At home in exile Why diaspora is good for the Jews

JEWS WHO HAVE made their scholarly reputations studying other peoples and communities sometimes return, in the autumn of their careers, to studying their own. Simon Schama, best known as a European historian and art critic (though he did write an early book on the Rothschilds), recently produced a high-profile BBC series that became a book entitled "The Story of the Jews." Now Alan Wolfe, a sociologist and political scientist highly regarded for his work on American democracy and Christian evangelicals, has published "At Home in Exile: Why Diaspora Is Good for the Jews." It's good for the Jews that Wolfe has tackled this subject. He has long been one of America's best nonfiction book reviewers and deploys that talent again and again in "At Home in Exile." En route to making his own argument, Wolfe surveys a wide swath of other writing on the subject, from Chaim Nachman Bialik, Ahad Ha'am and Simon Dubnow to Ruth Wisse, Irving Kristol and Anthony Julius. Wolfe's responses can be cutting - he's particularly tough on writers who use trumped-up charges of anti-Semitism to pre-empt criticism of Israel - but they're never gratuitous. Given that Jewish identity has never been Wolfe's area of academic research, his command of the work he's discussing is impressive. Still, if Wolfe had merely written a series of essays about thinkers who have explored Jewish identity in the Diaspora, he might have produced a better book. That's because for all of his insight, his own arguments are no more convincing than some of those he criticizes. Wolfe makes two basic claims. The first is that, as his subtitle suggests, "Diaspora is good for the Jews." But who says it isn't? Yes, early Zionist thinkers disparaged Diaspora life as unsafe, shallow and soul-destroying, and some contemporary Israelis - Wolfe focuses on A.B. Yehoshua and Hillel Halkin - echo those arguments today. Yes, some American Jews believe that Europe remains as anti-Semitic as ever. In response, Wolfe usefully documents how vibrant contemporary European Jewish life actually is. But Wolfe is primarily writing for an American Jewish audience about the status of Jews in the United States. And here, the "Diaspora negation" he sets out to rebut barely exists. Even the staunchest American Zionists do not claim that Jews cannot live secure, authentic, fulfilling lives in the United States. To the contrary, America's most prominent Zionists - people like Alan M. Dershowitz, Abraham H. Foxman and William Kristol - also tend to be passionate believers in America's hospitability to the Jews. Were Wolfe arguing that Diaspora is not merely "good for the Jews" but better than living in a Jewish state, he'd be asking for a fight. Were he even to argue that Diaspora Jewry could thrive in Israel's absence, he'd be making a controversial claim. But although critical of Israel's rightward political trajectory (he approvingly cites my own work on the subject), Wolfe shies away from those claims. As a result, when he stops answering early Zionist thinkers and their Israeli progeny and begins addressing contemporary American Jews, he starts shadow boxing. "The notion persists," Wolfe writes, "that Diaspora Jews, cut off from the language, traditions and sense of solidarity that nationhood offers, are being unfaithful to their Jewishness." Persists among whom? Except among homesick Israeli immigrants and some Orthodox Jews who see living in the land of Israel as a religious imperative, there are precious few American Jews who think that residence in the United States makes them "unfaithful to their Jewishness." Wolfe offers no evidence that many American Jews actually feel the "unfaithfulness" he wants to cure them of. Even the staunchest American Zionists don't claim Jews can't live fulfilling lives here. Wolfe's second claim is that what will make Diaspora "good for the Jews" in the years to come is Jewish universalism. "The lost universalism that has been so much a part of Jewish tradition," he writes, "may well be prepared for a comeback." I doubt it. Like Wolfe, I admire Jewish efforts to use our history of persecution as motivation for defending other vulnerable peoples. But when Wolfe claims that this form of universalistic Jewish identity is poised for a comeback, he's mistaking his own preferences for reality on the ground. PART OF THE problem is that Wolfe conflates the organized American Jewish community - groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Commitee (Aipac), the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee - with the mass of American Jews. When it comes to the organized Jewish community, he's right to deplore a "lost universalism." American Jewish groups, which in the decades after World War II focused largely on civil rights and civil liberties, have since the 1970s turned much of their attention to defending the Israeli government against external criticism. But contra Wolfe, there's little reason to believe they'll shift back. American Jewish organizations have become increasingly dependent on a small group of superrich donors who are significantly more conservative than American Jews as a