Contention, Controversy, and Change: Evolutions and Revolutions in the Jewish Experience, Volume I 9781618114631

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CONTENTION, CONTROVERSY, AND CHANGE Evolutions and Revolutions in the Jewish Experience VOLUME I

Touro College Press

CONTENTION, CONTROVERSY, AND CHANGE Evolutions and Revolutions in the Jewish Experience VOLUME I

SIMCHA FISHBANE ERIC LEVINE Editors Foreword by ALAN KADISH, MD

New York 2016

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-1-61811-462-4 (hardback) ISBN 978-1-61811-463-1 (electronic) ©Touro College Press, 2016 Published by Touro College Press and Academic Studies Press. Typeset, printed and distributed by Academic Studies Press. Cover design by Ivan Grave Touro College Press Michael A. Shmidman and Simcha Fishbane, Editors 27 West 23rd Street New York, NY 10010 USA [email protected] Academic Studies Press 28 Montfern Avenue Brighton, MA 02135 USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com

Table of Contents VOLUME I

Contributors.............................................................................................................. vii Foreword..................................................................................................................... xiv Acknowledgments.................................................................................................... xx

I. Introduction The Problematics of Jewish Collective Action: Community and Conflict and Change Eric Levine................................................................................................................... 3

II. Mobilizations, Contentious Politics, and Collective Action Opportunity, Honor, and Action in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 Rachel L. Einwohner................................................................................................. 61 Musar and Modernity: The Case of Novaredok David E. Fishman...................................................................................................... 91

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Exhibiting Dreyfus in America: The Jewish Museum of New York and the Soviet Jewry Movement Maya Balakirsky Katz.............................................................................................. 119 Ritualized Protest and Redemptive Politics: Cultural Consequences of the American Mobilization to Free Soviet Jewry Shaul Kelner................................................................................................................ 144 “A Strike in Heaven”: The Montreal Rabbis’ Walkout of 1935 and its Significance Ira Robinson................................................................................................................ 183 Between Militarism and Pacifism: Conscientious Objection and Draft Resistance in Israel Yulia Zemlinskaya...................................................................................................... 198

III. Social Trends, Communal and Institutional Change Israeli and American Organizational Responses to Wife Abuse Among the Orthodox Roberta Rosenberg Farber....................................................................................... 233 American Jewish Hospitals and “The Jewish Problem” in American Medical Education Edward C. Halperin.................................................................................................. 267 Emancipation, Modernity, and Jewish Identity in America Mervin F. Verbit.......................................................................................................... 307 Index............................................................................................................................ 339

Contributors

Herbert Basser, PhD, received his BA at Yeshiva University and both the MA and PhD at the University of Toronto. He is professor emeritus of religion and Jewish studies at Queen’s University in Canada. He is the author of eight books and in excess of a hundred major articles and reviews. He has delivered over forty scholarly papers and many popular talks. He has been a visiting professor at the Hebrew University, University of California at Berkeley, Harvard University, and University of Toronto, and taught full-time at Queen’s from 1980 until retiring in 2014. His major areas of expertise are in the history of Judaism and Christianity in the first century, medieval commentaries, and rabbinic literature. Benjamin Brown, PhD, is associate professor in the Department of Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He also works as a researcher at the Israel Democracy Institute Religion and State project and serves as the academic co-director of the Van Leer Institute’s Gdolim project with (Dr. Nissim Leon). His book on Rabbi Abraham Yeshaayahu Karelitz, the Hazon Ish, was widely echoed. Dr. Brown’s areas of expertise include ultraOrthodox Jewish thought, Jewish law, the history of Orthodoxy, Hasidism, the Musar movement, and the contemporary Haredi community.

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Rachel L. Einwohner, PhD, is associate professor of sociology at Purdue University. Her research focuses on the dynamics of protest and resistance, and her interests include questions related to protest effectiveness, the role of gender and other identities in protest dynamics, and protesters’ sense of efficacy. She has explored these topics with theoretically driven analyses of a diverse set of movements and cases of protest, including the US animal rights movement, the college-based anti-sweatshop movement, and Jewish resistance during the Holocaust. Her published work has appeared in journals such as the American Sociological Review, the American Journal of Sociology, and Social Problems. She is also the co-editor (along with Jo Reger and Daniel J. Myers) of Identity Work in Social Movements (University of Minnesota Press, 2008). Her current work, which has received funding from the NSF and the NEH, examines the efforts to create resistance movements in the Jewish ghettos of Nazi-occupied Warsaw, Vilna, and Lodz. Roberta Rosenberg Farber, PhD, is adjunct associate professor of sociology at Yeshiva University and for the last twenty-one years she has taught sociology at Stern College for Women. In addition to teaching core sociology courses, she developed courses on Jews in America, Israeli Identities, and the Sociology of Religion. Her teaching, research, and writing interests reflect these topics but focus on processes of change, including the change process of baalei teshuva and the changing response of Jewish Orthodox communities in America and Israel to social problems like wife abuse. She regards this latter process as an example of social change within a traditional religious community. For a long time she has had an interest in the interaction between methodologies, feminism, spirituality, and social change, particularly as expressed in the 1960s and 1970s into the present. Simcha Fishbane, PhD, is a professor of Jewish studies at the Touro College Graduate School of Jewish Studies. He has been a rabbi, scholar, and educator serving the Jewish community for many years. He is the founder of a Jewish university in Moscow, Russia, a branch of Touro College, and served as its dean for three years. He has also been instrumental in establishing similar programs in Canada, Israel, Germany, and Italy. Professor Fishbane is the author of numerous books and articles on such diverse topics as Mishnah Berurah, Aruch Hashulchan, Mishnah and Talmud, and Jewish custom and ritual, as well as

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contemporary Jewish life in North America. He also serves as the executive assistant to the president of Touro College. David E. Fishman, PhD, is professor of Jewish history at the Jewish Theological Seminary, teaching courses in modern Jewish history. Dr. Fishman also serves as director of Project Judaica, a Jewish-studies program based in Moscow that is sponsored jointly by JTS and Russian State University for the Humanities. Dr. David Fishman’s academic scholarship focuses on the history and culture of Jews in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, modern Jewish political movements (Zionism and Jewish socialism), Yiddish culture, and the Holocaust. He has taught at Bar Ilan University in Israel, as well as at universities in Russia, Ukraine, and Lithuania, and is a senior research fellow at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Dr. Fishman is the author of numerous books and articles on the history and culture of East European Jewry. His books include Russia’s First Modern Jews and The Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture, and he is the editor of a volume of Rav Soloveitchik’s Yiddish writings, Droshes un ksovim. Michah Gottlieb, PhD, is associate professor in the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University. His current research focuses on the role of Bible translation in the development of modern Judaism. Gottlieb is author of several books including Faith and Freedom: Moses Mendelssohn’s Theological-Political Thought (Oxford University Press, 2011) and Faith, Reason, Politics: Essays on the History of Jewish Thought (Academic Studies Press, 2013). He is also editor of Moses Mendelssohn: Writings on Judaism, Christianity, and the Bible (University Press of New England, 2011). His latest book, Jewish Protestantism: Translation and the Turn to the Bible in German Judaism, will be published by Oxford University Press. Edward C. Halperin, MD, MA, is chancellor and chief executive officer of New York Medical College of the Touro College and University System. Dr. Halperin received a BS in economics from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, a MD from Yale University, and a MA from Duke University. He was an intern in internal medicine at Stanford University Medical Center and a resident in radiation oncology at the Massachusetts General Hospital/ Harvard Medical School. Dr. Halperin was on the faculty at Duke University for twenty-three years, where he served as professor and chairman of the

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Department of Radiation Oncology, vice dean of the School of Medicine, and associate vice chancellor. He held two endowed professorships and was named a fellow of the American Council on Education and the American College of Radiology. In 2006, Dr. Halperin became dean of the School of Medicine, Ford Foundation Professor of Medical Education, and professor of radiation oncology, pediatrics, and history at the University of Louisville, and in 2011 took on the additional position of university vice provost. Dr. Halperin’s research has focused on pediatric cancer, adult brain tumors, the role of radiotherapy in organ transplantation, ethics, and the history of racial, religious, and gender discrimination in higher education. He is the co-author/editor of the first five editions of Pediatric Radiation Oncology and of the fourth and fifth editions of Principles and Practice of Radiation Oncology. He has published more than two hundred articles in the peer-reviewed scientific, historical, education, and ethics literature. Zvi Jonathan Kaplan, PhD, is associate professor and chair of the History Department at the Lander College for Women - The Anna Ruth and Mark Hasten School of Touro College in Manhattan. He has written on Moses Mendelssohn, Hungarian Ultra-Orthodoxy, and modern French Jewry. He is the author of Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea? French Jewry and the Problem of Church and State (Brown University Press, 2009). He is the coeditor of Re-examining the Jews of Modern France: Images and Identities, which will be published by Brill. Maya Balakirsky Katz, PhD, is professor of art history at the Lander College for Women - The Anna Ruth and Mark Hasten School of Touro College and on the faculty of Touro’s Graduate School of Jewish Studies. She has written on the intersection of religious identity and media in essay collections, exhibition catalogs, and encyclopedias, as well as in journals, such as AJS Review, Jewish Social Studies, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Modern Judaism, Contemporary Jewry, and Israel Studies. She is co-editor of Images: A Journal of Jewish Art and Visual Culture (along with Steven Fine, Vivian B. Mann, and Margaret Olin). She is the author of the book The Visual Culture of Chabad (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and editor of Revising Dreyfus (Brill Press, 2013). She is currently working on her book Drawing the Iron Curtain: Jews and the Golden Age of Soviet Animation.

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Shaul Kelner, PhD, is associate professor of sociology and Jewish studies at Vanderbilt University and director of Vanderbilt’s Program in Jewish Studies. He studies American Jewish cultural politics, and is currently working on a book on cultural dimensions of the Soviet Jewry movement in the United States. His 2010 book, Tours That Bind: Diaspora, Pilgrimage and Israeli Birthright Tourism (NYU Press), received awards from the Association for Jewish Studies and American Sociological Association. Professor Kelner has been a fellow of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Institute for Advanced Studies and a visiting scholar at Tel Aviv University. Before coming to Vanderbilt, he was a senior research associate at the Center for Modern Jewish Studies at Brandeis University. Eric Levine, DSW, is Director, Social Work Alumni Engagement and Financial Resource Development and a professor at the Touro College Graduate School of Social Work in New York. He has held leadership roles for major Jewish organizations with recognized expertise in fund raising, strategic planning, organizational change, as well as Jewish communal policy and education. Prior to coming to Touro, he also taught as an adjunct professor for over 20 years at the Wurzweiler School of Social Work of Yeshiva University, teaching courses in ethics, social policy, social philosophy, organizational theory, ethnicity, administrative practice and community relations. Eric has authored some seventy articles, book chapters and papers on a wide range of communal, academic and professional subjects and is co-editor of the professional journal, the Social Work Forum. He has served on the boards of foundations, professional associations and a number of not-for-profit organizations. His current research interests focus on contentious politics and social protest movements; conflict and social change; organizational practice; ethics and social responsibility. Jess Olson, PhD, is an assistant professor of Jewish history and the associate director of the Yeshiva University Center for Israel Studies. Interested in questions of nationalism, religion, and Jewish identity in nineteenth and twentieth century Europe, Dr. Olson’s areas of research include the Jews of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Germany, history of Zionism and Jewish nationalism, and the intersection between Jewish Orthodoxy and political engagement. His manuscript on early Zionist, later Yiddishist, and finally

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executive in the Agudat Yisrael, Dr. Nathan Birnbaum, Nathan Birnbaum and Jewish Modernity was released in December 2012 by Stanford University Press. His publications include: Nathan Birnbaum and Tuvia Horowitz: Friendship and the Origins of an Orthodox Ideologue, Nation, Peoplehood and Religion in the Life and Thought of Nathan Birnbaum, and The Late Zionism of Nathan Birnbaum: The Herzl Controversy Reconsidered. Dr. Olson was a Yad Hanadiv/Beracha Foundation Fellow for the 2010–2011 academic year and was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship for 2011. Teaching and research interests include modern Jewish cultural and intellectual history, European Jewish history, history of Zionism and Jewish nationalism, history of Orthodoxy, Jews in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and modern Jewish thought. Ira Robinson, PhD, is professor of Judaic studies in the Department of Religion of Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec. He has taught at Concordia University since 1979 and served as the chair of the Department of Religion. He also served as interim director of the Concordia University Institute for Canadian Jewish Studies in 2005–2006 and 2012–present. Dr. Robinson is the president of the Canadian Society for Jewish Studies, past president of the Association for Canadian Jewish Studies (formerly the Canadian Jewish Historical Society), and past president of the Jewish Public Library of Montreal. Dr. Robinson was awarded the Louis Rosenberg Canadian Jewish Studies Distinguished Service Award by the Association of Canadian Jewish Studies in 2013 in recognition of his lifelong contribution to the study of Canadian Jewry. Nissan Rubin, PhD, is professor emeritus, Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Bar Ilan University. Now he is head of the Sociology and Anthropology Department at Ashkelon Academic College, Ashkelon, Israel. His main areas of interest include ritual in modern society, sociology and anthropology of Talmudic texts, and rites of passage in ancient Judaism. His published books include Research Methods in Social Science—Strategy, Design and Measurement (Tel-Aviv: Dekel, 1978, with Ernest Krausz and Steven H. Miller), The Beginning of Life: Rites of Birth, Circumcision and Redemption of the First-Born in the Talmud and Midrash (Tel-Aviv: Ha-Kibbutz Ha-Meuchad, 1995), The End of Life: Rites of Burial and Mourning in the Talmud and Midrash (Tel-Aviv: Ha-Kibbutz Ha-Meuchad, 1988), The Joy of Life: Rites of Betrothal

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and Marriage in the Talmud and Midrash (Tel-Aviv: Ha-Kibbutz Ha-Meuchad, 2004), Time and Life Cycle in Talmud and Midrash (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2008), and New Rituals Old Societies (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2009). He has published numerous papers on rites and rites of passage in contemporary Israeli society and studies applying social scientific methods to the understanding of Late Antiquity Judaism. Mervin F. Verbit, PhD, is professor of sociology and chair of the Sociology Department at Touro College and director of the Israel Studies Institute, which cultivates a better understanding of Israel among American academics. Formerly, he taught at Brooklyn College of The City University of New York, where he also directed the university’s Program for Study in Israel and is now professor emeritus. Dr. Verbit, who specializes in the sociology of religion and contemporary Jewry, has been visiting professor at Bar Ilan University, Hebrew University, Tel Aviv University, and Yeshiva University. He is a fellow of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and of the Center for Jewish Community Studies. He has served as director of the Interuniversity Fellowship Program in Jewish Studies, academic director of the North American Jewish Data Bank, and president of the Association for the Social Scientific Study of Jewry. Dr. Verbit’s communal activities have included service as chairman of the Zionist Academic Council, as national chairman of American Professors for Peace in the Middle East, and as a member of the boards and committees of several of the major organizations in the Jewish community. Yulia Zemlinskaya, PhD, is the director of Morashtenu: Our Heritage—The Charter for Democracy, an Israeli NGO. She earned her BA in sociology and political science at  Tel Aviv University and her PhD from the University of Manchester. She taught at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in the Politics and Government Department, serving as a lecturer and head of the Politics of Conflict MA program. Dr. Zemlinskaya’s expertise lies in the field of civil society and protest and Israeli society and politics, and she often provides commentary on the variety of socio-political issues concerning Israeli society in the Russian-speaking media. In addition to her work at Morashtenu, she is a teaching fellow at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Her forthcoming book is entitled Political Conscience in Israel: Draft-Resistance and Conscientious Objection (Aldershot: Ashgate).

Foreword

With the sweeping changes in the social, political, scientific, and religious structures of society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we are perhaps witness to the beginning of a new era in Jewish history. Although many aspects of Jewish communal life have been thought of as unchanging and traditional, the reality is that the Jewish community has been profoundly influenced by and in turn has influenced the recent changes in society. The revolutionary changes in travel, communications, information technology, and urbanization of our society, for example, have rendered everyday life almost unrecognizable from what it was only two hundred years ago. We drive elaborate technological marvels along a vast interconnected highway system and we fly across continents in our normal routine. We have begun to harness the potential of silicon and electricity to carry our voices and ideas to people across the world in a matter of seconds. The shrinking of both the physical and figurative distances that separate people from one another has undeniably altered our perception of our place in the global community. Furthermore, the migration of human populations from dispersed rural lands to crowded cities has created our modern society with diverse demographics and complex needs.

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The collective implications of these modernizations are no less relevant to the present and future of Judaism. As both a parent and an educator, I would argue that never before have we been so uninformed about the world in which our children will live. How then can we hope to prepare them adequately to prosper both financially and spiritually in a future we know so little about? The following chapters of Contention, Controversy, and Change: Evolutions and Revolutions in the Jewish Experience will attempt to address those questions by analyzing the important people and movements of the recent past in the hope of better informing us about what to expect in the near future. They will also explore the intersection between Jewish religious, communal, and social movements, along with their leaders, that has defined Judaism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Since the Diaspora began over twenty centuries ago, Jewish communal life has centered on the synagogue. The synagogue has formed the fundamental basis of religious observance in the Jewish community and in many cases served as a nexus for social action as well. Jewish communal organizations, apart from religious ones such as synagogues and schools, serve a variety of functions, including those that are internal to the Jewish community as well as functions that address external relationships with other people and communities. A number of compelling models are available for analyzing the structure and function of the contemporary Jewish community. The works of the late Daniel Elazar, Steven Windmueller, and others come to mind as providing necessary tools and perspectives for studying our ever-evolving community. In my estimation, there are certain characteristics of community that are particularly useful and central and I will focus on these factors in this essay. More specifically, one can examine the actions of Jewish communal life as potentially organized into two “ideal type” analytic categories: first, whether the focus is internal or external to the Jewish community, and second, whether the goals can be accomplished through advocacy or direct service, i.e., social and communal services. These two characteristics create a schematic for four different classes of Jewish initiatives: internally focused direct service and advocacy organizations, and externally focused direct service and advocacy organizations. An example of an internally focused social service organization, whose primary function is to provide care, shelter, and food for impoverished Jewish people, is the Ark in Chicago. This organization’s mission is primarily focused

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on helping the poor and is a paradigm of an organization that does very little to lobby, either internally or externally, or create a philosophical position. It produces indirectly positive public relations, both inside and outside the Jewish community, because of its help for the poor. It also promotes a positive social interaction among its volunteers and donors through a number of means, all of which combine to coalesce into a direct service organization for the internal community. The American Jewish World Service is an example of a primarily externally focused direct service organization. Their mission includes working to realize human rights and end poverty in the developing world. They provide financial support to both local grassroots and global organizations serving Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. While they do this by mobilizing both Jewish and non-Jewish American communities, they proudly identify as a Jewish organization with a primarily Jewish leadership. The Anti-Defamation League is an example of an externally directed advocacy organization. Advocacy, in the sense intended here, refers to action taken to influence public opinion and to build support for a particular cause or policy. Typical expressions include lobbying, letter writing and petition campaigns, rallies, public meetings, and similar actions. The ADL’s primary function is to look outside the Jewish community for evidence of prejudice and to use its communal organization to advocate for the Jewish people as a whole. The movement discussed later in this text, to save Soviet Jewry, is an example where the Jewish community looked externally to advocate for Jews living in the oppressive USSR. An example of an internally focused advocacy organization, discussed in several chapters in this book, was the World Zionist Organization founded at the first Zionist Congress under the influence of Theodore Herzl. This organization crossed political borders and was designed both to create an internal group that could advocate for Zionism, as well as provide positive public relations outside the community. However, its primary function was to organize the Jewish community to support Aliyah and the eventual establishment of the State of Israel. Almost all Jewish organizations, like the ones named above, have a component of intra-institutional social interaction that constitutes a segment of their experience. Even though the primary purpose of the organization may be

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social or community service, bringing Jewish or like-minded people together for a common cause is an ancillary goal. For many, the sense of community and shared purpose is a powerful binding force created by collaboration within these organizations. It is not surprising, considering the ubiquity of Jewish organizations devoted to service and advocacy, that the impetus for the Jewish social imperative, in addition to the more easily understandable ritual imperative, stems from the Bible. In Genesis 2:15, God tells Adam in the Garden of Eden that his role is to work the land and to guard it. This early commandment to build, maintain, and improve our surroundings as a primary responsibility of humankind has left a strong impression on the Jewish people. This goal of global social improvement has been a prominent theme throughout Jewish writings and history. While ritual has been rejected by some Jews as an unnecessary component of that paradigm, the altruistic desire has remained a core component of Jewish thought and action. In addition, concern for the future of the Jewish people has fueled organizational life and activism. Some of the major movements described in this volume are focused on initiatives driven by these forces. Zionism arose out of a philosophical and practical response to anti-Semitism and discrimination. At its core, it was the establishment of a framework to enhance the future of the Jewish people. Notwithstanding the Enlightenment and emancipation of many peoples in the past two centuries, racial and religious discrimination has sadly remained a component of most modern societies until recently. Although allowed to vote and in some cases accepted as citizens, Jews had continued to be viewed as the “other” in many societies. Even in the United States, until the early 1960s, restricted covenants prevented Jews from living in many neighborhoods. Sports clubs excluded them from membership and certain professions and schools had strong quotas limiting Jewish inclusion. These discriminatory practices played a role in shaping the structure of Jewish life by both uniting the various Jewish communities and by serving as an impetus for Jews to establish their own organizations, in which moral, social, religious, and recreational activities could thrive. The subsequent creation and expansion of the State of Israel, of course, represents the most extreme response to discrimination and is the most profound change in Jewish communal life since the exile in 70 CE.

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Controversy within the Jewish community has surrounded the concept of Zionism since its creation. For both religious and social reasons, a schism developed within the European Jewish community, shortly after Theodore Herzl engaged in activism and began building the political structure that produced modern Zionism. Some religious groups believed that human action without a revealed mandate from heaven should not replace divine intervention in the return of Jewish sovereignty to Israel. Others were more concerned about perpetuating the controlled environment that existed in some places in Europe, rather than risking religious observance and the communal structure by a move to Israel. Those early concerns persist among small elements of the Jewish community even today, but have been replaced on a moral and philosophical basis by a worldwide questioning of Zionism’s implications. The social and philosophical upheaval produced by Zionism’s emergence has exposed and provided insight into the core religious and social issues facing the Jewish people in the modern world. Furthermore, Jewish history provides many examples of divided communities struggling to determine the best course for the Jewish future, in addition to the Zionist and anti-Zionist groups, active in Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Similarly, we can use the same lens to understand the issues facing the Jewish people in biblical and historical events. The Bible describes Korach’s band, who challenged establishment values through communal organization. At the time of the siege of Jerusalem in 70 CE, factions for and against surrender to Rome were present and disagreed with each other. The Israeli War of Independence featured disagreements, not only between Jews and Arabs, but between different factions of pre-state resistance that were often violently opposed to each other, resulting in events such as the sinking of the Altalena. Thus, Jewish communal and organizational life, apart from direct religious observance, has been both important and essential to the creation of modern Judaism in all of its nuances. Despite decreasing occurrences of discrimination and the existence of many outlets for Jewish expression and participation in society, the strongest argument for the continued existence of Jewish communal organizations and activism is the unique success and accomplishment they continue to contribute to our global society.

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The roles of many Jewish organizations have evolved in the past few years to include audiences and services outside their original objectives. This expansion and diversification of individual organizations can be cited as one way in which our Jewish community is changing in this new era of Jewish history. This change can point to, among other things, the growing sense in the global Jewish community of confidence and an expanded role in the global society. This would allow us to see the old communal borders as more permeable than ever before. As one reads through this volume, one cannot help but admire the achievements of Jewish organizations and hope that they continue to thrive well into the future. Regardless of origin, purpose, and accomplishment, one might wonder what explains the powerful impulse to engage in the organizational development and participation highlighted in this book. I believe that there are two important factors that explain the richness of Jewish organizational life—goal oriented causes and externally or internally imposed isolation. In light of increasing anti-Semitism in Europe now, and the rising cost of education worldwide, our communal dependence on Jewish advocacy and service initiatives must continue to grow. As long as we work together to recognize and discuss the effects of our isolation in a meaningful way and continue to apply ourselves to our socially and ritually inspired goals, we can ensure a bright future both for our people and for all humanity. Alan Kadish, MD

Acknowledgments

The editors, Simcha Fishbane and Eric Levine, would like to thank Dr. Alan Kadish, president and CEO of the Touro College and University System, for his support of this project, Dr. Michael Shmidman, editor of the Touro College Press, for his wisdom and guidance, and the gifted authors who contributed their scholarship in order to make this volume a reality. Simcha Fishbane would like to express gratitude to the Touro College Library Director and staff for their devoted assistance in conducting research and obtaining materials essential to making much of this book a reality. We both extend our thanks to Miriam Gutherc Shajnfeld and Yael Simon for their editorial expertise and assistance. We would like to dedicate the book to the memory of Dr. Anthony Polemeni, treasured, respected and beloved colleague and friend. May he rest in peace. Eric Levine would also like to dedicate the book to the memory of his mother Gloria Levine, who passed away just prior to its publication. He would especially like to extend deep thanks to his wife Roxanne and daughter Tamar Levine, the next two generations of the Levine family, for their enduring love and support.

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Finally, we thank the copyright holders for granting permission to reproduce the following material in this book. Einwohner, Rachel L. (2003). “Opportunity, Honor, and Action in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943.” American Journal of Sociology 109(3): 650–675. Reprinted with the permission of the University of Chicago Press and the author. Farber, Roberta Rosenberg. (2010). “Israeli and American Organizational Responses to Wife Abuse Among the Orthodox.” Jewish Journal of Sociology 52: 7–32. Reprinted with the permission of the Maurice Freedman Research Trust Ltd. and the author. Fishbane, Simcha. (1995). “Back to the Yeshiva: The Social Dynamics of an Orthodox Sabbath Morning Service.” Pp. 123–134 in Ritual and Ethnic Identity, edited by Jack Lightstone and Frederick Bird. Waterloo, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier Press. Reprinted with the permission of the Wilfrid Laurier Press and the author. Fishman, David E. (1988). “Musar and Modernity: The Case of Novaredok.” Modern Judaism 8(1): 41–64. Reprinted with the permission of the Oxford University Press and the author. Kaplan, Zvi Jonathan. (2004). “Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum, Zionism, and Hungarian Ultra-Orthodoxy.” Modern Judaism 24(2): 165–178. Reprinted with the permission of the Oxford University Press and the author. Balakirsky Katz, Maya. “Exhibiting Dreyfus in America: The Jewish Museum of New York and the Soviet Jewry Movement.” Pp. 359–394 in Revising Dreyfus. Boston, MA: Brill Press. Reprinted with the permission of the Brill Press and the author. Kelner, Shaul. (2008). “Ritualized Protest and Redemptive Politics: Cultural Consequences of the American Mobilization to Free Soviet Jewry.” Jewish Social Studies 14(3): 1–37. Reprinted with the permission of the Indiana University Press and the author. Olson, Jess. (2007). “The Late Zionism of Nathan Birnbaum: The Herzl Controversy Reconsidered.” AJS Review 31(2): 241–276. Reprinted with the permission of the Cambridge University Press and the author. Zemlinskaya, Yulia. (2008). “Between Militarism and Pacifism: Conscientious Objection and Draft Resistance in Israel.” The Central European Journal

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of International and Security Studies (CEJISS) 2(1): 9–35. Reprinted with the permission of the Central European Journal of International and Security Studies and the author. First appeared at http://www.cejiss.org/issue-detail/ between-militarism-and-pacifism-conscientious-objection-and-draftresistance-in-israel.

The Problematics of Jewish Collective Action: Community and Conflict and Change1 Eric Levine Introduction C’mon people, now, smile on your brother, everybody get together try to love one another, right now.2

As the refrain from a popular rock song from the 1960s claims, the act of bringing people together, creating community, seemingly possessed a magical essence. Years later, a similar theme was again echoed in my own professional experience when I was the director of a community-based organization in New York City. A member of the board often used the word “community” in her comments at meetings. Watching her face and listening to her voice, one was struck by the almost mystical quality the word seemed to have for her. That experience led to a lifelong passionate academic and professional fascination with both the myriad meanings people associate with the notion of community and the social process of community organizing, or collective 1

2

The author would especially like to thank Marian Stoltz-Loike, Simcha Fishbane, and Roxanne Levine for their extremely important insights and constructive criticism on this chapter as well as acknowledge the suggestions made by various readers who provided helpful feedback. The song, entitled “Let’s Get Together,” has been sung by various artists. It was written by Chet Powers in 1963. The copyright is held by Irving Music, Inc. (BMI), renewed in 1991. Retrieved from http://www.oldielyrics.com/lyrics/the_youngbloods/get_together.html.

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action. I have been especially captivated by the subject of Jewish collective action, how Jews throughout history and in the contemporary period have organized their efforts to build communities, to manage organizations and institutional, cultural and religious change, to deal with internal communal conflicts, to manage their relationships to their external environments, and to respond to opportunities and challenges, especially those that are life- and community-threatening. Even more, I remain forever intrigued and inspired by how communities, institutions, organizations, and movements are created, mobilized, and sustained, and the heroic efforts often displayed by their leaders and constituents alike. Our rock lyricist may have been delightfully naïve in assuming that love alone creates togetherness. Perhaps it does take a bit of love for people, for both individuals and collectivities, to become actively involved in community building. But, building community, sustaining organizations, and mobilizing people is hard, labor-intensive, and often contentious work, although hopefully rewarding in the end. As such, this writer is fascinated by what I will call the “problematics of collective action,” or more specifically the problematics of uniquely Jewish collective action. Academic, professional, and personal choices can be dramatically influenced by early life experiences. I write as one deeply affected by childhood memories of the Civil Rights Movement and as a direct participant in the anti-Vietnam war, student, Soviet Jewry, and late anti-poverty movements. These personal experiences laid the foundation for this lifelong preoccupation and, as a consequence, the subject of contentious politics and social movements has become of special interest to the author. The purpose of this chapter is to discuss collective action, with a focus on community, conflict, change, and contentious politics. My goal is to offer a general overview of these concepts, drawing heavily from sociological literature, including a survey of the major trends in theory and analytical frameworks. This will be followed by an application of theory to cases of Jewish contention. Through this demonstration, the claim will be made that this expansive literature should be applied widely to specifically Jewish instances of collective action, deepening and expanding our understanding of these cases and thereby suggesting a rich future research agenda. These discussions set the basic framework for the chapters that follow, following which I will lay out the structure of the book and its organizing focus around Jewish collective action.

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The Notion of Community The study of community has a distinguished history in various fields of inquiry. Tracing the etymology of the word, Martinez-Brawley notes that the New English Dictionary on Historical Principles suggests that the term is derived from the Latin word communis, a noun implying “fellowship, community of relations or feelings. In medieval Latin, the word came to be used concretely in the sense of a ‘body of fellows or fellow townsmen.’”3 The Oxford English Dictionary cites communis as well, and also lists com + unus, meaning “together as one.”4 In a report published by the British National Institute for Social Work, a group known as the Barclay Working Party in 1980 defined community as a network, or informal relationships, between people connected with each other by kinship, common interest, geographical proximity, friendship, occupation, or the giving and receiving of services—or various combinations of these features.5 In her study of student and community organizing in the 1960s, sociologist Wini Breines conceives of community as a network of relationships more direct and more total, more personal than the formal, abstract, and instrumental relationship characterizing state and society.6 One of the classical works on the subject was written by the German social scientist Ferdinand Tönnies in 1887, entitled Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (Community and Society). In that work the author coined the term gemeinschaft to refer to his notion of community, where people relate to one another through mutuality, common destiny, close bonds, and personal rewards and obligations derived from close bonds. Relations are more intimate, more direct. This social pattern is often observed in families, villages, and small geographic units. In contrast, gesellschaft described society, where rationality is valued, the market directs trade and exchanges, and self-interest prevails over the sense of common obligations and duties. Relationships are distant and formal, occur in larger social units, 3 4 5 6

E. Martinez-Brawley, “Community,” in Encyclopedia of Social Work, ed. Richard L. Edwards (Ed.-in-Chief), 19th ed., vol. 1 (Washington, DC: NASW Press, 1995), 539. Georges Van Den Abbeele, “Introduction,” in Community at Loose Ends, ed. Miami Theory Collective (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), ix-xxvi. Martinez-Brawley, “Community.” Wini Breines, Community and Organization in the New Left, 1962–1968: The Great Refusal (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989).

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and are characterized by impersonal, contractual ties. Gemeinschaft and gesellschaft are the antitheses of one another.7 British social anthropologist Anthony P. Cohen claims that the standard ways of defining community in the social sciences have been based on an analysis of structure. These models, in his estimation, are off the mark. Instead, he approaches community as a phenomenon of culture, one “which is meaningfully constructed by people through their symbolic prowess and resources.”8 Furthermore, rather than formulating yet another lexical meaning for the term, he proposes that we seek to establish its use as a concept. The word implies that people have something in common with each other that distinguishes them from members of other groups. Community is that entity to which one belongs, beyond the bonds of kinship but more immediate than the broader society. It connotes a relational idea: the opposition of (that is, distinction between) a community to other social entities. For Cohen, the point of studying the nature of community is to examine that element that captures this sense of discrimination, or boundary, which marks the beginning and end of community. He is interested in what the idea of boundary means to people, the meanings they impute to it, and the symbolism surrounding community and boundary. Cohen’s work is insightful, instructive, and germane to this essay; we shall return to it later. The term community and the related notion of community building are commonly spoken but used very loosely. To be precise, there is no such thing as Jewish, Catholic, Latino, Irish, Italian, Asian, or African-American communities per se, although we use the wording for the sake of colloquial ease. For example, there is really no such thing as an Irish community of New York, or for that matter any other grouping, whether it be based around religion, nationality, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, class, or any other ascriptive or self-defining characteristic. But, there are, in fact, many communities comprised of such individuals or groups in the New York area. One would be hard-pressed to talk about a specific community of Manhattan, the Bronx, or Westchester, and all the more so one of Chicago, Los Angeles, Toronto, or Vancouver. All of these areas are far too large geographically and demographically and too 7 8

Martinez-Brawley, “Community”; Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Society (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1988). Anthony P. Cohen, The Symbolic Construction of Community (London: Routledge, 1993), 38.

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diverse to constitute unitary communities. But within these larger geographic frameworks one can speak about individual or local communities. It may then be possible to speak about an African-American community of Harlem, Crown Heights, or Mount Vernon, New York; an Italian community of Yonkers or Bay Ridge, New York; a Jewish community of Teaneck, New Jersey; a Latino community of Washington Heights in Manhattan; or an Asian-American community of the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and so on. One can even identify multiple sub-communities of varying sizes and constituencies within these settings.9 To illustrate, When government leaders refer to the Common Market as a “community,” they may be regarded as indulging in rhetoric: stating an aspiration to common interest which is all too obviously missing in reality. But when the inhabitants of a Shetland island talk of their “community,” they refer to an entity, a reality invested with all the sentiment attached to kinship, friendship, neighbouring, rivalry, familiarity, jealousy, as they inform the social process of everyday life. At this level, community is more than an oratorical abstraction: it hinges crucially on consciousness.10

The sense of community often possesses a spatial component, for generally people “feel” a deeper sense of community when they also share geographic proximity, such as in a neighborhood, a region, a town, a housing development, and so on. In my childhood in the Bronx, New York, our apartment building constituted a community, and that sense was especially reinforced when the tenants organized rent strikes against the landlord. But community need not always involve close proximity. Communities are not just geographic entities, but can be identified along functional, ethnic, gender, age, occupational, social, economic, religious, ideological, cultural, and many other lines of delineation. In fact, people often perceive that they are part of a community that transcends local lines. There are non-geographically-based communities, such as professional or alumni associations, and all manner of  9 Eric M. Levine, “Bowling Together: Community Building in the 90s,” Cornerstone 2 (1997): 69–77; Levine, “Everybody Get Together. . . Right Now: Reflections on the Meaning of Community and Community Practice,” Social Work Forum 34 (Winter/Spring 1998–9; published in 2000): 33–52. 10 Cohen, The Symbolic Construction, 13.

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racial, religious, or ethnic groups that go beyond geography. So, members of organizations living in different areas can feel a sense of community with one another although they do not share residential proximity (i.e., Touro College alumni, National Association of Social Work, NAACP, AFL-CIO, AIPAC, Orthodox Union, etc.). National organizational systems will often create regional or local chapter structures to simulate that closer feeling. Still, the point is that vibrant, close-knit communities generally require some way in which their activities and purposes can be carried out by constituents on a regular and frequent basis. To have sustaining power beyond the mere coincidental, communities need vehicles that can provide structure, regularity, stability, security, continuity, and shape to social life. In American society today, at least until recently, communal life has been for the most part synonymous with organizational life. Organizations come into being as people identify and seek solutions to their common interests or problems. Organizations provide the framework for regular, sustained contact among people. The sense of community consists of a fundamental social feature as well. Generally, people prefer to find others who are like-minded, who share similar values, attitudes, and lifestyles. When people speak of a strong community, they mean the extent and quality of social networks, social circles and relationships that exist, and the linking of people together: that is, social cohesion. Social circles represent the ways people structure their everyday lives, the ways people interact regularly. For our interests, cohesion represents the extent to which people interact with others in consistent fashion.11 The more interactions and social relations that occur among people, the greater will be the probability that people will be integrated into a community and the continuity of communal life sustained. Individuals cannot survive alone, nor can they sustain a lifestyle or set of values alone. They also cannot respond to perceived needs and interests without banding together to amass the resources and deliver the services required to respond to those interests. Individuals and organizations are reinforced in what they do by virtue of the fact that they gain the support of others. In short, the more local, the more regular and sustained the interaction, the more intense the depth of 11 Calvin Goldscheider, Jewish Continuity and Change: Emerging Patterns in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986).

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relationships, and the more basic the interactions among relatively homogeneous people, in terms of serving and meeting essential human needs, the stronger will be the sense of community.12 The strength of community within any given group is determined by the degree to which its members experience a sense of solidarity and a sense of significance. Finally, the word community does not refer to a fixed place or point in time—a community is always in a state of transition and motion, always in a state of becoming. Social life never stands still; human needs and social conditions are constantly shifting and changing. The idea of community really represents a continuum, from low to medium to high levels of “communitiness.” Consequently, the condition of becoming a “complete” community is never truly achieved.

The Social Construction of Community13 To this basic set of ideas about community, another critical dimension needs to be added. Community does not magically materialize out of thin air; it does not exist in and of itself. Indeed, the whole idea of community is a socially constructed entity. Community does not exist outside of people’s perceptions and collective definitions. It only comes into being as people are aware of it, are conscious of it, define it as such, and organize their lives around it. Human reality is socially constructed reality. The social construction of reality is the process by which people create their understanding of the nature of the environment around them. The social order is the result of ongoing human production. It is not biologically derived or otherwise given in our natural environment, and it exists only as a product of human activity.14 There is no single objective definition of reality, but only various and sometimes competing realities, each of which is defined by a different group, public, culture, or individual. As long as the definition of reality seems to work and is supported by a consensus, people will continue to regard it as true. As long as it works, or continues to provide satisfactory answers and explanations for the 12 Goldscheider, Jewish Continuity and Change. 13 This line of reasoning draws on the work of Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1966); Herbert Blumer, “Social Problems as Collective Behavior,” Social Problems 18, no. 3 (1971): 296–306; Cohen, The Symbolic Construction. 14 Berger and Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality.

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surrounding world, almost everyone in the society will take it for granted and will have little interest in pressing beyond it to anything deeper or more complicated. Reality just seems to be there, pre-existing and pre-arranged. The reality we encounter is merely the interpretation we place on the evidence of our senses, and people in different cultures may interpret that reality very differently. These realities are socially constructed and are relative to a particular people at a particular time and place. The same data or “facts” may have different meanings to different groups or peoples at different times and thus will constitute different realities. These different realities are usually expressed in different words and symbols which come to have a reality of their own. To Berger and Luckmann, language actually structures our thinking and beliefs in the ways we look at facts, so that we tend to forget the difference between those facts themselves, the beliefs we have about them, and the meanings we give them. Moreover, language is capable of transcending the reality of everyday life altogether. . . . Language now constructs immense edifices of symbolic representations that appear to tower over the reality of everyday life. . . . Language is capable not only of constructing symbols that are highly abstracted from everyday experience, but also of “bringing back” these symbols and appresenting them as objectively real elements in everyday life.15

Data or facts have no meaning in and of themselves until they are given meaning by a certain group or public in society. When the definitions fail to deliver meaningful explanations, people begin to question them and will be open to new constructions of reality being offered by various groups. People create cultural products (physical like cities, PCs, and baseballs, and nonmaterial, like language, beliefs, and theories). These products take on a life of their own. We are confronted by these products as part of reality and become so socialized that we forget that these are cultural creations and take them for granted as part of the natural landscape. Similarly, collective beliefs are also social in origin. They are shared and become part of social reality itself. Once beliefs are shared, they acquire an existence independent of the individual. Beliefs are created by individuals not in isolation but in the course of communication and cooperation; in routine 15

Berger and Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality, 40.

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exchanges, in conversations in bars, at parties, in meeting rooms, in trains, over the phone and through e-mail. Within circles of friends, acquaintances, colleagues, and family, events and information are discussed, interpreted, and commented upon. The categorization and interpretation that occur in these discussions transform the unfamiliar and uncertain into the familiar.16 Therefore, this process of defining reality and constructing meaning is social and consensual, the result of interaction among people. People behave according to perceived reality and whatever people believe to be real will be real in its consequences. Most of us believe and act upon that reality which we have learned to be true from family, friends, socialization, and the larger society. Berger and Luckmann similarly suggest that society exists only as individuals are conscious of it and that individual consciousness is socially determined.17 Community, too, is socially constructed and is a function of collective perceptions and definitions. It emerges and is sustained when individuals interact with one another, when they exchange and define shared concerns and issues, when they organize and work together, and when they share significant parts of their lives. The needs can be as broad as human experience itself: starting and sustaining synagogues and churches, establishing self-help groups and civic and communal organizations of all types, organizing neighborhood associations in order to erect stop signs, supporting the local school, building a community center, raising funds for the United Way or the UJA Federation, and so on. Thus, to reiterate the fundamental argument about the emergence of community, it does not exist outside of people’s perceptions and collective definitions. A sense of community becomes “real” only as people are aware of it, are conscious of it, define it as such, and organize their lives around it. For Cohen, various processes of modernity have worked to undermine the structural bases and the boundaries of community. These include such interrelated forces as industrialization and urbanization (and, I would add, suburbanization), the dominance of the cash economy and mass production, centralization of markets, the spread of mass media and the veritable explosion of mass information, the growth of the transportation infrastructure, and increased mobility. He asserts that as the structural bases of community 16 17

Bert Klandermans, The Social Psychology of Protest (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1997). Berger and Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality.

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become blurred, the symbolic bases of community take precedence. Thus, he concludes that community is a mental construct and “whether or not its structural boundaries remain intact, the reality of community lies in its members’ perceptions of the vitality of its culture. People construct community symbolically, making it a resource and repository of meaning, and a referent of their identity.”18 [Community] does not consist in social structure or in “the doing” of social behavior. It inheres, rather, in “the thinking’” about it. It is in this sense that we can speak of the community as a symbolic, rather than a structural, construct. . . . Community exists in the minds of its members, and should not be confused with geographic or sociographic assertions of “fact.” By extension, the distinctiveness of communities and, thus, the reality of their boundaries, similarly lies in the mind, in the meanings which people attach to them, not in their structural forms. As we have seen, this reality of community is expressed and embellished symbolically.19

Community and Collective Action The building, developing, and managing of community (and its organizations and institutions) is, in essence, a collective enterprise and a form and manifestation of what can be termed “collective action.” In fact, a sense of community is both an outcome of collective action and, along with other crucial elements, enables further collective action. Collective action of all sorts is facilitated by the existence of dense networks of relationships, providing the platform from which communal, organizational, institutional, and movement activity can ensue.20 As noted above, the act of creating community is a process whereby people come together to respond to shared interests and concerns. A great deal of what people wish to accomplish cannot be achieved alone, either by private, individual action or through markets and the modern instrument for aggregating private interest, the corporation. Only through some form of collective action can people realize important individual and group goals and produce the myriad shared benefits associated with social 18 Cohen, The Symbolic Construction, 118. 19 Cohen, The Symbolic Construction, 98. 20 William A. Gamson, “The Social Psychology of Collective Action,” in Frontiers in Social Movement Theory, ed. Aldon D. Morris and Carol McClurg Mueller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 62.

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life. . . . Collective action can involve advocating for causes or goals, recruiting others, and banding together to gain voice and representation before public institutions, corporations, and other bodies, or it can entail producing something of value that is shared beyond those who created it. Whether the goal is the creation of public parks or pathways, health care or human rights, environmental sustainability or electoral accountability, or information databases and communications systems, the need for at least two people to act together toward the establishment of some shared “public good” is an enduring fact of human life.21

Collective action encompasses a wide array of human endeavor, “from raising an army to raising a barn; from building a bridge across a gulf separating states to building a faith community that spans the gulf between races; from organizing a business cartel to organizing a small partnership to compete in a crowded market; from the food riots of revolutionary France to the progressive dinners of charitable New York.”22 In other words, collective action is any and all activity aimed at producing a collective good; that is, “actions taken by two or more people in pursuit of the same collective good.”23 At its most elementary level, collective action means the pursuit of a common objective through joint action—people working together for a variety of reasons, often including the belief that doing so enhances the prospect of achieving the objective. In that collective action covers a wide range of activity, it is useful to differentiate between the institutionalized and normatively sanctioned from those that are outside institutional channels, i.e., social movements.24 For Tilly and Tarrow, two of the leading scholars studying collective action, the term means coordinating effort on behalf of shared interests or programs.

21 Bruce Bimber, Andrew J. Flanagin, and Cynthia Stohl, Collective Action in Organizations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 1. 22 Gerald Marwell and Pamela Oliver, The Critical Mass in Collective Action (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 1–2. 23 Marwell and Oliver, The Critical Mass, 4. 24 Doug McAdam and David A. Snow, eds., Social Movements: Readings on Their Emergence, Mobilization, and Dynamics (Los Angeles: Roxbury Publishing Company, 1997); David A. Snow, Sarah A. Soule, and Hanspeter Kriesi, “Mapping the Terrain,” in The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements, eds. David A. Snow, Sarah A. Soule, and Hanspeter Kriesi (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 3–16.

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Football teams engage in collective action, but so do churches, voluntary associations, and neighbors who clear weeds from a vacant lot. When you go to school or to work for a big company, you enter an organization that is carrying on collective action. But most of the collective action involved occurs with no significant contention and no government involvement. The bulk of collective action takes place outside contentious politics.25

Community and collective action are intrinsically interrelated concepts— the coming together of community is a form of collective action and at the same time serves as a platform for continuing collective action. The notion of the social movement community (SMC), introduced as a tool for analyzing social movements, also helps to strengthen this link between community and collective action. Communities (physical or virtual), especially at the grassroots level, commonly provide the space for much social movement activity. Social movements contain more than just politically oriented organizations. Often, social movements are not actualized via centralized formal originations but mobilize, interact, and act through informal networks with fluid boundaries, flexible leadership structures, malleable divisions of labor, and informal structures inside communities.26 Drawing on the experience of the contemporary American women’s movement, Buechler conceived of the SMC as comprised of “informal networks of politicized participants who are active in promoting the goals of a social movement outside the boundaries of formal movement organizations.”27 Communities can be comprised of multiple kinds of existing organizations, cultures, structures, leaders, constituents, informal groups, cultural groups, alternative organizations, coalitions, communications, and networks of people. Movement activists involved in a range of causes live, work, and regularly interact in the community context. But, movements and mobilizations also experience cycles of high and low activity—ebbs and flows—and frequently enter into periods of abeyance: extended phases of quietude but not disappearance, in which they remain ready to resurface when favorable conditions arise.28 Thus, the SMC can encompass all types of extant, quiescent, and 25 Charles Tilly and Sidney Tarrow, Contentious Politics (Boulder: Paradigm, 2007), 5. 26 Steven M. Buechler, Women’s Movements in the United States (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990). 27 Buechler, Women’s Movements, 61. 28 Verta Taylor, “Social Movement Continuity: The Women’s Movement in Abeyance,” American Sociological Review 54 (1989): 761–75.

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potential collective action. As a conceptual and analytical tool, the SMC enables scholars to focus closely on the interaction between all the actors, relations, and physical/virtual spaces that grow and support movements.29 The idea of the SMC suggests that researchers seek to uncover the potentiality for collective action emanating from community and see its connection to the type, depth, and quality of communal cohesiveness and continuity.

Conflict and Change and Collective Action The community and collective action processes that have been described so far do not represent static or stable phenomena. The economic, political, social, cultural, institutional, and religious patterns of any given society or community are elements in constant motion, continual conflict, continual flux. A quite serviceable definition of conflict signifies that it is a perceived divergence of interest, or the recognition that interests are currently incompatible or cannot be met at the same time.30 For Tarrow, conflict between challengers and authorities is normal and not to be viewed as an aberration.31 Furthermore, social conflict and change occur at many levels of social life and at many levels of complexity. Conflict takes place in a host of arenas of human interaction: interpersonal, interorganizational, intergroup, and intercommunal. Despite commonplace assumptions and perceptions, conflict is an inherent feature of human existence characterizing all forms of social relations. The absence of conflict would constitute the abnormal. It can function as a positive force for change and growth, for people and communities, and need not entail anger, hate. or hostility. Many, if not most, conflicts can be and are often resolved amicably and, in fact, the bulk of collective action takes place outside of contentious politics.

29 Steven M. Buechler, Social Movements in Advanced Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Suzanne Staggenborg, Social Movements (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Staggenborg, “Organization and Community in Social Movements,” in The Future of Social Movement Research: Dynamics, Mechanisms and Processes, eds. Jacquelien van Stekelenburg, Conny Roggeband, and Bert Klandermans (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 125–144. 30 Dean G. Pruitt and Jeffrey Z. Rubin, Social Conflict: Escalation, Stalemate, and Settlement (New York: Random House, 1986). 31 Tarrow, Power in Movement.

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In everyday life, contention ranges from small matters like which football team we should support to bigger questions such as whether grandpa rightly divided his inheritance among us, his heirs. But it also takes place in chess matches, competition among retail stores, and struggles of defense lawyers with presiding judges.32

However, conflict can have deleterious outcomes if it is not managed or resolved constructively. According to Fligstein and McAdam, accounting for social change and social order is one of the enduring problems of social science.33 They write that: On the one hand, many aspects of social life appear extremely stable across the life course and even across generations. On the other hand, it often feels as if change is ubiquitous in social life. We do not necessarily see a contradiction between these perspectives. We argue that stability is relative and even when achieved is the result of actors working very hard to reproduce their local social order. That is, even under generally stable conditions, actors are engaged in a constant set of adjustments that introduce incremental change into constructed social worlds. Skilled social actors work to improve their position in an existing strategic action field or defend their privilege. To a degree, change is always going on.34

Change can encompass piecemeal steps that occur from contention on an ongoing basis, as well as more dramatic shifts that may come about as a result of social-movement-like action.35 While there may be periods of little apparent change—where the status quo goes relatively unquestioned and social patterns, conventions and structures are stable—other periods can be marked by rapid shifts that produce massive, sudden and dramatic change. In these situations, the old rules just don’t seem to apply anymore, and the creation of new meanings and cultural innovation are at their height.36 32 Charles Tilly, Contentious Performances (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 5–6. 33 Neil Fligstein and Doug McAdam, A Theory of Fields (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 34 Fligstein and McAdam, A Theory of Fields, 7. 35 Fligstein and McAdam, A Theory of Fields. 36 Wendy Griswold, Cultures and Societies in a Changing World, 4th ed. (Los Angeles: Sage Publications, 2013); Ann Swidler, “Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies,” American Sociological Review 51, no. 2 (1986): 273–286.

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Conceptually defining social change itself is a challenge as well, for its dimensions are many and variegated. There is no clear-cut definition of social change. Generally speaking, it is: Relatively wide and non-temporary, though not irreversible, variation or difference or alteration in the properties, in the state, in the structure of the social organization of a given society, that is, in the relations between the major social systems that form it—be they related to the economic, political, state, religious, or family spheres or within one of such systems or in one or more institutions among those linked to it, observable at a certain moment with respect to a previous one, considering the identity of the unity to which one refers and the variables taken into account to single out the variation [quoting Gallino].37

In a recent new theoretical direction, Fligstein and McAdam argue that institutions, organizations, and social movements share the same fundamental characteristic: collective strategic action. They propose a general theory of social change and stability rooted in a view of social life as dominated by a complex web of strategic action fields. Summarizing their view in brief, strategic action fields are the fundamental units of collective action in society. They are socially constructed “mesolevel” social orders in which actors, both individual and collective, interact on the basis of shared understandings about the purposes of the field, their relationships to others in the field, and the rules governing legitimate action. And all collective actors themselves, (e.g., organizations, clans, supply chains, social movements, and governmental systems) are made up of strategic action fields.38 In strategic action fields, actors with different resource endowments are always vying for advantage.39 As a result, strategic action fields are always in some sort of flux as the process of contention is ongoing. Fligstein and McAdam see fields as only rarely organized around a truly consensual, taken-for-granted reality. There is constant jockeying among actors, and conflict and change are 37 Marco G. Giugni, “Introduction: Social Movements and Change: Incorporation, Transformation, and Democratization,” in From Contention to Democracy, eds. Marco G. Giugni, Doug McAdam, and Charles Tilly (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1998), xi-xxvi. 38 Neil Fligstein and Doug McAdam, “Toward a General Theory of Strategic Action Fields,” Sociological Theory 29, no. 11 (2011): 1–26. 39 Fligstein and McAdam, A Theory of Fields.

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far more common in society than is often acknowledged. An episode of contention is a period of sustained contentious interaction between actors utilizing new forms of action, marked by a shared sense of uncertainty about the rules and power relations surrounding the field.40 To some observers, there has been a tendency among theorists to emphasize the continuity and durability of cultural systems and to underplay the role of people and organizations in negotiating and changing systems.41 In strategic action fields, actors seek to create and maintain stable social worlds by securing the cooperation of others. Strategic action is all about control in context. People are always acting strategically even in the most stable social worlds.42 One eminent scholar, Chantal Mouffe, goes so far as to claim (in her critique of deliberative democratic theory) that the primary reality of social life is strife. There is no rational, impartial solution to political issues. Further, there is an inevitability to conflict due to the ubiquity of power and the plurality and disputed nature of values. She argues that conflict can play an integrative function and she proposes that society seek to achieve what she terms an “agonistic pluralism.” “Agonism” constitutes a struggle among adversaries, as opposed to antagonists. An adversary is one with whom you share a common allegiance to democratic principles, but where there is disagreement on their interpretation. Where antagonism means destructive conflict, agonism seeks to reach consensus while embracing dissent, acknowledging difference and plural values.43

The Development of Social Movement Theory Hell no, we won’t go! Let my people go. Ha’am doresh tzedek chevrati (The people demand social justice)!

These are familiar chants, shouted in protest on behalf of compelling causes: opposition to the Vietnam War, support for Soviet Jewry, and the J14 Israeli tent 40 41 42 43

Fligstein and McAdam, “Toward a General Theory of Strategic Action Fields.” David A. Snow, Anna E. Tan, and Peter B. Owens, “Social Movements, Framing Processes, and Cultural Revitalization and Fabrication,” Mobilization 18, no. 3 (2013): 225–242. Fligstein and McAdam, “Toward a General Theory of Strategic Action Fields.” Chantal Mouffe, Agonistics (London: Verso, 2013).

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city protests in 2011, respectively. Historically, people have mobilized for institutional, policy, and cultural change over a range of political, social, religious, self-help, and social justice causes. And they have targeted governments, corporations, religious institutions, social attitudes, and more. Well-known causes in the United States have included movements and counter-movements to promote or oppose women’s liberation, Black Power or other ethnic actions, age, reproductive rights, civil rights, labor, immigrant rights, gay and lesbian rights, the environment, economic justice and peace, anti-globalization, various religious actions across all faiths, and many others. Research about social and political movements, strikes, riots, protests, insurgencies, revolutions, and other forms of contentious politics appear regularly in professional journals and academic literature. These works advance the systematic, scholarly, and scientific study of these phenomena, and provide a forum for the discussion of methodologies, theories, cases, and conceptual approaches across disciplines. The utility of this literature has been gaining wide acceptance. Indeed, McAdam and Boudet comment that scholars across a vast array of social science disciplines have turned to social movement theory to better understand the dynamics of conflict and change within their respective scholarly domains.44 Still, the field of social movement study is a fragmented one and differing theoretical traditions with differing emphases and foci have developed over time. The field itself is relatively young, at least in sociology, mainly emerging since the 1950s and as a defined field of inquiry only since the mid-late 1970s.45 While it is beyond the scope and purpose of this chapter to offer a lengthy review of the theoretical development of social movements and contentious politics, a brief survey appears below. In many ways, the nature of social movements and social movement organizations shares similar features with community and community organizing. According to McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly, there is no fundamental discontinuity between social movements and other, more conventional forms of institutional politics.46 It would therefore be useful to provide opening concepts, themes, 44 Doug McAdam and Hilary Schaffer Boudet, Putting Social Movements in Their Place (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 45 McAdam and Boudet, Putting Social Movements in Their Place; Andrew G. Walder, “Political Sociology and Social Movements,” Annual Review of Sociology 35 (2009): 393–412. 46 Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly, “To Map Contentious Politics,” Mobilization 1, no. 1 (1996): 17–34.

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and definitions of contention and social movements, which will be further elaborated on below. Definitions abound, and in one particularly insightful view, social movements are seen as collective challenges to systems or structures of authority: collectivities acting with some degree of organization and continuity, partly outside institutional or organizational channels, for the purpose of challenging or defending extant authority in the group, organization, society, culture, or world system in which they are embedded.47 They have change-oriented goals, exhibit a mixture of extra-institutional and institutional activity, and use both conventional and unconventional tactics. In an effort to sharpen the conceptualization of social movements and to advance our ability to both analyze and understand them in deeper fashion, Snow and Soule offer a series of basic questions that can be explored. For example, they suggest, what are the conditions and/or processes that account for the generation of mobilizing grievances? What specifically are the sets of contextual conditions that facilitate or constrain the emergence and flourishing of social movements? What is the character of movement participation; what are the determinants that influence who participates in social movement activities and why? How do social movements go about the business of strategically pressing their claims and dealing with the various relevant actors within their field of operation? Finally, what difference do movements make?48 Tarrow is widely recognized as one of the leading scholars of social movements and what has become known as contentious politics. The ensuing outline generally follows his framework.49 He dates the outbreak of the modern social movement to the eighteenth century and traces the origins of the theory of contentious politics and social movements to various classical theoretical traditions: Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Gramsci on the left, De Tocqueville, Michels, and Weber on the right, and to the recent writings of Skocpol. 47

Elizabeth A. Armstrong and Mary Bernstein, “Culture, Power, and Institutions: A Multiinstitutional Politics Approach to Social Movements,” Sociological Theory 26, no. 1 (2008): 74–99; David A. Snow, “Social Movements as Challenges to Authority: Resistance to an Emerging Conceptual Hegemony,” Research in Social Movements: Conflicts and Change 25 (2004): 3–25; David A. Snow and Sarah A. Soule, A Primer on Social Movements (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010). 48 Snow and Soule, A Primer on Social Movements. 49 Tarrow, Power in Movement, 6–31; Tarrow, Strangers at the Gates: Movements and States in Contentious Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 8–26.

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Contemporary theory developed between the world wars and especially in the post-World-War-II era, and four schools of thought emerged as the dominant models to analyze movements. In the period immediately following World War II, collective behavior theory emerged as scholars sought to comprehend fascism, Nazism, Stalinism, communism and other mass movements. By and large, these early scholars viewed social movements as manifestations of individual and social dysfunction, as a result of anomie, disorganization, and anti-social behavior. For collective behavior theorists, the social psychological aspects of mass behavior was a central focus of study. In their view, movements represented irrational mass behavior, appearing in the form of fads, crazes, gangs, riots, and other extreme manifestations, in reaction to societal strain, grievances, and both relative and absolute deprivation. The assessment of social movements changed dramatically with the 1960s and the advent of the civil rights, anti-war, student, worker, women’s, and other movements. Three basic theoretical approaches developed from the 1960s onward, and they still inform current research. A rational choice/resource mobilization paradigm explored organizational capacity and resources, while a structurally-rooted political process model examined insurgent consciousness, organizational strength, and political opportunities; a last approach sought to uncover the cultural and emotional characteristics of collective action. This constructivist or cultural approach drew on the earlier collective behavior tradition, and on cultural, social-psychological, framing, and collective identity themes as a counterpoint to an overly structural bias in the other models. The use of the term “social movement theory” commonly refers today to the synthesis of these three models—resource mobilization/mobilizing structures, political opportunities/process, and framing processes—that has become dominant over the past twenty years.50 However, theory development has continued apace and the main points from these schools have contributed to the emergence of a newer framework much in use today. We will return 50 Fligstein and McAdam, “Toward a General Theory of Strategic Action Fields”; Fligstein and McAdam, A Theory of Fields; Doug McAdam, John D. McCarthy, and Mayer N. Zald, “Introduction: Opportunities, Mobilizing Structures, and Framing Processes—Toward a Synthetic, Comparative Perspective on Social Movements,” in Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements, eds. Doug McAdam, John D. McCarthy, and Mayer N. Zald (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 1–22.

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shortly to examine this newest model, referred to as “contentious politics” or the “dynamics of contention,” as it strikes this writer as the most comprehensive and compelling framework for studying collective action and social movements available today. The first 1960s-era theory, the rational choice/resource mobilization perspective, suggested that movement actions are rational, adaptive responses to the costs and rewards of action. The perspective held that society at all times contains a sufficient amount of grievances around which protest might appear, thereby opposing overly psychological explanations for movement emergence. Instead, the basic goals of movements are defined by conflicts of interest built into institutionalized power relations. As a result, the formation and mobilization of movements depend on changes in resources, group organization, and opportunities for collective action. Scholars also claimed that centralized, formally structured movement organizations are more typical of modern social movements and more effective at mobilizing resources and mounting sustained challenges than decentralized, informal movement structures. Resource mobilization also placed emphasis on entrepreneurial professionals as key factors in social movement emergence and continuity. Finally, movement success is largely determined by strategic factors and the political processes in which they become enmeshed.51 A successor model, political process, primarily explored the structure of political opportunities, the level of organization within the population, and the collective assessment of prospects for insurgency. The political opportunity structure refers to the extent to which the external environment contains both the potential and the necessary elements that facilitate or inhibit collective action. Among the features of political opportunity are structural conduciveness, system vulnerability, the number of centers of power in the environment, its openness to new political actors, increased political enfranchisement, the availability of coalitions and alliances, the instability of current political arrangements, the presence of influential allies, and the repression exercised against the challengers to the power structure. Another key element 51 J. Craig Jenkins, “Resource Mobilization Theory and the Study of Social Movements,” Annual Review of Sociology 9 (1983): 527–553; John D. McCarthy and Mayer N. Zald, “Resource Mobilization and Social Movements: A Partial Theory,” American Journal of Sociology 82, no. 6 (1977): 1212–1241.

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in political process is organizational strength, representing the extent to which all kinds of resources, social networks, and organizational capacity (internal systems, infrastructure, and know-how) are available to be devoted to the movement. Similar to resource mobilization and rational actor models, indigenous organizational strength is built upon the existence or establishment of leaders, members, communication networks, and systems of incentives and rewards. This last concept is critical in order to fend off what is called the “free rider” effect, whereby people refrain from joining in movement activity because they feel they can benefit from the movement without being active.52 The last enabling characteristic, insurgent consciousness or cognitive liberation, entails the recognition by movement participants that they have the confidence, motivation, and capacity to take action. It refers to a transformation of consciousness and captures the subjective meanings people associate with their situation. In many ways, cognitive liberation is akin to collective identity, meaning construction, and framing processes, to which we now turn. Earlier, we noted that the social movement community provides the platform for collective action to be mobilized. Collective action is frequently embedded in communities from which people can derive meaning and identities that are critical for their lives and well-being.53 Moreover, movements are not merely carriers of ideas but are active sites for the production and maintenance of meaning and identity for all involved.54 Hence, the constructivist or cultural approach arose to recapture and reconceptualize the social psychological dimensions and the internal relational, interactive dynamics of movements. In this approach, the notion of collective identity materializes as a powerful analytical concept. It refers to the perception of a sense of “we” among members of the community, an interactive and shared definition produced by several interacting individuals who are concerned with the orientations of their action 52 Doug McAdam, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930–1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); McAdam and Boudet, Putting Social Movements in Their Place; McAdam, McCarthy, and Zald, “Introduction”; Tarrow, Power in Movement; Tarrow, Strangers at the Gates; Tilly and Tarrow, Contentious Politics. 53 Snow, Tan, and Owens, “Social Movements, Framing Processes, and Cultural Revitalization and Fabrication.” 54 Robert D. Benford and David A. Snow, “Framing Processes and Social Movements: An Overview and Assessment,” Annual Review of Sociology 26 (2000): 611–639.

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as well as the field of opportunities and constraints in which their action takes place. Collective identity consists of a collective consciousness that individuals are part of a single unit, that they possess a group sense, shared meaning and goals, shared expectations of achieving success and obtaining the collective good, and shared views of the social environment.55 Collective identity also encompasses (collective) actions that help to further demarcate the group as well as its interpretation of the problems it is addressing. Communities, causes, movements, and organizations frequently provide the context where actors seek self-realization and create meaning. Individuals will come together and function effectively if as a group they have collectively arrived at common understandings of a given problem and have defined their circumstances, have created a sense of group integrity, and have established shared goals, perceptions, strategies, and dreams. Through collective action people produce meaning, communicate, negotiate, perceive, evaluate, and make decisions. Consequently, the processes of the social construction (and, I would add, reconfirmation) of collective meaning, collective identity, and collective action are interdependent, mutually reinforcing, and function hand in hand with one another. The collective search for shared meaning is a powerful mechanism that ties people to the organization, movement, or community and strengthens their commitment to one another. Through constant interaction, common experiences, and dialogue, people create a shared definition of reality, beliefs, the larger social environment, and the agenda to be pursued, thereby creating and sustaining community. People not only come to understand each other’s definitions of shared situations, they define them reciprocally, live in the same 55 Debra Friedman and Doug McAdam, “Collective Identity and Activism: Networks, Choices, and the Life of a Social Movement,” in Frontiers in Social Movement Theory, eds. Aldon D. Morris and Carol McClurg Mueller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 156–173; Donatella Della Porta and Mario Diani, Social Movements: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2006); Bert Klandermans, “The Social Construction of Protest and Multiorganizational Fields,” in Frontiers in Social Movement Theory, eds. Aldon D. Morris and Carol McClurg Mueller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 77–103; Alberto Melucci, Nomads of the Present—Social Movements and Individual Needs in Contemporary Society, eds. John Keane and Paul Mier (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989); Verta Taylor and Nancy E. Whittier, “Collective Identity in Social Movement Communities: Lesbian Feminist Mobilization,” in Frontiers in Social Movement Theory, eds. Aldon D. Morris and Carol McClurg Mueller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 104–129.

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world, and participate in each other’s lives.56 Thus, shared meaning is constantly revisited and renegotiated. Culture, ideology, symbols, collective identities, and meaning construction play important parts in the origins and outcomes of community and any collective action its members may take.57 The presence of this group or communal sense of collective identity is a condition permitting several other processes to occur. It allows for individual and group calculations of costs and benefits of participation and action. These estimations take place within networks of relationships, whereby individuals interact and influence one another. Even the motivation to participate in communal and organizational life is not exclusively an individual level phenomenon. Although perhaps rooted in personal psychological traits, motivation is also constructed and nurtured through social interaction.58 Beyond the “mere” step of creating opportunities for people to come and work together is the ongoing attempt to frame the shared meanings and definitions that people bring to their situation. The concept of framing refers to the conscious and strategic efforts by groups of people to fashion shared understandings of the world and of themselves that legitimate and motivate collective action.59 It refers to the ways that the members of a social movement organization go about defining themselves, developing their collective identity, and developing their sense of purpose and vision. The idea of the frame connotes a mind-set, a way of interpreting objects, situations, and experiences to guide action by making events meaningful.60 Framing represents the search for meaning, the public presentation of it, and organization to achieve it. Berger and Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality. Hank Johnston and Eitan Y. Alimi, “A Methodology for Analyzing Frame Dynamics: The Grammar of Keying Battles in Palestinian Nationalism,” Mobilization 18, no. 14 (2013): 453–474; Aldon D. Morris, “Political Consciousness and Collective Action,” in Frontiers in Social Movement Theory, eds. Aldon D. Morris and Carol McClurg Mueller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 351–373. 58 Alberto Melucci, Nomads of the Present—Social Movements and Individual Needs in Contemporary Society. 59 David A. Snow, E. Burke Rochford, Steven K. Worden, and Robert D. Benford, “Frame Alignment Processes, Micromobilization and Movement Participation,” American Sociological Review 51, no. 4 (1986): 464–481. 60 David A. Snow and Robert D. Benford, “Ideology, Frame Resonance, and Participant Mobilization,” in International Social Movement Research: From Structure to Action, eds. Bert Klandermans, Hanspeter Kriesi, and Sidney Tarrow (Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1988), 197–218; Snow et al., “Frame Alignment Processes.” 56 57

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Meaning production is foundational to collective action and social movement activity, and, in truth, is also foundational to all human activity.61 The product of framing activity is referred to as a collective action frame.62 Collective action frames offer strategic interpretations of issues with the intent to mobilize people to action. An additional framing concept, frame alignment, refers to the congruence of individual and group world views, and the extent to which individual interests, values, and beliefs are complementary with the organization’s activities, goals, and ideology. Frame alignment is the way an organization formulates its messages in relation to the existing culture and traditional symbols.63 A typology of four frame alignment processes has been proposed to describe the process by which activists seek to construct the rationale to justify their activism: frame bridging, frame amplification, frame extension, and frame transformation.64 Frame bridging refers to attempts by an organization to reach out to populations which are sympathetic to its message but are not part of its current base of support. The organization attempts to interest these unmobilized potential constituents in its issues of concern. Frame amplification is the effort by an organization to generate support by interpreting its programs or causes in ways that demonstrate similarity between the values and beliefs of individuals and organizational interests. The organization seeks to clarify the values and beliefs of prospective constituents using selected issues, problems, or events. Frame extension refers to the situation when the organization is reaching out to people who are not part of a sympathetic pool of possible adherents, or when its programs or resources do not seem to be of relevance to potential members. The organization may expand its usual appeals to the public by including points of view or interests that are significant to people outside the organization but have been incidental to the organization until now. Finally, frame transformation occurs when the organization’s program appears as irrelevant or 61 David A. Snow, Robert D. Benford, Holly J. McCammon, Lyndi Hewitt, and Scott Fitzgerald, “The Emergence, Development, and Future of the Framing Perspective: 25+ Years since Frame Alignment,” Mobilization 19, no. 1 (2014): 23–46. 62 Benford and Snow, “Framing Processes and Social Movements.” 63 Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 64 Doug McAdam, John D. McCarthy, and Mayer N. Zald, “Social Movements,” in Handbook of Sociology, ed. Neil J. Smelser (Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1988), 695–737.

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antithetical to the views held by target groups. In this case, the organization may have to discard its values or interpretations in favor of new ones in order to gain support. This process means the re-making of the organization’s message and world view in order to make it palatable to desired prospects.65 Tarrow teaches us that entrepreneurial agents in social movements draw from existing mentalities and political culture to manipulate symbols in order to create frames of meaning that will mobilize others to act on behalf of movement goals. Social mentalities are popularly held values, beliefs, and practices about private life and behavior.66 Moreover, every policy issue has its own culture, generating a discourse that evolves and changes over time, providing continuous interpretations and meanings. Words, phrases, images, metaphors, and all sorts of symbolic devices are used to shape and influence this discourse. These elements always appear as clusters and, as such, present as interpretive packages.67 Movements are forever engaged in a symbolic struggle over meanings and interpretations, confronting the media, competition, authorities, elites, and others. Elsewhere, Gamson notes that every political theme that is in contention will be represented by sets of ideological packages and counter-packages as movements and opponents seek to control the public discourse.68 Finally, one more dimension of collective action warrants discussion, especially in the contemporary era, and has been identified in the literature as a powerful new theme for analysis. The emergence, broad availability, and ease of new technology creates new and previously unimagined modes of communication, community, and activism. The ability to connect to others via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, FaceTime, e-mail, and so on creates new possibilities for making connections, building community, mobilizing action, and perhaps innovating forms of community heretofore inconceivable, even “organizations”

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Snow et al., “Frame Alignment Processes.” Sidney Tarrow, “Mentalities, Political Cultures, and Collective Action Frames: Constructing Meanings through Action,” in Frontiers in Social Movement Theory, eds. Aldon D. Morris and Carol McClurg Mueller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 174–202. 67 William A. Gamson and Andre Modigliani, “Media Discourse and Public Opinion on Nuclear Power: A Constructionist Approach,” American Journal of Sociology 95, no. 1 (1989): 1–37. 68 Klandermans, “The Social Construction of Protest and Multiorganizational Fields.”

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without organizations.69 Recent scholarship has been examining various characteristics of digital communication and mobilization that have real-life consequences and implications.70 Many scholars have commented on the power and utility of new means of communication as a key element in the mobilization of the Arab Spring.71 They have also begun to explore whether internet-based communication merely amplifies and facilitates the emergence of collective action and social movements or creates new demand. Does online activity actually create new identities, new grievances, new impulses, and new areas of conflict?72 In an online book review dialogue among scholars about a recent celebrated book by Earl and Kimport73 on the power and impact of technology on collective action,74 Polletta assesses the Earl-Kimport claim that 69 Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody (New York: The Penguin Press, 2008). 70 Jennifer Earl, “Studying Online Activism: The Effects of Sampling Design on Findings,” Mobilization 18, no. 4 (2013): 389–406. 71 Charles Tilly and Lesley J. Wood, Social Movements 1768–2012 (Boulder: Paradigm, 2013). 72 Jennifer Earl, Katrina Kimport, Greg Prieto, Carly Rush, and Kimberly Reynoso, “Changing the World One Webpage at a Time: Conceptualizing and Explaining ‘Internet Activism,’” Mobilization 15, no. 4 (2010): 425–446; Freancesca Polletta, Pang Ching Bobby Chen, Beth Gharrity, and Alice Motes, “Is the Internet Creating New Reasons to Protest?,” in The Future of Social Movement Research: Dynamics, Mechanisms and Processes, eds. Jacquelien van Stekelenburg, Conny Roggeband, and Bert Klandermans (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 17–36. 73 Jennifer Earl and Katrina Kimport, Digitally Enabled Social Change: Activism in the Internet Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011). 74 Joss Hands, “Framing Digital Activism—On the Value and Limits of a Taxonomy of Mobilization,” Mobilizing Ideas (20 November 2011). Retrieved from http://mobilizingideas.wordpress.com/2011/11/20/framing-digital-activism-on-the-value-and-limits-ofa-taxonomy-of-mobilization/#more-333; Paul-Brian McInerney, “@ctivism: How technology affords new forms of mobilization, tactics, and movements #DigitallyEnabled SocialChange,” Mobilizing Ideas (20 November 2011). Retrieved from http://mobilizingideas.wordpress.com/2011/11/20/ctiv ism-how-technolog y-affords-newforms -of-mobilization-tactics-and-movements-digitallyenabledsocialchange/#more-335; Freancesca Polletta, “Maybe You’re Better Off Not Holding Hands and Singing We Shall Overcome,” Mobilizing Ideas (20 November 2011). Retrieved from http://mobilizingideas.wordpress.com/2011/11/21/maybe-youre-better-off-not-holding-hands-and -singing-we-shall-overcome/#more-348; Deana Rohlinger, “Point-and-Click Change? Understanding Social Movements in the Digital  Era,” Mobilizing Ideas (20 November 2011). Retrieved from http://mobilizingideas.wordpress.com/2011/11/20/pointand-click-change-understanding-social-movements-in-the-digital-era/#more-355.

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the Internet is ushering in a new repertoire of protest. In this repertoire, mobilizations are sporadic rather than deep-rooted and enduring. Protests flare up, gather huge numbers to the cause, and then fade away—sometimes to reemerge, other times not. More people participate than in earlier repertoires, and they do so for diverse reasons: because they care passionately about the cause or because they’re mildly concerned; because they believe that protest will be effective or because they just want to express themselves. Targets are diverse and issues are too. There are few clear dividing lines between politics and, variously, leisure, consumption, and popular culture: people may use the same tactics to protest the war in Iraq and the cancellation of their favorite TV show. And movement organizations are becoming obsolete: protests are often organized by small groups, “lone wolves,” or participants who never even meet each other.

Internet Communication Technology (ICT) provides two “affordances”: cost and copresence. Cost affordance means that activists can organize and mobilize more people with fewer resources. Copresence means that activists can coordinate activities across time and space. The creative leveraging of these affordances can transform mobilization in fundamental ways, in both the scale of activism and also its shape and character. Indeed, a single organizer can now mobilize huge numbers of people, reach previously unreachable audiences, and use new tactics, such as “denial of service” attacks on target servers. In this new digital mobilization era, we can now speak of “e-tactics,” “e-movements,” and “e-mobilization.” Ironically, two cases of recent mass movements (Arab Spring and the Occupy movement) have, in fact, generated extensive and intensive face-to-face interaction and on-site participation, along with electronic mobilization. New digital media have been vital to both movements, through blog entries, Facebook posts, Twitter feeds, and YouTube videos. They were used not only to spread information and coordinate logistics but also to build collective identity among protesters as well as external supporters. To Polletta, “digital media may foster a new kind of collective identity—a virtual one—that is in some ways more effectively mobilizing than the kind of collective identity forged in church basements and college dorm lounges by people holding hands and singing We Shall Overcome.” Similarly, these e-tactics helped to galvanize a much larger number of people supporting the Occupy protesters, who came to the protest sites, or donated online, or signed online petitions. These people shared a sense of collective identity with the protesters, one they have gained

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from ICT. Polletta reasons that digital media may make possible an imagined community that is in some ways closer to what supporters want it to be than what it really is, because the virtual character of a community can make it easier to project one’s aspirations onto it.

The Dynamics of Contention There’s battle lines being drawn. Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong. Young people speaking their minds, Getting so much resistance from behind. What a field day for the heat. A thousand people in the street, Singing songs and carrying signs, Mostly saying, “hooray for our side.” It’s time we stop, Hey, what’s that sound? Everybody look—what’s going down?75

Despite the voluminous literature and theoretical development that had been generated since the 1960s, by the early 2000s leading voices began to advocate for a new synthesis of theory.76 McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly claimed that the extant model focusing only on political opportunity, mobilizing structures, and framing processes had become obsolete. They also challenged the usual boundary between institutionalized and non-institutionalized politics. Furthermore, they asserted that different academic fields emerged and functioned in isolation: political science tended to cover normative politics, while sociology studied “abnormal” or unconventional expressions of politics. In fact, they asserted, there is a continuum between institutionalized and non-institutionalized politics including revolutions, social movements, industrial conflict, war, rebellions, terrorism, civil wars, strikes, interest group politics, nationalism, and democratization. These phenomena have common 75

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“For What It’s Worth,” David Frey, Ben Mcdonald, Stephen Stills, Scott Davis, copyright: 1967, Cotillion Music Inc., Life Of Rhyme Music Publishing, Dayspring Music LLC, Springalo Toones, Ten East Music, Richie Furay Music, Word Music LLC; retrieved from http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/buffalospringfield/forwhatitsworth.html McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly, “To Map Contentious Politics”; McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly, Dynamics of Contention; Walder, “Political Sociology and Social Movements.”

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causal properties, and rather than analyzing each type of mobilization in isolation, they argued for the comparative study of these forms of collective action.77 Instead, they have come to see the object of study more properly defined as the dynamics of contention or contentious politics: episodic, public, and collective making of claims by connected clusters of persons or major political actors, when at least one government is a claimant, an object of claims, or a party to the claims. If realized, the claims would be consequential and affect the interests of at least one of the parties. While the authors recognize that contention and claim-making can and are often directed at targets other than governments, their interest was in studying that interaction since governments possessed a level of power and coercion not found in the same way in other contexts.78 Contention, collective action, and politics overlap in contentious politics. Contentious politics means repeated public displays of worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment by such means as wearing certain colors, marching in disciplined ranks, sporting badges that advertise the cause, displaying signs, chanting slogans, and picketing public buildings.79 Whereas contentious politics represents interactions in which actors make claims leading to collective efforts in which a source of power/authority is the target, a social movement is defined as a sustained campaign of claim-making, using repeated performances that advertise the claim. Contentious performances include the expressions noted above plus rallies, demonstrations, creation of specialized associations, public meetings, public statements, petitions, letter writing, and lobbying.80 Now, movements do more than just contend: they build organizations, socialize and mobilize people, put forth ideologies, and promote self-development and a

77 Doug McAdam and Sidney Tarrow, “Introduction: Dynamics of Contention Ten Years On,” Mobilization 16, no. 1 (2011): 1–10; Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly, “Comparative Perspectives on Contentious Politics,” in Comparative Politics, Rationality, Culture, and Structure, eds. Mark Irving Lichbach and Alan S. Zuckerman, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 260–290. 78 McAdam and Tarrow, “Introduction: Dynamics of Contention Ten Years On”; McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly, “Comparative Perspectives”; Tilly and Tarrow, Contentious Politics. 79 McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly, “Comparative Perspectives”; Tilly and Tarrow, Contentious Politics. 80 Tilly and Tarrow, Contentious Politics.

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sense of collective identity.81 But, ultimately contentious politics centers on consequential collective claims that, if realized, would affect the interests of others.82 The model still drew from earlier approaches, notably acknowledging that contentious politics results from political opportunity (changes in policy, law, public opinion, elite backing, supportive coalitions, or new threats), mobilizing structures (such as social networks, established organizations, and resources), and framing processes (taking advantage of grievances, presentation of ideology, development of collective identity and group consciousness, and symbolic discourse). But now, as a consequence of the path-breaking work of Tilly, the dimension of contentious interaction and contentious performances expanded the model and set the stage for the next phase in theory development.83 McAdam, Tarrow, Tilly, and fellow travelers in theory have come to view contention as composed of mechanisms and processes with episodes of contention (and not isolated movements) as the units of analysis. Mechanisms are a class of events that alter relations among specific sets of elements in identical or similar ways over a variety of cases of contentious situations. Processes are regular combinations and sequences of these mechanisms; mechanisms compound into processes.84 This new model has arguably become a dominant analytic framework for the study of contentious politics today; yet, it is not without its critics, even from among its strongest proponents.85 Tarrow provides a cogent statement of contentious politics as a form of collective action, and it is worthwhile to cite him at length: Contentious politics emerges in response to changes in political opportunities and threats when participants perceive and respond to a variety of incentives: material and ideological, partisan and group-based, longstanding and episodic. Building on these opportunities, and using known repertoires of action, people with limited resources can act together 81 Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics, 3rd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 82 McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly, “Comparative Perspectives.” 83 Tilly, Contentious Performances. 84 McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly, Dynamics of Contention; Tarrow, Strangers at the Gates; Tilly and Tarrow, Contentious Politics. 85 McAdam and Tarrow, “Introduction: Dynamics of Contention Ten Years On.”

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contentiously—if only sporadically. When their actions are based on dense social networks and effective connective structures and draw on legitimate, action-oriented cultural frames, they can sustain these actions even in contact with powerful opponents. In such cases—and only in such cases— we are in the presence of a social movement. When such contention spreads across an entire society—as it sometimes does—we see a cycle of contention. When such a cycle is organized around opposed or multiple sovereignties, the outcome is a revolution.86

Tarrow introduces yet another consideration to the research of contention that is both conceptually fascinating and analytically powerful. He argues for the concerted study of the language of contention. Changes in contentious language emerge from critical historical moments. “During such episodes, people come together in conflict with others and constitute new collective actors through the forms their actions take, what they call them, and what they call themselves.”87 Thus, revolutions are not only critical political turning points; they are also linguistic ones, because they provide people with stories and language they then apply to other situations and add into everyday language.88 In sum, while organizing to produce social change is normally to be celebrated and supported, some movements can be unconstructive—even dangerous, such as the Weather Underground of the 1960s and 1970s, Neo-Nazis, religious cult movements, and racial supremacists, or extremist political and terrorist groups. At their best, however, social movements and other expressions of collective action and contentious politics not only have potential to produce needed change, they have unique capacity to bear witness and represent a moral response to a shattered world. I especially find the passion and visioning framed by collective action to be powerful and inspiring, as illustrated by the slogan employed in the J14 protests in Israel, aspiring for a brighter future, seeking greater equality, prosperity, democracy, and justice. Yet, for all the sensational, even romantic, media treatment and dramatic repertoire of public performances, social movements as a form of contention tend to be infrequent and most people never participate in them. There is even a tendency to exaggerate their prevalence and impact. In truth, the changes 86 Tarrow, Power in Movement, 16. 87 Sidney Tarrow, The Language of Contention (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 5–6. 88 Tarrow, The Language of Contention.

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sought by movements often happen, if at all, because of the interplay of numerous forces and actors, both conventional and unconventional.89 Still, movements in society at large and in the Jewish community in particular have produced noticeable impact and often serve as harbingers of change.

Conflict and Change and Collect ive Action in the Jewish Experience Conflict between and within individuals, groups, institutions, and organizations in the Jewish community and the emergence of factions, interest groups and parties should not be unexpected. Remarkably, consensus on many issues of concern is regularly achieved despite dramatic differences among organizations, communities, and constituencies. Jewish history is replete with cases of internal contentious politics, intracommunal tension, hostility, violence, and social, political, religious, and sectarian movements. Over the course of time, such movements of protest, dissent, schism, and new institutional and ideological expression have changed the course of Jewish history and altered the texture and the fabric of communal life. In addition to the many cases of conflict or movements focused on internal Jewish issues, other efforts have focused on external challenges, including those mobilized against occupying or oppressive authorities, for example Masada, the second-century rebellion against the Roman Empire led by Bar Kochba, the Chanukah and Purim narratives, and the pre-Israeli-statehood insurgency against the British by the Irgun in the 1940s, among countless others. As such, Jewish communal conflict and even communal and institutional schism are not new phenomena. Illustrative “internal” cases include the original schism with Christianity, the Pharisee-Sadducee split, the controversy between the Rabbinic tradition and Karaites that spread over centuries, messianic movements such as that led by Shabbetai Tzvi in the seventeenth century, and the emergence of Hasidism and the ensuing divergence between Hasidim and Mitnagdim (literally, opponents). Even today, cleavages, barriers, and hostilities among different Hasidic or Charedi (non-Hasidic ultraOrthodox) groups in Israel and America exist along ritual, regional, ethnic, and ideological lines. 89

McAdam and Boudet, Putting Social Movements in Their Place.

