People who need peoplehood

The elderly man leaned in close, his message urgent. “You see this suit?” he asked, fingering his lapel. “Syms, $125. Believe me, I could afford a $900 suit. But what I don’t spend on suits I can give to Israel. Young people? They don’t care. Doctors, lawyers. I ask them to help out, and they give me $1,800, that’s it. In my day, you supported Israel — no questions. Now some federations give 40, 30 percent to Israel and the rest for the local things. I swore I’d never give unless at least half went to Israel.”

The man and I talked at a community dinner last week — or, more accurately, he talked and I listened. He was a builder, perhaps three times over: A Holocaust survivor who remade his life in the shadow of Auschwitz, a businessman who made a small fortune in real estate, a philanthropist who laid the foundations for his local Jewish community. He’s in his 80s now, and he doesn’t like what he sees: His contemporaries are fast disappearing, and young people do not have their instinct or commitment to Jewish communal giving.

He’s a doer, not a reader, but was posing the same question as the authors of an article in this month’s Commentary magazine: “Whatever Happened to the Jewish People?” Steven M. Cohen and Jack Wertheimer lament that there is a “weakened identification among American Jews with their fellow Jews abroad, as well as a waning sense of communal responsibility at home.” Their evidence for this “creeping disaffection” includes federation campaigns that have not kept pace with inflation, as well as a “steep decline in the numbers of those giving.” Poll data tell them that fewer and fewer Jews say that caring about Israel is a “very important part” of their Jewish identity and that they are less inclined to say that Jews around the world share “a common destiny.”

A number of trends contribute to “the waning attractiveness of a united Jewish appeal to a united Jewish people,” as the authors put it. There are positive trends, like the search for personal meaning in religious life and creativity and vitality within the denominations. (Positive trends, that is, with negative consequences: The strength of the Reform and Conservative movements in the United States scores lower on the authors’ peoplehood scale than Israeli-style Orthodoxy, which shapes the perception of Judaism even among Israelis who consider themselves secular.)

There are ambiguous trends too, including “pick-and-choose” Jewish identities, multiculturalism and globalization, and what Cohen has called the decline of institutional and partisan loyalties of all sorts. And then there are trends that the authors clearly disapprove of, including high rates of intermarriage and eroding social interactions among Jews. Whatever these last two say about our acceptance by non-Jewish Americans, they clearly contribute to the “fraying of bonds” within the Jewish community, write Cohen and Wertheimer. (Wertheimer has previously written that efforts to include non-Jewish spouses and the children of intermarried couples in communal life have been a “resounding failure,” both in sheer numbers and in the compromises he sees Jewish institutions making in the name of “outreach.”)

Cohen is a sociologist and pollster, Wertheimer a professor of American-Jewish history at the Jewish Theological Seminary, but there is nothing detached or forensic about their essay. They make clear where they stand when they write that “to retreat from peoplehood is to repudiate what has been at the core” of Judaism.

But they also stack the deck more than slightly. They define “peoplehood” as support for Israel and rallying around Jewish crises and dismiss as “individualistic” Jewish giving that focuses on universal causes like hunger and domestic poverty or even needy individuals within the Jewish community itself. The authors lament that Jewish federations have made a very conscious effort to keep more of the money at home for domestic giving — for schools, identity-building programs, family services, the local needy. Yet it’s not clear why giving money so that the Jewish Agency bureaucracy can assist an elderly Jew in Hadera is considered “peoplehood,” while doing the same thing for the Jew who lives down the block is “symptomatic of a decline of morale, of national self-respect.”

I also think they are romanticizing a very distinct, and perhaps sui generis, moment in Jewish history — actually, American-Jewish history — when “we are one” could be said with a straight face. Before the horrors of the Holocaust and the redemptive rise of the Jewish state, did Jews really act as if they were “a single collective whose religious civilization must be nurtured”?

The blessed lack of existential crises facing the Jews cannot be understated when trying to understand why, indeed, Jewish philanthropy and social capital appear to be in decline. Cohen, in correspondence with blogger Dan Sieradski, denies that he and his coauthor are “blaming young people for these trends,” but it is hard not to feel that the peculiar condition of today’s Jews has been overlooked when they write that younger generations lack “national self-respect.”

I wanted to agree with the man at dinner, because he is a giant, and because his generation built the Jewish community as we know it today. But I think it is less helpful to compare his generation with those who came after than to begin asking how Jewish individuals and institutions can craft an identity — a people, in fact — that is not dependent on crises for its health.

Cast the question that way, and you might observe that the universalistic impulse of a group like the American Jewish World Service or a federation campaign that urges individuals to “Live Generously” are signs of an evolving definition of Jewish peoplehood, not symptoms of its decline.