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You are here: Home / Readers Forum / Making Our Story Matter

Making Our Story Matter

April 15, 2011 By eJP

by Avi Herring

In a recent course I attended at NYU Wagner’s School of Public Service, we were each asked to prepare a pitch to a hypothetical potential employer, where we explained what inspired us to pursue a career in public service. I briefly explained how I was passionate in helping re-imagine a vibrant American Jewish future and how I hoped to devote my life to achieving it. In his response to my pitch, the teacher asked a question I was not expecting. “You spoke clearly and seem to be very passionate,” he said, “but there’s something I don’t understand: what’s the problem you are trying to address?” He was asking, in a somewhat cryptic way, why a group of mostly upper middle-class, fully integrated, citizens merited attention like Malaria-ridden countries in Africa or the inner-city school system in the United States.

My first reaction was to spout what I learned while touring the gas chambers of Auschwitz. “Barely 60 years after the Holocaust, the event that gave birth to the word ‘genocide’,” I wanted to say, “you have the gall to ask me why I should devote my time to strengthening the Jewish community?”

While I fundamentally disagree with the previous line of reasoning, it was the first thought to enter my mind. The reason it did, I suspect, is that depicting one’s group as the “victim-under-constant duress” is both a powerful identity builder for one’s group and an effective argument against outsiders who question the group’s legitimacy.

________________

The story a group tells about itself is one of the fundamental building blocks of group identity. Indeed, our current place in the Jewish calendar, between Purim and Passover, illustrates two of the most powerful narratives in Jewish history. When we read the Megillah, we recall a time when vicious Jew-hatred almost destroyed a vibrant Diaspora Jewish community. In contrast, the Passover story is one of freedom and self- determination. At the Passover Seder we spend little time recalling our suffering and much more celebrating our own freedom – debating, discussing and engaging as only free people can do. In a sense, Purim is the Jewish “fear narrative,” based on a negative, foreboding feeling of vulnerability, while Passover is the “empowerment narrative,” a positive, forward-looking vision for what Jewish freedom can look like.

These two holidays, and their two respective narratives, represent where we have been, and where we should be going, as an American Jewish community.

During the second half of the 20th century, the Jewish people had a powerful fear narrative that was entirely appropriate for its time. As the narrative goes, millennia of anti-Judaism, and then a shorter period of anti-Semitism, culminated in the horrors of the Holocaust, which compels every Jew to say “never again.” As a result, Jews must support the State of Israel against its enemies, remain vigilant against anti-Semitism in the United States and around the world, and more recently, guard against assimilation and intermarriage among American Jews. Iterations of this fear narrative, adapted to Israeli and American Jewish audiences, were effective at mobilizing Jews to respond, at least philanthropically, to support the Jewish collective.

While effective several decades ago, the fear narrative simply does not match most American Jews’ understanding of their own situations today. As Charles Silberman wrote a generation ago in his classic book, A Certain People, the social anti-Semitism that once existed in America has almost completely disappeared. Jews have ascended to the highest positions in political and professional careers, join the most exclusive country clubs, and are one of the highest-performing economic groups in the United States. While many Jews have still experienced an anti-Semitic incident, anti-Semitism in no way dominates their lives. Additionally, an exclusive focus on the fear of intermarriage and assimilation obscures the vibrancy and creativity that also abound in American Jewish life.

At the same time, though Israel is still under threat and recent upheaval in the Middle East certainly presents serious challenges, it is a regional economic and military superpower that bears little resemblance to its precarious position in the 1950s.

_________________

There have been two main responses to the decreasing salience of the fear narrative among American Jews. The first – best exemplified by traditional Jewish defense organizations and the current right-wing Israeli government – has been to ratchet up the fear narrative in an effort to persuade American Jews of its relevance. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has, on a number of occasions, likened Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Hitler and compared the international community’s failure to impose harsher sanctions on Iran to Neville Chamberlain’s abandonment of Czechoslovakia in 1938. Even more recently, this Purim around one hundred people gathered at the United Nations to read the Megillah in public, comparing Ahmadinejad to Haman the Agagite.

