Jews in America: What's Your Noun?
We pass by the building that used to house the
Ramm Printing Press, one of the largest Jewish presses in the world, famous for
typesetting the Talmud in the way we’ve been studying it ever since. From this building, Jewish thought and
religious texts were spread like never before.
In this building were also printed Yiddish literature, Chassidic
teachings, and an occasional Socialist pamphlet. What a world that must have been, the world
that brought my grandparents to life. A
world where Jews mixed and mingled with the society around them, and lived as
Jews outwardly. A world in which they were the society at large, and
maintained connection to their identity, though not all in the same way. Only remnants can now be seen, echoes of a
distant past. A street named for the Jews. Faded shop names in a Yiddish that now almost
no one on the street speaks or understands.
Though
I am certain I mentioned it, and it’s clear in my email signature, I learn at
the end of my tour that Daniel didn’t know that I was a rabbi. Which helps explain why he was somewhat taken
aback at some of my questions as we meandered the cobblestoned streets and
passed where the great Synagogue had stood, now a construction site awaiting
possible rebuilding.
He seems a bit flummoxed when I ask him,
because I am a rabbi after all, to define his Jewish identity for me. He doesn’t seem to understand the
question. So, I elaborate. “How do your Jewishness and your
Lithuanianness work together?” He shares
with me that it’s complicated and that for him, they are two separate parts of
who he is. In fact, he moved to Israel
when he was in his 20s, and gave up his Lithuanian citizenship, and now if he
wants it back, he has to forfeit his Israeli citizenship. The two cannot coexist, he seems to say. And, he doesn’t have a problem with that,
because in many ways that’s how it has always been: The Jews of Europe, no
matter how integrated, no matter what percentage of the population, no matter
how many shop windows were in Yiddish, were almost always other.
I don’t know why I asked Daniel that question
right there, but I’m grateful he answered me and took me seriously, because I
think that this personal heritage and history tour gave me an opportunity to
reflect on my own identity in the face of my personal history. Jewish Identity and what it means has been an
interest since before I was even considering the rabbinate. My Master’s Thesis was predicated on
interviews of eighth-graders asking them about their Jewish identity. Among the questions I asked my eighth-grade
subjects was a question that I had been grappling with myself at the time, and
which I imagine is also on many of our minds as well, as we navigate the
interesting times we’re living through.
So, I’d like to ask all of us tonight to think
about and answer for ourselves the following.
If you had to define yourself, would you say that you are a Jewish
American or an American Jew? Would you
say that you are first and foremost an American or first and foremost a Jew? I do recognize that among us are family and
loved ones who are not Jewish, and so I ask for you to think about this
question and how you would define someone in your life. American Jew, or Jewish American? What’s the difference? As I see it, following standard grammar, it’s
a question of which is your noun and which is the modifier?
Perhaps for you there is no distinction between
the two. The way I understand it, it’s
the question of whether we feel that we are Americans who happen to be Jewish,
the same way that our neighbors are Americans who happen to be Catholic. Or are we Jews who happen to live in America
the way we’ve lived in other places before?
Where does one part of our identity begin and the other end? Can we, and do we, find balance between the
two? Has that balance changed in the
last number of years? Has that balance
shifted for us since October 7?
Some of us had maybe thought for some time that
we were Jewish Americans. The last
number of years, with the Tree of Life shooting, the Charlottesville rally, and
the ugly antisemitic responses to the ongoing wars in Israel maybe made us feel
more like Jew was our noun. We sense the increased antisemitism, and we feel it. I’ve spoken from this bima before about the
rising antisemitism coming at us from all sides. This past year especially has forced us to
ask whether this is the new normal: additional security assessments and hired
guards just to send our kids to school.
We’re right to be skittish. We’re
right to be vigilant. We’re not right to
give up on Judaism in America. And we’re
not right to give up on fighting for the kind of America that made this nation
a haven and a home for Jews unlike any history has ever seen.
This past year has seen much handwringing about
the state of American Judaism. In The
Atlantic, Franklin Foer describes it as the end of the Golden Age of Jews in
America.
“America’s ascendant political movements—MAGA
on one side, the illiberal left on the other—would demolish the last pillars of
the consensus that Jews helped establish. They regard concepts such as
tolerance, fairness, meritocracy, and cosmopolitanism as pernicious shams. The
Golden Age of American Jewry has given way to a golden age of conspiracy,
reckless hyperbole, and political violence, all tendencies inimical to the
democratic temperament. Extremist thought and mob behavior have never been good
for Jews. And what’s bad for Jews, it can be argued, is bad for America.”[1]
Joshua Liefer’s hot off the press book Tablets
Shattered describes what he calls the end of An American Jewish Century. “It is…no surprise that the prevailing
emotions of contemporary American Jewish life are anxiety and division. American Jewish life is marked more by
conflict than consensus than at any point since the first half of the twentieth
century because the foundations of American Jewish life that were built in the
last century have begun to crumble.”[2]
Liefer here, and Foer in his article, look to
the declining role of major Jewish institutions in America, like Federations
and Jewish denominations, including the Reform movement, which have sizable
endowments, and declining influence and membership. On a smaller scale is the synagogue, with
overall declining numbers of members and more mergers and dissolutions. Foer and Liefer also put much emphasis on shifting
and diminishing connections to Israel and Zionism. They see it as on par with a crumbling institution
in terms of the influence on the Jewish American community. The rocky foundations were made evident on
October 8.
