Jews in the Land of Promise

...The whole sequence of events aroused a new Jewish consciousness...

...Idon't want the Jewish community that has raised and nurtured me to disappear...

...at present approximately 5.5 million people call themselves Jews, and there is considerable reason to doubt that this figure will increase in the years ahead...

...Louis Farrakhan's version of black pride is gaining ground, to judge from the huge auditoriums he fills...

...Finally, I am not ready to stop worrying about anti-Semitism...

...The first generation of Jewish immigrants was less traditional or aligned with Jewish life and values than it was made out to be by children and grandchildren...

...Since then the unmarried have married and had a couple of kids, raising the rate to roughly 2.3 (a figure gleaned from Steven M. Cohen and Paul Ritterband's New York surveys...

...In thefall of 1980, shortly after Silberman began working on his book, the Jewish birth rate was somewhere between 1.2-1.9 per couple, well below replacement levels...

...Where Silberman comes upon material that might darken the bright picture he is painting, he characterizes it as based on "wildly improbable assumptions," or on confusing and contradictory statistics...

...Intermarriage was not always a part of the American Jewish scene...

...Maybe we have simply become used to the double standard when it pertains to the Jews...

...it also results in children having to shuttle back and forth between two communities...

...for me, it began to have the ring of smugness two-thirds the way through the book...

...Given the bleak expectations of Jewish disappearance, you could actually say they are better...

...The level of observance in the home may change from what it was during the previous marriage, or some of the new family members may not be Jewish, forcing a choice between family integration and religious identification that few children, never mind adults, are capable of making...

...Turnover is fairly high," becausesome "cannot accept the system of beliefs" and the "demands of Orthodox law," but that is not terribly important...

...what is more, among the 18-29-year-olds in the sample a mere 16 per cent would reject it...

...Present conditions compare favorably with the idealized past...

...This removes them from the roots of their being, for language in general and Hebrew in particular is the source of Jewish culture...

...To be sure, the method of their demise would not be as horrific as the one employed in Nazi Europe...

...Nor are these men atypical...

...They appeared poised to wipe away the last best hope of the Jewish people, the living symbol of its renewal, with a population that had the highest Jewish birth rate anywhere, thus intensifying the fear about extinction...

...In A Certain People the aged seem to have faded into the sun...

...The number of Jewish day schools is growing, people are giving more money to the U J A, attachment to Israel is strong (a little over a third of the Jews in the land of promise have visited the Promised Land), and Jewish pride (like the ethnic pride of others) fills the country...

...That certainly seems worth noting, but it is missing from Silberman's portrait...

...With the stigma of divorce largely gone from the American scene, and with a growing emphasis on passages of adult life, people who have finished raising their children and feel unhappy in their relationships are willing to try an alternative lifestyle in ways that previous generations of Jews would never have contemplated...

...The Orthodox are part of the pattern: In one community where 10 years ago a single rabbi in the Beth Din (Jewish Court) spent half his time on divorces, three rabbis are dealing with them full time and are overworked...

...Not only does divorce produce single-parent households...

...To date, American Jews have found no organized way of responding to these new Jewish problems...

...It has been amply documented that educated parents continue to have at most two children on the average...

...Perhaps the worst consequence of all this is the reorganization of family life...

...Many contend that intermarriage cannot be considered separately from the matter of Jewish education and community involvement...

...American Jewry became convinced it would go to the brink, gaze at the end, and in an act of courage preempt its physical and spiritual destruction...

...In Ronald Reagan's America, where saying things are good seems to be considered enough to make them so, that is in perfect pitch...

...Jewish divorce remains the lowest of the three major religions...

...The author is a reader and redactor...

...Here in public, in black and white, thegoyim were saying precisely what many American Jews had begun to fear: They, like their European counterparts, would disappear...

...Item (as Silberman might say): Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, a prominent modern Orthodox rabbi who for years prior to his recent move to Israel attracted the unaffiliated to New York's Lincoln Square Synagogue, told me that just before the move he had a Thanksgiving celebration...

...The news is good...

...The content of what remains of the Judaism of theShapiros of DuPont, lo say nothing of rank and file Jews, strikes me as too thin a membrane to hold up the Jewish future...

...Once thought immune from the process, Jews no longer are...

...In theU.S...

...Similarly, that only one in four and not four in 10 are intermarrying (if Sil-berman's "low" figures are correct) does not give me a feeling of hope...

...As for the religion, it is not abandoned...

...another fellow named Gerald Greenwald is vice-chairman of Chrysler...

...The explosion in the number of Jewish retirement communities in such areas as southern Florida is a demographic time bomb...

...Still, this will be a popular book...

...Their influence in journalism, both print and broadcast, is undeniable...

...American consensus forbids anti-Semitism...

...He suddenly realized, he said, that of all the Riskins sitting around the table only his immediate family had not been touched by intermarriage...

...it merely produces a false sense of security...

...On college campuses young Jews are not always trying to flee their religion these days either—although, granted, they have few if any objections to dating or even marrying non-Jews...

