The New Middle Ground: A Challenge to Conservative Judaism

The decline of Conservative Judaism in America has been widely documented. ¹ Some blame the movement’s troubles on organizational dysfunction, which prevents it from competing effectively in the religious marketplace.² Most, however, recognize that there are deeper causes. At the most fundamental level, the Conservative movement is in crisis because Jewish centrism itself is in crisis. The problem is not merely that the center is realigning itself, but that the center as we have known it is disappearing as traditionalist and liberal Judaism become more polarized.

The good news is that there is a new centrism taking shape. Paradoxically, the same evolutionary process that has eroded the old middle ground ultimately is leading to a new, very different middle ground. That process is well underway. The new centrism was the force behind the Ḥavurah movement of the 1970s and 1980s, with its neo-traditionalist/egalitarian ethic, and is the force behind the new “emergent” spiritual communities of the last decade that share that ethic.³ It is also a potential source of renewal in the Conservative synagogue. In this essay, we will look at the nature of that new centrism, and the opportunity and challenge that it presents to the Conservative movement.

Why has the moderate traditionalism that sustained the Conservative movement earlier in its history gone into decline? Why has the old center not held? Most often, we explain the process demographically, as an effect of ethnic assimilation. The centrist Jews who populated Conservative synagogues in the heyday of the movement, from the 1950s to the 1980s, were viscerally traditional in their hearts and liberal in their heads. Their centrism was a function of ambivalence. As the children and grandchildren of immigrants, they felt the need to balance their loyalty to the Jewish past with their commitment to the American future. The Conservative movement represented a comfortable, if not always consistent, equilibrium of those two poles. In that way, it offered them a natural home.

The weakening of ethnic allegiance among liberal Jews in recent decades, which Steven M. Cohen and others have documented, has loosened the glue that bound them to tradition.⁴ A growing number of young American Jews share their parents’ religious liberalism, but without the ethnic bond to tradition that once moderated it. Because their liberalism is no longer balanced and restrained by visceral loyalty to the past, moderate traditionalism is no longer their default position. Hence the center has eroded.

That narrative is true as far as it goes, but it is too narrow to tell the whole story. If we widen the frame, we see that the decline of the old Jewish centrism is due not only to our assimilation into the mainstream. It is also due to changes within the mainstream itself. Religious centrism has declined not only in the Jewish world but in the West in general. The hollowing out of the middle can be fully understood only if we look beyond our particular story and examine the broader evolution of modernity, specifically the evolution of religious liberalism.

In recent decades, liberal faith has undergone a change that makes it harder to square with traditional allegiances of any sort. The commitment to autonomy that was always at the heart of liberal Christianity and Judaism has grown more radical and absolutist, to the point that it cannot sustain the sense of corporate loyalty that even the most moderate religious traditionalism depends on. Viewed through this broader lens, Conservative Judaism has declined because the two poles that once lived side by side within it can no longer co-exist. Liberalism and traditionalism are intrinsically more polarized today than they were in the heyday of the movement.

As we have noted, Conservative Judaism thrived in the mid-twentieth century because it reflected the ambivalence of partially assimilated American Jews. Its mixture of liberalism and traditionalism, though not always intellectually or emotionally consistent, met a deep need for Jews of that period. The movement was able to meet that need only because liberal faith at that time was still, to some extent, compatible with visceral allegiance to...