Jews and the New American Scene
Lipset, Seymour Martin & Raab, Earl
riage rate is over 50 percent and still rising; the conversion rate is declining; and only 28 percent of the children of mixed marriages are raised as Jews. Among Jewish organizations, most think...
...Anti-Semitism still exists, but it is declining...
...Ethnicity is very clearly declining as well...
...For at least a century, the Jewish community has been led by laymen rather than rabbis, and very often by highly secular individuals rather than religiously committed ones...
...For Lipset and Raab, the dynamics of Jewish demography must first be put into their context, which is America's open society...
...Jewishness" is that amorphous combination of factors such as family history, ethnic inheritance, politics, language, culture, support for Israel, and fear of anti-Semitism...
...In truth, ethnic differences are diminishing fast in America, and being replaced by what sociologist Herbert Gans has called "symbolic ethnicity...
...Only synagogues and day schools do that, yet they are not the heart of American Jewish life, nor the center of attention, effort, and spending...
...C learly, Lipset and Raab mean Judaism per se, and not "Jewishness...
...As Lipset and Raab report, there is evidence that the emotional attachment to Israel is falling among young Jewish Americans...
...Date of change: r The American Spectator April 1995 67...
...Orthodox Jews, whose children are not intermarrying (and who are still having lots of children), will constitute a larger proportion of the community with each passing decade...
...That hard core will be more . . . well, hard-core...
...City...
...The most prestigious and influential organizations still fight any role for religion in American public life as if it were a harbinger of forced conversion to Christianity...
...T he American Jewish community the authors describe would be a far cry from the one that exists today: smaller, presumably less influential but less wedded to liberalism, less secular, better educated in religious matters, and more likely to survive undiminished across the following generations...
...What can provide the glue...
...As Lipset and Raab put it: The central core of Jewish identity has been religion, even though an ethnic culture is built into that religion...
...The American experiment is testing whether that is possible, as it has not been in the world generally...
...For, in the main, the American Jewish community continues to act as if religion were largely peripheral to its real concerns...
...A rich ethnic culture such as that of Italian-Americans becomes diluted, and by the third or fourth generation little remains in the intermarried family but a couple of recipes and some touching old photos...
...Only Cole Porter could do justice to the scene...
...Jews and the New American Scene is part history, part sociology, part demography, and part futurology, all in a digestible 239 pages...
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...Israel has also been a very strong force for Jewish identity and solidarity, but here, too, there are signs for concern...
...In fact, Lipset and Raab predict that there will be many fewer Jews in America, but not at its present size...
...The truth is that institutions like the American Jewish Committee and Congress, B'nai B'rith, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and the many Jewish Community Relations Councils have been unable to transmit Judaism across the generations...
...Outreach" and "continuity" programs, now common in both synagogues and secular Jewish agencies like the American Jewish Committee, reflect this assessment...
...Jews were for a long time thought to be an exception, but this is highly uncertain now...
...It is a deeply interesting boolc, about an issue of far more consequence than its ill-chosen title would indicate...
...But however strongly held, most of those social values...
...But Jews are different in one critical way: their ethnic, cultural, and linguistic group is also a religious group...
...Only one, according to Lipset and Raab: religion...
...That's all there is to it...
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...It is less and less likely that any ethnic group can long retain its separate identity and resist assimilation...
...They also oppose the education vouchers that might make Jewish day schools—whose value in sustaining Judaism is easily demonstrable by data—more affordable for thousands of Jewish families...
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...that might well amount to about half of the present population...
...Today there are 1.3 million Americans with some Jewish ancestry who practice other religions, and 1.1 million Jews who tell poll-takers that they are Jewish but do not practice Judaism...
...What differentiates Jews from other ethnic groups is that religion is at the heart of their heritage...
...It is that religious core which provides a special edge of separatist cohesion for Jews...
...In addition, many Jews whom Lipset and Raab call "religious fellow travelers" believe that religion is a fine thing but do not practice it very much themselves...
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...Judaism, by contrast, is a religion, and it is only by clinging to Judaism, the authors suggest, that Jews will be able to resist assimilation...
...Secular Jews—persons of Jewish descent who do not practice their religion—will tend to lose their Jewish ethnic identity as well, and succumb to assimilation...
...j ews will probably be the ultimate test of the hypothesis that the melting pot will efface ethnic identity in America...
...Fear of anti-Semitism JEWS AND THE NEW AMERICAN SCENE Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab Harvard University Press / 239 pages / $22.95 reviewed by ELLIOTT ABRAMS 66 The American Spectator April 1995 is one of these factors, and it is obvious from the data that Jews exaggerate the amount of it to be encountered in America...
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...As Lipset and Raab write: Part of America's inherent promise had been that ethnic separateness and open integration into the general society could exist side by side...
...Just be sure to allow six weeks for your change to take effect...
...its utility as a cement of community solidarity will decline accordingly...
...As Lipset and Raab point out, there is a strong correlation between religious and political conservatism on a wide range of issues...
...It may finally fail for the majority of Jews...
...Not surprisingly, Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab have added some very keen analyses to this debate with the absorbingly written Jews and the New American Scene...
...T his may change, and Lipset and Raab hint that they think it will...
...They remain absolutists on church and state matters, wanting less a wall of separation than an iron curtain...
...That is partly why Jews may be seen as the ultimate test of the American society's ability to erode separatist group impulses...
...These groups will be reduced in size, and the Jews who remain, two generations on, will be more observant—and more conservative as well...
...The very openness of our society to Jewish advancement threatens to advance the rate of assimilation, and Lipset and Raab call it a "double-edged sword, hacking away at disadvantage and, on the back-stroke, cutting away at Jewish identity...
...are no longer particular to the Jews, and have clearly not provided the glue which can keep the Jewish community together...
...That particular experiment has already failed for most European immigrant groups...
...Are there any grounds for believing or hoping that the Jewish community's demographic decline can be stopped...
...Why should they permit irreligious Jews to define the community's position on important issues, whether educational questions such as school vouchers or moral ones such as homosexuality...
...Indeed, one could fill a dictionary of quotations with lines from Jewish liberals suggesting that "social justice" is what Judaism is really all about...
...This is precisely what America's fabulously open society is steadily eroding...
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...The authors point out that most American Jews are irreligious, and that most believe their community's coherence is tied to common beliefs or characteristics other than religion...
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...They believe thatif the cycle of benevolent integration and intermarriage continues uninterrupted, then the American Jewish community might approach a hard-core minimum in two generations...
...Unfortunately, Lipset and Raab are sociologists and authors rather than the president and vice president of any major Jewish organization...
...Jews remain, on the whole, attached to the Democratic Party, and what the authors call "cultural liberalism" still dominates the community: Some want to believe that an intrinsic quality of Jewish life consists of such universally benevolent "Jewish social values" as equality, social justice and world peace...
...Lipset and Raab suggest that this remnant will form the heart of the Jewish future in America, and will perhaps attract to it those "fellow-traveling" Jews who are "spiritually or communally hungry...
...Among Jewish organizations, most think intermarriage is inevitable and worry that the community will shrink, others hope that enough children of intermarried couples will be raised as Jews to maintain the Jewish population...
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...Many Jews have argued that politics, which they like in this context to call "the fight for social justice," is what holds the community together...
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...Jews are intermarrying, but so is everybody else: Catholics with Protestants, Japanese-Americans with Caucasians, Italian-Americans with old Yankees, Irish-Americans with Scandinavians...
...0 MOVING...
Vol. 28 • April 1995 • No. 4
