Iraq Now
To the Editor:
Amir Taheri suggests that things in Iraq are not as bad as they seem, marshaling first-hand observations and an assortment of statistical metrics to support his thesis [“The Real Iraq,” June]. He is cautiously optimistic about the future: if the American people stay the course, he feels, chances are good that some kind of stable and democratic Iraq will emerge.
Mr. Taheri notes that his view of the situation is opposed by virtually all other accounts appearing in the Western media, which are dominated by “half-truths and outright misinformation.” How has this happened, one wants to know? Is there a conspiracy among Western journalists to suppress the good news? Are the analysts and pundits uniformly too myopic to see past the daily reports of murder and mayhem to the genuine achievements? How did so many get it so wrong?
As I see it, Mr. Taheri’s cheerful picture of Iraq slights or ignores several alarming trends; I will mention but two. He writes that the “insurgency’s effort to foment sectarian violence” has thus far “run aground.” Would he stand by this assertion today? U.S. military commanders, for their part, have said that the bloody, almost daily operations by both Sunni and Shiite death squads have brought Iraq to the brink of civil war.
Mr. Taheri also asserts that “all parties and personalities currently engaged in the democratic process have committed themselves to the principle that power should be sought, won, and lost only through free and fair elections.” This seems to me either tautological or wrong. Several politicians command private militias and otherwise use the power and resources of the government in order to effect their will outside of it.
Even when democratic, the political culture seems increasingly illiberal. Although anti-Semitic provisions were left out of the Iraqi constitution in the eleventh hour, anti-Semitic and anti-gay rhetoric are still an accepted part of political discourse. Many of Iraq’s leading politicians—including the prime minister—have a worldview that is essentially Islamist. (This is not to mention the sympathy of many supposedly moderate Shiite politicians for Hizballah and the mullahs’ regime in Iran.) And all of this is with America’s close counsel and influence.
Paul Schneider
Boston, Massachusetts
To the Editor:
Amir Taheri’s article gave me hope that America’s “democratic project” in Iraq is moving forward despite the troubling stories I read or watch in the media almost every day. Especially heartening was his report about the Iraqi refugees that have returned home since the fall of Saddam Hussein: “By the end of 2005, in the most conservative estimate, the number of returnees topped the 1.2 million mark.” This suggests that Iraqis are voting with their feet for a new life and a new politics in their country.
But shortly after Mr. Taheri’s article appeared, the New York Times published an item reporting that the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants had counted 644,500 Iraqis fleeing the country since the U.S.-led invasion. The news report did not discuss the net flow of persons, but it characterized the overall situation as an “exodus.” Which is it?
Peter Barnes
Alexandria, Virginia
Amir Taheri writes:
Paul Schneider asks whether there is a conspiracy by Western media to suppress the good news about Iraq. There is, of course, no conspiracy. What is at work is the classical media dictum that good news is no news. For example, during the U.S. invasion in 2003, the looting of the Baghdad Museum was reported out of all proportion; but there was little follow-up to show that many of the stolen objects had been found and returned to Iraq. Similarly, the brief closure of Iraqi universities in 2003 was massively reported; the fact that they have been open and working ever since then is hardly noticed.
There is also no denying that Iraq has become an issue in the domestic politics of the United States and Great Britain. For partisan reasons, some of the more determined opponents of President Bush and Prime Minister Blair would love to see Iraq fail. Many of the half-truths and misinformation about Iraq to which I referred in my article emanate from those quarters.
Mr. Schneider is right to point out the rise in sectarian violence in the months since my essay appeared. Much of this, however, is traceable to increased hostile activity by Iran, especially through Moqtada al-Sadr’s army, the Jaish al-Mahdi. Sadr’s religious mentor, Ayatollah Haeri, who lives in Qom in Iran, has vowed to avenge the death of Shiites killed by Sunni radicals. Even so, however, there is no evidence that sectarian violence has spread beyond certain districts of Baghdad.
Mr. Schneider is also correct on another point: by modern Western standards, Iraq’s new democracy is far from liberal. With regard to issues of manners and “lifestyle,” for example, the new Iraq is closer to Victorian England than to contemporary Britain. It may take decades before Iraq can become like Switzerland. By Arab standards, however, the new Iraq is doing much better than many of us expected.
Peter Barnes draws our attention to the people who have left Iraq over the past three years. But there are big differences between their case and that of the millions who fled from Saddam Hussein’s regime. The new Iraqi exiles, most of whom have taken up temporary residence in Jordan and Syria, were not driven out of their homes. They chose to leave for personal reasons. Many have links to the fallen regime, and fear revenge. Some are Christians who have been subjected to systematic violence by Salafists connected to al Qaeda. There are also hundreds of professionals: doctors, teachers, businessmen, and lawyers who have fled because they have been specifically targeted by insurgents.
