless of the relative “situation” or even the concern of his audience.

[Hugh Nissenson has published stories in Harper’s and COMMENTARY. He has just left for Israel, where he will be reporting on the Eichmann trial.]

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Ned Polsky:

Unless one defines a Jew in strictly racist terms—i.e., as anyone born of Jewish parents—I am not a Jew, and since childhood have not thought of myself as such. As some answers below may make clear, the truth of this has seldom struck me so fully as when I looked over your questionnaire, whose assumptions are remote from mine.

(1) The situation of the Jew in America has indeed changed, for the better. Anti-Semitism still exists in both economic and “social” forms, usually together, but in general there has been a continued economic rise of American Jewry accompanied increasingly by social acceptance. In the two institutional areas best known to me, book publishing and college teaching, anti-Semitism has radically declined. There has even been one breach made in that most cherished and long-standing “gentleman’s agreement” of American intellectual life—the agreement among Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, since their beginnings, that no Jew should ever receive a permanent appointment in English.

This changed situation hasn’t influenced my “attitude toward [my] own Jewishness” simply because I feel no “Jewishness” in either a religious or cultural sense (see below). Things might be different if people passed judgment on me as “Jewish”; but not since I was nine years old or thereabouts, when I was attacked as a “mockey” by an Irish street gang, have I to my knowledge been personally subjected to either anti-Semitic or pro-Semitic discrimination. And American anti-Semitism as a whole seems to me a relatively piddling affair; no Jew has suffered in America a ten-thousandth of what any Negro suffers from discrimination, and I think that everyone concerned to combat discrimination should apportion his energies accordingly.

(2) A political autobiography is in order: In 1944, aged fifteen, I was a Stalinoid liberal of the PM variety. The next year, at the University of Wisconsin, I fell in with older radicals held together chiefly by anti-Stalinism: Cannonites, Shachtmanites, Socialist party members, and “critical supporters” of all sorts. They set me reading a weird mixture of Marx and the Moscow Trial reports, radical papers and internal bulletins, back issues of Partisan Review, heavy doses of Trotsky, and Dwight Macdonald’s Politics. I fellow-traveled briefly with the Shachtmanites and then became a libertarian socialist, which I still am. Of Americans who were then writing on politics, by far the most impressive to me was Dwight Macdonald.

I recognized that most of the radicals around me were of Jewish origin, and the historical reasons for this, but never thought much about it, nor about the fact that the contemporary writer and the college teacher who politically influenced me most were not Jews. It seemed beside the point, and still does.

Nor do I think your term “socialist” fully comprehends them. Their commitments then were mainly to revolutionary Communism—albeit in Trotskyist or attenuated “independent” forms—and they came to democratic socialism, if at all, rather late. They are perhaps best reflected in the Partisan Review of 1937-43. Many have followed PR’s turnings since then, and have abandoned politics altogether or at best incline a rare and ritualistic nod to socialism; none even pretends that the magazine is today seriously “partisan.” In the decade 1947-57 (roughly), a good number sunk to red-baiting as a way of life and embraced the New Leader or National Review, or tried to make up with their parents and become “good Jews” by writing neo-religious essays for COMMENTARY; or tried for a hole-in-one by writing red-baiting essays for COMMENTARY. But some others, in a sense picking up where Macdonald left off, turned from PR’s orbit to found Dissent and work out a new radical critique of the times; I fully subscribe to their goals.

(3)(A) No.

(B) Like some other minority groups, Jews have contributed to American tastes in food and in humor; otherwise I see not much influence of Jewish culture in the broad sense. Jewish influence on American “high culture” is more complicated: Jews have not made original contributions disproportionate to their numbers (as the major names in American painting, literature, music, and scholarship testify), but have played a key role as importers—interpreters, critics, publicists—of European ideas on the American scene.

(4) Only to a small degree am I “a product of Jewish tradition”—less so, in fact, than some Christians I know—and I certainly feel no reverence for it. Some indices: (A) Though I read many periodicals regularly, COMMENTARY became one of them only a few months ago, for the magazine interests me precisely to the extent that the new editorial regime has de-Judaized its contents. (B) Just now I jotted down a list of those thinkers who have truly shaped my world view and self-image. I find that the non-Jews outnumber writers of Jewish origin eleven to three, and that in the writings I admire by the latter (Marx, Freud, Cassirer) there is nothing particularly Jewish. (C) My parents imposed Jewish tradition on me to the extent of making me take Hebrew lessons and go through a Bar Mitzvah ceremony. But some time before then—how and when I knew not—I adopted the view that there exists no God or supernatural power or supreme being, much less a specifically Jewish one, and since then have become even more convinced of the necessity of atheism (which I find logically superior to agnosticism, for reasons too complex to relate here). To me the Bar Mitzvah ritual was (and is) utter nonsense; my chief emotion at the time was shame at not having the courage to rebel against what I knew to be false.

I see no virtues unique to the Jewish tradition, and some evils. The main evil—here I follow Nietzsche—is that the Jews invented Christianity. And the Jewish tradition ultimately bears some responsibility for Nazism, for the latter is Old Testament racism stood on its head. The claim that the Jews (or any other racial or religious group) are in any sense “chosen people” is a total lie, with disastrous consequences of world-historical dimensions for Jew and non-Jew alike.

(5) All religions rest on false assumptions. I hope any children I have will become atheists.

Regarding atheism: America’s peculiar contribution to intellectual conformism is not that my contemporaries typically reject atheism, but that they can’t even bear to admit there are real live atheists. Whenever I get into a discussion of religion, inevitably I encounter the argument, “Even though you claim to be an atheist, you’re really a religious man.” This is put forward not only by middlebrow liberals but by many scholar-obscurantists (Paul Tillich is their leader) who widen the definition of “religious” until it becomes meaningless, i.e., includes everything and everyone. Maybe there is something after all to the notion that modern American character is unduly oral, for our theologians seem to operate on the principle “If you can’t beat ’em, make ’em join you.” Adepts of this false logic of definition should learn the wisdom of Gilbert and Sullivan, “When everybody is somebody, nobody is anybody.”

(6) I am anti-Zionist. Jewish chauvinism is no less despicable than other kinds of chauvinism—and more despicable than many, since it is based on racist ideology.

The Zionists’ best argument (though I think it invalid) is that the Jews who underwent special sufferings during the Nazi era should have some land of their own in compensation. But even if one grants this, it is surely indefensible that any part of such land should be forcibly taken from others. In the dispute between Israel and the 900,000 Arab refugees it has driven from their lands, I support the Arabs.

[Ned Polsky has contributed articles and review! to the Chicago Review, Dissent, Explicator, and other magazines.]

