Americas Jews

Introduction

Introduction One of the most serious weaknesses of many writings in American Jewish history and sociology is that they often study what was and is happening to American Jewry in a vacuum, that is, as if American Jews were"a people apart," completely isolated from and unaffected by what was and is happening to and within American society as a whole. On the other hand, there is an opposite weakness in which Heine's famous proverb, "Wie es sich christelt, so judelt es sich" ("As Christianity goes, so goes Judaism")' is accepted so unqualifiedly that one is blinded to the unique history, patterns, and trends in American Jewry. Within the field of the sociology of American Jewry these two tendencies are correspondingly related to at least two of the three dominant perspectives from which most analyses proceed-survivalism and assimilation (Sklare, 1974). The survivalist, being ideologically committed to Jewish survival, is prone to be overly insular, to judge contemporary developments in terms of some preconceived notions of the American Jewish community. These are, in turn, frequently based upon misconceptions about Jewish communities in the past, and/or upon the tendency to focus on some developments within the contemporary community, however unrepresentative they 'The proverb is frequently attributed to Heine, though I have been unsuccessful in locating it in his work. It actually precedes him by many centuries; a similar proverb is found in the twelfth-cen tury book, SeIer Hachasidim, by Rabbi Judah ben Samuel, the Pious (c. 1150-1217): "It is known that as is the Gentile custom in most places so is the Jewish custom." xv xvi Introduction may be, as if they were the wave of the future and a confirmation of a faith in survivalism. The assimilationist, on the other hand, is convinced that Jews will inevitably assimilate , and tends to view all manifestations of Jewish group selfconsciousness as "false consciousness," as superficial, and/or as nonauthentic manifestations of ethnicity. While I am convinced of the necessity of a comparative perspective for the understanding of contemporary American Jewry, I reject simplistic notions of 50-called value-free sociology. On the contrary, the perspective of this work is unambiguously survivalist. Where a critical stance manifests itself in this book, particularly in the final chapters, it is within the age-old Jewish tradition of the"Al Cheyt complex,"* or constructive self-criticism, rather than that of an outside objective (or subjective) observer. Approximately ten years ago, Charles S. Liebman wrote a very perceptive sociological analysis of American Jewry in which he characterized the American Jews as "ambivalent" (Liebman, 1973). Through his analysis of American Jewish religion, politics, and family life, Liebman argued that American Jews live with two opposing sets of values-those of integration into American society versus those of Jewish group survival. These two values to him are mutually exclusive , and his book concludes with his pessimistic perception that the stronger value of integration will ultimately be victorious over the weaker one of survival. Liebman's perspective , however, should not be confused with the assimilationist one mentioned earlier. On the contrary, in this book he is unequivocably survivalist, and his very pessimism places him within the old and persistent Jewish survivalist tradition which sees Jewry as "the ever-dying people" (Rawidowicz, 1974, pp. 210-24; Sklare, 1976), which sees each generation of Jews as the last, and which makes monumental efforts to insure that it will not be so. Liebman identified the American *The term derives from the traditional Jewish prayer recited nine times on the Day of Atonement, in which one confesses to a long list of sins, which hardly any (if any) individual could have committed in toto; as each sin is enumerated, one beats one's breast lightly, symbolically. Introduction xvii Jewish condition as ambivalent because he implicitly identified integration with assimilation, and he foresaw that value as winning out over the more weakly held value of survival. A somewhat similar analysis, though from a different perspective, was presented in an essay by Seymour Leventman (1969), in large measure a sequel to his book with Judith R. Kramer, Children of the Gilded Ghetto (1961). Leventman defined "the problem of the Jewish Community" as the "preoccupation with position in two social worlds, Jewish and nonJewish " (p. 33). He delineates three generations of Eastern European Jews in the United States; the first, the immigrant generation, was concerned primarily with ingroup survival and the...