Most of the new Iraqi exiles do not regard themselves as refugees. Unlike refugees from Saddam Hussein, moreover, they do not face any legal barrier to their return at the time of their choice. In fact, many thousands have gone back since the last general election, in which, by the way, over 60 percent of these temporary exiles voted.
Leaving one’s country for personal considerations, even when these are linked to the overall situation, is not the same as being driven out of one’s homeland by one’s own government. And in any case, the number of those who have returned since liberation is still far higher than the number of those who have left as temporary exiles.
The One & the Many
To the Editor:
In “Whatever Happened to the Jewish People” [June], Steven M. Cohen and Jack Wertheimer lament the recent decline among American Jews of a commitment to Jewish peoplehood, citing among other things anemic giving to Jewish causes and lackluster attendance at pro-Israel rallies. They contrast the current situation with numerous examples of Jewish solidarity from the 19th and 20th centuries, like lobbying efforts on behalf of endangered European Jews, the establishment of aid organizations, greater support for Israel, and the struggle to free Soviet Jewry. As they see it, intermarriage, American individualism, and the distraction of “universal” concerns are to blame for the worrisome trend.
We share their concern for the soul of American Jewry, but there is more to the story than they let on.
It is hard not to notice that all of the authors’ examples of ethnic cohesiveness came in moments of crisis. Indeed, American Jewish identity and community cohesion have depended almost exclusively on the need to respond to Jews in peril. In this way, Jews are like distant relatives who sporadically reunite for a period of mourning: the shared tragedy brings short-term intimacy, but this is not in itself a recipe for continuity. The declining commitment to k’lal yisrael—the Jewish community as a whole—is a direct result of our having failed to create a positive model of Jewish peoplehood. We will continue to be stunted if we root our connection to one another only in a shared concern for our own.
There is an alternative model of Jewish peoplehood, at the heart of which is the very social-justice work that the authors cite as symptomatic of the problem. As the inheritors of a tradition that emphasizes human liberty, dignity, and justice, we must see both the welfare of our own people and issues like genocide in Darfur, poverty, AIDS, and the worldwide lack of affordable health care as distinctly Jewish problems.
Of course, this requires a paradigm shift in the classic American Jewish consciousness. In the 1960’s, Abraham Joshua Heschel harangued the Jewish community for not seeing civil rights as a Jewish cause, a miscalculation that he saw as a bruise on the Jewish soul. The same is true regarding the critical issues of our day.
Messrs. Cohen and Wertheimer point out that while the idea of peoplehood has declined, synagogue membership and ritual observance have soared. The problem is that in America, Jewish observance is increasingly seen as a personal, rather than communal, activity—a sort of Yiddish yoga, more focused on self-improvement (tikkun atzmi) than the pursuit of justice in an unjust world (tikkun olam). At the same time, many Jews who are interested in social justice fail to see its deep connection to the Jewish tradition, let alone to the Jewish people.
The sense of peoplehood among American Jews is also tied to Israel, and since 1985 we have seen in Israel the “who is a Jew” debate, the first intifada, the rise of a hard-Right religio-nationalism, the turmoil of the Oslo years, the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, and the second intifada. Just as our institutions have not created a rationale for k’lal yisrael that is not dependent on crisis, neither have we modeled a way of loving and supporting Israel that can sustain connections in difficult, complicated times. For many American Jews, especially young ones, reading the news and watching CNN raise questions about the Israel-Palestinian conflict that cannot be answered by simple slogans. We must offer a more nuanced way of being “pro-Israel,” one that goes beyond the notion of “Israel right or wrong.”
Rabbi Sharon Brous
Ikar
Los Angeles, California
Daniel Sokatch
Progressive Jewish Alliance
Los Angeles, California
To the Editor:
In their article on the demise of Jewish peoplehood, Steven M. Cohen and Jack Wertheimer stack the deck more than slightly. Their definition of “peoplehood” amounts to supporting Israel and rallying around Jewish crises, and they dismiss Jewish giving that focuses on universal causes like hunger and poverty or even needy individuals within the Jewish community itself.
The authors lament that Jewish charities have made a conscious effort to keep more of their funds at home for schools, identity-building programs, family services, and the local needy. But it is not clear why giving money to assist an elderly Jew in Hadera, Israel is considered “peoplehood” while doing the same to assist a Bronx retiree is “symptomatic of a decline of morale, of national self-respect.”
