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November 1, 2001

The American Jewish Identity Survey (2001)

Jewish Education Combating Assimilation
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I am beginning to see, as a result of my experience with individuals in the community and on college campuses, that the young people Rabbi Israel has talked about do not have time to worry about the problem of their Jewishness, that is, Jewishness is not their problem. Here I agree, that the problem of the survival of Judaism – the crisis – lies with the Establishment. What does the Establishment have to offer these young people who have come home, trained and culturally conditioned by Yale? How can we get them to identify with the Jewish community? The problem will be easier to grapple with if we realize, first of all, that we are dealing with three different types of individuals, not just one. First, there are the young people who come into the community wishing to identify themselves with the community. They quickly affiliate and participate. Second, there is the larger group which I would call the neutral group, that is those who are neither here nor there. These people can be influenced. The third group, a smaller one, moves out of the community and does not wish to be spoken with.I think that it is important for the Establishment to take a good look at the needs of the first two groups. There is a new client in the Jewish community and this client no longer is the person who needs social-welfare assistance. For the client is actually the community itself. We must pay attention to this fact. When I talk about this “we,” I am talking about all of us who are involved in institutions within the community. We must begin to look at the service or the substance of what we have to offer. I think that there are areas that can be developed through the modification of existing institutions or the creation of new ones that will be at- tractive to this young group returning home from college. We must keep in mind that the colleges of today have given them some kind of underpinning — a set of values to which they would like to respond. If we are to reach them we have to be…
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I have been asked to share with you my impressions of the impact on the Jewish community in general, with specific reference to my community and my institution, of the now famous or infamous statistics concerning the 52% out-marriages contained in the recent population study by the CJF. The most shocking thing about this news is that anyone is shocked at all. In our bones, we all knew that it was coming—indeed, that it was inevitable. We were reluctant to talk about it without rhetorical disguises and semantic convolutions, because it was bad for our communal business, because we were tired of "crying wolf," and because we were apprehensive about the consequences.But so deeply disturbing is this latest revelation about the decline of the Jewish community, that the times will permit nothing less than utter frankness. We must all be civilized, of course, but learn to speak to each other without the kind of courtesies and sensibilities that cramp our style and cause us to be less then honest with each other.Harsh words, I know. But the bitter truth is that our Jewish community still has not absorbed the extent or meaning of this catastrophe. The forces of denial are already rallying: the CJF statistics will be questioned, vested interests will assert themselves, and we will try our damndest to shoot the messengers. More articles and books will be written declaring that maybe, really, intermarriage is good for us, that we must not submit to pessimism, that we are panicking prematurely, that "Gott vet helfn." (A remarkable paradox: those with the least faith in a Deity suddenly discover that we can rely on Him even if He does not exist...) And maybe worst of all, yet another commission will be formed, another study launched, and another conference called. And life will continue as usual, as it—life—ebbs away from the American-Jewish community.Even now, some of us are reaching to the psychological medicine chest for some palliatives and have grabbed the most available no…
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The Challenges of Jewish Education in the 80s (1979)

Any discussion of Jewish education in the coming decade stands to benefit much from Dean Henchey's cogent analysis of the general educational scene. Because Jews do not live in a vacuum, or even – in the open, democratic, and pluralistic society of North America – in hermetically sealed enclaves, what he has to say about the contours of society as they are beginning to emerge for the 1980s must clearly enrich any analyses and prescriptions that we may offer for Jewish education in particular. However, because of the peculiar nature of our community and our concerns, our focus must simultaneously be somewhat narrower and somewhat broader. It must be narrower, because as a minority (irrespective of the degree of our creativity) we are bound to operate within the social parameters, communal structures, and cultural paradigms which our whole society sets for us. Perhaps it would be more courageous to speak of rejecting these structures and paradigms and reaching out boldly for something radically different. But realistically, that will not happen, certainly not when one considers how intimately and intricately North American Jewry is tied in with the mainstream of Western civilization and, even more, with the cutting edge of its most progressive elements. The best we can do — and this must never be denigrated — is to seek out creatively those nooks and crannies within these structures which we consider more amenable to Jewish development, more accessible to Jewish aspiration, and more compatible with Jewish values and principles. It is here that collective innovation is possible for us. Our focus must be broader because our educational concerns embrace not only the transmission of knowledge — of the cognitive and abstract elements of culture per se — but the whole gamut of Torah, which is as broad as life itself. For the Jewish educator, character and religious conduct and morality are not merely the consequences of education, but the very substance and stuff of educat…
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