This article was first published by Jewish Ideas Daily (www.jewishideasdaily.com) and is reprinted with permission.Starting in 2005, American readers of
Haaretz noticed something new in its
pages: well-informed, jaunty analyses of American Jews and American Judaism. The
paper’s correspondent was clearly a native-born Israeli, but, in decidedly
un-Israeli fashion, he was not only genuinely interested in understanding
American Jewry from within, but had insightful things to say about
it.
Now, three years after the end of his US stint, and having
established himself on both sides of the Atlantic, (including as the author of
the
Jerusalem Post blog,
Rosner’s Domain), Shmuel Rosner has produced a Hebrew
volume aimed at his native audience.
Despite its flip title,
Shtetl,
Bagel, Baseball is an excellent tour d’horizon of current trends in American
Jewish politics, demographics, economics and religion. The subtitle,
On the
Dreadful, Wonderful State of America’s Jews, well conveys the author’s dual
approach: a characteristically skeptical Zionist take on the future of American
Jews coupled with an un- Zionist willingness to be charmed and dazzled by their
accomplishments and relentless experimentation.
In the latter respect,
Rosner (a friend and colleague) parts company with the more doctrinaire versions
of classical Zionism’s “negation of the Diaspora.”
By virtue of its size,
wealth, organizational heft and sociocultural/ political salience at the nerve
centers of the world’s leading power, American Jewry is unlike other Diaspora
communities. Moreover, despite its genuine problems, it alone can plausibly
claim to offer a political and cultural alternative to Israel as the chief locus
of the Jewish future. And that is what makes Rosner’s book so welcome an entry
at this particular juncture in history.
For while Israel has long been,
for large numbers of American Jews, a central feature of their identity, younger
Jews seem to be charting a course whose arc increasingly tends away from the
Jewish state, as from fixed ethnic and national attachments generally.
Meanwhile, as far as most Israelis are concerned, American Jewry scarcely
registers at all.
ROSNER IS well-equipped for the task. An avid student
of American history, he is also an obsessive consumer of reports, policy papers,
polls and press releases. His book, although alarmingly thick with statistics,
is saved from dreariness by his acute skills as an analyst, his peppery style,
and generous helpings of on-the-scene reporting. Refreshingly though New York,
Washington, and other major centers are never far from view, Rosner offers
compelling reportage from such unfamiliar places as Corpus Christi, St. Louis
and San Diego.
Among the issues Rosner surveys: arguments over just how
many American Jews there are; the complexities faced by intermarried couples and
the synagogues and communities trying to include them; the high cost of communal
membership and Jewish education; the growing popularity of tikkun olam; the
hypothesis of an inexorable drift of the young away from Israel; the uneasy
relations of American Jews with Evangelical Christians; stirrings of fracture in
the religious denominations; and the damaging effects of Israel’s religious
politics, and the rabbinate’s state-sanctioned delegitimization of non-Orthodox
movements, on Diaspora feelings of solidarity.
Naturally, American
politics is at the heart of this book, and party affiliation is at the heart of
that. Rosner observes that even today, it doesn’t take much for an American
politician to be “pro-Israel” in the eyes of American Jews. A declared
commitment to Israel’s existence is enough to ensure that most will vote
according to their general socio-cultural predilections, which is to say,
Democratic.
Conceivably, a mass shift toward Orthodoxy could change this,
but, demographically speaking, that would be a long way off.
On the
religious issues, Rosner perceptively notes that Orthodoxy is torn between
ultra-Orthodoxy and a distinctively traditionalist brand of feminism; Reform
between greater spirituality and ever-more-radical revisions of tradition;
Conservative Judaism among the truth claims and expressive tendencies at work in
the movements on its left and right flanks.
Rosner touches on theology
only to the extent that it affects social and political attitudes. And he hardly
deals with the literary and performing arts, where American Jewry has created an
idiom and sensibility all its own. He does mention Philip Roth, but only in
asserting that American Jewish writers are obsessed with Israel.
Yet
Roth’s obsession, though genuine, is at best sporadic, and is also exceptional;
the striking thing about American Jewish letters is how little room there is for
Israel in the works even of those (like Saul Bellow and Cynthia Ozick) deeply
and publicly committed to it.
Indeed, the other writer Rosner discusses,
Michael Chabon, presents Israel (in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union) as that which
gets in the way of Jewish identity. In general, the American Jewish creative
imagination still seems wreathed in the memory of Yiddish and the esthetic and
moral values of irony and political distance: a place where Israel has a hard
time making itself heard.
This deep but subtle disjunction emerges in
Rosner’s recounting of an exchange some years ago with the American columnist
(and IDF veteran) Jeffrey Goldberg in Slate. Describing American Jews as
“self-deprecating and violence-averse” and Israelis as self-confident and
humorless, Goldberg quips: “Who needs jokes when you have F-16s?” But, Rosner
points out, you do have F-16s, or at least your country does.
IMPLICIT IN
this exchange is Zionism’s enduring challenge to Diaspora sensibilities: namely,
the Jewish assumption of responsibility for human society as a whole. It is a
challenge that American Jews can meet only if they take their own wider
responsibilities as Americans as seriously. Israel, Rosner writes, “hasn’t made
life easier for Diaspora Jews, it’s made life more complicated. It forces them
to make an unpleasant choice – to stay or to go – and forces them to justify
that decision... not just to themselves, but in a way that will sound appealing
to the generations coming after them.”
The statement goes to the core of
Rosner’s fundamental perspective.
He clearly loves American Jews and
finds them fascinating. Yes, he writes in his conclusion, “they don’t live here.
But I love their caring about Israel. I’m not convinced that they’ve lost
interest... Almost none of them actively want Israel to fail.”
But, as a
Zionist, he also continues to see things in classically binary Zionist terms.
One center or the other will prevail. In what he calls “the great relay race” of
Jewish history, only one team of runners can win, and you have to place your
bet.
It need not be that way; indeed, throughout most of Jewish history,
it hardly ever was. Nor is it quite that way, or yet that way, in our own time.
In one of the paradoxes noted by Rosner himself, even as American Jews remain
leery of Israel’s claims to Jewish cultural and spiritual centrality, the one
seemingly successful effort in recent years to engage young Jews has been to
send large numbers of them to, precisely, Israel.
America, for its part,
has much to teach Israelis about how people of vastly different persuasions can
live together, how religion thrives precisely when it keeps its distance from
politics, and how Jewish identity not only takes its lumps from but can also
flourish in the endless experimentation of freedom.
It comes down to
this: for the two Jewish centers truly to engage one another on all levels, each
would have to reach out fully to the other while fully holding its own. Sadly,
the likelihood of that happening is a bet against very long odds.
The writer is a member of the Board of Yerushalmim, a fellow of the Jewish People Policy Institute and a contributing editor at Jewish Ideas Daily. He is currently writing a biography of Rav Kook.