TJS S3E9 1945-55 part I Did the Jews turn white?

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Our greatest human adventure, says Tom Robbins, is the evolution of consciousness. We are in this life to enlarge the soul, liberate the spirit, and light up the brain. And I have to say that that sounds like a worthy task to me. Because I'm Rav Mike Foyer, and this is The Jewish Story. Episode 9, 1945-55, Part 1, The Decade When American Jews Became White. So I've been fairly focused on Israel since the Jewish story came into being this season. And truth be told, it's not really going to change. I mean, after all, we've been dealing with events of biblical proportion. Think about it, the conquest of the land, the engathering of the exiles, rebirth of Jewish government. But I can see in my research that we're going to be in the 50s for quite some time.

And furthermore, that this is a formative decade for Jews on both sides of the Atlantic. So I want to devote two, maybe three episodes right now to filling in the other side of the story. Because many historians and sociologists, whether you know it or not, see the years of 1945-55 as the golden decade of American Jewry. And as I hope to show, this is not entirely unwarranted. The move to the suburbs, economic mobility, the incredible leap of Jewishness into the mainstream of American culture really make this a unique decade in the history of the Jews in North America. Now, granted, I'm also aiming to complicate that rosy picture, because as you'll find, there are some major flies in this ointment.

The golden decade, for instance, was also the decade of the Cold War, McCarthyism, the communist scare. And that's something that will present a very real and somewhat anti-Semitic challenge to American Jewry. There's also the reality of the Jewish state. I mean, they're both sides of the Atlantic in this story, and the Jews in America, of course, don't live there. Despite that fact, its existence is going to pose challenges and perhaps even dangers to their identity, not to mention, of course, strengths and benefits. And of course, in the 1950s, the shadow of the Holocaust hung over everything. As one Jewish American essayist put it, before 1967, many Jews in America experienced the Holocaust not as something they spoke about, but rather like a family secret, hovering, controlling, barely mentioned, except in code or casual reference.

And what I actually find most interesting when I look at the big picture here is that certain key struggles which took place in the 50s in American Jewry are actually making a comeback today. A comeback where they might never have gone away but just got pushed underground by that need for consensus post the birth of the State of Israel and the Holocaust and in the flush of prosperity that the 50s offers. We'll tackle issues of Israel and dual loyalty for sure next episode or maybe two down the line when we update American Zionism in the post-independence era. And I'm still debating right now, we'll see where we get, whether Jewish communism deserves its own treatment. But I do want to talk today about the cultural evolution of American Jewry and how it was bound up with a move toward whiteness.

And I feel like if I can make it into this episode, I'd also like to touch on how the Jews of America began to assimilate the Holocaust into their collective memory. And if you've even glanced at social media recently, between the tweets about who owns the word concentration camp and the raging fight over whether Jews are white, you know that these issues are more alive today than ever. So, where better to start on our journey toward understanding American Jewry in the golden decade than with the impending tricentennial celebration of American Jewry? In December 1951, Ralph E. Samuel, Vice President of the American Jewish Community, itself the elder statesman of Jewish community organizations, announced the formation of a committee to plan the 300th anniversary of the establishment of the first permanent Jewish community in North America.

Did you get all that? And he declared that the celebration would not be a purely Jewish event, but rather, quote, pay homage to the American heritage of religious and civil liberty. Samuel emphasized, in fact, that American Jews had built a flourishing American Judaism, and at the same time had taken part in, quote, building the American democratic civilization that we have today. And in fact, the theme that the committee eventually proposed reflected exactly this perspective. It was man's opportunities and responsibilities under freedom. And as the committee stressed, it was meant to express the hopes and aspirations and objectives of the future for ourselves, and for all Americans, indeed for all human beings throughout the world.

