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From Directional
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The Jewish Imprint
My contribution centered on the
"Varieties of Secular Experience."
Cantor and Waltzer addressed a unify-
ing theme — the theme — of Jewish
life in Detroit: the question of Jewish
identity.
It dovetailed with my own thoughts
on Jewish secularism. Many Jews in
Detroit drew their identities as Jews
through memberships in various orga-
nizations that helped to direct their
lives. These include the . Workmen's
Circle/Arbeter Ring, the Birmingham
Temple, the Sholem Aleichem
Institute, the Freiheit Gesang Farein
(the Peoples' Chorus), more than 40
landsmanshaftn, the Poale Zion (Labor
Zionists) and the Jewish Parents
Institute.
In a world that seemed to press for
the abandonment of Jewish culture,
these organizations and others like
them reasserted what they considered
their essential Jewish identity through
cultural, educational and often politi-
cal activities.
Since the Great Migration (of Jews
from Eastern Europe to the U.S.)
around 1880-1920, Detroit Jews have
grappled with the problems of assimi-
lation and Americanization — the loss
of tradition, Jewish education and reli-
gious ritual commitment. What, in
fact, did it mean to be a Jew in
America?
In the face of American pressures
and seduction, Jewish religious institu-
tions, from Orthodox to Reform,
feared the loss of young Jews to
American culture through assimilation
and intermarriage and the loss of
Jewish identity and religious commit-
ment.
I think it has never been the goal of
a Jew to make the world more reli-
giously Jewish, only more human.
Secular Jews clung to principles of eth-
ical and humane behavior that they
identified as Jewish. Those who wrote
and spoke out argued that this concern
for mentshlicbkeit signified the funda-
mental reason for Jewish existence.
Jews in America have had to cope
with the dilemma brought by the drive
for total acceptance and success in
American life, balanced against the
desire for connectedness to the past
and its consequential group identity;
for an inviolable separateness while
melting into the American landscape.
Confronting this growing problem,
about 10 years ago, Arthur Hertzberg,
rabbi and historian of American Jewry,
wrote that without a "spiritual revival,
American Jewish history will soon
end." Hertzberg referred to what he
deemed a crisis of epic proportions in
America, the danger of the loss of
Jewish identity — defined any way
you wish — in this and the next gen-
eration.
A Secular Perspective
More than one or my Holocaust sur-
vivor friends, whom I have been inter-
viewing since 1981, has told me about
the "modern" Jews in prewar Europe.
By this they meant non-Orthodox,-
apostate secularists. Each of them has
added some qualification, however:
"Of course, a modern Jew in Volove
would be like an Orthodox rabbi in
Detroit."
Defining "secular Jew," then, might
be as difficult as defining any Jew, and
depend on the definer's perspective
and the circumstances. Among the
countless paradoxes of Jewish identity,
there are some secular Jews who
believe in God.
And in A.B. Yehoshua's novel, Five
Seasons, the protagonist tells an
Orthodox follower of a rebbe that "I
am not a believer at all," and the
Orthodox Jew admonishes that it is
"enough to say that you don't believe. I
don't either." Thus, if there are secular-
ists who believe in a deity, there are
religious Jews who do not.
Theological questions — like how
one can be a secular God believer or
a religious nonbeliever — I, as a mere
historian, leave to rabbis or novelists.
Given such diversity, perhaps we will
soon be able to say that even a reli-
gious rabbi, in our time, rests her
Jewish identity on human, secular,
ethical relationships CI
4 Your Health
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