At the first planning meeting for a new project examining Jewish leaders in their twenties and thirties, Shaul Kelner, himself a young-ish  sociologist, threw down the gauntlet: “Maybe we ought to study older leaders to find out why they are so worried about Jewish youth. What might explain the hand-wringing of the baby-boomers?”Shaul, of course, had a point:  it had become a commonplace to bemoan “helicopter” parents who continually hover over their college-aged children.  Perhaps, a study of younger Jews would merely perpetuate an irrational anxiety.

Nonetheless, the project to study younger Jewish leaders proceeded. Some of the impetus for the research did come from worries. Like quite a few earlier generations, today’s older leaders are concerned about their successors. Are enough younger people sufficiently dedicated to Jewish life to invest themselves in professional and volunteer work in behalf of Jewish causes? And will those who choose to get involved be up to the job?

Our research was primarily motivated, though, by sheer curiosity about three big questions: How do younger leaders think about Jewish issues? What have been the formative experiences shaping these leaders? And where do they seem to be leading their followers?

These are not hysterical questions, but rather stem from a number of new realties.  Just before we launched the project, Robert Wuthnow, one of the leading sociologists of religious life in America, had published his study, After the Boomers: How Twenty and Thirty-Somethings are Reshaping American Religion. Wuthnow argued that large numbers of college grads defer the large questions of career and family formation until they are well into their thirties, with the result that when they make life-course decisions, they do so without benefitting from strong connections with their parental home and house of worship. The social settings that in the past had helped shape decisions no longer have nearly the same influence.

As ever larger numbers of younger Jews live their twenties and part of their thirties as odyssey years, they too are disengaged from Jewish institutional life, with many not setting foot in a synagogue from the time of their Bar/Bat Mitzvah to well into their late thirties or early forties. This reality renders the panoply of start-ups, initiatives and programs created by and for Jews in their twenties and thirties all the more important. Our project wanted to learn where younger Jews do connect with some form of organized Jewish life and who the leaders are who develop programs for their peers.

It is also no secret that major shifts in technology and communication are reshaping how younger Jews find means to connect.  Organizations no longer require a large infrastructure and budget to engage younger people. This has opened up new opportunities for start-ups operating on modest budgets. It also has created opportunities for creative people to rise rapidly by sheer dint of their smarts and energy.  Conventional Jewish institutions have been slow to come to grips with the fact that their expectations no longer work for younger people: Why bother with the laborious process of moving up step-by-step in a large bureaucracy like a Federation when start-ups offer fast track opportunities? Our project wanted to understand how younger Jews are adapting to the new realities.

The extent to which a generational divide is opening has also preoccupied us. Is it true, we wondered, that Jews in their twenties and thirties share a fairly uniform set of views on Jewish issues? And is a rift opening in the community between younger and older leaders on core questions of Jewish policy?

Once our research commenced, it became dramatically evident that younger leaders are not a monolithic  population. In fact, a great many of them move easily between long-established institutions and recent start-ups. Some, in fact, play leadership roles in both types of organizations. One of the founders of E-3, a social and cultural program in Denver, which reaches hundreds of young people, also happens to hold a professional leadership position in the local federation. A woman in Chicago who founded Club 1948, an Israel-oriented cultural start-up, also works for the American Zionist Movement. In some localities, to be sure, lines between mainstream and non-conventional organizations are quite rigid, but in others there is open collaboration, so that social events will be co-sponsored by a range of organizations whose leaders fan out to recruit attendees sympathetic with their own particular cause.

This suggests that attitudes toward establishment institutions vary greatly. True, significant percentages of younger leaders express distant and critical views of the mainstream organizations and synagogues. But other younger people work for these institutions, often trying to reshape them as more hospitable places for their peers.  The more honest non-establishment leaders will also concede that they depend heavily on financial support from organizations and foundations run by older leaders.

