Jeremy Rosen
The Rise and Fall of American Judaism

Jeremy Rosen - The Rise and Fall of American Judaism

- Ladies and gentlemen, from New York, happy Thanksgiving, although it’s not so happy. Halfway down the parade, there was a Palestinian demonstration that for awhile blocked it, accusing Jews of genocide. I don’t remember anything on Fifth Avenue, Sixth Avenue, accusing Syria of genocide or any other Arab state of genocide. But that’s just the nature of the world in which we live here in New York. And I have to say that most of us don’t feel as comfortable now living in New York as we did once upon a time. The whole climate is one in which there is a huge generational gap thanks to the universities, thanks to the left wing propaganda, thanks to local government, all of which have been infiltrated by an anti-Jewish agenda. And it’s being felt. It’s not the end of the road. There will be a pushback, and in some areas there is, but at this moment, it’s a very, very fraught, tense atmosphere in which we don’t know exactly how it’s going to turn out, which party we can rely on, if anybody, if any of them, and which politicians are simply playing games. And the question is, what games are they playing and how is it going to change? So I’m not a happy bunny, but even before this, it was my plan to talk about American Jewry. And the changes that it has gone through mainly the issue of religion, but that is also connected to the social agenda and the social makeup of American Jewry. American Jewry initially, that is to say before America became an independent state, the Jews that came here were primarily people escaping 1492, the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, which was followed shortly after by the expulsion of the Jews from Portugal.

And they began moving. Those who chose not to move up to Europe or to move east to the Ottoman Empire chose to come across to South America, initially to Brazil. But then Brazil became Portuguese. The Portuguese expelled the Jews, and they moved up to areas in the north, the Caribbean islands. And from there they moved up to the southern states of America. And they essentially were what we call Spanish and Portuguese. That is to say not Ashkenazi, European Jews in the Ashkenazi sense, not entirely Sephardi or Mizrahi in the Oriental sense, but in a line between. They certainly had descended from the Jews of Babylon, moving across North Africa into Spain. But in Spain, they developed a unique culture of their own within the Jewish framework. And they set up the first synagogues in America. Parallel with them, there were the first British Jewish immigrants who came in the 17th century looking for making their fortune. But the main synagogues to begin with were all Sephardi and all traditional. And you’ll remember the story of Peter Stuyvesant, who was the mayor of New York, who did not want the Jews to settle there and tried to ban them. And the Jews appealed to the Dutch company that controlled New York at that time, and they were allowed in. But still, it took some time for the first Jewish North synagogue. There was She'arit Yisra'el, the Spanish and Portuguese named to this day. They had a location in Rhode Island in the north, and one emerged in Tel Aviv, I’m sorry, in New York in the 18th century. Washington had needed in 1790 to reiterate the fact after the Declaration of Independence had in theory given equal rights to every citizen, as we know, it didn’t give equal rights to the Black slaves.

And it didn’t initially automatically give rights, civil rights to the Jews. And Washington, the first president actually in 1790, had to declare that the Jews were welcome and entitled to equal citizenship. That before, of course, Napoleon was the first to do it in Europe. The number of Jews living in the United States at that stage numbered in the thousands. Some people speculate around 20,000. All that began to change in the middle of the 19th century. In the middle of the 19th century, there was a significant migration of Jews from what was at that stage the Habsburg Empire, which ranged from Vienna all the way up through Germany, across to Hungary. But mainly the immigration through Hamburg came from Germanic Jews. And it came at precisely the time when the reform movement was developing and growing in Germany, in Europe, and becoming a significant force. Of course, it was boycotted by the east, not recognised even in England. But at this stage it was a rising movement which tried very hard. Initially, its aim was only to make life a little less burdensome, to make it a little more appealing to the German new enlightened and freed community. And so sermons in German, and then it moved on to things like introducing an organ, introducing Canonicals, the way that the members of the church in the Protestant world, more than in the Catholic world used to dress. And then it moved on centre of Berlin in removing much of the rabbinic oral law and relying much more fundamentally on the Old Testament, which if you take it literally is quite restrictive.

