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Jewish Journal

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March 22, 2021

The Melting of the American Melting Pot

Columnists, Featured /

A century ago, during the dark days of the Spanish flu, a time when it was not politically incorrect to associate an epidemic with its place of origin, Americans had a much tougher time sheltering at home.

For starters, there was no Internet, social media, Netflix, Peloton, TiVo, cable or even basic TV. Even radio was a nascent, novel industry. Binging on books, newspapers and magazines was all there was to occupy the mind.

You decide which quarantined people were worse off.

There was also no anticipated vaccine for the virus. The only thing that arrived at warped speed was death. The United States in those days had a population of 103 million and a death toll from the Spanish flu of 675,000. Today, the United States has a population of 330 million, with the coronavirus claiming 547,000 American lives.

Again, draw your own conclusions.

Not surprisingly, back in 1918, social distancing was not widely viewed as a remedy to stem the rate of infections. And even if the Anthony Fauci of that era had urged Americans to stay away from one another, it would have been useless—at least in dense urban population centers. After all, Fauci’s own grandparents immigrated to New York in the late 19th century and likely settled in Manhattan’s Little Italy, sandwiched between the Jewish delicatessens on Orchard Street, the tongs of Chinatown and the remnants of the Irish in Five Points. (African-Americans built their own world, uptown, in Harlem.)

Amid the teeming dead were also millions who survived the virus but now had to survive each other. Cramped tenements of immigrant life somehow co-existed right beside one another—a short radius in distance, and yet, culturally, miles apart. The dividing lines were written in chalk and were often confused with hopscotch. Privacy was impossible with everyone airing their laundry, hopefully clean, on fire escapes. So many speaking their own native tongues sat beside one another in sweatshops, easily misunderstood. Others pushed carts and competed for customers.

There were street gangs and turf wars, of course. But most people understood that being an American meant getting along with others in the neighborhood. Sure, the Sharks and the Jets occasionally rumbled, but Maria and Tony had a much better chance of making it in America than Romeo and Juliet fared in Verona. Isn’t that why so many decamped from Europe and Russia for a more promising land? Mutual respect was a necessity, made possible by immersion, which softened tensions.

Today, we are guided by an entirely different impulse, the woke warfare of tribal feuds, shouting slogans in anti-American solidarity.

The American melting pot accomplished many things, but primarily, it worked wonders with antagonisms. Immigration sagas came to a halt at Ellis Island and demanded some buy-in into the American experiment. Sometimes it was begrudging. Many lost their surnames, revamped by interpreters who didn’t have much of an ear for languages. But with each generation, these disparate peoples went from a common poverty to a celebration of successes, born from common struggles. It required a belief that what they shared as Americans was stronger than their grievances.

As a teenager, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor worked in a kosher bakery in the Bronx. Her customers all believed her to be Jewish. Frank Sinatra, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and even Colin Powell, as young men, all spoke Yiddish.

Enough said.

These were the decades before the politics of identity laid waste to assimilation, giving it a bad name akin to ethnic, gender and racial appeasement. Melting within the mainstream was suddenly considered the patriotism of surrender—making the erasure of identity complete.

A century ago, they walked away from a deadly virus and a world war determined to bond together as Americans even more resolutely. Today, we are guided by an entirely different impulse, the woke warfare of tribal feuds, shouting slogans in anti-American solidarity. Liberal culture has collapsed, and Critical Race Kool-Aid has replaced the convivial pints of St. Patrick’s Day cheer, which always managed to bring out the Celtic in Italians, Jews, Poles, Russians, Armenians, Asians and African-Americans.

Imagine what Martin Luther King Jr. would say to all this tarnishing of his teachings?

Nowadays, skin color determines who you can toast, and who you must curse. What has melted away is our tolerance for one another. We are being encouraged to keep to our own kind, respect and glorify our differences and, for heaven’s sake, not appropriate another’s culture—whether it be ethnic food recipes or Halloween costumes. Segregation was once un-American. Today “separate but equal” is making a comeback. How else to explain colleges hosting customized graduation ceremonies?

Imagine what Martin Luther King Jr. would say to all this tarnishing of his teachings? The man who once dreamed that his children might “one day be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” would have nightmares from all this talk of racial privileging and racist accusation—where color is the overriding measure of moral rectitude. Intersectional protocols have become a national pathology. The dissections of our identities have turned us all into strangers. White children are being taught to believe that they are natural-born oppressors because of the color of their skin. Evil is a white person’s prerogative.

A liberal arts education now means either four years of righteous anger or self-flagellated atonement—depending on your skin color.