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In the last two centuries, in Europe, Israel, and America, conflicts have waxed and waned among and between religionists and secularists, Zionists and anti-Zionists, German and Russian Jews, socialist and capitalist Jews, political liberals and conservatives, American Jewish students and the establishment in the 60s, Israeli political parties, and left-wing and right-wing American Jewish groups regarding the nature of the State of Israel. In addition to the apparent ideological divergences fueling these hostilities, differences among these opponents often also concerned economic, regional, ethnic, urban-rural, linguistic, and other cleavages. And the nature of relations among Jewish religious groups in contemporary times has frequently been characterized by intense intergroup rivalry, tension and divisiveness, with increasing implications for overall communal fragmentation. These significant cases of conflict and factionalism are of interest both from the vantage point of social research and as a practical concern for communal planning and governance. Despite wishful thinking or nostalgic memories of unity, the Jewish community historically has been far from unified, and hardly monolithic. In the view of the sociologist Samuel Heilman, “One point . . . is beyond dispute: sectarianism, division, and dissensus have been a continuing element of Jewish communal existence from the beginning and throughout the centuries.”90 Jewish religious, political, and social movements throughout the sweep of Jewish history have been researched by scholars from a wide number of academic disciplines. But, while contentious movements outside the Jewish experience have received extensive scholarly attention, using the growing body of theory and methodology of contentious politics and social movements, there has only been limited use in Jewish scholarship of this specific literature to understand the uniquely Jewish cases of protest and dissent. It is my assertion that the literature devoted to contentious politics provides important conceptual, theoretical, and methodological tools with which to deepen our understanding of Jewish mass movements, as far back as biblical times and into the present. In principle, this methodology could be applied to the wide range of internally and externally directed episodes and cases of contention, as noted above.

90 Samuel Heilman, American Jewish Disunity: An Overview (New York: American Jewish Congress, 1986), 16.

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I am pleased to acknowledge that a growing number of scholars have begun to use these tools to analyze cases of Jewish contention. Recent research has examined the Soviet Jewry movement,91 the Women of the Wall,92 the Israeli peace movement,93 a range of resistance efforts in Israel,94 the Shas party in Israel,95 the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,96 the Arab Spring and its effect on Israel’s tent protests,97 the J14 protests,98 the Israeli settlement movements and Gaza,99 Israel and the 2010 protest flotilla,100 resistance during the Holocaust,101

 91 Shaul Kelner, “Ritualized Protest and Redemptive Politics: Cultural Consequences of the American Mobilization to Free Soviet Jewry,” Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, Society 14, no. 3 (2008): 1–37. See also his contribution to this volume.  92 Steven V. Mazie and Patricia J. Woods, “Prayer, Contentious Politics, and the Women of the Wall: The Benefits of Collaboration in Participant Observation at Intense, Multifocal Events,” Field Methods 15, no. 1 (2003): 25–50.  93 Tamar Hermann, The Israeli Peace Movement—A Shattered Dream (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Megan Meyer, “Organizational Identity, Political Contexts, and SMO Action: Explaining the Tactical Choices Made by Peace Organizations in Israel, Northern Ireland and South Africa,” Social Movement Studies 3, no. 2 (2004): 167–197.  94 Sami Shalom Chetrit, Intra-Jewish Conflict in Israel: White Jews, Black Jews (New York: Routledge, 2010); Lev Luis Grinberg, Mo(ve)ments of Resistance (Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2014); Tamar Hermann, “Do They Have a Chance? Protest and Political Structure of Opportunities in Israel,” Israel Studies 1, no. 1 (1996): 127–148.  95 Nancy J. Davis and Robert V. Robinson, “Overcoming Movement Obstacles by the Religiously Orthodox: The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Shas in Israel, Cumione e Liberazione in Italy, and the Salvation Army in the United States,” American Journal of Sociology 114, no. 5 (2009): 1302–1349; Davis and Robinson, Claiming Society for God Religious Movements & Social Welfare (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012).  96 Eitan Y. Alimi, “Constructing Political Opportunity: 1987—The Palestinian Year of Discontent,” Mobilization 11, no. 1 (2006): 67–80.  97 William A. Gamson, “Arab Spring, Israeli Summer, and the Process of Cognitive Liberation,” Swiss Political Science Review 17, no. 4 (2011): 463–468.  98 Zeev Rosenhek and Michael Shalev, “The Political Economy of Israel’s ‘Social Justice’ Protests: A Class and Generational Analysis,” Contemporary Social Science 9, no. 1 (2014): 31–48.  99 Tilly and Tarrow, Contentious Politics. 100 Tarrow, Power in Movement. 101 Rachel L. Einwohner, “Opportunity, Honor, and Action in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943,” American Journal of Sociology 109, no. 3 (2003): 650–675; Rachel L. Einwohner, “Identity Work and Collective Action in a Repressive Context: Jewish Resistance on the Aryan Side of the Warsaw Ghetto,” Social Problems 53, no. 1 (2006): 38–56; Jocelyn A. Hollander and Rachel L. Einwohner, “Conceptualizing Resistance,” Sociological Forum 19, no. 4 (2004): 533–554; Michaela Soyer, “‘We Knew Our Time Had Come’: The Dynamics of Threat and Microsocial Ties in Three Polish Ghettos Under Nazi Occupation,” Mobilization 19, no. 1 (2014): 47–66. See also Einwohner's contribution to this volume.

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human rights, borders and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,102 and conscientious objection in Israel.103 Hopefully, we will see further use of this literature; this book seeks to make its own scholarly contribution to the field.

The Biblical Exodus: A Demonstration Case in Jewish Contentious Politics Brief case illustrations will suggest how the tools of contentious politics and social movements can be applied. In the first example, the biblical narrative depicting the exodus of the nascent Jewish people in the Book of Exodus, chapters three through five, provides the dramatic story line. The story of the liberation of the Israelites from slavery at the hands of the Egyptians is both well-known and celebrated, historically serving as inspiration to the Jewish people as well as many other religious, national, or ethnic groups seeking freedom from persecution and hardship. While this narrative has received extensive treatment and has been the subject of much commentary and exegesis, not the least of which is the Passover holiday reenactment, here we will employ the tools available from the field of contentious politics and social movements. The short review that follows is not intended as an in-depth case study but as an example of the rich methodology that could and should be applied to historical and contemporary episodes and cases of Jewish movements. As we have observed, political opportunity refers to variability in the openness of the system to challenge. The political environment shifts, conditions change, or pivotal events create new potentiality for change. Such 102 Uri Ben-Eliezer and Yuval Feinstein, “The Politics of Borders and the Borders of Politics: Sovereignty and Autonomy around Israel’s Human Rights Abuses in the Separation Barrier Project,” Mobilization 14, no. 3 (2009): 357–374; Ilana Kaufman, “Resisting Occupation or Institutionalizing Control? Israeli Women and Protest in West Bank Checkpoints,” International Journal of Peace Studies 13, no. 1 (2008): 43–62; Polly Pallister-Wilkins, “Radical Ground: Israeli and Palestinian Activists and Joint Protest Against the Wall,” Social Movement Studies 8, no. 4 (2009): 393–407. 103 Dan Lainer-Vos, “Social Movements and Citizenship: Conscientious Objection in France, the United States, and Israel,” Mobilization 11, no. 3 (2006): 357–376; Yulia Zemlinskaya, “Cultural Context and Social Movement Outcomes: Conscientious Objection and Draft Resistance Organizations in Israel,” Mobilization 14, no. 4 (2009): 449–466; see also her contribution to this volume, originally published as “Between Militarism and Pacifism: Conscientious Objection and Draft Resistance in Israel,” Central European Journal of International & Security Studies 2, no. 1 (2008): 9–35.

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environmental swings could include new leadership, availability of influential allies, shifting alignments of power, or changes in the tendency toward repression in the system. The opportunity reveals itself in the ability of challengers to gain access to power or to manipulate the system. In the exodus case, a moment of political opportunity has developed with changed circumstances. Readers will recall that Moses had been living in the land of Midian with his wife and father-in-law’s family. The oppression suffered by the enslaved Hebrews had reached new heights back in Egypt, with the advent of a merciless new ruling pharaoh. Moses arrives as a new “movement” leader and is instructed by God to return to Egypt and lead his people out of slavery. He is reunited with his brother Aaron, who will serve as his second-in-command and public spokesperson. But even more importantly, Moses has received unqualified support and confidence from God, the quintessential influential ally. In other words, an emergent structure of political opportunity has created new possibilities for the Israelites. But as we have learned earlier, movements and contention require all manner of human, material, and technical resources. Here, too, contemporary theory sheds light on the exodus’s movement potential. Moses mobilizes the existing network of the Hebrew tribes. He gathers together the tribal leadership and announces that he has come, on God’s direction, to liberate the people. Moses and Aaron persuade them through words and signs to join the movement. The tribal leadership plays a critical role as they spread the word through their networks: mass recruitment is underway. It is no mean trick to persuade slaves that there is hope for the future, that they are to be freed, and that they now need to transform themselves from passive slaves to active agents in their own salvation. Another resource, perhaps more important than all the rest, lies in Moses’s grasp: the power of God. Moses knows that God’s omnipotence, transcendence, and omniscience are at his side. God’s promise and power are unmatched resources. Indeed, it is the staff of Moses that comes to symbolize the power of God in the eyes of all contentious parties and becomes the essential instrument to deliver the plagues that are brought down on the House of Egypt, in most dramatic fashion! Finally, God has directed the slaves to gather spoils from the Egyptian people. This confiscated property enables the Israelites to amass

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the material resources necessary to “fund” the mobilization, organize the escape, and support them in their early travels throughout the desert. Amazingly, the biblical text also suggests that Moses and Aaron attended to the tasks of sparking cognitive liberation and framing. Moses consciously puts forth collective action frames (i.e., a liberation frame, a chosen people frame), that are intended to mobilize the people. He assures them of God’s support and their future as a free people. He puts forth a vision of a nation destined for greatness in the land of milk and honey. He also attends to promoting a collective identity. Until now, the “people” are merely an assemblage of independent, unconnected, weak, timid, and insecure tribes. Through his framing activity he begins to forge a collective sense of “we” as a Jewish people. That is, he promotes a sense of cognitive (and physical) liberation, a sense of trust, faith, and confidence in the future. Along the way, he also assigns them concrete tasks to perform (prepare to leave, bake unleavened bread, gather the spoils, dab the doorposts with blood, stay in their homes during the final plague, and so on) that reinforce their active agency in the process. Interestingly, by the time the escaping slaves have reached the shores of the Red Sea, with the soldiers of Egypt not far behind, the text refers to the people as the army of Israel, quite a transformation from their prior slave status and mentality just a short time ago. Contentious politics also entails contentious interactions. Here, the narrative is even more explicit. The repeated meetings with Pharaoh are hostile, difficult, and ultimately, on the surface, unsuccessful. While the text does reveal that God has hardened Pharaoh’s heart to refuse all entreaties from Moses and Aaron, in order to dramatically set the stage for the plagues and further motivate the slaves to join in collective action, the interactions were vituperative and highly confrontational. Finally, all such politics entails a tactical, contentious performance repertoire. The ten plagues are demonstrable performances of increasing intensity and gravity. It is not until the final plague smiting the first born of Egypt that Pharaoh lets the people go. These performances contained a dual purpose: to force the hand of Pharaoh but also to clearly exhibit the power of God to the Jewish people and motivate them to take action. And before God passes over the land, killing the first born, the Jews are told to smear their doorposts with

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blood from the paschal sacrifice. While this command served to heighten the drama, it also functioned to identify who was in and who was out: individual and collective identity. And, in a final dramatic scene, Pharaoh unleashes the military to chase down the fleeing gaggle of slaves, only to be defeated at the splitting of the Red Sea.

Conservative Judaism under Siege A second, more contemporary, example further demonstrates the value and utility of theoretical models on social movements and contentious politics for cases and episodes in Jewish life. The discussion that follows is drawn from earlier research conducted by the author on organizational conflict within the Conservative Jewish denomination that resulted in the emergence of an internal dissenting social movement, the establishment of new organizations, and ultimately, denominational schism. The author had discovered this controversy while working at a Jewish communal organization devoted to conflict resolution among religious groups in the Jewish community. In that research, interview data and analysis of public and organizational documents produced a vivid picture of the conflict.104 Perhaps since its inception some one hundred years ago, strains and struggles have been apparent between the traditional and liberal wings of Conservative Judaism.105 In 1983, the second denominational split occurred when the Union for Traditional Conservative Judaism (UTCJ) was formed to advocate for a return to a more traditional approach in Conservative Judaism and away from radical change which was seen as leading the denomination in the wrong direction. The first schism in the Conservative denomination occurred when the Reconstructionist movement was established. Although 104 On the request of the interviewees, all identifying information was kept anonymous. The author has maintained a confidential tracking of all interview data; Eric M. Levine, “Communities in Conflict: Social and Religious Movements in Jewish Life,” doctoral dissertation, Wurzweiler School of Social Work, Yeshiva University, 1994; Levine, “Protest, Schism and Movement: A Case of Jewish Religious Conflict,” unpublished paper, 1999. 105 Marc Lee Raphael, Profiles in American Judaism (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1984); Marshall Sklare, “The Conservative Movement: Achievements and Problems,” in American Jews: A Reader, ed. Marshall Sklare (New York: Behrman House and The Center for Modern Jewish Studies, Brandeis University, 1983), 301–318; Sklare, Conservative Judaism: An American Religious Movement (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1985).

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the exact date of the secession is the subject of some scholarly discussion, it can probably be traced to 1940, with the creation of the Jewish Reconstructionist Foundation. This particular case of the UTCJ involves synagogues and their central coordinating bodies, which are basic social welfare institutions and the building blocks of Jewish communal life. Furthermore, the Union for Traditional Conservative Judaism represents an example of the fracturing and reconstitution of community, reflecting action taken by people in response to commonly felt needs and concerns. The case involves an incipient social and religious movement, religious movement organizations, conflict, and religious schism. Religious conflicts often represent the struggle over access to limited resources, such as power, constituencies, prestige, communal authority, control over decision-making, and funding. However, tensions in the religious sector can also imply conflicts of a different and unique nature, including those over ideological supremacy, values, and the conferral of religious legitimation.106 The breaking away of the Union for Traditional Conservative Judaism from the larger body of Conservative Judaism took place at a time when the Jewish community was increasingly confronted by a variety of religious and societal tensions. The process of secession by the traditionalists in Conservative Judaism and the eventual formation of the UTCJ can probably also be located in the inherent tensions and inconsistencies in the denomination. The emergence of the group occurred at a time when such issues as the changing definition of Jewish status and evolving roles of women in Judaism, including their right to ordination, assumed increased meaning. It was the latter issue that particularly galvanized this group. The numbers of disgruntled traditionalists had been growing during the 1970s and by the end of the decade, this faction claimed that the denomination was too obsessed with change, with radical departures from traditional interpretations of Jewish law.107 In fact, they became convinced that Conservative Judaism neither possessed nor 106 Lewis Coser, The Functions of Social Conflict (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1956). 107 Abraham J. Karp, “A Century of Conservative Judaism in the United States,” in American Jewish Yearbook 1986 (New York: American Jewish Committee and Jewish Publication Society, 1987), 3–61; Jack Wertheimer, “Recent Trends in American Judaism,” in American Jewish Yearbook, 1989 (New York: American Jewish Committee and Jewish Publication Society, 1989), 63–162; Wertheimer, A People Divided, Judaism in Contemporary America (New York: Basic Books, 1993).

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required a left-wing position because Reconstructionism, despite leaving, had actually triumphed within the Conservative movement itself.108 The faculty of the Jewish Theological Seminary ( JTS) had voted in 1979 to postpone indefinitely any decision to admit women to the rabbinic school. But, mounting pressure forced the issue, resulting in a 1983 action to finally admit women and approve their ordination. As a reaction to this move, those opposed to this decision and other changes met in New York City in 1983 and organized the UTCJ as an ongoing lobby within the denomination. Although the women’s issue had been the primary issue, it was no longer so. Activists had tried to take back the Conservative denomination, but failed. The group now broadened its program to represent the interests of those within the Conservative coalition who opposed what they perceived as a move away from tradition. Such issues as the training of women as cantors, religious standards at the denomination’s summer youth camps, ongoing cooperation with the denomination, specific decisions made by the Union’s own rabbinic leaders, the hiring of Union-affiliated scholars at the Seminary, and Union fears about Conservatism’s commitment to matrilineal descent, continued to widen and deepen the chasm between the Union and its parent organization. Subsequent organizational moves that took place in 1990 effectively completed the transformation of the UTCJ from a protest movement organization to an independent religious institution in its own right. In February of that year, the UTCJ announced that it would open in September the Institute of Traditional Judaism (ITJ), a new non-denominational rabbinical school. Then, in April, the UTCJ Board of Directors recommended that the name of the organization be changed to the Union for Traditional Judaism (UTJ). Two resolutions to alter the by-laws and change the name were passed by the membership at its annual conference in May. Finally, in 1992 the UTJ absorbed the Fellowship of Traditional Orthodox Rabbis (FTOR), a professional association of liberal Orthodox rabbis disenfranchised from the mainstream of that denomination. Technically, organizational schism was brought about by the creation of the initial social movement organization, the UTCJ. The name change plus these other momentous events completed the formal break and signified full social, communal, and organizational separation from the parent denomination. 108 Jack Wertheimer, “Recent Trends in American Judaism.”

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The ensuing discussion of the UTCJ will examine key dimensions of social movement emergence and continuity. While not employing the full framework of “dynamics” or contentious politics, this analysis will selectively examine salient features of political opportunity (i.e., changes in policy, law, public opinion, elite backing, supportive coalitions, and new threats), mobilizing structures (such as social networks, established organizations, and resources), and framing processes (i.e., taking advantage of grievances, presentation of ideology, development of collective identity and group consciousness, and symbolic discourse).

The Political Opportunity Structure As in the biblical case of the exodus, the structure of political opportunity played an important role in the emergence of the UTCJ. The trends toward liberalism within Conservative Judaism and its policy shifts related to ordaining women as rabbis and cantors presented a new threat which prompted activists to seize the opportunity, hone in on a focal point for protest, and galvanize an aggrieved constituency. The appearance of a sister institution, the FTOR, provided a coalition partner in advocating for a more traditional approach to Jewish law, policy, and practice. Finally, the broader Jewish environment was aflame in debates over religious traditionalism and liberalism. In the years surrounding the establishment of the UTCJ, issues related to “personal status” (“Who is a Jew,” marriage, divorce, conversion, intermarriage, matrilineal and patrilineal descent) and the nature of relations between the Jewish denominations in general were being hotly debated. The rise of the UTCJ was paralleled by similar tensions and organizational conflict being played out in other Jewish religious groups.

Pre-existing Social Networks It is also possible to analyze the UTCJ in terms of its available mobilizing structures, including social networks, established organizations, and resources. The networks around JTS alumni—the professional rabbinic body (Rabbinical Assembly), the youth program (United Synagogue Youth) and the camping movement (Camp Ramah)—facilitated the emergence of the movement organization. These networks epitomized cliques or sub-networks of people who shared important features of their lives, and proved to provide the web of

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relationships and the institutional arrangements around which to organize collective action. On a simple geographic basis, the strongest support for the UTCJ came from the east coast of North America, primarily the Greater New York area, Philadelphia, Boston, Ithaca, and eastern Canada. These regions possessed the greatest concentrations of traditionally-minded laity, rabbis, cantors, and educators associated with Conservative Judaism, and the UTCJ drew well from these traditional pockets. Even in the age of phones and faxes, close geographic proximity proved to be important for sustaining contact, enthusiasm, and involvement. Movement rabbis had a sense of how their colleagues lined up along the traditional-liberal continuum. Such knowledge came from acquaintance with others via youth experiences, rabbinic school contacts, or seeing fellow rabbis in professional contexts. Two rabbis recalled looking through denominational registration lists to find names of sympathetic rabbis whom they knew to be more traditionally oriented and “to see whether we would have any support for trying to pull the reins on things,” despite the denomination seemingly going in the other direction.109 The dilemma is apparent in one telling publication, as is the function of pre-existing social networks. For others, the sense of personal isolation was not only a function of denominational changes or policies. Often, the cause was the lack of a supportive religious environment with enough of a social circle sharing a basic life style and value system. Apparently, the UTCJ observed that many young people who were products of the denomination’s own educational, youth, and camping programs became alienated from their own community. These were Conservative Judaism’s best products, but as they became more knowledgeable and often more committed and religiously observant, the youth found that they were all too often more observant than their adult counterparts in congregational and organizational life. Conversely, the adult lay leaders were bewildered at the increased observance levels of their children, accusing them of “becoming ‘Orthodox’—an accusation which all too frequently became a self-fulfilling prophesy.”110 109 Interview no. 5. 110 Douglas Aronin, “The Dilemma of the Traditional Conservative Lay-person,” Cornerstone 1 (1988): 22.

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Resource Mobilization at the UTCJ The Union leadership was keenly aware of the need to gather and mobilize resources in order to fulfill their evolving goals. Much of the organization’s promotional literature evidenced constant calls for support in the form of donors, funds, members, leaders, and volunteers. Typically, written materials, especially newsletter columns, closed with a public relations appeal, presenting an upbeat sense of purpose and growth, urging donations, involvement, and moral and political backing. The appeal served as a sort of rallying cry to mobilize a broader constituency to respond to UTCJ’s efforts. Brochures were accompanied by pledge forms and return envelopes. It is not clear from public documents how effective such appeals were, but the steady appearance of these pitches indicated that the group was endeavoring to bolster its ranks and its financial standing. Financial survival was always a constant worry. Initially, in 1983, the entire organizational budget came from one benefactor. By 1992, he was still responsible for some 20–25% of the UTCJ budget, while the remaining 75–80% came from other fundraising and membership dues. There was little money in the bank, and even after the name change in 1992, the organization carried on with limited resources. Years later, in 2010, the organization filed for bankruptcy but returned to solvency some eight months later. Resource acquisition remains a constant challenge thirty years after the UTCJ’s founding. Frequently, the public relations pitches included citation of the various programs and services the UTCJ was offering or planning. In this way, the group was striving to show that they were activist and contributing to the betterment of the Jewish community. In a strict economic sense, resources sought and gained represent the input or demand side of an organization. Programs are just the opposite: they represent the output (production or resource expenditure) side of an organization. The spending of resources is obviously closely related to resource acquisition. Through its programs, an organization seeks to advance its purposes, advocate on behalf of its cause, and effect change. But, programs, activities, and services targeted to different constituencies also simultaneously function, if successful, to attract additional resources, beyond the simple, idealistic spreading of the message. In sum, both in fiscal reality as well as in the perceptions held by the UTCJ leadership, the issue of amassing and mobilizing resources remained an ongoing

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challenge throughout the organization’s entire life trajectory. The discussion now turns to another set of essential factors in the formative stages of this contentious episode and the development of movement organizations: mobilizing grievances, promoting collective identity, and employing collective action frames.

Grievances, Disenfranchisement, and Alienation It was apparent that the ongoing conflict within Conservative Judaism produced feelings of alienation among a number of activists in the UTCJ. The more they witnessed undesired changes in the Conservative system, perceived declines in worship and religious practice, and felt unable to affect the destiny of the denomination, the more they felt disenfranchised. After years of commitment to Conservative Judaism, UTCJ members no longer recognized nor felt at home in their communities. UTCJ leadership expressed strong feelings of being pushed out of the Conservative world after years of dedicated service, social ties, and commitment. In the recollections of UTCJ leaders, the act of being pushed out was seen and felt like an act of aggression, rather than a passive sense of growing isolation over time. They sensed the loss of their spiritual and communal home, and were no longer comfortable with ideological trends and denominational policies that had impact on the way that they structured and organized their lives. Then, once they organized to promote their specific view of Conservative Judaism, they were further isolated and stigmatized as threats to the denominational system, thus compounding the feeling of alienation. UTCJ leaders emphatically maintained that the denomination used pressure tactics to undermine, if not destroy, the UTCJ. Throughout the entire system, they claimed, potential supporters were constantly brow-beaten and threatened. People were absolutely terrified to outwardly demonstrate their interest in the UTCJ or its positions, for fear of losing their jobs or organizational stature. People were quietly involved with their heads down. We had the support of senior faculty, administration and lay officers. Some backed away for fear of job security, and not ideology, especially at JTS ( Jewish Theological Seminary). Most people we lost was due to this reason. The longer we survived, the greater the threat, the more frightened the powers that be became.

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It never dawned on the Conservative Movement that they should co-opt our program. They just fought and squeezed. Only when we started to achieve did they come back to us and say that maybe we should talk about things you wanted three years ago. . . . They pressured rabbis not to support us. Many are still afraid to lend their names. Lay office holders were threatened, others who were on the ascendancy were stopped. They used every bit of power that they had to try to crush this minor insurgency within the Conservative Movement and miscalculated. They slammed the door on us. The threats of job security are real, they threatened rabbis that they would fill their congregations if they were disloyal to the Conservative Movement. Rabbis feared their careers would end. You can’t get more abusive of power than that.111

The depth of the alienation that was expressed by the organizers and members of the UTCJ was very palpable. One prominent leader decided that in good conscience he could no longer remain associated with Conservative Judaism. Determining that his beliefs, needs, indeed his fate, could no longer be compromised, he courageously resigned from his positions at JTS, despite tenure and the great respect, if not awe, in which he was held. Clearly, the conflicts in the denomination were not merely esoteric intellectual exercises but had real-life, practical consequences. In the wake of the women’s ordination issue, the scholar wrote that “It is my personal tragedy that the people I daven with, I cannot talk to, and the people I talk to, I cannot daven with. However, when the chips are down, I will always side with the people I daven with; for I can live without talking. I cannot live without davening.”112 His words were carefully chosen to describe his feelings and to achieve the desired effect. But the use of the word “tragedy” was particularly powerful and telling. Further, he captured his own loss of place, of community. Due to radical changes in the denomination, he can no longer daven with the people he talks to, Conservative Jews. Conversely, the people with whom he cannot speak, Orthodox Jews, are the only ones with whom he can pray. Forced to choose, he would opt for associating with Orthodoxy, for at least there he can practice his Judaism. But this, too, brings sacrifice: the inability to communicate. Either path, he senses, leads to isolation. 111 Interview no. 4. 112 The Yiddish language verb, to pray, is pronounced dah-ven, accent on the first syllable; David Halivni, “A Special Perspective,” Hagahelet 1 (March/April 1986): 2.

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Frame Alignment: Branding the UTCJ The UTCJ and its successor, the UTJ, engaged in the tasks of frame alignment early on. The UTCJ took great pains to distinguish itself from its parent group in terms of norms, beliefs (theology or ideology), actions, policies or decisions, behaviors (ritual practice), and organizational affiliation. For example, frame amplification was in play when the UTCJ assailed the parent denomination for its lack of devotion to traditional religious practices, and for not doing what it should to encourage basic Jewish practices. By doing so, it pointed out the differences between the two groups. In addition to expressing its basic disagreement with its parent denominational system, the UTCJ promulgated the view that it was remaining true to the pure version of the religion, while the establishment had moved away from the correct practice and interpretation of the faith system. As we noted earlier, frame amplification is the effort by an organization to interpret its cause in ways that demonstrate similarity between the values and beliefs of prospective constituents using selected issues, problems, or events. One newsletter column announcing the ITJ’s formation continued the reinterpretation of the UTCJ’s essence for the public.113 Such notions as tolerance and open-mindedness are repeated, as is a reference to traditional Jewish living. The appeal to tolerance and open-mindedness is an interesting message. Here the organization is venturing into frame extension, reaching out to people who are not part of a sympathetic pool of supporters, expanding its usual appeals to include points of view or interests that are significant to people outside the organization. Ironically, this would appear to constitute a strong petition for support from the religious left or secular Jews, for whom religious tolerance was a cherished value. Indeed, at the time of these events, the religious left of the Jewish community (i.e., the Conservative, Reconstructionist, and Reform movements) commonly complained that the Orthodox world did not extend them formal recognition and religious legitimacy. The column also mentions for the first time a passionately halakhic lifestyle as a new formulation of outlook. Most significant is the elaboration of the 113 Ronald D. Price, “Good News for the Jewish World: A Rare Coalition,” Hagahelet 3 (Spring, 1990): 1.

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emerging transdenominational coalition, drawn from the camps of Traditional Conservatism and Modern Orthodoxy. This is an example of a movement using frame bridging to appeal to populations which are presumably sympathetic to its message but are not part of its existing base of support. This is one of the most explicit references to recruitment from and blending with the Orthodox camp. Another telling comment in the article alludes to the claim that the creation of the school filled an institutional void. Heretofore, according to the article, the UTCJ/ITJ coalition did not have an institution that articulated its approach to Judaism. Thus, it must be concluded that neither JTS nor Yeshiva University was seen as compatible with the group’s new vision and sense of identity. Indeed, as a result of the battles and the major changes that ultimately took place within Conservative Judaism, an early UTCJ leader was led to conclude that my frame of reference is no longer the Rabbinical Assembly or the Conservative Movement. When asked, I say that I graduated from JTS with embarrassment or chagrin, then I quickly add that it is no longer my frame of reference, so as not to appear as supporting what’s been going on in the Conservative Movement these past few years.114

The definition of the organization underwent transformation through the years. In order to survive with changing times, most organizations recognize the need to periodically evaluate their efforts and make course corrections. The leaders of the UTCJ consciously tried to articulate a changed identity for traditional Conservative Jews in response to the shifts occurring within Conservative Judaism, and to offer a reassessment of what they could hope to accomplish as an organization. Various documents attempted to reconstruct the organization’s history by introducing language that redefined or reinterpreted the group’s meaning and purpose, revealing an evolution in its efforts at frame amplification. In addition, the texts indicate a first foray into what we have identified as frame transformation, whereby an organization discards its previous interpretations and remakes its messaging in order to become palatable to desired prospects. 114 Interview no. 5.

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The new language sought to remind the constituency of what the group had always stood for, albeit in a revised form in line with changing circumstances and conditions. For example, a newsletter column written by the executive director discussed the organization’s name change, and in this document, evidence of attempts to characterize the emerging new collective definition/ identity are found. The name of our organization will now be the Union for Traditional Judaism . . . the community will henceforth be able to judge us based on our own actions and our contributions, rather than first measuring us against any particular movement. The transdenominational nature of the Union can now more easily flourish. Our name is a reflection of our identity. The Union for Traditional Judaism is the organization which teaches traditional observant Judaism to a community which today, by and large, is secular in its lifestyle. Our goal is . . . to bring Jews into the world of Jewish observance. Our desire is to create and nurture traditional communities which will be characterized by a lifestyle based on the values and observances of the Jewish tradition while remaining open to the modern world. . . . We hope that our name now makes us accessible to a broader constituency.115

Disagreement on ideology and theology also played a constant role in the conflict between the UTCJ and the main denomination. These subjects appeared frequently in UTCJ publications. The arguments very much revolved around the disparate world views of the respective factions. According to the claims of UTCJ adherents, as reported in the various texts, the Conservative mainstream was willing to place modernity and contemporary needs and values before the devotion to tradition, as if faith takes a back seat to current fashion. I am cognizant of the enormous pressures exerted upon us from different quarters to ordain women. But, a religious Jew, when faced with a confrontation between sociology and religion, must choose religion. That is the meaning . . . of accepting the yoke of the mitzvot [commandments]; even if it is uncomfortable, even if it is being attacked and ridiculed, and even if you have doubts about its ethical correctness . . . one does not abandon faith in God every time one has a doubt—every time one has a question. . . . The task is to reach out to heaven when it is cloudy; when no heaven is visible. Truly 115 Ronald D. Price, “‘Tov Shem Mishemen Tov’ A Good Name . . .” Hagahelet 3 (Summer, 1990): 1.

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religious Jews came out of the concentration camps strengthened in their faith, fortified in their commitment to Judaism. They could not afford losing everything.116

The author of the preceding words, the same leader quoted earlier who could no longer pray with Conservative Jews, had been the leading philosophical, ideological, and halakhic voice for the UTCJ since its inception, in addition to being one of the foremost Jewish scholars of the Conservative denomination and beyond. His reference to the concentration camps came from personal experience. He was a survivor of the Holocaust as a young man. His personal alienation and ideological differences progressed beyond an acceptable point and assumed practical ramifications. And, as noted above, after the ordination vote passed, he resigned from his faculty position and departmental chairmanship at the Seminary. A cursory look at the UTJ’s current web site would suggest that the site is not being updated regularly. Still, the language there reveals that the Union has completed its claim to a new image and has adopted a totally new frame. The UTJ is a trans-denominational education and outreach organization dedicated to promoting the principles of traditional Judaism. We support and encourage traditional Jewish practice among individuals, congregations, institutions, scholars and religious leaders across the spectrum of the Jewish community. Our programs and resources are used by a wide range of synagogues, schools, and other Jewish institutions. Our goal is to bring the greatest possible number of Jews closer to an open-minded, observant Jewish life.117

Furthermore, the FAQ page takes pains to differentiate the UTJ from either Conservative or Orthodox Judaism and to carve a unique niche for itself. Two consecutive FAQ headers read: What distinguishes the UTJ from the Conservative movement? What distinguishes the UTJ from institutional Orthodoxy?

116 Halivni, “A Special Perspective,” 2. 117 See the UTJ web site home page at http://utj.org and “Frequently Asked Questions” at http://utj.org/faq.

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Thus, as time passed, the protest movement, now institutionalized as the UTJ, used the process of frame transformation to construct a new image in order to hold on to any remnant traditional Conservative Jews, but now even more so to attempt to reach out to new constituents, new members, and new bases of support.

Collective Identity in the UTCJ From its inception, it was clear that a strong, consistent theme of collective identity was emerging. The UTCJ endeavored to define itself as an organization, to establish its credentials, and to shape and capture a constituency. The bid to identify the group was different from merely seeking to mobilize numbers and support. This was a distinct attempt to create a group consciousness, a sense of belonging, a sense of “we.” During the early phases of the organization’s life, any descriptions of UTCJ goals and objectives appearing in documents commonly referred back to Conservative Judaism and its institutions. These mentions served the purpose of firmly rooting the UTCJ within the denomination as loyal citizens, while also indicating their point of departure from the parent body. The early documents reflected the total preoccupation with the Conservative establishment, and suggested that the sole raison d’etre was to advocate for a particular kind of Conservative Judaism and save it from itself, to recapture the denomination and return it to its proper path. On another level, even as leaders sought to define and shape the purposes of the organization, the group also sought to attend to the social-psychological needs of its constituents, to provide various kinds of support for its affiliates and fellow travelers. Very consciously, the UTCJ saw its role as endeavoring to make the stay of those who remained in Conservative Judaism comfortable, to prevent them from being outcasts in their own denomination, and to provide at least a partial home for those who followed traditional Conservative Judaism. The UTCJ thus recognized that it needed to provide for the social and communal needs of its following. People needed to feel that they had a home, especially in a time of controversy and conflict. The provision of a comfortable place for people to share concerns and make plans together bonded people to the collectivity. For instrumental reasons as well, the process of bonding, of creating collective cohesion was crucial, for it then enabled the

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group to mobilize and pursue its political interests. Furthermore, especially in the early days, the forging of group consciousness and the nurturing of interpersonal bonds were integral to the process of defining the fledgling movement. Indeed, creating identity and cohesion was part of the group’s initial definition and purpose. The organizing of the UTCJ very much served the purpose of providing the estranged traditionalists a reference group and support network of likeminded individuals who experienced similar ordeals. The UTCJ answered a real need of people to share their stories, to describe to each other the problems they faced in their home communities. Fulfilling this need achieved a number of important purposes for the UTCJ. It provided a basic justification for existing. But, it also helped to identify and involve people in the enterprise, bonded them to one another, and helped to forge a group sense of direction and vision. What made it become an organization? A need to find other like-minded people, especially when you’re feeling alienated. You needed something for [strength or moral support] . . . [the UTCJ enabled them] to express [that] they were legitimate, because they were being told from the right and left they were not legitimate. They had a sense that there were a lot of people out there. People need to know that there are others out there and not to fear coming forward. If there is a vehicle people will align organizationally or ideologically and say I support that.118

Whither the UTCJ/UTJ Project? Since its original mandate was frustrated, the Union reinterpreted and redefined its mission and created new tactics and new goals. Despite these and other organizational moves throughout the 1990s and into the early twenty-first century, the UTJ has faded from the scene and, while still in existence, it has had little long term impact either on Conservative Judaism or the broader Jewish community. It continues on as a small religious special interest group with only a limited following. The UTCJ was certainly not successful in influencing the Conservative denomination, but perhaps that is placing an unrealistic expectation on the movement. The denomination did not halt its efforts to 118 Interview no. 5.

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ordain women, nor did it change direction on the many other concerns raised by the original UTCJ activists. Obviously, the UTCJ itself saw that hope was lost, for it eventually dissociated from Conservative Judaism. However, the movement was successful in another way in that it was able to create a meaningful refuge for disenfranchised Conservatives and Orthodox. In the final analysis, its greatest contribution may be that it provided an organizational and communal home for an alienated and searching constituency in the Jewish community. Ultimately, the community-building features of the UTCJ/UTJ enterprise were arguably its most meaningful. The UTCJ created a new collective identity for its following, succeeded in reframing the issues, and, in effect, removed its constituency from the conflict. At least for a time, the UTCJ created an entirely new community. Once again, the point of this quick review of episodes and cases is to demonstrate how the body of literature and theory discussed in this essay might be applied to many other chapters in the Jewish experience. Clearly, the analyses could go much deeper and further than those suggested here. Therefore, this writer repeats the call to the field to employ these tools and methods to deepen our understanding and appreciation of Jewish mass movements and politics, internally and externally directed, for the sake of enhancing our grasp of history and also to enable us to evaluate and respond more effectively to contemporary situations.

Organization of the Book This collection, published by Touro College Press, presents a distinguished group of scholars from the fields of sociology, history, medicine, political science, religion, and Jewish studies, reflecting rich scholarship and research with both historical and contemporary relevance and interest. The book’s title, Contention, Controversy and Change: Evolutions and Revolutions in the Jewish Experience, is intended to substantiate the point made early on that change is ever-present and inherent to social life and assumes many forms and manifestations. These essays explore the primary themes of social, political, religious, intellectual, philosophical, ideological, communal, and institutional movements and change in Jewish history. The discussion of conflict and change of all sorts revolves around the overarching theme of collective action:

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motivating, inspiring, mobilizing, or coercing people to believe, live, and behave in sanctioned and/or shared fashion. The essays explore collective identity, collective action, change, and contention of all forms over time in the Jewish community. Many manifestations have occurred throughout Jewish history: from out-and-out warfare to subtle inter-personal tensions, public debates, literary treatises, organizational power plays, hostile takeovers, grass roots mobilizations, shifts in communal policy and patterns of funding, and everything in between. And while it was noted above that much change can occur in revolutionary and dramatic ways, change need not be so and typically occurs gradually and evolutionarily. The book is organized around three central themes in two volumes. In the first volume, the essays revolve around two of the themes. The opening section, “Mobilizations and Contentious Politics,” examines a range of confrontations, disputes, controversies, and struggles engaging authorities or target audiences within Jewish communities as well as against outside oppressive regimes. Critical moments and turning points for communities are assessed. In the second section, the chapters analyze internal “Social Trends, Communal and Institutional Change.” These essays address evolving patterns within the context of the broader external environments in which Jewish communities have lived. Here we witness adaptations and shifts in communal policy and practice, institutional structure, and responses to social issues. The second volume is devoted to “Developments in Philosophy, Ideology, and Religious Practice,” and the notion of collective action frames and collective identity take on deep relevance. The authors examine expansions and transformations in social, religious, or political philosophy, along with new expressions and manifestations of religious behavior and other forms of collective action. These works demonstrate how interpretive Jewish idea frames are presented by communal leaders and thinkers in order to influence belief, behavior, organizations, and communities.

Conclusion With the heightened general public consciousness of contentious political movements in recent years, due to increased global terrorism, the Arab Spring, the Occupy phenomenon, and Israel’s J14 movement, this collection has great

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contemporary relevance and value as an academic contribution for teaching and research purposes, and potentially as a guide for organizational leaders and activists. Indeed, clear understanding of the theory and history of the process of community, collective action, and contentious politics is critical if future communal and institutional action is to be strategic, deliberate, objective-driven, and successful, rather than arbitrary, unfocused and serendipitous. The essays take on even more significance in light of recent trends in the Jewish community, particularly in North America. We may be witnessing the unfolding of a new era in Jewish life, with the emergence of a new civic culture. To Windmueller, a keen observer of the Jewish community, Jewish institutional life is undergoing a profound transformation to a different communal paradigm, moving from the parochial to the global, from fixed ideological, religious movements to trans-denominational institutional models, from ponderous multi-dimensional structures to efficient single-issue activities. New generations of Jews are moving past their parents’ traditional affiliations, creating their own expressions of Jewish belonging and engagement.119

Among the radical shifts taking place, he foresees the decline of the “legacy” organizational system and the rise of “boutique Judaism,” a shift from centralized governance to localized management, the end of ideology, closures, mergers, and consolidation of organizations, a culture of experimentation, and a culture of “free,” implying new models of affiliation and engagement.120 As we brace for the full impact of this transformational moment, the long term implications would suggest a far weaker, less-cohesive and well organized American Jewish community. The results of these structural and social changes will be profoundly significant as the Third American Jewish Revolution unfolds. In turn, a communal system experiencing economic dislocation and a demographic reconfiguration will inevitably operate differently and must in turn manage its resources more prudently. Finally, the impact of

119 Steven Windmueller, “The Unfolding of the Third American Jewish Revolution,” in In This Time and In This Place: American Jewry 3.0, by Steven Windmueller (USA: CreateSpace, 2014), 236. 120 Steven Windmueller, “The Emerging Jewish Civic Culture,” in In This Time and In This Place: American Jewry 3.0, by Steven Windmueller (USA: CreateSpace, 2014), 219.

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these new realities will recast the role and place of Jews within the larger society as well.121

There is a wonderful line hidden in Mishle, the Book of Proverbs (29:18) which aptly sums up this essay: B’ain chazon yiparah am, that “where there is no vision, the people become unrestrained,” disturbed or unruly. When people lose their sense of vision, purpose, and direction, their shared efforts become disrupted and disorganized, and they can easily lose their way. It is an ongoing challenge to nurture the process of community building and collective action; to empower Jewish, as well as other, communities to stay in focus and not become distracted from the pursuit of human liberation and social justice, from enabling individuals and communities to live meaningful, inspired individual and collective lives. In other words, “C’mon people, now, smile on your brother, everybody get together try to love one another, right now.”

121 Steven Windmueller, “The Unfolding of the Third American Jewish Revolution,” 238.

Opportunity, Honor, and Action in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 19431 Rachel L. Einwohner Introduction While the tragedy of the Holocaust is well known, some common perceptions about it are inaccurate. The haunting Holocaust images with which many people are familiar typically portray the Nazis’ victims, especially Jews, as individuals who submitted meekly to their fate by going to the slaughter “like sheep.” Such depictions have prompted many commentators to ask, “Why didn’t the Jews resist?” Others respond to such questions by pointing out that European Jews did resist in a variety of ways, ranging from individual escapes to collective armed rebellions.2 1

2

This research was supported by a School of Liberal Arts Dean’s Incentive Grant, a Library Scholars Grant, and a PRF Summer Faculty Grant, all from Purdue University. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the 2001 meetings of the Pacific Sociological Association in San Francisco, California, and at the Noon Lecture and Discussion Series of the Jewish Studies Program at Purdue University in September, 2000. I thank the audiences at those presentations, along with Andy Buckser, Sue Buckser, Jennifer Earl, Alisa Korc Einwohner, Ken Ferraro, Jocelyn Hollander, Judy Howard, James Jasper, Aliza Kolker, Bob Melson, David Meyer, John Noakes, Toska Olson, Robert Ringel, Richard Williams, and the AJS reviewers for their helpful comments. I also thank Alisa Korc Einwohner, Emily Fairchild, and Tom Lenz for research assistance. Direct correspondence to Rachel L. Einwohner, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Purdue University, Stone Hall, 700 West State Street, West Lafayette, Indiana 47907–2059. E-mail: [email protected]. Originally published in: American Journal of Sociology 109, no. 3 (November 2003): 650–675. Yehuda Bauer, “Forms of Jewish Resistance during the Holocaust,” in The Nazi Holocaust: Historical Documents on the Destruction of European Jews. Vol. 7, Jewish Resistance to the

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Yet while these acts of resistance may help dispel the myth of Jewish passivity, they still leave important questions unanswered. In fact, from the perspective of macro-level theory and research on social movements, collective Jewish resistance during the Holocaust is more problematic than inaction would have been. One dominant explanatory factor among these theories is the notion of “political opportunity,” a set of various features of the political climate thought to open the door for protest to occur. However, given a context in which Jews were isolated, politically powerless, and targeted for extermination by a powerful regime, opportunity-based explanations would argue that collective acts of Jewish resistance never should have happened at all. This prediction sets the stage for the following analysis. Instead of asking, “Why didn’t Jews resist?” I ask “Why did Jews resist?” My inquiry focuses on a single case: the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943. In January and April, 1943,3 coalitions of Jewish activists in the Warsaw Ghetto used a small arsenal of smuggled weapons and homemade explosives to resist the Nazis’ attempts to deport them to the death camp Treblinka. This case is of substantial importance to the study of social movements for two reasons. First, it extends current theory and research to a new terrain. As scholars are increasingly recognizing the limitations of a research literature based mainly on the study of protest in contemporary Western democracies,4 an analysis of collective resistance that took place in a nondemocratic context during World War II offers a useful test of the applicability of dominant theoretical concepts to a broader range of cases. Second, as stated above, this case presents an important challenge to one of the explanatory factors offered by these theories: namely, the concept of political opportunity. The dire conditions in the Warsaw Ghetto, along with the sheer strength of the Nazi regime, Poland’s widespread anti-Semitism, and

3 4

Holocaust, ed. Michael R. Marrus (Westport, CT: Meckler Corporation, 1989), 34–48; Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001); Marrus, ed., The Nazi Holocaust. The first uprising lasted only a few days, while the second lasted from April 19 until the destruction of the ghetto in mid-May. The ghetto revolts are distinct from the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, a citywide uprising against the Nazis staged mainly by non-Jewish Poles. Doug McAdam, John D. McCarthy, and Mayer N. Zald, eds., Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly, Dynamics of Contention (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

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Jews’ segregation from the rest of Polish society, severely restricted opportunities for collective action. An examination of the emergence of collective resistance under conditions that would seem to preclude it therefore helps clarify the relationship between opportunity and action and furthers our understanding of the dynamics of protest and resistance. Below, I argue that collective action in the Warsaw Ghetto emerged not in response to opportunity but to a lack thereof; in fact, it was only once the ghetto fighters became aware of the hopelessness of their situation that they began to plan for resistance. Opportunity and constraint cannot explain this case completely, however. The ghetto residents’ assessment of their situation as one in which their deaths were inevitable facilitated the construction of a motivational frame that equated resistance with honor and dignity. This case therefore shows how framing processes can compel action in the absence of opportunity, real or perceived. I begin with a more detailed discussion of the concept of political opportunity and its role in the emergence of collective action. Then, drawing on secondary sources as well as on primary data in the form of diaries and memoirs written by ghetto residents, I describe life in the Warsaw Ghetto between 1940 and 1943. My empirical discussion centers on the emergence of armed resistance in the ghetto and is therefore focused more on the events preceding the uprising than on the resistance itself. I conclude with a discussion of the implications of this case study for future theory and research on contentious politics in a variety of settings.

Political Opportunity and Social Movement Emergence: The “Classical Agenda” and More Recent Formulations Classical treatments of the role of political opportunity in collective action include political process theory5 and work on the concept of “political opportunity structures.”6 This research explains movement emergence in terms of 5 6

Doug McAdam, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). Peter K. Eisinger, “The Conditions of Protest Behavior in American Cities,” American Political Science Review 67 (1973): 11–28; Herbert P. Kitschelt, “Political Opportunity Structures and Political Protest: Anti-Nuclear Movements in Four Democracies,” British Journal of Political Science 16 (1986): 57–85; Hanspeter Kriesi, “The Political Opportunity

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various aspects of the broader political context in which insurgency takes place. Although political opportunity has come to mean a number of different things, including features of the electoral system, elite alliances, policy changes, and state repression, the concept generally refers to some restructuring of power relations that creates an “opening” for protest to occur.7 Similarly, research on revolutions points to state crises and conflict between states and elites as factors that make revolutions possible.8 Explanations like these are part of what McAdam et al. describe as the “classical social movement agenda.”9 While much of this theoretical work is focused at the macro level, some scholars also emphasize protesters’ subjective interpretation of their circumstances, arguing that protesters must be aware of opportunity in order for facilitative environmental factors to translate into collective action. In a wellknown quote, McAdam notes, “Mediating between opportunity and action are people and the subjective meanings they attach to their situations.”10 Structure of New Social Movements: Its Impact on Their Mobilization,” in The Politics of Social Protest: Comparative Perspectives on States and Social Movements, eds. J. Craig Jenkins and Bert Klandermans, 167–98 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995); David S. Meyer and Suzanne Staggenborg, “Movements, Countermovements, and the Structure of Political Opportunity,” American Journal of Sociology 101 (1996): 1628–60; Kurt Schock, “People Power and Political Opportunities: Social Movement Mobilization and Outcomes in the Philippines and Burma,” Social Problems 46 (1999): 355–75; Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Sidney Tarrow, “States and Opportunities: The Political Structuring of Social Movements,” in Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements, eds. McAdam, D. McCarthy, and N. Zald, 41–61; Charles Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978).   7 William A. Gamson and David S. Meyer, “Framing Political Opportunity,” in Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements, eds. McAdam, McCarthy, and Zald, 275–90; Doug McAdam, “Conceptual Origins, Current Problems, Future Directions,” in Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements, eds. McAdam, McCarthy, and Zald, 23–40.   8 Jack A. Goldstone, “Introduction: The Comparative and Historical Study of Revolutions,” in Revolutions: Theoretical, Comparative, and Historical Studies, ed. Jack A. Goldstone (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), 1–17; Jack A. Goldstone, Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991); Jack A. Goldstone and Bert Useem, “Prison Riots as Microrevolutions: An Extension of State-Centered Theories of Revolution,” American Journal of Sociology 104 (1999): 985–1029; Jeff Goodwin, No Other Way Out: States and Revolutionary Movements, 1945–1991 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).   9 McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly, Dynamics of Contention. 10 McAdam, Political Process, 84.

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Although he first made this claim in 1982, expressly synthetic treatments of macro- and micro-assessments of opportunity—what McAdam et al. refer to as “the attribution of opportunity”—are more common among recent theoretical discussions of social movement emergence.11 Some of this work even suggests that participants’ optimistic assessments may, in some cases, counteract structural limitations. For example, when describing the process by which activists “frame” or make sense of opportunity, Gamson and Meyer argue that activists “systematically overestimate the degree of political opportunity” in order to convince others to join their cause, and that “by influencing perceptions of opportunity among potential activists, organizers can actually alter the material bases of opportunity.”12 Similarly, C. Kurzman’s analysis of the 1979 Iranian Revolution argues that although a strong Iranian state precluded structural opportunity, the Iranian people still perceived opportunity to exist; their belief that the opposition movement was poised to succeed facilitated their participation and the government’s eventual overthrow.13 These scholars therefore suggest that protesters’ abilities to create opportunity—even if only in their own minds—can facilitate collective action. Finally, although the concept of opportunity has been used widely and has received a great deal of empirical support, opportunity-based explanations for the emergence of collective action are not without their critics. Goodwin and Jasper, who provide perhaps the most explicit of these criticisms, suggest that opportunity need not always result in collective action.14 Citing research that has found, for example, that state repression (generally thought to indicate a lack of political opportunity) can in some situations actually facilitate protest, they conclude that the effect of this factor “is not invariant, but historically and situationally contingent.”15 Goodwin also puts forth a “state constructionist” theory of revolutions, which argues that high levels of state repression may help construct or “incubate” revolution by 11 McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly, Dynamics of Contention. 12 Gamson and Meyer, “Framing Political Opportunity,” 285–86. 13 Charles Kurzman, “Structural Opportunity and Perceived Opportunity in Social Movement Theory: The Iranian Revolution of 1979,” American Sociological Review 61 (1996): 153–70. 14 Jeff Goodwin and James M. Jasper, “Caught in a Winding, Snarling Vine: The Structural Bias of Political Process Theory,” Sociological Forum 14 (1999): 27–54. 15 Ibid., 38.

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justifying action against the state and reinforcing the belief that there is “no other way out.”16 Similarly, Goldstone and Tilly suggest that situations of extreme threat—a factor they see as existing separately from opportunity— can facilitate collective action.17 In their view, “threat” refers to the costs associated with action (or non-action). They therefore argue that collective action can occur in the absence of opportunity, if the costs of inaction are perceived to be great. My inquiry is grounded in and provides empirical support for Goldstone and Tilly’s argument, as well as for Goodwin and Jasper’s critique and the theoretical discussions of the interplay between structural opportunity and the perceptions of such. As I explain in more detail below, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising took place despite a lack of opportunity, real or perceived. In fact, collective resistance emerged precisely because Jews recognized there was no way out of the ghetto. This awareness helped create collective action by allowing a particular motivational frame18 to take hold: one that equated resistance with honor. An analysis of this case therefore goes beyond recent discussions of structural and perceived opportunity to show how framing processes can facilitate collective action even in the absence of political opportunity. It also suggests that some of those contingencies to which Goodwin and Jasper refer can include genocide and the belief among participants that their deaths are inevitable, contingencies that fit Goldstone and Tilly’s concept of threat. Finally, as I explain in the conclusion, this case points to the need for empirical research on a greater variety of cases—especially those in situations of extreme powerlessness—to continue to refine our understanding of the emergence of collective action.

16 Jeff Goodwin, No Other Way Out: States and Revolutionary Movements, 1945–1991 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 17 Jack A. Goldstone and Charles Tilly, “Threat (And Opportunity): Popular Action and State Response in the Dynamics of Contentious Action,” in Silence and Voice in the Study of Contentious Politics, ed. Ronald R. Aminzade et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 179–94. 18 Robert D. Benford, “‘You Could Be the Hundredth Monkey’: Collective Action Frames and Vocabularies of Motive within the Nuclear Disarmament Movement,” Sociological Quarterly 34 (1993): 195–216.

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Case Selection and Data Protest and resistance can take many forms.19 Correspondingly, European Jews resisted the Nazis in many different ways. Individual acts of resistance included going into hiding, escaping from camps and transports, “passing” as Gentiles, sabotaging goods made in factories, burying and destroying valuables rather than allowing them to be confiscated, and even committing suicide.20 In the Warsaw Ghetto, similar acts of individual resistance were noted; in addition, residents set up schools for children and continued to observe religious holidays, despite a ban on these practices.21 Some in the ghetto were even more openly defiant of Nazi rules. For example, Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Warsaw Jew who survived the ghetto, describes in his memoirs how he and his brother risked beatings by refusing to obey the rule requiring all Jewish men to bow and doff their caps to passing German soldiers;22 other men went hatless, even in winter, to evade this law.23 While such individual acts of resistance are notable, my analysis focuses on collective Jewish resistance because it falls within the domain of social movement theory, whereas individual acts do not. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was not the only example of collective Jewish resistance during the Holocaust; Jews also staged uprisings in other ghettos, as well as in concentration camps, and they joined with non-Jews James M. Jasper, The Art of Moral Protest (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 5; Nelson A. Pichardo Almanzar, Heather Sullivan-Catlin, and Glenn Deane, “Is the Personal Political? Everyday Behaviors as Forms of Environmental Movement Participation,” Mobilization 3 (1998): 185–205; James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990). 20 Janina Bauman, Winter in the Morning: A Young Girl’s Life in the Warsaw Ghetto and Beyond, 1939–1945 (New York: Free Press, 1986); Jack Klajman with Ed Klajman, Out of the Ghetto (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2000); Alicia Appleman-Jurman, Alicia: My Story (New York: Bantam Books, 1988); Robert F. Melson, False Papers: Deception and Survival in the Holocaust (Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000). 21 Yisrael Gutman, The Jews of Warsaw, 1939–1943 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982); Marie Syrkin, Blessed Is the Match: The Story of Jewish Resistance (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948). 22 Wladyslaw Szpilman, The Pianist: The Extraordinary True Story of One Man’s Survival in Warsaw, 1939–1945 (New York: Picador USA, 1999), 49. 23 Yisrael Gutman, Resistance: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1994), 125. 19

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in broader resistance movements throughout Europe.24 However, the Warsaw case is worthy of study for several reasons. First, this case is of great symbolic importance as the best-known example of collective Jewish resistance against the Nazis; indeed, Poznanski refers to the Warsaw case as the “paradigm of Jewish resistance.”25 It is also notable that Israel’s national day of Holocaust remembrance, Yom Hashoah, is held on the day recognized as the anniversary of the uprising.26 Second, the case is quite well documented, more so than most other cases of collective Jewish resistance. A large array of data, such as writings contained in diaries and letters that were recovered from the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto, allow historians and other scholars to produce a number of secondary sources. This paper is part of a broader analysis that draws on secondary sources, as well as on primary data from the famous Oneg Shabbat archives and from published diaries and memoirs written by Warsaw Ghetto residents.27 My description of the ghetto and uprising is not meant to be historically exhaustive.28 Instead, I use this case to illustrate how collective action can take place in the absence of political opportunity. Whereas C. Kurzman argues that studies of opportunity are best served by analyses of “mismatched” cases, Meir Grubsztein, ed., Jewish Resistance during the Holocaust: Proceedings of the Conference on Manifestations of Jewish Resistance ( Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1971); Marrus, ed., The Nazi Holocaust. 25 Renée Poznanski, “Reflections on Jewish Resistance and Resistants in France,” Jewish Social Studies 2 (1995): 128. 26 The April 1943 uprising actually began on the first day of Passover, the fifteenth day of the month of Nisan in the Jewish calendar. Yom Hashoah is the twenty-seventh of Nisan, but is recognized as the anniversary of the uprising. 27 The Oneg Shabbat archives, which contain underground newspapers, letters, and diaries, as well as reports on ghetto life, were organized by Emmanuel Ringelblum, a historian and ghetto resident who perished in 1944. The term Oneg Shabbat literally means “joy of the sabbath” and refers to a celebration held at the end of Sabbath services. During the time of the ghetto, when political meetings were expressly forbidden, Ringelblum and his archive workers used Oneg Shabbat as a code term for their activities. The materials they collected were placed in milk cans and buried in several locations in the ghetto. Although only a portion of the original archives survived, those that have been recovered are still invaluable for describing life in the ghetto. Yisrael Gutman, “The Genesis of the Resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto,” in The Nazi Holocaust, ed. Marrus, 118–59; Gutman, Resistance, 259. 28 For more detailed accounts, see Reuben Ainsztein, The Warsaw Ghetto Revolt (New York: Holocaust Library, 1979); Gutman, The Jews of Warsaw; Gutman, Resistance; Dan Kurzman, The Bravest Battle: The Twenty-eight Days of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (New York: Da Capo Press, 1993). 24

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or those whose levels of structural opportunity do not match participants’ perceptions of opportunity,29 my analysis focuses on a case with “matched” levels of opportunity. However, I argue that an examination of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is useful to social movement studies because it represents a case of collective action that took place despite a lack of opportunity—real or perceived—and therefore runs counter to what most research predicts. Finally, although I present a single case, my analysis is implicitly comparative; it employs what Bonnell calls an “illustrative” use of comparison, which “focuses on correspondences between a unit or units of analysis and a theory or concept.”30 I also use this case to speculate that the factors that facilitated the emergence of collective resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto may also operate in other contexts. At the same time, however, I recognize that there is much debate about the uniqueness of the Holocaust and the extent to which it may be compared to other settings.31 Some scholars32 argue that the Holocaust is incomparable and unique, whereas others believe that it may be compared to other cases.33 My position is more in line with the latter group of scholars, most of whom undertake comparative studies of genocide. To their work, I add that collective resistance during the Holocaust may be compared to collective resistance in other contexts. However, by taking this position, I do not mean to diminish in any way the profound tragedy of the Holocaust. I argue simply that the fact that resistance happened under such unparalleled conditions is of great importance 29 Kurzman, “Structural Opportunity.” 30 Victoria E. Bonnell, “The Uses of Theory, Concepts and Comparison in Historical Sociology,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 22 (1980): 171. 31 Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust; Judith Gerson, “‘In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd’: Questions of Comparison and Generalizability in Holocaust Memoirs,” paper presented at the Conference on Sociological Perspectives on the Holocaust and Post-Holocaust Jewish Life, Rutgers University (October 2001); Robert F. Melson, Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Alan S. Rosenbaum, ed., Is the Holocaust Unique? 2d ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2001). 32 Steven T. Katz, “The Uniqueness of the Holocaust: The Historical Dimension,” in Is the Holocaust Unique? 2nd ed., ed. Alan S. Rosenbaum (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001), 49–68; Deborah E. Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (New York: Free Press, 1993). 33 Melson, Revolution and Genocide; Robert F. Melson, “The Armenian Genocide as Precursor and Prototype of Twentieth-Century Genocide,” in Is the Holocaust Unique?, ed. Alan S. Rosenbaum, 119–31.

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to the study of collective action and may help to enhance our understanding of protest and resistance in other settings.

The Warsaw Ghetto, 1940–43 Following Germany’s infamous blitzkrieg invasion in September, 1939, Poland was divided into three sections. The eastern region became Russian territory, while the two remaining sections were occupied by Germany. Of these, the northern and western regions became part of the Reich, and the remaining territory—which included Warsaw—became known as the General Government.34 Although Hitler’s Final Solution for European Jews had not yet been codified, Jews living in the General Government were still subject to Nazi repression from the beginning of the occupation. Jews were forbidden to own businesses or work in certain occupations (usually traditionally Jewish occupations, such as textile work); they also had to obey curfews and were not allowed to possess certain valuables (e.g., furs). After December 1, 1939, each Jew in the General Government over the age of ten was also required to display his or her Jewish identity in the form of a white armband imprinted with a blue Star of David.35 In addition to these formalized edicts, Jews were frequently beaten on the streets, rounded up for forced labor, and coerced at gunpoint to perform humiliating acts such as dancing naked or cleaning officers’ quarters using their own undergarments as cleaning cloths. Religious Jewish men were particular targets of Nazi brutality and often had their beards cut, burned, or torn from their faces.36 By the end of September, 1939, the Nazis also began planning for the ghettoization of Polish Jews. In accordance with Nazi ideology, the Reich was to be judenfrei or judenrein (free of Jews); therefore, Polish Jews living in the region that had been annexed by Germany were either murdered or deported to the General Government. Within the General Government, Jews from the countryside and smaller towns were relocated to the larger 34 Gutman, The Jews of Warsaw, 10–12. 35 Ibid., 29. 36 Ainsztein, The Warsaw Ghetto Revolt; Alexander Donat, The Holocaust Kingdom: A Memoir (New York: Holocaust Library, 1978); Klajman, Out of the Ghetto; Gutman, The Jews of Warsaw; Gutman, Resistance.

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cities where they were ghettoized, or forcibly segregated from the rest of the Polish population and confined to sealed (i.e., walled-off ) areas.37 The Warsaw Ghetto was decreed on October 12, 1940, and sealed a month later, on November 16.38

Life in the ghetto The end of 1940 found Warsaw Jews confined to a 1.36–square-mile area that was surrounded by a ten-foot wall topped with barbed wire and broken glass.39 Within the ghetto there was considerable crowding. About 30% of the city’s population was forced to reside in 2.4% of the city’s area,40 and when the ghetto population reached its peak of 500,000 in the summer of 1941, average per room occupancy was thirteen.41 With crowding came disease. Typhus, a disease spread by lice, was a particular problem. Szpilman’s memoirs described how he was met nightly by his mother “with a bowl of spirits and pair of pincers” to remove and destroy lice that he picked up during the day,42 and Janina Bauman, who was interred in the ghetto with her family as a teenager, wrote, “Physical contact with strangers was what we tried most to avoid. . . . The homeless, tattered, undernourished people we brushed against in the streets were covered with lice and often suffered from infectious diseases.”43 Cut off from their jobs and traditional ways of earning a living, most ghetto residents had quite limited means; further, with official food rations estimated at less than three hundred calories per day, hunger was widespread.44 The memoirs of Adina Szwajger, a physician in the ghetto, describe her staff ’s efforts to feed their hospital patients; sometimes all they could provide was an injection of glucose solution.45 Beggars were everywhere, and it became typical to see starving people lying in the street. As time wore on, the sight of 37 Gutman lists ghettos in fifty-three Polish cities. Resistance, 51. 38 Gutman, The Jews of Warsaw; Gutman, Resistance. 39 Ainsztein, The Warsaw Ghetto Revolt; Gutman, Resistance; Kurzman, The Bravest Battle. 40 Gutman, The Jews of Warsaw, 60. 41 Kurzman, The Bravest Battle. 42 Szpilman, The Pianist, 18–19. 43 Bauman, Winter in the Morning, 40. 44 Kurzman, The Bravest Battle, 23. 45 Adina Blady Szwajger, I Remember Nothing More: The Warsaw Children’s Hospital and the Jewish Resistance (New York: Pantheon Books, 1990), 31–32.

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corpses (sometimes naked or covered with paper because their clothing was valuable to surviving relatives) became commonplace. Some of the more desperate beggars became khappers or “snatchers” who grabbed food away from others on the street and ingested it before they could be caught.46 Others turned to smuggling as a means of survival.47 Typically, children were the best smugglers; because of their size and agility, they were able to fit through small holes in the ghetto walls and were more adept than adults at evading guards. However, such activity was not without costs. Jack Klajman, who was a ten-year-old boy in Warsaw in 1941, described the actions of a German guard known as “Frankenstein” in his memoirs:48 He guarded the area in a jeep with a mounted machine gun. As children would climb the wall, Frankenstein and a German assistant would zoom in from out of nowhere on their killing machine. . . . Once you were spotted there was no time to hide—it didn’t matter whether you were in the process of climbing or just near the wall and getting ready. It took him only seconds from the time he eyed you until the moment he murdered you with a spray of bullets. . . . If you were a smuggler, you were terrified of him. But you had no choice. You had to eat.49

In an attempt to alleviate the suffering as much as possible, ghetto residents developed a number of self-help organizations that provided vital services such as soup kitchens. These organizations were at first supported by funds from the American Joint Distribution Committee and were kept going by donations from relatively solvent ghetto Jews when contributions from Americans fell off as the United States entered World War II.50 Other examples of social organization in the ghetto included clandestine schools, religious services, and political organizations. The latter developed an 46 Gutman, The Jews of Warsaw; Kurzman, The Bravest Battle. 47 Some ghetto residents actually found smuggling to be quite lucrative. Smugglers who catered to the interests of relatively wealthy residents (i.e., those who had been well off before the war and who managed to hold on to their valuables) grew wealthy themselves by bringing liquor and gourmet foods into the ghetto and selling them at black market prices. See Donat, The Holocaust Kingdom; Gutman, The Jews of Warsaw. 48 “Frankenstein,” whose name was Josef Blösche, was notorious in the ghetto and was mentioned in many memoirs and secondary sources. 49 Klajman, Out of the Ghetto, 21–22. 50 Gutman, The Jews of Warsaw.

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extensive underground network and used soup kitchens and other self-help organizations to hold secret meetings, as political meetings were prohibited by Nazi decree.51 As time went on, however, the situation became more dire. By May 30, 1941, an estimated 50% of the Jews in the ghetto were starving to death, and there were 5,500 deaths in July, 1941, alone, compared with only 454 deaths among Warsaw Jews in May, 1938.52 Yet the way that ghetto residents reacted to their circumstances is notable. Despite their suffering, there is evidence that many Warsaw Jews remained hopeful that the Nazis would lose the war and that life would return to normal.53 For example, the diary of Chaim Kaplan, a nearly daily account of life in the ghetto until its author perished in August, 1942, repeatedly describes the community’s belief that the Nazis would ultimately fall. On June 7, 1942, Kaplan wrote: The Nazi sword rests against our throats, wreaking havoc amongst us. But we were always a nation bound by hope—and so we shall remain. . . . The English radio, whose listeners endanger their lives,54 strengthens our hope . . . . Every word gives us courage; every small detail that points to any military weakness is carried through the length and breadth of the ghetto as though on eagles’ wings, with even children talking about it. When the news doesn’t tell us what we want to hear, we twist and turn it until it seems full of hints, clues, and secrets that support our views. . . . A stubborn people!55

Even as verifiable rumors of mass extermination of Jews elsewhere in Europe filtered into the ghetto, many maintained a stubborn optimism that it would not or could not happen to them. Describing the reaction to the news of a massacre in Vilna (a city northeast of Warsaw, in modern-day Lithuania) in late December, 1941, for example, one resident’s memoirs note, People consoled themselves with the thought that the Eastern districts were recognized as Russian territory, but other laws prevailed in the General Government and that Jews in this part of Poland would therefore be saved. 51 Gutman, The Jews of Warsaw; Gutman, Resistance; Kurzman, The Bravest Battle. 52 Ainsztein, The Warsaw Ghetto Revolt, 2–3. 53 Gutman, Resistance. 54 Owning and operating radios at this time was illegal, for Jews and all Poles. Gutman, The Jews of Warsaw, 31. 55 Chaim A. Kaplan, Scroll of Agony: The Warsaw Diary of Chaim A. Kaplan (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 347.

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Many believed that it would be impossible to exterminate the half a million people of the Warsaw Ghetto. . . . It was self-deceit, to be sure, but how could it have been otherwise?56

Similarly, Marek Edelman, one of the leaders of the Ghetto Uprising, wrote, “The Warsaw ghetto did not believe in the reports. All who clung to life would not believe that their lives could be taken from them in such a manner.”57 Ironically, while such attitudes may have helped Warsaw Jews cope with life in the ghetto, they also prevented collective resistance from occurring. That is, as long as survival was a matter of enduring the ghetto conditions—dire as they were—until Germany lost the war, collective resistance was seen as unnecessary.58 In his memoirs, Stanislaw Adler, a member of the Jewish police in the ghetto,59 wrote, The Jewish population had two choices: to engage in a heroic fight irrespective of the outcome and without any chance for even partial success, or to engage in a terrible race with time, a race which seemed to give some hope of survival. The kind of heroism required by the first choice nobody in the whole world would attempt as long as one spark of hope existed that they could last out. The overwhelming majority was overcome with an immense desire not so much to endure to the end of the war as to see with their own eyes the Nazis collapse. The community as a whole ardently and fanatically believed that this would happen though no logic could justify such a belief . . . . Therefore, this community, whose pre-war condition had compelled them to constant compromises and deprivations, persisted in their will to outlive this trial.60

In order for collective resistance to emerge, then, Jews’ perception of their situation had to change. The events of the summer of 1942 were transformative in this regard.

56 David Wdowinski, And We Are Not Saved (New York: Philosophical Library, 1985), 53–54. 57 Quoted in Ainsztein, The Warsaw Ghetto Revolt, 17–18. 58 Ainsztein, The Warsaw Ghetto Revolt. 59 A Jewish police force was created in the ghetto and operated as part of the Judenrat ( Jewish Council), a Nazi-decreed body that was charged with carrying out the orders of the German authorities. Gutman, The Jews of Warsaw, 36. 60 Stanislaw Adler, In the Warsaw Ghetto: The Memoirs of Stanislaw Adler ( Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1982), 80 (emphasis in the original).

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The great deportation, July–September 1942 On July 22, 1942, Germans began mass deportations in the Warsaw Ghetto, sending several thousand Jews to Treblinka every day for a period of six weeks. In response, many in the ghetto scrambled to protect themselves by finding employment in German-operated factories. Ghetto resident Alexander Donat wrote, “Everyone in the Ghetto frantically set about getting papers to prove employment. . . . Instead of saying ‘Hello’ or ‘How are you?’ people now greeted each other with ‘Are you covered?’”61 The memoirs of Vladka Meed, who became a courier for the ghetto fighters, also describe the mood at the time: People exchanged reassuring words, perhaps seeking to delude themselves as much as to console one another. The clouds would yet disperse. . . . It was necessary to find work, to obtain an employment card; then, according to the German edict, one could be sure of being permitted to stay in the ghetto. The ghetto put its trust in the printed word; workers would not be deported. Life might be hard, but still bearable.62

Even once the mass deportations began, therefore, some people still had false hope that they would survive because they had proper papers; others held fast to the thought that deportation simply meant being sent to a work camp. The latter view was perpetuated by rumors, as well as by Nazi propaganda in the form of letters and postcards from people claiming to have been deported to work camps—letters that victims were forced to write before being put to death.63 As the aktion (operation) progressed, however, hopes for survival were dashed. Kaplan’s diary entry of August 2, 1942, began, “Jewish Warsaw is in its death throes. A whole community is going to its death!”64 Donat’s memoirs point to the deportation of Janusz Korczak, a renowned pediatrician and children’s advocate who established an orphanage in the ghetto, as the clearest evidence that everyone in the ghetto would eventually 61 Donat, The Holocaust Kingdom, 58. 62 Vladka Meed, On Both Sides of the Wall: Memoirs from the Warsaw Ghetto (New York: Holocaust Library, 1979), 15. 63 Gutman, The Jews of Warsaw; Syrkin, Blessed Is the Match. 64 Kaplan, Scroll of Agony, 396.

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be killed. Korczak was sent to Treblinka along with two hundred children from his orphanage on August 5, 1942, despite attempts by community leaders to save him. Donat wrote, Why had the Judenrat [ Jewish council] tried to save Korczak? If the two hundred children were really going to be resettled somewhere in the East, wasn’t it perfectly natural for their teacher and shepherd to go along with them? What we had suspected all along—but could not or did not want to believe—was now confirmed. . . . This was not resettlement; this was deportation to death.65

The emergence of resistance The events of the summer of 1942 were therefore instrumental in changing Warsaw Jews’ assessment of their situation from one in which survival was possible to a growing awareness of the Nazis’ genocidal plans. Still, resistance was not a foregone conclusion. While many in the ghetto—notably, young activists from a variety of political organizations—began to call for resistance, others believed that collective action was too risky and could make the Jews’ situation even worse by increasing Nazi repression. Exchanges at a meeting held on July 24, 1942, two days after the beginning of the mass deportations, illustrated these conflicting views. Among those present was Hirsch Berlinski, a member of the youth Zionist organization Left Poa’lei Zion. Berlinski argued for collective resistance: In one way or another, deportation means annihilation. It is therefore better to die with dignity and not like hunted animals. There is no other way out, all that remains to us is to fight. . . . We realize that our armament compared with that of the enemy reminds one of a fly facing an elephant. But we have no alternative—annihilation faces us in one form or another.66

According to Berlinski’s diary, his comments drew the following responses from older ghetto leaders.67 Dr. Isaac Schipper, a historian and Zionist leader, said, “To defend ourselves is tantamount to bringing annihilation upon the

65 Donat, The Holocaust Kingdom, 71. 66 Quoted in Ainsztein, The Warsaw Ghetto Revolt, 36. 67 Ibid., 37.

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ghetto,” while Rabbi Zysie Frydman, the leader of the Orthodox group Agudath Israel, said further, I believe in God and I believe that a miracle will take place. The Lord will not allow His people to be annihilated. We must wait, we must wait for a miracle. To fight the Germans does not make sense. The Germans will wipe us out in a couple of days. . . . Dear friends, persevere and have faith and we shall be rescued!

Although the views of the ghetto elders prevailed at that meeting, as the aktion continued throughout the summer, more people began to support views such as Berlinski’s. A new mood therefore took hold in the ghetto: since death was a certainty, it was better for Jews to die in battle with the Nazis than to submit meekly to being slaughtered.68 By the end of September 1942, two organizations emerged that were dedicated to armed resistance: the Jewish Fighting Organization (Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa), or ŻOB, and the Jewish Military Union (Żydowski Zwiazek Wojskowy), or ŻZW. Each formed from the ghetto’s network of activist youth. Activists from a variety of Zionist and socialist youth groups such as the Bund, Hashomer Hatza’ir (“The Young Guard”), and Dror (“Freedom”) joined the ŻOB,69 while the right-wing Betari Youth of the Revisionist Movement established the ŻZW.70 Once formed, each organization set out to amass the weapons necessary for armed resistance. Those activists whose “good” (i.e., non-Semitic) looks and unaccented Polish allowed them to pass as Gentiles slipped out of the ghetto to try to obtain arms, while those who could not leave safely stayed behind to plan and train for resistance. However, even those who managed to cross safely to the Aryan side were still in danger, not simply because of their arms-smuggling activities, but because any Jew caught outside the ghetto was put to death. Jews working outside the ghetto were particularly fearful of blackmailers (shmaltsovniks) who extorted fees from Jews in exchange for not

68 Gutman, The Jews of Warsaw; Gutman, Resistance. 69 For a description of these and other organizations, see Yitzhak Zuckerman, A Surplus of Memory: Chronicle of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), xvii–xviii. 70 Wdowinski, And We Are Not Saved.

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turning them in to the Gestapo.71 Arms were also quite expensive. Ringelblum noted that the ghetto fighters had to pay three times the going rate for arms because of the risks that Polish arms smugglers took if caught helping Jews.72 To raise the necessary funds, members of the fighting organizations turned to those few remaining ghetto residents who were known to have valuables (mostly smugglers and members of the Jewish police). While some of these individuals voluntarily donated money to the resistance efforts, others did not; in such cases, ŻOB and ŻZW members exacted taxes and used force in order to get the desperately needed funds.73 ŻOB fighter Tuvia Borzykowski wrote in his memoirs, Our enforcement bodies were particularly severe towards members of the Jewish police,74 whom we taxed extra heavily. The policemen were among the richest Jews in the ghetto because they appropriated much property left by Jews who fell victim to the German extermination actions. Many were arrested for not responding to the demands of the tax collectors; there was even one case when a Jewish policeman was shot when resisting fighters who came to collect money.75

By January, 1943, the ŻOB had obtained only a few grenades and a few dozen pistols, yet by the start of the April 1943 uprising, each of the ŻOB’s roughly five hundred fighters had a pistol and a few homemade hand grenades, while the estimated four hundred members of the ŻZW had pistols and grenades, as well as twenty-one submachine guns, eight machine guns, and thirty rifles.76 Given the conditions under which they were amassed, these arsenals were certainly impressive; still, they were hardly enough to fight effectively against the much better armed SS troops. Thus, as Syrkin

Simha Rotem, Memoirs of a Warsaw Ghetto Fighter: The Past within Me (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994); Zuckerman, A Surplus of Memory. 72 Ainsztein, The Warsaw Ghetto Revolt, 68; Joseph Kermish, ed., To Live with Honor and Die with Honor: Selected Documents from the Warsaw Ghetto Underground Archives “O. S.” [Oneg Shabbath] ( Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1986), 597 (note 4). 73 Gutman, The Jews of Warsaw. 74 The Jewish police were hated throughout the ghetto for their participation in round-ups (Gutman, Resistance, 143). 75 Tuvia Borzykowski, Between Tumbling Walls (Beit Lohamei Hagettaot and Hakibbutz Hameuchad Publishing House, 1976), 38. 76 Ainsztein, The Warsaw Ghetto Revolt, 97–98; Gutman, The Jews of Warsaw, 344 and 348. 71

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notes, “The Jewish fighters were rich only in daring and the readiness to sell their lives dearly.”77

Explaining Armed Resistance in the Ghetto: Opportunity, Threat, and Honor By the end of May, 1943, the Warsaw Ghetto lay in ruins. The rebellion led by the ŻOB and ŻZW was crushed, and most of the ghetto residents were either deported to the death camps or killed in the fighting and subsequent razing of the ghetto by German troops. This outcome is hardly surprising, as the poorly outfitted ghetto fighters were no match for their opponents. What is surprising—especially from the perspective of opportunity-based explanations for collective action—is the fact that they staged armed resistance in the first place. Below, I assess political opportunity, both real and perceived, in the Warsaw Ghetto. I then argue that the lack of opportunity—or, better, the extreme threat—helped usher in a new set of interpretations among the ghetto fighters; namely, that resistance would lead to a certain death, but one that was honorable. Finally, by treating honor as a motivational frame,78 I discuss why the concept of honor became a compelling argument for resistance and show how opportunity and honor worked together to facilitate collective action.

Opportunity and threat Tilly argues that multiple sovereignty, or a situation in which more than one political bloc makes exclusive claims upon the government, may create opportunity for collective action.79 While multiple governing bodies existed in the ghetto (e.g., the Judenrat and Jewish police), most of these were established by the Germans themselves and therefore had little power to make claims. Instead of providing Jews with protection, these self-governance bodies actually facilitated Nazi repression by putting into place a set of procedures for compliance with Nazi edicts.80 The ghetto fighters also lacked assistance from 77 Syrkin, Blessed Is the Match, 203. 78 Benford, “‘You Could Be the Hundredth Monkey’”; David A. Snow and Robert Benford, “Ideology, Frame Resonance, and Participant Mobilization,” International Social Movement Research 1 (1988): 197–217. 79 Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution. 80 Gutman, The Jews of Warsaw.

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third parties. Although a Polish underground existed on the Aryan side, few groups were willing to do much to assist the ghetto Jews, despite numerous pleas.81 Some groups such as the Polish Armia Krajowa (Home Army) did supply some arms to the ghetto fighters, but this aid was limited;82 in fact, one shipment of ten revolvers in December, 1942, was mostly defective.83 D. Kurzman also suggests that the Armia Krajowa and Polish governmentin-exile in London were hesitant to help the ghetto Jews for fear of losing support among the openly anti-Semitic Polish population.84 Nor did Germany’s commitment to warmaking activity create opportunity for resistance in the ghetto. For instance, although Germany extended its involvement in World War II with the invasion of the Soviet Union in June, 1941, that invasion coincided with the systematic implementation of the Final Solution,85 which signaled increased repression and a further erosion of what little control European Jews had over their lives. Warsaw Jews therefore experienced none of the “openings” argued by many theorists to pave the way for the emergence of collective action. Indeed, since they lacked all rights of citizenship,86 Warsaw Jews were in no position to benefit from any shifts in the political system, even if such shifts had occurred. Further, Jews’ perceptions of their situation matched the structural reality. Whereas in the early months of the ghetto many Jews may have perceived opportunity to exist—in the form of an eventually weakened Nazi Germany that would lose the war—by the time of the uprising, there is no evidence that they believed that the Germans were weakening or that Allied forces would come to their rescue. Instead, people came to realize that everyone in the ghetto would eventually be targeted for death. As Kaplan’s 81 Ainsztein, The Warsaw Ghetto Revolt; Gutman, The Jews of Warsaw; Kurzman, The Bravest Battle. 82 Stronger ties to the Polish underground gave the ŻZW access to more arms; in contrast, the ŻOB had to rely more on homemade explosives (Kurzman, The Bravest Battle). 83 Gutman, The Jews of Warsaw, 300. 84 Kurzman, The Bravest Battle. 85 Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: HarperPerennial, 1992); Gutman, The Jews of Warsaw; Yisrael Gutman, “The War against the Jews, 1939–1945,” in The Nazi Holocaust, ed. Marrus, 13–27. 86 Gutman, The Jews of Warsaw.

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diary entry on July 11, 1942, read, “As long as there is no knowledge, hope still flows in the heart, but from now on everything is clear, and all doubt of our future is removed.”87 It is incorrect, however, to view the uprising as an attempt on the part of the fighters to save their own lives.88 Certainly, none of the ghetto fighters expected to beat the Nazis in battle; D. Kurzman quotes a ŻOB fighter who described the plans for resistance as “the most hopeless declaration of war that has ever been made.”89 It is also apparent that none even expected to survive the battle. Commenting on a conversation with ŻOB Commander Mordechai Anielewicz, Emmanuel Ringelblum wrote, He gave an accurate appraisal of the chances of the uneven struggle, he foresaw the destruction of the Ghetto and the workshop, and he was sure that neither he nor his combatants would survive the liquidation of the Ghetto. He was sure that they would die like stray dogs and no one would even know their last resting place.90

This pessimism was especially true before the January uprising, when the shortage of weapons and uncertainty about the fighters’ battle readiness was most acute. In his memoirs, ŻOB leader Yitzhak Zuckerman described the fighters as “novices” and rued the lack of weapons: “As January approached . . . there were very few weapons. We didn’t delude ourselves, nor did we ignore the fact that the great majority of the Jews had already been taken and killed, and only a few score thousand were left. Nor did we think the Germans would be satisfied with that.”91 Even though they had more weapons by April, the ghetto fighters still realized that they were outgunned. ŻOB fighter Simha 87 Kaplan, Scroll of Agony, 371. 88 Members of the ŻOB did try to save lives, such as by obtaining forged identification papers and safe houses on the Aryan side for Jewish children (Meed, On Both Sides of the Wall); however, the fighters did not plan to save their own lives. In fact, the ŻOB did not build its own bunker but planned to fight to the death instead (Kurzman, The Bravest Battle, 45). As ŻOB fighter Simha Rotem (aka “Kazik”) explained in his memoirs, for the ŻOB to build a bunker would have been “counter to its purpose.” Rotem, Memoirs of a Warsaw Ghetto Fighter, 38. 89 Kurzman, The Bravest Battle, 52. 90 Kermish, ed., To Live with Honor, 600. 91 Zuckerman, A Surplus of Memory, 278.

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Rotem’s memoirs recount his reaction to seeing German troops amass in the ghetto at the start of the April fighting: At 4 in the morning, we saw at the Nalewki Passage a line of Nazis marching to the Central Ghetto. They walked and walked endlessly. There were a few thousand of them. . . . Suddenly I felt how very weak we were. What were we and what was our strength against an armed and well-equipped army, against tanks and armored vehicles, while we had only pistols and at most grenades?92

By the time resistance emerged in the ghetto, then, opportunity—both structural and perceived—was severely restricted. Targeted for death by a powerful army and lacking both rights of citizenship and meaningful assistance from third parties, the ghetto fighters saw their situation as a hopeless one in which death was certain, whether they resisted or not.93 Such perceptions more accurately may be thought of as perceptions of threat rather than of opportunity, in the sense that the residents foresaw conditions of extreme danger. Yet this situation actually facilitated collective action, because it was only when the ghetto Jews were convinced that their deaths were inevitable that they began to plan for resistance. As Gutman notes, “Hopelessness was a prerequisite for resistance.”94

Honor Such assessments alone did not produce resistance, however. Accompanying this “attribution of threat” was the way that the ghetto fighters framed the resistance itself: as a way to display their honor and dignity by choosing the way they would die.95 As Emmanuel Ringelblum wrote in October, 1942, after the great deportation had ended: The Jewish public understood what a terrible error had been made by not offering resistance to the SS. It was argued that if on the day the Warsaw “resettlement action” was announced, everyone had rebelled, if the Germans had been attacked with knives, sticks, spades, and axes, if hydrochloric acid, 92 Rotem, Memoirs of a Warsaw Ghetto Fighter, 156. 93 Even though the January uprising lifted spirits somewhat, death was still the expected conclusion. See Borzykowski, Between Tumbling Walls; Rotem, Memoirs of a Warsaw Ghetto Fighter; Zuckerman, A Surplus of Memory. 94 Gutman, Resistance, 165. 95 McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly, Dynamics of Contention.