Unless you think this is a petty affair, this is no small celebration. The opening event, the National Tercentenary Dinner, was held at the Hotel Acer in New York City, and President Dwight D. Eisenhower was guest of honor and keynote speaker. It took place on October 20, 1954. It is preceded and followed by forums, exhibitions, pageants, musical festivals, everything you could imagine from public dinners to children's parties, all organized by local committees in at least 400 cities and towns across the country. There was even a coast-to-coast radio broadcast of the reconsecration of Congregation Sherit Yisrael, also known as the Portuguese or Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue. That's the oldest Jewish congregation in the U.S., and it's what gave them the right to say that 1954 was in fact 300 years.

The Jews had arrived. That's my point. By 1954, they were part of mainstream American culture. And the tercentenary celebrations, and in particular, the intellectual products that emerged around it, were the culmination of a much longer process of recovering a usable past. Of having a story about American Jewry that could demonstrate Jews had always been an integral part of American history and that this wasn't a new thing. It's why only seven years before, in the fall of 1947, the Hebrew Union College actually announced the establishment of an American Jewish archive. They explained the need for such an institution in the following words, American Jewry has become the center of world Jewish spiritual life.

The Jewish historian of the next generation, he'll begin a new chapter in the history of his people, a chapter which must be called the American Jewish Center. So all you Zionists out there, put that in your sandwich and mack it down. I've heard plenty of people say that American Jewry will be nothing more than a footnote in Jewish history. That may or may not be true, but it's certainly not how it saw itself in 1947. Because the Jewish community, in the eyes of the Hebrew New England College, had become, what they said, the pivotal and controlling factor in that historic development which began in 13th pre-Christian century Palestine. And when the eminent Jewish sociologist Nathan Glazer wrote his work, American Judaism, only a decade later in 57, he aimed in his own words to do so from an almost non-Jewish perspective.

Glazer emphasized Judaism as a manifestation of American values. And he aimed to integrate Jewish history into what he called a broad theory of American social structure. And especially to demonstrate that Jews were not that unique. Not unique, but quintessentially American. This is the age of the idea that the Jews are just like everybody else, only more so. Now, there were a few discordant voices in this joyous chorus of Jewish Americanism, and I'm not just talking about the Orthodox, who clearly saw themselves as different from the average American. You remember Horace Callen, philosopher and ideologue of cultural pluralism? You go back to episode one of this season, actually, if you want his story, and you revisit his vision of American freedom as the right of any ethnic, religious, or racial group to preserve and diversify its communal culture.

In his eyes, only when each ethnicity did that, could the harmonious symphony, as he called it, of the civic nation-state emerge. We need the Jews to be the Jews and not some par version of Americans. And that's why, in the lead-up to the Tercentenary, he published a blistering article called The Tercentenary, Yom Tov or Yurtzeit. It is a celebration or a day of mourning. so nothing in the rhetoric of this celebration encouraged American Jews to celebrate themselves as Jews was his primary argument on the contrary he saw this as a celebration of assimilation even the emblem of the whole event was assimilationist not a word of Hebrew on it and though there was a menorah that dominated the face of the logo the star above it was a five pointed American star and not the six sighted Magin David, Star of David Was this the great hope offered by the golden decade?

Was 1954 U.S. Jewry celebrating a 300-year struggle to finally disappear into the melting pot of American culture? You know, when I was in high school, my JV football team was a powerhouse. We were 9-1, and I want to tell you that 1 really hurt. And the backbone of the team was our defense. We called ourselves the Roaches. Now, I should also mention that my high school was seen by some as a model of integration because of the approximately 2,000 students, we had more or less parity in numbers between black and white. But despite those numbers, most of us led lives that were more or less self-segregated, but not on the football team. I happened to be starting inside linebacker on that great defense, and we called ourselves the Roaches because we were, of course, big, black, and everywhere, except for me.

So one day, you got to picture it. We're getting all hyped up in the locker room before the game. Roaches, roaches, yes, laughing at each other on the pads and getting the sort of testosterone flowing. And I thought I'd be a little bit funny. So in the middle of all the ruckus, I stood up and said, all right, guys, I'm sick of this racist crap. You could have heard a pin drop. People turn around like, what? White boy talking about racism? What's going on here? And I said, that's it, guys. I'm white. This whole roaches thing, big, black, and everywhere, you guys had to accept it. I'm not black. I white And then my friend Rich Summers looks at me and he says something quite astounding He says Mike you not white You Jewish Now in the moment I was just confused And truth is, over time, I began to feel a little bit proud of that label.

