Jewish Liberalism Research Articles

What can we learn from Bonhoeffer concerning the churches facing Palestinian suffering?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s essay on “The Church and the Jewish Question” (1933) inspired already two ecumenical processes. The first one was the decision of the Lutheran World Federation (LWF) in 1977 declaring apartheid a status confessionis, the second was the call of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches (WARC) to engage in a processus confessionis “regarding economic injustice and ecological destruction” (1997). This led the LWF (2003), the WARC (2004) and also the World Council of Churches (WCC in 2013) to formally reject imperial neoliberal capitalism. Now it inspires the church actions against the state of Israel, depriving the Palestinians of their civil and political rights and the justification of this by misusing the Bible in (Christian) Zionism. This amounts to apartheid according to all relevant human rights organizations and the UN. There are important consequences for Christian-Jewish relations in Germany and the West today. After Western antisemitism and the horrific genocide by German Nazis against the Jewish people it was extremely necessary to overcome this past by intensive Christian-Jewish dialogue. However this has become a deal to silence critique of Israel’s constant violations of international law and human rights, as pointed out by the Jewish liberation theologian Marc Ellis. In order to overcome this a theology of land respectful of human rights is needed. Churches are being called to a process of study and discernment leading to action. A special responsibility lies with the churches in Germany and the USA because their governments must link their cooperation with the State of Israel to international law and human rights.

Exceptional Whites, Bad Jews: Racial Subjectivity, Anti-Zionism, and the Jewish New Left

Abstract: It is often assumed that the 1967 Arab-Israeli War led to the "wholesale conversion of the Jews to Zionism," as Norman Podhoretz famously phrased it. This "conversion" is equally, if often less explicitly, said to coincide with the end of the era of Jewish marginality in the U.S. and West more broadly, as Jews of European descent were half-included, half-conscripted, into normative structures of whiteness, class ascension, and citizenship. While this epochal shift in Jewish racial formation and political allegiance is undeniable especially in the context of large Jewish secular and religious institutions, at the time this "conversion" was seen as anything but inevitable. Many Jewish liberals, including Irving Howe, Seymour Lipset, and Nathan Glazer, and reactionaries such as Meir Kahane, saw Jewish overrepresentation and hypervisibility in New Left organizations such as Students for a Democratic Society, the Youth International Party, and the Socialist Workers Party as a sign that Jewish youth rejected Zionism as well as the Jewish rise into the middle class. That retrospectively we see Jewish racial formation and political alignment after 1967 as a fait accompli often relies on the erasure not only of mass Jewish participation in the New Left, but also the erasure of the New Left's anti-imperialist political commitments, including critique of expansive Israeli militarism and the settler colonial assumptions underlying Zionism. Looking at memoirs, pamphlets, histories, and original interviews with Jewish participants in the New Left, this article excavates the political alignments of Jewish New Left activists, exploring opposition to the U.S.'s new support of the Israeli state as well as the changing Ashkenazi Jewish racial assignment. Rather than finding Third World and Black Power critiques of Israel antisemitic, it was precisely the Jewish New Left's politics of international and multiracial solidarity that encouraged their support for Black Power critiques of Zionism. In this way, Jewish members of the New Left also attempted to critically challenge their own whiteness, aligning support for Israel after 1967 with support for the racial and economic structures of militarism and capitalism at home.

The New Diaspora and the Global Prophetic: Engaging the Scholarship of Marc H. Ellis ed by Susanne Scholz and Santiago Slabodsky

