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Rabbi Deborah Waxman January 2014 Page 1 A Rabbi Deborah Waxman January 2014 Page 1 A RECONSTRUCTIONIST RESPONSE TO THE PEW STUDY Much ink has been spilled over the recent Pew Research Center’s study Portrait of Jewish Americans.1 I offer now both reflections on the study itself and the reactions to it, and a Reconstructionist response. In brief, I believe the Reconstructionist movement is well-poised to act on the tremendous positive Jewish identification reported by the study through continuing conceptual work and incubation of engaging ideas and practices. Findings and Reactions The study begins with an overarching claim that 94% of American Jews are proud to be part of the Jewish people, and 46% are very proud. In this era of majority society’s expansive embrace of American Jews and abundant choices in identities and commitments (including the choice to be “nothing,” to pass without judgment or difficulty as “American”), almost every Jew asked asserts pride in his or her Jewishness. This could easily be cause for celebration. Yet the initial reactions to the survey results were gloomy, even dire, because of other findings. The survey reports a marked decline in the religiosity of American Jews, especially compared to the “greatest generation,” those Jews who fought in World War II in the European and Asian theaters and on the home front and who, after the war’s end, built most of the institutions of postwar American Judaism. Where 93% of Jews in the greatest generation said their Jewish identity was based on religion, only 68% of millennials— the youngest generation of Jewish adults—identify their Jewishness with the religion of Judaism, while the remainder identify as Jews on the basis of ancestry, ethnicity or culture. However, the presumption of a decline and the interpretations of its significance are not as obvious as many believe. The study’s authors struggled with the difficulty of capturing Jewish identity. In their chapter “Religious Beliefs and Practices,” they observe: Though many Jews say religion is not a very important part of their lives, participation in Jewish traditions [seder, Yom Kippur fast] remains quite common….The data also make clear that American Jews have a broad view of their identities; being Jewish is as much about ethnicity and culture as it is about religious belief and practice. And many Jews defy easy categorization. Some Jews by religion are non-believers, while some Jews of no religion are ritually observant. Though Jewish identity is correlated with religious observance (Jews by religion are substantially more observant than Jews of no religion), the correspondence is not perfect.2 1 For a link to the survey results, see http://www.pewforum.org/2013/10/01/jewish-american-beliefs- attitudes-culture-survey/. 2 http://www.pewforum.org/2013/10/01/chapter-4-religious-beliefs-and-practices/ Rabbi Deborah Waxman January 2014 Page 2 The Pew study also failed to provide appropriate historical context. The greatest generation says that they identify as Jews by religion. Of course they do. To a historian of twentieth-century history, it is entirely predictable that they identify this way because of the historical context in which they were shaped. Understanding Historical Context and How It Shapes Responses The greatest generation was born in the prewar period, the years between the first and second world wars, precisely the period when Mordecai Kaplan formulated most of his thinking about Reconstructionism. During that period, there was first the slowing and then finally the complete stopping up of the massive waves of immigration of Jews from Eastern Europe. All kinds of Jews had emigrated in the years between 1881 and 1924, religious, Zionist, socialist, communist and Bundist. When Jewish immigration was halted entirely in 1924 due to nativist sentiment in America, the ideas behind various ideologies and approaches continued to cross the Atlantic—in Yiddish and Hebrew newspapers, in theater productions and art and music. But the people themselves, the folks who were born into the thick European welter of possible Jewish identities, all of them steeped in centuries of European anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism, stopped joining the ranks of American Jews. For this reason, by World War II’s start, there had already begun a narrowing of Jewish identity and a reshaping of Jewish life in America that looked radically different than the preceding 50-75 years. In the course of and following the Second World War, other things happened to further change the situation. American Jews became integrated into American society to an unparalleled degree. The Roosevelt administration enforced a unity campaign among American citizens and soldiers in the face of two empires bent on world domination who sought to destroy “the American way of life.” Think of the image of the soldiers raising the flag at Iwo Jima, or the war movies of those years. There was a white, Protestant lieutenant who commanded corpsmen of Irish, Italian and