Today, Jews in the United States make up only 2 percent of the American population — that is, a little more than five million people. From a sociological standpoint, one must picture a group with porous boundaries, given that the rate of exogamy exceeds 52 percent and that, on the whole, instead of “persecuting Jews, people marry them,” to borrow the words of the famous American Jewish lawyer Alan Dershowitz1. In fact, community leaders worry above all about the future of a Jewish community that is highly heterogeneous and assimilated, and most of whose members are unaffiliated. This is why they are more American than Jewish, except for the 10 percent who are Orthodox, whether “modern” or “ultra.” With the exception of this group — itself heterogeneous — American Jews have a below-average fertility rate, and sociologists and political scientists agree in thinking that, below the current threshold of 2 percent, the Jewish community would no longer have the political and cultural influence it enjoys today. Can it still be said to be living through a golden age? The 250 years of the Jewish presence in the United States were celebrated with great fanfare in 2004 by the various Jewish communities of the country. Like an adventure rich in wanderings, the three principal waves of immigration were depicted in various exhibitions on a national scale: Sephardic immigration, then German immigration, and that of the Jews of Eastern Europe.
This convenient (if approximate) division for the period from 1654 to 1939 allows us to say that the first “wave” of (mostly) Sephardim comprised twenty-three poor Jews — men, women, and children — who in 1654 boarded the Sainte-Catherine to flee the Dutch colony of Recife, in Brazil, which had been conquered by the Portuguese, who kept the Jews under the yoke of the Inquisition. It was in September 1654 that this small Marrano community, having lost everything, reached the island of Manhattan and landed at the port of New Amsterdam (the headquarters of the Dutch colony of the Netherlands), which would become New York with the arrival of the English, who drove out the Dutch. By the end of the seventeenth century, the Jews of New York made up roughly 2.5 percent of the colony’s population. They enjoyed the freedom of conscience granted by the Duke of York to all members of the colony.
At the time of the War of Independence, the Jewish population stood somewhere between 1,000 and 2,500 within a total population of about four million. In 1820 it numbered 4,000. From 1830 on, a mass Jewish immigration came to upend the life of the Jewish community. The second wave of (Ashkenazi) Jewish immigration was made up, for the most part, of German Jews. They came essentially from Central Europe and identified with Reform Judaism. The Jewish population rose from 15,000 in 1840 to 250,000 in 1880. The motivations for this migratory movement belong to the history of immigration to the United States, bound up with the development of maritime transport. More specifically, anti-Jewish demonstrations in Bavaria set off the first immigration of Bavarian Jews in 1836, at a time when German law restricted the number of Jewish marriages and when appearing before the mayor required paying a hefty sum. To finish sketching this all-too-hasty picture, let us recall the third wave of immigration, made up of the Jews of Eastern Europe. This one struck like a tidal wave beginning in 1881, the year of the assassination of Alexander II, preceded and followed by bloody pogroms. This wave accompanied another, still more powerful wave of immigrants of all faiths, coming above all from the Tsarist empire and from Italy. By 1900, half a million Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe had changed the landscape of American Judaism and brought another culture. The First World War halted this surge, but as soon as the armistice was signed the flow of immigrants resumed: in 1921, 120,000 Jews reached American shores before the quota laws of 1921 and 1924 set up an insurmountable barrier against them. In short, the Jews of Eastern Europe left a strong imprint on American Judaism: they brought greater fidelity to the Mosaic law than their predecessors. Over the years, however, Jewish tradition and the liberties taken with it in the name of Americanization fueled numerous controversies within the organized Jewish community.