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Marcus G. Raskin:

Social and political history has been shaped, broadly, by two types of individuals: the prophets concerned with substance, and the priests concerned with form. The priests, watching over ritual and insisting that the so-called letter of the law be obeyed, have served the function of holding the group together. The prophet’s role has been a different one, and broader. He is the conscience of the society, the poet of justice, the pragmatist of hope. His acts disturb the immediate, reform the future, and engender in people a non-ritualistic sense of their individual and group existence. Erich Kahler has said of prophets among the Jews that they “did not wait for questions and consultations, but took the offensive, appealed to the people as well as to the rulers, supervised the whole community, scolded and cursed it, prodded it on, and, in the final analysis, shaped its destiny.” In the Biblical history of the Jews, the leaders from Moses to Jesus fulfilled the requirements of the prophet.

In our own time, such men as Marx, Freud, and Einstein have served as prophets, but in a vastly different sense from the Hebrew law-shapers of antiquity. Perhaps the best contemporary parallel of the prophetic role may be found not among the Jews but rather among the Indian people and the American Negroes. Gandhi and Martin Luther King, most recently, have been the ones to step out of the given frame of reference at the crucial moment to dramatically extend the limits of possibility. Gandhi, rising above himself to become more himself, took the tortured and the torturers both out of their mutual bondage by reasserting starkly the truths of human freedom and human justice. With a similar total commitment to humanity at the prophet-like level, Martin Luther King is teaching moral truths both to the Negro youths who go to jail and to us who jail them.

These teachers and teachings have been die exception in the 20th century; most of the century has been dominated by priests who emerge from the confusion of modern complexity to search solely for the secure, the stable, and the imposed consensus. Unhappily, the 20th-century priest has made anachronistic use of past method in his confrontation with the present dilemma. Within this context the Jew also, who earlier played the prophet’s role for all of society, has now broken the dialectic between the prophet and the priest.

Yet Western civilization still seeks instinctively at least part of its conscience from the Jewish people. From the case of Adolf Eichmann, a parable is now awaited. For Eichmann—Ich Mann—is Everyman in the moral dialogue concerning individual and group responsibility for human actions.

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In our own American society, the problem of form and substance for the Jewish intellectual is clear. Non-intermarriage, observing dietary habits, belonging to a Temple in which attendance and observance is thought of in ritualistic terms—these are the concerns of form. Substance, on the other hand, suggests that the ethic of the Jew should be made relevant to those staggering social and political problems in which all men are involved, viz., the survival of both humanitarian principles and humanity itself. It is not only because of Jewish historical familiarity with injustice and pain that the Jew should be aware of the all-encompassing problems confronting contemporary men, but also precisely because, from his situation and tradition, he has been viewed by others as a potential prophet for modern society.

In this sense, “chosen people” means for the Jews not knowing the answers, but asking the right questions. I fear that we have stopped asking any questions and simply mouth the old answers; but we can only fulfill ourselves as men and as Jews in this troubled time by being concerned with the questions of the prophets and not the rote answers of the priests. For this task there can be no easy solutions, nor single spokesmen, but rather reaffirmation of those beliefs, goals, and responsibilities among ourselves which once provided the fertile beginnings for the greatest prophets of Western civilization. In this way we can teach ourselves and others the meaning of individual freedom, dignity, responsibility, and peace.

[Marcus G. Raskin, who took his law degree at the University of Chicago, is secretary to the Congressional Liberal Group in Washington, D.C., and will soon join the White House staff.]

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Lionel Rogosin:

I think of the Jews as a large family in which brothers often don’t speak to each other or everybody shouts at everybody else across the breakfast table. Nevertheless, a family—like the Karamazovs—that can produce a saint, an opportunist, a skeptic, or a renegade. For this reason Jews refuse to recognize barriers of class distinction or rank among themselves. Consider, for example, Jewish waiters. Unlike French or Italian waiters, Jewish waiters converse with their clients not only as equals but as superiors—as patronizing uncles. They give advice to which there is no alternative.

Now to your questions. In answering them I find it necessary to refer continuously to two profoundly disturbing problems. First, shall people eliminate their traditions, which retard and often enslave them, in order to build a modern chromium-plated existence of an individual emancipated, nourished, hygienic, yet demoralized and isolated? The alternatives must be considered as stages in the evolution of society, but while we meditate the machine is winning. Previously this view would have been considered pessimistic, but now that we can be annihilated by pushbutton warfare it has the force of truth. Secondly, if the machine leads to this inescapable fact of a possible total destruction, does not this fact cancel all considerations except the shackling of the engines of destruction? The fact obsesses contemporary thought and is pertinent to the theme of your questions.

(1) The overt manifestations of anti-Semitism in America have appeared to diminish in the last fifteen years, which reflects an awareness by American leadership that racialism is hardly worthy of the “champion of the free world.” Yet all this is not entirely reassuring. In the South, acts of extreme violence have been committed against Jews and synagogues by enraged white supremacists who in their hysteria imagine the Jews as another threat to their privileges. Similarly the mass hysteria induced by the cold war has exacerbated the tendency to identify all Jews with Russia and Marxism, and this too has undoubtedly increased latent anti-Semitism. The elimination of anti-Semitism must be sought in the causes, not in the symptoms. Severe international tensions must be reduced: a new vision is needed which embraces a passion for unity and peace and a disdain for self-destructive chauvinism.

(2) With Auschwitz and Hiroshima as warnings, it is folly to ignore world events and to concern oneself solely with Jewish affairs. Fifty years ago it was natural to indulge oneself in such escapism but today Jews must subordinate this natural inclination—without regard to the approval or disapproval of the Jewish community. The allegiance of men’s minds must be to those efforts which they believe will avoid catastrophe.

(3) My experience as a Jew in America has given me a sensitivity to the treatment of minorities. I am keenly aware of the failings as well as the successes of American democracy in this area, and I find it disturbing that Americans frequently express the principles and slogans of democracy without an awareness of the contradictions in practice.

The Jew in America, as in other countries, has supplied a high degree of skills and creativity to the intellectual and the economic life of the nation. Our heightened sensitivity to social evils has produced an inordinate percentage of the membership in progressive and revolutionary movements, to the dismay of the authorities and the public. (I found it extraordinary that in South Africa the overwhelming majority of whites fighting the ruthless Nationalist regime were Jews. However, these Jews were a tiny minority of the total Jewish community.)

Yet for these very qualities the Jews are indebted to the culture from which they have most suffered. One of the greatest periods of Jewish creativity was begun by Jews who had been emancipated from the life and mentality of the ghetto by the Napoleonic reforms. Not Orthodox Judaism, but Western civilization was the intellectual source of this genius. The Jewish mentality fused splendidly and indefinably with Western science. Men like Einstein and Freud seem to me to be the heirs of Aristotle and Newton and the unique Jewish historical experience.

