The Importance of Secular Jews
FEINGOLD, HENRY
ON MY MIND HENRY L FEINGOLD The Importance Of Secular Jews By secular Jews, I mean those Americans who incidentally, and sometimes unhappily, happen to be Jewish. Usually their Jewishness is...
...They have done so not through a Jewish conduit, but through their own efforts, using private centers of power that abound in American society—the universities, Wall Street and the business community, the law and science establishments...
...Singular Jews with special knowledge, whether in medicine or map-making, have been mobilized before in the Jewish interest...
...To accommodate Avital, he follows the basic Judaic tenet of "shalom bayit" maintaining "peace in the home," by participating in those facets of the religious culture that strengthen family life...
...They displayed a far greater sensitivity to dropping the A-bomb than the political leadership...
...The commitment is fulfilled by proxy, which means that Zionist will donate money to the cause, if possible, or time or skill...
...Usually their Jewishness is merely a fact of their lives...
...Many recognize the sustaining values of the culture they are now removed from...
...Yet despite the fact that their primary interest lies in self-actualization, they are often openly receptive to the cries of history's victims...
...Today the secular Jewish group has been much enlarged...
...American Jews are becoming voluntarily associated "tribes of one...
...When the secular Jew gives it, he gives of himself...
...The other day I read an interview with Natan Sharansky in which he was asked how lie, as a secularist, could live with his wife Avital, who is devout...
...It serves as a stand-in for the giving of the self, which is already committed...
...To consider such Jews as merely "checkbook Jews" misses what they are all about...
...Both selfness and selfishness turn inward toward nurturing the self, but selfness builds up the self...
...American Jews, by and large, choose to belong, first to themselves, and only secondarily to a cause, whether it is expressed in political or religious ideological terms...
...If only we had been able to mobilize Sam Rosenman, Ben Cohen, Sidney Hillman, Isador Lubin, David Niles, Herbert Lehman and the host of lesser influential Jews who had made their way to Washington during the New Deal period...
...The success of numerous young leadership cadres developed by the federations and UJA well attest to this...
...We are discussing an ideal type...
...If we imagine a continuum anchored at one end by religion or some other ideology, and, at the other, by personal fulfillment goals viewed in "secular" terms, in real life most American Jews would place somewhere in between...
...To approach them directly would probably be self-defeating...
...after Berlin began prattling about a secret weapon in 1943, thpir concern increased...
...They do not deny it, but neither do they want to be known for—and certainly not only for—their Jewishness...
...The secular mind-set can be clearly seen at work in the character of American Zionism...
...Yet there has been virtually no effort to identify, much less to mobilize, secular Jews to respond to a Jewish need...
...What some see as the passivity of American Jewry is largely explainable in terms of American secularism...
...American secularism is a mind-set not anchored in any political ideology...
...American Jewish organized philanthropy is the envy of other America sub-cultures...
...These secular Jews can be—and have been—enormously important in Intervening on behalf of Jewish causes, for example, in President Truman's almost instantaneous recognition of the state of Israel in 1948...
...When I say that American secularism is characterized by "selfness," this should not be confused with selfishness...
...A Jewish Bundist or a Jewish Socialist cannot be fully secular because his or her life is devoted to the "class struggle" or to redeeming the "homeland" or to some other cause...
...it symbolizes power, health, love, all those primordial things that are central to proper living...
...He or she has surrendered the self and become selfless...
...In American Zionism, there is no need to link theory and practice...
...Sometimes these secular Jews have not been mobilized—and I often wonder what would have happened if they had been mobilized, in opposition to Hitler's "Final Solution...
...Especially after the victory at Stalingrad in February 1943, when the Allies could finally see the light of victory at the end of the tunnel, these secular Jews, had they been mobilized, might have successfully influenced Roosevelt to bomb the death chambers and the rail lines leading to them, though that became possible only in the spring of 1944, when much of European Jewry was already in ashes...
...Yet no Jewish leader considered the possibility of mobilizing them...
...They consider ethnic or religious identity to be merely one facet of their lives, which they live on many levels...
...Another "what if: The scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project included a disproportionate number of secular Jews...
...This selflessness or idealism interferes with the development of self which is the sine qua non of the secular mind-set...
...And American Jews are disproportionately represented in them...
...Jews who have partially or totally abandoned the tradition are rarely hostile to what they or their parents once were...
...Jews who hold elected and appointed political office have been joined by technocrats, scientists, lawyers, professors, political strategists, policy planners—all of whom have risen to positions of influence...
...It is the Zionism of a highly secularized Jewry...
...In a future crisis, the intervention of secular Jews could be crucial...
...What might have happened had Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Leo Szilard, Victor Weiskopf, Eugene Wigner, Edward Teller and other Jews (and non-Jews of similar inclination) threatened to withdraw from the project unless something were done to save the Jews subsequently killed in Nazi concentration camps...
...Do you remember the Jewish secular elite around Roosevelt, the so-called "Jew Deal...
...American Zionists do not feel bound by the aliyah imperative...
...They were not considered part of the Jewish communityAre we—today—similarly failing to mobilize secular Jews...
...Development of the professional self does...
...Ideologically he or she is unfree or, if you like, religiously fettered...
...If we are to mobilize secular Jews today, we need to understand much more about how they perceive the world...
...Secular Jews are in fact quite generous with their wealth...
...American leaders felt themselves in a life and death race to produce the atomic bomb...
...And not only American Jews...
...Often they are armed with a new kind of power stemming from knowledge...
...The future security of American Jewry and perhaps of world Jewry may well depend on them...
...We have many more such Jews today and the need for their influence has not diminished...
...It does not dictate priorities or loyalties and certainly not life-styles...
...Few people are totally secular...
...He is free to pick and choose those religious tenets he wants to make part of his life...
...its quest is for career or the enhancement of skills, while selfishness is merely anxious to retain what has been accumulated, the preservation of estate...
...Like so many modern secularists he is capable of tolerance of others' beliefs even when they are far different from his own...
...Yet they are eminently enlistable for the Jewish enterprise if their own terms are adhered to...
...These elites possess a new kind of power based on esoteric knowledge...
...His response illustrates the modern secular mind-set...
...Religion for him, he said, was not a tribal matter but an internalized private sensibility...
...Many of the secular Jewish scientists working on the bomb had first-hand experience with the lash of Nazi anti-Semitism...
...Money for secular Jews is not merely a medium of exchange...
...These centers house the operational elites without which a complex modern society cannot operate efficiently...
...American Jews can rely less and less on numbers to make their weight felt at the polls...
...These Jews can be enlisted in the Jewish enterprise even though they are no longer directly involved in the community...
Vol. 14 • December 1989 • No. 7
