April Rosenblum

Offers We Couldn’t Refuse

What Happened to Secular Jewish Identity?

Intro: That Was Then, This Is Now

W hen it comes to popular understandings of Jewish identity, there’s

a big difference between the early 20th century and the turn of the
21st. The feminist scholar and activist Lillian Robinson once relat-
ed that while growing up in New York City in the 1940s and ’50s,
she believed being Jewish meant being secular and socialist like her
Jewish family and the milieu that surrounded them. Her perception
wasn’t the reality, of course — there were dozens of ways for people
to express their Jewish identities, ranging from passionately secular
to religiously consumed, with lots of variations in between — but
her memory illustrates that in the 1940s there were thriving, overtly
secular Jewish communities that were large enough and numerous
enough that it was entirely possible to grow up thinking that everyone
Jewish was like you.

Another friend of mine, a graduate student who teaches in a Mid-

western college town, where she teaches a Yiddish class, has noticed
that young Jews today, her students among them, think that if they
want to identify strongly as Jews, they have to take on religious prac-
tice. They don’t see Jewish secularism as an identity in itself, she
observes, but as something of a disclaimer, equivalent to “I’m not
really Jewish.” My friend herself — an ardent Yiddishist who studies
the largely secular Yiddish cultural milieu of the late 19th and early
20th centuries — tries to be as observant as she can of the religious
mitzvot (commanded deeds) that mark an Orthodox Jew. Yet when I
ask her if she believes in God., she shrugs somewhat ambiguously.
“Maybe if I lived in a place where I could see real alternative ways to

 Jewish Currents
live a Jewish life, I would do something different,”
she tells me.
I wonder if anywhere is that place today. Even
in New York — the only place, as the joke goes,
more Jewish than Israel — a friend who acts in
Yiddish theater is convinced that he has to become
a hasid to have an authentic, vibrant Jewish life.
No matter that he’s unenthusiastic about the idea
of God; it’s community he wants.
Young Jews who’ve gone so far as to seek out
ethnic Jewish life are in the minority. Outside of
Jewish institutions, I commonly meet Jews who,
unaware of any secular Jewish option, simply
don’t see themselves as one of the tribe — like the
activist I met who, intrigued by my studies of Jew-
ish history, observed, “My family’s Jewish, but I
don’t really think of myself as Jewish. I mean,
none of my family is religious, and I never had
any religious education.” He had worked for years
with an organization founded by a secular Jew-
ish radical, and was inspired politically by Emma
Goldman and other prominent secular Jews of the
early 20th century, yet when I remarked that his
lack of religion was no reason to question his Jew-
ishness, it was something of a revelation to him.
At the beginning of the 20th century there was
a vibrant culture of secular Jewish organizations,
schools, choruses, camps, social activities, art, and
popular culture. As the 21st century opens, Jewish
culture that is overtly and purposefully secular is
barely visible in American Jewish life. Among
young Jewish activists, I’ve continually encoun-
tered attitudes like the ones I’ve described here.
Young Jews who are aware of a vibrant secular
past may be affectionate towards it, but the atti-
tude remains: Secular Jewish culture, they believe,
is dead, or at least it’s only a matter of time before
it follows the natural course of things and dies,
returning Jewish culture to its supposedly normal,
original situation as a religious society.
May-June, 2009
The decline in overt secular Jewish identity in
20th-century America was not, however, inevita-
ble, but a response to the oppression and trauma
that Jews experienced and witnessed in the early
and mid-20th century. Out of fear of being targeted,
and longing to attain “the good life” in America,
Jews adapted to express their identities in ways
that emphasized religion over language and cul-
ture and therefore fit in with American social and
racial norms. As a result of this process, much of
the vibrant world of secular Jewishness was lost.
Discussions of modern Jewish identity often stand
this history on its head by citing the abandonment
of Judaism as either a cause or a symptom of as-
similation. For significant numbers of American
Jews in the 20th century, however, for whom re-
ligion hadn’t figured as a central feature of Jew-
ish identity in the first place, it was the growing
restriction of Jewish identity to a religious sphere
that led many of them to stop calling themselves
or thinking of themselves as Jews.
Before we go any further, some terms need defi-
nition. When I use the word “ethnic,” I’m refer-
ring to the cultural ties, customs and sense of con-
nection found within a group linked by heredity,
shared historical experience and geographical
origin. I use “Judaism” to refer to the Jewish reli-
gion; “Jewishness” — like its Yiddish equivalent,
yidishkayt — describes the general state of being
Jewish, which can encompass but is not limited to
Judaism.
For the purposes of this essay, the word “assimi-
lation” will be used to describe not simply the
natural process of integration into a new culture,
but the not-altogether-voluntary process by which
Jews and other oppressed groups abandon parts of
their culture for the sake of safety and/or status.
Most prickly is the term “secular” itself. Its ev-
eryday definition is “non-religious,” but religious
Jews have, over the years, unblinkingly used

 “secular” to mean “assimilated” — and to im-
ply ignorance or indifference towards what the
Orthodox consider to be real or authentic Jewish
identity and custom. (As Stephen Zunes has writ-
ten in Tikkun, “there is something fundamentally
wrong with someone who does not identify with a
certain ideology defining what that ideology is.”)
For the sake of clarity, I distinguish in this es-
say between “active secular Jewish identity” — a
sort of “practicing” identity in which the adherent
takes pride in being secularly Jewish and wishes
to impart that legacy to future generations —and
“passive secular Jewish identity” — the nonre-
ligious identity that comes from Jews leaving
or fading out of active religious observance and
community, without a conscious desire to be a
part of secular heritage. Actively secular Jews are
people whose Jewishness is a prominent part of
their lives and their self-expression. Their Jewish
identities are based not on participation in Juda-
ism, the religion, but on ethnic and cultural ties to
Jewish history and the Jewish people. While there
Illustrations by Babs Elderbee
10
are secular Jews who do practice other spiritual
traditions — Buddhism, Quakerism, Wicca, etc.
— most are atheists or agnostics, or are simply
more drawn to cultural Jewish life than to Judaism
as religion.
In writing this essay, I am hoping to nudge young
Jews who are living lives that would make their
secular Jewish foremothers and forefathers kvell
(swell with pride), yet don’t think of themselves
as “really” Jewish, to reconsider the sources of
their alienation. There are many reasons why they
don’t identify as authentically Jewish, but a criti-
cal one, often overlooked, is that secular Jewish-
ness, the category that would have allowed them
to connect vigorously with Jewish culture seventy
or a hundred years ago, was pushed off the map.
This essay seeks to fill in what is missing from
the historical conversation, and thereby prompt
young, non-religious Jews to think about how
very squarely they do, in fact, sit within Jewish
culture.
Jewish Currents
 When Secular Jewish Culture Was Normal (1880s to 1940s)

S ecular Jewish identity has not always needed to fight for a seat at the
American Jewish table. Between the 1880s and 1940s, being a secular
Jew or “freethinker” (the common euphemism for atheist) meant you
could participate in any of hundreds of cultural, social and political
activities in which it was assumed you had no tie to Judaism but did
have a strong Jewish ethnic identity. In 1935, for example, what we
know of today as Jewish day schools — that is, religiously-oriented
Jewish schools — had a total of three thousand students across the U.S.,
but there were other Jewish schools, specifically non-religious or even
anti-religious, with seven thousand students in New York City alone
(Nathan Glazer, American Judaism, 1957). These secular shules were
supplemental, not full-time, so comparing them to Jewish day schools
may be like comparing apples and oranges, yet the contrast between the
abundance of secular Jewish children’s education then and its paucity
now is noteworthy.

