A certain people: American Jews and their lives today.

A Certain People: American Jews and Their Lives Today

AMERICAN JEWS now witness their fourth and fifth generations in this country. The immigrants, who came in their millions from 1880 to 1920, marked the beginning. Their children, who flourished from World War I to after World War II, settled down. Their grandchildren, the third generation, flourished from World War II to the present, and their great-grandchildren are now entering positions of leadership in Jewry. Charles Silberman takes stock of where Jews have been and what it all means.

His book is a testament to the amazing opening of American society that has taken place since World War II. Second-generation Jews confronted a miserable world, in which if they affirmed their Jewishness they were clannish, and if they did not they were pushy. Whole industries and professions closed their doors to that generation. Entire cities were famed for their anti-Semitism--the Minneapolis Auto Club would not admit Jewish members. Overseas, the disaster in Germany pushed Jews into the spotlight of an international crisis. Not a few believed the Jews had brought it on themselves. Political career? Forget it. Engineering? No Jews admitted. Banking and insurance? For Leeds, not Levy. Law? Only in a "Jewish" firm. On and on the list ran. Second-generation Jews, for their part, threw off the marks of alien mothers and fathers, speaking English, not Yiddish, abandoning the distinctive practices of the faith of Judaism, seeking an undifferentiated society that would make room for them. But what they found in the main, in the liberal circles of the nonsectarians, was other Jews.

The dramatic shift from the second to the third generation may be stated very simply. Every door closed to the second generation opened to the children, and that is what Silberman marks and celebrates. With eight Jewish U.S. senators and well over a score of representatives, Jews find open to them political careers of which their parents' generation could not dream. But that is only part of the picture. Look at Irving Shapiro, former president of du Pont--a paradox Silberman celebrates for many pages. And that tells the whole story.

Silberman's is a pro-American book, a celebration of the achievements of the world's freest, most democratic society, the most idealistic nation in all of human history. He believes, and proves, that Jews--the indicators and barometers of the social climate--can make it in this country. And by making it, he does not mean attaining economic success or social acceptance; he means living freely and by choice as Jews, and enjoying the full respect of their neighbors. He maintains that Jews can and do preserve a powerful sense of self-identification, a difference, a tradition of their own. The second generation wanted to forget the things the third generation succeeded in remembering and handing on to the fourth. The second generation wanted to obliterate marks of distinctiveness altogether, the third generation wanted to hide them, and the fourth? They try to remember everything, and pick and choose what they like: free and self-respecting Jews in a free society, at last. Who would have dreamed it? Not my grandmother, the last of the Yiddish-speaking Neusners; not my father, a Zionist and a Jewish publisher, who celebrated the Sabbath by taking me to the movies; not my Jewishly self-hating mother, who rewarded me for good work with a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich in the cafeteria in G. Fox & Co. in Hartford. What did the third generation know of Judaism? And what did it want to know? But it remembered, we remembered, and our children know first-hand what we knew only by making up memories for ourselves out of our Scriptures. We became Jews out of books. They learned from our example.

Anti-Semitism? Silberman does not view it as an acute problem, and even in its chronic form, it does not present a major problem. He cites public-opinion polls to prove his case. Discrimination against Jews? Uncommon, and nowhere that matters. Assimilation and intermarriage? Has Silberman not heard of "the vanishing American Jew" of the 1970s? Indeed so, but he maintains--and here his ideas stand on the research of such great sociologists as Brown's Calvin Goldsscheider--that out-marriage leads to in-marriage, and the upshot is only positive from a demographic viewpoint. American Jews are more than maintaining their numbers and will continue to do so.

Is this a persuasive book? Yes. Silberman is a first-rate writer, the book is colorful and rich, a real pleasure to read.

Will this book last? No, because journalism never lasts, and this book is no more than journalism; it lacks the intellectual strength that only first-rate scholarship can provide. And also because the premise of the book is that the Jews are "a certain people," different from others. In no detail, however, does Silberman systematically place the Jews into the American context. So we never learn what is special about the Jews and what is not.

To read this book, you would scarcely remember that America treated other groups not much better than it did the Jews, and some much worse--the blacks, for one. Consequently, Silberman conveys the impression that everyone was out to get us Jews in particular. That was not the case. In fact everyone was out to get everyone else: It was America in an age of turning. The old Northern and Western European ethnic dominance was giving way not only to Jews but to all the newer Southern and Eastern European migrants, to Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox, as well as to cultures of Africa and Latin America. What happened after World War II? Silberman maintains that the impact of the massacre of European Jewry in death factories changed peoples' minds about the Jews. But other Americans also found doors open that had formerly been nailed shut--even in due course the blacks.

World War II marked the turning of America back toward its old, deeply egalitarian and democratic roots. The Jews benefited, but so did everyone else. America in its age of world leadership reached into its resources of idealism and made for itself a better society than it had ever been: a city on the hill. That was the ideal, and the reality was not so bad either--and was, and is, always getting better. So there is nothing so peculiar about the experience of "a certain people," and that, I think, is the flaw in Silberman's book. Contrast "roots" and ethnic affirmation, the commonplaces of the 1970s and the 1980s, with the re-Judaization of the third and fourth generations, and show me the difference. I see none. The blacks want soul food, the Jews want kosher food, and everybody eats pizza and "Chinese." America, America.

Does that mean the Jews are merely like everybody else--only more so? I do not know, but Silberman does not either. Why not? Because he does not tell us what he thinks is special about the Jews and their social experience or what he thinks is shared among various groups. He does not define his categories and let us in on his program of research. Silberman assumes that the Jews are "a people apart," and he is wrong. His premise is wrong because he has not worked out his problems of method and conception. Journalists never do--that's why they're paid more than professors.

Still, it's a wonderful book, and the best account of American Jews in the now-dying third generation that I have ever read. You don't have to be Jewish to enjoy this book. It's a celebration of America, and everyone should join in.