Since the mid-1980s, the debate over the place of Jews in the United States, and over the maintenance of an identity capable of ensuring transmission from generation to generation, has been regularly reopened. In 1988 the famous American sociologist Nathan Glazer wondered about the future of American Judaism in these terms: “When I review the alternatives open to American Judaism, it seems to me that the early projections of American sociologists about the future of Jews in the United States contain a large measure of truth: Jews, for the most part, will assimilate. This assimilation will not take the form of a disappearance of Jewish identity: an identity without much content will perpetuate itself. But neither religion in the traditional sense — Orthodoxy — nor the evolved religion whose major themes are survival and liberalism seems to me strong enough, or sufficiently suited to our conditions of life, to sustain the great American Jewish community of today.”2 To what extent is this question still pertinent today? American Judaism is often held up as an example by other diasporas, but beyond that first impression, is this a community comfortably settled in, or one in a state of survival? What is the impact of the shifting practices and choices of this fragmented community? How are we to account for its present degree of acceptance, even its “comfort,” and in what way is that comfort threatened?
A Community Comfortably Settled In, or in a State of Survival?
The Convergence of American Jewish and National Identities
Let us recall that Jefferson, in his inaugural address, had invoked the need for the support of “the Supreme Being,” expressing the will to make America a new Jerusalem — an idea, moreover, taken up by evangelicalism. But this is only one element of that meeting of identities which partly explains the present sense of convergence between sympathy for the State of Israel and the national interest, both in American opinion, within Congress, and — to a lesser degree today — within the presidency.
A historical perspective makes it possible to conduct an analysis of the points the Jewish and American cultures hold in common, and to draw two principal conclusions. The first lies in the observation of the remarkable way in which the Jewish “minority” managed to integrate into American society while preserving its identity there. If integration succeeded to the point that some leaders of the Jewish community now believe it threatens that identity, the identity itself seems generally to have been preserved by way of two factors: on the one hand, antisemitism, and on the other, the awareness of the universality of the Jewish experience in the 1960s. This awareness was brought about by the rupture of the bonds with the Black community that Jews had long supported, and intensified by the penetration of the memory of the Shoah into the public sphere in the wake of the Eichmann trial in 19613. And it was with the Six-Day War in 1967 that there occurred a transfer onto Israel of the feeling of vulnerability that this memory of the Shoah had revived. This observation touches on a second point: the privileged relationship among the American experience, Jewish culture, and the Israeli project4.
One notes, on the one hand, that if Jews found in America a genuine home, and if the United States was enriched by their culture, the memory of the Shoah has been “Americanized”5. Indeed, through various museums and in particular at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, it conveys the values of universalism and freedom dear to American democracy. On the other hand, it is important to note that the American experience and the Israeli experience share a community of interests: two “pioneer” nations that, since September 11, have both been confronted with Islamist terrorism. This congruence between American Jewish identity (both secular and religious) and national identity is unstable, for it depends on circumstances. The September 11 attacks had two major effects with respect to American Judaism: they provisionally led to a stronger identification with Israel, and they consolidated a national identity in crisis.
A generation earlier, the American population was made up in the majority of Whites of European ethnic origin (essentially Christian) and of Blacks, also Christian, whose roots were American. As a result, they possessed a basic familiarity with Judaism and Jewish history, such that Jewish concerns fell within their frame of reference. Now the changes in the composition of the American population brought about by immigration are diminishing the relevance of these convergences between American national identity and American Jewish identities. Groups coming from Asia, Hispanics, and other non-European groups have emerged onto the political scene. They have little awareness of the priorities of American Judaism. The same is true of non-Western groups such as Buddhists, Hindus, and American Muslims, whose political influence is on the rise6. This is why it is legitimate to pose one of the questions that disquiet the leaders of organized American Judaism: what allies will Jews find?
Yet before seeking allies, one must determine who the enemy is. Some have located the enemy within the ranks of American Jews, for whom — Orthodox aside — American identity prevails. But the answer is not simple. It implies other questions, including the one bearing on the declining intensity of the bond to Israel among the younger generations.