Beginning in the late 19th century, as they became involved with the polit-
ical movements in their respective countries, a growing number of Jews
identified as secular. Though Jews across the globe took part in this shift,
Eastern European Jews, in their settlements in Europea nd throughout the
Americas, developed the most visible and populous secular movements.
The secular Jewish culture that emerged included ideological group-
ings such as anarchists, communists and many varieties of socialists,
diverse brands of Jewish nationalists (Zionists, Bundists, territorialists,
and more), liberal intellectuals, and large numbers who, though they had
sympathies one way or another, were politically unaffiliated.

Just as religious Jewish society had social institutions such as religious

schools for children, yeshivas for higher religious learning, burial soci-
eties, kosher food outlets, and synagogues, so did secular Jews build a
world of institutions in which Jewish secularism was the norm. Secular
Jewish schools provided children with an education in academic sub-

May-June, 2009 11
jects as well as Jewish history, Yiddish language song . . . sung in the old country” (Eleanor Mlotek,
and literature, and social justice ideals. One could Mir Trogn a Gezang: Favorite Yiddish Songs,
read a multitude of Yiddish newspapers, sing in 2000). The poem extols unity between Jews: “And
choruses, join activist organizations, send chil- we are all brothers /. . . And we stick together /. . .
dren to summer camps, live in apartment build- like no one else /. . . Frum and link [religiously
ings — all created by and for secular Jews. observant and leftist] . . . all united, like the groom
with his bride . . .” (my translation). “Akhdes”
Actively secular Jewish culture dominated the tells us that Jewish society was composed of reli-
practically compulsory “national pastime” of Yid- gious Jews and politically engaged, non-religious
dish theater. As members of Jewish sports teams, Jews, and that religion and leftism were both sur-
unions, occupational organizations and lands- face qualities that might separate their adherents
manshaftn (fraternal organizations for Jews who from one another in daily life but were trumped
had emigrated from the same towns in Eastern by a deeper connection that united all Jews. What
Europe), actively secular Jews could also mingle linked frum and link, at least from Winchevsky’s
with religious Jews while performing secular ac- perspective, was ethnicity. (The passage was not
tivities based on an ethnic bond. included by Jewish secularists in most versions of
the song, however, and whether the inclusive feel-
To recognize the diverse array that made up Jew- ing was reciprocated by Winchevsky’s religious
ish civic society is not to say there weren’t dis- contemporaries is unclear.) .
agreements between religious and secular Jews as
to what constituted a valid Jewish identity. How- The eminent Judaic scholar Jacob Neusner re-
ever, secular Jewish culture was widespread and lates a humorous experience that illustrates the
visible enough that if religious Jews refused to same sense of ethnic Jewish identity (in Will Her-
recognize secular Jews as authentic, that rejection berg’s Protestant-Catholic-Jew: An Essay in Amer-
had little impact on secular Jews’ daily lives or ican Religious Sociology, 1960). While lecturing
in a community center on the life of
Maimonides, a shining star of Jewish
Secular Jewish culture was widespread enough that if religious thought, Neusner explained
religious Jews refused to recognize secular Jews as that Maimonides’ everyday language,
authentic, the rejection had little impact on secular Jews’ as with all Jews from Muslim Spain,
daily lives or on their confidence in their own culture. was Arabic. “One of the audience, an
elderly man,” recounts Neusner, “lis-
tened intently, and then broke out sar-
on their confidence in their own culture and their castically in Yiddish: ‘Eich mir a Yid!’ (‘You call
credibility as Jews. Jewishness was understood that a Jew!’). In his eyes, even Maimonides could
as an ethnic bond, beyond which the individual not rate as a ‘real’ Jew because he did not know
Jew commanded his or her own ideological alle- any Yiddish.”
giances.
To a 21st-century reader, the first thing that leaps
One illustration of this can be found in the poem out from this anecdote may be the apparent chau-
“Akhdes” (“Unity”). Published in 1890 by the be- vinism of the elderly man, but what is more in-
loved Yiddish socialist writer Morris Winchevsky, structive is that for him, Yiddish, the secular Jew-
it inspired the song, “Ale Brider” (“All Brothers”), ish language of daily life, outweighs Maimonides’
described in the 1920s as “the most popular folk monumental religious credibility when it comes to

12 Jewish Currents
defining what being Jewish means.
Throughout the early part of the 20th century, sec-
ular identity, both active and passive, was increas-
ingly dominant in American Jewish life. Even the
Conservative movement’s revered Teaching Insti-
tute, in the second decade of the century, tended to
graduate the type of Jewish education teacher who
was, according to Nathan Glazer,
more typically a Zionist than a religious Jew,
though of course many were both. This in-
stitute attracted many students to the Semi-
nary who did not feel strongly about religion
but did feel strongly about the Jewish peo-
ple and Jewish culture — about Jewishness.
. . . The Seminary did not try to justify in any
elaborate way the fact that it served as an in-
stitution in which many people who had no
strong feeling for the Jewish religion were
educated.
By the 1930s, all signs pointed to young Jews hav-
ing even less interest in religion than their parents’
generation. A 1935 poll of Jewish 15-25 year-olds
of all backgrounds in New York showed that 72
percent of young Jewish males and 78 percent of
young Jewish females had been to not a single re-
ligious service in the entire previous year.
Polls throughout the 1920s and ’30s, Glazer con-
tinues, repeatedly showed “that the Jewish stu-
dents had moved much farther from any religious
position that the Catholic and Protestant students.
More were atheist, more agnostic, fewer accepted
any traditional religious formulations.” In 1938,
less than one third of Jews in America were con-
nected to a synagogue, even indirectly through the
membership of an immediate family member. It
would have been hard to predict what a drastic re-
versal was about to take place in Jewish culture.

