Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on March 21, 2024

Next month, a majority of American Jews will gather with family and friends around a table to celebrate a Passover Seder, one of the most recognizable Jewish holidays, especially in the United States. Many of those offering the ritualistic meal will have designed elements of it themselves or chosen from various ideas on offer that speak to them personally.

According to American Judaic scholar Arnold Eisen, the former chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) in New York, American Jews by and large want to maintain some Jewish rituals but demand autonomy as to how they will do so. Thus, most of the same Jews celebrating the first Passover Seder will not go to synagogue the following Shabbat, where they do not control the ritual, Eisen said.

After hours and hours of conversations with American Jews, Eisen reported that Jews will not observe anything they do not find meaningful in the moment they observe it because that would be inauthentic.

Eisen spoke about his studies in person at Temple Chai on Monday, March 11. Additionally, about 200 people watched online as Eisen gave the 35th edition of the annual Eckstein Lecture, sponsored by Arizona State University Jewish Studies.

Arnold Eisen

The programs director, Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, introduced Eisen and explained that the lecture has focused on American Jewry in the last few years and called Eisen an interpreter of American Judaism.

Eisens lecture, American Jewry Today and Tomorrow, detailed large portions of his years of research about the American Judaism of yesterday and how it continues to impact the Jewish community.

American Jews still generally adhere to what Eisen termed a folk religion that allows them to testify to their religious experience, regardless of their belief in God and how they define it.

The traditions and rituals that carry the most meaning to contemporary American Jews are those like Passover connected to family, especially to parents and grandparents, which is in line with Americans from all faith traditions, he said. Thus, Passover continues to be essential for its familiar connection and universal celebration of freedom. Jewish rituals with less universal ideas that are more particular to Judaism alone, such as Sukkot or Shavuot, are less meaningful to most contemporary Jews.

American Jews want to determine for themselves how distinctive they want to be, whether celebrating Jewish holidays, practicing dietary laws or sending their children to Jewish schools.

Every single thing you do has to pass the bar of Is it meaningful to me to do this? How distinctive do I want to be? Eisen explained. While leading the JTS, an academic and spiritual center of Conservative Judaism, hes talked with hundreds and hundreds of people about how they choose whats most meaningful.

Parents tell him that choosing between Hebrew school and soccer practice for their children is painful, but sometimes they come down on the side of soccer because it makes you part of the larger world, whereas Hebrew school sets them apart.

That makes sense, given that American Jews historically have juggled certain big theological ideas. First, is the idea that Jews are Gods chosen people. In the late 19th and early 20th century, Jews trying to make it in the U.S. could see a chance to be accepted by non-Jews.

It was not good PR to tell the people that you want to be part of that you have to be apart from them, Eisen said.

He discussed the theories of the Jewish sociologist Nathan Glazer, who proposed that Jewish particularity would be a problem for the Jewish people because American society expects to see ethnic particularity abandoned. Glazer correctly predicted that intermarriage between Jews and Christians would become common. Outside of the Orthodox world, about 70% of American Jewish marriages are between a Jew and a non-Jew.

On the other hand, Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg argued that Judaism cannot survive if Jews are just like everybody else. Eisen explained that 20th-century Jews were also grappling with the rabbis insistence that the Jewish community could only survive if it emphasized its uniqueness rather than turning from or hiding it.

Jewish sociologist Charles Liebman later described the Jewish community as one caught between conflicting desires for integration on the one hand and being apart from the non-Jewish society on the other. Trying to walk that tightrope, Liebman suggested, would make most American Jews shrink from extremes and land somewhere in the middle. However, Eisen pointed out that theory kept him from foreseeing the rise of Haredi Jews.

Whats actually shrinking in American Jewish life is the middle, Eisen said.

Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism and someone Eisen met in person when he was in his 90s, insisted that it was important to make Judaism intuitive by surrounding people with Jewish history, literature, language and community so that people ask, Why should I not be a Jew? rather than Why should I be a Jew?

For more than 1,000 years before modernity, Jews lived in societies ruled by Christianity or Islam and knew where they stood. Sometimes it was bad and other times it was good. Maybe you were second-class citizens but you were tolerated, Eisen said. Modern ideas of liberal democracy shifted everything, especially in the U.S. and thus, American Jews have been negotiating their place within it over the last 150 years with some difficulty, and the Jewish calculus of how distinctive to be is something that continues to this day, he said.

As for the future, Eisen said its a fools errand to make predictions without knowing all the variables of the next 10, 20 or 30 years, an impossible task. He can only make educated guesses and said its more important to try to make it the kind of future that we want to have, rather than worrying about whats going to happen.

That said, the future definitely changed on Oct. 7, but theres no way to predict what that will mean for the future of American Jews and Judaism, he said.

We should not worry about the future of Judaism in America. The question is what you and I are going to do today and tomorrow to secure the future of Jews in America thats the only question. JN

For more information, visit jewishstudies.asu.edu.

Read more:

To be 'a part of' or 'apart from,' American Jews, identity and the future - Jewish News of Greater Phoenix

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