Jewish descent. After years of exclusion and anti-Semitism, Jews were suddenly on the “inside.” (This was in marked contrast to African Americans, who have always been the primary “other” in America.) The war itself, especially the fight against the Nazis, aligned American interests with Jewish interests in an unprecedented way: American forces fought against a fascist, anti-Semitic regime in defense of democracy and the protection of the rights of all individuals, including Jews. The Cold War period is perhaps most critical in understanding the response of members of the greatest generation. Almost immediately after the conclusion of a “hot” war, America entered into a “cold” war promoting democracy in the face of Soviet-backed Communism, that “Godless ideology.” Jews for the first time had been fully embraced by the majority population as Americans. In the 1950s, to be American was to be non-Communist, which meant, in part, to be religious. President Eisenhower famously stated, "[O]ur form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don't care what it is." During his presidency, the words “In God We Trust” were added to the U.S. seal and to paper currency, and “one nation under God” to the pledge of allegiance. (And, not coincidentally, Jewish Communists Julius and Rabbi Deborah Waxman January 2014 Page 3 Ethel Rosenberg were executed for treason.) So of course, the greatest generation identifies as religious: that’s what everyone, including their president, was telling them to do. On top of the narrowed and altered landscape of Jewish identification, there began in the years following World War II the massive suburbanization of the Jews, the move from dense ethnic enclaves in the city, density that had often been reinforced by housing covenants and other restrictions, to the suburbs. In the suburbs, the primary expression of Jewishness became the synagogue: grass-filled campuses with parking lots and big buildings that most Jews joined but didn’t necessarily attend. There’s a remarkably poignant scene from the movie Garden State in which Zach Braff, the movie’s writer, director and star, is explaining about suburban synagogues to Natalie Portman, who is famously Jewish but is playing a non-Jew. He says, “I don’t know any Jews who go to temple. The Jews I know, they go on one day, on Yom Kippur, the day of repentance. Did you know that most temples are built with moveable walls so that on the one day of the year when everyone comes to repent they can actually make the room big enough to hold everyone?” This is the religion that many (admittedly not all) members of the greatest generation are talking about, where they belonged but did not regularly attend. The correspondence between Jewish identity and religious observance has never been particularly accurate or clear. Even as Jews living in the years following World War II were quick to affirm that they were religious, “religion” never precisely signified particular religious practices, spiritual outlook, or belief in God that most people assume by the term “religious.” A Reconstructionist Interpretation I resist interpretations of the Pew study that point to decline and that exclaim worriedly about the Jewish future. From a Reconstructionist perspective, defining Judaism as religion has never been adequate, especially in America. We have much to contribute about how we talk about being Jewish, and how we use language and other tools to inspire Jews and carve out a vital future. Reconstructionism was founded out of the recognition that how we talk about being Jewish is critically important. Mordecai Kaplan burst onto the national scene in the 1930s with a rhetorical innovation, through the publication of a book titled Judaism as a Civilization. Kaplan proposed a metaphor—and by means of this metaphor an approach to Jewish living and Jewish communal organization. When Judaism as a Civilization was published, some Jews reported reading it and saying “Aha! This is what I have always believed!” These supporters urged the establishment of The Reconstructionist as a forum to explore the implications and applications of Reconstructionist thought. However, the argument to understand Judaism as a “civilization” was not immediately embraced and the Reconstructionist approach engendered significant controversy. Most of these attacks insisted that Judaism should be understood exclusively as a religion, even as their proponents differed on what religion was. In their efforts to explain and expand the significance of the Reconstructionist approach, Kaplan and his disciples coined another word that picked up on all of the aspirations of “civilization.” This term, “peoplehood,” was immediately widely embraced and quickly leapt into the American lexicon. “Civilization”— understanding Judaism as a religion, yes, and also a culture, a set of languages, diverse practices Rabbi Deborah Waxman January 2014 Page 4 and mores, with multiple entry points—has over the years come to dominate both the American and the Israeli landscape.
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