But again, modifying that and relying rather more on the ideas of the prophets rather than creating a religious structure. But even their religious structure started off in an interesting way, both in terms of officially rejecting the laws of Kashrut and in some cases moving the Sabbath to Sunday and having services on Sunday instead of Saturday. The reform movement in the United States was initially spearheaded by two rabbis who had come from Germany, a Rabbi Weiss and also a Rabbi Einhorn. And they founded what was called the Hebrew Union College of Cincinnati, which was the rabbinical college for the reform movement, which up to that moment did not have this kind of central rabbinic situation. And it’s very interesting that the famous 1883 since the Hebrew Union College Trefa banquet in Cincinnati celebrated the graduation of its rabbis by having the so-called Trefa banquet, a banquet at which, short of pork, every other non-kosher food was delivered up, meat and milk together as well to show that the old system was out of the window and a new system had come into being. Now at about the same time, there were a significant number of Jews suddenly coming into America from Russia. These Russian Jews were really roughly divided, a million and a half of them, really divided into two groups.

There were those who already in Russia had become socialist and secular and were torn between setting up an ideal secular state in Russia, and on the other hand, leaving their religion behind and moving to a new world where they hoped to perpetuate the socialist agenda. And for them, whatever religion they belong to, it didn’t matter that much. Their Judaism was more an ethnicity rather than a religiosity. And the trouble was that they were all working class and therefore they were not in that sense welcomed by the upper class German Jewish reform movement. And as a result, they drifted, and they drifted both out of ideology and also because anyway they weren’t that religious, but more important, they came into a country where to earn a living you had to work, and you had to move, and you might have to move a long way away from any Jewish community. And so they spread out wide, and in addition to spreading out wide, they also found it almost impossible to keep Shabbat, and therefore a huge proportion of them were no longer Orthodox in the traditional sense. A small number, very small number in thousands, not in hundreds of thousands, were living in New York, arriving at Ellis Island and settling in the lower East, West, the lower east side of London, of New York, and then moving across into Williamsburg and Brooklyn. But they were very small, not very well organised, made up primarily of small little Shtiebels, small little either Shtiebel where they would pray together, or landsmanshaft, which is, we came from the same place back home, so we’re staying together here. And many of these landsmanshafts were not religious.

They provided burial facilities and other facilities people might want without making religious demands. And so there was a divide between the aristocratic, very powerful, very wealthy, very significant German Jews whose main if you like sanctuary in New York was Temple Emmanuel on Fifth Avenue, which is there today. And they were not including anything within the ceremony that might look like too traditional. And in fact, if they did include anything in Hebrew, it was usually in the traditional Ashkenazi Hebrew. They were staunchly also anti-Zionist, and therefore didn’t for a long time adopt the Zionist modern Hebrew pronunciation in the services. But there were a lot of Jews who wanted to affiliate but not too much. And out of the reform movement, a mixture of people in the reform movement who wanted more tradition and people in the Orthodox who wanted less came a third dimension, and that was conservative Judaism. And that was traditional but very flexible. And many people found this very attractive. Over the next period of time into the 20th century, the complexion of American Jewry was that roughly 50% of those who claim to be religious affiliated either to the reform, mainly the reform, but also the conservative movement. The Orthodox contained a very, very small section, at that case, that time, probably no more than about 50,000, whereas the larger American Jewish community at that stage numbered roughly about 8 million.

So it is a very, very small sector. And it was left to the conservative and the reform movements to build up the community as more Jewish immigrants came into the country and to set up, whether it was the hospitals and the welfare systems and other ways of assisting Jewish immigrants, they took the major part and built it up very impressively. At the same time, the socialist immigrants were building up a very powerful secular Jewish identity, both in terms of socialism, but also in terms of art, literature, music, culture in general. And they played a very, very important part. But essentially they were in the main secular. And if their parents did have some remnant of Jewish identity, they very soon through this off because the opportunities that existed for them in America were way beyond opportunities that existed anywhere else, even in England, even in Europe. The opportunities to improve and to expand, to make a fortune, to set up businesses all over were phenomenal. And this is where the dream came of the goldene medina, the wonderful Jewish state where the streets were paved with gold, and Jews could be find found everywhere across the continent, right to the gold fields of California. And they were setting, if you like, a precedent, a new kind of Jew, very different to the Jew of Russia. The Jew of Russia was forced to be Jewish by the Russians and the anti-Semites everywhere.

And when they tried to expand and develop as they did in Vienna, in Austria and in Germany, they in the end found that everybody turned against them, and the gates were shut against them unless they converted. In America, this wasn’t the case. And so this massive immigration that started coming in was a godsend for the Jews as a people. And in one sense, a disaster for the Jews religiously. And the fact that so many Jews were coming over and abandoning their religion was one of the reasons why the Eastern European Orthodox Jews were so worried about sending people across the ocean to America for fear that they would totally assimilate. In one sense, one can understand their thinking. In another, it proved to be an utter disaster. From this period, and the Jews developing and coming and expanding, there was a reaction. And the reaction in America, which unfortunately antisemitism has always been there in one form or another, began to emerge. It wasn’t just antisemitism. It was also against Italians and other foreigners, but particularly against the Jews, it was far more powerful, endemic and financially supported. And this led to a revision of the immigration laws. So from a position of where 150,000 were still coming into the country before the first World War, by 1924, it had been reduced to something like 70,000, sorry, 50,000 a year coming from Eastern Europe.