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melted tar, boiling water, etc., had been poured over the Germans, Ukrainians, Latvians, and Jewish Order Service, in short if men, women and children, young and old, had begun a mass rising, there would not have been three hundred and fifty thousand murdered in Treblinka, but only fifty thousand shot in the streets of the capital. . . . Oaths were sworn aloud: Never again shall the Germans move us from here with impunity; we shall die, but the cruel invaders will pay with their blood for ours. Our fate is sealed, people were saying. Every Jew carries a death sentence in his pocket, handed him by the greatest murderer of all time. Thus we must think not so much of saving our lives, which seems to be a very problematic affair, but rather of dying an honorable death, dying with weapons in our hands.96

The main goal of the resistance, therefore, was not necessarily to beat the SS troops and secure safe passage out of the ghetto. Instead, it was to act honorably. For example, when describing the uprising to an interviewer, ŻOB leader Marek Edelman noted one instance in which he and his fighters shot at some German soldiers and missed them, saying, “We missed but it doesn’t matter.” When the interviewer asked him to explain, he replied, “The important thing was just that we were shooting. We had to show it. Not to the Germans. They knew better than us how to shoot. We had to show it to this other, the non-German world. People have always thought that shooting is the highest form of heroism. So we were shooting.”97 Further, by dying in battle, the ghetto fighters would preserve not only their own honor, but also the dignity and honor of the Jewish people as a whole.98 A notice posted by the ŻOB on April 18, 1943, the day before the April uprising began, made this goal clear; it read, “To fight, to die, for the honor of our people!”99 Similarly, ŻOB fighter Hirsch Berlinski wrote in his diary, “By acting in this manner we shall show the world that we stood up to the enemy, that we did not go passively to our slaughter. Let our desperate act be a protest flung into the face of the world, which has reacted so feebly 96 Quoted from Kermish, ed., To Live with Honor, 594–95. 97 Quoted in Hanna Krall, Shielding the Flame: An Intimate Conversation with Dr. Marek Edelman, the Last Surviving Leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (New York: Henry Holt, 1986), 3. 98 Yehoyakim Cochavi, “The Motif of ‘Honor’ in the Call to Rebellion in the Ghetto,” in Zionist Youth Movements during the Shoah, eds. Asher Cohen and Yehoyakim Cochavi, trans. Ted Gorelick (New York: Peter Lang, 1995), 245–53. 99 Kurzman, The Bravest Battle, 92.

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against the crimes committed by the Nazis against hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews.”100

Honor as a motivational frame The concept of honor itself—and why an honorable resistance was compelling—deserves more explanation. Honor may be described both individually and socially; the term refers both to an individual’s personal qualities and to his or her reputation in the eyes of others.101 Stewart also describes honor in terms of a right to respect, or “to be treated as having a certain worth.”102 A variety of studies have explored the role of honor in social interaction. For example, studies of urban youth gangs note the central role of honor as a guide for both legal and illegal activities.103 Much of this work examines how adherence to honor codes often leads to violence, especially when a person or group’s honor is questioned or threatened. Similarly, Baxter and Margavio argue that honor regulates the use of aggression in economic exchange.104 In light of such work, it makes a certain amount of sense that the ghetto fighters turned to armed resistance as a means of regaining the respect that had been denied them during Nazi occupation. Further, it is perhaps not surprising that the idea of resisting in order to die honorably originated with the young Zionists who were among the founders of the ŻOB and the ŻZW, since the Zionist movement in the 1930s and 1940s put forth a “new image” of Jews as strong and capable of self-defense.105 As noted earlier, joining the Zionists were also a number of young activists from Jewish workers’ organizations, such as the Bund; despite their political differences from the others on the topic of Zionism, these individuals also supported the idea of resistance against their oppressors.106 Eventually, the idea of dying honorably was 100 Quoted in Ainsztein, The Warsaw Ghetto Revolt, 36–37. 101 Vern Baxter and A. V. Margavio, “Honor, Status, and Aggression in Economic Exchange,” Sociological Theory 18 (2000): 399–416; Frank Henderson Stewart, Honor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 102 Stewart, Honor, 21. 103 Philippe Bourgois, In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Ruth Horowitz, Honor and the American Dream (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1983). 104 Baxter and Margavio, “Honor, Status, and Aggression.” 105 Cochavi, “The Motif of ‘Honor’”; Marie Syrkin, Blessed Is the Match. 106 Cochavi, “The Motif of ‘Honor’”; Gutman, The Jews of Warsaw; Gutman, Resistance.

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adopted by nonactivist segments of the ghetto population as well. Klajman’s memoirs note, Perhaps the devastation of the Aktion was the final straw, but people in the ghetto finally realized death was certain to come sooner or later, and that there was nothing to lose by resisting. With no fear of death, we were energized to fight to the best of our abilities. Everyone knew the chance of victory was zero, but winning wasn’t the goal. We just wanted to die with dignity.107

Similarly, Bauman’s diary entry from November 2, 1942, read, “They say, ‘Fight.’ Yes, of course, it’s the only way, though there won’t be much chance of survival if we do. But what else can we do? There is something called ‘dignity,’ much forgotten these days. Yes, I’m ready to join at once. . . . I’ve been trying to find out the people behind those three letters [ŻZW].”108 Honor—and the notion that aggression is the appropriate response when honor is threatened—may therefore be thought of as part of the “vocabularies of motive”109 that compelled resistance in the ghetto. According to Benford, such “vocabularies” consist of “rationales and justifications . . . [that] provide participants with ‘good reasons’ for identifying with the tools and values of the movement and for taking action on its behalf.”110 Specifically, framing resistance as honorable in this case illustrates the motivational vocabulary of “propriety,” or frames that cast the movement’s issues in terms of participants’ moral duty and ethical responsibilities to themselves and their communities.111 These themes are particularly evident in ŻOB fighter Zivia Lubetkin’s account of the call to resistance: “We said to ourselves: ‘We must see the truth for what it is. The Germans want to annihilate us. It is our duty to organize ourselves for defense, and struggle for our honor and the honor of the Jewish people.’ . . . This conviction was the motivating force behind our selfdefense, our approaching battle.”112 107 Klajman, Out of the Ghetto, 61–62. 108 Bauman, Winter in the Morning, 84. 109 Benford, “‘You Could Be the Hundredth Monkey’”; Snow and Benford, “Ideology, Frame Resonance, and Participant Mobilization.” 110 Benford, “‘You Could Be the Hundredth Monkey,’” 200. 111 Ibid., 207. 112 Zivia Lubetkin, In the Days of Destruction and Revolt (Israel: Beit Lohamei Haghetaot [Ghetto Fighters’ House], 1981), 91.

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Work on the role of identity and emotion in social movements suggests that the motivational force of a frame that cast resistance as honorable also drew its power from its emotional content and explicit reference to the Jewish community. Following the basic premises of new social movement theory,113 a large literature has emerged on identity, which is argued to lie at the heart of protest activity.114 Thus, framing their resistance as a fight for honor may have been compelling because, by doing so, the ghetto fighters made a statement about who and what Warsaw Jews were: strong and proud people, not the weak “subhumans” portrayed by Nazi ideology. Resistance was therefore the enactment of an identity.115 Perhaps more important, the statement stood not simply for the Warsaw Ghetto fighters, but for the Jewish people as a whole. Writing about resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto, Cochavi notes, A process of increasing openness and sympathy began to unfold in regard to the Jewish community at large, and the acceptance of responsibility for its condition and fate, a responsibility which included within its scope also the question of the way in which this same community should face its destruction. The call to rebellion was an expression, too, of the sense of responsibility for the public image of a community to which the members of the youth movement regarded themselves as being committed.”116

Finally, the commitment and responsibility noted in the quote above also suggests that emotions may help explain the motivational capability of an honor-based frame.117 That is, honor may have emerged as the mobilizing frame not only because of its statement about the fighters themselves, but also because of the strong feelings of solidarity and emotional ties between the ghetto fighters and the broader community that they believed themselves to represent. 113 Alberto Melucci, Nomads of the Present (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989). 114 Enrique Laraña, Hank Johnston, and Joseph R. Gusfield, eds., New Social Movements: From Ideology to Identity (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994); for a review of this literature, see Francesca Polletta and James M. Jasper, “Collective Identity and Social Movements,” Annual Review of Sociology 27 (2001): 283–305. 115 Craig Calhoun, “The Problem of Identity in Collective Action,” in Macro-Micro Linkages in Sociology, ed. Joan Huber (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1991), 51–75; Kevin Neuhouser, “‘If I Had Abandoned My Children’: Community Mobilization and Commitment to the Identity of Mother in Northeast Brazil,” Social Forces 77 (1998): 331–58. 116 Cochavi, “The Motif of ‘Honor,’” 251. 117 See Jeff Goodwin, James M. Jasper, and Francesca Polletta, eds., Passionate Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).

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Honor, motivational framing, and the attribution of threat Again, however, it is important to remember that resistance did not emerge until well after Warsaw Jews were confined to the ghetto and subjected to humiliating treatment. In other words, despite the motivational force of an honor-based frame, the timing of the resistance cannot be explained simply as a response to dishonor. Instead, the use of honor as a motivational frame combined with the attribution of threat to produce resistance. Indeed, framing resistance as honorable became compelling in part because the ghetto fighters were certain they would die. As Zivia Lubetkin wrote, “We all desired a different death, a death which would bring vengeance upon the enemy and restore the honor of our people.”118 The desperate situation in which the ghetto residents were placed—and of which they eventually became aware—therefore created a context in which an honor-based frame motivated collective action. A combination of structural constraints and interpretive processes framing action in terms of honor and dignity has been used to explain collective action in other severely restricted contexts. For instance, Loveman argues that high-risk human rights activism in repressive Latin American countries can be explained in part by identity processes set in motion by the threat posed by such activism.119 She quotes one Chilean activist who participated out of a strong sense of personal duty to those who were suffering: “For me, the suffering of the people I was helping was intolerable. . . . I believe that one commits oneself to things because of who one is. I believe that I would have lost my own dignity and self-respect if I hadn’t done the work I did.”120 Wood’s analysis of peasant participation in the Salvadoran opposition movement in the mid-1970s provides a similar example: as she explains, participation gave the peasants a chance to assert their dignity and pride and therefore provided “emotional benefits” that helped offset the high risks of collective action.121 118 By emphasizing vengeance (and not simply resistance), Lubetkin’s quote also suggests that there was more than one way to attain honor. Lubetkin, In the Days of Destruction, 123. 119 Mara Loveman, “High-Risk Collective Action: Defending Human Rights in Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina,” American Journal of Sociology 104 (1998): 477–525. 120 Ibid., 492. 121 Elisabeth Jean Wood, “The Emotional Benefits of Insurgency in El Salvador,” in Passionate Politics, eds. Jeff Goodwin, James M. Jasper, and Francesca Polletta (Chicago: University of

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I do not suggest that it was the risk of death that made armed resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto honorable or compelling, however. Other scholars use the term “high-risk activism” to refer to those situations where protest participants risk beatings, torture, and even death for their activities, and they argue that the dynamics of high-risk activism require different explanations than do other forms of collective action.122 While the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising may be thought of as a case of high-risk activism,123 what distinguishes this case from others is not simply that the ghetto fighters risked death, but that they believed they were certain to die; further, they felt that they would die regardless of their decision to resist. This assessment of their situation—and the process by which it emerged—helps make the interaction between opportunity, attribution of threat, and motivational framing particularly clear. If Warsaw Jews had the option of either resisting or continuing to live in the ghetto under German occupation, perhaps the uprising would not have taken place; indeed, the fact that no collective resistance took place before July, 1942, supports this conclusion. Yet with an attribution of threat so great that they believed their deaths to be inevitable, resistance—framed in terms of an honorable death—became preferred.

Summary and Conclusions The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising represents important evidence that European Jews did not always submit meekly to Nazi aggression. However, Warsaw Jews’ decision to stage resistance runs counter to what opportunity-based explanations of social movement emergence would predict. Instead of responding to opportunity, these activists resisted despite a lack of opportunity—and, more precisely, because they lacked opportunity. A lack of opportunity, both Chicago Press, 2001), 267–81. See also Calhoun, “The Problem of Identity”; Neuhouser, “‘If I Had Abandoned My Children.’” 122 Jeff Goodwin and Steven Pfaff, “Emotion Work in High-Risk Social Movements: Managing Fear in the US and East German Civil Rights Movements,” in Passionate Politics, eds. Jeff Goodwin, James M. Jasper, and Francesca Polletta (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 282–302; Loveman, “High-Risk Collective Action”; Doug McAdam, “Recruitment to High-Risk Activism: The Case of Freedom Summer,” American Journal of Sociology 92 (1986): 64–90. 123 Rachel L. Einwohner, “Identity and Emotion in High-Risk Activism: The Case of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising,” paper presented at the meetings of the Midwest Sociological Society, Chicago (April 2003).

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structural and perceived, and an attribution of threat facilitated the emergence of a motivational frame that cast resistance as honorable. This frame was compelling because it spoke to the propriety of collective action and promoted a positive collective identity. This analysis has several implications for social movement research. First, it demonstrates that collective action can emerge in the absence of any favorable shifts or “openings” in the political system. It therefore corroborates other studies that have also identified cases of collective action emerging in severely restricted contexts, including the Iranian Revolution and activism in Latin America.124 However, it goes beyond previous research on collective action in repressive contexts, some of which suggests that protesters may create their own opportunity—either real or perceived—where none exists. C. Kurzman uses the analogy of a door to make this point clear: whereas classical treatments of opportunity and collective action explain action in terms of “doors” that “open” and allow protest to take place, his analysis indicates that protesters are also able to open doors themselves.125 The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising suggests another possibility: protest can take place outside a closed door (even one that is bolted shut). This analysis also helps build a body of research that can begin to identify those contingencies that determine whether opportunity-based explanations can account for collective action.126 At first glance, one such condition would seem to be the presence of a democratic political system, in which citizens are afforded certain rights (e.g., the right to vote and to peacefully assemble) that help them take advantage of structural opportunities that arise. Indeed, some scholars have already begun to suggest that political process theory is better suited to explain the cases from which it has been derived—that is, protest in contemporary Western democracies—rather than protest more generally.127 However, given that the notion of political opportunity has also been used to explain collective action in nondemocratic contexts,128 the presence of a democracy is not a necessary condition for the theory to apply.129 Still, this case is useful in pointing to other 124 Kurzman, “Structural Opportunity”; Loveman, “High-Risk Collective Action”; Wood, “The Emotional Benefits.” 125 Kurzman, “Structural Opportunity,” 165. 126 Goodwin and Jasper, “Caught in a Winding, Snarling Vine.” 127 McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly, Dynamics of Contention. 128 Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions. 129 Kurzman, “Structural Opportunity.”

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contingencies—here, not simply a lack of democracy but a situation of utter powerlessness in which the insurgents had no voice, no supportive third parties, and no legitimate claims vis-a`-vis the governing authorities, even on their own lives. It was in the context of widespread, systematic genocide that resistance in the ghetto made sense. Genocide is therefore one historically specific factor that can mediate the effect of opportunity (or threat) on the emergence of collective action. Other cases of collective action in situations of extreme powerlessness, such as uprisings in refugee camps, slave rebellions, and prison revolts, may operate similarly (although see Goldstone and Useem for an application of opportunity-based explanations to prison riots).130 More research is therefore needed on a variety of cases of protest and resistance to continue to specify the conditions under which opportunity-based explanations apply best. Finally, there are some who would argue that it is inappropriate to apply social movement theory to a case like the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising—a case that appears to be quite different from what scholars would recognize as protest or a social movement in contemporary society. Yet it is precisely because this case is so different that it is important to apply our theories to it. This analysis therefore reiterates calls made by other scholars who suggest that it is fruitful to apply extant theories to a wider range of cases than commonly studied.131 Broadening our inquiries beyond “social movements” to include a host of different examples of “contentious politics” can identify the need for additional theoretical development.132 Continued research on resistance in dire situations such as genocide and slavery, where insurgents face utter powerlessness and hopelessness, will further these objectives considerably.

130 Goldstone and Useem, “Prison Riots as Microrevolutions.” 131 Goldstone and Useem, “Prison Riots as Microrevolutions”; David S. Meyer, “Opportunities and Identities: Bridge-Building in the Study of Social Movements,” in Social Movements: Identity, Culture, and the State, eds. David S. Meyer, Nancy Whittier, and Belinda Robnett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 3–21. 132 McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly, Dynamics of Contention.

Musar and Modernity: The Case of Novaredok1 David E. Fishman The pietistic current in Lithuanian Jewry known as the Musar movement has recently begun to attract the serious attention of Jewish historians. The work of Immanuel Etkes on Rabbi Israel Salanter, the founding father of Musarism, and of Shaul Stampfer on the Lithuanian yeshivas of the nineteenth century are two important scholarly contributions which have appeared of late in this area.2 The revival of scholarly interest in Musarism, after many years of neglect, is richly deserved. Musarism shares with Hasidism the distinction of being an original pietistic movement which was unique to the East European Jewish milieu. Like the latter, in the course of one or two generations it produced an impressive array of original religious personalities, each with his own distinct school of thought. And like Hasidism, Musarism grew and flourished in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, that is, at the very time when secularizing cultural and political movements exerted increasing influence in Jewish society. But whereas modern scholarship has lavished a good deal of attention on Hasidism—its doctrines, history, and confrontations with modernity—the analogous work on Musarism has only just begun. One focal point of the recent scholarship has been the relationship between Musarism and modernity; specifically, its relationship to the complex of social and cultural changes which overtook European Jewry in the 1 2

Originally published in: Modern Judaism 8, no. 1 (February 1988): 41–64. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1396120. Immanuel Etkes, Rabi Yisrael Salanter Ve-Reshita Shel Tenuat Ha-Musar ( Jerusalem, Israel: Magnes Press, 1982); Shaul Stampfer, Lithuanian Yeshivas of the Nineteenth Century: Creating a Tradition of Learning (Oxford, UK: Littman Library, 2012).

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nineteenth century. Etkes has suggested that, to no small extent, Salanter’s religious ideology was born out of a sense of crisis and alarm at the decline in religious sensitivity and punctilious halakhic observance among Lithuanian Jews. For Salanter, the growth of Haskalah circles in Vilna and Kovna that he witnessed during the 1840s was an ominous symptom of a greater spiritual crisis facing Jewry. As an antidote to the growing process of spiritual decay he proposed the institutionalized study of musar (moralistic) literature, not as an intellectual discipline but as an emotional experience of spiritual regeneration. The study of musar in a dark shadowy room, with a melancholy melody and passionate repetition of key phrases and verses, would cultivate one’s religious self-awareness, self-scrutiny, and self-discipline. The student would thereby develop a personality which could withstand the pervasive trend in society toward declining observance of religious and moral norms. Viewed in historical perspective, it may be said that Salanter sought to counteract the loosening of social and communal controls in nineteenth-century Lithuanian Jewry by fostering spiritual fortitude and self-control in the individual. He thus emerges from Etkes’ study as the apostle of Lithuanian Jewish orthodoxy, who developed a creative traditionalist response to the challenges of his time.3 Stampfer, on the other hand, has drawn attention to the fact that some of Salanter’s disciples took a conciliatory stance toward certain modern educational and cultural reforms. The Musar yeshivas which they founded in the 1880s were innovative not only by virtue of the fact that they integrated the Salanterian study of musar into the daily regimen, but in this somewhat surprising respect as well. In Kelm, Rabbi Simcha Zisl Braude included secular disciplines such as Russian and mathematics in his school’s curriculum; and in Telz, Rabbi Eliezer Gordon introduced modern educational procedures and structures, such as an entrance exam, a graded hierarchy of classes, and the periodic testing of the students’ knowledge of material. These reforms constituted tacit concessions to the criticism of traditional Jewish education enunciated by the Haskalah. I would take Stampfer’s observations a step further and contend that the Slobodka yeshiva of Rabbi Nosn Tzvi Finkel (generally referred to as the “mother” of the Musar yeshivas) also 3 Etkes, Rabi Yisrael Salanter, 147–164.

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incorporated ideas of the Haskalah and of European modernity, albeit in a much subtler form. Slobodkaite Musar internalized the modern bourgeois values of orderliness, personal hygiene, dignity, and restraint, and magnified their importance above and beyond any position they may have held in the traditional Jewish scale of values. In all three schools, Kelm, Telz, and Slobodka, the great majority of students were clean-shaven (i.e., beardless) and dressed according to European style (short jackets, fedora hats, neckties)—themselves noteworthy accommodations to westernization. Thus, an abiding feature of the Musar yeshivas considered in Stampfer’s study is their combination of Musarist pietism and accommodation to modernity.4 Following upon the lead of these two studies, I would like to examine in this paper the relationship between Musar and modernity in Novaredok, chronologically the last school of Musarism to arise in Eastern Europe. My argument, if I may anticipate, will be that Novaredok’s Musarist practices and world-view, which took form in the first decade of the twentieth century, were products of the age of radicalism and revolution in Russian Jewish society. In addition, I will contend that the organizational structure which Novaredok assumed beginning in 1917 was indicative of the over-all process of political and cultural mobilization in East European Jewry at that time. In short, I will claim that Novaredok’s basic forms, postures, and structures were inextricably linked to those of the modern, secular currents which surrounded it.

II The name Novaredok survives in popular memory thanks to its reverberations in folklore and literature. Anecdotes about Novaredok students are still retold in Orthodox circles, the most famous being about their practice of entering a pharmacy and asking the druggist for nails, in order to set themselves up for public ridicule. Chaim Grade’s monumental novel Tsemakh Atlas/Di Yeshive 4

Braude’s institution, which was an elementary school (Talmud Torah) and not a yeshiva for mature students, was located in Kelm between 1873 and 1880, and in Grobin from 1880 to 1886 (Braude later returned to Kelm and taught Musar to groups of students there). On Slobodka and Telz see Stampfer, Lithuanian Yeshivas. My suggestion regarding the internalization of European bourgeois values in Slobodka Musarism requires closer scrutiny; for now see Menes’ characterization in “Patterns of Jewish Scholarship in Eastern Europe,” in The Jews, ed. L. Finkelstein (New York, NY: Harper, 1960), 417–419.

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(The Yeshiva) provides a vivid portrait of life in a Novaredok yeshiva in interior Poland and probes the personality of Reb Tsemakh Atlas, a Musarist whose unrelenting self-scrutiny and self-criticism lead to his psychic self-destruction.5 Valuable as these artifacts may be, legend and art cannot take the place of history. Hence a few general remarks are in order about the real-life yeshiva which existed in the town of Novaredok (Russian: Novogrodek, Minsk Gubernia) between 1896 and 1915. This yeshiva was perhaps unique in that it attracted the vociferous anger and indignation of traditional Lithuanian rabbis on the one hand, and modern Jewish intellectuals on the other. For both, Novaredok was the symbol of Musarism taken to a ludicrous extreme.6 While the controversies surrounding the yeshiva cannot concern us here, their objective basis in fact should be noted. This yeshiva was different from all others in two crucial respects. First, Novaredok unambiguously relegated the study of the Talmud to a position of secondary importance. Rabbi Yosef Yoizl Hurwitz, the yeshiva’s founder and leader, did not present any shiurim or halakhic discourses to his students, and there was no bona fide master or mentor of Talmudic studies on the premises. Instead, Hurwitz devoted his energies exclusively to strengthening his students’ moral and religious characters, through guiding their study of musar, meeting with them individually in private, and delivering rousing musar shmuesn. One former student estimated that Hurwitz’s Talmudic knowledge was equivalent to that of a mediocre rabbi, and added: “I say estimate, because he rarely spoke words of Torah and never stressed his scholarly side.”7 When shiurim were introduced to the yeshiva’s program in 1903 or 1904, they were delivered by students, rather than by an official rosh yeshiva.8 The students’ Chaim Grade, Tsemakh Atlas (Di Yeshive), vol. I (New York, NY: Yidish Natsionaler Arbeter Farband, 1967), vol. II, (New York, NY: CYCO, 1968). See also his poem Musernikes and “essay” Mayn Krig Mit Hersh Raseyner, issued by the Department of Yiddish Literature, Hebrew University, 1969. 6 For a partial review of the polemics see Rabbi Dov Katz, Pulmus Ha-Musar ( Jerusalem, Israel: 1972), index, “Novaredok.” See also Katz’s Tenuat Ha-Musar, vol. IV (Tel Aviv, Israel: Beitan Hasefer 1963), 323–324, and the scathing “exposé” of the yeshiva by A. Litvin (pseud. for Shmuel Hurwitz) “In Vos Bashteyt Di Novgrudker Muser?,” Yidishe Neshomes, vol. III (New York, NY: Farlag Volsbildung 1917). 7 Yehoshua Ovsay, “R. Yosef Yoizl `Ba’al Ha-Khorim’,” Ma’amarim ve-reshimot (New York, NY: Ohel, 1947), 123; Katz, Tenuat, 197–8 and 329; Rabbi Ben Tzion Bruk and Rabbi Dovid Zaritsky, eds., Gevile Esh ( Jerusalem, Israel: Yeshivat Bet Yosef Novaredok 1973), 25. 8 Katz, Tenuat, 198. 5

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weekly schedule was extremely flexible, even amorphous, with the formally scheduled events involving musar, not Talmud. Never had a yeshiva deviated so far from the historical norm.9 The second subject of controversy about the Novaredok yeshiva was the students’ behavior, which tended to be unusual, bizarre, even scandalous. Their study of musar included nighttime sessions of primal screaming, and uncontrolled outbursts of tears, whines, and fist-pounding. And they seemed to actively pursue schemes by which to make themselves the objects of mockery and disgust. Students would enter a crowded grocery, push to the front, and begin reciting the afternoon Amidah at the top of their lungs; they would wear filthy clothes on the Sabbath, which they had intentionally splattered with mud on Friday afternoon, and they would present words of Torah to their peers which were blatantly false, contradictory, or inane, etc. We will consider the ideological basis for this sort of behavior below, as well as its social significance. At this point it is sufficient to point out that their eccentric life-style, which was sanctioned and indeed encouraged by Hurwitz, was viewed by society at large as deranged and offensive.10 At first glance, the affirmation of any positive relationship between Novaredok and modernity would seem to be just as ridiculous as the behavior described above. Was not Novaredok the antithesis of everything we would consider modern, rational, worldly, or secular? One of Hurwitz’s fundamental teachings was the uncompromising and all-embracing rejection of the modern world. He blamed the “cursed Haskalah” for wreaking unspeakable spiritual destruction on Jewry, and for leading Jewish society to “reject the word of God and its bearers.” As a result of the Haskalah’s ravages, all Jews living outside yeshiva walls were hopelessly immersed in sinfulness. Even the ostensibly pious had fallen prey to the spirit of the new era and were at the mercy of their evil impulses. It was incumbent upon the truly pious to seclude   9

A. Litvin, “In Vos Bashteyt,” 1. On the Musar activities inside the Novaredok yeshiva and its successors see below, and also David E. Fishman, “The Musar Movement in InterWar Poland,” in The Jews of Poland Between Two World Wars, eds. Yisrael Gutman, Ezra Mendelsohn, Jehuda Reinharz, and Chone Shmeruk (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 1989), 247–271. 10 Katz, Tenuat, 257, 260, and 274, passim; Moshe Silberg, “Kat Ha-Novardokaim,” Ha-Aretz, December 26, 1932, 2; A. Litvin, “In Vos Bashteyt,” passim. See also Grade, Musernikes, 9–11.

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themselves inside yeshiva walls for the sake of their spiritual protection, and there pursue the study of musar. Total withdrawal from surrounding society was imperative. We must abandon the path of compromises and realize that there are only two paths open to us—either forsake the Torah altogether and choose the world, or strengthen ourselves even further by creating our own separate compartment.11

In keeping with this outlook, the Novaredok yeshiva, and its successors during World War I and the inter-war period, assumed a vehemently rejectionist stance toward European dress, manners, culture, and education. Novaredok students (unlike those in Telz and Slobodka) wore beards, traditional long black coats, and proverbially long tsitsis which hung down to their knees or ankles. They flaunted their disregard for personal hygiene and orderliness by wearing garments which were worn, soiled, and tattered. To the eyes of moderns, their external appearance was a throwback to the “Middle Ages” and the embodiment of “darkness.”12 Least of all was there any room for compromise with regard to secular learning or literature. When Hurwitz became aware that one of his satellite yeshivas during World War I had introduced secular studies, he responded by personally travelling to it, and proceeded to demolish the yeshiva’s interior, to disperse its students, and to close the school down. The reading of secular books and newspapers was strictly prohibited in Novaredok yeshivas, and a first time offense was sufficient grounds for expulsion.13 In other Yosef Yoizl Hurwitz, “Ma’amar Be-Tkufot Ha-Olam,” in Madregat Ha-Adam, pt. 1 ( Jerusalem, Israel: Keren mefitse torah ve-musar, 1970), 18–21 and passim. On Hurwitz’s book Madregat Ha-Adam see below, n. 35. Although the discourse quoted above was delivered in 1918, the idea of sectarian withdrawal from society was a mainstay of his thinking throughout. See Katz, Tenuat, 235. 12 Katz, Tenuat, 237 and 257; Grade, Musernikes, 15 and 40–41 (“Di Musenikes Geyen”); for a contrast between European dress and manners and those of a Novaredok Musarist, see Grade, Tsemakh Atlas, vol. I, 58. 13 R. Shmuel Weintraub, “Hesped Le-Yud Zayin Kislev,” Or Ha-Musar, vol. I (Bne Brak, Israel: Hokhma Ve-musar 1965), 15; Mordkhe Shtrigler, “Farshverer” (an autobiographical novel on life in a Novaredok yeshiva in inter-war Poland), Yiddisher Kemfer (March 27, 1964), 72–73; Grade, Musernikes, 32. One of the sub-plots in Tsemakh Atlas, vol. II, involves Tsemakh’s participation in a scheme to burn the books of a socialist youth group’s library. See also Hurwitz, “Tikun Ha-Midot,” Madregat Ha-Adam, pt. 1, 29–30.

11

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Lithuanian yeshivas, the attitude toward such matters was much more relaxed, especially during the inter-war years. Students were allowed to look at Hebrew or Yiddish newspapers in their spare time, and the administrations came to accept the fact that some students would also pursue a general education. When Mark Wischnitzer toured East European yeshivas in 1931, as an official of the Hilfsverein des Deutschen Juden, he encountered numerous students who had completed general secondary schools, several who had attended universities, and a number of university graduates. “I met such students in Telz, Slobodka, Radin, Mir, and elsewhere. The old contradictions were almost erased; the `kultur-kampf was over.”14 Novaredok was conspicuously absent from Wischnitzer’s list. He did not encounter such students in Novaredok yeshivas (e.g. in Bialystok, Mezritsh) because there the Kulturkampf was not over. One can thus speak of accommodationist and rejectionist wings within the Musar movement with respect to modernity, with Telz and Slobodka making up the former, and Novaredok the latter. This would seem to put the entire topic of Novaredok and modernity to rest.

III If, however, one goes beyond Novaredok’s professed ideological stance toward modernity to examine the origins of its Musarist practices and the tenor of its world-view, the picture becomes more complex and surprising. Let us begin with something small but central. Perhaps the most famous institutionalized musar practice associated with Novaredok was the birzhe. This was an hour of the day set aside for the peripatetic exchange of musar insights among students. Moshe Silberg, who studied in a Novaredok yeshiva in 1917, described his first encounter with the birzhe as follows. The yeshiva actually looked like a stock-market at that hour.15 . . . The students strolled in pairs across the length and width of the hall, full of enthusiasm and lively gesticulations. . . . When I first entered the yeshiva, in the midst of this noise and excitement, a bokhur about 14–15 years old came up to me, greeted me, and without waiting for a response, grabbed my arm and asked: 14 15

Mark Wischnitzer, “Di Banayung fun Di Yeshives in Mizrekh Eyrope Nokh der Ershter Velt Milkhome,” Yivo Bletter, vol. XXXI-XXXII (1948), 15. The most common meaning of the Yiddish word `birzhe’ is “stock-market.”

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“Nu, what news can you tell me about your spiritual affairs?” I was stunned by his question and didn’t know what to answer. . . . I tried to get rid of this nudnik, and when I finally succeeded, I bumped into a second person who greeted me, grabbed my arm, and once again asked about my spiritual affairs. How, he asked, did I intend to improve my character?16

What are the origins of this practice? Nowhere is it to be found in the writings of or about Israel Salanter. Indeed it does not even date back to the inception of the Novaredok yeshiva. Yehoshua Ovsay, who studied there in 1900, does not even mention it in his memoirs. The answer is provided in an obscure Musarist source. According to Rabbi Ben Tzion Bruk, the late Novaredok rosh yeshiva in Jerusalem, Hurwitz introduced the birzhe into the yeshiva’s program in 1905. It was not, however, the product of his own imagination, but rather something he borrowed from the practices of Jewish revolutionaries. “Our master said that if oral propaganda can be of such utility for their ideas and nonsense, then why should we not use it for Torah and the fear of God?”17 Bruk’s memory serves him well. A key vehicle for communication and agitation in the early Jewish labor movement was the birzhe, a street designated for the outdoor peripatetic exchange of information and ideas at a set time. According to Ezra Mendelsohn’s study Class Struggle in the Pale, Birzhes . . . became focal points of activity. . . . Here workers and agitators met to discuss the problems of the day, and confer with the “representatives.” This was the place too where . . . illegal literature was distributed and where important meetings were arranged. . . . Workers would often walk arm in arm [emphasis my own] . . . as they denounced the members of the “bourgeoisie” who . . . might just happen to be walking on the other side of the street. . . . In a country where freedom of assembly and speech was denied, birzhes were vitally important. Without them it is doubtful whether the mass movement would have survived.18

16 Silberg, “Kat Ha-Novardokaim,” Ha-Aretz, 2. See Katz, Tenuat, 292–295, and Litvin, “In Vos Bashteyt,” 2. 17 Rabbi Ben Tzion Bruk, “Petah Davar,” in Gevile Esh, 15; also Katz, Tenuat, 292. 18 Ezra Mendelsohn, Class Struggle in the Pale (Cambridge, UK: University of Cambridge Press, 1970), 69–70; see also Henry J. Tobias, The Jewish Bund in Russia From Its Origins to 1905 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1971), 101.

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The recollection of Leyb Berman, an activist in the labor movement and the Bund, concerning his first birzhe bears an uncanny resemblance to that of Silberg. I was startled and stunned by the very fact that Yoshke the agitator took me by the arm, and began speaking to me. He led me up and down the narrow boulevard and then handed me over to a second agitator, the second to a third.19

During the Russian revolution of 1905, when strikes and protest activities proliferated, the birzhes grew by leaps and bounds. Hundreds and even thousands of Jewish workers flocked to them to learn about the unfolding tumultuous events. The local leadership of the Jewish Labor Bund used the birzhes to conduct “flying meetings,” and pass on instructions to their followers concerning revolutionary activity of all kinds. Non-proletarian and non-radical elements of Jewish society also attended the birzhes; some came out of solidarity with the revolutionary cause, while others were motivated by pure curiosity. In cities where the revolutionary forces were in control, people came to the birzhe to consult the leaders of the Bund as if the latter were the ruling authorities. “People used to come [to the birzhes] for every different reason: questions of divorce, dowry, business partners who had fallen out . . . a speculator who had himself been outwitted. . . . All used to come, and one could hardly escape them by telling them that they should rather go to the rabbi.” It was not unusual to find yeshiva students amidst the crowd.20 With the onset of tsarist reaction in 1906, workers’ birzhes were disrupted by the police with ever increasing severity and brutality. The institution soon faded from the scene. But its Musarist imitation remained a mainstay of Novaredok

Leon Berman, In Loyf Fun Yorn (New York, NY: Unzer tsayt 1945), 107; similarly Leon Bernshteyn, Ershte Shprotsungen (Buenos Aires, Argentina: Farlag Yidbukh, 1950), 33–35. 20 Tobias, The Jewish Bund in Russia, 305–312; Jonathan Frankel, Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews 1862–1917 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 143–158 (quotation from 148). See the accounts by A. Litvak, “Der Bund in Varshe, 1905,” in Geklibene Shriftn (New York, NY: Bildungs komitet fun arbiter ring, 1945), 178–179, and Grigori Aronson, “Di Homler `Birzhe’ un Di Homler Zelbst-shuts (Zikhroynes Vegn) 1905,” in Der Veker, April 1, 1955, 10–11. Aronson notes the presence of yeshiva students. “They joined the various revolutionary circles, and with the help of gymnasium students they studied the treyf socialist literature.” 19

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yeshivas for many years to come. The connection between the Musar birzhe and its labor-movement antecedent was, on the other hand, quickly forgotten.21 Our surprising discovery concerning the origins of the Novaredok birzhe suggests that we might be well-advised to examine the pedigree of its other musar practices as well. And indeed, a fresh look at them yields some rather provocative results. The student body of a Novaredok yeshiva was divided into small groups of about ten, called va’adim, which met periodically to review the problems they faced in improving their religious and moral characters. At va’ad meetings, the members might confess their sins to each other, report on their efforts to eradicate a certain evil trait of theirs, or engage in mutual or self-criticism. The proceedings were usually dominated by an older student, called the rosh ha-va’ad, who was charged with guiding and supervising the group. He might present theoretical discourses on the obstacles and pitfalls involved in transforming one’s character, or, alternately, deliver pointed jabs and digs at the shortcomings of the va’ad members.22 Although the format and personal dynamics of va’adim varied, and depended largely upon their leadership, their essential quality was everywhere the same. They served as the primary social units inside a Novaredok yeshiva, and helped forge a strong sense of collective identity among students. The atmosphere at va’ad meetings was highly charged and intimate, since they involved the sharing and raw exposure of one’s flaws and sins. The proceedings were closed to non-members and bore a conspiratorial aura about them. In the privacy of these small, closed circles, the students engaged in the task of “working on themselves” with intensity and vigor. There were antecedents to the institution of the va’ad; Salanter had established groups for the study of Musar beginning in the 1850s and was a staunch The traditional explanation of the origins of the Musar birzhe was that it was modeled after the noisy hustle-bustle of the stock-market (see note 14 above). Just as the market-place is the arena for ascertaining and determining the rise and fall in the value of stocks and currencies, so the Musar birzhe is the place for ascertaining and determining the rise and fall of one’s spiritual “stock,” Katz, Tenuat, 293. 22 Katz, Tenuat, 199–200 and 286–291 (Katz uses the term havurot musar rather than va’ad); Silberg, “Kat Ha-Novardokaim,” Ha-Aretz, 2; Litvin, “In Vos Bashteyt,” 2. For a riveting literary depiction of a va’ad, see the section “A Toyte Hant” of Grade’s poem Musernikes, 16–22. 21

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supporter of efforts by his followers to create havurot musar for laymen and scholars.23 But the va’ad’s unique features and atmosphere made it much more than a study group. And since it was apparently introduced in Novaredok at the same time as the birzhe, that is in 1905,24 one should seriously consider the possibility that it too was modeled after an institution of the Jewish labor and revolutionary movement—the underground circle or cell. The small, intimate, and secret circle of workers was the primary organizational unit of the Jewish labor movement. In the kassy, as they were called, members met to share their grievances, discuss labor actions, and study the doctrine of socialism. In striking similarity to the va’ad, they were led by an accomplished “agitator,” who presented socialist discourses and provided practical guidance on the tactics of economic struggle. The secret circle was the arena where the worker became self-conscious (a term which could be applied with equal validity to the Musarist in his va’ad) and imbibed the ideals of his cause.25 The Jewish Labor Bund consisted, structurally speaking, of a complex network of underground workers’ circles. At the apex of each locality there stood the city-wide “committee” (komitet) of the Bund, a term reminiscent of the Novaredok va’ad. These underground “committees” acquired great prominence and prestige on the Jewish street in 1905, when they were perceived as the mysterious and powerful force behind the unfolding events.26 Although there is no firm evidence connecting the Novaredok va’ad to the underground worker’s circle (as there is with the birzhe), the similarities between them and the historical setting in which the va’ad was introduced (Lithuania, 1905) strongly suggest such a connection. One former Novaredok student, the Yiddish writer Mordkhe Shtrigler, has characterized the va’adim

23 Etkes, Rabi Yisrael Salanter, 196–205 and passim. 24 O-vsay does not mention the va’ad in his memoirs of his stay in Novaredok in 1900, whereas all later memoirists and historians pay considerable attention to it. This suggests that it was not yet in existence at the time, and that it was one of the “reforms” which Hurwitz introduced in the yeshiva in 1905; see below. 25 Mendelsohn, Class Struggle, chapter 4, “The New Organization,” 63–81; Tobias, The Jewish Bund in Russia, chapter 9, “The Local Organizations,” 95–104. 26 Ibid., 97 and 296–300; Sholem Levin, Untererdishe Kemfer (New York, NY: Ikuf, 1946), 100–101.

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as “cells” and drawn a parallel between them and the underground revolutionary cells of tsarist Russia.27 I am also inclined to attribute a third musar institution in Novaredok, the peule or prat, to the influence of the Jewish labor movement. A peule was an exercise or operation undertaken by the individual student to improve his character. It was designed to uproot a specific moral defect of which the student was aware and involved the repeated performance of acts which embodied the opposite virtue in the extreme. Since pride, arrogance, and the quest for social esteem were considered the ubiquitous vices of yeshiva students, they were the object of most peules. Asking a druggist for nails (or for butter), or walking down the street dressed in a repulsive, ridiculous manner, were peules for uprooting pride and the drive for social prestige and instilling in their place humility and an indifference toward honor (hishtavut). Denying oneself food was a common peule for uprooting hedonistic tendencies; lending one’s dearest possessions to a friend was a peule against selfishness, in order to instill charity.28 The performance of these acts constituted the core of Novaredok’s program of character development. Peules were carefully planned, conscientiously repeated, and scrutinized after the fact for their personal impact. Va’ad meetings frequently reviewed the peules performed by members, and debated their efficacy and/or harmful “side effects.” At the birzhe, a student might share his insights on the performance of a certain peule.29 Novaredok’s focus on peules as the prime vehicle for bringing about spiritual/moral change was in itself an important innovation in Musarist thought. Salanter and his major disciples conceived of spiritual/moral transformation as a process involving study of musar and personal introspection. For them, character was changed through sedentary activity of the mind. In Novaredok Musar, character development required a vigorous program of action. To quote Hurwitz, “only actions can undo [earlier evil] actions. You can think for

27 Shtrigler’s Yiddish translation of Silberg’s article with his own additional annotations, “Di Novardoker,” Yiddisher Kemfer, Rosh Hashanah Almanac 5745, 32, note 15. 28 Katz, Tenuat, 255–257 and 260; Silberg, “Kat Ha-Novardokaim,” Ha-Aretz, 2; Grade, Musernikes, 20 and 45–49. Another term for the peules was protim. 29 Grade, Musernikes, 20–22.

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all the years of Methuselah; without peules you will only be dreaming and accomplishing nothing.”30 This activist orientation, so incongruous with traditional rabbinic intellectualism (even as modified by Salanterian Musar) may have drawn its inspiration from the Jewish labor movement. The labor movement was nothing if not activist. The strike, the demonstration, the rally, and, under extraordinary circumstances (as in 1905), the act of violence—these were the vehicles for bringing about changes in the workers’ condition. The birzhes and underground circles fulfilled many roles—they were social clubs, mutual aid societies, and educational forums—but their primary function was to prepare and organize workers for concerted action. The circle, birzhe, and strike were linked to each other in a logical progression which proceeded from consciousness-raising, to mobilization, to action. This system seems to have been adopted by Novaredok, with the Musar peule replacing the labor action as the instrument of change. What the peule and labor action held most deeply in common was their boldness and selfless heroism. Just as it took a great deal of devotion to the ideals of socialism to risk dismissal, beatings, arrest, or worse for participating in a strike or revolutionary act, so did the performance of a peule which would arouse public ridicule and hostility (or worse) require considerable dedication to the ideals of Musarism. In both, young people were performing daring and courageous acts for the sake of their “cause,” and the most daring activists of all were viewed by their peers as heroes. Our discovery that Novaredok’s unique institutions—the birzhe, the va’ad, and perhaps the peule—were adapted from the practices of the Jewish labor movement serves to illuminate and complicate the personality of R. Yosef Yoizl Hurwitz. Hurwitz was evidently not the myopic rejecter of modernity some have imagined. While preaching total withdrawal from “the world,” he was himself quite attuned to the goings-on of society at large. Not only was he aware of the growing labor and radical movement among Lithuanian Jews, but he was familiar with its internal structures and institutions. And, most remarkably of all, he was willing to borrow those institutions from the most self-consciously secular and anti-rabbinic movement in Jewish society and transform them into

30 Etkes, Rabi Yisrael Salanter, 111–119 and 311–325; quote from Hurwitz, “Darke Ha-Teshuva,” Madregat Ha-Adam, pt. I, 170.

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Musarist ones. This reveals a degree of flexibility and creativity we would hardly have imagined.

IV What led Hurwitz to appropriate the birzhe, the secret circle, and the ethic of activism from the Jewish radicals? Without a doubt he considered them to be useful vehicles for strengthening the Musarist spirit of his yeshiva. He was willing to learn from his adversaries, and borrow their tools. The reasoning reported by Rabbi Bruk is undeniable—if such things “are of utility to their ideas and nonsense, then why should we not use [them] for Torah and fear of God?” But this reasoning, true as it is, constitutes only a partial explanation. Other sources indicate that Hurwitz introduced these borrowings in response to an acute crisis in his yeshiva during the revolution of 1905. Radical ideas gained entry into the Novaredok yeshiva no later than 1902. In that year, an underground committee of the Bund was established in town, and one of its two founding leaders was a student from R. Yosef Yoizl’s yeshiva named Avrohom Kaplan. Few people knew at the time that this “diligent Musarist” was secretly a “self-conscious Bundist.”31 Little is known about the mysterious Kaplan, but it is not unlikely that he attempted to spread his ideas among his peers in the yeshiva. If Kaplan was an exceptional case in 1902, students like him became numerous in Novaredok between January and October of 1905. Revolutionary fervor engulfed the town (“demonstrations were a daily occurrence” writes one memoirist32), and the yeshiva was not immune to its influence. A substantial number of students left its walls to embrace the exciting cause of political activism. This large-scale defection of students left Hurwitz “greatly shattered.”33 Dov Katz, whose work on Novaredok relies in part upon conversations with former students, describes the state of the yeshiva as follows.

31 32 33

H. Kaplan and Y. Maslav, “Der Bund in Novaredok,” in Pinkas Novaredok, ed. E. Yerushalmi (Tel Aviv, Israel: Alexander Harkavy Relief Committee, 1963), 52. Ibid., 53. Mordkhe Ginzburg, “Di Muser Bavegung,” Pinkas Novaredok, 38.

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R. Yoizl found it necessary to strengthen the spirit of the yeshiva after the rebellion which occurred in Russia in 1905, into which many of the yeshiva’s students were drawn. When R. Yoizl spoke of the causes which led him to [do so], he mentioned several of his most outstanding students who were drawn into the currents of the time. He recalled in particular the case of a student from Semiatitz, who was extremely diligent, whose thirst for Torah dominated all his senses, and who had no desire in life but to study Torah. But suddenly, after going home to his family for the holidays [probably Passover, in April, 1905], he became a heretic, and set out on an evil path. . . . It was then that R. Yoizl added reforms, to repair the edifice of the yeshiva.34

The anonymous reforms referred to by Katz are in all probability the Musarist practices reviewed above—the birzhe, va’ad, and peule. An awareness of the historical context in which Hurwitz introduced these practices enables us to appreciate just what he was doing. His appropriation and adaptation of the institutions of the Jewish radical movement was a calculated attempt on his part to stem the tide of defections from the yeshiva to the revolutionary movement, and perhaps even to turn the tide back the other way. He undertook to create the trappings of the revolutionary movement inside his yeshiva, to create a yeshiva with its very own birzhes, secret cells, and acts of heroism. These features were designed to infuse the yeshiva with the special atmosphere of the radical movement, which was so attractive to the youth—an atmosphere of intimacy, secrecy, idealism, and adventure. Seen from this perspective, the Novaredok yeshiva emerges as a historical phenomenon of some import. Here was a yeshiva which actively competed with the labor and radical movement for the hearts and souls of young Jewish men. Instead of assuming a defensive posture of “hunkering down” and hoping that the stampede of the youth to the godless socialists would soon end, Novaredok transformed itself institutionally in an effort to make itself an attractive alternative to the godless socialists. This boldly creative step reflects a realization on Hurwitz’s part that the traditional model of yeshiva education simply could not sustain the commitment and loyalty of students under the newly created circumstances. Political activism had tapped into some very

34 Katz, Tenuat, 200.

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powerful drives and energies among the youth, and unless his yeshiva could somehow do the same, it was doomed to fail.

V It is tempting to dismiss Novaredok’s appropriations/borrowings from the Jewish labor movement as nothing more than “window dressing”—changes in form, but not in substance. The 1905 reforms did not affect the yeshiva’s values and ideals, which remained exclusively religious and pietistic, that is, based on fear of God and the proper observance of His commandments. Novaredok remained, even with its birzhes, cells, and activism, as unworldly as ever—a school of sectarian ascetics, recoiling from all involvement in general culture or politics. This point is well taken, and there is a good measure of truth to it. But one should not draw from it the blanket conclusion that Novaredok Musarism as a religious system was effectively uninfluenced by modern radicalism. Religious systems may eschew the values of modern cultural and social movements and still internalize their style, rhetoric, and world-view in subtler ways. Novaredok Musarism is a case in point. It bears the unmistakable imprint of the radical ethos—extremist in outlook, committed to the use of unconventional and violent means, and self-consciously defiant of traditional conceptions of propriety and piety. It is, in my opinion, a form of religious radicalism and rebellion.35 35

Before developing this point, I should like to make the caveat that there is no systematic exposition of the tenets of Novaredok Musar in existence. Hurwitz wrote close to nothing during his lifetime, and the book bearing his name as author, Madregat Ha-Adam, is in reality a compilation of musar-shmuesn which he delivered between 1917 and 1919 (the year of his death) while residing in Gomel and Kiev. The shmuesn were transcribed and edited by a student, Isaac Waldschein, and were published as a series of pamphlets, which were distributed to Hurwitz’s disciples, then scattered throughout the Ukraine. They were first brought together in book form many years later. Katz, Tenuat, 219–220; Y. L. Nekritz, “Yeshivot Novaredok,” in Mosdot Torah Be-Eropah Be-Binyanam U-be-Hurbanam, ed. S. K. Mirsky (New York, NY: Ogen, 1956), 258–259. Although Madregat Ha-Adam acquired the status of Holy Scripture among Hurwitz’s disciples, it is less than ideal as a repository of Novaredok’s basic teachings. The shmuesn are excursive rather than systematic, and since they were delivered to a group of long-standing disciples, many fundamentals are taken for granted. To complicate matters even further, they reflect the unique historical conditions of the time of their presentation; conditions which differed considerably from the ones which prevailed in the formative period of Novaredok Musar. It was 1919, not 1905. Tsarist Russia had been toppled, the Jewish labor

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Three of the central tenets of Novaredok Musar may be stated, in brief, as follows: 1.  The human soul in our time is almost totally under the control and governance of evil passions and inclinations. The power of the yetzer hara over most people is so great that they are unaware of their enslavement to it. Only an elect few, who have become self-conscious through the study of Musar, are aware of this fact, and are engaged in a never-ending struggle against their yetzer hara. 2.  The struggle against one’s evil passions/inclinations is a total war. There can be no concessions or compromises with the yetzer hara, because concessions, no matter how small or temporary, will merely serve to strengthen its power. The yetzer hara cannot be harnessed or transformed; it can only be defeated. 3.  Defeat of one’s evil passions/inclinations requires the use of extraordinary and extreme measures. Conventional means are inadequate and ineffectual for the enormous task of defeating the yetzer hara.

This is a radical diagnosis of man’s moral and spiritual condition; it is strikingly similar, in tone, to the political radical’s analysis of society and its ills. In the mind of the political radical, the forces of evil (tsarist tyranny, capitalism, or what have you) are in total control of society; there can be no accommodation or compromise with these ruling forces—compromise solutions merely play into the hand of the oppressors, and constitute “collaboration” with them. Only extreme, violent action, i.e., revolution, can topple them from power.

movement was more a part of history than of any immediate reality, and Hurwitz and his disciples were refugees in the Ukraine, where Jews were engaged in an elemental struggle for survival against famine, epidemics, and pogroms. The force which threatened to draw Hurwitz’s students away from the yeshiva was not the idealistic radical movement, but rather the harsh pressures of the “material struggle” for food, clothing, and shelter. Many sections of the shmuesn contended with this new source of distraction and defection. For all of these reasons, Madregat Ha-Adam does not reflect, at least on the surface level, the full extent to which radicalism permeated Novaredok’s religious ideology. To recognize the latter, one must pull back from the immediacies of the text and extrapolate the basic ideas and attitudes which underlie much of its contents. This is, admittedly, a hazardous enterprise. It is, however, possible to do so thanks to the works of Chaim Grade, which probe the Novaredok mentality and mode of thinking extensively and with great insight. The characterization of Novaredok’s basic tenets which follows relies heavily upon my reading of Grade.

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The radicalism of Novaredok’s vision is vividly conveyed in the term sheviras ha-midos, the shattering or crushing of one’s character traits, which expresses one of the highest ideals of Novaredok Musar. The term, which is so central to the Novaredok lexicon, is nowhere to be found in the classical rabbinic sources,36 and thus represents something of a conceptual breakthrough. Its underlying assumption is that man’s character traits are in and of themselves full of evil; hence the word ra’os (the shattering of evil traits) is superfluous. The doctrine of sheviras ha-midos contends that moral selftransformation is achieved by crushing and shattering one’s character traits, rather than by cultivating or adjusting them (the latter, more positive conception is expressed by the better-known term tikkun ha-midos, “the perfection of one’s character traits”). Only on the ruins of one’s previous evil character can a new character be built. The act of violent destruction is essential to attaining the desired goal.37 Hurwitz was adamant that one’s old, evil traits could not form the basis for a gradual process of self-improvement. The break with the old trait must be total and uncompromising. He drove home this point with a telling parable. If someone has a treyf kitchen and wants to repent and make it kosher, he might say “how can I repent all at once and break all my dishes? It will cost a great deal of money! I’ll do it gradually. I’ll break one dish, and replace it with a kosher one; later I’ll replace a second dish, later a third, and later a fourth, until it is completed.” Such a person would be considered a fool. For as soon as the [first] kosher dish mixes with the rest, it is all treyf. He can live as long as Methuselah—breaking one dish and replacing it, breaking one dish and replacing it—they will be treyf forever. If he wants to repent he must break all the dishes at once, and buy entirely new ones.38

36 The earliest usage of the term and its derivative forms known to me is in Vilna Gaon’s Commentary on Proverbs; see Sefer Mishle Im Biur Ha-Gra (Petah Tikva, Israel: M. Filip, 1980), index, “sheviras ha-midos.” In Novaredok Musar, it was developed into the cornerstone of a full-fledged doctrine. One of R. Elijah’s statements became Novaredok’s veritable slogan: “The main point of man’s existence is to fortify himself through sheviras ha-midos; if not, then why should he live?” (Commentary on Proverbs, 4:13; Even Sholomo 1:2). Hurwitz cited it in Madregat Ha-Adam (pt. I, 42 and 125), and students repeated it incessantly in birzhes, va’adim, and ecstatic outbursts during their study of Musar. 37 See Hurwitz, “Darke Ha-Teshuva,” Madregat Ha-Adam, pt. I, 165–173, and Grade, Tsemakh Atlas, passim. 38 Hurwitz, “Darke Ha-Teshuva,” Madregat Ha-Adam, pt. I, 151–2.

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The line of thinking expressed by the doctrine of sheviras ha-midos is radicalism transposed from the realm of politics to that of ethics. The object of aggression has been transferred from society to the ego. The goal is to bring down the ancient regime not of the state, but of the soul. In Novaredok Musar, as in any radical ideology, attainment of the goal necessitates extreme measures. Hence, the peules occupy a position of central importance, since they are the tools through which sheviras ha-midos is to be achieved. One must “perform extreme peules aimed against one’s weakness in a specific matter, which correspond to it fully and are its very opposite.”39 The traits of pride and arrogance are to be crushed by performing repeated acts of public self-humiliation, the vices of avarice and greed are to be uprooted by performing repeated acts of extreme self-denial, while quiescence and servility (sins in the Novaredok ledger) are to be eradicated by performing repeated acts of extraordinary initiative, assertiveness, and independence. The outsider, non-Musarist, may consider the peules involved to be ludicrous, disruptive, even harmful to the well-being of the performer and those around him. But conventional standards of propriety and morality simply cannot apply when the objective is so difficult and urgent a goal as sheviras ha-midos. The Musarist must take whatever action is necessary to stamp out his evil traits, even if it arouses vociferous objections in society at large. This includes resorting to “improper” and “immoral” means. Hurwitz did not mince words: Wherever you may feel [inner, moral] weakness you must strengthen yourself, occasionally also employing means which deviate externally from what is just. Only the Knower of hidden things [i.e. God] will understand such peules.40 You must go to the very extreme, and occasionally, the extreme will break a bit of the Torah—according to the external perception of the unknowing. . . . Others, and perhaps you yourself, will have arguments against this path . . . . [It] will also require you to depart from the truth somewhat.41 The deeds of both the evil man and the righteous man arouse arguments and objections. The one violates the Torah for the sake of [indulging] his [evil] traits; the other violates the Torah because of [his struggle against] his [evil] traits.42 39 Ibid., 167. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid., 171. 42 Ibid., 171–72.

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One cannot effect a spiritual revolution in oneself if one is squeamish about performing acts which run counter to “what is just,” “truth,” and “the Torah.” These principles may have to be suspended in order to attain the higher goal of sheviras ha-midos. In Novaredok Musar, ends justify means. Needless to say, Hurwitz did not produce his teachings out of whole cloth. Madregat Ha-Adam is full of citations from the Talmud, Midrash, Bahya’s Hovot Ha-Levavot, Maimonides’ Shemone Perakim and Mishne Torah, and the Vilna Gaon’s Commentary on Proverbs, used to bolster his points. But this should not obscure the fact that he used his sources selectively, in order to articulate an original moral philosophy of his own. The fact that this philosophy was radical in tenor, and employed the rhetoric of extremism, destruction, and “direct action,” was not indebted to any one of his literary sources, and cannot be attributed to pure coincidence. One must conclude that Hurwitz intentionally cast his Musarim in radical terms, in order to make it challenging and exciting to Lithuanian Jewish youth. The Musarist vision of sheviras ha-midos and peules could speak to their reservoir of discontent vis-à-vis the “status quo” and their idealistic desire to “create a new world.” These emotions, which were usually expressed via revolutionary political activity, would now be sublimated into a vision of individual, moral revolution. Silberg, for one, was sensitive to the affinities between Novaredok and radicalism. It would be a great error for us not to recognize the sign of the times in this movement. . . . This was a yeshiva with a revolutionary ideology, with the special tempo and enthusiasm of such an ideology. . . . The difference was in the content, in the object of revolution. The one sought a new social and economic order, the other—a new individual spiritual order. Their common denominator was the desire to turn everything upside down, to uproot accepted notions by radical means, which stood in complete contradiction to the idea of evolutionary development.43

Hurwitz’s ingenious project of adapting revolutionary practices and theories for his own purposes proved to be a tremendous success. In the years following 43 Silberg, Ha-Aretz, December 28, 1932, pt. 2.

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1905, the Novaredok yeshiva grew considerably, and Hurwitz was compelled to expand its faculty/spiritual leadership to include his sons-in-law and two other colleagues. On the eve of World War I, nine years after the crisis which had shaken it, Novaredok was one of the three largest yeshivas in Russia, with an enrollment of over three hundred students.44 This figure is remarkably high, given the fact that Hurwitz was held in low regard in rabbinic circles, including Musarist ones. He was no great Talmudist, and his public reputation was that of a fanatic—at best misguided, at worst dangerously deranged. The students who flocked to Novaredok did so despite the fact that their studies under Hurwitz would not bestow upon them high social prestige or launch their successful rabbinic careers. If anything, their association with the man and his institution might hinder their efforts to obtain a good shiddukh or rabbinic shtele. One must therefore attribute the yeshiva’s attractiveness to young men to factors of a very different order. Novaredok’s way of life appealed to them in its own right as challenging and exciting. One of the attractions must have been the rebelliousness inherent in the Novaredok life-style and its defiance of traditional norms, mores, and values. Performing shocking and offensive peules was only one of the ways in which students violated the norms of socially acceptable behavior. The utter neglect of Talmudic study in an institution which claimed to be a yeshiva was another. But there were more. The students disavowed all material possessions and celebrated a life of indigence. They wore filthy, worn clothes, and slept on synagogue benches with pride, claiming that a concern for material belongings distracted one’s concentration away from the task of spiritual self-transformation. They rejected the idea of pursuing a livelihood in principle, because this indicated a lack of bitokhn (trust in God) on one’s part. The Novaredokers even denigrated family ties, including marriage, as harmful to the Musarist quest. Students who minimized contact with their parents (e.g., who did not go home for the holidays) were praised as models of devotion to Musar. Hurwitz himself set a startling example, by leaving his wife and children behind in Slobodka and sending them no financial support while he led the yeshiva. “The concepts of 44

Ginzburg, “Di Muser Bavegung,” Pinkas Novaredok, 38.

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father and mother, wife and child, relative and family were foreign to them,” Silberg reported. They championed the ideal of hefkerut—total personal independence and freedom.45 Silberg characterized the Novaredokers as religious bohemians, who embraced a philosophy of vagabondism and renounced “bourgeois” life, its pleasures and aspirations.46 Whether the terms “bohemians” and “vagabondism” are apt or not, they do convey the unconventionality and irregularity of the Novaredok life-style. Parents, rabbis, and elders must have been deeply troubled by the rejection on the part of these young men of traditional Jewish values in the spheres of community, religion, work, and family. They had renounced the ideal of a sheyner yid (learned scholar, prosperous merchant, head of family, communal leader) lock, stock, and barrel. For many teenage youths, becoming a Novaredoker constituted an act of rebellion against one’s parents and their values—every bit as much as was joining the Bund. The Novaredokers viewed traditional orthodox Jews with hostility and contempt. The roots of this hostility were ideological. Traditional Jews were religious conservatives whose only desire was to sustain and protect the stable and familiar religious life-style of the past. The Novaredokers, on the other hand, were religious radicals, who set forth the ideal of spiritual revolution and upheaval. Their outlook was encapsulated in one of Hurwitz’s most famous adages that “the worst thing that can happen to a person is to stay the same.”47 They despised the complacent piety of the rabbis and balebatim, a “piety” which was uncritical, unreflective, and thoroughly infected with the vices of greed, power, pride, and hypocrisy. In Novaredok, there was no greater term of derision than “balebos,” the bourgeois Jew who was

45 Silberg, Ha-Aretz, December 28, 1932, pt. 2; on the renunciation of material goods see Katz, Tenuat, 236–238 and 241–251; on the denigration of family ties, see R. Avrohom Joffin, Ha-Musar Ve-ha-Da’at, vol. II (New York, NY: Ha-va’ad lehotsa’at kitve maran, 1972), 1, which relates how Hurwitz praised a student for refraining from going home when one of his parents died, despite the protestation of relatives; also Grade, Musernikes, 22, where a student vows never to go home for the holidays, and 38–39. On Hurwitz’s lengthy separation from his family see Katz, Tenuat, 206–207. 46 Silberg, Ha-Aretz, December 28, 1932, pt. 2. 47 Menes, “Patterns of Jewish Scholarship in Eastern Europe,” in The Jews, 523.

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self-satisfied and comfortable48 (the term carried just as great a stigma among Bundists, for different but analogous reasons). The students conceived of themselves (much as did Bundists) as a heroic, idealistic avant-garde, living in accordance with a new and more truthful morality. In sum, Novaredok Musarism, as constructed by Hurwitz, was a radical religious counter-culture. It appealed to drives and emotions similar to those which led other young men to leave traditional orthodoxy and join the Bund. Unlike Bundism, however, it was a rebellion from within. Employing categories drawn from the religious tradition, it subverted many traditional Jewish values and mores.

VI Novaredok Musar underwent a second process of transformation more than a decade later, during World War I, the Russian revolution, and their aftermath. Once again, the yeshiva faced a crisis which threatened its survival, and Hurwitz responded in a similar vein. By borrowing select ideas and practices from the modern Jewish political movements, he was able to revitalize the institution and energize its students. The steps he took were taken to their logical conclusion by his disciples in the years immediately after his death. The second institutional crisis began in 1914, with the outburst of the World War I, when a sizeable number of students fled the town, and Hurwitz was left “like a shepherd without his flock.” In 1915, Hurwitz decided that he and his remaining students should leave Novaredok, the town they had helped make famous, in order to avoid falling under the occupation of the advancing German troops. After several months of wandering, the yeshiva settled in the Belorussian city of Gomel. In the following year, it divided itself into four parts, with three contingents of students proceeding southward to Kiev, Kharkov, and Rostov. These groups were supervised by Hurwitz’s sons-in-law and leading disciples. Smaller groups of students subsequently left the four “central yeshivas,” as they were called, for innocuous towns and villages in the surrounding areas. By late 1916, the students of the former Novaredok yeshiva were scattered throughout Belorussia and the Ukraine, and for good reason. 48

Shtrigler, note 5 to “Di Novardoker,” Yiddisher Kemfer, Rosh Hashanah 5745, 30.

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Many of them were subject to the Russian military draft, and a large assembly of young men would have attracted the attention of the authorities, and led to searches, forced military inductions, and arrests.49 Throughout this period of war, exile, and dispersion (1914–1917), the yeshiva continued to lose students. As they confronted the war-time hardships of dislocation, hunger, and epidemics, most of the young men joined the general stream of Jewish refugees, or returned home to their families. According to one estimate, only eighty students reached Gomel along with Hurwitz. Many left the yeshiva after having been separated from their mentor and master. And many of those who remained Novaredokers throughout these travails felt that the struggle for a piece of bread and a place to sleep was draining their energy, and overwhelming their effort to pursue spiritual goals.50 The threat of Novaredok’s general demoralization and even disintegration loomed large. Hurwitz addressed the crisis creatively. First, he announced an important ideological shift intended to bolster his students’ morale. He instructed them to abandon their social isolation and aloofness, to aggressively seek out Jewish youngsters wherever they may be and convert them to Novaredok Musarism. His new slogan was lezakos es ha-rabim, “to turn the many unto righteousness.” He composed a lengthy letter to his students in which he elucidated this new idea and called upon them to implement it.51 “We must create . . . yeshivas and kibbutzim [study collectives] everywhere—in cities, towns, and villages, so as to bring the entire younger generation under the banner of Torah and fear of God.”52 In part, Hurwitz was making a virtue out of necessity. Novaredok’s dispersion was to be viewed from now on as a doctrinal imperative rather than a lamentable fact. By providing the students with an important reason for remaining far away from each other and from their master, he eased their sense of demoralization. Moreover, by vigorously propagating the ideal of “turning the many unto righteousness” Hurwitz imbued the students with a sense of mission and a new élan. They were charged with a mission of 49 Ginzburg, “Di Muser Bavegung,” Pinkas Novaredok, 38; Katz, Tenuat, 209–212. 50 Katz, Tenuat, 210. 51 “Ma’amar Mezake Et Ha-Rabim.” 52 Hurwitz, Madregat Ha-Adam, pt. II, 235.

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spiritual rescue; the future of Torah, Musar, and Jewry at large lay on their shoulders. This about-face in Novaredok’s social posture, from introverted isolation to aggressive expansion, was a crucial development in transforming Novaredok from a yeshiva into a movement. Its horizons were no longer limited to the souls of individual yeshiva students, but now extended to the entire Jewish people, or at least to the entire younger generation of Russian Jews. Novaredok was no longer indifferent to the fate of Jewry at large. The students began to engage in public propaganda and outreach, establishing new “branch” yeshivas in numerous towns. This shift in orientation occurred at an important juncture in Jewish history—when Zionists, Diaspora Nationalists, and liberal “assimilationists” were engaged in open and aggressive competition to control the newly established educational institutions for the children of war-time refugees.53 Hurwitz in a sense threw Novaredok into the fray, as a religious educational movement which would compete with the secular currents for the education of refugee children. Hurwitz took a further step in transforming Novaredok into a movement in December 1917, at which time he gathered the students from the four corners of the Ukraine to Gomel for a Novaredok convention. Not a kinus, a gathering, or an asifa, a meeting, but a ve’idah, a convention, which followed parliamentary order. In attendance were official delegates representing their respective yeshivas; a chairman presided over the proceedings and followed a set agenda. Reports were presented on the state of various yeshivas, and the deliberations concluded with the passage of resolutions by majority vote. The convention adopted by-laws for the Novaredok movement, which established an internal organizational structure and set forth uniform guidelines regarding the study of musar and the performance of musar activities.54 It is not coincidental that Hurwitz called his convention in 1917, when there was a tremendous flourish of political and organizational activity in Russian Jewry. In the aftermath of the February revolution of that year, all the Jewish political movements held conventions—the Zionists, the Bund, 53 See Zevi Scharfstein, Toldot Ha-Hinukh Be-Yisrael Ba-Dorot Ha-Ahronim, vol. II ( Jerusalem, Israel: Rubin Mass, 1960), 35–48. 54 Silberg, Ha-Aretz, December 28, 1932, pt. 2; Katz, Tenuat, 215–219.

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the Socialist Territorialists/Autonomists, etc. These were the very first party conventions held under conditions of total legality, and attracted widespread public attention. New political, religious, and cultural organizations sprang up that year like mushrooms after a storm, with each holding a conference or convention of its own.55 Once again Hurwitz appropriated an institution of the modern Jewish movements and utilized it to strengthen the Musarist cause. The consequences of these reforms were impressive. As Novaredok attracted new youths to its ranks, it grew in size, energy, and dynamism. At its peak, in 1919, it encompassed some thirty yeshivas, including several on the east bank of the Volga. In 1921, six hundred Novaredok students crossed the Soviet border into independent Poland; twice as many as there had ever been in the original yeshiva.56 Novaredok’s transformation into a movement reached its culmination in inter-war Poland. After the border-crossing, each of the four “central yeshivas” settled in a different Polish city and continued to found branch yeshivas in outlying areas. The Novaredok system grew by leaps and bounds, eventually embracing seventy yeshivas and three thousand students, and in the process, it made further recourse to the tools and institutions of the Jewish political movements. Conventions became a regular event and even appointed executive committees (va’ad ha-poel) to supervise the implementation of resolutions, and komisyas (comissions) to address specific issues. With Hurwitz no longer alive—he died in Kiev in 1919—the leadership was assumed by a central council (agudah merkazit) consisting of the heads of the four central yeshivas. An elaborate system of councils was instituted, which permeated the Novaredok yeshiva network from the national level down to the individual local yeshiva. Internal communication was maintained by an official in-house journal, Or Ha-Musar, whose issues featured Musarist discourses and, notably, a section of Novaredok news. The news section 55 56

Y. Slutsky, “Yahadut Rusia Bi-Shnat Ha-Mahapeha 1917,” He-Avar 15 (1968): 32–56. Y. Shayn, “Yeshivat Mezritsh Ha-Merkazit Ba-Tkufah Ben Shte Milhamot Ha-Olam,” Kol Yisrael, April 26, 1946, 2; Katz, Tenuat, 228. This heroic period in the history of Novaredok, during which they were persecuted by the communist authorities, has been described by Katz, Nekritz and others.

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included reports on the latest convention, on meetings of the central council, and the founding of new yeshivas.57 In adopting these tools, Novaredok again exhibited its flexibility to accommodate contemporary trends. Polish Jewry was becoming the most mobilized and organized Jewry in history, and Polish Jews were increasingly defining themselves in terms of the movement to which they belonged. Novaredok, a small religious sect of a few thousand, likewise assumed all the trappings of a modern movement. In doing so, it was a path-breaker. With the possible exception of Lubavitch (which was not as prominent or as large as today), no Hasidic group in inter-war Poland made recourse to such modern tools as parliamentary conventions, a hierarchy of officers, and an in-house journal. The old methods of organization and communication prevailed, no matter how numerous or scattered the group of Hasidim. In Ger, Aleksander, and elsewhere, there were no conventions, only gatherings at the rebbe’s court for special Sabbaths and holidays. There were no officers—excepting, of course, the rebbe himself and his gabaim. And internal communication was conducted by letter and emissary, not via an official movement journal. Novaredok’s use of modern organizational tools and mechanisms is reminiscent of Agudas Yisroel, the powerful Orthodox political party in Poland which did much the same. But this similarity should not obscure the deeper difference between them. Novaredok remained, as before, a pietistic sect, which avoided all involvement in the affairs of society at large. Novaredokers viewed political activity as a dangerous seduction of the yetzer hara and a diversion from one’s chief task in life, sheviras ha-midos. For this reason, none of Novaredok’s rosh yeshivas was active in Agudas Yisroel. The Agudah’s participation in Polish politics and its diplomatic efforts on behalf of the safety and well-being of Polish Jewry made it much too worldly for the Novaredokers. The Agudah’s internal political contests between individuals and factions, motivated by ambition and the drive for power and prominence, were viewed

57

On this period, see D. Fishman, “The Musar Movement in Inter-War Poland.”

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by them as a form of moral and spiritual degeneracy.58 Novaredok adopted the trappings of a political movement, but rejected the materialistic world-view upon which all political activity is predicated. Once again it had adopted the tools and terms of the moderns, while sustaining an adamant rejection of their values.

58

Shtrigler puts the following thoughts in the mind of a Novaredok Rosh Yeshiva: Underneath all its wide taleysim, “Agudas Yisroel” is also part of “the world,” which carries an unseemly odor to it. The religious party has immersed itself in the nonsense of politics. Reb Yankev heard that their people killed each other behind closed doors for a bit of honor . . . rabbis, who should sit and learn with the community, aspired for the opportunity to sit in Warsaw [in the parliament]—along with the goyim and atheists—and play political tricks, while wearing silk yarmulkes on their heads. . . . The whole thing had the odor of pride, boastfulness, with the Polish language in their mouths, and their drawing near to the Gentile rulers. If you’d ask Reb Yankev, He’d say that this was Satan’s latest disguise—in the frock of a rabbi. The whole Agudah is a new way to snatch young men away from the house of study. Until now, only the heretics published newspapers and literature, and every religious young man knew that they was as treyf as pork. . . . But the Agudah came along and began to publish its own papers with their own nonsense. . . . Religious young men devour them without fear, and Satan rejoices that his work has been done for him by others. A God-fearing young man begins to read these things and his desire is aroused. From there, it is easier to go over to reading newspapers and books without a rabbinic stamp of approval as well. . . . It’s not good at all. . . . They [the Agudah] don’t realize that they are opening up all the doors to the world. Shtrigler, “Farshverer,” Yiddisher Kemfer, May 29, 1964, 5–6. The subject of relations between Novaredok and the Agudah requires further study.

Exhibiting Dreyfus in America: The Jewish Museum of New York and the Soviet Jewry Movement1 Maya Balakirsky Katz The first and largest exhibition on the Dreyfus affair to date was mounted in the Jewish Museum of New York in 1987. The exhibition Art, Truth, and Justice attracted over seventy thousand visitors, a statistic that provides some perspective on the distance between the immediate national context of the Dreyfus affair and its representation a century later in the United States: the number of attendees at the exhibition in the four months of its run was equal to the total number of Jews in France at the time of the affair. The unprecedented success of the New York exhibition should not only be understood in terms of what is gleaned about the period on display (1890s France), but in terms of the era that mounted the display (1980s New York). The decade-long preparation of the exhibition occurred during the height of the American protest movement that sought to effect change on behalf of Soviet Jewry, denied immigration behind the Soviet Union’s Iron Curtain.

1

I would like to express my gratitude to Barbara Packer, manager of Exhibition Archives at the Jewish Museum and Shulamith Berger, head of Archives at Yeshiva University Library, for their expertise and for sharing their offices with me. When I spent the summer of 2009 at the Jewish Museum archives, the museum was in the process of archival reorganization (and continues to move much of the material around). Box numbers and folder numbers in the Jewish Museum exhibition archives would thus be irrelevant to cite, while exhibition titles remain the primary searching tool in the archives.

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While the relationship of the Soviet Jewry Movement to the political life of American Jews has been explored in a number of important studies, the relationship between the same protest movement and the cultural experience of American Jews has received only a modicum of attention.2 We know little, for instance, of the role that the movement played in Jewish art scenes in American cities where both Jewish activism and Jewish cultural patronage ran deep.3 How and to what extent Jewish museums addressed the Soviet Jewry Movement points to the relationship between the Soviet Jewish predicament and the cultural, as opposed to political, patronage of the issue in America. This essay begins looking at this relationship by tracing the evolution of “culture” in the exhibition practices of the Jewish Museum of New York during the decades of the Soviet Jewry Movement, culminating in the 1987 Dreyfus affair exhibition. The paper’s main focus, however, is a contextual analysis of the Dreyfus affair exhibition itself, pointing out how Dreyfusard and Jewish positions in finde-siècle France were intertwined while also touching on how the Dreyfus affair offered a useable model for New York activists in the 1980s.

Art and Activism One of the most groundbreaking—and lasting—contributions of the Dreyfus affair exhibition to Dreyfus historiography was the inclusion of a vast number of avant-garde paintings, sculptures, and decorative items. This striking display of high culture in relation to the affair offered a political context for understanding 2

3

Among many titles on the Soviet Jewry protest movement, see Stuart Altshuler, From Exodus to Freedom: The History of the Soviet Jewry Movement (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005). For an article that raises the cultural identity of American Jews as a product of the protest movement, see Shaul Kelner, “Ritualized Protest and Redemptive Politics: Cultural Consequences of the American Mobilization to Free Soviet Jewry,” Jewish Social Studies 14, no. 3 (Spring/Summer 2008): 1–37, which has been reprinted in the present volume; see pages 144–182. Also, see Stephen Feinstein, “Soviet Jewish Artists in the USSR and Israel: The Dynamics of Artist Resettlement,” in Soviet Jewry in the 1980s: The Politics of Anti-Semitism and Immigration and the Dynamics of Resettlement, ed. Robert O. Freedman (North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1989), 186–214. Efforts to chronicle the Soviet Jewish movement in particular cities have produced both independent and commissioned works of scholarship, such as Andrew Harrison’s informative Philadelphia’s Efforts to Aid Soviet Jews 1963–1998 (Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University, 2001); Henry L. Feingold, Silent No More: Saving the Jews of Russia, the American Jewish Effort, 1967–1989 (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2007). These works do not, however, address the role that the Soviet Jewry movement played on the art scene in those cities.

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the works of artists who had largely been studied according to artistic schools and formalist innovations. The display of Edgar Degas, Felix Vallotton, Henri Evenepoel, Aimé-Jules Dalou, and Emile Gallé in relationship to contemporaneous political issues contributed to the art historical understanding of the late nineteenth-century artistic culture and, moreover, the exhibition of their political leanings also reflected significantly on the changing attitudes of cultural patronage among New York Jews during the Soviet Jewry Movement. Soviet Jewry demonstrations often occurred around non-movement cultural events and through this strategy invariably began to affect mainstream reception of their cause; New-York-based protest organizations picketed both Jewish and Russian cultural events with the intent of tying the treatment of Jews in Russia to the greater destiny of Western culture. New York Jewish-sponsored events, such as the 1971 debut of the film Fiddler on the Roof, provided one kind of opportunity for demonstrators to speak out against Soviet anti-Semitism while Russian-sponsored cultural events provided an alternate platform to advance the protest for cultural equality in the Soviet Union.4 To recreate the Jewish cultural scene of the 70s and 80s in New York is to recall the dozens of local offerings in the greater New York area of Russian films, art exhibitions, and dance repertoires, made in the midst of highly-publicized bomb threats by the militant Jewish Defense League.5 And while other more mainstream organizations neither asked sponsors to cancel Russian-related events nor patrons to boycott them, nonetheless they insisted on the linkage between artistic performance and politics. Certainly, according to Gennady Estraikh, the die-hard fascination with the high culture of Russian art, theater, and dance had teetered in the 1950s with news of Stalin’s purges, and subsequently lost all appeal after the Soviet Union’s foreign policy during the Six-Day War in 1967.6 After the war,

4

5 6

At the Rivoli Theater, where Fiddler on the Roof debuted, picketers distributed petitions to “Remember Tevye’s three million children” while singing “If I were a Free Man.” Promotion material, Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry [from here, SSSJ], Yeshiva University Library Archives, Box 8, folder 23. For a recent film that includes many of the central cast of the movement, see Laura Bialis’s Refusenik, Los Angeles, 2007, DVD. Gennady Estraikh, “Professing Leninist Yiddishkayt: The Decline of American Yiddish Communism,” American Jewish History 96, no. 1 (2010): 33–60.

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Jewish activists effectively turned en masse against the culture of the left, a move that served as the centerpiece of their lobbying for human rights. This focus on high culture, or its fall from favor in light of Russian sympathies, was a Jewish political concern that would play a decisive role in American institutions devoted to the promotion and preservation of Jewish art. Notably, contemporary Soviet Jewish art initially came to American museums through protest organizations that made no pretense of disinterested motives. There was a clear emphasis on politically conscious consumption of culture in the 1970s that would make substantial inroads with a generation of Jewish cultural consumers raised on formalist claims of pure aesthetics. For example, the Greater New York Conference on Soviet Jewry organized and mounted the first solo art exhibition of a Soviet Jewish artist at the Jewish Museum of New York in 1972, and the Bay Area Council on Soviet Jewry organized and mounted the first Soviet Jewish group art exhibition at San Francisco’s Judah L. Magnes Memorial Museum in 1977.7 Both politically motivated organizations secured exhibitions at established Jewish museums in order to showcase a group of unofficial artists whose body of work would be regularly referenced in subsequent activist publications. We might thus look toward the particular cultural life staged inside Jewish museums and, here, the Jewish Museum of New York—combined with elements of the external Soviet Jewry Movement—to gauge the mutual reverberations of activism and art. The development of the Jewish Museum’s scope during the Soviet Jewry Movement sheds light on the programmatic turn toward socially responsible art in the 1980s, particularly apparent in the Dreyfus affair exhibit and the illustrated media it showcased.

The 1970s: Artistic Culture in an Era of Political Protest Perhaps the best way to describe the Jewish Museum’s institutional leanings at mid-century is to recall art historian Avram Kampf ’s public criticism, in 1968, 7

12 from the Soviet Underground (San Francisco: Bay Area Council on Soviet Jewry and Judah L. Magnes Memorial Museum, 1977). For a discussion on the shaping of Soviet Jewry archives in America and Israel, see Maya Balakirsky Katz, “Collecting the Exile: The Jewish National Movement in the USSR, 1967–1989,” Images: A Journal of Jewish Art and Visual Culture 3, no. 1 (2009): 119–128.

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of the Jewish Museum as an “institution adrift” because it defined “Jewish” too broadly and “art” too narrowly.8 Indeed, although the museum enjoyed critical acclaim for its avant-garde (formalist) roster, it received little support from its parent institution, the Jewish Theological Seminary of America.9 Having served as an academic consultant to the museum in 1966–67 precisely because of these institutional tensions between the museum and the seminary, Kampf predicted a dire situation for a newly-appointed director who, he hoped, would maintain “a more subtle balance” between the contemporary scene and the Jewish program.10 The seminary’s disapproval and Kampf ’s criticism resulted in board chairman David Finn’s declaration that the museum’s shifting policies were “in part the result of an ideological decision.”11 Although scholars have accounted for the Jewish Museum’s reorientation in a number of convincing studies, no one has addressed what I see as the most important influence on the museum, or, at the very least, its response to the seminary’s pressure to exhibit specifically Jewish subject matter. It is the Soviet Jewry Movement that provides the context for the Jewish Museum’s redirection from formalist interpretations of art in the 1960s toward socially derived interpretations of art in the 1970s and 1980s. The Soviet Jewry Movement, while not implicitly acknowledged in the museum’s exhibition schedule, throws into high relief the entangled

Avram Kampf, “The Jewish Museum: An Institution Adrift,” Judaism 17 (Summer 1968): 282–98. Important scholarship on the Jewish Museum’s redirection includes Julie Miller and Richard I. Cohen, “A Collision of Cultures: The Jewish Museum and the Jewish Theological Seminary, 1904–1971,” in Tradition Renewed: A History of the Jewish Theological Seminary, vol. 2., ed. Jack Wertheimer (New York: The Jewish Theological Seminary, 1997); Matthew Israel, “A Magnet for the With-It Kids,” Art in America, October 2007, 73–83. See also Emily Bilski’s essay that came out the year of the Dreyfus affair exhibit on the history of the Jewish Museum, “Seeing the Future through the Light of the Past: The Art of the Jewish Museum,” in The Seminary at 100: Reflections on the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and the Conservative Movement, ed. Nina Cardin (New York: Rabbinical Assembly, Jewish Theological Seminary, 1987), 143–154.   9 Norman L. Kleeblatt, ed., Too Jewish? Challenging Traditional Identities (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996). 10 Kampf, “The Jewish Museum,” 298. 11 Although the avant-garde roster achieved a level of critical esteem, it “had not attracted the financial support necessary to make such a program viable.” Grace Glueck, “Museum Turns to All-Jewish Shows,” New York Times, January 5, 1971, 40.   8

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relationship between Jewish culture and politics at the time.12 Putting its “ideological decision” into motion, the Jewish Museum turned its focus away from artists associated with the New York School (and, at times, from artists with ideological roots in the communist movement) and towards contemporary shows of Soviet Jewish artists with little traction in the contemporary art scene. These fairly obscure Soviet Jewish artists debuted at the Jewish Museum in 1972, beginning with the art of Soviet political prisoner Boris Penson, sponsored by the Greater New York Conference on Soviet Jewry. Curator Susan Goodman was also the wife of Executive Director of the National Conference on Soviet Jewry (NCSJ) Jerry Goodman and it would not be amiss to conclude that her interest in Soviet-era Jewish art overlapped with a personal activism. Susan Goodman contracted the museum’s critic, Kampf, to personally hand-pick the exhibition checklist and wrote a passionate catalog essay, signaling the birth of a new, socially conscious museum. Without further reference to the international campaign on behalf of Boris Penson and other Soviet prisoners arrested for planning a plane hijacking to illegally immigrate to Israel in 1970—a cause célèbre of the American Jewish protest movement—the museum announced that it would exhibit Penson’s work in absentia, under the title Art from a Soviet Prison, while the twentysix-year-old artist was serving a ten-year prison term in Russia. Kampf wrote to curator Susan Goodman, “We can waive the future artistic standards which must guide the museum,” and even suggested that Soviet-born artist Boris Aronson design a viewing strategy for the exhibition of Penson’s works as to be seen “through iron bars resembling a jail” (a suggestion the museum ultimately rejected).13 Despite Kampf ’s unapologetic embrace of “political considerations” and the museum’s initial decision to host such an unprecedented exhibition, it 12

13

Expressing regret with the Jewish Museum’s reorientation, art theoretician Arthur Danto located the Jewish Museum’s move toward social history and ethnography as part of the greater move away from the idealization of cultural universalism. Arthur Danto, “Postmodern Art and Concrete Selves: The Model of the Jewish Museum,” in From the Inside Out: Eight Contemporary Artists, ed. Susan Tumarkin Goodman (New York: The Jewish Museum, 1993), 11–22. Avram Kampf to Susan Goodman, August 18, 1972, Jewish Museum exhibition archives, folder “Boris Penson.”

