AMERICAN JEWRY’S COMFORT LEVEL AMERICAN JEWRY’S COMFORT LEVEL PRESENT AND FUTURE Manfred Gerstenfeld and Steven Bayme Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs Institute for Global Jewish Affairs Copyright © 2010 by Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (JCPA) and Manfred Gerstenfeld Copyright of the individual essays is with the authors. All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system—except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews—without written permission from the JCPA, 13 Tel Hai Street, Jerusalem, 92107, Israel. Tel: +972 2 561 9281, Fax: +972 2 561 9112. E-mail: [email protected], www.jcpa.org ISBN: 978-965-218-086-5 Set in Times New Roman by Judith Sternberg, Jerusalem Printed at Hauser Cover design by Rami & Jacky Dedicated to the memory of Emanuel Rackman, revered intellectual, communal, and religious leader, for his indefatigable and persistent advocacy on behalf of the unity of the Jewish people in both Israel and the Diaspora. Table of Contents Acknowledgments 9 David A. Harris: Foreword 11 Steven Bayme: American Jewry Confronts the Twenty-First Century 15 Manfred Gerstenfeld: American Jewry: Present and Future 55 ESSAYS AND INTERVIEWS 111 Manfred Gerstenfeld: The Fragmentation of American Jewry and Its Leadership: An interview with Jack Wertheimer 113 Manfred Gerstenfeld: Changes in American Jewish Identities: From the Collective to the Personal, from Norms to Aesthetics: An interview with Steven M. Cohen 123 Chaim I. Waxman: Changing Denominational Patterns in the United States 133 Steven Bayme: Intermarriage and Jewish Leadership in the United States 143 Sylvia Barack Fishman: Transformations in the Composition of American Jewish Households 151 Ira M. Sheskin: The Usefulness of Local Jewish Community Studies in Examining the American Jewish Future 160 Steven Windmueller: The Jewish Communities of the Western United States 170 Sylvia Barack Fishman and Daniel Parmer: Policy Implications of the Gender Imbalance among America’s Jews 181 Manfred Gerstenfeld: How the Status of American Jewish Women Has Changed over the Past Decades: An interview with Rela Mintz Geffen 190 Manfred Gerstenfeld: The Future of Jewish Education: An interview 201 with Jack Wertheimer Manfred Gerstenfeld: Jewish Grandparenting in the United States: An interview with Rela Mintz Geffen 211 Manfred Gerstenfeld: The Future of Reform Jewry: An interview with Rabbi David Ellenson 219 Manfred Gerstenfeld: The Future of Conservative Jewry: An interview with Arnold M. Eisen 228 Manfred Gerstenfeld: Modern Orthodoxy and the Challenges to Its Establishment: An interview with Marc B. Shapiro 237 Manfred Gerstenfeld: The Birthright Israel Program: Present and Possible Future Impacts: An interview with Leonard Saxe 247 Steven Bayme: The Intellectual Assault on Israel and Pro-Israel Advocacy: How the American Jewish Community Should React 257 Contributors and Interviewees 265 Index 269 Acknowledgments At the beginning of this decade the Center for Jewish Community Studies, affiliated with the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, published four books on the position of Jews in the American public square. This was undertaken in the framework of a research project initiated by the Pew Charitable Trusts.1 The last of these books, American Jewry’s Challenge: Conversations Confronting the Twenty-First Century, by Manfred Gerstenfeld, came out in 2005. It contains interviews with seventeen prominent American Jewish personalities and presents their thoughts about the future. This new book of essays and interviews, American Jewry’s Comfort Level, is a sequel to it. As in the previous volume, authors and interviewees often consider the same issues from different perspectives. Many thanks are due to the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and the American Jewish Committee for publishing this book. We would like to thank the authors of the essays and the interviewees for sharing their knowledge with us. The authors are grateful to David A. Harris, executive director of AJC, for providing the Foreword to the volume. We wish to thank Dr. Harold Shapiro, president emeritus, Princeton University and chair of AJC’s Koppelman Institute on American Jewish-Israeli Relations, for his support and encouragement of this project. We appreciate the collaboration of Dore Gold and Chaya Hershkovic, president and director-general, respectively, of the Jerusalem Center. We received many valuable comments from Rela Mintz Geffen, Alan Mittleman, Ira M. Sheskin, and Howard Weisband. We are thankful to them for sharing their insights with us. We are grateful to Edna Weinstock-Gabay, who was responsible for the production of this book. Chanah Shapira was most helpful in the final stages of preparing the text. Tamas Berzi has played an important role in the logistics of the project. Many thanks are due to Fredelle Ben-Avi and Naomi Babbin for typing the multitudes of drafts of this book, and to David Hornik for his copyediting, proofreading, and preparation of the index. Manfred Gerstenfeld Steven