Jack Ross responds to my posts about "bad Jews" reclaiming secular Jewish identity. He begins by taking on the embrace of AIPAC by the Conservative Rabbinical Assembly, which triggered my original post:
First off, the Conservatives are hemmorhaging membership, and they are clueless if
they think it's a good thing to celebrate their relationship with AIPAC,
which is a big part of the reason why it's their kids who have in such
huge numbers become disillusioned and are intermarrying. There is even
serious talk of the progressive bloc in the movement– which is
significant and disproportionately represented in groups like Rabbis
for Human Rights– bolting.
Second, it is worth making a
historical point: more or less, the whole history of the official
Jewish community is of the takeover by Zionists of local Jewish
philanthropy, which is almost uniformly aligned with the Conservatives.
Resistance to this is a major theme of the post-1948 history of the American Council for Judaism, the Reform group which opposed the creation of a Jewish state.
As to your reclaiming your identity as a "bad Jew": Why do you think I go to shul and am determined
to marry a nice Jewish girl and deeply resent your more militantly
leftish-atheist friends who give me grief for it? Because I know I
need to be a "good Jew" in order to be taken even remotely seriously as a commenter of any kind of Jewish issue, and more importantly, I do personally feel for myself that I'm not
entitled to be in any way at the ramparts if I'm truly a "bad Jew".
I
agree that my generation will reshape Jewish identity in favor of
universalism and that that's a good thing, but I do honestly believe
that it will have a major failing to account for if it should be
totally lacking in a corollary legacy in the Jewish religion.
Having
said all that, if having mostly Jewish friends and things of that
nature are necessary to be a "good Jew", then I want no part of it.
More to the point, I'm certainly not trying to argue that you have to
go to shul to be a good Jew, though I do find something awfully
conceited about the idea of being a "secular Jew". On the other hand I treasure the legacy of Jewish socialism, and already look
forward to one day sending a kid of mine to the Workmen's Circle summer
camp in Duchess County, but at the same time I don't see how that
construction of Jewish identity is relevant to today's world.
There
has to be a middle way – a Jewish universalist identity, if this is
indeed the promise of my generation. But it will be like the Jewish old
left–it will only last a couple of generations– if it does not
also lead to a revitalized progressive Judaism.