Reviewed by: The New Diaspora and the Global Prophetic: Engaging the Scholarship of Marc H. Ellis ed by Susanne Scholz and Santiago Slabodsky Seth Ward, retired The New Diaspora and the Global Prophetic: Engaging the Scholarship of Marc H. Ellis. Edited by Susanne Scholz and Santiago Slabodsky. Dispatches from the New Diaspora. Lanham, MD, and London: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2021. Pp. 307. $110.00. Ellis, the prolific author or editor of some thirty volumes, is best known as a “Jewish Scholar of Conscience” who introduced a Jewish liberation theology. Readers interested in his theological development and approach will find his interview in this book, conducted by its editors, to be especially enlightening. He traces his early influences to Dorothy Day and Richard Rubenstein and provides a needed introduction to key terms used by many of the chapter authors, such as Constantinian Judaism, the ecumenical deal, idolatry, empire, exile, and “the prophetic,” many of which he often describes as having “come to him.” A key element of Ellis’s approach is to emphasize the problem in modern times of the dichotomy between Jewish ethics and the oppression and killing of Arab Palestinians linked to the rise of the Jewish State. Nevertheless, Ellis recognizes that “Anti-Zionism is mostly theoretical,” that “seeing Israel as a colonial venture—only—is historically shortsighted,” and that Jews “are not returning to a position of powerlessness,” to decolonize Israel (p. 15). Ellis’s response may be seen as the “radical position linking the future of the Jewish People to the liberation of Palestinians” (Kwok Pui-Lan, p. 153). The terms in the book’s title, “New Diaspora” and “Global Prophetic,” flow from this as well. Nevertheless, while he raises this as a conundrum in the introduction, his writings often are [End Page 126] not seen that way. In any case, this book is not a venue for critical evaluation of Ellis’s thought in light of this conundrum or working out its ramifications. Books of this nature often seek to add to research in areas of specialization of a deservedly honored scholar or to do innovative studies that honor his or her profile in the field. Exemplifying this are Robert O. Smith’s critique of the term “Judaeo-Christian tradition,” Luis Rivera Pagán’s re-reading of the Bible (Hebrew Bible and Christian Testament) in solidarity with the Palestinian people, and Charles Ramsey’s study of Muhammad Asad. The book most often appears to be engaging the scholarship of Ellis mostly along the lines of “friends paying tribute to him” (p. ix), outlining the crucial role he has played as a colleague, mentor, advisor, and friend in their professional and personal lives. Sources for many essays are largely Ellis’s own writings and personal reflections. For example, Naim Ateek’s dismissal of Yitz Greenberg and other rabbis footnotes only Ellis. Appearing in 2021, the book does not engage the Abraham Accords, although there are references to Black Lives Matter. Unsurprisingly, contributors tend to discuss Latin American and Palestinian issues, with the Palestinian side mostly represented by Christians—themselves increasingly marginalized in a kind of double Exile in the Palestinian Autonomous area. The Foreword is by Susannah Heschel; Scholz and Slabodsky offer the introduction and the Ellis interview. The section headings should be familiar from Ellis’s writings. In addition to contributors already mentioned, the book includes chapters by Sarah Roy, Jessica Wai-Fong Wong, Miguel A. De La Torre, Claudio Carvalhaes, Thia Cooper, Rubén Rosario Rodríguez, William A. Walker III, Jin Young Choi, Brant Rosen, Keren Batiyov, Robert Cohen, Karen Baker Fletcher, and the two editors. Ellis’s sons, Aaron and Isaiah, offer personal and moving tributes as Postscripts. Seth Ward, retired University of Wyoming, Laramie, WY Copyright © 2023 Journal of Ecumenical Studies

Antisemitism and polarization: the political dynamics of American Jewish concerns about traditional and Israel-related antisemitism

ABSTRACT Notwithstanding the increasing alignment between social and political identities, political divisions exist within social groups as well as between them. Despite their shared traditions, American Jews face similar political divisions as Americans in general. But could the perception of a common threat, such as antisemitism, alter the dynamics of political polarization within a social group? American Jews’ concerns about antisemitism might themselves be filtered through political identities, with liberal Jews more concerned about “traditional” antisemitism (long-standing anti-Jewish stereotypes) emanating from the political right, and conservative Jews concerned about “Israel-related” antisemitism (blaming individual Jews for the actions of Israel) associated with the political left. Using a sample of over 2000 Jewish young adults, we find that, although liberal and conservative Jews are equally concerned about traditional antisemitism, conservatives are significantly more concerned about Israel-related antisemitism than liberals. We also find that, after a series of high-profile attacks on American Jews related to the 2021 Israel–Hamas conflict, liberal and conservative Jews’ concerns about Israel-related antisemitism increased at similar rates. These results suggest that, although concerns about antisemitism are influenced by political identity, rising antisemitism is unlikely to exacerbate political polarization between liberal and conservative Jews.