Traumas, Successes, and Disappearing Acts (1920s to 1950s)

D
espite having left behind the horrific conditions of the Russian Em-
pire and then the Soviet Union, Jewish immigrants arriving in the late
19th and early 20th centuries could not fully relax in their new United
States of America. White supremacist values were openly upheld as
American ideals, and people of Irish, Eastern European and Southern
European descent were not considered white. Widespread poverty af-
flicted the recently arrived Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe.
Like other non-whites, however, they were often refused public assis-
tance because the formal and informal criteria for which families were
“deserving” were based on white, middle-class cultural norms. Those
who could not demonstrate their conformity to America’s superior val-
ues were viewed as unworthy of government assistance. Social work-
ers might not deign to allow immigrants to receive aid if, for instance,
they still insisted on eating their ethnic Jewish or Italian foods, or still
relied on neighborhood networks of mutual aid, or took in boarders
to meet basic needs (Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks,
and What That Says About Race in America, 1998). Discrimination

May-June, 2009 13
in medical services, housing, social clubs and re-
sorts, education, and other fields specifically tar-
geted Jews.
The disadvantages of being visibly Jewish be-
came increasingly clear in the 1920s, when a
wave of xenophobia rocked the country, target-
ing Jews, Asian Americans and other “aliens”
as a corrupting and threatening element in U.S.
society. Jews in general were seen as “carriers”
of Bolshevism, and Jewish political activists, es-
pecially anarchists, were deported in large num-
bers. Henry Ford, in the newspaper he owned, the
Dearborn Independent, warned his readers about
“The International Jew: The World’s Problem,”
declaring that a cabal of Jews had taken control
of America. Ford also published the tsarist pro-
paganda forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of
Zion, as evidence of a Jewish conspiracy to take
over the world. At a time when immigration was
overwhelmingly composed of Eastern European
Jews, opponents of immigration lobbied hard to
14
ban the influx of “races” considered genetically
inferior and head off a threatening horde of revolu-
tionaries. In the process, Jewish immigrants were
described in a Congressional report as “filthy, un-
American and often dangerous in their habits.” In
1921 and again in 1924, anti-immigration activ-
ists won strict quotas, and the mass immigration
that had brought nearly two million Jews to the
U.S. since 1881 was reduced to a trickle.
Amid this nerve-wracking climate of racism, the
drive for upward mobility, which would have
been present for any poverty-stricken immigrant
group, became an endeavor with higher stakes.
Jews poured into colleges in droves. By World
War I, they made up 40 percent of the student
body at Columbia University in New York. At
public colleges that aided poor students with free
books or tuition, the numbers were astounding: by
1920, Jews constituted 90 percent of Hunter Col-
lege students and 80 percent at the City College
of New York.
Jewish Currents
University administrations responded to this in-
flux with a siege mentality. For most of U.S. his-
tory, colleges had been social networking sites for
upper-class, white Protestant boys whose families
had been in the U.S. for generations. As one of the
first ethnic groups to break into this monopoly of
elite, white socialites, Jews were a threat to the
standards universities held dear.
Located amid the largest Jewish community in the
U.S., Columbia began to voice concern about Jew-
ish enrollees in 1910. By 1917, the “quality” of
incoming students was described by the adminis-
tration as “depressing in the extreme.” Jews were
seen as a physically ugly and socially undesirable
group that would drive out the ruling-class males
that Columbia was really designed to attract. The
school soon sought to weed out Jews by making
applicants provide their place of birth, religious
affiliation, mother’s maiden name, father’s place
of birth and occupation, and a photograph. In case
Jews slipped through the application phase, new
personal interviews and psychological examina-
tions were designed to give admissions officers
discretion to reject Jews. The university also re-
served scholarships for students with native-born
parents, denied financial aid to students with
Jewish-sounding names, increased recruitment
outside of New York, and bent rules to fill slots
with under-qualified Christian students. By 1918,
Columbia’s Jewish population was reduced by
half, and by the 1920s, it was down to 15 percent.
Harvard and other colleges simplified the process
by privately instituting quotas to limit the number
of Jewish students.
Anti-Semitism like this made clear to Jews the
need to become adept at “camouflage.” It rein-
forced the pressures to assimilate that Eastern
European Jews had felt since they had first begun
to pour into the U.S. in the 1880s. At that time,
well-off communities of American-born German
Jews had seen it as an urgent task to reshape the
newly arrived Jews. German Jews in the Reform
May-June, 2009
movement had warned, notes Gerald Sorin (The
Jewish People in America, Vol. 3, 1992), that
if there “should grow up in our midst a class of
people abnormal and objectionable to our fellow
[non-Jewish] citizens, all of us will suffer.” The
German Jews thus built some of the country’s
first “settlement houses,” designed both to pro-
vide material aid for the new immigrants and to
Americanize them. Charitable institutions such as
the Educational Alliance in New York sprang into
action, providing training in English, hygiene, and
patriotism.
While some of these German-Jewish leaders were
driven by real sympathy and desire to help their
fellow Jews, a central motivation was to defuse
the threat to their own status that they perceived
in the newcomers. After experiencing a wave of
anti-Semitism in the 1870s, German Jews knew
how easy it might be for them to lose their status
as “white Americans.”
One key assimilationist tactic of those German
Jewish programs was the repression of the Yid-
dish language. Some settlement houses formally
adopted techniques to instill shame in Jews who
were caught speaking Yiddish on the premises. At
the Educational Alliance, Sorin writes, “English,
German, and even Russian were spoken in the
various citizen education courses, but Yiddish, the
actual language of the ghetto, was not. . . . Yid-
dish, the essence of Jewishness in immigrant eyes,
remained taboo . . .”
The messages about what it would take for East-
ern European Jews to succeed in their new coun-
try came through loud and clear: They were to rid
themselves of pesky signs of their ethnicity and
model themselves as much as possible after white
American culture. As late as the 1960s, students
at the City College of New York (CCNY) were
required to take speech classes so as not to pro-
nounce their consonants in ways characteristic of
Yiddish, Italian and other “white ethnic” mother-
15
tongues. Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, a student
there, remembers feeling that
Words like shmate trapped me — no mat-
ter who said them — marked, stripped and
revealed me. I came from people who talk-
ed like that. I came from them and would
be stuck with their lives. In case I needed
proof of the connection between their lives
and that accent, I had only to attend CCNY
and discover that in order to graduate, I had
to learn not to talk like that (The Issue Is
Power: Essays on Women, Jews, Violence
and Resistance, 1992).
Losing their unique culture might have been a
price to pay, but the rewards looked spectacular:
If Jews were able to blend in enough to evade
anti-Jewish prejudice and satisfy white cultural
norms, they would not only pull their families
out of poverty but have access to professional
jobs and middle-class comforts that their parents
could never have dreamed of in Eastern Europe.
America was making Jews an offer they couldn’t
refuse.
As the 1930s unfolded, there was growing justi-
fication for American Jewish fears. The country
experienced a marked rise in popular anti-Semi-
tism as the Nazis rose to power in Germany. Lin-
gist and activist Noam Chomsky recalls that the
sentiments in his German and Irish Philadelphia
neighborhood were largely pro-Nazi (Robert Bar-
sky, Noam Chomsky, a Life of Dissent, 1997). At-
tacks on the Roosevelt Administration commonly
described the President’s reformist policies as the
“Jew Deal.” Right-wing activists like Gerald L.K.
