REVIEWS: The Achievement off Milton Himmelfarb

...I regret the fact that he has been insensitive to the issues raised by younger Jews and more recently by Jewish women, but he is so much a product of a particular age that his contribution may simply not extend to the very newest developments in Jewish life...

...The 1930's have never receded from his mind, and the sense of guilt over an earlier innocence is not likely to disappear...

...Ask him to rethink his own policy because the world has changed and he will tell you he is no trimmer or opportunist...

...But the greatest single threat to Jewish survival, he states, is Zero Population Growth, which, he fears, is escalating society toward a future in which children are illegal items, sold on the black market, negotiable for cash...

...Youhave to vote for one or the other...

...If you refuse to vote, you vote Christian...

...A n d once we try it for demographic reasons, we may find we like it for its own s a k e . " To Himmelfarb, the suggestion is far from whimsy, and in a more optimistic era he made several appeals supporting the conversion of American Blacks to Judaism...

...If you write-in a third or fourth or twelfth parry— Esperanto, Hillelism, the unity of man - kind, socialist internationalism, the republic of learning —you vote Christian...

...His introduction to the 1966 Commentary Symposium is indispensable, and is probably better known than any of the essays in that collection...

...Writing on Jewish voting patterns, a favorite theme, he has carefully shown that Jews are different from other groups, continuing to vote along liberal lines, even against their own " J e w i s h " i n t e r e s t s . In the early 1960's, Jewish liberalism was displayed with considerable pride, but ten years later the pride has been replaced by ambivalence and some distaste...

...The Friday night service, on the other hand, would be completely traditional, except that the passage on the laws of candles would be omitted because it is offensive...

...Since that time, the language of crisis has become standard in Himmelfarb's vocabulary...

...For modern Jews every day is Election Day...

...Not only, he claims, are day schools often no better than public schools in their presentation of secular subjects...

...Himmelfarb is a teacher-at-large, a popularizer in the finest sense, believing that Jewish learning must be made accessible to involved Jewish laymen — those whose skills and training may be lacking but whose desire to learn is a deserving claim...

...In addition, he is Director of Information and Research for the American Jewish Committee...

...Yet we remain bigger than our numbers...

...He then castigates day schools for further insufficiency: their ignoring of Western culture...

...the Saturday morning service would not include the musaf (the additional service...

...To those who find it irrelevant, HimmelThe two or three months of Christmas remind us every year, against our will, that there is an America of people and things and custom that is not the same as the America of the great documents of freedom...

...they are, or can be, worse, for there is generally no meeting of the two worlds, fostering the impression that the Jewish and general cultures inhabit distinct and discreet spheres which never intersect...

...Conversions to Judaism could conceivably offset losses from intermarriage, and might even produce a net gain...

...the amidah would be spoken aloud, but only once...

...A strong supporter of day schools, Himmelfarb is thoroughly astute about their limitations...

...That alienation has long since given way to a cautious but deliberate involvement, expressed most often through politics rather than culture or religion...

...His concern for numbers extends to statistics on population, behavior, and especially voting patterns...

...On occasion, he goes too far, as in the amusing but silly notion that in the Beatles' film Yellow Submarine it is more than coincidence that the famous pun, "funny, you don't look bluish" relates the Blue Meanies to Hebraism, whereas the good guys are the Hellenists, the submarine people and the Beatles who shout a resounding " y e s " to love and to life...

...In the argument over quotas, Himmelfarb looked to the power struggle in the New York schools and wondered, with apprehension, what might have happened had Jewish teachers not belonged to the union...

...And in the synagogue itself, acting as its backbone, stands the daily minyan, a collection of members who, although unhappy about having to come (to say kaddish), form a dedicated and enthusiastic little community...

...As much as numbers, Himmelfarb loves words...

...Asa friend and colleague has noted, it is celebrated by eating, and Jews eat rather than drink...

...Too much liberalism, Himmelfarb became convinced, could harm the Jewish interest...

...It is the earlier Himmelfarb who has so much to offer...

...This book includes a good deal more: an essay on the Book of Jonah which shows Himmelfarb as transmitter of scholarly material, an intricate essay about the Psalms, and a contemporary interpretation of Matthew Arnold's divisions of culture into Hellenism and Hebraism...

...For Himmelfarb, everything is a Jewish issue...

...jimmelfarb is nowhere more at I home than in the synagogue...

...We have no lack of spokesmen...

...But for Himmelfarb — and very few others share this with him — there is really no boundary between " J e w i s h " and "general" concerns...

...the times have changed at least as much as he...

...The Holocaust is not a subject about which Himmelfarb has written...