The Blessing "Who Has Not Made Me a Gentile" and Its Alternatives: The Evolution of one Blessing in German Jewish Space in the Nineteenth Century

This paper discusses the Jewish discourse on the blessing She-lo ʿAsani Goy (Who has not made me a gentile), which originated in Germany in the nineteenth century and reflects a Jewish attempt to bridge the gap between tradition and modernity. While liberal Jews omitted this blessing or changed it, some Orthodox Jews suggested making only modest changes to the wording of the blessing. Others objected to any changes, but gave new interpretations to the prayer in a manner that strengthened the Modern Orthodox stance. This analysis forms a case study of an ostensibly venerable tradition that is in reality a modern response to new challenges.

How hybrid? Interethnic relationships within the self of Jewish Liberals in Tsarist Russia

AbstractEthnic/national hybridity can be defined as a combination of plural ethnic/national aspects within an individual's self. This article proposes five such types: fused, dissonant, alternating, contradictory and reciprocal. Among them, the least focused type—reciprocal—can be represented by Russian Jewish Liberals who were Russified but active in both Russian and Jewish milieus from the late 19th century until the early 1920s (after the Russian Revolution, exiled in Western Europe). In such people's selves, the Jewish and Russian aspects reinforced each other. They believed that Russia and Russians provided a stage on which Jews could fulfil their potential, such as economic roles as intermediaries, proliferators of Western knowledge and defenders of the legal order, any of which, in their view, Russia and Russians needed, and feel pride in their Jewishness. Thus, they tried to defend Russia in times of crisis. Comparison with other Russian Jewish trends such as Jews in the Mensheviks and Russian Zionism suggests that such Liberals would be an extreme case but that the Late Imperial Russian multiethnic/national milieu would have been likely to generate such a trend.

Tragedies of Jewish Liberation: Mapping Hebrew Literature Between the Occupied Territories and Global Capital

Tragedies of Jewish LiberationMapping Hebrew Literature Between the Occupied Territories and Global Capital Rachel Green A review of: Borders, Territories, and Ethics: Hebrew Literature in the Shadow of the Intifada by Adia Mendelson-Maoz. Pp. xxiv + 242. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2018. Paper: $39.95. Signatures of Struggle: The Figuration of Collectivty in Israeli Fiction. By Oded Nir. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2018. Paper: $32.95. On the surface, Oded Nir's Signatures of Struggle: The Figuration of Collectivity in Israeli Fiction and Adia Mendelson-Maoz's Borders, Territories, and Ethics: Hebrew Literature in the Shadow of the Intifada may seem to have little in common. Nir's monograph is a comprehensive and exceedingly bold re-conceptualization of Hebrew literary history from the "totalizing" vantage point of the historical materialism of Fredric Jameson, and the World-systems theory of Immanuel Wallerstein, Robert Brenner, and the Warwick Research Collective. Mendelson-Maoz's, on the other hand, is an artfully crafted, theoretically eclectic, spatio-ethical reading of select Hebrew texts published primarily between 1987–2007 that thematize Israeli experience, both military and civilian, during the period of the two Intifadas. Beyond sharing a partial chronological focus (the timeline of Mendelson-Maoz's book corresponds to roughly chapters four through seven of Nir's), each monograph articulates important aspects of the "tragedy"1 of Zionism and the State of Israel as vehicles for Jewish liberation. It is a tragedy that emerges in these studies as a set of seemingly unrelated failures, each socially repressed to different degrees. One tragic failure – Nir's focus, although he does not use the [End Page 259] word "tragedy" – is economic: despite its early socialist ideals, he posits, the Yishuv and its successor state became thoroughly capitalist and unequal, raising some Jewish boats while submerging many others. The other tragic failure – Mendelson-Maoz's focus, although she does not use the word "failure" – is political and sociocultural: that the project of Jewish liberation has morphed into the oppressor of millions of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, a state of affairs which Israeli culture has struggled to address, much less acknowledge. Analyzing literary excavations of these failures and of their implications, the two monographs under discussion here craft timely, and as I will argue, implicitly interrelated interventions that thoroughly reinvigorate Hebrew literature and Hebrew literary studies. Borders, Territories, and Ethics brings the spatio-ethical to longstanding ethical discourse in Israeli literature and culture, echoing most immediately Yochai Oppenheimer's Me'ever la-gader: yitzug ha-'aravim ba-siporet ha-'ivrit 1906–2005 (Barriers: The Representation of the Arab in Hebrew and Israeli Fiction 1906–2005; 2008). Signatures of Struggle, on the other hand, marks the beginning of a wholly new economic turn in Hebrew literary criticism, evidenced in rising interest in neoliberalism, histories of capital, and economic precarity. Recently published complementary works include Kfir Cohen-Lustig's Maker of Worlds, Readers of Signs: Israeli and Palestinian Literature of the Global Contemporary (Verso, 2019), which considers the impact of shifts in material production upon both Israeli and Palestinian literatures. Nir and Mendelson-Maoz's monographs share many strengths. In addition to their novel theoretical frameworks, both bring to the attention of an English language readership myriad works not yet available in translation. Signatures of Struggle, in particular, must be credited with reinvigorating decades of Hebrew literature, making long forgotten, maligned, and in some cases, seemingly uninteresting texts sparkle anew with energy and immediacy. Nir even reveals that he has selected some texts, such as Natan Shaham's Tamid anaḥnu, (Always We), precisely because of the scorn visited upon it by established critics (p. 78). Borders, Territories, and Ethics in turn excels at historicizing complicity and liberal guilt in the Israeli cultural sphere; its account of "yorim u-bokhim" (shooting and crying) in the second chapter should be of particular interest to scholars working on these issues. [End Page 260] ________ Signatures of Struggle advances the intellectually audacious idea that the State of Israel as represented in Modern Hebrew literature represents not the triumph, but rather, the failure of the Zionist collective project. It is comprised of a theoretical introduction and seven body chapters, each...