Smith made anti-Semitism a central plank of their
platforms. Street movements such as the Christian
Front and the German American Bund provided
the muscle to back up the anti-Semitic speeches,
and the nationally-syndicated radio anti-Semitism
of Father Charles Coughlin was highly popular.
Novelist Chaim Potok remembers (in Old Men at
Midnight, 2002),
16
You had Father Coughlin from Detroit
yelling anti-Semitic diatribes at you from
the radio on Sunday afternoons. Did I lis-
ten to him? Absolutely! You wanted to
know what the enemy was saying so you
could respond. And if you didn’t listen, the
anti-Semitic neighbors would turn up their
radios so you would hear him when you
walked down the street.
And then, of course, there was the ranting
and raving of Hitler, which I would get on
the radio — with a lot of static ­ from time
to time. . . . I wanted to milk everything for
what it was worth, because you never knew
if there would be another minute.
Among gentiles who were opposed to U.S. entry
into World War II, it was popular to charge that
American Jews were manipulating the govern-
ment into intervening. In August, 1941, for exam-
ple, Senator Gerald Nye (R-ND) opened hearings
to investigate “warmongering” by a “Jewish-con-
trolled monopoly” in Hollywood.
Meanwhile, news trickled out of Europe about
Hitler’s persecution of Jews. The stories were so
severe that government public relations offices
sometimes refused to publicize the real numbers of
Jewish victims, for fear that Americans would not
believe them. In 1945, postwar revelations about
the total number of dead confirmed to American
Jews that the targeting of Jews in Europe had gone
beyond even their worst fears. “I still remember
the day my father received a letter from Europe
telling me that not one relative had survived,”
Chaim Potok writes. “He sat down and told my
mother, and she just fell to pieces. She kept say-
ing, ‘Nobody? Nobody? I can’t believe nobody.’
. . . Once I talked about the Holocaust with my
father,” Potok recalls. “He told me that we had
lost one hundred and three aunts, uncles, second
cousins, whole families. Then he turned away.”
The vulnerability of their brethren in Europe had
Jewish Currents
a concrete impact on how Jews in the U.S. carried
themselves in their daily lives, regardless of how
safe their U.S. surroundings might have seemed.
In her autobiography, Sleeping with Cats (2002),
Marge Piercy writes that her family followed the
events of the war closely. “Mother told me about
what was happening to the Jews in Europe — it
is foolish to imagine people did not know. It was
all over the Yiddish papers.” Outside the safety of
Piercy’s home, however, “I was a Jew, and thus
an outsider. My mother was always saying, Don’t
tell anyone.” If it were known that her family was
Jewish, “she was terrified that the Nazis would
appear and carry us away to a concentration
camp.” Political events warned Jews, in subtle and not-so-
Some survivors of the Holocaust literally attempt-
ed to “disappear” their Jewish identities in order to
save themselves or their children from the trauma
that seemed to be always around the next corner.
Helen Fremont and her sister grew up in a Mid-
western suburban community in the 1950s. They
were raised as Roman Catholics and uncovered
their parents’ Jewish identities only as adults, in
the early 1990s. Fremont remembers (After Long
Silence: A Memoir, 1999) how
When I was small, maybe five or six, my
mother came to my bed every night to
tuck me in. She would teach me the sign
of the cross in six languages: Polish, Rus-
sian, German, Italian, French, and English.
Each night I selected a language, and we
said the sign of the cross in that language:
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the
Holy Spirit, Amen. Then she taught me
the prayer Our Father in these languages,
and I rehearsed them until I knew them
by heart. I loved the way gumdrop syl-
lables rolled off the tongue in Italian and
the way consonants crashed in German
. . . What I didn’t understand was that my
mother was equipping me with the means
of survival: proof of my Catholicism to
anyone in a dozen countries.
May-June, 2009
The American Jewish community was now made
up of indirect witnesses to the mass murder of their
people, as well as direct witnesses, in the case of
the survivors who now came in small waves to try
to build new lives in the U.S.
The genocide of the 1940s convinced Jews that
America was one of the very few places in the world
where they were safe. If the lure of a happy, mid-
dle-class American life was the offer they longed to
accept, the example made of European Jews served
as a chilling reminder of the alternative. The 1950s
thus provided the most vulnerable psychological
moment in history for American Jews as a group.
subtle ways, that if they were really glad to be in
America, they would do well to keep a low profile
and conform as much as possible.
McCarthyism soon drove this message home. Sen-
ator Joseph McCarthy, the Wisconsin Republican
who declared in 1950 that the State Department
was riddled with Communists, opened a series
of congressional hearings that became one of the
media events of the century. Throughout the U.S.,
viewers were glued to their new televisions. Jew-
ish families watched and listened to the hearings
together with rapt attention. Young Jewish chil-
dren soaked in an awareness of the moment from
the reactions of their parents. Among blacklisted
artists, writers, actors and workers in Hollywood,
Jews were the most visibly targeted. Overall, they
became perhaps the most noticeable ethnic group
subjected to hysterical anti-Communist scrutiny.
One of the lowest points of the decade came
for Jews in 1950 when a working-class Jewish
mother and father from New York City, Ethel and
Julius Rosenberg, were accused of passing nuclear
secrets to the Soviet Union. FBI Director J. Edgar
Hoover called the case “the crime of the century.”
In a massively publicized trial, the Rosenbergs
were held up as traitors to the nation and con-
victed and executed despite worldwide protests.
17
In many Jewish homes, left-identified or not, it
was felt that the Rosenbergs had been singled out
and demonized not only as communists but as-
Jews. Karen Brodkin remembers that her family
was deeply affected by the Rosenbergs’ trial and
execution on June 19th, 1953.
It was a terrifying thing and discussed in
the same hushed tones that the Nazi geno-
cide was talked about . . . My parents talked
about these things with their friends, but I
do not think they discussed them with our
non-Jewish neighbors . . . out of a fear that
to do so might evoke an anti-Semitism they
suspected our white neighbors harbored but
which they didn’t want to know about.
The Rosenbergs’ trial and harsh fate served as a
warning to American Jews not to step out of line
politically or socially. Just decades earlier, the U.S.
had been a beacon of freedom for thousands of
young Jewish radicals fleeing the violent repression
18
of tsarist Russia, and had permitted the relatively
uninhibited growth of vibrant mass movements of
Jewish activism for improved labor conditions and
all the radical issues of the day. For many Jews,
older memories and cautionary tales from genera-
tions of experience in Europe were now stirred up.
Paul Jacobs, a student radical in the 1930s, was
taught by his family the message that a Jew
does not “make rishis.” To “make rishis”
was to stir up a fuss of some kind, and it
was a cardinal sin, for it supposedly made
Jews vulnerable to the potential wrath of the
Christian world. This world was conceived
of as something like a potentially evil sleep-
ing giant who, if awakened by a loud noise,
might, and probably would, turn on the
disturber of his peace and do him harm (Is
Curly Jewish?, 1965).
By the mid-1950s, a kind of metaphorical (and
at times literal) disappearing act had become an
attractive option for American Jews. In order to
succeed and be safe, it was important to avoid be-
ing too “foreign,” too “ethnic,” too visible. The
resulting push to blend in, to become pure Ameri-
cans, and to be white, transformed American Jew-
ish culture.
White America was assumed to share values of
hearty patriotism and rugged individualism, and
to stand as a united front against the nation’s Cold
War enemies. America had also been founded on
the ideal of freedom of religion, however, so reli-
gion was one difference that was tolerated. Rather
than being a dubious ethnic group, Jews could be
simply the white people who “went to church on
Saturday.” This would require Jews to construct a
modern vision of themselves as a religion, not an
ethnic group.
Jewish Currents
 A New Jewish Identity for New Circumstances (1950s to 1960s)

