‘checkbook Judaism’ Assailed at Discussion on Jewish Survival in U.S.

Greater emphasis on Jewish education is needed to insure Jewish survival in the United States, it was agreed here in a colloquium by Label A. Katz, national president of B’nai B’rith, and Jack I. Fishbein, editor and publisher of The Sentinel, the Jewish weekly here. They spoke at the concluding program of a forum series conducted by the Adult Education Institute of Congregation B’nai David. Rabbi Herschell Saville, spiritual leader of the synagogue, was the moderator, as they debated the topic “The Vanishing Jews: True or False.”

According to Mr. Katz, “Jewish youth in public schools, particularly on college campuses, want to identify as Jews. They want to affiliate, not to assimilate.” He said that American Jews spend $100,000,000 a year for the religious education of their children, and that enrollment in Jewish all-day schools is now 75 percent greater than it was 12 years ago.

Mr. Fishbein, however, assailed what he called “checkbook Judaism” with its “almost total emphasis on fund-raising as a way of life.” He charged that fund-raising now consumes almost 90 percent of all the time and energy of organized American Jewry.

Pinpointing “the alarming trend toward intermarriage and eventual assimilation” as one of the major danger signs facing American Jewry, he said: “Freedom creates conditions in which assimilation naturally grows. More than 75 percent of all Jews of college age are now attending our universities, resulting in intermarriage. Seventy percent of the children of these unions are lost to Judaism.”

Mr. Fishbein said that one possible solution to the problem is a re-examination of “the whole approach to the synagogue, its functions, the role of the rabbi, etc., transforming it away from its present stagnation and returning it, instead to prophetic Judaism. Rabbis must assume their rightful place as the moral and ethical leaders of the Jewish people, rather than as fund-raisers, public relations experts and book reviewers.”