I’m curious if Liefer considered subtitling his
book “The End of a Jewish American Century.”
Either way, both of these works see the changes in American Judaism as
indicators that we cannot trust that the life we have lived as Jews in America
will continue in the same way. On this I
agree. And, I believe that it will be
the Jewish community’s ability to recreate itself which will hopefully give
rise to a new Jewish American Century.
Nowhere in history, until the establishment of
Israel, have Jews been able to even ponder that question that I asked us all to
consider. When Napoleon emancipates the
Jews they must declare on oath that they are French first. When Germany emancipates the Jews, many find
that the only way to true equality is through conversion to Christianity. My tour guide Daniel certainly couldn’t
conceive of being a combination of Jew and Lithuanian. And yet here, though imperfect, Jews have
been able to ascend the social ladder in business, politics, and media in
unprecedented ways.
We are a people of hope and a people that no
matter the circumstances have always been able to adapt. Though my trust in this nation has been
shaken over the last years, I have come to disagree with my friends who say
America and the West are completely lost and the only future for Jews is
Israel. I still believe in America, a
nation as hopeful as our people. A
nation, like Judaism, which asks us to live up to high ideals. It is these democratic ideals of this great
nation, the norms established through fight and protest, and the expanding of
rights to broader and broader groups of citizens which are the bedrock of why
America has been different.
We ought to pay attention when those norms are
challenged. We ought to pay attention
when the liberal “small-d” democratic order is strained by those who would not
agree to play by the rules, or who believe the rules don’t apply to them, or
who fix the rules or the referees in their favor. This is a danger to Jews in America because
it is a danger to America. We ought to
pay attention and speak out when politicians use antisemitic images in mailers
or mainstream antisemitic ideas. We also
ought to pay attention and call out when tactics that have been used against
Jews in the past are used on other groups, accusing them of spreading disease,
stealing jobs, or being responsible for missing pets or people.
Things are also not always as bleak as they may
seem, and it would be a disservice to our history to not acknowledge that
though there are many, many faults and much work to do, America has made
significant progress. Earlier this year,
Rabbi David Wolpe offered the following anecdote, imagining a conversation with
his great-great-grandfather. “Great-great-grandfather,” he says, “There are
antisemites at Harvard!” The reply:
“There are Jews at Harvard?” “Yes, but
some of them hate Israel.” “There’s an
Israel!”
Living outside the Land and now the State of
Israel, there are what my friend Rabbi Josh Franklin describes as two
reactions, each based in the Babylonian Exile.
When in the 6th century BCE, some 2600 years ago, our
ancestors were sent away from their home by force, the Psalmist, as one
reaction to the new reality, records that they offered a song of lament:
“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat, sat
and wept, as we remembered Zion. There
on the poplars we hung up our lyres, for our captors asked us there for songs,
our tormentors, for amusement: “Sing us one of the songs of Zion.” How can we
sing a song of Adonai on alien soil? If
I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither…”[3]
The attitude expressed here in Psalm 137 is one
of defeat, destruction, and exile. One
of being forced to give up traditions and worrying that a connection to the
past, to that which provided a sense of identity and place would be lost. In the aftermath of these last years, we can
mourn, we can bemoan our lot, we can hang up our instruments and await
redemption.
The second is a reaction like the prophet
Jeremiah who, witnessing and living through the exile, offers the people the
following advice from God:
Build houses and live in them, plant gardens
and eat their fruit. You should take wives and give birth to sons and
daughters; and you should take wives for your sons, and give your daughters to
husbands, that they may bear sons and daughters. Multiply there, do not
decrease. And seek the welfare of the city to which I have exiled you and pray
to Adonai in its behalf; for in its prosperity you shall prosper.”[4]
We have experience living a Jeremian
lifestyle. In America’s prosperity, the
Jewish community has prospered. In
America’s freedom, Jewish communities have been free to evolve, develop,
improvise and experiment, to become less insular, or more.
Additionally, Jeremiah teaches us that we are
supposed to do two things, seek the welfare of the place and pray to God on its
behalf. We are accustomed, at least on
the High Holy Days, to offering a prayer for our nation, though our Siddur does
include it in its Shabbat section, and most siddurim around the world include a
prayer for the government.
Prayer without action, we know, is in vain,
which is perhaps why God first says to seek the welfare of the city: Doresh et Shlom ha’ir. Seek the peace of the city. Work toward peace, do what it takes to make
the nation in which you live the best it can be, the most open to difference,
the most tolerant, the most fair, the most merit-based, the most open to
creativity, the most open to dissent, and the safest for all its
inhabitants. In this nation, we don’t
just work toward it, we get a say, we get a vote. We can use what we know is good for the Jews
to make decisions about who will lead this great nation that allows us to hold
on to both our Jewishness and our Americanness with pride and with a sense that
they belong together, not bifurcated, not split from each other, not in
opposition to each other.
It’s the end of my tour with my guide Daniel,
and we are back in the center of old Vilnius, just a block from my hotel. The skies have cleared. The restaurants dry off their chairs and
tables out in the plazas, awaiting the tourists for dinner. I thanked Daniel for the wonderful tour and
the good conversation. I wish him well
and take a moment to reflect on the history I have seen. And as I look around, I imagine what it might
have been like for my grandparents, and
their families and friends to have lived in this place. And I wonder how they would have defined
themselves as they walked these very streets.
Shanah Tovah.
