AJC Conference Examines 250th American Anniversary

As America approaches the 250th anniversary of its founding, the American Jewish Committee (AJC) recently examined where the American Jewish community has been, where it is now, and where it’s headed.

The discussion, which took place during one of the plenary sessions of the organization’s Global Summit in Washington, D.C., brought together three of America’s most thoughtful observers of Jewish life and Jewish history.

The three speakers were Rabbi Angela Buchdahl, senior rabbi of the Central Synagogue of Reform Judaism in New York City, professor Jonathan Sarna of Brandeis University, the elder statesman of American Jewish historians and author, Dr. Dara Horn, whose book, “People Love Dead Jews – Reports from a Haunted Present,” was a bestselling, iconoclastic look at contemporary Jewish culture and identity.

Although the program was ambitiously framed to summarize two-and-a-half centuries of Jewish life in America, it soon settled on a discussion of two of the important issues animating American Jewish life today, the rebirth of antisemitism in this country and the political divide that has fractured American Jewish communal existence.

Neither challenge, it seems, is all that new. As professor Sarna pointed out, antisemitism in America has been a history of peaks and valleys. It thrived in periods like the late 19th century, when racism was institutionalized through the passage of Jim Crow laws and American Jews also suddenly found themselves excluded from much of civil society.

American Jews found themselves battling discrimination just after World War I, when Henry Ford aggressively stoked the fires of antisemitism, and found that many of America’s commercial and academic elite were quick to follow his lead.

But in each period, American Jews took up the challenge to build remarkable Jewish institutions, created thriving religious communities and prospered in America. What resulted was what many consider a golden age of Jewish life after World War II that was rooted in the response to challenges earlier in the century. The same thing, Sarna predicted, could result from what has been set in motion today.

But Horn was not so sanguine. She sees the so-called Golden Age that began in mid-20th century America, which was founded on a strong religious identity, ignored the real lesson of 3,000 years of Jewish life — that Jews are a civilization. We spent these several millennia not being like everyone else.

She believes that the history of antisemitism is intimately connected to the content of Jewish civilization. The admonition, she argues, to shun false gods was a warning to stand up tyranny, and those who would tyrannize us, use antisemitism to gain or maintain power. Their lie, down through the centuries, has remained largely the same, that Jews are destroying what you value most. The only thing that changes is their description of what Jews are destroying.

In her new book, which is out Sept. 1 and has the provocative title of “The Final Solution To The Jewish Question – A Love Story For the Living,” is said to be a call to action, to stand up to the lie that is antisemitism and understand our role as a people.

The challenges facing Jews today has only added to the responsibilities that rabbis have today. To deal with all these challenges, Rabbi Buchdahl said her most important job, as a spiritual leader, is to build trust within her congregational community and with the outside world.

She reminded her listeners at the AJC conference that the great critic of American democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville, wrote in the early years of the republic that the American democratic experiment will succeed only if people trust each other.

If a society is to be ruled by common people and not by a king, you have to trust each other and the institutions that society creates. She invoked the advice of the prophet Jeremiah when we were exiled and no longer sovereign over ourselves. Seek the peace and prosperity of the city you have been exiled to, he counseled, because when they prosper, you will prosper.

And that is what Jews have done, Rabbi Buchdahl reminded her AJC audience, wherever they’ve gone, particularly in America. We have recognized that progress, prosperity, and peace will only come to the Jewish community if we contribute to the peace and the trust of the cities and of the nation in which we live.