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shrank from any political associations for the show and adopted a decisively art historical posture. Regardless of Kampf ’s political leanings at the planning stage of the exhibition and the later re-framing by Soviet Jewry organizations, the Jewish Museum clung to its museological mission to display fine art and,14 in launching the Penson exhibition together with the graphic works of an official Russian Jewish painter, Anatoli Kaplan, issued a curious staff memorandum on museum policy: The exhibitions of the works of these artists [Penson and Kaplan] will be handled as art exhibitions. There will be no political statements, and no attempt to exploit in any way the political implications of the shows. This policy will extend to the careful omission of value terms from publicity material—e.g., the works were “brought to this country by friends of the artist,” not “rescued.”15

The omissions advocated by the museum represented a meek public relations policy in light of the uproar over Soviet confiscation of Penson’s art as part of his severe, ten-year sentence. Furthermore, the memorandum lumped the two artists together despite their significant generation gap and their radically divergent political statuses. It stated: “The Jewish Museum is presenting the works of these two artists in line with its commitment to the Jewish community. It believes that both exhibitions make a comment on the position of the artist in a society in which freedom of creative expression is not a recognized social value.”16 It was an unfair art historical comparison because the assailed independent artist serving a ten-year prison term with permission to send out a single letter annually could not possibly communicate in the same way as the decorated Russian Jewish painter. Instead of drawing political lines, therefore, the museum took a tacit approach to defending the avant-garde coming out of Russia (and the especially marginalized avant-garde Soviet Jewish artists). This approach allowed the museum to expand its own approach to formalist aesthetics by casting ire at

14 The Jewish Museum understood that others might interpret the material politically and requested police security on the night of the exhibition’s preview. 15 Memorandum to Dr. Gerson D. Cohen from Marjorie G. Wyler, October 2, 1972 [emphasis my own]. Eventually the memorandum, in several versions, went out to all museum personnel. 16 Memorandum to Dr. Gerson D. Cohen from Marjorie G. Wyler, October 2, 1972.

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attempts to suppress formalist aesthetics by officialdom (in this case the Soviet government, but more narrowly, the seminary). Regardless of its timid public relations stance towards politicization, by declaring that both exhibitions commented on the position of the artist in an authoritarian society in which freedom of expression is not a recognized social value, the museum did in fact show its political inflections. And by pairing the embattled Penson to the officially approved Kaplan, it took a shot at Kaplan as a compromised artist; Penson’s troubled reception in Russia paved the way to his success at the Jewish Museum as much as Kaplan’s Soviet patronage cast him as an artistic failure. While both artists worked in aesthetically reductionist styles, the “promising” twenty-six-year-old was compared with modernists such as Picasso, while the seasoned official artist of the Soviet state was framed by his romanticized subjects and styles of literary figures such as Sholem Aleichem. Conspicuously, the museum catalog introduced the senior artist by stating, “like any other artist in the USSR the Jewish artist is supported by the State in his work and is dependent on it for his livelihood.” The catalog went on to explain that while the Soviet Union generally frowned upon Jewish subjects, “when politically expedient . . . [it] allowed isolated expressions of Jewish culture by artists who generally look towards the Jewish past,” presumably because such images implicated Tsarist anti-Semitism and seemed to suggest Soviet tolerance by contrast. Rather than tempering a political issue, the museum’s juxtaposition of the two artists turned out to be quite political—to the extent that the political undertones seemed to trump the aesthetic considerations. In reality, Kaplan was the more diverse artist, with decades of official accolades and a body of unofficial work as well. Not only was Kaplan known in the Soviet Union for his professional success in lithography, he also produced a vast personal collection in oil and ceramics that remained in his private collection throughout the Cold War. The Jewish Museum found Kaplan’s association with ethnographic trifles as self-evidently pointing to the bankruptcy of the arts under Soviet repression and, despite the fact that Kaplan represented a body of more accomplished work by any objective standard, framed him as a historian of a mythical, literary world (the sort of Jewish artist the seminary would undoubtedly support). In contrast, according to the catalog, Penson “found the forms and subjects of official Soviet art inadequate for conveying his experience, and

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was compelled to find new formal and iconographic means to render it meaningful to himself and thereby to regain a measure of wholeness and personal identity.”17 Relying on the then-standard account of Soviet art, the Jewish Museum interpreted social realist artists as a slavish tool of the authorities, while introducing the embattled nonofficial artists as heroic challengers of the political and aesthetic orthodoxies of the Soviet Union. In this framework, Penson was the precocious heir to the future of Jewish culture despite the Soviet government’s attempts to negate him or the Jewish Seminary’s weariness of non-representational formalist art. By displaying the analogies between the dematerialization of the aesthetic object and the artist’s dissident posture against state authority, the Jewish Museum could save face after scaling down its earlier commitment to New York’s minimalists and conceptualists and turning towards political gestures. In some ways, the closeted world of Soviet Jewish art allowed the Jewish Museum to extricate itself from the clinical formalism of art critic Clement Greenberg and create an exhibition calendar that invited Jewish audiences to think about culture as a forum for political activism, inspired by the Soviet Jewry Movement. Despite its professed disdain, the museum found itself ineluctably drawn toward artists with uncompromising visions of moral certitude.18 In a development that may seem counter-intuitive, the program of the Penson/Kaplan exhibit, with its influences from the Soviet Jewry Movement, displaced the museum’s prior avant-garde formalist agenda for an avant-garde political agenda. In doing so, it paved the way for a cautious reemergence of figuration and a more sympathetic treatment of American social realists such as Jacob Epstein, Jack Levine, Leonid Baskin, William Gropper, Chaim Gross, 17 Susan Tumarkin Goodman, Anatole Kaplan: Graphic Works (New York: The Jewish Museum, 1972), 1; Avram Kampf, Boris Penson: Art from a Soviet Prison (New York: The Jewish Museum, 1972), 1. 18 As the Jewish Museum did in the early 1970s, American art institutions framed the Soviet avant-garde within a decidedly reductionist polarization between “official” and “non-conformist” art in the mid-1980s (when the cultural reforms of the Glasnost era made it possible for museums in the West to borrow, acquire, and display Soviet art). See Donald Kuspit, “New York Contra Moscow, Moscow Contra New York: The Battle in the Soul of the New Russian Immigrant Artists,” in Forbidden Art: The Postwar Russian Avant-Garde, eds. John E. Bowlt, Donald B. Kuspit, and John E. Bowlt (Los Angeles and New York: Curatorial Assistance and Art Publishers, 1998), 149–172.

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Louis Lozowick, Max Weber, Moses Soyer, and Raphael Soyer, as well as of the socially conscious work of the Civil Rights Movement in America and the Dreyfusard cause in France. Another exhibition seen at the Jewish Museum of New York during the same time period, and equally interesting for the political questions it highlighted, was The Smithsonian Institute’s The Precious Legacy: Judaic Treasures from the Czechoslovak State Collections, which travelled to New York in 1983. The first major exhibition of Jewish cultural history, this was a watershed for the display of Jewish treasures from the communist bloc in American institutions during the Cold War.19 The Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES) succeeded in loaning over five hundred objects of Judaica from the State Jewish Museum in Prague (formerly the Czechoslovak State Jewish Museum) to be exhibited in six American cities (including the Jewish Museum of New York), setting attendance records for a Jewish-themed exhibition over its two-year tour.20 The American exhibition of the Czechoslovakian collection told two simultaneous stories: the long history of Czechoslovak Jewry and the collection’s place in Holocaust history. Beginning in 1938, the Nazis confiscated Judaica from Jewish communities in the Bohemian countryside and shipped their loot to Prague to create a “Museum to an Extinct Race,” which, in a twist of fate, created the largest Judaica collection in the world. Running parallel to these histories, however, was the situation facing Jews of the late twentieth century in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, a satellite state in the Eastern Bloc (in many ways, more communist than Russia). The exhibition project began when administrative assistant Mark E. Talisman accompanied Senator Charles Vanik on an ancestral heritage tour outside of Prague. On that trip, Talisman saw the Judaica collection and resolved to bring it to light in the United States not only for its record of historical craftsmanship, but to focus new attention on the Jewish plight in the Soviet bloc. The project resulted in fifteen years of government negotiations between the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic and the United States. In the acknowledgments for The Precious Legacy exhibition catalog, 19 20

David Altshler, ed., The Precious Legacy: Judaic Treasures from the Czechoslovak State Collections (New York: Summit Books, 1983). 135,000 visitors saw the Precious Legacy exhibition in the Jewish Museum of New York alone, making it its most successful exhibition at the institution.

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Talisman wrote that Vanik was one of many government officials who assisted with securing the international loans, and the list of supporters overlaps with those government officials (and their wives) who were committed to the Jewish cause in the Soviet Union.21 Although Vanik is remembered in the Soviet Jewry Movement as the senator who tied trade to human rights issues in the Jackson-Vanik amendment in 1975, The Precious Legacy exhibit tied trade to issues of Jewish cultural legacy while also, considering public awareness of the repressive Soviet bloc, reminding viewers of a very relevant and current dispute. The Precious Legacy succeeded in binding the consumption of culture to Jewish activism for museum patrons in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, St. Louis, Houston, and Miami. As noted above, though, making manifest in the museums the relationship between exhibitions and the contemporaneous mood of American Jewish activism proved controversial. Originally, in his position as chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, Elie Wiesel was supposed to write the foreword to the traveling exhibit’s catalog; in the end he did not contribute, possibly to keep contemporary politics at bay. American Jews saw the traveling exhibit as a reminder of the fate of the Jews who, behind the Iron Curtain, were the lynchpin of the Cold War, while Czechoslovakia saw the loan and its implications as a possible safe zone in their relations with the West: a special interest story about a national minority whose culture they had, after all, preserved and publicly exhibited. After visiting the exhibition, Rabbi Samuel H. Dresner wrote a letter to the editor in the New York Times suggesting that the objects be reclaimed from “the present communist custodian.”22 In a letter to curator Vivian B. Mann, Dresner wrote that “it should be considered who, in fact the Jewish community of Czechoslovakia was at the time [and] under what conditions such a transfer was made by them to a

21 For letters of support from United States congressmen and mentions of support from United States senators, see Jewish Museum Archives “The Precious Legacy,” Chrono 372. In a proposal for funding dated September 26, 1979, Talisman (along with signatories Michael Meyer and Hillel Kievel) wrote that “It would also be intended that the exhibit be sponsored by the White House, prominent members of the US Congress, including Congressman Vanik who has been personally interested in this effort.” 22 Samuel H. Dresner to New York Times Editor, July 13, 1984. Jewish Museum Archives, Chrono 372.

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Communist government.”23 The Jewish Defense League also took issue with the exhibition, claiming that there was no Jewish life in Czechoslovakia of which to speak and that the Czech government was receiving money for the exhibition, an allegation that the Jewish Museum refuted. In addition to several of these directly relevant Russian (communist) art exhibitions in the early years of the Soviet Jewry Movement, the Jewish Museum also ran a series of discreet but analogous exhibitions on Jewish protest art in the late 1980s, at the apex of the Soviet Jewry Movement. The popular adoption of conscientious art was motivated, at least in part, by the Soviet Jewry Movement’s advocacy of a politically aware consumption of culture. These social justice exhibitions, such as the Dreyfus affair exhibit, produced during a period of the museum’s own critical transition (including architectural expansion) and under a new curator (Norman Kleeblatt), tackled some of the thorny issues that rose within the protest culture of New York City’s Jewish communities in the 1980s.24

The Dreyfus Affair: Art, Truth, and Justice By the mid-1980s, the Jewish Museum not only slated politically charged, sometimes “second tier,” contemporary shows but also continued to narrow the parameters of “Jewish” content and broaden the parameters of “art” to include the mass-produced products of Jewish-interest protest movements. The largest and most successful of these social justice exhibitions opened in 1987 under the title The Dreyfus Affair: Art, Truth, and Justice, a triangulation that cast art into a political light from the outset. First conceived in the early 1980s when the Soviet Jewry Movement reached a critical mass as a consequence of the closing of Soviet immigration in 1979, the story of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a French Jewish military officer falsely accused of giving state secrets to the Germans in 1894, presented a particularly rich discourse for the modeling of contemporaneous political protest on behalf of a Jewish cause.25 While the museum’s 23 Samuel H. Dresner to Vivian B. Mann, November 15, 1984. Jewish Museum Archives, Chrono 372. 24 For instance, the Jewish Museum put on two broadly conceived exhibitions in 1986: Justice in Jerusalem Revisited: The Eichmann Trial; Miss Liberty, a menorah designed from eight miniature plastic Statues of Liberty and including an inscription from Emma Lazarus’ poem The New Colossus. 25 During the run of the exhibition, the Jewish public advocacy group the American Jewish Congress (AJC) prepared an article that made the distinction between Dreyfus’s case and

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applications for grant money make no direct mention of the Soviet Jewry Movement, the Jewish Museum’s 1987 presentation of nineteenth-century French protest and the circumstances of a European Jew instigated analogies to the plight of Soviet Jews. After all, 1987 marked the great culmination of decades of grassroots efforts, with the highly publicized release of Jewish dissidents imprisoned for their public activity, as well as the immigration of a relatively large number of former refuseniks (Soviet Jews who were denied permission to emigrate).26 In her introduction to the exhibition catalog, museum director Joan Rosenbaum affirmed that while the exhibition specifically addressed French Jewish history and the visual culture of the Third Republic, the museum “hoped to raise the many moral, sociological, and ethical questions about the Affair that seem relevant in light of contemporary attitudes and politics.”27 Before Art, Truth, and Justice officially opened to the public, the New York Times ran three articles reviewing the exhibition, two by art critics John Gross and John Russell and one by recent Nobel peace laureate Elie Wiesel, an early advocate of the Soviet Jewry cause. Noting the relevancy of the exhibition to the contemporary campaigns for human rights, Wiesel observed, “Since the Dreyfus Affair, people have realized that the struggle for mankind always comes down to a struggle for a single individual.” Wiesel again echoed this sentiment that December in Washington at the largest turnout for a Jewish-cause demonstration.28 Art critics Gross and Russell offered a more art historical perspective, but nonetheless also tied their analysis to the contemporary world. Russell opined that a visit to the exhibition “should be mandatory for anyone who wants to live in our time as an informed and complete human being.”29

26 27 28 29

the cause for or against Dreyfus. See Ernst Pawel, “Dreyfus—The Case and the Cause,” Congress Monthly (published by the American Jewish Congress—AJC), January 1988, 7–10. Jewish Museum Archives. Mordechai Altschuler, “Soviet Jewry—A Community in Turmoil,” in Terms of Survival: The Jewish World Since 1945, ed. Robert Wistrich (United Kingdom: Routledge, 1995), 188–222. Norman Kleeblatt, ed., The Dreyfus Affair: Art, Truth, and Justice (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987), xxx. Elie Wiesel, “When Hatred Seized a Nation,” trans. Lydia Davis, New York Times, September 6, 1987, Arts Section. John Russell, “The ‘Dreyfus Affair’ at the Jewish Museum,” New York Times, September 25, 1987, C-33.

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Once the exhibition opened, dozens of nationally-circulated reviews lauded the exhibition for providing a relevant lens for viewing current events.30 In personal correspondences, visitors congratulated curator Norman Kleeblatt on the importance of the exhibition in contemporary politics, noting how “timely” they found the experience.31 Art, Truth, and Justice is one of the best known exhibitions at the Jewish Museum and yet, much of its original reception history in New York City has been forgotten in favor of the exhibition’s contribution to the historiography of the Dreyfus affair. While the exhibition has figured prominently in Dreyfus bibliographies, a consideration of the exhibition as situating itself, however unconsciously, in the Soviet Jewry Movement sheds light on the relationship between New York Jewish protest and the Dreyfus affair exhibition. The 502 items on exhibit in Art, Truth, and Justice made Dreyfus’s story manifest through the visual culture that the affair had produced, demonstrating the import of mass-produced political caricatures and one-of-a-kind works of art in both the historical understanding of French anti-Semitism and the judicial process leading to Dreyfus’s rehabilitation. The objects on display began at the end—that is, with early films that set the stage for the events not as they took place but as they were recorded by enterprising artists, filmmakers, and intellectuals—and then turned back to the beginning with the illustrated press that instigated executive and judicial error and inflamed anti-Semitism in Dreyfus’s France. When it came to the personal plight of Alfred Dreyfus, Kleeblatt opted for a deliberately claustrophobic space to simulate the conditions of imprisonment, narrating Dreyfus’s first court 30

31

Scholarly reviews that came out after the opening of the exhibit include Paula Hyman, “The Dreyfus Affair: The Visual and the Historical,” The Journal of Modern History 61, no. 1 (March 1989): 88–109; Gabriel P. Weisberg, “Propaganda as Art: The Dreyfus Affair as Popular Exhibit,” Arts Magazine 62, no. 4 (December 1987): 36–41; Kenneth E. Silver, “The Other Fin-de-Siècle,” Art in America, December 1987, 104–111; Richard I. Cohen, “The Dreyfus Affair—A New Text? On the Dreyfus Affair Exhibition at the Jewish Museum, NY,” in Studies in Contemporary Jewry, vol. 6, ed. Ezra Mendelshohn (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 71–90; Dora Polachek, “A Witness to its Time: Art and the Dreyfus Affair,” Modern Judaism 10, no. 2 (1990): 205–214. The success of the Dreyfus affair exhibit facilitated fundraising for the year’s annual budget and the final report to the NEH attributed “the heightened public attention that the museum received” to growth within the museum in general. Final Report to National Endowment for the Humanities, Dreyfus Affair exhibition archives. Jewish Museum Exhibition Archives.

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martial, conviction, degradation, and incarceration at Devil’s Island with only a couple of personal items. By presenting the Dreyfus affair as a highly visual event—staged, contended, and eventually corrected on the public stage—the exhibition made the case for the pervasive political power of contemporary visual culture, both high and popular, and demonstrated the role it played in current Jewish-cause activism. The section of the exhibit addressing the “Revision Debate” presented, as well as performed, the power of public mobilization. Striking images of finde-siècle crowds—angry and determined—were exhibited to an audience personally familiar with debate and public outcry on behalf of a Jewish cause. One example includes Louis Armand Rault’s image, taken from the 1899 album The Artists’ Hommage to Picquart, of a fictitious demonstration that included the recently self-exiled Emile Zola. Although it should be noted that Dreyfusard artists were far more likely to represent the motif of crowds as a symbol of mob mentality and anti-Semitic violence, in the new context of the Jewish Museum exhibit, the aspect of crowds in protest had a different impact. For their part, American Jews had long been divided on the issue of just how publicly to protest Jewish issues, particularly vis-à-vis Soviet Jews. A telling quote on the complexity of attitudes towards advocacy appeared in 1965 in the right-wing Agudah journal, The Jewish Observer: The decision to forsake quiet diplomacy and to enter the arena of world public opinion loosened a flood of demonstrations and gimmicks. Torah [religious] Jewry . . . has advocated and pursued the policy of caution and reason. The most responsible Torah leaders have warned against airing the problem of Soviet Jewry in the daily press and at mass demonstrations, only to be criticized for following the course of the shtadlonim [ Jewish intercessors in the ghetto].32

As late as 1986, Jewish leaders such as the late Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson successfully advocated for the cancelation of New York’s Solidarity Sunday for fear that publicity might worsen conditions for Jews in Russia.33 32 Simcha Neuschloss, “Soviet Jewry and Jewish Responsibility: The Historical and Torah Dimensions of the Problem,” Jewish Observer, September 1965, 4. 33 The Dreyfus affair exhibit came at a time when the future of Jewish immigration looked promising under Glasnost and the protest movement began to reflect on its role in the changing political tide. The protest rhetoric the year of the Dreyfus exhibition demonstrates this change: where protest posters once announced “Let My People Go,” they now

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With the Dreyfus exhibit in mind, the position of the Agudah and Schneerson towards advocacy at the end of the twentieth century could be compared easily with the consistory in nineteenth-century France. In turn, in presenting (and promoting) the power of visual media and public outcry in the Dreyfus affair, the Jewish Museum sided with the vocal politics of Soviet Jewry organizations—which by 1987 were celebrating their victory over critics—in marked contrast to the more timid Jewish factions of the past or present.34 Dreyfusard artist Henri-Gabriel Ibels bitterly made the point regarding Jewish action when he complained in 1898: “The Jews did not march! For many reasons. First of all, they had attacked neither the army, nor the Nation; then, Dreyfus, though their coreligionist, did not interest them any more than any other captain who found himself in the same situation.” Ibels ironically concluded that “finally, not understanding this unjustified campaign, they [the Jews] took the wise option of waiting for the storm to pass.”35 Ruth Harris has argued that when the Jewish writer Bernard Lazare wrote a pamphlet in support of Dreyfus, later mimicked in rhetorical style by Zola, Dreyfus’s brother Mathieu “thought the moment was not right to publish such incendiary allegations and it was put aside.”36 Mathieu tried to steer the burgeoning activism of 1897 to more diplomatic channels and, as he explained in his memoir, “the political turn that the Affair unfortunately took, and which it took even more afterwards, singularly complicated it.”37 The artist Charles Paul Renouard offers a good example of this: courtroom portraits show Dreyfus’s lawyer Labori making sweeping gestures during his final arguments as the Dreyfusard camp was consciously trying to repress emotional outbursts. As Ruth Harris has shown, textual reportage actually read “Let My People Know . . . The Struggle is Not Over,” suggesting that a sizeable group sympathized with exactly the opposite sentiment. See advertisement in Shofar, Autumn 1987, 10. 34 At the very least, the multivalent presentation justified the grassroots proliferation of visual protest material, with which Jewish institutions and households found themselves inundated in the 1980s. On the position of the representatives of French Jewry on the Dreyfus affair, see Zvi Jonathan Kaplan, “The Uses and Abuses of the Dreyfus Affair in the ChurchState Debate,” Historical Reflections 35, no. 3 (Winter 2009): 85–94. 35 Henri-Gabriel Ibels, Allons-y! Histoire contemporaine (Ire partie) racontée et dessinée par H.-G. Ibels (Paris, France: P.-V. Stock, 1898), 43. 36 Ruth Harris, Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2010), 55. 37 Quoted in Harris, Dreyfus, 56–57.

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points to disappointment over the non-emotive Dreyfusards at the Rennes trial,38 and these images of presumably passionate activity in the courtroom were meant to animate a disappointingly boring defense rather than to be a historical portrait of passionate activism. Presenting the affair from the perspective of its most outspoken personalities did not represent the mainstream Jewish attitude in the 1890s, but certainly offered a poignant portrait for the 1980s. The Soviet Jewry Movement’s most apparent mark on the exhibition was in the display of anti-Semitic imagery. Whereas Jewish collectors had long targeted out the anti-Semitic market for private ownership, as far as my research bears out Jewish institutions never put such works on public exhibition. The display of visual anti-Semitic images first came through the Soviet Jewry Movement in an effort to analogize Soviet propaganda with Nazi anti-Semitism. In 1975, for example, the SSSJ printed red posters and leaflets protesting a Soviet art exhibition at the Knoedler & Company art gallery with declarations such as “SSSJ Protests the Soviet ‘Art’ of Anti-Semitism,”39 squarely calling the Soviet brand of repression by the most resonant name. Following the precedent set by the quarterly Jews in Eastern Europe in London, Soviet Jewry organizers took out full-page ads in the New York Times to reprint obscene Soviet propaganda that viewers would associate with Der Stürmer-type images from the Holocaust. By demonstrating the similarity between Nazi and Soviet anti-Semitism, the Jewish sponsors of the reprints aimed to apply the urgency of the Holocaust to the Soviet Jews seeking visas out of the Soviet Union. Yet, while anti-defamation organizations or protest demonstrations may preserve images of hate as object lessons in intolerance, prior to this exhibit institutions dedicated to Jewish culture typically limited their purview to Jewish representation rather than the representation of Jews. Responses to the show reflected discomfort at the shift: in his review of the exhibition, art critic John Gross cast doubt that the categorization of “great art” redeemed the anti-Semitic works on display and lamented that “great art doesn’t necessarily

38 Ibid., 285, 304, 344. 39 Organized in association with Fairleigh Dickinson University. “SSSJ Protests the Soviet “Art” of Anti-Semitism,” Jewish Press, September 26, 1975, 17. SSSJ Box 8/22A; for photographs at Knoelder Gallery, see SSSJ, Box 14/1.

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Figure 1.  Anti-Semitic Display in The Dreyfus Affair: Art, Truth, and Justice, September 13, 1987–January 14, 1988. Photo Erica Sanger. The Jewish Museum, New York/Art Resource, NY.

go together with desirable opinions.”40 In ignoring several formally delivered complaints that the anti-Semitic displays created inappropriate content, the Jewish Museum unapologetically adopted a sociological approach that considered both “Jew” and “art” as socially constructed categories. After the “Degradation,” “Revision Debate,” and “J’Accuse” sections, the floor plans call the room with the anti-Semitic displays the “Gallery of Horror” after the vicious poster series Musée des horreurs (Figure 1). The museum later reinstalled some of the objects from the Dreyfus exhibition’s “Gallery of Horror” in its permanent exhibition, “Culture and Continuity.” This inclusion defines Jewish identity as dependent on an understanding of how it is perceived from the outside, a historical prism to which Kleeblatt would eventually dedicate an independent show at the Jewish Museum in 2002, the controversial Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art. In including the anti-Semitic image in a museum setting, the Jewish Museum adopted the point of view propounded by Soviet

40

John Gross, “In France’s Dreyfus Affair, The Artists, Too, Asked ‘Which Side Are You On?,” New York Times, September 20, 1987, Art Section, 2–43.

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Jewry organizations at the time: Jewish cultural patronage requires political as well as aesthetic discernment.41 A small installation of various testimonials and expressions of support from around the world in the form of posters, souvenirs, and board games followed the large display of graphic anti-Semitism, but the greater impact came in the next room. There, Kleeblatt had arranged an “artistic salon” dedicated to tracing the influence of the Dreyfusard and anti-Dreyfusard press on canonical works of art. Edouard Debat-Ponsan’s 1898 painting of an allegory of Truth emerging from a well was one of the centerpieces of the salon. A young, frail girl holds up a mirror to the world, forcing France to take a long, hard look at itself, while a clergyman and a blindfolded soldier attempt to restrain her. Two small works by Jean-Jacques Henner showing female allegories flank the massive painting, and a life-size bronze allegory, Movement Enchained (l’Action enchainée), looks over her shoulder to the right. These works by established French artists only relate to the affair in the most tangential and broad sense, in that they reference the use of allegorical figures of the Revolution to describe the republic. This connection is made more explicit by the museum’s placement of a quotation from Anatole France’s eulogy to Emile Zola over the painting of Truth: “A Moment in the Conscience of Humanity.” The museum’s artistic salon was designed as a traditional drawing room exhibition, and placed in its most elegant room, the former dining room, used by the Warburgs only on formal occasions. This site most authentically preserves the original mansion and Warburgian aura of an earlier Jewish philanthropy. The display labels were placed on the chair railings and inspirational Dreyfusard quotes circled the room at the ceiling moldings. While other exhibitions at the museum staged modernistic installations around the anachronistic French Gothic décor of the original Warburg mansion, the artistic salon in the Dreyfus show fully integrated the traditional appointments of the room into the exhibition (Figure 2). By allowing the monumental fireplace, for instance, to function as part of the display, the museum created of itself an in situ installation that championed a past Jewish artistic patronage and offered a particularly resonant 41

Notably, an installation of anti-Semitic visual culture, including part of the anti-Dreyfusard propaganda, became part of the permanent exhibition, reinstalled in 2003 as Culture and Continuity: The Jewish Journey.

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Figure 2.  “The Artistic Salon” in The Dreyfus Affair: Art, Truth, and Justice, September 13, 1987–January 14, 1988. Photo Erica Sanger. The Jewish Museum, New York/Art Resource, NY.

space for New York Jewish visitors to contemplate the confluence of social and political contexts. What emerged in the actual staging of the exhibition was a symbolic system more relevant and meaningful to the contemporary observer than the presentation of an imagined fin-de-siècle French public. As part of the Jewish Museum’s construction of “viewing” the progress of the Dreyfus affair through one’s experience of the illustrated press, the museum distributed brochures in newspaper format with red ink overlay for the headlines. In its use of the largeformat design, reproduction of anti-Semitic caricatures, and use of the color red, the exhibition brochure had the look and feel of Soviet Jewry protest literature. While fin-de-siècle French protesters mostly used monochromatic black ink for their graphic campaigns—a trend typical of protest movements in general in order to produce a bold “textual” look with direct appeal and low-cost practicality—red as a color of protest prevailed in the refusenik movement against Soviet nationalism. Similarly, posters issued by the British Board of Deputies in the 1970s and by the Greater New York Conference on Soviet Jewry and the SSSJ in the 1980s consistently used the singular color red to metaphorically convey the impending danger of the Soviet culture’s destruction of Jewish culture. In one SSSJ poster, for instance, an opaque red cover

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Figure 3–4.  Posters from the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry collection, Yeshiva University Archives, Mendel Gottesman Library, New York, NY.

appears aggressively ripped out in one spot to reveal a “hidden” scene of Jewish uncertainty, while in another poster, the red background bleeds into the space of the Jewish star in the foreground (Figures 3–4).42 The museum’s Dreyfus brochure replicated the print mediums made popular in the fin-de-siècle, but by printing them in a particular red color scheme it was evoking the “red” journalism of the Soviet Union.43 Even the Art, Truth, and Justice catalog, a collection of scholarly essays focused exclusively on nineteenth-century France, appeared in the Soviet national colors of red and yellow rather than, for instance, the French tricolor. Other motifs in the Dreyfus exhibition, such as a pair of prominentlyinstalled obelisks, likewise made correspondences between the minutia of French fin-de-siècle public discourse and contemporary American human rights activism. While the form of the obelisk may be one of the most ancient 42 Soviet Jewry organizations sold these red-inked reminders of the relevancy of the antiSemitic press as poster “sets” for educational purposes. 43 While the red brochure distributed at the exhibit made overtures to the Soviet press, Russia appeared in more subtle ways in the exhibition as well. Within the dozens of exhibits of anti-Dreyfusard memorabilia, one of the most insidious was a Russian Dreyfus affair board game. This alliance between Russian and French antipathy toward unjustly prosecuted Jews suggested a legacy of injustice from the Third Republic to the Iron Curtain. On the side of the sympathizers, a video exhibit looped an 1898 Dreyfus documentary by a filmmaker who took his films to Jewish districts in southern Russia.

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monument designs, its inclusion in the exhibit made more immediate overtures to the Washington Monument; this was the site of the most successful rally on behalf of a Jewish cause in history, which took place during the fourmonth run of Art, Truth, and Justice. The exhibition design team produced a sand-grey obelisk as an installation prop in the exhibition’s section on the Third Republic to frame the caption for Jean-François Rafaëlli’s salon painting, “Georges Clemenceau Holding an Electoral Meeting in Paris, at the Circus Fernando in 1883,” (1885, Figures 5–6). Rafaëlli’s painting depicted Clemenceau campaigning a decade before Dreyfus’s first arrest, but the inclusion of the painting in the exhibition casts Clemenceau as predestined for the Dreyfusard cause. The obelisk décor for the portrait of a future Dreyfusard situates Clemenceau’s political career in terms of the greater fate of the republic. In bringing to the fore the contemporary associations with the obelisk form— the Washington Monument and the Jewish rally that had its place there—the exhibit offered another association through which American Jews could frame their struggle on behalf of Soviet Jewry; just as the Dreyfus affair hinged on the health of the French Republic, the fate of Soviet Jewry in the context

Figure 5.  Obelisk display in The Dreyfus Affair: Art, Truth, and Justice, September 13, 1987–January 14, 1988. Photo Erica Sanger. The Jewish Museum, New York/Art Resource, NY.

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Figure 6.  March on Washington, December 6, 1987.

of the Cold War was connected to the fate and success of American democracy. While the first obelisk, manufactured by the exhibition design team, created a theme-based entry foyer for the high art part of the exhibition, the second obelisk on display appeared within the larger art display and was a study of 1900, The Monument to Auguste Scheurer-Kestner, by Aimé-Jules Dalou for an actual French public project. In a room devoted to the artist class’s expressions of personal conviction, Dalou’s allegorical composition celebrates Scheurer-Kestner’s heroic role in the revision of Dreyfus’s sentence as an upholding of French democratic values. The museum’s associations between fin de siècle France and Cold War America, as emblematized by the use of the color red and the grand obelisk, tied the Dreyfusard outcry on behalf of a lone Jew to the late-twentieth-century outcry on behalf of Soviet Jewry that threatened to cast a shadow on the fate of democracy. And, despite including anti-Semitic images in the exhibition, in linking fin de siècle France and contemporary American culture, the museum offered a model for public protest as an antidote to visual anti-Semitism. It also inspired a view of the Dreyfus affair through a late-twentieth-century lens of Jewish public protest. This historicized view obscures the greatest difference in attitude towards public protest: the rabbinical representatives of French Jews were state-appointed clergy members and they generally shunned playing Jewish politics on the public stage, especially in the wake of the Dreyfus affair. As the Soviet Jewry Movement is now considered a victory of history, new approaches to the museological display of the Dreyfus story are under

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way. The Musée Judaisme in Paris (under the curatorial direction of AnneHélène Hoog and Vincent Duclert) consciously limits the display of press clippings in favor of a more representative body of Dreyfus’s personal items. The 2007 exhibition at the Jewish Museum in Frankfurt am Main, which briefly documented the role that the Dreyfus affair played in Vienna, offers a look outside of French politics. It will also be interesting to see how the Maison Zola/Musée Dreyfus in Médan, France, still in its planning stages, will evolve. After the success of the Dreyfus show, the Jewish Museum continued to explore the visual culture of social justice movements (for example, the 1991 Bridges and Boundaries: African Americans and American Jews), in addition to returning directly to Soviet Jewish culture. The year following the Dreyfus affair exhibition, the museum unveiled such shows as A Century of Ambivalence: The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union, 1881 to the Present (1988) and Tradition and Revolution, the Jewish Renaissance in Russian Avant-Garde Art, 1912–1928 (1988).44 In addition, the Jewish Museum ran a packed schedule of ancillary public programs in conjunction with these Russian and Soviet exhibits and distributed literature on the refusenik cause;45 it hosted recent émigrés, such as actors Rita Karin and David Rogow, the émigré ensemble troupe Shashmaqam, pianist Vladimir Feltsman, and émigré artists Komar and Melamid, who spoke on “How Our Art Changed from Russia to Israel to the United States.” It also ran over twenty independent lectures, performances, panel discussions, and film screenings, as well as a full-day symposium on various aspects of Russian and Soviet Jewry. Dissident Joseph Begun specifically addressed “The Dissident Movement in the USSR” and NCSJ executive director Jerry Goodman spoke on “The State of Soviet Jewry Today” at the museum. On April 24, 1988, the Jewish Museum sponsored a family Soviet Jewry Day program entitled “Let Our People Go,” featuring workshops in poster-making and a “reunion” with young Soviet émigré families. In May of the same year, the Jewish Museum 44 One might profitably compare, for instance, the post-Soviet exhibition at the Jewish Museum in 1995 of Russian Jewish artists in “A Century of Change” to the presentation in “A Century of Ambivalence.” See Susan Tumarkin Goodman, Russian Jewish Artists in a Century of Change, 1890–1990, (held September 21, 1995–January 28, 1996). 45 For a fuller discussion of the post-Dreyfus exhibition schedule at the Jewish Museum, see Maya Balakirsky Katz, “Staging Protest: The New York Jewish Museum and the Soviet Jewry Movement,” American Jewish History 96, no. 1 (2010): 61–78.

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sponsored a Brooklyn tour of the Russian immigrant community titled “Little Odessa in New York.” The exhibitions at the Jewish Museum varied in their historical scope, iconology, style, and mediums, but the Soviet Jewry Movement helped the Jewish Museum develop from a highly circumscribed avant-garde art museum to an interdisciplinary museum in the cultural history mold. Between the Dreyfus exhibition and the reopening of the museum at its expanded and renovated site on Fifth Avenue in 1993, it sought to design a new mission statement. Hiring cultural activist John Kuo Wei Tchen as a consultant, the museum articulated its place as an institution of tolerance along cultural activist lines.46 Looking at the trajectory of exhibitions, the Jewish Museum used the relationship between culture and social change in the 1972 Penson/ Kaplan exhibitions to justify its own avant-garde program in political terms, while cementing the relationship between culture and social change as its modus operandi in the 1987 Dreyfus affair exhibition. In considering the Jewish Museum of New York’s institutional redirection, we might add its Dreyfus Affair: Art, Truth, and Justice to the cultural texts produced in and around the Soviet Jewry protest movement.

46 See “The Jewish Experience Concept Statement,” October 10, 1990 and the comments made by John Kuo Wei Tchen. Jewish Museum archives “Blacks and Jews.”

Ritualized Protest and Redemptive Politics: Cultural Consequences of the American Mobilization to Free Soviet Jewry1 Shaul Kelner Between 1989 and 1999, more than a million Jews emigrated from the Soviet Union and its successor states. The exodus successfully concluded a transnational mobilization that, for over a quarter century, had brought citizens of Western nations together in solidarity with Soviet Jews whose government refused to “let them live as Jews or let them leave,” as the slogan put it. Operating from both inside and outside of the USSR and mobilizing the resources of states and nongovernmental organizations, the movement succeeded in the unlikely mission of altering the policy of a totalitarian superpower. The significance of the movement, however, cannot be measured solely by its effectiveness in achieving its goals vis-à-vis Soviet Jewry. During the years 1

Originally published in Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, Society 14, no. 3 (Spring/ Summer 2008): 1–37, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40207022. Helpful comments on drafts of this article were provided by Riv-Ellen Prell and Gillian Lindt, by members of the Curb and Robert Penn Warren centers’ culture workshop at Vanderbilt University, by participants in the Power, Politics, and Social Movements Colloquium also at Vanderbilt, and by participants in the Advanced Methods Workshop led by Charles Kadushin and Juan Battle at the CUNY Graduate Center. Thanks also to Yaacov Yadgar, Jim Schwartz, Ellen Bayer, Cindy Chazan, Jacob Birnbaum, Glenn Richter, Avraham Weiss, Adina Anflick, Shulamith Berger, Jennifer Anna, and Shuli Boxer Rieser for their assistance.

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it was operative, the movement also shaped the ways that Jews in the United States understood and enacted their identities as Jews and as Americans.2 By deploying Jewish rituals and religious symbolism as tactics of protest, movement activists in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s helped construct a public political culture that defined Jewish participation in the American identity politics of the era as a religious imperative. To examine the American branch of the Soviet Jewry movement (ASJM),3 therefore, is to open a window onto the question of American Jewish cultural construction and change in the second half of the twentieth century. The notion of a Jewish religious imperative to identity politics was not unfamiliar to students of American Jewry in the 1970s and 1980s.4 At the ASJM’s height, the efforts to free Soviet Jews were seen as being of a piece with American Jews’ political work to support Israel, combat anti-Semitism, and memorialize the Holocaust. By the late 1970s, these causes seemingly commanded such broad and deep support among the American Jewish populace that observers were speaking of them as expressions of an American Jewish “civil religion.” According to Jonathan Woocher, the primary expounder of this idea, “Civil Judaism” prescribed neither a belief in God nor traditional ritual observance. Rather, it invoked elements of a Judaic cosmology to hold out a “vision of Jewish destiny and mission” centered on a Durkheimian affirmation of the sanctity of the ethnic group and a demand for political activism on its behalf.5 Among the civil religion’s core tenets were said to be the interwoven assertions of “the unity of the Jewish people,” “mutual responsibility” among Jews, and the imperative of “Jewish survival in a threatening world.”6

2 3 4

5 6

A similar claim might also be made regarding Jews in Canada, Europe, and elsewhere. This article focuses on the American branch of the movement. I use the term “Soviet Jewry movement” to refer to worldwide activities on behalf of Soviet Jews, not just actions taken in the USSR by Soviet Jews themselves. Leonard Fein, Where Are We? The Inner Life of America’s Jews (New York: Harper and Row, 1988); Simon N. Herman, Jewish Identity: A Social Psychological Perspective (Beverly Hills, California: Transaction, 1977); Jacob Neusner, Israel in America: A Too-Comfortable Exile? (Boston: University Press of America, 1985). Jonathan S. Woocher, Sacred Survival: The Civil Religion of American Jews (Bloomington, Indiana: University of Indiana Press, 1986), 200. Woocher first introduced the concept of Civil Judaism in a 1978 paper. Ibid., 67.

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These were popularly expressed in slogans that doubled as affirmations of faith: “We Are One,” “I Am My Brother’s Keeper,” and “Never Again!” By offering an internally consistent explanation that rang true among Jewish communal activists at the time, the Civil Judaism thesis remains helpful for thinking about American Jewish political culture of that era. Yet, in spite of its virtues, its explanatory power is limited by the functionalist paradigm from which it proceeds. To interpret the ethnic activism of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s as a behavioral manifestation of American Jews’ transcendent value commitments is to posit a problematic bifurcation of thought and action. The unidirectional causal model (values → behavior) subordinates practice, making it the mere reflection of an ontologically privileged realm of ideas. Not only does this impede recognition of the ways in which thought and action are mutually constituted but, in directing attention away from “ephemeral” contingencies of action toward a realm of quasi-autonomous value systems that is said to motivate behavior, it fails to take adequate account of the situated character of human action. I offer here an alternative perspective on the rise of American Jewry’s theologized identity politics in the second half of the twentieth century. Treating political culture as a collective product of institutionally grounded actors actively constructing practices and meanings in particular ways at particular times within particular interactional fields, this perspective conceives of American Jewry’s politics of redemption not as a behavioral expression of preexisting values but as an emergent, mutually constituting union of meaning and action.7 It sees these politics as a form of praxis, equally generative and generated. Although this article does not purport to be a comprehensive account, it indicates the ways that a constructivist approach might revise our understanding of the American Jewish experience in recent decades. During the 1960s and 1970s, and to a lesser extent in the 1980s, political activists functioning as cultural and social entrepreneurs constructed Jewish identity politics as an imperative infused with transcendental significance. Evidence of this has been found by Michael Staub in the writings of public 7

See Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1977), and Arnold M. Eisen, Rethinking Modern Judaism: Ritual, Commandment, Community (Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

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intellectuals and by Woocher in the fund-raising speeches of United Jewish Appeal leaders.8 Its popularization, however, was not solely the result of discursive practices. Beginning in 1963 and continuing for almost three decades, activists in the American movement to free Soviet Jewry were crucially implicated in creating this political culture by innovating protest tactics that advanced it not only through discourse but also through embodied, meaning-generating actions. By popularizing ritualization as a strategy of protest, Soviet Jewry movement activists in the United States subverted the conceptual dichotomies that distinguished expressive from instrumental dimensions of political action, and religious cosmologies from secular politics. The transgression of spatial boundaries between so-called “public” and “private” domains was central to effecting this broader blurring of conceptual categories. Through activities like Passover marches and “Freedom Seders,” which brought Jewish rituals out to the streets, and “Matzoh of Hope” rituals, which brought political protest into the home, Jews enacted and thereby advocated the idea that an authentic religious Judaism was one that was engaged in “redemptive” political action in support of other Jews. They also enacted and thereby advocated the idea that an authentic American Jewish politics was one that unapologetically invoked Judaic ritual forms. Clearly, this contained elements of an intergenerational critique directed by Jewish Baby Boomers against their parents’ modes of Americanization. Yet its roots in the youth culture of the 1960s and 1970s did not prevent the older cohorts from sometimes claiming it and contributing to its development. Clearly, too, this particularly Jewish form of political action was also rooted in the broader American context of that era. The cause of Soviet Jewry was one of many social movements that were transforming American politics and culture at the time. The civil rights, anti-war, feminist, black power, and other movements were each legitimizing new forms of political participation, empowering previously marginalized groups, and enabling new social identities to be articulated and enacted through new cultural practices. American Jews were thoroughly implicated in these broader processes of social change.

8

Michael E. Staub, ed., The Jewish 1960s: An American Sourcebook (Lebanon, New Hampshire; Brandeis, 2004); Woocher, Sacred Survival.

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Their communal life was altered indelibly by them.9 To acknowledge this is not merely to call attention to historical context but also to assert the necessity of situating the rise of a religiously inflected Jewish identity politics in a broader theorization of social movements and their effects. Beyond its implications for the particular issues of the Soviet Jewry movement and late-twentieth-century American Jewish politics, then, the following analysis can be understood as commenting on the general role of social movements in the process of Jewish cultural construction and change. To address the question of how the American movement for Soviet Jewry deployed ritualization to mediate the interaction between religion and politics and thereby construct identity politics as a transcendental imperative, I will examine the movement’s activities surrounding the Passover holiday. First, however, I provide context in the form of a capsule history of the movement10 and an introduction to the social movement studies perspective that informs the analysis.

A Capsule History of the ASJM Soviet oppression of its Jewish citizens, especially since the late 1940s, had a Kafkaesque character. The totalitarian state mobilized its bureaucracy to provide plausible deniability as it pursued an undeclared policy of cultural annihilation. Judaism was vilified in official state organs as a reactionary force of capitalist imperialism. Most Jewish cultural and religious institutions were shut down, save for those tokens that the Kremlin left operating in order to claim that the lack reflected Jewish disinterest rather than state-sponsored anti-Semitism. Show trials for economic crimes disproportionately targeted  9 Riv-Ellen Prell, “Jewish Summer Camping and Civil Rights: How Summer Camps Launched a Transformation in American Jewish Culture,” David W. Belin Lecture in American Jewish Affairs, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 2006; Riv-Ellen Prell, Prayer and Community: The Havurah in American Judaism (Detroit, Michigan: Wayne State University Press, 1989); Staub, Jewish 1960s. 10 For the most comprehensive histories of the American movement to free Soviet Jews, see Gal Beckerman, When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010); Henry L. Feingold, “Silent No More”: Saving the Jews of Russia, the American Jewish Effort, 1967–1989 (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 2007); Fred A. Lazin, The Struggle for Soviet Jewry in American Politics: Israel Versus the American Jewish Establishment (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2005); William W. Orbach, The American Movement to Aid Soviet Jews (Amherst, Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press, 1979); and Pauline Peretz, Le combat pour les juifs soviétiques: Washington-Moscou-Jérusalem, 1953–1989 (Paris: Armand Colin, 2006).

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Jews. Barriers prevented Jewish advancement in the workplace. Jews could not easily escape the discriminatory treatment. Emigration was severely restricted, and even applying for an exit visa could lead to loss of livelihood and additional persecution by the state.11 During the first decade of the postwar era, expressions of American and Jewish-American concern over the oppression of Soviet Jews had been sporadic and ineffectual. This began to change, however, after the Israeli government established a clandestine office in the late 1950s to raise awareness of the plight of Soviet Jews and to encourage public action on their behalf throughout the West.12 In 1963, a number of governmental, international, academic, juridical, and Jewish organizational reports on anti-Jewish policies in the Soviet Union appeared within months of each other, thrusting the issue of Soviet Jewry into American public consciousness. By October of that year, the Conservative Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel had succeeded in bringing together representatives of major American Jewish organizations to begin “marshalling resources for public action.” In early April, 1964, twenty-four organizations established the American Jewish Conference on Soviet Jewry (AJCSJ), an “ongoing ad hoc” umbrella agency to coordinate action on the cause.13 Arguing that “a ‘Conference’ could be no substitute for a great international struggle,” a recent immigrant from Britain named Jacob (Yaakov) Birnbaum gathered approximately 250 students at Columbia University several weeks later to establish the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry (SSSJ).14 Other grassroots organizations, too, were formed in communities across the country, such as in Cleveland, San Francisco, and southern Florida. Disappointed with the efforts On the nature and extent of Soviet oppression of its Jewish citizens, see Yaacov Ro’i, The Struggle for Soviet Jewish Emigration, 1948–1967 (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 12 A first-person history of this “Liaison Bureau,” code-named Nativ, was written by its longtime director Nehemiah Levanon: Nehemiah Levanon, Hakod—Nativ (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1995). For a briefer history in English, see Nehemiah Levanon, “Israel’s Role in the Campaign,” in A Second Exodus: The American Movement to Free Soviet Jews, eds. Murray Friedman and Albert D. Chernin (Hanover, New Hampshire: Brandeis, 1999). 13 Jerry Goodman, “American Response to Soviet Anti-Jewish Policies,” American Jewish Year Book 66 (1965): 313, 315. 14 Jacob Birnbaum to J. J. Goldberg, July 13, 2002, private collection of Jacob Birnbaum. See also Paul S. Appelbaum, “The Soviet Jewry Movement in the United States,” in Jewish American Voluntary Organizations, ed. Michael N. Dobkowski (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood, 1986), 617. 11

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of the AJCSJ, five of these organizations joined together in 1970 to create the Union of Councils for Soviet Jews. By 1985, this union had grown to thirty-two affiliated councils.15 Conflict over goals and tactics emerged almost immediately between the “grassroots” organizations and the “establishment,” AJCSJ, with the former preferring public protest and the latter initially advocating quieter work through official channels. Disagreement also surfaced early on regarding whether the movement should advocate for religious freedom (AJCSJ) or emigration (grassroots). Zionist activism among Soviet Jews themselves gained momentum later in the 1960s and helped to invigorate the American movement. Galvanized by the Leningrad trials of 1970 and 1971, in which eleven people (nine of them Jews) were tried on charges of attempted hijacking, the ASJM entered a period of heightened activism. The members of the AJCSJ reconstituted the organization as the National Conference on Soviet Jewry, providing it for the first time with a budget, offices, and full-time staff. Mass demonstrations involving hundreds of thousands of people became annual events. Three world conferences on Soviet Jewry were convened in Brussels and Jerusalem. The US Congress passed legislation (the Jackson-Vanik amendment) linking American trade concessions to freedom of emigration for Soviet Jews.16 After a temporary relaxation in Soviet emigration restrictions from 1971 to 1974, the gates slammed shut again. The reduced flow of immigrants sparked bickering between American Jewish organizations and Israel over the phenomenon of noshrim (drop-outs), Soviet Jews who left the USSR on Israeli visas but decided en route to switch destinations for other countries in the West. With the tightening of emigration, division over the noshrim issue, and an absence of any legislative agenda following the passage of the 1974 Jackson-Vanik amendment, the movement faced a loss of momentum. The 1977 arrest of dissident 15 16

Micah H. Naftalin, “The Activist Movement,” in A Second Exodus. The struggle over this legislation, which was called the Jackson-Vanik amendment, is extensively treated in all five of the histories cited above. It is also explored in Milton Goldman, “Jackson-Vanik: A Dissent,” and William Korey, “Jackson-Vanik: A ‘Policy of Principle,’” both in A Second Exodus; Peter Hagel and Pauline Peretz, “States and Transnational Actors: Who’s Influencing Whom? A Case Study in Jewish Diaspora Politics During the Cold War,” European Journal of International Relations 11, no. 4 (2005); and Noam Kochavi, “Insights Abandoned, Flexibility Lost: Kissinger, Soviet Jewish Emigration, and the Demise of Détente,” Diplomatic History 29, no. 3 (2005).

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and human-rights activist Anatoly Sharansky reinvigorated the sputtering movement. Sharansky, well-known among Western diplomats and correspondents in Moscow, was charged with spying for the Central Intelligence Agency and sentenced to thirteen years in prison. Capitalizing on his fame and stature, the movement succeeded in dramatically personifying the continuing plight of Soviet Jews. The goals of the Soviet Jewry movement were finally achieved in the series of events that culminated in the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. During the 1990s, more than a million Jews left the USSR and its successor states, with approximately three-quarters of those emigrants settling in Israel.17

Cultural Construction in Social Movements Scholarly interest in the Soviet Jewry movement has risen even as the movement itself has receded into history. Since the 1990s, a spate of articles, books, and conferences has appeared, and more recently the movement’s history has become the subject of museum exhibitions and documentary films.18 Institutional histories, written primarily by former activists, have tended to renew the intra-movement factional battles on the newly opened front of historiography.19 More dispassionate treatments have emphasized the Soviet Jewry movement’s implications for the exercise of political power by Jews inside and outside Israel,20 by transnational networks,21 and by the foreign policy apparatuses of nation-states.22 Little consideration, however, has been given to the National Conference on Soviet Jewry, NCSJ Statistics, September 20, 2007, www.ncsj.org/ stats.shtml. 18 See, e.g., Laura Bialis’s film Refusenik (Los Angeles, 2007) and Rachel Schnold’s edited volume, Jews of Struggle: The Jewish National Movement in the U.S.S.R., 1967–1989 (Tel Aviv: Beth Hatefutsoth, 2007). 19 Stuart Altshuler, From Exodus to Freedom: A History of the Soviet Jewry Movement (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005); Albert D. Chernin, “Making Soviet Jewry an Issue: A History,” in A Second Exodus; Wendy Eisen, Count Us In: The Struggle to Free Soviet Jews, A Canadian Perspective (Toronto, Canada: Burgher, 1995); Yossi Klein Halevi, “Jacob Birnbaum and the Struggle for Soviet Jewry,” Azure 17 (Spring 2004); Levanon, Hakod— Nativ’; and Naftalin, “The Activist Movement.” 20 Feingold, “Silent No More”; J. J. Goldberg, Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment (Reading, Massachusetts: Basic, 1996); Lazin, Struggle for Soviet Jewry in American Politics; Peretz, Le combat pour les juifs sovietiques; Ro’i, Struggle for Soviet Jewish Emigration. 21 Hagel and Peretz, “States and Transnational Actors.” 22 Kochavi, “Insights Abandoned.” 17

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movement as a cultural force in American Jewish life. This may not be surprising, given that the historiography of the movement is still young, but it is unfortunate—both because it paints too narrow a picture of the mobilization itself and because it misses opportunities to integrate the movement into broader questions about the ways that religion and politics intersect to shape Jewish public culture in a changing American context.23 As I address in these pages the cultural implications of the mobilization tactics adopted by ASJM activists, I draw on a rich field of research into the general sociology of social movements. Here, the cultural turn of recent decades is significant to my purposes. For most of the previous century, sociological accounts of social movements had tended to follow Gustave Le Bon in explaining them as the product of collective emotion, the irrational result of mob psychology. Reacting against the delegitimization of real political grievances inherent in this approach, scholars sympathetic to the movements of the 1960s proposed alternative analytic frameworks that conceived of movements as agents of rational, strategic action, the very antithesis of unrestrained emotion. These approaches have vastly improved our understanding of social movements, but their efforts to expunge the taint of emotionalism have produced an equally distorted image that makes movements seem as if they are trapped in a Weberian cage of sterile rationality. Since the 1990s, a cultural turn in social movement theory has sought to correct the overemphasis on instrumental rationality, restoring to theory the expressive dimension of social movements without resurrecting Le Bonian notions or sacrificing the insights of the post-1960s work. If the cultural turn has a core research question, it is “How do social movements construct meaning?” The corollary is “To what effect?” The concept of “cognitive praxis” offers a helpful model for thinking about these issues—one that synthesizes the cognitive, emotional, and behavioral dimensions of meaning construction and that draws our attention to the links between institutions and individuals. This perspective argues that a social movement is not a technical operation simply applying strategically considered tactics to achieve clearly defined, preexisting goals. Rather, it functions in a more profound manner, temporarily opening a public space in which novel ways of thinking, acting, and 23

See Prell, “Jewish Summer Camping and Civil Rights,” and Staub, Jewish 1960s.

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being interactively emerge. By creating new ways of thinking, movements enable new forms of behavior to take shape. By creating new ways of acting, movements enable new forms of thought to emerge. This historically situated interaction between ideology, aims, and action program is termed the “cognitive praxis” of a social movement.24 From this perspective, the question of the Soviet Jewry movement’s role in the ascendance of a religiously framed American Jewish identity politics in the 1960s and 1970s appears in a new light. The concept of cognitive praxis directs us to look to the mutually reinforcing relationship between the ASJM’s tactics and its worldview. On its face, the notion that Soviet policy might be effectively altered by engaging American Jews in newly adapted or invented religious rituals might appear to lack a certain logic. To speak of ASJM activists as engaging in cognitive praxis, however, is to assert that, in their trial-and-error process of mobilizing against the Soviets, they innovated a knowledge-space in which the logic of these activities appeared both self-evident and compelling.

The Passover Narrative’s Cosmological Frame Over the ASJM’s three-decade lifespan, its ongoing mobilization of Jewish holiday and life-cycle rituals became one of the defining features of movement culture. Activists created special candle-lighting ceremonies for Hanukkah, dedicated hakafot (processions with the Torah) to absent Soviet Jews on Simhat Torah, and held public fasts at the United Nations on Tisha b’Av. They mailed Rosh Hashanah greeting cards into the Soviet Union and enacted Purim plays that portrayed refusenik Sharansky in the role of Mordecai. They cordoned off empty chairs on synagogue pulpits and held bar and bat mitzvah ceremonies for young Soviet Jews in absentia. Unquestionably, however, the movement’s efforts to transmute ritual into a form of political protest found their most elaborate expressions in the rituals that emerged around Passover: the Passover march, the Freedom Seder, and the Matzoh of Hope.

24

Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison, Social Movements: A Cognitive Approach (University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996). Their approach can be seen in relation to Bourdieu’s use of the term “practice,” which refers to the way that the material and the symbolic fuse. All action simultaneously reflects concepts and reproduces them. Because it is the product of action, however, this reproduction occurs each time in a unique way, enabling change to take place in the symbolic order.

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To many, the spring festival’s relevance seemed self-evident. Themes traditionally associated with the holiday—oppression and liberation—were considered to have a direct bearing on the situation of Soviet Jewry. From the very first, and before activists undertook to create Passover-linked protest rituals, the Exodus narrative was invoked as a rhetorical frame. Meeting in Washington, DC, on April 5, 1964, the day after Passover had ended, B’nai B’rith president Label Katz inaugurated the establishment’s efforts to create a mechanism for working on behalf of Soviet Jewry: “I call to order the American Jewish Conference on Soviet Jewry. . . And with the Passover festival still fresh in our souls, we are here in obedience to the commitment of the Haggadah. . . . ‘In every generation, one ought to regard himself as though he had personally come out of Egypt.’”25 Such references would be echoed countless times over the next quarter-century. Participating in a 1977 Passover “walkathon” for Soviet Jewry, New York congresswoman Bella Abzug called the event “a celebration of the spirit and meaning of the Passover holiday—the spirit of freedom.”26 U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Jeanne Kirkpatrick prefaced her 1983 remarks to the Third World Conference on Soviet Jewry by declaring it not only “fitting” but a “matter of the deepest symbolic significance” that we have come to the City of Jerusalem on the eve of Passover, the commemoration of the first Exodus, to express our solidarity with Soviet Jews. In this season of freedom and renewal, the struggle of Soviet Jews to liberate themselves from bondage burns with a special brightness.27

Kirkpatrick’s reference to Jerusalem hinted at the particularistic reading given by movement activists to the Exodus narrative. Passover was invoked less as a universal metaphor for liberation than as a way of linking the Jewish 25 Label A. Katz, “Address,” April 5, 1964, box 1, folder “AJCSJ 1965–1967,” Records of National Conference on Soviet Jewry, Collection I–181, American Jewish Historical Society, Newton Centre, Massachusetts, and New York (hereafter cited as NCSJ I–181 AJHS). 26 “Abzug, Holtzman, Congressmen Lead Soviet Jewry Walkathon,” press release, March 28, 1977, box 19/10, Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry Collection, Yeshiva University Archives, New York (hereafter cited as SSSJ/YUA). 27 Jeanne J. Kirkpatrick, “Address to the Third World Conference on Soviet Jewry,” March 15, 1983, box 25/8, SSSJ/YUA.

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present with the biblical account of the Jewish past. “Just as our ancestors faced the cruel Pharaoh in ancient Egypt, and were then freed from bondage,” the SSSJ’s Rabbi Avraham (Avi) Weiss declared at a protest rally, “so too we face the oppressors of today in the Kremlin, and pray and act for the freedom of our brothers in Russia.”28 Although the appeal of the Passover frame rested on this basic parallel, it was not uncommon for activists to extend the metaphor. Treating the Haggadah like a checklist, a 1983 SSSJ pamphlet entitled “Pharaoh Andropov— A Plague on Your House!” drew equivalences point by point. It compared the treatment of “prisoners of conscience” in Soviet labor camps to the hard labor imposed on Israelite slaves, equated the forced conscription of young Jewish men into the Red Army with the drowning of male Israelite newborns in the Nile, contrasted the prohibitions on Jewish education in the USSR with the seder’s emphasis on transmitting the Exodus story from parents to children, and portrayed the Kremlin’s latest restrictions on Jewish emigration as a counterpoint to Pharaoh’s ultimate decision to free the Israelites.29 These more elaborate uses of the Passover frame had the practical benefit of enabling mobilization around specific facets of the Soviet Jewry problem, even as they helped to reinforce the overarching notion of the Exodus narrative’s validity as an interpretative schema. The holiday’s themes and symbolism alone do not fully account for Passover’s place in ASJM activities. Critical to the emergence of Passover as a focus of mobilization was the holiday’s popularity among American Jews. Surveys of religious practice have consistently revealed the importance American Jews attach to the Passover seder, which to this day remains the most widely practiced Jewish holiday ritual, engaging over three-quarters of the adult Jewish population.30 Activists recognized the potential for mobilization inherent in a season that engaged the great majority of American Jews in behavioral affirmations of 28

“‘Freedom Seder’ for Soviet Jews at Gates of Russian Diplomatic Residence,” press release, April 9, 1987, box 32/14, SSSJ/YUA. 29 Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry, “Pharaoh Andropov—A Plague on Your House!” undated, leaflet, box 25/9, SSSJ/YUA. 30 Laurence Kotler-Berkowitz et al., The National Jewish Population Survey 2000–01: Strength, Challenge and Diversity in the American Jewish Population (New York: United Jewish Communities, 2003).

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their Jewish heritage. In 1966, New York’s first broad-based Passover action for Soviet Jewry was agreed on by representatives of various youth groups following the rejection of another holy day, the Fast of Esther, which organizers believed held “no meaning” for “large numbers of Jewish youth.”31 In choosing to hold a Passover vigil and march, not only did the organizers harbor no doubt about the holiday’s ability to engage young Jews but they also had the foresight to realize that, because the holiday coincided with Good Friday that year, public schools would be closed, allowing legions of Jewish students to descend on New York City for the rally. No doubt the relatively hospitable April weather also served to increase Passover’s attractiveness as a time for public action, at least when the choice was between it and the winter festivals. The decision to mobilize around Passover was vindicated. The march drew twelve thousand, the largest crowd that had yet been assembled by the movement.32 Specific issues also fostered mobilization around the Passover holiday. Among the grievances that galvanized the initial formation of movement organizations in the early 1960s and spurred action over the course of the movement’s life were the Kremlin’s restrictions on Passover observance. Most notable were the bans on the baking and distribution of matzoh, the first of which was decreed in 1957.33 The obstruction of Soviet Jewry’s ability to celebrate American Jewry’s most cherished Jewish holiday was particularly galling to the latter’s sensibilities. Indeed, placards could be seen at New York’s 1966 Passover rally reading “USSR! Permit Free Matzo Baking.”34 In and of themselves, neither the strategic mobilizations around Passover nor the deployment of the Exodus narrative as a rhetorical frame attests to a religious imperative motivating identity politics. The rhetorical tropes could be deemed instrumental, perhaps artful, maybe even poetic. Nothing requires us to attribute deeper meanings to them. Indications of something more profound emerge, however, when we consider the ways in which this rhetorical 31

Moshe Stern and Theodore Comet to NAJYC Subcommittee on Soviet Jewry, January 14, 1966, box 2/3, SSSJ/YUA. 32 Irving Spiegel, “Students Rally Here to Protest Suppression of Jews in Soviet [sic],” New York Times, April 9, 1966. 33 Orbach, American Movement, 17–18; Yaacov Ro’i, “Hag ha-pesah mul ha-mishtar ha-sovyeti,” Annual of Bar-Ilan University. Studies in Judaica and the Humanities 24–25 (1989). 34 Assorted papers, box 2/3, SSSJ/YUA.

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frame took on ritual form through the adaptation and innovation of Passover customs. By acts of ritualization like the Passover march, Freedom Seder, and Matzoh of Hope (all described below), ASJM activists repositioned the Exodus narrative from a metaphor or an analogy to which the Soviet Jewish situation could be likened, to a cognitive framework through which it could understood. Ritualization expanded a rhetorical frame into a cosmological frame with cognitive, emotional, discursive, and embodied dimensions.35 This constructed the ASJM as a form of redemptive politics. The ritualized affirmation of the Exodus story as a model of the Soviet Jewish situation and as a model for its resolution incorporated the unfolding events into a mythic structure that rendered a complex situation readily understandable, provided assurance about its ultimate resolution, and girded people for a protracted struggle unfolding in cosmological rather than historical time.36 In the process, these ritual enactments reaffirmed American Jews’ beliefs in the paradigmatic validity of the primal narrative and reasserted their membership in the community that affirmed this story as its own. Rather than interpret movement rituals as evidence that a Jewish “civil religion” motivated American Jews’ efforts on behalf of the Soviet Jewish cause, we should understand the act of ritualization as the means by which ASJM activists constructed their efforts as a religious imperative. No bifurcation of body and mind, material and ideal, action and meaning should be posited. Ritualization did not merely enact meanings that had independent and prior existence. Rather, it constituted meanings that existed only through their realization in practice.37 The notion of a religious imperative to identity politics arose in the 1960s and 1970s through practices that 35 36

37

In distinguishing between rhetorical and discursive frames, I am differentiating speech as strategic communication from speech as a broader act of meaning-construction. The notion of religion as a model of and model for reality is Clifford Geertz’s. See his “Religion as a Cultural System,” in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic, 1973). On the rest, see Marshall Sahlins, Islands of History (Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 1985). The dualistic position that separates idea from action and assigns primacy to the former has been voiced most strongly in Protestant-inflected analyses of ritual. This position has itself been critiqued, including by Catherine Bell, whose position informs my own. See Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), and Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

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generated this idea by engaging people in activities that expressed it. The two were mutually constituted.

The Birth of Ritualized Protest Tactical ritualization was adopted by all quarters of the ASJM in the United States. The AJCSJ’s 1968 biennial convention called for “24–hour vigils; special Sedorim; [and] distribution of the ‘Matzoh of Hope’” at Passover, “special Hakafot” at Simhat Torah, and “special candle-lighting ceremonies on Chanukah,” all of which had already been occurring across the country.38 Three years later, Philadelphia’s Jewish Community Relations Council went further, offering an exhaustive action program for mobilizing a variety of publics. Enlisting traditional and folk customs in service of the cause, its recommendations for synagogue mobilization went holiday by holiday, including Tu bi-Shvat tree plantings in Israel to honor Soviet Jews, Purim carnivals to “link the theme of Soviet Jewry to the plight of the Jews in the days of Haman,” and Shavuot “all-night study sessions” about the history and culture of Soviet Jews.39 In 1976, that community’s Soviet Jewry Council, a group that bridged the grassroots/establishment divide and maintained membership in both the Union of Councils for Soviet Jews and the National Conference for Soviet Jewry, began conducting bar and bat mitzvah “twinnings” in which Americans would symbolically share their coming-of-age ceremonies with Soviet Jewish peers denied the ability to celebrate the rite of passage in the USSR.40 This large-scale deployment of ritual as a mobilization tactic was an innovation of American Jewish political culture of the 1960s and 1970s. To understand its emergence, we must look to the organization that pioneered its use in 1964, the New-York-based SSSJ. At times headquartered in its founder’s apartment, the small organization relied on the dedication of its leaders and activists rather than on large budgets, elaborate infrastructures, or 38

Albert D. Chernin to Israel Miller, “Summary of Conference Activity,” April 2, 1967, box 1, folder “Meetings—Biennial (1968),” NCSJ I–181 AJHS; “Programmatic Recommendations Adopted by the Biennial,” April 7–8, 1968, box 1, folder “Meetings—Biennial (1968),” NCSJ I-181 AJHS. 39 JCRC of Greater Philadelphia, “Action Program on Soviet Jewry for Jewish Organizations,” 1971, personal archives of Abraham J. Bayer. 40 Andrew Harrison, Passover Revisited: Philadelphia’s Efforts to Aid Soviet Jews, 1963–1998 (Madison, New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2001).

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enthusiastic support from the Jewish establishment, all of which it lacked. Under Birnbaum and national coordinator Glenn Richter, the SSSJ became known for an ability to mobilize quickly, to draw media coverage, and to maintain a steady stream of ongoing, creative protest activities. Founded at Columbia University on April 27, 1964, the fledgling group managed only four days later to bring one thousand demonstrators to a May Day rally at the Soviet Mission to the United Nations, inaugurating the era of sustained public protest on behalf of Soviet Jews.41 According to a 1973 study of the SSSJ, the organization’s approximately three hundred committed New-York-based activists were typically young men in their late teens or early twenties from religiously observant households. Half were or had been active in the antiwar movement, and just under a third were involved in the campaign for civil rights. Most had been involved in Zionist activities.42 Slightly older than the student activists were a number of young, primarily Yeshiva-University-educated rabbis who provided intellectual leadership and helped to articulate a religious language for the SSSJ’s work. This formidable lineup included Saul Berman, Irving (Yitz) Greenberg, Steven (Shlomo) Riskin, Charles Sheer, Avraham Weiss, the Jewish-Theological-Seminary-trained Arthur Green, and, for a time, Meir Kahane. Youthful, independent, free of institutional histories or loyalties, unbound by prior convention, operating in a field that had yet to be defined, and devoted solely to a single issue, the SSSJ was structurally positioned to innovate tactics. That its innovation led it to Jewish symbols and rituals was a result of many things. Some of this was personal. “From the very, very beginning,” Richter says, “this was really Yaakov Birnbaum’s, you know, thing—to put in simple, overt Jewish symbolism.”43 Other forces were also at work. The SSSJ’s strong links to modern Orthodoxy certainly had an influence, as did the prominence of rabbis in the organization. Its goal of mobilizing young American Jews argued in favor of tactics that would have specific resonance among this population. Here, generational politics helped frame the choice. In alighting on 41 Orbach, American Movement, 27–30; Ronald I. Rubin, “Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry,” Hadassah Magazine, December, 1966. 42 Jim Schwartz, “A Study of Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry: A Report Submitted to SSSJ Leaders and Activists” (manuscript, New York, 1973), chapter 2. 43 Glenn Richter, interview with author, July 27, 2006.

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ritual as a form of nonviolent guerrilla theater, the SSSJ situated itself squarely within the broader field of counter-cultural youth protest of the 1960s. If, as Americans, this aligned the activists with other members of their generation, as Jews it differentiated them from their parents. The decision to construct Jewish political action as oppositional, unabashedly particularist, and highly visible was part of a scathing critique launched by Jewish Baby Boomers against the models of political action and Americanization associated with what they believed to be their parents’ “silence” in the face of the Holocaust.44 The particular nature of the grievances also informed the tactical choices. By using the very rituals that the Soviets were trying to stamp out, the SSSJ engaged in an act of defiance.45 Just as important in the emergence of movement tactics was the opportunity structure of the American political arena. Successful political mobilization in the era of television required attention to visual symbols and drama. Ritualized protest functioned as guerrilla theater, which drew attention and coverage. Its overt use of Jewish symbols—such as shofars, prayer shawls, menorahs, and matzot—communicated quickly and effectively in a visual medium. As Richter explained, We saw what worked in demonstrations. We, you know, again, you find your way through. You see what gets on TV, what doesn’t. You see that symbols get on. . . . The symbols we used were easy to understand, identified as Jewish symbols, and, of course, portable. Except for one big monster menorah that we had built out of pipe . . . but again, the symbol itself was easy to understand. . . . It was easy for us as Jews to understand, and it was easy for non Jews after a while to identify it as a Jewish symbol.46

Nothing guaranteed that particular symbols would be effective in communicating internally to the protesters or externally to the media, however. Nor did tactics that were once compelling necessarily remain so. Part of this was because Soviet Jewry movement organizations operated in a competitive field, where the impulse to collaborate for the good of the cause was counterbalanced by each group’s imperative to forge a distinct organizational identity. For example, speaking of the SSSJ’s shift away from the use of the shofar, 44 See Eli Lederhendler, New York Jews and the Decline of Urban Ethnicity: 1950–1970 (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 2001), 186–92. 45 Ibid. 46 Richter, interview.

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whose piercing blast featured prominently in the group’s early demonstrations, Birnbaum reflected, “Later on it became cliché. I didn’t like it. Everyone was using it.”47 Decisions to adopt and abandon tactics were made in the context of an ever-evolving situation that required ongoing strategic decisions which took into account multiple target audiences (the Soviet government, the American government, the media, US public opinion, American Jewish opinion, Soviet Jews, the other ASJM organizations, and the SSSJ’s membership). Nothing in the SSSJ’s decisions to deploy ritual nor in the other organizations’ decisions to appropriate the tactic was foreordained. In Richter’s words, I think we sort of found our way. We didn’t start off with a strategy. We . . . sort of came out of the civil rights background, there was some sort of experience in that. But, mostly, we basically just blundered through and found [whether] things worked, and if things worked, great. . . . You did all this on the fly, you know. There wasn’t a ritual committee.48

As a result, the AJSM’s cognitive praxis emerged through a fluid, situation-specific, strategically informed (but not strategically determined) process. Out of this highly contingent environment emerged three major strategies for the ritualization of protest: the invention of new ritual through bricolage, the movement of existing ritual out of its traditional space and into the public square, and the introduction of the public square into the traditional space of existing rituals. In the case of the Passover holiday, these were manifested in the Passover march, the Freedom Seder, and the Matzoh of Hope.

Sanctifying Secular Modes of Protest The SSSJ’s rallies and vigils combined a penchant for high drama, a sensitivity to the power of religious symbolism, and, not unrelated, a delight in what Richter called “shtick.”49 The pattern was laid almost from the outset. At its April 1965 “Jericho march” around the Soviet UN Mission, seven rabbis wearing prayer shawls bore seven Torah scrolls. Seven students followed and sounded seven shofars. Around the building they led the crowd of three 47 Jacob Birnbaum, interview with author, December 11, 2003. 48 Richter, interview. 49 Ibid.

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thousand marchers, encircling it. It was a symbolic reenactment of Joshua’s battle at Jericho, an assertion that the movement would bring down the walls imprisoning Soviet Jews. Outside Aeroflot’s New York offices a dozen years later, SSSJ activists “with black candles, white robes, prayer shawls, rams’ horns and incantations,” conducted a Halloween exorcism of the “dybbuk of antiSemitism which has possessed the very soul of the Kremlin.”50 Returning there in 1983 for a “‘Pharaoh Andropov—Let My People Go’ demonstration,” they came equipped with a “giant four-foot matzoh, ringed with barbed wire and emblazoned with the name of Russia’s most famous Prisoner of Conscience, Anatoly Sharansky.”51 So integral to the SSSJ’s culture was this predilection for the dramatic and the ritualistic (the line between the two never very distinct) that it emerged as much when the protestors acted with tongue in cheek as when they acted in utter seriousness. The SSSJ’s desire to construct protest as ritual drama in its own right is best understood by looking at how a rally was ideally imagined. In actuality, because of the casual banter, the logistical matters to attend to, and the interactions with reporters, police, and bystanders, attention was not always riveted to the stage. The idealized visions that exist on paper are not encumbered by such distractions. In its plans for one vigil, the SSSJ envisaged torch bearers dressed in black pants and white shirts, marching in to the sound of beating drums and encircling the crowd. Speakers would describe their personal travels to Russia. Next, a “thematic representation, in word and song, of the great past of Soviet Jewry” would be presented from the stage. At the end of the “cantata,” the entire crowd would rise to read or sing “a number of passages from the Passover Haggadah.” Later, each participant would donate the Haggadah he or she brought. These would be delivered by the truckload to the Soviet UN Mission. After the Haggadah reading, a draped memorial piece commemorating the Nazi massacre of thirty-five thousand Jews at Babi Yar in the Ukraine would be paraded in. Slowly, the drums would give way to the rising sound of the dirge “Kel molai rahamim.” The story of Babi Yar would be told, and the Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s poem commemorating the massacre would be read. At midnight, a spotlight would focus on the memorial 50 51

“Exorcism—Soviet Jewry Style!” press release, October 28, 1977, box 20/2, SSSJ/YUA. “Four Foot Matzoh Ringed with Barbed Wire to Highlight Passover ‘Let My People Go’ Demonstration,” March 31, 1983, box 25/9, SSSJ/YUA.

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that would be unveiled as the assembled sang “Ani maamin” (“I believe with perfect faith in the coming of the Messiah”). An all-night study vigil would then begin. At dawn the following day, participants would march to the Isaiah Wall at the United Nations building for morning prayers, including a special prayer for Soviet Jewry. There would then be singing and dancing and, finally, another round of “Ani maamin.”52 Such focused solemnity was difficult to achieve in practice. Still, the SSSJ’s use of drama and ritual marked the Passover marches of the early years and opened the way for other public deployments of ritual. In 1966, the twelvethousand-person “Passover Youth Protest/Geulah [Redemption] March,” cosponsored with the twenty-two-member New York Youth Conference on Soviet Jewry, included “Jericho style” encirclings, “symbolic re-enactment of the Crossing of the Red Sea,” and the lighting of an “eternal flame.”53 The following year saw the vigils spread to seventeen cities outside of New York, including Chicago, where “blasts on the shofar [heralded] the beginning of the march.”54 In New York, the ceremonialized aspects of 1967’s twenty-four-hour Passover vigil included a havdalah service and a “dramatic program with special music composed in honor of Soviet Jewry.” The “eternal flame” featured at the previous year’s march made a return appearance and was lit in the morning at the Statue of Liberty. The program concluded with a pledge to rededicate efforts, set in writing and ceremoniously signed.55 Not all was high ritual, however. In addition to speech-making by politicians, in the early afternoon following the all-night vigil, weary participants were treated to a “dramatic reading by Henny Youngman.”56 The Passover marches and vigils were acts of bricolage that tore Jewish ritual practices (like shofar blowing) out of various traditional contexts, mixed them together, combined them with elements of the secular Western political 52 53

54 55 56

Assorted papers, boxes 2/15–17, SSSJ/YUA. New York Youth Conference on Soviet Jewry (NYYCSJ), “Minutes of Youth Directors’ and Youth Representatives’ Meetings,” March 8, 1966, box 2/3, SSSJ/YUA; Glenn Richter, “Geulah March for Soviet Jewry,” Queens College Hillel Newsletter (March 1966); “Outline: Leil Shimurim All Night Vigil, Geulah March and Rally,” box 2/3, SSSJ/YUA; Spiegel, “Students Rally Here.” Chernin to Miller, “Summary of Conference Activity.” NYYCSJ, press release, April 24, 1967, boxes 2/15–17, SSSJ/YUA. Assorted papers, boxes 2/15–17, SSSJ/YUA.

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demonstration, and embedded these in a framework that employed dramatic conventions to achieve an aura of stylized theatricality. The tallit-robed rabbis blowing rams’ horns and the torch-bearing youth marching to drum beats were simultaneously actors and audiences in ritual dramas. The stage sets, costumes, props, scripts, scores, and lighting were devices for gaining media coverage, to be sure. But they were also devices for constructing protest not simply as instrumental political action but as expressive dramas that asserted the transcendent meaning in American Jewish activism on behalf of oppressed Jews elsewhere in the world. Movement leaders clearly articulated their intention that the protests be experienced in this way. In a letter to youth group directors, the organizers of the 1966 New York Youth Conference march raised the point in the context of the problem of crowd control: [It] cannot be stressed too strongly that with such large numbers involved, it is most important that the students conduct themselves with utmost propriety. They should see these two hours of march and rally as a solemn redemptive act by free American Jews on behalf of their muted brethren.57

Exhortations, however, cannot compel an experiential state. The solemnity that rally organizers so desired could exist only in and through practice. To the extent that they managed to create it, it was through the ritualization of the protest march itself. Distinguishing ritualization (a process) from ritual (its product), Catherine Bell explains the concept: Viewed as practice, ritualization involves the very drawing, in and through the activity itself, of a privileged distinction between ways of acting, specifically between those acts being performed and those being contrasted, mimed, or implicated somehow. . . . [R]itualization is a way of acting that specifically establishes a privileged contrast, differentiating itself as more important or powerful. . . . [R]itualization gives rise to (or creates) the sacred as such by virtue of its sheer differentiation from the profane. 58

A focus on ritualization as a practice, rather than on ritual as a thing, leads us to ask about the strategies that were employed to ritualize. What did activists do to make the ASJM protest marches stand out in contrast to other political 57

Jacob Goldberg, Ted Comet, and Jacob Birnbaum to Youth Directors, undated, box 2/3, SSSJ/YUA (emphasis in the original). 58 Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, 90–91.

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demonstrations? For one, they decontextualized existing Jewish rituals and symbols and deployed them in new combinations as signifiers of rituality. Their use of torches and drums, though not drawn from Jewish tradition, functioned similarly. Most important, they engaged in a stylizing of action by employing “formality, fixity, and repetition,” classic strategies of ritualization throughout history.59 Techniques of the theater were central to all these strategies. As Passover marches and vigils gave way in the early 1970s to hundredthousand-person “Solidarity Sunday” rallies, the SSSJ’s planning role diminished in favor of the “establishment” organizations. With the SSSJ’s marginalization in the planning of these events, much of the symbolism of the early years disappeared. Solidarity Sunday was held in May or June, decoupled from Passover. Torch lightings and Haggadah readings fell by the wayside, leaving the programs dominated by speeches from politicians, communal leaders, and other dignitaries. The early Passover marches had left their mark on the movement, though. They helped fix Passover as a major focus in the ASJM’s calendrical cycle. By establishing ritualization as an expected mode of protest, they opened a space for other forms of ritualization to take root. By employing guerrilla theater tactics and by incorporating Jewish religious symbols and rituals, they legitimized the combination and sparked its creative use in other areas. All of these results can be seen in the Freedom Seder.

Religion in the Streets Blessed be Thou, . . . King of the universe . . . who has sanctified us with Thy commandments and commanded us to kindle the festival lights. . . . It is a very small candle that we light here but because we do not forget our brother and sister Jews, it is a light that will reach across an ocean.

Beyond this opening action, very little ritual from the traditional Passover observances was employed in the first “symbolic seder for Soviet Jewry” that occurred under the auspices of the New York Coordinating Committee for Soviet Jewry on April 10, 1968, near the Soviet UN Mission. A blessing over wine was chanted, a piece of matzoh raised, the phrase “Mah nishtanah 59

Ibid., 92.

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ha-laylah ha-zeh?” (Why is this night different from all other nights?) invoked, and “Ve-hi she-amdah” (The promise that sustained) sung. Otherwise, the script created by screenwriter Alvin Boretz, who would later write episodes of the television series Kojak, was an extended series of monologues designed more to inform than arouse. When designated readers were not reciting long passages from Elie Wiesel’s instant classic on Soviet Jewry, The Jews of Silence, they were instructing the crowd about the contradictions in Soviet nationalities policy: “Let us take special note that [in contrast to Jews] the Germans in the Soviet Union, have within the last ten years built up, with Government help, a vast network of radio and television broadcasts.”60 Although future ASJM seders would also serve as vehicles for conveying information, their expressive dimensions would assume greater prominence.61 Across North America, the deployment of modified Passover seders as vehicles of public protest was a feature of mobilization efforts throughout the Soviet Jewry movement’s three decades. Again, the SSSJ played an important role in developing the tactic, but it was not the only organization doing so. The AJCSJ called in 1968 for continuing the practice of “special Sedorim” that the New York Coordinating Committee had begun, and later it circulated reprints of the Boretz “‘Haggadah’ program” for communities to reproduce or adapt for their own “observances.”62 Program manuals by Philadelphia’s Jewish Community Relations Council (1971) and the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council (1981) also encouraged the practice.63 It was picked up by grassroots and establishment organizations in many communities, including

60

Alvin Boretz, “A Symbolic Seder for Soviet Jewry: Passover 1970—A Protest for Freedom,” box 1, folder “1970 January-1971 July AJCSJ,” NCSJ I–181 AJHS, p. 3. 61 Ibid.; Irving Spiegel, “Passover Seder Is Held Here for Jews of Soviet [sic],” New York Times, April 11, 1968. 62 “Programmatic Recommendations Adopted by the Biennial,” NCSJ I–181 AJHS; Abraham J. Bayer to Conference Membership, “A Passover Campaign,” February 19, 1970, box 1, folder “1970 January-1971 July AJCSJ,” NCSJ I–181 AJHS. 63 JCRC of Greater Philadelphia, “Action Program on Soviet Jewry for Jewish Organizations”; Jacqueline K. Levine to NJCRAC International Commission, “Draft Outline Proposed Program Manual for Soviet Jewry,” memorandum, June 14, 1981, personal collection of Abraham J. Bayer.