(4) I have a primary involvement in the feeble yet eternal struggle for unity and self-preservation. Everyone has an obligation to all history and to all people. And yes, I see merit in the claim that the Jews have created special values (a claim underestimated by those who are not Jews and overestimated by those who are), but the concept of a “chosen people with a mission” can have ugly consequences. France has proclaimed the mission of civilizing Africa and Asia; but in Algeria, the French civilizing methods are an expression of national arrogance inspired by this false concept.

As for my children, I hope that it will be possible for them to become a bit more civilized than I am. A world without mass murder would increase the chances. I want them to be familiar with the values inherent in all traditions and aware of the fallacies in all traditions. I don’t believe in a system of thought that is omniscient.

(5) Given my beliefs, this possibility—that my children may convert to another religion—does not concern me.

(6) I have visited Israel four times. Obviously I have a special sympathy for Israel but not to the exclusion of other nations. In Israel, Jewish culture is dissolving in the fervor of nationalism like many ancient cultures which are crumbling under the impact of the machine age. Jewishness everywhere is gradually disappearing. I don’t view the substitution of modern nationalism for Judaism without apprehension. Nationalism may be a necessary step for the evolution of a higher social order, but it generates conflict and aggression. Nationalism appeals to the sense of inferiority within man. It is the defense against self-doubt, it is the bulwark of the fractured ego. In the Jewish family-nation we identify so much with the great Jews that every Jew thinks he is something of an Einstein or at least a close relative. I don’t deny that Jews have made great contributions to civilization, but I have an antipathy to Jewish chauvinism. The origin of genius is still a mystery, but I am confident that the human animal will continue to be creative without hypernationalism. In every age the creative minority has a role. Today the intellectual and spiritual leaders must oppose the extremes of nationalism which lead the blind into the inferno.

[Lionel Rogosin is the producer of two widely acclaimed documentary films, On the Bowery and Come Back Africa. He is at present in India where he hopes to produce a third movie, and he is also writing a book on his experiences in South Africa.]

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Edgar Rosenberg:

Since the end of the war (the fifteen-year period covered by your symposium), I’ve been sheltered almost continuously in one university or another: Cornell, Illinois, Stanford, San Jose State, now Harvard. I had originally come to the States from Bavaria in 1940, and I should say that I began to think of myself as a fully endowed American from the moment I cast anchor in Ithaca in the winter of ’45. Since then my responses to the business of being a Jew in America have been static, unassuming, acquiescent. It hasn’t been, I think, much of a problem. It might have been even less of one if I had not experienced the turmoils which one inevitably encounters when one’s life is radically uprooted in adolescence. I daresay that, living in the colleges, I have escaped a good deal and a good deal has escaped me. By and large, I depend on chance signs and tokens to instruct me whether the overall picture of Jewish identity and Jewish integrity in America has changed much in the past decade and a half. Somehow I think there is more of it than there used to be. Speaking as an academic, I am pretty sure there is more. It seems to me that in the late 40’s, when I was taking composition courses at Cornell, very few of my classmates made an issue of their Jewishness in their writing. Now that it’s my turn to teach English to the natives, I find myself swamped with manuscripts “of Jewish interest” (so much so that recently a writing student of mine, the son of a distinguished New York rabbi, complained about all that thick air of Jewish self-consciousness around him). While the college lies steeped in sentiment, spreading its gardens to the moonlight and whispering from its rooftops the last enchantments of the 17th century, the young barbarians try to sound like Salinger and their playmates madly read Goodbye, Columbus. Perhaps it would be odd if they didn’t: evidently the astonishing number of serious and semi-serious Jewish writers who have emerged in the past decades—the Bellows and Wests and Millers and Mailers and Malamuds—exact discipleship among the undergraduates.

But having gone this far, I find myself pulled up short by the Janus-faced notion of “identity.” If I measure my Self by my automatic and unconscious ties, I should say that I am three parts American to one part Jew (the proportions are approximate). If I apply the opposite yardstick and try to gauge my identity by the conscious and palpable vibrations, the frisks and gambols and capriccios of the nerves, I am as much of a Jew as the next man. When I hear the Jews mentioned in the crowd, I suspect the worst—and half the time (just as one keeps mistaking the faces in the street for the one face which one has been straining to avoid) it wasn’t the word I thought it was. By the same token, the word Jews used to pounce from the printed page at me like a four-letter word; but now that I’ve read a lot of unflattering literature about the Jews, I find that I have domesticated the thing and disinfected myself of its toxic effects. I suppose that most Jews share these responses in one degree or another.

This leaves me with a bundle of unresolved biases and crotchets (one can’t call them creeds) which are haphazard, accidental, and of little interest to the nation. For example, I still wince (with a provincial’s mistrust) when I hear that Goldberg has invested himself as Ormont and Katzen-Ellenbogen compressed himself into Cates. I still tend to regard converts from Judaism as lapsed souls—but if the conversion is intelligently motivated (as, say, Karl Stern’s was), I’ve no objections. Candor compels me to confess that I find the opposite maneuver—conversion to Judaism—inexplicably absurd. It’s as though one wanted to warn these people not to make fools of themselves by inviting gratuitous trouble. This feeling may stem, in part, from the recent rash of Hollywood conversions, which were absurd. Somehow (and the “somehow” reflects the general shiftiness), I’ve nothing whatever against intermarriages, insofar as they don’t imply, to me, the breach of trust involved in downright apostasy.

All my political beliefs are linked to the fortunes of this country, and all my cultural allegiances are rooted, sentimentally and nostalgically, in the traditions of the West. I happen to prefer Bach to Bloch and Brahms to Bruch. I am surrounded by Catholic art. A Dürer portrait and a Tolstoy make eyes at each other across the living room: only last year a student of mine mistook the Dürer for a Jesus and asked me, with a touching degree of solicitude, when I had converted, and to what, and why didn’t I confirm my apostasy by changing my name. Yes, certainly: Edgar Montrose would have sounded attractive, and moreover the name practically commits you to teach the novels of Walter Scott. What we think of as specifically Jewish art (Sholem Aleichem, Chagall, Agnon) hasn’t so far caught up with me, though naturally I am willing to turn around and meet it halfway. At the same time, I feel an obscure and irrational pleasure whenever I discover that some artist I admire (say, Pirandello) turns out to be Jewish—just as I must have shared with many Jews an instinctive and altogether Byzantine sense of triumph at the news of the Israeli blitzkrieg. But I feel no political ties whatever to the State of Israel. As for German politics, they are precisely as remote to me as if I had never lived there. Occasionally I scan the German Jewish weekly, Aufbau, which goes in heavily (and on the whole intelligently) for the latest political scandal—and scandal, after all, is a form of glamor, as anybody who reads Ibsen and Snow ought to know.

