May 21, 2009
Last month, PBS aired a documentary, At Home in Utopia, about the United Workers Cooperative Colony, one of four Bronx housing complexes owned and run by immigrant Jewish factory workers. The residents were militantly secular, proudly Jewish, and unapologetically communist — a sort of rock-paper-scissors identity that has become unthinkable in the either/or era of Jewish belonging.
It’s not just the commie tag that throws us for a loop. Secularism and Jewish pride have become estranged bedfellows, as it were: Both the resurgence of Orthodoxy and a trend toward spirituality even among unaffiliated Jews have made the idea of a “secular Jewish culture” seem as utopian and quaint as, well, a Jewish cooperative colony in the Bronx.
It’s nearly midnight for bastions of secular Jewish culture like the Workmen’s Circle and the network of shules where left-leaning Jews sent their children for lessons in Yiddishkeit, with emphasis on the Yiddish. Today, Yiddish is for hobbyists, scholars, and preservationists. Jews are still overrepresented in activist roles, but no longer put their stamp on the trade unions nor industries beyond the entertainment field.
The demise of secular Jewish culture is neatly charted in the latest issue of Jewish Currents, the lively, 63-year-old journal of the movement. “Does Jewish Secularism Have a Future?” it asks in the current issue, and the answers it provides are hardly comforting.
The introduction to the special issue, presumably written by editor Lawrence Bush, summarizes the forces that conspired to suppress a signature movement within American-Jewish life: The Holocaust wiped out secularism’s “taproot” in Europe, communism and socialism failed, and Jews transferred their secular passions to support for Israel. Most of all, perhaps, American Jews were able to leave the factories and their dense ethnic neighborhoods for the suburbs, which “made possible the assimilation of Jews and the marginalization of their Jewish identities.”
And yet, Bush writes, in a charming autobiographical essay, everything seemed in place for a secular Jewish revival. Jewish liberalism remains “amazingly tenacious,” he writes, while “a large plurality of American Jews, if not a majority, continued to be unaffiliated with any synagogue — suggesting there was quite a pool of potential recruits for a secular approach to Jewish life.”
So what happened? In the historical essay she contributes to the issue, April Rosenblum suggests the wound was self-inflicted. By absorbing “white American codes of normalcy” Jews redefined their Jewishness to “de-emphasize ethnicity and emphasize religion.” Synagogue came be to be seen as the “authentic” expression of Jewish identity, while the folkways — deli food, distinct mannerisms, political activism — were seen as shallow at best and embarrassing at worst.
Of course, one response to “Does Jewish secularism have a future?” is “Should it?” As much as I admire and sometimes envy the ferment of the secular Jewish heyday captured in Irving Howe’s World of Our Fathers, I recognize that it was a movement of and for its time. Secularism flourished when Jews shared a distinct language, an experience of oppression and exclusion, and a particular place on the socioeconomic ladder. They also shared, as immigrants and the children of immigrants, an easy access to a Jewish culture that reached back beyond the tenements and union halls. No, they weren’t all lapsed Talmud scholars and the children of rabbis. But they were close enough to religion that they at least understood what they were rejecting and could hold on to elements of religious life that, paradoxically, enhanced their secularism.
There’s no going back, and I’m not sure who among us would go if there were. If poverty and prejudice help define Jewish culture, I’ll pass, thank you.
But something’s missing. As Rosenblum writes, “What has been lost is the range of possibilities in which secular Jewish identity is one of the legitimate ways to be a proud Jew.”
Outside of Israel, where a secular Jewish identity is a given for perhaps the majority, expanding those possibilities has fallen to a handful of young “social entrepreneurs.” I’m thinking of Jewcy, the website; and Heeb, the magazine; and J-Dub, the record label. The activist spirit lives on in American Jewish World Service and Hazon, to name two.
The smart, serious people behind these ventures are striving to create a vocabulary for those who feel a sense of Jewish pride without religion (and among whom are the ever-growing numbers of intermarried folk and their children, a force to be reckoned with in the not-so-distant future). They’re often fierce, funny, and subversive. Yet most lack the numbers, will, and wherewithal to build lasting institutions, the way their grandparents built synagogues and, yes, housing co-ops.
And the Jewish establishment doesn’t help when it persists in defining secular Jews negatively: the “unaffiliated,” the “disengaged,” the “nonreligious.” We need to encourage young secular Jews to define who they are, as opposed to who they are not. The Jewish future will be richer if secular Jews are again able to develop not just an attitude, but a culture.
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