Jewish Culture and Its Discontents

Let me begin by thanking Michael Weingrad, Jonathan Rosen, and Abraham Socher for their engaging reflections on my essay, “The Death of Jewish Culture.” I’ll address their specific comments before offering a brief suggestion about where to go from here.

Jonathan Rosen, to start with him, balks at my diagnosis of the ills of contemporary secular Jewish culture in America. He fears my definition of Jewish culture is too capricious, too programmatic, and too constrictive. He needn’t worry. No one is proposing to excommunicate Kafka or King Solomon, two casualties he names of my putative wrath. I wish we had more like them. But we don’t. And the reason is simple: Jewish cultural secularism is too thin and open-ended to support a collective identity divorced from religion and peoplehood.

Menahem Mendl of Kotsk, the 19th-century hasidic anti-rebbe, taught: “Man is commanded regarding two things: not to deceive himself and not to imitate his fellow.” American Jews are guilty on both counts. We love being American, and we flatter ourselves that whatever we produce as Americans counts as equally valid expressions of Jewishness. How else can the likes of Woody Allen, J. D. Salinger, Judy Blume, Frank Gehry, Mel Brooks, Irving Berlin, and Bob Dylan be claimed as icons of modern Jewish culture?