The Jewish Americans: A Review

Interesting thoughts from Joseph Epstein on the PBS show.  In Humanities Magazine, he writes:

As someone who feels a strong link with Israel, I have never for a moment thought of abandoning the United States to live there. As a writer it would cut me off from my subjects; as a man it would uproot me painfully. One of the greatest strokes of good luck in my life has been to be born and live in the United States. And yet, as a Jewish American with an historical sense, it is impossible for me to be unaware of how important the state of Israel is. Letty Cottin Pogrebin puts it well when she says, “This [America] is our country, that [Israel] is our home,” and then goes on to quote Robert Frost saying that “home is where they have to take you in.”

The Jewish Americans ends on a note of slightly confused promise. Anti-Semitism appears less currently than at any time in the history of Jewish Americans. Much in the Jewish religion is itself undergoing radical change, at least in its Reform and Reconstructionist branches, where women are now among the majority of those studying for the rabbinate. At the same time, there has been a resurgence of Orthodox Judaism among younger Jews in the United States. So we see in this excellent documentary some Jews doing yoga sessions under the guidance of a woman rabbi, while others walk the streets in silken kaftans and long white socks as if living in eighteenth-century Poland.

What The Jewish Americans does not take up is that, irony of ironies, the relative absence of anti-Semitism in America today along the increase of mixed marriages between Jews and gentiles may ultimately be the biggest threat faced by Jewish Americans who wish to continue to live fully as Jews and as Americans both. The consequence of perfect assimilation, so longed for by earlier generations of Jewish Americans, could mean the end of the Jews as a distinctive people in America. Like the man said, it's a complex fate, that of being a Jewish American.