For the second time in a year, a study has come out showing that young American Jews don’t care about Jewishness and Israel nearly as much as the last generation. Chaim Waxman, a Rutgers professor of sociology emeritus, presented a paper at the recent Jewish People Policy Planning Institute conference (hope I got that right) in Israel. It says that Jews are growing alienated from their communal leadership and names a few factors, including the internet, which allows people to associate in new ways, and more important, the changing understanding of identity in America in which young people see their identities as "pluralistic and fluid" and don’t see ethnic identity as holding great value.
The Obama Effect, writ large. "The fluid state of identity," he wrote in his first book, marks "modern life."
Professor Waxman’s response is a conservative one; he wants to "charge up" young Jews by getting them to join birthright trips, the free trips to Israel available to Jews-only, up to age 26 (one of my relatives who went on this trip was encouraged to join the Israeli army). Cohen and Kelman made the same point in their landmark (and parochial) study of last year: that "ethnic cohesion (Jews relating to Jews)" was needed to strengthen Jewish identity and support for Israel. Alas, 62 percent of Jews under 35 are marrying non-Jews. Charles Bronfman, who underwrote that study, called the study’s findings "disheartening" and also called for more birthright trips.
My first thought was that these studies are reactionary. Young
Jews are distancing themselves from Israel for progressive reasons: antisemitism is all-but meaningless in their professional and social realities, meanwhile the Jewish state forces millions of Arabs under occupation to use separate road systems and uproots their olive trees and poisons their goats and pours raw sewage on their land.
I talked to my (non-Jewish) wife about it over dinner and she said I was being too hard on the studies. Of course religious groups will do such things when they see their numbers falling. "It would be shocking if they didn’t respond that way." I guess she’s right. Then she said: "Why don’t the ‘birthright’ people let anyone go on the trip for free? Maybe that would work better." I said, "But see, you are the kind of person who would have leapt at the chance; and they don’t want gentiles riding the buses with Jewish kids for two weeks, then marrying them."
My wife, who majored in anthropology, said that tribal affiliation is a comfort in life. Recently a childhood friend of hers from Chestnut Hill (a WASP section of Philly) moved to our area, and my wife hangs out with her. "It’s so easy," she says. Their manners are so similar. "It’s easier than hanging with you," she said. Our manners are different. Lately, for instance, my wife found herself, in a conversation with her mother, asking her persistent questions to get at specific points her mother was raising. "Who is doing that? What did they say?" she asked; and her mother was a little taken aback, and my wife thinks that this is my Jewish manner that has rubbed off on her. In the culture she grew up in–of "vodka and needlepoint," she puts it– if you are having a conversation and miss something, or someone is vague, you just let it pass and try and figure it out, or not, as the conversation goes on.
My wife doesn’t regret marrying me; what I find so interesting is the complexity of these relations. Affluent Americans have great freedom. We can visit Africa, visit Europe, even visit our roots, and then go back to associating as equals with other multicultural half-rooted empowered people. That’s how things have worked out in the blue states. A remarkable thing about Obama’s progress is that fluidity. His first book (1995) was all about his blackness. The book honored the black side of his family more than the white side; in one scene he all but mocked a stepbrother he met in Kenya, also half-white, who didn’t feel very black and was trying to make it in a white world. Obama then worked alongside Rev. Jeremiah Wright as a community organizer of poor blacks. And he married a black woman who in college in 1985 had written angrily against "assimilation," saying it was a chimera that actually kept her at the "periphery" of society.
Well, society changed. Michelle Obama is not at the periphery. Obama’s speeches now mention his white ancestors more than his father. And when the Obamas are in the White House, they will be both black and not black, and their White House won’t discriminate on that basis.
I am trying to say that fluid identity is a bewitching byproduct of American meritocracy, affluence, and multiculturalism. Yes, it is assimilation, but a new kind. The Bronfmans and Waxmans are, maybe understandably, trying to get the toothpaste back in the tube. The way to reinvigorate American
Jewish identity is for American Jews to acknowledge the Nakba and stop
thinking of themselves as the foreign ministry of a state that practices apartheid with 3 million people under its power.
And let gentiles take the "birthright" trip too. Who knows what would happen.
(Thanks to Richard Silverstein, who has a link to the full Waxman paper here. And note that Norman Finkelstein has observed the same trend as the sociologists, but identified its progressive basis: "I think you see the erosion in particular among college students
because they study and they’re better informed, and they see that all
of this stuff Israel is doing has now become morally indefensible. And
so there’s some who are just embarrassed, and they have become, as it
were, indifferent; and then there are those who have become completely
hostile, in an active way.")