...He does not mean to imply "that the Cowans are representative of intermarried couples" (just 20 per cent of Gentile spouses convert to Judaism, and "the level of commitment varies"), yet Milton Himmelfarb has noted that "our imports are better than our exports...

...The people about whom Silberman is writing will be relieved and cheered by his message: "Right on...

...He and young Jews like him, he insists, "have no bones to pick with their Jewish baggage...

...In essence, the good news is that the Jews have managed the transformation to being Americans without having to give up their outer identities...

...His long book reads as smoothly as a Time cover story, with the items corresponding to the magazine's little boxes...

...More to the point, relatively few Jewish couples dissolving their marriages go to a Beth Din and traditionalists view secular divorces as "illegal" in terms of Jewish law, creating great difficulty when the question of remarriage within the faith arises...

...Even Orthodox Jews, who were looked upon, in the words of one sociologist, as "a residual category," would gradually yet inexorably evaporatein the cauldron of a relentlessly open society, the melting pot of America...

...If the news is so good, why do I feel so bad...

...The European experience is quite similar...

...When both members of a divorced couple remarry other problems develop for their offspring...

...I'm O.K...

...Louis Farrakhan and his black brand of anti-Semitism notwithstanding, "the black-Jewish congressional coalition has remained strong, as have the alliances with black mayors such as Thomas Bradley in Los Angeles...

...instead, opec is fading into impotence...

...Now Silberman's "good news" is that it is about 25 per cent...

...Israel emerged from the ensuing Six Day War stronger than before, however, and the most marginal American Jews discovered latent feelings of peo-plehood bubbling up out of nowhere that they expressed in the form of unprecedented contributions to the United Jewish Appeal's Israel Emergency Fund...

...Well, despite Silberman's splendid prose and comprehensiveness, I cannot share his optimism...

...An unexpected by-product of Jewish divorce, it turns out, is that one of the former partners (most commonly the husband and father) must leave the community in which the family has resided...

...I don't think it is enough to say that the Jews are not vanishing, they are simply changing...

...Contrary to the widely held notion of assimilation having been the price of success, too, Silberman learns from his reading and traveling that things were not terrific in the old days...

...A fellow named Irving Shapiro, active in the U J A, was able to reach the top at DuPont...

...The People of the Book are fast becoming a people for whom the basic sacred texts of their tradition are accessible through translation alone...

...Absent, too, is any serious discussion of the aging Jewish population...

...Silberman concludes: "The gulf that once separated the generations has been largely closed...

...The "sins" of the parents are in these circumstances visited upon the children, who find themselves removed from their familiar surroundings whenever they are with the parent who has taken up residence elsewhere...

...The in-trareligious divisive potential of the expanding number of Jewish divorces, therefore, cannot be ignored...

...That some have succeeded financially, politically and otherwise without neutralizing their names or totally denying their Jewish affiliation, that Shapiro turned down an invitation to join acoun-try club in Wilmington because it normally excluded Jews, is less than satisfying...

...To support his fundamentally optimistic view, Silberman cites a variety of social scientists and researchers whose studies appear to confirm the vitality of American Jewish life...

...How are problems of this kind being handled by American Jewry...

...In closing, Silberman tells us "nothing could be more significant than the absence of any significant upturn in anti-Semitism...

...Anyone looking for new findings in this work, incidentally, will be disappointed...

...It deprives grandchildren of important role models who contribute to Jewish continuity...

...Silberman concedes that 59 per cent of I he Jews in the Greater Boston Community Survey (which he frequently cites as trend-revealing) said they would be neutral or accept intermarriage, and only 34 per cent declared they would strongly oppose or discourage it...

...No serious energy-crisis backlash developed...

...All this, mind you, while staying in touch with their Jewishness (that is, their ethnicity) or their Judaism (their religion...

...Silberman implies it can, or at least that it will do...

...We may be changing, but change should not be mistaken for dissolution...

...That it will do is not...

...My difference with Silberman, I think, is that what I see as at best remission of the ultimately debilitating disease of American Jewish assimilation, he sees asacure...

...author, "People of the Book," "The Gate Behind the Wall" In 1964 the now dead but then widely read Look magazine published a cover story entitled "The Vanishing American Jew...

...For someone confronting the precipitous decline of the '70s, a return to the 2.3 birth rate registered in the previous decade may be heartening...

...I do not mean to suggest that all is bleak...

...The shut he helped organize, the Pacific Jewish Center, has nearly 300 members, virtually all of them baaleiteshuva, individuals who have returned to the tradition...

...In 1971 the National Jewish Population Survey found that in the 25-29-year-old group, 15 per cent of the households consisted of separated or divorced individuals...

...In the late 1950s the rate hovered somewhere between 10-15 per cent, although some studies were pegging it higher in particular sections of the country (18 per cent in New York, 37 per cent in Marin County, California...

...In a generation, none of his Riskin relatives would be Jews...

...Coming barely 20 years after the world had witnessed the actual vanishing of the European Jew, and in a period the American Jewish community itself felt was marked by extraordinary change and ferment, the article aroused a great deal of discussion and no small amount of anxiety...

...To those concerned that a one or two tenths margin beyond replacement will not overcome the inroads of intermarriage, Silberman responds that the intermarriage rate has been exaggerated...