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by Canadian activists in Montreal and by the American Jewish Congress in San Francisco.64 Soviet Jewry Freedom seders, as they came to be known, emerged in a context where a number of Jewish social movements were adapting the traditional Passover ritual to conform with their disparate visions of an authentic American Jewish politics. In a noncentralized process of grassroots ritual innovation, groups of women in various parts of the country independently began using seders as early as 1971 to express a Jewish feminism. Women’s haggadot published in 1974 by Aviva Cantor and in 1976 by Esther Broner and Naomi Nimrod became the basis for further diffusion of the practice, as did the work of Ma’yan: The Jewish Women’s Project that in the 1990s began holding community-wide feminist seders in New York.65 Unlike the feminist seders, however, those of the ASJM were intended to be wrenched from the home or community center in which the traditional seder usually took place, and redeployed on the streets as an act of public protest. By transgressing the spatial boundaries that had typically confined the ritual, activists subverted the mutually reinforcing dichotomies of private versus public realms and religious versus political action. In this sense, the ASJM seders bore more in common with the ritual created by Arthur Waskow that first made use of the term “Freedom Seder.” Conducted before the news media in the basement of an African American church in Washington, DC, on April 4, 1969, the first anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination, Waskow’s interfaith Freedom Seder sought, in Staub’s words, “to fuse Judaism and New Left radical politics.”66 Whereas this deployment of a transformed Passover seder was decried by more conservative factions among American Jewry as “the crude political rape of a religious tradition,” the ASJM’s equivalent ritualizations of a theology of assertive Jewish particularism were embraced as official establishment policy.67 64 Eisen, Count Us In. 65 Vanessa L. Ochs, Inventing Jewish Ritual (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: The Jewish Publication Society, 2007); Sonia Zylberberg, “Transforming Rituals: Contemporary Jewish Womenss Seders” (doctoral dissertation, Concordia University, 2006). 66 Michael E. Staub, Torn at the Roots: The Crisis of Jewish Liberalism in Post-war America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 163. 67 Ibid., 192, quoting Robert Alter, “Revolutionism and the Jews 2: Appropriating the Religious Tradition,” Commentary 51 (February 1971): 48–51.

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The SSSJ first sponsored its own “Symbolic Seder of Redemption” in March, 1969, five days before Waskow’s seder was held. A thousand Jewish students bearing torches and haggadot inscribed with Passover greetings in English, Yiddish, and Russian marched from New York’s Carnegie Hall to the Soviet UN Mission. There, at linen-covered tables heaped “high with matzos, bitter herbs and a giant ‘cup of salvation,’” the “ancient ritual of the retelling of the redemption from slavery [was] conducted by Rabbi Steven Riskin of the Lincoln Square Synagogue, with particular reference to the critical plight of the three million Jews of the USSR.”68 In subsequent years, the SSSJ would continue sponsoring the event, renamed Freedom seders, making them an almost annual occurrence from 1974 through 1990. Attendance, however, never reached the level of the 1969 seder, dwindling by the 1980s to between only two and four dozen people, the SSSJ’s most committed activists. When Rabbi Avraham Weiss assumed leadership of the SSSJ in 1983, the seders were moved from Manhattan to the official diplomatic residence of the Soviet UN Mission, located in the Bronx near Weiss’ congregation, the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale.69 The SSSJ’s Freedom Seder ritual remained relatively consistent over the years. A small table would be set up, and on it would be placed a seder plate with its traditional symbols as well as some visual references to Soviet Jewry, updated as needed: Many Passover symbols will be laid out on the table, including matzoh, traditionally called the “bread of affliction,” bitter herbs, and wine. Each seat will have a special place setting bearing the photograph of Soviet Jewish Prisoner of Conscience Josef Mendelevich, now 28, who was sentenced to 12 years in the notorious 1970 Leningrad trial for seeking exit to Israel.70 68 “Symbolic Passover Seder of Redemption for Soviet Jewry Climaxes Hagadah March to Soviet Mission,” press release, March 30, 1969; “Passover Seder in Front of Soviet UN Mission Is Culmination of Redemption Hagadah March from Carnegie Hall,” press release, March 26, 1969, box 5/1, SSSJ/YUA; “1,000 Young People Protest the Plight of Soviet Jews,” New York Times, March 31, 1969. 69 Assorted papers, boxes 11/13, 16/10, 20/16, 22/4, 22/28, 23/19, 24/12, 26/21, 28/3, 30/9, 32/14, 33/23, 35/10, 36/9, SSSJ/YUA. 70 “‘Open the Doors Passover Freedom Seder’ at Gates of Soviet Residence,” press release, April 14, 1976, box 16/10, SSSJ/YUA.

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An abridged version of the traditional seder would be conducted, with the symbols explicitly related to the plight of Soviet Jewry and with the language and format of the Haggadah subtly modified to express new meanings. Sometimes, the language changes would occur through substitution, a particularly common technique for adapting the Four Questions: For our brothers in the Soviet Union—(1) Why is this year different (and worse) than any other? . . . (2) Where are our friends—Sharansky, Slepak, Ida Nudel, and where is Mikhail Tsivin? . . . (3) How have the Jews in Russia been able to celebrate the holiday of freedom, how have they observed their seder in the past? . . . (4) And finally, when, when will our Soviet brothers be allowed to live with dignity and freedom of religion, or be allowed the right to leave?71

Answers were provided to inform and arouse: (1) This year the doors of the Soviet Union have closed tighter than ever before. Emigration figures are at their lowest in more than a decade. . . . (2) This year finds Sharansky in Christopol Prison starving and sick. . . . (3) This is how [prisoner of conscience] Yosef [Mendelevich] and his friends celebrated one Pesach: . . . They made wine from apples, and to hide it put it in a dirty bottle with rancid food . . . For an egg, they wrote “egg” on a piece of paper. For maror [bitter herbs], Yosef said their condition was maror itself . . . (4) Like all the years gone by, we don’t have an answer for this last, but most important question. So, we come here today to demand the answer from the only people who know it.72

In other cases, parallelism rather than substitution was the governing principle of adaptation. The Haggadah’s traditional words would be retained but supplemented with new language designed to echo and contrast it. This could be used to ironic effect, as in the case of the traditional tale of the rabbis in B’nei Brak: A tale is told of Rabbi Eliezer, Rabbi Joshua, Rabbi Elazar ben Azaryah, Rabbi Akiba, and Rabbi Tarphon. They were reclining in B’nei Brak and discussing

71 “SSSJ Freedom Seder, 1982/5742,” box 24/12, SSSJ/YUA, 1–2. 72 Ibid.

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the exodus from Egypt throughout the night, until their pupils came to them and said, “Masters, the time has come to recite the morning Shema.” And a tale is told of our Soviet brothers. They will be reclining and discussing the exodus from Egypt and the hope of another exodus, an exodus in our time, from Russia, throughout the night. But they will discuss the Passover in fear, not of their pupils coming but of the KGB.73

The material culture of the seder, including the three traditional symbols—pesach, matzoh, and maror—would also be subjected to interpretive commentary: • •

•

Rabbi Avi Weiss of the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale held aloft an egg from the table and said it “represents Soviet Jews—the more you boil them the tougher they become.”74 The injunction is to remember the themes of oppression and liberation in Passover, but to Anatoly Sharansky, now in the solitary confinement cells of the Perm labor camp, it’s real indeed. As we taste the bitter herbs, his entire life is bitterness.75 This [matzoh] is the bread of affliction which our ancestors ate in the land of Egypt, and cannot eat in the land of Russia.76

The seders would customarily conclude with a shift in the way that its material objects were used to signify meaning. During the seder itself, matzoh, maror, and the like were used by the protestors to invoke meanings relevant in the main to them as Jews. For this audience, the seder and its objects served semiotically as mediators of two distinct realms, uniting current events and core narrative. In this use of the ritual, the Soviet regime was a secondary audience. To any government representatives who may have seen the protest seder, the specific meanings attributed to the individual symbols were likely subordinated to a generic signification of Jewish religion and culture. The message to the Soviets was intended to derive from their witnessing American Jews using Jewish symbols before them as an act of defiance. At the conclusion of the seder, however, the physical objects that had been deployed symbolically were then used physically to invade Soviet space. Haggadot were collected and 73 74 75 76

Ibid., 2. “Seder at Russian Mission Site Vows Relentless Freedom Fight,” American Examiner-Jewish Week, April 20, 1974, box 11/13, SSSJ/YUA. “Freedom Seder,” press release, March 27, 1981, box 23/19, SSSJ/YUA. “SSSJ Freedom Seder, 1982/5742,” 1.

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shipped to the Soviet UN Mission. Children attempted to slide the matzot and bitter herbs through the gates of the Soviet compounds. The signifying power of the matzoh was transferred to its physicality as this became its salient characteristic vis-à-vis the Soviets and as the boundary that separated it from them was breached.77 The act of removing the Passover seder ritual from its traditional setting in the home and adapting it as political street theater was intended to convey opposite messages to the Soviet audience and to the American Jewish performers. For its Soviet targets, the Freedom Seder deployed the very symbolic practices and materials that the Kremlin was trying to wipe out, thereby framing the Passover ritual as an act of protest. For American Jews, by contrast, the invocation of the seder’s forms did the converse, framing public protest as an act of religious ritual. Here we must draw a distinction between the signifying power of the symbols themselves and the signifying power of the act of using the symbols—that is, between the meanings deriving internally from the ritual as a text and the meanings created through ritualization as a performative act. Read as text, the Freedom Seder’s ritual integrated Soviet Jews into a traditional Jewish cosmology. Viewed as performative act, the Freedom Seder’s ritualization made similar assertions about the nature of the protest and about the subject position of the American Jews who so engaged in it. Ritualization constructed the act of protesting as a sacred obligation and resituated the protestors from actors in the domain of secular politics to an assemblage of the faithful responding to a command they were duty-bound to answer. Their repeated references to unity, responsibility, and survival—the themes identified by Woocher as core tenets of the American Jewish civil religion—can be interpreted as conscious articulations of this commanding imperative, this sense of mitzvah, which the performance of the rite implied: • •

77 78

We are one indeed, inextricably linked by the chains of history. . . . Only when the Soviet Jews are free can we consider ourselves totally free.78 Addressing the frustration of those who see little change in Kremlin behavior despite repeated demonstrations and pressures, Rabbi Weiss challenged “those who say to us, ‘why do you keep coming out to

“‘Freedom Seder’ for Soviet Jews,” press release, April 11, 1979, box 22/4, SSSJ/YUA. “Seder at Russian Mission Site Vows Relentless Freedom Fight.”

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•

•

protest over and over?’ My response is, how can you not come? How can you experience Passover and not speak out for those in the Egypt of today?”79 [W]hy is this year different from any other? Because this year, free Jews throughout the world are gathering together and are sending our message to the Soviets louder than ever—we will not forget our brothers and we will work for them until the doors are open and they are allowed to leave.80 A letter from a Russian Jew was read and the roll of current Russian Jewish prisoners called. Following each name, the crowd chanted “The Jewish People Live.”81

By physically moving the Passover seder out of the home and reconfiguring it as a vehicle for public protest in the streets, the SSSJ and other Soviet Jewry movement organizations subverted the spatial and conceptual distinctions separating a private-religious realm from a public-political one. The physical relocation of the traditional ritual and its adaptation to speak explicitly to issues of the day asserted the essential religiosity of Jewish political action. Through the Freedom seders (and through similar ritual relocations like the Tisha b’Av protest fast), American Jews from the 1960s through the 1980s constructed a politicized religious culture and a sacralized political culture that posited political action on behalf of oppressed Jews to be a religious obligation, a mitzvah, incumbent on all American Jews by virtue of the imperatives of Jewish unity, mutual responsibility, and survival.

Politics in the Home The American Soviet Jewry movement’s sanctification of the so-called political realm had its counterpart in the politicization of what was commonly thought of as the religious realm. Not only were home and synagogue rituals taken out into the street but the ASJM’s specific political agenda as well as its overall activist orientation were also inserted into the home and the synagogue. Through this, the movement further undermined the segregation of “private” and “public” spaces on which a false dichotomization of religion and politics rested. By blurring the lines between religious spaces and political spaces, the 79 “Russian ‘Nyet’ to Passover Food at ‘Freedom Seder’ at Soviet Diplomatic Residence,” press release, March 27, 1988, box 33/23, SSSJ/YUA. 80 “SSSJ Freedom Seder, 1982/5742,” 1. 81 “Seder at Russian Mission Site Vows Relentless Freedom Fight.”

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movement helped blur the line between religious action and political action, a crucial move in the construction of identity politics as a religious imperative. ASJM penetration of the traditional ritual spaces of Jewish life went beyond the venerable practice of responding to adversity by calling out in prayer. Such classic forms as instituting special prayer days and composing liturgical appeals did, of course, occur throughout the movement’s three-decade history. Not surprisingly, they were among its earliest forms of ritualized political action. In October 1963, for example, the Synagogue Council of America declared Yom Kippur a “national Day of Concern” for Soviet Jews.82 The following June, Representative Abraham J. Multer (D-NY) entered into the Congressional Record two prayers for Soviet Jewry featured at the AJCSJ’s inaugural conference.83 In 1967, the New York Board of Rabbis circulated a “Special Prayer for the Seventh Day of Passover on Behalf of Our People in the Soviet Union” to be “used in Temples and Synagogues of New York City.” The prayer liberally invoked both the symbols of the holiday and the themes associated with Woocher’s Civil Judaism: [ J]ust as the chains of slavery were broken in the days of Egyptian bondage . . . so deliver our people who are today denied the right of Faith, of selfexpression . . . and of a sense of destiny as a people in the Soviet Union. . . . [W]hen they suffer indignity, we feel their pain; when they are denied the right to speak and live as Jews, we too are imprisoned by the shackles of spiritual slavery. As Thy name is ONE so are we one people.84

What distinguished the ASJM’s efforts to insinuate its message into the spaces of traditional religious observance, however, was its mobilization of established home and synagogue rituals. Unlike the composition of special prayers for Soviet Jews, the adaptation of established ritual practices contained an implicit assertion that the movement had a right to change these rituals. In the synagogue, this was best exemplified by the practice (inspired by the Union of Councils for Soviet Jews) of bar and bat mitzvah twinning. In the home, the most successful example was the AJCSJ’s Matzoh of Hope ritual for Passover seders. Originally referred to by the less-PR-savvy title “Matzoh of 82 Orbach, American Movement, 18. 83 Congressional Record ( June 8, 1964): A3111. 84 Edward T. Sandrow, “Special Prayer for the Seventh Day of Passover on Behalf of Our People in the Soviet Union,” April 30, 1967, boxes 2/15–17, SSSJ/YUA.

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Oppression,” this 1966 creation represented something uncharacteristic for the AJCSJ.85 The coordinating body usually preferred the role of publicist to artist, promoting protest rituals developed by organizations in the grassroots and in local communities. With the Matzoh of Hope, the AJCSJ made its major foray into ritual innovation of its own. Continuing in the tradition of modern Jewish political and religious activists who for over a century had been adapting the Passover Haggadah and its rituals to communicate the ideals of reform Judaism, secular Zionism, Soviet communism, American liberalism, and other ideologies,86 the AJCSJ called on American Jews to affirm their commitment to the Soviet Jewish cause by setting aside a piece of matzoh at their Passover seders and to explain its significance by reading an associated text (shown here in its 1967 version): That the Jews of the Soviet Union may know that they have not been forgotten . . . The American Jewish Conference on Soviet Jewry . . . urges that the following statement be read at the Seder of every American Jewish household. THIS IS THE MATZOH OF HOPE . . . This matzoh, which we set aside as a symbol of hope for the 3 million Jews of the Soviet Union, reminds us of the indestructible link that exists between us. As we observe this festival of freedom, we know that Soviet Jews are not free to learn of their Jewish past, to hand it down to their children. They cannot learn the languages of their fathers. They cannot teach their children to be the teachers, the rabbis of future generations. They can only sit in silence and become invisible. We shall be their voice, and our voices shall be joined by thousands of men of conscience aroused by 85 Israel Miller to AJCSJ member organizations, “Matzoh of Hope,” memorandum, March 15, 1967, box 1, folder “AJCSJ, 1965–1967,” NCSJ I–181 AJHS; Albert D. Chernin to NJCRAC membership, “Project re ‘Matzoh of Oppression,’” memorandum, March 21, 1966, box 75, folder “Activities-Soviet Jewry, 1965–1970,” National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council records, undated, 1940–1994, Collection I–172, American Jewish Historical Society, Newton Centre, Mass. and New York (hereafter cited as NJCRAC I–172 AJHS). 86 Carole B. Balin, “The Modern Transformation of the Ancient Passover Haggadah,” in Passover and Easter: Origin and History to Modern Times, eds. Paul F. Bradshaw and Lawrence A. Hoffman (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999); Joel Gereboff, “One Nation, with Liberty and Haggadahs for All,” in Key Texts in American Jewish Culture, ed. Jack Kugelmass (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2003).

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the wrongs suffered by Soviet Jews. Then shall they know that they have not been forgotten, and they that sit in darkness shall yet see a great light.87

Estimates of the number of households that actually incorporated the new ceremony ranged from “tens of thousands”88 to “all American Jewish seders.”89 Whatever the true figure, the AJCSJ considered its campaign a resounding success. Reviewing its 1966 debut, the AJCSJ estimated that “nearly one million copies of the statement were reprinted in various forms.”90 The conference alone had sold 175,000 copies to organizations such as Hadassah (31,000), the Reform movement’s Union of American Hebrew Congregations (15,000), and the San Francisco Jewish Community Relations Council (15,000). Five years later, it was still estimating annual circulation levels around one million. Synagogues and Jewish community centers posted the text in their buildings, reprinted it in their bulletins, and sent it as special mailings to their members. Jewish newspapers editorialized about the statement and reprinted it in their pages. Large advertisements reprinting the statement and the call to action were also placed in national media like the New York Times.91 As the ASJM evolved, so did the Matzoh of Hope ritual. Restrictions on matzoh-baking featured prominently in the original 1966 version of the ceremony. “Most [Soviet Jews] cannot have matzoh on their Seder tables tonight,” the text informed American Jews. It invited them to imagine what this might mean. “Conceive of Passover without matzoh—without that visible reminder of our flight from slavery.”92 One year later, such language was dropped because of the “increased availability of matzoh in the Soviet Union.”93 More significant revisions of the ritual occurred in 1970, when the AJCSJ adapted the reading to reflect changes not only in the situation of Soviet Jews but also in the American movement’s professed aims. The emergence in the late 1960s 87 Miller to AJCSJ member organizations, “Matzoh of Hope.” 88 Abraham J. Bayer, “American Response to Soviet Anti-Jewish Policies,” American Jewish Year Book 74 (1973): 215. 89 Orbach, American Movement, 84. 90 Miller to AJCSJ member organizations, “Matzoh of Hope.” 91 Ibid.; Bayer, “American Response to Soviet Anti-Jewish Policies,” 215. 92 Albert D. Chernin to NJCRAC membership, “Edward G. Robinson Tape on ‘Matzoh of Oppression,’” memorandum, March 10, 1966, box 75, folder “Activities—Soviet Jewry, 1965–1970,” NJCRAC I–172 AJHS. 93 Miller to AJCSJ member organizations, “Matzoh of Hope.”

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of overt Soviet Jewish agitation for emigration belied the AJCSJ’s assertion that Soviet Jews “can only sit in silence and become invisible.” Abandoning the paternalistic claim that American Jews “shall be their voice,” the organization rewrote the concluding paragraph to read, “As their voices rise in Jewish affirmation and protest, we add our voices to theirs.”94 Similarly, the emergence of the emigration movement in the USSR helped resolve a dispute in the American movement over the question of whether it should fight only for amelioration of the Jews’ condition in the USSR (the AJCSJ’s initial position) or for emigration as well (the position of the grassroots SSSJ).95 As late as 1969, the AJCSJ had conspicuously omitted freedom of exit from the litany of freedoms that the Matzoh of Hope text declared that Soviet Jews lacked, an ironic absence for a text added to a ritual commemorating the biblical Exodus.96 By 1970, however, the conference had come to embrace emigration as an overt movement goal. It revised the text of the Matzoh of Hope to mention the previously unacknowledged “free[dom] to leave,” placing it first in the list.97 Alterations of the new ritual came also from sources other than the AJCSJ. A substantial amount of power to define the ritual rested with the thousands of American Jews who hosted the seders where the Matzoh of Hope text was recited. This was not only because each household controlled its own seder but because there were few norms governing the conduct of the novel practice. Beyond the call to set aside a piece of matzoh and read the text, the AJCSJ never specified precisely when and how in the course of the seder to perform the Matzoh of Hope ritual. Was the Matzoh of Hope itself to be a fourth matzoh in addition to the three traditionally placed on the seder plate? The afikoman? The half of the broken middle matzoh that was not used as the afikoman? Something else? When in the seder was it to be mentioned and set aside? After the recitation of “This is the bread of affliction”? When the middle matzoh was broken? When the afikoman was retrieved?

94 Ibid. 95 Appelbaum, “Soviet Jewry Movement in the United States,” 618; Peretz, Le combat pour les juifs soviitiques, 118, 137. 96 AJCSJ, “That the Jews of the Soviet Union May Know That They Have Not Been Forgotten . . . ,” New York Times, April 2, 1969. 97 AJCSJ, “In the Name of Humanity,” New York Times, April 17, 1970 (boldface emphasis removed).

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Those seeking guidance could find it in some haggadot of the era that offered their own variants of the new ritual. Adopting a flexible definition of the word “traditional,” Alfred Kolatch’s The Family Seder: A Traditional Passover Haggadah for the Modern Home offered instructions for including the innovative Matzoh of Hope alongside an equally novel companion observance called the “Seat of Honor”: As a tangible expression of our concern for the plight of Soviet Jewry . . . we now place one more chair at our Seder table. Before this Seat of Honor, we place a full table setting, and on the plate we place one whole matzo which we call the Matzo of Hope. In Israel, the custom has developed to place upon the Seat of Honor a large, hand-printed card, or a commercially prepared poster, which declares our commitment to work, unceasingly, towards the day when Jews, so desiring, will be permitted to leave the Soviet Union at will, as guaranteed by the charter of the United Nations.98

It goes on to instruct all assembled to recite in unison a text, different from the one written by the AJCSJ, explaining that “This Seat of Honor and this Matzo of Hope . . . are here to remind us that although 35 centuries have passed since the Pharaohs conspired to destroy the Jewish people, enlightened and scientifically sophisticated nations like the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics have not yet learned the lesson of history.” Readers then proclaimed their “oneness with [their] fellow Jews in the Soviet Union” and pledged to “work diligently and sincerely towards winning their complete and unbridled freedom.” Family Seder inserted the page devoted to the ritual after the instructions for eating the afikoman (tsafun), the final act of the seder dinner before the recitation of the concluding grace (barekh). In addition to this liminal placement, the page was also given a graphically indistinct heading. Not only did these indicate the non-traditional status of the Soviet Jewry ritual but they also made the page appear to be an insert that, having no predetermined place in the Haggadah’s precisely ordered text, could be turned to at any point the seder leader deemed appropriate. On Wings of Freedom, the Haggadah of the Jewish student organization Hillel, inserted its poetic adaptation of the ritual after the text of “Ha lahma anya,” the point in the seder when the matzoh is first held aloft and presented as 98 Alfred J. Kolatch, ed., The Family Seder: A Traditional Passover Haggadah for the Modern Home, rev. ed. (New York: Jonathan David, 1991), 64.

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“the bread of affliction.” Gone was the name “Matzoh of Hope,” but the symbol remained, joined, as in Family Seder, by the empty chair. To make clear the nontraditional character of the ceremony, the instructions for it were presented as “optional directions”:  PTIONAL DIRECTIONS: A person sitting near an empty chair holds O up a piece of matzah and reads the following: This is the bread for the person who is not here: The Jew in the Soviet Union, learning Torah behind closed curtains, Savoring hidden freedom like matzah covered by the cloth, Waiting, like the afikomon, to be redeemed; The Jew in hostile Arab lands, in impoverished Ethiopia Let us look not only at the empty chair But at the full plate of matzot, The plate full of hope that freedom is not a fairytale, But a tale as real as it is old.99 Our awareness of the Matzoh of Hope ritual’s ongoing evolution should caution us against viewing the ritualization of protest as a “reflection” of a prior, independently existing worldview. Practice and ideology were reciprocally constructed as movement activists adapted their mobilization tactics to address historical developments and practical constraints. The name change from “Matzoh of Oppression” to “Matzoh of Hope” may have occurred because, as an AJCSJ memo suggested, a “technical subcommittee agreed” that it was warranted by “the changing circumstances since Passover 1966.”100 Still, it bore within it ideological implications that were hardly technical. The shift in orientation from decrying present hardships to expressing confidence and faith in the future contributed to the infusion of a redemptive eschatology into the movement. Although such an approach would also be developed independently by the SSSJ, the AJCSJ was at first reluctant to follow the implications of a redemptive politics to their logical conclusion.  99 Richard N. Levy, ed., On Wings of Freedom: The Hillel Haggadah for the Nights of Passover (Hoboken, New Jersey: B’nai B’rith Hillel Foundations in association with Ktav Publishing House, 1989), 24–25. 100 Miller to AJCSJ member organizations, “Matzoh of Hope.”

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Faced with a choice to do what it considered, at the time, to be the strategically wise thing and avoid calling for emigration, or to have its Passover ritual echo Moses’ call to “Let my people go,” the AJCSJ opted for the more politic of the two. The Exodus narrative of redemption would not serve as a guide to policy on Soviet Jews for the AJCSJ, at least not until the strategic environment changed. When it did change, the seeds that had been planted enabled the AJCSJ to join the grassroots organizations in using the Passover narrative as a cognitive framework for understanding the Soviet Jewish situation and American Jewry’s possible responses. By the time the author of the Hillel Haggadah prepared its version of the Matzoh of Hope ritual in the 1980s, this conceptual framework had been sufficiently established that Hillel could use it not only to think about the plight of Soviet Jews but also to consider the situation of imperiled Jews in other parts of the world as well.

Conclusion Dissenting from the view that ritual can be interpreted as something which places people’s emotions and motivations on display, Stanley Tambiah cautions us not to forget that ritual is a highly formalized mode of action. Whatever it may do to express or generate sentiment, its conventionality also implies a certain psychological distancing on the part of those who engage in it. “Ritual is not a ‘free expression of emotions,’” he writes, “but a disciplined rehearsal of ‘right attitudes.’”101 We should pay heed to Tambiah’s words and take care not to misread the protest rituals of the American movement for Soviet Jewry as windows onto the psyches of American Jews of that era. In the rituals we see not psychological phenomena but sociological ones. The ritualization of protest in the American movement to free Soviet Jews constructed through its very existence a collective mode of religious being that asserted the centrality of the political as well as a collective mode of political being that asserted the centrality of the religious. It emerged not as the behavioral reflection of a value system that had prior, autonomous existence, nor as the result of discourse alone. Instead, ritualization evolved through a highly contingent praxis as small cadres of activists decided, 101 Stanley J. Tambiah, “A Performative Approach to Ritual,” Proceedings of the British Academy, 1979, reprinted in Readings in Ritual Studies, ed. Ronald L. Grimes (Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson, 1996), 495–511, esp. 499–500.

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sometimes day-to-day, about details of mobilization strategies, tactics, and logistics. How best to recruit participants? To garner media coverage? To sustain commitment? To assert the movement’s Jewish character? Early decisions influenced later ones. The guerilla theater of the Passover marches opened a space for the Freedom Seders. The mobilization of Passover led to the realization that Purim and Shavuot and Rosh Hashanah could be mobilized, too. And if holidays, then why not life-cycle ceremonies? Innovations from one organization were adopted and adapted by others. One year after its development in New York, the Passover march had spread to cities across the United States and Canada. The political deployment of Jewish ritual that began with the upstart SSSJ’s small group of modern Orthodox youth in New York quickly diffused to other movement organizations and was even embraced to a certain extent by the establishment bureaucracies represented by the AJCSJ. The result of this was more than simply the invention of Jewish ritual; it was the construction of a historically and generationally specific American Jewish politics. At a particular moment in American Jewish history, a protest campaign sought to effect a type of change for which established models of political action provided little guidance and inspired even less confidence. Choosing to innovate, young activists began mobilizing Jewish ritual as a form of symbolic protest. Contained within the tactic were the seeds of its own transformation into a strategic end. The ritualization of protest subverted spatial distinctions that had been a primary support of a dichotomous understanding of religion and politics. By moving Jewish ritual out of the home and synagogue and into the streets, and by making the reciprocal move of bringing political protest out of the streets and into the rituals of the home and synagogue, activists constructed a form of Jewish practice that blurred distinctions between political and religious realms and between instrumental and expressive behavior. Their tactical ritualization asserted a sacred imperative to political action by asserting a political imperative to religious action. In so doing, the campaign to alleviate the plight of Soviet Jews broadened into an American Jewish social movement in the fullest sense of the term, one that sought not only to change Soviet policies but also to enact a new synthesis of American Jewish political, ethnic, and religious identities. Whether the movement’s effects vis-à-vis American Jewry will be anywhere near as lasting as its effects vis-à-vis the Jews of the former Soviet

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Union remains to be seen. Within a decade of the movement’s end, observers of American Jewish life were already speaking of a populace less inclined to locate meaning in the politics of redemption, and of a communal leadership focused not on unity in the face of external threats but on factional conflicts and fears of dissolution from within. Steven Cohen and Arnold Eisen labeled it a “retreat of public Judaism,” and Woocher himself speculated about the demise of Civil Judaism and its ethos of Sacred Survival.102 If the ASJM’s creation of a Jewish religious imperative to identity politics has failed to outlast the movement, we do not trace this to a change in values (as the civil religion thesis would force us to do because of its causal model that bifurcates thought from action and proposes that ideas motivate and therefore precede behavior). Rather, we trace it to a change in praxis—a change in those activities that construct meaning through their very enactment. With the successful conclusion of the American movement to free Soviet Jews, largescale mobilization by its activists and organizations came to an end. As a result, American Jews stopped engaging in the meaning-constituting practices that were no more and no less than the politics of redemption itself. As the ideas and behaviors rose together in a process of mutual construction, they fell together when this process ceased. I cannot claim that this offers a complete explanation for the rise and fall of religiously inflected identity politics among American Jews in the second half of the twentieth century. The political culture in question was constituted outside of the Soviet Jewry movement as well, in American Jewish activism on behalf of Israel, Holocaust remembrance, and the fight against anti-Semitism, to list but a few examples. Even so, I do claim broader applicability for the approach taken here, by which changes in political culture are explained in 102 Steven M. Cohen and Arnold M. Eisen, The Jew Within: Self, Family and Community in America (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2000); Jonathan Woocher, “‘Sacred Survival’ Revisited: American Jewish Civil Religion in the New Millennium,” in The Cambridge Companion to American Judaism, ed. Dana Evan Kaplan (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2005). See also Steven M. Cohen, Religious Stability and Ethnic Decline: Emerging Patterns of Jewish Identity in the United States (New York: Florence G. Heller-Jewish Community Centers Association Research Center, 1998); Samuel G. Freedman, Jew Vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000); and Jack Wertheimer, A People Divided: Judaism in Contemporary America (New York: Brandeis, 1993).

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terms of the emergence and decline of collectively generated and historically situated meaning-constituting practices. As investigations in this vein consider other arenas that were implicated in the theologized identity politics of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, we can anticipate a further expansion of our understanding of a history that continues to unfold.

“A Strike in Heaven”: The Montreal Rabbis’ Walkout of 1935 and its Significance1 Ira Robinson Introduction The standard narrative of the development of the Eastern European Jewish immigrant community in North America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as expressed classically in works like Moses Rischin’s The Promised City,2 attributes great importance to the development of the Jewish labor movement and its ethos, while often ignoring the immigrant Orthodox rabbinate.3 In my recent work on the immigrant Orthodox rabbinate in North America, particularly in my book Rabbis and Their Community,4 I have asserted the importance of the immigrant Orthodox rabbinate in the development of Jewish communities in this era. In this article, I will demonstrate how the two seemingly disparate social phenomena of the Orthodox rabbinate and Jewish 1 2 3

4

I would like to thank Dr. Simcha Fishbane for encouraging me to publish this article here, and Dr. Steven Lapidus for a helpful suggestion. Moses Rischin, The Promised City: New York’s Jews, 1870–1914 (New York: Harper and Row, 1970). Cf. Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1975). Jenna Weissman Joselit, “What Happened to New York’s ‘Jewish Jews’?: Moses Rischin’s The Promised City Revisited,” American Jewish History 73 (1983): 163–172. On American Orthodoxy in general, see Jeffrey S. Gurock, Orthodox Jews in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009). Ira Robinson, Rabbis and Their Community: Studies in the Immigrant Orthodox Rabbinate in Montreal, 1896–1930 (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2007).

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labor can be seen to have shared common values and were as often as not mutually reinforcing rather than antagonistic in their goals and strategies. Thus while much of the leadership of the North American Jewish labor movement may indeed have been religiously non-traditional, specifically anti-religious attitudes did not predominate in the North American Jewish labor movement in the way that they tended to do in the more doctrinaire political environments of Eastern Europe and Palestine. Many in the rank and file of Jewish labor tended to have positive attitudes toward much of the Judaic tradition and its practices. There is considerable evidence that prior to the Second World War many of the supporters of Jewish labor unions attended Orthodox synagogues, purchased kosher meat, and gave their children Jewish educations in which they did not always distinguish what may seem to many observers incompatible “religious” and “secularist” ideologies. The rabbis, for their part, often championed the cause of the Jewish labor movement, supported the organization of Jewish labor unions, and publicly sided with the workers in their labor disputes.5 When circumstances were appropriate, rabbis also engaged in actions influenced by the ethos of Jewish labor. The study of the immigrant Jewish community of Montreal in the first decades of the twentieth century allows us to examine this interactive phenomenon between rabbis and Jewish labor in detail. Starting in the 1920s, the Yiddish-speaking immigrant Jewish community of Montreal established a self-governing body, the Jewish Community Council (Va’ad ha-’Ir—henceforth, VH), that explicitly empowered the leadership of the Jewish labor movement to join in community governance and exercise control over such “religious” activities as supervision of the kosher meat industry and the subsidy of Jewish educational institutions.6 The Montreal immigrant Orthodox rabbinate, for its part, was organized by the VH as the Rabbinical Council (Va’ad ha-Rabbonim— henceforth, VR). The VR integrally participated in the activities of the Jewish Community Council and thus necessarily interacted with the Jewish labor leadership. The influence of the Jewish labor movement in Montreal was felt considerably beyond formal labor-management issues, as evidenced in the student 5 Gurock, Orthodox Jews, 120. 6 Ira Robinson, “The Foundation Documents of the Jewish Community Council of Montreal,” Jewish Political Studies Review 8, nos. 3–4 (1996): 69–86.

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strike at the Aberdeen School in 1913.7 In this context, one of the more interesting results of the influence of the Jewish labor movement in Montreal includes consumer strikes in the 1920s against the high price of kosher meat,8 as well as labor actions by Montreal’s rabbinically trained slaughterers (shohtim), who formally organized a union of their own, the Agudat ha-Shohtim (henceforth, AS) and repeatedly engaged in standard labor tactics against the VH. Against this background, this article will examine in detail events within the Montreal Jewish community in 1935 that resulted in almost all the rabbis of the VR of the VH of Montreal walking off their job in protest, creating what one of their number, Rabbi Hirsch Cohen, somewhat facetiously described as “a strike in heaven” (a strayk in himmel).9 This article will reconstruct from newspaper and archival sources the course of this “heavenly strike” and its influence on the VH and its governance. It will particularly examine the ways in which the local Yiddish language daily, Der Keneder Adler (henceforth, KA),10 and its editorial policy influenced the course of the rabbinical strike, the structure of the Montreal immigrant Orthodox rabbinate, and the ultimate resolution of the crisis that precipitated the strike. It will contextualize the rabbinic action with respect to the inherent structural tensions within the Montreal Jewish community and, particularly, within its kosher meat industry and the frequent conflicts therein between rabbis, slaughterers, meat packing companies, butchers, and consumers. This article will also attempt to use the Montreal incident to raise and examine some broader issues regarding the interplay of “religious” and “secular” elements in the social and cultural development of the immigrant Jewish community in North America in the first half of the twentieth century. In so doing, it will serve to nuance our understanding of the social, cultural,   7 Roderick Macleod and Mary Anne Poutanen, “Little Fists for Social Justice: Anti-Semitism, Community, and Montreal’s Aberdeen School Strike, 1913,” Labour/Le Travail 70 (Fall, 2012): 61–99.   8 Ira Robinson, “The Kosher Meat War and the Jewish Community Council of Montreal, 1922–1925,” Canadian Ethnic Studies 22, no. 2 (1990): 41–53; Gerald Sorin, A Time for Building: the Third Migration, 1880–1920 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 94.   9 This was the title of an essay written by Rabbi Hirsch Cohen and published in Montreal’s Yiddish daily newspaper, Der Keneder Adler (henceforth, KA) on April 12, 1935. 10 On KA, see David Rome and Pierre Anctil, Through the Eyes of the Eagle: the Early Montreal Yiddish Press (1907–1916) (Montreal: Vehicule Press, 2001).

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and religious dynamics of early twentieth century North American Jewish communities.

The Immigrant Orthodox Rabbinate The significance of the immigrant Orthodox rabbinate at the turn of the twentieth century for the development of American Judaism had long been downplayed by those for whom the master narrative of the development of the American Jewish community did not encompass traditional Orthodox Judaism. However, it is apparent, upon reflection, that the religious expression of the immigrant generation was largely guided by the model of eastern European Orthodox Judaism. This was so not because the majority of the immigrants were necessarily ideologically committed to the specific doctrines of Orthodox Judaism. It was simply because Orthodoxy, in its Eastern European guise, happened to be the Judaic religious model most easily available to the immigrants as they moved to establish their synagogues and communal institutions.11 In any event, the religious institutions founded by the immigrants soon attracted immigrant Orthodox rabbis who, though often bewildered and dismayed at the great change in the level of religious observance of Jews in America,12 doggedly began creating an institutional framework for rabbinical organization and supervision of kashrut and other areas of Jewish life.13 The forces of rabbinic organization that played out in community after community in North America in the first decades of the twentieth century

11

12 13

It is noteworthy that Reform Judaism at the turn of the twentieth century essentially gave up on influencing the immigrant generation religiously, hoping instead to attract their Americanized children. Conservative Judaism, significantly, got much of its impetus from the 1901 reorganization of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America supported by American Jews predominantly affiliated with the Reform movement who hoped to influence the Judaism of the immigrants’ children. On the seminary reorganization, see Mel Scult, “Schechter’s Seminary,” in Tradition Renewed: a History of the Jewish Theological Seminary, vol. 1, ed. Jack Wertheimer (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1997), 45–102. Cf. also Michael R. Cohen, The Birth of Conservative Judaism: Solomon Schechter’s Disciples and the Creation of an American Religious Movement (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). An interesting expression of this bewilderment is Jonathan D. Sarna, trans., People Walk on Their Heads: Moses Weinberger’s Jews and Judaism in New York (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1981). Jeffrey Gurock, “Accommodators and Resisters.”

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were at work in Montreal as well.14 One major characteristic of the development of the North American rabbinate was the existence of sharp rivalries between rabbis as they competed for a limited number of positions related to the supervision of the production of kosher meat, which alone could afford these rabbis decent remuneration. In Montreal there existed a rivalry between two rabbinical coalitions that lasted for most of two decades. At first (1907–1918), the struggle took place between rabbis Hirsch Cohen and Simon Glazer and their respective partisans. This struggle for control ultimately resulted in Rabbi Glazer leaving Montreal, and being replaced by Rabbi Yudel Rosenberg, who inherited Glazer’s following as well as his struggle with Rabbi Cohen.15 Rabbis Cohen and Rosenberg continued all their careers as rivals. Nonetheless they were also able to cooperate, at least intermittently. In the early 1920s, they first tried combining against a newly arrived rabbi, Sheea Herschorn, who was, like his rabbinic rivals, set on carving out a place for himself in kashrut supervision.16 Ultimately, the logic of the situation convinced the rivals that cooperation was better than competition. This led to the founding in 1922 of the VH of Montreal, an organization with an ambitious mandate to create order out of seeming chaos in the kosher meat industry, establish the VR, fund Jewish education, and much else. What resulted was, however, far short of the vision that animated VH’s founders. Almost immediately, the factions led by rabbis Cohen and Rosenberg, respectively, that had united to found the VH split apart and left it in the hands of Rabbi Cohen and his partisans. Rabbi Rosenberg and his allies sought to present to the Montreal Jewish public an alternative rabbinic structure and a rival network of kosher butchers. What followed was two years of often bitter 14

On the Montreal Jewish community and its history, see Pierre Anctil and Ira Robinson, eds., Les Communautés juives de Montréal: histoire et enjeux contemporains (Sillery, QC: Septentrion, 2010). For Canada as a whole, see Gerald Tulchinsky, Canada’s Jews: a People’s Journey (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008). On trends in the North American immigrant Orthodox rabbinate, see Kimmy Caplan, Orthodoxy in the New World: Immigrant Rabbis and Preaching in America (1881–1924) [Hebrew] ( Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History, 2002). 15 Robinson, Rabbis, 21–68. 16 On Herschorn, see Ira Robinson, “‘The Other Side of the Coin’: The Anatomy of a Public Controversy in the Montreal Jewish Community, 1931,” Studies in Religion 40, Issue 3 (September 2011): 271–282.

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rivalry between the two factions that amounted to a “Kosher Meat War.” It lasted from 1923 to 1925, and only stopped because neither side was able to completely defeat the other. Ultimately the sheer waste of the rivalry and the exhaustion of any viable alternative led the two sides to reform their alliance based upon the previous status quo.17 Reestablishing the original structure of the VH and its VR did not, however, ensure completely smooth sailing. That is because the rabbis of the VR were not the only important factors in this equation. Another important group that was influential in the continued unrest in this area was that of the slaughterers (shohtim). It is of considerable significance that these men were not merely envious of the prerogatives of the rabbis—their official supervisors—whom they did not necessarily consider their superiors in rabbinic education and erudition; they also organized in a union, the AS.18 Thus, in 1929, Rabbi Getsel Laxer led a strike of shohtim that lasted nearly five months and caused no end of bitterness and recriminations.19 In the aftermath of that strike, the AS signed a contract with the VH that stipulated that the shohtim would receive 62% of the gross income from slaughtering and an income of $53 per week.20 Labor relations between the AS and the VH were no better in 1933, during the depths of the Great Depression. When the shohtim’s salaries were reduced in that year,21 the AS called a strike that lasted from March to September.22 One of the reasons for the AS’s discontent, beyond the obvious wage issue, was that the administration of the VH was increasingly under pressure to fulfill one of the promises made at the VH’s inception, to help fund the Jewish educational institutions of the city that were feeling the severe financial pinch of the Depression. The VH had thus begun giving significant amounts of money (over $31,000 between April 1933 and May 1935) to these institutions.23 17

Robinson, “Kosher Meat War.” On some of the legal and political tactics utilized, see Ira Robinson, “Toward a History of Kashrut in Montreal: the Fight over Municipal Bylaw 828 (1922–1924),” in Renewing Our Days: Montreal Jews in the Twentieth Century (Montreal: Vehicule Press, 1995), 30–41. 18 Robinson, Rabbis, 69–86. 19 Ibid., 78–81. 20 KA, February 27, 1935. 21 KA, March 11, 1935. 22 KA, September 28, 1934. 23 Keneder ‘Id, August 23, 1935.

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The strike actions of the AS were publicly condemned in the Jewish community media. The Canadian Jewish Chronicle (henceforth, CJChr) editorialized that the “uncompromising Agudath ha-Shochtim,” which had “let loose a torrent of abuse” directed at the VH, “stands today discredited and unmasked before the entire community.”24 It is no wonder that, at the beginning of 1934, Toronto’s Yiddish-language daily, looking at the state of kashrut in Canada, opined that “the kosher meat question has brought disgrace [shande] on the name of the Jew in several communities. The rabbis are dragged into gentile courts and the kosher meat industry is widely considered a ‘racket’”.25 The autumn of 1934 found the AS again opposing the VH in Quebec Superior Court, this time over the qualifications of slaughterer Itamar Brenner. Brenner, who had received a certificate indicating his qualifications as a slaughterer from Rabbi Yudel Rosenberg, had practiced his trade in the small Jewish community of Glace Bay, Nova Scotia. However, when he moved to Montreal and attempted to establish himself as a shohet in that city, the VH went to court to obtain an injunction against him on the grounds that he was not considered to be qualified to slaughter in the eyes of the Montreal rabbinate and had refused the rabbis’ summons to appear before them.26 The issue, then, was the authority of the VH and its VR to be the sole authority for kashrut in Montreal. The shohtim were once again under the leadership of Getsel Laxer, and he denied in his court testimony that the VH had the sole authority to certify slaughterers. Rabbi Rosenberg, who had granted the license for Brenner to become a shohet in Glace Bay, was called to the stand and affirmed that he certified Brenner to slaughter only poultry, not cattle. When Brenner was called to the stand, however, he testified that Rabbi Rosenberg had indeed asked him to slaughter cattle for the VH during the 1933 AS strike but he had refused to betray his colleagues and become a scab.27 It was further reported that the meatpacking companies of Montreal, for whom the kosher trade was a not insignificant part of their business, had an interest in the results of this 24 25 26 27

Canadian Jewish Chronicle, June 2, 1933. ‘Idisher Journal (Toronto), January 30, 1934. On issues of kashrut before American courts in this era, see Bernard J. Meislin, Jewish Law in American Tribunals (Hoboken, NJ: KTAV Publishing House, 1976), 175–188. KA, September 27, 1934. KA, September 30, 1934.

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dispute and favored the slaughterers over the VH.28 During the hearing, a KA reporter heard one of the lawyers comment facetiously that this dispute should be brought before the League of Nations for resolution.29 Entering the year 1935, it was clear that tensions between the VH and the AS had not been resolved by the Brenner trial. For Laxer and others, it seemed clear that the only way to deal with the VH was in further court cases in which they could assert their independence from the VR.30 At the same time, the Depression was taking its financial toll. In December, 1934, the annual meeting of the VH reported expenses of $83,741.72 and income of $73,737.99.31 There was, in other words, a significant deficit of some $10,000 that needed to be dealt with. This resulted in pressure to reduce expenditures. There were two possible areas of reduction, each with its own pitfalls. One was to cut salaries and risk the renewed wrath of the shohtim. The other, no less risky for the VH, was to cut the financial subsidies it had been paying to several Montreal Jewish educational and cultural institutions. But how could these already penniless institutions, some of whose teachers had not been paid in months, absorb a further cut in their meager income?32 Thus the first issue at play in the VH at the beginning of 1935 was financial in nature. To help meet these challenges, on January 22, the VH presented its financial state to the rabbis, and proposed a 15–20% reduction in salaries.33 The fallout was not long in coming. On February 19, the KA reported that the AS, under the leadership of the ever militant Rabbi Getsel Laxer, had broken its contract with the VH.34 For its part, the VR tried to arrange a compromise in an attempt to attempt to placate the AS, while still keeping faith with the schools, which, under this compromise, would continue to get at least $5,000–10,000 annually.35 But once the issue of pay cuts for the rabbis of the VR was broached, the situation deteri28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

KA, October 9, 1934. KA, September 28, 1934. KA, April 12, 1935. KA, December 10, 1934. The VH annual meeting reported that over $15,000 had been allocated to four schools and the Jewish People’s Library. KA, December 10, 1934. KA, March 13, 1935. KA, February 19, 1935. KA, February 24, 1935.

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orated rapidly. On February 25, the KA reported that the VH, in order to continue giving financial support to the schools, would have to reduce the salaries of the supervising rabbis, which ranged from $25.00 to $65.00 weekly, by 15–20%. For the rabbis, once confronted with this new and disturbing reality, enough was enough. The KA reported that in response to the proposal to cut their wages, the majority of the rabbinical members of the VR staged a walkout and joined the AS in its strike against the VH. The VH, for its part, claimed that the kosher slaughtering it supervised was ongoing with wellknown and qualified slaughterers and the supervision of rabbis Moshe Yomtov Wachtfogel and Yitzhak Shternberg.36 This meant that only one of the eight rabbinical members of the VR, Rabbi Wachtfogel, was still on the job. The seven others walked out, including the VR’s chair and vice chair, rabbis Cohen and Rosenberg. Other rabbis participating in the walkout were Aaron Zalmanovitz, Abraham Samuel Dubitsky, Joshua Ha-Levi Herschorn, Yosef David Berger, and Nathan Nata Aframovitz. These rabbis continued to regard themselves as constituting the VR and in this guise published a statement in the KA that in VH slaughterhouses where five shohtim were normally stationed, there were now only three, and that the possibility for non-kosher meat to be marked as kosher was very likely under these conditions.37 The KA, as in the past, firmly sided with the VH in its struggle against dissidents, and its editor, Israel Rabinovitch, stated on February 26 in his front page column: The VH is, after all, the elected Kehilla corporation of Montreal Jewry. Any attempt to attack it, from whatever side, attacks the will of the majority.38

The Montreal rabbinical strike had thus begun. The English-language CJChr, which often commented on Jewish labor issues, used standard labor terms to describe this incident, and spoke of the rabbis as having “downed their tools.”39 The VH charged the rabbis with having walked out for no reason and with no warning.40 Other charges were hurled back and forth. The KA reported on 36 37 38 39 40

KA, February 25, 1935. KA, February 27, 1935. KA, February 26, 1935. CJChr, March 1, 1935. KA, March 3, 1935.

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March 4 that Rabbi Cohen had, in a meeting of leaders of congregations, stated that the rabbis had walked out because the VH was concerned only with issues of kosher meat and not other communal questions. Not so, retorted the VH, on the contrary, the VH had for years wanted the rabbis to fulfill functions other than kashrut, including visiting hospitals and schools, but that it was the rabbis who had balked at such extra work.41 Moreover, the VH charged, the rabbis had walked out because the VH continued to support the schools at the expense of their salaries.42 In his response, published in the KA on March 6, Rabbi Cohen quoted the “gentile Shakespeare” (der ‘orel shekspir) and asserted that “the devil can quote scripture.”43 He pleaded for a nonpartisan committee to hear the rabbis’ complaints.44 The very next day, Rabinovitch in his daily KA column replied to Rabbi Cohen, asking openly and pointedly who was at fault in this situation of kashrut. This position was repeated in the next day’s CJChr.45 On March 11, the dispute ratcheted up a notch. The VH placed an advertisement in the KA, claiming to employ eleven shohtim and ten mashgichim (supervisors), and to be supervising sixty-seven butcher shops. More significantly, the advertisement claimed that rabbis Wachtfogel and Shternberg constituted the legitimate VR.46 For their part, the dissident rabbis formed an organization called the Va’ad ha-Kashrut (hereafter—VK) to oppose the VH. At a meeting held in the Chevra Kadisha synagogue, the rabbis promised $10,000 yearly from the VK to support the Talmud Torah. It is noteworthy that the dissident rabbis, organized as the VK, had positioned themselves as a specifically Orthodox body, as opposed to the VH, which was inclusive of elements in the Jewish community that were not strictly Orthodox. It is at this point that one of the major fault lines in the rabbinical walkout became publicly visible. In its inception, the VH had been purposefully constituted so as to be inclusive of elements of the “radical” Jewish community and to undertake to support financially not merely the 41 42 43 44 45 46

KA, on March 15, 1935, quoted Rabbi Herschorn who stated, in response to a request that the rabbis visit hospitals, that this was for priests who were there to “kidnap souls.” KA, March 4, 1935. William Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice, Act 1, scene 3. KA, March 6, 1935. KA, March 7, 1935; CJChr, March 8, 1935. KA, March 11, 1935.

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religiously-oriented education of the Talmud Torah, but also the “radical” (i.e. “secular”) educational institutions of the Jewish People’s School and the Peretz School. The fact that Rabbi Cohen offered the VK’s financial support only to the Talmud Torah indicates that he wished to have no part in this inclusive coalition. He further charged that “radical” elements had gained control of the VH, and that the opponents of the rabbis and their VK came from people who possessed neither tefillin nor separate meat and dairy utensils at home.47 This meant, of course, that Rabbi Cohen and his striking colleagues probably saw in this crisis an opportunity to recreate the VH in the image of a strictly Orthodox institution and to put an end to communal subsidies of non-Orthodox Jewish schooling. As Israel Rabinovitch commented, this strike had now taken on the aspect of a “holy war.” As far as he was concerned the key issue was money, though the rabbis wished people to believe that there were other issues.48 A handbill, dated April 6, 1935,49 gives the rabbis’ side of the affair. It is entitled “Why Change the Va’ad ha-’Ir?” (Farvos darf men tshengen dem Va’ad ha-’Ir?). It accused the VH of misallocation of funds: The VH supports “radical” educational institutions that teach Jewish children to become “complete nonbelievers” [apikorsim]; and it further pays $25.00 weekly to a man unacceptable to the religious community, who was characterized as a “black sinner” [shvartsen ba’al avera].

In general, the handbill portrayed the rabbis’ battle against the VH as a fight for Torah and Judaism and against antireligious radicals. Furthermore, the rabbis reiterated their charges that the VH now had inadequate supervision over kosher meat. The VH, it was charged, stations three shohtim where the rabbis say there is a need for five. There is, furthermore, no rabbinical supervision of VH butcher shops which thus operate in a state of anarchy (hefker). Kashrut for the upcoming Passover season, during which the rules are more complex 47 48 49

KA, March 11, 1935. An article that appeared in the KA on March 15, 1935, refuted this charge, saying that of 55 representatives to the VH, only 9 represented the “radical” institutions. KA, March 11, 1935. April 6 is a handwritten note on the handbill, the original of which is in the possession of the author. KA of April 9, 1935 reacts to this circular.

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than in the rest of the year, is now the hands of people at the VH who are as adequate to do this job “as a Cossack knows [the intricate Aramaic liturgical hymn] akdomus.” However partisan the message of this handbill was, it was signed “The new committee for peace.” By April, in other words, while recriminations still flew back and forth between the two sides, people on all sides of this issue were looking for a way out of the mess the rabbis’ walkout had caused. The VH and its supporters could not see themselves as dispensing with the services of the most important Orthodox rabbis of the city. The rabbis, for their part, had hoped to form a VK that would become a communal institution that worked specifically for their religious interests in a way that the VH did not. However their hope was disappointed. The key to their disappointment was their failure to come up with a recognized communal leader to become the head of the VK. They had hoped to persuade Mr. A. Drazin, a vice-president of the VH, to become its president and it was reported in the KA on March 15 that he had in fact accepted this post.50 The very next day, however, the newspaper reported Drazin’s claim that he had not in fact accepted the post.51 In retrospect, it was the VK’s failure to attract viable lay leadership that ultimately doomed the rabbis’ walkout to failure. Israel Rabinovitch commented on April 21, “One day this [dispute] will be settled and we will have to look each other in the face.”52 Two days later, a meeting held at the Nusah Ari Synagogue called for a peace conference between both sides of the conflict.53 A key break in the conflict came about a month later, when rabbis Rosenberg, Aframovitz and Berger asked to return to service with the VH and were reinstated by VH. They, along with rabbis Wachtfogel and Shternberg, were accepted back into the VR. According to a KA article, these three rabbis had seen the error of their ways and had all written letters to the VH expressing their regret for their actions. Due to the extenuating circumstances, the VH had decided to take them back.54 50 51 52 53 54

KA, March 11, 1935. KA, March 15, 1935. Cf. also KA, March 17, 1935. KA, April 21, 1935. KA, April 23, 1935. KA, May 24, 1935.

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This event, which constituted a cruel blow to the hopes of the dissident rabbis, received an immediate response on the part of the remaining dissidents. A handbill was issued entitled “Appeal to All Synagogues and Orthodox Jews in Montreal.” It was signed by Rabbi Zalmanovitz the most prominent dissident then in the city (Rabbi Cohen was then in the United States) proclaiming that the founding of kehillot in cities like Winnipeg, Toronto, and Montreal had been unmitigated disasters for Orthodoxy. The VH continued to support the radical schools where the students were taught not to believe in the Torah of Moses and whose leaders had no need for either the rabbis or the Talmud Torahs.55 Rabbi Rosenberg responded on the next day on behalf of the VH that he had rejoined with a call for the remaining dissident rabbis to come back as well. Resignedly he stated that from this sort of communal division, no one profited except Satan, whose purpose it is to increase senseless hatred in Israel.56 Thus through the summer of 1935, the newly reconstituted VR functioned with five members: Rabbis Rosenberg, Wachtfogel, Aframovitz, Berger, and Shternberg.57 Remaining for the moment outside the new consensus were Rabbis Cohen, Zalmanovitz, Dubitsky and Herschorn. This continuing division within the Montreal Orthodox rabbinate is symbolized by the fact that, when Rabbi Abraham Isaac ha-Kohen Kook, Ashkenazic chief rabbi of British mandated Palestine died in early September, an official Montreal eulogy was delivered by rabbis Berger and Afromovitz of the VH.58 A few days later, however, the leading holdout rabbi, Hirsch Cohen, had returned to Montreal after what the KA described as “a lengthy vacation” and visited the offices of the KA.59 Cohen immediately began asserting his presence in the city and, on September 23, the KA reported that he and Rabbi Zalmanovitz had publicly eulogized Rabbi Kook a second time.60 The division between the VR and the holdout dissident rabbis was still apparent in early October, when a KA report presented Rabbi Wachtfogel as spokesman for 55 56 57 58 59 60

Handbill dated Iyar 5695/May 25, 1935 in possession of the author. KA, May 26, 1935. These five rabbis signed a pronouncement of the Montreal Rabbinical Court. KA, July 3, 1935. KA, September 9, 1935. KA, September 13, 1935. KA, September 23, 1935.

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the VR.61 However on October 17, when the VR appealed for funds for the Isaac Elchanan Yeshiva in New York, Rabbi Hirsch Cohen was once again listed as chair of the VR, taking his former place.62 By the annual meeting of the VH in December of that year, things had returned to at least a semblance of “normal” and it was reported that the VH once again was in control of “96%” of the kosher slaughter in Montreal.63 So did the “Strike in Heaven” result in anything meaningful? The answer to this question is neither an unequivocal yes nor no. On the one hand, the rabbinic personalities and the financial situation that brought about the crisis of February to October 1935 remained almost exactly the same. On the other hand, the crisis did bring about some important structural changes in the way the rabbis and shohtim did their business. One of these changes involved the payment of rabbis and slaughterers. The reality of the situation, which indeed satisfied no one, was that the VH income was truly insufficient to support eight rabbis and twenty-four shohtim. Rabbis’ salaries were thus cut still further so that in the VH budget presented in October, 1936,64 the salary of the chair of the VR, Rabbi Hirsch Cohen, was set at $40.00 per week, the vice-chair got $35.00 weekly, two other rabbis got $25.00 a week, and four others received $50–75 monthly. For their part, the shohtim were divided into three categories in terms of their work and remuneration: those who were able-bodied with large families, those who were able-bodied with small families or other sources of income, and older men with limited physical strength. These measures, while unpopular with the rabbis and shohtim, served to mitigate the budgetary crisis by trimming what had been an inflated payroll of rabbis and shohtim. Many of the men of the payroll had been rabbis who had emigrated to Montreal from the ruined Jewish communities of Eastern Europe after the destruction of the First World War and had been given jobs in the VH even though they were admittedly not fully able to work.65

61 62 63 64 65

KA, October 2, 1935. KA, October 17, 1935. KA, December 16, 1935. KA, October 30, 1936. KA, April 21, 1935.

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The rabbinical walkout of 1935 also clearly exposed the changing role of the Orthodox rabbinate, as well as new expectations that rabbis ought to be performing pastoral duties like other clergymen, such as visiting the sick. It further delineated the tension within the immigrant Jewish community of Montreal between Orthodox and “radical” Jews that would ultimately result in the VH becoming a decidedly Orthodox institution with hardly a memory of its initial “radical” presence.66

66

On the later history of the VH, see Steven Lapidus, “Orthodoxy in Transition: The Vaad Ha‘ir of Montreal in the Twentieth Century,” doctoral dissertation, Concordia University, 2011.

Between Militarism and Pacifism: Conscientious Objection and Draft Resistance in Israel Yulia Zemlinskaya1 Introduction The outbreak of the Second Intifada in 2000 prompted many Israelis to object to Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories by refusing their reserve call-up or by resisting the draft. They have established and were active in four social movements (Yesh Gvul, Courage to Refuse, New Profile, and Shministim), which supported conscientious objectors and draft resisters as well as argued against Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. By analyzing a total of eighty-seven in-depth interviews with members of the four movements, this study attempts to answer the following question: “What are the critical discourses voiced by Israeli conscientious objectors and draft resisters, and how can their emergence on the Israeli public sphere be explained?” The analysis of these interviews demonstrated that in their appeal to the Israeli public, members of Yesh Gvul and Courage to Refuse utilized symbolic meanings and codes derived from dominant militarist and nationalist discourses. In contrast, draft resisters, members of New Profile and Shministim, refusing to 1

Originally published in The Central European Journal of International and Security Studies (CEJISS) 2(i): 9–35. Reprinted with the permission of the Central European Journal of International and Security Studies and the author. First appeared at http://www.cejiss. org/issue-detail/between-militarism-and-pacifism-conscientious-objectionand-draft-resistance-in-Israel.

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manipulate nationalistic and militaristic codes, voice a much more radical and comprehensive critique of the state’s war making plans. Invoking feminist, anti-militarist, and pacifist ideologies, they openly challenge and criticize dominant militarist and Zionist discourses. While the majority of members of Yesh Gvul and Courage to Refuse choose selective refusal, negotiating conditions for their reserve duty, the anti-militarist, pacifist, and feminist ideological stance of members of New Profile and Shministim leads them to absolutist refusal. How can these differences in the movements’ discourses be explained? I contend that the two different critical discourses and patterns of refusal can be understood in the context of recent socio-economic, political, and cultural changes within Israeli society. In recent decades Israel has undergone a process of cultural and structural demilitarization that has resulted in a diminishment of the prestige and importance of military service in civilian life. Simultaneously, the dominant Zionist discourse, which considers Israel as a Jewish state, has been challenged by a post-Zionist critique. Post-Zionism, criticizing the discriminatory nature of the state defined in nationalistic terms, provides a vision of a more civil and liberal Israel. Both demilitarization and post-Zionist critique have particularly affected the Israeli middle and upper classes: that is, the urban, secular and mostly Ashkenazi stratum of Israeli society—the very stratum to which Israeli conscientious objectors and draft resisters belong.2 Their critical discourses, therefore, can be seen as an integral part of the socio-political and cultural changes that have emerged in Israel in the past decades. The first half of this paper begins with a brief introduction of the movements under study. It then moves to a discussion of the socio-political and cultural changes in Israeli society mentioned above. These provide a background 2

The absolute majority of the conscientious objectors and draft resisters interviewed for this study come from major cities (Tel Aviv or Jerusalem) and secular, middle class families. With regard to the refusers’ socio-demographic profile, a picture emerges that is similar to that revealed in studies by Israeli scholars on conscientious objectors to the First Lebanon War (see Sara Helman, “War and Resistance, Israeli Militarism and its Emergent Crisis,” Constellations 6, no. 3 [1999]: 391–410; Helman, “From Soldiering and Motherhood to Citizenship: A Study of Four Israeli Peace Protest Movements,” Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State and Society 6, no. 3 [2003]: 292–313), and to the First Intifada (Ruth Linn, “Resistance and Motivation—Moral, Political or Personal? Israeli Soldiers as Selective Conscientious Objectors during the Intifada,” Social Behavior and Personality 23, no. 1 [1995]: 35–44; Linn, Conscience at War—The Israeli Soldier as a Moral Critic [Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996]).

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for understanding the movements’ discourses, presented in the second half of the paper.

The Movements Yesh Gvul was founded during the First Lebanon War (1982–1985). It became the first social movement in Israel that supported soldiers and officers willing to refuse combat. With the onset of the First Intifada (1987–1991), the movement resumed its activities and began to counsel soldiers and officers who refused to serve in the Occupied Territories, backing them morally and financially. It was also active during the Second Intifada, but was less visible in the Israeli public sphere, due to the appearance of new organizations that offered their support to conscientious objectors and draft resisters. The outbreak of the Second Intifada in October 2000, opened a new chapter in the history of conscientious objection in Israel, marked by the proliferation of movements supporting the refusal. Alongside Yesh Gvul, three other organizations began to advocate refusal to serve in the Occupied Territories and to support those willing to refuse their military duty: Courage to Refuse, Shministim, and New Profile. There is, however, a significant difference between these organizations, both in their socio-demographic characteristics and their ideological orientations. While Courage to Refuse, similar to Yesh Gvul, was comprised of reserve combat soldiers and officers and advocated selective refusal to serve in the Occupied Territories, Shministim and New Profile were mainly comprised of high school students (or those who just finished high school) and supported absolutist refusal. Moreover, due to the fact that combat service in Israel is the almost-exclusive preserve of male reservists, almost all members of Yesh Gvul and Courage to Refuse are male. In contrast, both Shministim and New Profile are mixed movements comprised of female and male activists. The differences between the movements are summarized in Table 1.3

From Militarism to Demilitarization In his classic article, entitled “Militarism in Israeli society,” Kimmerling argued “whether we like it or not—our society is militarist par excellence. Militarism 3

The calculations of “average age” and “birth cohorts” presented in the Table 1 are based on the interviews with the members of the movements.

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Table 1 Movement

Average Birth Age Cohort

Membership

Type of Refusal

Yesh Gvul

46

60s

male combat soldiers and officers

selective

Courage to Refuse

28.8

70s

male combat soldiers and officers

selective

New Profile

21

80s

majority are female activists

any type of refusal

Shministim

19.4

80s

female and male highschool students

any type of refusal

is a central organizational principle around which Israeli society revolves, works, determines its boundaries, its identity, and the accepted rules of the game.”4 This militarization is expressed in the profound influence of military matters on the political, economic, judicial, and educational spheres of Israeli society. In the political sphere, militarization is evident from the centrality of security matters in decision-making processes and the importance of military experience for political careers.5 Furthermore, the Israeli political map is structured according to political actors’ solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: left-leaning parties traditionally support a two-state solution to the conflict and withdrawal from the Occupied Territories, while right-wing parties advocate the idea of Greater Israel, which implies continuation of the Occupation and of the settlement enterprise. In the economic sphere, militarization is expressed in the allocation of a large proportion of the budget to military needs. Israeli education, particularly schooling, is oriented toward the perpetuation of the military ethos through memorial ceremonies and preparation of the youth for the military service that is part of their curriculum.6 Another indicator of the militarization of the society is the ready conversion 4

5 6

Baruch Kimmerling, “Militarism in Israeli Society,” Theory and Criticism 4 (1993): 124 (Hebrew). The article was originally published in Hebrew; my translation was informed by the translation of the same quotation found in Michael Feige, “Peace Now and the Legitimation Crisis of ‘Civil Militarism,’” Israel Studies 3, no. 1 (1998): 87. Uri Ben-Eliezer, “Rethinking the Civil-Military Relations Paradigm: The Inverse Relation between Militarism and Praetorianism through the Example of Israel,” Comparative Political Studies 30, no. 3 (1997): 356–375. Y. Levy, Edna Lomsky-Feder, and N. Harel, “From ‘Obligatory Militarism’ to ‘Contractual Militarism’—Competing Models of Citizenship,” Israel Studies 12, no. 1 (2007): 127–148.

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of advancement in the military into advantages in civilian life.7 In Israel, exofficers with prominent military careers are “parachuted” not only into positions of power in the political sphere, but into all other spheres. Retired high-ranking officers, argues Kalev, “become directors of banks and high-tech firms, senior-level managers of business and industrial projects, principals of schools and the heads of educational institutions.”8 Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the militarization of Israeli society is its cultural expression. Having analyzed the cultural and cognitive dimensions of the militarization of Israeli society, Kimmerling conceptualizes the Israeli order as “civil militarism.”9 The difference between civil militarism and other forms of militarism is that the former implies internalization of conflict and war preparation by “most statesmen, politicians and the general public as a self-evident reality whose imperatives transcend partisan or social allegiances.”10 The social significance attributed to military service, the prioritization of security matters over any other political or economic considerations, and the cognitive orientation toward constant war preparation is what Kimmerling terms “militarism of the mind.”11 Military service, which delineates the boundaries of the political community, is identified “as the ultimate token of political obligation as well as the highest contribution to the achievement of collective goals.”12 It is perceived as an expression of loyalty to the state and as such it defines the hierarchy of belonging to the state, determining “who is a ‘patriot’ and to what extent.”13 Exploring cultural dimensions of militarization, several phenomenological studies have investigated how war and military service construct the life-world of Israelis. Helman’s study, based on interviews with conscientious objectors to the First Lebanon War, shows that military service is identified   7 T. Levy, The Other Army of Israel: Materialist Militarism in Israel (Tel-Aviv, Israel: Yediot Aharonot Press, 2004) (Hebrew).   8 Henriette Dahan Kalev, “Officers as Educators: The Ex-Military in the Israeli School System,” Israel Affairs 12, no. 2 (2006): 268.  9 Kimmerling, “Militarism”; Kimmerling, The Invention and Decline of Israeliness: State, Society and the Military (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001). 10 Kimmerling, The Invention and Decline, 215. 11 Ibid. 12 Helman, “War and Resistance,” 393. 13 Orna Sasson-Levy, “Constructing Identities at the Margins: Masculinities and Citizenship in the Israeli Army,” The Sociological Quarterly 43, no. 3 (2002): 360.

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by her interviewees with Israelis.14 They overwhelmingly state that “Israelis are only those that went through the army.”15 Military service is perceived as an entry ticket to the public sphere: it grants the right to equal participation and legitimizes critical opinions of state policies. Another study, based on interviews conducted with Israeli men who took part in the Yom Kippur War, demonstrates a pattern of normalization and integration of the war into the personal biographies of its veterans.16 In their narratives, war appears as an inevitable and natural part of the life of Israeli society.

Crisis of Civil Militarism Despite this high level of militarization, compared to other democratic countries, in the past two decades Israel has experienced a shift in military-society relations, expressed in the diminishing influence of the army. The institutional and cultural changes that Israel has undergone in recent decades translated into a legitimation crisis experienced by the Israeli army, as well as a motivation crisis among conscripts and reservists. In other words, the Israeli army seems to be gradually losing its legitimacy and prestige among Israelis. As a consequence, the motivation of conscripts, in particular of those belonging to the traditional elites of Israeli society, to complete their military service is falling. This gradual demilitarization is an outcome of several interrelated processes. Firstly, the hegemonic status of the security ethos has diminished. The old collectivistic ethos of heroism and self-sacrifice for the common good has been replaced by more individualistic, democratic, and civil values.17 These latter have led to the re-conceptualization of the social role model: the role model of contemporary Israeli youth is not a combat officer from an elite military unit, but rather a “high tech entrepreneur, lawyer or media celebrity.”18 14 Sara Helman, “Militarism and the Construction of the Life-World of Israeli Males: The Case of the Reserve System,” in The Military and Militarism Israeli Society, eds. Edna Lomsky-Feder and Eyal Ben-Ari (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1999), 191–225. 15 Ibid., 201. 16 Edna Lomsky-Feder, “The Meaning of War through Veteran’s Eyes: A Phenomenological Analysis of Life Stories,” International Sociology 10, no. 4 (1995): 463–482. 17 Yoram Peri, “Civil Military Relations in Israel in Crisis,” in Military, State and Society in Israel, eds. Daniel Maman, Eyal Ben-Ari, and Zeev Rosenhek (London, UK: Transaction, 2001), 107–137. 18 Ibid., 109.

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Secondly, in the past two decades the IDF has been losing its social prestige due to perceived failure to “deliver the goods.”19 Since the First Lebanon War, during the First Intifada, and in the mid-nineties during the occupation of Lebanese territory, the army was repeatedly criticized for the way it handled these campaigns. Even their very legitimacy was challenged by peace movements and conscientious objectors. Thirdly, in recent years the influence of the military on civilian institutions diminished while civilian control over the military increased. This process is expressed in the greater intervention of both judicial system and social organizations into the military affairs.20 In addition, the IDF itself, as a result of a surplus of manpower over the past two decades, has undergone structural changes.21 A sharp increase in the number of potential conscripts led the IDF to reconsider its recruitment policy and the length of service. The recruitment policy became more flexible, allowing a larger proportion of conscripts to be exempt from service; the length of combat reserve service was also shortened.22 The sharp rise in exemptions given on the basis of psychological unsuitability during service—from 19 Ibid. 20 Uri Ben-Eliezer, “Rethinking the Civil-Military Relations Paradigm”; Levy, The Other Army of Israel; Levy et al., “From ‘Obligatory Militarism’”; Peri, “Civil Military Relations”; R. Shtern, “Revolution in Motivation to Serve in IDF,” Maarahot 360 (1998): 28–35 (Hebrew). The greater control of the civilian sphere over the military is expressed in greater involvement of the parents of conscripts in the conditions of their service, as well as greater accountability of the military to parents’ lobby groups (Levy et al., “From ‘Obligatory Militarism’”; Levy, The Other Army of Israel; Peri, “Civil Military Relations”). During the 1990s there was also an increase in criticism of the military in the Israeli media (Peri, “Civil Military Relations”; Peri, “Change in the Security Discourse in the Media and Changes in Perception of Citizenship in Israel,” Culture and Democracy 5, no. 4 [2001]: 233–265, [Hebrew]). 21 Between the mid-eighties and the mid-nineties there was a rise of more than 25% in the population of individuals between the age of eighteen and twenty-one, and an almost 59% rise in the number of potential reservists due to the large emigration wave from the former Soviet Union. Peri, “Civil Military Relations,” 122. 22 The IDF expressed greater flexibility in exempting conscripts with a low physiological profile (“Profile 21”), and in discharging soldiers who were categorized as unsuitable for military service. As a result approximately 25% of men eligible for service are not conscripted and approximately 20% are discharged before completion of service due to “unsuitability” (Peri, “Civil Military Relations,” 125). Baruch Nevo and Yael Shor (The Contract between the IDF and Israeli Society [ Jerusalem, Israel: YIr Ha’atika Press, 2002], 14–15 [Hebrew]) estimate that in 2010 only 50% of all those eligible for service will complete the full term of duty.

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3% in 1992 to 10.1% in 2004—is just one of the indications of the changing approach of the army.23 One of the high-ranking officers from the IDF human resources unit, commenting on the trend, argued that “it is highly unlikely that one in ten Israelis suffers from such a serious psychological problem that she has to be exempt from the army on this basis. The psychological health of Israeli youth could not have deteriorated to such an extent.”24 This trend, however, is not only an outcome of the army’s flexibility toward unwilling conscripts, but is also a reflection of underlying cultural change. Although the army’s human resources department called the change a “loss of values in Israeli society,” arguing that “what once was seen as a shame, now became a norm,”25 the trend seems to be rather an indication of the diminishing importance of military service for civilian life in contemporary Israel. The “erosion of the hegemonic military ethos” is discussed in the Israeli press and among Israeli scholars as a “motivation crisis” among potential conscripts and reservists.26 While in a comparative perspective the motivation of Israeli youth to serve in the military seems to be quite high,27 in the past two decades 23 Y. Yushua, “Running to Psychiatric Officer,” Yediot Aharonot, 30 August 2005, 4–5 (Hebrew). 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid. 26 Levy et al., “From ‘Obligatory Militarism,’” 128. See also Stuart Cohen, The Scroll or the Sword? Dilemmas of Religion and Military Service in Israel (London, UK: Hardwood Academic Press, 1997); Stuart Cohen and Or-Israel Bagno, “The Social Significance of Military Service in Israel: A New Perspective,” in Democratic Culture—Military and Society in Israel, eds. A Sagi and Y. Stern (Ramat Gan, Israel: Bar-Ilan University and the Israel Democracy Institute, 2001), 4-5: 138–142; Levy, The Other Army of Israel; Nevo and Shore, The Contract, 14–15; Nevo and Shor, The People’s Army? The Reserves in Israel ( Jerusalem, Israel: YIr Ha’atika Press, 2002) (Hebrew); Peri, “Change in the Security Discourse”; Peri, “Civil Military Relations”; Shtern, “Revolution in Motivation.” 27 In 1994, a survey conducted by the IDF showed that 50% of respondents replied that they would volunteer for a full three years of service even if it would be voluntary, and 44% said that they would volunteer for a shorter period (Peri, “Civil Military Relations,” 126). The data published by the Israel Democracy Institute shows that 84% of the respondents said that they “desire/strongly desire” to enlist in military service (Nevo and Shor, The Contract, 15). This data, however, should not be taken at face value, since the same authors contend that only 55–60% of all eligible to serve in the military finish their full three years of service (Nevo and Shor, The Contract, 14; Peri, “Civil Military Relations,” 126). The discrepancy in the data, between high levels of motivation among Israeli youth to serve in the army and the low actual number of individuals completing their compulsory military service can be explained by two factors. Firstly, the sample of the survey exploring motivation to serve may be non-representative of the entire population of individuals eligible for service.

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there has been a gradual decrease in motivation to serve in combat units, to volunteer for command courses, and to continue military service after completion of compulsory duty.28 Simultaneously, there has been an increase in the number of conscripts asking to be placed in rear roles and applying for exemptions for mental health reasons before and during military service. The rise in the evasion of reserve call-ups is just one of the symptoms of the motivation crisis. Recently, the evasion became so widespread that the whole concept of a people’s army, which implies universal conscription and an equitably distributed burden of reserve service, became irrelevant. The inequality in distribution of the burden of reserve service is evident from the following data: in 2000, only 12% of men out of all Jewish men between the ages of 21 and 25 served more than four days in reserve and only 4% served more than 26 days in a year.29 Those who regularly answer a reserve call-up (80,000 reservists) constitute just 1% of the Israeli population!30 Muslims are excluded from military service, while Orthodox Jews, religious women, married women, and mothers (or pregnant women) are given exemption; of those eligible for conscription, only 55–60% complete their compulsory term of duty.31 The motivation crisis, however, is not equally spread among the Israeli population. It is rather a motivation crisis among the secular Ashkenazi elite.32 The latter was always regarded as the social backbone of the military. Members of the kibbutzim and the urban middle class youth traditionally filled the ranks of elite units and moved up the military hierarchy to become officers. This was also a stratum of Israeli society which benefited from militaSecondly, the data about motivation to serve implies that respondents were surveyed before their conscription. It is possible that after they have been conscripted some of the respondents may have changed their opinion, and perhaps did not complete their service for various reasons. 28 Levy, The Other Army of Israel; Levy et al., “From ‘Obligatory Militarism’”; Peri, “Change in the Security Discourse”; Peri, “Civil Military Relations.” 29 Nevo and Shor, The People’s Army?, 12. 30 The data is taken from the report of Channel 2 News (Israel) shown on 20 April 2007, by reporter Nam Amit. It can be found at: http://www.keshettv.com/VideoPage.aspx? MediaID=15664 (last viewed on 28 April 2007). 31 Nevo and Shore, The Contract, 14; Peri, “Civil Military Relations,” 126. 32 Levy, The Other Army of Israel; Levy et al., “From ‘Obligatory Militarism’ to ‘Contractual Militarism’”; Peri, “Civil Military Relations.”

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rism the most. The process is rooted in the diminishing value of military virtues in the civilian sphere. The erosion of the social value of military service caused by economic, cultural, and political changes has affected the motivation of those who had previously benefited from militarism the most. Non-consensual, controversial wars damaging the army’s prestige distanced the secular Ashkenazi stratum of Israeli society from the military. Globalization and transition to a market economy led to the devaluation of military experience in the civilian job market, while liberalization in the political sphere has broken the direct link between military virtues and civil rights.33 In short, from the perspective of the elite stratum of Israeli society, investment in the accumulation of military virtues in contemporary Israel has ceased to be worthwhile. As Levy et al. put it, “the state demanded a higher payment for reduced returns.”34 The motivation crisis among the secular-educated Ashkenazi stratum of society was conceptualized by Levy et al. as “a retreat from ‘obligatory militarism,’ which sees compulsory military service as an unconditional contribution to the state, and the adoption of ‘contractual militarism,’ that is making service conditional on its meeting individual ambitions and interests.”35 The newly emerged form of militarism, according to the authors, embodies a shift in relations between secular middle class youth and the army, wherein bargaining plays a central role. Despite the remaining formal obligation, the value of military service is measured against its utility in the civil and economic spheres. Rather than being based on a collectivistic ethos, contemporary youth’s motivation to serve is increasingly dependent on the convertibility of prospective military experience into advantages in civilian life. This type of relationship between the social elite and the army indicates for the authors a transition from republican citizenship to citizenship defined in more liberal terms.36 The importance of this conceptualization of the changes in militarization patterns, presented by Levy et al., for understanding the conscientious objection movements is twofold. Firstly, it is important because conscientious objectors traditionally come from the very stratum of Israeli society that, 33 Levy, The Other Army of Israel. 34 Levy et al., “From ‘Obligatory Militarism,’” 130. 35 Ibid., 128. 36 Ibid.

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according to Levy et al., is at the core of the changes discussed above.37 Secondly, the claims of conscientious objectors have always been an amalgam of republican and liberal discourses. The puzzle of conscientious objectors in Israel lies in the fact that anti-war and anti-occupation protest (before the recent Intifada) was led by combat reserve soldiers and officers—the backbone of the Israeli military—who used military rhetoric to legitimize their anti-war claims in the public domain. The appearance of a new type of conscientious objection movement, exemplified by Shministim and New Profile, in contrast to Yesh Gvul and Courage to Refuse, is an interesting target for interpretation within the context of debates on the demilitarization of Israeli society. Members of all four movements come from a similar social background (i.e., they belong to the urban, secular, middle and upper classes). The difference between reservists and younger refusers, however, is in their relation to the army. Members of Yesh Gvul and Courage to Refuse represent a symbolic core of Israeli society—those 4–12% of all Israeli Jewish men eligible for reserve service who actually complete their reserve duty. They, therefore, can be seen as bearers of the militaristic ethos. Their discourse, as we shall see further, is derived from the Israeli militaristic culture which stresses contribution and loyalty. Their refusal is selective and conditioned upon the nature of a particular military campaign. They do not reject military service as such, but object to an unjust war. In contrast, members of Shministim and New Profile represent those 40–45% of Israelis who do not complete their compulsory military service. Socially speaking, in contrast to reservists, they represent a very widespread trend within Israeli society. Despite that, they are politically marginalized since their avoidance of military service is ideologically motivated and used as a tool in political protest. In other words, these younger refusers constitute a politically radical segment of a mainstream phenomenon. Their anti-militarist, post-nationalist and feminist discourse, marginalizing them within the Israeli political map, turns them into a political vanguard. In order to clarify this point further, in the next section I consider the recent changes in the ideological orientations and identities of Israelis.

37

Levy et al., “From ‘Obligatory Militarism.’”

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From Zionist to Post-Zionist Discourse In order to understand the movements’ discourses one has to place them within Israeli political culture. There are different ways of approaching this question. I, however, wish to focus on the role of Zionist ideology in structuring the Israeli political map. Its importance within Israeli political culture cannot be overestimated. Zionist ideology determines Israel’s national aspirations and policies. It encompasses national myths and ethos. It constitutes personal identities. Last, but not least, it defines frontiers of national consensus, thereby demarcating legitimate and illegitimate political discourses and strategies, and turning political actors into outsiders.

Zionism in Structuring Israeli Political Culture and National Identities Israeli political culture is characterized by a widespread consensus among Jewish Israeli citizens of Israel based on a set of shared beliefs. One of them is a belief in the necessity of a strong military for the survival of the state. Another is the belief in the Jewish-Zionist character of the state. Although this claim is often challenged by radical leftist groups and leftist oriented academics, it nevertheless remains the official definition of the state of Israel supported by a wide consensus of the Jewish Israeli citizens of Israel. Analyzing the historical roots in and contemporary implications of Zionist ideology for the Israeli state, Kimmerling described the Israeli social order as a Zionist hegemony. Zionist hegemony, argued Kimmerling, is “expressed in the taken for grantedness of the equivalence between Jewish religion and nation.”38 The phenomenon results from the aspirations of the Zionist movement (the generator of modern Jewish nationalism), firstly, to legitimize the idea of the establishment of the Jewish state in “The Land of Israel” (Zion), and secondly, to unite all Jews in the achievement of this goal. As there was no other viable source that could legitimize Zionist aspirations for an independent Jewish state, as well as define boundaries of the collective and consolidate a national consciousness, Judaism

38

Baruch Kimmerling, “Religion, Nationalism and Democracy in Israel,” Constellations 6, no. 3 (1999): 340.

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was reinterpreted in secular terms and has since served as a source for national self-identification. The close linkage between Zionism and military service is apparent from a close look at the Israeli political map. Any ( Jewish) political party or movement that publicly disassociates itself from the Zionist ideology or doubts the necessity of the military service automatically excludes itself from the consensus. Exclusion from the consensus results in an inability to draw wide public support. The outrage directed at any Jewish criticism of Zionism is rooted in a close association between Jewish and Zionist identity. Those who criticize, or worst of all denounce, the Zionist enterprise are perceived by the Israeli public as traitors who betray both their nation and their own Jewish identity. Criticism of Israeli politics is frequently equated with negation of one’s Jewish identity, while leftist critics of the Zionist enterprise are often called self-hating Jews.39 In the same context, anti-Zionism is often associated with anti-Semitism.40 The political strategy of Israel’s largest peace movement—Peace Now— exemplifies the power of Zionist consensus. Peace Now is regarded and conceives of itself as central to the peace movement in Israel because of its ability to mobilize the public for a political protest. The movement has always avoided being associated with non-Zionist or anti-Zionist peace movements by avoiding or carefully managing joint demonstrations with radical leftist movements. Moreover, despite criticizing both the conduct of the First Lebanon War and the Second Intifada, leaders of the movement have never publicly supported the refusal movement.41 This strategy was aimed at preserving Peace Now’s public image as a consensus, mainstream leftist movement in order to retain its broad public support. However, despite wide consensus regarding the Jewish-Zionist character of the state and core values associated with Jewish Israeli identity, Israeli public opinion and identities are far from being monolithic. It is argued that from the beginning of the 1980s, Israel underwent socio-political, economic,

39 W. M. L. Finlay, “Pathologizing Dissent: Identity Politics, Zionism and the ‘Self-Hating Jew,’” British Journal of Social Psychology 44 (2005): 201–222. 40 Anita Shapira, “Israeli Perceptions of Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism,” Journal of Israeli History 25, no. 1 (2006): 245–266. 41 From the interview with the leadership of Courage to Refuse, which sought support and alliance with Peace Now, but have never publicly been backed by the movement.

