Friday, December 31, 1999

Holocaust Reparations

(This satire was originally published in the New York Jewish Week in December 1998)

What’s all the fuss about Holocaust money going to our organizations and not to the survivors and their families? That’s the way it has been for the longest time in American Jewish life and there is no reason to change a formula that has resulted in the steady growth of our establishment.

Anyway, the Holocaust ended fifty-three years ago and, as the Swiss were saying until recently, there are few survivors and those who remain among the living cannot prove their claims. The real Jewish survivors are our organizations which, although they stopped functioning years ago, continue to be in business.

As for the Jewish needy who lived through the destruction of European Jewry, they can collect welfare, Medicare, food stamps, Section 8 and a slew of other government benefits. If that’s not enough, they can shnor in shul or from relatives. Besides, they’ll soon be getting $500 each from the humanitarian fund that Jewish groups have set up with other people’s money. This should keep them quiet for quite a while.

We should be more concerned about the dozens of major Jewish organizations which each day are on the firing line doing battle to raise money and get some scraps of publicity. It’s hard work to get a press release published once a year in the New York Times and it’s hard and degrading to get the very rich to part with some of their wealth in return for a meaningless dedication or insincere sycophancy.

Jewish organizations have a profound respect for the dead and they show it at a cost of millions of dollars each year when they give their departed machers a deserved final resting place on the obituary page of the Times. Isn’t it more appropriate to spend money on this cause than to enrich Holocaust survivors who for a half a century have been able to recount their wartime experiences?

We have learned from survey research, another expensive habit of our establishment, that two-thirds of American Jewish Holocaust survivors have been to Miami Beach at least three times and most have done well financially, while raising their children to be good Americans.

Thanks to our trailblazing organizations, while their parents still speak with an accent, the children have warmly embraced the great American Jewish imperative of assimilation. It took the European Jews who came here between 1880 and 1914 three generations to accomplish what the children of so many Holocaust survivors have achieved in one generation. We ought to show gratitude for the groups that have demonstrated that you can be a good Jew without being Jewish.

Jewish leaders have struggled for years to stay in business, enduring the slings and arrows of those who say that they and their agencies are not needed. Why can’t we understand that it has not been easy to go to all of those conferences and conventions, to eat at so many dinners, to sit at boring meetings and to listen to inconsequential speeches?

The recent General Assembly in Jerusalem gave proof of the sacrifice of American Jewish leaders. Three thousand made the trip – just a small proportion of our apparently inexhaustible supply of machers – and most were forced to travel economy class. There were fat cats and back-home big shots who had to squeeze into narrow seats because there weren’t enough business class seats and too many were occupied by the nouveau riche Israelis. Worse still, they endured long days of long speeches and streams of cliche. Some speakers had the temerity to give their talks in Hebrew, a strange language for American Jewish leaders. Machers who are accustomed to sit front and center on the dais were forced to sit hundreds of feet away. On the trip home, one was heard to mutter, “This is like being in a cattle car.”

As for those who were in the cattle cars, they aren’t showing any appreciation. Instead of accepting what their superiors are offering, they have become greedy as they grasp for the spoils resulting from the slave labor of class action lawyers. Some are demanding an accounting of the past fifty years of reparation and restitution money. There are accusations that German Jewish property was stolen by the Nazis has been denied to their rightful Jewish owners because our restitution contortionists have constructed an elaborate bureaucratic maze that makes it impossible for Jews to get what is theirs. It’s wonderful that this disgusting charge has been ignored by the American Jewish media and only the Jerusalem Report, which no one reads anymore, has picked up the story.

Some of the worst noise is coming from Williamsburg Chasidim, people who think that just because they are Holocaust survivors they have the right to sit at the same table with the machers and decide what to do with the Swiss money. They do not even speak English and with their old world dress and folkways, they are an embarrassment. Who cares whether their families suffered in Auschwitz and Treblinka? For decades they have been aloof from the establishment and the old boys’ network that controls Holocaust funds. Now they are greedy, like Chasidim always are.

Let them be represented by clean-shaven Orthodox Jews who are always willing to make a deal giving the establishment what it wants, so long as they get their cut. Some Jewish leaders are fed up with all the criticism, saying that whoever does not like the way business has been conducted in American Jewish life since Haym Solomon’s time can go back from whence he came. Thankfully, cooler heads are prevailing. They know that it’s best to ignore the pesky noise-makers. They might cause some trouble and get a bit of attention but soon enough it will all pass.

At the end of the day, our organizations will get their money and their way. That’s the way it has always been.

Soon enough, there won’t be any Holocaust survivors.

Friday, December 24, 1999

Defining Judaism Downward

(Originally published in the New York Jewish Week)

A new form of Christian-Jewish comity has arisen, not as the agenda of any organization but from powerful social realities that are certain to be transient, yet which are alive in contemporary Jewish life.