...Himmelfarb and others have consolidated their positions and have, to some extent, retreated, and he has held out against the general swing to the left that has overtaken much of the intellectual and academic world...

...1966) The Wrong Question That the Nazis wanted to murder every Jew they could get their hands on was the last thing about Nazism that interested us...

...If you try to jam the voting machine, you vote Christian...

...In another age (which usually means the 1930's, his historical touchstone), no social activist would have thought to look to religious institutions to provide relevance...

...the references to the sacrificial cult would be eliminated...

...To avoid that guilt he has moved progressively further from its source...

...1963) solution, Himmelfarb suggests bitterly, will be summarily dismissed by the universalists...

...The New Left is the old wolf in sheep's clothing, while the ghost of Stalin lurks in the background, still seducing the flock of the young, the innocent, the naive...

...10.95 While American society abounds with good critics who are Jewish, the Jewish community is less fortunate...

...For a Jew, everything but voting Jewish is voting Christian...

...The last five weeks of the secular calendar, however, thrust Jews into a regular' 'cycle of unease.'' He touched another vital base after the Six Day War...

...When Himmelfarb writes " w e " it is not an editorial device...

...He is unrelenting in his insistence on a conscious, deliberate choice of Jewishness, which he measures both by numbers and by words, and which he defends by stressing the hollowness of universalism and the betrayal of the Left...

...In an essay about Jews, Thanksgiving and Christmas, he describes Thanksgiving as a " J e w i s h " holiday, when families converge to eat a large (kosher) bird...

...But even as a spokesman, he remains a critic who writes with honesty, compassion and insight about Jewish life in our time...

...There is no such thing as not voting...

...the music of particular prayers would be chosen to complement the spirit of the text...

...religion was silly and infantile...

...Big things seem to happen around and to us...

...Finally, in 1972, he urged his readers to join him in voting for Richard Nixon...

...He endorses, instead, "parochial, fleshly J e w s " who contend that for people who have too many children (the Indians, the Chinese, perhaps even the Russians and Americans) ZPG is commendable, but that Jews should struggle for M P G (Maximum Population Growth...

...He would have the leader of the service say every word aloud except for the silent passages...

...He and his wife, the parents of seven children, live near New York City...

...Two years later, Emil Fackenheim's "Jewish Faith and the Holocaust" (Commentary, August 1968) would lay that idea to rest...

...In the Sabbath services, however, Himmelfarb would make several c h a n g e s . He would remove the m'chitzah separating men and women (the right act for the wrong reason: he would do it to reduce the amount of talking...

...a cult i v a t e d man who identified American history with what he had studied in elementary school would not believe you if you told him that it could interest anyone with mind...

...Again, what one eats then is not the flesh of an unclean bird...

...The advent of the pill, legal abortions, and society's sanction of childlessness, singleness and homosexuality have combined to undermine the traditional emphasis on procreation and the family structure...

...Commentary has undergone significant changes since Himmelfarb's work first appeared in its pages a quarter of a century ago...

...The essays are reprinted almost exactly as they were first published...

...Collected between covers and arranged by topics, they don't always fit together...

...But as the most articulate spokesman for a point of view I don't share, he has made me challenge my own views on a variety of subjects, and that, surely, is a good sign...

...For modern Jews there are only two parties, the Jews and the Christians...

...Milton Himmelfarb is the best of our critics...

...for them, population control is a form of blasphemy...

...He is Director of Information and Research Services at the American Jewish Committee and has taught Modern Jewish History at the Jewish Theological Seminary, the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in Philadelphia and Yale...

...Jewish day schools, he asserted, are no guarantee of anything...

...1967) farb replies that the synagogue does not stand or fall on that test...

...Political labels are of little help here, as Himmelfarb has shifted less than is commonly supposed...

...For a man so concerned with seeing things in their proper context, Himmelfarb is at fault for not giving more thought and effort to the nature of the collection as a whole...

...Himmelfarb pointed to the surprising ascendancy of Rosenzweig over Buber among the theologians, and went on to deal with the lack of impact on Judaism of the death-ofGod movement...

...he means it literally, reflecting his own sense of involvement and participation, even when he is writing with critical distance...

...most of the shorter pieces seem dated and tedious now...

...here, he opts for silence...

...On his first visit to Israel, he is startled by the chatter of hotel chambermaids—in Hebrew...

...the Jewish threat was merely verbal...

...A man will say that the United States must rethink its foreign policy from beginning to end because the world has changed...

...Jewish theology, he contended, was not exactly a product of modern times...

...My own hope is that Himmelfarb in the next few years will return to his earlier style, and will become less the spokesman than the critical observer...

