(Originally published in the New York Jewish Week)
The point to be understood about racism or other forms of bigotry is that, as hateful as they may seem to others, these views are regarded as truthful by those who express them. So it has been regarding what is written about Orthodox Jews. The term “ultra-Orthodox” — innocent to those who use it — is meant to convey fanaticism and worse, yet it has been incorporated into the vernacular as the appropriate way to describe a great many religious Jews whose main sin is to live according to the dictates of their religion.
Bigotry is a dynamic social and emotional force. Left unchecked, it feeds on itself and grows and becomes uglier. While anti-Orthodox bias has become routinized, it escalates as it takes on ever-nastier overtones.
An example is the remarkable New York Times review of “Kadosh” (Hebrew for “sacred”), a movie by Amos Gital, an ultra-secular Israeli.
Movies are a form of expression, therefore also protected speech. Amos Gital has the right to make whatever movies are conjured up by his disturbed fantasies. But the right to speak does not mean that what is spoken is right, as is evident in the nearly universal condemnation of hate speech. Mr. Gital can go about bashing the Orthodox, but we should recognize his hate for what it is.
Stephen Holden, the Times’ reviewer, knows that “Kadosh” is a work of fiction, at least in the particular story that is being told. But he takes the ugly incidents depicted in the movie as reflections of what life is like among the very Orthodox. After telling us about rebellious Rivka, who is forced to marry Yossef, “a boorish, rabble-rousing fanatic who rattles around Jerusalem in a sound truck broadcasting millennial screeds, “Mr. Holden writes:
“Their wedding night scene would be the stuff of grotesque comedy if it weren’t so cruel. After hastily removing as few clothes as necessary, Yossef climbs on the bed, pulls the covers over them and without so much as kissing his bride, or even looking her in the face, brutally lunges at her as she screams in agony. Later, when he suspects her of infidelity, Yossef goes ballistic and viciously beats her with a belt.”
This is fiction, of course, just a movie by someone who doesn’t like the Orthodox, except that the reviewer continues: “The sort of oppression endured by the women in ‘Kadosh,’ of course, is not limited to ultra-Orthodox Jews. It is just as virulent among Moslem fundamentalists and extreme sects in other religions. At its heart is a fear and loathing of sex that originates largely from a primitive notion of women’s bodies as essentially unclean.”
So the fiction is reality because Orthodox Jews — or at least the “ultra” variety — rape their wives, beat them with belts, etc. We Orthodox can perhaps take a measure of comfort in that we are in the company of other religions.
Stephen Holden doesn’t have data to support his remarkable assertion, as there isn’t any. I would bet 10 to 1 that if a study was conducted, the incidence of spousal rape and abuse would be 10 times greater among the non-Orthodox. But the truth would hardly matter, for a network of stereotypes about the Orthodox has been formed and it has become embedded in the way that these religious Jews are described.
While Mr. Holden breaks new ground in the viciousness of his words, his path has been well prepared by a stream of articles in the general press and nearly every Jewish newspaper in the world. It is easy to believe the fantasy, as devoid as it is of any reality, because the myth has been transmitted via so many presumably reliable publications. When our own media stop regarding Orthodox Jews — or many of them — as fanatics who engage in bizarre, abusive and wrongful behavior, we might expect that outsiders will have a more balanced view. Until then, as a reviewer wrote in, of all places, Israel’s daily Haaretz, “We have become our own anti-Semites.”
As I have noted often, the Orthodox have problems. They are not entirely immune from the pathologies in the world around them. Because there is a high degree of intra-communal awareness and a heightened sense of responsibility, the tendency is to address internal problems, as is apparent in the large number of Orthodox-sponsored voluntary groups that provide an impressive array of social services.
In a way, this candor backfires, as when the media focus on a problem area — drugs are the current favorite — and make the situation seem worse than it is.
There are difficult spots, to be sure, but more than any other group I know of, the Orthodox attempt to deal with what is painful or aberrant.
It is now acknowledged that population surveys systematically undercount the Orthodox. Reports of their deviance or wrongful behavior invariably are exaggerations. If we accept as credible all of the statistics, it appears that at least 150 percent of all Orthodox Jews are dysfunctional. Happily, this statistical anomaly is readily explained when we recognize that many Orthodox exhibit multiple behavioral disorders.
Friday, March 03, 2000
Wednesday, March 01, 2000
A Statement on Jewish Education
(Originally published by the American Jewish Committee)
It is comforting to know that after a century of day schools on these shores, a corner has finally been turned and American Jewry is prepared to embrace these institutions by providing them with the spiritual, intellectual, and — hopefully — financial resources they require. There are good reasons for optimism, for believing that we are at long last on the right path. Day school enrollment is up, notably in the non-Orthodox sectors where it has been lagging, and the trend is certain to continue as new schools are established and additional families that must be regarded as Jews at risk recognize the importance of a meaningful Jewish education. The naysayers appear to be gone with the wind or at least silenced and marginalized. Day schools have become legitimate, the in thing. Stories about them fill the pages of our publications. Philanthropic support has increased, and the vast new wealth attained in the recent period has resulted in a building boom in the day school world.
Everything is apparently coming up roses for day schools, as the longtime votaries of these institutions sense that their dreams are being fulfilled, their advocacy heeded, their efforts rewarded.
But if all is hunky-dory in dayschoolville, why did Jack Wertheimer write a scathing essay for Commentary with the provocative title "Who’s Afraid of Jewish Day Schools?" and why has the Jewish Council on Public Affairs retreated from its limited acceptance of modest and indirect government benefits to sectarian schools? More disturbingly, perhaps, after all of the attention and effort, why is enrollment in non-Orthodox day schools only 40,000, a small percentage of the school-age children in Reform, Conservative, and unaffiliated homes? What are we to make of the statistics of enrollment in non-Orthodox high schools? The figure is fewer than 2,500. Furthermore, there are parallel statistics which indicate that, in non-Orthodox schools, enrollment is heavily geared to the preschool and early elementary grades. More tellingly, are we certain that day schools can do the job that we want them to do, that they can arrest and effectively counteract the powerful assimilatory forces that are integral to the lives of all Jews at risk and that ultimately impel many of our youth away from a lasting Jewish commitment?
