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

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)