The Jews in America: Four Centuries of an Uneasy Encounter.

The Jews in America: Four Centuries of an Uneasy Encounter

WHEN I WAS a graduate student at the Columbia University School of International Affairs in the early 1970s, the most memorable course I took outside my area of specialization was Modern Jewish History with Arthur Hertzberg. He was the kind of professor one dreams of--witty, opinionated, and immensely knowledgeable. I remember, for example, his penetrating definition of the exact beginning of modern Jewish history: The day Jews could cease being Jews without having to convert to another religion.

Since then, I have made sure to read almost everything Hertzberg has written. I usually disagree with him--his opinions are quite to the left on most issues--but he has been one of the few remaining intellectually honest left-liberals, and he is too bright to ignore. Moreover, unlike most other Jewish academics, Hertzberg, now a professor at Dartmouth, actually takes Judaism seriously, and until recently was the rabbi of a major conservative synagogue in New Jersey. So I looked forward to reading The Jews in America: Four Centuries of an Uneasy Encounter. Now I wonder if it would not have been better had I never heard of Arthur Hertzberg, the book is such a disappointment.

For one thing, Hertzberg's greatest gift, the ability to provoke thought, is virtually absent. The book is a dry history, and worse, it is the sort of narrowly focused and uninspiring history one would expect only from a materialist historian: the story simply of a people struggling to gain socio-economic power. The Jews in America is not about ideas, individuals, passions, or, incredibly, religion.

As a result, the Jews, certainly one of the world's most interesting and passionate people, appear lifeless and dull, which is precisely how Hertzberg sees American Jewry: national Jewish organizations are "totally bland," and are led and populated by "hollow men"; "American Jewishness [has become] all too respectable--and boring." How could anyone produce an interesting book about a subject he believes is bland, hollow, and boring?

In writing this book, the liberal academic Professor Hertzberg has utterly ignored the passionate intellectual Rabbi Hertzberg. In an almost classic Marxist view of history, the book concentrates on Jews' attainment of economic and political power in America, first by competing with one another (the struggle for power between German Jews, who came in the early 1800s, and Russian Jews, who came in the late 1800s, is the book's dominant theme), then by competing with the Christian majority. Once Jews attained this power, Hertzberg concludes, they became bland and boring. Yet, according to Hertzberg, no great characters or great theological struggles emerged in four hundred years of American Jewish history.

Of course, as in all sophisticated materialist analyses of history, Hertzberg's presentation, while not very interesting and actually quite depressing, is at least partially right. For many Jews, as for members of every other group to immigrate to America, seeking economic and political security was life's greastest goal. But if the pursuit of economic and political power has made Jews boring, isn't it fair to ask if America itself is boring? After all, with few exceptions (such as, Hertzberg notes, the Puritans and ultra-Orthodox Jews), America is the place where people overwhelmingly came to be free and to make money--not to think more deeply and live more profoundly. To cite the most current Jewish example, although 85 per cent of Soviet Jews prefer America to Israel, the most interesting Soviet Jews usually go to Israel. Natan Sharansky emigrated to Jerusalem, not to Brighton Beach, and this has been true of nearly every Soviet Jew whose first concern was Judaism and Jewish identity rather than making a good living (which I do not say at all judgmentally).

Can any ethnic group or civilization whose paramount goals are freedom and prosperity be interesting? Freedom and prosperity stir passions in those who do not have them, but once people attain these goals do they become devoid of passion? That isone question raised by Francis Fukuyama in "The End of History?": With the worldwide ascent of liberal democracy and free enterprise, will history, or at least history with passions and ideological tensions, be replaced by a boring world of shoppers?

Though he provides no answers, Hertzberg implicitly raises the most important question with which American Jews (and other Americans) must graple: What do you do once you have attained security and affluence? When Jews cannot rely on fighting anti-Semites or on escaping poverty to give their Jewishness meaning, what will they turn to?

The answer, of course, is religion, which is why the so-called secular Jew is becoming an anachronism. Jews of the postwar generation who remain secular increasingly assimilate, while those who choose to retain their Jewish identity increasingly do so through commitment to Jewish religiosity rather than to secular ethnicity. Even Woody Allen, in his significant new film, Crimes and Misdemeanors, concludes that only religion can give meaning to Jewish identity.

The secular, ethnic identity that sufficed to keep the past generation of American Jews "Jewish" has little meaning or appeal today. In this regard, Hertzberg's implication may be correct. Secular Jews are boring, as are secular non-Jews--but, then, so are secular histories of a religious civilization. A hundred years from now, another Jewish historian will write a more interesting history of American Jewry, in part because he will not view history through a materialist prism, and in part because his subject will be more interesting. American Jews will have either assimilated or become religiously Jewish: a development, incidentally, that will please most American Christians--and God. And as Jews readopt Judaism, they will abandon the "isms" that many of them have affirmed in its place, most prominently liberalism: a development that will please most readers of this journal--and God.