Israel and the Diaspora at 50

Judaism, Spring, 1998 by Irving Louis Horowitz

How Jewish religions, national integration, and cultural identity are forged in light of these two immense events is the burden of this analysis. It is evident that contradiction is far more characteristic of Jewish life than is consensus. Straggles between Orthodoxy and Reformism, nationalism and cosmopolitanism (for want of a better word), Israeli national interests and Jewish universalist claims, and capitalist individualism and socialist collectivism, have all hardened into postures rather than been resolved over the course of the century. Add to this mix such volatile private concerns as intermarriage, conversion, ethnic heritage, secularization, and the task of analysis appears daunting, while that of synthesis seems well-nigh impossible.

Policymakers repeatedly claim that even were Israel not to exist, conflict among Arab and Muslim interests would continue to fester. Dare one add in reverse that, even were Arab hostilities to Israel and Muslim animosities toward Jews magically to dissolve all at once, conflict among Jewish interests - political and religious-would continue in force? Urgent questions have been raised about generational concerns: the evolution of Israel as a national entity with "normal" state proclivities to monopolize force, and the prospect that Judaism may become a minority religion even within Israel, much less within the context of most open societies. It behooves the social-science community to answer whether Judaism is any different than other world-class religions, and what constitutes Judaism as a frame of reference in national and cultural terms with nominal regard to issues of religious observance or theological discourse.

There is also the thorny, if largely unspoken, issue of how strategies of becoming Jewish enhance or impede principles of scientific research. Concerns for Jewish survival strongly imply that such survival is a positive value. But whether a moral center of gravity, much less teleological purpose, can be deduced from the history of religions as a sociological concern merits examination.(2) Within these domains of relevance, I should like to consider minimal and maximal approaches to Jewish survival. To be sure, the topic of Jewish survival in the period ahead is so broad and pervasive that the potential for saying something new, much less presenting a startling set of findings of conclusions, is more presumptuous than ambitious. Yet, it is in the nature of human nature to persist in lurching forward, no matter how slightly, and to seek closure no matter how tentative.

I take as my text a highly personal point-counterpoint as it were: the collection of my essays published a quarter century ago under the rubric Israeli Ecstasies and Jewish Agonies,(3) and the work I have pursued in the intervening years called Taking Lives.(4) The purpose of Israeli Ecstasies and Jewish Agonies was to explain how a dialectical set of relationships emerged as a result of a new centrality for Jewish life, Israel, and the evolution of a new periphery as well, in North America. For what seemed to be at stake in the late 1960s and early 1970s was the serious weakening of Jewish life as an entity of value apart from the existence of Israeli society. Now, the situation is curiously reversed. There is a widespread recognition of the reawakening of Jewish life and a growing skepticism of the centrality of the Israeli center. My intentions in Taking Lives were somewhat less global: to develop a social-scientific framework for understanding the Holocaust in terms of state legitimacy, or more specifically, variables of class, status, and power familiar to those who work in the Weberian tradition. Curiously, we have a large literature based on personal testimonials and biographies, and only a slightly smaller number of writings exploring theological and religious considerations that emerged from the Holocaust. The social analysis of this monumental tragedy is only now receiving its proper due.

What makes the study of Jewish identity complex is that we are not dealing with a unilinear phenomenon, but one more akin to a multiplexed phenomenon moving in a variety of historical as well as structural directions. To discuss the Jewish condition is to examine religiosity, nationality, and culture all at once as well as one at a time. Indeed, to disaggregate these elements of Judaism results in distortions and reductions that can, and sadly enough often do, lead to little light and much heat.

To be sure, the arguments between those who emphasize issues of class stratification on one side, and cultural identity on the other, indicate that exaggerated claims for any one sort of social-scientific method are likely to result in frustration and futile argumentation. I mined from a study of Israeli-Jewish relations to an examination of the deeper roots of the Jewish condition, for the explosion of literature on the Holocaust led to serious distortions in the intellectual landscape; and no less important, the social-scientific accounts, while attempting to repair such distortions resulting from a variety of reductionisms in the popular literature, had introduced a few new sins of their own.