The authors romanticize a distinct postwar moment in American Jewish history when “we are one” could be said with a straight face. Before the horrors of the Holocaust and the redemptive rise of the Jewish state, did Jews really act as if they were “a single collective whose religious civilization must be nurtured”? Hardly. In any case, the history of Jewish communal institutions shows that the first and foremost charitable impulse was always to help the widow and orphan, with support for the Holy Land and the far-off yeshiva somewhat lower down on the list of priorities.
Nostalgia will not solve what ails the Jewish people; what thinkers and institutions must ask is how they can help craft an identity that is not dependent on crisis for its health. The question is not “whatever happened to the Jewish people?” but “what’s next for the Jewish people?” Cast the question this way, and one might find that the universalist impulse of a group like the American Jewish World Service or a federation campaign that urges individuals to “Live Generously” are signs of an evolving definition of Jewish peoplehood, not symptoms of its decline.
Andrew Silow-Carroll
New Jersey Jewish News
Whippany, New Jersey
To the Editor:
Steven M. Cohen and Jack Wertheimer make a strong case that American Jews are losing their sense of Jewish peoplehood. But they fail to take note of contrary evidence, even when they themselves mention it in passing. If, as they say, congregational membership has held steady and ritual observance has increased, this suggests that Jews are looking to be connected to each other and to their faith. It is our obligation to respond to these Jews and to challenge them and others to embrace new structures for peoplehood.
The authors argue that, historically, being Jewish has meant “seeing Jews as a global extended family, exhibiting concern on these grounds for one’s fellow Jews.” But it is also one of the most fundamental tenets of Judaism that we must act universally and be a light unto the nations (or la-goyim)—that is, to behave in such a fashion as to inspire humanity’s respect and imitation. When Jews mobilize to help victims of a hurricane or to stop genocide—efforts that the authors come close to dismissing—one might argue that they are being their most Jewish.
Ruth Messinger
American Jewish World Service
New York City
To the Editor:
The decline in a sense of peoplehood among American Jews that Steven M. Cohen and Jack Wertheimer chronicle should not be surprising. Over the course of three generations of freedom in America, Jews moved rapidly into the American intellectual and cultural mainstream while largely rejecting serious engagement with Jewish religion and culture.
Ironically, from the 1960’s to the 90’s, the organized Jewish community focused almost exclusively on Jewish peoplehood and support for Israel as the center of Jewish life while underfunding or ignoring such crucial binding elements as religious, spiritual, and intellectual renewal. In the absence of a strong commitment to Judaism as a religious civilization, the idea of peoplehood declined.
Messrs. Cohen and Wert- heimer seem to diminish the importance of recent signs of energy in this neglected area of American Jewish life. They write: “Membership in both synagogues and JCC’s has held steady and measures of ritual observance . . . have held their own or better. American Jews have also increased their participation in educational programs at all levels. But this heartening development has not noticeably contributed to augmenting their ethnic cohesion or their sense of peoplehood. Instead it has gone hand in hand with its diminishment.”
I would counsel patience. The growth of vibrant congregational life, Jewish learning, personal spirituality, and a genuine commitment to social justice based on Jewish values were not the cause of the problem, and their amazing resurgence may be the first step toward a revival of peoplehood.
For the same reason, Messrs. Cohen and Wert- heimer need not worry so much about diminished giving to traditional federation campaigns. Many federations have successfully developed new, more personal ways to encourage involvement with the Jewish community and the Jewish people. Examples include designated giving to specific projects (rather than to a general fund) and the building of bridges between Israel and Diaspora communities through local initiatives. Indeed, the rebuilding of peoplehood must begin with the personal. Meaning, purpose, learning and a commitment to social justice and real spirituality will mark the renaissance of 21st-century American Judaism and the rebirth of peoplehood.
Barry Shrage
Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston
Boston, Massachusetts
To the Editor:
Steven M. Cohen and Jack Wertheimer correctly highlight the fraying of the bonds of Jewish peoplehood today. In the latter half of the 20th century, Jewish leaders proudly proclaimed the virtues of “civic Judaism” as a mainstay of Jewish identification. But other currents—American individualism, the rise in mixed marriages, and the quest for personal (or customized) spirituality—have been undermining the fundamental teaching that Jewish living entails responsibilities to the greater Jewish community.
Is the trend as dire as the authors suggest? For one thing, they may have underestimated the role that Israel plays in preserving Jewish cohesiveness. The success beyond all expectations of the Birthright Israel program constitutes a powerful statement that being a Jew in the 21st century means having a relationship with the Jewish state. Perhaps even more significantly, the authors minimize the hastily organized 2002 demonstration in support of Israel in Washington, D.C. Contemporary estimates placed the size of the crowd in attendance at over 100,000—hardly a “meager turnout.”