American Jewry is in a post-assimilation stage in which the massive, ceaseless Judaic abandonment of the past two or three generations has been incorporated into our communal and personal lives. Organized American Jewry continues to send a message imploring Jews to become more committed, even more traditional. Activities aimed at promoting this goal receive significant funding. From the look of things, there is progress, as when the Reform movement embraces greater religiosity. There are homes where Judaism is more vibrant today.

Still, the far larger picture in terms of numbers is one of irreversible loss, along with the acceptance of this loss by defining Judaism downward. In the process, a new reality has been established at the family and personal level in relationships between Christians and Jews.

If the petty warfare abates among the statisticians who are called demographers, we should be told within a year whether the intermarriage rate has changed since the 1990 National Jewish Population Survey. The news will be interesting, perhaps important, and much will be made of it. It will beget articles and reports, conferences and task forces, and projects galore. In the end, though, it will be mainly a sideshow.

The big news in American Jewish life no longer is intermarriage or Jewish loss. They are yesterday’s story, although they have a great bearing on today’s reality. Today’s new story is how in the face of what seems to be massive Jewish loss, American Jewry is attempting to reinvent itself as a secularized ethnic group — essentially as a membership group — in which our religious practices and beliefs are artifacts and options, but not imperatives.

By the hundreds of thousands or more, American Jews are saying that it is for them to choose how they will act as Jews. Attention may be paid to history and to tradition, but we owe the past nothing. We are not obligated to follow the ways of our grandparents or, for that matter, our parents. Nor should we fret much about posterity, since after all, our offspring deserve to have the same freedom as we claim for ourselves.

In this Reconstructionist vision (not the movement) of Jewish life, the door is wide open for experimentation and change, including the erosion of barriers between Jew and Christian. In the amalgam that is evolving among post-assimilation Jews, what separates one religion from the other is articulated in arrangements that allow for closer personal religious interrelationships than anything that was visualized by the National Conference of Christians and Jews.

This development is the inevitable consequence of intermarriage and the corollary living patterns that have become standard in many American Jewish households. It has been apparent for a generation that a steadily growing number of those living in what loosely is called a Jewish household are people who are not Jewish, not by birth or choice or any other definition. They number today well above 1 million and they are, in the main, Christians by birth and, to a lesser extent, the children of intermarried couples. If these non-Jews are not practicing Christians, they identify in some fashion as being Christian, whether because they adhere to symbols that identify them as such or because of family ties with practicing Christians.

It will take a decade or two to have a fuller appreciation of the religious and social outcomes of mixed marriages, but what can already be appreciated is the weakening of attitudinal and behavioral features that separate Christian from Jew.

While Jews who intermarry used to withdraw completely from Jewish life, there is now an expanding tendency to straddle the two religions. There are intermarried Jews who have heeded the part of the continuity message that urges American Jews to identify as Jews. Their ability to do this in the face of intermarriage has been made possible by the attenuation of religion in Jewish life and by the growing receptivity of Christians toward Jews.

Among Americans generally, Jews are a greatly admired people, respected for their intelligence, industry and contributions to the arts and sciences and to society. This makes it easier for Christian spouses in intermarriage situations — and their nuclear families as well — to be receptive to some maintenance of Jewish identity by the Jewish spouse. This receptivity is in line with the religious tolerance and pluralism that is critical in the outlook of liberal Christian groups.

At one level, this development is reflected in two-religion families, in the effort to accommodate both religions — their major holidays and some element of observance. It is facilitated, as well, by marital arrangements that allow each spouse to go his or her separate way and for the children to decide as they approach adulthood how they may want to identify religiously. Interestingly, Jewish demographic surveys are beginning to ask respondents about church attendance and other outside religious experiences.

It is likely that we are still early in the process of creating hybrid religious experiences. As American Jewry becomes more secular and also more heedful of the pleas to stay in the fold, the new kinds of arrangement are likely to expand.

This is the Jewish social reality at the end of the century. It is a remarkable story. Under conditions that are now present in Jewish life, this development will carry well into the next century. As a social reality it cannot be ignored, no matter what reservations any of us may have. Indeed, what is at present mainly the personal experience of many Jews is likely to be incorporated into the outlook at activities of organized American Jewry.

From a religious standpoint, it is an arrangement that cannot last more than two generations. Jewish survival cannot be based on intermarriage or advanced assimilation, or on a hybrid religion that eliminates our distinctiveness.

Wednesday, December 01, 1999

Christians and Jews

We no longer hear about the National Conference of Christians and Jews and so it’s hard to say whether they are still in business, although when it was alive for sure, it was scarcely breathing. The group’s agenda touched the lives of few Christians or Jews, while the refrain of a Judeo-Christian tradition that was central in the development of Western thought was high-sounding rhetoric belied by the Holocaust. For all of its truly good intentions, the organization served as a mausoleum for an idea. While no one could inveigh against what was being preached, few people embraced it as a central theme of their lives.

