At Home in Exile by Alan Wolfe

Author:Alan Wolfe
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780807033142
Publisher: Beacon Press

IV

Although written by Jews for Jews, A Statement on the Jewish Future closely resembles a jeremiad, the quintessential Puritan sermon lamenting the decline from a golden age. It may seem odd that a people as persecuted as the Jews could ever have had a golden age; if one is nonetheless going to use the term, the most applicable period would be the years when writers such as Halevi and Maimonides thrived in medieval Spain. It is therefore significant that Benjamin Epstein, the early postwar director of the Anti-Defamation League, used that very term to characterize American Jewish life in the two decades after World War II. It was during these years, Epstein wrote, in a manner similar to Irving Kristol, that American Jews “achieved a greater degree of economic and political security, and a broader social acceptance than has ever been known by any Jewish community since the Dispersion.”32 Such postwar success was more than a matter of economics and politics. These were the decades of an American religious revival, and Jews were swept up with everyone else; it was at this time, as Sarna pointed out, that “religion became the major vehicle for Jewish identity, while secular Judaism as an ideology largely collapsed.”33 Those who worry about the prospects for Jewish continuity, however pessimistic about the future, can look back half a century to a time when American Jewish life seemed so much more vibrant.

It is, of course, impossible to turn the clock back and return American Judaism to the way it experienced the world in the 1950s and 1960s. Yet even if we could, it is by no means clear that we should. Far from constituting a model that future generation of Jews should emulate, the two or three decades after World War II were, in the long course of Jewish history, the exception rather than the rule. The reason why can be explained by considering the ways in which American Jews during that period carried out one of the most basic tasks facing any religion: organizing the relationship between space and time.

From the moment the Jews were expelled from the Holy Land, they developed an ambivalent attitude toward specifically defined places. In ancient times, Rabbi Sacks points out, “Jews were a nation in the normal sense, bound together because they lived in the same land, under the same government. Shared fate, under such circumstances, requires no special faith, no theology, no leap of the imagination.”34 But once exile became the condition of the Jews, they developed a religion that could “be practiced anywhere, centered on the synagogue as an institution and on collective Jewish responsibility as an idea.” Judaism in that sense could not be more different than Catholicism, the first of the monotheistic faiths to link itself with political rulers and to organize itself into administrative units resembling the federal structure of states. Reflecting such spatial commitments, Catholics could assert their presence through monumental churches and majestic mausoleums. Denied such a physical presence due to their

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