In a word, where is the evidence to back up the heady claims being made by day school proponents? In the main, this evidence comes from the experience of the Orthodox, most of whom have life patterns that are significantly different from those of other Jews.
The purpose of these questions is to provide a necessary antidote to the unbridled optimism that informs too much of the discussion of Jewish education, especially the day school sector. It is not my aim to rain on the day school parade. There is, I suppose, a touch of heresy in the questions I am asking, for all of my adult life I have been an advocate of day schools.
They spring, in fact, from a fierce belief that day schools are far and away the best that we have in Jewish education and about the best that we have to counteract Judaic abandonment. I hope that these questions and others like them will force us to think more deeply about the day school phenomenon, what these schools are about and what they can accomplish in an environment that for most Jewish families is antithetical to the mission of meaningful religious Jewish education. There is good news about day schools, to be sure, but the good news is only part of the story.
Even as we focus on the problematic side of the day school equation, as I will, it remains that a great deal has been achieved in recent years. It’s just that the work isn’t done, not by a long shot. Day schools need cheerleading because they have been starved for affection, because after being treated for so long as the stepchildren of Jewish communal life they need tender loving care. It is good for their spirit, maybe also for business as day schools become stylish for Jews who had shunned them.
Even as their status has improved, the economic lot of most of these institutions has not. Excluding yeshiva-world and Hasidic schools, the strong tendency is to view the education that is being provided as a product that is sold to consumers who happen to be parents. As with other goods and services, the expectation is that the consumer will pay the regular price, irrespective of financial ability. This means, of course, that some children, mainly in middle-class homes, are being turned away.
Despite the confident claims that the number is substantial, it is impossible to figure out how many potential students are not enrolled in day schools because of parental financial constraints. American Jewry, after all, is not quite in the poorhouse. There are bar/bat mitzvahs of non-day schoolers that, when all costs are factored in, are about as expensive as eight or ten years of day school tuition. Cost is obviously important for some American Jews who remain on the day school sidelines, but probably not for most of those who prefer private schools or strong public schools for their children because they believe that these institutions are stronger and that supplementary education is sufficient.
While economic considerations may themselves not be a disincentive for most parents who reject the day school option or who limit their children’s attendance to the early years, the poor financial condition of too many of these schools and the limited philanthropic support they receive result in unattractive facilities and curtailed academic programs that do not offer the enhancements or variety available at the competing, non-Jewish institutions.
Philanthropic support has gone up, of course. However, the new funding is usually targeted for discrete projects and not to the institutions themselves. In the federation-centered philanthropic arrangement, the tendency was to give direct subventions to day schools. As inadequate as this assistance may have been in many instances, the schools themselves were helped, to one extent or another.
The new boys on the block—the emerging and increasingly powerful world of private Jewish foundations—do not believe in this approach. Like foundations generally, they are project-oriented. Teacher-training and curriculum development are perennial favorites in this philanthropic sector, as they are in public education. A reliable barometer for determining what to invest in in Jewish education is to examine, rather uncritically, what is preferred in the public sector, without much heed to the obvious circumstance that, despite endless rounds of reform, public education does not appear to be in good shape.
The upshot is that there are private Jewish foundations blessed with good intentions without much of a clue about Jewish education that scurry around as they replicate what is currently correct in the education field, without regard to effectiveness or overlap. The day schools themselves tend to get lost in the shuffle, so that there are institutions all over the Jewish educational landscape that, while poorly housed and poorly fed, are blessed with philanthropic dollars that allow administrators, teachers, and students to travel to Israel, attend conferences, take special courses, and engage in other rather pleasant activities that allegedly enhance the educational product. All of this is marketed as advancing Jewish education.
Unless there is greater appreciation of the value of philanthropic networking and also of the need to give direct assistance to underfunded schools, we will be in for a stream of announcements hyping wondrous grants and activities, all of which will result in little im-provement in schools that cannot attract parents who are comparison shoppers and who are turned off by the, at times, pathetic facilities and puny programs.
For all of their limitations, day schools have a splendid track record. The indicators of weakness are easy to point to—inadequate buildings, poorly stocked libraries, outdated computer rooms, and limited curriculums—and yet, when they are measured by student performance on standardized tests or college admissions or career success, day schools do well.
And this is without factoring in the Jewish benefits.
There is something wonderful and mysterious about the success of day school students, something that cannot be explained by the ordinary accounting that informs too much of society’s understanding of what makes for good education. Top-flight facilities and elaborate and innovative academic programs are, of course, to be desired, but they do not provide any guarantee that the product will work, no more than their absence can serve as a certain predictor of educational failure. Everything else being equal, it’s good to have the accoutrements, but everything else is never equal in education. What counts most for educational effectiveness is the environment, whether the school is a place where study and intellectual curiosity and growth are paramount, whether there is a culture that promotes learning.
Jewish schools succeed far beyond what might be expected of them because they are inherently infused with a spirit of educational purposefulness. The ideals and attributes, as well as the positive approach to texts, that imbue these places of learning serve these youngsters, their families, and society well during their formative years and later on. The strongly positive study ethic leads to a strongly positive work ethic.
Day school accomplishments are not myths. What is fanciful are the reasons given by community officials who justify their lack of enthusiasm for day schools—in Wertheimer’s phrase, they are afraid of day schools—by exaggerating the problems of these institutions and ignoring their successes. A prime example is the charge that day schools do not promote social integration. Jewish schools are inherently exclusionary in that they are for Jewish students, which is to say they are not for 98 percent of the population. But it is wrong to build on this inevitability the claim that day school graduates do not ultimately fit in with the rest of society. They do, as is evident in the academic world, in professions, in the workplace, and many other settings.
