At Ease
A Certain People: American Jews and their Lives Today.
by Charles E. Silberman.
Summit Books. 458 pp. $19.95.
I am told that my grandfather, who during World War II was killed in the Bialystok ghetto at the age of eighty-two, was in the habit of taking his pulse three times a day. My father, too, before his heart gave out, would often stand, face taut, with his right hand held gingerly by two fingers of the left. It was thus no surprise to find myself part of a community that regularly conducts surveys and self-studies like nurses applying thermometers in a hospital. The Jewish preoccupation with health is intended to be protective.
Until recently, American Jewish health charts were a cause of deep concern. Fewer births and a fast-growing rate of intermarriage had fostered predictions of decline in the world's largest center of Jewish population. The severest prediction had been of a drop from about 5.7 million in 1979 to fewer than a million within a century. Gloomier even than the numerical balance was the forecast for Jewish “identity”—a term sufficiently vague for the thing it designates. By the early 1970's, every branch of organized Jewish communal life had declared a crisis in young leadership and was fretting over the waning interest of young people in retaining their Jewish association.
Then, about five years ago, the mood began to shift. Several sociologists and communal workers started to question the findings of their colleagues. Was the devastation really as thorough as had been thought? The Havurah (religious fellowship) movement, which had, in common with the generation of the 60's whence it emerged, a unique capacity for “feeling good about itself,” brought a certain mood of satisfaction into the larger community as well. Most important, the general upsurge of optimism ushered in by the first Reagan administration buoyed the Jews, who are always exceedingly sensitive to shifts in the national spirit, and made them feel that perhaps their house, too, was being put in order.
Although he does not credit this last-named cause, Charles Silberman in A Certain People: American Jews and Their Lives Today sets out to show that the new optimism is appropriate because it is warranted by the facts. While some Jews, still bearing scars of recent history, may be alarmed and bewildered by the dramatic changes in their condition in American society since World War II, they have no reason, Silberman writes, to fear the consequences of their good fortune, because “they are not heading for a fall.” American society is different from those that preceded it—pluralistic, democratic, and essentially tolerant; and the gains that Jews have made in it are to be fully trusted.
Told as a story of rags to riches, the book begins with a brief history of modern anti-Semitism, under which Jews were oppressed in Europe and discriminated against more subtly in America. Silberman explains that anti-Semitism is no longer a significant factor in America; its disappearance has marked the final stages of Jewish emancipation. As long as Jewishness was a liability, those born into the condition were naturally burdened by their heritage, having to choose between ethnic loyalty and success in the larger public domain. But now that Jewishness is no longer problematic, the individual Jew can remain true both to his ambition and to his people, without the necessity of inner conflict.
This benign environment, far from threatening survival (as many had assumed), nurtures the Jew, so much so that in Silberman's estimation even intermarriage, once considered the measure of assimilation, may yet prove to be an instrument of survival. As growing acceptance of Jews among Gentiles is balanced by a growing acceptance of intermarriage among Jews, mixed-marriage couples who once felt shunned are now able “to be integrated into the Jewish community and thus to identify themselves as Jews.” Citing a wide range of statistical data, Silberman contends that, with Jewishness no longer a social handicap, intermarried couples may well bring up their children as Jews, resulting in a possible gain to the people of 40 percent! (The exclamation point is Silberman's own.) Moreover, the cultural and religious renewal that he sees under way in all sectors of Jewish life makes such a life increasingly attractive to converts and to the Jewish young.
From this sociological analysis of a religious community's success, the author reaches certain political conclusions. “American Jews are secure—secure enough, in fact, to risk displeasing a second-term Republican President by remaining liberal Democrats.” Attributing Jewish success in America to the country's essentially secular and pluralistic atmosphere of liberal tolerance, Silberman urges Jews to stay true to this real tradition of Americanism even as they undergo a kind of Jewish revival. He ends his work with an afterword on Bitburg in which he congratulates American Jews both for having behaved like natives (by expressing their pain and outrage on the occasion of the President's visit to a German cemetery containing the graves of Nazi stormtroopers) and for their readiness to “speak truth to power.”
