Judging by a host of indicators, from Morrie Balstein’s inveterate tuches-grabbing in Zoolander to Joseph Lieberman’s appearance on the Democratic ticket in the 2000 elections, it seems that non-Orthodox, big city American Jews have largely cast off their history of racial otherness. Whereas Ashkenazi Jews, in particulary, were once marked by distinctive accents, dress, and religious beliefs, and the stigmas associated with immigrants and racial others, many of us now wax triumphant over our ascension to the swivel chairs nearest the throne. Our elites have climbed to the highest rungs of power, while the domestic Jewish population as a whole revels in unprecedented degrees of security, mobility, influence, and affluence.
In this age of integration, what distinguishes secular Jews from our non-Jewish American counterparts? What remains of the history of marginality and difference that informed our beliefs, traditions, and ethics throughout the Diaspora? And without that difference, what does it mean to be Jewish?
Are Jews a Minority?
Without a doubt, Jews are a numerical minority in the United States. According to the 2001 National Jewish Population Survey (NJPS), 5.2 million Jews constitute less than two percent of the American population, and there is much evidence that the community is getting smaller. Significantly greyer than the national average, 81 percent of American Jews are over the age of eighteen, and nineteen percent are older than 65. At the same time, the birthrate is dwindling, and is now around 1.8 children per family, which is well below the so-called “replenishment rate” of 2.1.
Additionally, the NJPS reported that 52 percent of Jewish women, compared to 27 percent of all women, ages 30-34 have not had any children. To compound this concern, the 2001 American Jewish Identity Survey found that, since 1990, only 40 percent of Jewish adults (identified by either religion or upbringing) have married a spouse of Jewish origins.
Though we are sure to remain a statistical minority, we are no longer an oppressed one. Unlike, for instance, many African-American communities that are caught in cycles of systemic racism and poverty, American Jews are constantly celebrating their unprecedented economic prosperity, physical security, political representation, and social mobility.
Jewish notables are influential in all areas of white-collar American life. From Paul Wolfowitz to Michael Bloomberg, Jewish people—especially Jewish men—occupy visible positions of power. Most major Hollywood studios were founded by Jews, and, unlike other historical instances of Jewish complicity with the ruling class, in the United States, the entire Jewish community has profited, not just the elites.
Consider, for instance, that a full quarter of Jewish adults have earned a graduate degree, and that 59 percent of employed Jews work in management, business, and professional/technical positions. These figures, significantly above the national average, have earned Jews, along with Asian-Americans, the controversial title “model minorities.” At once patronizing and admiring, this term points to a combination of successful acculturation tactics and high levels of scholastic, economic, and social achievement.
Jews and Whiteness
Being a model minority, as opposed to, say, a hated and feared minority, is intimately tied to changing perceptions of Jews in the United States. The previously unimagined social and economic power of American Jews is not solely the result of hard-working and quick-thinking Jewish immigrants; it is also the consequence of shifting perceptions of Jewish difference. Our historical transition from religious to racial otherness and, recently, to widespread and seemingly permanent integration has everything to do with an increasingly seamless cultural identity with our white and Christian compatriots.
During the period of heightened Eastern European immigration from the mid-19th century to the early decades of the 20th, what had previously been understood as Jewish religious difference was recast in racial terms, which were informed by the race-based eugenics theories of the time. Jews shared this otherness—somewhere between the two stable poles of white and black—with a host of non-Anglo-Saxon immigrant groups, such as the Irish, Italians, and Greeks. The discourse that shaped public opinion insisted that Jewish difference was a matter of phenotypical traits like facial features and accent. Such differences were taken as “proof” of the essential differences that distinguished Jews from other light-skinned Americans.
This construction of Jews as a racial other in the US merged European anti-Semitic stereotypes about Jewish qualities (greedy, filthy, dishonest, pushy) and Jewish looks (big noses, dark skin, diseased bodies) with the pre-existing racial divisions that structured American society. And though prohibited from being white, Jews were also distinguished from the absolute racial otherness of blacks, even though they were consistently described as dark or black-skinned, with stereotypical “African features” and falsified African historical origins. Their ambiguous place between the dominant racial categories leads scholar Eric Goldstein to argue, in his American Jewish History article, “The Unstable Other: Locating the Jew in Progressive-Era American Racial Discourse,” that the arrival of these “off-white” Jewish immigrants threatened the white/black racial binary that enabled white America’s sense of coherent national identity and racial supremacy.
It was around this time that heated debates about immigration began to employ the racial otherness of Jews. So-called “Hebrew” characters became a common part of the Vaudeville stage, while throughout the press, cartoonists, journalists, and public intellectuals debated the malignant effects of Jewish immigrants on the American national identity. In his book, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race, Matthew Jacobson shows that even The New York Times bemoaned the “unwashed, ignorant, unkempt, childish semi-savages” that arrived to Ellis Island after 1881. This racialized Jewish otherness was employed for social and political purposes by “nativists” who opposed immigration on the grounds of national racial purity. Many argued that the Jewish character was incompatible with American identity and democratic politics.
Nevertheless, Jews did assimilate, and in the last two or three generations, due in part to the horror of the Holocaust and the general delegitimation of social Darwinism and scientific racism, the discourse of Jewish racial otherness has fallen out of favor and, in large part, disappeared even from the memory of mainstream Jewish American institutions. Today, Jews are so widely dispersed in prominent positions of social and political authority that their presence feels not only acceptable, but natural. Such assimilation would have been unthinkable for many in our grandparents’ generation and is markedly different from the contemporary experience of African-American leaders, for instance, who are all-too-often written off as good examples of, or, worse yet, as exceptions to, their race.
