Tuxedo World & DAVID'S BRIDAL Presents BRIDALWORLD Free Engagement Sittings From Rawlinson Photography Register to Win A4 Night Stay @ SUPERCLUBS From Directional Strategies 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. 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