T
he 1950s was the breakthrough decade for a new, non-ethnic vision of Jew-
ish identity, as Jews entered a transition period in terms of both class status
and community structure.

Before World War II, the real-estate industry had actively used restrictive
housing covenants — contracts that prohibited houses in white neighbor-
hoods from being sold to Jewish or African-American buyers — to maintain
segregated neighborhoods. In 1948, the Supreme Court made such contracts
unenforceable in Shelley v. Kraemer. At the same time, many urban, work-
ing-class, ethnic neighborhoods were being torn apart by federal campaigns
of urban renewal. Whole neighborhoods were bulldozed, despite the pro-
tests of their residents, in order to build highways, stadiums and upscale
business districts.

Meanwhile, in the new suburbs, which were just beginning to be a large-

scale American phenomenon, houses were often cheaper than city rents.
For those who could afford to move, the 1950s thus created a pressure, and
opened a first-time opportunity, to do so.

African Americans, increasing their post-war migration from the South to

Northern cities, began to move into working-class neighborhoods that had
previously been majority-Jewish, and certainly all-white. Already influ-
enced by the racism that surrounded them in white America, Jews had their
fears fueled by realtors who stood to profit if they could get anxious urban
homeowners to sell cheap. Rabbi Harold Marx was one of a small number
of Jews in Chicago who worked to oppose the real-estate industry’s efforts
to get Jewish buyers to sell and flee the city. Motivated primarily out of
concern for the African Americans who were being refused their rights,
Marx and his colleagues understood that Jews were also being victimized
by the manipulated panic. The realtors “would go to Jewish homes and say,
‘You better get out because the neighborhood is changing,’” Marx recalls
(in Blacks and Jews, a film by Alan Snitow and Deborah Kaufman). “They
bought homes at much less than they were worth. They turned around and
sold them at much more than they were worth. They were a group of people
that we fought with all of our vigor.”

By the mid-1960s, suburban living was an American norm. Yet not every-
one had been included in the migration. Despite the Supreme Court’s ruling,

May-June, 2009 19
the Federal Housing Authority (FHA) continued quietly in public, to dress without ostentation
openly to encourage and pressure developers to . . . to assimilate with a world which might see
keep white neighborhoods all-white ­ — but now us as too flamboyant.” Rich’s grandmother, a
the FHA saw fit to enforce post-war segregation Sephardic Jew who had mastered Southern stan-
only against African-Americans, not against Jews. dards of white womanhood, dressed subtly and
For the first time since the beginning of large-scale wore the most unassuming jewelry possible. “A
Jewish immigration into the U.S., large numbers few times, within the family, I saw her anger flare,
of Jews were making a transition from working- felt the passion she was repressing. But when [my
class urban enclaves, in which a pool of ethnic father] took us out to a restaurant, or on a trip,
groups carved out their niches, to places where the Rich women were always tuned down to some
there was one assumed race: white. WASP level [that] my father believed, surely,
would protect us all.”
It was not necessarily easy for Jews to squeeze
themselves into white, middle-class cultural Charles Silberman tells (in A Certain People,
norms. “My grandmother tried to live in our subur- American Jews and Their Lives Today, 1985)
ban house the way a good Jewish mother in the im- about how in his own neighborhood, “A few
migrant working-class community was supposed weeks after a neighbor’s father moved in with her,
to live,” remembers Karen Brodkin, but the new members of the block association came to call not
norms of suburbia — with its isolation, absence of to welcome the elderly gentleman but to protest
extended families, and stay-at-home, marginalized his habit of sitting on the front lawn quietly read-
roles for women — didn’t allow Brodkin’s grand- ing his Yiddish newspaper while he caught the af-
mother the meaningful, engaged life she’d had in ternoon sun. ‘It’s not nice,’ they complained, by
the old neighborhood. “Fulfilling the immigrant which they meant that they were embarrassed by
dream of suburban prosperity brought no plea- his public display of Jewishness. Had the 82-year-
sure,” writes Brodkin. Instead, “[s]he lost the hard, old man read a French newspaper, the block asso-
work-based domesticity she knew and from which ciation members would have been delighted with
she derived her identity and authority.” Eventually, the touch of class he added to the neighborhood.”
Brodkin’s grandmother took her own life.
In a world in which religious difference was the
Poet Adrienne Rich remembers (in Visions of most permissible one, religious gestures became
America: Personal Narratives from the Prom- a source of ethnic self-defense. In Deborah Dash
ised Land, edited by Wesley Brown and Amy Moore’s research on Jewish GIs during World
War II, she observes that many secu-
larly-identified Jews found them-
The main method of declaring oneself Jewish that the selves isolated and alienated in the
army offered was through religious services. Jewish vastly gentile armed forces, and thus
identity was being shaped by the confines of what gentile experienced Jewish religious services
society condoned as acceptable, normal self-expression. as the only refuge they had. Soldiers
like Albert Eisen and Harold Paris
wrote home to their secular families,
Ling, 1993) how her father, a well-heeled South- at times apologetically, to describe an excitement
ern Jew who had done his best to assimilate into that they had never experienced before for Friday
the white world, expected his family to behave night services. Eisen wrote to his parents that, “as
in public. They were “constantly urged to speak a minority, it becomes necessary for us to declare

