‘be proud of your connection to Eastern European secular Jews’

by on May 10, 2009 4
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Rachael Kamel writes:
I read your memo to "bad Jews" … and I think that you are actually describing "secular" Jews from Eastern Europe, who overwhelmed the US Jewish community through their massive immigration around the turn of the 20th century. We can be proud of our connections to them–they were the Jews who predominated in the union movement, the civil rights movement, and so on. When we imagine that synagogue affiliation is the only real way to be Jewish, it is because we have forgotten so much of our own history … and because "religious" Jews remade Jewishness along the lines of American Protestantism. Which raises many interesting questions about who is really assimilated … More to the point, I think there are many echoes of this experience in the way many of us live our Judaism today. We didn't just come out of nowhere. (For more on this, see Laura Levitt's "Impossible Assimilations" in the Sept. 2007 American Quarterly)

About Philip Weiss

Philip Weiss is Founder and Co-Editor of Mondoweiss.net.
Posted in Israel/Palestine, US Policy in the Middle East, US Politics

{ 4 comments... read them below or add one }

  1. Leila Abu-Saba says:
    May 11, 2009 at 6:44 am

    Huh, that is so interesting, because I've noticed that the American Jews who have been close friends of mine are 80% descended from secular leftists: union organizers, Bund members, Communists and more. The other 20% are Sephardim from Arab countries, almost regardless of politics. My husband is half-Jewish, through his mother; I realized after we'd been married some years that I could not have married him if his mother had not been so casually Un-Zionist. Her family is largely un-Zionist. West Coast, lefty to the point of being Socialists (some of them) and the Bund shows up in the family tree here and there. If I'd married into a family of ardent Zionists, I think our marriage would have frayed around the edges (or all the way through) within a year. Or we just would never have tied the knot.

  2. RowanBerkeley says:
    May 11, 2009 at 10:41 am

    I have a certain feeling for Eastern European Jews, especially the progressive young urban petit-bourgeois Jews of inter-war Poland, but I wouldn't see anything much to be "proud of" about them; it's more a matter of sympathy for their helpless plight.

  3. Eva Smagacz says:
    May 11, 2009 at 12:31 pm

    I am very proud of Polish Jews who engaged with the country that gave them refuge centuries earlier. They spoke the language, engaged in politics, wrote amazing prose and poetry. Even today, in a country virtually devoid of Jews (someone estimates talk of less than 10 thousand Jews in Poland) they are in arts, media, politics and government. Where is the helplessness of their plight?

  4. Citizen says:
    May 11, 2009 at 3:40 pm

    What "helpless plight?" How were they more helpless than the typical Pole of inter-war Poland? Please elaborate. Thanks.

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