[Edgar Rosenberg is Briggs-Copeland Assistant Professor of English at Harvard and the author of From Shylock to Svengali: Jewish Stereotypes in English Fiction (1960). He has also published fiction and criticism in literary journals.]

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Philip Roth:

Small matters aside—food preferences, a certain syntax, certain jokes—it is difficult for me to distinguish a Jewish style of life in our country that is significantly separate and distinct from the American style of life. (I am thinking of the urban and suburban middle classes.) What a Jew wants and how he goes after it, does not on the whole appear to differ radically from what his Gentile neighbor wants and how he goes after it. There does not seem to me a complex of values or aspirations or beliefs that continue to connect one Jew to another in our country, but rather an ancient and powerful disbelief, which, if it is not fashionable or wise to assert in public, is no less powerful for being underground: that is, the rejection of the myth of Jesus as Christ. Not only does this serve to separate the Jew from his Christian neighbor on the one side who accepts Jesus, but also from the man on his other side who is indifferent, and even from the fellow across the street, the downright atheist, whose tradition, whose social history and bias, do not lead him to reject the Christian savior with quite the same quality of willfulness, zeal, and blood certainty.

And wherein my fellow Jews reject Jesus as the supernatural envoy of God, I feel a kinship with them. It is not the sort of kinship, however, that produces solidarity and trust between us—for the strength with which Jesus continues to be rejected is not equalled by the passion with which the God who gave the Law to Moses is embraced, or approached. What passion remains is neither for the Law nor the God, as for a few festive holidays and nostalgic ceremonies, and here, too, there is not so much evidence of passion, as of duty and guilt, a kind of religious tolerance toward one’s own religion; surely this is no more true of Jews in our country than of Christians; however, it is not less true. How can it be otherwise? If indeed there were a religious connection between us as Jews there would be a cultural one as well: for a moral and political and social character of one’s own springs not from disbelief, but faith and conviction. The result is that we are bound together, I to my fellow Jews, my fellow Jews to me, in a relationship that is peculiarly enervating and unviable. Our rejection, our abhorrence finally, of the Christian fantasy leads us to proclaim to the world that we are Jews still—alone, however, what have we to proclaim to one another?

Piety about “the tradition” does not satisfy. The values of the tradition—the laws of human conduct, the light of human intelligence—have not for a very long time now been the special property of any one people, if they ever were. I cannot but value and respect my forebears where they have struggled tenaciously against chaos and ignorance and cruelty, and value their tenacity as well; but this has not been all of the Jewish tradition that has been passed down to me. Nor has it been the only tradition: where the Jewish past has informed my spirit and imagination, so too has the political and cultural past of America, and the literary past of England. Neither reverence toward the tradition, nor reverent feelings about the Jewish past seem to me sufficient to bind American Jews together today. Whatever awe and grief we feel in contemplating the arc of Jewish experience, the cycle of expulsion, wandering, and suffering, the history of a people is finally its history, and its purpose is to give us some measure of our place in the world, how it has happened that we are here, acting as we do. One cannot will oneself into a community today on the strength of the miseries and triumphs of a community that existed in Babylonia in the 7th century B.G.E. or in Madrid in 1492, or even in Warsaw in the spring of 1943; and the dying away of anti-Semitism in our own country, its gradual ineffectiveness as a threat to our economic and political rights, further disobliges us from identifying ourselves as Jews so as to help present a proud and united front to the enemy. And that is a good thing, for it enables a man to choose to be a Jew, and not to be turned into one, without his free accession, by a hostile society.

Since one need not commit oneself to this religion so as to help protect its rights; since one cannot commit oneself to it simply because one’s ancestors did—what then? For myself, I cannot find a true and honest place in the history of believers that begins with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob on the basis of the heroism of these believers, or of their humiliations and anguish. I can only connect with them, and with their descendants, as I apprehend their God. And until such time as I do apprehend him, there will continue to exist between myself and those others who seek his presence, a question, sometimes spoken, sometimes not, which for all the pain and longing it may engender, for all the disappointment and bewilderment it may produce, cannot be swept away by nostalgia or sentimentality or even by a blind and valiant effort of the will: how are you connected to me as another man is not?

[Philip Roth won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1960 for his collection of stories, Goodbye, Columbus.]

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Sonya Rudikoff:

A part of the Jewish tradition which speaks strongly to me is suggested in a phrase from the New Year’s services, the “bond of life.” I know this refers primarily to the relation between the dead and the living, but it also seems to echo significantly throughout the whole of Jewish life and thought. There are suggestions of the messianic hope, the mystery of Jewish survival, the fortitude of the suffering servant, the respect for learning and spirituality, the impulse to ethical transcendence, a commitment to justice, a devotion to life itself. The bond of life demands that we love more when we perceive a lack of love in the world, that we be more in the world than of it. This was the congeries of ideas, feelings, and values which came to my mind as I thought over your questions.

What interests and puzzles me, however, is the number of aspects of the Jewish traition which seem so much at variance with this impulse. How could a people so sensitive to the bond of life develop a communal existence which so often distorts that bond? How could the idea of the hallowing of life turn into legalism and rigidity? How does critical rationalism and dissidence come to mean an insularity to experience other than the verbal? How did it happen that a people chosen for its tasks, to fulfill a mission, sometimes came to feel chosen for its perfections and talents?

As a Jew, I could wish that the Jews did not think so much about their values, talents, achievements, sense of identity, special orientation, love of intellect and learning, and all the rest, that the Jews were not so conscious of their own values. Certainly, we have such talents and values, but too great an awareness of them has been “growing to a plurisy.” Sometimes Jews seem as proud of their intellectuality and free-floating rationalism as some women are of their intuition! Perhaps the values of the Jewish tradition can best be preserved and renewed by unconsciousness, perhaps in Socratic fashion we ought to love and seek not what we have but what we need.

One of the most venerable, and to me, significant, Jewish values is the uncompromising rejection of idolatry. I would certainly want to preserve and transmit it, but how is that to be done? By repetition, exhortation, celebration, punishment for transgression? These are not absent from Jewish history; yet sometimes I feel that, although Jews have renounced idolatry as it pertains to actual images, the Jewish attitude toward, say, the Talmud may have been as idolatrous in effect as if the Talmud had really been an image. Quite possibly the impulse to idolatry has merely been displaced, not truly renounced, and there is not so much reason to celebrate. (In this connection, it will be interesting to see what happens to the recent flowering of visual talent among American Jews, and whether there are consequences for Jewish observance and imagination because of the new temples designed and ornamented as works of modern art.)

