What Does It Mean To Be Jewish (Outside The Bubble of the American Jewish Institutional World) Part 3

"Public opinion surveys some years ago indicated that hardly 18% of American Jews attended religious services at least once a month." -Wil Herberg, 1950

"Only 13% were what might be called regular worshippers by Lakeville standards, attending High Holy Days each year, on Festivals, and on Sabbath once or twice a month or more... To Lakeville's Jews, belonging rather than attending seemed to be what mattered about religious affiliation." -Sklare, Greenblum and Ringer, 1969, based on research conducted in the 1950s

[The results of the latest Pew survey are] "devastating... I thought there would be more American Jews who cared about religion." Forward Editor-in-Chief Jane Eisner, New York Times, October 1, 2013

You'll excuse my schadenfreude, but the frenzy around the latest Pew survey has given me a bitter chuckle or two at the expense of our gedolim.

I'm a Yiddishist, which means that I've spent my entire adult life being condescended to, marginalized, erased, and generally having the shit mansplained out of me by the Jewish institutional world and its various representatives, bureaucratic and academic. So, you know, allow me a little pleasure.

Many times I've been informed that the Yiddish language itself is illegitimate (a mere dialect/jargon/pidgin/creole), that it can't be a substitute for religion (as if I would khas v'sholem suggest such a stupid thing), that I myself am a soyne yisroel for daring to suggest that Yiddish, too, is an important Jewish language (an insult to the real sonim yisroel, in any case.)

Don't you know that Yiddish in America failed because it could not reproduce its institutions or even its speakers? To which I can answer today, look in the fucking mirror, buddy and tell me what you see.

One could easily argue that American Jewish religion, as a successor to European forms of Judaism, failed to reconstitute itself in a sustainable, reproducible way. I'm hardly the only one saying this: American synagogue/Temple oriented Judaism is a failure and was a failure, almost from the very start.

I may be unique, though, in calling out the Jewish pundit class for pushing an ahistorical narrative heavy on fear and guilt and light on critical thinking.

"Many parents thought their children might marry gentiles, and most were resigned or only moderately unhappy about this prospect. Love was widely felt to outweigh religion as a criterion for marriage... Opposition to intermarriage was usually attributed to concern over possible personal difficulties rather than over Jewish survival." - Sklare, Greenblum and Ringer 

"What haunts me and the many parents I know who have children in the twenties and thirties is whether they will marry, and if so, whether they will marry Jews." - Jane Eisner, Forward, January 7, 2013

The time to worry about apathy, alienation, affiliation and intermarriage was the 1950s, when anyone who looked at the literature knew exactly what kind of demographic shit storm was brewing. But it's 2013 and the Jewish community is reaping exactly what was sown in the post-war synagogue/suburb boom. Game over. To think that at this point you can, for example, shame people out of intermarriage is so bizarre that it's hard for me to take the notion seriously. And yet, the 'fight' against intermarriage is considered by those with power to be completely legitimate. Am I the only one who thinks real solutions to our problems are never gonna come from these people?

What is to be said about the state we're in today, if we're to take some kind of historically informed perspective? I'd say something like this: post WW II, the face of institutional Judaism changed practically overnight but the people did not. A cultural disconnect is built into the very fabric of modern American Jewish life.

Landsmanshaftn, fraternal organizations, shtiblekh, Talmud Torahs, the entire Yiddish cultural apparatus, all was replaced (or at least declared dead) in the supercessionary march toward Temples, synagogues, two generation families, JCCs, Hebrew schools etc.

American Jewish life had been remade in the image of an imaginary new American Jew. The real American Jews continued to evolve, gradually, as they had been doing for decades- with declining interest in religion and an emotional and personal attachment to their Yiddish past.

Not only did the institutions change, so did the official narrative of American Jewishness. A whole lot of American Jews found themselves and their families written out. Certainly for the tens of thousands of American Jews who had been involved with radical politics before 1950, that past became so politically toxic that it could only be spoken of in the most contemptuous terms possible. Forget about learning that history in Hebrew school, ell oh ell.

But even putting aside that particular (not demographically insignificant) population,  there are innumerable ways the average Jew became alienated from him/herself, distanced from his or her own recent past.