“The Enemy Is Us7”
In 2010, David Harris, executive director of the American Jewish Committee, repeatedly articulated a major change: the American Jewish community for which the AJC was, in his view, the spokesman forty years ago was both smaller and strong. Strong, in his view, because the great majority of Jews married coreligionists and raised their children in respect for tradition. Identifications, religious or secular, were then reinforced by the memory of the Shoah and the creation of the State of Israel, then by the memory of the Six-Day War and of the movement on behalf of the Jews of the USSR. It was in this way that the Jewish people’s sense of solidarity (peoplehood) was sustained.
The question of intermarriage is not only the one over which the most ink has been spilled, but also the one that most divides Jews in the United States. Some perceive intermarriage as the collapse of family values and see in it the greatest threat to “Jewish continuity.” For them, there is a preventive role to be played in averting exogamy and, failing that, conversion is expected.
Others hold that exogamy will remain the product of the American — even the American Jewish — way of life and cultural code. For the partisans of this way of thinking, all efforts should be directed toward mixed couples and toward encouraging their involvement in community life. The aim is also to increase the proportion of those who provide a Jewish (religious) education to their children.
The twenty-first century has thus seen the emergence of a train of doubts, casting a shadow over the dominant optimism regarding the future of American Judaism. The sense of group identity has largely given way to private identities, to chosen identifications corresponding to the prevailing notions of “self-realization,” whether or not these notions are inspired by Judaism8. Moreover, since intermarriage corresponds to one of the American ideals, it is increasingly difficult for parents who preach tolerance to influence their children. The trouble is that only a minority of children born of these marriages identify with Judaism.
Nor does the fragmentation of the Jewish community and its internecine struggles facilitate the phenomenon of identification among Jews in the United States. On the other hand, identification with Israel is made more difficult for those who lack sufficient knowledge of the country and who are dependent on its media coverage. It is this that leads the journalist Jeremy J. Goldberg to say that “the enemy is us.”
Jews in the Media: A Contested Point of View
The relationship between Jews and the media is among the domains in which the myth of “Jewish power” is no doubt most present. Ever since the pamphlet The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the myth has been alive that a worldwide Jewish conspiracy relies on the manipulation of the press. This skewed vision was spread in the United States in the 1920s by the famous industrialist Henry Ford, owner of the newspaper The Dearborn Independent. It was extended to the realm of theater and cinema, where Jews found a niche, since no closed strongholds had yet been formed. In the lexicon of antisemitism, control of the media is one of the most effective stereotypes, especially when it is bound up with the myth, relayed by the Arab countries, of a “worldwide Jewish conspiracy.”
At the risk of being schematic, let us sum up what resembles a phenomenon of perception: for non-Jews, the press is a Jewish bastion; for Jews, particularly those affiliated with a community, the press conveys antisemitic prejudices. Now, as the American journalist Jonathan Jeremy Goldberg asserts, these two opposing views each contain a measure of truth. About 5 percent of Jews work in the American media, and notably at the four major dailies: the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. This sense of “over-representation,” given their small percentage of the American population, is heightened by the existence of an elite in the media world and in particular in the world of Hollywood entertainment. Yet community-affiliated Jews agree in saying that the treatment of the news today is hardly favorable to Israel. For a quarter of a century, activists engaged in the various American Jewish communities have striven to denounce the press’s tendency to focus on the weaknesses of the State of Israel without considering the tragedies that terrorism brings about. The irony, indeed, is that the refuge state of the Jews of the diaspora should be the only one where a person is killed for the sole fact of being Jewish.
According to the journalist Morley Safer of CBS News’ 60 Minutes, “the problem some journalists have is that in the atlas of their minds, Israel is somewhere in Westchester and not in the Levant. So they use the standards proper to Westchester and not those of the Byzantine world […]. The trouble is that one ends up with a kind of curious double scale of evaluation.”9 This is also the view of a large part of the American Jewish community, fragmented as it is. In a 1994 survey, 54 percent of those questioned (Americans of Jewish origin) agreed that the American media judge Israel more harshly than the Arab countries. In 1989, while the Intifada was the subject of reporting throughout the world, 79 percent of Jews in the United States felt this lack of proportion. This phenomenon seems accentuated by the dissemination of the publications of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), which devote a large number of their articles to human rights violations committed by Israelis, only rarely mentioning questions of human rights abuses and contempt for democracy in the Arab countries.