Of course, much more remains to be done. With the decline in Hebrew literacy, no common vehicle of discourse exists to unite Jews around the world. Knowledge of Jewish history remains minimal at best and distorted at worst. The Holocaust has become the one seemingly obligatory chapter of the Jewish experience that Jews are expected to know while the full sweep of their history as a creative and vital people is unexamined. The increase in mixed marriages has been met with the near collapse of two critical values of Jewish peoplehood—the importance of marriage within the faith and conversion to Judaism as the single best outcome of a mixed marriage. The definition of who is a Jew has been blurred, undermining the memory of Sinai as the unifying theme of Jewish identity. Lastly, the much-touted vocabulary of spirituality emphasizes personal narrative and self-actualization over linkage with the larger collective narrative of the Jewish people.
Nevertheless, in speaking of Jewish peoplehood, Jewish leaders too often emphasize threats to Jewish existence. Although real dangers should not be trivialized, a language of Jewish woes hardly forms an effective base on which to construct sustained and meaningful identification with the Jewish people. American Jews are too well integrated into American society and have too many other doors open to them to respond to cries of panic. Jewish leaders need to respond to the challenge of preserving peoplehood by invoking positive memories of the Jewish past and infusing meaning in the importance of a collective Jewish future.
Steven Bayme
American Jewish Committee
New York City
To the Editor:
Steven M. Cohen and Jack Wertheimer write: “Jews have always understood that the two sides of [their] dual identity—the religious and the ethnic/national—are inextricably intertwined.” True enough, historically, but the formula has evolved in modern times. Today, one can comfortably be a member of the Jewish people by embracing one or the other element; in fact, only a small minority of Jews has retained both.
Moreover, as bases for identity, both nationhood and religion themselves have changed. For the last hundred years, Jewish nationhood has been shaped by Zionism and the modern nation-state of Israel. Religious identity, for its part, has been expanded to a kind of cultural affiliation that no longer depends on piety or observance.
Under the new arrangements, the term “Jewish people” encompasses much more and has a looser meaning than in the past. This allows for diversity, which has its virtues, but it also comes with a price in weaker bonds of commitment. The common denominator among Jews may be no more than a kind of diffuse cultural heritage to which Jews of varying attitudes feel attached in undefined ways.
I agree with Messrs. Cohen and Wertheimer that there has always been a moral center to the Jewish tradition, and that the idea of responsibility to the collective is at its core. If the tradition is reduced to holiday ceremonies, it does not amount to much.
Here American Jews find themselves in a paradoxical situation, for American culture fosters an outlook on life that is more or less explicitly hostile to social solidarity. Thus, it will not do for the authors to blame the waning of care for common Jewish causes on the “therapeutic” inclination to favor personal meaning over social responsibility. This tendency is an ever-present one in a society like America that promotes self-reliance.
A radical form of individualism is also increasingly sweeping over Israel, and the ideal of mutual responsibility is on the wane there, too. What is weakening is not just a tribal bond but the moral spirit that transforms mere kinship into a meaningful, binding social vision. If Judaism renounces its checks against the excesses of individualism, it will lose its moral identity. And without that, peoplehood stands little chance.
Gadi Taub
Hebrew University
Jerusalem, Israel
To the Editor:
I want to add a note to Steven M. Cohen and Jack Wertheimer’s urgent wake-up call. One of the things that has “happened” to the Jewish people over the past century is Zionism. Now, nearly 60 years since the founding of the Jewish state, the larger implications of this upgrade for Jewish peoplehood are becoming more evident.
There are myriad ways to lead a full Jewish life in Diaspora communities, but chiefly in subjective terms like living one’s faith, imbibing one’s group culture, and expressing fellowship with the Jewish people.
In a nation like Israel, no such effort is required. The Hebrew language is everywhere, religious and civic traditions are marked publicly, and parliamentary politics by their nature seek consensus among the populace. Citizens pay their dues to peoplehood by remitting taxes and serving in the army (at a minimum), and everyone knows that he has a stake in the community.
To live in the Diaspora and achieve something comparable requires constant dedication, which as Messrs. Cohen and Wert-heimer argue, needs to be reinforced. I agree, and all those who are active on that front have my respect and admiration. But the challenge is not just a matter of nurturing attitudes at the level of individuals and communities; to the extent possible in a voluntary society, the “nationhood” model has to be emulated.
Messrs. Cohen and Wertheimer relate that Jews in America once invested great energy in Jewish peoplehood: “intervening on behalf of imperiled fellow Jews abroad”; establishing the Joint Distribution Committee “to channel funds for the same purpose”; providing “massive financial and emotional support to an embattled Israel.” But what these efforts had in common was that they were undertaken on behalf of “the other guy,” who in this case were other—i.e., non-American—Jews. Being always for the other guy may be laudable, but it can also mean hardly ever being for oneself. Such a basis for Jewish identity can be difficult to maintain.
