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...

Radical Camera and Red, White and Blue-washing

This winter the Jewish Museum mounted a terrific exhibit about the Photo League called Radical Camera. The Photo League (1936-1951) was a group of amateur and professional photographers who joined together to teach and exhibit cutting edge photography with a socially conscious point of view.

As the name of the exhibit hints, the Photo League, its members and the work it produced, reflected the progressive/Socialist/Communist currents of the day. Mason Klein's essay in the exhibit catalog argues that viewers should resist easy categorization of the League, and, he says, to generalize about the radical politics of the League is to make the same totalizing mistake of the blacklisting madmen who eventually destroyed it (along with many similar organizations.) He writes:  "To reduce such a vitally boisterous and dynamic association to its earliest iteration [which was more explicitly Marxist] is to echo the mindset of the U.S.attorney general's office, which falsely condemned and ultimately destroyed the Photo League as a subversive organization in 1947."

Fair enough. Art is a messy business and an artists' collective bears little resemblance to a political party. However, there is no question that the League and its members were "informed by a socialist sensibility and advocacy..." [catalog, p. 13].  This made the League no different than any number of magazines, clubs,  and fraternal organizations of this period, all with an over-representation of young Jews, most the sons and daughters of poor Eastern European immigrants.

As you can imagine, I loved the Radical Camera exhibit. The radical history and art of Eastern European Jews (and their children and grandchildren) is an important part of American Jewish history, one that can be appreciated without subscribing to its politics. (Indeed, to presume that investigating, discussing and appreciating the history of Jewish Communists should be taboo, and somehow implies an endorsement of Communism or, kholile, Stalinism, is a childish and willfully malicious manipulation of history for ones own political purposes. But that's another discussion.)

A new documentary has just arrived on the scene, also about the Photo League. The movie is called 'Ordinary Miracles' and I was excited to check it out recently at Quad Cinema here in New York. My excitement quickly turned to rank dismay. For one thing, the word 'Jewish' was mentioned once in the movie, as far as I could tell. How could a subject so richly Jewish as to be featured at the Jewish Museum be portrayed without addressing the Jewishness of its members? The mind boggles.

But that was only the beginning. The politics of the Photo League students and teachers isn't just toned down in Ordinary Miracles, it's almost entirely erased, only to emerge, toward the end of the film, out of nowhere, as a catalyst for the Photo League's prosecution and and ultimate dissolution. A viewer who knew nothing about the history of the Photo League would be baffled as to why the League would be targeted at all.

Instead of exploring the politics of the Photo League (an integral part of the League's approach to documentary photography), director Nina Rosenblum chose to spend large chunks of the narrative (in an already brief movie) on subjects only tangentially related to the story of the League, namely the visit of Lewis Hine to the League's New York headquarters and the military service of various League members during World War II. But why?

It seems to me there are two, complementary explanations, neither of which reflects very well on the film's maker. If you look at Nina Rosenblum's filmography, her previous documentaries include films on, you guessed it, Lewis Hine and soldiers fighting in World War II. Rather than tackle the tough subject of politics, Rosenblum does a cut and paste from her previous work, something we should all be wary of these days.

But there's something else going on in Ordinary Miracles. The director is clearly uncomfortable with the politics of the League, going so far as to erase it almost completely from the film. She focuses on the war time service of League members, and their implied patriotism, as well as using clips of interviews with a few League members who play down the role of politics in the League, decades later.  The effect of these narrative choices is to present a sanitized Photo League bearing little resemblance to the one portrayed in the Jewish Museum's Radical Camera exhibit.

Ordinary Miracles's is so brazen in its distortions as to inspire a genre all its own: Red, White, and Blue-washing.  It's a disingenuous, baffling dishonor to the work of the Photo League and, ironically, a betrayal of the very ideals of truth and documentary integrity at the heart of the Photo League mission.