Over the years, I have moved toward the way of being Jewish that my father rejected. But today, my way of being Jewish stands as another orphaned version of American Jewishness, as my father’s very different version was all those years ago. With jarring suddenness, it now seems no longer possible to be at once comfortably Jewish, and also Zionist, and also liberal, and also fully accepted outside the Jewish world.
Jewish America is in a kind of collective identity crisis, as the new contours of our place in the world, since the Hamas massacre of Oct. 7, 2023, and Israel’s brutally conducted subsequent wars, have emerged. Open antisemitism has awakened from one of its periodic slumbers.
I have spent the past few years researching my family’s history, going back to our roots in Germany in the late 18th century. What that has made clear to me is how fraught the project of Jewish membership in the wider world has always been. For most of Jewish history, the great majority of Jews have lived in separate, self-contained, observant Jewish communities. Then, with the coming of the Enlightenment, in parts of Western Europe, Jews were gradually — the word will sound strange in 21st-century America — “emancipated,” meaning that the ubiquitous restrictions on where we could live, what work we could do, where we could study and what rights we had were lifted or at least loosened.
This process was always controversial, externally and internally. The relatively few non-Jews who were champions of Jewish emancipation — people like the German historian Christian Wilhelm von Dohm, the author of “On the Civil Improvement of the Jews” (1781) — usually saw the Jewish character as having been warped by centuries of oppression, and wanted Jews to change as the price of acceptance. We would adopt last names. We would cease to engage in our traditional occupations of peddling, trading and money lending. We would give up our custom of de facto self-regulation and submit to the full authority of the state.
Such opportunities were available, or even attractive, to only a few Jews. The traditional Jewish community, with its all-encompassing rituals and sense of solidarity, could be a comfortable place, one that not everyone longed to escape, if that became an option. “There were locks inside the ghetto gates in most cases before there were locks outside,” the historian Salo Baron wrote in a famous essay in 1928.
