ARE AMERICAN JEWS TURNING TO THE RIGHT?

...Had Jews felt themselves to be part of "the white majority" and had they followed a mere crude calculus of self-interest, they might have joined other whites in holding nonwhites down...

...The one thing it seems crucial to say is that such problems cannot be solved by local measures, though they may be eased by them or aggravated (as they sometimes were by the Lindsay administration, in its occasional high-minded ineptitude) . What brings blacks and poor Jews into conflict is a combination of social difficulties as these rub painfully against both groups: difficulties ranging from bitter competition over scarce housing to enraged confrontations in poor schools...

...It does seem clear, however, that the slippage in the Jewish Democratic vote was centered in the poorer, less-educated, and more religious urban segments...

...At the same time—and surely, to one or another extent, because of their sense that they remain a group incompletely absorbed, one that never can be fully absorbed, into American society—the American Jews have persisted in their overwhelming commitment to political liberalism...

...This process, be it noted in passing, is of considerable duration, going back to a decision by Ben Gurion to weaken the position of Zionists in the West vis a vis those who were running the state of Israel...

...Abbot, Gold & Rogowsky, Police, Politics and Race (New York: American Jewish Committee, 1969), p. 7.] Then 63 percent, or 1,313,161, voted against the board and 765,468 for it...

...Jews whose collective imagery was filled with the time they were "slaves unto Pharaoh in Egypt" could sympathize with former slaves in the New World...

...Black power, black separatism, black nationalism were growing before his assassination, but that event dramatized the end of integration as a common goal of American blacks...

...and except for apostles of abstract internationalism (Jews who often find it possible to praise the ethnicity of all groups but their own), few commentators would be foolish enough to celebrate or denounce such a turn without qualification...

...But since World War II, there is no longer a proletarian majority even among immigrant Jews, and the bulk of the Jews in America is clearly middleclass, with a large proportion of professionals and academics...

...who have become skeptical about the possibility or desirability of governmental social action...

...If, as seems likely, there will be areas in which the interests of Jews and blacks clash, then at the very least we should avoid journalistic apocalypticism...

...And there is good reason for dropping a certain kind of bleached uniARE AMERICAN JEWS TURNING TO THE RIGHT...

...Himmelfarb has recently brought his writings together in a book, The Jews of Modernity, which merits the attention of anyone interested in these matters.' Still, it would be exaggerating to say that even he offers a sustained statement of Jewish conservatism...

...And finally, the U.S...

...It is a view of things that accepts a crudely Marxized vision of society in behalf of a Nixonite politics...

...Second, the most recent Jewish population survey is over three years old, and was never meant to be definitive or rigorously accurate...

...Perhaps one difficulty in such entanglements has to do with the phrase "more liberal...

...Every effort should be made to contain such clashes, to keep them within appropriate limits...

...Her place should be achieved on merit only, irrespective of sex...

...The Pandora's box of ethnicity was opened wide, for good and/or bad...

...Jews, as well as other whites, tend by now to see it as linked to the problem of blacks...

...Confessing that despite his efforts 60 percent of the Jews in that ward voted against Rizzo, he remarked: "Thank God for the goyim...

...It would be fatuous to suppose that this is always possible, and in a given instance, it may be necessary to make painful choices...

...Except for a small minority of zealots, most American Jews who reflect upon such matters are quite prepared to recognize the possibility that serious conflicts may arise between their concern for Israel (which, if more than quixotic, must take into account its Realpolitik calculations) and their interests as Jews in America and American citizens...

...33 as a rule, see their "class interests" as being linked with the political Right...

...With the vicissitudes of their long history, the Jews have been prepared for almost anything but to be taken as part of the dominant "majority...

...but systematically to expect less of them than of white students, systematically to install a double standard of judgment is surely not to do them a service...

...It is crucial to note that many American Jews still feel like losers, and being able to buy a private home, or send kids to college, or move into a suburb isn't quickly going to remove that feeling...

...To be sure, "affirmative action" can easily slide into quota, and thereby become objectionable...

...If black is beautiful, Jewish would be exquisite...

...but to insist upon this point is to speak to black colleagues in the name of some pure realm of merit, whereas they see a decidedly impure reality in which merit has been far from dominant...

...Are the Jews becoming more conservative as they grow more affluent...

...When one comes to think of it, this is a remarkable fact...

...No issue or phrase is more likely to stir fears and anxieties among self-aware Jews than quotas: it rouses memories of exclusion from European cities and schools...

...It has been especially virulent in the cities of the North...

...The "Black Revolution," stronger in subjective expressiveness than objective results, expelled whites from its ranks...

...The Communist countries have shown themselves to be hospitable to, and sometimes actively employing, anti-Semitism...

...But for many others, from Conservative rabbis to socialist intellectuals, being Jewish, though it cannot be reduced to social idealism, unavoidably means a crucial component of social idealism...

...Some Jewish cisely the Jewish visibility in the professions, academic life, and the communications industry that makes a good many Jews nervous...

...Consider, for just a moment, the problem of crime...

...43 danger of forgetting their timeless Jewish ideals . . . the tendencies [he said] which are developing, especially within American Jewry, which would have the Jewish people limit its problems and activities for its own benefit and which renounces the universal character of our national and religious ideals, are an indication of the dangers...

...Cohen and Sandrow conclude: Jewish voters did not rush to Rizzo as did more than two out of every three non-Jewish white voters in Philadelphia...

...That a similar process of manipulation, rage, and befuddlement could occur among American blacks did not seem, until recently, a conceivable course...

...American Jews ordinarily vote in greater numbers than do 40 BERNARD ROSENBERG & IRVING HOWE other citizens, but there is reason to believe that in 1972 larger numbers of them stayed away from the polls than in earlier years...

...The possibility of black anti-Semitism has startled American Jews...

...Politically, this often leads toward a reinforcement of conservative tendencies within the Jewish world...

...another, of a higher state, suffers pain because of the whole city...

...In both Jewish organizational and nonorganizational circles— Left, Right and Center, secularist and religious— there are tentative discussions, occasionally elated but mostly troubled: Has the traditional American Jewish commitment to liberalism been weakened in recent years...