At home in America, the Anti-Defamation League’s (ADL) 2009 survey on anti-Semitism found that 12% of Americans hold views of Jews that are “unquestionably anti- Semitic,” the lowest such percentage ever recorded. Even among those classified as anti- Semitic, the very questions used to measure anti-Semitism have debatable validity. For example, are Americans who believe Jews have too much power necessarily anti-Semitic, or do they simply believe that the over-representation of Jews in positions of power is detrimental to building an inclusive and democratic society? The larger point is that many powerful individuals and organizations in the Jewish community continue propagating the same fear narrative even though the situation on the ground has changed and many American Jews find that narrative much less salient.

The other response – and it is here I see much greater promise – is to rediscover different versions of the empowerment narrative, the most famous of which we will soon celebrate at our Passover Seders. The two main narratives that have emerged from the empowerment framework reflect the inherent tension in Jewish life, as Andrew Silow-Caroll recently wrote in eJewish Philanthropy, between the particularistic and universal. On the particularistic side, Jewish thinkers have attempted to breathe new life into the concept of Jewish peoplehood, which was assumed throughout much of Jewish history but was not a raison d’etre of the Jewish community until recently. The general idea, in broad terms, proposes that Jewish collective association throughout history has produced remarkably meaningful and creative understandings of human life, and Jews today should continue that tradition of richness and creativity.

On the more universal side, the narrative of “tikkun olam” suggests that the prophetic voice in Judaism compels Jews to right the world’s wrongs, including those that are outside the Jewish community. Finally, there are also attempts to combine the particularistic and universal. For example, the American Jewish World Service and Hazon focus on international development and food justice, respectively, but they do so with a major focus on intensive Jewish learning and Jewish collective action.

The question remains as to whether these narratives, which are positive and somewhat more complicated than the fear narrative, can be effective builders of Jewish collective identity. In attempting to rediscover and reinvent positive Jewish narratives of empowerment, two points are clear to me. First, unlike the fear narrative which dominated the Jewish communal agenda in the latter half of the 20th century, the 21st century will not see one Jewish narrative, but many.

Second, attempts to re-imagine the Jewish narrative will be much more successful than attempts to exaggerate the fear narrative. While remaining aware of the potential for anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism, we must also candidly acknowledge that fear, while a powerful identity builder in the short term, will not lead to sustainable expressions of Jewish identity in this century.

Avi Herring is a student in NYU graduate dual-degree program between the Wagner School of Public Service and the Skirball Department of Jewish Studies.

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Comments

  1. Steve Silberfarb says

    April 15, 2011 at 7:41 pm

    Avi Herring is obviously a chip off the old block (his father, Rabbi Hayyim Herring is a prominent Jewish thinker and writer) and he brings nachas not only to his family but to his community in Minneapolis (disclosure: I am the CEO of the Minneapolis Jewish Federation).

    I find myself in deep agreement with Avi and I’d probably go a step further. I think it’s about making our individual stories matter first and foremost to each of us as individuals. While to be sure there are many common elements and no doubt threads that are connective, each person’s Jewish identity is unique to them and shares space with many other identities worn by American Jews. The important component is each person taking responsibility for expressing his/her Jewish identity however the person determines is most meaningful and relevant.

    If Judaism truly has meaningful and relevant messages, and I believe it does, then let’s trust in its deep richness, shared history and vast opportunities to touch every aspect of the human condition. And let’s not view Jewish life as narrow channels that mostly reflect fear (which Avi so capably described). In the context of American Jewish life today, fear, guilt, suppression will only inhibit exploration of Judaism’s array of possibilities in the highly competitive marketplace of meaningful and relevant ideas and experiences.