Liberal Jews and Religious Liberty

Liberal Jews and Religious Liberty

From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History by Nancy Sinkoff (review)

Reviewed by: From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History by Nancy Sinkoff Kirsten Fermaglich Nancy Sinkoff. From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2020. 538 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009421000337 In From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History, Nancy Sinkoff has done the important work of reclaiming Lucy Dawidowicz's significance as an American public intellectual in the years after World War II. Although few scholars have previously identified Dawidowicz as a member of the famed New York Jewish intellectuals, Sinkoff makes a compelling case for this categorization. Despite Dawidowicz's significance in helping to establish the intentionalist school of Holocaust thought, which argued for the primacy of Hitler's antisemitism in explaining the origins of the Holocaust, she has mostly been forgotten in books on New York Jewish intellectuals, and has similarly fallen off the map of American intellectual history, and of American Jewish history. By describing Dawidowicz's friendships with figures like Irving Howe and Norman Podhoretz, and by highlighting her [End Page 482] public prominence as an interpreter of the Holocaust and of eastern European Jewish culture, as well as expertise in Yiddish language and literature, Sinkoff reclaims Dawidowicz's significance in American Jewish and intellectual life. As the title of the book suggests, Dawidowicz moved politically from liberal to conservative over the course of her life, a trajectory that mirrored that of many other New York Jewish intellectuals. Born in 1915 in New York City to Jewish immigrants from Warsaw, Dawidowicz lived in Jewish neighborhoods in the Bronx, and attended high school and college in New York City. She was also deeply involved in the secular Yiddishist community of the Sholem Aleichem Folk Institute. Like other New York Jewish intellectuals, the left-wing politics of this environment shaped her early life as a member of the Young Communist League and National Student League. By 1938, however, like many on the Left, she had broken with the Soviet Union, and intensified her studies of Yiddish, accepting a fellowship as a graduate student at the YIVO in Vilna, and departing for research in Poland that same year. Those experiences became defining ones in shaping her identification with Polish Jews facing destruction. Dawidowicz barely escaped the Nazi occupation and felt deeply all her life the deaths of her friends and patrons in Poland. Immediately after the war, she worked with the YIVO and the Joint Distribution Committee, tracking down and collecting the Yiddish literary treasures scattered throughout Europe, as well as working with survivors in DP camps. In 1949, she began almost twenty years on the staff of the American Jewish Committee (AJC). During that time, Sinkoff shows, her politics moved steadily rightwards. Her reports on communism and the Soviet Union reflected her fervent anticommunism and anxieties about Jewish radicalism, while her work on religious minorities and Black-Jewish relationships in the United States reflected at first the standard liberal position of the AJC, but increasingly signaled dissent from strict separation of church and state, and discomfort with Black social and cultural differences from Jews. By the late 1960s, when she left the AJC, her politics had already turned inward to the history and well-being of the Jewish community and rightward away from the universal ideologies that marked Jewish liberalism. That preoccupation with eastern European Jewish history was the final and perhaps most significant chapter of her life, as described by Sinkoff. Dawidowicz published two major books that established her as an expert in eastern European Jewish history and the Holocaust—The Golden Tradition and Hitler's War against the Jews—and cemented her relationship with New York Jewish intellectuals, who at that moment were experiencing a similar political and intellectual turn towards Judaism, the Jewish community, and the Holocaust. Although she had planned on publishing a major book on the history of the American Jewish community towards the end of her life, she never completed it; it was her work on eastern European Jewry and the Holocaust that marked her professional and...

