THE JEWISH REVIVAL

...In her recent book, Generation Without Memory: A Jewish Journey in Christian America, novelist Anne Roiphe offers an intimate chronicle of her personal search for a 314 path of return to Judaism...

...Jewish dayschool attendance has risen sharply over the last decade...

...The number of even nominal Jews is declining: birthrates are alarmingly low, lower even than the national norm for middle-class families...

...Jews are in fact assimilating, and the culture is losing content rapidly as America takes the Jews to its heart...

...The degree of cultural assimilation can approach the bizarre...

...You Jewish...

...A look at the Jewish revival in the context of the dissolving Jewish cultural existence reveals its true significance...

...Very much part of a literary and political international culture, with typically slight Jewish backgrounds, they have decided to celebrate the traditional Sabbath eve meal with their own version of the ceremony...

...She has just signed up for an elementary Yiddish class...

...But what are the ultimate chances for the success of this balancing act...

...The dangers of physical destruction are obvious...

...So the leader of the week at one of the informal rabbiless prayer groups (Havurot), which helped spark the revival in the mid-'60s, chooses a D. H. Lawrence poem to replace the Torah portion reading as a means of capturing the spirit...

...During the Yom Kippur service a California "new age" Jewish collective, at the point in the day when the traditional list of sins is enumerated and confessed, the leader asks the participants to formulate their own "sins...

...After recounting his successful career as a physical chemist and Ivy League professor, author of 316 several books, and recipient of major scientific awards, he describes his current situation: I am now a full-time student of Talmud at Yeshiva—in Brooklyn . . . . I am also the unpaid and under-utilized Secretary-Treasurer of my wife's store, "New York's Top Designers in Women's Fashions at Brooklyn's Bottom Prices...

...Halkin's Zionist argument is simple and direct...

...A Sabbath group of left-wing Jews recites a Marxist essay on the meaning of Sabbath written by a member in traditional prayer form...

...In the 1960s, Marion lived in a commune...

...The modern reliance on will and choice finally denies the revival the assurances of continuity that a living tradition confers...

...The success of this thoroughly modern and radical experiment in the possibilities of historical continuity is not guaranteed by the assumption of old forms or proclaimed ties to the past...

...In the United States, in the only significant Jewish community outside Israel relevant to the question of Jewish survival, it is quite obvious that assimilation is proceeding rapidly...

...Though raised in an Orthodox home, he is not religious...

...Among the usual stories of brilliant medical careers, academic success, families and divorces, we read about the surprising decision of an alumnus who chose Judaism...

...The story concludes with an observation about continuity of tradition even in a football stadium: Robert Cohen, the grandfather, watched family and friends lift Harvey to their shoulders in celebration as the band played the hora...

...Janet Golder is a Radcliffe graduate, art historian, active feminist...

...That this very same Anne Roiphe, just a few years back, achieved a measure of notoriety with a piece in the New York Times celebrating the joys of Christmas in her Jewish home dramatizes the more general shift in sensibility...

...We don't hear much from the imaginary friend, but his basic position is clear enough...

...One can choose anything, whatever one was last year, or yesterday...

...Beyond this sort of "personal" Judaism, there are more collective expressions of the spirit of inclusiveness...

...Their understanding of Orthodox commitment does not require a renunciation of modern aspirations, neither career nor sexual freedom nor even, with the advent of kosher restaurants like Moshe Peking and La Difference, Chinese and French cuisine...

...So we find families in which the parents decide to keep kosher but the children do not...

...At the Purim celebration in New York's gay synagogue, the Queen Esther of the traditional Purim play is freilach (Yiddish for "gay") in both the old and new ways...

...Still, she says, Yiddish "feels like home...

...This is the true innovation of today's revival, its experimental essence...

...They have two children...

...Not having done enough to fight nuclear power," says one participant...

...Her parents never spoke Yiddish when she was growing up in the suburbs of Indianapolis...

...Halkin is an American Jew now settled in Israel, a scholar of Hebrew literature...

...They never go to the synagogue nor do they keep a Jewish home...

...But significantly the modern hope to "have it all" is not confined to self-consciously innovative groups...

...He justifies his cautious optimism by describing the Sabbath service at a commune in the country, a self-created ceremony constructed by Jews from his own secular, intellectual milieu—eclectic, somewhat countercultural, without any official sanction from rabbis or organized Jewish institutions...

...Some demographic projections, admittedly highly speculative, predict a Jewish community of under a million (or even less) in three generations...

...They have no intention of joining a synagogue or other organized group...

...To Halkin, the equation of "substance" with the idea of some uniquely Jewish contribution to modern culture, as Max Dimont articulated it, is a seductive but ultimately spurious idea and an ineffectual basis for community...

