THE HOUSE OF STUDY

...I do not believe that Israel's foundations are built on shifting sand, that Israel is ever in imminent danger of destruction...

...I would, of course, understand and insist that such a service would underwrite and encourage a variety of Jewish schools, and that the major opinions and outlooks of the parents could be taught in institutions congenial to their views...

...Why, then, are the claims of Jewish knowledge upon the whole Jewish body politic still resisted...

...The presumption that even Jews who are not Jewish nationalists have a unique stake in Israel is defensible only on the proposition that the Jews are an international people with unique ties which bind them to each other...

...What we need to establish is the principle, and the practices which flow from it, that the leadership of the Jewish community as a whole, with every form of persuasion and pressure at its disposal, will try to convince the Jews to avail themselves of the educational opportunities the community can provide...

...Such a major study, as a preliminary to serious action, is now required...

...Jewish leadership in the United States has a large responsibility for the future of world Jewry, and it has exercised that responsibility for the last generation with great commitment and enormous dignity...

...validity of the propositions that Tsrael is in mortal danger and that we can survive through labor on its behalf...

...On present trends, the end of the Diaspora is thinkable in the 21st century, and it is this awesome possibility which presents the largest single immediate Jewish problem...

...A somewhat older and much less specific Jewish version of this notion is "marginality," the ascription to the Jew of the role of resident critic and conscience of Western society...

...Be it emphasized that this article is proposing not that less money be given by Jews, and certainly no less to Israel...

...Before my eyes there is the terrifying image of the Titanic...

...The contemporary Diaspora listens with approval to all these notions, since they are "positively Jewish" and are uttered by people who obviously care deeply — but there is clearly no reversal of the trend to evaporation...

...But it is peril, not rhetoric, that beckons us...

...We must now provide a free Jewish education to every Jewish child everywhere in the world...

...Tt shows no sign of a mass decision to transfer itself to Israel, nor have the contemporary culture of Israel and the involvement in its life checked its assimilation...

...it elicited many hundreds of calls...

...It has no commonly accepted theories about the nature or value of its existence, and yet it chooses to live on...

...The more fundamental reason is that Jewish education, were it a service offered by the Jewish community, would involve the whole community in the task of insuring that the service would be used...

...We have not vet asked the vast numbers of social workers, teachers and doctors in the Jewish community to do something for a couple of years of their lives in less fortunate parts of the Jewish world, and the kind of thrust I have here described would inevitably lead to such a program, and also to a revival of Jewish adult education...

...T Mhere is only one remedy which has not yet been tried — Jewish knowledge...

...We are told by the existing communal leadership that Jewish education and learning are an ideological matter, differently conceived by various kinds of Jews and even held by some of them to be irrelevant, or at the very least, not vital to their Jewishness...

...one can worry deeply about poor Jews without sharing with them a common set of rich memories...

...Perhaps such a study would show that the real costs of the rhetoric of the "positive Jews" cannot be borne by the Jewish community, which must still defend itself and defend Israel...

...Significant elements of two generations which might otherwise have become completely marginal in their Jewishness have indeed been transformed by their attachment to Israel...

...In the average well-run Jewish community in the United States, the community as a whole once a year works at soliciting its members for the United Jewish Appeal, and this task involves our most effective leadership...

...It is therefore not possible simply to make a grandiose rhetorical declamation about the need for more Jewish education, or universal Jewish education, at community expense, without a major study of the negative implications for existing structures, balanced against more believable projections of the good that might ensue...

...That leadership has also the prime responsibility for the survival of its own community, and here the American Jewish leaders are on the bridge of a very leaky ship...

...But it is equally true that the attrition of the Diaspora has not been checked...

...adopt as our credo ein breirah — there is no alternative...

...T Mhere are many corollaries to this outcry for universal Jewish education at community expense...

...If we regard it as the public business of the entire Jewish community to make it possible for every individual Jew to live in freedom, it must also be our business to make it possible for every individual Jew to grow up free from ignorance of the sources of his tradition — even if such freedom raises the danger of real Jewish difference...

...This experiment was quite successful...

...The difficulty with this argument is that what it asserts is more self-serving than self-evident...

...such as the synagogues, would be radically affected...

...The very trauma of the memory is supposed to make it possible for Jews to survive in their discreteness in the Diaspora...

...The suggestion is, of course, not new, but every time the proposal is made, it is immediately counterattacked...

...MOMENT DECEMBER 1975 THE HOUSE OF STUDY How To Make It To The Year 2000 ARTHUR HERTZBERG Every year, come fund-raising time in the Jewish community, there is a corporate attack of jitters about the future of Israel...