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and cultural changes that led to an emergence of an alternative post-Zionist discourse and identities.42

Post-Zionist Alternative In recent decades, so-called Zionist hegemony, usually understood as a national ideology based on viewing Israel as a Jewish state, has been challenged by postZionist discourse.43 Post-Zionist discourse, stressing the discriminatory nature of the state defined in nationalist terms, proposes a liberal, post-nationalist approach to citizenship that would include all citizens of Israel on equal terms. It also challenges the ultimate right of the Jewish people to the land of Israel, thereby affirming the national aspirations of Palestinians and their respective right to self-determination in Palestine. The appearance of this new ideological orientation on the Israeli political map happened simultaneously with the process of demilitarization. Both processes were rooted in the liberalization 42

43

Guy Ben-Porat, “Dollar Diplomacy: Globalization, Identity Change and Peace in Israel,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 12, no. 3 (2006): 455–479; Eliezer Don-Yehiya, “Zionism in Retrospective,” Modern Judaism 18, no. 3 (1998): 267–276; Arnold M. Eisen, “Reflections on the State of Zionist Thought,” Modern Judaism 18, no. 3 (1998): 253–266; Herbert C. Kelman, “Israel in Transition from Zionism to Post-Zionism,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 555 (1998): 46–61; Nicole M. Harris, “Framing the Zionist Movement: The Effects of Zionist Discourse on the Arab-Israeli Peace Process,” Strategic Insights 4, no. 5 (2005): the electronic version is available at: http://www.ccc.nps. navy.mil/si/2005/ May/harrisMay05.asp; Uri Ram, “The State of the Nation: Contemporary Challenges to Zionism in Israel,” Constellations 6, no. 3 (1999): 325–338; Ofira Seliktar, “‘Tenured Radicals’ in Israel: From New Zionism to Political Activism,” Israel Affairs 11, no. 4 (2005): 717–736; Sami Smooha, “Ethnic Democracy: Israel as an Archetype,” Israel Studies 2, no. 2 (1997): 198–241. Simultaneously with the appearance of the post-Zionist discourse, the ethno-nationalistic version of traditional Zionism emerged on the Israeli political sphere. New Zionism, mostly adopted by religious Zionists ( Jewish settlers), reasserts the traditional Zionist vision of Israel as a Jewish state. Religious Zionists utilize this discourse as an ideological foundation for the expansion of the Jewish settlements in the Occupied Territories (Ram, “The State of the Nation”; Ram, “National, Ethnic or Civic? Contesting Paradigms of Memory, Identity and Culture in Israel,” Studies in Philosophy and Education 19, nos. 5–6 [2000]: 405–422); Seliktar, “‘Tenured Radicals’”; Smooha, “Ethnic Democracy”; Gershon Shafir and Yoav Peled, “Citizenship and Stratification in an Ethnic Democracy,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 21, no. 3 [1998]: 408–427). Ben-Porat, “Dollar Diplomacy”; Don-Yehiya, “Zionism in Retrospective”; Eisen, “Reflections”; Harris, “Framing the Zionist Movement”; Uri Ram, “Postnationalist Pasts: The Case of Israel,” Social Science History 22, no. 4 (1998): 513–545; Ram, “National, Ethnic or Civic?”; Seliktar, “Tenured Radicals”; Shafir and Peled, “Citizenship and Stratification”; Smooha, “Ethnic Democracy.”

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and democratization of Israeli society in the past two decades. They have both affected the same stratum of the Israeli society—middle class, secular, Ashkenazi origin Israelis who are generally characterized by a leftist orientation and who overwhelmingly fill the ranks of peace movements. They are, as a consequence, the most likely articulators of the post-Zionist critique. Post-Zionism, as a critical discourse, was initially articulated by academics, particularly by historians and sociologists.44 Scholars belonging to the postZionist camp have challenged the dominant view of the past Israeli state, dispelling historical myths and deconstructing collective memories. The group of academics that for the first time challenged the hegemonic Zionist narrative of the foundation of Israel became known as “new historians.” New historians, among them Benny Morris and Ilan Pappe, famously subverted the official version of events that led to the establishment of Israel and the Palestinian refugee problem. Exposing previously unknown facts about Israeli military power during the Israeli-Arab wars, they have challenged the David and Goliath ethos. They have also undermined Israel’s self-portrayal as a peace pursuing state, showing its uncompromising position during peace talks. Critical sociologists, for their part, have problematized the definition of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, demonstrating in their works how the state systematically discriminates against its non-Jewish citizens. Demystifying Israel’s self-portrayal as a melting pot, they have also shown how a hegemonic Zionist narrative imposed by Ashkenazi elites stratified Israeli citizenship, disadvantaging Sephardic Jews and women in various spheres of social life. Their answer to the inequality and discrimination present in the Jewish state was its “civilization” and transformation into a multicultural state shared by all its citizens. Overall, post-Zionist academic discourse not only exposed unknown facts and criticized the Zionist enterprise, showing its effects on Israeli and Palestinian society, but more importantly has re-conceptualized Israel’s past and present. The post-colonial theories applied to the Zionist movement have challenged the very core of Zionist ideology, which 44 For the full review of the arguments of new historians and critical sociologists, see Ilan Pappe, “Post-Zionist Critique of Israel and Palestinians,” Journal of Palestinian Studies 26, no. 2 (1997): 29–41; C. I. Waxman, “Critical Sociology and the End of Ideology of Israel,” Israel Studies 2, no. 1 (1997): 194–210; Gershon Shafir, “Israeli Decolonization and Critical Sociology,” Journal of Palestine Studies 25, no. 3 (1996): 23–35.

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considered Palestine as a Jewish homeland, thereby re-conceptualizing the relationship between newcomers and the local population.45 Alongside the academic post-Zionist critique, a less academic version of the discourse has been adopted by progressive sectors of Israeli society. The emergence of post-Zionist discourse and identities among the Israeli middle and upper classes was an outcome of several processes that Israeli society has undergone since the 1980s. Economic liberalization, coupled with the effects of globalization, made conflict settlement a priority for the business elite. Apart from the increasing economic prosperity of the Israelis, these processes have led to cultural change, expressed in the rise of a consumption culture. Shafir and Peled termed these changes a “bourgeois revolution” arguing that they led to the emergence of a business community alongside a pleiad of politicians, journalists, and academics interested in a more liberal and civic Israel.46 The First Intifada, which followed these transformations, has once again demonstrated the high economic and moral cost of the unresolved conflict with the Palestinians. The beginning of the Oslo peace process (1993–2000), prompted by the Intifada, promised a settlement of the conflict that would in its turn bring normalization of Israeli-Arab relations and wider acceptance of Israel in the region. The Oslo Accords not only increased international investment in the Israeli economy, resulting in an economic boom, but more importantly produced a vision of Israeli society as a society freed from conflict and war. A viable solution to the intractable conflict created conditions for a shift from collectivistic orientations idealizing unity, contribution, and loyalty to a more individualistic societal orientation stressing individual rights. More importantly, liberalization, globalization, and peace processes undermined nationalistic and territorialized aspects of Israeli identity. Ethnic nationalism that linked Israeli identity to a particular territory was challenged by newly emerged post-national, de-territorialized identities.47 Another way of character45 Ilan Pappe, “Post-Zionist Critique”; Shafir, “Israeli Decolonization”; Waxman, “Critical Sociology.” 46 Shafir and Peled, “Citizenship and Stratification.” 47 Ben-Porat, “Dollar Diplomacy”; David Newman, “Citizenship, Identity and Location: The Changing Discourse of Israeli Geopolitics,” in Geopolitical Traditions? Critical Histories of Geopolitical Thought, eds. Klaus Dodds and David Atkinson (London, UK: Routledge, 2000), 302–331; Ram, “The State of the Nation.”

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izing post-Zionist discourse is by comparing post-Zionist conceptions of citizenship with a traditional Zionist version. Whereas, within the Zionist nation-building project, citizenship was interpreted within ethno-nationalist and republican discourses, post-Zionism reinterprets citizenship in more civic and universalistic terms.48 On a practical level this trend has expressed itself in the diminishing cultural importance of military service, which was previously seen as the epitome of good citizenship. It is my contention that the critical discourse articulated by members of Shministim and New Profile reflects precisely this trend within Israeli society. Unlike members of Yesh Gvul and Courage to Refuse, whose discourse resonates with the consensus due to its appeal to nationalist and militarist codes, the younger refusers’ rhetoric is derived from post-Zionist discourse. Their narratives expose a liberal rather than republican or ethno-nationalist approach to citizenship. They define the duty of the citizen in civic rather than militaristic terms. As we shall see, their criticism of militaristic Israeli culture and the Jewish character of the state mirrors similar critique voiced by post-Zionist academics.

Contractual Militarism: Courage to Refuse and Yesh Gvul49 The main difference between members of Yesh Gvul and Courage to Refuse and members of New Profile and Shministim is that, while a majority of reservists viewed themselves as mainstream and wanted to appeal to the consensus, high school students rather considered themselves as radical activists. Several studies on conscientious objectors to the First Lebanon War indicate that the socio-demographic profile and rhetoric of conscientious objectors were quite similar to the consensual peace camp in general.50 Conscientious objectors, members of Yesh Gvul, belonged to the same social stratum—educated, middle class, secular Ashkenazi males—as the leadership of the largest consensual peace movement in Israel: Peace Now. Unsurprisingly, both used the 48 Shafir and Peled, “Citizenship and Stratification.” 49 The term “contractual militarism” was coined by Levy et al., “From ‘Obligatory Militarism.’” 50 Sara Helman, “Citizenship, Identity and Peace Protest in Israel,” in Military, State and Society: Theoretical Perspectives, eds. Eyal Ben-Ari, Z. Rosenhek, and Daniel Maman (London, UK: Transaction, 2001), 183–206; Helman, “From Soldiering and Motherhood.”

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“fighter” mobilization frame and security discourse to legitimize their claims on the public sphere. The only difference between the two movements was the attitude to refusal. Whereas Peace Now, having criticized the Lebanon War, avoided calling upon soldiers to refuse to fight it, Yesh Gvul openly challenged the unconditional status of military duty. As Helman put it, conscientious objectors to the Lebanon War, challenging state monopoly over security discourse, demanded “to allow each individual the leeway to decide where, when and under what circumstances he will fulfill his military duties.”51 Courage to Refuse self-reportedly has a similar socio-demographic profile of mostly Ashkenazi, middle class, educated males—and a similar ideological message. The commonality between Yesh Gvul and Courage to Refuse discourses can be clearly seen from their public letters. Both movements, in their appeal to the Israeli public, have manipulated the hegemonic codes derived from Israeli militaristic culture. Both movements have used images of the fighter and have emphasized their loyalty to the state, stressing their past war experience and willingness to take up arms in defense of the state. One may wonder why the founders of Courage to Refuse have established a separate movement rather than joining Yesh Gvul. Leaders and founders of the movement argued that at the time when they were considering refusal (at the beginning of the Second Intifada) Yesh Gvul was not in the public eye, so some of them did not know about the movement. Others argued that due to the age of Yesh Gvul members (most of whom refused during the Lebanon War and First Intifada) and their association with the radical left, Yesh Gvul can no longer appeal to the mainstream. Courage to Refuse wanted to capitalize on their members’ combat experience and the fact that they had all served in the Occupied Territories, many during the Second Intifada. This, they believed, would enable them to persuade the Israeli public of the injustices that happen in the Occupied Territories and in their righteousness in refusing to serve there. Members of Courage to Refuse (at least at the time) viewed themselves as belonging to the political mainstream; they wanted to appeal to the mainstream and sought political alliance with mainstream leftist movements and parties. This can clearly be seen from the following extract of an interview with one of the members of the movement: 51 Sara Helman, “Negotiating Obligations, Creating Right: Conscientious Objection and Redefinition of Citizenship in Israel,” Citizenship Studies 3, no. 1 (1999): 60.

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We are the IDF! We’re the children of the mainstream who are breaking their consensus. It is not out of fear, it’s not because we are spoiled, it’s because we have caused a terrible injustice to an entire people. We’re breaking the rules because we have no other choice. We have an obligation to refuse. It’s an historical role we must play.52

As the above quote demonstrates, the majority of Courage to Refuse members (at least in the beginning of their political activism) identified themselves with the IDF and emphasized their membership in the mainstream, viewing refusal as a last resort.

Loyalty to the IDF The analysis of the interviews shows that, similar to the conscientious objectors to the First Lebanon War, members of Courage to Refuse view military service as an important citizen duty. Conscientious objectors to the Lebanon War interviewed by Helman identified military service as a paramount citizen obligation that determines one’s contribution and belonging to society.53 They viewed military service as “the ultimate criterion of membership and participation in the socio-political community.”54 Similar discourses emerge from the interviews with the members of the Courage to Refuse. Yuval, a member of Courage to Refuse and an intelligence officer and political activist in various leftist organizations, explains why, after declaring his refusal, he continued serving in the reserves: Yuval T.: I have continued to serve and I still do that. Interviewer: Why? Yuval T.: I think a lot about society, to be part of the society, to be very careful . . . I do not want to exclude myself from the society. Interviewer: Do you think refusal would exclude you from the society? Yuval T.: I think refusal excludes me from the society in a certain sense. I want to influence society with my views, I do not want to be out of touch with society, I do not want to exclude myself. I want to live here. 52 Ronit Chacham, Breaking Ranks: Refusing to Serve in the West Bank and Gaza Strip (New York, NY: Other Press, 2003), 62. 53 Helman, “Negotiating Obligations.” 54 Ibid., 54.

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In Yuval’s narrative, military service is viewed as a practice that continually re-establishes his social belonging and legitimizes his critical voice. In order to be an equal member, to participate and to influence public opinion, one has to perform his military duty. The termination of this practice leads to the abolition of social contact and excludes one from society. As opposed to the younger generation of refusers, refusal by the reservists was distinctively selective: they opposed the Occupation, but not the existence of the army or conscription as such. A majority of the interviewees argued that military service is important considering the geo-political circumstances of Israel. Ori’s statement is representative of this dominant voice among refusers belonging to the older generation: I still believe that the army is important for the state and for people who live here. I think that a strong navy and air force are important because Israel is still under threat, and it needs deterrence.

Since military service is constitutive for the social identity of Israeli males,55 it was not surprising that some refusers identified themselves in terms of their military career, stating “I am a pilot,” “I am an officer,” or “I am a commander.” The trend was particularly prominent among those who were high-ranking officers. They often saw their refusal as an outcome of their identity as a military commander. These interviewees argued that the position of an officer and the values associated with it impose on them the responsibility for other people. Their public refusal therefore was seen as a means both to persuade their fellow soldiers that they do not avoid military service out of egotism and that they act out of genuine care for their comrades and the future of the army. The following quotations represent these voices among reservists: Interviewer: W hy did you sign the letter if you could just avoid service by going abroad? Yaniv I.: I think because of the fact that we were officers, we felt the responsibility. We were commanders. I think if you are the commander of twenty people it gives you a responsibility, you can’t just leave them. It’s not right. You have to do something that will show that it’s not about you doing this because you don’t want your hands to get dirty, 55

Helman, “War and Resistance.”

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but you want the whole situation to stop—that they don’t have to go either. Itai S.: Military service is very important for me. That is why I have refused . . . I have identified myself with all the values the IDF represents; even nowadays I do. Honestly! You know, it is often said that the IDF is one of the most moral armies in the world, it stresses moral values. In my opinion it is true nowadays as well. That is what you learn in the officers’ course. I believe that in its core the Israeli army is the most moral in the world. But the problem is that in the Occupied Territories it collapses, it doesn’t work. This understanding led me to refusal. I believed in these values so much, the values I have learned in the army, that I just could not see them collapsing. In the above quotation refusal is presented as an act of concern for one’s fellow soldiers and the moral character of the army, as opposed to the younger generation of refusers who view their refusal as an act of protest not only against the Occupation, but also against the militarization of society in general. Members of Yesh Gvul and Courage to Refuse confine their criticism of the Israeli army to the occupation of the Palestinian Territories. Their refusal is both selective and conditional: their willingness to serve depends on the nature of the duty they are asked to perform.

Zionism Courage to Refuse went even further then Yesh Gvul in proving its loyalty to the state. The movement constantly emphasized its adherence to Zionist values. The first line of the famous “Combatants Letter” issued by the movement states: “We, reserve combat officers and soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces, who were raised upon the principles of Zionism, sacrifice and giving to the people of Israel and to the State of Israel.” From the interviews it becomes apparent that although not all the members of the movement identified with the Zionist and militarist aspects of Courage to Refuse’s public image, its leadership did. The founders and leaders of the movement strongly felt that these cultural codes resonate with the Israeli mainstream public. In its demonstrations the movement often used the slogan “Zionism 2002 is Refusal.” The founders of the movement also felt that a Zionist identity legitimized their protest against the

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state. The following reflective account of one of the founders of the movement demonstrates this point: In January 2002, when I came to the first refusers’ meeting, it was as if I looked in the mirror and saw reflections of myself. Socially speaking we came from the same place. We were good middle class kids. Maybe I can allow myself to rebel because I take it for granted that I live comfortably. Perhaps the ability to rebel is related to one’s proximity to Zionism. Those who didn’t grow up with the assumption that their parents and grandparents were full partners in the Zionist project must find it harder to contradict the state.56

While the movement rapidly expanded during the first year of its existence, some of its new members disagreed with Zionist and militarist aspects of the Courage to Refuse image. Other members, even though they did not identify with these aspects, pragmatically agreed with the leadership that the hegemonic codes that signify the movement’s belonging to the mainstream increase its chances of influencing the Israeli public. Daniel’s narrative reflects these pragmatic voices within the movement: I’m not really a Zionist, I feel more Israeli than Zionist. Nevertheless, I have no problem demonstrating with the slogan “Zionism is Refusal.” I do not advance this standpoint, but I believe that change comes from within the consensus, when it is driven by the people from inside of the system. This is the strength of the movement.

In the above quotation, Zionism is seen as an ideology at the core of the social consensus. Whether the members of the movement identified with this ideology or not, the majority pragmatically agreed that it would increase the public appeal of the movement and thereby its chances to bring about social change.

Negotiating Conditions Despite the two-decade gap between the refusal of Yesh Gvul and that of Courage to Refuse, the members of these movements articulate a similar discourse with respect to military duty. Their willingness to serve is conditioned by the nature of the duty they are asked to perform. The case of Eli, a 56 Chacham, Breaking Ranks, 30.

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veteran member of Yesh Gvul, is particularly interesting, as it is paradigmatic for the discourse articulated by reservists. Eli was one of the signers of the first Shministim letter, published in 1978. He later joined Yesh Gvul. Having refused, he was imprisoned several times during his compulsory service and reserve service. Despite his objection to the First Lebanon War and the occupation of the Palestinian Territories, he continued to serve in the reserves. He argues that since he is not a pacifist his protest is directed at unjust wars, but not against military service as such: Eli G.: I went to most reserve duties. Interviewer: Why did you go? Eli G.: For two reasons: I am not a pacifist, I am not avoiding my duty to protect the country, I am avoiding the Occupation. So if, let’s say, I have to go to Bait-Shen to protect the border I don’t have a problem with this. I make a distinction between what is inside the Green Line and outside of it. A similar discourse of conditional military service emerges from the narratives of the members of Courage to Refuse. With the exception of several members, the majority stated that they will continue to serve in the IDF as long as their tour of duty is not in the Occupied Territories. They stressed that, due to the security threat from neighboring countries, Israel needs a strong army and therefore they see military service as an important citizen duty. Rami’s defense of his decision to continue his reserve service exemplifies this line of argument among refusers belonging to the older generation: Interviewer: So are you serving in the reserves? Rami K.: Yes. My principal position is that I am not against the IDF. I am for the IDF as long as it is defense forces. I am not prepared to be a part of the Occupation; I am not prepared to cross the Green Line or to carry out missions which serve the Occupation. Interviewer: What about serving the Occupation within the Green Line? Rami K.: There is a point in this statement, but I put my line here. There is a difference between going to the Territories yourself and preparing for the war with Syria (what I am doing now). I think, war with Syria can

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happen and not because of Israel. Israel needs defense forces for that case. I am ready to argue with the radical left about this point. As opposed to the younger generation of refusers, the majority of the members of Yesh Gvul and Courage to Refuse restrict their protest to objection to the Occupation. Their objection is expressed in refusal to serve in the Occupied Territories or to specific missions they are asked to perform. Similar to Rami, the majority of the members of Courage to Refuse, answering my question as to whether they will continue to serve in the reserves, argued that it depends on the nature and location of their service.

New Radicalism: New Profile and Shministim A refuser of the First Lebanon War, a member of Yesh Gvul, stressed the difference between his generation of refusers and younger refusers of the Second Palestinian Intifada: Eli G.: (A) new non-conformist generation in the Israeli left has emerged. The problem with my generation is that there is a very strong conformism in the society. The new generation of refusers from Shministim and New Profile is a much more non-conformist generation; it asks these questions at a much younger age. The non-conformism of the members of New Profile and Shministim is expressed in their refusal to manipulate the symbolic meanings belonging to nationalist and militarist discourses. Unlike Yesh Gvul and Courage to Refuse, signatories of the Shministim letters, which criticized the Israeli policy on the Occupied Territories, did not attempt to justify their criticism in the eyes of the mainstream by emphasizing their patriotism, loyalty, and contribution. Their criticism of the Israeli army was much more radical and uncompromising. In their letter published in August, 2001, Shministim accused Israel’s government of committing crimes, conducting racist policy, and breaching human rights: To: Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, We, the undersigned, youths who grew up and were brought up in Israel, are about to be called to serve in the IDF. We protest before you against the

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aggressive and racist policy pursued by the Israeli government and its army, and to inform you that we do not intend to take part in the execution of this policy. We strongly resist Israel’s pounding of human rights. Land expropriation, arrests, executions without a trial, house demolition, closure, torture, and the prevention of health care are only some of the crimes the state of Israel carries out, in blunt violation of international conventions it has ratified. These actions are not only illegitimate; they do not even achieve their stated goal of increasing the citizens’ personal safety. Such safety will be achieved only through a just peace agreement between the Israeli government and the Palestinian people. Therefore we will obey our conscience and refuse to take part in acts of oppression against the Palestinian people, acts that should properly be called terrorist actions. We call upon persons our age, conscripts, soldiers in the standing army, and reserve service soldiers to do the same [emphasis the author’s].

Shministim was the first generation of refusers in the history of Israel who dared to compare the actions of the Israeli government to terrorist acts. The radicalism of their critical voice does not resemble the apologetic tone of letters published by Yesh Gvul and Courage to Refuse. Moreover, the public letter published by the second group of Shministim in March, 2005, in addition to similar criticism of Israel’s policies in the Occupied Territories, had a prominent social agenda. This was another innovation in the refusers’ “repertoire of contention” that, appealing to the “security discourse,” went as far as stating that the Occupation harms the security of Israel. Shministim in their critique have linked the maintenance of the Occupation to the deterioration of the economic situation and social welfare: The Occupation has corrupted Israel, turning it into a militaristic, racist, chauvinistic and violent society. Israel is wasting its resources on the perpetuation of the occupation and repression in the territories, while hundreds of thousands of Israelis live in shameful poverty. In recent years Israeli citizens have experienced a deterioration of all public services. Education, medicine, welfare, pensions, everything to do with the well being of the citizenry has been neglected and sacrificed for the continued existence of settlements which the majority of the population wishes to be evacuated.

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We cannot stand idly facing this situation, which amounts to a “targeted liquidation” of the principle of equality. We wish to live in a society which pursues justice, upholding equal rights to every single citizen. The Occupation and repression policy is an obstacle to the realization of this vision, therefore we shall refuse to take part in it. We wish to contribute to society in an alternative way, which does not involve harming other human beings.

The depth and the radicalism of the criticism reflected in the above Shministim letter are typical of the narratives of the young draft resisters. Their narratives expose comprehensive criticism of Israel’s policies in the Occupied Territories and are often based on pacifist, anti-militarist, and feminist ideology. In the narratives of some refusers these ideologies overlap, in other cases particular ideological discourses are more dominant. In the next three sections I will present these ideological arguments in turn.

Pacifism and Anti-Militarism As opposed to reservists, most of the younger refusers are absolutist refusers.57 Absolute refusal was usually an outcome of the refusers’ pacifist and antimilitarist stance, a stance which characterizes narratives of many high school refusers. Pacifist and anti-militarist ideology provided a wider framework for critical analysis of the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian Territories. While members of Yesh Gvul and Courage to Refuse view Israel as a special case, as a country under existential threat whose security needs have to be met, but just not through the occupation of Palestinian Territories, the security discourse is visibly absent from the narratives of the draft resisters belonging to Shministim and New Profile. Their discourse is characterized by the wider contextual framework wherein Israel’s occupation is viewed as just one of the many cases of similar occupations around the world. Maayan’s criticism of Israeli militaristic culture is an example of such analysis: Maayan P.: I want to deconstruct the army tomorrow; I honestly would get rid of all the armies tomorrow, even today, why wait till tomorrow? 57 All interviewed members of Shministim and New Profile who have already refused were absolutist refusers. An absolute majority of the refusers who have not yet had a chance to refuse in practice due to their age argued that they will refuse to serve in the army altogether.

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I believe that a law that permits militarism, the law that approves and gives national value to all the violence is a law responsible for all the victims of the violence. Whether it is to develop nuclear weapons, to bomb civilian areas, to crush human rights in occupied Iraq, in occupied Afghanistan, during the Vietnam War, during the Lebanon war or in the Occupied Territories; whether these are militant rulers in Japan during the Second World War, or militias in Sudan that murder anyone and everyone. For me, the military institution does not square well with the idea of peace. Maayan’s narrative is a clear example of anti-militarist discourse. She opposes not only the occupation of the Palestinian Territories, but the existence of the military institution as such. She places the Israeli-Palestinian conflict among other similar, in her view, cases of occupation, and compares Israeli militarism to other countries ruled by military elites. A discussion of the validity of Maayan’s analysis is beyond the scope and purpose of this study. What is important to note here is that the anti-militarist critique voiced by the younger generation of refusers is an important discursive innovation in the Israeli public sphere. Although pacifist and anti-militarist voices existed from the very inception of Israel, they were marginal and invisible for the mainstream public. Anti-militarist critique is still a marginal phenomenon in Israeli society, but with the appearance of Shministim and New Profile the margins have become much wider and more visible in the public sphere.

Post-Nationalism and Anti-Zionism Neither post-nationalism nor anti-Zionism was declared as part of an official ideological position of Shministim and New Profile. However, the ideological stance of their members is evident from the curious fact that the members of these movements were refusing to take part in Courage to Refuse demonstrations. The younger refusers argued that they could not join in as they did not identify with the Israeli flag used by Courage to Refuse in all its demonstrations. While for Courage to Refuse the Israeli flag served as a means to show their membership in the mainstream of Israeli society, for the younger generation it represented the Zionist movement and the ideology that they heavily criticize and blame for the perpetuation of the occupation of Palestinian

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Territories. Omri’s narrative is a good example of how these two discourses were employed as a criticism of Jewish nationalism and Israeli occupation of the Palestinian Territories: Omri E.: My refusal goes beyond the occupation, it is just a horrible symptom; racism and militarism didn’t stop there—it is much deeper in our society. I think that a country by definition is a tool for people, it is supposed to serve the people, it cannot ask people to give their life or the life of other people for the existence of the state. The purpose of the state is to serve the people and I will not die, not for this and not for any other country because I think the existence of the people is more important than existence of the country, a Jewish country or any other. . . . I don’t believe in any kind of nationalism. Zionism specifically is a very racist and imperialist type of nationalism; it was the nationalism of people not living here but of people who lived in Europe, who had a mutual cultural background and decided to have a country in another part of the world that wasn’t Europe. It wasn’t populated by white people so it was ok to take their land; it could be Uganda or Africa, ideology didn’t matter because these were not white civilized people that land had been taken from. The very core of Zionist ideology is very racist; a superiority saying that certain people, because of their race can have a right to the land that other people cannot. It is racist, colonialist and imperialistic. The anti-Zionist, post-nationalist views reflected in Omri’s narratives to a large extent resemble post-Zionist academic discourse. Political Zionism, which led to the founding of the state and since then has served as its national ideology, is viewed by Omri as a racist and imperialist ideology. It is seen as another example of Western imperialism. In his narrative patriotism is replaced by radical humanism; the value of the nation-state is nullified by the value of human life. As opposed to members of Yesh Gvul and Courage to Refuse, who emphasized loyalty and making a contribution to the state, members of Shministim and New Profile view the state as a tool that is meant to serve its citizens. No state can demand its citizens sacrifice their life in its name.

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The existence of people, argues Omri “is more important than existence of a country.” The Jewish state is not an exception.

Feminism Although a feminist perspective can be employed to justify conscription of women, radical feminist scholars overwhelmingly oppose militarization, criticizing it for exploiting and disadvantaging women.58 Militarism (which often goes hand in hand with nationalism), argue feminists, is based on patriarchal and masculine values.59 Women are, therefore, systematically discriminated against within military institutions and harassed and disadvantaged in militarized societies. Many young draft resisters, particularly the members of New Profile (which is a feminist movement), base their ideological objection to military service on feminist ideology. For these refusers, feminist perspectives serve as an analytical framework allowing effective criticism of the military and militarization. Idan, a member of New Profile, in her criticism of the Israeli security discourse, based on her feminist stance represents this line of argument among feminist oriented refusers: Idan H.: There is a tendency to see the army as an existential necessity, something without which we can’t live, something that can’t be touched in any way or reduced. And this is because the army protects you. I think this view neglects many social and economic problems, problems of violence and harassment. There is no army that deals with these problems, and I am sure that these problems are not less important in any way. The issue of a woman being killed by her husband is not a less important issue than military issues. In my opinion, the argument that we shouldn’t touch the army as it deals with issues of life and death is hypocritical. There are many issues which we regard as less important because of our upbringing. . . . When we talk about terror as an existential threat, we don’t regard domestic violence against women as an existential threat to a particular social 58 Sasson-Levy, “Constructing Identities.” 59 Joane Nagel, “Masculinity and Nationalism: Gender and Sexuality in the Making of Nations,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 21, no. 2 (1998): 242–269.

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stratum. Why is this not a topic for discussion in the Committee for Internal Affairs? It is also an issue of life and death, but the social discourse regards it as less important. In her narrative, Idan challenges the security discourse that places issues concerning national security on top of the public agenda. Raising questions about the place of women in a militarized society, she criticizes the military consciousness of Israeli society that prioritizes issues of national importance according to their contribution to national security. In such a society, argues Idan, women’s welfare is on the bottom of the public agenda. Subverting assumed hierarchies, she frames issues of domestic violence as an issue of prime national importance. Feminist ideology, which featured in a majority of the narratives of the female interviewees, was often responsible for their absolutist refusal. The gendered structure of the army makes selective refusal irrelevant for women. An overwhelming majority of the female conscripts serve in the rear roles and are unlikely to be sent to the Occupied Territories. As a consequence, unlike male conscripts, their opposition to service in the Occupied Territories cannot be actualized in refusal to serve there. Radicalizing the means of the protest, female refusers argued that they see any role within the military as assisting to perpetuate the Occupation. Female refusers frequently employed a feminist perspective to criticize the gender division of labor within the IDF. Invoking a stereotype of a female conscript who serves coffee to a high-ranking officer, they often stated, “I don’t want to serve coffee to a commander who sends helicopters to Gaza.”

Citizen Duty in Civil Terms Israeli public discourse and education stresses the importance of loyalty and making a contribution to society, while military duty is seen as a paramount citizen obligation. Members of Yesh Gvul and Courage to Refuse consistently emphasized their military ranks and combat experience as evidence of their loyalty and contribution to the nation. As opposed to reservists, high-schoolers overwhelmingly reject viewing military service as a positive contribution to the society. They do not negotiate conditions of military service. They rebel against the military culture that views military duty as the ultimate contribution to

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society. Younger refusers define “contribution to society” in civil terms. The following quotations exemplify their approach to what is to be considered a contribution to society: Noa L.: I see the fact that young people are asked to serve their country for two years as a good thing. Only, I don’t see military service as a contribution. I don’t think that what the army does serves society; it destroys, it damages society. The fact that I didn’t want to serve in the army doesn’t mean that I do not want to contribute to the society. To the contrary, I do want to, just in a different way: for instance, through helping children from underprivileged backgrounds. That is what interests me. Ala Y.: By refusing to serve in the military I am showing to others an alternative way of contributing to the society, not through military service; not in a way which oppresses human rights, but in a way which helps people to fulfill their rights and to make the state respect human rights. Danya V.: In my opinion, civic contribution to the society, like involvement in civic associations, is much more important and significant. . . . My contribution is expressed in my involvement in the community that sees itself as a part of civil society, we care, we influence and change things. . . . The members of Shministim and New Profile, as the above quotations demonstrate, interpret civil duty and social responsibility in civic terms. Militaristic thinking characterizing society at war is visibly absent from their narratives. Moreover, military service is viewed as corrupting society’s moral image, as harming its security and economy. These draft resisters stress the importance of volunteering in civic organizations, which they see as equal or even more important contributions to society than military service. For them, their involvement in the community and civil associations demonstrates their loyalty to their country.

Conclusion This study demonstrated that Israeli refusers articulate two distinct critical discourses. Reservists, members of Yesh Gvul and Courage to Refuse

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appealing to mainstream opinion, utilize militarist and nationalist codes derived from the hegemonic discourse. The members of both movements stress their loyalty and contribution to the state. They consider their military experience, participation in Israeli wars, and military ranks as indications of their patriotism that legitimizes their critical voice. Their refusal is selective and conditional. The majority of reservists do not reject military service altogether, rather arguing that their readiness to perform military duty depends on its nature and location. In contrast, the younger generation of refusers’ criticism of the state is much more radical and comprehensive. In contrast, high-schoolers, members of New Profile and Shministim, view any military position within the army as directly or indirectly perpetuating the Occupation. Their absolutist refusal is rooted in pacifist, anti-militarist, and feminist views. Employing these ideologies to criticize Israeli militaristic culture, these young refusers define citizen duty in civic terms. The discourses articulated by Israeli refusers reflect recent socio-political and cultural changes within Israeli society. The difference in discourses uncovered in the analysis grasps the very dynamic of these changes. The grammar of these discourses, being rooted in Israeli political culture, reflects both the existence of the social consensus and the alternative discourses that challenge its historical and moral legitimacy. Militarist identities and the rhetoric of the reservists who opt for selective refusal, being rooted in Israeli militarist culture, indicate that consensual nationalistic and militarist codes are still playing a legitimizing role in the appeal to the mainstream public. The appearance of the radical anti-militarist and feminist critique, voiced by draft resisters, is a reflection of the gradual cultural change within the Israeli society. These voices are still politically marginal and perceived as such by the majority of the Israeli public. They, however, represent a larger trend within the mainstream that strives for a more civic and liberal Israel, an Israel where military duty is not the ultimate way to contribute to society, but just one of many.

Israeli and American Organizational Responses to Wife Abuse Among the Orthodox Roberta Rosenberg Farber Introduction1 In the beginning of 2007, the population of world Jewry was estimated to be 13.155 million. Of that, approximately 59.4% lived in the Diaspora and 40.6% in Israel. Of those living in the Diaspora, 46.2% lived in the Americas. Of that percentage 43.1% lived in the United States and Canada. Thus, approximately 87% of Jews currently live in two major Jewish population centers: Israel and North America. Of those living outside of Israel, 87% live in 6 of the G8 countries (countries with the leading world economies): the United States, France, Canada, the United Kingdom, the Russian Republic, and Germany.2 Demographically this means that the Jewish Diaspora is shrinking and secondly, that United States Jewry overwhelmingly constitutes its primary population.

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In this exploratory study, I examine available services for victims of abuse in the Jerusalem area of Israel, where the majority of haredi, or the ultra-Orthodox, Jewish population lives. These services are then compared with those I found in my earlier study of services for Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox American Jewish abuse victims in New York City, New York. Important cultural differences are identified in shelter policy, as well as in identification of the larger population with shelter residents. Sergio DellaPergola, “World Jewish Population,” American Jewish Yearbook 2007 (NY: American Jewish Committee, 2007), Table 1: 563.

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Both Israel and the United States are industrialized countries with a high standard of living, education, and Western democratic values. For our purposes, the primary difference between the two countries is the role of religion, it being a far more determinant variable in Israel than in the United States. The other significant political difference is that unlike the United States, Israel is surrounded by hostile neighboring countries.3 Still a third critical factor is that whereas in America Jews are a small minority, in Israel Jews are the clear majority comprising approximately 80% of the population. It is this last variable combined with the larger role of religion in the politics and administration of the state that made me wonder whether or not the Jewishness of the state of Israel impacts the delivery of services for religious victims of abuse and if so, how. With financial support from the HadassahBrandeis Institute, I undertook an exploratory study of the social services available to religiously Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox victims of spousal abuse.

Background In earlier research, I examined the process of intentional social change within traditional religious Jewish communities as expressed in the changing response to the presence of wife abuse.4 Whereas previously, religiously Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities denied that abusive behaviors exist within their communities, over the past 10 to 15 years there has been an acknowledgement of its presence. To confirm the presence of change, I identified several indicators. Firstly, the emergence of new organizations and new units within existing organizations to deal with the problem of domestic abuse clearly indicated that change had occurred. Secondly, the publication in community 3 4

See Sergio DellaPergola, “Actual, Intended, and Appropriate Family Size Among Jews in Israel,” Contemporary Jewry 29 (2009): 127–152, for this factor as a population determinant. See: Roberta Rosenberg Farber, “The Use of Social Capital Resources in the UltraOrthodox American Jewish Response to Wife Abuse,” Papers of the Fourteenth World Congress of Jewish Studies: History of the Jewish People and Contemporary Jewish Society (World Union of Jewish Studies, 2009); Roberta Rosenberg Farber, “Jewish Religious Communities and Wife Abuse,” in Jewish Studies in Violence: A Collection of Essays, eds. Roberta Rosenberg Farber and Simcha Fishbane (University Press of America, December 2007); Roberta Rosenberg Farber, “The Programmatic Response of the Ultra-Orthodox to Wife Abuse: A Study of Social Change in Traditional Communities,” Contemporary Jewry 26 (2006): 114–157.

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newspapers and magazines of articles about domestic abuse, which previously they had not published, indicated change. Thirdly, the organization of numerous conferences on this topic and the now popular relationship and parenting conferences indicate further social change. The contemporary prevalence of relationship and parenting conferences advertised in community newspapers and magazines suggests a preventative approach to abusive behaviors within families. It may also indicate a movement away from direct confrontation with the problems of domestic abuse in a community forum format. This last step would not be possible without the existence of organizations and professional staff that directly respond to victims of domestic abuse. In interviews, American professionals noted the following changes: •

•

•

•

One person who speaks before various groups on the topic of spouse abuse noted that before beginning to speak, she always asks those in the audience who know of someone who has been abused to raise their hand. When she first began speaking approximately 20 years ago, no one raised their hand. Today, nearly everyone in the audience raises their hand. Another professional noted that the women who come to her for counseling today are younger and have been married for only a short time. In the past, Jewish women tended to come for help approximately 10 years later than their American counterparts. When asked whether she thought this change indicated a declining commitment to marriage, she answered, no: it indicted a declining commitment to women suffering in marriage. In the past, daughters would be afraid to tell their parents if they were being abused. When told of abuse in a relationship, parents often advised their daughters to return to their husbands. Today, a professional who counsels abused women finds that parents are generally supportive of daughters who come to her for help. In speaking with community professionals, the fact that change had occurred was often mentioned, as however was the fact that the change is not as great as they would like it to be, indicating a need for further change, especially from the rabbinic leadership.

In part, these changes reflect the increasing openness and attention given to problems like substance, spouse, and child abuse and pedophilia within the larger American society. The shift, however, is also the result of community consciousness raising efforts of new organizations like Shalom Task Force and

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professional organizations. These efforts were supported by the expansion of professional programs in existing community organizations.5 Today, an extensive network of intersecting programs are responsive to the particular religious and cultural needs of the Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jewish populations within the New York City area and throughout the country. This development functions as both a critical indicator of change, as well as a catalyst for change. These resources have not always been available in part because America lacked the sensitivity to the religious and cultural needs of minority populations and secondly, because religiously observant Jews, like other cultural and religious minority populations, preferred to deal with social problems through their own social networks and legal organizations. Today, non-profit community organizations typically work in tandem with local government offices. The new organizations and units within existing organizations that developed in response to greater awareness and acknowledgement of abuse problems are discussed in my study “The Programmatic Response of the Ultra-Orthodox to Wife Abuse” (2006). The process of social change in Israel reflects a comparable pattern: ideological change in the larger society leads to policy shifts with respect to the response to wife abuse within Israeli society. This ideological change then filters down to religiously observant Jewish communities, and provides the background to their acknowledgement of wife abuse within their communities and the acceptance of social services. Muhlbauer notes that before ideological changes occurred in Israeli society, incidents of domestic violence were treated as a “singular tragedy.”6 Similar to change in America, multiple ideologies, typically advocated by elite groups were linked together in their condemnation of domestic abuse.7 5 Farber, “The Programmatic Response of the Ultra-Orthodox to Wife Abuse”; Chana Widawski and Shoshannah D. Frydman, “A Marriage of Jewish Family Services and the Criminal Justice System,” Journal of Jewish Communal Services 82, no. 1/2 (Winter/Spring 2007): 59–67. 6 Varda Muhlbauer, “Domestic Violence in Israel: Changing Attitudes,” The Annals of the NY Academy of Science 1087 (2006): 306. C. Wright Mills made the distinction between a personal trouble and a social problem; see C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1957). 7 For a history of American social policy against family violence, see Elizabeth Pleck, Domestic Tyranny: The Making of Social Policy Against Family Violence from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

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Muhlbauer observes, “It was the human rights movement that also helped politicize feminist visions and policies when two of the major groups joined forces in the 1974 elections. Thus the initially subversive messages delivered by small groups of women gradually succeeded in transforming public views and sentiments and taking the subject of domestic violence out of the closet.”8 This change in ideology led to a shift in public policy and the development of services for victims of domestic violence. Currently, abuse services are available for the religiously observant population in Israel and America. In both countries, the religiously observant Jewish communities constitute a minority population. This raises the question of whether or not there is a difference in the type of services provided or in the service delivery patterns. In the following I discuss the provision and delivery of services for abused religiously observant Jewish women in Israel and then compare Israeli patterns with those in America.

Methodology The two largest population centers for Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jewry are New York City and Jerusalem. In my previous study, I focused on resources in New York City. With the assistance of a grant from the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, I travelled to Israel in the summer of 2008 to explore the organizational response of Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities to domestic abuse. I focused particularly on the Jerusalem area. Using the Internet and personal contacts, I successfully identified key organizations and personnel that respond to victims of domestic abuse within the Orthodox and haredi communities. As in my New York research, I interviewed key personnel. Questions asked pertained to the initiation and implementation of services for victims of spouse abuse in the Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox or haredi communities in Israel; the role of rabbis in the development and implementation of services; and the use of services offered by these various communities. All of my initial interviews took place in the organizational offices. Follow-up discussions and questions occurred through the Internet and telephone. Two of the three organizational leaders I spoke with were modern Orthodox, one was haredi. I also interviewed a social worker, a 8

Muhlbauer, “Domestic Violence in Israel,” 308.

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psychologist, several rabbis and rebbetzins (rabbis’ wives), all of whom work in a professional capacity with the haredi population. Of these professionals, one was traditional/not-religious, another was a religious Zionist, and the others were haredi. These interviews occurred in public spaces like a coffee shop or restaurant. Because I did not interview victims of abuse or their abusers in my research in America, I received a certificate of exemption from the Yeshiva University Committee on Clinical Investigations Exempt Categories Common Rule 45 CRF 46.101(b) and Non-Human Subject Research. I maintained the same protocol for my research in Israel.

The Population In both the United States and Israel, the ultra-Orthodox consist of both Hasidic and Yeshivish groups.9 They tend to live in enclave communities, dress more modestly than the surrounding culture, reject most of modern culture, and regard their observance of religious law as more scrupulous than other Orthodox Jews. In these communities, authority derives from and is mediated through religious law and cultural tradition by scholarly rabbinic authorities whose interpretation and application of the law is often accepted without question. The ethos of these communities, combined with cultural and religious customs and ritual observance, tends to constitute a formidable 9

For a discussion on the origins of yeshivish and hasidic groups, see Allen Nadler, The Faith of the Mithnagdim: Rabbinic Responses to Hasidic Rapture (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). Heilman distinguishes the ultra-Orthodox from Orthodox Jews who “pass nearly indistinguishably among other contemporaries, preserving their religion in compartments of their lives that remain largely out of view to outsiders” (Samuel C. Heilman, Defenders of the Faith: Inside Ultra-Orthodox Jewry [New York: Schocken, 1992], 11). The ultra-Orthodox are those Orthodox Jews “who have not merged as easily into the mainstream” (ibid.). They are called “ultra-Orthodox,” assuming that they maintain stricter standards of faith and observance. He observes that the terms “Orthodox” and “ultra-Orthodox” come from a language foreign to Jewish experience. Unlike them, “‘haredi’ resonates with Jewish meaning. . . . For today’s ethnically more secure Jews, ‘Orthodox’ becomes ‘dati’ and ‘ultra-Orthodox’ becomes ‘haredi’ . . .” (Heilman, Defenders of the Faith, 12). He also notes that “while other Jews increasingly use this designation, ironically haredim generally do not use it to refer to themselves. Rather, in their vernacular Yiddish, they commonly call themselves Yidn, Jews, or more specifically erlicherYidn, virtuous Jews” (ibid.). Use of the term haredi rather than ultra-Orthodox is more prevalent in Israel.

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bulwark against social change and assimilation. Nevertheless, changes have occurred in response to encounters with modernity.10 In some cases, community structures that initially thwarted change now facilitate change.11

What is Wife Abuse? In her vignette about wife abuse, Flowers Aren’t Enough, Naomi Ackerman traces the process of self-doubt and degradation that occurs as a result of physical abuse inflicted on a wife by her husband. The name of her play refers to the syndrome whereby after abusing his wife, the husband returns with flowers and a promise never to hit her again. Her one-person play has been performed all over the world to audiences in lands with exceptionally diverse cultures. As she notes, wife abuse and the process of self-doubt proceed essentially along the same path worldwide. Wife abuse is a subset of domestic violence that occurs within a family context. It refers to spouse, child, and/or elder abuse. In the United States, See: Roberta Rosenberg Farber, “Those ‘New York Jews,’” Tradition 29, no. 3 (1995): 1–16; Roberta Rosenberg Farber and Chaim I. Waxman, “Postmodernity and the Jews: Identity, Identification, and Community,” in Jews in America: A Contemporary Reader, eds. Roberta Rosenberg Farber and Chaim I. Waxman (Hanover: Brandeis/New England University Press, 1999); Sylvia Barack Fishman, “Negotiating Egalitarianism and Judaism: American Jewish Feminisms and Their Implications for Jewish Life,” in Jews in America: A Contemporary Reader, eds. Roberta Rosenberg Farber and Chaim I. Waxman (Hanover: Brandeis/ New England University Press, 1999); Sylvia Barack Fishman, Jewish Life and American Culture (Albany: State University of New York, 2000); Samuel C. Heilman, Synagogue Life: A Study in Symbolic Interaction (Chicago: The Chicago University Press, 1973); Heilman, Defenders of the Faith; Samuel C. Heilman and Steven M. Cohen, Cosmopolitans and Parochials: Modern Orthodox Jews in America (Chicago: The Chicago University Press, 1989); Jenna Weissman Joselit, New York’s Jewish Jews: The Orthodox Community in the Interwar Years (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); George Kranzler, Hasidic Williamsburg: A Contemporary American Hasidic Community (Northvale: Jason Aronson Inc., 1995); Jerome E. Mintz, Hasidic People: A Place in the New World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992); Laurence J. Silberstein, ed., Jewish Fundamentalism in Comparative Perspective: Religion, Ideology, and the Crisis of Modernity (New York: New York University Press, 1993); Nurit Stadler, Yeshiva Fundamentalism: Piety, Gender, and Resistance in the Ultra-Orthodox World (New York: New York University Press, 2008); Haym Soloveitchik, “Rupture and Reconstruction: The Transformation of Contemporary Orthodoxy,” Tradition 28, no. 4 (1994): 64–130. 11 Farber, “The Programmatic Response of the Ultra-Orthodox to Wife Abuse”; Farber, “The Use of Social Capital Resources in the Ultra-Orthodox American Jewish Response to Wife Abuse.” 10

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domestic violence is the largest cause of injury to women ages 15–44.12 It is estimated that 31% of all female homicides are attributed to domestic violence.13 “If current abuse patterns continue, some estimate that up to 50% of all women will be victims of domestic violence at some point in their lives.”14 Because emotional, verbal, and financial abuse can and do escalate into physical abuse, these different types of abuse are often treated as a single phenomenon. Abusive behaviors include acts of physical battering and sexual force or intimidation, including slapping, shoving, pushing, kicking, raping, punching, and the use of a weapon. Abuse also involves the threat of force; verbal and psychological intimidation can immobilize a person, demean selfimage, and jeopardize emotional security. Verbal and psychologically abusive behaviors include shaming tactics that degrade a person in private or in public and in the presence of friends. Abuse can also take the form of withdrawal, neglect, and ignoring a person. These behaviors isolate women and make them feel worthless. Generally, abuse is secret. For various reasons, including the threat of further and more severe physical violence, a wife is often fearful that someone will discover her secret. This need for secrecy leads a woman to avoid or shun family members and other women, which isolates her even further. Such isolating behaviors are typically encouraged by an abusive husband. In general, a pattern of abuse within the relationship is not suspected, but if friends do suspect abuse, they will often avoid the woman as a consequence of feeling uncomfortable with the situation and not knowing what to do or say. Friends also may fear witnessing an incident or that the husband will be verbally abusive toward them. Or, because of the unpredictable behavior exhibited by abusive people, friends may fear getting involved in a situation they would not know how to handle. Thus, friends, neighbors, and other community members tend not to want to get involved and so avoid contact with the couple in question. 12 A. Novello, M. Rosenberg, L. Saltzman, and J. Shosky, “From the Surgeon General, US Public Health Service,” JAMA 267, no. 23 (1992): 3132. 13 US Department of Justice [FBI], Crime in the United States, 1991 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1992). 14 A. Corsilles, “Note: No-drop policies in the prosecution of domestic violence cases: Guarantee to action or dangerous solution?,” Fordham Law Review 63 (1994): 854 n.6.

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Often, however, this pattern of isolation does not apply to the husband, especially in traditionally structured communities that have a greater number of gender-segregated activities. Religiously observant Jewish men, for example, are required to pray three times a day, preferably with a minyan (prayer quorum of 10 men). They have relationships that develop from this daily interaction independent of relationships the husband and wife have as a couple. Thus, the husband often retains and continues to build his social status in the community even while he is an abusive husband at home. Jacobs and Dimarsky note that one of the myths that prevent effective action against wife abuse is the failure to recognize that an abuser can harbor and express contradictory behavior patterns.15 In other words, he can be both a kind and an abusive person. Abuse is fundamentally about power and control.16 Isolation is a technique used to achieve this goal. Isolation is especially effective when the husband has a good reputation in the community. This prohibits the wife from revealing that her husband is abusive since she understands that no one will believe her. Also, oftentimes her standing in the community is based on his status, in which case the woman is further hurt by the abuse her reputation suffers if she does go ahead and disparage him; everyone will assume she is the problem. As a result, the woman is condemned to endure an abusive relationship, while the man is pitied for being married to such a woman. This deception closes off traditional channels through which a wife might find solace and relief. 15 Lynn Jacobs and Sherry Berliner Dimarsky, “Jewish Domestic Abuse: Realities and Responses,” Journal of Jewish Communal Service 68, no. 2 (Winter 1991–2): 95. 16 There is general agreement that abuse is about power and control. See other sources referenced in this paper on abuse. An example of this relationship is pictorially represented in the Power and Control Wheel, which was “developed in the early 1980s in Duluth, Minnesota, when battered women in support groups and men in batters’ intervention groups were interviewed and asked to describe their experiences of abuse. The women were asked to identify the ways in which they felt they were controlled, and the men were asked to identify the tactics they used to maintain an environment of fear and control (Pence 1987: 12)” (Diane Gardsbane, Healing and Wholeness: A Resource Guide on Domestic Abuse in the Jewish Community [Washington: Jewish Women International, 2002], 12). One of the slices on the wheel is isolation, which is described as “Controlling what she does, who she sees and talks to, what she reads, where she goes—limiting her outside involvement—using jealousy to justify actions” (Gardsbane, Healing and Wholeness, 13). Use of this Wheel is widespread in programs designed to educate and act against wife abuse.

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Community Attitude: Denial The primary attitude to wife abuse recently thought to characterize strict religiously observant Jewish populations has been that of denial. Earlier, this was also the general attitude of all Jewish populations.17 In fact, Jews tended to believe that most social problems present in modern society did not afflict their communities. These attitudes have changed as a result of clear evidence to the contrary. However, because the ultra-Orthodox or haredi populations typically live apart from other Jews and are not as well integrated into the society of the country in which they live, their attitudes have been the last to change. But change has occurred. As an indicator of this change in these communities, numerous organizations and programs have developed in both America and Israel that are responsive to various social problems such as wife abuse.18 The attitude of denial, in other words, though still present has greatly lessened. Denial of abusive behaviors in traditional communities can be understood from a number of perspectives. Graetz identifies assimilatory trends and the resulting confrontation between groups as one of the sources of denial. The denial is “based on a metaphor of Jewish society in a ‘hostile world’ and assumes that the former is relatively more moral than the latter.” Thus, the source of negative or immoral behaviors that may afflict the Jewish world is the larger society in which Jews are living: “Large groups of Jews adjust to the notions and metaphors of the outside world, causing stress within Jewish society,” which, in turn, leads to a definition of traditional behavior as more moral than that of the Jewish out-group (i.e., those who are more assimilated), “which has a different perception of what constitutes normative behavior.”19 Another way the phenomenon of “denial” can be understood is not that the behavior never happened or happens, but rather that such behavior constitutes an individual aberration. Using C. Wright Mills’ distinction, wife abuse would then be regarded as an individual problem rather than a social issue.20 The definition of a situation determines the prescription for action: if it is an 17 Farber, “The Programmatic Response of the Ultra-Orthodox to Wife Abuse.” 18 Farber, “The Programmatic Response of the Ultra-Orthodox to Wife Abuse.” 19 Naomi Graetz, Silence is Deadly: Judaism Confronts Wifebeating (Northvale: Jason Aronson Inc., 1998), 152. 20 Mills, The Sociological Imagination.

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individual behavioral problem, the solution must likewise be individualistic, which is the way religious law typically adjudicates such issues. On the other hand, if wife abuse is perceived as a social problem, which would happen if it was recognized to occur more frequently, a communal response is appropriate. From a contemporary Western cultural perspective, wife abuse is an obviously destructive force that should be opposed by all community members and leaders.21 Sociologically, however, because it touches on power relationships that serve as a model for other social and institutional relationships, any change is easily perceived as threatening, particularly within a family structure that is perceived to be more patriarchal than egalitarian.

Egalitarianism and Feminism as Sources of Social Change The shift to greater egalitarianism in the American family occurred concurrently with the spread and acceptance of feminist reforms, as illustrated in the development of American family policy. Indeed, it can be argued that the primary impetus for change within Jewish religious communities was the shift in American family policy, which no longer tolerated domestic violence as a necessary, if evil, component of marriage.22 Spillover of ideas from the larger community to subcultures is almost unavoidable. Porous group boundaries of contemporary societies ensure that even if resisted, Western modern and postmodern societies, as found in America and Israel, constitute a source of new ideas and perspectives for members of traditional cultures to emulate and adopt, even if not consciously.23 According to Graetz,24 it is when large numbers 21

Traditional perspectives on the family may regard beatings as a legitimate way for the head of a family to retain discipline, a perspective that conflicts with contemporary thought. This conflict was at the center of the development of American family policy (see Pleck, Domestic Tyranny). 22 Farber, “The Programmatic Response of the Ultra-Orthodox to Wife Abuse”; Pleck, Domestic Tyranny; Muhlbauer, “Domestic Violence in Israel.” 23 See: Steven M. Cohen and Arnold M. Eisen, The Jew Within: Self, Family, and Community in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000); Farber and Waxman, “Postmodernity and the Jews”; Sylvia Barack Fishman, A Breath of Life: Feminism in the American Jewish Community (New York: The Free Press, 1993); Fishman, “Negotiating Egalitarianism and Judaism”; Fishman, Jewish Life and American Culture; Soloveitchik, “Rupture and Reconstruction.” 24 Graetz, Silence is Deadly.

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of Jews adopt the norms and mores of the larger society that the assertion of moral superiority of the traditional religious culture is needed and consequently, denial of various social problems arise.

Social Capital as Social Change Resources Traditional religious communities have large amounts of social capital resources, the Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities being no exception. In the New York City area, I found that in order to break through the tightly-woven fabric of overlapping relationships and organizations that characterized these communities so as to transform the thread of denial, an understanding of how the community’s norms and values function was required. In addition, there needed to be a respect for and acceptance of its authority structures. Denial of spouse abuse was embedded in multi-layered and overlapping relationships, but once the abundance of social capital resources present in traditional religious communities was harnessed, these multi-layered relationships were used as avenues along which to channel social change. In other words, the very same multi-layered and overlapping relationships that enable a community to retain its distinctiveness by thwarting change and acculturation can become the pathways through which change can occur. Using the shared traditions and social structure of a community to bring about change is a process I called “changing through tradition.”25

Rabbinic Attitudes In the only survey data on rabbinic attitudes and behaviors towards wife abuse, Cwik26 reports that rabbis from three denominations (Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform) had “estimated that Jewish wife abuse is about two-thirds to three-quarters of what it is in the general society at large, which did not indicate strong ‘denial.’”27 He found that although the attitudes of the 25 Farber, “The Programmatic Response of the Ultra-Orthodox to Wife Abuse”; Farber, “The Use of Social Capital Resources in the Ultra-Orthodox American Jewish Response to Wife Abuse.” 26 Marc Steven Cwik, “Special Issue: Peace in the Home? The Response of Rabbis to Wife Abuse Within American Jewish Congregations—Part 1,” Journal of Psychology and Judaism 20, no. 4 (Winter 1996); Marc Steven Cwik, “Peace Within the Home? The Response of Rabbis to Wife Abuse Within American Jewish Congregations—Part 2,” Journal of Psychology and Judaism 21, no. 1 (Spring 1997). 27 Cwik, “Special Issue: Peace in the Home?,” 280.

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Orthodox rabbis were slightly more patriarchal than the Conservative rabbis who did not differ from the Reform rabbis, “surprisingly, the actual levels of patriarchal attitudes for all three denominations were extremely low.”28 In fact, the Orthodox rabbis were “significantly more likely to believe that it is the duty of a rabbi to directly contact an abusive husband and put a stop to his abusive behavior than both the Conservative and Reform rabbis. However, rabbis from all three denominations believed that it is the duty of a rabbi to describe ways for a wife to put a stop to her husband’s abuse.”29 Similar to the Cwik study in challenging stereotypes, Steinmetz found: Regarding definitions of and beliefs about wife abuse among ultra-Orthodox men in Israel, the findings of the current study indicate that more than three fourths of the participants defined all of the behaviors that were presented to them as wife abuse. Thus, their definitions of wife abuse were highly consistent with those that are accepted in the empirical and theoretical professional literature (e.g., Sigler, 1989). With regards to men’s beliefs about wife abuse, the results revealed that most ultra-Orthodox men did not justify wife abuse. In addition, two thirds of the participants believed that husbands are solely responsible for their violence, and they disagreed with the argument that women who are battered are to blame for violence against them. It should also be noted that close to two thirds of the ultra-Orthodox men believed that violent husbands are capable of controlling their behavior. In addition, the vast majority approved of punishing violent husbands. Nonetheless, about 16% to 40% of the participants still agreed that women who are battered are to blame for violence against them. Although 70% of those participants disagreed with the argument that women who are battered benefit from abuse, about 21% to 28% of them supported that argument.”30

Social Change Changes in haredi communities must be examined while holding in mind how very slow social change processes tend to be, especially when they concern an institution as fundamental to the community as is the family. An advantage to working within a culture that has a strong, religiously based moral and value structure is that the ideals and values inherent to the system can be used in 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid. 30 Simona Steinmetz and Muhammad M. Haj-Yahia, “Definitions and Beliefs About Wife Abuse Among Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Men From Israel,” Journal of Interpersonal Violence 21, no. 4 (April 2006): 546–547.

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consciousness-raising and social change programs. Images of the ideal family, for example, can be contrasted with the reality of abusive relationships. This is an invaluable tool in bringing about change, especially since it is never sufficient to eliminate a behavioral pattern without having something to replace it. However, even though these images constitute the ideal towards which marriage and family relationships strive, a picture of marriage with all its complex challenges must be presented to young couples.31 Adoption of this approach can be seen in the numerous parenting and relationship skills conferences and seminars that are now advertised in local community newspapers.32 The following discusses the four Israeli organizations that provide services for religiously observant Jewish women who are victims of spouse abuse.

Israeli Organizations Four primary organizations provide services for religious victims of abuse: the Bat Melech Shelter, The Israel Center for Family Justice, The Crisis Center for Religious Women, and the Yad Sarah Unit on Domestic Violence. All of these organizations originated in response to problems of domestic abuse within religious families. Unlike the others, the Yad Sarah Unit on Domestic Violence was created within an established organization. I interviewed the key personnel in these four organizations. The interviews were conducted in the organizational offices, each taking approximately 1–2.5 hours. My questions concerned the origins of the organization, initial and current reception by the community and community leaders, services offered, problems encountered, and general reflections on the way in which social problems are or are not dealt with in the religiously observant Jewish communities. I also interviewed a professional social worker and psychologist who work with this population, and other professionals who work with this population in different capacities. The organizations and their work are discussed below.

1. Miklat Bat Melech In 1995–6 Noach Korman, a rabbinical lawyer for the religious courts, established the first shelter for haredi women. It all began when a haredi woman 31 Jacobs and Dimarsky, “Jewish Domestic Abuse,” 99. 32 Farber, “The Use of Social Capital Resources in the Ultra-Orthodox American Jewish Response to Wife Abuse.”

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requested that Korman represent her in a divorce court; she claimed that her husband beat her. He agreed to take the case and asked where she lived. “A hotel lobby” was her answer. “Why?” he asked. She said she was afraid to go back home, and her parents said she couldn’t go to them since they still had 10 children at home. Since she was now married, her parents said, she should go back to her husband. Korman called many people to try to find a home for this woman, but nothing was available. He finally found an elderly woman who needed help with housework and so, the woman went to stay there. A second haredi woman, who was married for only 6 months and already pregnant, asked Korman to represent her. She said her husband had been abusive from the beginning of their marriage and that she had tried to go back to her parents, but they refused to take her; they said they were afraid of her husband. Immediately before her marriage, this woman had learned in a religious seminary in Jerusalem. Korman contacted the seminary, and they permitted the woman to stay at the seminary on the condition that she would not leave her room. The administration was afraid she would be a negative influence on the other girls and so, someone brought food to her room for meals. A third haredi woman asked Korman to represent her in a divorce from an abusive husband. This woman was currently living in a shelter, leading Korman to inquire whether or not state assistance was available for all victims of domestic abuse. What he found was that the state will pay a woman’s rent only if she is living in a shelter. Korman then asked administrators of the secular shelter for help in establishing a shelter for religious women. They agreed, and Korman brought together leading rabbis and government agency officials to develop a shelter for religiously observant women. The shelter founded by Korman in 1996 was called Miklat Bat Melech (Shelter for the Daughter of the King). It was funded in part by the Welfare Ministry, through which other shelters in Israel are funded, and in part by private donations raised by Korman. The shelter site consisted of 4 apartments. As soon as it was completed, it was filled with 3 women and their children. All shelters receive support from the Welfare Ministry, which provides staffing and service standards. Thus technically, Miklat Bat Melech is administered by Korman’s organization as a haredi shelter for the Welfare Ministry of the Israeli government, which provides support and supervision.

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In 2000, Korman opened another shelter in Ramot (a neighborhood in Jerusalem) for 6 women and approximately 30 children. Every month Korman found it necessary to reject 4–5 women; hence, in 2005, Bat Melech opened still another shelter in Bet Shemesh (another Jerusalem neighborhood). Soon however, because they were able to add more rooms in the second shelter, they closed the Bet Shemesh shelter. They now have approximately 14 spaces, and usually there are 10 or more women with children in residence. For safety purposes, the Bat Melech shelters have closed-circuit TV and are online with the police. Only once did they have a security problem, which occurred because a woman had gone out on Shabbat and left the door open so she could return easily. A husband got into the shelter, kidnapped his wife, and threatened to kill her. She was returned to the shelter, after which the husband committed suicide. Following this incident, Bat Melech changed to electronic gates so that now, even when they are not locked, the gates cannot be opened from the outside. The Bat Melech shelters in Jerusalem are the only ones in all of Israel that cater to the specific needs of religious women and their children. They have counseling and therapies for both mothers and children. In addition, because many haredi battered women lack financial independence, Bat Melech shelters provide training in a field of their choice. Interviewing skills are developed, and the women are given the opportunity to attend university. In other words, the point of Bat Melech is not only to provide shelter, but also to rebuild the selfesteem, competence, and independence of both the women and children.

2. Miklat-Bat Melech Israel Center for Family Justice As more women got in touch with Korman, he realized that many did not need to go to a shelter, since typically their husbands had received restraining orders that kept them away from their homes. For the women and children, remaining at home was a far better alternative. What these women did need, however, was legal aid. And so in 2004, Korman established the Israel Center for Family Justice. The Center is staffed by lawyers, social workers, and psychologists who provide legal aid and other services for victims of domestic abuse. This aid is provided to women who live at home and to those who reside in shelters. Opened in 2004, the Bat Melech Israel Center for Family Justice provides all Israeli women in need with legal representation in both the civil and

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religious court systems. In 2005, 1,035 women sought legal help from Miklat, nearly 4 times the number in 2004. It is assumed this large increase was due to word-of-mouth recommendations for their work. It is also thought to reflect a growing willingness among the haredi population to address the problem of domestic violence. In 2005, 687 women came to the Center to consult with staff attorneys about issues such as divorce, alimony, child support, child custody, criminal charges, and restraining orders. Whether or not restraining orders are easier to get in Israel or more effective than in America is not clear to me. Professionals I asked knew of no research on this subject.

3. Yad Sarah’s Unit for Domestic Violence At Yad Sarah in Jerusalem, I interviewed Dr. Shlomit Lehrman, the Director of Yad Sarah’s Unit for Domestic Violence, for approximately 1.5 hours. Yad Sarah is an organization best known for renting out and providing free medical equipment rentals to anyone who needs it in Israel. Because of the fine reputation they have with the Orthodox and haredi populations, the Department of Welfare chose them to offer psychological and counseling services to victims of domestic abuse in the haredi population. The Jerusalem Unit opened in 2001 with 2 staff workers, and quickly expanded to the 11 staff members it has today. Yad Sarah has 70 centers for treating domestic violence in various locations throughout Israel. They receive approximately a quarter to a third of their budget from Israel’s Welfare Office. However, only the Jerusalem office of Yad Sarah specializes in treating members of the haredi population with problems of domestic violence. They see approximately 150–170 individuals every month. Basically, Yad Sarah’s Unit for Domestic Violence functions like a walk-in clinic. They treat women and children who, if not actual victims, are almost always passive victims, meaning they witness the violent abuse of their mothers. One young girl of 9, for example, would not go to sleep until she placed her scissors, taken from her pencil case, under her pillow so if necessary, she could defend her mother against her father. Yad Sarah also treats men who, in the great majority of cases, are the abusers. An Israeli psychologist I spoke to said he never treats abusers although they have come to him for treatment. The reason is that they never admit to being an abuser. Essentially, they don’t acknowledge that they have a problem and thus, this psychologist believes, they would not be amenable to change.

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I mentioned this to Dr. Lehrman, and she indicated that this was indeed the case in nearly all situations and thus a treatment problem. Their unit dealt with it by first of all enlisting the help of significant others, including family and rabbinical leaders. Secondly, if the men abusers do not cooperate with treatment protocols, they could go to jail, an implicitly coercive dimension to the treatment. Lehrman used these measures, along with the support of significant others, to convince the men that they have a problem and require treatment. I mentioned this approach to the psychologist, and he said he just wasn’t willing to spend his time convincing abusers that they had a problem and needed help, and so he doesn’t treat them. In general, the policy of the unit at Yad Sarah is for all staff members to treat men and women, victims and aggressors. Children, however, have specialized social workers who treat only children. In addition to offering various psychological therapies, Yad Sarah does a lot of outreach work, speaking to groups whenever and wherever requested. They sponsor lectures and workshops for community members, rabbis, mikva (ritual bath) attendants, and others. In conjunction with the Family Office of Education, they also make presentations to religious high schools. Yad Sarah’s work with the haredi (ultra-Orthodox) population is somewhat more restricted than is their work with other Orthodox groups. Although they have an excellent working relationship with haredi rabbis, including the heads of yeshivot, the haredi population does not avail themselves of the preventative work they do to raise awareness about domestic abuse. On an individual basis, however, Yad Sarah does work with rabbis on issues like birth control and mikva. In addition, Yad Sarah will intervene to prevent family problems from escalating into abuse. For example, if it comes to their attention that a wife needs help with the children and housework, representatives from Yad Sarah present the woman’s point of view to key rabbis or yeshiva deans, who in turn speak with the husband to ensure that men listen to their wives’ needs. This stops the conflict from escalating into verbal and even physical abuse. Dr. Lehrman also consults with rabbis when she encounters resistance to participating in group therapy due to the religious prohibition against talking about others (loshon hara). Once she explains the many benefits of group work to the rabbis, she says they generally rule it permissible for the women to attend.

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Yad Sarah has a rabbinical committee that includes haredi emissaries. Haredi rabbis typically refer persons to Yad Sarah for counseling, even though they do not permit preventative presentations in high schools or other venues. The interventionist role of Yad Sarah is possible because all Orthodox groups, including haredim, trust the organization and personally trust Lehman and her staff. Orthodox and haredi representatives are willing to listen to her perspective, and take advice on client needs. Overall, however, the haredi approach suggests that they treat wife abuse as an individual rather than a social problem.33 Yad Sarah offers innovative therapies organized around individuals, couples, groups, and communities. They have adapted the 12-step approach of Alcoholics Anonymous to domestic violence for use with both victims and violators. Groups for parents may use Adler’s approach or psychodynamics. Some groups are meant to empower and provide support for victims. For men, there are anger control groups. I found their community group therapies the most interesting. This involves both parents and children (3 months to 15 years). If there are 18 families, for example, they are divided by age and gender into groups. The families in each group talk about the same subjects, such as punishment, time-out, red lines or boundaries, and rules. After speaking about these topics in these separate groups, they come back together again as complete families and speak about the same topics. The power in this approach comes from the fact that each person has now learned the same concepts and terminology, and so the complete family can interact by sharing the same ideas and framework. This is significantly different from a situation in which only one person attends therapy and thus, only he or she knows the new language, ideas, and concepts. This places the personal growth dimension of therapy into a family context. Sharing in the learning process enables productive rather than negative confrontation and cooperation between family members. It enables the family to grow together as a unit. Yad Sarah also runs groups that use arts and crafts, dance, drama, and large and small animals. For girls of 17–20 years old, who grew up in families with 33 Mills, The Sociological Imagination.

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domestic violence and are concerned about the homes they will be building, Yad Sarah runs therapy sessions. Lehman notes that in general, for therapy to work, whether the patient is the batterer or the victim, the individual in therapy must desire change. Each must understand that he or she has a problem and must be willing to put a lot of effort into effecting change.

4. The Crisis Center for Religious Women: Debbie Gross Debbie Gross is the founder and executive director of the Crisis Center for Religious Women, which works in conjunction with the National Rape Crisis Center. She is a recipient of the Jerusalem Foundation Teddy Kollek Award for Leadership and Community Service. I interviewed her for about 2 hours in her office in Jerusalem. The Crisis Center for Religious Women was established to provide emotional support and advice for religious women and children in crisis. Although this is their target population they, like the other organizations described above, serve anyone requesting help. The services offered by the Crisis Center for Religious Women include a telephone hotline; workshops on abuse, violence, and rape with the goal of preventing future occurrences; and comparable workshops for children and teenagers, which have self-protection as their goal. The Crisis Center began in 1992 when Gross was sitting around her kitchen table with neighbors one morning to discuss how to respond to problems of sexual abuse in Jerusalem-based Orthodox families. When Gross asked a modern Orthodox woman why she hadn’t gone to the National Rape Crisis Center, the woman answered, “They can’t possibly understand my background.” Recognizing that the needs of religious women were not served by facilities run by the state, this statement led to the formation of a 24-hour hotline geared to religious women. The system Gross developed permits women to call back for further discussion and advice without compromising anonymity, an essential dimension in a population that is fearful someone will overhear and know what is going on in their life. When appropriate, the hotline volunteers make various referrals for psychological therapy, legal aid, medical treatment, and other assistance.

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A separate hotline was established for Ethiopian Israelis who, although particularly vulnerable to violence for various reasons, were not calling the existing hotlines. Volunteers at the Crisis Center also work as translators for the Ethiopian women who receive subsidized therapy. Debbie Gross initially developed training protocols and courses for the various types of work at the Crisis Center. Initially, 12 women were trained for the hotline, each for 6 months, after which the women spent another 6 months listening to the way trained counselors handle phone calls. Volunteers who work on this hotline receive a monthly stipend. Although they received calls from all segments of the Israeli population, as of July 2008, 60% of their calls were from haredi, 30% from dati leumi (National Religious), 5% from masorti (Traditional), and 5% from secular women. Clearly, the hotline was serving its intended population. The hotline is manned with live volunteers from 8 am to 10 pm, after which they have a beeper system with a call-back that occurs within minutes. Since their inception through July 2008, they have trained over 700 volunteers in 17 training courses. At the end of a course, each volunteer receives a comprehensive manual to guide them in their work. Additional training is provided at monthly meetings. Although they do counseling for crisis intervention, they do not do therapy. Today, the organization has approximately 165 active volunteers who work alongside the following paid staff positions: 1 staff supervisor of volunteers who also coordinates with outside volunteers and agencies like the police; 1 staff coordinator for the educational workshops; and 6 part-time and 6 fulltime staff members give workshops. In addition, they have volunteers giving workshops as well. Because of the high demand for their workshops, they have trouble keeping up with the requests. By the end of July 2008, the Crisis Center had conducted 1,200 workshops. Since 1993, the Center has been involved with over 35,000 different cases. Volunteers are mostly between 40–55 years of age. Younger women tend to be in school and/or married with children, and therefore are too busy to volunteer. Women above the age of 55 are often active grandparents. Others may be too elderly to volunteer. And still others may not yet be sensitized to this way of responding to domestic abuse. The Crisis Center for Religious Women receives about 25% of their funds from the Ministry of Welfare; the remainder comes from active fundraising.

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The Crisis Center works outside of but within the law, meaning, for example, they will work with rabbis to convince a man to leave his wife for 2 months so that the Center can work with his wife. They encourage divorce only when there are no children. In the summer of 2008, Gross arranged for the Crisis Center to conduct post-trauma intervention workshops in Sderot (which was being targeted with missiles from Gaza multiple times daily) for staff working with children and teenagers. Another recent project for the Crisis Center is the development and implementation of a series of training workshops for first-responders in case of a major natural disaster or terrorist attack. Gross has been an international force for change. Under her leadership, the American organization, Shalom Task Force, developed their hotline and training programs. In Europe, Gross assisted in the development of a hotline in Belgium that serves religious women through Europe. She was also instrumental in developing a hotline in Melbourne, Australia. The cases the Center deals with are approximately 40% sexual abuse; 40% domestic violence; and 20% other kinds of crisis.

Conclusions In my earlier study of the response to wife abuse in traditional religious American Jewish communities, I focused on the process of intentional social change as opposed to the change that inevitably occurs as a consequence of assimilation, acculturation, and adaptation. This led me to examine grassroots organizations like Shalom Task Force, as well as institutional units like Project Eden. In Israel, I examined organizations that likewise sought to bring intentional social change to the Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities, although as might be expected, their strategies differed. The Crisis Center for Religious Women began as a grassroots organization established by Debbie Gross. She developed and implemented a telephone hotline that has been replicated in America and Europe. Using a more top-down organizational approach, Korman, who is a rabbi in the Rabbinical Courts, worked with the Israeli government and rabbinic leadership to establish the first and only shelter for abused religious women. He then established the Center for Family Justice to provide legal and financial advice for this same population.

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The highly respected Yad Sarah organization added a Unit for Domestic Violence to provide psychological counseling and therapy for abused women and male abusers in religiously observant Jewish communities. As in America, the very provision of services functions as a catalyst to further social change. This is especially true for a population in which such services were completely lacking. Each of these organizations takes a very different approach. Yad Sarah’s Unit for Domestic Violence functions as a walk-in clinic for psychological counseling and/or therapy. For the most part, it is individuals who initially come to them from religious communities because their fine institutional reputation makes them an acceptable choice for Orthodox persons with problems of domestic abuse. These persons may then become involved in individual and/or group therapies. The Crisis Center for Religious Women seeks to connect abused women to resources generally unavailable in their culture. As such, they function as a referral agency, ensuring that callers who are victims of abuse receive access to appropriate counseling, therapy, medical, and/or legal aid. Gross’s approach, in other words, is to bring abused religious women into contact with resources from secularly educated professionals (i.e., persons educated outside the traditional religious culture). Noah Korman’s shelter and family justice system is perhaps the most innovative and interesting of the organizations. He is personally a member of the Orthodox haredi community, and professionally works within the religious court system. As might be expected given this background, Korman’s organization is essentially an outgrowth of the community’s values, norms, and mores. The change he brings, in other words, is from the inside. It is closest to what I called the process of “changing through tradition.”34 His approach is suggested in his choice to call the shelter Bat Melech, a term used to refer to all Jewish women. The immediate significance of this name is the implication that battered Jewish women are no different from all other Jewish women. They should not, in other words, be stigmatized and excluded. His focus is to ensure that they, like all Jewish women, have self-respect and esteem; that they are part of an 34 Farber, “The Use of Social Capital Resources in the Ultra-Orthodox American Jewish Response to Wife Abuse.”

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ongoing supportive community; and that they have an opportunity to be the best mothers they can. This means that they must be part of a community that has as its focus, like that of all Orthodox communities, the raising of children. Thus, there are numerous therapies and activities for family units, and specifically for children in the Bat Melech shelters. Recognizing that the achievement of self-respect and dignity requires a sense of independence and self-reliance, Korman developed the Israel Center for Family Justice. This organization provides legal and financial counseling and aid for abused women in shelters, as well as those women fortunate enough to be able to remain in their homes, typically because they have a restraining order against their husbands. Korman’s approach is in concert with the phrase bat melech, taken from Psalm 45:14. The entire phrase is kol k’vod bat melech penimah, translated to mean “all honor awaits the Jewish woman within.” Rashi, the great medieval commentator, interpreted this phrase to mean that the princess, the Jewish woman “who conducts herself with modesty and dignity, shunning ostentation, is the true symbol of nobility and glory.”35 The Maharshal in Gemara Yevamos (77a) notes that “The honor and dignity of a princess require that she remain in her palace and not go outside and mingle with the common folk.” The Israelite women, in other words, emulated the dignified behavior of a princess, and did not leave their tents so as not to come upon the improprieties of the marketplace. There are, of course, interpretations of this phrase that are more suitable for our times. For example, the understanding that the essential or inner nature of a woman is best demonstrated and actualized within the home environment. In this inner realm, she can bring out the strengths and talents of her family, and thereby raise good Jewish children. Still another understanding of this phrase would emphasize the importance for women to develop their inner resources.36 This is the approach Korman takes in the Bat Melech shelters and Center for Family Justice, in comparison with Gross’s Crisis Center for Religious Women, also an important contribution, in which her organization provides a link between abused women and outside resources. 35 36

Avroham Davis, trans., The Metsudah Tehillim: A New Linear Tehillim with English Translation and Notes ( Jerusalem: Metsudah Publications, 1983), 87. I thank Professor Jonathan Sarna for making this important point.

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America and Israel In reviewing my interview notes, I was struck by the difference in emphasis I found in the two countries even though the Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities are very similar in both countries: they live in enclave communities with a strong, religiously based culture and patterns of authority, and recognize the family as a fundamental institution. Nevertheless, professionals in the two countries expressed vastly different orientations. American professionals seemed primarily concerned with the individual woman, the victim of spousal abuse. The goal was first of all to ensure her safety, and secondly to strengthen her psychologically. In Israel, however, while the safety of the woman and her children was of course a concern, primary emphasis is given to the effect abuse has on family structure and stability. Thus, children were consistently mentioned as integral to the process of healing and recovery. They were the focus of various therapies and programs, separately and in concert with treatments for mothers and the community. An essential component of the healing process was the formation of a supportive community structure within the shelter. This focus seemed to be absent in my interviews with American professionals. Upon further research, I found that this difference is present at the national policy level as well. In America, for the protection of its residents, shelters typically consist of scattered site apartments. The requirement for a group shelter is that it must have a minimum of 40 persons, about which one American Jewish professional noted, “thank God we don’t have 40 women,” meaning, of course, that we don’t have that many women in our shelters. In Israel the situation is very different: the Welfare Ministry will only approve group shelters. This difference in national shelter policy seemed quite significant to me, and so I began to speculate on its roots. My first thought was that the difference is reflective of the distinctive national cultures of the two lands. America is known to emphasize and value individualism and personal development. Israel, on the other hand, a Jewish state with socialistic roots, has a far more communalistic society even with the

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encroaching Americanization37 and the realization that the Jewish family is not as perfect an institution that it was once believed to be.38 Applied to shelter policy, the greater American emphasis on the individual would not regard scattered site apartments as problematic for the abused woman and her family, whereas the more communitarian orientation in Israel recognizes the severely negative consequences of social isolation. Thus, Israel emphasizes the importance of the group and community context in the strengthening of an individual. Group shelters are understood to eliminate the severe isolation of women and their children. They allow women and children to interact with one another, participate in various group therapies, and attend shared classes. Some activities and therapies are specifically designed for children. In others, families and even communities function as the unit for therapy, counseling, and various services. In addition, shelter residents are permitted to have guests. The primary unit in Israel, in other words, is the woman along with her children within a consciously constructed community. Then I thought about it some more, and realized that another possible reason for the difference in national shelter policies might be the way in which the shelter population is perceived, both by the government and by the general population. While this consideration is also reflective of the culture, it does not rely on the dichotomy of individualism and communalism. Rather, it tends to be dependent on class, ethnic, racial, and/or cultural differences that determine whether or not the women in shelters are regarded as “a part of us” or as “the other.” Indeed, the common perception in America is that battered women are of the lower classes, which is supported by national studies discussed earlier.39 37 Uzi Rebhun and Chaim I. Waxman, “The ‘Americanization’ of Israel: A Demographic, Cultural and Political Evaluation,” Israel Studies 5, no. 1 (Spring 2000); Uzi Rebhun and Chaim I. Waxman, “Challenges for the Twenty-First Century,” in Jews in Israel: Contemporary Social and Cultural Patterns, eds. Uzi Rebhun and Chaim I. Waxman (Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 2004). 38 Chaim I. Waxman, “It’s All Relative: The Contemporary Orthodox Jewish Family in America,” Conversations: The Journal of the Institute for Jewish Ideas and Ideals, no. 5 (Autumn 2009). 39 See: Jana L. Jasinski, “Physical Violence Among White, African American, and Hispanic Couples: Ethnic Differences in Initiation, Persistence, and Cessation” (National Criminal Justice 199704, 2004); J. A. Sweet, L. L. Bumpass, and V. Call, The Design and Content of the

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However, in this discussion a distinction must be made between the shelter population of battered or abused women, and those who are not in the shelters. Weitzman’s “Not to People Like Us”: Hidden Abuse in Upscale Marriages clearly illustrates that battered women can be found among all social classes.40 Nevertheless, even given these facts, the shelter population does have distinctive characteristics defined by race, class, and culture. In part this distinction, as noted by Weitzman, is reflective of the resources that can be accessed by women of different classes. Although the class difference is certainly present in Israel as well, there are religio-cultural commonalities that give rise to the sense of a shared destiny that may trump existing class differences, particularly within Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox subcultures. This sense of oneness is evident in the name Korman gave to his shelter, Bat Melech, which defines abused women as intrinsically united with all other Jewish women. This point is made in another way as well. In my interview with Debbie Gross, she observed that in America, battered or abused women are not regarded as good and caring mothers; this separates them from the rest of the population in which women are generally regarded as good mothers. In Israel, however, one of the reasons they are understood to enter the shelters is precisely so that they can better care for their children. Thus, they are regarded, like all Israeli women, as good mothers. According to research on intimate partner violence in America, abused women generally come from an underclass in which marriage, family, and by extension, community are not of value. The term “intimate partner violence” is used instead of spouse abuse precisely because most abuse occurs between unmarried partners.41 In Israel, on the other hand, where 97 percent of all

40 41

National Survey of Families and Households. NSFH Working Paper No. 1 (Madison: Center for Demography and Ecology, University of Wisconsin, 1988); J. A. Sweet and L. L. Bumpass, The National Survey of Families and Households—Waves 1 and 2: Data Description and Documentation (Madison: Center for Demography and Ecology, University of Wisconsin, 1996), retrieved from http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/nsfh; US Department of Justice [FBI], Crime in the United States (1992). Susan Weitzman, “Not to People Like Us”: Hidden Abuse in Upscale Marriages (New York: Basic Books, 2000). Callie Marie Rennison and Sarah Welchans, “Intimate Partner Violence,” Bureau of Justice Statistics: Special Report (US Department of Justice, 2000), 3; Sweet, Bumpass, and Call, The Design and Content of the National Survey of Families and Households; Sweet and Bumpass, The National Survey of Families and Households; Jasinski, “Physical Violence Among White, African American, and Hispanic Couples,” 1–4.

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households consist of married, with and without children, couples, this is not the case. Specifically within the shelters for religious women, all can be presumed to be married. In sum, the points I found most striking in interviews with key Israeli leaders are as follows: 1) Focus on family and community in Israel rather than the individual woman: The three organizational persons I interviewed in Israel all expressed concern for maintaining the family unit. This concern is concretely expressed in the policy of not placing women in shelters except as a last resort. Restraining orders from the police are used effectively (although whether they are more effective than they are in America is not clear), making it possible to leave the woman and her children in their home and community, and thus able to remain connected to their social network. A concern with maintaining the woman and her children within a family and communal context is found in the shelter programs as well. The goal is to not break up the family unit and if possible, to restore and improve it. Counseling is provided for all family members, and attempts to reconcile the family include multiple therapies—individual, group, family, and community. Divorce is recommended when there are children at home only as a last resort. In a meeting between the son of an important but aging rabbi and the staff at Bat Melech, the rabbi’s son (who is also a rabbi) said that physical violence is prohibited, and if a marriage reaches that point, there is a need to divorce. However, noting the many problems a woman with children will face if she divorces, particularly within a haredi community, this rabbi suggested that if the marriage is an emotionally abusive one, then the woman should stay because she will suffer even more if she divorces. The assumption is that the well-being and future of the children take precedent over the happiness or unhappiness of the individual wife and mother. The definition of the client or the “unit” with which the agency or professional was most concerned shifted from the individual in America to the family in Israel, where treatment programs in the shelters, clinical organizations, and in the very composition of the shelter itself focused on the family. The only type of shelter the Israeli government subsidizes is the group shelter.

