The Special Case of American Jewry
The Optimistic Jew
* CHAPTER 2 *
The Special Case of American Jewry
I agree with those who claim that America is different and American Jewry is different. This difference is why American Jews are often indifferent to fundamental Zionist arguments and are not impressed with Israeli intellectuals and politicians preaching the classic Zionist message. The reason is that unlike 19th century European Jewry, Zionist arguments have had little significance for the 20th century American Jewish experience. The American Zionism of Brandeis and Kallen has been and still is a more accurate reflection of the American Jewish experience. Their argument was that the creation of Israel would imbue American Jews with more self-confidence and self-esteem and would thus make them better American citizens. Looking at the status of Jews in American society before and after the creation of the State of Israel one would be hard put to deny the validity of their position.
What is so singular about America that makes it less amenable to the classic Zionist message? At the most fundamental level it is because America’s history, cultural origins and foundational mythologies are different from those of Europe. The United States is the only Western country whose mythologies are Old Testament and not pagan. The Bible and biblical metaphor form the foundation of American culture, not the Greco/Roman, Teutonic or Druidic myths which reflect the pagan roots of European culture.
Exodus and the search for the Promised Land is the dominant American metaphor. America has transformed the idea of the Promised Land into an amorphous concept called The American Dream. The Exodus metaphor appears in various degrees in all five of the foundational cultures of the United States:
- the Puritan Forefathers
- African Americans
- the West
- the mass immigration
- suburbia
The Puritan Forefathers
The metaphor of the Pilgrims and Puritans was Hebrew. England was their Egypt and the King their Pharaoh. The Atlantic Ocean was their Red Sea and America the New Canaan. Some historians even claim that the Jewish holiday of Succoth inspired Thanksgiving. Both are harvest holidays commemorating God-inspired and God-guided deliverance in the wilderness. America’s Puritan heritage and other fundamental Protestant influences have engraved the American character with the Hebrew imprint. American mythology is Old Testament. Neither Thor nor Jupiter lies at the bottom of the American character, but Moses, the Chosen People, the Promised Land, and redemption. The Puritans saw their religion as a continuation of the Covenant of Israel but under a different administration.
One message of the Old Testament was that a nation as well as an individual could be in covenant with God. They intended to establish such a nation, doing God’s work, on the shores of the New Canaan of America. This vision still has enormous impact on the American character today and partially explains that sense of exceptionality that Americans have about themselves (which so often infuriates other nations).
Many of these early Americans found justification for their distaste for absolutism and divine right in the Old Testament. They believed that government must be moral before it is political. The equal protection clause of the Constitution has its roots in the belief that all men are equal in the eyes of God.
The infatuation of the Jews with America equals that of the Protestant Americans with the Hebrew heritage. Early Sephardic Jews, in an attempt to identify America with the Promised Land, asserted that the American Indians were descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes. Ashkenazi Jews called America Die Goldene Medine—the golden country (the land of milk and honey). The word America has quickened the hearts of Jews for years, in ways that may be surpassed only by the word Israel.
Revolutionary America and modern Israel are also strikingly similar. They are the only countries in the world to be established in whole as a country, a society, and a culture, by a group of founding fathers inspired by visions of a universal role. It is the messianic prophetic message that informs both experiences, for better and for worse.
African Americans
The second foundational culture is that of the African Americans. It is also based on the Exodus metaphor, although in both negative and positive ways. It is both an escape from the Egypt of America and a journey to the promised land of America. The Black spirituals, rooted as they are in the slave experience, sing of deliverance from slavery, going into the Promised Land (Go Down Moses), and crossing the river Jordan (the Mississippi serving as a substitute — how water-deprived Israelis wish it were so!).
Examine the speeches of Martin Luther King and other Black civil rights leaders and see how often the Exodus and redemption metaphors repeat themselves. In King’s last speech before he was murdered, he likened himself to Moses, and I paraphrase: “I may not enter the Promised Land with you; I may only stand on the mountain top and look in, but you will enter.”
Even though African Americans constitute only 15 % of the population, Black culture has made a disproportionate contribution to American culture. What, after all, is American music? Jazz, rock and roll, blues. This music can be traced back to Black church music, founded on biblical mythology and metaphor.