For me, the key image is my dad making brokhes for my family at khanike or pesakh, pretty much the only time we did anything ritually in my house. My dad, having attended an Eastern European style shtibl in 1940s Philadelphia, spoke Hebrew with a lovely Ashkenazi tam. To my callow, Hebrew schooled ears, though, his Hebrew was ugly, grating, wrong.

No one ever explained to me why my dad spoke Hebrew the way he did and had I never learned Yiddish I'm not sure I would've ever figured it out. If I hadn't pursued Yiddish it's unlikely I would've been able to reconcile the gigantic disconnect between the Jewishness I learned at school and that which I absorbed at home, and it's unlikely I would've cared much, anyway.

But who cares about me? What about all these Jews of no religion? This 30% of unchurched Jews? Are they people whose grandparents were khas v'sholem Communists? Or, let's be honest, what about this large majority, with or without 'denomination', who just don't care about religion? Are they like me, everyday Jews turned off by an educational apparatus which did more to alienate than educate?

Who can say? Jane Eisner is the editor-in-chief of the most important Jewish newspaper in America. Her word can summon the resources to conduct a million dollar survey. I'm a nebekh nobody with a blog, So, obviously, I'll take a page from her playbook and put this out there, Pew Trust peeps, if you're looking to do this whole thing over, I've got some ideas:

I just met Pew
And this is Crazy
But I've gotta survey a couple thousand Jews regarding their cultural and educational experiences
So call me maybe?




To be continued...

What Does It Mean To Be Jewish (Outside The Bubble Of The American Jewish Institutional World) Part 1

The Pew Trust recently released a huge survey of the American Jewish population. The Pew study is important because a major Jewish population study hasn't been done in ten years. While the survey is far from perfect, it's an important wake up call to an ever more delusional American Jewish institutional leadership. Or, maybe it's a message to us, the so-called constituents, that our leaders not only have no interest in who we really are, but are in active denial about it. (Much more on this soon.)

I've been shocked and dismayed to see the reactions of Jewish communal leaders to this latest report. For example, Jane Eisner, editor in chief of the Forward, was quoted in the New York Times saying she

"...found the results “devastating” because, she said in an interview, “I thought there would be more American Jews who cared about religion.” 

“This should serve as a wake-up call for all of us as Jews,” she said, “to think about what kind of community we’re going to be able to sustain if we have so much assimilation.”

Jane Eisner is a smart woman and a formidable journalist. So why would she be devastated by the state of American Jews when sociologists have been saying the exact same things about American Jews for at least fifty years: American Jews have no use for the Jewish religion. Even more than the statistics, the leadership's reaction tells us that something has gone very wrong in the official American Jewish narrative.

However! Before we get to the polemic, let's go to the numbers. One of the points I want to make is that the demographic findings of today are predicted in the sociological literature of 50 years ago. Synagogue attendance, observance of kashrus, Hebrew literacy, attitudes toward intermarriage: these were all on the downward trend decades ago and it warn't no secret. 

For example, in the mid-50s, the American Jewish Committee sponsored a study of a fairly new Chicago suburb; it was known as 'Lakeville' in the literature. The findings of the Lakeville study didn't come out in full until the mid-60s. Its authors were the cream of the crop of American Jewish sociology: Marshall Sklare, Benjamin Ringer, Joseph Greenblum. Though Lakeville was wealthier, better educated and had a smaller percentage of the foreign born than the greater American Jewish population, the study's authors felt Lakeville was a predictor of general trends among American Jews. And boy, were they right.

I'm going to focus on just one 'metric' at the moment, as it has a good one to one correspondence between the Lakeville study and today's Pew report, and it highlights the true state of American Jewry.

Jews in Lakeville were asked to list what they considered to be the most important criteria for being a 'Good Jew.' The responses are here listed in order of frequency:

• Lead an ethical and moral life
• Accept his being a Jew and try not to hide it
• Support all humanitarian causes
• Promote civic betterment and improvement in the community
• Gain respect of Christian neighbors
• Help the underprivileged improve their lot
• Know the fundamentals of Judaism
• Work for equality for Negroes

Sorry for the poor photo quality. This is a snapshot of the Lakeville study published in 1969 but based on research from a decade earlier.

