They Missed Something

 https://forward.com/news/785155/jfna-israel-education-generational-divide/

https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/marc-rowan-declares-mamdani-our-enemy-at-50th-uja-federation-wall-street-dinner/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJ_evTivC0I&t=1340s

Three items of note came into my awareness.  Different subjects but with a common interpretation.  The first two are traditional news articles.  The Jewish Federations of North America, an umbrella group of many purposes, assembled its key people.  Over my adult lifetime, now half a century, the people allowed a seat at the table have become less of a cross-section of the wider American Jewish public than they once were.  Thousands might have attended.  My representation was not among them.  A variant of that gaining a feature in a philanthropic newsletter described a New York gathering of Wall Street's Jewish contributors.  American's economy made me prosperous, but not philanthropically wealthy.  They don't represent me either.  What I got instead of a bottomless supply of money to cast my influence preferences, was knowledge of Judaism's underpinnings, a fierce independence, an ability to reason subservient to none, and a willingness to schect the sacred cows whose poop becomes burdensome.  Reports of these two gatherings of Dominant Influencers, present on a lesser scale in my community and synagogue, conveyed an entitlement to manipulate.  My Way or the Highway.  Or at least the exit ramps.  A lot of people took that option,  It left the Jewish upper tier with funds but fewer people than they could have had.  Maybe even without the best people that they could have had.  Reb Tevye expressed his skepticism on Broadway, "when you're rich they think you really know."  First crooned the year of my Bar Mitzvah.  Still sung at high school performances two generations later.  Wall Streeters know they can vote their shares.  

The third presents a podcast with historical underpinnings.  It displays a series of remarkable color drawings and just over a half-hour of commentary. The artwork moves sequentially with themes of the talk.  The history conveyed timelines.  It described moments of glory, institutions led by people whose personal achievements in commerce, science, and public affairs gave them an admiration, even an authority, that could be transposed to Jewish agencies.  Nobody challenged the legitimacy of those high achieving men.  Institutions already existed, many formed in the World War 1 era amid formation of unions, the Scouts, Workman's Circle, burial societies, nascent Jewish advocacy groups.  Visionaries transformed these grass roots banding together to institutions that could maintain a legacy.  Many promoted unity as the path to successfully achieving the element of power needed to secure each group's interests.

Indeed American Judaism did thrive, but in a less idealized way than the podcast suggested.  My Bar Mitzvah took place on Shabbat HaGadol, 1964.  My tallit, which I still wear twice a year, was woven of silk and was crafted in Israel, displaying the shade of blue that Israelis display on their flags.  The Six-Day War would not happen for another three years.  Jews did not yet have access to our most sacred historical structures.  In America, Jews had emerged from World War II.  Our fathers served in Europe or the Pacific, let Uncle Sam subsidize their college degrees that they never expected to have, and relocated us to suburban tracts with great local schools and nascent synagogues which promised to process every school age male through to Bar Mitzvah, leaving something for the daughters too.  We had institutions.  My Rabbi graduated from the Jewish Theological Seminary.  Across town, the Reform Rabbi had his ordination from their flagship seminary.  Other American rabbis received their training in pre-war Europe, displaced by the conflict, sometimes by the concentration camps.  A growing American synagogue structure offered stable, though not always lucrative employment.  Our congregations also had its share of native Europeans.  Most, like my grandparents' generation, arrived in New York before the restrictive immigration laws.  Others settled as war refugees.  

Those people created American Judaism, the world of summer camps, Hebrew School, USY Bowling Leagues.  But also an alluring secular world.  They attended City College or state university.  I could set my sights on the Ivies, provided I remained diligent in public school.  Israel had a mixed identity.  Our teachers taught us about it in multiple dimensions.  That land had been promised to us and after a long absence, Jews regained sovereignty, but an insecure one.  Its inhabitants included idealists from Eastern Europe but also people seeking refuge.  We learned of Holocaust survivors, and an obligation to offer them a piece of our American prosperity.  The distinction between gifts, as donations to plant trees, and loans as Israel Bonds, did not seem part of our curriculum.  Nor did the real population swell that overlapped with many of our birth years.  Those inhabitants of Muslim lands who experienced retribution from their native countries because a place of Jewish sovereignty had become a reality.

The creators of the podcast express the same contemporary issue, though in different ways. Superimpoosing the news items with the podcast, I think the themes unite in an important way.  Each deals with fragmentation of the Jewish base of support for Israel.  For decades, at least since a need to address Holocaust devastation of Judaism from its base in Europe, the need to have a refuge, a place on earth with Jewish sovereignty.  has been a cultural imperative.  Whether it served well as an anti-dote to anti-Semitism, globally and in America, can be debated from numerous perspectives.  But when Israel came under attack in 1967, the outpouring of support and funds crossed all Jewish perspectives.  It came at a time of rising economic and social standing of America's older Jewish immigrants and younger native born. People of my generation knew Holocaust survivors personally in America and understood that Israel provided a refuge to whoever sought their protection.  We did not forget useful, maybe even essential partnerships. African-Americans, as their identity moved ahead from Negroes to Black to current language begun in that era, welcomed Jews who could relate to their own struggles.   Lobbying for repressed Soviet Jews had just begun.  It was an era of goodwill, at least in part.  It was also an era when communal leadership earned the respect due to individuals who had made the most of their difficult circumstances.