Trends in Jewish Young Adult Experiences and Perceptions of Antisemitism in America from 2017 to 2019

Since 2016, a series of horrific acts motivated by antisemitism appear to have caused a fundamental shift in the prevalence of antisemitism in the United States. Little is known, however, about how the events during this time have affected the day-to-day experiences and concerns of American Jews. Using repeated cross-sectional data from surveys of Jewish young adults who applied to Birthright Israel, this paper analyzes recent trends in Jewish young adults’ experiences and perceptions of antisemitism. Despite the high-profile incidents during this period, there is no evidence of a major increase in experiences of antisemitic harassment among Jewish young adults—either on or off campus—between 2017 and 2019. At the same time, data show a substantial increase in concerns among young Jews about antisemitism in the United States and on college campuses, with concerns about antisemitism in the United States (but not on campus) being especially concentrated among liberal Jews. These results suggest that Jewish concerns about antisemitism are linked to broader views about the climate for marginalized populations in the United States. They also point to growing Jewish anxieties over violence, safety, and acceptance in the United States. In an era of widely disseminated antisemitic conspiracy theories, even young Jews who have no first-hand experience of antisemitic harassment have become concerned.

The Anti-Jewish Narrative

According to the mainstream narrative about race, all groups have the same innate dispositions and potential, and all disparities—at least those favoring whites—are due to past or present racism. Some people who reject this narrative gravitate toward an alternative, anti-Jewish narrative, which sees recent history in terms of a Jewish/gentile conflict. The most sophisticated promoter of the anti-Jewish narrative is the evolutionary psychologist Kevin MacDonald. MacDonald argues that Jews have a suite of genetic adaptations—including high intelligence and ethnocentrism—and cultural practices that lead them to undermine gentile society to advance their own evolutionary interests. He says that Jewish-designed intellectual movements have weakened gentile identity and culture while preserving Jewish identity and separatism. Cofnas recently argued that MacDonald’s theory is based on “systematically misrepresented sources and cherry-picked facts.” However, Cofnas gave short shrift to at least three key claims: (a) Jews are highly ethnocentric, (b) liberal Jews hypocritically advocate liberal multiculturalism for gentiles/gentile countries but racial purity and separatism for Jews/Israel, and (c) Jews are responsible for liberalism and mass immigration to the United States. The present paper examines these claims and concludes that MacDonald’s views are not supported.

Israel in modern Jewish identity: an internal debate

ABSTRACT Contemporary Jewry is burdened by a fierce debate about Zionism and Israel. A sizeable sector of Jewish academics, where leftists and self-declared liberals are strongly represented, criticises the Jewish state to the point of casting doubts regarding its very existence. Although their argumentation is frequently similar to the utterances of non-Jewish antisemites, what moves these Jewish Israel-critics is not so much Jews and Judaism but rather the Zionist idea. Such anti-Israel Jews are influenced by modern ideological trends and pressures that affect also, strangely enough, certain Israeli Jewish intellectuals. These developments happen on the background of an increasing pattern of Jew-hatred in non-Jewish society, a transformation of past antisemitism now expressed as anti-Israelism.