Nor is it true that younger leaders share the same perspectives on Jewish issues. Israeli policies toward the Palestinians are perhaps the most contentious question–so contentious, in fact, that some groups explicitly shy away from discussions about those policies, lest the event implode. But that does not mean younger Jews do not enjoy programs about other aspects of Israeli life, such as its cinema, foods, and environmentally-conscious efforts.

It is also evident that social position is an important variable when considering the attitudes of younger leaders: non-establishment leaders in their twenties do not hold the same views as their thirty-something counterparts, and young leaders who work in the not-for-profit sectors tend to think differently from their peers who work as lawyers and business people.  Rather than think about the entire mass of younger Jewish leaders, the project scrutinized trends within sub-populations.  How do younger leaders working in establishment organizations differ from those in non-establishment groups? Where are the fault lines? And which leaders are most influential?

On this last question, the six members of the research team draw different conclusions.  Some regard the non-establishment types as the leading edge. Everyone wants to know where they are headed, which suggests that they are the most influential. Others, and I am party to this perspective, see far more interplay between younger leaders who are involved in establishment and non-establishment organizations, with reciprocal influences and changing family and economic circumstances likely to modify views.

Over the coming weeks, readers of Jewcy will have the opportunity to examine first-hand some of the rich findings of this project and the range of perspectives it has generated among the research team.  An article at this site by Ari Y. Kelman, of UC Davis, will argue that based on a new map of Jewish sites on the internet, the time has come to reconsider the nature of Jewish community.  A second article by Sylvia Barack Fishman of Brandeis University looks at how younger Jewish leaders think about family formation. Like much else about this project, both are likely to provoke strong responses.

Jack Wertheimer, a professor at JTS, directed the project on Young Jewish Leaders under the auspices of the Avi Chai Foundation.  His Jewcy dialogue with Joey Kurtzman on “The End of the Jewish People” can be found here. His report, Generation of Change: How Leaders in their Twenties and Thirties are Reshaping American Jewish Life, is available here.

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Well, Joey, I never saw it coming. All your talk about the new age in which we live, the easy movement of people and ideas, the collapse of boundaries between people and the joys of intermarriage. And now when all is said and done, where do we end up? We’re back to the stale arguments between socialists and Zionists about universalism versus particularism that took the Jewish world by storm 100 years ago!

After the horrors of the Gulag, Castro’s hell in Cuba, countless “Great Leaps Forward,” and the defeat of Communism in most parts of the world by triumphant liberation movements, you want to take us back to the glory days of socialism. After all the oppression and slaughter that Jews—and hundreds of millions of others—have suffered in the socialist paradises, you want to return to the delusions of your grandparents, if not great-grand-parents. They, at least, could claim ignorance about the outcome of the wonderful socialist experiments. You have no such excuse, but harbor the wish that somehow the current century will differ from the last one.

Leaving aside your willful historical amnesia, your retreat into the past is sinful because you are blind to the opportunities presented to you and your generation of Jews today. Instead of working to further the greatest Jewish experiment of the past two millennia, the extraordinary, maddening, exhilarating, confusing, and ultimately heroic Jewish State, you want to experiment with the biggest non-starter of all—“universalized Judaism.” Instead of building a vibrant Jewish community in this country to demonstrate that Jewish life is so vital it can renew itself after the horrors of the Shoah, you want to expend all your energy to return to the nightmare from which people behind the iron curtain awoke barely 15 years ago. The socialism that “once swept Jewish Europe” was a catastrophe for Jews and non-Jews alike, but you want to give it another crack because you imagine the 21^st century is ripe, even if the 20^th was not.

As I see it, you’ve been suckered, repeatedly. First, you’ve taken to heart the socialist pretensions of your own forebears. Immigrant Jews and their children talked the socialist talk, but did not walk the walk. They did everything in their power to make it in capitalist America. And they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. Aside from engaging in sometimes bizarre political behavior, so that as Milton Himmelfarb famously put it, “Jews earn like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans,” the heirs of the socialist Jews are very nicely ensconced in upper middle class America and more than happy to enjoy their comforts.