But the interesting thing was an exception was made in these restrictions on Jews, Italians, Eastern Europeans in general who were thought to be degrading American culture was that they allowed clergymen to come in of all religions. And so this was the moment at which in Eastern Europe, they suddenly realised that rabbis could come into the country, into the United States and come in. Ordinary laymen couldn’t. And although there had been orthodoxy in United States of America beforehand, it was still as I mentioned very small. After the Hebrew Union College of Cincinnati became the first rabbinical college, the one after that was the Jewish Theological Seminary of New York, which was initially founded by Orthodox Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jews and was meant to cater to the Orthodox community. But the Orthodox coming into the country at that stage didn’t find them orthodox enough for them, and so under the leadership of Professor Schechter, JTS essentially became identified with the conservative movement. So the two big rabbinical training colleges in the United States of America at the end of the 19th century were reform and conservative. But suddenly the Orthodox tried to fight back, set up a yeshiva. The first yeshiva was set up in New York, and this was set up by, actually, it was set up in 1886 as a private yeshiva, but then became a kind of rabbinic training college, and then turned in due course to a university in the 1920s.

And it catered to a very small sliver of Jews. But with the arrival of rabbis from Eastern Europe for the first time, after the first World War, before the second World War, there began to be a change in the dynamic of American Jewry, in which by the time you got to the Second World War, most people in America assumed that orthodoxy was finished. It was over. There were just a handful of Orthodox rabbis who’d come in mainly to New York. But then the famous Rabbi Soloveitchik moved into Boston, and other rabbis coming down moved out to different centres, the famous Lakewood Yeshiva in New Jersey. And this was the beginning of what we would call the emergence of ultra orthodoxy. Yeshiva University, OU became the standard bearer of, if you like, centrist, modern, whatever term. Orthodoxy of a more enlightened form, it was, and by enlightened I simply mean combining a religious way of life, religious study with a secular way of life and secular study. But these rabbis coming in from Eastern Europe now were opposed primarily to secular study, with the exception of the great J.B. Soloveitchik from Boston who ended up as the head of the Orthodox aspect of Yeshiva University. And he was probably the greatest rabbi of America during the past generation, with the exception possibly of the Lubavitch Rabbi, and we’ll talk about Hasidism in a minute.

So this new phase began to change with World War II. World War II was also a time when, for example, the divisions in Israel, in America over Zionism reached a head. There was a small section that were powerfully Zionist, and they wanted a campaign for Zionism. They wanted a campaign, for example, to intervene over the Holocaust. Whereas the mainstream, mainly reform said, no, we’re Americans first, maybe Jews second. We don’t want to get involved in this. We certainly don’t want to support Zionism because that would imply that we’re not good American citizens. And at the same time, we don’t really want to get involved in pressuring the American government over the Holocaust because that might appear to them that we’re not fully American citizens. And that was in certain respects under Rabbi Weiss, the son of the other one I mentioned, the dominant, not the exclusive, there were exceptions, but not the dominant mood of the reform movement. And there were at the time, famous people like Ben Hecht and Peter Bergson who were identified more with the right wing Herut party in Israel, the Begin supporters, who fought like mad against the Jewish establishment of reform at the time in order to get them to fight for Jewish rights. And remember all of Hollywood, all these Jewish directors did not want to get involved, didn’t want to boycott Germany, anything like that. That was the mood. And at the same time, the mood in the country was virulently anti-Semitic and anti getting involved in the war. Ford, the founder of Ford Motor, he funded tremendous amount of anti-Semitism.

He had the Protocols of the Elders of Zion publish for free and distributed throughout his network. He supported a man called Father Coughlin who was the equivalent of a kind of a jihadi radical preacher of those days, Catholic, raging against the Jews. And his radio programme was the most popular programme in the United States between the two world wars. And there were limits on where Jews could go to at universities and clubs and everything like that. It was a horrific atmosphere which only began to change significantly after World War II. The other thing that’s happened significantly after World War II was the arrival of some fundamentally important, significant ultra-Orthodox, you’ll call ‘em Haredi, we call them now, rabbis. There were a handful, as I mentioned before, a handful of little Yeshiva, small ones, but nothing significant. But suddenly you had this immigration of great important significant rabbis. I mentioned Rabbi Soloveitchik who was an outlier because although he came from one of the most illustrious Eastern European rabbinic families was the most enlightened of them. But then you had other rabbis that came in like Rabbi Kotler, who was totally eastern European and set up the Lakewood Yeshiva, and other rabbis like him who were completely on the ultra-Orthodox side.