...Sheila and Josh, a professional couple in their thirties, are planning a Pidyon ha-Ben for their new-born son...

...Such individuals may go to live in Israel because they become convinced that there they will be most authentically fulfilled personally...

...The concern with a personal quest for meaning, shadowed by the murky notion of authenticity, means that analysis and predictions of the long-term historical and sociological significance of personal actions should not in principle be given weight...

...One leaves the non-Jewish ways and renounces modern aspirations for the sake of total immersion in Orthodox Jewish ritual, practice, and text...

...We walk back and forth together and often share lunch...

...There is much talk, for example, about the therapeutic value of "keeping the Sabbath...

...To underline the fragility of this self-conscious revival-by-will, to question its long-term prospects for revitalizing the American Jewish community is not to say that one should not participate, or to imply that there are better forms, there for the willing, in our current condition...

...The decline of religious orthodoxy, the natural process of assimilation for people whose Jewish identification has no serious cultural force, the pressure of anti-Semitism—these will erode what is left of Diaspora Jewish life...

...Now she works as a lawyer...

...But they find something intriguing in this archaic Jewish ritual for a first-born son...

...He can offer no explanation for this contradiction: "It's just something I've come to feel strongly about over the last few years...

...This surprising flowering of unorthodox Judaism must be seen against the backdrop of the highly successful integration of Jews into American life and in reaction to a perceived decline of Jewish commitment...

...But they generally freely grant the right of the children to reject active Judaism and to choose other paths of meaning when they reach the proper age...

...319...

...Yet the Jewish paideia is hardly alive and well in America...

...Do something Jewish today...

...This emphasis on individual choice accounts for the revival's fragility...

...He told the guests that his own father had been held aloft in such a manner a long time ago in a Polish ghetto, as he himself had been embraced and serenaded in a crowded tenement flat near Avenue C, on the Lower East Side, far from football fields and pom-pom girls...

...The willing of meaning by individuals who believe that such commitments must be chosen is the distinguishing mark of this revival...

...As Halkin points out, these are modern secular ideals that assimilating Jews transmuted into "Jewish" ideals through a complex process...

...Such sentiments and activities on the part of young American Jews mark a striking and unexpected phenomenon: a Jewish revival...

...Can they provide a counterweight to assimilation and dissolution...

...The store and my Yeshiva are less than a mile from our home...

...There is almost no constraint on innovation in ritual and ceremony...

...Historical experience suggests that authentic religious and ethnic life depends on faith and organic ties to community and tradition...

...But he is not convinced that there is no hope for change...

...Where else indeed," Halkin asks, "has there been another Jewish community so well-organized with so little substance to its life...

...Jewish life in the Diaspora is doomed: this is the somber thesis of Hillel Halkin's Letters to an American Jewish Friend, a work full of vigorous argu315 ment and brilliant analysis...

...They add this piece of Jewishness to their otherwise unchanged contemporary lives...

...But in the intense desire to slake the thirst for tradition, ritual, roots, wholeness, and community, there are temptations—temptations to exaggerate, to avoid examining the limits of the enterprise, to deny the dangers of isolation and false hopes...

...exhorts a poster on a California college campus...

...Hassidic-style countercultural groups like the "Aquarian Minyan" proclaim the "joys of Jewishing" at vegetarian (Passover) Seder celebrations and in workshops on "Judaism and Yoga," "Davening [Hebrew prayer] and Meditation...

...Although we can detect a distinctly modern note in the quest for "the integrated whole life," the form of return is classic for a baal tshuve (returnee...

...Its traces may be found even in the unexpected resurgence of modern Orthodoxy...

...They don't know how to do it, exactly...

...He grants the emptiness of the official American Jewish community and its organizations...

...Alvin Golder is a former academic, Rimbaud scholar, and radical political journalist...

...In general the new Jews do not stake their survival on the idea of a specifically Jewish contribution to modern culture, or on a sense of an impending assault of anti-Semitism or on a religious impulse, or on the foundation of a land or a language—but rather on will...

...Only the Jews, of all the European minorities, have both assimilated and kept up a self-conscious community debate over assimilation...

...Yet what seems to underlie the many modes of affiliation is not primarily a commitment to revitalize Judaism, 317 or to reestablish the primary communal bonds frayed and attenuated by historical and cultural forces—the traditional image of a religious revival or cultural "revitalization movement...

...Special mention and citations for bravery go to the American Jews for their role in this "greatest cultural and moral adventure story in the history of man": This is the story, culture, and heritage which has been entrusted to the American Jews by a manifest destiny . . . . History has chosen well in selecting the American Jews for the task of preserving and perpetuating the Jewish paideia...

