Lest Memory Cease: Finding Meaning in the American Jewish Past, and: Jewish Continuity in America: Creative Survival in a Free Society (review)

There has been a long-standing and persistent concern in the United States that Jews, attracted by the receptivity and secularism of America, would disappear as a group. ¹ As early as 1818, for example, the attorney general of the United States predicted that American Jews, in the absence of persecution, would cease to exist as a separate people by the middle of the twentieth century. In 1893 the rabbi of Chicago's monumental Zion Temple, echoing a host of other Jewish clerics, called America "the land of freedom" and wondered from the podium whether Jews could move among Americans and not be swallowed up by them. Only a few years later, in 1905, the New York Tribune was certain that "from the very start ... [the Jewish ] child unconsciously acquires a contempt for the un-American habits and characteristics of his father. The American public school and associations with business do the rest.... The laissez-faire spirit of our national life seems in many cases to accomplish what the persecution of ages has failed to bring about...." ² And in 1964 two major American magazines ran pieces "predicting" that American freedom would result in the disappearance of the Jews. ³

Henry Feingold, a most prolific scholar of the American Jewish experience, continues to wonder, along with many contemporary Jewish leaders and academics, about the danger to Jewish "survival" in this "land of freedom," or land of secularization and individuation, to be more precise. Throughout Lest Memory Cease, a collection of essays (elegantly written over a period of thirty years), Feingold expresses a deeply felt and sharply articulated concern about the survivability of a Jewish community and culture in an open, benevolent, and absorbing democracy. Abraham Karp, another preeminent historian of Jewish life in the United States, shows much of the same concern in Jewish Continuity in America, his collection of essays, also written over a span of three decades.

Feingold is the less sanguine of the two. In America, he says, there "is little Jewishly Jewish a secular Jew can hold on to," and that Jews have become "America's most irreligious subculture" (pp. 177, 14). In thirteen pieces (gathered in four sections: History, Anti-Semitism, Political Culture, and Secularism), Feingold does point to sources of vitality and potential for Jewish continuity- philanthropy, anti-anti-Semitism, the memory of the Holocaust, political liberalism, and especially Israelism, the primary "cement that holds Jews to its corporate memory" (p. 49). But he sees problems in all of these for Jewish survival without a commitment to "group history and sacred text." To will survival, he writes, there must be a richer, historically rooted "culture or ... belief to generate it" (p. 161).

Professor Feingold does not go as far as Howard Sachar or Arthur Hertzberg who have warned that Jews must return to faith or disappear, but he does imply a future of vacuousness without a revival of Jewish religiosity, or at least, in Deborah Dash Moore's term, a "religiously- authenticated ethnic identity." ⁴ He does not believe that the lost Yiddish culture could have sustained Jews in this country, but what nettles him is that "nothing has been generated by American Jewry to take its place" (p. 177, emphasis mine). Yet, in 1981, eight years before he wrote that sentence, Feingold, in an essay reprinted here on "Jewish Refugeeism," was more optimistic. In trying to show why Jews are different from other émigrés to the United States, Feingold said that while typical American immigrant groups retain strong sentiment for the "old country" that can persist for generations, emigration entailed, for them, a removal from the cultural and...