It is time for American Jews to think “national”—that is, to democratize and to empower the Jewish self within the American collective. It is time to establish a Jewish public trust, which would issue a national bond for Jewish education. Purchasers of these securities would be entitled to, say, virtually cost-free tuition for their children in a formal or informal Jewish educational setting of their choice. Synagogues that purchase a set amount of bonds annually, proportional to their membership, could also receive a communal subsidy.
ELI LEDERHENDLER
Hebrew University
Jerusalem, Israel
Steven M. Cohen and Jack Wertheimer write:
Our correspondents are divided in their assessment of our central thesis, namely, that American Jews, particularly those in younger age cohorts, are disengaging from identification with the Jewish people. Barry Shrage and Andrew Silow-Carroll downplay the seriousness of the problem, albeit in different ways. Mr. Shrage, whose leadership of the Boston Jewish community is legendary, counsels patience, citing vitality in the religious and educational domains. As he sees it, these positive developments “may be the first step in the rebuilding of strong bonds between Jews.”
But American Jews, like their Christian neighbors, can easily embrace a passionate and learned religious orientation and yet still lack any collective responsibility to a specific group. In America, strong religious commitment and vibrant local religious communities can (and do) go hand-in-hand with weak transnational or transcommunal bonds.
At one time, those who chanted “Shema Yisrael,” the credo of Jewish faith, at morning services could be counted on to proclaim “Am Yisrael Chai” (“the Jewish people lives”) at Sunday afternoon rallies. This seems to be no longer the case. In this regard, we agree with Rabbi Sharon Brous and Daniel Sokatch when they write that “Jewish observance is increasingly seen as a personal, rather than communal, activity.” We are disturbed by the growing tendency of American Jews to engage in Jewish learning, spiritual pursuits, and ritual observance while at the same time professing little attachment to Jews as a people and Israel as a Jewish state. The individualism of American culture is so pronounced that even the most learned and observant Jews manifest fewer signs of political interest, national identification, and ethnic involvement than did their equally religious (and possibly less educated) counterparts 20 or 30 years ago.
Mr. Silow-Carroll claims that our perspective is too nostalgic. To this we plead guilty; having lived through the activist years of the 1960’s and 70’s, when American Jews rallied again and again for the good of the Jewish people, we feel an acute loss when we observe the anemic scene today.
Mr. Silow-Carroll also denies the veracity of our thesis by questioning the meaning of one piece of evidence among the many that we adduced. He claims that shifting philanthropic donations from Israel to domestic causes is not a sign of diminished commitment to Jewish peoplehood. We disagree. But more important, he ignores the weight of evidence we present demonstrating that American Jews today are also less concerned than they once were with Jewish widows and orphans in the United States. Despite great increases in wealth, fewer Jews today are supporting domestic Jewish institutions and programs than was the case just two decades ago.
The last few years have witnessed a surge in volunteering and civic engagement grounded in Jewish teachings. American Jews have been in the forefront of the struggle to call attention to genocide in Darfur, in good part thanks to the work of Ruth Messinger and the American Jewish World Service. Similarly, Rabbi Sharon Brous and Daniel Sokatch are two of this country’s most effective leaders in the growing movement to connect social-justice work with Jewish teachings. But our admiration for their work (and our concurrence with their view that Jewish peoplehood must encompass both constructive as well as defensive dimensions) cannot obscure our differences with them on the priority of aiding fellow Jews who are needy or (as in the case of Israel) who are under attack.
They write: “We will continue to be stunted if we root our connection to one another only in a shared concern for our own.” We suspect that Ruth Messinger would concur. In response, we say that Jews will be stunted (and diminish as a vital people) if their activist passion focuses exclusively on concern for others. A glance at the literature of our critics’ organizations reveals a decided if not overwhelming preference for mobilization on behalf of the larger society and general good, with little if any activity directed at the specific needs of fellow Jews. Of the dozen “tikkun” projects listed on the website of Ikar (the spiritual community headed by Rabbi Brous), only two have Jews as their principal beneficiaries. Of the Progressive Jewish Alliance’s eighteen public statements since the end of 2003, only one (supporting the Gaza disengagement) dealt with matters arguably particular to Jews and the Jewish people. The American Jewish World Service supports an impressive project aiding communal life in the former Soviet Union; but it is apparently the lone featured project with specifically Jewish beneficiaries.
