First Things RSS Feed - Edward S. Shapiro

Global Anti-Semitism?

Sun, 01 Feb 2015 00:00:00 -0500

Last May, the Anti-Defamation League made the startling pronouncement that one-quarter of the world’s population is anti-Semitic. The source for that charge was the ADL Global 100: An Index of Anti-Semitism , a comprehensive survey of international populations sponsored by the ADL and funded by New York City real-estate magnate Leonard Stern. Newspapers across the country and beyond broadcasted the statistic without question, affirming the results as a fair measure of the deplorable state of world attitudes toward the Jews.

Continue Reading »

The Decline and Rise of Secular Judaism

Sat, 01 Mar 2014 00:00:00 -0500

In his 1782 book Letters from an American Farmer , John de Crèvecœur asked the most famous and important question in American history: “What then is the American, this new man?” The authentic American leaves behind him “all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds.” The American “entertains new ideas, and forms new opinions.” Crèvecœur was enthusiastic about this new man whose “labors and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world.”

Continue Reading »

The Crisis of Conservative Judaism

Wed, 01 May 2013 00:00:00 -0400

The institutions of Conservative Judaism—its synagogues, its summer camps, its youth organizations, its sisterhoods and men’s organizations, its seminaries, its rabbinate—will live on. Conservative Judaism as a movement, defined as a significant number of people whose daily lives reflect the acceptance of a distinctive way of life as articulated by an intelligentsia, may not.

Continue Reading »

New York Kippah Count

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0500

Jews have been counting themselves since the time of Moses. The Bible provided an exact figure of the number of adult male Jews who left Egypt, and while traveling in the desert the Jews were commanded by God on more than one occasion to count the population of the various tribes. It is doubtful, however, whether these censuses, or any other censuses of Jews, were as controversial as the recent population survey of the Jews of metropolitan New York.

Continue Reading »

Is the Left Good for Jews?

Tue, 01 Dec 1998 00:00:00 -0500

Jews Against Prejudice: American Jews and the Fight for Civil Liberties
by stuart svonkin
columbia university press, 364 pages, $32.50

Continue Reading »

Blacks and Jews Entangled

Mon, 01 Aug 1994 00:00:00 -0400

In her 1991 autobiography, Deborah, Golda, and Me , Letty Cottin Pogrebin argued that black-Jewish relationships rested on a common history of oppression. "Both blacks and Jews have known Egypt," she wrote. "Jews have known it as certain death (the killing of the firstborn, then the ovens and gas chambers). Blacks have known it as death and terror by bondage." Paul Berman agreed. "It was the past that made the blacks and the Jews almost the same," he wrote in the February 28, 1994 issue of the New Yorker , "and the past has the singular inconvenience of never going away." Jewish attitudes toward blacks have developed within the context of this faith in a common history and destiny. Of the many pieties of American Jewry, few have been accepted so readily and widely at face value or have been so influential as the easy assumption that blacks and Jews share vital interests arising out of what the rabbi-historian Arthur Hertzberg termed the "comradeship of excluded peoples."

The dismay of American Jews regarding the current status of black-Jewish relations arises from the presumption that blacks and Jews should stand side by side through thick and thin. "The truth is that Jews do feel different vis-a-vis the black community," Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai Brith, recently stated. "There is a history, there is a kinship, and it goes beyond the rhetoric. Look, there’s never going to be a crisis in Irish-black relations or Italian-black relations, because they have no relations. But we do."

Jews have supposed that they, more than any other group, could and did empathize with the plight of blacks, and that blacks recognized this. Jewish newspapers early in the twentieth century compared the black movement out of the South to the exodus from Egypt, noted that both blacks and Jews lived in ghettos, and described anti-black riots in the South as pogroms. Even European Jews voiced compassion for the American black. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was translated into both Yiddish and Hebrew. In his 1902 book Old New Land , Theodore Herzl wrote:

Continue Reading »

We Are Many

Tue, 01 Feb 1994 00:00:00 -0500

A People Divided:
Judaism in Contemporary America
by jack wertheimer
basic books, 267 pages, $25

Continue Reading »

The 1960s Revisited

Mon, 01 Jun 1992 00:00:00 -0400

The Death Of An American Jewish Community:
A Tragedy Of Good Intentions
by Hillel Levine and Lawrence Harmon
Free Press, 370 pages, $24.95

Continue Reading »