Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on July 19, 2024

In the wake of the October 7th massacre and subsequent outbreak of anti-Zionist, anti-Israel sentiment throughout the US, there has been much talk about the end of the Jewish American Golden Age. This Golden Age, the thinking goes, lasted approximately from the end of the Second World War until October 7, 2023. It was during this period that American Jews prospered first and foremost as Americans, which is to say, ones Jewishness did not mark ones American fate. If you were a Jew born in America, you were free to be openly Jewish, or not; you were free to marry a Jew, or not; you were free to become anything you wantedexcept, perhaps, president of the United States. Above all, if you were an American Jew during this so-called golden eighty-year window, you were exempt from religious and ethnic persecution. This period, the pundits now suggest, is over. For American Jews, the age of golden has ended.

This theory sounds plausible. The only problem with it is that its wrongits based on a too-meager understanding of Jewish history, and, not incoincidentally, is predicated on an anemic understanding of what it means to be Jewish, not just today, but for all time.

Jewish history has not always coincided so neatly with secular history, as it now seems to be. For well over a thousand years, what we think of as secular history could also accurately be described as Greek history. Think Herodotus: history as a seemingly unending list of battles, dates, victors and their spoils. Jews were never particularly interested in producing or seeing themselves in this kind of historical framework. Instead, the Jewish people had their own tradition in which they recorded and observed themselves through time, represented in large part by the Mishnaic, Talmudic and post-Talmudic rabbinic discourses. It should come as no surprise then that when Jews began to acquire what we might think of as historical consciousness and began to read and write historynot only by and for themselves, but within the greater world-historical discoursethis happened to coincide with the spread of exilic and diasporic Jewry, and the various assimilations that accompanied it.

One such Jewry demands our attention: Medieval Islam. For a span of nearly eight hundred years, Jews lived under Islamic rule in what is broadly known as Al-Andalus, or the Iberian Peninsula. Culturally speaking, this was a magnificently fertile period, producing philosophical, theological and scientific advances in nearly every aspect of life. Today, many historians, including Jewish historians, consider that periodcan you guess? The Jewish Golden Age. Why? Because the Jews of that period produced what we still think of as the greatest works of Jewish Law and philosophy ever written. Im thinking, as a prime example, of Moses Maimonides and his Code of Laws and Guide for the Perplexed. If the Jews of that period, we think, were capable of such extraordinary accomplishment, how bad could it have been? Well that depends on what you think of dhimmi statusliving as a perpetual second-class citizen under Islamic rulers who forced their Jewish subjects to pay protection once a year as a kind of life tax.

Im sorry but theres nothing golden about that age. We can love Maimonides and be eternally grateful for his contributions and still recognize that the time and place in which he lived was anything but golden. He certainly didnt think of it that way.

My point is not that the past eighty years of American Jewish life was not so great. My point is that thinking about Jewish existence in terms of Golden Ages and non-Golden Ages misses the point of what it means to be a Jew in the world entirely. And no, I dont have a simple answer for what it means to be Jewish. Its up to each of us, in each generation, to figure that out for ourselves. But if we look back on those prosperous, supposedly harassment-free decades of American Jewish life from 1944 through 2023, its not the abundance of wealth and freedom itself that we should think of as golden, its the opportunity that abundance afforded us to fulfill our as-yet unfulfilled obligation as the Jewish people. Weve forgotten that piece. And thats on us.

Shawn Aron Weiss is a rabbinical student at the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies in Los Angeles as well as a Fellow with the Sinai Temple Israel Center Fellowship. His essay "Philo and Rav Kook: On the Harmony of Creation and the Creation of Harmony" is forthcoming at Masorti. He and his wife, and their twin girls, live in Southern California.

Read more here:

On the Idea of a Jewish Golden Age - The Times of Israel

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