Losing Their Religion
Elliott Abrams’s book If You Will It: Rebuilding Jewish Peoplehood for the 21st Century focuses on the great challenges facing American Jewry. Those challenges are not the acute ones—pro-Hamas protesters that make the already overpriced elite four-year college experience an ever worse deal, or the growing acceptance of anti-Semitic violence and vandalism. These are serious problems, but the United States today remains one of the safest, most conducive places for Jews, or anyone else, to live in the history of the world.
Abrams addresses the chronic and worsening problems of assimilation and loss of religious and group identity and commitments, which he documents in depressing detail through the results of a 2020 Pew Survey. Among the non-Orthodox, intermarriage rates are above 70 percent. Most young Jews do not feel a deep attachment to Israel. As Abrams notes, the Jewish situation is not dissimilar to the decline of affiliation faced by other groups, such as Roman Catholics, and while his book is primarily aimed at a Jewish audience, it will be of interest to others interested in what it takes to maintain a distinct set of beliefs that is at odds with the dominant culture.
The decline of American Jewry is really just the story of the non-Orthodox movements. While Orthodoxy was largely written off as a withering relic some decades ago, its numbers are rapidly growing. Although only 10 percent of American Jews are Orthodox, they constitute 17 percent of those under 30. Orthodox schools and synagogues are growing rapidly. Orthodox Jews have become culturally and politically prominent, from Ben Shapiro and Jared Kushner to Jack Lew. The Reform movement has the opposite dynamic, with an aging membership and empty houses of worship. Orthodox Jews report very high levels of attachment to Jewish peoplehood and the State of Israel.
This data would suggest an obvious diagnosis: The problems of declining American Jewish identity can be traced to a break from its normative roots. The solution would be an attempt to increase traditional religious education and observance. Abrams puts the possibility of a revival to one side. He takes as a given that the overwhelming number of American Jews will not decide to practice in the traditional manner—and that is surely correct. For the remainder, some solution must be found that fosters their sense of Jewish peoplehood, taking advantage of Jewishness’s dual valence as a faith and people.
Abrams’s recommendations are eminently reasonable—they focus on increasing enrollment in Jewish day schools, particularly nondenominational or community schools that enroll primarily students from non-Orthodox homes, as well as Jewish camps and experiences in Israel. All these solutions have two features in common: They seek to solidify Jewish identity by creating particularistic social contexts—and they are very expensive.
Most of Abrams’s recommendations focus on creating islands of Jewish insularity within the highly pluralistic lives Jews live. Studying, playing, and traveling with other Jews in explicitly Jewish environments strengthens the communal—indeed the tribal—feeling among participants. As Abrams writes, previously such close community was achieved organically—prior to the 1960s, American Jews largely lived around and socialized with other Jews. Many also had recent immigrant backgrounds that kept them connected to a sense of identity. Today, such experiences must be cultivated.
Abrams does not speak much of what these schools will teach, other than an emphasis on Hebrew and, to suit the tastes of their customers, high academic studies. The content of these programs needs more consideration—and particularly, who will teach there. One of the many causes for the decline of the Conservative and Reform movements is that many of the professionals who staffed their institutions brought with them a fuzzy notion of Judaism focused on "tikkun olam," a multifaceted Talmudic term literally meaning "repairing the world," that has been distorted to mean advancing progressive political causes. Too many Jewish professionals have focused more on "allyship" than muscular support for Israel. If being Jewish is just some private label progressivism, it is not surprising that many will simply take the name-brand versions of the ideology without the increasingly discordant particularism. Without teachers who will present a strong and positive, non-apologetic view of what it means to be a Jew, such schools, while probably better than nothing, will be of limited use.
Efforts to promote Jewish peoplehood in the United States must also be cognizant that they are swimming headlong against the cultural tide. A crucial component to Jewish continuity, as Abrams and all serious observers recognize, is endogamy. But today’s culture values individual autonomy, and radical autonomy in matters of the heart. American Jews largely subscribe to the "Love is Love" motto of the LGBT political movement—can they abstract enough from their political commitments to understand that this message needs qualification to ensure that, as Abrams puts it, they will not merely be descendants of Jews in prior generations, but also the ancestors of those in the future?
Abrams does not provide solutions for another major cause of the "disappearance" of American Jews—staggeringly low fertility. Jews have lower fertility than the general population, with signs of further decline to come. One in five American Jewish women will not have children, double the proportion in the general population.
Of course, declining fertility is a national and indeed global trend; Jewish patterns are reflective of broader cultural changes, but as with many things, Jews are on the cutting edge. Indeed, fertility statistics further reinforce how fully a part of the surrounding society American Jews are (and how separate from it Orthodox Jews continue to remain). But this is a crucial point: The problems of Jewish peoplehood in the West are largely not caused by internal factors, but by broader cultural factors to which Jews are fully exposed.
These cultural trends do not stand still and may continue to have even greater effects. Internal Jewish communal solutions to problems caused by external forces, moreover, can only be partially successful. Indeed, while the causes of declining fertility are not obvious, to the extent they are caused by some kind of cultural cues or conditioning, pooling low-fertility Reform- or Conservative-affiliated Jews in schools together may only reinforce their expectations about reproduction.
Abrams treats the non-Orthodox and Orthodox worlds as fairly separate and says little about the most successful experiment in American Jewish life of the past decades, the Chabad Lubavitch movement. Chabad is a very devout Hasidic sect, but they have taken upon themselves to establish communal institutions open and welcoming to all Jews. Unlike Reform and Conservative synagogues, they do not charge steep membership fees, or any at all. They are deeply aware that almost all their participants will not become Orthodox, but believe that any increase in traditional practice or increased Jewish knowledge is to be celebrated. Chabad has managed to reach over one third of American Jews with its programming. It may be the case that as many non-Orthodox Jews participate in ritual observance through Chabad as Reform and Conservative. Every year sees the opening of new Chabad houses.
Chabad shows that one need not seek to bring American Jews into Orthodoxy to engage them in ways that excite them about their heritage, faith, and the Jewish state.
All of Abrams’s ideas are worthwhile and necessary, and hopefully the profound disgust many Jews have had at the universities, newspapers, and other institutions they had counted on will be turned into the creation of new institutions. But Chabad demonstrates that aside from creating institutions, it is equally important to have the right people work in them, people for whom the continuity of the Jewish people is their driving passion.
If You Will It: Rebuilding Jewish Peoplehood for the 21st Century
by Elliott Abrams
Wicked Son, 288 pp., $28.99
Eugene Kontorovich is a professor at George Mason University Scalia Law School and a scholar at the Kohelet Policy Forum, a Jerusalem think tank.
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