Those are the essentials. What about that which is merely 'desirable' to being a good Jew?

In contrast, many virtues directly connected with traditional Judaism and Jewish identity tended to be considered merely 'desirable,' not 'essential.' Some of the most widely named 'desirable' attributes (again in the order of frequency with which named) were these:

• Be well versed in Jewish history and culture
• Marry within the Jewish faith (emphasis mine)
• Contribute to Jewish philanthropies
• Belong to Jewish organizations
• Support Israel (emphasis mine)
• Attend weekly services
• Attend services on High Holy Days
• Belong to a synagogue of temple 

Many interesting observations to be drawn here. One of which is obviously that a new, American, Jewish ideal had come to maturity by the 1950s. This ideal called for being a good person (with some sort of mushy, liberal values), and a proud Jew. And, most pertinent to our discussions today, endogamy and support for Israel didn't even make it into the 'essentials' column. The traditional notions of Torah Jewishness: kashrus, shabes, taharas mishpokhe are certainly nowhere to be found. As the authors of Lakeville write about this new American Jewish ideal: "Virtually all the traditional religious, nationalistic and cultural values were missing." 

You don't have to look too hard to know that the parents of the 1950s gave birth to the Jew of 2013. To wit: what it means to be Jewish, from the Pew report of 2013: 

• Remembering Holocaust 73%
• Leading ethical/moral life 69%
• Working for justice/equality 56%
• Being intellectually curious 49%
• Caring about Israel  43%
• Having good sense of humor  42%
• Being part of a Jewish community 28%
• Observing Jewish law   19%
• Eating traditional Jewish food 14%

(screen cap of the Pew report below)

Obviously, there have been some tremendous cultural shifts in American Jewish life since the Lakeville study. Decades of Holocaust education, for example, have placed the Holocaust at the center of American Jewish life in a way that was unimaginable when the Lakeville material was published. And that 19% who answered 'Observing Jewish law'  in 2013 can perhaps be attributed to another trend that was only dimly perceived in the 50s and 60s, the resurgence of traditional Judaism.  And yet, the American Jew of 2013 isn't that different from that of the 50s and 60s. He's less embarrassed of Jewish humor, maybe, but his Jewishness is sentimental, intellectual,  and only vaguely nationalistic. He may belong to a synagogue, but he has no interest in going there.

The numbers are all there, and have been there for decades. Our most pressing problem today isn't intermarriage, (as many would have it) but an American Jewish ideal at odds with traditional Jewishness and Jewish continuity. To act as if this is a surprise, in the face of decades of research, shows a tragic failure of leadership in the American Jewish institutional world.

(Part Two here)
(Part Three here)
(Part Four here)

American Jews Hate Synagogue and There's Nothing You Can Do About It: As Explained by My 1950 Boyfriend Will Herberg

The Postwar Revival of the Synagogue: Does it Reflect a Religious Awakening? -- Will Herberg, Commentary, April 1950 (no link, article behind paywall)

But the divisions within the synagogue, however large they may loom when seen from the inside, are trifling compared to the great gulf that today separates the synagogue as a whole from the vital areas of Jewish life. Let it not be forgotten, in the first place, that out of the close to five million Jews in this country, no more than one and a half million-- or less than a third-- have even the remotest connection with the synagogue. Public-opinion surveys some years ago indicated that hardly eighteen per cent of American Jews attended religious services at least once a month... It must be admitted that only a minority of American Jews are in any important way associated with the synagogue. [emphasis mine]

Oysh. But that was then and this is now, right?

Errrrr.... Let's look at a snapshot of 2010

The folks at the Steinhardt Social Research Institute had this to say about the last major estimation of American Jewish population and life in 2010, (from their summary, page 17)

• Majority of Jews uninvolved uninvolved in Jewish communal communal life, lack education
• Even among those who identify “by religion,” majority do not belong to synagogues, participate in Jewish life cycle events, or have visited Israel

• Most U.S. Jews do not understand understand Hebrew and many not able to read

I spend a lot of time reading Jewish sociological research papers (I know, I need a boyfriend, a corgi puppy and/or a life). From reading the literature today, you'd think folks woke up yesterday and noticed that American Jews hate going to synagogue. Everyone's running around with their gotchkes in a royal bunch, angsting how to drag us back to a place that has no relevance or compelling interest to the average American Jew AND NEVER HAS!!! That simple revelation, though, seems elusive to the khakhomim of the Jewish institutional world, a place whose memory is both selective and short.