A liberal arts education now means either four years of righteous anger or self-flagellated atonement—depending on your skin color. This is equity, diversity and racial justice by fiat, a woke spin on Patrick Henry’s old battle cry: “Give me diversity or give me death!”

Yes, much of American history shows how the better angels of our nature were often absent—all that homophobia, misogyny, racism, and the Original Sin of slavery that serve as a shameful stain on our past. But it is absurd to ignore the significant progress that has occurred over the past 50 years, or declare that the United States has no national purpose other than to perpetuate white privilege over people of color. Or that freedom, opportunity, and merit are racist concepts. Or that democracy is not a great leveler but rather a lever for oppression.

Even with its many moral blots and blind spots, America is not a nation without virtue. Has anyone, actually, looked at a map lately—nations led by autocrats, theocrats, terrorists and tyrants dressed up as statesmen? If American Exceptionalism is an undeserved ethos, then where are the nations with better passing grades, and why do so many risk their lives to cross our borders?

We are the world’s oldest democracy for a reason. Before so casually dispensing with the melting pot, we might reflect on how American assimilation transformed tens of millions of lives for the better, through epidemics and other hardships, and yet without the cultural amnesia so many now fear.

Thane Rosenbaum is a novelist, essayist, law professor and Distinguished University Professor at Touro College, where he directs the Forum on Life, Culture & Society. He is the legal analyst for CBS News Radio. His most recent book is titled “Saving Free Speech … From Itself.”

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Abolitionist Rabbis: Their Urgent Lessons for Today

Leave a Comment / Columnists, Opinion /

As the first half of the nineteenth century ended, Americans faced an urgent matter of conscience. The enslavement of human beings, central to the U.S. economy, was tearing the country apart. The situation called for spiritual and moral leadership.

Most American Jews at the time were of European descent. And as a group, they were not strikingly different from their non-Jewish white neighbors in their attitudes toward slavery. Northern Jews tended to oppose the practice, and some, like August Bondi, fought pro-slavery militias in Kansas under the leadership of John Brown. Southern Jews tended to endorse slavery, and a few, like Judah Benjamin, would become part of the Confederate leadership (and, in defeat, move to England, where he died and was buried a Christian).

But Rabbi Sabato Morais, an Orthodox rabbi, and Rabbi David Einhorn, a Reform rabbi, felt compelled to issue full-throated denunciations of slavery. They turned to our foundational narrative, our Exodus story, for guidance and brought the story to life. In so doing, they showed us how to move from the seder table into action.

Each of them faced congregants who urged them not to make trouble for their people by engaging in this debate. Of the two, Morais kept his congregation. Einhorn was driven from his home in Baltimore by a mob and relocated north, where he found a congregation that embraced him.

During his Thanksgiving sermon in 1864, Rabbi Morais thundered, “Not the victories of the Union, but those of freedom [of] my friends, we do celebrate. What is Union with human degradation? Who would again affix his seal to the bond that consigned millions to [enslavement]? Not I, the enfranchised slave of Mizraim.”

In that same year, Rabbi Einhorn asked his Philadelphia congregation, “Is it anything else but a deed of Amalek, rebellion against God, to enslave beings created in His image, and to degrade them to a state of beasts having no will of their own? Is it anything else but an act of ruthless and wicked violence, to reduce defenseless human beings to a condition of merchandise and relentlessly tear them away from the hearts of husbands, wives, parents and children?”

Strikingly, each rabbi poskined (adjudicated) directly from our written Torah, rather than from halacha — something that, surely, the Orthodox rabbi was not eager to do. Their method was a tacit acknowledgement of a point made by the infamous anti-abolitionist, Rabbi Jacob Morris Raphall, who said in 1861, “How dare you denounce slaveholding as a sin? When you remember that Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Job … were slaveholders, does it not strike you that you are guilty of something very little short of blasphemy?”

Even more problematically, the Rabbis and Sages of the Talmud who shaped Judaism as we know it today also tolerated slavery. As Gail Labovitz reminds us in her important article “More Slave Women, More Lewdness: Freedom and Honor in Rabbinic Constructions of Female Sexuality”( Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, Fall 2012), “Rabbinic texts legislate for a slave society, biblical law incorporates slaveholding, slavery is well documented within the two primary cultures in which rabbinic Judaism took shape, and multiple sources of evidence demonstrate that Jews could be slaveholders or held as slaves.” She and Catherine Hezser, the author of “Jewish Slavery in Antiquity,” document that while our Rabbis and Sages found ways to limit and reform the institution of slavery — which was ubiquitous in their ancient world — they never condemned it unequivocally as evil.