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As this summary suggests, Silberman's book, though based on a good deal of reading, is less a critical analysis than an argument for a certain view of American Judaism and its adherents. Advertising his candor (“Readers are entitled to know who is speaking to them and from what perspective”), he uses this as a license to move freely from one plane of writing to another, insinuating himself as advocate whenever the statistical evidence for his position is questionable, buttressing the data with a variety of anecdotal “items,” heightening the soluble problems, skirting the intractable ones, and dropping his political message to add the final flavor like a cherry atop an icecream sundae. All this is done in the sweetly reasoned tones of an arbiter, bringing happy prospects to a fretful tribe.
Silberman's idea of Judaism is similarly pliant. He favors a visible Judaism—the retention of Jewish-sounding names, the observation of Jewish holidays, and strong identification with Israel—but he resists any of the nay-saying features of the religion, let alone its system of imperatives. The word halakhah, the Jewish way of life under religious law, scarcely appears in the book. Silberman believes, rather, that individual autonomy, “finding an approach to Judaism that has meaning for oneself, is the greatest strength of the current Jewish renewal movement, not its fatal flaw.” Citing with approval Mordecai Kaplan's statement that “the Jewish religion existed for the Jewish people, and not the Jewish people for the Jewish religion,” he sees the vindication of this thesis in the actual behavior patterns of American Jews, whose supermarket approach to their religious civilization allows them to choose those customs that fit in best with their current lives. Yet even Kaplan, the founder of Reconstructionism (the branch of Judaism to which Silberman belongs), might have been surprised to find his views thus interpreted as a triumph of sociology over religion.
If American Judaism does have a fatal flaw today, Silberman, for one, believes it is to be found among the Orthodox. Describing a neo-Orthodox commune in California, for example, he momentarily drops his customarily amiable tone:
There was a decided cultlike atmosphere to the shiur (study group) [sic: shiur means a Talmud lesson] I attended in 1979. It was evident in the authoritarian manner in which Rabbi Lapin conducted the “discussion” and, even more, in the sheeplike way in which the forty-five or fifty participants accepted his pronouncements as if they were profound and revealed truths. They were not. To someone familiar with the rabbinic commentaries on the biblical passage under discussion—Abraham's argument with God over the latter's proposed destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah—Lapin's comments seemed banal as well as unpleasantly chauvinistic. Yet no one in this group of seemingly bright, articulate young men and women questioned or challenged anything Lapin said, even when he was denigrating Christianity in what I found to be a crude and offensive way. “They don't want to be bothered anymore,” an Orthdox rabbi friend explained to me, “They are running away from complexity.”
So there are, after all, limits to Silberman's approval of Jewish religious heterogeneity. Still, it is bracing to find a critical edge in a book that is elsewhere so soppy—as, for example, several pages later, when he glowingly offers the following item:
The headline on the front-page article of the September 30-October 5, 1984 issue of Our Town, a weekly newspaper serving Manhattan's fashionable Upper East Side, read, “The New Year's Call for Renewal.” The article that followed, written by Harvey M. Tattelbaum, rabbi of the Temple Shaaray Tefila, a Reform congregation in the neighborhood, concluded with an invitation “to join us on Rosh Hashanah afternoon for our ‘Tashlich’ service (casting away of our sins) at the East River about 81st Street . . . at 3:00 P.M. New breath is infused into an ancient ritual. The Shofar is blown, songs are sung, prayers are intoned. It has become our Synagogue's Rosh Hashanah ‘happening’ by the waters.”
In this, the very stuff of parody, Silberman seems to find not only a sign of “a notable return to traditional rituals, ceremonies, and forms of worship,” but intimations of that independence of spirit, tolerance, and intellectual complexity of which he so approves (and which, as anyone knows who ever attended one, is so characteristic of “happenings”).