...38 BERNARD ROSENBERG & IRVING HOWE can Communists who never deviate from the Kremlin line...

...A consistent, often intense alignment with liberalism characterizes the politics of American Jews since at least World War I, even, it should be stressed, when that alignment seems to threaten the immediate interests of some or many Jews...

...And even Jews critical of Israel on one or another count, as we are, strongly share this feeling—a feeling the Yom Kippur war made seem only more urgent...

...labor groups seem more responsive to injustices in the Soviet Union than injustices at home: on certain issues the American Jewish Committee, once the stronghold of conservative German Jews, now takes a more liberal position than the Jewish Labor Committee, which reflects the views of the leaders of the Jewish garment unions...

...To complicate matters, there were Israelis who winked approval of Jewish intellectuals supporting McGovern: perhaps out of genuine sympathy, perhaps out of embarrassment, perhaps to hedge their bets...

...This much out of the way, let us now turn to an examination of some recent trends in American Jewish life that may prompt a drift toward conservatism...

...It is easy to sneer at affluent Jews who go to their expensive Community Center to hear lectures on the Holocaust...

...In 1971, tough and reactionary Frank Rizzo became mayor of Philadelphia...

...How can one know that appeals to Jewish interest are "merely" a veil for a drift into affluent conservatism...

...Nothing matters more to us than military aid from the U.S...

...That these trends are as yet decisive, or even dominant, seems unlikely...

...Judah Shapiro, "The Assignment Was the Future," Jewish Frontier, December 1972.] This is diplomatically put, but it makes the point...

...35 Anti-Semitism among Negroes has recently become a matter of some concern...

...On at least two factors: the powerful tradition of secular Jewish socialism, very strong in the earlier decades of the century, now fading but still felt and remembered, and sometimes affecting younger people who do not know the historical forces that are working upon them...

...Perhaps it will take another decade before a distinctive Jewish rationale for conservatism emerges...

...The obligation to defend Israel collides with an equal obligation to maintain a certain distance from Israeli policy, lest Jews, Zionist or not, look a little like those Ameri3 A small, not at all world-shaking example...

...Simply to attack quotas is to disregard, as well, the urgent and often justified feelings of minority groups that the entrenched systems of seniority in factories, and of recruitment of students and faculties in universities, are often discriminatory in practice, even though veiled by the claims of merit...

...On what has this commitment to liberalism been based...

...To what extent Commentary reflects growing sentiments within the Jewish community, or to what extent it runs counter to the dominant sentiments of that community, no one really seems to know...

...We have no reason to doubt the validity of these findings...

...Were the tradition of social activism to be abandoned or seriously weakened, one result would be a very severe identity crisis among nonreligious yet "Jewish" Jews...

...There is one who knows pain only because of his children, his parent, or his neighbor...

...Rabbi Ben Zion Bokser, who heads the Forest Hills Jewish Center, has called for a revival of the "messianic vision" and has attacked ethnic isolationism, citing a lovely apothegm from the Hasidic Rabbi Nahman of Bratzlav: Each person suffers pain according to the condition of his soul and the level of his service to God...

...He betrays a touching, sometimes delicious ambivalence on this matter: as if to say, the liberals with their defense of quotas, their evasion of black anti-Semitism, their indifference to Jewish needs are poison for the Jews, yet don't let me catch anyone suggesting that we aren't as good liberals as we used to be...

...Once an inspiring force for radical and secularist sentiment, the Jewish unions have become more moderate, sometimes conservative, with the passage of the years...

...Goldman says comes from on high, and within Israeli politics he leans toward the center-right...

...39 Committee Against Review Boards—dominated by the PBA...

...on the second, the skepticism some had about our judgment was not simply to be dismissed...

...2 They don't, 2 Add to this complication still another: it is preARE AMERICAN JEWS TURNING TO THE RIGHT...

...This conclusion is based on a competent study by three political scientists, David W. Abbot, Louis H. Gold, and Edward T. Rogowsky...

...There are some signs of a rightward turn among Jewish intellectuals, but how extensive this is and, more important, to what extent it reflects widely based changes among American Jews is a matter for speculation...

...but it is cheap and foolish to sneer at them, for whatever may seem discordant in their behavior is also discordant in the behavior of everyone else...

...Among Catholics, ethnic extraction, education, and occupation were weak indicators of CRB sentiment, whereas among Jews both education and occupation appeared to be equally potent...

...How can one test such a proposition...

...Most likely, American Jews feel a little more secure and less "peculiar" than ever before...

...They cannot...

...If it is true that in the main the wealthier, better-educated Jews are those who vote liberal most heavily, what then happens to the view suggested earlier in this essay, that the process of settling into American affluence may gradually undermine the traditional Jewish commitment to liberalism...

...Probably, we are witnessing a regrouping of forces and ideas within the Jewish world that will bring into existence a stronger conservative wing, which will in time enable the emergence of a conservative Jewish intelligentsia...

...Can we be indifferent to the fears of Jews side-swiped in the course of that transition...

...V Within the Jewish world narrowly conceived, that is, within the Jewish organizational world, the theme of a possible upsurge of conservatism is often debated with regard to two problems: quotas and "parochialism...

...4) DISENCHANTMENT over Communist anti-Semitism both in Russia and the East European countries has, for a segment of the older, "progressive-minded" or fellow-traveling Jews, been traumatic...

...whereas Jews divided about 50:50 between Rizzo and his opponent...

...but there is one of a very high state who suffers pain because of the troubles of the whole world...

...When the Israeli ambassador in Washington made his political preferences a little too clear, he was admonished to stop by important American Jewish leaders...

...And if such trends exist, what are we to make of them...

...On the other hand, continues Berry, ARE AMERICAN JEWS TURNING TO THE RIGHT...

...King lived to hear himself hissed by his own comrades, derided as "de Lawd," put down as an Uncle Tom...

...If those who adhere to the values and ideas of the liberal-left show renewed energy, it may well be able to retain a powerful and perhaps dominant position in the Jewish community...

...Yet there is very serious ground for being disturbed by the slippage—in some instances, much worse—of academic standards in the universities which, while not caused by "affirmative action," is to some indeterminable extent encouraged by it...