...You're O.K...

...That is slightly above the statistical replacement level of 2.1...

...But the highest Jewish rate occurs in the 35-44-year-old age group(10 per cent)—in other words, among those in their early middle years, whose children are especially likely to be affected by and conscious of the divorce...

...There is an additional aspect to our pessimism...

...Their names, noses and affiliations remain intact...

...The news is almost as good in the areas of birth rate and intermarriage, the entrances and exits of Jewish life...

...Since an overwhelming number of American Jewish men and women attend college, the likelihood that they will have families large enough to maintain the Jewish community is quite small...

...Ihope he is right...

...Black leaders have been largely silent or tacitly supportive, including Mayor Bradley of Los Angeles...

...They are two and a half times more likely than the population at large to be included in Who's Who in America (and probably three and a half more times likely to buy it...

...In 1920, Julius Drach-sler found a rate of slightly over 1 per cent...

...Silberman does not say...

...They pretty much invented the motion picture industry...

...The fears" about hostile Americans out there trying to do in the Jews, Silberman assures the reader, have also "turned out to be groundless...

...Moreover, because he is such a consummate collector of facts that he simply labels "items," the bad news can always be offset by some anecdote or opposite illustration...

...If that were not bad enough, because Jewish communities continue to focus on wholly constituted families as the primary players in local life, those who lack the status may be unable to participate fully...

...Jews by choice may be a better and more lasting article than Jews by birth...

...He has taken the often convoluted prose of social scientists and translated their ideas with uncommon skill to render them accessible to the lay reader...

...the tendency to see two children as the norm goes back to the turn of the century...

...In addition, a new phenomenon is emerging: the breakup of Jewish couples after 20-30 years of marriage...

...it places a skewed burden on the receiving Jewish communities, the elderly having no need for, say, day schools, yet requiring other services that strain the limits of local resources...

...Scores of Jews are rejoining the fold in one way or another...

...Rather, it iscloser lo 25 per cent...

...it robs existing Jewish institutions of active membership and financial support...

...Reviewed by Samuel Heilman Professor of sociology and Jewish studies, Queens College, City University of New York...

...But I am afraid that saying things are good really is not enough to make them so...

...Throughout America there are havurot, fellowships practicing a kind of intimate and communally heightened Judaism...

...On the other hand, he urges us, "consider Rachel Cowan," a convert living as "an observant Jew...

...In the high academic strata, in politics, the professions, real estate, just about every sphere of influence, the Jews have made it...

...The reconstituted families, made up of a variety of semi-related individuals, pose socially and emotionally complicated situations that are sometimes made more complex by the injection of religious differences into the mix...

...In California, that never-never-land of American life, Michael Medved, screenwriter and author, raised in an assimilated home, has discovered that "Judaism is a total way of life" and, we are told, has become "a devoutly Orthodox Jew...

...Silberman's maternal grandparents had nine children (mine had 17), but in the U.S...

...Besides, at 2.3 or 2.2 the Jews can hold their own, maybe even grow a little...

...In a bit of fractured prose and mixed metaphor, Silberman quotes one of the authors of The Jewish Catalog, the new Shulchan Aruch(Code of Jewish Law) of the 1970s and the 1980s...

...Furthermore, it is still the case that American Jews have the lowest birth rate of all comparably aged religious groups...

...we Jews are here to stay...

...It is not—as Egon Mayer, author of an American Jewish Committee study, has claimed—40 per cent...

...Can supporting the U J A, retaining an obviously Jewish name, or even a two-week trip to Israel take the place of a firm footing in Hebrew that allows first-hand exploration of Jewish texts and traditions...

...That the exchange has occurred is certainly beyond doubt...

...No one likes to hear bad news...

...A1944 New Haven study by Ruby Kennedy reported 2.6 per cent...

...And the pressure on Israel to reach accommodations with its sworn enemies does not let up...

...Three years later, in 1967, Arab forces massed at the borders of a seemingly vulnerable Israel...

...Several dimensions of American Jewish life Silberman glosses over...

...While still a small proportion of the total, such separations are becoming less rare...

...In his chronicle of the American Jewish experience, particularly over the last four decades, Charles E. Silberman echoes that new Jewish consciousness: The situation is not so bad as you may have thought...

...Others, including myself, see it as insufficient to counter losses brought about by assimilation and its encouragement of small families (let alone the extraordinary toll the Holocaust took upon world Jewry...

...It would not vanish...

...Whatever the upsurge in attendance at Jewish day schools, though, the vast majority of Jewish children do not go to them and cannot read the Bible in its original Hebrew...

...Divorce is a glaring example...

...Over the last 25 years, the proportion of the Jewish Family Service caseload involving separation and divorce has gone from 5 to 30 per cent...

...To be sure, the most objective data on the subject, the 1972-78 National Opinion Research Center surveys, indicate that in the U.S...

...Silberman is a wonderful storyteller...

...This would instead be "a holocaust of our own making," as some Jews put it—the result of low birth rates, increasing intermarriage accompanied by individuals and families leaving the community, as well as by a dilution of the character of Jewish life among those very few remaining...