The Jewish identity in America: Reassembly required

[question everything]

A long op-ed, here are selected paragraphs:

(snip)

Today, my two children are the only Jews of their generation in my extended family. Neither of my siblings are practicing Jews, nor are my four first cousins. I know many college and professional friends born to Jewish parents, but few identify as Jews — other than for ironic purposes or in fleeting moments of fashion. Nor did they raise Jewish children. What the Nazis were unable to accomplish, modern life and Western cultural ennui seemed to be finishing. I wasn’t going to be complicit.

(snip)

After the horror last month at Tree of Life in Pittsburgh, I thought of the most and least Jewish person I ever knew, my grandfather, Philip Pinsof (the last name was Anglicized at Ellis Island). Born in Chicago in 1910, a second-generation American, like many Jews of his era, he spent his life in a family business, never moved out of the metropolis he was born in, and had an ambivalent relationship with his faith and people. During the Holocaust they plowed much of their savings into efforts to spirit distant relatives out of Germany and other parts of Europe to Israel. Phil had no use for God, but he did love Israel. I remember pressing him at one Passover Seder during my college years to justify Israel in light of its various bad deeds, Zionism being racism, and all the rest.

“Doc, one day they are going to come for us here,” he said gravely, from the living room of his elegant house overlooking Lake Michigan. “Maybe not in my lifetime, hopefully not in yours. But when they do, all that you’ve built for yourself, your professional title, your money, your standing in the community, will be worth nothing. “On that day, you better damn well hope there is an Israel, because the alternative will be an oven or a gas chamber or a bullet in your head, if you’re lucky.” I remember thinking, in a very 20-year-old way, “Are you out of your mind? We are Americans!”

(snip)

The FBI’s 2017 data indicate anti-Jewish acts are the second most common form of hate crime in the country, after anti-black crime. (It recorded three times more anti-Jewish crimes than anti-Muslim.) There were 976 such offenses in 2017, up from 834 in 2016. Jews were the target of 60 percent of religious hate crimes, despite being 2 percent of U.S. population.

And then we have the chants of “Jews will not replace us,” in Charlottesville. There’s our Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker, who said while running for Senate in Iowa in 2014 that Jews should be ineligible to be judges. My U.S. Rep.-elect, Ilhan Omar, regards Israel as a pariah oppressor state. And does it take a lot of surface-scratching to see America’s contemporary support of Jews and Israel as being mainly about geopolitics and Christendom’s conduit to the rapture?

More..

http://www.startribune.com/the-jewish-identity-in-america-reassembly-required/501047352/

[TwistOneUp]

1. I read every word

And if the White Christian Nation thing takes place, they won't buy ovens or gas. They'll use bullets, and we'll be in the bulls-eyes.

[marybourg]

2. Never give up hope. My fiercely atheistic

grandson, who had neither briss nor bar mitzvah, went away to college (in a less Jewish state than the one was born in) and met “a girl”. This fall he went to Yom Kippur services. I think the author’s definition -especially as he applied it to his nieces, nephews and cousins - may be too narrow.

[EllieBC]

3. Affiliation in Reform congregations is shrinking, yes.

Conservative too. Orthodox (from Modern Orthodox to Charedi) is growing. In many communities Reform synagogues have become nothing more than b'nai mitzvot mills. Conservative was the great suburban Jewish experience that worked well for a while. Their services are longer than Orthodox though.

It's been said many times that however many times some group tries to wipe us out we survive. Will we survive against self-extinction? The Orthodox are trying to make sure we do.

[question everything]

4. I posted a new thread about a new book called "The Chosen War."

Last edited Mon Nov 26, 2018, 12:48 AM - Edit history (1)

I read a review several weeks ago, in the WSJ and it said, in part:

In 1841, in a fiery speech, Poznanski declared that it was time for Judaism to let go of its antiquated yearnings for the Promised Land and the ancient Temple, and focus instead on building a permanent home in America. “This synagogue is our temple,” he thundered, “this city our Jerusalem, this happy land our Palestine.” For his progressive views, Poznanski was praised by the liberal media of the day for replacing “the dark clouds of sectarian prejudice” and spreading the light of “right, reason and philosophy.”

Rearrange some of the details, and you have the same drama still being played out in American Jewish communities today. The reformers advocating for more lenient conversions, say, or for less emphasis on study and more on social-justice action, are the descendants of yesteryear’s organ enthusiasts. The Orthodox Jews struggling to maintain embattled customs in the face of more assertive egalitarianism would have empathized with the old-fashioned souls in that Charleston shul. The same ideological struggles that galvanized and polarized Jews in 1841 continue to do so in 2018.