You were also ripped off by your Jewish school. Instead of offering far more complicated messages about how Jewish observance repairs us and makes us better human beings, your schooling apparently succumbed to the Judaism lite of “Tikkun Olam.” All we have to do is invest in saving the whales or any other cause du jour and presto—we have a sufficient expression of our Judaism. I applaud Jews who want to save whales and do good in the world, but only if they also want to do good for Jewish life too and to live as Jews. Helping others is no substitute for helping one’s own.

And now you are taken in once again by a “prominent philosopher” who wants the middle class to give away a quarter of its income. This proposal is worthy of a debate?! And if most middle class Americans find this unrealistic scheme as absurd as I do, what do you want to do, Joey? Redistribute their income against their will? I sure hope this is not one of those shiny new ideas that, in your view, are “humiliating” Judaism “in the marketplace of ideas.”

Rather than dwell on the past, let me suggest where we differ regarding a way forward. You trace the collapse of Jewish engagement to the allure of new ideas. Unfortunately, you don’t let on what those ideas are. As I see it, Jews are drifting away because they are seduced by rampant individualism, which persuades them to do their own thing. Consumerism, bowling alone, finding your bliss are not exactly powerful ideas, even if they are attractive candy. You and I at least share a common belief that Jews ought to care about something beyond themselves. You favor universal concerns; I favor Jewish needs first, followed by some engagement with larger causes. From where I sit, growing numbers of American Jews invest themselves in no causes, neither Jewish nor universal. The marketplace of ideas offers a mighty thin gruel in our time

We also differ on strategy. You are intent on pursuing the disaffected who may or may not want to be Jewish, and while you’re at it, you counsel the abandonment of Orthodox Jews and others who care about Jewish peoplehood. It’s a remarkable approach to building a market, Joey: Sever your ties to your most faithful customers in favor of those who show the least commitment to anything Jewish. I favor the reverse: build from the core outward—and the core is committed to Jewish peoplehood.

As you consider what is novel about our times, I wonder whether you recognize that for the first time since Emancipation, Orthodoxy is ascendant, rather than on the defensive. While the heirs of the socialists and other universalists are disappearing as Jews and while liberal versions of Judaism are finding it ever harder to retain the allegiance of their youth, Orthodox Jews are building strong communities, reproducing at high rates, and are so self-assured that they are engaged in outreach efforts to win back Jewish souls. I’ve met a fair number of Jews who have been touched by these efforts. Their existence ought to teach us something about the hunger many Jews feel for real Jewish meaning.

You and I also differ on how Jews can best survive and thrive as a small minority in America. You seem to favor ever more accommodation to current mores and values. I contend that Judaism can only thrive if it is countercultural, and the culture it must reject is precisely what you find most appealing. Of course, as Jacob Neusner observes, Judaism must make sense of the world in which we live. But that explanation must be rooted in Judaic thinking and categories. Its explanations must transcend the ephemeral to address deeper human needs. Any Judaism offering such meaning must be rooted in authentic Jewish teachings.

And what you propose, Joey, is inauthentic: How can you claim that a Jew is “anyone who makes an effort to enrich his life with the wisdom of the Jewish tradition and Jewish scripture”—a definition, by the way, that would include millions of Bible reading Christians—even as you reject the assumptions about Jewishness embedded in every book of the Torah and subsequent Jewish texts? Already in the Book of Exodus, the people of Israel are commanded to serve as “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” Countless Jewish texts explicitly stress the special obligations Jews have toward one another. Jewish literature is replete with distinctions between Jews and gentiles. Your jettisoning of Jewish peoplehood is a repudiation of the very wisdom that suffuses the texts you claim are at the core of your Jewishness.