But in my eyes, the time has come to try and understand whether Rich was right or wrong. Are the Jews white or not? Now, the subject most discussed amongst observers of the Jewish American culture in the late 40s and early 50s was the mass exodus from city to suburb. You know, just as one segment of Am Yisrael was fleeing the melels in the Jewish quarters of the Arab world for a better life in the land of milk and honey, another whole segment was fleeing the urban ghettos of the American cities for the promised land of private lawns and single-family houses. And it was all part of a larger American, in fact, global trend of urbanization. For instance, in the 1880s in America, 29.5% of the populace lived in cities and towns.

But by 1960, it was 69.9%. That's a huge shift. And in 1957, 87.5% of all Jews lived in urban and suburban centers. Now, that flight to the burbs was also reflective of an overall economic shift because the United States emerged over War II with the strongest economy in the world. Real wages rose steadily between 1946 and 1960, lifting buying power by a massive 22%. Now that sudden reality that most Americans now had some level of discretionary income is what launched the consumer culture that you know. But the move towards suburbia and into the white American mainstream was more than simple economics. In 1944, Congress passed the Servicemen's Readjustment Act, also known as the GI Bill of Rights. And it was arguably the most massive affirmative action in all U.S.

history. The goal was to develop the needed labor force skills that the country wanted in the post-war boom. And furthermore, to provide those who had them with a lifestyle that reflected their value to the economy. It made perfect sense. And nearly 16 million people eventually received benefits from the GI Bill. It went all the way up through the Korean War. These benefits included preferential hiring, you know, you get jobs first, financial support during the job search, loans for starting small business, and most important, low-interest home loans and educational benefits, tuition, living expenses, and the like. Now, nearly half a million American Jews fought in World War II. And when they returned, these veterans were the ones who really drove the cultural transformation and helped create a suburban Jewry.

They led the way out of the urban ethnic enclaves where they'd been raised, and they moved to the parts of the country that they got a glimpse of during the war. And furthermore, they were often the first to buy houses because they came from a world in which their parents preferred to rent. And of course, many took advantage of their benefits to go to college or professional school, which also helped them break into the middle and upper middle classes. The GI Bill in general across America caused the greatest wave of college building that the country had ever seen. And the Jews, of course, were quick to take advantage. By the mid-50s, fully 62% of college-age Jews, men and women, were enrolled. That's in comparison to 27% of the general American population.

And of course, the most striking result of that educational tidal wave was a sharp decline in Jewish small business and a skyrocketing of the Jewish professional. Enter the stereotype of Jewish doctor and lawyer to replace that of Jewish peddler and garment factory laborer. Just as an example, in Boston, just over 1% of all Jewish men before the war were doctors, compared to 16% in the post-war generation. But all this is about economics, not race. You could say the Jews became wealthy, but why would I say that they became white? Now that question goes to the heart of the construction of race in America. And I'm not equipped to get to the depth of it now. I admit that freely. But I do recommend reading a pretty amazing book called How the Jews Became White Folks and what that says about race in America.

You can find the details on my Patreon feed. By the way, if you want, for just $1, you'll get access to all the bibliographies and the notes I make on these shows. Now, the book is not a perfect analysis. There are many challenges that can be made to it. nevertheless, there's one point which the author makes there that I want to bring here. And it's about the shift from race to ethnicity and the role of economics in that shift. Because that shift between race and ethnicity underlies much of today's argument about whether the Jews are white or not. So here we go. In the wake of World War II and the awful consequences that racial theory had brought to the world when combined with fascism, the biological approach to explaining differences largely fell out of favor with any rational person.

