Future Shock
No doubt Henry Luce would have been pained to contemplate it, but the era that the founder of Time was pleased to dub the “American century” became the Jewish century in American history.
Before the 20th century, the Jewish presence in America, although of long standing, was relatively small. It was 1654 when the first Jewish settlers arrived in North America. The 1820s brought the first large-scale migrations from Prussia, Bohemia and elsewhere in Central Europe. But it was not until the closing years of the 19th century that the slow collapse of the empires of Austria and Russia, coupled with the new technologies of steamships and railroads, spurred what became a migration of more than 2 million Jews from Eastern and Central Europe to America.
And it was only in the 20th century that those immigrants and their descendants created what has become the most prosperous, secure and educated community in the more than 4,000 years of recorded Jewish history. To a degree out of proportion to their numbers, that Jewish population has shaped its adopted land--its culture, its humor, its laws and its politics.
For 100 years, tracking the trajectory of Jewish life in America has been the task of the “American Jewish Year Book.” The annual volumes--of which the 100th has recently been published--have become an indispensable reference work for those interested in American Jewish life. For decades, each volume has featured one or two main essays--often major works by scholars, including historians Oscar and Mary Handlin, Lucy Dawidowicz and Jack Wertheimer and sociologists Everett Carll Ladd Jr., Seymour Martin Lipset and Nathan Glazer. In addition to those works, each year’s volumes have included annual summaries of developments in Jewish communities around the world, directories of organizations and religious calendars. A combination of almanac, sociological treatise and organizational directory, edited and published first by the staff of the Jewish Publication Society and now by the American Jewish Committee, the “Year Book” has both mirrored and helped to shape the hopes, fears and obsessions of at least the leadership of the American Jewish community.
Starting with a community made up mostly of working-class immigrants, the arc of American Jewish history in the century just ended passed through decades of rapid growth, the movement of the first American-born generation into higher education and greater prosperity, suburbanization and assimilation. In the closing years of the century came what scholars have called the beginnings of a bipolar community, with one part of the population returning to a strengthened sense of Jewish identity--often accompanied by greater observance of religious traditions--even as the larger share grows ever more tentative in its ethnic and religious identification.
Along the way, Jews have become an intensively studied model for one of America’s most persistent questions: whether a minority group can successfully mix into the mainstream of society while still retaining a genuine distinctiveness--and if so, how. The annual volumes of the “Year Book” provide invaluable source material for any student of the Jewish experience who hopes to wrestle with that issue.
In the early years of the century, Jews--restricted from many professions and discriminated against in well-established lines of business--turned to fields of endeavor that were too new to have barriers to entry. In the century’s first decade, Jews made most of the nation’s clothes, taking advantage of new technologies that allowed production lines to replace hand-sewing. A couple of decades later, Jewish entrepreneurs had pioneered another industry that established businessmen shunned and were making a large share of the nation’s movies.
Those successes coincided with a rise in anti-Semitism, which had been relatively subdued through much of the 19th century. The turn of the century was a time of rapid industrialization in which millions of people saw traditional ways of life uprooted by economic forces they could barely discern. Many sought villains to blame, and Jews, along with Catholics, blacks and--on the West Coast--Asians became favored targets.
Not surprisingly, the “Year Book’s” articles in the early years of the century reflected the anxieties of the Jewish population. Many articles in those years sought to demonstrate Jewish fealty to their adopted land by, for example, listing names of Jewish war veterans. Others reported on the activities of anti-Semitic organizations and those whose mission was to combat them. But despite those concerns, the writings and public statements of Jewish leaders from the early 20th century reveal a remarkable optimism about prospects for life in America.
Surveying the history of the “Year Book” in an essay that opens the centennial edition, Jonathan Sarna, professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University, and Jonathan Golden, a Brandeis graduate student, quote this passage from the inaugural 1899 volume: “While in many countries the mediaeval spirit prevails, making the Jew a wanderer and an outcast, on American soil he seems to be preparing a distinctly new era . . . [and] finding ample field for the highest and most varied endeavor.” In a similar vein, one finds this line from the 1902 volume, predicting that “in the near future” the United States would contain “the centre and focus of Jewish religious activity and the chosen home of Jewish learning.”
Strikingly, today, when those predictions have largely come true, the optimism of those early years has dwindled. Indeed, though Sarna and Golden’s historical essay describes the topics that riveted American Jewish attention in past decades--the rise of Nazism in the 1930s, the renewal of Orthodoxy after World War II, the Yippies in the 1960s, the stirrings of Jewish feminism in the 1980s--it is a second major essay in the book that encompasses the current dominant concern.
