Alan Wolfe is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College. He is the author and editor of more than 20 books. Professor Wolfe attended Temple University as an undergraduate and received his doctorate in political science from the University of Pennsylvania in 1967. He has honorary degrees from Loyola College in Maryland and St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Professor Wolfe writes often for different publications including The New York Times, Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly, and The Washington Post. He served as an advisor to President Clinton in preparation for his 1995 State of the Union address and has lectured widely at American and European universities. He has twice conducted programs under the auspices of the U.S. State Department that bring Muslim scholars to the United States to learn about separation of church and state.
This exchange is dedicated to Professor Wolfe's new book, At Home in Exile: Why Diaspora Is Good for the Jews (Beacon Press, 2014).
(Parts 1 and 2 can be found here and here.)
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Dear Professor Wolfe,
In the previous round I asked you whether the diaspora is more appealing to Jewish universalists than Israel. Your answer was quite unequivocal:
The answer is yes. In both Europe and the United States, younger Jews, while more likely to intermarry, are also more likely to want to see their liberal values reflected in Israeli domestic and foreign policy.
Now, near the end of your book you rightfully celebrate the impressive level of engagement of young diaspora Jews in several non-exclusively Jewish universalist causes such as feminism, civil rights, peace, and environmentalism. You stress how the remarkable vigour they bring to these causes is to a large extent a modern manifestation of their Jewishness.
But one could argue that the mass-scale preservation of any kind of Jewish vigour – be it secular or traditional, liberal or conservative – is the result of the particularism of previous generations. Had their grandparents not insisted on marrying Jewish, for instance, today’s young Jews may have been much less committed to the universalist causes mentioned above. Similarly, if all of today’s Jews were to assimilate, universalism might live on, but the special Jewish commitment to universalism would quickly become a thing of the past.
My question: Isn’t the future of Jewish universalism (and of Judaism as a force of good in the world in general) still dependent on at least a measure of ‘particularist’ thinking? Doesn’t actively striving for Jewish continuity (which is what particularism is all about) also serve the universalist cause?
I’d like to thank you again for your book and for doing this exchange.
Yours,
Shmuel.
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Dear Shmuel,
And may I thank you as well for such provocative questions that have forced me to think hard about the implications of what I wrote?
We live in an age when people have choices and, when denied them, seek to assert their right to make them nonetheless. Throughout history, most religions, Judaism very much included, were not like that; you were born into a way of life and, with very rare exceptions, you continued in that way until you were buried. I feel these truths in my own life. My parents were both Jews. My father had four brothers and two sisters – everyone married a Jew. My mother had two sisters and one brother, and again the same was true. Our families, on both sides, lived within walking distance of each other. I cannot recall a single friend whose parents came from different religious traditions. I attended a public school in which my class was roughly 90% Jewish. Jews owned all the major stores in the neighborhood. When I left Philadelphia for Nashville, in which was located the first graduate school I attended, for the first time I met more than a few random non-Jews.
Just as you suggest, this highly particularistic world produced a generation of universalists. I consider myself one of them. Secure in our identity at home, we were free to pick and choose at will. A number of my friends married outside the faith, as I did myself. We stopped attending shul once our our bar mitzvahs were complete. For this generation, my generation, it is fair to say that secularized or cultural Judaism provided the bridge between the all-Jewish world of our youth and the wider one that framed our (chosen) careers.
My generation is now having grandchildren. Although that blessed event has not yet happened for me, the Judaism of the grandchildren of many of my friends is unaccompanied by much knowledge of Hebrew or familiarity with Jewish liturgy. This upcoming generation is interested in Israel and is aware its predecessors did not arrive on the Mayflower. Otherwise they would be a major disappointment to those who worried about Jewish continuity three or four decades ago. If continuity means to continue unchanged, they have broken their commitment.
But why should that be the way we define continuity? You ask whether “actively striving for Jewish continuity” is required. I do not think the question is whether the striving is active or passive. What really matters, I believe, is whether Jewish continuity is understood in group terms or individual terms, that is whether we want the traditions and folkways to continue or whether we want ways of life that have changed over the years to continue to change in recognizable ways.
A group approach to continuity says something like this:
We Jews are once again threatened. Unless we defend ourselves, our enemies will try to eliminate us. We must put aside personal differences and unite. We look to Israel, the place where Jews are most threatened, to lead us. We are a people and can only survive as a people.
If this is the approach to continuity we take, then, no matter how strenuously offered, it will fail. Indeed the more strenuous the message, the more likely it will fail. Such an approach would have succeeded for my parent’s generation and, to some degree, mine. In those days, particularism did lead to universalism. If the world never changed, if continuity were a straight line, we would still need strong particularists to make the next generation committed universalists.
The trouble is what we no longer live in those days. With groups losing their hold on individuals in a post-ethnic and increasingly secular age, Jewish continuity in our era is best achieved by appealing to the intelligence and discernment of the audience, primarily younger Jews who did not grow up under particularism. The message to them should be something like this:
We Jews have done great things because we have, at least until recent times, lived among strangers. The state founded in our name, if it is to survive, needs the more universal perspective that we embody because we still live among strangers. Statehood is a great thing for the Jews. By it cannot be protected through appeals to nationalism, and especially forms of nationalism that are as particularistic as they are hostile toward those who live around us. Israel was born in idealism. Idealism is the only thing that can save it.
Jews will survive, as they have for so many centuries. Once we needed universalists who were raised in a particularist milieu. Now we need even more committed universalists who can eclipse the universalism of their parents.
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