To the Editor:
Whether your correspondent (Deborah Dorfman, January 1955) is describing her real situation or is writing with tongue in cheek, it seems to me that she does point up a tragic dilemma of many Jewish parents—and admits herself defeated. These parents “lost their religious beliefs before finishing college.” They have more in common with their fellow liberal intellectuals among Gentiles than with the average Jew. They honestly tell their children of their lack of Jewish identification. Then they send their children to Jewish religious schools, join Jewish organizations, lead social lives almost entirely among Jews. They do not know why and are bitterly worried about “segregation.”
Does not your correspondent show that for most of us some kind of “segregation” is a sociological fact, which even those well-equipped cannot escape? Does not your correspondent clearly, if plaintively, show that we are a “peculiar people”?
This being so, would it not be advisable for us to reexamine the historical basis for our peculiarity? Would we not find that it is inseparably bound up with a peculiar understanding of man and God and their relations? With a vast system of responses made to life’s problems within a peculiar framework-Judaism?
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If, in some way, we are segregated, it seems to me that we have two choices. One, we can accept the fact more or less resignedly and stagnate within our “social ghettos,” imitating the desirable but unattainable “integrated”—i.e., non-Jewish—world. We send our children—faute de mieux—to Sunday school to learn of their historical background and to help them with their social integration into (at least) the Jewish community. Since we lost our religious beliefs before finishing college, we do not, of course, want our children instructed in the outmoded superstitions of “religion.”
Or, two, we might recognize that we belong to a group that had conceived of itself as divinely ordered to be holy. We might recognize that we are the result, even today, of a historical process deliberately and consciously instigated and carried on by our leaders in the past. We might then question whether “our religious beliefs before we finished college” had much in common with those responses to life, that Judaism which—to the mystification of sociologists and historians—has kept us alive to this day. . . .
I feel certain that your correspondent would not reject in “politics, literature, the theater, and other ‘intellectual’ pursuits” anything she has not tried to understand and appreciate as a mature person. Only in regard to Judaism, tied up in her mind with emotional, negative (and non-existent) stereotypes of “the average Jew” (canasta and Florida), does she base her judgment on what is essentially an adolescent reaction.
She does not know Judaism’s intellectual sophistication or its emotional satisfactions. . . .
Walter Hartmann
Silver Spring, Maryland
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