And then you had the arrival of Hasidism. And the first one worth mentioning is Rabbi Schneerson of Habad. He arrived in New York just before the Second World War, and his son-in-Law, who was the heir apparent if not undisputed at that time, came in soon after. And he established himself in Brooklyn. And Rabbi Schneerson himself, charismatic as he was, was, and Habad will forgive me for saying this, no way as enlightened as his son, not religiously. The son remains staunchly religious, but for the first one, he was the first rabbi who adopted modern methods from Madison Avenue and also adopted what one would call the franchise system of sending his representatives out into the world because it was part of his ideology that we have to bring Judaism to the Jews wherever they are, no matter who they are or what they are. And we’ve got to somehow or other reconnect them with Judaism. And he established what was called the baal teshuva movement, that is the returning to Judaism movement. And it started slowly, slowly, slowly from Brooklyn, and it slowly began to grow. And they slowly began to establish centres, first of all in in New York and then around the world. And now Habad is to be found everywhere around the world. And there is no movement within Judaism, which is as outgoing and dynamic as they. But look at them. They have stuck to their Eastern European dress. They stick quite rigidly to the Eastern European version of orthodoxy. Their numbers are growing. When they came here to begin with, they were in the hundreds. Now they are in the hundreds of thousands, reaching shortly to the millions.

It’s unbelievable the extent to which they have expanded. On the other hand, there was a man who came in later on, a bit later in the early 1950s, called Joel Teitelbaum, otherwise known as the Satmar Rebbe. Satmar is the town in Hungary that he ended up identifying with and setting up his movement. He was staunchly anti-Zionist. He believed that Zionism because it was secular, was a danger to Judaism. And he did whatever he could do to avoid identifying with it to the point of not recognising the state of Israel. Now, of course, you will have seen unfortunately some people who look like Satmar called Neturei Karta, who are offshoots of Satmar, who had adopted the ideology of Satmar that Rav Yoel Teitelbaum bound wrote down in a famous book via Joel Moishe. And this is The Inheritance. And they are a splinter group who you find demonstrating sometimes with the Palestinians going to visit Khomeini, the Iranian regime. And although up to now they were ignored by Satmar who did not identify with them, now for the first time, the Satmar Rebbes have come out and rejected them and said they are not part of our movement. But they give Satmar a bad name. But Satmar refused to reach out. Their policy of Rebbe was don’t reach out. If you reach out, they’re going to water you down. We’ve got to stay within our communities. Stay within our little ghettos if you like.

And the only answer to the disaster of the Holocaust that has wiped out so many of us is to have as many children as we possibly can. And because so much Torah was lost, we have to focus entirely on rebuilding the stocks of Torah, which was the ideology of Satmar. And so from about 7,000 in the early 50s, they again are now reaching the millions. And not only have they got their main centre in Williamsburg, but they have their own towns, townships out in New York and out in New Jersey where they have totally self-contained communities. And with 10, 12 children a year, they are growing exponentially as indeed they were in the land of Israel. In Israel after the war, when the head of the Jewish community, the Chazon Ish, who sat in Bnei Brak, the greatest rabbi of that era, negotiated with Ben-Gurion that those sitting and studying full time should be relieved of army service or at least postponed. He was talking about 500 students sitting in Yeshivat in his day. Nowadays there are hundreds of thousands. When I went to Mir Yeshiva, which was a Haredi Yeshiva in Jerusalem, in 1965 there were 70 students in Mir. Today there are something like 10,000 scattered in different campuses around Israel. And throughout Israel, the Haredi world, like the Haredi world in New York is expanding exponentially.

And with this expansion comes influence. Now they in America do not identify with the mainstream reform, conservative, even moderate Orthodox world. Very few of them turned up at the great march at Washington. Some did, so let’s not black them all in the same way there are some in Israel Haredi who joined the army. They’re not all like that, but by and large they do not identify with the mainstream, and they set up their own centres of influence and political pressure. They don’t like Habad. And Habad sets up its own centres of pressure and influence in Washington and elsewhere. So you have two different sections of the Haredi world who have their own agenda. And interestingly enough, because in America there is no connection between state and religion, they are free to either survive and thrive through their own efforts or collapse. They don’t get officially any government funding the way they might do in America, in Israel. But they do get ways of supporting the poor, supporting some kind of education for the handicapped and other grants they get for government one way or another. So what I’m trying to say is that since World War II, slowly, slowly, the ultra Orthodox have been increasing. And this applies to the OU, to the modern Orthodox.