Some day schools fail on the Judaic side, particularly in their religious education and socialization of young Jews at risk. In too many places, the religious ambiance and program is threadbare or minimalist, so the schools can scarcely promote an abiding Jewish commitment. The sense of educational purposefulness that is richly evident on the secular side is not matched by a corresponding sense of religious purposefulness.
This deficit is manifested in several ways. The Jewish program takes a backseat to the core academic curriculum, often amounting to no more hours than are provided in typical supplementary schools. As in supplementary schools the course work is basic, focusing on Hebrew language skills, a touch of Bible study, attention to the holidays and, at times, to certain observances. What is lacking is spirit and intensity, the recognition that a concerted effort must be made to raise the religious consciousness of the children, else their Jewish instruction ultimately will be lost in a sea of assimilatory tidal waves.
What is or should be distinctive about Jewish schools is their Jewish component. As important as the regular academic program may be, it is not the reason why the institution is brought into being. When a school community—its lay leaders, educators, and parents—lose sight of this, the day school is apt to be regarded as a begrudging choice whose attractiveness diminishes as grade level rises. Small wonder that a considerable proportion of non-Orthodox day schoolers are transferred out before completion of the full complement of elementary school grades. As for Jewish high schools, even for most day school families it is not on the radar screen.
As important as day schools are, some of the rhetoric about their transformative potential among Jews at risk is overblown. It takes determination to bring about transformative results and where it is lacking, as it is in many day schools, we ought not expect miracles.
It is evident that day schools—all of the non-Orthodox and some of the Orthodox—are caught in a dilemma. If they aim too high Jewishly, they are likely to turn off Jewish involved families that are on the fringe regarding day schools. Their children will not be sent if the day school is regarded as "too Jewish," as significantly above the Judaic level of the home.
But if the schools aim too low, as is now often the case, they probably can attract more students, but their defining-down of Judaism will inevitably result in disappointing outcomes. Several researchers have noted that the admission into non-Orthodox schools of children who are further removed from Jewish commitment than the core school population may result in the dilution of a day schools’ mission and effectiveness.
It is facile to suggest that day schools should aim down the middle of the Jewish road. Rather, it is better for their leaders, advocates, and parents to understand that a day school education is not a quick fix or a guarantor of lasting Jewish involvement. Statistically it provides better results than any other educational approach; even so, the ability of day schools to succeed in a Jewish sense has been compromised by the compromises made in American Jewish life during the century that has just ended.
If day school education is oversold, support for the product will be short-lived, as evidence appears pointing to its limited effectiveness. But, because they are the best shot we have to limit our losses, perhaps also to recapture lost ground in a modest number of Jewish homes, there are reasons enough to rally around them and to open new schools and expand those that exist.
As for their Judaic content, critical as it is, after visiting a great number of schools and reflecting on my ardent advocacy of the concept of religious purposefulness, I have come to recognize that change in the desired direction is severely limited by imperatives of time and curriculum and by parental expectations. Change will not come in response to outside advocacy, except perhaps very slowly. It can result only from awareness within the community that comprises each school that it is in the interest of all to enhance the sense of religious purposefulness.
Since this is a long shot in many places and, at best, a slow process everywhere else, Judaic enhancement for day school students can come from programming that does not challenge the imperatives of time, curriculum, and parental expectations. As a practical matter, this means outside programming that reinforces and adds to what can be derived from the day school experience. This programming should encompass youth activities, camping, Israel experiences, innovative synagogue services, extracurricular activity such as Shabbatonim and whatever else can bring children into an informally linked network of Jewish contacts and consciousness-raising. The hope is that with day schools as the centerpiece, children will grow in Judaism and this growth will be maintained as adulthood approaches.
It follows that the debate over the relative merit of different types of continuity activities is an idle, perhaps unhealthy, exercise. We need to invest—financially and emotionally—in a range of activities, hopefully in a linked fashion.
It follows, as well, that because the reach of day school obviously does not extend to the vastly greater number of homes and children who prefer supplementary education, if we are not to concede defeat about the Jewish prospect of such children, they too must be brought into the ambit of networked activities. In the aggregate, the Jewish prospects of day schoolers are brighter, yet statistically reality compels that careful attention be paid to Jewish children in supplementary schools.
As for children who receive no Jewish schooling, Jewish messages and programming generally do not enter their homes or lives. While serendipity occasionally brings about unexpected results, it is rather difficult to plan or program for serendipity.
But we can target the children in Jewish schools and their families. The debate over priorities—over assigning relative value to different continuity activities—arises from communal parsimony and not from a determination to weed out activities that are ineffective. The American Jewish community is affluent, and it manages to sustain a huge infrastructure that is as impotent as it is unnecessary. If priorities are to be set and funding shifted, they should be in the direction of day schools and other Jewish education and away from the feeding of a bloated infrastructure.
The triage mentality that now dominates communal thinking and philanthropic actions relating to Jewish education guarantees that results will be slow and puny.
We are lacking the will, not the resources, to try more and to accomplish more. Even where there is sufficient commitment, as in the private foundations, there is too often a lack of an understanding of the field or of the need to have cooperative ventures. As we seek to attain a newer level of support for Jewish education, we must recognize that new arrangements are needed. What didn’t work in the past will not work in the future. If we package yesterday’s result, we will forfeit the opportunity for a brighter Jewish tomorrow in many Jewish homes.
It is comforting to know that after a century of day schools on these shores, a corner has finally been turned and American Jewry is prepared to embrace these institutions by providing them with the spiritual, intellectual, and — hopefully — financial resources they require. There are good reasons for optimism, for believing that we are at long last on the right path. Day school enrollment is up, notably in the non-Orthodox sectors where it has been lagging, and the trend is certain to continue as new schools are established and additional families that must be regarded as Jews at risk recognize the importance of a meaningful Jewish education. The naysayers appear to be gone with the wind or at least silenced and marginalized. Day schools have become legitimate, the in thing. Stories about them fill the pages of our publications. Philanthropic support has increased, and the vast new wealth attained in the recent period has resulted in a building boom in the day school world.
