8 | MARCH 30 • 2023 

opinion
Which side are you on: Jewish American 
or American Jew?
E

arlier this month the New 
York Times convened 
what it called a “focus 
group of Jewish Americans.
” 
I was struck briefly by that 
phrase — Jewish 
Americans — in 
part because 
the Times, like 
the Jewish 
Telegraphic 
Agency, tends to 
prefer “
American 
Jews.
”
It’s seemingly a distinction 
without a difference, although 
I know others might disagree. 
There is an argument that 
“
American Jew” smacks of 
disloyalty, describing a Jew 
who happens to be American. 
“Jewish American,” accord-
ing to this thinking, flips the 
script: an American who hap-
pens to be Jewish.
If pressed, I’d say I prefer 
“
American Jew.” The noun 
“Jew” sounds, to my ear any-
way, more direct and more 
assertive than the tentative 
adjective “Jewish.” It’s also 
consistent with the way JTA 
essentializes “Jew” in its cov-
erage, as in British Jew, French 
Jew, LGBT Jew or Jew of color. 
I wouldn’t have given 
further thought to the sub-
ject if not for a webinar last 
week given by Arnold Eisen, 
the chancellor emeritus 
at the Jewish Theological 
Seminary. In “Jewish-
American, American-Jew: 
The Complexities and Joys of 
Living a Hyphenated Identity,” 
Eisen discussed how a debate 
over language is really about 
how Jews navigate between 

competing identities.
“What does the ‘
American’ 
signify to us?” he asked. 
“What does the ‘Jewish’ sig-
nify and what is the nature of 
the relationship between the 
two? Is it a synthesis? Is it a 
tension, or a contradiction, or 
is it a blurring of the bound-
aries such that you can’t tell 
where one ends and the other 
begins?”
Questions like these, it 
turns out, have been asked 
since Jews and other immi-
grants first began flooding 
Ellis Island. Teddy Roosevelt 
complained in 1915 that “there 
is no room in this country 
for hyphenated Americans.” 
Woodrow Wilson liked to say 
that “any man who carries a 
hyphen about with him carries 
a dagger that he is ready to 
plunge into the vitals of the 
Republic.” The two presidents 
were frankly freaked out about 
what we now call multicultur-
alism, convinced that America 
couldn’t survive a wave of 
immigrants with dual loyalties.
The two presidents lost the 
argument, and for much of 
the 20th century “hyphenated 

American” was shorthand 
for successful acculturation. 
While immigration hardliners 
continue to question the loy-
alty of minorities who claim 
more than one identity, and 
Donald Trump played with the 
politics of loyalty in remarks 
about Mexicans, Muslims 
and Jews, ethnic pride is as 
American as, well, St. Patrick’s 
Day. “I am the proud daughter 
of Indian immigrants,” former 
South Carolina Gov. Nikki 
Haley said in announcing 
her run for the Republican 
presidential nomination this 
month. 
For Jews, however, the 
hyphen became what philos-
ophy professor Berel Lang 
called “a weighty symbol of 
the divided life of Diaspora 
Jewry.” Jewishness isn’t a dis-
tant country with quaint cus-
toms, but a religion and a por-
table identity that lives uneas-
ily alongside your nationality. 
In a 2005 essay, Lang argued 
that on either side of the 
hyphen were “vying traditions 
or allegiances,” with the Jew 
constantly confronted with a 
choice between the American 

side, or assimilation, and the 
Jewish side, or remaining dis-
tinct. 
Eisen calls this the “ques-
tion of Jewish difference.” 
Eisen grew up in an observant 
Jewish family in Philadelphia, 
and understood from an early 
age that his family was differ-
ent from their Vietnamese-, 
Italian-, Ukrainian- and 
African-American neigh-
bors. On the other hand, they 
were all the same — that is, 
American — because they 
were all hyphenated. “Being 
parallel to all these other dif-
ferences, gave me my place in 
the city and in the country,” 
he said.
In college he studied the 
Jewish heavy hitters who 
were less sanguine about the 
integration of American and 
Jewish identities. Eisen calls 
Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, the 
renegade theologian at JTS, 
“the thinker who really made 
this question uppermost for 
American Jews.” Kaplan wrote 
in 1934 that Jewishness could 
only survive as a “subordinate 
civilization” in the United 
States, and that the “Jew in 
America will be first and fore-
most an American, and only 
secondarily a Jew.” 
Kaplan’s prescription was a 
maximum effort on the part of 
Jews to “save the otherness of 
Jewish life” — not just through 
synagogue, but through a 
Jewish “civilization” expressed 
in social relationships, leisure 
activities, and a traditional 
moral and ethical code.
Of course, Kaplan also 

PURELY COMMENTARY

Andrew 
Silow-Carroll

JTA

JTA illustration by Mollie Suss

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