Finding Jewish Conflict, but Not Civil War

Journalists, like dramatists, are drawn to conflict. The clash of contending ideas provides the frame on which we weave our narratives.

Samuel G. Freedman, a journalism professor at Columbia University and the author of several well-received books, went searching for conflict among Jews. He found it.

No great feat of detection there. “Two Jews, three opinions” is a stock line. The notion of Jews as an especially argumentative people is a widespread Jewish conceit--a somewhat silly one, perhaps, given the intensity of quarrels around the world, from Belfast to Fiji--but generally harmless.

Freedman, however, claims to have found more than routine disagreements. The American Jewish community today, he says, is in the midst of nothing less than a “civil war.”

“America’s 6 million Jews are pulling toward the extremes,” he writes. As he sets out to determine the cause, he poses a question: “Why is it that the most comfortable, secure and prosperous Jewish community in history is also one of the most fractious?”

It is a questionable question. Widespread disengagement from Jewish communal life, not the emotional intensity of furious debate, would be the more accurate description of American Jewish life in most places. Indeed, if a civil war rages among Jewish Americans, the vast majority are determinedly noncombatants.

Nonetheless, the disagreements Freedman writes about are important and interesting--certainly to Jews and probably to many others fascinated by the interplay of religion and ethnicity in American life.

Freedman names the chief disputes: intermarriage and how to respond to it, the role of women in religious life, whether Israel is conceding too much in peace negotiations, the proper definition of Orthodoxy and the relationship between the Orthodox (however defined) and the rest of the Jewish population.

On each of those quarrels he has hung a tale well told--from the story of a bitter zoning dispute over a proposed Orthodox center in a mostly Jewish suburb of Cleveland to the debate at a prominent Los Angeles synagogue over adding the names of the Bible’s four matriarchs--Sarah, Rachel, Rebecca and Leah--to a prayer whose ancient formulation cites only their husbands.

Not for nothing does Freedman teach journalism. His narratives could stand as classroom “how to” models--smoothly written and illustrated with well-chosen details from the lives of his protagonists. Between the stories he has woven chapters that provide history and context.

In addition to that, the book is a highly informative primer on the major issues facing contemporary Jewish life. An account of a civil war, however, it is not.

Disputes over Mideast negotiations are real, for example, but Harry Shapiro, who went to jail for planting a bomb--inoperative, he insisted--at a synagogue where Shimon Peres was to speak, was an isolated oddball. Using his tale as an example of a trend toward extremism is a stretch.

Freedman’s description of the debate in Los Angeles’ Library Minyan during the late 1980s about whether to add the names of the biblical matriarchs to the Amidah prayer fits his theme no better. (Full disclosure: I am a member of the Minyan, though of more recent vintage.)

The argument was a serious one that pitted core values--fidelity to tradition and commitment to egalitarianism--against each other in the realm of prayer, where every word is, literally, sacred. And yet the debate, as Freedman describes it, was civil and learned. And in the decade since, few have left because of the decision to allow the change, and the congregation has continued to grow. There is little sign of civil war here.

Indeed, by the book’s end, one begins to wonder whether Freedman really believes in his purported theme. For over the course of the volume, a different focus emerges, becoming fully articulated only at the end.

What truly seems to engage Freedman is an elegy for a disappearing feature of American Jewish life: deeply committed secular Judaism. In the first half of the 20th century, Freedman notes, most American Jews were nonreligious but intensely felt their Jewish ethnicity. Today, those who cannot cleave to a religious identity find less and less to hold on to.

“Once Seinfeld is a hit even in Boise, then Jewishness as ethnicity, a folk culture, as something separate and divisible from religion, is ceasing to exist in any meaningful way,” he writes.

The long argument over whether Judaism is primarily an ethnicity or a religion is finished and religion--whether Orthodox or liberal--has won, he says. Freedman honors his father as an example “of secular Judaism at its best,” and religion’s triumph troubles him. Yet he sees no alternative, and his description of the American Jewish future ends wistfully: “a core . . . oriented around religion and a periphery clinging to the eroding remnants of ethnicity.”

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David Lauter is specialist editor of The Times.