Indeed, let's give the mic back to Will Herberg: 

Even the minority of Jews who do belong to the synagogue do not as a rule find it the center of their interests as men and as Jews. Other concerns-- Zionism, labor unionism, philanthropy, social services, "anti-defamation" -- seem closer and more deeply related to the immediacies of life and the core of personal emotion; and with these concerns religion and the synagogue appear to have very little to do.
....
What is not sufficiently appreciated is that however natural it may appear to us, the present position of the synagogue in relation to Jewish life represents probably the sharpest break with fundamental Jewish tradition that modern history has witnessed. It represents the fragmentation of Jewish existence, and the secularization of Jewish institutions and activities. [emphasis mine]

Rather than (or even in addition to) bringing our youth closer to IDF hotties, or building Identity, or rebranding Judaism, or any other narishkayt the Federation wants to fund, we'd be well served to spend a few minutes confronting the trauma of the recent past. How can we heal the historical and cultural fragmentation still being felt by the average Jew? I've got a few thoughts, one of which is that it ain't gonna happen in a synagogue.

The year in Yiddish revivals, with a prologue by Molly Picon

Wow. It's been a year (pretty much to the day) since I revived this blog. I've covered everything from OTD Hasidim to masturbation mussar to the erasure of Jewish Communists from American documentary film. But my focus has always returned to my favorite topic: how we do and don't talk about Yiddish. The very first post I wrote for the blog was about an AP wire story on the 'revival' of Yiddish among college students. It's the story that keeps on giving, and give it did in 2012. Here is a surely incomplete survey of 'revival' stories from 2012.

• Tablet discovers Mendy Cahan doing what he's been doing for decades 

• Later that year Haaretz cracks the same story 

• Cuz 'It’s Yiddish revival time'  in Israel 

• And did you know?? "Programs for Yiddish-lovers are proliferating both inside and outside the academic world in Israel, despite many having written off the language." 

• But can Yiddish be revived among Arab Israelis if they never spoke it in the first place? 

• Don't forget about Canada 

• And this is not quite a revival story, but still working off the revival trope

I could list twenty articles like these to make my point: there is no revival. There is only a Jewish populace deeply confused about its identity and conflicted about the sacrifices it's made in the name of assimilation, Americanization, Zionism and the myth of a unified Jewish monoculture. The revival meme is a way of neutralizing those who would question the value of all those things; it frames their connection to Yiddish as cute, unthreatening, and incapable of maturing. To talk about Yiddish in terms other than its 'revival' is to tread on politically dangerous ground.

If my round-up of articles doesn't make my point, perhaps you'll be more impressed by the beloved pixie diva of Yiddish theater, Molly Picon.

In 1980 Molly Picon appeared on Israeli TV. There's a lot to unpack about her appearance (in which the show's host interviews her in English and she answers in Yiddish) but right now I'll just skip to the part where Molly herself proclaims a Yiddish revival. In 1980.

Around 3 minutes in Molly says that her Israeli hosts, including the Yiddish actor Shmulik Atzmon, are excited about the current Yiddish revival. All over the world, she says, there is a growing interest in Yiddish, especially among young people. They want to know 'Who are we?' and 'What have we lost?'

At Queens College, she says, six hundred students (!) study Yiddish and now in Europe and Israel, too, students want to learn Yiddish.

To which I have to ask, politely, what the hell? What in bloody hell happened between 1980 and today?

Well, for one, there has been an incredibly burst of creativity around traditional Eastern European music. Some call that the 'klezmer revival.'