And it is the modern Orthodox in Israel who are the greatest support, in America rather, who are the greatest supporters of Israel, far more than anybody else. If you look at the displays on the Independence Day marches in New York, you will see that schools, modern orthodox schools are all out there in numbers. There are reform and conservative ones too. I don’t want in any way to not give them credit. But the overemphasis on support for Israel is coming mainly and has been up to now mainly from that area. At the same time, the reform and the conservative movements are suffering tremendously from intermarriage and from people disappearing out. And some of them think very strongly that by making conversion easier, by allowing any one parent like a father to define your Jewish identity, this is going to bring more people back or hold onto more people. And in certain ways it does, but overall it does not. The numbers and the influence are not now what they were before World War II or indeed before the 70s and the 80s. That is what is fundamentally changing. That if you look to a sector of the community to support Israel in the United States of America, it is the so-called Modern Orthodox Yeshiva University network, which is expanding despite all predictions that it was going to disappear. And at the same time the Jewish community in terms of Jewish influence, so that interestingly enough, Satmar in Williamsburg has tremendous influence within the Democratic New York political system because they are votes, and votes count.

And in America it’s the pork belly system that counts, how much money you give and what donor you are that has a powerful influence, which is one reason why despite the displays in the streets and despite the current situation where so many people are demonstrating and where it seems something like 70% of the younger generations support the Palestinians for reasons we know the infiltration of the universities and so forth, there still is a significant support for Israel in America in general. So we have not reached the crisis point, but we have definitely reached a danger point. And at the same time, all the surveys that are taken, the most recent survey by Pew have shown that something like nearly 50% of people who say they are Jewish say they are in no way religiously Jewish. They are either Jewish by heritage, by ethnicity, but not by religious commitment. Now if that is going to carry on this way, then it’s going to be in essence the death knell or the limit role of reform and conservative. But actually since that time, both reform and conservative have been including more tradition, been moving more in the direction of Jewish knowledge than they ever were before.

But at the same time, the main drift of the non-Orthodox has been to emphasise Tikkun olam, which is to repair the world which they interpret to mean being socially responsible and committed. Which is, it’s true half of the story, but the other half of the phrase to put the world right is through God, through a religious way of life. And that is the way to do it 'cause if you’re not living a religious life, what are you going to pass on to the next generation? And in this movement, the result is that the reform, most of the reform have come to be more identified with left wing values, both ethnic values, both political values and religious values and social values than they are with the Orthodox or with Israel. And this is one of the reasons why what has happened now has come as such an amazing shock to their system. Because up to now they thought they had the best of both worlds. But now it’s becoming clear that no matter how much you help immigrants, no matter how much you help people socially and welfare and so forth, and I’m not saying you shouldn’t, not for one minute am I saying you shouldn’t. That will not insulate you from the hatred because the hatred that you thought was just anti-Zionism is now clearly anti-Judaism. And synagogues are being attacked, and people who are being attacked who’ve got nothing to do with Zionism are being attacked. And this is now a shock to the reform system. And it may be that out of this will come a regeneration of reform. And I sincerely hope so because I do believe that something is better than nothing and that anything that identifies Jews should be validated and should be important. But the fact is that Judaism has always been, even within Judaism, a minority interest, always it’s been a minority.

The majority have always either assimilated if they could or married out if they could or otherwise were killed. And so in one sense, the situation is not new. But what is new is that whereas when I was growing up, America in Jewish terms was considered to be the centre of Jewish culture, all the best academic work, all the best literature, music and art, this was being produced by American Jews. If you, you know, make a list of all those great novelists, whether we’re talking about Philip Roth or you’re talking about Joseph Heller or Herman Wouk or Saul Bellow or any of these people, they were secular by and large. Not exclusively, but Jews were Jews, ethnically, not some other way. And it’s similarly, the great musicians talking about Gershwin, Berlin, Dave Brubeck. You’re talking about Arthur Miller in drama. You’re talking about medicine, technology, all the prize winners. These were all Jews who’d integrated into American life and succeeded at the expense of their Jewish identity. Again, obviously Kissinger’s another example of it. And they were very heavily involved in American social life. And after the universities lifted their numerous clauses, their limit on how many Jews could go into universities, they swarmed in and did extremely well and became very, very influential.