Bayme Note 1 Alan Mittleman, Jonathan D. Sarna, and Robert Licht, Jewish Polity and American Civil Society: Communal Agencies and Religious Movements in the American Public Square 9 10 Acknowledgments (New York: Rowman & Littlefield , 2002); Alan Mittleman, Jonathan D. Sarna, and Robert Licht, Jews and the American Public Square (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002); Alan Mittleman, Religion as a Public Good: Jews and Other Americans on Religion in the Public Square (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003); Manfred Gerstenfeld, American Jewry’s Challenge: Conversations Confronting the Twenty-First Century (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005). David A. Harris Foreword As we approach the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, American Jewry faces daunting new challenges that demand fresh responses. The ever- accelerating pace of change renders policies of the past as obsolete as yesterday’s newspaper. The situation that the organized Jewish community addressed a generation ago was strikingly different than the reality today. On the international scene, the world stood in awe at Israel’s swift victory in the Six-Day War of 1967. Israeli security seemed assured. Israel advocacy meant educating the world to understand that Israel had gained large stretches of territory on its borders in a war of defense for its very life, and that it was up to the Arab world to offer peace for land. How different the picture is now. Israel has indeed negotiated peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan in exchange for land. But American Jewish support for Israel is up against the widespread perception that Israel—no longer the David that defeated Goliath—has “colonialist designs” that prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and that this constitutes the chief obstacle to rebuilding American influence in the Arab world. And in other Western countries, the anti- Israel bias is even worse. Making the task of interpreting Israel’s policies even more difficult, a good number of American Jews buy into the “blame Israel first” line too. What is the Israel advocate to do? Four decades ago, anti-Semitism seemed on the wane, as books, films, and plays about the Holocaust resonated with the broad public, and most people absorbed the lesson that the hatred of Jews that was translated into mass murder could be turned against any other vulnerable minority as well. Advocacy on this issue amounted to little more than pinpointing and publicizing the activities of fringe extremist groups. But anti-Semitism in our day has metamorphosed into the big lie that, of all the nationalist movements in the world, Zionism is uniquely evil and constitutes a danger to world peace. Ironically, it is Iran, which had good relations with Israel until 1979, that bangs the drums most loudly for the destruction of the Jewish state, and is developing the nuclear capacity that could carry out that threat. How shall we counter the new anti-Semitism—the demonization of Zionism— and how can we convince the world to stop the Iranian nuclear program? The domestic political terrain on which Jewish community-relations groups operated a generation ago was relatively simple. Americans, especially those in 11 12 David A. Harris leadership positions, were overwhelmingly whites of European ethnic origin, Christian in religion, or else blacks, also Christian, with deep ancestral roots in the United States. They possessed a cultural awareness, at least on a basic level, of Jews, Judaism, and Jewish history, so that Jews’ concerns fit within their frame of reference. That is no longer the case. Latino, Asian, and other non-European groups— many of them recent immigrants—have emerged on the political scene. They have had relatively little historic contact with Jews, and hence their understanding of Jews’ priorities cannot be taken for granted. The same is true of the growing non-Western religious groups, such as Buddhists and Hindus—not to mention American Muslims, whose political clout is on the rise. Where will Jews find coalitional allies in this increasingly complex American mosaic? Perhaps the biggest change for the worse has occurred internally—or as the legendary American cartoon character Pogo famously put it, “We have seen the enemy and he is us.” The Jewish community for which our organizational structure spoke forty years ago was small but relatively robust. The great majority of Jews married other Jews and brought up their children to feel part of the Jewish collective. Whether one was religious—of whatever denomination—or secular, a common sense of peoplehood, underlined by the memory of the Holocaust, strengthened by the emergence of the state of Israel, and heightened by the Six- Day War and the Soviet Jewry movement, bound Jews together. That sense of group identity has gradually waned and in its place has emerged a largely privatized identity: one is attracted to particular ideas or practices that enhance self-fulfillment, whether they come from Jewish or non-Jewish sources.