Nevertheless, difference persisted, and so a new language was needed, and this is where the language of ethnicity began to replace that of race. Differences began to be perceived as cultural rather than biological. Now, on one hand, this was a move in a progressive direction. Culture isn't immutable like race, and therefore the social inequalities between races are now ethnicities, don't have to be seen as an unchanging biological reality mandated by God, nature, or both. Suddenly, the door seemed to open for growth, change, and of course, assimilation into the mainstream. And don't forget, mainstream America in the pre- and post-war was white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. So it's true that that door was open for growth, change, and assimilation into the mainstream, But at the same time, in the minds of many post-war thinkers, not all ethnicities were created alike.

Now, by the way, Jewish intellectuals like Nathan Glazer that I mentioned before, in his work Beyond the Melting Pot, were a driving force in this shift in not only thought, but public policy. And many of them went into politics. They also helped shape the very construct of ethnicity in a way which maintained the distinctions between successful ethnic groups, like the Jews, and those who suffered what they called a culture of poverty, or a poverty of culture, depending on how you look at it. Now, the foundational difference in America was, and frankly still is, between black and white. Since the late 19th century, certain groups of Europeans had been largely excluded from white Protestant America.

the Irish, anyone who wasn't of Northwestern European origin, and of course, the Jews. And that exclusion kept them largely in the lower economic strata, where they were quite useful in driving the industrial growth of the young country. For the purpose of the picture, of the Jewish story at least, I want you to imagine the garment workers of the Lower East Side, classically stereotyped as dirty, criminal slum dwellers. Add to this a quick glance at the U.S. census categories, and you'll see that such people weren't just ethnic, as we call them now. They were actually categorized as non-white, although they weren't quite seen as black. You could call them off-white. Now, that was all pre-World War II.

In the post-war boom, there was a need for a huge influx of skilled and educated workers, like I said, And that need lifted a lot of economic barriers to the Jews and other so-called off-white Europeans, but not for black Americans. And nothing makes that more clear than the way the GI Bill played out. Two and a half million African Americans registered for the draft, and more than a million eventually served. But as the explosion of the civil rights movement in the 50s and 60s showed, the federal government was downright complicit in shutting the post-war window of opportunity that this presented to African Americans. In particular, the very federal programs that were designated to assist demobilized veterans and the families that they began to build systematically discriminated against African American veterans.

The educational benefits of the GI Bill, support of the Veterans Association, in particular the loans of the Federal Housing Administration, were all forms of affirmative action that allowed Jews and other Europeans to join the rising tide of that post-war boom. But if you know a bit of American history, what the African-American veterans got was segregation, redlining, urban renewal, just discrimination. In essence, the very programs which helped to erase the distinctions between white and off-white America, the Europeans who had not been accepted pre-war, helped reinforce those distinctions between black and white. Now, in terms of the Jews making it into the white mainstream, we have to add to that economic element the guilt amongst mainstream white America, conscious or not, over where anti-Semitism had led to.

And therefore, it got, I wouldn't say erased, as we see now, but firmly placed underground and outside the realm of acceptable behavior. And now we can begin to see how the door was open, not only for economic, but for social elevation, for becoming white. All the Jews had to do now was prove that their culture had been fit to the American dream all along. The tricentennial was all about that. But it was suburban life which provided the perfect proving ground. In the suburbs surrounding the cities of the Northeast and the Midwest, Jews would work very hard to show that it was their hard work that had brought them into the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant mainstream. And the idea that we pulled ourselves up from our own bootstraps, that it was Jewish values and Jewish culture, essentially our ethnic roots, that allowed us to succeed became central to Jewish self-identity.

It was the Jewish answer to the Protestant work ethic, which I happen to believe is largely true. But you should know in the sociologies of the 50s, it also became a source of explicit condemnation of other ethnicities, in particular African Americans who it was claimed lacked the same cultural capital and power of ethnic fabric to do the same Now like I said there a lot of truth in the bootstrap story My survival great uncles who arrived penniless and broken in America moved heaven and earth in order to recreate themselves as wealthy builders and send their children to college. But you can't ignore the fact that it took federal programs of a massive scale to create conditions whereby those abilities could be recognized and rewarded rather than disparaged and denied as they'd been pre-war.