...We are not the ones to sneeze at $26 million...

...If Milton Himmelfarb can be patient, he is likely to find a growing number of allies...

...Census Bureau has not yet released the 1970 figures on income and age...

...If they know their past at all, they know about peasants, workers, and the lower orders being stirred up to commit pogroms...

...So does the 1969 New York mayoral election where two right-wingers, Mario Procaccino and John Marchi, got three votes for every two given Lindsay...

...Another result is a visible and distressing decline of sympathetic feeling among Jews toward the blacks—in some instances 36 BERNARD ROSENBERG & IRVING HOWE it almost seems as if the outbreak of marginal anti-Semitism among blacks serves as an occasion, or pretext, for the withdrawal of social generosity...

...and anyone who feels the slightest sense of Jewish identity 32 BERNARD ROSENBERG & IRVING HOWE must live with this doubleness as best he can...

...Yet there remain the realities of statecraft, and these evidently clash with the Labor Zionist ideology...

...Before the Enlightenment, Jewish attitudes toward politics were essentially static, detached, and conservative...

...By now the Jewish middle and upper middle classes are no longer a step away from immigrant parents and grandparents...

...Anti-Semitism flourishes in most of the European Communist countries...

...The Israelis, concerned primarily with their survival—and who is to tell them they are wrong?—find it necessary, as a state, to take a "pragmatic" attitude toward international arrangements of power...

...Such people worried about Nixon's abandonment of Taiwan, not because they admired Chiang Kai-shek but because they feared it might presage abandonment of Israel— perhaps as part of an overall retreat to "isolationism" or, what is more likely, an effort to strike a deal with the oil-producing Arab countries...

...A few write for the National Review...

...24, 1972.] So the issues are joined: in symbolic shorthand, Bokser confronting Birbach, with a spectrum of uncertainty, confusion, and mixed feeling between them...

...the socialcultural traumas of adjusting to urban life...

...Nevertheless, it seems likely that some younger Jewish scholars have been hurt, and others may continue to be hurt, by "affirmative action...

...At home, sharp improvements in condition, a leap forward socially, economically...

...Sam Yorty's victory over Tom Bradley in Los Angeles (reversed in 1973, with Jewish districts now giving strong support to Bradley) and Carl Stenvig's victory in Minneapolis in 1969 lend some credence to the idea of a conservative Jewish trend...

...Whatever conservatism there has been among American Jews has generally been indigenous and nonideological, rooted in sentiments of religious orthodoxy, and seldom requiring the ministrations of secular intellectuals...

...We have every reason to stress the differences between "affirmative action," which on the face of it merely requires universities to make special efforts to increase the number of black or female faculty members, and quotas, which set a fixed number for such an increase...

...If Jews have been the great obsession of Christianity, blacks have been the great obsession of America...

...Meanwhile, a few observations: • In discussing quotas and "affirmative action," we must avoid the rhetoric of either/ or...

...A few Jews did, of course, but the majority set itself up as an ally of the blacks, at times just about the only stable ally they had...

...And can we suppose that even the most humane and judicious consideration of all the elements in this clash could possibly lead to a quick and easy solution...

...By the best estimates, however, Jews remained second only to blacks in their support of McGovern...

...By the same estimates there was a drop in the Jewish Democratic vote of about 15 to 17 percent between 1968 to 1972...

...To what extent has "affirmative action" seriously damaged Jewish (or non-Jewish white) faculty members...

...Ben Zion Bokser, "Jewish Universalism & Jewish Parochialism," Congress Bi-Weekly, Nov...

...the idea of galut, or exile, comes to be abstract, ideological, merely literary...

...Very often that meant Jews...

...All probably counted as contributing factors, but what no one knows is the relative weights to assign to them...

...There are factors in Jewish life—not merely sentiments and attachments—which encourage the liberal-left...

...the economic deprivations of ghetto life in the North...

...The very novelty of this transformation of status can unnerve those who are its beneficiaries, and sometimes serves to veil still-painful disabilities to which Jews are subject, e.g., subtle kinds of economic and social discrimination...

...What we are talking about is political necessity, at least necessity as the leaders of Israel make their calculations for survival: it has little or nothing ARE AMERICAN JEWS TURNING TO THE RIGHT...

...And insofar as this signals a banking of old fires, the atmosphere of American Jewish life becomes a little more amenable, if not to ideological conservatism then to moods, compromises, resignations that serve as well...

...Perhaps...

...IN THIS COMPLEX OF CIRCUMSTANCES, American Jews could hardly avoid being torn by fierce tensions...

...Perhaps all that "Jewish conservatism" consist of right now is a growing disillusionment with liberalism...

...The trend toward particularism in the Jewish world has already encountered some powerful critics...

...No one seems to know with any exactitude, though some recent studies indicate it is less widespread among blacks than among white gentiles...

...It is hardly a secret that the number of Jews active in liberal, protest, radical, and civil libertarian movements is highly disproportionate...

...Nor should it be supposed that "ordinary Jews" who go about their daily life, running their businesses or working at their professions, have forgotten the Holocaust...

...III Several motifs can be isolated in the drift, insofar as there is one, toward Jewish conservatism: (1) THERE is a growing feeling—but still, as we have suggested, qualified by historical memory—that Jewish life in America is reasonably secure, or at least as secure as Jewish life ever can be...

...antimerit, but in actuality complex weighings of many factors...

...Within a decade or two, such unions as the ACW and the ILGWU will have to undergo extreme transformations in leadership and sociopolitical orientation...

...the signals from some Israelis...

...In early 1973 Frank Fitzsimmons, head of the Teamsters Union, was given a banquet for having raised $26 million for Israel...

...indeed, we have the impression that some Jews acted in accord with this position without needing to be told that it was held by influential Israelis...

...We ask you, as supporters of Israel, to subordinate any other concern...

...Brewton Berry, a sociologist who specializes in race relations, remarks that On the one hand, the Jews are a notoriously [sic] liberal group, harboring less anti-Negro feeling than gentiles...

...There follows a certain depoliticization of organized Jewish life in America, a weakening not only of Zionism or Labor Zionism but of all movements and causes...