A question deserves to be raised here: can the media be at once dominated by Jews and express an anti-Israeli bias? A first remark: the Jews who work within the media come essentially from the most assimilated sectors of the community, as do most influential Jews. Moreover, journalism requires a certain detachment, and some exaggerate this remove so as not to run the risk of being accused of partiality. Famous journalists such as Anthony Lewis and Thomas Friedman of the New York Times — one of the most Jewish of American institutions — or Mike Wallace of CBS News acknowledge that it is precisely their attachment to the Hebrew state that prompts them to focus on its failings. Wallace, whose reports provoked an uproar in the American Jewish community, admits that he is on the lookout for stories with a backdrop of injustice. He confesses that he never suffered from antisemitism, but becomes furious when he is called a “self-hating Jew.” Various interviews with Jewish journalists show that Wallace belongs to a minority of them. Like Richard Roth of CNN, most assert that they make no connection between being a journalist and being a Jew10. And yet it goes without saying that the type of bond to the Hebrew state is not a matter of indifference.
What Kind of Bond to Israel?
The closeness between the United States and the young Hebrew state intensified markedly with the Six-Day War in 1967, which for many revived the specter of the annihilation of a people. Now, today, some sociologists and community leaders warn: the attachment to Israel has grown tenuous. It is true that young people who have no memories of June 1967 are less likely to feel a strong bond to the Hebrew state. According to a 2008 survey, only 49 percent of non-Orthodox Jews under thirty-five consider that “a potential destruction of the State of Israel would be a personal tragedy,” whereas this percentage is very high among community leaders, who identify strongly with the fate of the state, having a more recent memory of the Shoah, of antisemitism, and of the creation of the Hebrew state11.
What are the major questions that Jews in the United States ask themselves with respect to Israel? The future of Israel as the only democracy in the Near East, and the future of the peace process12. The second question often takes precedence over the first. Yet since the failure of the Oslo Accords, some have doubts about the desire for a peace agreement on the Palestinian side, while others are critical of Israel.
The year 2008 saw the creation of a new Jewish pressure group: J Street, further to the left than AIPAC. Until then, the Jewish community had been dominated for some ten years by organizations situated rather to the right of center (in particular AIPAC and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations), which espoused Israeli positions. Now, since roughly two-thirds of the members of the American Jewish community are Democrats, AIPAC’s positions (it was founded in 1954 within the American Zionist Council) did not represent the majority of Jews.
J Street presents itself as a “liberal” lobby, “pro-Israel and pro-peace.” Like AIPAC, it has, as a lobby, a “Political Action Committee” (PAC) to fund campaigns. For the moment, J Street is far from being able to compete with AIPAC, which has enjoyed an almost Hollywood-like influence and prestige on Capitol Hill for more than fifty years, a tightly woven network of contacts, and lobbying techniques that have proved their worth. Its staff, its news bulletin, its budget (about 75 million dollars, against 3 for J Street) still allow it to secure the support of Congress13. AIPAC, which is headquartered in Washington, has branches in New York, San Francisco, and Austin (Texas). In the mid-1960s this pressure group succeeded in convincing Congress to grant military and strategic aid to Israel and to regard the Hebrew state as a strategic ally. To be sure, Jewish members of Congress sympathetic to the cause of the young state were so many links in reinforcing AIPAC’s influence. AIPAC’s founder (Si Kenen) knew how to meet Congress’s need for information by creating the Near East Report, a bulletin distributed in 30,000 copies and a mirror of the Israeli government’s positions. This publication concentrates on developments in the relations between the two nations and informs its subscribers about the results obtained, in particular about bills relating to Israel passed by members of Congress.