I’m not going to engage in the charade you apparently encountered while growing up, Joey. I’m not going to argue that the sum total of Jewishness is to repair the world. Rather, I believe engagement with Jewish texts and Jewish living will deepen you as a person, ground you in the life of a vibrant people undergoing one of the most exciting revivals in human history, and compel you to struggle with concepts both foreign to this age and timelessly profound. I hope your “impulse to Jewishness” will triumph sufficiently to give authentic Judaism a serious chance to heal your fractured, Frankenjewish identity. The Jewish people need you.

I’ll be happy to continue our conversation—online or off.

Jack

The post Back to the Future appeared first on Jewcy.

Dear Joey,

You call yourself a reporter and in fact your last letter is a fascinating report from the field about the perceptions of a certain segment of your generation. At this point it is hard to know how many of your peers share your outlook and experiences, but I believe you when you argue that you have come of age in a very different world than earlier generations of Jews.

This is my understanding of what you report: 1) You live in a world of “cosmopolitan pluralism” where you interact with people of many backgrounds (e.g. your experience with Korean-American friends at a Baptist Bible school), and, more broadly, you are immersed in a “polyglot, postmodern American creole culture.” 2) You take it for granted that society is so open that there is no barrier between Jews and non-Jews and certainly no way to prevent intermarriage, even if you wanted to—which you do not.

I believe there is yet an additional factor shaping your generation, which has great bearing on our discussion of peoplehood: You live at a time when well-educated Americans marry late, if at all, and have few children, if any. The fact that the responsibilities of parenting are far down the road for most of your generation further disconnects you from what used to be conventional Jewish life.

By contrast, your Orthodox peers for the most part live in a different world. Since they tend to marry when they are 10-to-15 years younger than most non-Orthodox Jews and have children at younger ages, they assume a set of responsibilities that bring them into contact with organized Jewish life and have a greater and more immediate stake in the collective Jewish present and future.

I can understand why you would regard all these circumstances as a wonderful gift. You feel free and unbounded—no family, no children, no people, no limits, just the great wide world. Little wonder that you latch on to the great causes of our time: “Darfur and mass child death-by-malnutrition” give your life meaning. But do they? I don’t question your concern with these horrors. Which thinking person would not be shaken? But forgive my skepticism, Joey: If you cared deeply about these causes, you would pick yourself up and join the Peace Corps or volunteer for any of the myriad of service organizations sending Americans to do good in the world. Instead, you are content to invoke the mantra of Darfur and malnutrition, as if the brutalities of war and poverty are some new invention.

There is something profoundly adolescent about all this emoting, which is about right because your generation is living out a delayed adolescence, but you are convinced that it is all a terrific gift. Rabbinic Judaism, by contrast, understood long ago that unbounded freedom is a trap. No family, no children, no people, no limits amount to … very little. I doubt your immigrant forbearers would shep nachas.

There is a quality to your writing about Jewish ethnocentrism that is highly reminiscent of the not-too-distant past. Ninety years ago, Rosa Luxemburg declared she had “no room in my heart for Jewish suffering.” Because of the “screams … of the unheard,” she wrote, “I have no separate corner in my heart for the ghetto. I feel at home in the entire world wherever there are clouds and birds and human tears.” Three years after writing these words, she was murdered for her revolutionary activities by German nationalists.

After World War II in countries throughout Eastern Europe, other Jews also proclaimed their eternal fidelity to international socialism, only to be lined up in front of firing squads for being “rootless cosmopolitans.” Don’t be so quick to assume that the easy pluralism and globalism you take for granted is forever, any more than is the post-nationalist era proclaimed by the Tony Judt’s of the Jewish world. And don’t assume your non-Jewish peers are as indifferent to group allegiances as they might claim. Your Jewish spiritual ancestors with their flights of internationalist fancy learned this lesson too late.

You and I can’t seem to discuss the peoplehood issue without reference to intermarriage. Let me try to clarify where we differ: I never suggested that intermarriage is the cause of all that bedevils American Jewry. Of course, intermarriage is a symptom of profound social transformation and the collapse of social barriers.