Something is amiss here. In their zeal to engage in so-called “repair of the world” (tikkun olam), these leaders have advanced a model of activism that underplays the well-being of the Jewish part of it. They recall Abraham Joshua Heschel’s participation in the civil-rights movement, but they forget that Heschel was also a prescient and pioneering advocate of human rights for Soviet Jews, a staunch defender of Israel in the weeks before the Six-Day war, and deeply committed to the improvement of the Jewish people through Jewish education. Are there not similar needs today?
We write in the wake of a war in northern Israel that has left scores of Israelis, both Jewish and Arab, dead and injured, widespread ecological damage to the land of Israel, and massive damage to the Israeli economy. This can only mean acute hardship for Israel’s neediest citizens. The generous financial contributions American Jews have made in the last few months notwithstanding, where is the volunteer engagement of the most socially-conscious Jews in relieving the suffering of Israelis? Why are the leaders of Jewish organizations who nobly organized efforts to aid the victims of natural disasters in Asia and the southeastern United States now suddenly struck dumb in the face of Jewish victims?
When we read the dismissive letters of Jewish leaders who cannot or will not bring themselves to fight for distinctively Jewish needs, we are puzzled. Have they lost their nerve because they believe the claims of peoplehood no longer resonate with American Jews? Do they prefer to leave the work to some unnamed others? Or is it that they genuinely prefer that Jews expend all or most of their resources on universal causes while allowing the needs of the Jewish people to languish?
The enormously talented and successful Jewish social activists of our day need to help all of us avoid the mistake of an earlier generation of leaders who saw activism as an either/or proposition: either you devote your efforts to the larger world, or you devote your energies to helping your fellow Jews. In fact, universalistic and particularistic passions are not mutually exclusive; Jews committed to helping their own are more likely to help the world.
Three of our correspondents, Steven Bayme, Gadi Taub, and Eli Lederhendler, concur with our thesis that the connection of American Jews to the greater Jewish people is eroding, and move the discussion beyond the descriptive and analytical to the programmatic by identifying potential resources for the re-invigoration of Jewish peoplehood. There are great merits to each of their proposals, and we encourage communal leaders to explore ways to act upon their ideas.
Birth Dearth
To the Editor:
Noting some of the factors that have hindered fertility in the modern world, Eric Cohen writes: “Children are no longer economic assets, as they generally were in rural and industrial societies; rather, they are economic burdens, voracious consumers who produce virtually nothing until their late teens or early twenties” [“Why Have Children?,” June]. Well said, although parents who have had to support children through college and graduate school might add that the period of production-free consumption sometimes extends into the early thirties.
This points to an interesting fact about child-rearing in our day—that it has become a much more costly and time-consuming job than it ever used to be. Children in the middle-class neighborhood in which I grew up in the 1950’s and 60’s had a great deal of autonomy from their parents. The costs of higher education had not yet blasted off to the stratosphere. Today, besides the hugely increased costs of education (especially for those who choose to enroll their children in private schools from the outset), there is soccer practice to drive to, plays and debates to attend, activities and friends to monitor, and ambitions endlessly to nourish. These are burdens that even non-neurotic parents take up because they know that they are the best way to see their children through to success.
To put it in crude terms, the sheer cost of parenting in dollars and cents and physical effort is so high that it often deters otherwise eager parents from having more children. Mr. Cohen is certainly right that “we need a persuasive, humanistic answer to the question, ‘Why have children?’” But in this respect we are up against the very structure and rhythm of modern life.
Thus, it is also important to have the right policies in place to encourage child-bearing. One such policy is school vouchers. I cannot count the times I have heard from neighbors and fellow parishioners that the chief barrier to their having a larger family is the cost of private-school tuition. Vouchers are a good idea in their own right, and they might enable parents of limited means to have the extra child they want but fear they cannot afford.
Lynne McFadden
Indianapolis, Indiana
To the Editor:
Eric Cohen’s poignant article describes a problem in the West—an ongoing “birth dearth”—that is dangerous for society as a whole and tragic for the people who comprise it. In discussing why people in the developed world are having fewer children, well below the 2.1 per couple necessary for population replacement, Mr. Cohen touches on the issue of selfishness or individualism, but does not present them as primary factors.
In the early 1970’s, when the American Jewish community awoke to its own population crisis, Donald Feldstein, a lay leader, questioned the prevailing view that the biggest deterrent to large families was finances. He argued, somewhat counterintuitively, that money itself seems to be a powerful contraceptive. After all, it is the world’s poor who have the most children, and the financially well off who have the fewest. Indeed, some social scientists have said that the way to solve the population explosion in third-world countries is to raise people to the middle classes—where, once they arrive, they will have too many other needs to fill to think about so many children!
Feldstein went on to promulgate a “law” by which perceived needs and expectations rise geometrically with arithmetic rises in income. A corollary is, “All my life I have been within a few thousand dollars of having all I need.” (Today the figure would have to be amended to a few hundred thousand dollars—or more.)