AIPAC’s budget comes exclusively from the dues of its members: about 55,000 in the mid-1980s. In addition to the financial power that comes from its broad base, AIPAC can count on a large team of experts. The strength of this pressure group also derives from the network it has built up, in the worlds of business and politics, and in a bipartisan manner. Its influence is reinforced by two allies: the Conference of Presidents of Major American Organizations (created in the 1950s, which speaks on behalf of some fifty organizations and institutions) and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs. Its good relations with other, non-Jewish lobbies, such as the unions and the Christian fundamentalists, reinforce its impact. Until the Obama presidency, the political establishment was well served by an almost unique representation of the organized Jewish community, insofar as AIPAC’s point of view summed up that of Israel’s supporters in the United States.
The support of Christian Zionists — millions of fundamentalist Protestants who perceive Israel as essential to America’s spiritual survival — is an important pillar for AIPAC. Many of them regard the Jewish people as the Chosen People, emphasizing the fact that the creation of the State of Israel is inscribed in the Bible. Among the Millenarians, the re-creation of a Greater Israel is interpreted as the harbinger of the “Second Coming of Christ.” For religious reasons, then, about fifty million fundamentalists, including thirty million evangelicals, espouse the Zionist theses. Indeed, for his support of the Hebrew state, Jerry Falwell, one of the leaders of the evangelical movement, received a decoration from Menachem Begin, then in the Israeli government. But in the long run, is there not reason to be concerned about the Millenarians’ support for the Hebrew state?
Even if J Street, the new counterweight to AIPAC, cannot yet rival it for so much political backing and such well-honed lobbying techniques, according to its detractors the recent lobby threatens the fragile unity of the organized Jewish community insofar as it claims the right to criticize Israeli policy. Now, a new context tied to the “Walt-Mearsheimer affair” has allowed the dissenting voices that are rising within the organized Jewish community to be heard, even at the risk of discrediting Israeli positions. In this sense, J Street gives liberal Jews the possibility of being represented in Washington and proves a valuable ally for President Obama, who can thereby get his positions critical of Israel accepted with less friction. Conversely, J Street benefits from the new course charted by the new presidency to affirm its positions, at the risk of wholly discrediting the Israeli stance14.
From the start of his term, Obama broke with the great ideological closeness of the Bush administration to the governing party in Israel, while affirming the maintenance of the “special relationship” that binds the United States to the Hebrew state. It seems that the controversy that erupted over the Mearsheimer and Walt report, titled The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, accusing the “pro-Israel lobby” (that is, AIPAC) of holding American policy in the Near East hostage and thereby disserving American interests, had the effect of getting the idea accepted that the United States should not remain the unconditional defenders of the Hebrew state — even though this report was condemned for factual errors and sometimes faulty reasoning, and criticized for its near-anti-Jewish views15.
Their 83-page report was posted online in March 2006 on Harvard University’s website and published simultaneously by the London Review of Books. Academic specialists in international relations, John Mearsheimer (professor at the University of Chicago) and Stephen Walt (professor at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government) provoked a very lively controversy. Let us note that the center to which Walt belongs has the function of training senior civil servants. Attempting to explain the special relationship that binds America to Israel, Mearsheimer and Walt revived the controversy over the role of the “pro-Israel lobby” in American foreign policy in the Near and Middle East, in a study that apparently met the criteria of academic seriousness. In closely argued fashion, they deplored the pro-Israel choices made over more than twenty years, in the name of the disadvantages these would entail for their country.
In their view, this poor diplomatic choice was imposed on Congress by AIPAC, which comes down in favor of an armed and powerful Israel. It is on account of this position that this pressure group finds itself at odds with the majority of Jews in the United States, who vote for the Democratic Party (78 percent of them voted for Obama in 2008) and who are not convinced of the necessity of pursuing settlement in the disputed territories, even if they support the Hebrew state. Yet as an ethnic lobby, AIPAC indeed remains a major actor in American politics, on the same footing as the other ethnic pressure groups. To criticize its influence as an anomaly running counter to “the national interest” testifies to a refusal to reckon with the complexity of the way national interests are elaborated in a pluralist democracy such as that of the United States.