The Movement and the Middle East: How the Arab-Israeli Conflict Divided the American Left by Michael R. Fischbach

Reviewed by: The Movement and the Middle East: How the Arab-Israeli Conflict Divided the American Left by Michael R. Fischbach Yehudah Mirsky (bio) The Movement and the Middle East: How the Arab-Israeli Conflict Divided the American Left. By Michael R. Fischbach. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020. xi + 297 pp. University trends come and go, but spirited, regularly agonized, discussion of Israel, Zionism and Palestine abides. Recent years in particular have seen waves of activism on a number of campuses under the banner of the movement urging Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel. While the BDS Movement has, for now, singularly failed to achieve [End Page 296] its larger political and economic goals, it has succeeded in, depending on one's point of view, galvanizing, or traumatizing, any number of campuses. Of course, we cannot know whether today's activists will carry their experiences beyond university to their professional and civic lives. Yet they, and their teachers, would do well to remember that today's controversies have a history. Especially now, when, owing to Bernie Sanders's impressive, if ultimately unsuccessful, bid for the Democratic presidential nomination and the growing prominence of younger activists and politicians has breathed new life into the American Left. Thus, The Movement and the Middle East, by Michael R. Fischbach, Professor of History at Virginia's Randolph-Macon College, comes at an opportune time. The book's chief argument is in the subtitle, which Fischbach well proves through ample documentation. Looking at the many, many sources in the book's footnotes left this reader thinking that in addition to their value as historical evidence, they are a cornucopia of teaching materials, especially for undergraduates engaged in their own explorations of the confluences and strains of their own political, religious, class and ethnic identities. It is helpful to see what this book is and is not. Fischbach's scholarly intervention is in the history of the American Left, which has often passed over the internal battles over Israel/Palestine he documents at length. One of his lengthy footnotes, for instance, lists all the works about the antiwar movement that omit the issue (230, note 3). He amply demonstrates the extent and intensity of arguments about Israel coursing through the American Left from the 1960s to the 1980s, when his chronicle reaches its terminus. The book is, for better or worse, much less an intervention in American Jewish history. He presents no historical context for the rich history of pre-1960s American Jewish Leftism from which many of his protagonists emerged, chronicled so well by Tony Michels, the late Ezra Mendelsohn and others, or for the history of American Jewish Anti-Zionism (amazingly, the American Council for Judaism nowhere appears). Nor does he set the Jewish Left activism of the period in the context of all the other fronts of Jewish political activism of those years. Crucially, Fischbach hardly mentions the Soviet Jewry movement. This omission matters not only for its being a different front of Jewish political activism, but also for its centrality to the Cold War politics that so decisively affected the story Fischbach aims to tell. The tapestry of countercultural activists described in works like Gal Beckerman's When They Come for Us We'll Be Gone (2010), and Yossi Klein Halevi's essential Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist (2014, first published in 1995), is nowhere to be found. These were also the years of Jewish countercultural spiritual revival, of the [End Page 297] rise of the Havurot, and of groups like Yavneh, chronicled by the late Benny Kraut in The Greening of Orthodox Judaism (2011). These, too, go unmentioned, even though some of the participants in Fischbach's story, like Michael Lerner and Arthur Waskow, were involved in both. And Meir Kahane was then offering his own sort of radical challenge to bourgeois Jewish liberalism. Another key omission is the parallel reversal in those years on the other side of the political spectrum, to wit, how after 1967, Israel, once a liberal cause, became identified with the right, and evangelical and other traditionalist Christians who had formerly disdained Zionism came to embrace it. Above all, Fischbach throughout largely records but scarcely...

Is Criticism Disloyal? American Jews' Attitudes toward Israel

AbstractTo what extent is it possible for American Jews to maintain a deep emotional connection to Israel while criticizing the actions of the Israeli government? This long-debated question echoes earlier investigations of different forms of patriotism toward one's home country. Drawing on two 2019 surveys of American Jews, we find that, like Americans in general, Jewish liberals and conservatives express different forms of patriotism toward both Israel and America. Jewish conservatives tend to oppose criticism of Israel and America for any reason, while Jewish liberals view criticism as an important part of “caring” about both countries. Both forms of patriotism are positively associated with stronger emotional connections to the relevant country. These results suggest that emotional connection to Israel represents a form of social identification with Israel and that lower levels of connection to Israel among some American Jews are driven more by apathy than active criticism or hostility.