A new form of Christian-Jewish comity has arisen, not as the agenda of any organization but out of powerful social realities that are certain to be transient, yet which are alive in contemporry Jewish life.

American Jewry is in a post-assimilation stage in which the massive, ceaseless Judaic abandonment of the past two or three generations has been incorporated into our communal and personal lives. Organized American Jewry continues to send a message imploring Jews to become more committed, even more traditional. Activities aimed at promoting this goal receive significant funding. From the look of things, there is progress, as when the Reform movement apparently embraces greater religiosity. There are homes where Judaism is more vibrant today.

Still, the far larger picture in terms of numbers is one of irreversible loss, along with the acceptance of this loss by defining Judaism downward. In the process, a new reality has been established at the family and personal level in relationships between Christians and Jews.

If the petty warfare among the statisticians who are called demographers abates, we should be told within a year whether the intermarriage rate has changed since the 1990 National Jewish Population Survey. The news will be interesting, perhaps important, and much will be made of it. It will beget articles and reports, conferences and task forces and projects galore. In the end, though, it will be mainly a sideshow.

The big news in American Jewish life no longer is intermarriage or Jewish loss. They are yesterday’s story, although they have a great bearing on today’s reality. Today’s new story is how in the face of what seems to be massive Jewish loss, American Jewry is attempting to reinvent itself as a secularized ethnic group – essentially, as a membership group – in which our religious practices and beliefs are artifacts and options, but not imperatives.

By the hundreds of thousands or more, American Jews are saying that it is for them to choose how they will act as Jews. Attention may be paid to history and to tradition, but we owe the past nothing. We are not obligated to follow the ways of our grandparents or, for that matter, our parents. Nor should we fret much about posterity, since, after all, our offspring deserve to have the same freedom as we claim for ourselves.

In this Reconstructionist vision of Jewish life, the door is wide open for experimentation and change, including the erosion of barriers between Jew and Christian. In the amalgam that is evolving among post-assimilation Jews, what separates one religion from the other is articulated in arrangements that allow for closer personal religious interrelationships than anything that was visualized by the National Conference of Christians and Jews.

This development is the inevitable consequence of intermarriage and the corollary living patterns that have become standard in many American Jewish households. It has been apparent for a generation that a steadily growing number of persons living in what loosely is called a Jewish household are people who are not Jewish, not by birth or choice or any other definition. They number today well above one-million and they are, in the main, Christians by birth and, to a lesser extent, the children of intermarried couples. If these non-Jews are not practicing Christians, they identify in some fashion as being Christian, whether because they adhere to symbols that identify them as such or because of family ties with practicing Christians.

The 1990 data indicated that a majority of children in Jewish homes were not being raised as Jews. It will take a decade or two to have a fuller appreciation of the religious and social outcomes of mixed marriages, but what can already be appreciated is the weakening of attitudinal and behavioral features that separate Christian from Jew.

While Jews who intermarry used to withdraw completely from Jewish life, there is now an expanding tendency to straddle the two religions. There are intermarried Jews who have heeded the part of the continuity message that urges American Jews to identify as Jews. Their ability to do this in the face of intermarriage has been made possible by the attenuation of religion in Jewish life and by the growing receptivity of Christians toward Jews.

Among Americans generally, Jews are a greatly admired people, respected for their intelligence, industry and contributions to the arts and sciences and to society. This makes it easier for Christian spouses in intermarriage situations – and their nuclear families as well – to be receptive to some maintenance of Jewish identity by the Jewish spouse. This receptivity is in line with the religious tolerance and pluralism that is critical in the outlook of liberal Christian groups.

At one level, this development is reflected in two-religion families, in the effort to accommodate both religious – their major holidays and some element of observance. It is facilitated, as well, by marital arrangements that allow each spouse to go his or her separate way and for the children to decide as they approach adulthood how they may want to identify religiously. Interestingly, Jewish demographic surveys are beginning to ask respondents about church attendance and other outside religious experiences.

It is likely that we are still early in the process of creating hybrid religious experiences. As American Jewry becomes more secular and also more heedful of the pleas to stay in the fold, the new kinds of arrangement are likely to expand.

This is the Jewish social reality at the end of the century. It is a remarkable story. Under the conditions that are now present in Jewish life, this development will carry well into the next century. As a social reality it cannot be ignored, no matter what reservations any of us may have. Indeed, what is at present mainly the personal experience of many Jews is likely to be incorporated into the outlook at activities of organized American Jewry.

From a religious standpoint, it is an arrangement that cannot last more than two generations. Jewish survival cannot be based on intermarriage or advanced assimilation or on a hybrid religion that eliminates our distinctiveness.