whole. They also draw more and more of their support, especially in the younger generations, from the Modern Orthodox community, where Jewish identity is strong and political opinion leans to the right. Among the bulk of American Jews, by contrast, most of whom have little contact with the organizations that speak in their name, universalism doesn't need to make a "comeback" because it never left. A key reason American Jewish organizations depend increasingly on rich donors and the Modern Orthodox, in fact, is that non-Orthodox American Jews are today so universalistic that many find the prospect of joining Jewish organizations ghettoizing. They are, however, enormously overrepresented in all manner of progressive causes. If Wolfe wants ordinary Diaspora Jews to look beyond tribe and seek justice and equality in the broader world, he's already got his wish. But Wolfe wants more than that. He believes this universalism will not merely improve the world, but also keep Jews Jewish. Fears that liberal, secular Jews are assimilating, he claims, are overblown. "The Jews of the postwar period, it turns out, did have Jewish grandchildren," he writes. "They simply have turned out to be far more inclined toward universalism than those who came before them." That's true. But one way in which those grandchildren are manifesting their universalism is by marrying non-Jews at an astonishing rate. In 1970,17 percent of American Jews married gentiles. Today, among non-Orthodox Jews, it's 71 percent. These intermarriages are a tribute to the universalism Wolfe celebrates. Many young Jews find that the traditions of tolerance, cosmopolitanism and sympathy for the underdog bequeathed by American Jewish culture give them much in common with the well-educated, politically liberal gentiles with whom they share urban, blue-state America. The Jewish partners in these unions may feel there is something distinctly Jewish about their universalistic values. But given the woeful state of American Jewish education, they're unlikely to ground that belief in Jewish texts or Jewish history. As a result, as the generations pass, the universalism remains but its Jewish character grows thinner and thinner. According to an analysis by the sociologist Steven M. Cohen of data gathered by the Pew Research Center, only 43 percent of the children of intermarried parents identify as Jews. And even among those who do, only 17 percent marry Jews themselves. It's odd that secular Jews like Wolfe, who prize education in other realms, cannot see that education is the key to Jewish continuity too. "Days devoted to prayer and learning are hardly compatible with modern conditions," he writes. The truth is almost exactly the reverse. When American Jews were more ghettoized, Jewish continuity did not require Jewish learning. Today, when Jewish continuity is a choice, it does. NOWHERE IS THIS better illustrated than in the least universalistic of American Jewish populations: the ultraOrthodox (in Hebrew, Haredim, those who fear God). Unlike Modern Orthodox Jews, who seek to reconcile adherence to Jewish law with engagement in the wider world, the ultra-Orthodox cloister themselves so effectively that even today, some American-born ultraOrthodox Jews speak English with a Yiddish accent. In his book "The Pious Ones," the New York Times reporter Joseph Berger explores one wing of the ultra-Orthodox world - the Hasidim - and shows that "days devoted to prayer and learning" are quite "compatible with modern conditions." Hasidic life is booming. Because Hasidim have double or triple as many children as their more secular American Jewish counterparts, and because in their communities intermarriage is virtually nonexistent, their numbers are growing with astonishing speed. There are today more students in New York's ultra-Orthodox yeshivas than there are students in the Boston public schools. Berger cites studies suggesting that by century's end, ultra-Orthodox Jews may constitute a majority of all Jews in the United States. For people like Wolfe, who are interested in joining Jewish identity with progressive ideals, this is uncomfortable stuff. In the 20th century, American Jews made themselves politically synonymous with liberalism. Yet in the 21st, American Jewish life may be increasingly defined by people who prefer sex-segregated sidewalks and barely teach their children math. The most intriguing sections in Berger's book discuss the conflicts between Hasidim and the more secular, often Jewish, neighbors with whom they butt heads over issues of property, pluralism and women's rights (a subject ably detailed in Samuel Freedman's "Jew vs. Jew"). As the Hasidic population grows, these intra-Jewish conflicts most likely will too. For decades, liberal Jews have battled conservative Christians in America's culture wars. In the decades ahead, they may increasingly find that their culture war adversaries are fellow Jews. The real question isn't whether Diaspora is good for the Jews. It's what kind. PETER BEINART is an associate professor of journalism and political science at the City University of New York, a contributing editor at The Atlantic and a columnist for Haaretz.

