Historian troubled by toll of
American-Jewish assimilation

by Robert Wiener
NJJN Staff Writer

Looking at the fate of world Jewry through the lenses of past, present, and future, historian Henry Feingold will tell the Jewish Historical Society of MetroWest that “American Jews are doing very well compared to other ethnic groups — but American Judaism is not doing so well.”

Feingold previewed the talk he will deliver on Monday, Nov. 7, at 8 p.m. at the Alex Aidekman Family Jewish Community Campus in Whippany in a conversation with NJ Jewish News.

“In terms of personal income, vacations taken, summer homes owned, orthodontia for their kids, life expectancy, the Jews are at the very top of the American economic pyramid,” he said. “But in terms of when we ask in our latest survey with which branch of Judaism are you affiliated, do you belong to a congregation, do you give to UJA? — a growing number of people are answering ‘just Jewish.’”

While Feingold said he is in despair at what he perceives is a growing disconnect between an assimilated people and its religious traditions, the director of the Jewish Resource Center at Baruch College in New York did say, “The news of our death is much exaggerated.”

Feingold, who fled Nazi Germany as a child in 1939 and holds a doctorate in history from New York University, has devoted decades of scholarship to issues of Jewish survival.

His address will link the state of the American-Jewish community with the observance of the 67th anniversary of Kristallnacht, when rampaging bands of Nazis trashed Jewish businesses and synagogues in Germany in an early moment of the Holocaust.

“There is the whole question of whether German Jewry was aware of the urgency of their condition,” said Feingold. “Some people think many German Jews were actually saved because of Kristallnacht. For the first time, it convinced them they would not be able to remain in Germany and Austria until the storm blew over, and they began to search seriously for ways out.”

Feingold, whose work, he said, focuses on “how American Jewry responds to crises of Jewries abroad,” said Jewish people in America were far more successful at helping Jews in the postwar Soviet Union than those targeted for extermination by the Nazis.

“Despite all our pessimism, the American Jews 30 years after the Holocaust were much better during the Soviet Jewry case than during the German Jewry case,” he said. “They were much more confident; they knew where the levers of power were and did not hesitate to use them. We had an indigenous, fully trained, highly professionalized group that was able to take up the cudgels. The Soviet Jewry movement in America was haunted by the failure to act effectively in the 1930s, when the German Jews had to be saved and we didn’t have the power to do anything about it.”

According to Feingold, “The German Jews would not have existed by the end of the 20th century because of the low population rate — the high rate of attrition and the low birth rate. Had Hitler been patient, he would not have had a Jewish problem in Germany.

“It was not only assimilation; it was a low birth rate,” said the professor. “The Jews were not reproducing themselves. If there had been no Holocaust, the German Jews would not have been a coherent community by 2000.”

It is a lesson that Feingold believes has relevance to American Jews in 2005.

Even though “those who are affiliated are stronger than ever,” he told NJJN, “most Jews say they do not light candles on Friday nights or go to a synagogue, but say ‘I feel Jewish in my heart.’ We call them ‘cardiac Jews.’ It is not a heart that beats very strongly, but they somehow still feel that way. It’s not a very good way on which to build community.”

Robert Wiener can be reached at rwiener@njjewishnews.com.

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