In this context, Jews are more divided than ever over Israeli policy. Beyond the peace process, another question confronts community leaders: the perception of Israel as a democracy. Indeed, the sense of an Orthodox monopoly over certain legislation disquiets them. The question of religious pluralism and of its place in Israeli society is crucial to the strengthening or, on the contrary, the weakening of the bonds with American Jews. These concerns must be situated in the context both of assimilation and of Jewish renewal in American society.
By erupting into the American public space, the Walt-Mearsheimer affair showed that the radical critiques of Israel and the anti-Zionist campaigns that had been expressed a few years earlier on university campuses, during a wave of calls for “divestment” coming from the American left (economic disinvestment from the Hebrew state), were now reaching the public sphere as well. To cite only one example, Noam Chomsky, a linguist and intellectual internationally known for his critique of American policy, called in May 2002 on American universities — and in particular the renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) — to sell off the shares of companies doing business with Israel.
The anti-Zionist campaigns continue today at prestigious universities, and their violence disquiets the organized Jewish community. This is a community whose number of affiliates has fallen sharply since the postwar period, but whose religious denominations persist.
Fragmentation of the Jewish Community and Religious Denominations
Over the course of the last two centuries, religious life was organized around the principal denominations. By contrast, the twenty-first century has opened a debate over their pertinence today. A “post-denominational” ethos nonetheless came into being as early as the 1970s with the publication of the volumes of the Jewish Catalog. These volumes constitute a kind of guide or “ready-to-use” manual of the American Jewish way of life as it was practiced in the 1970s and enriched by the counterculture movement and the Havurah movements, which made possible the flowering of independent prayer groups. For the authors of these volumes, the religious movements had lost their reason for being.
Yet in the twenty-first century, communal exhortations urge people to conduct themselves Jewishly (“Do Jewish”) while avoiding quarrels among the denominations. Thus the denominations have not fallen into disuse. Some 73 percent of the community is distributed among the Orthodox (modern and stricter), the Conservatives, the Reform, and the Reconstructionists. The quarrels among the various tendencies are nonetheless not trivial: they bear on the definition of the Jew, on the question of intermarriage, on conversion, and on the way of reading and interpreting the Torah. It is the various denominations that create the institutions and the youth camps necessary to the transmission of Jewish identity. For what is at stake is indeed communal engagement, with all the passion it requires.
In the general picture of greater assimilation and of a certain homogenization of the non-Orthodox groups, the resurgence of Orthodoxy can be read as a countercurrent. Demographically, the curve is clearly ascending within an active community. According to the predictions of the sociologist Steven M. Cohen, if Orthodox Jews continue their demographic growth, they will constitute about a quarter of the American Jewish population in some forty years, and if they continue to be very active communally, it is highly probable that they will represent half of the community activists in the next generation. Insofar as, for the rest of the American Jewish community, the question is whether they will have Jewish grandchildren, it appears that Jewish continuity will be embodied and ensured by Orthodoxy. Some community leaders are categorical: it is through Orthodoxy that Jewish learning ought to be safeguarded, and that the strengthening of bonds with, and identification with, Israel ought to be ensured16. A return toward Orthodoxy, however, often goes hand in hand with a preference for the political right and may lead to positions far from moderation. The efforts to reduce the number of conversions are a notorious case in point. Finally, there remains unresolved the question of Israel’s monopoly in matters of rabbinic decision (the Chief Rabbinate) regarding the definition of the Jew and the convert, and regarding the rights of non-Orthodox rabbis to officiate at the major events that punctuate Jewish life. The great majority of American Jews show themselves outraged by the attempts made by the Orthodox to delegitimize the liberals.