In defense of the Jewish diaspora. Turning to his Jewish roots, Wolfe (Political Science/Boston Coll.; Political Evil: What It Is and How to Combat It, 2011, etc.) explores the long and often acrimonious debate between Jewish diaspora and Zionism. The author's study exposes a sometimes-shocking level of chauvinism displayed by pro-Zionist activists over the past two centuries, which has left a heritage in which even non-Israeli Jews often see themselves as second-class citizens compared to those living in the Holy Land. Wolfe sets out to demonstrate that Judaism has not merely survived the diaspora, but flourished in it, despite the horrid testimony of Hitler and Stalin. In fact, argues the author, it may be in diaspora that Jews most truly fulfill their mission to the world. Wolfe introduces readers to a number of intellectuals on both sides of the debate, some well-known and others quite obscure. He also brings up a shower of -isms: selectivism, particularism, universalism, nationalism and, of course, Zionism, just to name a few. Yet he manages to stop short of turning the book into a dry intellectual history by returning continually to current applications for the ideas expressed. For instance, Wolfe takes on the Jewish tendency toward pessimism, countering the hand-wringing over assimilation and intermarriage to emphasize the strength of a global faith community that has overcome astounding obstacles. Living in Israel was not a prerequisite for success as a people. "There are many ways to be Jewish," he writes. "The notion that there ought to be a contest for the worst way, and that the prize should go to those who live among non-Jews, seems increasingly perverse." In an age when the existence of a Jewish state, controversial though it may be, is taken for granted, Wolfe provides good fodder for Jews to debate the role of that state in their lives and in the life of their faith. A thought-provoking and optimistic look at global Judaism. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

One thing I had noticed about the academic study of religion is that scholars invariably study their own. I do not just mean that Mormons write books about Mormons or Catholics about Catholics. It goes deeper than that: mainline Protestants typically observe people much like themselves, as do Orthodox Jews. My membership in none of the above, it turned out, had given me something of an academic advantage. I may have lacked the insights that come from lifelong involvement with one particular faith. But in return I was widely viewed as someone writing about religion with no particular axe to grind. When a referee was needed, there I was. Those I studied generally treated me as an outsider but also as one making a special effort to understand them. Far from feeling excluded from their world, I felt, if anything, a bit wary about the warm embrace they offered. Yet the fact that I had spent so much time among deeply religious Christians made me increasingly aware of two ways in which my differences with them were insurmountable: I was Jewish by background and nonreligious by conviction. For me, the two had always been intertwined. My parents were not themselves religious, nor for that matter strongly committed to any ideology. (I recall my father telling me that when he grew up, everyone he knew was either a socialist, a communist, or a Zionist, but that he had managed to avoid all such identification.) Nonetheless my parents felt Jewish enough to arrange a bar mitzvah for me, and so without much conviction on their part or mine, I did my religious duty at the age of thirteen. That has pretty much been it. I do at times read the Old Testament--the prophets in particular appeal to me--but I cannot say that the angry God pictured therein is one I find especially attractive. It is not just that I have a hard time envisioning God creating the world and then meddling with it when we human beings displease him. The religious side of Judaism is as much about practice as it is about belief, and even in this realm I feel no urge to honor the tradition by following rules that at best seem arbitrary and at worst absurd. Although I know my share of rabbis, and even though I admire their learning and commitments to social justice, I cannot bring myself to regularly attend the synagogues of any of American Judaism's major branches. The only times I enter a shul are when I am invited to speak in one. I study religion but do not practice it, not even the one in which I was ostensibly raised. If people who write about religion tend to write about their own, perhaps the time had come for me to write about mine: those who take pride in being Jewish while having little interest in the beliefs and practices that make one Jewish. Put that way, it sounds so ungrateful, taking from a tradition without giving anything back. I do not think this is a fair charge, and I urge the reader to consider this book an