...But the bits and pieces of revival seem fatally vulnerable to the originating motivation—the self-conscious willing by modern, basically secular people in search of solutions to contemporary dilemmas of individualism and fragmentation...

...more subtle is the possibility that the culture that is developing will be "Israeli," something other than truly Jewish...

...The new Jews would have it so...

...intermarriage, a threat 20 years ago when it was under 10 percent, is now well above 30 percent and will keep on rising...

...The revival, though limited in numbers, is hard to miss...

...Above all there is the danger of substituting positive thinking and self-congratulation for a lucid appraisal of the contradictions and tensions that permeate the project of reconstructing Judaism...

...Ethnic therapy groups and workshops on Jewish liberation address specifically "Jewish" syndromes of psychic oppression and images of physical inferiority...

...If the form of Jewish commitment one has chosen at present does not satisfy one's emotional or spiritual needs next year, then one must move on—perhaps to a universalist politics or to a new version of Eastern mysticism or whatever...

...Other groups have melted more readily into the general pot, have not maintained the complex net of community and religious organizations, have not experienced world-historical events like the Holocaust and the establishment of Israel...

...Nor is the movement without literary testimonials...

...He finds hope for the continued vitality of Jewish life in the movement of "new Jews" and he articulates their aspirations...

...To judge from the enormous popularity of the three editions of the Jewish Catalogue (how-to manuals of practical Judaism with sales of over 400,000), the appearance of Judaica sections in bookstores, and the unabated popular interest in the Holocaust, more and more people are continuing to discover a religious or, at least, an ethnic impulse within themselves...

...Strollers on New York's Fifth Avenue are accosted by the aggressive proselytizing Hassidim of Chabad...

...The desire to do this while participating fully in the wider secular culture is understandable...

...The various forms of new Jewish activity suggest origins traceable to ideals of social justice, to assertions of ethnic pride, to the questions evoked by family and parenthood, to the healing function of ritual in giving fragmented lives a longed-for sense of ceremony and significance, to that most contemporary desire to feel better, more existentially at ease...

...they ask, offering inspirational literature and invitations to pray in their "Mitzva-Mobile...

...They certainly do not feel that the children, by deciding not to follow particular ritual observances, have betrayed either the true Jewish faith, or the Jewish people, or Jewish history...

...In a front-page human-interest feature, the New York Times described a Miami Bar Mitzva held in the Orange Bowl, complete with waitresses dressed as porn-pom girls and a 64-piece band from a local high school playing football marches and Happy Birthday...

...But it is doubtful that they will emigrate to Israel because they become intellectually convinced that the long-term survival of the Jewish people would have a finitely increased probability should they take this action...

...We have now managed to arrange the integrated whole life which we value...

...The Jews have managed to retain their integrity as a people within the larger American society...

...Since he left his New Jersey home many years ago, he has had no relation to Jewish life nor is he planning to get involved in it in any way...

...The new Jews in all their variety present a fascinating and spirited attempt to confront the peculiarly modern problem of cultural and ethnic dispersion armed with the dwindling resources of that ancient and disturbing strand of Western history—the continuing survival of a Jewish people and religion...

...Not having allowed myself all the pleasures I could have," adds another...

...In the absence of this spiritual and social context people may certainly undergo conversions and take on commitments as individuals...

...Max Dimont, a sprightly cheerleader in the Harry Golden mold, ends his latest tale of Jewish wonderfulness, The Jews in America, with a paean to Jewish history ("There is no history in the world to compare to it in nerve, energy, and grandeur"), and achievement...

...As one troubled Orthodox professor said to a recent graduating class of his Orthodox high school: "Today you can do anything wearing a yarmulke [skullcap...

...For him, an autonomous Jewish political and linguistic community is the prerequisite for the development of the authentic secular culture that holds out the only hope for a continuation of Jewish historical existence...

...One needn't feel that important universal values depend on the continued existence of a Jewish community in America...

...The same fragility undermines the force of Halkin's Zionist argument even for the committed Jews who are the elite of the current revival...

...Feminist values require the elimination of all patriarchal language, and the addition of prayers in a feminist manner...

...Neither did her grandparents...

...A subway advertisement suggests the indefinable benefits of observing the Sabbath candle-lighting ceremony...

...Take this account in a recent Fifteenth Reunion report of a Harvard class...

...Observations of the decline of Jewish identification under the steady assaults of secular modernity lead to conclusions strikingly different from the kind of bright optimism characteristic of such books as Dimont's...

...The revival is a sign of vague but deep dissatisfactions with the quality of personal and social life today...

...Who else has dared give the world God, Abraham, Moses, Isaiah, Job, Jesus, Spinoza, Marx, Freud, Einstein...