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2) Cooperation between institutional and rabbinic leaders: Cooperation in Israel between institutional and rabbinic leaders appears to represent something akin to standard operating procedure although it, like all other types of informal communication, necessarily depends on trust between the various parties. Those seeking change in Israel recognize that the rabbinic hierarchy must be dynamically and directly involved. This was likewise true in America. 3) Consciousness-raising and preventative measures: Israeli ultra-Orthodox rabbis respond to the problem of wife abuse (and other abusive behaviors) as though it was a personal “trouble,” thus mitigating individual action, rather than as a social problem requiring a group or community response.42 In the United States, ultra-Orthodox rabbis seem more open to preventative measures than ultra-Orthodox rabbis in Israel. Numerous seminars and conferences on issues of abuse in America have taken place with the approval and attendance of rabbis from all denominations and sects.43 This has not occurred in Israel to the same extent. In addition, ultra-Orthodox rabbinic leaders do not permit their congregants to attend seminars or lectures on abuse. 4) Group boundaries: Paradoxically, in the United States treatment is individualized while group preventative seminars and training are permissible, a relationship that is reversed in Israel where group treatment is the norm but group prevention measures are not permitted by the rabbis. This may, in fact, reflect an issue of group identification and boundaries. The larger Israeli society conceptualizes the problem of domestic abuse as a social problem.44 If ultra-Orthodox and Orthodox rabbis followed suit, this would blur the line between the two communities with respect to the integrity of a fundamentally important social institution within the Orthodox world. To conceptualize domestic abuse as a social problem would then suggest a 42 Mills, The Sociological Imagination. 43 See rabbinical study; Farber, “The Programmatic Response of the Ultra-Orthodox to Wife Abuse.” 44 Muhlbauer, “Domestic Violence in Israel.”

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similarity between the two communities—the ultra-Orthodox and the more secularized Jewish components of Israeli society. On the other hand, in not conceptualizing wife abuse as a social problem, an important boundary, encompassing behaviors and relationships within the most fundamental of institutions, is erected between the religiously observant population and the more secular Israeli Jewish population. In America, establishing this boundary is not as important, since the differentiation between the Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jewish populations and the predominantly Christian population groups is so much sharper. In Israel, this view is not really challenged by activists within the community, probably because it is not the battle they choose to fight. For example, Korman produced two DVDs: one on wife abuse and one on child abuse. These are sold in stores located in haredi neighborhoods in Israel and New York. They are intended to raise community awareness of domestic abuse in the religious communities, but the learning process occurs privately, within the confines of one’s home. 5) Israeli shelter policy: In my interviews with social service professionals in America, there was little if any discussion of family therapy or efforts to keep the family together.45 The primary emphasis was on strengthening and protecting the individual abused woman. Certainly, this seems appropriate, but it was interesting to see the different approach used in Israel, especially the fact that the state of Israel only funds group shelters. I wondered about the roots of the difference in approach. While this is obviously a deep and broad question concerning the roots of social policy, two possible sources seemed most salient, each a reflection of national values and culture.

45

I did attend a presentation by a judge in the Brooklyn Family Court, in which she expressed a serious concern for family, particularly for children, in her discussion of how the community is dealing with child abusers. Here, the concern was the negative effect that community publicity given to the sentencing of a child molester was having on other children in the family. There is an ongoing need to find a balance between showing concern for the family of an abuser, and the need to identify him in order to protect other children.

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Many studies confirm the significance of the individual in American society, understood to reflect modernity and most recently, postmodernity.46 Greater value is given to the multiplicity of lifestyle choices open to the individual, including religion, sexual preference, and family style. Behavioral commonalities that join individuals together in a group are not valued to the same extent as is personal choice and expression. Israel, on the other hand, although frequently understood as a society that is now postmodern in its orientation, is still thought to reflect Jewish communal values. Although these values might become increasingly less important in a friendly environment, they would not be expected to decrease in importance when a nation is surrounded by hostile neighbors, as is Israel. If then, as DellaPergola notes, this geographic political variable has an effect on fertility rates, then certainly it might be expected to affect other aspects of the culture as well.47 Social policy regulations regarding shelters for abused women might just be one of many expressions of these values. Another possible reason for the difference in shelter policy is that in America, the shelter population is thought to reflect a distinct population group with characteristics unlike the majority of Americans and certainly unlike the policy makers. Importantly, the population in American shelters is a largely unmarried one. Thus, emphasis is given to protection of the individual, and not to the healing or reconstitution of the family unit. In Israel, this is not the case. The Israeli population is predominately a married one, and the residents within the Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox shelters are certainly married. Thus, there is a sense of shared values, mores, and norms (e.g., marriage), as well as a sense of shared destiny. These qualities in common seem to prevent the larger population from stigmatizing women within the shelters and thus from developing a policy that would emphasize only the individual and not the family unit within a communal context.

46

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See: Ronald Inglehart, Modernization and Postmodernization: Cultural, Economic, and Political Change in 43 Societies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel, Modernization, Cultural Change, and Democracy: The Human Development Sequence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). DellaPergola, “Actual, Intended, and Appropriate Family Size Among Jews in Israel.”

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Suggestions for Further Research I began this research with the intent of exploring available services for religiously Orthodox Jewish victims of spouse abuse in Israel, and of comparing my results with those I found several years ago in my study of available services for the same population in America.48 Specifically, I wondered whether the fact that unlike America, Israel is a Jewish state with a majority Jewish population, would impact the delivery of these services, even though in both countries, the specific group with which I was concerned, the Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox population, is a minority subculture; in America this population is a subculture within a subculture. What I found was that there was indeed a difference. The professionals I spoke with in America emphasized an overriding concern with the individual abused woman. In Israel, on the other hand, the family unit was emphasized. Secondly, in America, shelters consist of scattered site apartments until there are 40 or more residents, and then group shelters are supported by the government. Israel, on the other hand, will only support group shelters. Thirdly, in Israel treatments focused on the family unit situated within a community context. Only group shelters are supported because they eliminate the inevitable isolation experienced by abused mothers and children. They consciously seek to create a supportive, interactive community within the shelter with a variety of healing therapies and programs. This approach builds on the importance of an individual’s role within a social setting rather than as an individual unit. I identified two cultural sources that may account for the difference in shelter policies and the related emphasis in treatment strategies. The first is the highly individualistic character of the United States as compared with the more socialist and communally based foundation of Israeli society. The second is the different perception of abused women in the two countries. In America, the shelter population is regarded as a distinctive group, unlike other women in the population. Government studies of intimate partner violence support this sense of difference. Weitzman’s “Not to People Like Us” makes the point 48 Farber, “The Programmatic Response of the Ultra-Orthodox to Wife Abuse”; Farber, “The Use of Social Capital Resources in the Ultra-Orthodox American Jewish Response to Wife Abuse.”

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that abuse is not economically or class based. But the stereotype does seem to correctly define the women who are in the shelters. And because family, (i.e., the married with children model), is not a priority for the majority of the shelter population, treatment focuses on the individual abused woman. From a policy perspective, however, this attitude and approach is a mismatch for American subcultures for whom family is the most fundamental of institutions and who do not have large numbers of women in shelters. The inflexibility of the American shelter policy leads to a situation in which it is not possible to place members of groups for whom family and community are fundamental into a group shelter. Thus, there is an additional stress factor of extreme isolation for persons from subcultures in which the group and community are exceptionally important. In Israel, on the other hand, professionals I spoke with noted that women in the shelters are regarded as good mothers and therefore, treatment is designed for the family unit: the mother and her children within the context of a consciously constructed supportive shelter community. These differences led me to regard the effects of national culture on the delivery of social services as an important focus for further study. The results of the Israeli approach need to be evaluated and then compared with a comparable population in America. Overall, however, I think it is important to evaluate the appropriateness of contemporary approaches to social problems for distinctive subcultures. Mary Pipher, for example, discusses the mismatch between the traditional culture of Vietnam and the offering of psychological services as a way of dealing with depression and loss.49 So too, the strong family and community based cultures of groups like the Jewish Orthodox and religious Muslims would seem to make the family and community oriented helping strategies found in Israel preferable to the individually oriented American approach. Of course, this would require suspension of the rule that a shelter must have a minimum of 40 occupants before it can be approved and supported as a group shelter. Typically understood as norms and values that underlie action, culture has been used in the social sciences as an explanatory value, particularly when 49

Mary Pipher, In the Middle of Everywhere: Helping Refugees Enter the American Community (New York: Harvest/Harcourt, Inc., 2002), 279–304.

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dealing with minority populations. We see this in earlier theories that emphasized a “culture of poverty” to explain personal behaviors that seem to be responsible for a life of poverty. Competing theories emphasized the role of inequities in the social structure as the cause of poverty. Ann Swidler takes a somewhat different approach. She understands culture not only as the ideals, norms, values, and the artifacts of a society, but the ways in which the non-material culture is implemented in concrete situations: Swidler understands culture as “strategies of action.”50 Perhaps this approach provides a way of looking at, evaluating, and comparing the ways in which a national culture is expressed through public policies. In my discussion of approaches to wife abuse in America and Israel, I suggest that each of the national shelter policies is reflective of the national culture. I understand national culture to encompass the strategies of action employed by the nation in its formulation and administration of services for abuse victims. Clearly, this idea is not fully developed in this paper but hopefully, seeds have been planted for further research and analysis.

50

Ann Swidler, “Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies,” American Sociological Review 51, no. 2 (April 1986): 273–286.

American Jewish Hospitals and “The Jewish Problem” in American Medical Education1 Edward C. Halperin Origins of the Jewish Hospital Judaism and healing Do humans have the right to intervene in disease, which some faith traditions view as divinely visited upon the sick? Do physicians have the right to interfere with the deliberate designs of Providence? Some religious traditions deal with the issue of a physician’s interference with disease by rejecting medical aid altogether. Others ask, “Is there any less moral justification for curing illness than there is for applying human intelligence to build a home or water the soil?” Some attempt to resolve the conflict by asserting that God granted humans the right to cure disease based on sanctions found in sacred scriptures.2 In Judaism, there is a strong tradition of support for human efforts to heal the sick, and physicians are held in high esteem. The obligation to heal is found in Leviticus 19:16, in which humans are enjoined not to “stand idly by the blood of your neighbor,” and in Exodus 21:18–19, wherein Jews are instructed 1

2

Acknowledgement: The vast majority of this chapter has been previously published by the author in the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 56 (2001): 140–167; North Carolina Historical Review 67 (1990): 385–410; and Academic Medicine 67 (2012): 610–14; it is reproduced here with the written permission of the copyright holders. Immanuel Jakobovits, Jewish Medical Ethics (New York, NY: Bloch Publishing Company, 1959).

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that if a person is injured in a quarrel, then the individual causing the injury must cause the injured party “to be thoroughly healed.” The Talmud (Baba Kamma 85a) invokes the latter verse to teach that “from here [it is derived] that the physician is granted permission to cure.” Judaism also teaches that the value of human life is supreme. The Talmud (Sanhedrin 37a) states that “if any human being saves a single soul of Israel, Scripture regards him as if he had saved an entire world.” The prophet Ezekiel (34:4) chides Jews to include care for the ill as one of the attributes of God that they must emulate: “You have not strengthened the weak or healed the sick.” In addition, the Talmud includes multiple references to community health and responsibilities such as visiting the sick and repairing the world.3 In contrast to religious traditions that object to human intervention in disease, free will is deeply embedded in Judaism. The twelfth-century rabbi and physician, Maimonides, wrote that “free will is bestowed on every human being” and “a man’s actions are in his own hands; no compulsion is exerted. He is constrained by nothing that is external to him.”4 The purpose of keeping the body healthy is to allow the individual to pursue knowledge of God and of God’s perfect morality. Maimonides wrote: The study of medicine has a very great influence on the acquisition of the virtues and of the knowledge of God, as far as on the attainment of true spiritual happiness. Therefore, its study and acquisition are preeminently important religious activities.5

The development of European Jewish hospitals During the Middle Ages, medicine was one of the few professions open to Jews in Europe. In addition, medieval Jewish physician-translators helped preserve the medical teachings of the ancient Greeks and Romans and transmit them to the West.6

Fred Rosner and J. D. Bleich, Jewish Bioethics (Hoboken, NJ: KTAV Publishing House, 2000); Fred Rosner, Medicine in the Bible and the Talmud (New York, NY: KTAV Publishing House, 2008); Sherwin Nuland, Maimonides (New York, NY: Nextbook Schocken, 2005). 4 Nuland, Maimonidies, 7. 5 Ibid., 5. 6 Ibid., 15–16. 3

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The English word hospital comes from the same Latin root as hospitality, hostel, and hotel. Early hospitals were religious establishments maintained by Christian, Muslim, and Jewish organizations as places of refuge for travelers, pilgrims, and the needy.7 As early as the eleventh century, European synagogues set aside a hekdesh, or hostel for the poor, which was probably a room for the lodging of travelers that may also have been used as a place to care for sick itinerants. If medicine was not able to cure sick, indigent, traveling Jews, at least they could die with dignity in a hekdesh in the care of their coreligionists. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in Spain and Germany, inns for the care of sick strangers were supported by the community, benevolent societies, and charity boxes. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Jewish communities erected more elaborate, modern houses for the sick (called Kranken haus) in Breslau, London, Berlin, Vienna, Paris, Amsterdam, and Hamburg. By the early twentieth century, there were forty-eight Jewish hospitals in Poland, including one thousand beds in Warsaw.

The Stuyvesant Pledge and the Jewish community in the American colonies In September, 1654, the Sainte Catherine, a small French frigate, sailed into New Amsterdam (now New York City) carrying twenty-three Jewish refugees from Brazil. Peter Stuyvesant, director-general of New Netherlands, requested permission from his superiors at the Dutch West India Company in Amsterdam to refuse entry to these “deceitful,” “very repugnant,” and “hateful enemies and blasphemers of the name of Christ.” To Stuyvesant’s distress, his directors reminded him that some of the company’s shareholders were Dutch Jews and ordered him to admit the refugees provided they would pledge that “the poor among them shall not become a burden to the company or to the community, but be supported by their own nation.”8 7 8

William Bynum, The History of Medicine: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008). Tina Levitan, Islands of Compassion: A History of the Jewish Hospitals of New York (New York, NY: Twayne Publishers; 1964); D. E. Bridges, “The Rise and Development of the Jewish Hospital in America,” rabbinic thesis, Hebrew Union College, Jewish Institute of Religion (1985); M. Wagner, “Jewish Hospitals Yesterday and Today,” Modern Healthcare 21 (February 4, 1991): 32–33, 36, 38; Alan M. Kraut and Deborah A. Kraut, Covenant of

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The growth of Jewish hospitals in the United States Some historians view the Stuyvesant Pledge as the foundation of American Jewish communal institutions. The formation of Jewish hospitals in the United States, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, was a logical continuation in the Jewish community’s creation of an extensive social network designed to assure the public that American Jews neither were nor ever would be a societal burden.9 There are at least three other major causes for the creation of American Jewish hospitals. First, the American Jewish community felt that by creating their own hospitals, they could spare their coreligionists the indignity of Christians’ attempts to convert them as they lay on their death beds.10 Second, Jewish hospitals were refuges that respected the faith of American Jews. They provided kosher food, an on-site synagogue, the comfort of a rabbi on the staff, and the placement of a mezuzah on the door post.11 Because traditional Jewish teaching takes a very circumscribed view of autopsy, Jewish hospitals were also created, in part, to reduce autopsies perceived as unnecessary.12 Third, and most importantly, Jewish hospitals were built in response to anti-Semitism in the medical profession. Formal quotas designed to restrict the access of Jewish students to universities probably originated in imperial Russia. In March, 1881, Tsar Alexander II of Russia was assassinated in a bomb attack perpetrated by an anarchist. His successor, Tsar Alexander III, was surrounded by advisers who wished to cut Russia off from the liberalizing influence of Western Europe. Within one month of the assassination, the reactionary Care: Newark Beth Israel and the Jewish Hospital in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007).   9 Jonathan D. Sarna, American Judaism: A History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004). 10 Levitan, Islands of Compassion; Bridges, “Rise and Development”; Wagner, “Jewish Hospitals.” 11 Irwin M. Berent, A Jewish History of the 20th Century (Norfolk, VA: Jewish History USA, 2001). 12 Arthur J. Linenthal, First a Dream: The History of Boston’s Jewish Hospitals, 1896–1928 (Boston, MA: Beth Israel Hospital, 1990); Edward C. Halperin, “The Jewish Problem in U.S. Medical Education 1920–1950,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 56 (2001): 140–167; Barbara Zingman and Betty Lou Amster, A Legendary Vision: The History of Jewish Hospital (Louisville, KY: Jewish Hospital Healthcare Service, 1997).

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regime countenanced a series of riots, or pogroms, directed against the Jewish population.13 In May, the notorious May Laws severely restricted Jewish settlement to specific areas within Russia. Furthermore, Jews were forbidden to own mortgages and leases. In 1887, the Russian government instituted educational restrictions that limited Jewish enrollment in universities to 10% within the pale of settlement and 5% outside the pale. In Saint Petersburg and Moscow the limitation was placed at 3%. The program of educational restriction was referred to by numerous clauses.14 The use of quotas for Jewish students in Russia continued until the World War I. After the war, with the overthrow of the old government order in Central and Eastern Europe, and with the general emancipation of the Jewish population, many Jews looked forward to an era of freedom and equality. Unfortunately, postwar events belied that hope, as a wave of anti-Semitism swept throughout the Western world. Bolstered by unsettled economic conditions, the rise of Bolshevism, the stigma of the Jews’ association with the Russian Revolution, and the prevalence of nationalism, restrictions on Jewish freedoms gradually developed throughout Europe. Eastern European countries by general agreement and Hungary by law enforced numerous clauses. Student riots against Jews became commonplace.15 Poland and Romania began admitting Jewish students to medical schools in direct proportion to the number of cadavers supplied by the Jewish community for dissection. Since Jewish religious law restricts the performance of autopsies, that policy severely limited the possibility of a Jewish student’s gaining admission to medical school.

A Quota is Put in Place Twentieth-century United States quotas restricting the access of Jewish students and physicians to medical school and postgraduate training were a response to the massive wave of Russian Jewish immigrants arriving at the 13

Edward C. Halperin, “Frank Porter Graham, Isaac Hall Manning, and the Jewish Quota at the University of North Carolina Medical School,” North Carolina Historical Review 67 (1990): 385–410. 14 Rufus Learsi [pseud. for Israel Goldberg], The Jews in America: A History (Cleveland, OH: World Publishing Co., 1954), 125. 15 Cecil Roth, A Short History of the Jewish People (London, UK: East and West Library, 1969), 421–425.

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beginning of the twentieth century and the interest of these immigrants and their children in medical education. From 1880 to the beginning of World War I in 1914, two million Russian Jews immigrated to the United States, joining about four hundred thousand Jews already in the country. Following World War I and the Red Scare, the United States saw a rise in nativist feeling and a growth in organizations like the Ku Klux Klan that targeted population groups with foreign roots.16 Overt anti-Jewish prejudice in the academic community in the United States reached its zenith when the children of these eastern European Jewish immigrants began to enter college in large numbers. By 1902, for example, 90% of the undergraduates at City College of New York were Jewish.17 From 1900 to 1922, the proportion of Jewish students at Harvard College rose from 7% to 21%. President A. Lawrence Lowell, along with some members of Harvard’s governing boards, alumni, and faculty, noted this increase with grave concern. Lowell disapproved of immigrants who failed to merge into his image of mainstream America. Lowell had been an officer of the Boston-based Immigration Restriction League and was concerned that superior Anglo-Saxon culture might be undermined by excessive Jewish representation in the college.18 In 1922, Lowell told Harvard’s graduates that “if every college in the country would take a limited proportion of Jews we should go a long way toward eliminating race feelings among students and, as 16

17

18

Ibid., 386–89; Abraham Leon Sachar, A History of the Jews, 5th ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967); Bernard Martin, A History of Judaism, 2 vols (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 2: 319–48; Seymour Rossel, Journey through Jewish History: The Age of Faith and the Age of Freedom (New York: Berman House, 1983), 95–97; Learsi, The Jews in America, 125; Paul Borchsenius, The History of the Jews, 5 vols. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1965), 4: 149–76. Sherry Gorelick, City College and the Jewish Poor (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1981), 85; Heywood Broun and George Britt, Christians Only: A Study in Prejudice (New York: Vanguard Press, 1931), 72; Kenneth Collins, Go and Learn: The International Story of Jews and Medicine in Scotland (Aberdeen, UK: Aberdeen University Press, 1988), 100. Seymour Martin Lipset and Everett Carl Ladd, Jr., “Jewish Academics in the United States,” in The Jew in American Society, ed. Marshall Sklare (New York: Berman House, 1974), 255–89; Marcia G. Synott, “Anti-Semitism and American Universities: Did Quotas Follow the Jews,” in Anti-Semitism in American History, ed. David A. Gerber (Urbana-Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 233–70; Henry Aaron Yeomans, Abbott Lawrence Lowell 1856–1943 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948), 209; Leonard Dinnerstein, Antisemitism in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 85.

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these students passed out into the world, eliminating it in the community.”19 Lowell suggested a quota and rationalized his views by arguing that a large Jewish presence on the campus would increase anti-Semitism in the student body and cause Gentile students not to attend Harvard.20 Harvard’s Board of Overseers appointed a committee to consider the quota proposal. A faculty committee recommended that “in the administration of rules for admission Harvard College maintains its traditional policy of freedom from discrimination on grounds of race or religion.”26 The faculty committee voted against a formal quota, as did the board.21 An unofficial program of educational access restriction was, however, adopted and spread to many colleges, universities, and professional schools. Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia University, also supported a policy of “selective admissions” to limit the admission of Jews in favor of his perception of an elite “natural constituency.” Butler said that he had “not eliminated boys because they were Jews and do not propose to do so. We have honestly attempted to eliminate the lowest grade of applicant and it turns out that a good many of the low grade men are New York Jews.”22 The pressure of Jewish applicants was particularly strong among potential medical students. In 1927, Dean Hugh Cabot of the University of Michigan advised University President C. C. Little that, because new medical students were admitted based on academic qualifications and because there were so many Jewish applicants of European origin with high qualifications, the school was going to be overrun with undesirables. Cabot responded by imposing racial and religious quotas. He put this into practice by requiring that applicants appear in Ann Arbor for an interview or for an alumni or

“Lowell Tells Jews Limit at College Might Help Them,” New York Times, 17 June 1922, 1, 3. For a detailed discussion see Synott (n. 20) and Marcia Graham Synott, The Half-Opened Door: Discrimination and Admissions at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979), 58–80. 20 Yeomans, Lowell, 209–18. 21 Broun and Britt, Christians Only, 102–4; T. Bender, New York Intellect: A History of Intellectual Life in New York City from 1730 to the Beginning of Our Own Time (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1987), 289–292. 22 Harold S. Wechsler, The Qualified Student: A History of Selective College Admission in America (New York: Wiley, 1977), 161–62. 19

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faculty interview in New York, Denver, or Los Angeles.23 This personal interview was used at Michigan and other schools to exclude Jews on the basis of their having an unacceptable personality. One medical school dean concurred on the usefulness of this technique in justifying Jewish exclusion: “It is a fairly tenable fact that . . . personal acceptability and magnetism . . . is less prevalent among the Jewish class, from which by far the large number of Jewish applicants is being recruited, than among the entire list of applicants as a whole.”24 Cabot’s new policy included the addition of an admissions test as well as a short essay on a nonmedical subject along with the interview. In the first year of the new policy, 49% of Michigan’s initial applicants did not present themselves for interview and examination. The reduction was particularly noticeable in New York, the major source of Jewish applicants.25 A 1946 review of thirty-nine US medical school application forms showed that all asked the applicant’s religious preference or affiliation, ten asked for the religion of the applicant’s parents, fifteen asked the parents’ race, and eleven inquired if the family name had ever been changed. Similar questions were also used on college applications to screen for Jews, Catholics, and African Americans.26 Ernest Hopkins, president of Dartmouth College, summed up the reason for these questions: “Any college which is going to base its admissions wholly on scholastic standing will find itself with an infinitesimal proportion of anything else than Jews eventually.”27 At some institutions, the system of discrimination was less subtle. At Yale Medical School, for example, Milton Charles Winternitz, dean from 1920 to 1935, instructed his secretary to mark applications with an “H” for 23 H. W. Davenport, “Not Just Any Medical School”: The Practice, Science, and Teaching of Medicine at the University of Michigan, 1850–1941 (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 29–30. 24 Quoted in Max Danzis, “Jewish Hospitals and Facilities for Graduate Training,” Medical Leaves 3 (1940): 65–74, see 66. 25 Davenport, Not Just Any Medical School, 30. 26 S. Jarcho, “Medical Education in the United States, 1910–1956,” Journal of Mount Sinai Hospital 26 (1959): 339–385; W. R. Hart, Report of the special investigating committee of the council of the City of New York, adopted December 23, 1946; Leon Sokoloff, “The Rise and Decline of the Jewish Quota in Medical School Admissions,” Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine 68, no. 4 (1992): 497–518. 27 Quoted in Dinnerstein, Antisemitism in America, 86.

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Hebrew and a “C” for Catholic. Winternitz told his admission committee: “Never admit more than five Jews, take only two Italian Catholics and take no blacks at all.”28 A letter of rejection to a Jewish applicant to the medical school of Loyola University in Chicago read simply: “I am sorry to have to inform you that your application for admission to the School of Medicine cannot be acted upon favorably because the quota for Jewish students has been filled.”29 Additional confirmation of the implementation of Jewish quotas can be found in documented events at other medical schools. In the early 1930s, Arthur Bernstein, an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, applied for admission to the university’s medical school. He described his meeting with Dean William Pepper: The dean said to me: “I might as well tell you right now that you do not have a chance here because we took in the ten Jewish boys that we always take in and that is our quota. We also take ten Catholics and the rest are Protestants.” I said, “That’s not fair,” and we got into an argument and he said: “Why is it that Jewish mothers always want their sons to be doctors?” I said: “Dr. Pepper, you’re wrong. That’s not true. My father wants me to be a cantor, my mother wants me to be a rabbi. I want to be a doctor.” Finally, after about forty minutes, he said, “My God, this was supposed to be a fifteen minute interview. Get out and don’t ever come back.”30

Bernstein did not give up without a fight, however. He took his case to the president of the alumni association, a non-Jewish physician, who said, “‘What! With these grades they didn’t take you?’ He sat down and dictated a letter in which he said, among other things: ‘I had no grades anywhere near this good when you took me in. I can assure you that if you don’t take him in, you will never get another penny from the alumnae of the Newark area.’” Bernstein was admitted, and attended the school.31 Among the most dramatic demonstrations of the quota occurred at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). The UNC Medical School Dan A. Oren, Joining the Club: A History of Jews and Yale (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 136–58, 249–57, 148. 29 Quoted in Broun and Britt, Christians Only, 130. 30 Quoted in William B. Helmreich, The Enduring Community: The Jews of Newark and Metrowest (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1999), 92. 31 Ibid. 28

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was a two-year program under the direction of Dean Isaac Hall Manning from 1905 to 1933. Manning faced constant difficulty sustaining UNC’s two-year medical college. The tightening of standards for medical education substantially reduced the total number of medical schools in the United States between 1906 and 1931. By the 1930s, the eleven remaining two-year medical colleges in the United States found it difficult to attract and hold faculty.32 With no hospital facilities or sites for clinical training, the two-year schools were dependent upon four-year medical schools to accept their students for the final two years of clinical training. Manning labored hard to place his graduates. For Manning, the success of his transferred students was a measure of the success of his school.33 “It is vital to the existence of this school to transfer only such students that can and will hold their own in the schools to which they are transferred,” he wrote.34 The problem of the Jewish student was, in Manning’s view, serious: Shortly after the World War large numbers were applying for admission– enough as a matter of fact to practically swamp the schools. Many were exceedingly objectionable students. Very few were North Carolinians and in no instance had a North Carolina Jewish student been refused admission to the Medical School if he met the entrance requirements. There is no prejudice against Jews as such in a medical school. A number had been admitted and on the whole were acceptable students. Nevertheless, they had to be admitted in couples as in several of the laboratories the students worked together in couples and only rarely would a Jew and a Gentile work at the same table.35

Being fearful that he could not place Jewish students in four-year schools and that the inability to transfer students would reflect poorly on UNC, Manning restricted the admission of Jewish students at the UNC Medical 32 A discussion of Abraham Flexner’s role in this process is found in his autobiography, I Remember the Autobiography of Abraham Flexner (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1940). 33 W. Reece Berryhill, William B. Blythe, and Isaac H. Manning, Medical Education at Chapel Hill: The First Hundred Years (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina School of Medicine, 1979), 28; Halperin, “Frank Porter Graham.” 34 Isaac Hall Manning, “History of the UNC School of Medicine, 1879–1937,” unpublished manuscript (ca. 1940), Isaac Hall Manning Papers, 1866–1946, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina. 35 Ibid.

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School to 10% of the total class (i.e., no more than four out of the forty entering students per year).36 In 1933, a Jewish UNC undergraduate named Morris Krasney applied for admission to the medical school and was refused by Manning. Manning wrote that “the refusal was entirely on the ground that four Jewish boys had already been admitted, and in the judgment of the Dean, this was as many as he could hope to transfer.”37 Krasney’s attorney contacted the president of UNC, Frank Porter Graham. Graham was a man of strong character with an uncompromising belief in democratic and Christian ideals and a strong commitment to human rights.38 He reviewed Manning’s policy and decided it was a matter of institutionalized anti-Semitism which could not be tolerated at UNC. He felt that any state citizen who was qualified for admission to medical school was entitled to a place irrespective of his religion. When Manning refused to admit Krasney, Graham ordered Krasney’s admission and accepted Manning’s resignation. This appears to have been the only episode of a US medical school dean losing his job over the issue of Jewish quotas.39 The resignation of the dean of Emory’s dental school in the 1960s was also associated with antiSemitism in admission and grading policies. By 1941, the medical historian Henry Sigerist concluded that Jewish medical school applicants were subject to an effective quota. Sigerist noted that the medical faculties of European universities admitted all students who could satisfy the entrance requirements. If the number of students increased, then the medical school was supposed to respond by enlarging its faculty and facilities. In contrast, according to Sigerist, US schools limited the number of students according to the facilities available: While there undoubtedly are advantages in having a small, carefully selected body of students instructed in small groups by a large faculty, the system has led to serious discriminations, and has provided an easy pretext for racial and other prejudices. . . . colored students are segregated into two colored schools (Howard, Meharry) and only very few of them are admitted incidentally to northern schools where their position is far from enviable. . . . 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid. 38 Warren Ashby, Frank Porter Graham: A Southern Liberal (Winston-Salem, NC: John F. Blair, 1980). 39 Halperin, “Frank Porter Graham.”

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Jewish students are subject to a tacit, but nevertheless highly effective, quota-system and in most schools the number of Jewish students admitted rarely exceeds 10 per cent of the total enrolment [sic].40

Women suffered discrimination as well. Sigerist did not comment on the obvious exception to European liberalism, the absence of Jewish students in German medical schools. A long essay on “Jews in America” appeared in the January, 1936, issue of Fortune magazine that summed up the situation in the United States. The unsigned article observed that in medicine Jews do not occupy a position of power corresponding to their abilities or their numbers in the profession. Hospital medical boards and the like are apt to be controlled by non-Jewish doctors . . . of approximately 14,000 young men and women attempting annually to enter the seventy-six reputable US medical schools 50% are Jews while of the 6,000 more or less who get in only 17% are Jews.41

The article cited opposing explanations for this phenomenon: Non-Jewish doctors cite these figures as proof of the danger of Jewish aggressiveness and commercialism in the profession while Jewish doctors cite them as proof of discrimination, arguing that if there are a disproportionate number of Jews in medical schools the reason may be that Jews are brighter than non-Jews.42

The article’s author doubted this latter assessment. The truth seems to be that medicine is merely the most obvious point of collision between forces set in motion by the peculiar development of Jewish life in America. Given the desire of Jews to see their sons in the learned professions, and given their urbanization and hence their access to free college education, and given the assiduity of Jewish children, a clash was inevitable. There is no occasion to explain it by an alleged Jewish intellectual superiority.43

40 41 42 43

Henry E. Sigerist, “Trends in Medical Education: A Program for a New Medical School,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 9 (1941): 177–198, 181. “Jews in America,” Fortune, February 1936, 79–85, 128–130, 133–144. Ibid., 141. Ibid., 141.

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We may conclude from contemporary accounts that there is strong anecdotal evidence for the existence of Jewish medical school admission quotas.

Statistical Studies of Medicine’s “Jewish Problem” Jarcho argued that documentation of anti-Semitic medical school quotas in the 1930s was difficult.44 He was probably unaware of contemporary statistical studies of medical student ethnicity that conclusively established systemic rejection of Jewish medical school applicants. In the early 1930s, Harold Rypins, MD, secretary of the New York State Board of Medical Examiners, calculated that there were approximately six thousand new medical students per year who were selected from twelve thousand applicants. He estimated that about 3.5% of the US population was Jewish and about 17% of US medical students were Jewish.45 Rypins’s calculations were consistent with studies conducted at about the same time by Fred C. Zapffe, MD, secretary of the Association of American Medical Colleges, William Pepper, MD, dean of the Medical School of the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Max Danzis of Newark, New Jersey, and Dr. A. Rongy of New York City.46 Rypins’s data showed that the probability of a Jewish applicant gaining admission to a New York City medical school was 15% versus 63% for a Gentile. In spite of this data, Rypins argued that there was no religious discrimination against Jews. He felt that, insofar as Jews were admitted to medical school at a rate higher than their representation in the population (17% of US 44 45 46

Jarcho, “Medical Education in the United States.” Harold Rypins, “The Jewish Medical Student,” undated typescript, in the Morris S. Lazaron Papers [hereafter Lazaron Papers], American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, Ohio. Max Danzis, “The Jew in Medicine,” American Hebrew and Jewish Tribune, 23 March 1934, 372–401; Fred C. Zapffe, “Report of Applicants and Applicants Made for Admission to the 1933 Freshman Class of Seventy-nine Medical Schools,” Journal Association of American Medical Colleges 9 (1934): 93–106. Dr. F. A. Mass, secretary of the Committee on Aptitude Tests for Students of the Association of American Medical Colleges made “as careful a count as we can of the Jewish students who took the Aptitudes Test,” Mass to Lazaron, 1 March 1934, Lazaron Papers. Rongy’s work is quoted in Broun and Britt, Christians Only, 147–50. See also A. M. Kaplan, “Are Medical Colleges Unfair to Jewish Students?,” The Jewish Tribune, 1 August 1930; “Medical Schools Fair to Jews,” The Literary Digest, 13 September 1930. Bodi articles may be found in the Lazaron Papers. Wilham Pepper extensively studied Jewish admission rates to medical schools. See Pepper to Lazaron, 13 February 1934; Pepper to Dr. Alfred Stengel, 13 February 1934; Lazaron to Pepper, 15 and 16 February 1934; Pepper to Lazaron, 30 January and 16 February 1934, Lazaron Papers.

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medical students versus 3.5% of the US population and 43% of New York City medical students versus 30% of the city’s population), any assertion that there was a restrictive Jewish quota fell short. The essence of the problem, he concluded, was that “Jews were concentrated in New York City, that New York City’s medical schools could not accommodate all of the Jewish applicants, and that those students who were not accepted in New York City rarely found a place elsewhere in the United States.”47 The most detailed study of the quota was performed in 1934 by Rabbi Morris S. Lazaron of Baltimore (1888–1979). Concerned about the allegation of an excess of Jewish medical school applicants and an oversupply of Jewish physicians, Lazaron wrote to the deans of US medical schools and directors of residency programs. His letters asked the deans to provide data concerning the proportion of Jewish students in their schools and their assessment of Jewish medical students. Lazaron similarly asked residency program directors to supply information on the number and quality of Jewish house officers. This extraordinary survey was never published.48 Lazaron surveyed the deans of sixty-five medical schools. He received fifty-seven responses including thirty-four with definite data, ten with approximate data, and thirteen which he discounted because they came from two-year basic science schools or the dean was unable to provide sufficient data. Lazaron calculated that, in 1924, about 11% of US medical students were Jewish. By 1933 that number had risen to 20%, consistent with the calculations of Rypins, Pepper, Zapffe, and Rongy. Reviewing the last names of students taking the medical college admissions test, Lazaron calculated that about 32% of applicants to medical school in 1933–1934 had “Jewish” names. Pepper did a similar review of names at the same time. His estimate was 50%.49 Lazaron’s data indicated that in 1933–1934, 26% of Jewish applicants to US medical schools obtained a place versus 46% of Gentiles.50 A 1939 study by the B’nai B’rith found that about 25% of Jewish applicants to medical school

47 Rypins, “The Jewish Medical Student.” 48 Morris S. Lazaron, “The Jewish Student in Medicine,” unpublished typescript, ca. 1934, Lazaron Papers. 49 Ibid; see Pepper letters in n. 45. 50 Lazaron, “The Jewish Student.”

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were admitted versus 50% of Gentiles.51 Other reports indicated that in 1927, 69% of Gentile medical schools applicants who were graduates of the City College of New York obtained admission to medical school versus 50% of Jews. In 1930, the disparity had widened, with 80% of Gentile City College of New York students succeeding versus 20% of Jews. An October, 1945, article in the American Mercury magazine reported that 75% of Gentile applicants to medical school in the United States were successful versus 25% of Jews.52 From 1920 to 1940 the percentage of Jews in Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons fell from 47% to 6%.53 There was wide variation in the percentage of Jewish medical students in US schools in 1933. Many schools had no more than 4 to 10% of Jews in the class. Other schools, which had a more liberal policy concerning the acceptance of Jews, such as Chicago Medical School, New York University, New York Homeopathic Medical College, the University of Illinois, and Wayne University Detroit College of Medicine and Surgery, had student bodies in which 50 to 60% of the class were Jewish. There can be no doubt that Jewish medical school applicants faced discrimination in their attempts to gain a medical education.54

What’s Wrong With Jews? We find a window into the thinking of medical school deans in the written comments that accompanied their responses to Lazaron’s survey. Many of the responses decried discrimination. For example, Dean G. E. Bethes of the medical branch of the University of Texas at Galveston wrote, “I feel that the Jewish medical students in the University of Texas are no different from the Christian medical students so far as scholastic ratings are concerned, so far as their ability to do work is concerned, so far as failing students are concerned, and so far as other conditions are concerned.”55 51 52 53 54 55

Lee J. Levinger, “Jewish Medical Students in America,” Medical Leaves 2 (1939): 91–95; Sachar, A History, 255–58. Broun and Britt, Christians Only, 143–47; New York Times, 28 August 1946, 29; New York Times, 23 January 1946, 1; F. Kingdom, “Discrimination in Medical Colleges,” American Mercury 56 (1945): 394. “Discrimination Charged,” New York Times, 15 March 1956, 23; “Bias at Columbia Denied at Hearing,” New York Times, 18 May 1946, 39; Natalie Berger, ed., Jews and Medicine: Religion, Culture, Science (Philadelphia, PA: The Jewish Publication Society, 1997), 225. Lazaron letters; see notes 13, 44, and 47. Bethes to Lazaron, 23 February 1934, Lazaron Papers.

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Dean Frank Vincenhaler of the University of Arkansas School of Medicine agreed: I do not believe that any restriction should be placed on any man regarding his religious beliefs. The field of practice is and ought to be open and restriction should only be placed to the degree that men are sufficiently prepared in their premedical studies to enable them to appreciate and take advantage of their medical studies. My observation after a long life of medical practice has been that the Jewish physicians as a rule are high grade.56

The majority of deans, however, were opposed to an increase in Jewish admissions. This opposition was couched, by some, as a question of proportional representation. Many state-supported medical schools, particularly those in the South, Midwest, and West, based their discrimination against Jews on the low proportion of Jews in the local population. These schools often limited the number of out of-state applicants accepted. If a disproportionate number of out-of state applicants were Jews, then it followed that few of them were accepted. This was not, these schools argued, the result of anti-Semitism but rather the result of a desire to serve the state’s taxpayers. Were a Jewish state resident to apply, the deans of these schools claimed, he would have every reason to expect admission if qualified. The dean of the University of Alabama School of Medicine stated in 1934, for example, If we should accept all the Jewish applicants from the Northeast who offer three or four years of preparation and whose references as to character, etc., seem satisfactory, we should fill up our freshman class twice over and exclude all our own native sons. Obviously this would be unjust to the people who support the state university.57

A large proportion of the letters objected to Jewish medical students on the grounds that they were more suited for book work than for working with their hands and thus did not do well at clinical work. This objection hearkens back to the restrictions directed against European Jews, from the Middle Ages on, regarding membership in trade guilds. Jews were restricted from participating in skilled trades, were confined to money lending and dealing in used clothes, and then were criticized for not being good at working with their 56 57

Vinchenhaler to Lazaron, 30 January 1934, Lazaron Papers. J. N. Simpson to Lazaron, 22 February 1934, Lazaron Papers.

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hands.58 This anti-Semitic characterization is typified by the comments of Dr. J. T. McLintock of the State University of Iowa College of Medicine, who wrote that the Jewish students “have difficulty in handling the practical angle of the medical course, but they do very well on the didactic or so-called book work which is required.”59 McLintock’s views were echoed by Dean C. R. Bardeen of the University of Wisconsin Medical School who stated that “the chief weakness of the majority of them [ Jews] seems to be a tendency to memorize than show the ability for practical work in the laboratory and wards.”60 There were an equal number of letters complaining that some Jewish students were unethical or generally ill suited for medicine. Some letters hinted at Jews being politically radical or overly interested in money. Some deans merged their views of Jews into a general concern about immigration. Dr. A. C. Curtis, secretary of the University of Michigan Medical School, believed, Those Jewish students who come from families in the United States for two or more generations are usually well bred, well cultured, and distinctly high class people. . . . Those students who are born in Europe, or whose parents have recently migrated from Europe, are apt to be an entirely different type, sometimes radical, sometimes asocial, often unstable. I do not feel that they can compare with the American born Jew any more than the native Pole can compare with the Pole who has lived in this country for three or four generations.61

Dr. H. R. Wall of the University of Kansas School of Medicine felt that “the Jewish student does not have as high ethical standard as the average Christian student that is, he is more apt to be commercially inclined, and yet we have had exceptions to this general impression.” These views were supported by Dr. Worth Hale, Assistant Dean of the Harvard Medical School who felt that “as a member of the committee of admission I am inclined to believe that it is more difficult to be sure what the Jewish applicant will develop into than the average Christian applicant.” Dr. H. G. Whitecotton of the College of Medicine at Syracuse University likewise felt that “a proportionately large

58 Sachar, A History, 255–58. 59 McLintock to Lazaron, 7 February 1934, Lazaron Papers. 60 Bardeen to Lazaron, 23 February 1934, Lazaron Papers. 61 Curtis to Lazaron, 6 March 1934, Lazaron Papers.

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number of students who we find generally unfitted for the practice of medicine are Jewish rather than Gentile.”62 Some of the deans thought that the problem of the Jewish medical student might be attributed to psychopathology. Illustrative are the comments of Dr. W. J. Moss, dean of the University of Georgia School of Medicine: “My general impression is that the Jewish students, who are admitted to this and other schools with which I have been connected, stand high on scholarship. I believe that relatively a high percentage of Jewish students are of a neurotic temperament.”63 Others criticized the Jewish students for their alleged arrogance. A. R. Loraine, acting dean of the Chicago Medical School, reported that it has been my experience that Jewish students, on the average, compare favorably with the Nordic type. The only criticism I have is their tendency to develop a superiority complex which at times makes them appear to be disrespectful to their superiors. On the average, I may say that ten per cent of the Jewish students in this college suffer from the above anachronism.64

But he was less worried about Jews than about other undesirable groups. “Certainly from a social and political point of view we have far greater problems to contend with in the immediate future, such as the procreation and education of the biologically unassimilable races such as the Negro and Asiatic.”65

The Quota and Residency Training Discrimination in obtaining internship and residency positions was also widespread. An early incident occurred in Brooklyn, New York, at the Kings County Hospital. In 1916, a Jewish intern was overpowered in his room, bound, gagged, and taken by force to a train station and told not to return. That same intern became an Army medical officer in World War I and died in the line of duty. In 1927, at the same hospital, an estimated twenty Gentile interns kidnapped, physically intimidated, and warned three Jewish interns to leave the 62 Wall to Lazaron, 27 February 1934; Hale to Lazaron, 30 January 1934; Whitecotton to Lazaron, 29 January 1934; Lazaron Papers. 63 Moss to Lazaron, 2 February 1934, Lazaron Papers. 64 Loraine to Lazaron, 7 March 1934, Lazaron Papers. 65 Ibid.

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“Christian institution.” Jewish interns were subjected to other insults including segregation from the dining hall and at the tennis courts. A subsequent investigation resulted in the temporary suspension of six Gentile interns and the hospital superintendent. All were eventually reinstated.66 Jewish medical school graduates had considerable difficulty during the interwar period acquiring internship and residency positions. In 1923, Dr. B. E. Greenberg of Boston noted that out of the twenty-five to thirty [ Jewish] men who graduate from medical schools [in Boston] each year, practically all of them are compelled to go into general practice, to become the sort of practitioner who does not carry much weight, who is not considered at the head of his profession, because they are not given the opportunity to get into hospitals to procure hospital experience.67

Others found a less pessimistic situation, but emphasized the concentration of Jewish house officers within Jewish institutions. Lazaron surveyed one thousand US hospitals with one hundred beds or more in 1934, receiving 421 responses. He found that, consistent with the fact that approximately 20% of medical students were Jews, approximately 22% of interns in the United States were Jewish. The majority of these Jewish interns were concentrated at Jewish hospitals, however, where 90% of the interns were Jews.68 Responding to Lazaron’s survey, many directors of medical education and teaching hospitals were as frank as the deans. Dr. William G. Turnbill, superintendent of the Philadelphia General Hospital, reported I find rather a large number of Jewish boys graduated from Philadelphia schools this year who have not been able to secure an internship. Some of these boys are splendid students who undoubtedly will make excellent physicians . . . I have not the least doubt that Jewish boys are docked on account of unacknowledged prejudices on the examination.69

66

67 68 69

A series of articles appeared in the New York Times between 21 and 30 June, 1 and 3 July, and 5 and 8 July, 1927. This series begins with the article “Three Jewish Interns Hazed in Hospital, Six Doctors Held.” See also “Beaten Internes Leave Hospital Pending Inquiry,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 21 June 1927, 1; “Hazing: Pro and Con,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 30 June 1927, 16. Quoted in Arthur J. Linenthal, First a Dream, 211. Lazaron, “The Jewish Student in Medicine,” 3, chart IV, Lazaron Papers. Turnbull to Lazaron, 10 February 1934, Lazaron Papers.

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Turnbill believed this was neither due to “antagonism to the individual or antagonisms to the Jews as it is due to the fear and feeling that the Jew is beginning to dominate the profession.”70 Harry G. Dunham, superintendent of the Newport Hospital in Newport, Rhode Island, had other grounds for explaining his hospital’s discriminatory practices. He admitted that “there are three applicants from Jewish doctors to every one Gentile doctor that we receive. Whether this is due to the fact that Jewish young men find difficulty in securing internships in the larger hospitals I do not know.” Dunham commented that physicians on the intern selection committee “have found by past experience that the average Jewish interne is so zealous in his desire to learn, and so aggressive in his demands for hospital opportunities to learn, that they have been prejudiced with the preference to engage a Gentile interne whenever possible.”71 Dr. Lloyd Nolan, the chief surgeon of the Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Company in Birmingham, Alabama, responded to Lazaron that the patient population he served was generally not suitable for Jewish physicians: Because of the fact that we handle a large proportion of native whites of the laboring class and Negroes, we have made special effort to select interns from this particular part of the world, and consequently we have had few applications from Jewish medical students. . . . As a matter of fact, we have not had an intern of the Jewish faith for a number of years, although we have appointed one for work to begin July 1, 1934.72

Other physicians observed no difficulty in placement of Jewish house staff. Dr. John O’Hanlon, medical director of the Jersey City Hospital in Jersey City, New Jersey wrote that: “Individual aptitude for the practice of Medicine should . . . be a determining factor for the practice of the profession, rather than whether one is or is not Jewish.”73 Dr. A. A. Herald, president of the North Louisiana Sanitarium in Shreveport, Louisiana, expressed his humble opinion [that] there is no cause for alarm in the fact that so many Jewish boys wish to study medicine; we certainly have no surplus here, for in our Parish (county), out of about 175 doctors there are only three Jews in practice; I note also 70 Ibid. 71 Dunham to Lazaron, 13 February 1934, Lazaron Papers. 72 Nolan to Lazaron, 14 February 1934, Lazaron Papers. 73 O’Hanlon to Lazaron, 17 February 1934, Lazaron Papers.

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that in the large cities, especially in the East, a large percentage of the leaders are Jews and there can certainly be no objection to a surplus of them in the profession if they continue to excel.”74

Rationalization, Accommodation, Assimilation, and Fighting Back: Jews Respond to Discrimination The response of the Jewish community to discrimination in medicine ran the gamut from active support to vigorous public opposition. Some Jewish doctors, such as Dr. A. Rogny of New York, rationalized restrictions against Jews in medicine and argued that Gentile patients simply preferred Gentile physicians. This being the case, the quota fulfilled a societal need to avoid an oversupply of Jewish physicians: It is quite commonly known that the facts of medicine make it an intimate profession. Doctors are particularly aware that the lines of practice are sharply divided. Seldom does a Jewish physician acquire a clientele among non-Jews while the number of non-Jewish patients who consult the average Jewish physician is so small that—allowing for the inevitably rare exceptions they must be discounted entirely as a source of professional revenue. Naturally if the supply of Jewish doctors were to increase too far in excess of the demand, an economic problem would arise not dissimilar to the problem of thousands of Jewish lawyers. We shall not touch upon the question of ethics here, but experience has taught us—too often to pardon any further risk in this direction—that a condition of severe competition [between physicians] is conducive to a lowering of ethical standards.75

Other prominent Jewish physicians argued that there were no anti-Semitic Jewish quotas. They said, instead, that Jews, being a predominantly urban population in the United States, were disinclined to become country doctors and therefore were not being selected for medical school because they would not improve medical care in rural areas. In this way, they echoed the proportional representation argument of some of the medical school deans. Danzis, a Jewish surgeon practicing in Newark, New Jersey, argued that a tendency for Jewish physicians to gravitate to urban centers contributed to Jewish physicians serving a largely Jewish clientele:

74 75

Herald to Lazaron, 15 February 1934, Lazaron Papers. Rogny, quoted in Kaplan, “Are Medical Colleges Unfair?”

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The tendency of the medical graduate is to gravitate to the large centers of population, where the educational and clinical facilities for practice are better than those in the smaller cities. . . . The Jew, being a city dweller . . . is most likely to continue his practice there for the same reason as the non-Jew does, and also because of the Jewish community group life which he may lack in the small town or rural district.76

Rabbi Lazaron and some other Jewish leaders thought that an appropriate response to discriminatory quotas was accommodation to their existence and improved vocational counseling for young Jews. They hoped that students would select alternative careers. In fact, Lazaron never published his data, which illustrated discrimination against Jewish students so clearly. In a letter to magazine publisher Morris A. Beale dated 21 May, 1936, Lazaron explained his reluctance to allow Beale to publish the report. Publicity to the facts in the article has already been given through a number of the medical colleges in the country, and it is an open question whether it would be advisable at the present time to make the material in the article a matter of public discussion. Difficulties of the sort considered in the article can be much better solved through education in those quarters where education is necessary.77

Lazaron was proud of his Sephardic Jewish heritage and felt very much a part of American culture. He was at home in the upper levels of Gentile and Jewish society and counted Irving Berlin, Eddie Cantor, the Schulzbergers of the New York Times, and actress Irene Dunn among his friends. His brother-in-law was the famous Zionist Abba Hillel Silver. Lazaron “did not want to upset the apple cart” within his perceived social circle by making a public protest. He counseled Jewish students to do the same.78 But many Jews were not persuaded by calls for accommodation. Unable to obtain places in US medical schools, they matriculated in European schools. By 1932–1933 the Council of Medical Education and Hospitals of the American Medical Association reported that 1911 Americans were studying medicine 76 77 78

Danzis, “Jewish Hospitals and Facilities.” Lazaron to Beale, 21 May 1936, Lazaron Papers. Author interview with Clemintine Lazaron Kaufman, 3 February 2000. For a discussion of the differences between German-Jewish Reform society in Baltimore and Russian-Jewish Orthodox society, see Gilbert Sandler, “Becoming American,” Jewish Baltimore 93 (2000): 36–41.

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in Europe. The most popular sites were Great Britain (452), Italy (222), Germany (337), and Switzerland (403). By the mid-1930s it was estimated that 95% of Americans studying medicine in Europe were Jews.79 In February, 1933, the Federation of State Medical Boards of the United States began to require that Americans matriculating in European medical schools obtain a license to practice medicine in the country in which the medical school from which he/she graduated was located as a prerequisite to sitting for any US state licensing examination. Since Great Britain had no citizenship qualifications for licensure, and because of the absence of language barriers and the rise of Nazism in Germany, England and Scotland became the favored sites for training. When the English General Medical Council, in collaboration with US medical education authorities, made it more difficult to gain entrance to medical school, Scotland became the preferred site for American Jews. Scottish medical schools tended to have more flexible entrance requirements, and there were many historical links of Scottish medical schools to the United States. Almost 90% of Americans studying medicine in Great Britain did so in Scotland.80 The medical schools of Scotland welcomed large numbers of Americans in the 1930s. Some studied at Saint Andrews University, the University of Glasgow, and Edinburgh University. Particularly popular were the extramural medical colleges: Anderson Medical College of Glasgow and the School of Medicine of the Royal Colleges of Edinburgh. Ninety-six percent of American Jewish graduates of Scottish medical schools from 1925 to 1940 were from New York and New Jersey. The academic performance of the Jewish students was, by and large, excellent.81 The entry of Jewish refugee doctors in significant numbers and the matriculation of US Jewish medical students in England in the 1930s were generally opposed by the English medical establishment. Danzis, “American Students Abroad,” Journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges 5 (1930): 117; “Report of Committee on Foreign Medical Students,” Journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges 8 (1933): 360; Collins, Go and Learn, 109; F. C. Zapffe to Lazaron, 19 November 1935, Lazaron Papers; Sokoloff, “The Rise and Decline,” 505. 80 Collins, Go and Learn, 109–32, Sokoloff, “The Rise and Decline,” 504–505. 81 Kenneth Collins, “American Jewish Medical Students in Scotland: 1925–1940,” meeting abstract, American Association for the History of Medicine, 1987; Collins, Go and Learn, 120–21. For comparison, see Harold Rypins, “The Foreign Medical Graduate,” Journal of the American Association of Medical Colleges 8 (1933): 92–96. 79

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Organized English medicine wished to offer economic protection to British medical students and physicians. Pressure was brought to bear against the Scottish medical board by English medical organizations to adopt restrictions against foreigners. The Scottish board rejected such pressures, arguing that these restrictions were designed to protect the medical profession, not the public. Scotland remained relatively open to Jewish medical students and refugee physicians throughout the 1930s and 1940s. The pass rate of Scottish medical school graduates for the New York State Board Medical examinations for 1937–1938 was 83%.82 Some US Jewish physicians and community activists began calling for the establishment of medical schools in connection with Jewish hospitals as a response to restricted Jewish access to medical schools. Jewish-sponsored medical schools, it was argued, would offer educational opportunities to those students barred from existing schools by discrimination. Within the Jewish community, objections to the proposal were voiced by those who feared that new medical schools would lead to further overcrowding of the profession, would promote Jewish “clannishness,” and would demonstrate tacit acceptance of discrimination by the existing schools.83 Three US medical schools, Middlesex College of Medicine and Surgery in Massachusetts, Chicago Medical School in Illinois, and the Essex College of Medicine and Surgery in New Jersey, were particularly known for being open to Jews. They were poorly ranked by the American Medical Association’s Council on Education, were intermittently in conflict with state medical societies, and frequently on the verge of closure. Middlesex did close in 1947—an event strongly applauded by the editorial page of The New England Journal of Medicine.84 The remains of Middlesex’s campus are now occupied by Brandeis University. At its founding in the late 1940s, Brandeis considered but chose not to establish its own medical school. The dean and president of the Chicago Medical School from 1932 to 1966 was a Jewish physician, Dr. John Jacobi Shenin. According to the Lazaron study, in 1933–1934 about 35% of the 82 83 84

K. E. Collins, “The Jews in Medicine in Scotland, part II,” Proceedings of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh 19 (1989): 225–30; Collins, Go and Learn, 121. “Medical School Proposed for Jews,” New York Times, 14 May 1932, 4; “Medical School for Jews Rejected,” New York Times, 7 December 1931, 14. “Standards of Medical Education,” New England Journal of Medicine 232 (1945): 146–47; Sokoloff, “The Rise and Decline,” 506–8.

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school’s students were Jewish. Clinical instruction took place at Cook County Hospital. The school became fully accredited in 1948 and is now known as the Rosalind Franklin University/Chicago Medical School.85 In September, 1942, the Essex College of Medicine and Surgery received a license from the New Jersey Board of Medical Examiners and enrolled its first class in 1945.86 The school, however, was never able to obtain permission from the New Jersey Board of Education to grant the MD degree. The school acquired equipment from the recently closed Oglethorpe College of Medicine in Georgia.87 In its statement on admissions, Essex proclaimed that, “Women are admitted on the same terms as men and all well qualified candidates are given equal consideration without reference to race, color or creed.”88 At a 1946 fund-raising dinner for the college, a school official proclaimed the school was created as an answer to “the anti-democratic challenges presented to schools that subject” students to discriminatory practices.89 The roster of Essex’s first two admitted classes included graduates of historically African-American colleges (Fisk University, Lincoln Memorial University), the University of Puerto Rico, many graduates of Catholic universities, several women, and a significant number of students with traditionally Jewish surnames. Essex was unable to secure an affiliation with any of New Jersey’s universities, only taught a two-year basic science curriculum, did not readily establish clinical training sites, and closed in its second year of operation after its charter was revoked.90

85 Sokoloff, “The Rise and Decline,” 508–9; Larrain to Lazaron, 7 March 1934, Lazaron Papers; Finch University of Health Sciences/Chicago Medical School website (http // www.fincms.edu), accessed 2 March 2001. 86 “Medical School Planned,” New York Times, 27 September 1942, 27. 87 “Moved Equipment from Oglethorpe College of Georgia,” New York Times, 25 February 25, section IV, 9. 88 The “Essex College of Medicine and Surgery” file in the Special Collections/Archives of the University of Medicine & Dentistry of New Jersey Library. George F. Smith Library of the Health Sciences, Newark, New Jersey. This file contains the announcement for the first and second sessions of the college, 1945–1946, and a few letters and newspaper clippings. 89 “$500,000 Sought by Essex Medical,” New York Times, 23 May 1946, 27. 90 Additional reports concerning Essex College can be found in the New York Times, 12 January 1943, 8; New York Times, 8 July 1943, 8; New York Times, 22 July 1943, 11; New York Times, 27 September 1943, 21; New York Times, 15 October 1943, section IV, 9; New York Times, 5 November 1943, section IV, 9.

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In 1945, Dr. Samuel Belkin, president of Yeshiva University, proposed the establishment of a Jewish-sponsored medical school. One of the early promoters of a medical school at Yeshiva, Dr. Elihu Katz, argued that “a Jewish sponsored medical school is a powerful force that will go a long way towards destroying racial and religious bigotry . . . and combat existing quota systems so prevalent in many medical schools.”91 The Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University was chartered in 1951. From its inception, admission to the school was intended to be nondiscriminatory. Einstein was persuaded to lend his name to the enterprise in 1953 after he was shown evidence of Cornell Medical School’s restrictive practices.92 Affiliations of Yeshiva’s new medical school with New York’s largest Jewish hospitals, Montefiore Hospital and Mount Sinai Hospital, were considered. Ultimately, Montefiore and the Bronx Municipal Hospital Center became major teaching sites for Albert Einstein College, while Mount Sinai went its own way. Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan was founded in 1852. Supported by local Jewish philanthropy, the hospital provided care for indigent Jewish patients, a training site for Jewish interns and residents, and hospital privileges for Jewish physicians. With many internship and residency positions closed to Jewish medical school graduates from the 1920s to 1950s, and because house staff positions at Mount Sinai were awarded based on competitive oral and written examinations, Mount Sinai had excellent house officers (although not all were Jewish; between one-quarter and one-third were Gentile).93 In 1934, the director of the hospital, Dr. Joseph Turner, advised Rabbi Lazaron that house staff appointments are made on a strictly merit and nonsectarian basis. Since none of the applicants are asked about their religious beliefs (religious affiliation is not [a] test of qualification for appointment), it will be impossible to

91

Quoted in Ernst R. Jaffe, “The Early History of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine,” The Einstein Quarterly Journal of Biology and Medicine 13 (1996): 22–26. 92 H. M. Zimmerman, “The Naming of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine,” Surgical Neurology 6 (1976): 92; Sokoloff, “The Rise and Decline,” 513. 93 Kenneth M. Ludmerer, “The Origins of Mount Sinai School of Medicine,” Journal of History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 45 (1990): 469–89. For a general history of the Mount Sinai Hospital and the other Jewish hospitals of New York City, see Levitan, Islands of Compassion.

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indicate definitely the number of Christian and Jewish internes, but it is accurate to say that the great majority of internes are Jews.94

The decline in institutional anti-Semitism after World War II opened opportunities for Jewish medical students to seek post-graduate training at non-Jewish hospitals. Bright, young staff physicians and clinical researchers were less likely to pursue careers at Mount Sinai because they were now able to locate positions at medical schools. Out of a desire to continue to compete for the best and brightest physicians, and to augment its clinical research program with close links to departments of basic medical sciences, Mount Sinai Hospital established its own medical school in the 1960s.95

Government and Private Investigations of the Quota Leaders of medicine and the press took note of the quota soon after its introduction, although no effective action against quotas was taken until after World War II. Dean A. M. Schwitella of the Saint Louis University School of Medicine expressed his concern about restricted Jewish access to medical schools at a meeting of the American Association of Medical Colleges in 1928.96 In a 1932 speech to the National Conference of Jewish Social Service, Dr. Israel Strauss, a New York neurologist, told his audience “we know that there is discrimination against the Jews because of their race or religion. High [academic] rank does not admit them.”97 A report in 1931 to the executive committee of the American Jewish Committee observed that US medical schools failed to accept Jews in the same ratio as their proportion among the applicant pool.98 At a 1935 meeting of the National Conference of Jews and Christians, Jewish quotas in colleges, universities, and medical schools were condemned as “un-American.”99 In a 1940 article, two prominent New York

94 95 96

Turner to Lazaron, 16 March 1934, Lazaron Papers. Ludmerer, “The Origins of Mount Sinai School.” H. Schneiderman, “Review of the Year 5690,” American Jewish Year Book 32 (1930–1931): 78. 97 “Medical School Proposed for Jews,” 4. 98 “Medical School for Jews Rejected,” 14. The report advised, however, that this was “not altogether traceable to anti-Jewish discrimination, as other factors are taken into account.” 99 “Faith Parley Bans Atheistic Groups,” New York Times, 31 August 1935, 11.

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Jewish physicians, Nathan Ratnoff and Isidor Held, denounced the argument for proportional representation. One of the commonly advanced justifications for the small percentage of Jews admitted to medical schools is that Jews are already more than adequately represented in the medical profession according to their numerical proportion in our population. Doubtless the latter statement is correct, but the argument is deplorable. Favoring a quota in medicine or any other branch of education, according to nationality, seems to us a regress to medievalism.100

Near the end of World War II, Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia of New York City established a committee to investigate racial and religious discrimination.101 Called the “Mayor’s Unity Commission,” the group received, in January, 1946, a “Report on Discrimination in Institutions of Higher Learning” authored by Dr. Dan W. Dodson, an educator on leave from New York University. Dodson’s report described a fall in the average number of Jewish students in grade A medical schools from 12.16% of the student body in 1933 to 6.29% in 1938. From 1925 through 1943, the percentage of City University of New York graduates who applied for admission to medical school and were admitted fell from 58% to 15%.102 The Unity Commission was told that not only did local private colleges and professional schools limit the numbers of New Yorkers admitted, but that out-of-town schools give priority to their local populations and that they believe that New York City institutions should provide for the educational requests of its student population. As a consequence, all New Yorkers and especially Jews, Catholics and Negroes, find themselves discriminated against both in the New York and out-of-town institutions.103

In March, 1946, the noted Reform rabbi, social activist, and Zionist leader Stephen S. Wise (1874–1949) filed an application before the New York City 100 Nathan Ratnoff and Isidor W. Held, “Some Problems of the Jewish Medical Student,” Medical Leaves 4 (1940): 146–51. 101 B. Fine, “Curb is Demanded on Bias in Colleges,” New York Times, 24 January 1946, 18. 102 B. Fine, “Bias in Colleges against City Youth Charged in Report,” New York Times, 23 January 1946, 1. 103 Ibid.

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Tax Commission to cancel the tax exemption of Columbia University.104 Acting in his capacity as president of the American Jewish Congress and as an individual taxpayer, Wise asked the commission to cancel Columbia’s exemption for violating the antidiscrimination clause of New York State tax law. Wise argued that Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons had discriminated against Jews and “betrayed the democratic purposes for which public subsidy for education is granted.”105 Wise showed data provided by Dr. Alexander H. Pekelis of the New School for Social Research documenting that, in 1920, 47% of the College of Physicians and Surgeons’ newly admitted study body was Jewish versus 19% in 1924, 12% in 1938, and 6% in 1940. From 1941 to 1946 the number never exceeded 12%.106 Julius L. Goldstein, an attorney, sued Columbia on similar grounds. New York State Attorney General Nathaniel Goldstein also brought legal action against the Tax Commission to compel it to move against Columbia. The acting president of Columbia University, Frank D. Fackenthal, and the medical school dean, Williard C. Rappleye, publicly denied that Columbia discriminated based on race, color, or creed. At a public rally attended by Eleanor Roosevelt, Wise denounced Columbia, stating that “as a result of its racially and religiously discriminatory practices, it has ceased to be an educational institution.”107 Ultimately, New York Supreme Court Judge James B. M. McNally held that, although the tax law did prohibit discrimination, the legal remedy must be exercised by the person aggrieved (i.e., a student who allegedly was denied admission). Because of the Supreme Court’s ruling, the Tax Commission rejected Wise’s petition.108 Wise’s approach to discrimination was diametrically opposed to that of Lazaron. Lazaron never published his study of discrimination, was cautious about its release, and felt that the best response of young Jewish students who were denied admission to medical school was to seek alternative careers. Wise, on the other hand, had no hesitancy about public protest and publicity. Some 104 “Discrimination charged,” New York Times, 15 March 1946, 23. Wise’s autobiography is Stephen Wise, Challenging Years: The Autobiography of Stephen Wise (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1949). 105 Stephen Wise, Letter to the Editor, “Discrimination in Schools,” New York Times, 26 March 1946, 30. 106 “Bias at Columbia Denied at Hearing,” 91. 107 “Unity Ideal Hailed by Mrs. Roosevelt,” New York Times, 30 May 1946, 18. 108 “Case in Court Bias Action on Columbia,” New York Times, 26 March 1946, 30.

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have characterized the spectrum of responses of the American Jewish community as following the lines of the Sephardic and German-Jewish community on the one hand and the Russo-Polish community on the other. Many in the Sephardic and German-Jewish community such as Lazaron, whose ancestors immigrated in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, viewed public protests and the establishment of separate Jewish medical schools and hospitals as opposed to their notion of Jews being as American as any other group. Often the attitude of Sephardic Jews and upper-class German Jews toward the recently arrived Russian and Polish Jewish immigrants was somewhat distant. Lazaron and his circle did not favor protest and agitation.109 Wise and many in the Ashkenazi Jewish community of New York City, in contrast, saw nothing wrong in publicly demanding equal access to educational opportunity. Egged on by Wise and others, political pressure in New York City mounted for direct action against educational institutions practicing discrimination. In July, 1946, representatives of the NAACP, the Order of the Sons of Italy, the Jewish War Veterans, the American Jewish Congress, and the American Jewish Committee called on the New York City Council to investigate racial and religious discrimination in colleges, graduate schools, and professional schools. Mayor O’Dwyer agreed.110 In September, 1946, the New York City Council created a special committee to investigate why graduates of New York City’s public schools and the branches of the City University of New York had difficulty in obtaining admission for graduate and professional education. The investigation was chaired by Councilman Walter R. Hart of Brooklyn.111 Hart’s committee documented a decrease in the admission of graduates of the City University to the five private medical schools in the city: New York Homeopathic Medical College, Long Island College of Medicine, New York University, Cornell, and Columbia.112 In public hearings, Hart’s committee uncovered the existence of a 1940 letter from Dean William S. Ladd of Cornell stating that “we limit the number of Jews admitted to each class to roughly the proportion of Jews in the population of the state.” Since Cornell took eighty 109 Kaufman interview; A. J. Rongy, “Half a Century of Jewish Medical Activities in New York City,” Medical Leaves 1 (1937): 151–63. 110 “Bias Investigation in Colleges Urged,” New York Times, 11 July 1946, 26; “O’Dwyer Supports Bias Inquiry Here,” New York Times, 28 August 1946, 29. 111 “City Inquiry Voted on Bias in Colleges,” New York Times, 11 September 1946. 112 Sokoloff, “The Rise and Decline,” 503 and 510.

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new students from an applicant pool of roughly twelve hundred, and since Ladd estimated that about seven hundred of the applicants were Jews, no more than eight to twelve Jewish students matriculated at Cornell each year. Cornell’s application asked for the “racial origin or lineage” of the applicant, the “maiden name of the applicant’s mother,” and the “birthplace of the applicant’s parents.” Under questioning, Dr. Dayton J. Edwards, assistant dean of Cornell and member of the admissions committee, admitted that these questions had no bearing on an applicant’s qualifications or ability to succeed in medical school but denied “it ever occurred to him the data could be used to guess at an applicant’s race or religion.” The committee reported that about 5% of Jewish applicants to Cornell were accepted compared to 15% of Catholics and 25% of Protestants.113 Hart’s commission charged that while New York City medical schools denied, publicly, that they had quotas, many admitted to having them off the record. The commission favored legal action against discrimination by the city’s medical schools as well as the establishment of a city or state university, with professional schools, to offer equal opportunity for education. In 1946, New York State Governor and two-time Republican presidential candidate Thomas E. Dewey established a temporary commission on the need for a state university. Headed by Owen D. Young, the state commission, along with investigative efforts of the New York State Board of Regents, further documented discrimination by New York’s medical schools.114 In 1948, the New York legislature passed the Educational Practices Act, which stated that “the American ideal of equality of opportunity requires that students, otherwise qualified, be admitted to educational institutions without regard to race, color, religion, creed, or national origin.”115 In 1952, a study by the American Jewish Committee and the New York State Committee on Equality in Education showed a reduced probability of Jewish winners of the state medical scholarship getting into one of the state’s nine medical schools. Overall, Gentile scholarship winners had a 76% admission rate versus 36% for Jews.”116 A separate 1957 study by the American Jewish Committee continued to report 113 114 115 116

Sokoloff, “The Rise and Decline,” 511. B. Fine, “State University Asked at Hearing,” New York Times, 21 October 1947, 25. Quoted in Jarcho, “Medical Education in the United States,” 371. “Study Finds Jews Face Medical Bar,” New York Times, 6 June 1952, 19; “Jewish Bias Report is Expected in Fall,” New York Times, 17 June 1952, 12.

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considerably lower acceptance rates of Jewish applicants to medical school as well as Roman Catholics of Italian descent.117 A 1957 report by the Philadelphia Fellowship Commission indicated that Jewish graduates of Temple University and the University of Pennsylvania also fared less well than their Gentile classmates in obtaining admission to medical school.118

How Many Jewish Hospitals Were There? How Many Are There Now? In the United States prior to the mid-nineteenth century, there were few Jewish physicians and no Jewish hospitals. Relatively secular German-Jewish immigrants fostered the first wave of hospital construction from 1854 to 1880, starting with the establishment of the Jewish Hospital Association of Cincinnati in 1854.119 By the time of the Civil War, the Jews’ Hospital in Manhattan had opened its doors to both Jews and non-Jews, and it explicitly offered its services for the care of the Civil War wounded. Soon after the war, the hospital changed its name to the more inclusive Mount Sinai Hospital. By 1868, there were also hospitals under Jewish auspices in Baltimore, Chicago, and Philadelphia.120 The second wave of construction, from 1880 to 1945, was fostered by more religiously observant East European Jewish immigrants. In the last wave of construction, which was fueled by the Hill-Burton Act between 1945 and 1960, the number of beds in Jewish hospitals increased from 13,800 to 18,283. Philanthropic support to these institutions exceeded eighteen million dollars per year, and social prestige within the Jewish community was associated with membership on a hospital board of trustees.121 In 1966, US 117 “Hospital Found Lacking Doctors,” New York Times, 2 June 1957, 65. 118 Sokoloff, “The Rise and Decline,” 512. 119 Jacob Rader Marcus, Communal Sick Care in the German Ghetto (Cincinnati, OH: Ohio Hebrew Union College Press). 120 Wagner, “Jewish Hospitals,” 32–33, 36, 38; Kraut and Kraut, Covenant of Care, 200; H. Schneiderman, American Jewish Year Book 31 (1929–1930). 121 Wagner, “Jewish Hospitals,” 32–33, 36, 38; Kraut and Kraut, Covenant of Care; R. A. Katz, “‘Paging Dr. Shylock!’: Jewish Hospitals and the Prudent Re-investment of Jewish Philanthropy,” in Religious Giving: For the Love of God, ed. David H. Smith (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009); Barbra Mann Wall, American Catholic Hospitals: A Century of Changing Markets and Missions (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011); R. Katz, “Continuing Their Mission, Jewish Hospitals Reinvest in Philanthropy,” The Forward, 27 June 2008. http://www.forward.com/articles/13591, accessed 24 January 2012.

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Jewish hospitals had an aggregate bed capacity of 25,000, admitted more than 560,000 patients, delivered about 75,800 babies, and recorded approximately 3.5 million outpatient visits.122 The American Jewish community founded many hospitals with clearly identifiable Jewish names. Eighteen hospital names contained the word Jewish, and five contained the word Hebrew. Fourteen were named Mount Sinai or Sinai, eight were named Beth Abraham, Beth David, Beth El, or Beth Israel, three were named Montefiore, and two were named Menorah.123 It is difficult to determine the total number of Jewish hospitals founded and operated in the United States because of openings, closings, name or location changes, gaps in the historical record, consolidation of two or more hospitals under a new name, and uncertainty about distinctions between hospitals, tuberculosis sanatoriums, chronic disease care institutions, and nursing homes. In at least one case, I found that a hospital with a “Jewishsounding name” was a Protestant institution. After reviewing the published literature and consulting primary sources extensively, my best estimate is that, throughout US history, there have been 113 Jewish hospitals.124 Of these 113 hospitals, 22 (19%) are still operating independently under a name and with other characteristics that at least minimally connote a Jewish heritage, and 24 (21%) have been purchased by or merged with one of the 22 still-extant Jewish hospitals. Another 35 (31%) have closed, whereas 24 (21%) have been purchased or merged with a non-Jewish hospital chain, and 9 (8%) are operating as old age/nursing home/rehabilitation facilities. These 113 hospitals were key components of undergraduate medical education and graduate medical education (GME) in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, Los Angeles, Miami, New Orleans, New York, Philadelphia, and San Francisco, and some maintain that role today. 122 F. Rosner and H. Jongmann, “Hospitals,” Encyclopaedia Judaica, vol. 8 ( Jerusalem, Israel: Keter Publishing House, 1971): 1034–1039. 123 Ibid.; Levitan, Islands of Compassion; Bridges, “The Rise and Development”; Wagner, “Jewish Hospitals”; Kraut, Covenant of Care; Berent, Norfolk, Virginia; Edward C. Halperin, “The Jewish Problem in U.S. Medical Education,” 140–167; Zingman and Amster, A Legendary Vision; Schneiderman, ed., American Jewish Year Book 31 (1929–1930); C. Ely, Jewish Louisville: Portrait of a Community (Louisville, KY: Jewish Community Foundation of Louisville’s Foundation for Planned Giving, 2003); Ludmerer, “The Origins of Mount Sinai School,” 469–489. 124 Rosner and Jongmann, “Hospitals,” 1034–1039.

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But are the 22 hospitals that continue to operate independently still Jewish? Most have little or no input into their governance by the organized Jewish community, while their medical staffs and patient populations that are not predominantly Jewish. Several are in the process of merging with other, non-Jewish hospitals. This raises a broader issue: What does it mean to be an American Jewish hospital?

What Is a Jewish Hospital? To define what it means to be a Roman Catholic hospital in the United States, you could turn to the Catholic Church’s ethical and religious directives regarding the operations of hospital and health systems and, by analyzing them, understand what a hospital would need to do to meet the standards.125 There are, in contrast, no equivalent documents that could help you determine what is and what is not a Jewish hospital. It is not surprising that there is no consensus among American Jews concerning the definition or mission of a Jewish hospital. The Jewish community in the United States is characterized by a wide diversity of beliefs and ritual practices, a high rate of intermarriage, and low rates of synagogue membership and attendance. The largest American Jewish denomination, Reform, tried to craft an official prayer book in 1975 and ended up with ten different Sabbath evening prayer services reflecting alternative, and sometimes contradictory, theological perspectives (a subsequent Reform prayer book provided a more unified approach).126 For the purposes of this article, I will define a Jewish hospital as one which possesses most of the following characteristics:127 • • • •

a name designed to identify the hospital as being under Jewish auspices, governance derived primarily from the Jewish community, a predominantly Jewish administrative and medical staff, philanthropic support obtained primarily from the Jewish community,

125 Wall, American Catholic Hospitals; US Conference of Catholic Bishops, Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services, 5th ed. http://www.usccb.org/about/ doctrine/ethical-and-religious-directives/, accessed 27 January 2012. 126 D. E. Kaplan, “The Theological Roots of Reform Judaism’s Woes,” The Forward, 25 February 2011. http://www.forward.com/articles/135476/, accessed 24 January 2012. 127 Bridges, “The Rise and Development.”

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a history of founding principally by members of the Jewish community who, in the founding documents, indicated that they were building a hospital primarily to serve Jewish patients and physicians, and availability of Jewish religious practices (e.g., kosher food, ritual circumcision of newborns, respect for Jewish tradition regarding autopsy, placement of Jewish ritual symbols).

Using this definition, not more than five contemporary American hospitals with Jewish names meet most of the criteria (in contrast to the decline of Jewish hospitals, an increasing proportion of US hospital beds are in Catholic hospitals).128 For many secular American Jews, however, it may be sufficient to define the remaining Jewish hospitals as Jewish if they are “not Christian” (i.e., if they do not display Christmas trees or other outward signs of Christian observance).

The Fall of Jewish Hospitals There are three major reasons for the disappearance of American Jewish hospitals: economics, decline in anti-Semitism, and demographic changes that affect philanthropy. I will consider each of these below.

Economics Jewish hospitals are subject to the same marketplace pressures as their non-Jewish counterparts. Changes in Medicare regulations in the 1970s and 1980s, the rise of health maintenance organizations in the 1990s, and advances in medical technology prompted a wave of hospital acquisitions and mergers in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. While large, for-profit entities entered the industry, many small hospitals were impelled to close or consolidate. These changes particularly affected independent, community-based hospitals, including Jewish hospitals.129

Decline in anti-Semitism Institutionalized anti-Semitism in the United States declined appreciably after World War II. Hitler and the European Holocaust drove home the 128 Wall, American Catholic Hospitals. 129 Bridges, “The Rise and Development”; Katz, “‘Paging Dr. Shylock!,’” in Religious Giving; Katz, “Continuing Their Mission.”

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consequences of anti-Semitism and made anti-Semitic comments and overt practice less socially acceptable in the United States. Returning Gentile veterans seemed less tolerant of discrimination, and Jewish veterans were unwilling to accept it. A strong economy removed some of the fear of economic competition surrounding Jews. President Harry S. Truman’s Commission on Higher Education recommended that colleges and universities remove questions on applications pertaining to religion, color, or national origin. Supreme Court decisions and civil rights legislation mandated equal opportunity. In 1950 a national conference on higher education called the quota system “undesirable and undemocratic.” Little of the liberalization of medical school admissions policies directed toward Jews can be attributed to the leadership of organized US medicine such as the AMA or AAMC. Most of the change was induced by societal change and political pressure exerted by concerned laymen. By the mid-1950s the proportion of Jewish medical students in many schools rose. Currently, overt Jewish quotas are unknown, although subtle discrimination may still exist in some schools and residency programs. Blatant anti-Semitic quotas designed to restrict Jews’ access to medical school, internship and residency, and hospital staff privileges declined in the 1960s. Such quotas and restrictions are now both socially unacceptable and illegal. The impetus for Jewish hospitals as a response to anti-Semitism in the medical profession has therefore largely disappeared. For example, part of the motivation for New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital to establish its own medical school was to preserve a pipeline for recruiting Jewish physicians and scientists who were, by the 1960s, able to secure positions elsewhere.130 Jewish applicants for GME positions may now seek jobs at any US teaching hospital. Similarly, practicing Jewish physicians may apply for staff privileges anywhere without concern that their religion will stand in the way.

Demographics and philanthropy Finally, the population of self-identifying Jews is shrinking as a proportion of the total US population. In the 1940s, the Jewish population peaked at 3.7% of

130 Ludmerer, “The Origins of Mount Sinai School,” 469–489.

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the US population.131 In 2010, the Jewish population comprised 1.9% to 2.2% of the US population.132 There has also been a general assimilation of the American Jewish community. The intermarriage rate is approximately 50%. Polling of American Jews shows that affirmative responses to the statement “I have a strong sense of belonging to the Jewish people” decline according to the age of respondents, from a high of 72% among individuals aged sixty-five years or older to a low of 47% for adults younger than thirty-five.133 Further, the number of American Jews reporting that most of their close friends are Jewish fell by 10% from 1990 to 2000.134 The proportions of American Jews belonging to Jewish organizations other than synagogues and Jewish community centers, of those saying they have made donations to the Jewish Federation (the Jewish community-wide charitable body), and of those observing religious rituals have also decreased.135 Similarly, the proportion of Jews holding the traditional Jewish viewpoint that all Jews are responsible for one another is declining. A 1998 survey reported that only 52% of American Jews agreed with the statement “I look at the entire Jewish community as my extended family,” and 47% agreed that “I have a special responsibility to take care of Jews in need around the world.”136 131 Sarna, American Judaism. 132 Ibid.; Gal Beckerman, “New Study Finds More Jews in the United States than Previously Thought,” The Forward, 31 December 2010. http://www.forward.com/articles/134138/, accessed 24 January 2012; Leonard Saxe, US Jewry 2010: Estimates of the Size and Characteristics of the Population. http://www.brandeis.edu/cmjs/pdfs/AJS.SSRI_Population. pdf, accessed 24 January 2012; Leonard Saxe et al, The 2005 Boston Community Survey: Preliminary Findings. http://www.cjp.org/local_includes/downloads/16072.pdf, accessed 24 January 2012. 133 Steven M. Cohen, A Tale of Two Jewries: The “Inconvenient Truth” for American Jews. http:// www.jewishlife.org/pdf/steven_cohen_paper.pdf, accessed 24 January 2012. 134 Saxe et al., The 2005 Boston Community Survey; Chaim I. Waxman, “American Jewish Identity and New Patterns of Philanthropy,” in The Call of the Homeland: Diaspora Nationalisms, Past and Present, eds. Allon Gal, Athena S. Leoussi, and Anthony D. Smith (Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2010), 81–104; Chaim I. Waxman, “American Jewish Philanthropy, Direct Giving, and the Unity of the Jewish Community,” in Toward a Renewed Ethic of Jewish Philanthropy, ed. Yossi Prager (New York, NY: Yeshiva University Press, 2010), 53–77. 135 Waxman , “American Jewish Identity,” in The Call of the Homeland, 81–104; Waxman, “American Jewish Philanthropy,” in Toward a Renewed Ethic of Jewish Philanthropy, 53–77. 136 Sarna, American Judaism.

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It is not surprising therefore, that philanthropic support for Jewish hospitals has also declined among American Jews. Organizations that were founded to provide services or employment mostly to Jews have quietly broadened their missions to accommodate and serve a diverse audience in order to survive. Jewish hospitals located in urban, historically Jewish neighborhoods have seen their constituencies move to the suburbs, where suburban Jews have sometimes created new hospitals. Often, the Jewish hospitals that were “left behind” have disappeared, although there are a few notable exceptions that either have carved out a market niche or have persisted because of a concentration of urban Orthodox Jews. Traditionally, Jewish Americans concentrated their charitable donations on Jewish causes. However, the proportion of wealthy American Jews focusing on Jewish communal organizations as the major locus of their philanthropy has fallen from near 100% to 33%. Jewish Federation support to hospitals has also fallen: In 1959, approximately 25% of the total funds available to Jewish Federations for local purposes were spent on hospitals and other medical programs. After the creation of Medicare in 1966 and the states’ widespread adoption of Medicaid in 1967, hospitals began to derive large proportions of their income from these two government-funded sources and from insurance payers. In light of these changes, by 1967, Jewish philanthropic bodies were reassessing the rationale for Jewish hospitals and hospitals’ continued need for Jewish Federation financing. By the end of the twentieth century, Jewish hospitals received less than 2% of their revenue from Jewish umbrella funds or Federations.137 Concurrent with the decline in impetus for American Jews to provide philanthropic support to Jewish hospitals, there has been a rise in the acceptance of Jews into upper-class social circles in the United States. Not surprisingly, this rise has been associated with philanthropy from Jews being directed to secular universities, opera companies, symphonies, museums, social and civic causes, and non-Jewish hospitals and medical schools. For example, after World War II, Cornell University Medical College was threatened with lawsuits and 137 Katz, “‘Paging Dr. Shylock!,’” in Religious Giving; Harry L. Lurie, A Heritage Affirmed: The Jewish Federation Movement in America (Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1961); Jack Wertheimer, “Current Trends in American Jewish Philanthropy,” American Jewish Year Book 92 (1999): 3–83.

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governmental hearings regarding its admission quotas that discriminated against Jewish applicants. Now, the Weill Cornell Medical College is named after a Jewish philanthropist and his wife who donated several hundred million dollars to a medical school that probably would not have admitted Mr. Weill’s coreligionists in generations past.