Everything is apparently coming up roses for day schools, as the longtime votaries of these institutions sense that their dreams are being fulfilled, their advocacy heeded, their efforts rewarded.
But if all is hunky-dory in dayschoolville, why did Jack Wertheimer write a scathing essay for Commentary with the provocative title "Who’s Afraid of Jewish Day Schools?" and why has the Jewish Council on Public Affairs retreated from its limited acceptance of modest and indirect government benefits to sectarian schools? More disturbingly, perhaps, after all of the attention and effort, why is enrollment in non-Orthodox day schools only 40,000, a small percentage of the school-age children in Reform, Conservative, and unaffiliated homes? What are we to make of the statistics of enrollment in non-Orthodox high schools? The figure is fewer than 2,500. Furthermore, there are parallel statistics which indicate that, in non-Orthodox schools, enrollment is heavily geared to the preschool and early elementary grades. More tellingly, are we certain that day schools can do the job that we want them to do, that they can arrest and effectively counteract the powerful assimilatory forces that are integral to the lives of all Jews at risk and that ultimately impel many of our youth away from a lasting Jewish commitment?
In a word, where is the evidence to back up the heady claims being made by day school proponents? In the main, this evidence comes from the experience of the Orthodox, most of whom have life patterns that are significantly different from those of other Jews.
The purpose of these questions is to provide a necessary antidote to the unbridled optimism that informs too much of the discussion of Jewish education, especially the day school sector. It is not my aim to rain on the day school parade. There is, I suppose, a touch of heresy in the questions I am asking, for all of my adult life I have been an advocate of day schools.
They spring, in fact, from a fierce belief that day schools are far and away the best that we have in Jewish education and about the best that we have to counteract Judaic abandonment. I hope that these questions and others like them will force us to think more deeply about the day school phenomenon, what these schools are about and what they can accomplish in an environment that for most Jewish families is antithetical to the mission of meaningful religious Jewish education. There is good news about day schools, to be sure, but the good news is only part of the story.
Even as we focus on the problematic side of the day school equation, as I will, it remains that a great deal has been achieved in recent years. It’s just that the work isn’t done, not by a long shot. Day schools need cheerleading because they have been starved for affection, because after being treated for so long as the stepchildren of Jewish communal life they need tender loving care. It is good for their spirit, maybe also for business as day schools become stylish for Jews who had shunned them.
Even as their status has improved, the economic lot of most of these institutions has not. Excluding yeshiva-world and Hasidic schools, the strong tendency is to view the education that is being provided as a product that is sold to consumers who happen to be parents. As with other goods and services, the expectation is that the consumer will pay the regular price, irrespective of financial ability. This means, of course, that some children, mainly in middle-class homes, are being turned away.
Despite the confident claims that the number is substantial, it is impossible to figure out how many potential students are not enrolled in day schools because of parental financial constraints. American Jewry, after all, is not quite in the poorhouse. There are bar/bat mitzvahs of non-day schoolers that, when all costs are factored in, are about as expensive as eight or ten years of day school tuition. Cost is obviously important for some American Jews who remain on the day school sidelines, but probably not for most of those who prefer private schools or strong public schools for their children because they believe that these institutions are stronger and that supplementary education is sufficient.
While economic considerations may themselves not be a disincentive for most parents who reject the day school option or who limit their children’s attendance to the early years, the poor financial condition of too many of these schools and the limited philanthropic support they receive result in unattractive facilities and curtailed academic programs that do not offer the enhancements or variety available at the competing, non-Jewish institutions.
Philanthropic support has gone up, of course. However, the new funding is usually targeted for discrete projects and not to the institutions themselves. In the federation-centered philanthropic arrangement, the tendency was to give direct subventions to day schools. As inadequate as this assistance may have been in many instances, the schools themselves were helped, to one extent or another.
The new boys on the block—the emerging and increasingly powerful world of private Jewish foundations—do not believe in this approach. Like foundations generally, they are project-oriented. Teacher-training and curriculum development are perennial favorites in this philanthropic sector, as they are in public education. A reliable barometer for determining what to invest in in Jewish education is to examine, rather uncritically, what is preferred in the public sector, without much heed to the obvious circumstance that, despite endless rounds of reform, public education does not appear to be in good shape.
The upshot is that there are private Jewish foundations blessed with good intentions without much of a clue about Jewish education that scurry around as they replicate what is currently correct in the education field, without regard to effectiveness or overlap. The day schools themselves tend to get lost in the shuffle, so that there are institutions all over the Jewish educational landscape that, while poorly housed and poorly fed, are blessed with philanthropic dollars that allow administrators, teachers, and students to travel to Israel, attend conferences, take special courses, and engage in other rather pleasant activities that allegedly enhance the educational product. All of this is marketed as advancing Jewish education.
Unless there is greater appreciation of the value of philanthropic networking and also of the need to give direct assistance to underfunded schools, we will be in for a stream of announcements hyping wondrous grants and activities, all of which will result in little im-provement in schools that cannot attract parents who are comparison shoppers and who are turned off by the, at times, pathetic facilities and puny programs.
For all of their limitations, day schools have a splendid track record. The indicators of weakness are easy to point to—inadequate buildings, poorly stocked libraries, outdated computer rooms, and limited curriculums—and yet, when they are measured by student performance on standardized tests or college admissions or career success, day schools do well.
And this is without factoring in the Jewish benefits.
There is something wonderful and mysterious about the success of day school students, something that cannot be explained by the ordinary accounting that informs too much of society’s understanding of what makes for good education. Top-flight facilities and elaborate and innovative academic programs are, of course, to be desired, but they do not provide any guarantee that the product will work, no more than their absence can serve as a certain predictor of educational failure. Everything else being equal, it’s good to have the accoutrements, but everything else is never equal in education. What counts most for educational effectiveness is the environment, whether the school is a place where study and intellectual curiosity and growth are paramount, whether there is a culture that promotes learning.