So this has been a very thin analysis of the relationship between race, ethnicity, and economics that underlies so much of the discourse around Jewish whiteness today. It's about basically whose side are you on? It's almost more of a class distinction than race, and to try to separate race and class in America is a futile effort, trust me. It deserves a lot more thought, in particular because it's approaching it from a somewhat monochromatic, American-centered model of Jewry. But this is, after all, the American side of the story. Either way, I welcome your thoughts. Send me your thoughts. Are the Jews white or not? I'm not really sure, but I want you to appreciate that it was the struggle to enter into suburbia and into the American Protestant dream lifestyle that gave that touch of cultural whiteness with which the Jews are struggling today.

So for right now, I want to touch the other major transformation within Jewish identity that came together with the flight to suburbia, the rise of a truly religious identity. The core of American Jewry who came of age in the post-war period grew up in a very different world from the one their parents had known. They were suburban middle-class kids. They went to congregational schools after their secular school. They celebrated bar and bat mitzvahs. They enjoyed summers at Jewish camps. And most of them looked forward to going to college upon graduation from high school. Their mantra, whether they knew it or not, was that Jews are just like every other Americans. And not. And the easiest way to give some sort of livable form to that seeming contradiction, just like Americans but not, was to become Americans of the Jewish faith.

Now, the Eastern European immigrants who'd made up the bulk of American Jewry had created an ethnic, even quasi-national identity in the late 19th and early 20th century. Their Yiddish culture contained a rich religious life, but that religious life was embedded in the linguistic, cultural, largely secular, matrix of a vibrant street culture, basically. It was an experience that grew out of the urban enclaves in which they lived. I think of it as Brighton Beach Judaism. And I heard bits about it from the childhood of my own grandparents. You were Jewish because that's what everyone was. Oh, you went to public school where all the teachers were Jewish. You might not keep the holidays, but there was no point in going to school on Rosh Hashanah because no one would be there.

You could speak Yiddish to the barber, and the bus driver knew your father from synagogue. And the physical move to suburbia, along with the rising economic and social status, and the subsequent desire to fit in, meaning leave your Jewishness somewhat behind, uprooted that culture. and what replaced it was actually Judaism. It may sound odd, but for most American Jews, the one-to-one identification between Judaism and Jewishness, the idea that they were in fact a religious community of Americans, began with the decade following World War II. Oh, it's always been there. All you have to do is go back to episode one and see how it was actually the cornerstone of American Reform Judaism. And you can follow after that and see some of the struggles between the Zionists and the anti-Zionists about over whether the Jews are a religion or a nation.

But it was only post-war that the religious model of identity and communal organization began to dominate in America. Now, don't misunderstand me. This is not to say that suddenly American Jews became more religious in the sense of more observant of Jewish law and custom. In the fact, if anything, the opposite was true. There are many sociologists from the 50s and 60s who puzzled over the paradox of how the Jews defined themselves overwhelmingly as a religion, while at the same time they showed an increasing indifference, if not downright apathy, for actual religious practice. So much so that by the late 50s, Nathan Glazer had concluded that Orthodox religious faith was destined for the dustbin of history.

Guess he was wrong about that one. All right, many observers explained this move toward religious identity, like I did. In fact, perhaps I explained it like them, which is it was the only effective way for Jews to hold that tension around wanting to remain Jewish and wanting to be just like other Americans. Because in post-war American society, religious activity was perhaps the only recognized as legitimate cause for self-severgation. One was still allowed to want their neighbors, friends, and of course spouses to be of the same faith. And that actually was a sign of being a good American. These were the years when Jewish and Christian communal leaders began to espouse the rosy notion of a Judeo-Christian culture, a notion which pre-war would have been downright absurd.