That topic is Jewish population trends, and the essay is written by demographer Sergio DellaPergola and his associates Uzi Rebhun and Mark Tolts, all of Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In its sometimes dry columns of population figures, one can see all the anxiety of an American ethnic community increasingly focused on thoughts of decline. DellaPergola begins his tour of the demographic horizon modestly: “Long-term transformations of Jewish population and society--especially over the course of the 20th century, which witnessed the Shoah and Israel’s independence--defy conventional forecasting,” he writes. Demographic projections, he notes, are fairly accurate over a 20- to 30-year span but “shakier” in the longer term. That disclaimer out of the way, he proceeds to offer a forecast that is sweeping in its conclusions and deeply disturbing to many American Jewish leaders.
The world Jewish population is about 13 million--some 15% higher than it was at the end of World War II but several million less than before the Nazi murders began. Of the worldwide total, fully half live in just six metropolitan areas--New York, Los Angeles and South Florida in the United States; Tel Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem in Israel. If current trends continue, the demographers write, the concentration of the Jewish population will increase, but its center of gravity will shift. The American Jewish population, holding steady at about 6 million, will begin to decline as the baby boom generation ages. The roughly 4.9 million Jews in Israel--younger on average and with a higher birthrate--will increase. The other Jewish communities in the world--nearly all of which have been on the decline--will dwindle rapidly as the young emigrate to Israel or America.
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By the end of this decade, the demographers project, Israel’s Jewish population will surpass America’s. And by mid-century the majority of the world’s Jewish population will--for the first time in more than 2,000 years--be living in Israel.
For American Jews, that projection foretells a major shift in worldview. Far from being the center and focus of Jewish life--the bulwark that supports Jewish communities elsewhere, including in Israel--American Jews will increasingly cede position to their Israeli cousins, DellaPergola’s projections suggest. Over the next three generations, the number of American Jews could be cut in half, the demographers project. Though intermarriage is a factor, low birthrates and an aging population are more central to their calculations.
For the last half century, a strong American Jewish community has provided money and other forms of aid to Israel. In the century to come--as the American Jewish population ages and declines--the flow of assistance eventually will have to reverse, DellaPergola and his colleagues suggest.
Unforeseen events, of course, could change those projections. The collapse of the Soviet Union gave Israel’s Jewish population a large and unexpected boost in the 1990s. Peace in the Middle East could lead to another increase. Conversely, if Jews--in Israel and elsewhere--come to believe that Israel’s future holds only endless strife with Arab neighbors, emigration to the United States could rise. But barring a truly major change, American Jews in the generation to come almost certainly will experience a decline in their percentage of the U.S. population and in their overall influence on American culture.
That such a small immigrant group--Jews never even reached 5% of the American population--could have had such impact on a vast nation testifies both to the entrepreneurial energy of American Jewry and to the openness of American society. But the 6 million Jews in America are now barely 2% of the overall American total--a considerably smaller share than at the time of World War I--and the slow increase of Jewish numbers lags far behind overall U.S. population growth. Politically, the “Jewish vote” already is too small to matter in all but the closest elections. Even in New York, Hillary Rodham Clinton easily won election to the Senate despite tepid support in heavily Jewish areas. Culturally, Jewish prominence has waned. And religiously, though Islam has not yet surpassed Judaism as the nation’s largest non-Christian faith--and may not do so for a decade or more--that crossing of paths is only a matter of time.
The 20th century began with a rapid increase in the American Jewish population, and it ended with an observant Jew, Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, running for vice president and walking away from defeat with his political standing enhanced. The Lieberman nomination ratified the collapse of anti-Semitic prejudice as a major factor in American life and, within the Jewish community, it may yet mark a revival of the type of modern orthodoxy with which he is identified. His success, however, does nothing to change long-term demographics. The “Year Book” will continue, no doubt, to chronicle the impact of Jews on America. But it may well be that it already has recorded the high point.
It is crucial, though, to remember that a dwindling presence does not mean disappearance. Even as the Jewish community’s relative share of the U.S. population declines, it remains vibrant, particularly in places like Los Angeles. As the United States moves forward into a period of increasing cultural and ethnic diversity, it will be increasingly hard to say who constitutes the “majority” in much of the nation. In this new multicultural era, the Jewish example of maintaining vibrancy amid assimilation may gain in importance even as the actual size of the Jewish presence erodes.