And many of them still are to this day, but these are by and large Jews who have not passed on their Jewish identity to the next generation, which was true of the Jews in Germany, was true of the Jews that came, many of them from Russia, and true of the Jews that came from Vienna and elsewhere. And so now we’re in a situation where Israel, despite the smallness of it, is by far the most productive in literature, in music, in art, in ballet, in almost every area. I forgot to mention all the Jewish artists that were in America. They played a phenomenal part, I should have mentioned them. But in Israel there’s far more dynamism, and there are more academics studying both Jewish and non-Jewish subjects in Israel, than there are in the United States of America. There are so much going on there creatively and productively, that it has become in fact the intellectual and the spiritual centre of Jewish life. So from a position when I began where America was the centre and we all look to America, now frankly we’re wondering about America, and we’re looking more to Israel. And that is why I conclude that I feel the golden age of American Jewry is over. It doesn’t mean to say it’s the end any more than it’s the end of Anglo Jewry that it’s shrunk from 500,000 to 200,000 now, or that France is 500,000, but many of them are assimilating. Nowhere is as dynamic and positive as Israel for all the troubles that it has to go through. So there we are. That’s where I’m going to stop and open up for questions and answers and debate.

Q&A and Comments:

Thank you, Susan, for having me twice in one week. Thank you, Carla, and thank you Estelle.

Susan, not just in New York. We’re saying we’ve personally experienced a very uncomfortable situation in Toronto, which until now has been exemplary, multicultural city. Yes, and you have a prime minister who is strongly opposed to Israel and supportive of Hamas and support of the Palestinians. So Toronto, which was Montreal, which was once considered Jewish centres and comfortable are now feeling the pinch and feeling the problem.

It seems says Romaine, that Jews do not thrive in easy circumstances. Well, that’s a good question. I would say the other way round. We are so used to having to thrive in difficult circumstances that we do, and that brings us together. And what we see in Israel is after a year of division within Israel, people are coming together. I dunno how long it’s going to last, and I hope they solve the reason for that split. But yes, we’ve always had this. And it goes back to the days of Moses. When Moses said towards the end of his life that you will go off the tracks. I know you’re going to go off the tracks, and I know you’re going to abandon God, and I know you’re going to suffer from it. And yet God won’t forget you. You’ll come back, you’ll survive, you’ll revive. And in the famous phrase at the end of the poem in Ha'Azinu, he says, , when Jews Israel get too well off, too fat, they get kicked over. And that tends to happen. Peter Stuyvesant opposed the arrival of Jews to the city was the mayor of New Amsterdam, not New York. You’re quite right now, quite right. I should have said that. Forgive me, I’m English. I knew that, but I didn’t say it. It just came out the wrong way. It was New Amsterdam. It wasn’t New York yet. And that’s why it was the Dutch company that told him to shut up and put up.

Q: Shelly, why did Eastern European Orthodox rabbis come to the US in 1920s after they were discouraged from leaving Europe?

A: Because already after the first World War, antisemitism exploded everywhere. They had hoped that under a new Russia things might be better. But after the communists took over, things got worse, and they banned religion. And so they began to see that antisemitism was getting worse and worse. Most of the rabbis did not see it, but thank God some rabbis, a few, a handful did. And it was that handful, that few, you can name them on the fingers of one hand, who did come, did set up institutions and did help Judaism survive.

Q: Shelly asks, shouldn’t the reform movement in Germany be given credit for wanting to stem the huge conversion of Jews to Christianity in 1820s, mainly for education, professional opportunities like Moses and Mendelssohn’s sons.

A: Well yes, but they all converted. They converted all of Mendelssohn’s sons married out, and they were no longer Jewish. And even Marla had to convert to get a job in Vienna’s Symphony orchestra. So you know, you can’t say that they stemmed the tide. You can say they offered an alternative for some for a period of time, and they did. And in that I would give them credit. So I’m not giving them credit for that. But you cannot say they stemmed the conversion. You cannot say they stemmed assimilation. Quite contrary, as most people would argue, they were a door out of Judaism rather than a door into Judaism.

Q: From Monty, where does Abraham Joshua Heschel fit into the modern American Judaism?