...The proposition that laboring for the survival and strengthening of Tsrael would preserve the Jewishness of world Jewry is true...

...In my nightmare, it is sinking not while the band plays but while in its main dining room a very successful black tie fund-raiser is being conducted...

...To put it bluntly, even brutally: the modern Jewish community of the Diaspora is constructed of Jews who are busy at the business of being Jews without involving their interior beings, their selves...

...The overwhelming majority of American Jews are the descendants of the post-1882 immigration, which means that they are now in the third generation of American freedom...

...To the best of my knowledge, there is nowhere among the vast reams of paper that the Jewish establishment has written — position papers on almost everything that might be of interest to Jews — even one study of what it would cost to create a structure of Jewish education, in all its varieties, as a Jewish public service...

...A Jewish community that takes its own culture and ethos more seriously could find ways of constructing a Jewish Peace Corps for the young people of the Diaspora...

...We continue to be urged, from quarters as diverse as the court of the Rebbe of Lubavitch and secular Yid-dishists, that we ought to create a rich Jewish life in what amounts to a reconstituted shtetl...

...It has been written to suggest that Jewish learning is everybody's business...

...It is the breakdown of a fundamental lie that Jewish tsores are public business while Jewish learning is private, that tsores are unideological, around which coalitions can be built, while learning is something that Jews can do when and if it suits them, with some help from the community...

...Jewish culture and learning are encouraged for those who care, even with some approbation for this precious minority, but the contemporary Jewish community avoids the notion that such learning is the sine qua non of everybody's Jewish business...

...As everyone knows, the pressure within the major structures of Jewish life during the past few years has succeeded in creating a few endeavors and some increased funding for day schools and other educational bodies...

...On the contrary, it is the great achievement of the Jewish state — and the fundamental affirmation of Zionism — that the third Jewish Commonwealth, created in our century, is a profoundly rooted, lasting phenomenon...

...I do not believe that Jewish knowledge is any more ideological than Jewish tsores...

...It is undoubtedly true that a variety of institutions which have at present a major investment in purveying Jewish education for a fee...

...In the 19th century, wherever they lived in relative freedom, whether in New York or in Budapest, Jews of the third post-ghetto generation "achieved" an intermarriage rate of 30 to 50 percent...

...In actual fact, before our eyes, the Diaspora has not behaved according to either plan...

...Pledge cards, always, but why should the only people who come regularly to my door to give me tracts and try to persuade me to their spiritual position be Mormons or Jehovah's Witnesses...

...Obviously, the vastly increased costs the Jewish community would assume in such a venture would affect negatively some of our existing programs...

...This present Diaspora is therefore an unideological phenomenon...

...What plagues me, however, is the suspicion that the commitment to Jewish education in the Jewish community as a whole is like the assent to integration and busing in America as a whole — something one believes in but tries desperately to get done without disturbing any older privileges...

...The very notion that the Jewish community owes separate services of particular quality to its own is an assertion about a conviction— that Jewish togetherness is itself a value...

...Zionist theory used to predict the end of the Diaspora, but not through evaporation or indifference...

...It is sadly true that despite mass (more than five million, as compared to some thousands in the 19th century) and despite the success of our pro-Israel endeavors, the rate of intermarriage today is of the order of 30 percent...

...The contrary view of Ahad Ha'am was that only a minority would go to the new Jewish center, but that the culture that would be created there would act to preserve the Jewishness of the Diaspora...

...There is no lack of prescription...

...I have no doubt that it will last into the 21st century, and beyond...

...Young people in Israel give several years of their lives to military service...

...On the other hand, the Diaspora, and especially the Diaspora in the free world, which means primarily the American Jewish community, worries me greatly...

...That, at least, was the thesis of Theo-dor Herzl...

...Others urge upon us the memory of the Holocaust as, at the very least, a way of telling our children that the Jew is different because he can be made into a victim at any moment...

...The Jewish State is depicted as being in severe, perhaps mortal danger, and we are told that it can be saved only by instant outpourings of the fabled Jewish generosity...

...Nonetheless, even this is a far cry from the kind of massive effort that we mount in the Jewish community in the attempt to "cover every card" for the federated drive of the Jewish community and for Israel Bonds...

...I propose this not primarily out of concern for the funding of Jewish education, though many Jewish young people, even in affluent communities, are not being taught because Jewish education costs the kind of money that many parents cannot or do not want to afford...

...it is a Jewish community of five and a half million people, the largest in the world, that is in jeopardy, and it is therefore we...

