Young American Jews Still Hunger for Meaning

Growing up, like so many Jewish children of my generation, I would hear stories of the old country, where Jewish nightmares happened in broad daylight, where grandparents with numbers on their arms endured unspeakable persecution.

But whereas a Jewish child growing up in Argentina or Poland or Ethiopia might have heard such stories as a warning, I heard them as a kind of American affirmation. They were another way of saying: The horrors of history happened over there. We are in the new world. And here can never become there.

Perhaps that sounds naive. But consider the fact that, like millions of American Jews, I was raised in exactly the milieu that my friend Daniel Gordis describes in his provocative new essay: liberal-minded, optimistic, and allergic to the suffering and sadness that previous generations of Jews accepted as a matter of course.