BOOK REVIEW
Manfred Gerstenfeld’s
American Jewry’s
Challenge
Rowman and Littlefeld, 2004
Book Review by
Shalom Freedman
Manfred
Gerstenfeld a veteran international business consultant, with a lifelong
involvement in Jewish communal affairs
is as much a man of action as thought.
In the past decade he has
published a series of books that aim to contribute not only to the Jewish
people’s understanding of their situation in the world but to their capacity to
work to improve it. In the first of these works, Gerstenfeld interviewed, soon
after the signing of the Oslo Agreement, 16 prominent Israelis all of whom were
affiliated with either the Labor or Likud parties and thus not at the political
fringes of the society. His aim was to provide what he called a “snapshot of the
society at a particular time”. Fifteen years later he would conclude that the
great value of this work was in part that not a single of these mainstream
Israeli figures understood the devastating role the anti-Semitic and hate-filled
Palestinian educational system was having regarding any possible reconciliation
with Israel. Gerstenfeld maintains that had the Israelis understood the
Palestinian educational system they would have known Oslo was doomed to failure
from the beginning.
In 1996, Gerstenfeld did another
collection of interviews, and in these, he exposed the myth that Europe, after
the Shoah, ceased being anti-Semitic. He showed that the seeming surge of
European anti-Semitism in the last five years was merely a blowing-on-the-coals
of a fire that was already burning.
Now in American Jewry’s
Challenge, Gerstenfeld interviews 17 prominent Americans and makes a 2003
“snapshot in time” of the situation of American-Jewry. This snapshot comes after
what he calls a series of “mega-events” which transformed the political and, in
time, the social landscape of American Jewry. The first of these is the
Palestinian violence against Israel that renewed in full force on Rosh
HaShanah 2000. The second, was 9/11 – the murder of thousands of Americans
by Islamic terrorists. The third, was the US invasion of Iraq and dethroning of
Saddam Hussein. The fourth is the worldwide upsurge in anti-Semitism that
occurred during this time.
These mega-events caused an
upheaval in the perception and thought of American Jewry. Gerstenfeld was quick
to sense the change and almost immediately began carefully choosing communal
leaders and intellectuals who could provide perspective on what was happening in
American-Jewish society during this time.
In an informative 100 page
introductory essay, Gerstenfeld outlines the main findings of the work. He
discusses the well-known demographic problems of the American Jewish community:
low fertility, high intermarriage and assimilation, as well as the rapid aging
of the population. He mentions what Daniel Pipes calls “the end of the Golden
Age of American Jewry”, with the rise of a rapidly growing rival community – the
Muslim minority. He also considers the new relationships between Israel,
supporting Evangelicals and the largely liberal-left American Jewish community.
He considers the relationship to Israel on the part of American Jews and sees a
strengthening in their relationship to the Jewish state. In addition, he touches
upon what has become one of the major problematic areas for American Jewry – an
area where, ideally, their weight should be felt and yet is not – the American
college campus. He talks about the Left’s veering away from traditional
positions and becoming a fierce opponent of the Jewish state. However he does
not discuss what, at the time of the book’s writing, had not yet happened, the
High Church, Presbyterian-led movement for disinvestment from Israel. He also
ponders voting numbers looking ahead to the 2004 election, and sees that 48% of
Jews are thinking of Bush. In fact it later turned out that only some odd 20%
did, and that the Jews continued to vote for liberal-left candidates no matter
how apparently inimitable they are to Jewish communal interests.
He also considers the changing
patterns of US Jewish philanthropy with younger Jews contributing less
proportionately to specifically Jewish causes. He also touches upon the role of
the synagogue and denominationalism in providing Jewish identity and continuity.
He underlines the importance of the growth of Jewish religious educational
frameworks for younger people. He too considers the general American trend of
declining voluntarism and its effect on the American-Jewish community.
And he touches upon the high
financial
cost of belonging to the Jewish community. He also seeks to define those issues
that he, and his interviewees believe will be on the agenda of the
American-Jewish world in the decades to come. And this of course, with the hope
of helping provide a framework for strategies that will better enable the
community to successfully work at these problems in the future.
The 17 people he interviewed and
their subjects are:
Norman Podhoretz:
Countervailing Trends in American Jewry
Alan Dershowitz: Unprepared Jewish
Leadership and Radical Change
Gary Rosenblatt: Change and Perplexity
David Harris: Confronting Existential
Questions
Malcolm Hoenlein: A Community Seeking
Unity through Consensus
Stuart Eizenstat: The Activism of
American Jews and Restitution
Abraham Foxman: The Resuscitation of
Anti-Semitism
Marvin Hier: Building a Major
Organization from Scratch
Daniel Pipes: The End of American
Jewry's Golden Era
Shoshana Cardin: Community versus
Individualism
Rela Mintz Geffen: Sociological Changes
in the Community
David Ellenson: New Concepts for
Teaching Reform Rabbis
Ismar Schorsch: Indicators of Spiritual
Renaissance
Norman Lamm: Changes in Modern Orthodoxy
Richard Joel: Revitalizing Hillel
Carole Solomon: National and
International Responsibilities
Mark Charendoff: At the Core of the
Funding Revolution
There is a
Foreword by Jonathan Sarna and an Afterword by Alan Mittleman.