...But this Milton Himmelfarb was born in Brooklyn in 1918...

...It was the aftermath of 1967 which marked the beginning of the end of universalism, as threats against Jewish life in America and especially abroad seemed to heighten...

...It was a lesson about Jewish history and the rest of the world...

...These views were shared by a large segment of American Jewry, some of whom responded to the events of the late 1960's in less genteel ways...

...This theme is sounded frequently, and with such bitterness that it rings of repentance and sadness, and the cynicism of a man who, along with thousands of others, once believed in a universal brotherhood which would render all parochialisms obsolete...

...with rabbinic and religious institutions on the one hand, and the organizations and philanthropies on the other, any number of personalities of greater or lesser prominence produce an endless flow of pronouncements...

...1963) Traditions Traditions die hard, even the tradition of the untraditional...

...While his intellectual roots are planted in 19th century Europe, Himmelfarb's personal perspective is drawn from a broad historical base, as he reaches into medieval and even classical times to illustrate and clarify his perceptions of the modern world...

...William Novak is associate editor of this magazine...

...1967) On the Six Day War Each Jew knows how thoroughly ordinary he is;yet taken together, we seem caught up in things great and inexplicable...

...With two decades of his Commentary essays now collected in one volume, it is appropriate to consider his singular achievement...

...Himmelfarb speaks with contempt of the " p r o p h e t i c " Jews, who not only lead the Z P G movement but practice its teachings...

...More recently, he has become known as a political commentator, and his writing has become far more polemical and less analytical than it once was...

...When they do turn their attention to Jewish fertility, it is to invoke the support of Jewish tradition or law for birth control...

...While Himmelfarb is neither the first nor the only writer to describe the peculiar nature of this particular diaspora, he has been able to illuminate and interpret mundane and common experiences...

...But Himmelfarb was on thinner ice when he offered that even the Holocaust was not qualitatively new to the Jewish experience and did not, therefore, require a new theological response...

...In varying degrees, he has always been a liberal, and liberalism has gone through some rough times in recent years, unthinkable in the 1950's, then possible, becoming reasonable, fashionable, respectable and finally once again unthinkable as the country has groped for suitable ideological responses to its problems...

...But each was written in response to certain stimuli, or issues, or news events...

...1970) Survival The rabbis, more than anyone else, are worried about our survival, but they seem to prefer not to know that we are failing to reproduce ourselves...

...Without exactly defending the J . D . L . , Himmelfarb brought up the issue of American Jewish behavior during the Holocaust, pointing to the J . D . L . ' s understandably popular attack on Jewish complacency and on those Jewish organizations which had more comfortably opted for respectability and universalism...

...commitment, he asserts, cannot be a partial process...

...To vote Christian you don't have to pull the Christian lever, to vote Jewish you have to pull the Jewish lever...

...His passion is Jewish identity and self-awareness...

...all biblical passages would be chanted, especially the psalms...

...And in the struggle between Jews and Blacks, which reached its zenith in the mid-1960's, Himmelfarb feared that a policy of gratification and appeasement toward Blacks by the general society would serve to dislocate and harm the Jewish interest...

...and not the same, either, as the America of Thanksgiving...

...The preservation of a stable Jewish population, even the faint hope that it might actually increase, is important enough a goal to prompt Himmelfarb to call for Jewish proselytizing...

...There is no adequate reason, he claims, to discourage it, and no reasonable explanation for the reluctance of rabbis to support it...

...Those who were once its adherents have been jolted into a stand which is often defensive and scornful toward others whose faith in universalism and humanism remains stronger than a parochial commitment...

...There is one word he uses continually: the first person plural pronoun...

...Himmelfarb laments the upsurge of Hellenism in modern times...

...I am in fundamental disagreement with Himmelfarb on almost every issue of policy and politics...

...And what comes out of the mouth on Thanksgiving is equally Jewish—both the message and the tone...

...In Deuteronomy we are told that even then we were ' 'the smallest of people.'' How many are we ? The number of Jews in the world is smaller than a small statistical error in the Chinese census...

...And so it is hardly surprising that when Himmelfarb finally wrote about the Jewish Defense League he did so without the intolerance that might have been expected from a man who so abhors violence...

...For years, Himmelfarb has been editor of the American Jewish Yearbook, an annual compendium of raw data and reports on Jewish life in America and throughout the world...

...It is almost as if we were not acting hut were being acted through...

...Predictably, there would be far less sympathy for the excesses of the Left, and not even the relatively harmless Jewish student movement could earn his respect...

...His talent extends to dealing with the words of others...