The reason I labeled intermarriage a disaster in my opening letter is that it promotes further erosion in Jewish life. How? First, because intermarriage fuels more intermarriage: it depletes the market of eligible Jewish males (who intermarry at higher rates than Jewish females) and thus forces many Jewish women who seek to create a Jewish family but do not want to intermarry to choose between a life without children or single parenthood or marrying a non-Jew. Second, when only 30 percent of intermarried parents claim to be raising their children as Jews, we are losing a large majority of the next generation. And, third, many among those who are raised with some Jewish content, are exposed to such confused messages that they struggle to reconcile their incompatible heritages. All the happy talk so fashionable in today’s Jewish community about intermarriage merely obscures these underlying realities.

I reject your contention that we are obsessed with “bloodlines and marital practices.” The religious and communal leadership of the Jewish community has capitulated on this issue, avoiding serious discussion about what is really going on, and prattles endlessly about “outreach” as if there is a vast horde of intermarried families clamoring for engagement with Jewish life, but is somehow shut out by the “bloodline” police. Nonsense. Everyone from Chabad to Reform to birthright Israel is engaged in outreach. Their efforts cannot mitigate the reality that large majorities of intermarried families and their children are lost to the Jewish people.

Why is this reality not spurring you and your friends at Jewcy to action? Why do you spend your time defending the status quo, rather than fighting for the revitalization of Jewish life? In 1969, a group of young Jewish activists forced their way into the General Assembly of the then Council of Jewish Federations to demand greater investment in Jewish education. This was during the era of the Civil Rights movement and the anti-war demonstrations. The Jewish students protesters were supporters of those causes too, but they invested their energy in challenging the Jewish establishment for being insufficiently Jewish in its priorities.

Today, by contrast, you and other young Jews are busy worrying about the ethnocentrism of the Jewish community. I am not a big fan of baby-boomer self-absorption, but in this case, a portion of my generation had it right. And you have it wrong: the problem of American Jewish life is an insufficiency of Jewish pride and connection, not a surfeit of ethnocentrism.

I wish your version of generational rebellion would focus on the unbearable lightness of Jewish life in American. I wish you would stop with the self-congratulatory routine about “the self-confidence of this generation of Jewish Americans” to look at the hollowness of Jewish life. Yes, you are confident that no barriers will impede you as you strive for socio-economic success. But the collapse of those barriers is hardly your achievement. Are your peers self-confident in their Judaic literacy and the ease with which they can negotiate their way around a synagogue religious service, a Jewish text, a neighborhood in Jerusalem?

Most of your generation attended mediocre if not worse Jewish educational programs; most are illiterate in the national language of the Jewish people; most have only a glancing familiarity with the riches of our Jewish heritage. Instead of being angry about the terrible waste and demanding of the establishment that it
gets its priorities straight, you resort to motherhood and apple pie talk about Darfur and malnutrition, as if that requires a great sell.

Your concluding observations about the death of ethnocentrism, reminds me of a conversation I held last summer with a group of American Jewish college students. One of them declared: “I believe it is immoral for Jews to give priority to aiding fellow Jews when so many other people are in greater distress.” In reply, a different student shot back, “Don’t we have a greater responsibility to take care of our own family? Jews around the world are our family.”

As I read your impatient remarks about those who believe “ someone is a less appropriate object of our love and commitment because of the particulars of their genealogy,” I can only conclude that either you don’t accept that human beings have a special responsibility to give back to their own family or that you don’t regard the Jewish people as your family. Given the world in which I grew up, these are unthinkable options for me.

But if you truly accept no special responsibility for fellow Jews, if you cannot bring yourself to rank concern for fellow Jews uppermost in your priorities, then I am left to wonder what being Jewish means to you. Taking care of your own people does not cut it for you; assuming the yoke of Torah, which among other things issues a religious commandment to build a Jewish family in the time-honored fashion of marrying a Jew, does not seem to resonate. So, Joey, what do you believe ought to be the content of a Jewish life?