attempt to return the favor that growing up Jewish offered me. Judaism, after all, is not just a religion: it is also a way of thinking that can take secular as well as religious form, and it is the latter that has inspired me the most. David Goldberg, the London-based Liberal rabbi I mentioned in my introduction, does not know me, nor I him, but I felt he had me in mind when he wrote that "irreligious, nonbelieving doctors, scientists, social workers, teachers, artists, actors, tradespeople who still respond in however attenuated a fashion to some echo of their Jewish heritage and try, in however modest a way, to make the world a slightly better place for their being in it are in my view as much part of the wide campus of Jewish culture as the most devoutly observant Talmud scholar." The historian David Biale makes a distinction between two different varieties of Jewish secularism. One is represented by the biographer of Leon Trotsky, Isaac Deutscher, who called attention to the non-Jewish Jew: thinkers such as Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud (as well as Baruch Spinoza and Rosa Luxemburg) who because they "dwelt on the borderlines of various civilizations, religions, and national cultures" could "rise in thought above their societies, above their nations, above their times and generations, and . . . strike out mentally into wide new horizons and far into the future." The other secular tradition, according to Biale, involves thinkers who, however much they rejected Judaism as a religion, were steeped in Jewish history, identified with Jewish suffering, or were inevitably shaped by everything from which they had hoped to escape. In this latter category, Biale includes figures such as the poet of the Statue of Liberty Emma Lazarus, a Jew of Sephardic background, as well as nearly all the leading Zionists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, for whom nationalism rather than faith became their creed and cause. Biale does not want to conflate these two categories; calling thinkers Jewish just because of their background strikes him as verging on "a kind of racial determinism." As someone who does not consider himself as alienated as those in one of his categories or as conversant with Jewish sources as those in the other, I am not convinced that Biale is correct. For one thing, it is almost impossible to assign some key thinkers to either category; Freud, by example, is included by Deutscher as a non-Jewish Jew but also discussed by Biale because he wrote a book about Moses. In addition, times have changed, severing secular Jewish intellectuals, especially in the United States, from the immigrant experience that had once kept Hebrew and Yiddish culture alive. The most important reason, however, is that both kinds of secularism, at least before Israel came into existence, were shaped by the experience of exile they shared, as Deutscher so strongly emphasized. In the absence of boundaries within which membership is defined by a state, exilic people such as the Jews honored remembrance--or Zakhor , as they call it--by clinging to their history. They also attached special importance to the written word while tolerating a certain amount of ambiguity in the meaning of those words. Lacking armies, they came to appreciate that arguments were more likely to be settled by winning others over to your ideas than by taking over their land. Whatever one's level of identification with matters Jewish, these were the traits that tied all Jewish secularists together in the absence of a unified political collectivity. All this helps explain why those who have never read the Talmud can be so influenced by all those Jews of yore who did little else. The great Hebrew scholars of the past bequeathed to us who live in more fortunate times the opportunity to build upon their tradition and push it into territory that has little to do with how God's commands ought to be interpreted or what holidays should be celebrated and why. This Talmudic heritage, I believe, explains how I can feel Jewish without in any deep sense being Jewish. There was a time when religious Jews believed in God and argued furiously about him. There is now a time when huge numbers of fully assimilated Jews do not believe in God--and argue about everything anyway, including God. If the Jewish religion has been one long argument, I am home in that faith however much I fall short on knowledge of Hebrew, trips to Israel, or attendance at services. As with religion, so with ethnicity. I take great pride in the accomplishments of particular Jews. Some of my friends consider it odd that I seem always to know that a composer, writer, or politician is Jewish, even when their name, such as Lorenzo Da Ponte, gives no hint that he or she might be. (Da Ponte not only wrote the libretti to the great Mozart trilogy of The Marriage of Figaro , Don Giovanni , and Così Fan Tutte , he also became, in turn a Roman Catholic priest, a grocer in Pennsylvania, and a professor of Italian at Columbia University.) If I learn that the first Lord Snowdon, Anthony Armstrong Jones, the husband of Princess Margaret, was descended from a German Jewish financer, or that the actress Gwyneth Paltrow comes from a long line of rabbis and publishes her seder recipes online, those facts stick with me, seemingly forever, just as I happen to know the number of Boston Red Sox players of Jewish background in 2006 (four: Kevin Youkilis, Gabe Kapler, Craig Breslow, and Adam Stern).