For those rabbis, slaves were human beings and accorded some basic rights — but so were women and minors, and they too fell under patriarchal authority. Further, the rights accorded to Jewish slaves were much greater than those of non-Jewish slaves. However, no Jewish master was allowed to humiliate or injure, much less murder, a slave from any background.

In Mishneh Torah, Maimonides cautions Jews to treat non-Jewish slaves with compassion — to serve them food equal to one’s own and to not degrade them with brutal behavior or disrespectful speech. However, he also observes that the law does allow slaveowner to work a slave brutally, even if the community disapproved. (Mishneh Torah, Slaves 9:8)

Given that tradition, even Rabbi Raphall was forced to admit that “The slave is a person in whom the dignity of human nature is to be respected; he has rights. Whereas the heathen view of slavery which prevailed at Rome, and which, I am sorry to say is adopted in the South, reduces a slave to a thing, and a thing can have no rights.”

But Morais and Einhorn went much further. They each came to regard any system in which one human being owns title to another as simply evil. The halakhist and the reformer both returned to narrative, to our foundational story of Exodus, and in it they found a hidush — a new understanding.

The halakhist and the reformer both returned to narrative and in it they found a new understanding.

For example, Rabbi Einhorn said of slavery, “Scripture merely tolerates this institution as an evil not to be disregarded, and therefore infuses in its legislation a mild spirit gradually to lead to its dissolution”; he compared slavery to polygamy, allowed in the Talmud but forbidden to Ashkenazi Jews by Rabbeinu Gershom circa 1000 CE. And Rabbi Morais, speaking to the moral condition of the slaveholding United States, argued that “Degeneration fostered by luxury, corruption engendered by satiety, have conspired against thee.”

For these rabbis, and for generations of American Jews who followed, our Torah’s injunction to identify with the stranger based on our servitude in Egypt is a command to reject human trafficking in all its forms. This is not assimilation into liberal modernism but an application of Judaism to the burning questions of one’s day.

Midrash Rabbah 28:6 teaches that not only did the soul of every Jew who was or would ever come into the world stand at Sinai to receive Torah, but also that each soul was granted some particular Torah which they were uniquely constituted to comprehend. This is why our Torah is like a palimpsest with texts upon texts; new understandings come into the world with each Jewish soul.

The Jews of nineteenth-century America inhabited a world different from that of the rabbis and that which produced our great codes of law. Like the rabbis who imported dialectical methodology into their Talmudic practice and like Maimonides, who joined in the revival of philosophy in the Muslim world (which would give rise to the western Renaissance), abolitionist rabbis responded to their particular situation while keeping oriented to Torah as the center of gravity. The membrane that separates Jews from the dominant cultures in which we have lived has always been both permeable and unbreakable.

Jews like Rabbis Morais and Einhorn, were exposed to the challenges of Modernism. They understood that while God is the ultimate Owner of our person, no other human being can be, and that our Exodus story mandates a radical understanding of cavod ha briot, human dignity.

Their hidush continues to transform our communal institutions. In his tshuvah “Halakhic and Metahalakhic Arguments Concerning Judaism and Homosexuality,” Rabbi Gordon Tucker articulates a halakhic methodology that “would include the more conventional halakhic methods but would also appeal to aggadic (narrative) texts that have withstood the tests of time to become normative Jewish theology and ethics.” In her groundbreaking book “Engendering Judaism,” Rabbi Rachel Adler suggests that in place of a kinyan (acquisition) marriage, in which a man “takes” a wife, loving Jewish companions of any gender can sign a brit ahuvim, a lover’s contract affirming their equal status.

Jews can be open to the lessons of our time and still maintain Torah as our center of gravity, always refining, always moving toward justice. Our country is still coming to terms with our history of slavery and the systemic racism that upheld it and outlived it. We are called to do our part. Rabbis Morais and Einhorn can, with their example, show us a way.

Rabbi Robin Podolsky serves on the Board of Governors for the Sandra Caplan Community Bet Din, writes at shondaland.com and jewishjournal.com, advises the Jewish Student Union at Occidental College and serves as writing facilitator and dramaturg for Queerwise, a spoken word and writing group. She also serves on the National Ritual Committee for Bend the Arc.

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The Forgotten Roots of Modern Zionism

Leave a Comment / Commentary, Opinion /

Not many Jews today recall a nineteenth-century European Jewish leader who wrote a booklet that inspired young Jews to move to the Land of Israel. The man first believed in assimilation as an answer for Jews, but later, due to what he saw as rising anti-Semitism, he advocated a new idea — what eventually became known as Zionism. He met with notables all over Europe to advance his plans, and his booklet led him to chair a movement that convened a groundbreaking convention of Jews discussing a mass Return to Zion.