One clear dichotomy that many of
the essays touch upon is the growing strength in terms of Jewish education of a
minority core-community, and the increasing Jewish ignorance of an assimilating
minority. Perhaps it is true to say that never have there been so many “learned
Jews and learning Jews in America” and so many Jews who are absolutely ignorant
of their tradition. As for the positive element, the Orthodox world with its
network of day schools has been for years the leading element. But an
encouraging note is given by the growth of Conservative and also, to a lesser
degree, Reform Jewish educational institutions. This growth of education gives
the Denominational leaders Norman Lamm, Ismar Schorsch, and David Ellenson the
hope of a spiritual revival in America.
Yet the opposite pole is the
prevailing note for the great majority. This great majority seems increasingly
remote from any sense of Jewish peoplehood, any sense of Jewish communal
obligation, and with this any sense of obligation to the well-
being of Israel. For a great part of the younger generation of American
Jews – those still willing to let themselves be called Jews – their Jewishness
is not about what they can give to others. As Sylvia Barack Fishman points out
in her most recent study on Jewish intermarriage in America, the overwhelming
majority of those think of their Jewishness as a means to personal meaning and
identity. It is not about what their being Jewish can give to the Jewish people,
but what about their association with a Jewish community or culture can give to
them individually. In this, American Jews fit in perfectly with the general
trend of American society. Gerstenfeld, in this regard, cites the by-this-time
classic work Bowling Alone which shows that the Americans of today do
not have less and less connection with voluntary organizations even in terms of
their own leisure time activities.
This critical turn to the
personal and individual does not bode well for the community’s strength in
providing future vital political support to Israel. In his interview, Alan
Dershowitz faults American Jewish leadership for being uneducated and unprepared
to deal with the attacks being made on Israel. Carole Solomon speaks about how
unprepared Jewish young people have been when facing the onslaught of anti-Israel
propaganda. And she suggests that communal leaders have to understand that
providing religious and day-school education is not enough, but that Jewish
young people must be taught about the history and society of Israel. On the
other hand, Alan Mittleman, in his Afterword, sees that the “mega-events” have
made American Jewish leaders understand that they must be more open to
coalitions with conservative American groups; must be more realistic in regard
to expecting peace with Palestinians. But of course Mittleman’s words were
written under the influence of 9/11 and without any awareness that in May 2005,
American Jewish leaders would be on their feet applauding, almost unanimously,
Israeli Prime Minister Sharon’s plan for one-sided disengagement.
Aside from urging that Israel’s
case be made “more efficiently” in America by what he calls “defense
organizations”, Manfred Gerstenfeld makes a number of suggestions on how to
strengthen the Israel-Jewish-American connection. He speaks of the importance of
“mega-donors” in initiatives to strengthen the Jewish community. He sees that
new small organizations might be the key to being more effective on campus. And
he emphasizes the importance of “mobilizing the Jewish grassroots” to greater
activism. But he also suggests that long-term demographic trends are not going
to be overturned “overnight” and that there is great work to do in the years ahead.
The situation of American Jewry,
as outlined in this work, is thus extremely problematic but not
without considerable reasons for hope. Among many suggestions for
improving the situation scattered throughout the work, are those which advocate
more intense education about Israel and Jewish history in American-Jewish
schools, including religious schools. In this regard, the present work does not
explore in any detail the important phenomenon of ultra-Orthodoxy in America.
There are those who point to the vast increase in Jewish Studies programs on
university campuses. Other elements are the singular efforts of outstanding
individuals. Gerstenfeld lauds the exemplary behavior of Rachel Fish who took on
the Middle East Studies establishment and induced Harvard to cancel the
appointment of an anti-Semitic professor. Gerstenfeld mentions the “Birthright
Program” which has brought thousands of young American Jews to Israel, for a
quick acquaintance with the country. This program is now being supplemented by
the “Masua Program” which will bring young American Jews to Israel for much
longer periods of time; and this, when it is clear that a first priority for the
Jewish people should be providing for its young people as much of a Zionist
education as possible.
All in all, the alarming trend
outlined in the book of American-Jews’ “dropping out” from communal
responsibility presents the greatest challenge of all to its Jewish leadership.
To connect more and more individual Jews to their communal and historical
responsibility is the true challenge of the Jewish future. This too requires
bucking the trend of greater distance between American and Israeli Jewry.
It is to be hoped that this
illuminating volume will be a real contribution in moving the Jewish world and
its leadership toward meeting the challenge of providing greater Jewish strength
and solidarity in the future.
Shalom Freedman is a freelance writer in
Jerusalem with a long-time interest in American-Jewish communal and cultural
life.