Three Generations of Cultural Judaism

By JESSE TISCH

SECULAR JEWISHNESS FOR OUR TIME
A Three-Part Symposium by Three Generations
of Writers, Educators, and Cultural Activists in
1938- 40, 1968-69, and 1998-2000.
Edited by Barnett Zumoff and Karl D. Zukerman
346 pages. The Forward Assocation. $29.95.

There is a proud tradition—running parallel to the religious one—of freethinking, non-theistic Judaism, and nowhere was it more embodied than in the Yiddish journal Kultur un Dertsiung (Culture and Education). For decades, Kultur un Dertsiung churned out essays on Jewish education, literature, and the day’s popular ‘isms’: Zionism, socialism, Bundism. Then, like the culture it chronicled, the journal faded, and seemed on the verge of disappearing—until now.

Thirty-eight of its original Yiddish essays are now available in English, brought to life through the alchemy of translation and the enterprise of two archivists, and collected for the first time in Secular Jewishness For Our Time. Like a good novel, the essays take the pulse of secular Jewish life in two important periods: before the Holocaust (1938-40) and during the cultural upheavals of the late 1960s (1968-69). And what a difference thirty years makes.

As artifacts, these essays are gems. Filled with wry, gnomic wisdom, the prose crackles with edgy intelligence and a surprising lyricism—these were non-writers, but boy, could they write. Collectively, they reveal not only the Jewish zeitgeist, but something more personal. Here we discover what was on people’s minds as they worked, shopped, and raised children; what they thought about, dreamed about, and argued about in their free time.

We also see the folly of trying to predict how secular Judaism will look decades, or even years, down the road. Of the two groups of Yiddish essayists, the first was the more idealistic: they had seen the future, and it was secular. God didn’t trouble them, perhaps on the logic that what doesn’t exist shouldn’t weigh heavily on you. Posterity would preserve Yiddish folkways, and religion would fade from the scene—or so they believed.

“They were egregiously mistaken,” the editors write in their introduction. Instead of growing, the institutions that had sustained secular Jewish life—including periodicals like Kultur un Dertsiung—began to fade. Not surprisingly, the second batch of essays is marked by “a subtly pervasive loss of optimism,” according to the editors. Two things brought that about, but only one of them was the Holocaust. Till the mid 1940s, secular Jews had been Jewish through politics—i.e. socialism—and a common language—i.e. Yiddish. But the Red Scare ‘50s were a tough time to be a Jewish socialist. And in post-War America, millions of Yiddish speakers were becoming English speakers in an effort to assimilate. All this was happening around the time the words “under God” were added to the pledge of allegiance, making the ‘50s a difficult time for Jewish secularists.

And so socialism gave way to American liberalism (or—in other cases—closet socialism), and “yiddishkeit” just gave way. Despite the major changes, however, a lot stayed the same for ardently secular Jews. Remove the topical references from these essays, and many are timeless. “The problem of the education and culture of the Jewish youth in America—of the tomorrow of our people—has become very current,” one essay notes. (Try to guess when it was written: 1939 or 1969?) Yiddish may have lacked a precise word for this kind of worry, but 30 years of hand-wringing attests to its place in Jewish DNA.

Other essays could have been written 40 years ago—or 40 years from now. And yet they all are unmistakably of their time. Yiddish style, Yiddish syntax, and a Yiddish sensibility mark these 38 time capsules. Even when the subjects are heavy (on Hebrew education: “The children should look directly at the teacher and intuitively empathize with the developing story.”), the authors show a lightness of touch. Who could resist an essay called “On Constant Jumping and Jewish Holidays”? Even the footnotes have a kind of deadpan humor. An oblique reference to the Hebrew Bible is explained this way: “Amos is referring to the fat wives of aristocrats.”

An evergreen subject—one of many, it turns out—is the “culture wars” between culture and religion. “Most secular Jews today are not secularists, i.e., those for whom their secular views are part of a militant struggle against religion,” the editors write in the introduction. Furthermore,

Both groups share a common need to be deeply involved with secular Jewish culture—secular Jews because it is the way for them to maintain their Jewish identity if they don’t want to or cannot bring themselves to express that identity through Torah/Talmud observance, and religious Jews because they need to understand the breadth and depth of the full Jewish culture.”

In other words, we have more in common than we think. That point, which is obvious to some and dubious to others, is debated in the third and final batch of essays, written in English for a recent conference on Jewish secularism. New era (1998-2000), new language, same concerns: The role and content of ritual; clashing definitions of secularism; and of course, transmission to the next generation.

In some ways, the last batch of essays is the most interesting, for it deals with a paradox that seems defining today, but was less noticeable during Yiddish’s heyday. On one hand, there are more secular Jews than ever before in the United States. On the other, the recent essayists find that secular Judaism—as a coherent set of values, with a historical awareness built into it—is becoming harder to transmit to the “next generation.”

Whereas Jewishness once spread “by osmosis” through neighborhoods, “our secular Jewish forbears found themselves in a very different milieu from that in which we currently live,” one essayist writes. “In America, secular Jewishness has not caught on,” another states bluntly.

The sentiment is expressed often in this collection. At the very least, it raises a question: How much do secular values inform the popular expressions of secular Judaism today? Jewish books, music, and magazines are all “secular,” though they obviously lack the secularist spirit of the 1930s. Is that OK? Or does it represent the loss of something important? The issue speaks to the two contested questions at the heart of this collection: What about secular Judaism is most meaningful?, and How can secular Judaism sustain itself?