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“Choose life,” says the Jewish tradition. But shouldn’t Jews stop praising themselves for this, and for their ethical sense? Shouldn’t Jews reconsider whether it really is life they are choosing, and the bond of life and the Living God, whether their ethical sense may not be really righteous indignation, whether the mysterious injunction is read as a demand for new action or for the reinforcement of what is already known? Perhaps the bonds of family life, so highly valued in the Jewish tradition, are more binding than blessed, more destructive than life-enhancing. Every Jewish child under five is extremely bright, has a stamp collection, can rattle off the states and their capitals. I have never heard of a Jewish child under ten who was not quite brilliant; but where are the sleepers and late bloomers in this tradition? The Hasidic elders believed in loving more where there was insufficient love; yet we know that Hasidic communities rejoiced at the death of the Vilna Gaon. The Jews who tried to prevent Abraham Geiger from taking the Breslau pulpit in the 1840’s, the British Jews who fought the establishment of a Reform synagogue—well, it is hard to believe that before Reform God was more offended by organ music than by the sale of benedictions, more concerned with fringes on clothing than with love of the neighbor. And what does God think of the repeated talk about choosing life set against the prayer thanking Him for not having made the worshipper a woman?

The distortions of history have put self-hatred in the place of humility, and self-consciousness has become the humility of the Jews. Now, this may have been intended to serve a purpose, but I feel strongly that the point of being chosen for a great task is to work silently, like yeast in dough. The difficulty is, of course, that one must know what one is doing; to be human, one must use the capacity for what Ortega calls ensimismarse, to withdraw into the self for an examination of one’s purposes. I’m aware as I say this that possibly the major contemporary problem, certainly the great American problem, is self-consciousness, and that trouble, as we know, began in the Garden of Eden.

Jewish self-consciousness is surely connected with the tradition’s relative lack of employment for the individual soul and conscience. Except for monotheism, the question is rarely raised what must one believe to be a Jew, because Jewish identity has usually been a matter of belonging rather than belief. Although the Commandments imply a consideration of both the existence of others and the energies of self, Jewish tradition has tended to stress the others, the community, the culture. This is particularly interesting when we consider the experience of younger generations of American Jews whose parents or grandparents may have been the children of immigrants, but whose culture was not Jewish in the older more legendary sense, whose significant mental images do not refer to the tension between the Jewish community and American vocation. In a sense, this situation may be a paradigm of the contemporary American problem altogether, for, as the nation grows older, its task is to develop beyond the events of immigration, revolution, and unification. Americans have lived a life here for enough generations to find memory becoming history. Just as Americans are no longer innocents, or new men, no longer freed from history, so too the Jews in America are no longer living the legend of immigration. Much of the discussion of this subject has tended to see Jewish existence in America as a watering-down, a falling-away from older forms, in the same sense that early inquiries into American life assumed a European reference. But it may be that the Jews, whose very existence speaks of history, are necessary to American life not in the old way but in some new relation that is still to be revealed. Religion may become more significant than culture.

As for Israel, it does not speak to me, although I am interested in and sympathetic to its fate. The meaning of Jewish destiny does not seem to me fulfilled in the establishment of that State. Indeed, the very opposite strikes me, that in becoming like the nations, Israel’s mission and destiny are distorted. Perhaps the establishment of the State found a solution for certain problems of Jewish life, and that is necessary and valuable; but, apart from the fact that this solution then engenders its own problems and creates a trap for both Jews and Gentiles, it seems to ignore the more historical history, the Biblical and ancient and medieval continuity of the Jewish people, the spiritual meaning of its destiny. If in the world to come we are asked anything at all, I feel it may be not why we didn’t emigrate to Israel, but why we didn’t sufficiently love our neighbor as ourselves.

I myself feel a reverence for this continuity, but I don’t feel allied with any group or part of the Jewish community. I went to Reform Sunday Schools and did not grow up in a religious household or one particularly imbued with Jewish culture. The Jewish socialist tradition was not a part of my experience as, say, the tradition of modern art was, and I’ve learned more about Jewish culture from the pages of COMMENTARY than from my own experience. And, although I was confirmed by Milton Steinberg, I was at that time quite antagonistic to religious thought generally, so if his example affected me it was not in any direct sense. I’m puzzled and sobered to realize how little the demand of belief is made upon me in so much of Jewish ceremony and worship.

[Sonya Rudikoff has contributed fiction and criticism to Partisan Review, Hudson Review, Arts, and COMMENTARY. She won a Partisan Review Fellowship in 1957.]

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Samuel Shapiro:

(1) The situation of the Jew in America has not altered noticeably in the past fifteen years, at least not to my knowledge. Perhaps the establishment of the State of Israel has sharpened the sense of identification of some Jews. But postwar prosperity and the consequent decline of anti-Semitism have had an opposite and greater effect, and tended to make us as smooth and bland as any other group of successful middle-class Americans. Except for the yarmelkes and the (usually concealed) Torah, the synagogue in my suburb would be hard to distinguish from some local churches.

(2) The angry rejection of their heritage by Jewish socialists in the 1920’s and 1930’s seems to me essentially a reflection of their Jewishness, akin to the invective and dire prophecies of Jeremiah and Karl Marx. They were Jews in opposition, just as Baudelaire and Joyce were profoundly Catholic in their anti-clericalism; a lot of them later sent their children to Jewish Sunday school. Socialism in the United States seems at the moment principally confined to small groups of ex-combatants who gather together in sectarian magazines to swap stories about the Glorious Past; there are leftist stirrings on a few campuses, but nothing to get excited about. Socialism as a political issue seemed totally defunct during the last campaign. Nevertheless, having spent most of 1959 in half a dozen Latin American countries, where socialism is taken for granted by a majority of intellectuals and is in operation in a number of basic industries, I don’t feel that the socialist cause in America is as dead as it may seem to be. If the armaments race stops, and if Keynesian remedies don’t halt the next depression, there will be a revival of socialism; it is there waiting to germinate, like a seed beneath the snow.

Other forms of revolt against our conventional contentment, like the Beat poetry of Allen Ginsberg and the New Conservativism of Barry Goldwater, are too conventional and too silly to take seriously.

(3) My life has had little that is specifically Jewish about it in the usual sense. I never had any religious training, I was never Bar Mitzvah’d, I never learned to speak or read Hebrew, and I have visited far more churches and cathedrals than synagogues. I don’t say this in a belligerent tone, but simply as a statement of fact; I haven’t consciously rejected conventional Judaism, but simply drifted away from it.