Having a large family may have something to do with money but probably not that much. Ultimately, it has to do with priorities. Are children the first priority? Does giving our children siblings and cousins and a large extended family rank high on our ladder of values, or are consumption and consumerism to be the decisive realities of our lives? The health of our society, the meaningfulness of our lives, and—for Jews—their existence as a people, may very well depend on the priorities people choose.
Rabbi Haskel Lookstein
Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun
New York City
Eric Cohen writes:
I thank Lynne McFadden and Rabbi Haskel Lookstein for their thoughtful letters. Both raise a crucial question about the relationship between wealth and family size: why do wealthy people have fewer children, and is the lack of wealth (or the pursuit of it) a reason not to have more children?
It is impossible to deny that children are expensive. It is also impossible to deny that our modern luxuries come to feel like necessities, including the luxury of freedom that children necessarily interrupt. Perhaps the deepest problem is that modern parents think about their children in the same way they think about themselves: as seekers of opportunity. This means that many people wait to have children until they can give the not-yet-born every tool for success, or until they have attained it for themselves.
Promoting school vouchers in the name of being pro-natalism, as Lynne McFadden proposes, seems like a very wise idea, one whose appeal may only grow as society ages and the need for children becomes more apparent. But in the end, Rabbi Lookstein is right: culture matters most, not economics or policy. If they believe that life is the most important gift they can give the young, then modern men and women will find a way to get by economically, even with very large families. Surely this is much easier to do in those cultures—like the Orthodox Jewish world—that place a divine value on procreation and that organize their community life to nurture the young. But even for the rest of us, raising more than one or two children is not impossible, just hard.
The Dark Side
To the Editor:
At the outset of his sensitive but skewed review of my book Reckless Rites [June], Hillel Halkin asserts that the book’s subtitle, “Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence,” promises more than it delivers; although he graciously acknowledges that the book is “replete with interesting detail,” he insists that I have simply misinterpreted (or overinterpreted) the historical evidence.
There is no “legacy of Jewish violence,” Mr. Halkin claims—or at least there was no such legacy until the meek, long-suffering Jews were rescued by modern Zionism, which “rightly convinced” them that “a people that would not fight for its independence would never get it.” He does not contend with the first five chapters of Reckless Rites, which discuss violence in the biblical tradition and carry the story forward to the 20th century. Instead, Mr. Halkin focuses exclusively on the book’s second half, rehearsing the record of individual acts of Jewish violence against Christians from late antiquity to the 18th century. Noting the relative scarcity of incidents in this period, he wonders “just what all the hullabaloo is about.” This is a bit like tuning in to a rerun of The Godfather after the wedding, the dead horse, and Michael’s return from Sicily—and then wondering what all the shooting is about.
The Godfather differs from a violent movie like Bonnie and Clyde in that it goes beyond the depiction of violence to explore a long and dark legacy—in much the same way that Daniel Goldhagen’s epic narrative in Hitler’s Willing Executioners differs from Raul Hilberg’s more clinical account in The Destruction of the European Jews. Just as Goldhagen devotes the first part of his book to the evolution of “eliminationist anti-Semitism” in German culture, I too, albeit less teleologically, devote my early chapters to the biblical legacies of Jewish violence. And just as it would be misleading to review Hitler’s Willing Executioners while ignoring its early chapters, so is it misleading to review Reckless Rites while focusing almost exclusively on its latter half. Unless, of course, the point is to deny the darker side of Jewish tradition and to separate the record of Jewish violence (whether in 7th-century Jerusalem or 20th-century Hebron) from the texts and tenets of Judaism.
Mr. Halkin acknowledges that the relatively small number of violent incidents by Jews in pre-modern Christian societies does not nullify my thesis. Given the restrictions on the “Jewish freedom to do anything,” he writes, the point is not “what Jews actually did to Christians” but “what Jews would have liked to do.” Yet it is precisely here that Mr. Halkin misrepresents one of my book’s major themes by declaiming that my “real subject” is therefore “not actual violence but the potential for violence in Jewish emotions.”
My book, for better or worse, has little to do with emotions; in fact, the word “emotion” is absent from the helpful concordance prepared by Amazon of the book’s 100 most frequently used words. Some of the words that do appear there are “Amalekites,” “biblical,” and “Germans.” Mr. Halkin credits me with showing that the term “Amalek” was applied “as a label [for] Christians by some medieval Jews.” But he neglects to mention that the term (as I show) was applied to Armenians in the 19th century, to Germans since the rise of Hitler and still today at Yad Vashem, and in recent decades to Palestinians. Since the bible commands Jews to exterminate all Amalekites—“male and female, young and old,” in Maimonides’ formulation—it would seem that attaching the appellation to peoples or individuals (as Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef, the spiritual leader of the Shas party, did to Yossi Sarid when the latter served as Israel’s Education Minister) would be of some relevance.