This difference signals a fundamental shift in Jewish self-consciousness, to the point where we are more at home with power than with our own history of disempowerment. Having left behind, hopefully for good, periods when our identity was policed by anti-Semitism and having entered, to the contrary, a period in which we are encouraged to involve ourselves in national institutions, traditions, and values, the tricky thing is figuring out what—if anything—is particularly Jewish about our lives in the US.
Choosing and Losing Jewish Identity
American Jews can now choose if they want to be Jewish and, moreover, how they want to perform and practice their Jewish identity and traditions. This “dim-sum” Jewishness, as former Heeb Magazine editor Jenn Bleyer has called it, signals a radical discontinuity between traditional and contemporary ways of being Jewish. In part, there is good reason to celebrate the relative democracy, prosperity, and US multiculturalism that has enabled Jews to assimilate. Unfortunately, though, the very institutions that make us free have also freed us from what were our Jewish communities—and ourselves.
Before and during the Haskalah, the Jewish response to the Enlightenment, being Jewish in Eastern Europe was not only an inescapable mark of otherness, but the social context for everyday life. For centuries, Jewishness was a category of existence comprising what we now call “identity.” This category involved the culmination of daily prayer and gender expectations to language and literary traditions.
Perhaps an analogy is the way in which race is played out in the US today, where whiteness is not something one chooses on particular days, with particular people, in a particular setting. Rather, it is such a determining part of social space that it is better described as an undercurrent of daily life, a way of understanding oneself and one’s community that gives meaning to the world. Similarly, traditional forms of Jewishness, in their subtle but all-encompassing presence in nearly all aspects of life, once played an indissociable role in our ancestors’ lives, and made their existences what they were.
To understand Jewishness as an identity that can be chosen a la carte reveals the degree to which traditional identity has been transformed in the last century in the US. While greatly improving the quality of life for the Jewish community, the unprecedented participation in secular institutions has also profoundly diminished the Jewishness of life. But even though American Jews have escaped the conditions of alienation and vulnerability in which our traditions were forged, we remain marked by our collective history of oppression.
Take everything from the Passover celebration of liberation to the educational programs about the Holocaust to the ADL’s near-hysterical concern with minor acts of anti-Semitism in the United States and Europe. Think of the stories we tell, the ethics we espouse—even if sometimes only in name—and the traditions that we constantly choose to reenact. Yet, there is a disturbing dissidence between the large role that victimhood and vulnerability play in our narrative, on the one hand, and our privileged status in the US, on the other.
Our stories, songs, and prayers are those of a people dispersed across the world as strangers and wanderers, at the mercy of their hosts, while most of our experiences are actually quintessentially American, with a strong association not only with power and privilege, but also with belonging as nearly indistinguishable whites, and suffering (read: choosing) only the most nominal Jewish otherness.
How, then, are non-Orthodox Jews to pin down the borders of a community or establish widely accepted conditions for living a rich and “authentic” Jewish life? Obviously, eating gefilte fish and reading a few transliterated prayers is inadequate, while decades of Talmud study strikes many as excessive.
A checklist of practices and ideas just doesn’t appeal to the majority of Jews today, our lives being so highly integrated with our neighbors’. Moreover, it doesn’t take into account the myriad ways in which Jewishness is articulated and practiced. What is a model for authentic Jewish culture that respects a healthy pluralism and the tides of change without descending into either “anything goes” Jewishness or the hegemony of the one “real” way to be Jewish?
Following the suggestion of scholar Arnold Eisen in his Jewish Social Studies article “In the Wilderness: Reflections of American Jewish Culture,” perhaps we can think of Jewish culture as a “conversation—learned and lively—about the meanings and practices that distinguish it.” Eisen enables us to make certain general demands on those Jews who choose to participate in our shared conversation, without prohibiting all but the expert scholars and rabbis from determining our cultural and communal identity.
His suggestion illuminates the real danger of becoming indistinguishable from mainstream American culture: losing each other as interlocutors. Such a loss would happen on every level, from basic identification with Jewishness, to children’s attendance at Hebrew school, to engaged scholarship and religious study about all things Jewish. As a result of this loss, the malleable, yet remarkably durable conversation that both is—and is about—being Jewish also begins to falter. And the less we see ourselves as minorities, and the more we choose forms of Jewish identity wholly amiable to assimilated public and social life, the quicker our conversation about ourselves as Jews will disappear.
Can Jews Be Anything But A Minority?
What is left of Jewish identity independent of the lived experience of being a minority? What is left, when we’re predominately secular, no longer racialized, and fully empowered to nibble at the leftovers of Jewish history, texts, and practices that suit our whims? If awareness of Jewish history and texts continues to fade in step with our ascension to powerful positions and cultural assimilation, what will endure of our collective conversation?
The danger haunting Jews today is not anti-Semitism, religious discrimination (in fact, quite the opposite, with the Jewish two percent of the population counting as one of the three main religions), or any substantial barriers to Jewish participation in elite institutions, government offices, and commerce. Rather, in becoming the crafty—and cultural indistinct—accomplices of elite US society, we face the danger of multiple amnesias: forgetting who we were, who we are, and where we are going.
We can’t fight amnesia by reclaiming our grandparents’ faith and rituals, but we can remember and honor the richest parts of our tradition and minority history by furthering the political ideals of justice and equity. This is a challenge to our own assimilation that does not rely upon kugel and kippot, but instead marks our difference in political terms. It aligns us with the powerless in our own time, whose unfolding stories so intimately mirror our own storied past.