...The difficulty at the moment is that quotas and "affirmative action" programs take on a new context: an effort to help minority groups, sometimes in disregard of the merit principle and sometimes, it is alleged, in order to realize the merit principle...

...The Jewish vote split along class lines, with lower income groups going mainly for Rizzo and upper income groups for his liberal Republican opponent...

...And because the Jewish social democracy keeps fading, both in numbers and intensity, there occurs within the Jewish community a growth in the relative strength of Jewish orthodoxy, for by contrast the religious minority (e.g., the Hasidim in Brooklyn) retains some coherence, some passion, some strength of conviction...

...As Southern segregationcrumbled, blacks poured into Northern ghettos where they soon ran up against a complex of thus far unsolved problems: the backlash of neighboring white ethnic groups...

...One result is the rise of such demagogic types as Jerry Birbach, the redneck who inflamed every sensitive Jewish nerve in the Forest Hills struggle of 1972...

...5) AMERICAN JEWS, apart from minuscule fringe groups, feel a deep involvement with Israel: this holds true for conservatives and socialists, believers and secularists, assimilationists and Yiddishists...

...a few others, at the Jewish Theological Seminary, have been trying to work out a coherent conservative position...

...They feel, in effect, that their survival depends on American help...

...How many Jews, either within or, more important, apart from the declining Zionist movement, responded to such intimations we cannot say...

...and the premise, shared by many Jews for perhaps two centuries, that Jewish survival and interests are best served by an open society promoting social justice...

...There has always been a small number of conservative Jewish intellectuals in America...

...That significant trends within American Jewish life bespeak a conservative turn seems indisputable...

...The Jewish poor, "the other Jews" whose visibility is even lower than that of "the Other America," are still with us, and estimates of their number steadily grow as they are rediscovered...

...To left-liberal or radical Jews, as to civil libertarians, reflection on that setback is bound to be depressing...

...It is said in some quarters that black insistence on quotas or "affirmative action," when it occurs, constitutes a tacit admission that blacks cannot now compete in the universities or elsewhere on the basis of merit, or at least that not many or enough of them can...

...Although only a tiny fraction belongs to the Zionist movement, Jews are, mostly, post-hoc Zionists in some loose way...

...Young people who experience vague yearnings to discover a "Jewish identity" are now rarely inclined to turn toward Jewish socialism or Jewish unionism, both of which have lost a good part of their vitality...

...The loss will be, already is, enormous—for the Jewish world, for whatever remains of American socialism, perhaps for intellectual life...

...The issue merits a fullscale examination, not possible here...

...we recommend an excellent article by Leonard Fein in Midstream, March 1973...

...but these prove to be uncertain and contradictory in character, perhaps because elections cannot be assumed to be precise registers of political sentiment and perhaps because Jewish political attitudes have become uncertain and contradictory...

...II hat most American Jews are economically better off than heretofore in this century is a fact...

...And as long as this condition obtained, both organized and spontaneous haters in America concentrated on blacks, and only secondarily on Jews...

...Black antagonism— whether deep-rooted or, as seems more probable, the verbal upchuck of an enraged fringe—is linked in their minds with global anti-Semitism and the enmity of Arabs toward Israel...

...Resisting cuts in the public financing of hospitals or school lunch programs or education is a moral good in its own right, but it is also a way of bringing together Jews, blacks, Puerto Ricans, white ethnics...

...These are either a result of stupidity or of a not-so-clever attempt to discredit the whole idea...

...All of which throws some light on the pitfalls of such research...

...that most of the victims of black crimes are themselves black...

...What the coming years require are concrete social programs that will recreate links between Jews and their former allies in the liberal-labor alliance...

...fund-raisers and large contributors became governors and leaders...

...Brewton Berry, Race and Ethnic Relations (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965) , p. 355.] How widespread this anti-Semitism has been in the black community remains a question, indeed, a crucial question...

...The closest to a coherent effort at developing an ideology for a new Jewish conservatism is in the writings of Milton Himmelfarb— yet we are not quite certain that Himmelfarb himself would accept this designation, since one of the most curious aspects of his polemics is that, even while assaulting traditional liberal "fallacies," he fiercely "defends" American Jews against charges that they have become less liberal...

...Moralizing may not be enough, it may even jar many nerves...

...If a major change is indeed taking place, then we are in the midst of it—never a good vantage point for historical perspective...

...Word now comes to us from Israel that the ruling Labor party has recently put into effect a variety of quotas for its electoral candidates-25 percent women, 20 percent under 35, 33 percent Jews from Moslem countries...

...Speaking of this situation, Judah Shapiro, a leader of American Labor Zionism, has remarked that two major consequences follow for American Zionism from its close identification with the State of Israel: 1. pragmatism and consensus replaced ideology and polemic...

...But the application of correct principles can sometimes be very diffiARE AMERICAN JEWS TURNING TO THE RIGHT...

...It may be that while the general commitment to liberalism persists, the intensity with which it is held or the readiness to expend energy and experience inconvenience in its behalf gradually declines...

...Personal fright on the streets, poor public schools, a meritocracy in decline —all merge psychically with the precariousness of Israel and the mortification of Soviet Jewry...

...That much of the crime among black youth is related to the pathology of drugs—and also, perhaps, to the rage -that followed upon the discovery that the revolution of rising expectations would not be followed by a revolution of rising gratifications...

...the appearance of a group of Jewish intellectuals, mostly exradical, who supported Nixon on the bizzare ground that he was the more "prudent" of the two candidates— take your pick...

...But that was not good enough for those who expected Jews—and Jews alone—to remain unaffected by the law-and-order issue [Emphasis added...

...Negroes have engaged in boycotts of Jewish establishments, have disseminated anti-Semitic propaganda, have published vicious sheets like Dynamite and Negro Youth...

...At this point it would be well to acknowledge some anomalies, perhaps confusions...

...and whatever radicalism we have had in America has found disproportionate support among Jews...

...31 versalism favored among "progressive" Jews in America...

...Perhaps this is a blessing prematurely bestowed...

...these can be gleaned from Himmelfarb's book, in Commentary's pages, and elsewhere: • The notion that Jews are by centurieslong tradition a people of liberal inclination is a parochial error, the consequence of ignorance of Jewish history...