The Saga of the West
The great migration to and conquest of the West is another great Exodus. The West with all that it represents (cowboys, individualism, and freedom) is still a fundamental saga of American culture. These pioneers were looking for their own promised land. They wanted to leave the perceived injustices of the East for freedom, dignity, and happiness. The Great Plains were the Sinai desert. Read the correspondence and the diaries of these pioneers and you will discover redemptive biblical language in its full force. James Michener’s popular novel Centennial captures the sense of destiny of these pioneers. Prayers of guidance and of thanksgiving were their daily lot. The phrase Manifest Destiny connotes a God-given right and task, similar to the God-given right and duty of the Hebrews to conquer the Promised Land.
American politicians spoke about the God-given rights of the God-fearing nation to these lands. Native Americans were sometimes seen as hostile Canaanites who had to be eliminated to make room for God’s people. To justify their elimination the white settlers often called them Amalek.
The Immigrant Saga
The immigrant saga is the fourth foundation of American culture. America was the Promised Land for a mixed multitude of downtrodden peoples looking to escape the persecutions of modern day pharaohs and find freedom and dignity. Their Exodus was in steerage, not on camel or donkey, and the ocean, as with the Pilgrims, was their Sinai wilderness. Their sighting the Statue of Liberty at the gateway to the Promised Land after their travails remind one of the Israelites looking over the Jordan River from Mount Nebo into their Promised Land after forty years in the desert.
Suburbia
The foundation cultures of the Puritans, African-Americans, the West, and mass immigration are all variations of the Exodus metaphor. In addition, we have the materialistic redemption dream of suburbia, a caricature of the Exodus metaphor, but no less powerful than the other foundation cultures in molding the American persona.
Fleeing the imperfect city — looking for the American Dream of perfect happiness and harmony in the promised land of new perfectly designed communities. The promised-land American Dream of suburbia has resulted in a peculiarly idiosyncratic American-style literary form called suburban angst, based on the failure to find perfection and harmony, something that only Americans would even seek. Some claim that the elusiveness of this American Dream has had crucial formative impact on the American psyche, culture, and polity. How un-French, how un-German, how un-Italian – how Jewish! Is this one reason that so many Europeans feel foreign in American culture while so many Israelis feel at home?
American Culture and Patriotism
Europeans often deride the United States for having no culture. This is both true and untrue. The United States certainly has culture and profound cultural creativity. But unlike Europe, America has no generally agreed upon normative culture. It is a mosaic of subcultures. American cultural life has no center and no periphery. Neither Jews nor anyone else can be accused of not assimilating, like the Eastern European Jews in Germany, or assimilating too much, like Stalin’s ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ in the Soviet Union. Can anything be more amenable for Jews than this?
Patriotism in the United States is also different. It is not measured by swearing loyalty to Volk, Fatherland, or hereditary sovereign; it is measured by swearing to uphold and defend the Constitution. Civil rules of behavior, not race, blood, or mythical appeals to the land and historical legend determine what a true American is. One does not pledge allegiance to the tribe; one pledges allegiance to the flag and the republic for which it stands: that is, to the Constitution, which is the republic. A true American is one who adheres to Americanism, to the American way of life, not to particular bloodlines. This is why Chinese, Blacks, and Jews can talk about ‘our Pilgrim forefathers’ without a sense of absurdity.
Objective Challenges
Is it any wonder then that few other ethnic groups in the United States have surpassed the Jews in believing in or taking advantage of and fulfilling the American Dream? Judged by the practical standards of Americanism, the Jews are the most American of all the American ethnic groups. They are the wealthiest, best educated, most professional, most organized ethnic group in the United States. They have a higher percentage of political representatives in proportion to their size than other minorities—even representing areas that have no sizable Jewish vote.
So why, with all this, is Jewish existence in the United States still a matter of doubt over the next fifty or sixty years? The organized American Jewish community has significant pretensions in regards to Jewish history. It has developed the two-center theory of modern Jewish existence in opposition to the one-center theory of Zionism. American Jews would agree that classical Zionism is right in regard to the rest of the Jewish world but wrong in regard to the United States. The rest of the Jewish world may be “in exile” but American Jews are not. They might put it thus: “We are obviously not in our ancient homeland, but we are still at home”.
They would claim that the American Jewish relationship to Israel is similar to that of Babylonian Jewry during the Talmudic period and the formation of Rabbinic Jewry. They would claim that modern Jewish life can and will survive in at least two more or less equal centers: Israel and North America.
