March 4, 2021

To read Gil Troy’s original article, click here.
To read Gil Troy’s counterpoint to this response, click here.

In his recent article, titled “The Non-Negotiable Judaism My Parents Gave Me,” Gil Troy laments the “collapse” of American Conservative Judaism and the overall failure of the Conservative movement. He takes the fact that by 2017, just 16% of American Jews identified as Conservative (compared to the time when it was the major movement in America) as proof of its failure. However, I disagree. I believe the movement did exactly what it was meant to do, even though it did not visualize the critical role it would have in ensuring the growth of traditional Judaism in the United States.

It is clear that the movement has been decreasing in strength and importance for some time. As early as the late 1970s, when I was Midwest regional president of United Synagogue of America (the congregational arm of the movement), I, along with Dr. Saul Shapiro (z”l), a senior statistical analyst for IBM and regional president of the Metropolitan New York Region, conducted a survey of 10% of the movement’s member families in the United States and Canada. Our goal was to find out enough about the religious practices and aspirations of the movement’s membership to chart a program for the continued growth of what was then the largest religious movement in the North American Jewish community.

The results of the survey were devastating. We were able to show, with a high degree of statistical accuracy, that the movement in the United States had no long-term capacity to replicate itself. We found that while many adult members of the movement came from more observant backgrounds, in the absence of any long-term commitment to religious observance, they had not been able to convey the same level of religious feeling to their children. As Troy’s article rightly points out, the movement was, and remains, composed mainly of observant clerical leadership with very few observant lay followers, even among the lay leadership itself.

I recall speaking in 1979 at Chicago’s Rodfei Zedek Congregation, a pillar of Conservative Judaism on the South Side, and being introduced not only by my title but also as “a Sabbath-observant Jew” — as if this were a novelty. At the time, I remarked to the assemblage that our future as a movement was bleak indeed, when it could not be taken for granted that the lay leadership was observant.

In an article which I penned for Commentary magazine in 1984, I predicted that, as a result of this dichotomous situation, the traditionalists in the movement would move to the modern Orthodox camp while the reformists and those anxious for further change would move toward the Reform movement, which, itself, would become more traditional. All that, of course, has occurred, although modern Orthodoxy is also in danger of being challenged as not sufficiently observant, at least in the eyes of the ultra-Orthodox. The continued reluctance of the movement to have taken unequivocal stands on major issues of religious import, coupled with the desire to be all things to all people, in the end, simply accelerated the defection of the movement’s members.

So in light of all of this, why do I believe the movement was a success? Because the movement should be acknowledged by one and all, especially by today’s Orthodox, as having been a transitional movement that “conserved” American Judaism for the ultimate resurgence of Orthodoxy. Recall that at the end of World War II, nobody thought there was a future for Orthodoxy any longer. The Holocaust had decimated the religious communities of Europe; American Jewry was suburbanizing itself with little interest in traditional observance; and those who arrived in Israel from Europe were little more than a thread of Orthodoxy.

It should be acknowledged as a transitional movement that “conserved” American Judaism for the ultimate resurgence of Orthodoxy.

What the Conservative movement did do, and for which it should be eternally proud, is establish a framework in which American Jews could hold on to their connection with traditional Judaism while being permitted to live a lifestyle concomitant with the social mores of the times. To accomplish this, the movement established large synagogue/community-center complexes, encouraged family prayer and organized a successful youth program, United Synagogue Youth (USY), a first-rate Hebrew-speaking camping experience (the Ramah Camps) and an Americanized day school system (the Solomon Schechter Schools). Thirty years later, when Orthodoxy began to take hold once again and increased learning and observance became the norm, there were Jews in America for Orthodoxy to recruit.

One would be very surprised to find how many leaders of modern Orthodox synagogues in America grew up in Conservative homes. Sitting around the Shabbat table in Los Angeles some years ago at the shalom zachor of our youngest grandson, I noted that 80% of the people there, all members of Orthodox congregations in Los Angeles’s Pico-Robertson area, grew up in Conservative congregations. The Conservative movement deserves accolades for holding the middle ground during an era of religious uncertainty.

As far as the Conservative movement is concerned, it should admit that it was indeed a transitional movement and that, as we have seen over the last years, it is a shrinking  element of the mosaic that is American Judaism. Nevertheless, it need not be ashamed of what it accomplished during a most difficult period in American Jewish life.

Gil Troy, along with me and many others who now live modern Orthodox lives, represent the success of that movement which was, for want of a better title, a product of its times.

Sherwin Pomerantz was formerly chairperson of the Council of Regional Presidents and a national vice president of the United Synagogue of America. He currently serves as president of Congregation Ohel Nechama, an Orthodox synagogue in Jerusalem’s Katamon neighborhood.