Conclusions
The twenty-first century has seen the emergence of new attitudes and priorities within the Jewish community. Intermarriage, antisemitism (essentially confined to university campuses, but more insidious elsewhere), and the campaigns undertaken to undermine Israel’s legitimacy still motivate the older leaders (in particular the baby boomers born after 1945), but are of less interest to the young. This remark applies in particular to those engaged in innovative activities outside the traditional American Jewish institutions. Indeed, the new questions that disquiet community leaders today must be read in the context of a substantial assimilation but also of a Jewish renewal.
In the face of the many uncertainties with which American Jews are confronted, there exist, within that laboratory of experiments that is the United States, extraordinary forces of renewal — cultural, sociological, political, and religious — which we have only touched upon in this limited space. As an eminent American sociologist remarks, the new generation pushes the notion of the “sovereign self” still further than the previous generation, feeling itself liberated from the social constraints its fathers respected17.
Indeed, new cultural expressions have appeared. In New York, independent “minyanim” have sprung up, drawing as many as two hundred people on Shabbat (Saturday) morning, a phenomenon begun as early as the start of the 2000s. Internet-based Jewish culture, as well as YouTube, allows tens of thousands of music clips and humorous or educational films to spark interest, even to shore up a flagging identity. In American song, young people such as Matisyahu (a singer with an Orthodox look) felicitously inaugurate the marriage of rap with certain aspects of Americanized Jewish culture. New magazines have flowered from the pens of young journalists, such as the recent Tablet Magazine, which prides itself on presenting “a new read on Jewish life,” not to mention the irreverent Heeb, aimed above all at the young… So many modalities of Jewish being, endlessly declined and reinvented with greater or lesser success, often with the support of philanthropists eager to safeguard the Judaism of the New World at any cost. The renewed interest in the spirituality of Judaism goes hand in hand with a resurgence of spirituality in the United States, as witnessed by the appeal of Jewish spirituality among Hollywood stars and by the success of the website Aish.com, which combines the study of biblical texts, spirituality, and mutual aid. Who said that a “mensch” no longer exists?
Notes
Alan Dershowitz, The Vanishing American Jew: In Search of Identity for the Next Century, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1997.↩︎
Nathan Glazer, “Sous la bannière étoilée” (Under the Star-Spangled Banner), Les Nouveaux Cahiers, Autumn 1988, p. 14. We understand the term “community” in a broad sense and not merely an organizational one.↩︎
On the support given by the United States to the memory of the Shoah and on its political stakes, we take the liberty of referring the reader to Françoise S. Ouzan, Histoire des Américains juifs, de la marge à l’influence (A History of American Jews: From the Margins to Influence), André Versaille éditeur, 2008, pp. 144–160.↩︎
On this cultural and identity convergence, see Histoire des Américains juifs, op. cit., pp. 160–169.↩︎
Peter Novick, L’Holocauste dans la vie américaine (The Holocaust in American Life), Gallimard, 2001.↩︎
Their pressure group has been modeled on AIPAC. (See Histoire des Américains juifs, op. cit., pp. 171–179.)↩︎
J. J. Goldberg, Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment, Reading, Addison-Wesley, 1996.↩︎
One thinks here of other spiritual influences, such as those that marked the BuJews — the Jews of Buddha.↩︎
J. J. Goldberg, Jewish Power, op. cit., pp. 279–280; Morley Safer, CBS News, pp. 280–281. This passage draws on the work Histoire des Américains juifs, pp. 179–181.↩︎
J. J. Goldberg, Jewish Power, op. cit., p. 282.↩︎
Steven Cohen, JCPA.↩︎
Bayme; Viewpoints conference.↩︎
During Operation “Cast Lead,” J Street did not manage to erode the nearly unanimous support of both Houses for Israel’s response to the missiles launched at the country.↩︎
At the first national conference of J Street in Washington (October 25–28, 2009), which was meant to answer the one organized (on a grand scale) in the spring by AIPAC, there were about 1,500 people.↩︎
Mearsheimer, John, and Walt, Stephen (2007). The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.↩︎
Bayme and HAJ.↩︎
Steven Cohen; Arnold, The Jew Within, and interview with Steven Cohen and Chaim Waxman.↩︎