Conclusion: Does It Matter? Following a period of rapid immigration of eastern European Jews to the United States from 1880 to 1914, Jewish applications for admission to medical school increased sharply in the 1920s and 1930s. While the proportion of Jewish medical students rose, this was not commensurate with the increase in Jewish applicants. The discrepancy between the proportion of Jewish applicants and the proportion of Jewish matriculants was justified, at some medical schools, by a stated belief in proportional representation of in-state applicants. This proportional representation, of course, was invoked only for Jews and not for women, African Americans, or any other group that the medical schools wished to exclude. Many schools clearly established a “gentleman’s agreement” of restrictive quotas. Many medical school deans and directors of post-graduate medical education programs harbored anti-Semitic views. Individual Jews and the Jewish community responded to discrimination in a variety of ways. Some urged assimilation, acceptance, and accommodation. Others flocked to schools that did not discriminate, went abroad to medical school, or started their own medical schools and post-graduate programs. Ultimately, through political channels, particularly in New York State, pressure was brought to bear against discrimination. The quotas began to wane after World War II. Many Jewish hospitals have been sold, and the proceeds of those sales have been used to endow grant-making foundations. Recent sales have created assets that constitute almost 5% of the total assets of Jewish foundations. Some of these Jewish foundations have concentrated their grant making on health and human services, whereas others have focused on the needs of elderly Jews, recent immigrants from the former Soviet Union, people with disabilities, and Holocaust survivors.138 138 Katz, “‘Paging Dr. Shylock!,’” in Religious Giving.

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But does the disappearance of American Jewish hospitals matter? It seems to be to the detriment of traditional Jewish commitments to education and to provision of health care to the poor. Also, it is a loss to the extent that Jewish hospitals have served as a “public face” of the Jewish community in the United States. On the other hand, American Jewish hospitals may be the victims of the American Jewish community’s successes. In the late twentieth century, the American Jewish community secured consistent support for Israel, participated in successful efforts to release a million Jews from the former Soviet Union, won widespread recognition of the Holocaust, and helped strike down residual, institutionalized anti-Semitism in housing, resorts, university admissions, and employment. Further, the multiple achievements of the American Jewish community in the medical profession, the decline in anti-Semitism, open access to GME positions and hospital privileges, and the general acceptance of Jews in the American mainstream have, in many cases, made American Jewish hospitals into historical artifacts. In addition, although there are some areas in the United States with high concentrations of Orthodox Jews, the majority of American Jews do not insist that hospitals provide kosher food, Sabbath elevators, a synagogue, and a Jewish administrative and medical staff. Many of the remaining “Jewish hospitals” are simply bricks and mortar with Jewish plaques and signs that no longer meet the criteria that would define them as Jewish. The evolving US hospital marketplace and cultural changes have combined, in large measure, to make the distinctly Jewish hospital an endangered species that will likely survive in only a few places. These disappearing hospitals leave behind a proud legacy: they are institutions that succeeded so profoundly in abetting the success of the American Jewish community that they became unnecessary.

Emancipation, Modernity, and Jewish Identity in America* Mervin F. Verbit It is as true for sociology as for history that any analysis of human behavior should take account of the relevant historical background. In order to understand ourselves, we need to know how we became what we are. The process of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in which Jews in Europe were given the same political status and rights that were then opened to the rest of society is known as the Emancipation and is universally recognized as a major transition in the history of the Jews. It is always one of the significant dividing lines in the periodization of Jewish history. The Enlightenment, with its new ideologies, and the Emancipation, with its new institutional norms and structures, together constitute the gateway to the modern era. Historians differ about which specific event marks the threshold to modernity, if indeed there was a single threshold, but all agree that the Enlightenment and the Emancipation made the world—and the Jews—modern.1 There have been many changes, both within the Jewish people and in the larger societies in which Jews lived, that required the Jews to organize their communal affairs and their individual lives in new ways. The Emancipation went much further. It generated fundamental changes in the very character of Jewish identity, with profound consequences for Jewish beliefs, attitudes,

* 1

The assistance of Dovber Seldowitz in preparing the footnotes, especially those on classical Jewish sources, is gratefully acknowledged. The literature on modern Jewish history is, of course, voluminous. The most recognized summary treatment of when the modern period begins is probably Michael A. Meyer, “Where does the Modern Period of Jewish History Begin?” Judaism 24, no. 3 (1975): 329–338.

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behavior, and institutions. Thus, the Emancipation may well be the most important transition in the history of the Jewish diaspora. Although the conditions of Jewish life often changed, sometimes radically, the basic sense of what being Jewish meant remained stable from place to place and age to age. There were, of course, many controversies among Jews, and they were sometimes bitter. Jews disagreed about such matters as the proper interpretation of the sacred literature, the specifics of law, the relative emphases among the elements of the religious life, and the appropriate way to deal with the Jewish community’s internal and external issues. Jews famously and significantly argued about almost everything, and Jewish history is replete with controversy. Jewish table talk thrives on it, Jewish learning masters it, surveys of Jewish opinion measure and analyze it, and some of the best-known Jewish jokes depend on it. Rarely have the Jews responded to history’s challenges—big or small, internal or external—with one voice. There are almost always multiple interpretations of the Jewish situation and equally numerous approaches to dealing with it. However, there is one subject on which Judaism’s ample classical literature of controversies has no entry. The basic meaning and character of Jewish identity were not issues until modern times. Indeed, the very concept of Jewish identity emerged only recently out of the modern condition. The Emancipation was a change unlike the others that Jews had confronted. Its offer of a new relationship with the nations of the world was conditioned on the Jews defining their Jewishness in fundamentally new ways. The Emancipation was not, so to speak, a coup d’état in which one set of powers replaced another, bringing with it new policies on old issues. Rather, it was literally part of a revolution, whose goal was to put life’s pieces together in new configurations. What is more, it was not addressed to the Jews alone. It was seen as nothing less than a new understanding of society and of society’s relationship to the people in it, initially for the Western world and eventually, it was thought, for all humanity. Behavior is often explained as a response to the situations in which people find themselves, but people’s interpretations of those situations are more consequential than the situations themselves. Ever since Max Weber, defining the subject of sociology, made verstehen a technical term in research methodology,2 2

This idea can be found in several places in Weber’s collected work. See, for example, Max Weber, Basic Concepts of Sociology, trans. H. P. Secher (New York: Philosophical Library, 1962), 29–58.

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and William Isaac Thomas and Dorothy Swaine Thomas made “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences” an axiom in the analysis of human behavior,3 it has been clear that people’s understandings frame and mold their actions. Knowing what sociologists call the “definition of the situation” (how people define their situations and themselves in those situations) is, therefore, essential to any sound analysis of human behavior. The ways in which Jews respond to any situation in which they find themselves depend on their interpretations of what being Jewish means. Western societies have undergone many profound changes in the last few centuries: urbanization, industrialization, technological advancement, diffusion of political and economic power, rationalism, individualism, relativism, pluralism, secularization, specialization (division of labor), and diffusion of the ideas of liberty and equality. Of the many changes that constitute the transition to modernity, the two that have had the greatest direct impact on Jewish identity are secularism and individualism. Jewishness is at its core a matter of religion and peoplehood, and these two dimensions of what it means to be a Jew are thoroughly interwoven. Jewish religion requires a Jewish people as a structured collective entity for its fulfillment, and the Jewish people gets its distinctive character from its religious self-definition. In light of the racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity among Jews, as well as the variations in their situation in the world at any given time, it may well be that what holds Jews together, aside from religious selfdefinition, is only a common name, and a common name is hardly a basis for unity or long-term viability. Individualism and secularism are the ideas that challenge the two defining elements of Jewishness and, therefore, they have had the most serious effect on Jewish identity. The ideology of individualism goes far beyond recognition of the value and dignity of the individual person. It rests on the belief that the individual person alone is inherently meaningful. It views institutional arrangements as derivative, with their legitimacy contingent on the satisfaction of individuals’ needs and desires. That idea is a fundamental tenet of the modern outlook, and it echoes through all of society’s institutional spheres in ways so basic that they are usually taken to be axiomatic. 3

William Isaac Thomas and Dorothy Swaine Thomas, The Child in America (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1928), 571–572.

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The political expression of individualism is the principle that the polity is in essence only an arrangement among its individual members, to whom it belongs and whose convenience, according to a balance of individual judgments, it serves. In its fullest expression, this view mandates that individual rights always outweigh collective interests and should be compromised only in the face of opposing individual rights. Individualism’s economic manifestation is the principle of individual ownership. Modern Western cultures are clear that a person has the right to do whatever he wants with his money, however it affects others and the body politic as a whole, just so it is legal, and a heavy burden of proof is placed on any proposal to limit that freedom by law. References to Judaism’s notions that people are only “custodians” or “trustees” of wealth that ultimately belongs to God4 are seen as metaphorical and sermonic. An individual generous Jew may feel guided by them, but they are not given any institutional effect. Individualism’s psychological expression is the belief that individuals should be able to function on their own. Psychological therapy attempts to repair any inability to cope alone with the problems that life places in our path. While it is nice to have assistance, and we urge people to help one another personally and in support groups, we still maintain that the ideal is to be independent and to be able, if necessary, to manage our lives alone. Philosophically, questions about the meaning of life are most often posed, and usually answered, in terms of the individual’s life. Life is seen as being about what individuals think, feel, and do as they attempt to fulfill themselves. Society and culture are typically treated as the stage setting of life, not as the subject of life’s core plot. Ironically, individualism even echoes through sociology. Despite sociology’s defining insight that society cannot be reduced to individual behavior, individual fulfillment remains the usual legitimation of cultural norms and structural arrangements. Institutions and organizations tend to be evaluated with regard to how well they serve the needs of individuals. “The greatest good for the greatest number” may sound like a social good, but it is really a totaling up of individual benefits. The call to respect individual dignity and to

4

Jacob ben Asher, Arba’ah Turim: Yoreh Deah, par. 247.

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meet individuals’ needs has morphed into the idea that only the individual has inherent worth. In Judaism, society and history have their own inherent value, as is made clear at the very beginning. The first instruction that God gives to His justcreated humanity in the biblical account of creation is to “be fruitful and multiply.”5 It would be hard to understand the primacy of procreation if the purpose of life were located in the individual person. However, if God’s central purpose for humans is vested in their role in a historical process, then having children is clearly and necessarily the first requirement. It, alone, guarantees that there will be history. In Judaism, geulah (redemption) refers not to the salvation of the individual, but to the fulfillment of history. Community is also essential. As the Bible continues, God, assessing Adam, concludes that “it is not good for man to be alone.”6 If that were simply because it is nice to have other people around, then God could have solved Adam’s problem by giving him a group of friends. However, the solution to Adam’s aloneness is a wife, and the solution clarifies the problem. Marriage is the only relationship in which, in theory if not always in reality, two people are totally open to each other with no aspect of life or dimension of being veiled. In every other relationship something about a person remains private, outside of and irrelevant to the relationship. Something remains the individual’s. Only in marriage is everything opened up, nothing reserved in principle to the individual alone. Marriage removes the protective shell around the individual, leaving the person always linked to an other. That many marriages are purposely structured differently is another reflection of the modern ethos emphasizing the centrality of the individual. The biblical account seems to be telling us that the individual, alone, is inadequate to the realization of Divine purpose, because the purpose of life does not inhere in the individual but rather in the collective over historic time. Our linkages to others vary in substance and strength, but a person engaged in fulfilling life’s purpose is never alone. The same point is made again and again in Jewish thought. A few examples will illustrate this emphasis on the collectivity as essential. Classical 5 6

Genesis 1:28. Genesis 2:18.

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Judaism posits seven basic laws for the “children of Noah,”7 that is, for all humanity. One of those laws mandates the establishment of a legal system, symbolizing and incorporating values and norms rooted in culture and social interaction. Although Abraham was the first Jew, God’s revelation of Torah defining the Jewish way of life was not given to him (except, according to some commentaries, privately for his personal guidance).8 God waited until there was a Jewish people, a society, to receive and implement the Torah. The 613 commandments, Judaism’s understanding of proper Jewish living, are the collective possession of the Jewish people. No individual Jew can possibly observe them all, because some are relevant only to people in specified roles and positions. In Judaism, the Jewish people is not simply the coming together of individual Jews in order to organize the activities they wish to do together. Rather, it is an entity with its own collective character and purpose. Individual Jews derive their meaning and place in history and the cosmos from their being part of the Jewish people. In classical Jewish thought, the individual Jew’s place in humanity is derived from his being part of the Jewish collectivity. The spectrum of Jewish thought includes many approaches to how the special role of the Jews should be played out, but a unifying theme runs through the varieties of interpretation. All peoples, of course, are unique in that they are different in one way or another from other peoples. The distinctiveness of the Jews is that the Jewish people committed itself to play a special role in the unfolding of human history toward its fulfillment. For theological traditionalists, that role was accepted literally in the Covenant at Sinai; according to theological liberals, it emerged metaphorically over history. In any case, a core idea of Judaism is that the Jews have a distinctive historic role as a structured polity. By contrast, in the ethos of individualism the validity of society is derivative. Attachment to groups is an individual option to be exercised for the realization of individual goals. Groups do not have inherent meaning. Only the individual person matters, and liberty comes to mean that all are free to do as they wish so long as they do not interfere with the freedom of others. The scope of individual decision is broadened, and the widest range of options 7 8

Talmud—Sanhedrin 56a-b; Moses Maimonides, Mishneh Torah: Hilchot Melachim, par. 8:14. Talmud—Yoma 28b.

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is considered not only legitimate but desirable. Individualism thus brings with it growing relativism. As individuals become detached from their cultures and as technology provides familiarity with cultures from all over the world, a large array of alternatives for individual expression becomes available, and the ability—indeed, the need—to choose among them constitutes the essential human condition. Although the options are influenced, sometimes circumscribed, by many factors (national origin, gender, race, age, religious affiliation, education, occupation, class, and all the other characteristics that sociologists routinely treat as independent variables), in theory there are no constraints. Moreover, the less limited one is by the social categories into which one falls, the more liberated one is seen to be. Indeed, the ability to transcend the consequences of cultural conditioning comes to be regarded as a positive goal of education. In contemporary free societies, individuals can construct their lives out of whatever cultural materials they have at hand, and there is no expectation that they will end up where they started. Their parents’ choices may get the first hearing, but there is no expectation that they will maintain their parents’ ways. Indeed, young people are encouraged to chart their own course, as each person works out his own “life-style,” a term which implies that our choices are not rooted in mandated values or basic life goals, but rather are only a matter of style. Judaism always insisted on the value and the dignity of the individual, teaching that every person is unique, that saving one person is tantamount to saving the whole world, and that the individual is a microcosm of all being.9 It did so, however, in the context of the individual’s place in history and society. Modern individualism undermines, and would even deny and shatter, the inherent link between Jewish persons and the Jewish people. That constitutes a fundamental change in the very nature of Jewish identity. Secularism, another basic ingredient of the modern outlook, is the second major force re-shaping Jewish identity. Atheism asserts that there is no God. Atheists disagree about whether religion is useful, harmful, or just irrelevant, but they agree in rejecting its basic doctrinal claims. By contrast, secularism

9

See, for example, Talmud—Berachot 58a; Talmud—Sanhedrin 37a; Avot D’Rabbi Natan, par. 31.

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does not deny religion, at least not explicitly. Its goal is to limit religion’s role, especially in the public arena, but in the private sphere as well. Secularism confines religion to the church, stripping it of the power that it was wont to wield in societies where it shaped politics, economics, culture, education, art, health care, and virtually everything else. The secular perspective sees religious life as a legitimate choice that people can make, as long as they do not try to impose its norms on anyone else. Secularism sees religion as a repository of hymns, stories, poems, maxims, and celebrations that can beautify life and give it charm, but it wants religion kept in its place, and that place is modest. The actual criteria for decision-making in public affairs, and increasingly in the private realm as well, are not to be derived from religious principles. Those principles, when cited on public and official occasions, are quoted in the service of norms that are rooted in and justified by secular ideologies. Indeed, secularism got much of its impetus from the desire to circumscribe religion’s power after a period in which religious authorities controlled most social institutions and often tried to force non-adherents to convert. The secular perspective sees people as “more religious” or “less religious,” depending on how many elements of religious belief, practice, and feeling they incorporate into their lives. That conceptualization views religion as an anthology of items from which people choose whichever and as many as they want. Serious traditional religion, by contrast, claims that its values are rooted in ultimate truth, and, therefore, that religion must have pride of place and determinative influence. Religion need not, and usually does not, imply that public governance should be in the hands of ecclesiastical leaders or that God wants human behavior narrowly circumscribed. Most religions allow more latitude and discretion in conducting human affairs than might be apparent from the way in which religious authorities have sometimes managed things when they have had political power in their hands. Secularism was strengthened by another element of culture in the modern era. Science was so impressive in its achievements in the Enlightenment period that the scientific frame of mind came to be viewed as appropriate for all areas of understanding. “Scientism” (the belief that scientific canons of thought have universal applicability) thus became a hallmark of the modern outlook, and scientism made serious traditional religion look quaintly anachronistic.

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In science, progress is inevitable. We always know more than we used to. In the modern canon, humanity also improves over time in its understanding and in its moral character. History is understood as an upward path from ignorance and barbarism to enlightenment and refinement, with progress in human affairs the inevitable result of intellectual and moral evolution. Religions, by contrast, do not believe in the inevitability of goodness, trying instead to encourage the good by nurturing the behaviors that they consider proper. (Indeed, some religions describe descent from a glorious past.) Religion, therefore, appeared to be out of step with prevailing assumptions. In science, conclusions are not reached unless there is sufficient empirical evidence, and the modern outlook insists that assertions and decisions should be based on demonstrable facts. Religion at its core is about life’s most fundamental choices, which by their very nature are made in the absence of scientifically provable facts. Faith may be informed by experience and elaborated through reason, but religion rests finally on a leap of faith. There are never enough “hard” facts to prove religion’s doctrinal assertions. Science’s principles are always open to change. Indeed, science celebrates discoveries that change, or even reverse, its fundamental formulations. Religion claims that its principles may be applied in new ways to changing conditions and that our understanding of those principles can deepen and expand, but the principles themselves are eternal. Science is about means, not goals. It discovers how we can be faster, stronger, bigger (or, these days, smaller), more efficient, and more effective, but it cannot tell us what to do with the enhanced power that it gives us. It extends our reach, but it cannot tell us what to reach for. The modern frame of mind emphasizes means over goals. It is likely to praise the pragmatist and disparage the ideologue. It proclaims that “It is the journey that counts more than the destination” and “The question matters more than the answer.” Similarly, modern art explores color, shape, texture, and perspective, often in interesting, novel, and attractive ways, but it is less likely than classical art to create a picture of something. Modern music experiments with tonal systems, tempi, and ways of making sound beyond the orchestra’s usual instruments, but it rarely has the kind of tune that that you can hum on the way out of the music hall. The focus of the modern outlook, as in science, is on means. By contrast, religion is essentially about life’s fundamental goals. Religions articulate their

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sense of what those goals are, and they encourage ways of living that are explicit means toward the achievement of those goals. For these reasons among others, religion in modern societies was not only circumscribed. It also came to appear dissonant with what was considered the most sophisticated understanding of life. In a cultural milieu dominated by the tenets of modernity, serious religion is legitimate for those who want it, but it is typically patronized as less than “cutting edge.” It can be useful as a source of beautiful materials when carefully winnowed, but it is not a guide to life in its own terms. Thus, the secularism and individualism of the Enlightenment and the Emancipation challenged both religion and peoplehood, the two intertwined defining elements of Jewish identity. The Emancipation was not simply a promised improvement in the Jews’ political situation. It transformed the way in which Jewishness was conceptualized by the cultures in which Jews lived and, increasingly and more importantly, by most of the Jews themselves. That transformation made many Jews question Judaism’s central ideas about the historical role and structure of the Jews. A central concern of most nineteenth- and twentieth-century Jewish thought was the relationship between classical Jewish ideas and the new political realities of Jewish life, as Jewish thinkers explored ways in which Jews could respond to the bargain offered by the Emancipation while remaining authentically Jewish. Jews were offered, at least officially, the status of equal individuals in their societies. In return, they were expected to understand Jewishness as a “religious preference” limited to a relatively inconsequential private sphere rather than as the identity that framed their entire lives, both internally and in the context of their host societies. Jewish organizations would be voluntary associations of like-minded individuals doing certain activities together rather than the institutions of a full-blown Jewish community with its own norms, procedures, and mutual responsibilities. Jewish “people” would be a plural noun. This new opportunity to be equal citizens was placed before the Jews, and most Jews wanted to enjoy its benefits. While Jewish thinkers and leaders were debating about this deal in articles, books, sermons, speeches, and proclamations, the folk were working out the same issue through myriad large and small personal decisions which, though less

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eloquent and systematic than the treatises, were more consequential for the character of Jewish identity and Jewish institutions. In Europe, the process of Emancipation was slow, uneven, and often painful. In the United States, it was relatively easy, although not totally without communal troubles and personal tragedies. America was different. It had no feudal history and no counterrevolution. It never had a semi-autonomous chartered Jewish community. Its official norms always leaned toward the modern perspective, and, if they were not consistently carried out in practice, they were at least recognized in principle as the ideals of the society. In order to understand the dynamics of Jewish identity in twentieth-century America, it must be remembered that for the overwhelming majority of contemporary American Jews Emancipation occurred only when their forebears left Eastern Europe for America. Western and Central European Jews confronted Emancipation in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but the Jews of Eastern Europe were not offered the benefits, or the obligations, of Emancipation. The two million Jews who came to the United States from Russia, Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, Belarus, and the neighboring areas between 1881 and 1924, and whose descendants have since then constituted the vast majority of American Jewry and its leaders, had to deal with the Emancipation’s challenges only upon their arrival on western shores. Their place in society went through its watershed not when a new regime or a new political system took over in their home, but when they reached their new home. For them the United States really was a new world. As a result, the changes in Jewish identity that took place in early twentieth-century America can be understood as immediate responses to the ideas and opportunities of Emancipation. A note on terminology. The word “generation” is used in several senses. In demography, the first generation are the immigrants, the second generation are their children (which is to say the first generation born in the new country), the third generation are their grandchildren, and so forth. A more social and cultural definition is better for our purposes. A child who arrived as a two year-old is much more like the second-generation child born in America than like the adult immigrant who grew up in the old country. Sociologically, it makes more sense, therefore, to use first generation to refer to people whose primary socialization took place in the old country and second generation to refer to the first

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generation that grew up in America, either because they came here as very young children or because they were born in America to immigrant parents. That usage, of course, means that immigrants who arrived between the ages of, say, five and fifteen are hard to classify by generation, because their primary socialization was divided between two cultural contexts. The third sense in which the term generation is often used refers to significantly different stages of some process as they emerge over time, as in the first, second, third, and subsequent generations of, for example, cell phones or computers. Generation will be used here in a combination of the last two meanings: socialization and stage of development. By first generation we shall mean those immigrants who came late in life and typically made fewer adjustments to American culture. By second generation we shall mean the immigrants who came young enough to want to become Americans in a full cultural sense as well as the first generation to be socialized in America. Their impact was felt mostly from the beginning of the twentieth century until the 1930s. Their children, the third generation, from about the 1940s to the mid-1960s, showed the effects of the changes that their second-generation parents made to accommodate Jewishness to the new American context. Following a number of dramatic and far-reaching changes in both Jewish life and the larger American culture during the 1960s and 1970s, the fourth generation emerged. The descriptions of the Jewish identities of the second, third, and fourth generations that follow are modal. Our purpose is to show how the Emancipation and its related ideas affected the Jewish identity of most American Jews. One of the axioms of sociological analysis could be stated as “Everyone has a cousin who’s different.” Sociologists identify general patterns of behavior, and there are always people who are atypical. Whether or not exceptions prove a rule, they surely do not disprove it (unless the rule is posited as universal). No pattern of Jewish identity in twentieth-century America was universal. Obviously, many Jews differed from these modal types, and even the modal kind of Jewish identity had variations of detail. However, there were typical patterns, and these shaped the dominant contours of American Jewish life. It should be noted at the outset that the story of changing Jewish identity in twentieth-century America is about Jews who wanted to remain Jewish. The Jews who wanted to leave the Jewish people did so. It was easy in America. There was no need, as in earlier times, to convert formally and to register as

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something. In America a person could simply be “none of the above.” All that was needed was a change of address, perhaps a change of name, a convenient marriage, and a willingness not to discuss—or perhaps to deny—one’s background. America’s Bartholdys do not have children known to history as Mendelssohn. Jews who wanted to assimilate, did. The Jews who changed the character of Jewish identity remained Jewish. The changes were for them a way to maintain Jewishness. The second generation of American Jews in the twentieth century made two basic changes in their conceptualization of Jewishness. One entailed circumscription of the sphere of Jewishness in the life of the individual. Whenever Jews live in the context of non-Jewish culture, the scope of Jewishness is an issue, and it becomes especially salient when the host society offers equal status on condition that Jewishness be only a part, usually a minor part, of a Jew’s total being. Since second-generation American Jews were eager to demonstrate that they were fully American and that America was right to give them equality, they felt the need to restrict the relevance of their Jewishness to a clearly circumscribed part of life, leaving the remainder as territory inhabited equally with other Americans. Where this change started as a tactic directed outward, it soon became an internalized adoption of perceived general American norms. (It is one of the generalizations of sociology that people who are marginal, in transition from one status to another, almost always overshoot the mark in their efforts to show that they fit the status toward which they are moving.) For the majority of the second generation, the part of life that was Jewish was religion. However, it was religion in the limited sense of holiday celebrations, rituals, myths, maxims, and some general ideas about God and ethical values. It was not, for these Jews, a coherent and comprehensive set of basic beliefs and life-patterns that differentiate people from one another in philosophically profound and socially consequential ways. For most, it was more symbolic than significant. A second, “cultural,” option was chosen by a small proportion of Jews who expressed their Jewishness primarily through special appreciation of Hebrew and/or Yiddish language and literature. The majority of such Jews were not particularly religious or involved in the Jewish community’s affairs in other ways. A third approach focused on political and social issues, with Jewishness expressed mainly through activity supporting such liberal causes as the labor movement, welfare programs, and equal rights legislation.

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A fourth group, which emphasized philanthropy (the often-unjustly maligned “check-book Jews”), expressed their Jewishness primarily by supporting and managing the organizations and agencies that provided health and welfare services for fellow Jews and also for non-Jews. A fifth type of Jewish selfexpression focused on the position of Jews in society and worked to achieve equality for all segments of the American population. A sixth emphasis was expressed in the choice of other Jews as social companions, often as a result of discrimination that excluded them from general social settings. It was heavy in “fellow feeling” but usually light in Jewish content other than food preferences, in-jokes, and, perhaps, an occasional lecture or artistic performance. Each of these modes of circumscription focused on one or another of the dimensions of classical Jewish identity while minimizing the others. Each variant of primary Jewish expression generated its own set of organizations. Most Jewish organizations in the period of the second generation had a well-defined and limited scope of activity. These organizations served as vehicles through which Jews carried out narrowly circumscribed interpretations of how being Jewish should—and did—affect their lives. A study of the letterheads of most Jewish organizations in the second generation would most likely show very little overlap of leadership, aside from the occasional distinguished Jew willing to lend his name, usually in an honorary capacity, to a wide range of worthy causes. The second change that this generation made in its conceptualization of Jewishness was the notion that being Jewish did not make them significantly different from their non-Jewish neighbors. They encouraged and explicitly articulated an ethos of non-distinctiveness. They wanted to show their fellow citizens that equality was their due because Jews were like all other people. The similarities between Jews and others were highlighted as essential, and the differences were downplayed as matters of detail. There was another reason for cultivating the idea that being Jewish did not set a person apart in any significant way. The prevailing ideological justification for amicable intergroup relations in America in the early twentieth century was that people are all basically alike and should, therefore, treat others with empathy. The characteristics that served as a basis for discrimination were supposed to be seen as a minor—even a negligible—part of a person’s identity. People were encouraged to underplay their own and others’ ethnic, religious,

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and racial identities and, as enlightened people, to reach for a fuller appreciation of what we all have in common. The “buzz words” of the time were individualism, humanism, and universalism. Dwelling on one’s ethnic or religious background (the word itself is indicative: “background” is in the past) was seen as a sign of parochialism. Those who wanted to “get ahead” were expected to transcend what were then typically referred to as the “accidents of birth” that identified them ethnically or religiously and to demonstrate universal human concerns and attitudes. Race, of course, could not be abandoned in practice, but racial minorities were expected to set aside concern with the affairs of their group if they wanted to achieve upward mobility. (As we shall see later, things have changed in this regard.) The second generation of American Jews wanted to show that the differences between them and other Americans were superficial. Most Jews took pains to speak of their distinctiveness as a minor variation in the expression of the common values, ideals, and goals of American culture. If, in their private thoughts, they believed in the special distinctive character of Jewishness, which many clearly did, they usually did not say so in public. Indeed, they were likely to feel ambivalent about having such thoughts, which they knew were considered unworthy in the circles to which they aspired. To summarize, most second-generation American Jews conceptualized Jewishness as limited to a relatively small part of life and as not sufficiently distinctive to set them apart from the rest of society in any ideologically serious or behaviorally far-reaching way. The second generation articulated a Jewishness that fit comfortably into the canons of individualism and secularism. Did they believe what they were saying? Some did. Others saw it as a goal to be achieved. Some believed part of it and said the rest in order to encourage good intergroup relations. Others retained a robust sense of Jewish difference but rarely mentioned it in public and spoke of it guardedly in private. In any case, traditional Jews who rejected this modern definition of Jewishness were considered to be out of step with life “in our day and age.” The Jews of the third generation were different. Born in America and raised in homes where pre-Emancipation perspectives were only echoes of a transcended past, they were the first generation to have internalized modern identity patterns. The immigrants who came as adults had been socialized in Eastern European Jewish communities in which classical identity patterns

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prevailed, even among those who no longer believed traditional doctrines or who gave up religious practice. Their children, in turn, grew up in the homes of those immigrants. The third generation grew up in the homes and institutions of Jews who had redefined Jewishness in order to make it fit comfortably into what they saw as the American cultural scene, and that scene was shaped by the ideas of individualism and secularism. The third generation, consequently, turned out fundamentally different from Jews before them. The differences between classical and modern Jewish identity are not only a matter of degree. In many of their characteristics they are polar opposites. These are, of course, “ideal types” in that they are not found in absolutely pure form, but they help us to understand the fundamental transitions in Jewish life that were brought about by modernity. Classical Jewishness is first a collective identity; modern Jewishness is first an individual identity. In pre-modern times, the Jewish community was seen as prior, and anyone born or converted into it was a Jew. Converts not only declared a faith; they also joined a people, as reflected clearly in the laws and symbolism of conversion. In modern society, a person who is a Jew is eligible for participation, to the extent that he wishes, in the Jewish community. The difference between the two perspectives is subtle, but important. In fact, when referring to other Jews, third-generation Jews were much more likely to speak of “co-religionists” or “fellow Jews” than “the Jewish people.” The phrase “the Jewish people” became common usage only toward the end of the third-generation period, and it was then more often used to elicit financial contributions to help other Jews than to denote a world-wide society that shared a common past and future rooted in a sense of collective mission to which all Jews were party. Modernity also fragmented Jewishness. In the modern outlook people have many identities, and Jews are no different in that regard. Jewish identity is understood as one role among many. A man could be a husband, a father, a brother, a friend, a lawyer, a golfer, a Chicagoan, a Democrat, a neighbor, a Little League coach, a collector for the Community Chest, and a Jew. Each of these roles was to be played in its own sphere according to its own relevant norms. Before the modern period, Jewishness was pervasive. Pre-modern people also had several roles, of course, but Jewishness was not conceptualized as one of them. Rather, it was the source from which Jews derived the ideology and the norms guiding their implementation of all of their roles. Being Jewish

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was not part of their lives; it integrated all of the various parts of their lives and framed the totality. Think of Tevye. Although Fiddler on the Roof10 is overly romanticized, its depiction of pre-modern Jewish identity is on the mark. Tevye had many roles. He was a husband, a father, a father-in-law, a dairyman, an Anatevkite, and a poor man. It would be phenomenologically wrong to say that he was also a Jew. Rather, Tevye was a father, a husband, and everything else that he was as a Jew. Tevye’s Jewishness was not one of his roles. It was the way he played all of his roles. Tevye’s great-grandchildren, growing up as third-generation American Jews, would most likely have had a much more limited Jewish identity. Not only was Jewishness limited to a specific part of life for most thirdgeneration American Jews; it was not a very important part. Think again of Tevye. If he had sons instead of daughters, if he were a butcher instead of a dairyman, if he lived in Kasrilevka instead of Anatevka, if he were a rich man (as he so entertainingly tells us), Tevye would still be Tevye. However, if Tevye were not Jewish, you would not recognize him. It is fair to say that Tevye’s Jewishness was the most important thing about him. It is what sociologists call the most predictive variable, the one fact that more than any other enables us to know how Tevye will act. Compare that to most third-generation American Jews. They usually said, in conversation and in responses to questionnaires, that Jewishness was very important to them, and at some level they meant it. However, as has often been remarked without too much overstatement, an anthropologist could follow most third-generation American Jews around for several weeks before discovering that they were Jewish. In other words, although people said that their Jewishness was important, it did not shape their behavior in significant ways. It may be that what was important to these Jews was not the content of Jewishness, but the Jewish experience of their parents and grandparents. For others, what mattered may have been their right to their identity rather than its content. (Recall that we are describing modal patterns; of course, some Jews were very different.) Regarding the ethos of Jewish distinctiveness, second-generation Jews, despite their feelings of pride about Jewish accomplishments, asserted that 10

Fiddler on the Roof, music by Jerry Bock, lyrics by Sheldon Harnick, book by Joseph Stein. Based on Sholem Aleichem (pen name of Sholem Rabinovich), Tevye and His Daughters (or Tevye the Dairyman), several editions.

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being Jewish did not make them significantly different. Their children, the third generation, generally believed this to be true. After all, their own parents repeatedly made the claim, and it accorded with the ideas of the enlightened society of which they wanted to be part. As a result, third-generation Jews were comfortable with a Jewishness of relatively little consequence, a difference of detail within an encompassing cultural perspective and life-style shared with other Americans. As Will Herberg pointed out, Judaism in mid-twentieth century America was seen as one of the three “religions of America” in that, along with Protestantism and Catholicism, it gave Americans a concrete way of celebrating their American values.11 Most third-generation Jews saw themselves as Americans who “happened to be Jewish.” Finally, Jews in the third generation tended to be culturally estranged from their Jewishness. Even the parts of the tradition that they kept were not learned naturally or practiced automatically. They approached Jewishness as one does a foreign culture. The public practice of Jewish rituals was typically accompanied by the kind of explicit directions that are unnecessary and not given when people are doing things that are part of their own internalized culture. Most modern Jews had to be guided from page to page and from stage to stage as they moved through the performance of Jewish rituals. They learned Jewishness in classrooms whose links to home and community were at best tenuous, and often tense. The gap between religious school curricula and the substance of discourse in the settings that had become significant to the lives of most third-generation Jews was one of the most frequently lamented problems of Jewish education. Most third-generation American Jews were culturally alienated even from the parts of Jewish practice that they maintained. Even if the third generation practiced its Jewishness pretty much as its parents did, it defined the meaning of Jewishness differently. The complaint that was voiced in so many arguments between these two generations that “you just don’t understand” was an accurate statement of the problem. If the children had merely practiced fewer rituals or adopted a less traditional doctrinal stance, their parents might have disapproved, but they would have understood the change. After all, they had made those kinds of changes vis-a-vis their parents. The intergenerational conflict between the second and 11

Will Herberg, Protestant-Catholic-Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).

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the third generation was far more subtle, because its locus was in the very definitions of Jewishness and of religion in general. The parents had been raised with traditional notions about the meaning of being Jewish and the nature of religion; their children were not. The second generation thought pretty much like the first, but behaved differently. The third generation behaved pretty much like the second, but thought differently. One of the consequences of these changes in the nature of Jewish identity was that the Jewishness of the third generation had a high level of cognitive dissonance. Modern cultural norms about the nature and role of Jewishness contradicted what, nevertheless, the third generation continued to recite as Judaism’s basic tenets. For example, the modern reshaping of Jewish identity as one role among many was hardly compatible with the total commitment implied by “and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might,” a biblical verse12 given honorable place in every version, even the most liberal, of the liturgy. To cite another example, a people like all other peoples could hardly be bound in a covenant with God to play a particular role in history. And, Jewish children were encouraged to be proud of their people, but what is the basis for that pride if those people are really no different from everyone else in any way that matters? These issues were addressed in the writings of a few Jewish thinkers, but among the Jewish people at large, the inconsistencies simply undermined what could otherwise be a compelling commitment. Typical third-generation Jewish identity was also emotionally peripheral. Cultural forms that are unfamiliar or tangential cannot express a person’s most profound feelings. In all areas of behavior—music, art, sports, conventional etiquette—the more familiar and practiced we are with these forms, the more they can capture and convey the subtleties of our feelings. The same thing is true of religious and ethnic behaviors. It can feel good to pause and “express one’s Jewishness” from time to time, as rabbis often urged their flocks to do, but as long as Jewish expression was “from time to time” it could not capture or convey one’s real “self.” Jewish occasions, consigned to life’s pauses, were detached from the events that actually shape a person’s sense of who and what he is. The psychologist Isidor Chein pointed to what he called the “tendency for 12

Deuteronomy 6:5.

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the psychological isolation of Jewishness, its restriction to an island in the personal life space.” The result, Chein explained, was that Jewishess becomes identified with certain activities at certain times, as when one is in the synagogue or in the Hebrew school, and there is no connection between these occasions and anything else. Yet the essence of meaning is that something is meaningful only insofar as it is tied up with other things in the outer world and with the mainsprings of feelings and motivations in one’s inner self. Hence, the more circumscribed does Jewishness become, the less meaningful does it also become.13

Perhaps the most dramatic result of third-generation Jewish identity was the increase in intermarriage, which soared as many young Jews were unable to understand why their Jewishness constituted a distinction serious enough to separate them from a prospective non-Jewish mate. Pre-modern Jews who intermarried most typically did so as a withdrawal from Jewishness. Modern Jews who intermarried were merely following the implications of individualism and secularism to a logical conclusion in a social context that made close relations with non-Jews easy. Earlier generations intermarried as a purposeful act. Most third-generation American Jews intermarried because they met non-Jews, socialized with them fully, fell in love, and negotiated their religious differences along with all of the other differences that a loving couple negotiates as they build a relationship. For modal third-generation Jews in America, Jewishness was neither pervasive nor deep enough to be a deal breaker. Moreover, since they were taught that kind of Jewishness by their parents, most could not understand why those parents were so upset with their choice of a non-Jewish spouse. As Marshall Sklare, then the leading sociologist of american Jewry, perceptively explained, from their perspective they were not intermarrying; they were simply getting married.14 The late 1960s slowed and in some ways derailed some of the processes of earlier decades. Several things happened in the Jewish community and in the larger American culture that led to a re-examination of the ways in which American Jews responded to individualism and secularism. 13 14

Isidor Chein, “The Problem of Jewish Identification: Comment on Marshall Sklare’s, Marc Vosk’s, and Mark Zborowski’s ‘Forms and Expressions of Jewish Identity,’” Jewish Social Studies 17, no. 3 (1955): 220. The author heard Marshall Sklare make this remark but has been unable to find it in Sklare’s written work.

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In 1963, the American Jewish Year Book published Erich Rosenthal’s “Studies of Jewish Intermarriage in the United States,”15 which showed that much higher proportions of young Jews were marrying non-Jews than had generally been recognized. In Iowa, with a short supply of potential Jewish spouses, the intermarriage rate was 42 percent in the middle and late 1950s. Even in Washington, DC, with an ample number of Jews, the overall intermarriage rate was 13 percent, and it reached 18 percent for third-generation Jews (native born of native parents). The article became widely known through prominent coverage in the New York Times and in an attentioncatching May 1964 Look Magazine cover-story on “The Vanishing American Jew.”16 The parents of the third generation reacted with dismay. For them, intermarriage still meant renunciation of Jewishness. They had “modernized” Judaism so that their children could be comfortably Jewish in America, and they felt betrayed when those children married out in rapidly rising numbers. Intermarriage became the most popular program topic at Jewish group meetings, and several committees, commissions, and task forces were established by the major Jewish organizations to respond to the problem. This quickly led to a new focus on youth, Jewish education, and identity formation, which in turn brought increased attention to Jewish religion and peoplehood. Attitudes, ideas, and practices formerly thought to be oldfashioned suddenly appeared anew in the recommendations of social scientists and in the program proposals of “communal” (as opposed to religious) organizations. Then the events immediately preceding and following the Six-Day War made it clear that, despite modernity’s claims about universalism and equality, the world still held special dangers for the Jews. In May, 1967, another mass destruction of Jews appeared to be a distinct possibility. Gamal Abdel Nasser, the president of Egypt, openly prepared his military for war with Israel. He urged the United Nations to withdraw its peace-keeping forces stationed between Israel and Egypt, and the secretary-general of the UN promptly complied. Nasser declared that his basic goal was the destruction of Israel, and other Arab leaders spoke of pushing the Jews into the sea. The world looked on without interfering. It is likely that that experience was one of the factors that 15 16

Erich Rosenthal, “Studies of Jewish Intermarriage in the United States,” in American Jewish Year Book 64 (New York: American Jewish Committee, 1963), 3–53. Thomas B. Morgan, “The Vanishing American Jew,” Look Magazine (May 1964).

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generated greater attention to the Holocaust, which until that time was not taught as a separate subject of study in the American academic curriculum and was rarely commemorated in public events. What had been thought of as an exceptional pathological event turned out to be not necessarily unique and still a threat. Significantly, when the Six-Day War was over, Israel was not only praised but in some quarters vilified for having defended itself so effectively. The Six-Day War made Israel more salient for American Jews and increased the pride that they felt in the state’s character and accomplishments. However, the period of May and June of 1967 was also the functional equivalent for American Jews of the Dreyfus trial for Central European Jews at the end of the nineteenth century in that it demonstrated Jewish exceptionalism and vulnerability. Jews were still treated differently from others, and they were not free from danger. The difference, of course, was that now there was the State of Israel and the Jews could ably defend themselves—both on the battlefield in the Middle East and in the international chambers on the East River. The turn toward Jewish distinctiveness and religio-ethnic content that resulted from these events found a hospitable context. The 1960s were a time of far-reaching change not only for Jews but for American culture generally. Specific ethnic and religious identity were coming to enjoy a new prominence, and serious traditional religion was moving toward the cultural mainstream so dramatically that social scientists now study the desecularization of culture. Earlier in the twentieth century, the explicit approach to diversity was an emphasis on universalism and humanism, but in fact white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant (“WASP”) cultural forms were dominant. “Americanizing” the immigrants who were coming to America’s shores from all over the world actually meant teaching them to be more like white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Indeed, immigrants, as well as native-born minority groups, were named precisely in terms of their difference from that norm. They were “blacks” (or, in the usage of the early twentieth century, “negroes”) because they were not white, “Italians” or “Koreans” because they were not Englishmen, “Catholics” or “Jews” because they were not Protestant. A white Methodist from Italy was referred to as an Italian. A black Episcopalian from Stratford-on-Avon was a black. As part of their Americanization, Italians and Koreans learned to behave like Englishmen, and Catholics and Jews made their religions look more Protestant. Traditionalists—in both religions—made fewer changes and made

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them against internal resistance; liberals made more and deeper changes and did so with enthusiasm. The important point is that every change, with one exception, entailed adoption of Protestant ideas, forms, and styles. The Catholics and Jews making the changes typically spoke about being “modern” or “up-to-date.” However, it is hard to see how their changes responded to any newly discovered knowledge or newly appreciated philosophical breakthrough and easy to see how the changes brought their respective religions closer to the way Protestants do things. Use of the vernacular in liturgy, the role expectations of clergy, and church or synagogue architecture can head a long list of ways in which Jews and Catholics began to imitate Protestants. The one change that was not a Protestantization was the expansion of women’s roles in public worship and religious leadership. That was a gender issue that affected all religious communities more or less simultaneously, though each responded in its own ways. In the latter part of the twentieth century, people began to realize that there is no such thing as universal culture. Cultures are specific, concrete systems whose interrelated parts clarify and deepen one another. Cultural items ripped out of their context lose their rich suggestiveness and expressive power. Becoming more like white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants cost minorities the depth and much of the value of their own cultures. What is more, the radical individualism that accompanies the minimization of ethnic, racial, and religious identities tends to spawn a feeling of loneliness and alienation from the very people with whom we share cultural commonalities. As discontent grew, the “Black Is Beautiful” movement finally “blew the whistle” on what Milton Gordon called “Anglo-conformity.”17 Perhaps it was inevitable that blacks would be the group to do so. Italians and Koreans could learn to behave like Englishmen, and Jews and Catholics could make their religions more Protestant, but blacks could not turn white. When blacks asserted equal cultural legitimacy, the call echoed throughout society. Other groups also came to feel that they had given up too much. Virtually every ethnic group has its public fairs, parades, and celebrations. It is probably not a coincidence that Hispanics are the first foreign language group to feel comfortable 17 Milton Gordon, Assimilation in American Life: The Role of Race, Religion, and National Origins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), esp. 84–89.

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calling for bilingualism in governmental and other services. The Reform movement in Judaism (the movement that made the most changes) has been re-introducing many traditional forms of observance. The Latin Mass is once again found in many Roman Catholic churches. It has become respectable to draw on one’s cultural roots and to manifest them publicly. Unlike the early twentieth century, a black political scientist can now study black voting patterns, a Jewish sociologist can study Jewish identity, and a Spanish art historian can study Spanish art without being branded as parochial. In 1969 a remarkable event occurred in American Jewish life that highlighted the shift to more traditional content. A group of Jewish college students held a demonstration at the General Assembly of the Council of Jewish Federations and Welfare Funds (now called the Jewish Federations of North America), the most noteworthy annual gathering of American Jewish leadership with a program focused on health, welfare, intergroup relations, and assistance to overseas Jewish communities. What surprised the assembled leaders of the American Jewish community was that the students were demonstrating for more support from the organized Jewish community for the kind of Jewish education and religious practice that their elders had foresworn.18 Nurtured in modern Jewish homes and communities, educated in the most prestigious modern universities, and as conversant with the principles of modernity as anyone their age could be, these young Jews were challenging the wisdom of so ruthlessly subjecting Jewish life to the canons of modern ideology. They were calling for a more measured and nuanced approach to extending classical Judaism into the modern era. In fact, a number of the ideological tenets of modernity came to be questioned in the late twentieth century. Many of the components of scientism are no longer as axiomatic as they were when third-generation Jewish identity was molded. Recent decades have come to give more prominence to the recognition that progress in human affairs is not inevitable, that many of life’s most important decisions are necessarily made without adequate empirical evidence, and that all behavior has consequences, which is to say that all means lead to ends whether or not our goals are consciously chosen and made explicit. 18

For the speech that the student representing the demonstrators delivered at the General Assembly, see Hillel Levine, “To Share a Vision,” in Jewish Radicalism: A Selected Anthology, eds. Jack Nusan Porter and Peter Dreier (New York: Grove Press 1973), 183–194.

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These changes in perspective no doubt contributed to the return of serious traditional religion to the cultural mainstream as a respectable option. The radical individualism of the modern ethos is also coming to be reconsidered in light of a growing appreciation of community. Books like Habits of the Heart19 and Bowling Alone,20 which trace the unfortunate consequences of radical individualism, have attracted much more attention than academic works usually enjoy. Although Jewishness is still seen by most as, at least initially, an individual and personal matter, the notion of Jewish “polity” has gained acceptance. One speaks of “the Jewish people” or of “the Jewish community” more easily and naturally than a generation or more ago. What is more, universalism, individualism, and humanism have been replaced by diversity and multiculturalism as the watchwords defining America’s attitude toward ethnic, religious, and racial identity. We are no longer urged to base our intergroup amity on the similarities among people. Instead, we are encouraged to respect difference. Pluralism is a robust principle in America, and it confers cultural legitimacy on the differences both among and within America’s sub-groups as people construct and live out their identities. The notion of relativism, though still widely accepted, is also coming to be understood in a more nuanced way. Even if differing approaches to life and thought are treated as equally legitimate and worthy of protection in a multicultural democracy, that does not necessarily imply that they are all equally valid or make equally strategic contributions to human history. Defending the “right to be wrong” gives all positions equal rights, but it does not make all positions equally right. Many people, without denying the right of others to hold and live by different interpretations or disparaging the contributions that other ways of life can make, nevertheless believe that their own ideas and values are preferable. Rationality is still honored, especially as science and technology move forward more quickly and impressively than ever. However, there is growing 19 Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (California: University of California Press, 1996 and 2008). 20 Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000).

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awareness that rationality has its limits, that intuition and first reactions are often good guides, and that some aspects of life will continue to be surrounded by mystery. More people can accept the idea that the ultimate meaning of life will never be discovered; it will only be apperceived, and then with some necessary residue of doubt. It may be that “perfect faith” includes not only faith without doubt, but also—perhaps especially—faith despite doubt. The twentieth century has also made it clear that a cultural emphasis on rationality is not enough to immunize societies against pervasive immorality and unspeakable cruelty. The most frequently noted and probably the most consequential characteristic of the Jewish identity of the current, fourth, generation reflects an almost limitless application of the ideas of pluralism and diversity—not only group by group, but also person by person. Identity is seen as thoroughly voluntary and autonomous in nature. In a free society, of course, Jews can decide whether to remain Jewish and how to construct their Jewishness on an individual basis. What is new is that this freedom is not only a structural possibility but is also seen as a cultural mandate. Through most of Jewish history, one was Jewish or not. The border between Jews and non-Jews was clear, and, if one was Jewish, life was lived essentially within the Jewish community according to one of its various defined options. In the United States today, a person can see himself as partly Jewish and can understand the Jewish part (large or small) in any way he pleases. He can think of his Jewishness as referring to his ancestry, to his religious practice, to his “ethnic” customs, or to some kind of attachment to the Jewish people past or present. A 2011 study of the Jewish community of metropolitan New York reports that five percent of the respondents identify as Jewish even though neither parent was Jewish and they did not convert, and twelve percent consider themselves “partially Jewish.” The study also reports that there are approximately forty-nine thousand people in New York described as “religion non-Jewish, and the respondent considers self Jewish.”21 The latest large national study of American Jewry, carried out by the Pew Research Center, also recognizes that some people consider themselves Jewish by religion and others consider themselves Jewish on a basis other than religion. The Pew study also estimates that a not 21

Steven M. Cohen, Jacob B Ukeles, and Ron Miller, Jewish Community Study of New York: 2011, Comprehensive Report (New York: UJA-Federation of New York, 2012).

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inconsiderable number of American adults (about six hundred thousand) think of themselves as “partially” Jewish, a new category with serious implications for the meaning of Jewishness.22 In today’s America, people can openly express their ethnic and religious identities, and they are entitled to make whatever they wish of those identities. The traditions to which they are heir can make no effective claim on them. Rather, those traditions are seen as anthologies to which they have preferential access and from which they can select whatever they find satisfying. They are what Herbert Gans called “symbolic ethnicity” or “symbolic religion”23 and what Mary Waters called “ethnic options.”24 This situation was captured nicely by Bethamie Horowitz when she suggested the salad bar as a metaphor for current Jewish identity in America.25 The dominant view is that a Jew should do something Jewish, but how much and what is done is seen as properly left to individual decision. A person should not leave a salad bar with a totally empty plate but there is no “right” way to fill your plate at a salad bar. You can take more or less, this or that. Whatever you do is acceptable. Indeed, if someone suggests that certain “foods” are more important than others, that person is likely to be seen as overly ideological and intrusive. Interference that would be accepted at a literal salad bar is resented at the metaphorical one. This emphasis on individual choice in constructing identity has been noted in several important works on contemporary religious identity in general and Jewishness in particular. For example, Peter Berger describes the mandate for self-construction as the “heretical imperative,”26 and Arnold Eisen and Steven Cohen point out that Jews in the middle of the range of Jewish involvement are likely to see Jewish identity as subject only to the

A Portrait of Jewish Americans: Findings from a Pew Research Center Study of U.S. Jews, Pew Research Center, 2013. 23 Herbert J. Gans, “Symbolic Ethnicity and Symbolic Religiosity: Toward a Comparison of Ethnic and Religious Acculturation,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 17, no. 4 (1994): 577–582. 24 Mary C. Waters, Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America (California: University of California Press, 1990). 25 Bethamie Horowitz, “Reframing the Study of Contemporary American Jewish Identity,” Contemporary Jewry 23 (2002). 26 Peter Berger, The Heretical Imperative: Contemporary Possibilities of Religious Affirmation (Massachusetts: Anchor Press, 1979). 22

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“sovereign self.”27 A few of the recent books on Jewish identity carry such titles as New Jewish Identities, National Variations in Jewish Identity, Boundaries of Jewish Identity, Religion or Ethnicity? Jewish Identities in Evolution, People of the Book: Thirty Scholars Reflect on Their Jewish Identity, Jewish on Their Own Terms: How Intermarried Couples Are Changing American Judaism, and Dynamic Belonging: Contemporary Collective Jewish Identities.28 It is probably not by chance that most of these books are collections of essays by writers from differing perspectives rather than treatises by individual thinkers setting forth a single integrated interpretation. The reader who might look to Boundaries of Jewish Identity for a proposed delineation of boundaries will be disappointed by the essays, which, as the editors put it, “highlight the extent to which different ways of knowing and determining what is ‘Jewish’ . . . produce surprisingly diverse and sometimes contested definitions of identity.” The diversity is so great that Harvey E. Goldberg, the lead editor of Dynamic Belonging refers to “the gnawing question of ‘the Jewish people’: whether a sense of unity and shared future will be maintained or whether the coming decades portend the emergence of disconnected ‘Judaisms.’”29 The autonomy of identity goes far beyond Jewish life. The journalist and commentator David Brooks observed in a November 2012 New York Times op-ed article that “At some point over the past generation, people around the world entered what you might call the age of possibility. They became intolerant of any arrangement that might close off their personal options.”30 27 Steven M. Cohen and Arnold N. Eisen, The Jew Within: Self, Family, and Community in America (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2000). 28 Barry Kosmin, Barry Alexander, and Andras Kovacs, New Jewish Identities: Contemporary Europe and Beyond (Hungary: Central European University Press, 2003); Steven M. Cohen and Gabriel Horenczyk, National Variations in Jewish Identity: Implications for Jewish Education (New York: SUNY Press, 1999); Susan A. Glenn and Naomi B. Sokoloff, Boundaries of Jewish Identity (Washington: University of Washington Press, 2010); Harvey Goldberg, Steven M. Cohen, and Ezra Kopelowitz, eds., Dynamic Belonging: Contemporary Jewish Collective Identities (New York: Berghakan Books, 2012); Zvi Gitelman, ed., Religion or Ethnicity? Jewish Identities in Evolution (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2009); Jeffrey Rubin-Dorsky and Shelley Fisher Fishkin, eds., People of the Book, Thirty Scholars Reflect on Their Jewish Identity (Wisconsin, University of Wisconsin Press, 1996); Jennifer A. Thompson, Jewish on Their Own Terms: How Intermarried Couples are Changing American Judaism (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2014). 29 Harvey Goldberg, Dynamic Belonging, 2. 30 David Brooks, “The Age of Possibility,” New York Times, November 15, 2012.

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This total openness of Jewish identity results not only from factors internal to Jewish history and from general cultural changes. It is also driven by contemporary technology. Globalization brings all cultures to our doorstep. Our smart cell phones and the Internet enable us to carry the world’s many cultures literally in our pockets. Facebook dissolves the local community in which a person used to live and replaces it with a set of “friends” who easily arrive from anywhere and easily go away, either at their decision or at ours as people “unfriend” one another in a social environment at once more extensive and less cohesive than ever before. We can construct not only ourselves, but also our communities, at will. In addition to its autonomous nature, the fourth generation’s Jewish identity is characterized by correlation and polarization. Jewishness is no longer as concentrated within specific spheres of behavior as it was for the second generation. Religious observance, traditional beliefs, Jewish knowledge, cultural interests, philanthropic giving, organizational involvement, attachment to Israel, concern for the welfare of other Jews, and participation in Jewish social contexts have become correlative rather than alternative expressions of Jewishness. Recent empirical studies show clearly and consistently that the more a Jew is involved in one aspect of Jewishness, the higher his or her scores of involvement tend to be in the others. This pattern is what sociologists of American Jewry call the principle of “the more, the more.”31 This pattern of Jewish engagement is also reflected in leadership cadres, where the same names appear on the rosters of several different types of Jewish organizations, because Jews with enough Jewish commitment to play leadership roles are likely to embody the multi-dimensional character of Jewish living. The fourth generation is also becoming increasingly polarized, as Jews move toward the ends of the spectrum of Jewish expression. Compared to a generation ago, a higher proportion of young Jews is now getting intensive day school Jewish education, and a higher proportion is getting little or no Jewish education. The synagogue Hebrew Schools that offer programs on two afternoons a week (plus, occasionally, on Sunday morning as well) are declining. On the one hand, more Jews are practicing more rituals, and, on the other, 31 Paul Ritterband and Steven M. Cohen, “Will the Well Run Dry? The Future of Jewish Giving in America,” in Policy Studies ‘79 (New York: National Jewish Conference Center, January 1979), 2.

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more are observing fewer. Ritual observance scales now show higher concentrations near the top and the bottom, with fewer people in the middle than used to be the case. More Jews devote a significant percentage of their resources to Jewish institutions, and more Jews make only token contributions or none at all. More Jews relate to Israel with intensity and personal immediacy, and more Jews find little special significance in Israel and distance themselves from Israel. In all dimensions of Jewish life, decreasing proportions occupy the middle of the scale. The effects of this polarization are reflected in Jewish organizations. Several organized “renewal” groups and study programs have emerged that show an intensive involvement with Jewishness, usually in ways that combine classical modes with contemporary methods. By contrast, the membership organizations that thrived in the mid-twentieth century are declining. Perhaps most noteworthy, Orthodoxy is growing in numbers and vitality, and, at the same time, increasing numbers of Jews refuse denominational identification, calling themselves “Just Jewish” and showing the lowest levels of Jewish involvement. The Conservative and Reform movements, situated in the middle between the Orthodox and the Just Jewish, are, respectively, declining in adherents or barely holding their own. What worries people concerned about the vitality of American Jewish life in the future is that the movement to the poles is not balanced. Far more Jews are moving to the lower pole than to the higher end of commitment and expression. This polarization is also reflected in the dichotomization of American Jews into Orthodox and non-Orthodox that is found increasingly in empirical studies and analyses of American Jewish life. The distinction results from the significantly different statistical patterns found in these two categories of Jews. The statistical differences, moreover, rest on Jewish identity patterns among the Orthodox that are distinct enough from those of most other Jews to justify their being treated as different in kind. That is a change from the past, when the Orthodox were usually understood as different only in degree, occupying the high end of a continuum of Jewish traditionalism. Jews identified as Orthodox have vastly higher levels of Jewish engagement in all of its dimensions. It is also significant that Orthodoxy as an ideological position asserts an understanding of Jewishness that is seriously at odds with the culture’s—and most Jews’—prevailing norms. For a majority of

Emancipation, Modernity, and Jewish Identity in America

337

Jews, as we have seen, Jewish identification is an option. For Orthodoxy, it is a commitment covenanted at Sinai forever, and those who are born into that Covenant are bound by it. For a majority of Jews, almost any personally felt construction of Jewishness is acceptable and should be honored. For Orthodoxy, Jewishness has its inherent requirements, and, while it offers several options, its malleability is constrained by traditional Jewish law. For a majority of Jews, Jewishness is a subjective decision. For Orthodoxy, it is an objective mandate. As a result, non-Orthodox Jews can accept a much wider array of readings of Judaism than Orthodoxy, which must limit its range of acceptance to those readings that include what it sees as the fundamental principles defining Judaism’s essence. Thus, Orthodoxy accepts all Jews, but it cannot recognize all readings of Judaism. Different people have different motives for joining any organization. Because of the mixed motivations that attract people to any organization or institution, the people affiliated with a religious movement are not all likely to accept its ideology uniformly or conform to its standards of practice fully. Not all Jews affiliated with Orthodoxy—and who, as a result, are treated as Orthodox in research studies—in fact have the basic beliefs and follow the practices that constitute Orthodoxy. The same phenomenon, of course, also characterizes and affects the Conservative and Reform movements. Both Orthodoxy and the non-Orthodox movements are pluralistic, and both set limits around what they consider to be legitimate readings of Judaism. The difference is that Orthodoxy draws much closer limits around the forms of Jewish life it considers appropriate. It thereby often elicits resentment for denying the authenticity of several of the approaches to Jewish living that are now popular. Moreover, Orthodoxy’s birth rates and relative ability to resist assimilation have led to a dramatic growth in its share of Jewish population and Jewish leadership, especially among the young. As a result, its influence in Jewish affairs has increased, and its perspectives have moved from the periphery of Jewry to within its mainstream. It is impossible to predict what the current patterns of Jewish identity will produce in the future. Some have suggested that if present trends continue, American Jewry will become smaller but more intensively Jewish. This prediction rests on the expectation that diminishing Jewish identity and increasing intermarriage will feed each other and dramatically increase assimilation.

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At the other end, Jews living intensive Jewish lives will give one another social and normative support as they deepen and expand their Jewish engagement. The problem with basing predictions on current trends is that trends often change. Even if they are not reversed, they are often moderated. No one desires the kind of external pressure that sometimes elicits internal solidarity. Moreover, external pressure in the current situation of weakened Jewish identity and readily available escape routes could well lead more to flight than to internal strength. The modern outlook by itself has been found inadequate for addressing, let alone answering, many of the most profound human questions. People are now exploring ways to integrate the strengths of modernity with those aspects of earlier perspectives that seem to have enduring value. For Jews, this means the development of a new kind of Jewish identity that grows out of a conversation between classical Jewishness and contemporary understandings. The prospects are exciting, and if we are wise enough and determined enough, another Golden Age of Jewish history may lie ahead.

Index

A

Abzug, Bella, 154 Ackerman, Naomi, 239 Adler, Stanislaw, 74 Aframovitz, Nathan Nata, 191, 194–195 African-American community, 6–7 agonism, 18 agonistic pluralism, 18 Agudas Yisroel, 117–118, 118n58 Agudat ha-Shohtim (AS), 189 American identity politics, 145 American Jewish “civil religion,” 145 American Jewish Committee, 293, 296–297 American Jewish community, general assimilation of, 303. see also Jewish identity, dynamics in twentiethcentury America American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, 72 American Jewry behavioral manifestation of, 146 cultural experience of, 120 theologized identity politics, 146 American movement for Soviet Jewry, protest rituals of, 179–182. see also Passover-linked protest rituals Anielewicz, Mordechai, 81 anti-Semitism in the United States, decline of, 301–302

anti-Zionist peace movements, 210 Arab Spring mobilization, 28–29 Art from a Soviet Prison, 124 artistic culture, 1970s, 122–130 Czechoslovakian collection, 128 “Museum to an Extinct Race,” 128–129 Penson’s work, exhibition of, 124–127 The Precious Legacy: Judaic Treasures from the Czechoslovak State Collections, 128–129 relationship between exhibitions and contemporaneous mood of American Jewish activism, 129–130 shows of Soviet Jewish artists, 124 Soviet Jewry Movement and, 123–124 viewing strategy, 124 Asian-American community, 7 Atlas, Reb Tsemakh, 94

B

Babi Yar, 162 Barclay Working Party, 5 Bardeen, C. R., 283 Baskin, Leonid, 127 Bay Area Council on Soviet Jewry, 122 Begun, Joseph, 142

340

Belkin, Samuel, 292 Bell, Catherine, 164 Berger, Peter, 10–11, 333 Berger, Yosef David, 191, 194–195 Berlinski, Hirsch, 76, 83 Berman, Leyb, 99 Berman, Saul, 159 Bethes, G. E., 281 Birnbaum, Yaakov, 159 “Black Is Beautiful” movement, 329 bonding, 52–53 Boretz, Alvin, 166 Borzykowski, Tuvia, 78 Braude, Rabbi Simcha Zisl, 92 Breines, Wini, 5 Broner, Esther, 167 Brooks, David, 334 Bruk, Rabbi Ben Tzion, 98, 104 Buechler, Steven M., 14

C

Camp Ramah, 43 Cantor, Aviva, 167 Chein, Isidor, 325 citizenship, post-Zionist discourse, 211–214 Civil Judaism, 145–146 Civil Rights Movement, in America, 4, 128 Cochavi, Yehoyakim, 86 cognitive liberation, 23 cognitive praxis of a social movement, 152–153 Cohen, Anthony P., 6, 11 Cohen, Rabbi Hirsch, 185, 187, 191–193, 195–196 Cohen, Steven, 333 collective action, 12–15. dynamics of contention, contentious politics, 30–34 framing, 26 impact of technology on, 27–29 Jewish experience, 34–37 online activity and, 27–28

Index

as response to shared interests and concerns, 12–13 social conflict and change processes, 15–18 strategic action fields, 17–18 collective identity, 24, 32 communism, 21 community, notion of, 3–9 collective action and, 12–15 community building, 4, 6–7 continuity of communal life, 8 definitions, 5 fundamental social features, 8 geographic proximity, sense of, 7–8 idea of boundary, 6, 12 language, role of, 10 as a phenomenon of culture, 6 social construction of, 9–12 strength of community, 8–9 conscientious objection movement, 208 Conservative Judaism, 40–43, 186n11 schism, 40–41 contentious performances, 30 contentious politics, dynamics of contention, 30–34 language, role of, 33 mechanisms and processes, 32 prevalence and impact, 33–34 copresence, 29 cost affordance, 29 Courage to Refuse, 198, 208, 214, 221–222, 227 adherence to Zionist values, 218–219 brief introduction, 200–201 difference between Yesh Gvul and, 214–216 members of, 216–218 reservists’ views, 217–218 Yuval’s narrative, 216–217 The Crisis Center for Religious Women, 252–255 cursed Haskalah, 95

Index

Curtis, A. C., 283 Cwik, Marc Steven, 244–245 Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, 128

D

Dalou, Aimé-Jules, 121, 141 Debat-Ponsan, Edouard, 137 Degas, Edgar, 121 Dewey, Thomas E., 297 digital media and collective action, 27–30 Dimarsky, Sherry Berliner, 241 Dodson, Dan W., 294 Donat, Alexander, 75–76 Drazin, A., 194 Dresner, Rabbi Samuel H., 129 Dreyfus, Captain Alfred, 130 Dreyfus affair, exhibition on, 119 art critics’ views, 131 artistic salon, 137–138 brochure, 139, 139n43 Clemenceau campaigning, 140 construction of “viewing,” 138 display of anti-Semitic imagery, 135–137 exhibition’s contribution to the historiography of, 132 Jewish identity in, 136 The Monument to Auguste ScheurerKestner, 141 Obelisk display in, 140 objects on display, 132 personal plight of Alfred Dreyfus, 132–133 political context, 120–122 “Revision Debate,” 133 Dror (“Freedom”), 77 Dubitsky, Abraham Samuel, 191 Dunham, Harry G., 286 dynamics of contention, 30-34

E

Earl, Jennifer, 28 Edelman, Marek, 74, 83

341

Educational Practices Act, 297 Edwards, Dayton J., 297 Eisen, Arnold, 333 Emancipation and fundamental changes in Jewish people, 307–308, 316–317 Jewish identity, 308–309 e-mobilization, 29 emotional benefits, 87 e-movements, 29 Epstein, Jacob, 127 Estraikh, Gennady, 121 e-tactics, 29 Etkes, Immanuel, 91–92 Evenepoel, Henri, 121 exodus of Jewish people, biblical narrative, 37–40 contentious interactions, 39 contentious performance, 39–40 framing activity, 39 Moses and Aaron, role of, 38–39 tribal leadership, role of, 38

F

Fackenthal, Frank D., 295 The Family Seder: A Traditional Passover Haggadah for the Modern Home, 177 fascism, 21 Fellowship of Traditional Orthodox Rabbis (FTOR), 42–43 Feltsman, Vladimir, 142 feminist seders, 167 Fiddler on the Roof, 121, 323 Finkel, Rabbi Nosn Tzvi, 92 Finn, David, 123 First Intifada (1987-1991), 200, 204, 213 First Lebanon War (1982-1985), 200, 220 Fligstein, Neil, 16–17 formal movement organizations, 14 framing processes, 23–26 conscious and strategic efforts, 25 frame alignment process, 26, 48–52 frame amplification process, 26, 48–49

342

Index

frame bridging process, 26 frame extension, 26, 48 frame transformation, 26–27 honor as a motivational frame, 84–88 meaning production in, 25–26 Freedom Seder, 157, 161, 167–172 “free rider” effect, 23 Frydman, Rabbi Zysie, 77

G

Gallé, Emile, 121 Gamson, William A., 27 Gans, Herbert, 333 Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (Community and Society), 5–6 geulah (redemption), 311 Glazer, Simon, 187 Goldberg, Harvey E., 334 Goldstein, Julius L., 295 Goldstone , Jack A., 66 Goodman, Jerry, 142 Goodman, Susan, 124 Goodwin , Jeff, 65 Gordon, Milton, 329 Gordon, Rabbi Eliezer, 92 Grade, Chaim, 93–94 Graetz, Naomi, 242–243 Greater New York Conference on Soviet Jewry, 122 Green, Arthur, 159 Greenberg, B. E., 285 Greenberg, Clement, 127 Greenberg, Irving (Yitz), 159 Gropper, William, 127 Gross, Chaim, 127 Gross, Debbie, 252–254, 259 Gross, John, 131, 135 Gutman, Yisrael, 82

H

Haggadah program, 166 Hale, Worth, 283 Harris, Ruth, 134

Harry S. Truman’s Commission on Higher Education, 302 Hart, Walter R., 296–297 Hashomer Hatza’ir (“The Young Guard”), 77 Hasidism, 34, 91, 117 Held, Isidor, 294 Henner, Jean-Jacques, 137 Herald, A. A., 286 Herberg, Will, 324 Herschorn, Joshua Ha-Levi, 191 Herschorn, Sheea, 187 high-risk activism, 88 Hill-Burton Act, 298 Holocaust, Jewish resistance during, 61–62 classical social movement agenda, 63–66 role of political opportunity in collective action, 63–66 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943, 62–63, 66–70 Horowitz, Bethamie, 333 Hurwitz, Rabbi Yosef Yoizl, 94, 101n24, 113–116 convention in 1917, 115 defection of students and, 104, 113–114 fundamental teachings, 95 introduction of birzhe, 98, 102–103 Novaredok’s transformation into a movement, 113–117 personality of, 103, 108 revolutionary practices and theories, 104–105, 110–111 in strengthening his students’ moral and religious characters, 94–97 Talmudic knowledge, 94 teachings of, 110

I

Ibels, Henri-Gabriel, 134 IDF, 204–205, 205n27, 227

Index

individualism, 326, 330 in contemporary free societies, 313 ethos of, 312 geulah (redemption), 311 humanity, 312 ideology of, 309 marriage and, 311 principle of individual ownership, 310 psychological expression, 310 value and dignity of the individual, 310–311, 313 Institute of Traditional Judaism (ITJ), 42 Internet Communication Technology (ICT), 29–30 intimate partner violence, 259 Iranian Revolution, 1979, 65 The Israel Center for Family Justice, 248–249 Israeli society Ashkenazi stratum, 207 emergence of post-Zionist discourse and identities among middle and upper classes, 211–214 gradual demilitarization of, 203–208 ideological changes of, 236–237 issue of group identification and boundaries, 261–262 militarization of. see militarization of Israeli society shelter policy, 262–263

J

Jacobs, Lynn, 241 Jasper, James M., 65–66 Jericho march, 161 Jewish collective action, 4 Jewish communal conflict, 34–37 Arab Spring and its effect on Israel’s tent protests, 36 Israel and the 2010 protest flotilla, 36 Israeli-Palestinian conflict, 36

343

Israeli peace movement, 36 Israeli settlement movements, 36 J14 protests, 36 resistance during the Holocaust, 36 Shas party in Israel, 36 Soviet Jewry movement, 36 Women of the Wall, 36 Jewish Community Council (Va’ad ha-’Ir, VH), 187–191 Jewish Community Relations Council, 158, 166, 175 Jewish Defense League, 121, 130 Jewish Diaspora, 233, 308 Jewish Fighting Organization (Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa), 77–79, 81, 83–84 Jewish hospitals decline in number of, 298–300 definition of, 300–301 European, 268–269 healing process in Judaism, 267–268 Jewish Federation financing of, 304 medical school admission quotas and, 271–281 origins of, 267–271 philanthropic support for, 304 reason for fall of, 301–305 Stuyvesant Pledge and, 269–271 Weill Cornell Medical College, 305 Jewish identity, dynamics in twentiethcentury America, 317–338 basic beliefs and life-patterns, 319 border between Jews and non-Jews, 332 choice of other Jews as social companions, 320 conceptualization of Jewishness, 318–321 cultural emphasis on rationality, 331–332 diversity and multiculturalism, 330 ethnic and religious identities, 332–333 of first generation, 317–318

344

Index

of fourth generation, 335–336 Jewish intermarriages, 327 Jewish organizations, 320 Just Jewish, 336 modern Jewishness, 322 philanthropic expression of Jews, 320 polarization of Orthodox and non-Orthodox American Jews, 336–337 political and social issues, 319 as a response to Emancipation, 317 1960s, 327–328 of second generation, 317–321 Tevye of Fiddler on the Roof, 323 of third generation, 321–327 trends, 337–338 white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant (“WASP”) cultural forms, 328–329 Jewish Labor Bund, 77, 99, 101 Jewish labor movement in Montreal, 184–185 significance of immigrant Orthodox rabbinate, 186–197 Jewish medical school. see also Jewish hospitals admission quotas, 271–281 Americans studying medicine in Europe and, 289–290 criticisms against Jewish students, 284 decline of anti-Semitism and decline of, 301–302 discrimination against Jews, 281–287 government and private investigations of the quota, 293–298 internship and residency positions, discrimination in, 284–287 Jewish response to discrimination, 287–293 US medical schools allowing Jews, 290–292

Jewish Military Union (Zydowski Zwiazek Wojskowy), 77–79, 84 Jewish Museum of New York, 122, 128, 138 A Century of Ambivalence: The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union, 1881 to the Present, 142 Tradition and Revolution, the Jewish Renaissance in Russian Avant-Garde Art, 1912-1928, 142 Jewish Theological Seminary ( JTS), 42, 123 Jewish Women’s Project, 167 J14 Israeli tent city protests of 2011, 18–19, 33 Judah L. Magnes Memorial Museum, 122

K

Kahane, Meir, 159 Kampf, Avram, 122, 125 Kaplan, Anatoli, 125–126, 143 Kaplan, Avrohom, 104 Kaplan, Chaim, 73 Karin, Rita, 142 Katz, Dov, 104 Katz, Elihu, 292 Katz, Label, 154 kibbutzim, 206 Kimmerling, Baruch, 200, 202, 209 Kimport, Katrina, 28 King, Jr., Martin Luther, 167 Kirkpatrick, Jeanne, 154 Klajman, Jack, 72, 85 Kleeblatt, Norman, 132, 136–137 Knoedler & Company art gallery, 135 Kochba, Bar, 34 Kojak, 166 Kolatch, Alfred, 177 Kook, Rabbi Abraham Isaac ha-Kohen, 195 Korczak, Janusz, 75–76 Korman, Noah, 246–247, 255 Kurzman, C., 65, 68, 89 Kurzman, D., 80–81

Index

L

Ladd, William S., 296 LaGuardia, Fiorello H., 294 language of contention, 33 Latino community, 7 Laxer, Rabbi Getsel, 188–190 Lazare, Bernard, 134 Lazaron, Morris S., 280–281, 285–286, 288, 290, 292, 295 Le Bon, Gustave, 152 Left Poa’lei Zion, 76 Lehrman, Shlomit, 249–250 Levine, Jack, 127 Lithuanian Jewry, 91 Loraine, A. R., 284 Loveman, Mara, 87 Lowell, A. Lawrence, 272 Lozowick, Louis, 128 Lubetkin, Zivia, 85, 87 Luckmann, Thomas, 10–11

M

Madregat Ha-Adam, 106n35, 110 Mann, Vivian B., 129 Masada, 34 Matzoh of Hope, 157–158, 161, 173–176, 178–179 Matzoh of Oppression, 173–174, 178 Mayor’s Unity Commission, 294 McAdam, Doug, 16–17, 19, 30, 64 McLintock, J. T., 283 McNally, James B. M., 295 Meed, Vladka, 75 Mendelsohn, Ezra, 98 Miklat Bat Melech Shelter, 246–248 militarization of Israeli society, 200–203 anti-Zionist, post-nationalist views, 224–226 Ashkenazi stratum, 207 association between Jewish and Zionist identity, 210 conditional military service, 219–221

345

contribution to society in civil terms, 227–228 feminist perspective, 226–227 linkage between Zionism and military service, 209–211 Maayan’s criticism of, 223–224 motivation crisis and, 205–208 non-conformism of members, 221–223 pacifists and anti-militarist ideology, 223–224 relationship between social elite and army, 207 Mills, C. Wright, 242 Mitnagdim, 34 Modern Orthodoxy, 49 Montreal Rabbis’ Walkout of 1935, 185–197 accusation against VH of misallocation of funds, 193–196 changes post walkout, 196 chaos in kosher meat industry, 187–188 Der Keneder Adler (KA) report, 190–192 financial issues, 190 issue of pay cuts for the rabbis, 190 Jewish Community Council (Va’ad ha-’Ir, VH), 187–191 Kosher Meat War, 188–189 AS opposition of VH, 189–190 Rabbinical Council (Va’ad ha-Rabbonim, VR), 187–191 rivalry between Rabbis Cohen and Rosenberg, 187 strike actions of the AS, 189 strike of shohtim, 187–190, 192 Va’ad ha-Kashrut (VK) opposition to VH, 192–193 VR and AS walkout, 191 Morris, Benny, 212 Moss, W. J., 284 motivation crisis, 205–208

346

Index

Mouffe, Chantal, 18 Muhlbauer, Varda, 236–237 Multer, Abraham J., 173 Musarism, 91 musar, 92 Musar yeshivas, 92–93 Musée Judaisme in Paris, 142

N

Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 327 Nazism, 21 Neo-Nazi movement, 33 New Profile, 198–199, 200-201, 208, 214, 224, 226, 228 New York State Committee on Equality in Education, 297 Nimrod, Naomi, 167 Nolan, Lloyd, 286 Novaredok Musarism, 106–107 central tenets, 107 as a radical religious counterculture, 113 religious radicalism and rebellious nature of, 106, 106n35, 108 second institutional crisis, 113–118 use of modern organizational tools and mechanisms, 116–117 Novaredok yeshiva dynamics of va’ad members, 100–101 encounter with birzhes, 97–100, 103, 105 in folklore and literature, 93–94 labor movements, 99–101 on modernity, 95–96 musar practices and world-view, 97–104 peule, prat, 102–103, 109–110 radical ideas of, 104–105 reading of secular books and newspapers, 96–97 strikes and protest activities during Russian revolution of 1905, 99 student body of, 100

students’ behavior, 95 Talmudic studies, 94–95 on traditional orthodox Jews, 112 underground “committees,” 101

O

Occupied Territories, 200–201, 215, 220, 223, 227 Occupy movement, 29 O’Hanlon, John, 286 Oneg Shabbat archives, 68n27 On Wings of Freedom, 177 Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox or haredi communities, 257–263 Oslo peace process (1993-2000), 213 Ovsay, Yehoshua, 98

P

Pappe, Ilan, 212 Passover Haggadah, 174 Passover holiday reenactment, 37 Passover-linked protest rituals, 153–158 deployment of modified Passover seders, 166–167 Kremlin’s restrictions on Passover observance, 156 popularity, 156 themes and symbolism, 155 using Jewish symbols, 168–172 “walkathon” for Soviet Jewry, New York, 154 Peace Now movement, 210 Pekelis, Alexander H., 295 Penson, Boris, 124 Pipher, Mary, 265 Polish Armia Krajowa (Home Army), 80 post-Zionist discourse , 211–214 Promised City, 183

R

Rabbinical Assembly, 43 Rabbinical Council (Va’ad ha-Rabbonim, VR), 187–191 Rabbis and Their Community, 183

Index

Rabinovitch, Israel, 193 racial supremacist movements, 33 Rafaëlli, Jean-François, 140 Rappleye, Williard C., 295 Ratnoff, Nathan, 294 Rault, Louis Armand, 133 Reform Judaism, 186n11 religious cult movements, 33 Renouard, Charles Paul, 134 Richter, Glenn, 159–161 Ringelblum, Emmanuel, 81–82 Rischin, Moses, 183 Riskin, Steven (Shlomo), 159, 168 Rogny, A., 287 Rogow, David, 142 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 295 Rosenbaum, Joan, 131 Rosenberg, Rabbi Yudel, 187, 189, 191, 195 Rosenthal, Erich, 327 Rotem, Simha, 81–82 Russell, John, 131

S

Salanter, Rabbi Israel, 91–92, 98, 102 Salvadoran opposition movement, 87 Schipper, Dr. Isaac, 76 Schneerson, Rabbi Menachem Mendel, 133 Schwitella, A. M., 293 scientism, 314–316 modern outlook and, 315 progress and, 314–315 religion and, 315 secularism, 313–314, 326 perspective of religion, 314 Shalom Task Force, 235, 254 Sheer, Charles, 159 Shenin, John Jacobi, 290 sheviras ha-midos, doctrine of, 108–110 sheyner yid, 112 Shministim, 198–199, 200–201, 208, 214, 220–224, 228 Sholem Aleichem, 126

347

Shternberg, Yitzhak, 191, 195 Shtrigler, Mordkhe, 101 Silberg, Moshe, 97 Six-Day War, 121, 327–328 Sklare, Marshall, 326 Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES), 128 social change, 15–16 definition of, 17 egalitarianism and feminist reforms as source of, 243–244 in haredi communities, 245–246 social construction of community, 9–12 social mentalities, 27 social movement community (SMC), 14–15 social movements/social movement theory, 18–34 collective challenges of social movements, 20 collective identity, 23–24 collective search for meaning, 24–25 dynamics of contention, 30-34 framing processes, 23–26 political process/political opportunity structure, 22–23 rational choice/resource mobilization perspective, 21–22 social media, 27–28 Soviet anti-Semitism, 121 Soviet Jewry, 4, 18 Soviet Jewry Movement, 120, 122, 130–131, 141, 143, 160 American branch of the Soviet Jewry movement (ASJM), 145 1968 biennial convention, 158 cultural construction in social movements, 151–153 cultural implications of mobilization tactics, 152–153

348

Index

deployment of ritual as a mobilization tactic, 158–161 goals of, 151 history of, 148–151 Matzoh of Hope ritual, 147, 172–179 mobilization of Jewish holiday and life-cycle rituals, 153–154 mode of protest, 164–165 Passover-linked protest rituals, 153–158 special prayer days and composing liturgical appeals, 173 Soyer, Moses, 128 Soyer, Raphael, 128 “special Sedorim,” practice of, 166 spousal abuse victims abuse as power and control, 241n16 abusive behaviors, 240 background, 234–237 denial of abusive behaviors, 242–243 egalitarianism and feminist reforms as source of social change, 243–244 isolating behaviors of women, 240–241 methodology, 237–238 organizations in response to problems of domestic abuse, 246–254 Orthodox, ultra-Orthodox and haredi communities, 237–238 rabbinic attitudes and behaviors towards wife abuse, 244–245 social capital resources and, 244 social changes in haredi communities, 245–246 study subjects, 238–239 suggestions for research, 264–266 wife abuse, defined, 239–241 Stalinism, 21 state constructionist theory of revolutions, 65

Staub, Michael, 146 strategic action fields, 17–18 Strauss, Israel, 293 Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry (SSSJ), 135, 138–139, 180 construction of protest as ritual drama, 162 Freedom Seder ritual, 168–172 “Passover Youth Protest/Geulah [Redemption] March,” 162–163 “Pharaoh Andropov- A Plague on Your House!” pamphlet, 155 “’Pharaoh Andropov-Let My People Go’ demonstration,” 162 protest as ritual drama, 162 religious language, 159 secular modes of protest, 161–165 “Solidarity Sunday” rallies, 165 Stuyvesant, Peter, 269 Swidler, Ann, 266 Szwajger, Adina, 71

T

Talisman, Mark E., 128 Tarrow, Sidney, 15, 19, 27, 30 Tchen, John Kuo Wei, 143 technology, impact on collective action, 27–29 third-generation American Jews, 321–327, 330 cultural alienation from Jewishness, 324–326 intergenerational conflict between the second, 324–325 performance of Jewish rituals, 324 reference to other Jews, 322 Tevye of Fiddler on the Roof, 323 Thomas, Dorothy Swaine, 309 Thomas, William Isaac, 309 Tilly, Charles, 19, 30, 66 Tönnies, Ferdinand, 5 Tsarist anti-Semitism, 126

Index

Tsemakh Atlas/Di Yeshive (The Yeshiva), 93–94 Turnbill, William G., 285 Turner, Joseph, 292

U

Union for Traditional Conservative Judaism (UTCJ)/Union for Traditional Judaism (UTJ), 40–43, 53–54 budget, 45 collective definition/ identity, 50, 52–53 feelings of alienation, grievances, and disenfranchisement, 46–47 frame alignment, 48–52 goals and objectives, 52 mobilizing structures, 43–44 movement rabbis, 44 resource mobilization, 45–46 social networks, function of, 43–44 structure of political opportunity, 43 support for, 44 transformation of UTCJ, 42–43 UTCJ/ITJ coalition, 49 United Synagogue Youth, 43

V

Vallotton, Felix, 121 Vanik, Charles, 128 Vincenhaler, Frank, 282

W

Wachtfogel, Moshe Yomtov, 191, 195 Wall, H. R., 283 Warsaw Ghetto, 1940-43 emergence of resistance, 76–79 great deportation, July-September 1942, 75–76 life in, 71–74

349

Nazi repression against Polish Jews, 70–71 social organization in the ghetto, 72 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, 1943, 62–63, 66, 88–90 data, 67–70 honor, role of, 82–88 opportunity and threat explanations, 79–82 Weather Underground of the 1960s and 1970s, 33 Weber, Max, 128, 308 Weiss, Avraham, Rabbi Avraham (Avi), 155, 159, 168 Weitzman, Susan, 259 Whitecotton, H. G., 283 Wiesel, Elie, 129, 131, 166 Wischnitzer, Mark, 97 Wise, Stephen S., 294–295 Women’s movement, U.S., 14 Woocher, Jonathan, 145, 147, 173 Wood, Elisabeth Jean, 87

Y

Yad Sarah’s Unit for Domestic Violence, 249–252 Yesh Gvul, 198–199, 200-201, 208, 214, 218, 220–222, 227 difference between Courage to Refuse and, 214–216 Yeshiva University, 49 Yevtushenko, Yevgeny, 162 Young, Owen D., 297

Z

Zalmanovitz, Rabbi, 195 Zionist movement, 84 in structuring Israeli political culture, 209–211 Zola, Emile, 133, 137 Zuckerman, Yitzhak, 81