20 Jewish Currents
ourselves to those who, unfortunately, are imbued
with anti-Semitic sentiments.” The main method of
declaring oneself that the army offered Paris was
religious services. Jewish identity was being shaped
by the confines of what gentile society condoned as
acceptable, normal self-expression.
Jews began to adapt their communal activities
into forms that appeared primarily rooted in re-
ligion. Social clubs and communal functions that
had previously been based in ethnic organizations
now became based out of something called the
“synagogue center.” One of the earliest such cen-
ters was started by Mordecai Kaplan, the ground-
breaking Conservative rabbi who founded Jewish
Reconstructionism. In the early 1900s, Kaplan
had observed the massive flight from religious
observance and knew that atheists, even if they
wanted to, could not force themselves to believe
in God. He responded by teaching his followers
that in Jewish tradition, Jews need not believe in
a supernatural God in order to practice Judaism.
He advised synagogue leaders, in Nathan Glazer’s
words, “to make the synagogue more attractive”
to the entire Jewish community, including secu-
lar Jews, “by adding to the house of worship and
the [religion-oriented] school a variety of non-re-
ligious activities that might serve the entire sur-
rounding Jewish community.”
Some Jewish leaders thought such synagogue
centers might be the nucleus for a new type of
Jewish community, built upon “belonging” rather
than “believing,” and with a focus not on religion
but on what Kaplan called “peoplehood.” In such
centers, a variety of activities — religious, politi-
cal, cultural, intellectual, philanthropic — would
all be seen as legitimately Jewish.
These Jewish community centers, and the great
number of synagogues that sought to integrate
secular activities, became the foundation of an
unstated consensus among Jews in new suburban
communities. Religious institutions would let the
May-June, 2009
vast number of non-religious Jews come for what
they really wanted — secular social and cultural
activities among their ethnic peers. In return, those
Jews would pay dues and attend a few given reli-
gious observances per year out of a sense of being
loyal to their “roots” and belonging to the commu-
nity, and for the pleasure of seeing everyone.
Jewish centers indeed became central in suburban
Jewish life. But they soon lost the connotation of
a place where secular Jewishness would be as le-
gitimate as any other Jewish identity. In the classic
1970 novel for young adults, Are You There God?
It’s Me, Margaret, Judy Blume’s main character
moves to the suburbs of New Jersey from New
York City with her parents — one Christian, one
Jewish. Her new friends are astounded to discover
that she has no religion.
“But if you aren’t any religion, how are you
going to know if you should join the Y or the
Jewish Community Center?” Janie asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I never thought
about it. Maybe we won’t join either one.”
“But everybody belongs to one or the other,”
Nancy said.
For the uniformly white residents of Margaret’s
suburb, both the JCC and the Y are centers of ex-
tracurricular activities, yet Margaret is expected
to play in one of them according to her religion.
Confused, she decides it’s time for her to study up
on religions and make a choice. In the new world
of the suburbs, before she can decide where to
play volleyball, she has to decide what theology
she believes in.
Throughout the 1960s, some Jewish ethnic neigh-
borhoods still thrived in U.S. inner cities. Melanie
Kaye/Kantrowitz, born in 1945, grew up in Flat-
bush, Brooklyn, a mostly working-class Jewish
community that included many resettled Holo-
caust survivors. In Flatbush, she writes, “Jewish
21
was the air I breathed, nothing I articulated, every-
thing I took for granted.” It was only as an adult
that Kaye/Kantrowitz came to notice the values
her parents taught her as Jewish principles. They
were not religious values.
My father had been raised observant, my
mother, not. But to us breaking religious
observance was progressive, the opposite
of superstitious; when we ate on Yom Kip-
pur, it never occurred to me that this was
un-Jewish. I knew I was a Jew. I knew
Hitler had been evil. I knew Negroes . . .
had been slaves and that was evil too. I
knew prejudice was wrong, stupid. I knew
Jews believed in freedom and justice.
. . . Soon we would get our first TV, so my
mother (and I) could watch the McCarthy
hearings. I knew the whole fate of human-
ity hinged on these hearings, as surely as
I knew the Rosenbergs had been good
people, like my parents, with children
the same age as my sister and me. I knew
government people, like McCarthy, had
killed the Rosenbergs, and I was terrified,
but it literally did not occur to me that real
people, people I might meet, people who
had children and went to work, hated the
Rosenbergs, thought they should die. Nor
did it occur to me that there were people
who thought unions were bad, people who
did not know you never cross a picket
line, did not know prejudice was wrong
and stupid.
During their first years in the suburbs, many Jew-
ish families were able to maintain something of
the Jewish community that had nourished them in
the old neighborhoods they were leaving. Karen
Brodkin’s family arrived in Long Island in 1949,
but kept the same all-Jewish networks of friends,
colleagues and places to shop. Despite her sub-
urban surroundings, Brodkin’s parents were able
22
to impart to her the political values that had been
familiar to them in Brooklyn, values that mirrored
Kaye/Kantrowitz’ lessons during the same years
in Flatbush.
I tended to think of the political outlook I
learned in this milieu as Jewish. I knew from
listening to teachers’ shoptalk at my parents’
parties that school principals were bosses not
so different from garment bosses, as well as
jackasses; that the Board of Education was
an endless source of trouble and idiocy, and
that teachers were what made schools run
despite them. I listened to their stories of
teacher unions’ organizing and learned from
childhood that you didn’t cross picket lines.
I knew that everyone in this dispersed Jew-
ish community was a Democrat and voted
for Adlai Stevenson, while my spatial com-
munity of Valley Stream went solidly for
Eisenhower. . . . In one sense, then, being
a Jew meant being part of a multi-genera-
tional community, not really political but
Democrat, pro-union, anti-management, and
secular in the way one saw the world.
Most other Jewish families, however, merged
more quickly with the white, gentile mainstream
of suburban life, in which access to safety and
social mobility might even require that they sub-
merge the visible markers of their religious iden-
tification. Charles Silberman recalls that even the
religious Jews he knew removed their yarmulkes
in public, choosing a fedora instead to cover their
heads where gentiles might see. When Claire Gor-
finkel asked for a Jewish star necklace like the
ones she saw other young Jewish girls wearing,
her mother chided, “‘We don’t wear our religion
around our necks.’. . . For our family and that seg-
ment of the Jewish community of which we were
a part,” observes Gorfunkel, “it was sufficient to
know that we were Jewish. To go beyond that was
to flaunt it, perhaps even to invite trouble.”
Jewish Currents
 Jewish Identity Makes a Comeback,
in Altered Form (1960s to present)

T he 1960s marked the beginning of the end of tight-knit, urban Jewish enclaves.
Jewish elders who had stayed in the cities began to need more daily assis-
tance from their families. Worsening conditions of urban poverty, education
and crime, as well as increasingly visible racial tensions, led to a definitive
wave of Jewish migration. But the culture they encountered was something
vastly different from the Jewish communities of their childhoods.