Jewish schools succeed far beyond what might be expected of them because they are inherently infused with a spirit of educational purposefulness. The ideals and attributes, as well as the positive approach to texts, that imbue these places of learning serve these youngsters, their families, and society well during their formative years and later on. The strongly positive study ethic leads to a strongly positive work ethic.
Day school accomplishments are not myths. What is fanciful are the reasons given by community officials who justify their lack of enthusiasm for day schools—in Wertheimer’s phrase, they are afraid of day schools—by exaggerating the problems of these institutions and ignoring their successes. A prime example is the charge that day schools do not promote social integration. Jewish schools are inherently exclusionary in that they are for Jewish students, which is to say they are not for 98 percent of the population. But it is wrong to build on this inevitability the claim that day school graduates do not ultimately fit in with the rest of society. They do, as is evident in the academic world, in professions, in the workplace, and many other settings.
Some day schools fail on the Judaic side, particularly in their religious education and socialization of young Jews at risk. In too many places, the religious ambiance and program is threadbare or minimalist, so the schools can scarcely promote an abiding Jewish commitment. The sense of educational purposefulness that is richly evident on the secular side is not matched by a corresponding sense of religious purposefulness.
This deficit is manifested in several ways. The Jewish program takes a backseat to the core academic curriculum, often amounting to no more hours than are provided in typical supplementary schools. As in supplementary schools the course work is basic, focusing on Hebrew language skills, a touch of Bible study, attention to the holidays and, at times, to certain observances. What is lacking is spirit and intensity, the recognition that a concerted effort must be made to raise the religious consciousness of the children, else their Jewish instruction ultimately will be lost in a sea of assimilatory tidal waves.
What is or should be distinctive about Jewish schools is their Jewish component. As important as the regular academic program may be, it is not the reason why the institution is brought into being. When a school community—its lay leaders, educators, and parents—lose sight of this, the day school is apt to be regarded as a begrudging choice whose attractiveness diminishes as grade level rises. Small wonder that a considerable proportion of non-Orthodox day schoolers are transferred out before completion of the full complement of elementary school grades. As for Jewish high schools, even for most day school families it is not on the radar screen.
As important as day schools are, some of the rhetoric about their transformative potential among Jews at risk is overblown. It takes determination to bring about transformative results and where it is lacking, as it is in many day schools, we ought not expect miracles.
It is evident that day schools—all of the non-Orthodox and some of the Orthodox—are caught in a dilemma. If they aim too high Jewishly, they are likely to turn off Jewish involved families that are on the fringe regarding day schools. Their children will not be sent if the day school is regarded as "too Jewish," as significantly above the Judaic level of the home.
But if the schools aim too low, as is now often the case, they probably can attract more students, but their defining-down of Judaism will inevitably result in disappointing outcomes. Several researchers have noted that the admission into non-Orthodox schools of children who are further removed from Jewish commitment than the core school population may result in the dilution of a day schools’ mission and effectiveness.
It is facile to suggest that day schools should aim down the middle of the Jewish road. Rather, it is better for their leaders, advocates, and parents to understand that a day school education is not a quick fix or a guarantor of lasting Jewish involvement. Statistically it provides better results than any other educational approach; even so, the ability of day schools to succeed in a Jewish sense has been compromised by the compromises made in American Jewish life during the century that has just ended.
If day school education is oversold, support for the product will be short-lived, as evidence appears pointing to its limited effectiveness. But, because they are the best shot we have to limit our losses, perhaps also to recapture lost ground in a modest number of Jewish homes, there are reasons enough to rally around them and to open new schools and expand those that exist.
As for their Judaic content, critical as it is, after visiting a great number of schools and reflecting on my ardent advocacy of the concept of religious purposefulness, I have come to recognize that change in the desired direction is severely limited by imperatives of time and curriculum and by parental expectations. Change will not come in response to outside advocacy, except perhaps very slowly. It can result only from awareness within the community that comprises each school that it is in the interest of all to enhance the sense of religious purposefulness.
Since this is a long shot in many places and, at best, a slow process everywhere else, Judaic enhancement for day school students can come from programming that does not challenge the imperatives of time, curriculum, and parental expectations. As a practical matter, this means outside programming that reinforces and adds to what can be derived from the day school experience. This programming should encompass youth activities, camping, Israel experiences, innovative synagogue services, extracurricular activity such as Shabbatonim and whatever else can bring children into an informally linked network of Jewish contacts and consciousness-raising. The hope is that with day schools as the centerpiece, children will grow in Judaism and this growth will be maintained as adulthood approaches.
It follows that the debate over the relative merit of different types of continuity activities is an idle, perhaps unhealthy, exercise. We need to invest—financially and emotionally—in a range of activities, hopefully in a linked fashion.
It follows, as well, that because the reach of day school obviously does not extend to the vastly greater number of homes and children who prefer supplementary education, if we are not to concede defeat about the Jewish prospect of such children, they too must be brought into the ambit of networked activities. In the aggregate, the Jewish prospects of day schoolers are brighter, yet statistically reality compels that careful attention be paid to Jewish children in supplementary schools.
As for children who receive no Jewish schooling, Jewish messages and programming generally do not enter their homes or lives. While serendipity occasionally brings about unexpected results, it is rather difficult to plan or program for serendipity.
But we can target the children in Jewish schools and their families. The debate over priorities—over assigning relative value to different continuity activities—arises from communal parsimony and not from a determination to weed out activities that are ineffective. The American Jewish community is affluent, and it manages to sustain a huge infrastructure that is as impotent as it is unnecessary. If priorities are to be set and funding shifted, they should be in the direction of day schools and other Jewish education and away from the feeding of a bloated infrastructure.
The triage mentality that now dominates communal thinking and philanthropic actions relating to Jewish education guarantees that results will be slow and puny.
We are lacking the will, not the resources, to try more and to accomplish more. Even where there is sufficient commitment, as in the private foundations, there is too often a lack of an understanding of the field or of the need to have cooperative ventures. As we seek to attain a newer level of support for Jewish education, we must recognize that new arrangements are needed. What didn’t work in the past will not work in the future. If we package yesterday’s result, we will forfeit the opportunity for a brighter Jewish tomorrow in many Jewish homes.
