The “fatal and suicidal delusion of American Jewry” is that it can assure its future through philanthropic and defense activities, Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg declared at the B’nai B’rith Critical Issues Forum, which devoted its latest meeting to the need for free Jewish day schools.
“Real needs have been met and continue to be met and I do not downgrade them,” Hertzberg emphasized. “But the idea that involvement in funding hospitals, fighting anti-Semitism, or defending Israel will help to preserve the Jewish people is simply not true. It is not true even though we are doing a superb job in each of these areas. And it would not be true even if we were doing twice as well.”
If a Jew wants to be an airline pilot and a shomer Shabbat, “we will fight his case to the Supreme Court,” Hertzberg said, “and we will never worry about the expense. But to teach about Sabbath observance we do not have funds. Our priorities are insanely and suicidally wrong. And by maintaining them we are not going to have Jewish great-grandchildren who care.”
As a Zionist, “I was told that the reestablishment of the State of Israel would preserve the Jewish community,” Hertzberg continued. “In 1948 the rate of intermarriage was one in twelve. Today it is one in three, which is what it has always been in every third generation of Jews living in an open society in the diaspora.”
THE ONLY ANSWER
The only answer is Jewish day school education, which must be made available to all families, regardless of ability to pay, Hertzberg said. “If we do not cultivate our own interior ethos, if we do not raise a generation to care, within 30 years half of our Jews will be gone, and in a few generations we will have no one left to protect.”
Calling Jewish day school education for all “indispensable,” Hertzberg stressed that he has no quarrel with current Jewish efforts in the philanthropic and defense areas. These things must be done, and “we are doing them superbly,” he said. “But we are evaporating at the usual rate.”
Hertzberg is spiritual leader of Temple Emanu-El in Englewood, New Jersey, a professor of history at Columbia University in New York, and author, most recently, of “Being Jewish in America,” a collection of his essays on contemporary themes to be published by Schocken next January.
The B’nai B’rith Critical Issues Forum, created by Dr. Harris Schoenberg, who is also the director of the United Nations office of B’nai B’rith, and directed by him in association with executive director Walter La Raus and program director Rhonda Love of B’nai B’rith Districe One (New York and New England), brings leading political figures, opinion makers and thinkers to discuss with lay leaders and staff the vital issues facing world Jewry today.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
