“Are you Jewish?” the middle-aged women asked. I lied and told them no, but my friend, Sarah, chatted with them for a few minutes while I stood, impatiently, just out of earshot.
Afterward, I asked Sarah what it was all about.
“Lubavitchers” she replied.
Who?
“They believe their rebbe is the Messiah,” she responded.
I asked more questions, then got bored, changed the subject and forgot all about it.
It’s moments like those, though, that remind me of my near-complete lack of knowledge about even the basic tenets of Judaism. It can be a very lonely feeling, as if other Jews, by virtue of their religious training, are members of some special club. But of course there are thousands of us secular Jews. Even though some of us can’t tell the Torah from the Talmud, some of us are learned scholars. But those of us who don’t have any serious intentions of learning are just as Jewish as anyone else, or so we think. But I sometimes wonder how much longer our breed will last.
Secular Jews are, or course, not a new phenomenon. For over a century, what defined Jewish identity — whether in America or Czarist Russia — was for many Jews less about what their rabbi said, but was forged through the isolation and discrimination (and, in the Old World, occasional mass murder) that were central to the Jewish experience. When Jews came to America, they retained, at least for the first couple decades, the distinct culture and community that was built from the need for self-defense and mutual aid.
But somewhere in the middle of the twentieth century, American Jews went from out-group to being, on the whole, quite successful and accepted. Those of us who are white and lacking religious garb are free to pass in and out of white America and partake, at our leisure, of all the privileges within. This is, from the perspective of Jewish history, a happy turn of events. But at least, or maybe especially for secular Jews, it means that much of the basis for our identity is in our past, rather than from ongoing oppression.
For now, most of us secular, largely uninformed Jews continue to base our Jewish identity on familial connections and any number of cultural relics: dietary preferences, political leanings, the use of Yiddish hand-me-downs, etc. As the generations continue to pass, however, and the crueler parts of our history fade further out of living memory, the less religious among us may find the “Jewish” label increasingly less meaningful in an America where we continue to flourish.
Not that I think the millions of dollars spent by big Jewish donors on keeping kids Jewish are going to total waste, but the odds aren’t in their favor. Ethno-centric programming devoid of Jewish religion isn’t enough; ethnicity isn’t enough. And if belief in defending Israel has become the definition of Jewishness, if politics in the Middle East is the main check on assimilation in America, what are we to do once that’s solved?
And despite the honorable, but limited, work of secular Jewish groups like Workmen’s Circle, our assimilation–like so many other once tight-knit immigrant groups–could one day be complete.