Yet I wonder if there isn’t some flavor of Jewishness left, even after kashrut and t’fillin and Yom Kippur have been discarded. As a college professor and a critic of American foreign policy, I think I detect in myself some measure of those twin qualities of intellect and compassion that were always at the heart of the Jewish heritage, and that can endure after the abandonment of formal religious practices. I apply myself now to the study of U. S. relations with Latin America, a subject far removed from the traditional areas of Hebrew learning. But something Jewish somehow survives, something that I would not willingly let die. I think that Jewish culture, taken in the broadest sense, has an enormous influence not only upon American life, but upon the life of all mankind. It seems to me only a small, and in a Jew, pardonable, exaggeration to say that the world in which we live is dominated by the ideas of a handful of Jews—Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Albert Einstein (to say nothing of Jesus and St. Paul). These men also rejected much or all of traditional Judaism, but I see in them those same qualities of compassion and intellect that I discover, on a vastly reduced scale, in myself.

(4) I have never been much involved in the Jewish community in any of the many American cities in which I have lived. Even as an instructor at Brandeis University, where so large a proportion of the faculty and students is Jewish, I did not feel much force in the tradition. Only in towns and cities in the interior of Argentina, where I was received with the same kind of welcome accorded the Prodigal Son, have I ever felt myself part of the Jewish community.

My wife is also Jewish (I was about to add “of course”), but since we do not as yet have any children, I really don’t know whether we would give them religious training. I have noticed that many an agnostic Jewish father sends his sons and daughters to school to learn a little Hebrew and Jewish history on weekend mornings, and perhaps I would do so also. It doesn’t seem very important to me one way or the other; probably my wife will decide.

(5) I should be rather surprised if any of my children became Mormons or Methodists; but I should point out that if they were to become synagogue-going Jews, this also would amount to conversion to another religion. I don’t think I’d mind any of these possibilities very much, at least if the children didn’t start any energetic campaign to convert their old man.

(6) I feel a considerable amount of sympathy for the citizens of Israel, menaced as they are by hostile and dangerous neighbors. But I feel even more called upon to do what I can about the plight of those people, among whom I have lived, and whose situation I know at firsthand—the Negroes of Harlem, where I taught for eight years, and the victims of poverty and oppression all over Latin America, whose desperate situation I can testify to from personal observation.

[Samuel Shapiro, assistant professor of history at Michigan State University-Oakland and a regular contributor to the London Economist, is the author of the controversial “Cuba—A Dissenting Report,” to which the New Republic devoted almost an entire issue last year. His book on Richard Henry Dana is scheduled for publication later this year.]

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Barbara Probst Solomon:

This symposium made me feel I was looking through a window where the glass was tilted wrong. Why, living in a time of world chaos, am I now being asked what for me are rather marginal questions, echoes from a past which is not my own? These are not my questions, the narrowness of viewpoint irritates me, but I shall try to answer them.

My greatest disagreement with the symposium is its attempt to understand today’s Jew almost solely by his relation to other groups, outer forms, and traditions. This creates problems on paper which have nothing to do with life. I hear, at the end of long evenings, rather desultory conversations of young Jews—Chanukah or Christmas tree, does anti-Semitism still exist in America, how does one preserve one’s Jewishness (though, interestingly enough, what is rarely mentioned is intermarriage—perhaps because one would feel slightly ridiculous mulling over something which is already working out perfectly well). The tone of these conversations is sadly lacking in the vitality of reality. Our ancestors didn’t spend their time abstractly worrying about the Jewish problem. They lived with it.

I believe that the essence of being a Jew in America is that it has become an individual state of feeling rather than a collective state of being. I am left with the emotions of being a Jew; something which is nonetheless real because its true quality is inner rather than apparent, unsaid rather than said. I feel like a Jew, but I cannot act like a Jew. I have a memory of a noble religion in which I no longer believe, nor was taught to believe, and of a heroic struggle in which I have never participated. I am influenced not by a series of customs or traditions, but by a series of emotions and reactions which, as being a Jew has ceased to be a primary situation, fluctuate. I am least a Jew in the face of Jewish chauvinism; I was pure Jew the day I saw a deserted concentration camp.

When I say I feel like a Jew but cannot act as one, I realize I am going most emphatically against the Jewish religion. COMMENTARY has skipped over a vital point. It has concerned itself with the upholding of Jewish traditions and the Jewish community and has totally ignored the question of fidelity to a Jewish God. The great thing about the Jews is precisely their religion. This is their magnificent contribution to the world, this is what preserved them and this is what killed them. They died for their God—and not for some bastardized “culture.” There is only one Jewish religion, the Orthodox. The use of a temple as a social institution, the deifying and romanticizing of an abstract Jewish culture is a vulgarization (all those Mercedes Benz’s parked in front of Temple Emanu-El on Yom Kippur) and sinful and impudent in the face of what Jews have really died for.

When one gives up a belief in God, one ought to have the strength to give up the forms associated with religious observance. I feel a certain respect for the Jewish religion, and I don’t know what other “Jewish traditions” COMMENTARY may have in mind. I feel no involvement with any Jewish community, nor do I see the basis for either its existence or its exclusivity. Jews should realize the enormity of their giving up of religion, and they ought to be aware at least of when they have actually done this. As a culture in limbo in America, which is a country which breaks up all traditions, they are doomed to eventual extinction and all the trumped-up Chanukahs in the world won’t make a particle of difference. The only reason they can have for their continued exclusivity is some notion of purity of race—a belief which I refuse to uphold.

I don’t find that the Jews in any broad, group sense have made any impact on America. Except in the most superficial aspects (slang, foods, etc.), America in the long run absorbs and dissolves all outside influences, recreating them in her own puritan image. Jews have had, however, a great effect on this country as individuals This is particularly true in the creative arts, political theory, and psychoanalysis. The anguish of deserting a strong religion, and the knowledge that Jews never wholly attach themselves to any Christian country, has always spurred certain kinds of Jews to recreate something as strong as their religion. In regard to their socialism—I personally find much in that tradition that is still morally and economically viable. There are many Jews who are socialists. There is no such thing, however, as “Jewish socialism.”

COMMENTARY asks whether the position of Jews in America in the past fifteen years has changed. It isn’t the Jews’ position—it is America that has changed. I wonder if Jews would be so preoccupied with the “need for religion,” if they would be scurrying back in such force to their voluntary split-level suburban ghettos, if they didn’t feel in such a eunuch-like position; living in a country which is powerful, but does not feel powerful, a country which has lost its moral image of itself. One cannot ask in comfort, what is it to be an American? So instead one asks—what is it to be a Jew?