...Even a parochialist has universal obligations, and must know something of world culture to appreciate his place in it...

...Curiously, Himmelfarb calls his own proposals "reactiona r y " ; this may say something noteworthy about Havurat Shalom and similar informal congregations where, independently of Himmelfarb, most of these changes have long since become part of the service...

...Furthermore, they often mislead their graduates into believing they have received a sound Jewish education, when in reality they have learned only a few of the more elementary texts, commentaries and skills...

...Written only a few weeks after the battle, his article dealt with the religious sensitivities which seemed to emerge from the recent historic events...

...Despite my high praise for the author and his essays, this is not a very good book...

...And although Himmelfarb has mirrored, reflected and discussed all of these changes, alienation from Jewish life was never- the issue for him...

...At its inception in 1945, the magazine reflected the views of alienated Jewish intellectuals...

...He is the only man I can think of who will look up the w o r d ' ' J e w ' ' in the Oxford English Dictionary and write about what he finds there...

...he seems to have in mind a sort of Paganism...

...In Christmas America, whether we are of the second or of the seventh generation, it is easy to feel that we are not quite native...

...This might have been remedied by a general introduction by the author, and perhaps by short introductions to the sections...

...Thanksgiving is the great point of intersection between Judaism and the sacral tradition of America...

...Traditionally, the chief concern of American-Jewish number-watchers has been intermarriage...

...Now, as Cynthia Ozick once expressed it (in a phrase that Himmelfarb would love to have coined), universalism has become the Jewish parochialism...

...Blacks, he suggested, would be heeded because they threatened violence...

...1963) Cycle of Unease Thanksgiving seems made to order for Jews...

...But a good critic of Jewish life must combine the knowledge of the rabbi with the depth of the scholar and the sophistication of the professional politician...

...Consider his 1960 essay on Jewish day schools (which for reasons which escape me has not been included in the book...

...He is a man of principle, and such men are rare...

...Making Choices The Rabbis tell us that not Yom Kippur alone but every day is judgment day...

...And so the battles of the 1930's and 40's are not forgotten...

...The present volume includes almost all of Himmelfarb's work since 1960, a good deal of which is by now irrelevant — particularly some of the columns and shorter pieces...

...Himmelfarb, however, charges that the Jewish woman is " a virtuoso at contracept i o n , " and attacks a future society where the begetting of children is threatened or even prohibited...

...thus he can argue that it might be better for day schools to teach Bible in English so that Jewish civilization can be viewed and appreciated through the perspectives of a larger worldview...

...For the vast majority of educated Jews in the United States this dichotomy is simply in the nature of things...

...Himmelfarb is not a columnist...

...Whatever distance he has maintained stems from his particular form of participation in Jewish life, a distinct, yet difficult role because no framework exists for it...

...Still, in this case the singer is more important than his song...

...REVIEWS The Achievement off Milton Himmelfarb William Novak THE JEWS OF MODERNITY, MILTON HIMMELFARB, New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1973...

...French, Latin, Greek and Hebrew phrases punctuate (and do not always clarify) his writing...

...He has chosen the role of commentator, not formulator — of observer, not innovator — and in these roles makes his most valuable contribution, providing insights into the social, intellectual, and, most frequently, the political issues which face American Jewry...

...Without compromising his material, he interprets for his readers, helping them to comprehend and to connect...

...He must be part of the community — yet to interpret that community with integrity, he must also remain sufficiently distant to permit freedom, independence and objectivity...

...At b e s t , " he concludes, " t h e y have learned what children can learn": What they know and understand of Jewish history, for instance, is comparable to what someone would know and understand of American history if he had studied it in the eighth grade...

...Formerly editor of RESPONSE, an independent Jewish review, he has written widely on Jewish life and literature and will review books regularly in these pages...

...For us the big question, the question that called forth all our dialectical virtuosity, was: Is Nazism the final stage of capitalism...

...the bar mitzvah would be banned ("let them go somewhere e l s e " ) ; sermons would focus on the Torah reading...

...the individual essays do not serve well as chapters of a larger work...

...What may be worth repeating every few months or years becomes tedious when it reappears several times in the same volume...

...let the weaklings and conformists veer with the winds of popularity, he will remain loyal to his principles...

...If he has prejudices — and it is hard to think of a critic who has as many — he is always honest about them, and there is never anything sneaky in his tactics...

...He is equally critical of Reform and Conservative rabbis who assert that Judaism permits birth control: " T h e y must imagine that we are unrestrained breeders...

...Published two years ago, his is perhaps the most thoughtful critique of the American Jewish situation to date...

...The middle-aged do not want to incur that guilt again...