...There is, among the Jews, the complex inward turn of a thinker like Ben Halpern and the simplistic inward turn of a demagogue like Meier Kahane...

...The '60s were not a decade that encouraged the making of distinctions...

...The polls did consistently show that neither presidential candidate was personally appealing to the voters, only 55 percent of them bothering to vote at all...

...But at least one major complication should be noted: the disproportionate number of Jews concentrated in the professions, academic life, and the communications industries (influential in national life if not always within the Jewish community) tend to remain committed to liberal and universalistic values...

...A hierarchy of merit, real or alleged, can end up being almost as offensive as a hierarchy of caste or status...

...Israel, they feel, is the one glory salvaged from -a century of horror...

...It is an outlook quick to offer sympathy to all other groups—blacks, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, homosexuals, radical students— all except the Jews themselves, who are asked, in the name of their "traditions," to make unreasonable and masochistic "sacrifices...

...We don't want, insofar as California is concerned, to honor Fitzsimmons in any way...

...It is a comparative study of how Brooklyn Jews and Catholics, excluding Puerto Ricans, voted...

...Certainly, we are witnessing a regrouping of forces within the Jewish world, which will result in a conservatizing of its dominant liberalism...

...Now, some people say, all this is changing...

...Even our Jerry Rubins and Abbie Hoffmans, who professed their allegiance to El Fatah, have been rejected as "Zionists" by the Panthers— though they, as Marie Syrkin has pointed out, earned that designation as little as did the Polish Jewish Communists who were expelled from the party...

...the appearance of a tiny but influential segment of very rich Jews in the Nixon camp...

...There are many situations with regard to jobs, promotions, status, etc., in which merit may be close to irrelevant, since the distribution of goods takes place, properly enough, according to other criteria...

...The very rich, the Jewish millionaires, who were but a sliver before are no doubt a larger sliver now...

...Black students obviously merit special consideration and need special help...

...But the evidence anyone can muster for (or against) this impression is very tentative...

...Who can easily separate in such reactions the warranted concern from the "paranoid" excess...

...And if, indeed, black spokesmen are making an admission of particularly acute difficulties, then that should prompt particularly acute kinds of help...

...37 to do with the sentiments of Golda Meir or anyone else...

...3 Indeed, some of the Zionist leaders themselves recognize the probability of an inherent clash between a state and the universalistic movement (Zionism) attached to yet distinct from it...

...There is a feeling that such people are vulnerable to social and cultural attack because of gentile resentment of Jewish "control" of cultural life and from insurgent blacks trying to replace Jewish teachers by undermining the merit principle etc...

...For the last six or seven years a body of sentiment has been growing among many American Jews, especially those living in large cities such as New York and Philadelphia, that if, within the relative security of American life, 34 BERNARD ROSENBERG & IRVING HOWE there is indeed a threat to Jewish well-being, it comes mainly from below...

...If this has not led directly to conservative ideas, it has certainly encouraged conservative moods...

...In the Brooklyn sample of 374 whites who were interviewed, the religious breakdown was as follows: Protestant, 70.6...

...they were ready to pay for this help with declarations supporting the American role in Vietnam, some merely pro forma but others arising out of a "tough-minded" Weltanschauung that some Israeli figures, both in and out of the government, have begun to adopt...

...we have no fixed or pat formula...

...Such a phrase has no single, precise meaning, only a cluster of imprecise and at times contradictory meanings...

...Those deep impulsions of value and care that have drawn many Jews toward the liberal-left, regardless of whether it seemed to be in their personal interest—those impulsions remain...

...but finally the moral argument is crucial...

...for compassion and commitment...

...Negroes, for their part, have often expressed a great admiration for the Jews, and frankly envy them their success in overcoming the obstacles which have been placed in their path...

...They feared his actions might be taken as gratuitous interference in domestic affairs...

...Yet the paradox that must be recognized is that insofar as Israel functions—must function—as a state dealing with other states, its impact upon American Jews is— perhaps must be—conservative.That the Israeli government is a laborite government, and that its prime minister attends conferences of the Socialist International, does not significantly change things...

...But before turning to that question, we should note another basic fact about the life of American Jews, indeed, Jews in most parts of the world during the post-Holocaust years: it is a life inherently "schizoid...

...Jewish Telegraphic Agency, July 6, 1973.] What Dr...

...And these social difficulties can be removed, or at least significantly diminished, only through the kinds of large-scale measures that presuppose federal action...

...and thereby the conclusion may be cultivatedthat Jews should start enjoying the luxury of responding to political events more and more "like ordinary Americans," that is, in accord with their individual socioeconomic, or class, interests...

...Traditional sentiments play a stronger role here than social class, at least so far...

...And let us remember that in a highly competitive society, like ours, it is the people on top who are most inclined to find the principle of merit a social convenience, for they are persuaded, of course, that their dominance is a consequence of merit...

...Or, to be blunt about it, this threat comes from urban blacks who in the schools, a few industries, and some unions are pressing to undo Jewish positions and accomplishments—pressing, especially, to undermine the merit system that has made possible Jewish positions and accomplishments...

...Tragedy occurs when two sets of standards, merit on the one hand, equity on the other, come into conflict...

...It disarms the Jews as an ethnic group that must adjust itself to, and sometimes enter combat against, other ethnic groups...

...The consequences for Jewish life in America, and also, by the way, for socialists in America, are enormous...

...The question, then, becomes whether it is possible to compensate for an appalling history of outrage by giving blacks greater opportunities, more of the "breaks" (and in a way that is what "affirmative action" means or should mean) while at the same time holding in general to the value of merit...

...it has been shown to be deeply entangled with radical ideologies...

...But at this particular moment, at least some Jews, including the present authors, have another interest...

...Highly educated Jewish professionals overwhelmingly supported CRB, while poorly educated lower-class Jewish workers strongly opposed it...

...the messianic strand of Jewish sensibility (despite a remarkable outbreak in the New Left) keeps dimming within the mainstream of Jewish institutional life...

...And it may also be that while the Jewish middle class together with Jewish professionals and academics still vote regularly for liberal candidates, a small but crucial fraction of these groups is breaking away and turning to the Right, perhaps as a portent of things to come...