The Germans are in my book not only because they have been labeled as Amalekites but also because the early chapters of my book are devoted largely to the merciless bashing the biblical book of Esther has received at the hands of Protestant scholarship since the time of Luther. W. M. L. De Wette of the University of Berlin, one of the giants of 19th-century biblical scholarship, criticized Esther’s “bloodthirsty spirit of revenge and persecution,” and his loyal student Friedrich Bleek referred to the book’s “very narrow-minded and Jewish spirit of revenge.” Jewish thinkers like Claude Montefiore and Samuel Sandmel were also deeply concerned about the discursive tradition generated both by the book of Esther and the biblical commandment concerning Amalek.
Toward the end of his review, Mr. Halkin oddly attributes to me the assumption that in order to account for Jewish violence, “we must invoke unique causes like the intolerance of Jewish monotheism [and] Jewish hatred for Gen-tiles.” These items appear nowhere in my book. With respect to “the intolerance of Jewish monotheism,” he was evidently thinking of Regina Schwartz’s widely maligned 1997 book The Curse of Cain.
In his final paragraph, Mr. Halkin invokes modern Zionism as a kind of deus ex machina that “successfully sought to reverse” the repression of violence that characterized Jews “for much of their history.” This argument has been made by scholars like Anita Shapira and Daniel Boyarin, although the latter would presumably replace “successfully” with “tragically.” Boyarin has heroically gone on record accepting that my book has undermined some of his arguments. Elsewhere, I have criticized Shapira for her Sartrian claim that “over the course of generations the aversion to force among Jews took on the proportions of a Jewish trait, distinguishing them as a distinct community from their neighbors.” Mr. Halkin, a competent professional translator but a less than competent historian, seeks now to resurrect this simplistic view.
No less simplistic is his psychologizing. “In the end,” he writes, I emerge from my own book as “a bit of a closet Purim Jew”—that is, a Jew who secretly revels in the joys of Jewish violence. This is about as profound as saying that director Francis Ford Coppola emerges from The Godfather as a bit of a closet mafioso. In each case, an Italian and a Jew have confronted problematic aspects of their respective heritages without hiding either their deep affinity or their deep ambivalence.
Elliot Horowitz
Jerusalem, Israel
Hillel Halkin writes:
As I stated in my review, Elliott Horowitz wrote an interesting but not entirely honest book. Now he has written an uninteresting and thoroughly dishonest letter.
For instance: the holiday of Purim, apart from appearing as part of his book’s subtitle, is nowhere mentioned in Mr. Horowitz’s letter. Yet Purim figures on practically every page of his book, where it is repeatedly linked to a supposed “legacy of Jewish violence.” Much of my review was devoted to pointing out that Mr. Horowitz’s evidence for Purim’s having been an especially violent day in the annual cycle of the Jewish year is extremely flimsy. Instead of responding to this criticism, he has simply ignored it. I take this to be an admission of guilty as charged.
Having gotten Purim out of the way, Mr. Horowitz then says that I claimed that there is no “legacy of violence” of any kind in Jewish history. This is absurd, not only because I claimed no such thing—my review spoke in plain words of the great amount of violence in pre-exilic and early post-exilic Jewish history—but also because I made the hardly original observation that a strong predisposition to violence is universal to the human race, of which Jews (or does Mr. Horowitz disagree?) are a part.
What I also pointed out, however, and what Mr. Horowitz again does not respond to, is that throughout the Middle Ages, from early post-exilic times to the 20th century—that is, precisely the historical period on which he concentrates—this predisposition, for whatever reason or reasons, was held in check by Jews to a remarkably greater extent than it was by the Gentiles among whom they lived. Ruffled squawks about my historical incompetence aside, Mr. Horowitz does not argue with me about this, either. How could he? There is not a historical fact that he could have marshaled in his favor.
Mr. Horowitz seems to think that the fact that Jews, like every other people on the face of the earth, have resorted to violence on occasion—and that they have a literature in which such violence is sometimes condoned and praised and the destruction of their enemies hoped for—is a “dark” secret that he and a few other intrepid souls like himself deserve our admiration for exposing. But this dark secret is commonplace knowledge to anyone who has ever bothered to read a few books about Jewish history, or for that matter, to have attended a Passover Seder with its prayer of “Pour out Thy wrath upon the Gentiles.” If Mr. Horowitz wanted to write a Jewish version of The Godfather, a work he apparently takes as some kind of model, he should have done it as a movie script.