What will I give my children? What was given me? More than by religion or country, I was determined by the personality of my parents. My father believed he was responsible for and could create his own destiny, I grew up believing I could create mine. I worry for my children. I worry for their survival. I worry because they seem doomed to live in a totally traditionless world, a world where the values of humanism are crumbling and the sense of self is disappearing. The last thing I think about is whether they will convert either to formal Judaism or to the Christian religion. I wonder, instead, will they have any beliefs at all? All I feel I can give them is their strength as individuals and a morality and ethic that is active rather than reverent. The only honest sense of their history I can give them must be complex, contradictory—even confused.

I don’t know whether Israel embodies the values of a Jewish tradition and I don’t care. I admire it ferociously—most of all because it is real. It has met a need; Israelis are warlike when they have to be warlike—but they have fought for life and not the fatality of death. If there are ever again concentration camps, I hope my children will not walk passively toward that fate. But despite my admiration for Israel, I have only to meet an Israeli or a European Jew to know, regardless of the kinship, I am still most profoundly an American.

My landscape is not Israel. My troubles are American troubles. Engraven in my childhood were the battles my father fought in Verdun, Chateau Thierry. Suffering meant gas and trench warfare, not the pogroms. My mother waited for her older brothers to come home from the First World War, and saw the end of it in a crowd at Times Square, just as I waited for my older brother to come home from the Second, and saw the end of that one in a crowd at Times Square. And yet—for life is full of yets, even if they don’t suit symposiums—somewhere in the mid-50’s, when my own faith in America was rocked and my own children born, I looked at them and thought, Oh, their hair is so dark, and, Oh, where would one hike to now? But there are other days, days when I think, I cannot in good conscience have them go against what should be the moral history of their time. And to be with their history, in a good sense, they shall have to be more than Jews. Indeed, they may have to be bad Jews.

[Barbara Probst Solomon’s first novel, The Beat of Life, was published last year to wide critical acclaim.]

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Richard G. Stern:

(1) The situation. The Jew? One might collapse Mississippi Negroes or Algerian colons into useful singulars, but no longer American Jews. The unembarrassed and unfearful chameleonizing of the Jew in America has given him nearly as much elbow room as the white Anglo-Saxon. With of course the attendant loss which the American Jewish writers have been chronicling since the last war. Literature says “Here we go,” as well as “Good-by”: the next ten years may see as many Jewish Eugene Hendersons as the last have seen Augie Marches, the twenty before that, Asa Leventhals. As for me, I like to think that my own attitude is my own changing, not time’s. Twenty years ago, on the Saturday I should have been Bar Mitzvah’d, but was not, because one wasn’t in our family, I hid out in the Paramount theater ducking the friends to whom, on Monday, I conjured up my ceremony. Five years later, in college, I claimed to be half-Jewish, partially to duck the Hillel functions and partly to try my luck on the other side of the street. Today, being a Jew is like being a Chicagoan, except that I pay no taxes (there may be hidden ones). I’m glad, rather than not, but I don’t spend thirty minutes a year congratulating myself, or indeed, thinking of myself as a Jew. Would this—what, lassitude?—have been possible in 1920 or even in 1945? Not even for the most assimilated of Jews, in this one’s opinion.

(2) I imagine that there have always been “accepting” and “denying” Jews, as there are will-and-won’t reactions to all “penalties of medium severity.” There were certainly Jewish socialists who remained Jewish in ritual, community feeling, and self-consciousness, just as there were many of the sort the question describes. I think that Jewish socialists, from Lassalle on, have been, by and large, a first-class group, one which kept closer to humanism—again, by and large—than their Christian cohorts. The group of American Jewish socialists of the 30’s didn’t play nearly so important a role as the earlier Europeans, and I think that many of their notions were essentially poetic—e.g. their view of American popular culture as something especially vile and especially contagious I stuff in the barrel with the Distributist’s vision of the 12th century or the Agrarians’ of the old South. Yet my heart goes out to them. Their intellectual belligerence showed up a lot of messes. That tradition is, I hope, viable. If it involved attacks on Jewish parochialism, that did not, and does not deaden it for me, though such attacks would seem gratuitous today.

(3) When I think of my “experience as an American,” I think of being identified as the holder of an American passport, and thus happily distinguished by an aura of purchasing power or, in Germany, of Occupation Force mana. Since I haven’t been a winterer in Miami Beach, “my experience as a Jew” has not been similar. The noticeable identifying moments have been on the order of contributing to this symposium or being asked by a severe Jordanian border guard if I’d ever heard of the Stern Gang. As for “Jewish culture—in the broadest sense,” the influence on every form of American life is immense, beyond calculation. The masochism of Jewish song writers and comedians, the emotional Woolworths of Louis B. Mayer, the occult austerities of hundreds of physicists and composers, the Brandeis-Frankfurter-Ben Cohen form of the Second New Deal, a shape here, a phrase there, concepts, feelings: who can number or define the influences? Just as a shot in the dark, I’ll suggest this: harsh rebukes, open love, self-abasement, all of which individualize and color. Since the American “myth” pivots on individuality, perhaps Jews have tended to give new fuel to the myth at a time when it was really needed. Italian Americans could have added the same sort of fuel, but I don’t think they’ve poured in a tenth as much.

(4)-(5) Any obligation, any sense? I feel whips over a “No,” though “reverence,” supplies a little advance salve. I was taught as a seven year old to say, “I am an American Jew.” It was said mechanically, but the mechanism was worked by pride. I’m not proud of being an American nor of being a Jew. Lucky? Mostly. Content? Mostly. Certainly there is a continuity, a history, which serious men can examine and generalize about, but “obligation,” “sense of reverence?” I want to say “N-O!” writ large and with an exclamation point to drown out what may be some shameful doubt. As for getting involved in “the Jewish community,” there is a tattered allegiance which involves such self-examination as this symposium response, but little more. In an emergency, I might not be the last one to the hose. As for my children, they are half-Jews to the extent that I am Jewish, and they know about that, and about what would have happened to them if they lived in Munich in 1935. They are probably a bit better informed about Passover than Rafferty’s children. As for the claim that “the Jewish people have created or preserved certain special values,” I think this is mostly true and mostly glorious. It is also true of the Nepalese Sherpa, Catalonians, and Americans. (I better add that I don’t know if it’s true of the Jews as a “people.” How about the Falasha Jews in Abyssinia?) I don’t think that one transmits Jewishness to one’s children, as one sends them to a good school—for what it can bring them. The transmission of Jewishness means the transmission of a consciousness, and that should not be artificially induced. If my children have, or get it, splendid, or if they “convert to another religion,” or rather, take up another religion, also splendid. I reserve the privilege of letting loose shafts at any choice and will try and be brave about any shot back.

