|
|
|
(JWR) ---- (http://www.jewishworldreview.com) IS THERE REALLY NO PLACE left for the less observant American Jew?
Long the best fit for alienated outsider status in an overwhelmingly Christian America, the secular Jew has moved from culturally critical minority toward microscopic marginality.
For a couple of post-World War II decades, secular Jews were American insiders’ favorite outsiders. Blame the increasingly polyglot nature of the nation, the increased cultural focus on other minority groups, Christian and otherwise, and the depleted number of secular Jews caused by the full immersion via assimilation by some members of the group into the heart of non-Jewish America. Blame whomever you want, but secular American Jews have less and less of a cultural lectern from which to brandish their particular brand of Americanism.
While the acceptance of Jews into the mainstream of America’s power grid is pretty much finished business,
This alienation is the potential birthright of any American Jew, but the prerogative has been most often publicly exercised by the least religiously observant. The presumption here is that shared tradition, ritual and faith provide observant Jews with a fully accepting community. In short, they have their own world and they are so far from the American mainstream as to not experience the buried but real misgivings about truly belonging experienced by some of their more secular brethren. Of course, at various stages of, or for all of their lives, secular Jews don’t feel fully at home in traditional Judaism, either.
Regardless of their lack of faith or traditional observance, Jewishness is a crucial self-identifying trait for American Jews. It is in fact that very Jewishness, no matter how idiosyncratically defined, that provides the impetus for the nagging, not always acknowledged feeling of being somehow a half step from receiving full membership in the American melting pot.
(The melting pot is now, of course, an archaic and politically incorrect metaphor for a nation of immigrants, all of them proud of their ethnic and earlier national traditions and loathe to abandon them.)
This feeling of doubt is, at least in my case, not based on any external evidence. It is about perception. More specifically, it is about how you presume other Americans with whom you never had and never will have a conversation about those perceptions perceive you.
This expiation is necessary background to examine a new development on the American Jewish alienation front, courtesy of the heightened battle between various Jewish sects about Jewish authenticity. Simply put, more Jewish voices are being heard in the U.S. and in Israel that would narrow the definition of the authentic Jew to those rigorous and traditional in their practice of the religion. The more subtle residue of this public debate about who is a Jew, along with the movement in all branches of Judaism toward greater ritual, is to minister a second wave of alienation to essentially secular American Jews.
To oversimplify: If non-religious Jews are now having our Jewishness diminished, we are left on a rather small patch of ground.
Now, of course, we are Jewish and we are fully American and no one can take that from us. In reality, only a radical fringe of malcontents would actively try to deprive us of either identity. But public debates about which types of Jews would be recognized in which countries and by which branches of Judaism have an impact on perceptions, and more important, on self-perception. And this apparently growing divisiveness among American Jews can’t help but add to a sense of alienation among more secular Jews.
A little alienation can be a good thing. It can lead to the development of a healthy sense of skepticism, increased creativity and a willingness to question the status quo.
Too much alienation is merely debilitating. We seem to be moving toward polar extremes, with full assimilation and the denial of Jewish identity on one side and a rigid but growing Orthodoxy on the other. It’s leaving those of us who thought we were in the middle with what seems like less room, and less certainty about an ideal cultural/religious place to call
Jewish World Review Jan. 11, 1999 / 22 Teves, 5759
A Second Alienation?
By Neal Lipschutz
there remains for many Jews still at least a whisper of alienation from the mythological heart of Middle America. This sense of alienation is often a feeling of greater closeness to American ideals than to living, breathing Americans.
Neal Lipschutz is the managing editor for Dow Jones News Service.
