Jewish Acculturation in America: A Symposium

In response to Allan Arkush’s summer 2018 cover article on Jews in the American melting pot, an impassioned and unsparing assessment of the future of American Jewry, four leading thinkers weigh in:

  • Jack Wertheimer—whose book, The New American Judaism (Princeton, 2018), was the occasion for Arkush’s essay—furnishes the first reply, arguing that Jewish assimilation is not an inexorable process.
  • David Biale, a distinguished UC Davis professor of Jewish history, revisits his own provocative 1998 essay, at which Arkush took aim.
  • Edieal Pinker, a Yale professor of operations research (and deputy dean in its School of Management) offers a fresh statistical analysis of the 2013 Pew study of the U.S. Jewish community.
  • Erica Brown, an award-winning educator and author of 12 books on Bible, Jewish leadership, and more writes: “On the bottom of the pot live Jewish clichés, nostalgia, kitchy-ness, and an uninformed Jewish pride.”

Finally, Allan Arkush responds to his critics.

About the Authors

Allan Arkush,Jack Wertheimer,David Biale,Edieal Pinker,Erica Brown

Allan Arkush is the senior contributing editor of the Jewish Review of Books and professor of Judaic studies at Binghamton University.

Jack Wertheimer is professor of American Jewish history at the Jewish Theological Seminary and the author, most recently, of The New American Judaism: How Jews Practice Their Religion Today (Princeton University Press).

David Biale is Emanuel Ringelblum Distinguished Professor of Jewish History at the University of California, Davis.

Edieal Pinker is deputy dean and BearingPoint Professor of Operations Research at the Yale School of Management.

Erica Brown is an associate professor at George Washington University’s Graduate School of Education and Human Development and the director of its Mayberg Center for Jewish Education and Leadership. She is the author of 12 books and the forthcoming The Book of Esther: Power, Fate and Fragility in Exile (Maggid/OU Press).

Comments

  1. David Rosenberg

    Dear Erica, You end with the prescription “to fill them with joy.” I would change “joy” to “history”. Curiously in your piece the word doesn’t appear. Many decades ago, we thought secular youth were disinterested in Judaism because spirituality had been diluted. Or else, practice diluted with contemporary relevance, to be found in Buddhist meditation etc. Perhaps more singing would help, perhaps more musical accompaniment. But none of these satisfies the thirst for missing history—a hunger often repressed by fear that the tragic in history will turn the wavering soul off. For this reason, perhaps, it’s also disconcerting that the word Holocaust also does not appear in your piece. Yes, there is hardly much joy associated with it, but there is history, deep history, as even in the Hebrew word Shoah. Perhaps there is value in “filling them with history,” and thereby awakening even a thirst for Hebrew. Of course, I’ve tried to do this in recent books and seem to have failed. You could say the same for David Grossman, whose Booker-winning novel you review so well in an earlier issue. Most of its readers in English translation may identify with its hard theme of loss—but I‘d guess that few of those realize their thirsting for the history behind it, especially the Jewish history.

Suggested Reading

A Good Second Choice

A Good Second Choice

Allan Arkush

Yirimiyahu be-Tzion is a solid work of intellectual history, devoted above all to understanding Judah Magnes as he understood himself, sympathetic but honest, and attentive to the weaknesses as well as the strengths of his thinking.

A Rejoinder

Allan Arkush,

I didn’t know that there was anyone left in the academic world who held as simplistic view of history as the one that Eric Alterman espouses in his response to my review (“Context and Content,” Winter 2023). The historian’s job, he says, “is not to voice disapproval or approval” of anything. Consequently, he endorses “nothing and no one in this…