...Therefore, Jewish culture and knowledge should be as much a public business of the entire Jewish community, in coalition of all its forces, as are Jewish problems, or the problems of Jews...

...They have been willing to spend relatively few dollars on new programs or on strengthening older ones, but despite all of the seemingly brave sloganizing which has been the staple of Jewish life for the last few years about "reordering our priorities" and "a new agenda for Jewish life in the 70's," no one has dared commission a study to ask the hard questions on paper: What would Judaism as a top priority cost, and whose ox would be gored in the process...

...Along with all concerned Jews, I continue to worry with Israel, but never to worry about it...

...who can now, must now...

...In this framework the un-Jewish Jew who is totally committed becomes possible, becomes fact, becomes, even, an ideal...

...A terrible suspicion exists that the contemporary Jewish community is at its best when there are concrete problems to be faced, such as high political and military drama in the Middle East, or confrontation over Soviet Jewry with the Bolshevik superpower, that the free Diaspora is at odds with itself when there is a pause in external crisis and it must ask itself questions about inner content and value...

...His books include THE FRENCH EMANCIPATION AND THE JEWS and THE ZIONIST IDEA...

...There is no reason to presume that young people in the Diaspora, who are equally idealistic (witness the large number of Jewish young people in the Peace Corps) should not be asked for equivalent commitments...

...The problem which Jewish learning raises for our communal leaders is that it poses a radical challenge to values and even to lifestyles...

...These are developments to be welcomed, but the issue is not just a few more dollars, or a few more percentage points of the communal dollar...

...We are witness to a kind of polarization in which those who care seem to care much more than they used to, and those who don't much care, care less than before and know nothing...

...Adjunct Professor of Jewish History at Columbia University, and President of the American Jewish Congress...

...The expectation was that as a result of the creation of the Jewish state, the bulk of world Jewry would choose aliyah, and that the fringe elements which remained behind would disappear...

...It is expensive and uncomfortable — it will soil our dinner jackets — to go down into the boiler room and try to stanch the seepage...

...How are we to deal with a Diaspora which refuses to vanish and refuses to survive...

...The existing structures of the Jewish community have faced the question of the survival of Jewish education and Jewish culture in an essentially unserious way...

...It is possible to be passionately involved as a Jew, especially in the Diaspora, in all of the supposedly tangible problems of the Jewish community, while living in a completely non-Jewish, even un-Jewish, personal style...

...It is therefore necessary to neutralize it by defining it as, at most, a private matter...

...If commitments such as these were not at play, why would we be more involved with Jewish poor than with black poor, or with the needs of Israel than with those of Bangladesh...

...I have been a Zionist since my teens and I certainly assent to the proposition — it is obvious and self-evident — that world Jewry's involvement with Israel provides it with its central contemporary meaning and verve...

...One can do battle against the enemies of the Jews without understanding what it is that the Jews may be affirming...

...Anti-Semitism, recreation in a Jewish setting, social needs or the political defense of Israel — such concerns are tangible, unideological and nonpartisan...

...It has not defined the strategy of its own survival...

...One can raise money for Israel without knowing Hebrew, without understanding the internal spirit of the Jewish tradition...

...Such a conclusion is possible in the light of believable projections, and we may then have to come to some orchestration of objectives and some moderation of the rhetoric...

...It is because I am a Zionist, however, that I question the Arthur Hertzberg is Rabbi of Temple Emanu-EI in Englewood, N. J...

...This article is, however, not concerned with the corollaries and implications of its basic proposal...

...In the city of New York, a beginning was made toward such an effort more than a year ago when its Board of Jewish Education published advertisements in the major newspapers giving a telephone number which parents could call if they wanted to be directed to a Jewish school for their children...

...I suspect that the true reason — not the sham cover-ups that are advanced as rationalizations — is that the Jews of the world have not yet come to a true accounting with Western secular culture...

...This requires one fundamental change in the structure of the Jewish community...

...This has been so for a generation, and, for at least as long, Jewish leaders have called on the whole of the Jewish constituency to rally together and to canvass one another for support...

...Such a reordering of priorities would require, first, not a casual or evolutionary change of the communal budget, but a revolutionary change in the communal commitment...

...There remain, of course, the various religious movements and cultural ideologies, Zionist and non-Zionist, to suggest that we can be saved by theology, or mitzvot, or Hebrew, or Yiddish...

...It is even suggested that in the acts of giving and caring, of worrying about Israel and defending it in the public mind of the free world, the Jews of the Diaspora find not only the central meaning of their contemporary experience but also the guarantee of their own survival as Jews...

...but it is a partial truth...