The “new look” of non-ethnic Judaism had affected both secular and reli-
gious Jewish organizations. As Jews with little religious inclination joined
synagogues to express their Jewishness and in search of community, the at-
mosphere of those synagogues changed. Reform congregations, which had
long known for emphasizing inward spiritual faith even more than the ritu-
ally-oriented Orthodox tradition, became increasingly known as spiritually
minimalist, uninspiring social halls. Mitchell Silver recalls (in Respecting the
Wicked Child: A Philosophy of Secular Jewish Identity and Education, 1998)
how his passively secular parents sent him to Hebrew school “where I learned
very little Hebrew and not much of anything else, either . . . It was plain that
my parents were not very clear about why they were sending me to Hebrew
school and that they were not terribly concerned with what I was taught.”

Many of the children raised in such synagogues would later abandon ties
with the synagogue in search of more fulfilling spiritual experiences, or after
realizing they didn’t believe in God. But because most of the secular, eth-
nic expressions of Jewishness that they might have sought out a generation
earlier were no longer a visible alternative, when such Jews gave up their
religious affiliations, it often left them effectively detached from the Jewish
community as a whole. The growing religious dominance in Jewish life thus
had the unintended consequence of increasing assimilation out of the Jewish
community.

By the time the Civil Rights movement emerged, the disproportionately high
number of young Jews who were to be found among white civil rights work-
ers did not generally identify as Jews. While many, when asked, recalled that
their concern about racism stemmed from early awareness of the Holocaust
as a racist persecution against their own people, far more rarely did they
observe their work as wholly in line with the secular Jewish movements of
the recent past. To the contrary, many saw Jewishness as “a religion” and-

May-June, 2009 23

disclaimed any connection between their Jewish
identities and their political commitments.
But changes in the visibility of ethnicity in the
U.S. were again about to transform the way Jews
saw themselves. In the late 1960s, major African-
American activist groups declared efforts at inte-
gration into white society misguided and turned
instead toward building movements for Black
independence, self-determination and community
control. The Black Power movement quickly in-
spired similar organizing among oppressed ethnic
groups throughout the U.S., as well as the emerg-
ing Women’s Liberation movement. By the late
1970s, groups such as the American Indian Move-
24
ment, the Puerto Rican Young Lords, the Chicano
Liberation movement, and feminist organizations
had formed to raise consciousness among their
own peoples about the oppressions they faced,
to spread knowledge of their histories and foster
pride in their identities. These efforts had given
rise to women’s and ethnic studies initiatives
around the country. Ethnicity was claiming its
place at America’s table.
At the same time, the state of Israel was facing new
threats. In 1967, it had fended off what seemed to
be a viable attempt to destroy the state. American
Jews, who had been taught little about Israel in
their religious education and had previously given
little thought to it, were now invigorated with a
desire to know more about this nation of Jews
who had not only fought back but won. Some
Jews who had been deeply committed to the Civil
Rights movement and supported the nationalisms
of others found themselves feeling protective of
Israel when fellow activists condemned it as a
colonizing state. In addition, with proof laid out
that Jews could successfully defend themselves in
war, a new openness about discussing the traumas
of the Holocaust was felt in Jewish communities
throughout the country. Jewish self-awareness
was rising in the U.S.
After almost two decades since the terrible news
of the European death toll and the beginning of
McCarthyism, society had changed enough that
Jews could now claim an “outsider” identity with-
out facing great risks. The abundance of move-
ments for ethnic pride and self-determination
meant everyone was newly conscious of their
identity. Cultural festivals put on by Irish Ameri-
cans or Portuguese Americans didn’t threaten
their status as whites, so Jews going “back to their
roots” didn’t seem out of the ordinary. Jewish
baby boomers had grown up with enough safety
that they could experiment with an identity that
now seemed somewhat exotic rather than danger-
ous. As studies emerged about the increasing rate
Jewish Currents
of intermarriage out of the Jewish community,
Jews also became more conscious that the Jewish
community in the U.S. was shrinking. Reaffirm-
ing Jewish culture seemed imperative.
The same factors that had left the actively secular
institutions of Jewish life struggling to stay afloat
— the fear of “sticking out” in the 1950s, the mas-
sive trend toward assimilation into white culture
in newly suburban America, the rise to middle-
and upper-middle-class status that led newer gen-
erations of Jews to feel that their parents’ social-
ist identities were remnants of the past — had all
expanded the influence of religious Jewish insti-
tutions. Synagogues and their Jewish community
centers became nearly hegemonic in many Jew-
ish communities as they filled the vacuum left by
struggling secular Jewish institutions. Therefore,
as many Jews became newly interested in Jewish
identity and looked to reclaim it, their explora-
tions largely took the form of adopting religious
observance. Among these Jews were many who
did not believe in God but saw traditional practice
as a way to continue Jewish identity and maintain
connections with the Jewish community. While
passively secular, non-believing Jews were wel-
comed as full members of the family into most
Jewish institutions and activities, rarely were they
presented with the option of a proudly secular
Jewish path.
In the writings of Jews reclaiming their Jewish
identities between the late 1960s and the 1990s,
this ambivalence about religion comes through
in Jews’ descriptions of what drew them to syna-
gogue. Many came to religion in search of com-
munity or a feeling of legitimacy. Claire Gorfin-
kel, a young, socially-conscious woman raised in
the Reform tradition in San Francisco, rejected
religion in her college years, but after moving to
a small town in “an overwhelmingly Protestant
Bible-belt environment” in western Virginia, Gor-
finkel began attending regular services at the local
synagogue (I Have Always Wanted to Be Jewish
May-June, 2009
— and Now, Thanks to the Religious Society of
Friends, I Am, 2000). She was looking for new
friends, and hoping for “familiar music, a com-
mitment to social justice or a sense of commu-
nity.” She describes herself as having a “religious
experience,” as follows: “For the first time in my
adult life I had a sense of belonging, of being le-
gitimate as a Jew.”
Gorfinkel leaned spiritually so much toward the
Quakers that she gave serious thought to profess-
ing the faith and becoming one, but she felt she
could not because she was a Jew by birth, regard-
less of her actual beliefs. “When people invited
me to join,” she writes, “I would say that if I could
choose my religion, I’d be a Quaker, but being
Jewish was as irrevocable for me as being female.
. . . At some point I realized that for me joining a
temple wasn’t like becoming a Quaker. For one
thing, I already was a Jew and Judaism requires
no statement of faith” [my emphasis]. Gorfinkel
thought of Jewishness as a religious creed and
joined the local synagogue. But her certainty that
being Jewish is as irrevocable as a genetic trait,
and that her belonging as a Jew was not based on
her actual beliefs, speaks to the fact that she saw
Jewishness as something inborn, a tribal member-
ship.
While Jews were taking back their culture, knowl-
edge of the actively secular option had been lost.
For Gorfinkel and others, the word “secular” sig-
nifies the state of not being Jewish or not being
Jewish enough — something one should be mild-
ly ashamed of, unless one was trying to assimilate
— hence, her memory of feeling shame when, as
a college radical who had turned her back on reli-
gion, she went out on Rosh Hashone, the holiday
“when even secular, modern Jews” stay home.
In addition to the religious revival, a second phe-
nomenon occurred: Without naming them overtly
as secular or ethnic Jewish practices, American
Jews took up new forms of Jewish self-expression
25
that enabled them to identify themselves pub-
licly as Jewish without engaging in the religious
sphere. Two popular methods were Holocaust
commemoration and education, and expressions
of celebration or solidarity with Israel. Making
one’s support of Israel known became a prerequi-
site for Jewish organizations, synagogues, and
children’s education programs. Israel was not
simply a foreign nation to American Jews, it was
an extension of one’s Jewish self. For Jews who
had no interest in religion, standing up in behalf
of Israel allowed them to proclaim their pride in
and dedication to the Jewish people.
A similar phenomenon was occurring on the left.
Among Jews who disagreed with Israel’s policies,
protesting them as Jews became the most acces-
sible way to express their Jewish identity. Young
activists who had long been alienated from main-
26
stream Jewish communities, or whose passively
secular upbringings had not given them a close
Jewish community, now found that they hungered
for spaces to discuss and reconnect with Jewish-
ness. Activism on behalf of Palestinians enabled
them to make their Jewishness visible while act-
ing on deeply felt ideals.
Still other ways to express Jewish identity in secu-
lar ways came via popular culture: Jewish foods
and cookbooks, Jewish film festivals, television
shows based on Jewish characters, magazines tar-
geted at ironic Jewish hipsters, the klezmer music
revival, and, of course, the time-honored pastime
of keeping track of known or suspected Jewish
personalities on screen, in music, and in the news.
Finally, Jews who bore no outward interest in
Jewish culture could attest to the phenomenon of,
seemingly coincidentally, always ending up with
mostly Jewish friends, “although,” as Mitchell
Silver puts it (Respecting the Wicked Child), they
are “not sure how or why it happened.”
A smaller but quite engaged group sought out or
stumbled upon and reclaimed the explicitly ethnic
parts of their heritage. Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz
writes:
Last night I sang Yiddish songs with a
dozen Jewish women. L., a woman in
her twenties was teaching us the words, I
was moved by her pleasure in the words,
the sound and lilt — pretty. She seemed
like a daughter I might raise, braver and
less scarred — the sounds she speaks, her
inflections are the very sounds I grew up
trying not to make . . . In these songs the
way words sound good is to sound like
that, not “uneducated English,” but Yid-
dish, a language.
Jewish Currents
 Conclusion: Offers We Ought to Refuse