...we recognize, insofar as Israel is concerned, that there may be a need for this ritual ceremony...

...But it is beyond question that antiSemitism has appeared at least on the more "radical" fringes of some black movements, among the Black Panthers and groups dedicated to "Third World Solidarity...

...Jews who had "made it" set out to help blacks who had not...

...Now, it would be mere polemical excess to deny that in this cluster of propositions one can find some nuggets of truth...

...Politics is hard...

...4, 1973.] That this version of the quota system is used in Israel does not, of course, necessarily make it right...

...Here too we have a small-scale study, by Henry Cohen and Gary Sandrow, two investigators who did their best and admit it is inadequate: The available data are limited in scope and accuracy...

...As for those Jews who never were in or near the radical milieu, Soviet anti-Semitism often brings about a generalized revulsion against all forms of radicalism, perhaps even liberalism...

...3) THE PREVIOUS TWO TRENDS operate over an extended period of time, and if they have recently been felt more keenly in Jewish life, it is partly because of an accumulation of their effects and partly because more immediate causes of the conservative drift tend to bring these effects into play...

...Meanwhile, it may not be presumptuous to offer a few summary points of the thrust toward a Jewish conservatism, as 1 Milton Himmelfarb, The Jews of Modernity (New York: Basic Books, 1973...

...and who are inclined to see connections between the left-liberal New Politics and the authoritarian excesses of the New Left...

...Of that, we have no signs...

...Leonard Fein, in the above-mentioned article, describes an historical incident in which Histadrut, the labor federation of Israel, used a quota system—it would appear, then, that the Jewish position on this matter has not been so inflexible after all, or more to the point, that there has been no single Jewish position...

...they turn elsewhere, to religious improvisations, communal experiments, quasi-Hasidic retreats, a renewed interest in East European Jewish life...

...Some of us who are warm supporters of Israel had to say in 1972: "We are going to vote for McGovern because we think it would be best for the United States if he defeated Nixon [there seems recently to have accumulated a certain amount of evidence for this view] and because we also think that a McGovern victory will not harm Israel...

...Rightly or wrongly, many Jews seem inclined to feel more and more "at home" in the United States...

...but the stubborn if residual attachment they show to Jewish "identification," their readiness to contribute large amounts of money to an astonishing variety of Jewish causes and agencies shows that they still retain a stabbing awareness of what the nature of this century has been...

...At the time of the last presidential election, it was said that some of the Jews switching to Nixon who justified their stand —it had, be it noted, still to be justified— in the name of Israeli security were "really" alarmed by the possibility that McGovern, if elected, would raise their taxes...

...Ours is a time (when has it not been...

...What to do or say about the Holocaust they hardly know, any more than do the rest of us...

...The Messiah still has not come, not to New York, not to Chicago, not to Washington, not to Florida...

...In no other country can we find quite this configuration...

...What happened in 1966, "experts" keep saying, is that 55 percent of New York's Jews voted in a referendum, initiated by the Policeman's Benevolent Association, against Mayor Lindsay's newly created Civilian Review Board...

...First, in some parts of the city no predominantly Jewish division could be found...

...Thereupon the Negro-Jewish alliance approached collapse...

...How American Jews voted in the last presidential election and in the congressional races is still an unassembled jigsaw puzzle...

...Catholic, 83.1...

...What we have been witnessing here is a collective tightening-up of exradical Jewish intellectuals who wish to keep the liberal community within the centrist camp of such politicians as Hubert Humphrey and Scoop Jackson...

...In their present moods, most American Jews are not likely to respond to it...

...Soon enough, a number of American Jews would begin to emulate the blacks...

...they voted for and against him in approximately even numbers...

...the defection of the labor movement from McGovern (though the Jewish garment unions, perhaps responding to their large black and Puerto Rican memberships, endorsed McGovern) ; the McGovern position on taxes...

...All this may be symptomatic of, or contribute to, a burgeoning Jewish conservatism but certainly does not yet comprise it...

...Within the American Jewish world, the full-time fund-raiser and the nouveau riche donor swing a lot of weight, maybe more than old Labor Zionist comrades who did not go to Israel...

...Speaking in behalf of the quota for women, Golda Meir said: In a free egalitarian society, there should be no need for a legal defense of the woman's position...

...Irritable and overreaching as this campaign has been, its thrust has thus far seemed not so much toward a conservative ideology as against recent versions of what Podhoretz takes to be vulgarizations of liberalism...

...The same holds for black faculty members...

...Or is it those Jews who are not affluent that become more conservative...

...Perhaps, while the majority of Jews remain committed to liberalism, it is to a liberalism increasingly "moderate" and conservatized, the kind represented by Senator Jackson rather than by Senator McGovern...

...If, then, the drift toward becoming more "like the others" continues—and to an undeterminable extent, we believe there is such a drift—then the rise of an influential segment of Jewish professionals and academics may help retard it...

...They remain "sensitive"—and why should they not?—to the faintest intimations of attack, and they feel that their security is always shadowed by the recurrent possibility of attack...

...How can these two elements of Jewish experience be reconciled...

...With upward mobility and a high degree of cultural assimilation has come a remarkable redefinition: Jews who constitute a tiny numerical group are increasingly taken to be part of the majority...

...Few, if any, of the Jewish unions still have a majority of Jewish members: it is estimated, for instance, that less than 20 percent of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers' membership remains Jewish...

...So there is at least a mini-trend...

...Moralizing is not enough...

...Nahum Goldman, head of the World Jewish Congress, warned that Jews, having become prosperous and influential in the world, are in ARE AMERICAN JEWS TURNING TO THE RIGHT...

...2) TOGETHER WITH this drift toward becoming more "like the others," and surely to some extent for linked reasons, there has also taken place a slow but inexorable decline of the Jewish labor movement...

...IV I t is only natural, in trying to estimate a Jewish drift toward conservatism, to turn to election results...

...Nevertheless, the Philadelphia story, insofar as Cohen and Sandrow can reconstruct it, is the Los Angeles and New York story all over again...

...It is not, however, a study of how New York Jews voted...

