Are We One?: Jewish Identity in the United States and Israel (review)

Jerold S. Auerbach makes no bones about the personal odyssey that has taken him from liberal Jewish secularism to an uncompromising Jewish fundamentalism. His previous book, Jacob’s Voices (1996), told the story of how a “non-Jewish Jew,” one entirely comfortable with his New Deal liberalism, became a religiously observant Jew and a passionate defender of right-wing Zionism. The beat continues in Are We One?, an often shrill polemic out to show how the once-proud boast of American Jews—namely, that they are one with their brothers and sisters in Israel—was always fraught with a certain amount of tension, and how it is now essentially meaningless.

As Auerbach would have it, what American Jews want is an Israel that is the mirror-image of America: liberal, secular, and above all else dedicated to the propo sition that personal freedom and materialism are the trump cards that no vital connec tion to the Jewish past can beat. What many Israelis hanker for is to join with the nations of the world, rather than seeming separate from them, just as many American Jews still worry that they will be perceived as too Jewish and thus as less than American. Thus, Auerbach reminds us that what the sociologist Nathan Glazer said of American Jews in the 1950s—namely, that “Less and less of their life . . . is derived from Jewish history, experience, culture, and religion. More and more of it is derived from. . . American culture”—can now be said of Israelis in the 1990s.

Auerbach will have none of this, and so it is that he finds himself invoking the ancient biblical claims to Hebron and emerging as one of the few historiographers who passionately defend the settlers, just as he is a fearless champion of ultra-Orthodoxy in both Israel and America. Again and again, Auerbach insists that too many contemporary Jews have traded the burdens and obligations of history for the giddy attraction of McDonalds and shopping malls. “Shame, shame!” is the note on which each of his forays into modern Jewish history ends.

As it so happens, I disagree with Auerbach on nearly every one of his shrill pages. He sells Jewish-American culture short, just as he sells Israelis short. But what this all comes down to is an insistence that he—and he alone—has looked at the mirror on the wall and discovered that he—and he alone—is the fairest Jew of them all.

Are We One? will disturb many of its readers. That, after all, is Auerbach’s intention. But I would remind these exasperated readers, just as I remind myself, that education is often a matter of giving people a headache they didn’t know they had—and in the enormously complicated case of Jewish American and Israeli identities and how they intertwine, this is a headache likely to last a lifetime. “It’s hard to be a Jew,” my Yiddish-speaking grandfather would often announce. He didn’t know the half of it.