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The Contours of Our Jewish Community:

Snapshots from the 2018 Population Study

Editor’s Note: Each week, the Jewish News will offer
insights into the findings of the 2018 Detroit Jewish
Population Study with the intent of stimulating discus-
sion about its potential meaning and impact.

Why Aren’t More Jews
Coming Here?

G

rowing job market.
Relatively low cost of living.
Inexpensive opportunities for home
ownership.
Exceptional Jewish community programs, services
and financial assistance.
Attractive region that includes a dynamic center city
(Detroit), one of America’s great university towns (Ann
Arbor), plenty of fresh water and the ability to visit a
foreign country (Canada) and be home for dinner every
evening.
With all we have going for us, why does the Detroit-
area Jewish community continue to have a lagging
record of in-migration (4 percent of our Jewish popu-
lation said they moved here within the past five years,

according to the 2018 Detroit Jewish Population Study)?
That number was 3 percent in the 2005 population
study.
Conversely, the 2018 study shows that 6 percent of
our population will probably or definitely move out of
the Detroit area in the coming three years. Despite the
resurgence of the city of Detroit since the 2005 study,
especially as a place for millennials, the trend of more
people leaving than coming to the Detroit Jewish com-
munity has slowed but appears to be continuing.
In 2008, the small community of Dothan, Ala., adver-
tised in the Jewish News to recruit young families to
enjoy its (very small) Jewish infrastructure and receive
an incentive grant from one of its family foundations.
Nationally, several made the move. ■

QUESTIONS:
• Does increasing in-migration matter? If so, why?
• What more can we do to attract Jews from other
parts of the country?
• For those who do come, what can we do to be
more welcoming — especially when so many of us
(75 percent) have lived here our entire lives?

continued from page 5

ing learning as a journey to the
deeper self, a way to know our place
in the world?
Some of the high school teachers
guiding our children toward college
cannot spell and don’t understand
how to eliminate passive voice or
write vividly to paint a picture with
words. How can they lead our chil-
dren toward success?
As the system leaves our children
ill-equipped to meet their next
challenge, parents end up paying
hundreds or thousands of dollars
to college coaches to help them
game the system so their kid gets
an opportunity that he or she might
not be able to obtain on their own.
I’ve helped several wonderful high
school students on their essays,
but I feel uneasy about it because
I wonder if I am contributing to a
misguided way of life.
Our society moves at such a fast
pace that I’m not sure many of us
have had the time to ponder how
we got here or if this is where we
want to stay. I encourage my chil-
dren to consider taking a gap year
after high school to explore, wander,

10

November 8 • 2018

jn

ponder and develop their interests
so when they finally hit college, they
are ready for it. I don’t know if any
of them will take me up on this, but
I hope so.
One of the fundamental themes
of Judaism is simchah, or joy.
The word appears 12 times in
Deuteronomy because it lies at the
heart of the vision of life for the
Jewish people in the land of Israel:
to serve God with joy.
We have lost the joy of learning,
of pursuit, of adventure. Today, we
are frozen in an endless competition
for more, better, things and achieve-
ments. Life is short. Our material
possessions or framed degrees will
not follow us to the hereafter.
What we must cultivate, more
than a sense of self-reflection, is a
sense of purpose to drive everything
we do. Why apply to college? Why
this college instead of that one?
Why do anything? Without pur-
pose, there is no meaning.
All the problems teens face today
(and adults, too) — anxiety and
depression, eating disorders and
binge drinking, to name a few —

stem from a vacuum of meaning
and connection. We’re busier than
ever, we have the illusion of connec-
tion thanks to 24/7 social media,
but we are lonely; and this aimless
pursuit for the best college simply
compounds that emptiness.
If we could guide our col-
lege-bound teens in one direction
only, I’d suggest that we guide them
toward finding purpose. A big-
brand college is not the only place to
carve out a meaningful path. There
are 3,000 universities and colleges in
this country, so there is a place for
everyone.
If you know what matters to you,
if you’re driven by purpose and
meaning, you might have a better
chance of landing where you belong
than continuing to struggle in a
place where you don’t. Perhaps we
can guide our children toward that
pursuit, which might make a great
college essay, too. ■

Lynne Golodner is the Huntington Woods
mother of four teenagers.

continued from page 6

Anti-Semitism, Racism
and Absolute Rule

Many people who didn’t see or study the activities
of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1950s and 1960s don’t
realize the extent to which anti-Semitism and rac-
ism are tied together. Confusion is probably caused
by conflicts between Jews and Arabs in and near
Israel. That conflict is over land and needs to be
addressed in terms of the needs of both groups —
as difficult as that may be.
But “Alt-Right” (i.e. Klan/neo-Nazi) anti-Semi-
tism is of a different nature. It comes from a demo-
nization of Jews that goes back to the Middle Ages.
It has origins in intolerance of religious difference.
That difference went against the absolute control
that connected pre-modern religion and politics.
The insistence on single ideologies still exists in
some countries and groups, whether the absolute
thinking is religious or secular.
For reasons that appear to have more to do with
mentality than logic, anti-Semitism has consistent-
ly combined with racism. What some don’t seem to
realize is that hate speech against one group spins
off into hate speech and violence toward another.
Nazi anti-Semitism didn’t restrict itself to
Europe; some of the demonizing tracts that Hitler
spread have shown up in the Middle East and in
America. They are brought by racist and anti-Se-
mitic groups in a mental place where “right” and
“left” meet.
Given the president’s remarks about “both sides”
in relation to the Charlottesville Unite the Right
rally, it should be pointed out that the parallel to
the Klan and neo-Nazis isn’t CNN or anti-racist
protesters; it’s Al Qaeda.
Today, our president is using the Russian term
“enemy of the people” to refer to members of the
press. This came out of the Stalin era, where any-
one Stalin thought was threatening his dominance
was called by that name and sentenced to exile
in Siberia — in conditions that frequently caused
people’s deaths.
Chaos in the form of informal, pro-Nazi vio-
lence in Germany led to Hitler’s absolute crack-
down. Although we’re not seeing that extreme
today, we are seeing a similar combination of
chaotic speech that fuels violence and increasing
crackdowns on vulnerable people. At present,
fictional demonization followed by troop deploy-
ments are being directed at asylum seekers travel-
ing together for safety. Tragically, negative myths
about refugees led the shooter in Pittsburgh to
target Jews for the work of the Hebrew Immigrant
Aid Society.
I think most of us feel the need to respond to
this situation. Following the election, I feel we can
continue to respond by contributing to thinking
that supports our true humanity and letting our
voices be heard.

— Edna Garte
Waterford