Weakened Bonds

The trend to symbolic, or, as I prefer to think of it, decorative ethnicity, already visible in the Jewish life of the 50's, is even clearer now. In response to a question in the 1990 National Jewish Population Survey about how they define being Jewish, more Jews said the meaning of being Jewish in America is ``ethnic'' or ``cultural'' than agreed to ``religious.'' Subsequent analyses of the NJPS data by age cohorts show that the ``cultural'' label is even stronger for the younger groups. ``Culture'' provides a much more open, less binding parameter for defining a group than does religion, or even ethnicity. The bond it offers is not mutually exclusive. In this respect, these Jews are just like Waters' respondents. This is a new kind of ethnicity --- not the kind that emphasizes the separation between Jews and non-Jews, but one having to do with cultural variety.

We know what follows. Given this approach to ethnicity, intermarriage is not a rejection of one's original heritage. It is just the meeting of two individuals, who can make a perfectly compatible home involving the blending of their respective cultural heritages. Indeed, they now have a wider playing field, more lovely customs and ideas from which to choose.

They can keep being Catholic, and Scottish . . . and Russian Jewish.

Ethnic borrowing and recombination are not what happens only to Jews raised by Baptists. We served East African groundnut stew in our sukkah this year, and Thai noodles at last Shabbat lunch. For us, they were just interesting food. But it is the young man at Kripalu who chants Buddhist mantras regularly, but calls himself a Jew, also just borrowing? The line between the incorporation of elements from others' heritages and the blurring of one's own identity is not always so clear.

Jewish ethnicity in this new American version gives us Jews who feel themselves part of the community but who cannot distinguish between attitudes, activities and rituals that are Jewishly grounded and those that are not --- and who do not even know they are failing to make such distinctions; and Jews who slide imperceptibly out of the Jewish and into the majority community, or whose children do. If the Jewishness of large numbers of our Jewish people (whose religious civilization define Judaism) is merely decorative, I submit that we have a problem.