If you are thinking the man was Theodor Herzl, the book was “The Jewish State” (1896), the convention was the First Zionist Congress and the movement was the World Zionist Organization, you are wrong.

This Jewish leader died five years before Herzl wrote “The Jewish State.” His name was Leon Pinsker, and this year is the bicentennial of his birth in 1821. Pinsker’s booklet was titled “Auto-Emancipation: A Warning of a Russian Jews to His Brothers” and was published in 1882. The 1881 pogroms that followed the assassination of Tsar Alexander II had caused Pinsker, a physician, to rethink his dedication to assimilation. He was recruited to the Hibbat Zion (Fondness For Zion) movement and chaired its 1884 conference in Katowice, which united various parts of the movement as Hovevei Zion (Lovers Of Zion).

The eminent historian, Walter Laqueur, in his 1972 opus, “A History of Zionism,” labeled Pinsker’s book “a milestone in the development of Zionist thought.” British Chief Rabbi Immanuel Jakobovits also stressed Pinsker’s importance in his 1984 book, “If Only My People Zionism In My Life”: “Political Zionism was born and sustained out of negative factors: the intolerable conditions of Jewish homelessness. Pinsker’s Auto-Emancipation (1882) was sparked by the Russian pogroms in 1881. The seeds of Herzl’s Judenstaat were planted at the Dreyfus trial in Paris, and even Jabotinsky was only converted to Zionism at the age twenty-three by the Kishinev pogrom in 1903.”

There was a time that when anyone who was an educated Zionist knew who Pinsker was, had familiarity with his ideas and understood the importance of Hovevei Zion to Zionist history. But over the years, the Zionist narrative became simplified and little room was left to recall those who came before Herzl.

Over the years, the Zionist narrative became simplified and little room was left to recall those who came before Herzl.

Beyond simply correcting the record and restoring Pinsker’s place in the story of Zionism, we can learn much from his work on what Zionism was, is and can be.

Jewish unity was a key idea of the Hovevei Zion. The Katowice conference brought together less than three dozen delegates, but they travelled from France, Britain, Germany, Russia and Romania to attend. What’s also important to note is that even though Pinsker was not observant, he was able to find common ground with the delegates, some of whom were Orthodox rabbis.

It is a misrepresentation of history to state that the Zionist movement was a secular movement and that Orthodox rabbis opposed early Zionism. It is simply impossible to understand the early development of modern Zionism without studying the ideas, activism and impact of rabbis such as Yehuda Leib Kalischer, Yehuda Alkalai and Shmuel Mohilever. Rabbi Mohilever attended the 1884 conference and was elected president; Pinsker was elected chairman; Rabbi Kalischer’s son was elected to the central committee.

Part of the organizing that Pinsker and his colleagues did was generating direct financial support for the Jewish communities being developed throughout the Land of Israel in the last several decades of the 1800s. For example, the first agricultural school in pre-state Israel, Mikveh Israel, was built in what is now the Tel Aviv area in 1870 (Tel Aviv itself would not be founded until 1909). The 1884 conference attendees voted to send much needed funds to two communities in Israel. In essence, Pinsker helped build Zionist towns decades before the Holocaust.

Through their work, Pinsker and his colleagues put the idea of the Return to Zion into the consciousness of European Jews so that when Herzl arrived on the scene, there was already something serious to work with.

Throughout the time in which Hovevei Zion was active, Jews had to contend with Ottoman laws that prohibited them from buying property. If it were not for these immoral laws, who is to say that millions of Jews would not have left Europe for Jerusalem, the Galilee, Hebron and the Tel Aviv area long before Hitler ever came to power?

Despite the challenges to obtain real estate and many other obstacles, the early Zionist pioneers blazed a solid path. And that perhaps is the single most important lesson to learn from Pinsker and his contemporaries: In addition to the vital need for Jewish unity, however serious the challenges may be, Zionist work must go on.

Let’s use the bicentennial of Pinsker’s birth to recommit to Zionist education and to ensure the Zionist movement remains the big tent that it was from the outset — a safe space for the Orthodox and non-Orthodox to combine their efforts on behalf of the Jewish People in our eternal homeland.

Moshe Phillips is national director of Herut North America’s U.S. division. Herut is an international movement for Zionist pride and education and its U.S. website is https://herutna.org/

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