This took multiple forms.  Immigrants to early 20th century NY City, which included my grandparents, had little choice but to look out for each other.  Though my maternal grandparents would survive another half century, people of the community would purchase burial plots so that everyone could have a final resting place.  My grandfather and extended family subscribed.  When I visit Adolph Ullman, a small tract amid a vast Beth David Cemetery, I can wander through the stone gate and locate not only my mother and grandparents but their siblings who met a few times a year in a rented hall in Queens.  Beyond my own family, Jews banded together for common benefit.  Out of the effort came labor unions and Workman's Circles, a benevolent form of socio-economic safety net.  Largesse did not only come internally.  My parent's generation attended City College and its divisions.  They fought for the American military, some in each of the two World Wars, and others in Korea.  At my Bar Mitzvah, between wars, some men sat in the sanctuary and reception tables in Air Force and Army uniforms.  These men, and their new wives or betrothed but not yet wed, were too old to be my older brothers but too junior to be my parents.  We had a continuum.

While making institutions secure, litmus tests emerged, along with influencers who thought they could enforce whatever path leadership directed.  The following sixty years, whether the historical timeline of the podcast or the news reports of who gets to attend meetings where the Who's Who present their vision to their echo chambers, showed limitations to that authority.  Intermarriage publicity starting with Look Magazine's The Vanishing American Jew cover story generated a shunning stragety with threats of adverse consequences to resistors.  Authortity cannot mandate demographics, nor can it temper resentment.  Eventually those mostly self-made leaders hired professionals to create programming and influence policy decisions of whoever American voters elect.  Much investment went into creating leadership, one which socialized proteges more than it nurtured the independence and vision that created each legacy institution.  Oppose the mandate and you could be shunned, just like the intermarried were.  This has some very negative consequences.  People feel unwelcomed, even marginalized.  They don't want to tilt at windmills or carry unending minority views.  They don't take kindly to ranking as inferior, either by more modest wealth or by ideas that diverge from the banner each agency's poobah's demand everyone unfurl in the illusion of unity.  The ability to impose on people that way, to mistreat many, including myself at times, along the way, presupposes that they have no recourse and must therefore maintain allegiance.  Ironically, the efforts of the the original visionaries, those mostly men who help eradicate public anti-semitism in my young adult years, gave us a lot of alternatives.  Instead of licking our wounds as our children acquired Christian spouses, we could stay home from synagogue.  Our medical, legal, scientific, and commercial opportunities gave us forums to belong to worthy organizations that valued us with fewer conditions than many Jewish ones did.  Our synagogues are smaller and older.  As our Israel homeland has become more secure, our willingness to excuse every policy in the name of Jewish unity has acquired more boundaries.  When unwelcome, as many of us perceive ourselves to be, we can divert our synagogue dues and Jewish agency charitable dollars towards our alma maters and our secular institutions that have more successfully nurtured our loyalties.  The proteges of the founding leaders dealt with the autonomy that many Jewish Americans have aquired rather poorly.  The keynote speakers at a gathering of 2000 Wall Street demanding loyalty to them as leaders will probably keep those moguls or wannabes aboard.  They need a bigger fraction of the other five million American Jews and their talents than what those on the podiums declare as their entitlement.  

Judaism needs Kehillah, or community, as a core principle.  Our Torah describes leadership in many ways, not all of them flattering by modern standards.  As the video outlines, we started off with endless potential.  It become too selective, too demeaning of challenges.  What the two advocacy meetings really portrayed were the recessive genes of inbreeding expressed as the norm.  Functional, but without the allure that the icons of my grandparent's generation envisioned as where American Judaism might not only reach its Golden Age but keep it moving upwards indefinitely. 

One of my alma maters, an honorable Jesuit university, installed its latest President in a podcast ceremony.  In his featured remarks, he noted that the school he now leads benefited from its share of misdeeds.  The thirteen Jesuit founders brought sixed enslaved men to help them.  I could walk through an expanded campus in the 1970s because the school had claimed domain to the surrounding neighborhood, displacing a poor community less than just compensation.  Things that brought public benefit, but now seen as with some insensitivity to the victims.  My Jewish world has its element of benefit from its share of overpowering some people's vulnerability or lack of recourse.  The new University President claimed ownership all aspects of my alma mater's legacy.  My Jewish institutions generated a leadership that approaches those left behind, or often treated contemptuously, as deserving nothing better, not then, not now.  Two thousand of them from Wall Street.