And what about Yiddish language? The National Yiddish Book Center, established in the early 1980s, has obviously changed the face of Yiddish between then and now, systematically preserving Yiddish materials for future readers. But what about the classes where those readers will be educated? What about the learning? What about providing professional pedagogical resources for the next generations of Yiddish speakers? What about training the next generation of Yiddish teachers?

While there are some (too few) high quality resources for learning (and teaching) Yiddish today, it's nowhere near what you might think it would be for a language whose 'revival' was heralded over 30 years ago on Israeli TV.

More and more, real Yiddish literacy in the United States is in the hands of either academics (and quasi-academics) or the Hasidim who use it as a vernacular. These are the people who either have the resources to learn and use it or have a politico-theological reason for them to retain it as the language of everyday life.

As much as I love Molly Picon, even 600 students do not make a revival, or a revolution. A revival takes political will and institutional power. The day I see a Federation leader get up at the General Assembly and declare the importance of language transmission, the day I see a session devoted to planning for Yiddish language pedagogy at an educational conference, that's the day I will doff my Yiddish revival cap and herald a new age of Akvarious. Without these things-  communal prioritization, resources, a gigantic shift in our cultural conversation around Yiddish-  the much bally-hooed Yiddish revival is nokh vayt (still far off.)





Gawd, I depress myself sometimes.

Dual Language Public Schools: an upcoming conference sponsored by the Berman Jewish Policy Archive

As some of you probably know, next to Makeup Alley, BJPA is my absolute favorite internet resource. If I've spouted a piquant anecdote, a piece of historical trivia, a statistic about the apathy of Jewish Americans, you can bet it probably came from the massive holdings of BJPA.

Tomorrow (Monday) they're having a sure-to-be fascinating conference about dual language public schools. Over at the BJPA blog, the ever-thoughtful Seth Chalmer excerpted some relevant articles. He's got one on the crisis of Jewish language illiteracy, by Leon Wieseltier. And another by conference participant Adam Gaynor, about the potential for a multicultural approach to bring Jewish (and non-Jewish) students into frequent, and deeper, contact with Jewish content.

I wrote a brief response to Seth's post. Here's part of it:

There was a time when Jewish leaders pushed very hard to have modern Hebrew taught in American public schools. You can read the fascinating story in the work of historian Jonathan Krasner. From the turn of the century up to the immediate post-war era, Samson Benderly and his disciples fought to create an American infrastructure for Tarbut Ivrit (Hebrew Culture.) This included getting Hebrew accepted in American public schools. And, as Krasner notes, it was almost a complete failure. For complex reasons, American Jews rejected modern Hebrew, both as a public school option, and, on the larger scale, as noted by Wieseltier. 

The failure of Benderly and his followers to introduce Tarbut Ivrit into schools brings up an important question: if Jewish content is to be introduced into mainstream spaces, *whose* Jewish culture will be represented? One of the reasons for the failure of Benderly's project is that modern Hebrew had precious little relevance to Yiddish speaking immigrants and their children. 

Benderly's program was quite explicit in its ideology. It was not the Hebrew of Torah and prayer that would be taught, rather, the modern Hebrew of (then) Palestine. The plan was not just to make American Jews bi-lingual, but bi-cultural, with Palestine supplying a new mode of Jewish life in America, in the spirit of Ahad Ha'Am. This was obviously in conflict with the needs and concerns of the average American Jew who was, at most, a passive supporter of the Zionist project.  

Today, the ideology behind American Jewish educational initiatives is often much more obscure. "Jewish content" sounds nice in the context of multiculturalism, but, I ask, whose content? For example, what are the chances that I, a Yiddish identified modern Jew, would see anything that represented easten European life (which Gaynor omits from his article entirely) as more than the tired tropes of oppression and darkness? What are the chances that I would hear any Hebrew in other than the now standard modern Israeli pronunciation? 

The assumption that there is a monolithic Jewish culture is, in part, a legacy of Benderly and his followers who were quite clear about the way that American Jews would look to modern Hebrew as the future of American Jewish life. However, today, even more than at the turn of the century, the assumption of monolithic Jewish culture (and language) hinders real educational innovation.

What do you think about the state of Jewish literacy? Do you think there's a crisis? Do you think the answer lies in the public sphere or in a revisioning of the Jewish school experience?