“Cultural” Jew Label Grates on Me. By David Laskin.

“Cultural” Jew label grates on me. By David Laskin. USA Today, October 11, 2013. Also at Green Bay Press Gazette.

American Jews: Laughing But Shrinking. By Jonathan S. Tobin. NJBR, October 1, 2013.


Laskin:

The findings of the recent report by the Pew Research Center’s Religion and Public Life Project nailed me. I am one of those 20% of American Jews “of no religion” and among the 58% of American Jews who have intermarried. The Pew study pegs me as a “cultural” Jew who honors his ancestors, feels proud to belong to the same group as Moses, Kafka, Freud and Barbra Streisand, wishes he had videotaped his grandmother making challah and chopped liver – but would sooner enter a church to admire the frescoes than don a yarmulke to davan with the faithful.

 

And yet, the more I think about it, the more it grates on me to be confined in this category. Having spent the last three years researching and writing a book about my ancestors – Orthodox Torah scribes who studied at the famous Volozhin yeshiva – I can honestly say that I have never felt closer to my religion.

 

Does this mean I am going to attend synagogue this coming Saturday? Highly unlikely. What it does mean is that I spend more time reading books about Jewish history, visiting Jewish neighborhoods and sites when I travel, discussing family history and lore with far-flung relatives, pondering the Holocaust, and studying the Bible.

 

My oldest daughter, who was snippily informed by Orthodox classmates in college that she was “Jewish on the wrong side” and thus technically not Jewish at all, knows more about Judaism than I do – and I’m willing to wager more than some of those classmates who excluded her from their community. Her knowledge derives not from hours spent hidden away in the women’s section of an Orthodox synagogue, but from reading, studying, thinking, analyzing, traveling and discussing.

 

If she has children, I’m sure my daughter will pass on as much of her knowledge and reverence as the children are willing to absorb. The Pew study’s “Jews by religion” will say none of that counts because my daughter isn’t Jewish and thus her children won’t be Jewish either. I say these are narrow categories that leave no room for imagination, for curiosity, for inspiration, for true holiness.

 

As Yossi Klein Halevi recounts in his brilliant new book, Like Dreamers, modern Israel was founded by cultural Jews of no religion – Jews who were fiercely proud of their Judaism but who never set foot in a synagogue. After the Six Day War in 1967, those cultural Jewish Zionists were increasingly challenged by the religious Jews who spearheaded the settler movement in the West Bank. Halevi tells the story of “Israel’s competing utopian dreams – and how the Israel symbolized by the kibbutz became the Israel symbolized by the settlement.”

 

The clash between these two utopian dreams continues with no end in sight, but the survival of Israel, the survival of Judaism, does not lie in one camp or the other. My favorite figure in Halevi’s book is Meir Ariel, a kibbutznik who became one of Israel’s most highly regarded folksingers. Ariel, a typical kibbutznik atheist, grew increasingly religious as he aged. He studied Talmud but sang in clubs on Shabbat when he had a gig. To my mind, he beautifully straddled the categories of cultural and religious Jew.

 

On a recent trip to Rome, I had the privilege of interviewing Riccardo Di Segni, chief rabbi of Rome’s Jewish community. At the end of the interview, the subject turned, inevitably, to anti-Semitism. “You know, there are many types of anti-Semitism,” Rabbi Di Segni told me. “There is one type that does not allow Jews to be Jews. Another type does not allow Jews to be non-Jews.”

 

To my mind, there are many more categories of American Judaism than “Jew by religion” and “Jews of no religion.” Folksinger Meir Ariel, who tragically died in 1999 at the age of 57, is my model of a good Jew – reverent, steeped in the language of the Bible, flexible, open to the promptings of the spirit. Cultural and religious.