The many positive developments within American Jewry of the past twenty years are often cited by the proponents of the two-center theory as proof of the vigor of the American Jewish community. But these developments must be examined in light of more basic negative trends; trends documented and commented upon in great detail by the American Jewish community itself. Demographics, for one, are a major concern. For although the Jews have always been a small people and although size itself is not a prerequisite to cultural success, continued existence is first of all biological and numerical. Below a certain critical mass, even small peoples have difficulty sustaining communal identity and cultural creativity. In this regard, the long-term statistical trends are not promising. The American Jewish Committee’s Yearbook has reported that American Jewry is shrinking by about ½ % a year (in contrast to Israel’s Jewish community, which is growing by around 1 ½ % a year before aliya).
Other indicators show that this rate of shrinkage is likely to increase. By the end of the first decade of the 21st century, 50% of all marriages involving Jews may be intermarriages. Although some of these intermarriages result in the couple rearing their children as Jews, most at present do not.
In addition, the Jews are the most elderly ethnic group in the United States. Some reports claim that the median age of the Jewish community is already over 45 (as compared to about 35 for the general American community and 25 for Black and Hispanic Americans). The median age of American Jewry is, therefore, already beyond the age of reproduction.
Moreover, various social factors – such as a higher proportion of feminist consciousness – lead Jews of reproductive age to marry later than other ethnic groups. The biological future of the American Jewish community, therefore, is not bright if present trends continue.
One reason why this has not been more dramatically felt is the large influx of Israeli, Russian, and Latin American Jews into the United States over the last three decades of the 20th century. It is significant that even with this influx, demographic erosion continues as documented by American Jewish organizations themselves.
The Future of American Jewry
According to some demographic research, Israel has already become the world’s largest Jewish community. What cultural, psychological, and spiritual repercussions will this have for both communities? This question has yet to be addressed. Within the first two to three decades of the 21st century, more Jews will be living in Israel than in all Diaspora communities combined.
As the largest, wealthiest, most powerful Diaspora Jewish community in the world, American Jewry must redefine itself and play a special role in the creation of a new Judaism and a new Zionism. Its special character, unique potential and vital position within the American republic make its contribution to the Jewish future indispensable. It is a partner that the Jewish people must have in order to fulfill its potential.
America’s democratic principles, scientific knowledge, and technological power make it the natural spiritual and practical partner of the Jewish People. America’s heritage seems to have predestined her to become the primary supporter and partner of a renascent Jewish People and the State of Israel.
American Jewry must create a coherent “ideology” of what defines American Jewishness. This must be an American, not an inherited European or Asian ideology. This could be an updated expression of America’s Hebraic roots and could offer a coherent framework that enables American Jews to combine being world, American, and Jewish citizens. American Jewish educators might conclude that teaching about America’s Hebraic roots in Hebrew school outweighs running bar mitzvah “factories”. Teaching children to declaim prayers they do not understand has certainly not proven effective in preserving or enhancing Jewish identity.
Schizophrenia is the natural condition of today’s thinking American Jews. Fascinated with and enthusiastic about America, American Jews have always struggled to relate to America and their Jewishness at the same time and with integrity. They are often uneasy Americans and uneasy Jews. The 2000 Democratic vice presidential candidacy of Joseph Lieberman, while of great historical importance, failed to ease this angst in a meaningful way.
American Jewry must confront what it means to be Jewish in modern, secular, 21st century, pluralistic America. Nostalgic yiddishkeit can no longer suffice—as more and more Jews move further away from the East European tradition.
A real American Jewry must be created—with its own values and an agenda sometimes in tension with Israel— for the sake of Jewish cultural flourishing in general and for the sake of Israel. A mature 21st century Zionism would advocate as one of its central tenets “the reconstruction of the American Diaspora” while discontinuing the use of barren slogans pertaining to the “negation of the Diaspora”.
For the INTRO go HERE
For the Chapter One go HERE
Tsvi Bisk is an American-Israeli futurist. He is the director of the Center for Strategic Futurist Thinking (www.futurist-thinking.co.il/) and contributing editor for strategic thinking for The Futurist magazine.
He is also the author of The Optimistic Jew: A Positive Vision for the Jewish People in the 21st Century. Tsvi is available as a lecturer or as a scholar in residence as well as for strategic consulting
http://www.amazon.com/Tsvi-Bisk/e/B001HQ3J68/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0
Tsvi Bisk
The Optimistic Jew