[11] Other people collect china or stamps; I collect ethnicities. For all my belief that I am who I am because of what I have done, there lingers a sense that what I have done is at least partially explained by who my ancestors were. At the same time that I am fascinated by the accomplishments of individual Jews, however, I bristle at the idea of Jewishness as a fixed category. Liberal universalism, in my view, should have little to do with tribalism; the whole point of there being ethnic groups is so that people can pick and choose between the best and worst of all of them. There was a time in my life when I was attracted to the idea that unencumbered selves, lacking strong ties to community, were incomplete, isolated, and therefore alienated from the society around them. But then I saw how quickly groups can become self-protective entities, requiring their members to suspend critical judgment in solidarity with what is, in the final analysis, an abstraction. For the same reason I so strongly disliked the statements of faith required by evangelical colleges, I reject the loyalty oath that says anyone who criticizes his or her group is disloyal to it. This overall fascination with ethnicity during the past few decades, I believe, has produced too much interest in the group and too little in the individuals who compose it. The past three or four decades have witnessed the creation of numerous departments of Jewish studies. While such departments attract people with all kinds of views, including those quite critical of Zionism, and even though I have relied on their research in writing this book, too many of them promote a self-defensive mentality in which anti-Semitism is all too often portrayed as never ending and Jews are held innocent for whatever transpires in the Middle East. Outside academia, it especially concerned me that the New Republic , a magazine I loved and that had honored me by naming me a contributing editor, and to which I was attracted because it was so critical of the trend toward identity politics of other groups, published the anti-Arab mutterings of its former editor-in-chief Martin Peretz. (My relationship with TNR ended in 2013.) Special pleading, and of the nastiest sort, had not only won out in the field of politics, it had also become prominent in the world of letters. The wishy-washy Judaism in which I had been raised was neither devout nor observant. But at least it wasn't ugly. Although I wrote this book against this tendency for Jews to put Jews first, I do not think of myself as a lonely dissenter confronting all the forces of the Jewish establishment, and not just because that establishment, as I have argued in this book, is beginning to crumble. In truth, there are many Jews like me. We have our own identity, so to speak, one in part shaped by Jewish history, culture, and faith, but one also influenced by the special privilege of living among others with different faith traditions. When I think of what being Jewish means to me, neither the Maccabees nor the Anti-Defamation League come first to mind. What does instead is the world of the Haskalah. It goes without saying that, in Amos Elon's words, it was a "pity" that it all came to an end, and in so brutal a manner. But there is no reason why enlightenment cannot live once again, if not in precisely the form it did then. Call this book, written in what used to be called old age, a return to what was around me but not especially visible to me when I was young. Not especially concerned with Jewish life in the glorious years when Israel came into being, I find myself preoccupied with Jewish matters when Israel is losing so many friends. My aim is not to add my name to its enemies list; I hope I have made clear throughout that for all Israel's problems, it is an established state that came into existence for justifiable reasons, and it ought to be allowed to find its way to a better future. Instead, I merely want to make my voice heard. Like so many others concerned about where Jewish nationalism has led, I prefer a Judaism that is special but not chosen to one that is chosen but not special. Jews survive best, for themselves and for the gentile world around them, when they do more than live but live up to an ideal. Excerpted from At Home in Exile: Why Diaspora Is Good for the Jews by Alan Wolfe All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.