Friday, February 04, 2000
Population Crisis
(Originally published in the New York Jewish Week)
If all had gone according to plan, phones would be ringing in homes across the U.S. to select 5,000 presumed Jewish households for the year 2000 National Jewish Population Survey. For these chosen people, hopefully representative of the other six million or so American Jews, there would be an intensive follow-up barrage of questions about Jewish involvement and other matters of interest to demographers.
As we know, NJPS 2000 has been delayed, in part because it is the victim of a nasty fight within the small unfriendly fraternity of statisticians who fancy themselves experts on Jewish communal life. Although vast resources of time and money have already been expended, critics have at least temporarily undermined a much-heralded project that promised to reveal the state of American Jewry at the dawn of the new century and millennium. We will have to wait a bit longer to learn whether the doleful news conveyed by NJPS 1990 has been confirmed a decade later.
Despite heady and inaccurate assertions to the contrary, the 1990 findings were questioned early on, including by this writer. The central claim that the intermarriage rate had risen to 52 percent was challenged by Steve Cohen, primarily on the ground that second marriages and other sociological factors that tipped the data in the direction of a higher intermarriage rate should not have been included in the calculation. Now at Hebrew University, he continues to be a tough critic of NJPS, although when it suits his purposes he relies on the 1990 data.
In a Jan. 10 communication to an overseas foundation, Cohen conveyed statistics derived from NJPS 1990 that purport to show a remarkable rate of abandonment of Orthodoxy. One of the widely acknowledged flaws of the 1990 study is its significant undercounting of the Orthodox. Perhaps more to the point, the 1990 data did not distinguish — perhaps it could not — between persons who were raised in homes that were Orthodox only by affiliation and homes where halacha was the norm.
The over-reliance by NJPS on persons whose expertise is factor analysis, probabilities and other statistical arcana has limited the reliability of the project. There are scholars whose forte is understanding the social forces that impel contemporary Jewish life and who are not immersed in numbers games. They have been essentially excluded from the technical committee that has a key role in developing and interpreting NJPS. Apparently, in Jewish circles, thinkers do not count.
Still, a sincere effort has been made by Jim Schwartz, NJPS 2000 director, to solicit suggestions from many sources regarding the questions to be included in this year’s survey. Attention is also being paid to a comprehensive follow-up analysis of the data. In both respects, these are improvements over NJPS 1990, when there was a rush to publish and publicize a highlights document that, with great fanfare, announced the 50-plus percent intermarriage rate. The bulk of the 1990s findings have been the victim of benign neglect.
Even with the best people and the best intentions, NJPS cannot escape methodological pitfalls that undermine its reliability. American Jews are dispersed in hundreds of communities across nearly four million square miles. The survey is intended to determine, among much else, how many Jews there are in these many places. But in order to determine the distribution of telephone calls — how many in Brooklyn or Orange County, Calif., or Broward County, Fla., etc. — it is necessary to know with some precision in advance of the survey how American Jewry is distributed geographically. The upshot is that NJPS consists of much guesswork and extrapolations.
For all of the hoopla accompanying NJPS, it is, at best, an approximation of the contemporary Jewish reality.
What emerges from the survey has some reliability, although the product is compromised by the necessary use of the telephone as the means for collecting data. At bottom, NJPS is a form of telemarketing, a species of social interaction that is widely regarded as repugnant and shunned in many homes. While a relatively short list of questions has been prepared for the tens of thousands of households, 99 percent of them not Jewish, which will be called initially, it will be followed by a large questionnaire directed at the 5,000 households that presumably contain at least one Jew.
The hope is that the second round of questions can be completed in about 30 minutes. This would require that the draft questionnaire be reduced considerably and even then it would be a stretch to get the job done in a half-hour.
It’s even a greater stretch to believe that there will be many respondents willing to undergo this kind of intrusive telephone interrogation.
On the substantive side, there is the inescapable issue of whom to count as Jewish. Putting aside patrilineality, non-halachic conversions and other contentious issues that frame the “Who is a Jew?” debate, it remains that a large and constantly growing number of persons in what is loosely termed a Jewish household are not Jewish by anyone’s definition. These include non-Jewish spouses in mixed marriages and most of the children of such marriages who are not being raised as Jews. When the intermarriage rate is calculated by including persons in a Jewish household who do not regard themselves as Jewish, it obviously is significantly higher than it would be if the rate were based only on the behavior of core Jews.
This point is critical to the conflict over NJPS 2000 and it forms the basis for the argument that the true intermarriage rate is probably 35-40 percent.
There is much that is murky about our population statistics, a situation that will worsen as Judaic abandonment takes an escalating toll on Jewish identity. We ought to recognize that no matter how careful and objective NJPS may be, the notion of a fully accurate demographic picture is a pipe dream. NJPS is at most a partially reliable profile and exaggerated claims on its behalf are just that.
Rather than trying to resolve the irresolvable, NJPS should proceed. Its data should be made immediately available to diverse camps who can then interpret the numbers as they see fit. We should eschew any single approach. Ultimately, the story will be sorted out and we will learn what happened to American Jewry as the 20th century was winding down. In the meantime, let our community go about the far more important business of salvaging what we can.
If all had gone according to plan, phones would be ringing in homes across the U.S. to select 5,000 presumed Jewish households for the year 2000 National Jewish Population Survey. For these chosen people, hopefully representative of the other six million or so American Jews, there would be an intensive follow-up barrage of questions about Jewish involvement and other matters of interest to demographers.
As we know, NJPS 2000 has been delayed, in part because it is the victim of a nasty fight within the small unfriendly fraternity of statisticians who fancy themselves experts on Jewish communal life. Although vast resources of time and money have already been expended, critics have at least temporarily undermined a much-heralded project that promised to reveal the state of American Jewry at the dawn of the new century and millennium. We will have to wait a bit longer to learn whether the doleful news conveyed by NJPS 1990 has been confirmed a decade later.
