American Jewry: Past, Present, and Future Challenges to the Continuity of Community and Identity

Across four difference centuries, American Jewry has developed various options, each in its own way, to ensure the continuity of American Jewish life. Both choice and change have dominated much of American Jewish life, especially obvious in the past half-century, which have helped produce the various Jewish options. They can be understood as a way of responding to central, existential questions that Jews encountered as they settled in the more egalitarian, individualistic, democratic, and enlightened society that is the US. This book was framed at the outset by addressing two questions: (1) The question of Cultural Guidelines asks whether what it means to be a Jew is to be based primarily, even exclusively, on those guidelines provided by modern values, such as rationality, equality, individualism, and humanism, or by traditional values, such as religious faith and communalism and oriented toward halakhah. (2) The question of Structural Focus asks if one’s understanding of what it means to be a Jew focus on religious or on ethnic and/or other secular forms of Jewishness. The result of the struggle to answer these questions has led in the development of seven major options for American Jews as illustrated in Table 4.1 . However, if Jews are not only to survive but thrive in American society, they need to do more than deal with the question of Cultural Guidelines and Structural Focus. They must also meet three challenges: (1) Jewish education and socializing their children and, indeed, their adults as well, as to what it means to be an American Jew and how and why to be a Jew; (2) interfaith marriages or how to maintain a Jewish identity while living in a more diverse society; and (3) philanthropic endeavors or ensuring the present and future financial health of Jewish institutions and individuals.