A: Well, you’re right. I should have mentioned him. He was a kind of an of an in-between. He came from a very Hasidic background. He was very learned, a wonderful man who also joined the Jewish Theological Seminary, which was kind of the conservative seminary and was incredibly open-minded politically and socially. He marched with Martin Luther King, and he was a wonderful example, and he still remains to this day as the example for the conservative movement. But whereas he adhered rigidly to Jewish tradition, most of those who followed him did not. So his writing is amazing. He was an amazing person. His daughter’s still alive, is an amazing person. But he was in the conservative movement, even though he himself was orthodox. And that was true of a lot of other rabbis in the conservative movement. It was, there were a whole series of great Talmudic scholars who joined the conservative movement because they were also interested in critical analysis, in western culture, Saul Lieberman is the obvious case, and there were others. And he’s in a unique position now, Abraham Joshua Heschel. I can’t think of anybody today who is in a similar position with similar influence to him. I should also have mentioned Mordecai Kaplan who founded a movement called Reconstructionism during the 30s and the 40s. And he was an influence for a while. And his version of Judaism was, you know, sort of, we don’t have to believe everything. You don’t have to do everything. Do whatever you feel is right, which is beautiful in theory, but again, he had no real successor, and the movement has or but died out, not completely. It’s still there and there are still synagogues that subscribe, but it’s not as influential as it should have been.

Arian Goldberg, many years ago, Hasidic group took out a full page advert in the New York Times indicating that unless one is orthodox, their grandchildren will not be Jewish. At the time I thought that was harsh. However, in my limited experience with people, so many people I know, religious parents and non-Jewish grandchildren, what can we do? The fact is I think that’s overstating it a little bit because I personally know grandchildren of reformed Jews who are still Jewish. So I think to say that universally their grandchildren will not be Jewish is not fair. But in most cases it is the case, and it’s also the case in some orthodox families that the children disappear as they always have and used to even in Eastern Europe. But yes, you know, if you want to ensure that your children are not, your grandchildren are going to be Jewish, then you have to do something about it. And I remember as a young fledgling rabbi in Glasgow many, many, many years ago, I remember shocking my community because I said to them, look, parents are coming to see me because their children are marrying out. And they ask me to do something about it. And I say to them, look, you gave them no example at home, no religious example. For them and for you, Judaism was a social club, like a golf club. And now they’ve found a bigger, better social club to belong to because it’s got more members and more opportunities. Why shouldn’t they join the bigger club? And they were shocked that I dare say that to them. But unfortunately that seems to me to be the case. And in the same way you see in Israel that those people who have no Jewish education whatsoever, because it’s not mandatory in Israel to have a Jewish religious education. There are religious schools and other opportunities, but many of those do disappear. And how many of them when they come to America do marry out? Some of them still have attachment, so I don’t want to rubbish them all, but a lot of them don’t.

Bobby says, it doesn’t seem that the extreme elements of organised religion Palestinians, Orthodox Jews are always the ones who skew the odds by having numerous nut children. Yes, that’s true. I mean it’s a problem with the Palestinians too, but it’s also a problem in general with wealthier people in the Western elsewhere that you tend to have fewer children. But it does seem strange. But that’s because they realise that the only way for your religion to grow is if you reproduce. Because we don’t believe in converting people. Christians believe in converting. Jihadism and Muslims believe in converting. We don’t. We accept genuine converts, but we don’t make it a policy to go out and convert. And because we don’t, that’s the only way we can grow. Ronald, while many people in music in America were Jewish, Dave Brubeck was not Jewish. Thanks for putting me right. I wasn’t certain about that. I shouldn’t have mentioned that, but thank you for putting me right. I’ll never make that mistake again because I love Dave Brubeck. I love his music, and I’m sorry.

Q: Bobby Steger, what are the most significant differences between traditional Orthodox and modern Orthodox?

A: I think the difference is simply this. Modern Orthodox recognise there is something of value in western culture. That if you like, as my father would put it, there’s Athens, and there’s Jerusalem. Jerusalem should always take priority, but Athens can influence us. Give you an example of this. One of the reasons why the Haredi world, wherever it is, or certainly in England, in Israel, in Europe is doing well is because of the welfare system. The social welfare system is a system that developed out of socialism, out of the secular world, and yet they all benefit from it. Now when you then say there’s a lot to derive from the secular world, where do you draw the line? Do you draw the line at saying, when it comes to moral, ethical, and religious issues, we follow the orthodox line. When it comes to cultural, secular, other issues we can learn from medicine, from science and so forth, that then leaves the room open for the middle area. There is a middle area. And the middle area are certain new ethical issues like shall we say, brain death as opposed to heart death. And this is a new area which wasn’t mentioned in the ultra orthodox world. Now it’s a debate, and they’re arguing about whether we should adopt that. Similarly, there are debates about bisexuality and other sexual issues, and the question is where do you draw the line? There is the ultra orthodox who will not draw the line, who will not accept anything new, although they’ll accept technology and benefit from technology. They fly on planes, and they have cell phones, and they date the best doctors at the best hospitals. Then you have those who will say, we must be influenced.