The Foundations of American Jewish Liberalism by Kenneth D. Wald (review)

Reviewed by: The Foundations of American Jewish Liberalism by Kenneth D. Wald Gil Troy Kenneth D. Wald. The Foundations of American Jewish Liberalism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019. 255 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009420000136 Everyone knows that Jews are liberal. Everyone knows that good American Jews fast on Yom Kippur, eat Chinese food on Christmas, and vote Democratic on election day. And everyone knows this liberalism springs straight from the Bible to the pages of the New York Times—or does it? Kenneth Wald is one of those annoying academics who questions our defining clichés. He confirms that Jews are two to three times more likely than other Americans to vote Democratic. But he challenges this commonplace, self-congratulatory, "Judaic" explanation for American Jewish liberalism. Claims that Jewish liberalism reflects Jewish values, historical experiences of emancipation, the natural reaction to being a persecuted minority, or an ongoing sense of "social insecurity" do not apply over time or over space to other polities. Orthodox American Jews and Israelis are passionately Jewish, but often less liberal. Perhaps, Wald suggests, the story of American Jewish liberalism is an American one. Wald is also a rare modern academic who sees methodology as a tool, not as handcuffs. A veteran political scientist at the University of Florida, the author of the now-standard textbook Religion and Politics in the United States, Wald mixes sophisticated data analysis with good political history. The result is an illuminating explanation of American Jewish liberalism. Wald offers ten chapters organized in three parts. Part I, "The Problem(s) of American Jewish Liberalism," explains "Why American Jewish Politics Is Puzzling," while starting to develop the argument, in chapter 3, by asking "How Is America Different?" Having framed an intriguing question, Wald offers his fascinating history of American Jewish politics in part II, "Development of the American Jewish Political Culture." Rather than starting with Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, or mass eastern European migration in the 1880s, Wald begins at the very beginning. This broader perspective traces "How Jews Fell in Love with the American Regime," from 1776 onward in chapter 4. The next three chapters offer a nice capsule history of Jewish politics, American style, from George Washington's day to the mid-twentieth century. [End Page 462] Wald draws three important conclusions. First, America was different. America did not persecute its Jews. No American prince protected "his" Jews. The Constitution did not merely "tolerate" Jews. Instead, America's "inclusive understanding of citizenship"—for non-Blacks—integrated Jews into the polity as Americans, as equal citizens. This welcome allowed Jews to flourish individually, then communally, while shaping American Jewry's agenda. Having "attributed their success" to this "political climate steeped in classic liberalism," American Jews prioritized "defending the political system that made it possible. They developed a political cultural that reinforced their interpretation of the American Jewish experience, emphasizing above all else the importance of maintaining the principle of equal citizenship in a secular society" (4). This liberal world view preceded the Jews' alliance with the Democratic Party and explains the great American Jewish political anomaly: unlike most groups, Jews do not vote their pocketbooks. The NPR humorist Peter Sagal quips: "What is it about being rich and white that American Jews don't understand?" Jews vote against their class interests because they are voting for something more profound: their equal billing. Jews are acting on "rational self-interest" (31), Wald shows, but a political, existential one, not an economic one. With this inclusivity baked into the Constitution, consecrated by George Washington, American Jews worshiped the Constitution. They protected this political regime—and their expansive version of it—because it respected, accepted, and validated them. "By 1868," Wald writes, "the American Jewish community had come to consider the Constitution as part of the underpinning of Judaism in the United States…. Beyond religious freedom, the Constitution gave Jews equal citizenship and an ownership share in the country" (4). Here, Wald makes another subversive move. Frustrated that most scholars treat American Jews as passive consumers, merely purchasing America's goodies, Wald treats Jews as manufacturers of their destiny—and America's. "The Jewish political culture was the operational link between the...

Israelization and Lived Religion: Conflicting Accounts of Contemporary Judaism.

The article begins with an analysis of Yossi Shain, Ha-Me’ah ha-Yisraelit ve-ha-Yisraelizaziyah shel ha-Yahadut (The Israeli Century and the Israelization of Judaism) (2019), which puts forward a novel and enlightening revisionist view of the relationship between Israeli and American Jewries. The second part of the article reveals essential problems with Shain’s central argument. These come to a fore through the study of Judaism as a lived religion. Three examples are discussed at length to illustrate this point: developments in the religious lives of liberal Jews, Chabad, and Orthodox Feminism.