To read Gil Troy’s original post, click here.
To read Sherwin Pomerantz’s response, click here.

Today’s thin-skinned culture demands that I be offended that Sherwin Pomerantz “disagreed” with my recent article, “The Non-Negotiable Judaism My Parents Gave Me.” But his response thrilled me, even if half his argument misfires.

I hoped my article would trigger debate — rather than be squashed by Conservative Jewry’s powers that be. Many have spent the last half-century demonizing anyone who dared to yell that the Conservative Emperor had no clothes — that American Jewry’s once-reigning religious movement had lost its way ideologically and theologically, not just demographically. So I thank Pomerantz for his serious, thought-provoking response.

I also deeply appreciate the many heartfelt — often anguished — responses I have received since the Jewish Journal published my article. Those of us who grew up in the Conservative movement and went Zionist or Orthodox or both don’t delight in Conservatism’s drift; most of us lament its inability to inspire others as it inspired us.

So, yes, I agree with Pomerantz that mid-century Conservative Jews’ central failure was that “in the absence of any long-term commitment to religious observance, they had not been able to convey the same level of religious feeling to their children.” Traditionally, Jews alternated between fearing God and fearing anti-Semites; in the Conservative world my parents raised me in, many leaders feared their congregants, and most congregants feared their kids. As I argued in my essay, the constant defensive worry about whether “they” will show up or stay Jewish put too many people on guilt trips without launching enough satisfying, sustaining Jewish journeys, guided by a bedrock faith in God or a non-negotiable commitment to Jewish peoplehood and the State of Israel.

Tragically, as more people drifted away, rather than having the deep, soul-searching, self-critical debate they needed about where they went wrong, too many Conservative rabbis and leaders tended to ask what was wrong with anyone who asked such questions. Before the coronavirus, you could witness what these decades of denial wrought in the many empty seats every Saturday morning, which turned American Jewry’s grandest cathedrals into Grand Canyons.

As more people drifted away, too many Conservative rabbis and leaders tended to ask what was wrong with anyone who asked such questions.

Pomerantz and I part ways in two critical junctures. First, he should beware of an uncalled-for Orthodox triumphalism celebrating Conservatism’s collapse. The numbers of religious Jews in America and Israel are quite sobering, too. Only 10% of American Jews are Orthodox — with a mere three percent identifying as “Modern Orthodox.” The 2013 Pew study reported that half of those raised Orthodox abandoned it — although retention rates among younger Orthodox Jews are improving. The Jewish Virtual Library reports that of Israeli Jews over 20 in 2020, only 11% identify as religious while 10% are ultra-Orthodox.

Most categorically, I reject Pomerantz’s claim that the Conservative movement succeeded as “a transitional movement that ‘conserved’ American Judaism for the ultimate resurgence of Orthodoxy.” That argument disrespects Conservative Judaism’s mission to serve as a sustainable form of Jewish life. Pomerantz’s conclusion is like deciding the Boston Red Sox succeeded by cultivating Babe Ruth’s hitting skills before trading him to the New York Yankees, or that Americans appreciated the military experience they gave Benedict Arnold before he switched over to the British.

This “Conservadoxing” phenomenon Pomerantz toasts is also quite marginal overall. Although Pew tracked the dramatic drift from Orthodox to Conservative to Reform to unaffiliated to intermarried, the researchers found very little “switching in the opposite direction. For example, just 7% of Jews raised in the Reform movement have become Conservative or Orthodox, and just 4% of those raised in Conservative Judaism have become Orthodox.”

Jewish historians know that over the millennia, many more Jews left the fold voluntarily by assimilating rather than being bullied or killed by Jew-haters — by many orders of magnitude. And American historians know that over the decades, the lure of America’s New World identity has weakened most Americans’ Old World ethnic and religious ties. Therefore, the challenge from my parents, from the serious Conservative movement of my youth and from my article remains: What positive vision of old-new Pilates Jewishness, strong at its core, shaped by non-negotiable bottom lines, will work — not to keep our kids Jewish out of guilt, but to keep them doing Jewish regularly, meaningfully, out of their own pride and passion?

I warmly invite Sherwin Pomerantz for coffee as a fellow Jerusalemite, where we can toast the most wildly successful modern experiment in keeping Jews Jewish — from generation to generation, be they secular or religious — Zionism!

Recently designated one of Algemeiner’s J-100, one of the top 100 people “positively influencing Jewish life,” Gil Troy is a Distinguished Scholar of North American History at McGill University, and the author of nine books on American History and three books on Zionism. His book, “Never Alone: Prison, Politics and My People,” co-authored with Natan Sharansky, was just published by PublicAffairs of Hachette.