Despite heady and inaccurate assertions to the contrary, the 1990 findings were questioned early on, including by this writer. The central claim that the intermarriage rate had risen to 52 percent was challenged by Steve Cohen, primarily on the ground that second marriages and other sociological factors that tipped the data in the direction of a higher intermarriage rate should not have been included in the calculation. Now at Hebrew University, he continues to be a tough critic of NJPS, although when it suits his purposes he relies on the 1990 data.
In a Jan. 10 communication to an overseas foundation, Cohen conveyed statistics derived from NJPS 1990 that purport to show a remarkable rate of abandonment of Orthodoxy. One of the widely acknowledged flaws of the 1990 study is its significant undercounting of the Orthodox. Perhaps more to the point, the 1990 data did not distinguish — perhaps it could not — between persons who were raised in homes that were Orthodox only by affiliation and homes where halacha was the norm.
The over-reliance by NJPS on persons whose expertise is factor analysis, probabilities and other statistical arcana has limited the reliability of the project. There are scholars whose forte is understanding the social forces that impel contemporary Jewish life and who are not immersed in numbers games. They have been essentially excluded from the technical committee that has a key role in developing and interpreting NJPS. Apparently, in Jewish circles, thinkers do not count.
Still, a sincere effort has been made by Jim Schwartz, NJPS 2000 director, to solicit suggestions from many sources regarding the questions to be included in this year’s survey. Attention is also being paid to a comprehensive follow-up analysis of the data. In both respects, these are improvements over NJPS 1990, when there was a rush to publish and publicize a highlights document that, with great fanfare, announced the 50-plus percent intermarriage rate. The bulk of the 1990s findings have been the victim of benign neglect.
Even with the best people and the best intentions, NJPS cannot escape methodological pitfalls that undermine its reliability. American Jews are dispersed in hundreds of communities across nearly four million square miles. The survey is intended to determine, among much else, how many Jews there are in these many places. But in order to determine the distribution of telephone calls — how many in Brooklyn or Orange County, Calif., or Broward County, Fla., etc. — it is necessary to know with some precision in advance of the survey how American Jewry is distributed geographically. The upshot is that NJPS consists of much guesswork and extrapolations.
For all of the hoopla accompanying NJPS, it is, at best, an approximation of the contemporary Jewish reality.
What emerges from the survey has some reliability, although the product is compromised by the necessary use of the telephone as the means for collecting data. At bottom, NJPS is a form of telemarketing, a species of social interaction that is widely regarded as repugnant and shunned in many homes. While a relatively short list of questions has been prepared for the tens of thousands of households, 99 percent of them not Jewish, which will be called initially, it will be followed by a large questionnaire directed at the 5,000 households that presumably contain at least one Jew.
The hope is that the second round of questions can be completed in about 30 minutes. This would require that the draft questionnaire be reduced considerably and even then it would be a stretch to get the job done in a half-hour.
It’s even a greater stretch to believe that there will be many respondents willing to undergo this kind of intrusive telephone interrogation.
On the substantive side, there is the inescapable issue of whom to count as Jewish. Putting aside patrilineality, non-halachic conversions and other contentious issues that frame the “Who is a Jew?” debate, it remains that a large and constantly growing number of persons in what is loosely termed a Jewish household are not Jewish by anyone’s definition. These include non-Jewish spouses in mixed marriages and most of the children of such marriages who are not being raised as Jews. When the intermarriage rate is calculated by including persons in a Jewish household who do not regard themselves as Jewish, it obviously is significantly higher than it would be if the rate were based only on the behavior of core Jews.
This point is critical to the conflict over NJPS 2000 and it forms the basis for the argument that the true intermarriage rate is probably 35-40 percent.
There is much that is murky about our population statistics, a situation that will worsen as Judaic abandonment takes an escalating toll on Jewish identity. We ought to recognize that no matter how careful and objective NJPS may be, the notion of a fully accurate demographic picture is a pipe dream. NJPS is at most a partially reliable profile and exaggerated claims on its behalf are just that.
Rather than trying to resolve the irresolvable, NJPS should proceed. Its data should be made immediately available to diverse camps who can then interpret the numbers as they see fit. We should eschew any single approach. Ultimately, the story will be sorted out and we will learn what happened to American Jewry as the 20th century was winding down. In the meantime, let our community go about the far more important business of salvaging what we can.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Friday, November 12, 1999
The Flip Side Of The First Amendment
(Originally published in the New York Jewish Week)
The controversial exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum has given us an unwelcome lesson in the anti-religious tendencies that inform much of what is considered to be contemporary cultural life. In the great debate over the exhibit, the First Amendment rights of museums and artists have understandably been advanced, without sufficient attention being given to the corollary First Amendment strictures that mandate governmental neutrality in religious matters.
I am no fan of Mayor Giuliani, not by a long shot. True to form, he has been clumsy and bullying in his cancellation of a legal contract and in his threat to evict the museum from the architectural treasure that it has occupied and brought distinction to. He had an opportunity to articulate a principled position, to explain why government ought not to act in a hostile way toward religion. He could have taught by leadership, not by threatening, and he could have embraced an eloquence that places principle above narrow political gain. Instead of saying that the city would abide by a contract, despite the pain caused to a great number of New Yorkers, he took a path that guaranteed the seat in court.
I recognize that those who have suggested that some of the challenged art was not meant to be offensive to Catholics may be right. When we compare what is now in dispute with what has been displayed elsewhere, it may be that what has been called a “sensation” may primarily be an exploitative ploy aimed at attracting attention, attendance and financial support. Alas, the mayor could not resist taking the bait.
Giuliani has, however, raised a basic question that must not be obscured by any animus toward him or by one’s personal aesthetic. Why should the designation of something as art or literature or any form of expression result in its exemption from the constitutional ban on governmental action that advances or inhibits religion? It isn’t sufficient to argue that the First Amendment guarantees freedom of expression. Prayer is, after all, inherently a form of expression, yet I am certain that there is no First Amendment aficionado who contends that government can promote sectarian prayer.