AIDS Was Our Earthquake: American Jewish Responses to the AIDS Crisis, 1985–92

AIDS Was Our Earthquake:American Jewish Responses to the AIDS Crisis, 1985–92 Gregg Drinkwater (bio) On June 5, 1981, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported on an unusual cluster of Pneumocystis Pneumonia among five previously healthy young gay men in Los Angeles. That report is generally understood as the first official documentation of the epidemic that was briefly called "gay cancer" and then "Gay Related Immune-Deficiency" (GRID) before being labelled "Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome" (AIDS) in the summer of 1982. By 1985, 15,000 Americans had been diagnosed with the disease. Nearly 13,000 of them had died.1 The majority were gay and bisexual men and intravenous (IV) drug users—all populations that were widely stigmatized at the time. From the beginning of the AIDS crisis in 1981 through 1985, American Jewish leaders were largely silent. We do not see evidence of widespread Jewish communal engagement with AIDS in the United States until September 24, 1985, when two young and charismatic rabbis in San Francisco delivered Yom Kippur sermons on AIDS in their respective Reform synagogues: Congregation Sha'ar Zahav (serving primarily LGBTQ members) and Congregation Emanu-El (with primarily straight members). Both sermons, and the rabbis who delivered them, profoundly shaped liberal American Judaism's responses to AIDS. [End Page 122] The Sha'ar Zahav sermon, delivered by Yoel Kahn, a 26-year-old gay man newly ordained as a Reform rabbi, suggested a Jewish path forward on HIV/AIDS grounded in the insights of the Gay Liberation Movement and an approach that centered gay and lesbian lives. The Emanu-El sermon, in contrast, delivered by Robert Kirschner, a 34-year-old straight man newly promoted as his congregation's senior rabbi, called upon Jewish compassion in the face of a public health crisis affecting stigmatized populations. Yet both shared common ground. Rather than framing the religious and moral issue at the heart of HIV/AIDS as a need to proscribe sexual behavior coded as dangerous and aberrant, as was common among evangelical, Catholic, and Orthodox Jewish leaders, the rabbis who delivered both of these sermons reflected the emergence of a new moral calculus in which acceptance and tolerance of gay and lesbian people became a Jewish moral litmus test among liberal Jews. The Jewish AIDS initiatives that followed in the wake of the conversations these sermons helped spark were rarely about policing the sexual and intimate behavior of gay and lesbian people. Instead, most of the Jewish AIDS programs that emerged in the US in the late 1980s focused on providing support and social services to people with AIDS (hereafter PWAs) and their families; raising awareness about the risks of AIDS; making AIDS more visible in Jewish communities; and modifying the behaviors of non-gay Jews toward gay and lesbian people.2 In the early years of the AIDS epidemic, conservative American Christian religious leaders, such as Jerry Falwell, had insisted that AIDS was God's punishment for sinful "homosexual" behavior. A 1986 Gallup poll, five years after the AIDS crisis emerged, indicated that 42 percent of Americans agreed with him.3 Such religious bigotry in the early 1980s was one factor that gave political and cultural leaders license to minimize the threat of the disease and to openly mock those suffering from AIDS.4 Few Jewish leaders outside the ultra-Orthodox community, however, made claims about AIDS that explicitly invoked God's wrath as the cause of AIDS. One exception was the Modern Orthodox Rabbi Barry Freundel—the same rabbi who was arrested in 2014 for voyeurism at a Washington DC mikvah (ritual bath)—who wrote in a 1986 essay that—although one can cite Jewish proof texts arguing both for and against divine punishment—"[b]y far, the greater evidence indicates that God's retribution plays a role in epidemics such as AIDS." Yet even Freundel quickly dismissed the question as irrelevant to the Jewish obligation to "heal and prevent death wherever possible."5 More often, Orthodox Jewish leaders joined conservative Christians in describing AIDS as the consequence of what they saw [End Page 123] as abhorrent or even pathological behavior, although the vast majority still held that regardless of...

The Foundations of American Jewish Liberalism by Kenneth D. Wald

The Foundations of American Jewish Liberalism by Kenneth D. Wald

The Foundations of American Jewish Liberalism. By Kenneth D. Wald. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. xvi + 255 pp. $89.99 cloth, $29.99 paper, $24.00 eBook

The Foundations of American Jewish Liberalism. By Kenneth D. Wald. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. xvi + 255 pp. $89.99 cloth, $29.99 paper, $24.00 eBook

The Foundations of American Jewish Liberalism. By Kenneth D. Wald

The Foundations of American Jewish Liberalism. By Kenneth D. Wald