...They may also have thought those actions would be counterproductive: Golda Meir's sotto voce endorsement of Nixon (bestowed upon him in this surreal world together with those of Mao and Brezhnev) might hurt his chances of winning . . . or reinforce suspicions of "dual loyalty...

...Justice, equity, recompense, minority rights: these also count...

...The problem is galling...

...With such fears there go urgent and painful, but completely real, problems of social friction between adjacent black and Jewish communities, the latter almost always composed of older and poorer Jews less inclined to articulate liberalism and more concerned with group survival and personal safety...

...McGovern's alleged "isolationism" or his record on Israel...

...Cited in John Herling's Newsletter, Sept...

...Similarly, there has been a Republican vote among American Jews, in the early years of this century a national majority, after the 1930s a decided minority...

...It therefore seems likely that those Jews still trapped in poor or semislum neighborhoods will react to their fears by turning, especially in local elections, toward figures like Abe Beame—not toward ideological conservatives but simply mediocre politicians who promise what they probably will not be able to deliver: a return to earlier conditions of festering calm...

...And, for that matter, why must one choose?—since it seems likely that both motives operated together, in an all but inextricable mixture of group solidarity and personal interest...

...It is an inherently dubious notion that a measure of affluence—and that, after all, is the modest limit beyond which a great many American Jews have yet to move—necessarily signifies or requires a turn to conservatism...

...But it provides no immediate answer— perhaps none can be had—to the aging or retired Jewish garment worker or small shopkeeper in Crown Heights or the Bronx who is terribly frightened of being mugged, and often with good reason...

...and there are those who say that all the talk about universalist justice is rubbish, and that the Jews have to fight for their own turf...

...There is reason to be disturbed as Jews, as academics, as citizens...

...Lower-class Jews found allies in portions of the organizational Jewish intelligentsia, the rabbinate, and chauvinist ideologues—all together to proclaim an ethnic consciousness that fell easily enough into a ressentiment conducive to hostility or at least suspicion of other groups...

...The evidence is spotty and inconclusive...

...Hence, it may be supposed, there follows or will in time follow a gradual decline in the felt urgency of American Jews to transcend narrow class interests and respond to universalist moral appeals...

...I'm thoroughly ashamed of our Jews...

...it took powerful hold of the New Left here and abroad...

...The whole question of the supposed new conservatism among American Jews boils down to whether these factors, and others linked to them, still continue to operate...

...At this time the Negro-Jewish partnership was closest...

...that pathologies in the black community constitute a price for historical injustices such as no other group in America has ever had to pay—all this is true, important, urgent...

...but sympathetic and sophisticated faculty people will take the "affirmative action" idea at face value and not simply dismiss it on the ground that it is "really" a quota...

...The "universalist" outlook of modern, secular, and progressivist Jews is a moral and practical disaster...

...they have received, thus far, significant help from the Nixon administration...

...its fractiousness is reflected every day in the Knesset...

...and, perhaps most of all, the shock of discovering that they remained, even after their recent victories, a group still discriminated against, still suffering internal disruption and pathology, still overwhelmed by a heritage of centuries of oppression...

...The situation is one that requires a complicated balancing of values that are sometimes in conflict...

...The Jews did not elect Rizzo...

...Smarting under prejudice themselves, often committed to radical and universalist goals, feeling a kinship—if sometimes a rather abstract one—with oppressed blacks, the Jews shared in the fight for civil rights...

...Henry Cohen and Gary Sandrow, Philadelphia Chooses a Mayor, 1971 (New York: American Jewish Committee, 1972), p. 9.] On the other hand, Cohen and Sandrow quote a Jewish leader in the 63rd Ward who had rather different expectations...

...The painfulness of this problem is almost beyond imagining...

...Simply to denounce quotas, and say no more, is to disregard the claims and sensibilities of black spokesmen and black colleagues...

...This report was effusively praised by Daniel P. Moynihan in a foreword in which he could not refrain from gloating over a major liberal setback...

...Let us glance, much too briefly, at each of these...

...Jewish, 55.1...

...The Jewish working class is shrinking, aging, dying off, losing its elan...

...Intensifying such responses has been the flirtation of a portion of the New Left with Arab terrorism: it takes no great powers of imagination to conjure up the feelings of Jews when they see Jewish students collecting funds for El Fatah...

...Many of them have moved into the middle and upper-middle-class...

...And for that matter, if it is the wealthier and better-educated Jews who vote liberal, then, since Jews are by and large becoming both more affluent and better-educated, it ought to follow that the Jews as a whole are also becoming more liberal...

...The rejection of quotas as a means of holding down minorities and the espousal of the merit principle according to which individuals are judged by their competence or potential, regardless of race or color—this is correct in principle, and we reaffirm it without qualification...

...Those who stress the likelihood that such a trend is taking shape feel that the Jews will not long continue to be an ethnic group that responds more to moraluniversalistic appeals than to perceptions of class or group interest...

...The American Negroes have served as a kind of buffer for American Jews...

...Whatever its social meaning, this vote has not seemed to require much intellectual justification...

...In short, the traditional Jewish social democracy is leaving the scene and, with it, the Yiddishist-secularist tradition...

...Its other constituents were the Conservative Party, American Legion Posts, parents' and taxpayers' groups, the Brooklyn Bar Association, and the John Birch Society...

...Some of the evidence brought against "affirmative action" in Commentary consists of absurd literalisms put forward in its name, such as an announcement that a college is looking for a black scholar to teach Hebrew...

...So the issue is not merit vs...

...2. the instrumentality for raising funds also became the arbiter for the allocation of funds...

...For the Orthodox, nothing is finally crucial except an unbreakable tie with God: that defines them as Jews...

...The influence of such people is small in general, smaller still within the Jewish world...

...Remove that component, and the problem of Jewish distinctiveness for both individuals and institutions becomes critically acute...

...And they don't respond very much to appeals, whether authentic or spurious, for Jewish solidarity...

...It is fashionable, we know, in some advanced circles to look down on the "bourgeois liberalism" or "bleached substitutes for religion" by which many American Jews live, but thinking about how much more dismal American politics would be if those senti44 BERNARD ROSENBERG & IRVING HOWE meats were removed is enough to make one a little less condescending...