There is selectivity in some quarters in how the high wall separating church and state is looked at. One set of rules — a strict set — applies when the issue is governmental support, even indirect, of religious activity, and there is a lax set of rules when the issue is whether public funds can be provided to those who bash religion. The inconsistency is explained by the anti-religious thought that has dominated Western culture and which is too often accepted as a legitimate part of the Western democratic heritage. In this skewed view of things, government is regarded as neutral in religious matters when it finances anti-religious expression.
This formula explains why a crèche that depicts the Virgin Mary is not to be placed on public property, while public funds can be used to defile the same symbol. In the first case, the government is supporting religion; in the second, it does no more than allow others the freedom of expression.
To my surprise and his credit, Rabbi Eric Yoffie, leader of Reform Jewry, issued a strong statement expressing concern for Catholic sensibilities, something I was unaware of until it was called to my attention by an editor at this newspaper. Still, if there was a dominant Jewish position, it was in support of the art and against the mayor who has received backing from the Orthodox. Overwhelmingly, the rank and file of New York Jews is clearly in the museum’s corner. There is scant concern for the evident anguish of Catholics, not even a slight murmur of empathy for Cardinal O’Connor, whose condemnation of the display might have evoked a sympathetic hearing among Jews.
It is too extreme to charge that an anti-Catholic bias persists in American Jewish life. Sensitivity is another matter and on that count the record is not one that we can be proud of. It is unfortunate that few American Jews can begin to sense the pain of Catholics, to see that they are hurt when their symbols and artifacts are defiled.
For all of American Jewry’s elevation of the First Amendment as the noblest enshrinement of liberty, I imagine that if the shoe were on the other foot we would not so readily proclaim the virtues of unlimited, publicly funded expressions of anti-religion. It is usually not attractive to make inter-ethnic or inter-religious comparisons, to suggest that one group is favored while another is mistreated. That is usually a sly way of giving vent to prejudice. But can there be any question as to where we would stand if a Torah scroll was utilized in an obscene or sacrilegious fashion in what was called a work of art? For that matter, what are the odds as to whether the Brooklyn Museum would ever exhibit such a work?
The controversial exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum has given us an unwelcome lesson in the anti-religious tendencies that inform much of what is considered to be contemporary cultural life. In the great debate over the exhibit, the First Amendment rights of museums and artists have understandably been advanced, without sufficient attention being given to the corollary First Amendment strictures that mandate governmental neutrality in religious matters.
I am no fan of Mayor Giuliani, not by a long shot. True to form, he has been clumsy and bullying in his cancellation of a legal contract and in his threat to evict the museum from the architectural treasure that it has occupied and brought distinction to. He had an opportunity to articulate a principled position, to explain why government ought not to act in a hostile way toward religion. He could have taught by leadership, not by threatening, and he could have embraced an eloquence that places principle above narrow political gain. Instead of saying that the city would abide by a contract, despite the pain caused to a great number of New Yorkers, he took a path that guaranteed the seat in court.
I recognize that those who have suggested that some of the challenged art was not meant to be offensive to Catholics may be right. When we compare what is now in dispute with what has been displayed elsewhere, it may be that what has been called a “sensation” may primarily be an exploitative ploy aimed at attracting attention, attendance and financial support. Alas, the mayor could not resist taking the bait.
Giuliani has, however, raised a basic question that must not be obscured by any animus toward him or by one’s personal aesthetic. Why should the designation of something as art or literature or any form of expression result in its exemption from the constitutional ban on governmental action that advances or inhibits religion? It isn’t sufficient to argue that the First Amendment guarantees freedom of expression. Prayer is, after all, inherently a form of expression, yet I am certain that there is no First Amendment aficionado who contends that government can promote sectarian prayer.
There is selectivity in some quarters in how the high wall separating church and state is looked at. One set of rules — a strict set — applies when the issue is governmental support, even indirect, of religious activity, and there is a lax set of rules when the issue is whether public funds can be provided to those who bash religion. The inconsistency is explained by the anti-religious thought that has dominated Western culture and which is too often accepted as a legitimate part of the Western democratic heritage. In this skewed view of things, government is regarded as neutral in religious matters when it finances anti-religious expression.
This formula explains why a crèche that depicts the Virgin Mary is not to be placed on public property, while public funds can be used to defile the same symbol. In the first case, the government is supporting religion; in the second, it does no more than allow others the freedom of expression.
To my surprise and his credit, Rabbi Eric Yoffie, leader of Reform Jewry, issued a strong statement expressing concern for Catholic sensibilities, something I was unaware of until it was called to my attention by an editor at this newspaper. Still, if there was a dominant Jewish position, it was in support of the art and against the mayor who has received backing from the Orthodox. Overwhelmingly, the rank and file of New York Jews is clearly in the museum’s corner. There is scant concern for the evident anguish of Catholics, not even a slight murmur of empathy for Cardinal O’Connor, whose condemnation of the display might have evoked a sympathetic hearing among Jews.
It is too extreme to charge that an anti-Catholic bias persists in American Jewish life. Sensitivity is another matter and on that count the record is not one that we can be proud of. It is unfortunate that few American Jews can begin to sense the pain of Catholics, to see that they are hurt when their symbols and artifacts are defiled.
For all of American Jewry’s elevation of the First Amendment as the noblest enshrinement of liberty, I imagine that if the shoe were on the other foot we would not so readily proclaim the virtues of unlimited, publicly funded expressions of anti-religion. It is usually not attractive to make inter-ethnic or inter-religious comparisons, to suggest that one group is favored while another is mistreated. That is usually a sly way of giving vent to prejudice. But can there be any question as to where we would stand if a Torah scroll was utilized in an obscene or sacrilegious fashion in what was called a work of art? For that matter, what are the odds as to whether the Brooklyn Museum would ever exhibit such a work?
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