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It is therefore advisable, in reading this celebration of American Jews, to keep in mind the nature of our guide. Though he tells us at the outset that he is an American and a Jew, Silberman speaks above all as a liberal, determined to make the script fit the message he wants to deliver. Yet his is a liberalism with a new twist. When he urges Jews to remain liberal Democrats it is not because, as an earlier generation of liberal universalists once maintained, doing so would be better for the world, but because, in his view, the liberal agenda best serves the interests of American Jews in the 1980's. If Jews were to quit the Democratic party, for example, Jesse Jackson might have an easier time pushing the party toward an openly Third World stance on foreign policy. Similarly, if the Jews were to abandon their liberal attitudes on social issues and on the question of church-state relations, they would be helping to foster a religious extremism that would ultimately turn ugly against them. Or again, if Jews focus too single-mindedly on narrow issues like American support for Israel, they may lose that very influence in the general community that has made their support of Israel so effective. Thus does Silberman argue for the liberal agenda on the basis of sheer Jewish self-interest.
There are at least two objections to this. The first and more obvious one is that Jewish self-interest may dictate a rather different strategy. The historian Salo Baron pointed out some time ago that in the arena of power politics, “no greater misfortune can befall a group than being taken for granted.” By this standard alone, the growing numbers of Jews in Republican ranks strengthens Jewish bargaining power in both parties. Any true friend of American blacks would try to impress upon them the importance of this truth.
Secondly, though he begins his book by expressing relief that Jews no longer have to be “nice,” i.e., to make themselves publicly inconspicuous by lowering their voices and trying to fit in with the crowd, Silberman's concluding prescription amounts to nothing more than the advocacy of this same “niceness” in the political sphere. Yet either anti-Semitism has waned, in which case Jews are free to vote and to take political action according to their own best lights, or it has not, in which case Silberman's assertions of strength and safety are wrong, and Jews must be careful and canny in the alliances they forge. And if, as Silberman contends, American Jews are truly unthreatened, then all the more must they make support for Israel the focal point of their political activity, precisely because Israel is not similarly secure.
In the light of his larger thesis, Silberman's comments on Bitburg are particularly obtuse. The tendency to define the President's visit as a “Jewish issue” should have been strenuously resisted by the Jewish community, because here, certainly, was an insult to an entire country that had fought the Nazis, an insult that demanded a cry of “pain and outrage” from all Americans alike. Elie Wiesel's reproach to the President was eloquently appropriate; he was there in the White House as a survivor of the Holocaust. But in allowing the media to turn Bitburg into a “Jewish issue,” American Jewish leaders revealed their own lingering insecurities, and an identification with the victim's role that does not sit well with their allegedly newfound dignity.
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More objectionable than Silberman's political analysis, however, is his political posture, which seems to be lacking in principle. It is awkward to accuse a man of failing his own beliefs, but the Jewish alliance with traditional liberal values that Silberman invokes was based, after all, on a vision of liberty and justice that seemed to many to have come right out of Judaism itself. If Jews once gravitated ideologically to the Left, it was not only because this seemed to them the path of advancement, but because the promise of equal opportunity, mutual tolerance, and greater dignity for the individual appeared to universalize certain basic tenets of the Jewish religion, and was a program that would benefit all mankind as it benefited them.
The turn against this liberal ideology, or rather against what has become of it, is likewise based on a larger vision of liberty and justice rooted in the Jewish way of life. Though neoconservatives like Irving Kristol may and do try to show that their views coincide with Jewish political interests, their critique of liberalism is based not so much on calculations of personal or communal gain as on the failure of liberalism itself to achieve its stated ends. The debate, in other words, is still over what used to be called “the search for a better world,” and Jews who contribute to it still draw inspiration from their indigenous traditions.
Silberman's failure to appreciate the moral seriousness of Judaism is thus coupled with his failure to grasp the moral seriousness of the current Jewish political debate. He may be right about the strength of American Jewry, but the real evidence for that strength is to be sought in areas beyond his reach.
