To the Editor:
Loren Baritz faces his survival as an American Jew [“A Jew’s American Dilemma,” June] with a sense of guilt for those who stayed in Europe to die. He apparently regards this as a new problem, peculiarly American. Did not Johanaan ben Zakkai and his students go to Jabneh, leaving other Jews to die in Jerusalem? Did not the Jews of Babylon cling to their ancestors’ exile and leave Jews to die with Akiba and Bar Kochba?
But, says Mr. Baritz, the “historical wandering Jew retreated because he had to; he did not leave his last place of exile to improve his social or economic position.” Who drove Moses’ followers from Egypt? What brought the Jew to ancient Alexandria? What kept him in Babylon when the way to Jerusalem was open at last?
Mr. Baritz will have it that dispersion was always affliction, but it has often been the means of survival. Let Mr. Baritz not forget that the “selection system” of the extermination camps was merely a system of priorities. It was not intended that any European Jew should survive. Had Nazi plans not collapsed in the fortunes of war, world Jewry might now exist only because there were Jews who had left Europe sometime, for some reason. Mr. Baritz asks, “Who died in my place?” Why does he not ask, “Who lived that Jewry and Judaism might survive?”
Well, Mr. Baritz tells us why he prefers the guiltier question. It is not because as an American he is safe and rich; it is because as an American he is not sure he can be a Jew. To be an American he feels he must forget; to be a Jew he must remember. But what must he remember? Is Jewishness only a memorial to the Jewish victim? Is it indeed all past and no future? Does participation in Jewish history demand insulation, or membership in Jewish community require aloofness? Does the Jew betray himself because exile has at last become home . . .?
If so, Mr. Baritz faces a dilemma, indeed. But it need not be so. There is a sense of newness about the American emancipation; there is a sense of home in this land. As an American Jew I can welcome the Jewish state of Israel without the slightest sense of being an expatriate. As an American Jew I can seek to live here in the long preserved humane and ethical tradition of my fathers; I can preserve my Jewishness without the retreat into aloofness and isolation. This is not a dilemma, but a challenge. Jewish learning and Jewish ideals have flourished in exile, both forced and voluntary, with and without emancipation. America does not make it impossible to be Jewish; it challenges us to be Jewish, proudly, freely, and by choice. It does not ask us to forget the centuries, but only to give up hiding in them. It does not ask us to abandon our traditions, but to make them a design for the future rather than a record of the past.
George Herman
Bowling Green, Ohio
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Mr. Baritz writes:
I think that Mr. Herman’s convictions must be applauded. But his world—including its lucidity, rationality, and comfort—is not my world, and yet I will not try to scold him for making sense or for articulating what perhaps most American Jews feel. One point only I wish he would manage differently, for the sake of the orderliness of his own position. He says that I “apparently” regard the problem of the American Jew “as a new problem, peculiarly American.” Unequivocally, he implies that he disagrees. Yet he argues that “there is a sense of newness about the American emancipation; there is a sense of home in this land.” I point out this contradiction not to criticize Mr. Herman, but rather to emphasize the unfaced dilemma of at least some American Jews, a dilemma which I think might be expressed, in the spirit of Mr. Herman’s letter, something like this: “We American Jews are Jews, the same as Jews always have been; we participate in the ancient traditions and keep the old faith. But we are not the same because of this ‘sense of newness.’” The tension of this position occasioned my article in the first place. I earnestly hope that Mr. Herman, and others, can resolve it to their own satisfaction; they cannot resolve it to mine, but then, happily, they don’t have to.
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