(6) I’m particularly conscious of it, as I am about Sammy Davis, Jr. I’m more interested in it than in many new states, but think that I might be anyway. A “legitimate claim” on my sympathies? If anything, it has what I regard as an illegitimate claim, but on my sympathies and interest, not necessarily on my charitable dollar. As for the embodiment of Jewish tradition, who can say what best embodies so ancient and complicated a phenomenon? Perhaps some Mormon sect in southwest Utah. Israel does seem at least a mirror fulfillment of a prophecy, but then, even Nostradamus was “right” once in a while.

[Richard G. Stern, author of the novel Golk, teaches in the department of English at the University of Chicago. His second novel, Europe, will be published in September.]

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Allan Temko:

(1) Bigotry in virtually all of its forms, anti-Semitism not least among them, has declined perceptibly in this country since the last war: as a historical American phenomenon, it may in fact be moribund. The “kike” is no longer “a Jewish gentleman who has just left the room”—to repeat Jacob M. Schiff’s admirable definition—but a dwindling figure rapidly growing as extinct as the Cabbalist, and as shadowy in outline to a new generation of Jews as to Christian students who (with a modicum of self-conscious liberalism, granted) invite them to join hitherto impenetrable fraternities. Such episodes, of course, are only part of a broader national mood which in coming years, unless a severe economic depression stirs traditional prejudices into a semblance of former vigor, should have powerful ramifications throughout the fabric of American society. The blender of our national culture is whirling, and although large lumps remain, the mixture is becoming remarkably smooth.

For even racial segregation, as James Baldwin noted recently, “is dead,” and the “real question facing the nation is just how long, how violent, and how expensive the funeral is going to be.” (If this verdict appears premature, it is worth comparing the present social emancipation of Orientals on the West Coast with their pre-1945 pariah status which was as abject as that of Negroes elsewhere in the country.) In the undeniably milder, but no less terminal, case of anti-Semitism, the elegies are being intoned so discreetly, so softly, by so many sweetly mixed voices in this era of interdenominational fellowship, that we may never know when the interment takes place. It will have occurred, flowers will be found blooming on the grave, and that will be that.

Will “Jewishness”—which I take to be the quality of considering oneself a Jew—be buried at the same time? By paradox the very enfranchisement of “minority groups”—their Americanization—has accelerated the nation’s progress towards a homogeneous, not to say homogenized, culture which, at worst, can be reduced to a quasi-Yiddish joke on TV. The sudden blunting of their marginal “edge” has understandably disturbed many Jews, including some who a short time ago were eager to “pass” and frequently did, but who now wish to check their imminent absorption into the egalitarian sea. They remind me of a Taos Indian who had been psychoanalyzed, and wondered where his “Indianism” had gone.

Of all the elaborate gestures on which such Jews have thus far relied in order to preserve their Jewishness, the construction of resplendent synagogues and community centers appears to me the most strangely unavailing, and the religious revival which ostensibly is taking place within them, the most pathetic. While driving past such a monument with a partner in a once exclusively Gentile firm, whose middle-class Russian Jewish background almost identically parallels my own, he observed laconically: “Gave them a thousand dollars.” He did not give them anything else, but I expect that to the Episcopal vestrymen in his office, as well as to the Internal Revenue Service, the offering had a certain value.

Otherwise bagels and lox of a Sunday morning were the sum of his Jewishness; and I have been forced to ask myself, are they also the sum of my own?

I think not, if only because of my awareness—an informed awareness—of the grand tragic poem of Jewish history, and my suspicion that its final scene is being written with almost unbelievable swiftness under the impetus of the worldwide revolution of our times. The most insignificant role in this epic, like that of a chorister in Faust, gives the modern Jew an invaluable sense of “separateness” which not only possesses tragic beauty in itself, but provides him with insights into larger tragedies of the age.

But this in the end is a primitive “separateness” when seen in the context of the finest aspirations of the 20th century. If ever our inadequate politics become worthy of our magnificent science and technology (which Bellamy long ago knew required only rational control for the creation of Utopia), a higher separateness—an unprecedented individualism liberated from historical mystique, but with unending mystery of its own—should result. If we take away the snail shell of formal religion—Einstein replied to the question, What is a Jew?—the tender creature then exposed remains a snail nevertheless. Yet the analogy is inexact. The snail would either perish, or become a new kind of creature altogether. In any case the shell, like gorgeously wrought medieval armor, is obsolete; and although we can give it a more vivid, true, and honorable place in the museum of civilizations than did Toynbee, we cannot make it useful or even comfortable again.

(2) The socialism of the early 20th century was a crudely surfaced mirror in which the Jew—like everyone else—saw a distorted image. Today we have new mirrors, but I don’t know that they are more clear.

(3) The second question under this heading is a non-sequitur. Jewish culture in the broadest sense of the term includes the full legacy of Israel: law, language, arts, and history, as well as sectarian theology. Modern American life, and particularly the Puritan streak which runs deep in the American grain, would be inconceivable without this heritage. Therefore the first question logically should come second. My answer then would be (a) that my experiences as a Jewish American compose an organic whole in which specifically American qualities are overwhelmingly dominant, but (b) these qualities are inseparable from the Jewish cultural heritage which has helped to form American civilization. The influence, say, of Frank Lloyd Wright on that civilization—to cite a single master whose contributions have strongly affected my thinking—is in part Biblical. Not without reason Eric Mendel-sohn saw Wright, in his Arizona desert encampment, as an Old Testament chieftain with the gift of moral prophecy.

(4) I feel a deep obligation to study Jewish history, art, and folk tradition—subjects which are profoundly instructive, and at times inspire admiration, delight, and sorrow, but reverence no. In urging my children to undertake similar studies, and in fact supervising this phase of their education (for I do not know a more able teacher in my community as far as Jewish matters are concerned), I have tried to adhere to Shaw’s maxim: “Do not give your children moral and religious instruction unless you are quite sure they will not take it too seriously. Better be the parent of Henri Quatre and Nell Gwynne than of Robespierre and Queen Mary Tudor.”

(5) The conversion of my children would be no more calamitous than their religious adherence to Jewish liturgy, ritual, and supernatural dogma. In either event I would have failed as their father, teacher, and friend. On the other hand, to participate in traditional religious observances is in itself no more dangerous than the reading of Plato. Both can be sources of wisdom.

(6) The establishment of the State of Israel was simply another step in the Westernization of the non-industrialized regions of the world. As such, it may be considered as much American as Jewish. What confuses the situation at present is that the population is almost entirely Jewish, in the same sense that I myself am Jewish. Wait a generation or two, and see.

[Allan Temko teaches English at the University of California in Berkeley, and is the author of Notre-Dame of Paris (1955).]

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