Jack

Next: The Coming Jewish Schism

The post From Rosa Luxemburg to Jewcy appeared first on Jewcy.

Dear Joey,

Thank you for your illuminating and brutally honest opening letter. It ought to be required reading by all Jewish leaders, especially those who have worked so assiduously to silence anyone who dares utter the self-evident truth—vividly dramatized by your letter—that intermarriage is a disaster for the Jewish people.

If you are accurately representing the views of your colleagues at Jewcy, your letter is a heartbreaking reflection of what intermarriage has wrought. Not only do you forthrightly concede that “Judaism and Jewishness have never had so limited a claim on the identity of young Jews”—a reality denied by the advocates of outreach—you also urge the reinvention of Judaism so that it reflects the mixed “patrimony” of children raised in intermarried families. In other words, you seek religious syncretism.

I can sympathize with your predicament. Over the past decades, Jewish institutions have turned a blind eye to the cognitive dissonance developing in a great many intermarried families, which struggle to reconcile incompatible religions. The extended outreach industry based in synagogues, JCCs, and federations has downplayed the damage, pretending that everything will turn out all right. Christmas trees are really not religious symbols; Easter dinner is really not about Christ. It’s all just a way to be respectful of the Gentile side of the family. What your letter demonstrates is that “Jewish-American mongrels,” as you call them, took these celebrations seriously and are trying desperately to reconcile the irreconcilable components within their own identity.

For my part, I have a different message: Pick a single religion and a single people. It will save you much grief. I hope the religion you choose is Judaism and the people with a claim on you is the Jewish people. Your wish to create a Jewish identity mixing multiple religious traditions is a fantasy, and you know it because of the very ways you think about yourselves—“Frankenjews,” “mongrelized” are terms you employ to describe your fractured selves.

No authentic Judaism can be built on the religious syncretism you demand. And no concept of Jewish peoplehood ought to be capacious enough to approve of the premise that Jewishness has merely a vote but not a veto, a phrase, by the way, coined by Mordecai Kaplan and the Reconstructionists in reference to Halakha, but not accepted by the Conservative movement.

So to answer your two questions directly: “Has America annihilated Jewish peoplehood?” It has eroded the willingness of a significant sector of your generation to take responsibility for fellow Jews. But there are tens of thousands of young Jews who advocate for Israel on college campuses, eagerly sign up for Birthright trips (nearly 25,000 are going this summer alone!), join AIPAC, volunteer to address Jewish needs at home and abroad—and yes, take the time to go online to figure out how they want to connect to the Jewish collective. Many more will enlist when the Jewish community does a better job of teaching Jews that repairing the Jewish people (Tikkun Am Yisrael) is at least as important as repairing the world (Tikkun Olam).

As to your second question: How are you wrong? Your analogy of Yochanan Ben Zakkai gives it away. Yochanan Ben Zakkai retreated to Yavneh with a small band of followers in order to develop rabbinic Judaism. His was a minority movement that triumphed because it had a coherent, principled religious message. It was not a message of pluralism, “I’m ok, you’re ok,” or religious syncretism. It was not a “big tent” understanding of Judaism. Rathe
r, it sought to move Jews to act on religious imperatives and obligations. Only over many centuries did rabbinic Judaism gradually win over the masses of Jews.

Jewish life in the United States will be renewed when we build from the core outward, when we support the most committed, then reach out to the moderately engaged, and keep doors open for those of your disengaged peers who want to confront an authentic Judaism, rather than recreate Judaism in their own image.

I hope that the leadership of the American Jewish community will have the wisdom to reject religious syncretism and affirm the centrality of Jewish peoplehood. I pray that Jewish leaders will have the courage to assert what they have danced around—namely, that Judaism is different. It is different from Christianity and from secular liberal culture. I’m betting that some of your peers will be so moved by principled Jewish positions that they will cease to be Frankenjews, and become un-conflicted members of the Jewish people.

Jack

Next: The Old Ethnocentric Cult is Finished

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