The mainstream media has discovered the decade-old Jewish Continuity Crisis — with a vengeance.
New York magazine’s July 14 cover story, “Are American Jews Disappearing?” comes on the heels of a Sunday New York Times Magazine article (June 8) called “Vanishing,” and a National Review piece (May 19) by Elliott Abrams, entitled “Can Jews Survive?”
The upshot of each is that, with increasing social acceptance of Jews by Christian America, the American Jewish community is assimilating itself out of existence.
Anyone who has read a Jewish newspaper since the unveiling of the 1990 population study that found a national intermarriage rate of 52 percent knows the story, but the impact is multiplied when it appears in major outlets of the secular press.
That’s because we have this love-hate relationship with the media, complaining bitterly when it focuses on Israel or Jewish issues in a critical light, but also feeling a secret thrill of importance that, good or bad, hey, we’re being taken seriously.
And there are those who feel that it’s alright if American Jews feel uncomfortable about this glut of stories on the threat of increasing assimilation, because it’s a topic worth worrying about.
But why now?
Perhaps because Alan Dershowitz and Elliott Abrams have books out on the subject, taking different points of view. Dershowitz’s “The Vanishing American Jew” calls for “a Judaism that transcends the religious, that makes room for the secular.” Abrams, in his “Faith Or Fear: How Jews Can Survive In A Christian America,” insists that if American Jews abandon religion for culture, they will disappear.
On an emotional level, I tend toward Abrams’ assessment that Jews will survive “if they cling to their faith, to their Torah,” because that is what makes us Jews and has sustained us for centuries.
But objectively, I agree with sociologist Egon Mayer’s assessment that “we in the organized Jewish community are worried less that American Jews will disappear and more that we’ll disappear.”
He says the organized Jewish community is obsessed with the sense of crisis that fuels virtually every Jewish cause. (“How many organizations do you know dealing with Jewish happiness?” he asks.)
And while there is little if any growth in the American Jewish population — there are now about the same 5.5 million Jews that there were in 1950 — and there is a decline in synagogue and Jewish organizational membership, “the Jews are still out there, in a sense thumbing their noses at us.
“In effect,” says Mayer, “they’re saying, `Make me an offer I can’t refuse, and tell me why I should spend Saturday mornings in the synagogue instead of on the golf course.'”
If there is a crisis, then, it is in the leadership of the American Jewish community — its synagogues, organizations and federations — and its failure to offer a Jewish life meaningful enough to make people want to join up and participate, not out of guilt, because guilt won’t work anymore, but out of a sense of personal fulfillment.
That’s a tall order, because it requires creativity and sensitivity. The old appeals of a state of Israel fighting for physical survival and of Jews around the world in need of rescue are, thank God, outdated, for the most part.
Not surprisingly, the three recent articles showcase the growth and appeal of Orthodoxy, with its age-old traditions, wisdom and spirituality. There are ba’al teshuvas (returnees to the faith), brought in through outreach projects and Torah study programs, who say that their belief in authentic Judaism has given meaning to their Jewishness.
But statistically, Orthodoxy has suffered the greatest dropout rates throughout this century, and today represents only about 7 percent of American Jewry.
Mayer insists that the widespread concern over Judaism dying off has been going on for centuries and that rabbis and leaders will be worrying about Jewish extinction hundreds of years from now, too. This point of view is based in part on the notion that intermarriage offers benefits, in the way of active converts to Judaism, in addition to the obvious threats.
Mayer, who directs the Jewish Outreach Institute, sees the glass as at least half full. He believes in the need for more widespread and aggressive outreach to intermarried couples and families as a means of strengthening the Jewish community.
As for the concern about dwindling Jewish numbers, since when, Mayer wonders, have Jews been obsessed with large numbers? “True, you need 10 for a minyan,” he observes, “but once you have it, there’s no theological difference whether you have 11 or 100.”
Jewish life has long been kept alive by a small core of activists, but what is so troubling these days is that more and more Jews grow up disconnected from our synagogues and community without even knowing what they’re missing. That is the challenge to those of us who want to see them inside the circle.
For what we are left with, beyond the hype and the dramatic headlines in the media, is the fact that American Jews themselves aren’t vanishing — only their reasons to be Jewish.