    We are in an era in which the potential joy of being Jewish, experiencing Jewish and exploring Jewish has much to offer than continued reliance on the (largely artificial) “oy”s meant, nobly, to keep us together as a people.

    Are we builders of Jewish identity? Are we livers (not the chopped variety!) of Jewish identity (and those who are driven to build will find that by living we are building)?

    I am guided by two main concepts: 1. That a yearning for community (the connection of two or more individuals) and meaning are enduring and virtually embedded in human DNA. Yes, manifestations of community and meaning will evolve (they already are!) and might even be somewhat unidentifiable or at least vastly different to prior generations who have a their own frame of reference; 2. That our role in the Jewish institutional world is to facilitate collective and shared expressions of and opportunities for meaning through relevant programs, services and activities, and to do so guided by principles of accessibility, affordability and high quality.

    But so long as we scurry about driven by the incessant fear that the sky is falling (both in terms of external enemies and internal indifference), hold on to past narratives and insist that future generations embrace them as their own, and fail to grasp that Judaism in all its dimensions has something to offer each and every day in almost every aspect of life, we will choke off the oxygen required for vitality, discovery and self-expression. In doing so, we will actually undermine the community building and identity preservation many of us seek to secure. And in the end, the sky falling will become as self-fulfilling prophecy.

    With an enduring yearning for community, a tradition that is open, exciting and wise, and with values that are both fundamental to human existence and span the generations of our people’s existence, the sky is the limit for the Jewish future.

    sh/sh & chag sameach!

  2. Jordan Goodman says

    April 18, 2011 at 1:35 am

    Shalom All,

    That which used to be the sole provenance of non orthodox synagogue membership is available for free, online or ala carte at far less cost. Other than for a life cycle event, or an occasional high holiday worship service, most non orthodox Jews couldn’t care less one way or another about a synagogue as a place that provides the opportunity for Jewish community, whatever that might mean.

    Other than political liberalism (a standing joke about Reform has been to say that its theology consisted of the Democratic Party platform with holidays thrown in), anti anti semitism and an accident of birth, there is no meaningful agreed upon articulation of non-orthodox Judaism. The non orthodox movements, their synagogues and their Judaism will eventually go the way of the Catskills and the Jewish Deli, sadly for the same reason: irrelevance. The further away we get from the Eastern European immigrant experience, the more irrelevant Jewish ethno-cultural markers become for most Jews. Quite simply, nostalgia is insufficient as an engine for Jewish continuity.

    Clara Peller zl’ of “Wendy’s” fame had it right when she famously asked:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ug75diEyiA0

    Non Orthodox Judaism, its leadership and its institutions ought to be answering her question. For, “In the absence of vision, people will be unrestrained.”
    Mishlei (Proverbs) 29:18

    The irony is not lost on me that a Pastrami sandwich from the slowly dying Jewish Deli:

    http://bit.ly/hh6RsL

    juxtaposed with Clara Peller’s question (which clearly, crisply, concisely and compellingly frames the non Orthodox status quo), represents a metaphor for what needs to be rediscovered in order to create a meaningful contemporary non Orthodox Judaism. Her last line “I don’t think there’s anyone back there,” is spot on. Based on measurable results, the status quo is broken and beyond repair, and visionary leadership toward a passion producing picture of a preferred future is nowhere to be found.

    Non orthodox Judaism (not to be confused with peoplehood/ethno-cultural Jewishness), must be re-envisioned, retooled, and re-engineered to become a relevant, practical, application oriented way of life that is consonant with the 21rst century reality that Jews find themselves a part of. Rabbis and other Jewish teachers must let prospective congregants know through bimah teaching, other educational efforts and experiential opportunities that indeed, they have walked or are walking in their prospects’ moccasins. They must give folks answers to the questions, “Why Judaism? Why be Jewish? Why do Jewish?”

    Then and only then can one even begin to think about an effective delivery system. Will this be the non orthodox synagogue? Who knows?

    Hag Same’ah and Wholeness,

    Jordan

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