American Jewish Identity Politics

American Judaism in Historical Perspective / Jonathan D. Sarna

American Judaism in Historical Perspective Jonathan D. Sarna Thirty years ago, when I ‹rst became interested in American Jewish history, I mentioned my interest to a scholar at a distinguished rabbinical seminary, and he was absolutely appalled. “American Jewish history?” he growled. “I’ll tell you all that you need to know about American Jewish history: The Jews came to America, they abandoned their faith, they began to live like goyim, and after a generation or two they intermarried and disappeared.” “That,” he said, “is American Jewish history; all the rest is commentary. Don’t waste your time. Go and study Talmud.” I did not take this great sage’s advice, but I have long remembered his analysis, for it re›ects, as I now recognize, a long-standing fear that Jews in America are doomed to assimilate, that they simply cannot survive in an environment of religious freedom and church-state separation. In America, where religion is totally voluntary, where religious diversity is the norm, where everyone is free to choose his or her own rabbi and his or her own brand of Judaism—or, indeed, no Judaism at all—many, and not just rabbinical school scholars, have assumed that Judaism is fated sooner or later to disappear. Freedom, the same quality that made America so alluring for persecuted faiths, also brought with it the freedom to make religious choices: to modernize Judaism, to assimilate, to intermarry, to convert. American Jews, as a result, have never been able to assume that their future, as Jews, is guaranteed. Each generation has had to wrestle anew with the question of whether its own children and grandchildren would remain 139 This essay was originally presented on March 8, 2003, at the Jean and Samuel Frankel Center for Judaic Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Jewish, whether Judaism as a living faith would end and carry on as ancestral memory alone. Many readers surely recognize this assimilationist paradigm. It is a close cousin to the secularization thesis that once held sway in the study of religion . In American Judaism, it might be called “the myth of linear descent,” the belief that American Jews start off Orthodox, back in the immigrant generation, and each subsequent generation is a little less Jewish in its observance until that inevitable day when a descendant intermarries and ends up marching down the aisle of a church. We can all point to families where this has actually happened: the Gratz family, the Schiff family, the Warburg family. It has happened too in many lesser-known Cohen, Levi, and Israel families throughout the United States. “Will the Jews continue to exist in America?” Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg asked almost half a century ago. “Any estimate of the situation based on an unillusioned look at the American Jewish past and at contemporary sociological evidence must answer ›atly—no . . . History, sociology, and the emptiness of contemporary Jewish religion all point in the same unhappy direction.”1 Actively by choice, or passively through inaction, assimilation has been widely assumed to be unavoidable. My ‹eld of American Jewish history, if not a complete waste of time, is viewed as a foredoomed enterprise. Yet the history of American Judaism, at least as I have come to understand it while researching American Judaism: A History (Yale University Press, 2004), is in many ways a response to this ongoing fear that Judaism in the New World will wither away. Over and over again, I found Jews rising to meet the challenges both internal and external that threatened Jewish continuity, sometimes, paradoxically, by promoting radical discontinuities . Casting aside old paradigms, Jews transformed their faith, reinventing American Judaism in an attempt to make it more appealing, more meaningful , more sensitive to the concerns of the day. They did not always succeed , as the many well-publicized accounts of eminent Christians whose parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents turn out to have been Jews amply attest. But the story of American Judaism, at least as I recount it, is still far from the stereotypical story of “linear descent.” It is, instead, a much more dynamic story of people struggling to be Americans and Jews, a story of people who lose their faith and a story of people who regain their faith, a story of assimilation, to be sure, but also a story of revitalization. Let us consider a few examples. In the 1820s, some highly motivated and creative young Jews in the two largest American communities where 140 american jewish identity politics...