American Jewish Identity Politics

Introduction

Introduction Deborah Dash Moore Identity politics exploded in the United States in the 1970s. Awakened by student activists in the civil rights movement and the New Left, the politics of identity responded to the rise of black power. Feminism’s insight that the personal is political as well as a turn toward a revival of European ethnicity provided language to express new insights regarding authority within the United States and abroad. As women came to identify what Betty Friedan called “the problem that has no name,” they stirred others suffering from discrimination to ‹nd their voice.1 “Sisterhood is powerful,” like “Black is beautiful,” inspired more than those who championed the slogans.2 They became models for political action for Jews as for other Americans. The scholar Matthew Frye Jacobson dates the birth of identity politics “in the showdown over Zionism” at the Conference on New Politics in Chicago two months after the Israeli victory in the Six Day War “(and, not incidentally , in the slights that women . . . felt as women at that same meeting).”3 Reverberations of that stormy beginning would extend across two decades. David W. Belin, born in 1928, an accomplished lawyer who had just ‹nished serving on the Warren Commission investigating the death of President John F. Kennedy, seemed to be far removed from the younger generation of activists attending the Conference on New Politics. Yet he, too, would ‹nd himself drawn within the orbit of questions raised by identity politics. What did identity politics mean for American Jews? It meant trying to bring Jewishness together with political elements of an identity. Jewish identity acquired a self-conscious valence lacking for an earlier generation that had grown up in dense urban neighborhoods. Politics now extended into all reaches of society and culture, including Jewish life. What did it mean to be an American Jew? Was this a religious question? A question of ethnicity? Perhaps a political question? How did Jews understand themselves as individuals and as members of a group in the United States? Although David Belin had grown up during the Great Depression in Iowa, coming east to attend college and the University of Michigan Law School, as a father of four children, a liberal, a lawyer, and a Jew active in the movement of Reform Judaism, he became increasingly engaged in seeking new ways to understand what it meant to be a contemporary American Jew. In 1991 he endowed a lecture series at the University of Michigan in American Jewish Public Affairs. He sought through these annual lectures to build a bridge between university scholars and American Jews. Eager to explore issues raised by identity politics as they affected American Jews, he turned mostly to members of the baby boom generation for some answers. Those answers, as well as the questions, form the basis of the articles collected in this volume. I arrived at the University of Michigan in 2005 as director of Judaic Studies. I had been invited, a decade earlier, to give one of the early Belin lectures. Now I looked at a shelf full of published lectures, a rainbow of muted colors in soft covers, and realized that they opened a window on several decades of American Jewish life. Each one separately marked a particular moment in perspective. Taken together, however, they represent a generation of scholars grappling with questions raised by identity politics as they were con‹gured among American Jews. Although most of these lectures were not in conversation with each other, publishing them together initiates a dialogue that enriches their individual insights. These previously published essays re›ect several layers of identity politics . On one level, they interrogate the recent past of American Jews, starting with their experiences of World War II. Without the ›ourishing of identity politics and the white ethnic revival, many questions about American Jewish history might never have been explored. Those who adopted identity politics often saw Jews as an ethnic group in the United States, one connected both to other Americans and to other Jews throughout the world and in the past. On another level, these essays express ideas nourished in universities during the turbulent 1970s and 1980s. Those years marked the expansion of Jewish studies as a ‹eld in the United States and the establishment of American Jewish studies as an area of specialization.4 There is, however, a third layer, a personal one. Most of the scholars writing about American Jewish affairs also participated in those affairs as activists . They agitated...