...To see, as Dimont and others do, ideals such as "justice" or "knowledge" as attributes of the Jewish people as a whole, or any people as a whole, seems quite unfounded...

...It may be that there are no more effective palliatives available for the pains of alienation, and that those who can bring about some kind of revival, at least for themselves, are lucky...

...They'll look it up...

...It is our sense, however, that the richness of the revival gives a misleading basis for hopes of glowing reconstruction, and that the resurgence of interest in practical Judaism is a problematic phenomenon, expressive of the very forces of dissolution it seeks to combat...

...The effort to use the pieces of a weakening Jewish cultural existence to create a form of community more satisfying than what is normally available in contemporary society is ap318 pealing...

...The diversity of revival activities is impressive, the quest for a way of being Jewish inflected by the whole range of cultural options, from radical secular humanist and countercultural tendencies to orthodox religious and chauvinistic nationalist feelings...

...The hope is that one need give up nothing, that nothing truly human is alien to Judaism, that one can be anything and be Jewish too...

...New Jews think about how to give their children a sense of the Jewishness they have recently discovered or rediscovered or created...

...This revival, even if it seeks to establish itself as the continuation of a great tradition, was created in response to a perceived loss of tradition and continuity, and clearly bespeaks the fact that for most young Jews the tradition itself has become alien and ambiguous...

...Robert Cohen takes his story to demonstrate the consummate ability of Jews to survive as Jews while being regular Americans...

...Ellen Willis, a cultural reporter known for her feminism and rock criticism, shares with readers of Rolling Stone her anguished confrontation with the Orthodox Judaism adopted by her brother in a Jerusalem Yeshiva (a Talmudic academy...

...The only significant Jewish future therefore is in Israel, though even there, as Halkin eloquently demonstrates, the future is uncertain...

...He sees in the much-touted marriage of America and the Jews the co-optation of a sadly declining community sorely in need of reanimation...

...The attractive and well-dressed young professionals who pack New York's Lincoln Square Synagogue have little in common with the physical chemist turned Talmudic scholar...

...The basic elements of cultural identity—community, doctrine, ritual—are no longer given in America, even among the Jews...

...Halkin's book is written in the form of letters to an American friend, a secular but committed Jew who is active in Jewish life and visits Israel but has no intention of moving there...

...Will and choice stand in opposition to law and tradition...

...He understands why more and more of the most intelligent and sensitive Jewish youth have fled or drifted away from any serious participation in such a community...

...Even now, Halkin notes, the number of American Jews for whom Jewishness is more than a peripheral concern is almost certainly less than a million...

...It is a self-conscious recreation, a typically modern willing of the meaning of tradition, theology, and ritual by individuals for themselves, in response to contemporary values, anxieties, and aspirations...

...It is easy enough to accuse these often amusing, sometimes absurd efforts to be omnivorously inclusive of violating all sorts of norms, those of traditional religion as well as notions of conceptual coherence...

...He happily asserts that one can be gay and Jewish and proud of both—despite the traditional strictures against homosexuality...

...Each group recreates liturgies to encompass all of its concerns, secular and spiritual...

...For no other group is the discussion of their life as a people a constant and historically rooted issue...

...Such an interpretation would certainly be in line with the popular accounts of the Jewish experience in America, those reassuring narratives of a long-suffering people who finally find a free society and reach unprecedented heights of acceptance and success without having to relinquish religion, ethnic culture, or identity...

...New Jewish journals and media organizations (Response, Moment, Sh'ma, Genesis 2, Network) have appeared, dedicated to serious intellectual debate and controversy...

...Radical political journalist Paul Cowan, another intellectual who discovered Judaism in mid-life, frequently writes articles in the Village Voice that reveal a constantly deepening Jewish identity...

...He accepts or is brought to admit the general truth of Halkin's analysis of the modern course of Jewish history...

...The demand Halkin makes, because of these dangers, is that American Jews who are committed Jews take seriously the question—in his view, the moral necessity—of going to live in Israel...

...Much more characteristic, however, of today's revival is inclusion, not renunciation...

...There are New Left radical Jewish collectives, Jewish feminist organizations, women's prayer groups, gay congregations, communal religious living groups, Jewish Defense League chapters...

...Even the long defunct socialist Youth Bund is active again...

...Do these activities really hold out hope for the revitalization of Judaism, as Halkin's American Jewish friend argues...

...Some true religious conversions may occur...

...The parents firmly believe that one should not impose ritual or observance on one's children...

...This revival is expressive of dilemmas of modernity rather than of Judaism, of questions and discontents, yearnings and confusions that characterize thoughtful individuals today, whatever their cultural, religious, ethnic, or political allegiance...