So if the secular world at this moment says this is what we should do, then we should have mixed marriage rabbis. We should have lesbian rabbis and gay rabbis. That is the position of the reform movement. And the conservative movement falls halfway in between and tries to compromise, but is having a tough time compromising it. So the question is how far are you prepared to go to bend the line? So for example, I wear modern dress even though I would say I adhere quite rigidly to ultra orthodox law, but there are certain areas where I don’t. So for example, I will watch television, and I will read books of secular philosophy and so forth and so on. And philosophy plays an important part in my life. So it’s always a matter of where you draw the line, but in the end what matters is what are you passing on to the next generation? My father passed on to me a kind of a joy in religion, a love of pleasure from it, looking at the positive side and making it amenable and rational and arguing and accepting different points of view. And that’s what we have to find a way of passing on to our children.

Roger, thank you from Toronto, my second for this week. Thank you, Roger. I appreciate that. Ellie, thank you once again for enlightenment. Thank you, Ellie. Hillel and yet secretary, hold on. Where have I jumped?

I’ve jumped to Hillel. The Secretary of State Blinken is Jewish. Senate majority leader is Jewish. Presidential Jewish candidate gained the most support in history, certainly Bernie Sanders who is Jewish. Second gentleman is Jewish. They’re all publicly Jewish who believe in Tikkun Olam and almost, well, certainly Bernie Sanders. And the first gentleman does not support the current situation in Israel. Schumer sometimes and recently has come back a bit because he did not support Israel previously. He did not in any way condemn the squad and the people who are in Congress spouting the Palestinian line. So although they are Jewish, of them, Blinken really until October the 7th was never known for supporting Israel. Now on October 7th, he did so magnificently, and let’s hope he will keep doing so. But you know, these were Jews who were not passing their Judaism onto the next generation, certainly not Bernie Sanders. I don’t know exactly about Chuck Schumer, but I don’t think he’s got practising Jewish children. And their belief in Tikkun Olam is a belief in social justice. Now social justice is fine, but it’s not a Jewish feature. I want to know what Jewish feature he belongs to. Does he go to synagogue occasionally sometimes? Does he keep Shabbat or any other Jewish festival? These are the sort of things through which one passes on. Again, Ronald’s reiterating Dave Brubeck. Thank you. We’ve mentioned this.

Not a question, but thank you. Thank you, Rita. Rhonda, you’re a very good, passionate teacher. I also tune in Wednesday morning. Thank you very much. Don’t know who Rabbi Stern is, I think you might be mentioning me, but anyway, Sylvia in England the antisemitism has gone up 500%. That’s right. People are removing them as result, replacing their kippah with baseball caps, very frightened marches every Saturday in the centre of London with chants from the river to the sea and Jihad. Yes, this is a huge, huge problem, and it’s going to be worse because your new foreign minister, who was the most unsuccessful prime minister of England probably actually maybe before the previous year or so, is now the foreign minister. And throughout his time of being a prime minister, he was totally against Israel and supportive of the Palestinian narrative. So I’m not hopeful about England either.

Q: What do you call Haredi Jews who are not Habad or Satmar?

A: They are normally called either Yeshivish or Lithuanian because it was in Lithuania that the great rabbis objected to Hasidism. So either the Lithuanian or now the term is to call them Yeshivish as opposed to Hasidish in the younger generation. Thank you, Stephen.

Ralph, I was struck by reform movements, identify so strong with woke concepts like et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Yes, and not only that. I’ll tell you something else. I only know one, up to this event, up to seven, I only knew one New York reform rabbi who was totally supportive of Israel. And that’s Rabbi Hirsch of the Stephen Wise. And that’s because also he served in the Israeli army. And I know he is isolated in the reform movement. And most of the reform movements are not supportive of him. He’s almost a lone voice.

Q: Bobby, doesn’t it seem extreme elements of organised religions, whether it’s Palestine, Orthodox or yes, we’ve been there before, haven’t we?I must have jumped somewhere to the wrong place. So let’s go to the last, yes, David Cameron.

Okay, so ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much. I’ll call it a day there, and hope to see you again somewhere. If you’re interested in studying a critical view of the Bible, I might see you on a Wednesday morning. Bye.