And we can't overstate the impact that the military chaplaincy had on the formation of this idea. Just think about it. By the end of World War II, there were nearly 10,000 clergy in uniform fighting in the American army, and they were fighting together while ministering to their own separate flocks. And in particular, the rabbis who served as chaplains quickly discovered a new respected status as officers. And they saw that the U.S. military's commitment to equal representation of Judaism, together with the Protestant and Catholic clergy, actually changed people's perception of what Judaism was. During the war, and in the anti-communist era that followed, the idea of a tri-faith America emerged, where Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish religions became the religions of democracy, religions that formed the underpinning of the American way of life.

And thus, it makes perfect sense that if you want to hold on to your particularity while still adjoining that American way of life, better to be Jewish than a Jew. So, if Jews began to identify more as a religion, but actually were practicing what I think of as being religious even less, what did a religious identity actually consist of? Well, in his 1960 book, The Jew Within American Society, author and sociologist C. Batalow Sherman noted, a generation ago, the majority of American Jews were founded outside the synagogue. Today, the situation is reverse. Suddenly, to be a Jew meant to belong, first and foremost, to a synagogue or temple. Now, sociologists saw this not just as a Jewish phenomenon, but actually as another reflection of Jews adopting what they labeled as a Protestant model of communal organization.

Now, whether or not one agrees with that element, one thing is clear. From 1945 through the mid-50s, American Jewry witnessed the construction of some 600 new synagogues and temples across America. And together with that construction came an integration into the nationwide movements. the United Synagogue of America, which represents conservative Judaism, increases affiliates from 350 to 800 by the mid-60s. In the mid-50s alone, 131 new congregations joined. Reform Judaism's Union of American Hebrew Congregations reached 664 members by the mid-50s. That's up from 334 just in 1948. And it wasn't just numbers. In this decade, the synagogue took on a new role in maintaining identity and continuity. If, in the old model, the synagogue was the place you went to pray and learn Torah, now those classically ritual functions began to contract, and at the same time an educational and recreational role expanded.

Jews began to come to shul, of course to learn, but primarily to be Jewish together, not just to do the specifically Jewish religious thing. And these weren't your grandfather's synagogues, by the way, imposing in size, often with bold architectural design. They were meant to mark the accepted presence of a Jewish community in the urban landscape. Mind you, I grew up in one of these mega shuls. We used to call it the Purple Palace. And trust me when I tell you that you can't miss the fact that the Jews are in town. Now, incidentally, this post-war expansion transformed the conservative movement into the largest of the Jewish movements within the United States. There's a lot of pieces that went into that, but, you know, there's a very interesting event that happened in 1950.

In 1950, the movement's Committee on Jewish Law and Standards, that's the rabbinic body, which to this day sees itself as the inheritor of the ongoing process of applying Jewish law to the world in which we live, wrote a responsa, a tshuva, allowing conservative Jews to drive on Shabbat in order to get to the synagogue. Now, if you don't know anything about Jewish law, anyone who labels themselves as an Orthodox Jew will tell you you can't drive on Shabbat. People who label themselves as Reform Jews will tell you they can do whatever they want on Shabbat. It was the uniqueness of the conservative movement to say that we abide by laws and standards, hence the name of the committee, that we are now deciding something which had previously been recognized universally as forbidden, is permitted only for the sake of getting to the synagogue.

You can't drive to work, you can't drive to the JCC, Jewish Community Center, but you can drive to shul. Now, I'm not here to debate halakha, debate Jewish law, but you need to note the link between this decision, which in the eyes of many people marks a turning point in the movement's relationship to tradition, be that going downhill, or going full forward into modernity. You have to see the link between that decision and the rapid move of the Jews and their synagogues into the suburbs I remember when I was growing up we actually took a 10 walk from the old shul which was in the old Jewish sort of ring urban neighborhood We walked them all the way out into the suburbs and brought all of our Sifrei Torah, all the Torah schools, into this new building.

