Larry Says My Position Threatens the Jewish Future

In a comment the other day, Larry says that religion sustained the Jews for generations, and my assimilationist stance could break the chain:

Most of us are only a few generations away from the shtetl, where
our grandparents or great grandparents were orthodox Jews living in
poverty and political privation that most of us could not even imagine.
What sustained them was their faith. 

Phil, as a self-described assimilationist, what will an assimilated
Jew look like two generations from now? What will define your great
grandchilden as Jews?

Good comments. A couple responses.

I agree with Larry about faith and the shtetl (though I would also give credit to other socio-anthropological forms of tribal identity-formation like discrimination against Jews, Jewish importance to the local economy as merchants, etc.). The difficulty is, Things change; and what role does traditional religious faith have for modern, privileged Americans? When Walzer praises the Jewish religious revival of the last 15 years, he does so partly out of values that have nothing to do with spirituality and a lot to do with peoplehood. For instance, Jewish day schools segregate Jewish youth and keep them from socializing with gentile youth till college, thus reducing the likelihood of intermarriage. And a Jewish sense of peoplehood sustains a militarized Jewish state in the Mideast.

I have no problem with private religious observation, or with religious movements. For all I know, the rekindling of Jewish faith may be a very good thing, I’m not in a position to say. What I do have a problem with is the decision by privileged people to segregate themselves as a distinct people in a pluralistic society. It’s problematic to me because Jews are no longer outsiders, they are as empowered just about as WASPs (and their participation in the military is even lower than WASPs); and I think that people who wish to self-define so assertively have to accept a moderate degree of discrimination in the elite of a democracy. Mennonites, Mormons, etc., pay a price for their insularity. I will not vote for a Jew for president or vice president who opposes intermarriage of his own children. I don’t want a Jew who opposes intermarriage on the Supreme Court (just as I don’t want a devout Catholic in Scalia) or as the head of a university… I find these attitudes obnoxious and hurtful.   

You say I’m threatening the future of the Jewish people as an assimilationist and I have to accept the truth of that, intellectually. I don’t have kids but if I did I’m pretty sure I’d raise them as American Nothings, inevitably, though I’d do my best to instil a pride in their Jewish origin. But sociologically there’s an inevitability to my declension. My gentile wife and I were utter peers, sociologically. We both went to Ivy League schools, we came from roughly similar class (different segments of the great Upper Middle Class), and we were in the same professional subsector in New York, journalism–trying to influence public opinion, a powerful role in a democracy. The sort of sociological similarity my wife and I had is going to trump religious division again and again. Keeping these modern kids apart is going to require artificial, old-world barriers.

Let’s be clear: America granted us that privilege, our great and awful country. America prizes Jewish verbal and intellectual gifts in the information age. My intermarriage is symptomatic of the tremendous pressure on Jews in modern America to share our gifts. Walzer’s response is insularity and Jewish novelists writing for Jewish audiences. I say there’s a price to be paid for the unprecedented freedom my people have enjoyed here: share our gifts, accept the risks of democratic intermingling. If that means that my hypothetical grandchildren don’t call themselves Jews, I have to accept that. They won’t call themselves Christians either. Right now all these traditional distinctions, from Sunni’s to Shi’ites, to Jews and Christians, seem to be causing a world of hurt.   

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