On Orthodoxy and Other Matters: A Review Essay

68 SHOFAR Summer 1993 Vol. 11, No. 4 ON ORTHODOXY AND OTHER MATTERS: A REVIEW ESSAY by Benny Kraut Benny Kraut, Professor and Director of Judaic Studies at the University of Cincinnati, is author of the forthcoming BlackOewish Relations in the United States: The Limits of Intercultural Learning and What is American About American]ewish History and]udaism: A Historiographic Inquiry. ----------------Divisions Between Traditionalism and Liberalism in the American Jewish Community: Cleft or Chasm, edited by Michael Shapiro. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1991. 115 pp. $39.95. This book consists of four essays originally delivered as lectures at Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, three under the auspices of the Committee on Jewish Culture and Society of the College of liberal Arts and Sciences of the University of Illinois, and one under the auspices of the Committee of Adult Education of Sinai Temple. Despite the editor's attempt to find an organic unity for the essays through his catchy book title and contrived introduction, they stand as independent units, substantively having little to do with one another. The four contributions include: Alan S. Zuckerman, "The Structural Sources of Cohesion and Division in the American Jewish Community"; Mark Washofsky, "The Proposal for a National Beit Din: Is it Good for the Jews?"; Blu Greenberg, "The Feminist Revolution in Orthodox Judaism in America"; and Mark Schechner, "literature in Search of a Center." The essays are preceded by Michael Shapiro's introduction, which unfortunately is poorly done. The first half of it is irrelevant to the book at hand, while the unit as a whole shows unthinking reliance on Heilman and Cohen's Cosmopolitans and Parochials as the benchmark for evaluating American Orthodox Judaism, and contains highly dubious generalizations (pp. 5, 7, On Orthodoxy: A Review Essay 69 10). Instead of providing needed historical perspective by framing each of the essays against the intellectual background from which it comes-for example, putting Zuckerman into the decade-old sociological debate about how best to evaluate the American Jewish community, or Greenberg into the context of intellectual discussions offeminism and Judaism-the editor mixes his own vision of Jewish communal fissures and strains together with some cursory observations on the essays. The resultant combination is not very illuminating. As for the essays themselves, Zuckerman adds little to what he and Calvin Goldscheider have written previously. He reaffirms his structural model ofJewish communal cohesion, defined by the extent to which Jews freely and peaceably choose to interact with one another, which, he argues, is dictated in the main by the Jewish place in the broader society. The result is Jewish geographic and neighborhood concentrations and a distinctive middle-class socioeconomic niche in America, which, when reinforced by the Jews' unique educational profile and political liberalism and buttressed by their attachments to specific Jewish concerns such as Israel, promote Jewish ingroup socialization, separation from non-Jews, and group cohesion. Nothing new here, and there is no need to contribute to the decade-old debate over the conceptualization and methodology of this structural approach to measure either the past and present nature or future strength of the American Jewish community. Towards the end of the paper, however, Zuckerman muses that the contemporary resurgence of Orthodoxy, with its residential segregation, rejection of college education, overwhelming preference for Republican Presidential candidates in the elections of the 1980s, general animosity towards non-Orthodox policies and politics, and disputing ofwho is aJew, "may augur the presence of a cleavage within the American Jewish community, separating Orthodox from other kinds of Jews" (p. 29). Whereas the last fifty years witnessed American Jewish communal cohesion undivided by class or politics, when theological differences didn't seem to matter (p. 28), contemporaryJewry may find that the electoral and political differentiations of Orthodox Jews reinforcing differences in marital, residential, and educational patterns will serve to institutionalize ritual and ideological divisions and result in a "structural cleavage" of the American Jewish community (p. 32). These observations about Orthodoxy potentially rupturing American Jewish cohesion do merit some critical analysis. First, it is not possible to generalize about Orthodoxy so glibly since the deep divisions within it reveal distinctive subgroups with different relationships to Judaism and to the outside world. Zuckerman should...