And by the time I was a teenager, no one I knew lived within walking distance to the shul. You were either going to drive or not go. Now, the rise of conservative Judaism into its leadership role had a major impact on the relationship between American Jewry and Israel. That's because the movement really emphasized Jewish peoplehood and the ethnic dimensions of Judaism, along with the fact that it used elements of modern Israeli culture in its religious schools, its camp, and its youth movement, and the results were quite profound for American Zionism, including, of course, yours truly. And we're going to have to speak about this in a coming episode. But that's for now. This is also, in addition to the rise of the conservative movement, the era in which many rabbis, especially in the reform movement, began to teach that being Jewish in America meant seeking social justice.

In their time, it was fighting for open housing and fair employment, social welfare, pro-union legislation, the New Deal, the Fair Deal, what have you. Today, we know it as tikkun olam, religion defined as the pursuit of progressive politics. So that's another piece. And of course, the Orthodox world found it quite easy to fit into a religious identity. If anything, what changed for Orthodoxy in this era was a double-down emphasis on education. And that's at every level, elementary, secondary, but especially advanced. It was a very important event when in 1943, Rav Aron Cutler established the Beit Midrash Gevoah in Lakewood, New Jersey. Now, it was the height of World War II, and Rav Aron himself was a refugee from the Nazis.

and this first suburban yeshiva actually laid the seeds for a revolution in American Orthodoxy. I said revolution, but properly speaking, we might want to call it a counter-revolution because well before the establishment of Lakewood, if I'm not mistaken, before the turn of the 20th century, the leading institution of American Orthodoxy was the Yeshiva University in New York City, and its leading personality was Rav Yosef Ber Soloveitchik. Now, Roussel Veitchik and the evolution of what we today call modern orthodoxy are a story unto themselves. But for the present purposes, just know that the Rav, as he's known in the modern orthodox world, was a driving intellectual and religious figure for that part of the orthodox world which saw no conflict between a commitment to Torah and full participation in modern society.

Now, I don't think it's entirely unfair to call that suburban orthodoxy. If you don't believe me, just go to Teaneck and then tell me I'm wrong. Now, Rav Aron Cutler, the Rosh Hashiva, as opposed to the Rav, rejected the idea of integrating Judaism and modern American culture. In his eyes, what was needed most in post-war Jewish America was a core group of Jews which would devote itself 100% to learning Torah. Because he felt that the only way authentic Judaism could ever develop in America was if there was a population which isolated itself physically and concentrated exclusively on deep Torah learning. And that, of course, is a religious model. Now, there's more on this and what's called the Kolel culture that emerged from it to come down at another time.

So, a little bit of an overview. By and large, this religious model united the Jews of America, though each had their way of being religious. Now, that's not to say the Jews weren't fighting each other. We'll come to that right at the end. But there was another element in this organizational outlook, and that's exactly it. Organizations. You know, some observers, when they looked at American Jewish life in the 50s, or basically once it left the urban and went to the suburban environment, saw it in a pretty harsh light, much harsher than I've yet mentioned. Wealthy, powerful, but spoiled, crude, and Jewishly ignorant. Basically, they claimed that the move to suburban life had killed the organic communal culture of Yiddishkeit and left a cultural void filled with organizational activities.

Jews didn't know who they were, and so therefore they substituted self-knowledge with doing. And what emerged out of this, rooted in the synagogue religious communities, was what was called campaign Judaism. The first part of it was quite old. It was a long-standing principle of that all Jews are guarantors. Everybody's responsible for each other. And for the immigrant generations, that meant to be Jewish was to support one another. There's no end, literally could not count the communal, fraternal, mutual aid societies in the 19th and early 20th centuries. As those communities grew in scale, the challenge of competing organizations made unification a desirable goal for many. If you wanted to take a deep dive into the nitty gritty of American Jewish history, which I've only tried a bit, the best approach is actually through the history of its organizations and especially tracing the emergence of what's known as the United Federations, these umbrella organizations that brought together what had been other fragmentary charities, mutual aid societies, support systems, etc.

in the states and even in big cities. So you add to that sort of communal fabric the desire to combat the Nazi threat and the urgent crisis of the newborn state of Israel right after the post-war years, and poof, you get campaign Judaism. Because now, even if you live in the suburbs, and your newfound wealth and status make this notion of mutual aid irrelevant, and furthermore, you're a little bit wary of overly identifying on that level with the Jews, you can still root an identity in your power to give. And in the post-war era, local communities channeled vast sums of money through those generations. First aid to the Jewish DPs in Europe, and eventually into Israel, and it peaked between 46 and 1948.