F rom the 1880s to the 1940s, actively secular Jewish communities had
a vibrant place in communities of European Jewish descent through-
out the world. As actively secular Jews mingled in broader Jewish
society, Jewish secular and religious cultures bled into and influenced
one another. Harry Roskolenko remembers (in Gerry Sorin’s previ-
ously cited volume of The Jewish People in America) how, among
the Jews who bought newspapers in his cafe, “Ideas about God, the
synagogue, the union, intermeshed. . . .Who was not at least two or
three separate spiritual and physical entities on the Lower East Side?
My father managed socialism, Orthodoxy and Zionism, quite easily
. . .” Likewise, many Jews with well-considered opposition to religion
chose to maintain partial, or even full, religious observance despite
the fact that they either did not believe in God, at least not in the clas-
sical God of Judaism, or that Jewish law came from a divine source.
At bottom, what held Jews together was peoplehood. Writer Harry
Golden remembered (in A Bintel Brief: Sixty Years of Letters from the
Lower East Side to the Jewish Daily Forward, 1971):

My father was a Socialist and a freethinker, but he went

to shul every Friday night and Saturday and attended the
synagogue on every holiday and every ceremonial. Once
when I chided him about his piety in view of the fact that
he was a freethinker, he answered me, “These people
are my brethren, they are the people among whom I was
raised, and I love them. Dudja Silverberg [a very pious
Jew] goes to shul to speak with God, I go to shul to speak
with Dudja.”

The events of the 20th century pressured Jews who wanted to hold
on to their ethnic community to do so in approved ways. Jews faced
trauma in the first half of the 20th century that made them want their
Jewishness to disappear for safety’s sake. White American codes of
normalcy also motivated American Jews to reshape their communi-
ties to de-emphasize ethnicity and emphasize religion. This flattening
of Jewish culture, in addition to all the other factors in 20th-century

May-June, 2009 27
American life, contributed to greater assimilation
by American Jews. When later generations came
back to reconnect with their culture, they looked
according to the definition they had been given of
Jewishness: religion.
Many of the trends in late 20th-century Ameri-
can Jewish life can be understood as attempts by
American Jews to express secular Jewish iden-
tity without having access to a widespread, vis-
ible, overtly secular Jewish culture. Still, when
one speaks of oneself today as a fully-identified,
actively secular Jew, people demand to know:
“What is Jewish culture without the religion?”
It’s easy for them to point out how ambiguous
and amorphous Jewish culture is once you take
away the structured framework of religious ex-
pectations for Jewish life: “Just because you eat
knishes, just because you talk with your hands
or feel that you have to fight for social justice,
you think that means you have a culture?” Do we,
however, put the “legitimacy” of other ethnic cul-
tures to the same test? Few Italian-Americans, for
example, speak their ethnic language, yet whether
or not they stick to their inherited Italian Catho-
lic religious legacy, they — like American Jews
— are recognizable by the food traditional to their
families, by their names, by their mannerisms, by
their self-awareness as Italians, and by how other
Italians can spot them even if they don’t feel a
28
personal attachment to the ethnicity — and few
would argue that it’s hard to tell whether they re-
ally have a legitimate or meaningful culture.
The loss of a proud, actively secular Jewish identi-
ty was a casualty of a larger push to subdue Jewish
ethnicity as a whole. But now that Jews have the
safety to be openly ethnic again, efforts to spark
interest in Jewish culture continue to reinforce the
idea that the “authentic” way to do so is through
religion. What has been lost is the range of possi-
bilities in which actively secular Jewish identity is
one of the legitimate ways to be a proud Jew. This
contributes to continuing assimilation by Jews
who are not inspired by religion, and detracts from
the richness and creativity of the American Jewish
culture that remains.
Today, Jews who work to maintain and revive
secular Jewish culture are often seen as doing
something “artificial,” as though what’s done is
done and we should let Jewish history simply run
its “natural course.” Yet the loss of actively secu-
lar Jewish culture was not natural, not fated, and
not freely chosen by Jews. It was pushed on us
by circumstances of oppression and fear. If his-
tory teaches us anything, it’s that change happens.
Seen through the eyes of an historian, nothing is
more natural than Jews taking change into their
own hands and bringing renewal to secular Jew-
ishness in the 21st century. JC
Jewish Currents