...On the first of these propositions, Israelis might not care to argue...

...that, in some distorted way, even the ability to release this rage in antisocial acts indicates a gradual psychic freeing of blacks from earlier postures of submissiveness (though at great cost to both their immediate possibilities and their inner morale...

...A good number of them remain Jewish only at the level of their top leadership: thin layers of social democratic veterans...

...Can we be indifferent to the agonies of blacks in this moment of transition...

...YET THE LIBERAL-LEFT OUTLOOK remains strong among American Jews...

...42 BERNARD ROSENBERG & IRVING HOWE • There is the further fact that a formal defense of equality of opportunity can perpetuate extreme inequalities of condition, if only because of the radically different points from which competing social and racial groups start out...

...It is betraying no secrets to report that in 1972 intimations came from at least some Israeli officials: "Nixon is our friend and we want him to remain in office...

...THE INWARD TURN of at least a segment of the Jewish community, with the attendant slogan, "let's take care of our own," is paralleled by similar turns among both white and black ethnic groups...

...Paradoxically enough, it seems likely that Jewish women have profited from "affirmative action," since they comprise a rather large proportion of those academic women who have suffered discrimination...

...It assumes that middle-class people don't share many interests with poorer people, interests ranging from tax reform to national health insurance, from good schools to urban renewal...

...Proponents of a civilian review board considered it a channel through which blacks and Puerto Ricans might register their complaints against police brutality: The opponents of civilian review were organized in a coalition—Independent Citizens ARE AMERICAN JEWS TURNING TO THE RIGHT...

...they dovetail with other, softer data that have the look of reliability...

...We are supporters of Cesar Chavez's Farm Workers Union, and that union is threatened with destruction by a brutal raid from Fitzsimmons's Teamsters Union...

...The world still cries out with its torments...

...Cossacks, peasants in their rural idiocy, workers without consciousness, a mass of ignoramuses: these the higher-ups could manipulate to make the Jews into a scapegoat...

...the kind of chic celebrities who supported McGovern and could be identified by middle- or lowerclass Jews as the kind who had supported Lindsay...

...who are impatient with proposals 30 for social changes that go much beyond the present limits of the welfare state...

...The trend we are discussing here is, at most, a long-range one, and before it could be established as a reality, there would have to be maintained in the coming few elections the moderate Jewish shift toward the Republicans, as well as evidence offered that this shift has been particularly strong among wealthy Jews...

...The argument that it is "good for the Jews" that they be on the side of social change is manifestly wrong or, at the least, much too simple...

...Merit is indeed a major principle, but it is not the only one...

...As a rule, we'd say—well, if they want to give that unsavory character a banquet for raising $26 million, what the hell— it's only a banquet...

...Some American Jews now ask not, "Is it good for the Jews...

...Since 1966 is alleged to have been a turning point, let us go back to that year...

...There are those who say that, while remaining faithful to the tradition of universalist justice, they feel it necessary to emphasize Jewish rights at a time when these are threatened at certain points and systematically scoffed at by young "progressivist" Jews...

...To provide another New York example: a majority of the voters for Herman Badillo in the 1973 Democratic primary was Jewish...

...it takes more courage to say the same thing in Forest Hills, Jerry Birbach country...

...Internationally, the greatest horror in human history, the extermination of six million Jews, with consequent feelings of guilt, fright, shame, and sentiments of apocalypse...

...For many in the once-influential segment of Yiddishspeaking workers in or close to the Stalinist movement, the series of events that begins with the Moscow Trials, continues through the Hitler-Stalin pact, and ends with the harassment of Jews who wish to emigrate from the Soviet Union—this series of events has had a chilling impact comparable to the dismay and disorientation that beset East European Jews in the 18th century after the collapse of the false messianic movements of Sabbatai Zevi and Jacob Frank...

...indeed, they like to think they are superior to considerations of "class interest...

...they are two or three steps away...

...The Jews seem to be the only ethnic community in the United States in which significant numbers of people, though they rise rapidly in socioeconomic condition, do not change— or at least until recently have not changed— their political views...

...Zionism, to be sure, was never close to being monolithic...

...The civil rights movement, as it arose in the 1960s, had exceptionally variegated components...

...So long as deep-seated native resentments and hatreds were taken out primarily on blacks, they were less likely to be taken out on Jews...

...Support for the board came from an impressive number of civic, labor, civil rights, and religious groups, organized into the Federated Associations for Impartial Review (FAIR), directed largely by the New York Civil Liberties Union and volunteers...

...but at the least it ought to subdue the rhetoric of those in America who have made opposition to quotas into a symbol of Jewish self-respect...

...And for Jews, it might be appropriate to remember the crucial diffence in America between our discomforts and their ordeals...

...Perhaps their children have, but they have not...

...Impressionistically, all of these seem to us likelihoods and thereby possible ways of coping with the difficulties we have just noted...

...At its height, organized labor, Catholic and Protestant church leaders, idealistic youth, and a liberal Administration coalesced around the person of Martin Luther King and his principles of nonviolence...

...whites in taco voted around two to one for him...

...The overwhelming thrust of Jewish thought and writing in America these past several decades has been liberal, notably more so than in the population at large...

...The Jewish tradition," as an alleged foundation of liberalism, is a delusion since there are many and conflicting Jewish traditions, contemporary liberalism seems to have little genuine linkage with the "prophetic Judaism" it sometimes invokes, and most efforts to improvise such a linkage are mere frivolous conveniences...

...it rouses memories of how hard it was for Jewish boys in America to enter medical schools...

...But in view of the present reality, better be ashamed that we have to pass such rulings than not pass them...

...The possibilities here are explosive...

...One sign is the recent evolution of Commentary, which under the editorship of Norman Podhoretz, and with the help of Milton Himmelfarb, has been conducting a fierce campaign not only against the New Left (or its shattered remnants) but also against some of the ideas traditionally associated with socialism, social democracy, and even liberalism...

...On the contrary: Jewish survival is closely dependent on social stability, order, and moderation...

...philosophies and programs became beneficiaries and pleaders...

...41 cult, and men of good will can differ as to how it should be done...

...but, "Is it good for Israel...