And then we can trace the numbers that when the immediacy of the overseas crisis kind of tapered off in the early 50s, it shifted towards synagogue building, and of course, domestic educational concerns. And that's another critical piece of this Jewish religious identity, but I can see just looking at the clock right now that we're going to have to cut it off. There's way more to come. But I want to end with a little bit of a story. It's a little story because I said that this was the model of identity that united American Jewry. But I don't want you to get the idea that the Jews had stopped fighting each other. Not only were interdenominational struggles common at this point, the founder of the first indigenous American Jewish movement was also the subject of the first formal excommunication in the United States.

That would be Mordecai Kaplan. He published his magnum opus, Judaism as a Civilization, Toward a Reconstruction of American Jewish Life, in 1934. It's, by the way, highly worthwhile to look at his thought. And his thought and leadership actually gave rise to what today is known as the Reconstructionist Movement within Judaism. He viewed the Jewish people as a progressively evolving civilization. And that was a pretty radical perspective for his day. But apparently not radical enough to evoke the official wrath of the religious establishment. He bounced between the organs of orthodoxy and the conservative movement for quite a bit of time. But eventually, it was his publication of a new version of the Shabbat Sidur that tipped the power of orthodoxy against him.

Because there in the introduction, Kaplan argues that as one of the three fighting faiths of democracy, as we saw emerged out of the World War II experience, Judaism needed to adapt. Modern-minded Jews, he wrote, can no longer believe, as did their fathers, that the Jews constitute a divinely chosen nation. And here was the breaking point. This was a big piece in Kaplan's thought. You can find it in many places. But it boils down to this. Anyone unwilling to hold that tension between being both like and unlike Americans was out. and to clothe such a thought in the guise of an Orthodox prayer book was seen to be downright subversive. And so on June 12, 1945, a group of rabbis from the Gudathar Habanim, the Union of Orthodox Rabbis of the U.S.

and Canada, assembled a Beit Dein, a Jewish religious court, in the Macalpan Hotel in Manhattan. The war in the Pacific was still ongoing. The Jews hadn't yet used the springboard of the GI Bill to leap into suburbia. And of course, the full horror of the Holocaust remained hidden. But Kaplan had crossed a line. And it was a line that these rabbis feared would lead to a slide into complete assimilation. You can believe what you will, but they declared him a heretic, excommunicated him, and burned his prayer book. Now I know that's a hard place to end, but we're actually far from finished. I can tell that there's two more episodes to come. Because the Dolgen Decade raises some very hard questions. and I want you to keep them in mind as we move forward.

But for right now, I want to thank a few people. I want to thank all the folks that give their hard-earned money to help make this show happen, to keep it free and make it widely available, and I want to invite you to join them right now. The first way you can do that is to go to my website, jewishstory.co, and you can hit in the upper right-hand corner there the button that says Be a Patron, and you can click on through to give a little bit of per-podcast support. Go on and just do it right now. If that's not what you're after, you can also be in touch with me, rovmikefoyer at gmail.com or you can send me a personal message on my Facebook page rovmikefoyer Facebook and you can dedicate a show you want to dedicate to the memory of a loved one or you want to dedicate to a joyous occasion of someone who's with you today I'm happy to do it send me a message I'll give you the details but I also want to thank the Land of Israel Network that's thelandofisrael.com for creating a platform that allows me to reach so many amazing people I want to thank the Pardes Institute p-a-r-d-e-s.org for building an educational institution that allows me to touch the hearts and minds of so many amazing Jews.

And I want to thank you for listening. I'm Rav Mike Foyer, and this is The Jewish Story.